by John Knoerle
I watched Seifert rallying his troops, his skull bright with perspiration, his plastered strands unplastered, his longed-for chance to demonstrate his prowess to the stuffed shirts about to turn around and swallow him whole. I felt bad for him for a moment, maybe two.
Then I pointed at my watch and ticked my head toward the door.
Seifert nodded and strode across the speckled marble floor. He signaled to the keeper of the keys. The old man unlocked the door.
Seifert told him to keep The Schooler covered. The old man unholstered an ancient Colt and held it with both hands.
Commander Seifert stood in front of me and grabbed the door handle.
“My apologies Commander, but I need to ask for your sidearm.” Seifert looked up at me, I patted his shoulder reassuringly. “We need to make this look convincing.”
Seifert exhaled sharply through his nostrils. I didn’t press. This was the make or break moment.
Then he grabbed up his .32 revolver and handed it over, just like that.
Taking a man hostage with his own weapon is pretty lowdown so I was about to pocket his gun and pull the .44 Special when I realized that I hadn’t checked to make sure the .44 was loaded. Whoever said there was honor among thieves hadn’t spent any time with the Fulton Road Mob.
Frederick Seifert wouldn’t be packing an empty sidearm. I didn’t intend to use it but you never know. I pressed the barrel of the .32 to the base of Seifert’s spine.
“Is that really necessary?” he grumbled.
I placed a restraining hand on the iron door and felt bad for him a third time. “I’m afraid so,” I said. “This is a bank robbery.”
The man didn’t flinch, sigh, curse or fall to his knees and weep. He became, simply, very very still.
I said what I had to say. “I’ve come a long way to get here Commander, killed a lot of people I didn’t particularly want to kill.” I jammed the heater hard against his back. “One more corpse won’t make a difference.”
I couldn’t see the keeper of the keys behind me but the back of my neck told me his Colt had strayed from The Schooler to myself. If he was a trained commando like his colleagues I would’ve been dead by now. But he was just an old man up past his bedtime.
I heard a gun clatter to the marble floor. Henry had disarmed him.
“We’re going downstairs and collect the shipment. You can press the panic button the second we leave, there’s no need for any heroics. Understood?”
Seifert nodded.
Henry and I marched our prisoners across the lobby, under the steepled ceiling, toward the stairs. We were down one flight and about to turn the corner when we heard slapping shoe leather on stone steps. More than one, coming hard.
I jabbed Seifert with his own gun barrel. “Send ‘em back down.”
“Return to your posts!” called Seifert to the unseen stair climbers.
Their steps slowed. I prodded Seifert again. “This minute!”
The steps went the other way. We paused a beat, turned the corner and descended another flight. The Schooler led the way.
We turned left into a brightly lit corridor, squinty bright, hospital bright. We approached a room with a floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The currency counting room of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
There were two Gorgons at the door. One a dark-haired Latin, the other a strapping Swede with vented short sleeves to accommodate his biceps. Their .45 semi-automatics looked like toy guns in their mitts. These were the stair-climbers, their chests still heaving.
“Weapons on the floor gentlemen,” said a calm authoritative voice. The Schooler.
The guards looked to Seifert. He nodded. They very slowly placed their weapons on the floor. “Kick them away.” They kicked them away. “Now prone yourselves out.”
They remained standing. The Schooler repeated his command. They remained standing.
Henry was a good shot with his elegant little Beretta. He drilled the toe of the big Swede’s boot with one shot. The Swede pitched over, howling in pain.
The other guard dropped to one knee. The Schooler put the keeper of the keys on the floor with a nifty leg sweep, stepped forward and stopped five feet away as the burly Latin reached for his ankle gun. “Don’t make me kill you son.”
The guard froze.
“That’s it, that’s the way. Now lie down and put your arms behind you.”
Henry snatched the ankle gun once the guard was down. He moved over to the wounded guard, talking to him in a soothing voice as he did a quick pat down. The Swede was clean.
