Westlake, Donald E - Novel 35

by Help, I am Being Held Prisoner (v1. 1)

  Peripheral vision told me that Eddie had taken back the notebook and ballpoint pen.

  This was very boring. Partly for something to do, and partly because I was morbidly interested in the details of the felony I’d been committed to, I asked after a while, “How are we going to do this thing anyway? Those banks look pretty solid.’’

  “You haven’t been told the plan?”

  “As you pointed out,’’ I said, while still watching nothing happen at the bank across the street, “communication is not this outfit’s strong suit.”

  I could hear the doubt in his voice, as he said, “We operate pretty much on a need-to-know basis.”

  I looked at him. “I’m a member of this gang, aren’t I?”

  “Watch the bank,” he said.

  I watched the bank. The last customer had departed ten minutes ago, and nothing else had happened since. Nevertheless, I watched the bank. I said, “I’m a member of this gang, aren’t I?”

  “Of course,” he said. “We’re all on the same team.”

  “Then I need to know,” I said.

  “You’re probably right,” he said. I could hear him coming to a fast yet solid decision. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll begin with an unauthorized entry into Fiduciary Federal following the close of the business day.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “This observation of routine is helping to establish that question,” he said.

  Sometimes it took a few seconds to get through Eddie’s words to what he was saying. The military prism through which he viewed the world made him at times a bewildering conversationalist. But very neat. Working my way through this one, I came to the kernel of thought at the center, and suddenly realized the gang didn’t yet know how they were going to get into that bank.

  Hope blossomed in me, out of season.

  Eddie said, “Having gained access to the interior, we will then require the personnel remaining in the bank to telephone their homes and explain to their next of kin that an unexpected state audit of the bank’s records will necessitate their working late, possibly through the night.”

  I nodded. Nobody went in or out of the bank. Inside there, clerks moved back and forth, involved with the closing activities of the day.

  Eddie said, “We will then induce the senior officer present to open the vault.”

  That word ‘induce.’ I didn’t like that word ‘induce.’

  Eddie said, “You can’t watch the bank with your eyes closed.”

  I opened my eyes. “Just blinking,” I said. “Your eyes get tired when you keep looking like this.”

  “Four minutes left to your tour,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “What about the other bank?”

  “Just watch Fiduciary Federal,” he said.

  “No, I meant the robbery. How do we get into Western National?”

  “Ah,” he said. “That’s the brilliance of the scheme. Joe Maslocki deserves the citation for that.”

  “Fine,” I said. I thought dark thoughts about Joe Maslocki.

  “When the Fiduciary Federal building was put up, seven years ago,” Eddie said, “it was necessary to short-circuit a part of the alarm system used in the Western National vault.”

  I frowned, and remembered not to look away from the bank. “How do you know a thing like that?”

  “Our team,” he said, “has friends in the local building trades. Remember, that’s how the tunnel was constructed in the first place.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Radio silence,” he said.

  I couldn’t help it; I looked away from the bank. I stared in bewilderment at Eddie and said, “Huh?”

  He gave a meaningful head nod. I looked to my left, and damn if the high school boy wasn’t back, with our coffees. He put them down without looking at either of us, stood frowning at them for a few seconds, and then drifted aimlessly away, like a paper boat in a puddle.

  I looked back at the bank.

  Eddie said, “The Western National vault is wired against tunneling from every side, except where it is conjunctive with the Federal Fiduciary vault. In effect, the two vaults share a common wall and a common alarm system excluding that wall.”

  “Oh,” I said. I could see it coming.

  “Once we have breached the Federal Fiduciary vault,” Eddie said, “we will in a way be behind the lines of the Western National vault. We will tunnel through the wall from vault to vault.”

  “Ah,” I said. But it seemed to me that bank vaults, with or without alarm systems, did tend to have very thick and very solid walls. I said, “How long does this tunnel take to dig?”

  “Perhaps three hours.”

  I glanced at him, glanced away, and he said, “You are relieved.” I glanced at him again, and he was watching the bank, having pushed the notebook and pen back over toward me.

  I picked up the pen, had nothing to write, and put it back down I said, “Three hours? I thought it would take a lot longer than that.”

  “Not with the laser,” he said.

  I looked at him. “Laser?”

  “The one we’ll take from Camp Quattatunk,” he said.

  I said, “Camp Quattatunk.”

  “The Army base,” he said, as though that explained everything.

  I remembered having heard there was an Army base around here somewhere, but this was the first time I’d heard its name. Or that we would be getting a laser from it. I said, “A laser. That’s one of those burning ray machines, isn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  “And we’re going to get one at this Army base.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Steal it,” he said.

  Of course. I said, “We’re going to pull a robbery at an Army base so we can pull a robbery at two banks.”

  “Positive,” he said.

  Positive. I said, “When do we do this Army base robbery?”

  “The night before the banks.”

  Monday, December thirteenth. Two and a half weeks from now. I picked up the coffee and sipped it and it tasted like my future: cold, bleak, thin and not very sweet.

  “Two female employees exiting,” he said, “at three thirty- seven.”