I was standing there like a stooge, holding Seifert hostage, watching the Schooler’s sure-handed work when I realized we had a fatal flaw in our plan. We had no way to hogtie the guards.
Henry yanked off his belt, a fancy piece of braided leather strips. The buckle hung by a thread. When he bit through it the leather strips shook free.
Problem solved.
I cinched up Seifert in a left-armed chokehold so I could cover Henry Voss as he quickly bound the guards’ wrists and ankles. He did the same to the keeper of the keys.
We inched past them and entered the currency counting room. The three clerks wore green eyeshades and gray smocks with no pockets. They huddled against the far wall, terrified. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Ever.
The Schooler instructed them to raise their hands. They did. They had little rubber caps on the tips of their fingers.
I surveyed the counting room, hoping to see stacks of spendable bills that smelled of cigarettes and dried sweat. But The Schooler had been right about what we’d find. The big stainless steel tables were piled high with newly-minted currency, stacks of one hundred bills sealed with bank bands, then bound with tape into blocks containing a thousand bills apiece.
Our timing was good. Only one of the thirty or so blocks had been unbound for counting. Twenties. One thousand crisp new twenty dollar bills.
The air in the room crackled with static electricity. The Schooler’s eyebrows stood at attention. I kept the gun to Seifert’s back as The Schooler issued instructions to the counting clerks in a softly malevolent voice.
“No small denominations. Blocks of fifties and hundreds only. You should have five hundreds and eight fifties.”
The counting clerks stood stock still.
“Load the blocks onto the hand truck,” said The Schooler patiently, indicating the long flat steel cart against the glass wall.
The counting clerks didn’t budge. Henry addressed himself to the youngest clerk.
“What’s your name young man?”
“Fran-cis,” said the young man as if he wasn’t quite sure.
“They call you Frank?”
Frank nodded, looked away.
“Well Frank, here’s what I’d like you to do.”
The Schooler paused until Frank met his gaze.
“I’d like you to load the eight blocks of fifties and the five blocks of hundreds onto the hand truck and lead us down the hall to the loading dock. Can you do that for me?”
Frank chewed his lip and shuffled his feet.
“I understand your pride in what you do,” said The Schooler, gesturing with his free hand, his gun hand steady. “The Bureau of Engraving turns old undershirts and overalls into the world’s most valuable commodity, they spin straw into gold. And they trust you to safeguard it,” said Henry Voss with fatherly regard. Then his voice hardened ever so slightly. “But it’s not worth the life of anyone in this room Frank. Can we agree on that?”
“I...I guess.”
“Excellent, now let’s get underway.”
Frank loaded the blocks of currency onto the hand truck. His fellow counting clerks squinched their mugs at The Schooler with an intense something in their eyes. Defiance, I supposed. But I was wrong.
“Assist him if you like,” said Henry.
The other two clerks put their hands down and pitched in, sorting through the thousand- bill blocks on the steel table and heaving them to Frank at the hand t
ruck like gunnery mates pitching shells on the deck of a battleship. They weren’t happy about it, but they were a team. They weren’t about to let their youngest member take the fall.
Frank wheeled the loaded hand truck to the door. He could have stacked the blocks on top of one another so that we would have had a moment’s distraction as we inspected the blocks to make sure they were fifties and hundreds only. But the blocks were laid end to end for easy scrutiny. Fifties and hundreds only.
You had to hand it to The Schooler. The guy knew how to work a room.
Chapter Thirty-six
We formed a procession for the solemn walk down the aisle. Frank and the hand truck in front, The Schooler behind, me and Commander Seifert bringing up the rear. We squeezed past the proned out Gorgons at the door.
“See you soon asshole,” said the Latin one to my right.
“Real soon,” said the Swede.
I smiled and nodded and checked their leather bindings. Henry knew how to tie a knot.
We made our way down the corridor under the hospital lights. Sweat trickled down my ribcage.
The squadron of officers Seifert had deployed to the tunnels had to know they’d been had. Would they remain at their posts and await further orders like good little soldiers? Or would they come storming down the stairs or deploy to Rockwell to open fire as we pulled out of the delivery gate? Providing we could get the delivery gate open and the loogans hadn’t already been bushwhacked by Jimmy and Ambrose was able to bluff his way past the Secret Service agent in the tollbooth, find reverse and back the Packard up to the dock.
Other than that we were all silk.
We reached the end of the corridor. I’m a blue collar boy, I know loading docks. They’re loud sprawling places that stink of diesel smoke and sweat. But this loading dock was small and very, very clean. A narrow drive angled off toward the tollbooth and the gate on Rockwell, neither of which we could see from the dock.
The Schooler gave me a quick over-the-shoulder. I had the head muckety-muck at gunpoint. It was my turn.
“Open the gate Commander,” I said. “Open the gate and we’ll go away and never darken your door again.”
“I can’t,” said Seifert.
I positioned his gun at the base of his spine. “Can’t? Or won’t?”
“I can’t,” said Seifert. “It’s a two switch system. A release button down here, and one upstairs at the command center. Both have to be activated.”
The Schooler’s grimace said that this was the first he’d heard of a two-switch system.
“Prove it to me,” I said, grabbing Seifert’s collar and marching him over to the big square orange wall button to the left of the dock.
He pushed it. Nothing happened. I pushed it and held it down. Nothing happened twice. “Get on the horn to the command center and tell ‘em to throw the switch!” I said.
Seifert snorted.
“What’s so funny?”
“Lieutenant Commander Rolf Petersen is next in line for my job. This is the best night of his life.”
Son of a bitch. This was what the Gorgons meant by see you soon. I searched the four walls, six walls, however many there were in this medieval castle disguised as a bank. I saw a fire hose in a glass case. Ah ha.
There was an override, had to be. An override in case of fire. Time to get brilliant Schroeder. Whatever it was wouldn’t be hidden or hard to find in a hurry. I searched the ceiling for emergency lights that would kick on in a power outage, saw one above the big orange wall button.
I marched Seifert over to it and explained the situation. “There’s an override code for this button. Use it now or we all get dead.”
The Commander declined my invitation. I bent down and whispered in his ear.
“I understand that you’re eager to die a hero Commander, but I’m thinking young Francis might like to wait a while.”
Seifert cursed, and pressed the big square button once, twice, and held it down. The third time was the charm. I heard the distant ribbed steel gate roll open. T’was a sweet and beauteous sound.
I looked at my watch and looked away. I didn’t need to know the precise time to know we were behind schedule. The Secret Service agent in the tollbooth knew it too. He wouldn’t raise that steel arm if he thought the Federal Reserve cops had time to sniff out the double cross and rush out to Rockwell, blocking his escape route. Could be they were already there. The silence dragged on. The Schooler and I exchanged a quick anxious glance.
Then I heard it, the thrum of an engine. It was low and throaty, idling. A vehicle waiting for permission to enter. Which meant the Fed cops hadn’t deployed to Rockwell. Not yet. The question was which vehicle with what passengers?
I squinted my eyes to hear. Muffled voices echoed down the tunnel. No shouts, no gunfire. Just indecipherable conversation followed by a car door slam.
I wrote a term paper on Einstein my senior year in high school. What a headache. What he said, best I could tell, was that if you run real fast time slows down. I wasn’t running real fast at the moment but it sure felt that way. It couldn’t have been more than five seconds before that vehicle made its appearance, it couldn’t have been less than five years.
A wine red Packard backed up to the loading dock.
Sean and Patrick scrambled out and jumped on the running boards, gun hands deep in their overcoat pockets, their eyes darting above the checkered kerchiefs that covered their mugs.
Ambrose moved more deliberately, climbing out in stages, gat in hand, walking to the boot of the Packard with a rolling gait. He wore a black silk scarf pulled down over his nose, eyeholes cut out, tied behind his neck like a buccaneer. Kid was a born crook.
Ambrose opened the trunk.
I nodded to Sean and Patrick. “Unload it!”
They got to work. 900,000 dollars of newly-minted stacked-and-bound Federal Reserve notes, legal tender for all debts public and private, were quickly stowed.