  I looked at my watch. Three thirty-three. “Check,” I said, and wrote in the notebook “2 fem emp X 3:37”. Then I looked out the window and saw two girls, bulky in their carcoats, walking away from Federal Fiduciary Trust, as the guard locked the door again behind them.

  If only it looked harder to get into. Or easier.

  I didn’t want to think about the Army camp at all.

  15

  IN THE MIDST OF MADNESS we are in apparent normalcy. Nine days after my stakeout duty with Eddie Troyn I had a Saturday night date. With a telephone repairman named Mary Edna Sweeney.

  It was actually a double date, set up by Max Nolan, involving him and another local girl, named Dotty Fleisch. Max had broached the subject of finding me a date earlier in the week, and I had expressed immediate interest. “I’m not talking about great stuff,” he had cautioned me. “All the good gash goes out of town to college. In the summer around here you can write your own ticket, but this time of year you take what you can get.”

  “I’ll take it,” I had said.

  There was nothing wrong with Mary Edna Sweeney. On the other hand, there was nothing right with her either. She was twenty-five, deeply involved in her telephone company job, and she’d apparently had three boy friends in a row who’d joined the Army, been shipped to unlikely places, and promptly married girls they’d found in the foreign clime. Including one who had been sent to some remote radar station up around the Arctic circle and immediately married an Eskimo.

  All of these departures had made Mary Edna just a bit nervous; she tended to look startled at sounds like doors closing or car engines starting. Otherwise, however, she was a placid girl, a bit heftier than my usual tastes, with large, sweet, dark eyes and masses of black hair. “I have to keep my hair tied up
when I’m working,” she told me, “but boy, as soon as I get home I let it fly.”

  “I never met a lady telephone repairman before,” I said.

  “The telephone company is an equal opportunity employer,” she said, with that primness which unimaginative people reserve for nobler thoughts they’ve memorized. “They’re experimenting with male operators,” she said. “And I’m an experiment the other way.”

  “A repairlady.”

  “A repair person” she said.

  I said, “You do all that repairperson stuff? Climb the poles and everything?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Of course, I can’t wear a skirt.” And she blushed. Girls in small towns still blush.

  This conversation took place in the Riviera Restaurant & Cocktail Lounge after the movie. We had had an absolutely traditional first date; Max and I had crawled through the tunnel at just after seven o’clock, had met the girls in front of the Strand Theater, there had been introductions, and we had gone at once into the darkness to sit next to one another without touching while we watched a double feature. A double feature. Unfortunately the first picture was a caper movie about a bank robbery, full of hardened criminals and violent action—including the pursuit, beating and painful death of a squealer—and it left me a little limp. It took the entire second feature, a comedy about a giraffe that swallowed an experimental formula and became a super-genius, to bring me out of my doldrums and make it possible for me to exchange dialogue with Mary Edna Sweeney at the Riviera, to which we had repaired for cheeseburgers and a pitcher of beer.

  Mary Edna was a friendly enough girl, but she wasn’t someone I would have crossed a crowded room for. Nor an empty room either. But she did have one absolutely first-rate quality which put her above every other girl I d ever gone out with: she thought my name was Harry Kent.

  Dotty Eleisch was more of the same, without being quite an exact carbon copy. Paler, plumper, more given to bursts of speech or outbreaks of giggle, she was definable from Mary Edna without being any more or less desirable. Max had apparently been dating her off and on for several months, having told her he was a civilian employee out at Camp Quattatunk who lived in quarters on the base; I was now given the same background, and in the course of the conversation I learned for the first time that Camp Quattatunk wasn’t an Army base in the usual sense of the word but was an arsenal, a storage depot for military equipment. Thus, no doubt, the laser.

  Which led to thoughts of robbery. Certain scenes from the caper movie came vividly back into my imagination, in perfect color. I flung myself into conversation, trying not to look over my shoulder.

  At one point, in the men’s room, I discovered that the paper towel dispenser could be rigged so as to bring the entire load of paper towels out when the first one was tugged, but other than that it was just impossible to think about anything except the robbery. The caper movie had made it all much more real and much more desperate.

  Finally we all left the Riviera and separated, Max and his Dotty going off in one direction arm in arm, Mary Edna and I trailing away in the other, walking side by side but not touching. The streets we walked along were tree-lined, but at this time of year the trees were leafless, bony grasping things reaching out from the streetlights, branches clutching together over my head like medieval punishments.

  The specter of the bank robbery followed me along the sidewalk, making the already cold air even colder. Scenarios of disaster ran in repertory through my head: the robbery would occur and degenerate into gunplay and I would be shot to death; we would be caught and I’d stand trial for robbery and jailbreak and possibly even murder and be sent up forever; we would get away with it and I’d spend the rest of my life waiting for the axe to fall as inevitably it would; we would get away with it and the gang would insist on more robberies and one of the preceding scenarios would inexorably follow; in the course of the bank robbery I’d be called upon to shoot somebody and would refuse and be shot by my own people; or I’d do it and become a murderer as well as a bank robber; I would attempt some desperate ploy to prevent the robbery from taking place and would be found out by my co-conspirators and would be unloaded; or I’d be found out by the authorities and would be charged with jailbreak and attempted robbery; or . . . The variants were endless, it seemed, and not a happy one in the lot.

  Meanwhile, Mary Edna spoke at length on the subject of telephone company training films. No topic was likely to capture much of my interest right now, so telephone company training films were about as useful as anything else to fill in the spaces. I managed an occasional appropriate comment, Mary Edna pointed out occasional poles she had climbed for one purpose or another, and eventually we reached the smallish two-family house in which she lived on the second floor with her widowed mother and two younger sisters.

  It was so hard for me to remain aware of Mary Edna’s presence. It wasn’t her fault, it was that damned robbery. I was dimly aware of a slight sense of awkwardness when I said good night to her on her porch and politely waited till she had unlocked the door and gone inside, but it wasn’t until Max asked me the next day how I’d made out that I realized Mary Edna had been anticipating some sort of overture from me. A kiss, at the very least, possibly some groping. Who knew what she might not have had in mind? The next night, lying in my solitary bunk in my cell, the sounds and sighs of sleeping men in their other cells all around me, I thought of how almost any of them—enforced celibates all—would have behaved the preceding night on Mary Edna’s front porch, and my own behavior, or lack of behavior, struck me as very strange.

  But on that first date night, spurred on by the caper movie, I just couldn’t think about anything except the robbery. It was scheduled for ten days from now, Tuesday the fourteenth of December. I had first heard about it over two weeks ago, the time was rushing by, and I wasn't getting anywhere. My only forlorn hope was that the gang, who seemed to have everything else thoroughly planned, would never find a way to make that initial entry into Federal Fiduciary Trust, no matter how much surveillance was done. If we couldn’t get into the bank in the first place we couldn’t rob it, could we?

  I walked with my fingers crossed.

  16

  THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, at four-thirty in the afternoon, one week to the day before the scheduled robbery, I myself showed the boys how to get into the bank.

  I was on surveillance duty with Billy Glinn this time, the two of us sitting in the usual luncheonette, drinking the usual rotten coffee brought by the usual sleepwalking high school boy, watching nothing happen across the street. I was doing the watching and Billy was telling me a story about a time when he’d found a fellow having intercourse with a girl friend of Billy’s in the back seat of a car out behind a country roadhouse. “He run off into the woods,” Billy was saying, “but I didn’t take out after him right off.”

  “You didn’t?"

  “First,” he said, “I figured to settle that little girl down a bit, so I pick her up and whump her on the side of the chest. Under the arm, you know, I don’t want to hurt her titties, just bust a couple ribs to slow her down. I figure if she’s in the hospital I’ll know where she is. Then I went after the fella’s car, I pulled off the doors and the fenders and pulled the steering wheel out and messed up the engine a little bit and took and threw the hood up in a tree. Then I went off after the fella himself out through the woods. So when I caught up with him it turn out he took off so fast he left his pants behind—he’s bare-ass naked out there in the woods. Well, I was almighty angry at that fella, so—”

  “Uh!” I said. “Typewriter repairman going in.’’

  “What say?”

  “Typewriter repairman,” I repeated; and immediately could have bit my tongue. I’d made the announcement without thinking, partly because it was so rare for anything at all to happen over there at the bank, but mostly because I really didn’t want to know what Billy had done to the naked man in the woods. I was identifying too completely.

  “Typewriter repai
rman,” he said, finally understanding, and when I glanced at him he was laboriously printing the information in the notebook in his large childlike hand, misspelling magnificently and concentrating on every curve and every straight line. A pink tongue-tip protruded from a corner of his mouth, like a flower on a slag-heap.

  It was too late. I knew at once the typewriter repairman was our route into the bank, and I also knew there was no way now to stop the information from getting back to Joe Maslocki and the rest. If only I’d kept my mouth shut Billy, absorbed in the story he was telling, would never have noticed the typewriter repairman at all. But I’d told him about it, and he was writing it down, and in the fullness of time the rest of the group would also know. My last hope was gone, and I’d done it to myself.

  If only he wouldn’t think to write down the name of the company.

  He said, “What’s the name on the fella’s truck?”

  Shit fuck. I looked at the Ford Econoline van out in front of the bank, reading the company name emblazoned there. Did I dare lie? No, I did not dare lie. “Twin Cities Typewriter,” I said.

  “Twin,” he said, and wrote it with all the grace and speed of someone etching his initials on cast iron with a rock. “Ci—” he said. tieeeees,” he said.

  While he was working his way through typewriter, the last nail was hammered into my coffin. “Here he comes out,” I said, despairing, all hope gone. “He’s carrying a typewriter.”

  “Hee hee,” Billy said. Even he knew what it meant. “Wait till the boys hear about this.”

  I was willing to wait forever. I watched the repairman put the typewriter away in the back of his truck, then get behind the wheel and drive away. Billy kept hee- heeing.

  I felt so miserable that I forgot and took a sip of the coffee.

  17

  THERE WAS A CERTAIN morbid fascination in watching the gang put the pieces of the robbery together. Like, no doubt, the condemned man gazing out his cell window as the scaffold is being built.