I said, “On the floor, face down,” to Francis, “In the back seat,” to Sean and Patrick and “You’re coming with us” to Seifert.
Sean and Patrick piled into the back seat like kids off to the Bijou, Francis flattened himself on the loading dock, the unseen Federal Reserve cops stayed that way. Not even Commander Seifert squawked, which made me nervous.
The old women in Youngstown had a saying. Stets hält man den ältesten Wolf an der kürzesten Kette. ‘You keep the shortest chain on the oldest wolf.’ Seifert would bear watching.
“You drive,” I said to Ambrose. He jumped behind the wheel.
I took a look down the corridor. The Gorgons were still struggling against their lanyards.
“Enjoy the rest of your evening gentlemen!” I called as I marched their commanding officer down the narrow step stairs and into a back seat crammed with masked and giddy loogans.
The Schooler was the last one to join our happy group, Beretta out, backing up, sliding in to the front seat, head and gun out the window as Ambrose wheeled the Packard down the curved narrow drive at a high rate of speed. I braced myself for a collision with the steel security arm and gunfire from the redeployed fed cops on Rockwell ahead.
The steel arm was vertical, the tollbooth empty. No gunfire commenced.
The Packard breached the castle walls and hooked a sharp squealing left onto Rockwell. No sign of Jimmy and the seven twerps. That I halfway expected. There was another place they could go.
What I hadn’t pictured was a street and sidewalk free of Federal Reserve police. They were, apparently, still at their posts. Good little soldiers, their weapons trained on ghostly phantoms in the far distance.
The Schooler and I exchanged another quick and anxious glance. Had we had really pulled this off?
Then we heard the sirens.
Chapter Thirty-seven
“Where’m I goin’?” said Ambrose from the front seat. Yelled actually, the sirens were that loud.
The plan was to drive three short blocks to the alley off E. 2nd and roll u
p the ramp into the back of the waiting freight truck. But I had other ideas. The Schooler hadn’t revealed our final destination, where that truck was headed. If Jimmy wanted in on the party, and he did, then the rendezvous in the alley was his last best shot.
The Schooler told Ambrose to take a right on E. 2nd. Ambrose slowed. We passed a screaming squadrol headed the other way, the cops so intent they never glimmed us.
“Don’t turn,” I said to Ambrose. “Keep west on Rockwell, and don’t spare the horses.”
Ambrose punched it good, ignoring The Schooler’s angry Hey, earning the Mooney Brothers a hefty bonus should we ever get that far.
Another screaming squadrol brodied across the intersection of E. 2nd and Rockwell, behind us, headed east. God bless the bumbling Cleveland PD.
The Schooler and I had to talk, which meant the Commander had to go. He wasn’t much use as a hostage now that the local goms were hunting us. And I didn’t trust him not to try something stupid. We stopped at the traffic light on West 3rd. I jacked open the door.
Commander Seifert, who was perched on my lap like Charlie McCarthy, lunged for my gun, his gun, with both hands. His left hand grabbed the barrel, pushing it down. His right thumbnail bit into the underside of my wrist as his fingers tried to peel mine off the gun butt.
It was well executed. It might even have worked were it not for my excitable seatmates. Sean and Patrick flew, there’s no other word for it, flew across the back seat and expelled Commander Seifert from the vehicle and into the middle of Rockwell Avenue.
He staggered, blinking, to his feet. I felt bad for him one last time.
We roared off at the green. When I looked over The Schooler was measuring me for a coffin.
“Jimmy and his itchy young men are hiding in that alley, have to be,” I shouted. “Wherever we’re going we need to get there without the truck.”
The sirens swelled to an operatic chorus, Ambrose sped west. Rockwell became Frankfort. We passed Lulu’s Place, clusters of people on the sidewalk asking what’s all this, and entered the Warehouse District. That was the plan maybe. Wheel into the abandoned plant that Jimmy had hauled me to when I first met The Schooler. Lie low, wait for the heat to cool.
