by Behn, Noel;
“I don’t go down to the terrace, see? I see lights come out from the back of the garage building. Up on the second or third floor. This whole building’s windows. Windows run all the way across it. Two and three stories of windows, and every one covered by them heavy wire grates. ’Cause of the angle up here, I can’t see what window is lit up back there. It’s a couple of them, though.
“Okay, so this terrace goes down to the park in the corner; it’s right in the corner between the cliff and the building. I look up at the roof. It’s an easy climb. Maybe only eight feet. This side of the garage is buried in the hill, so it sticks up eight feet over it.
“Now, I’m going down the hill [on Hull Street]. I get up to the first door [top level of garage building]. It’s wide open, and I don’t believe what I see inside. They got the bare light bulbs burning in there, and not too many of ’em so it’s kinda dim, but what I see is armored trucks. Only they ain’t Brink’s trucks. They look black ’cause of the poor light. But if they were white, I woulda known it. ‘Mother of God,’ I tell myself, ‘I got two goddamn money companies parking trucks in this place.’ I make a mental note to myself to come back and steal all their keys and keep going down the hill.
“Okay, I’m coming up on that second door [the lower of the two doors through which he had seen two Brink’s trucks enter earlier in the day]. I go past and give her the peek. That light’s as rotten as upstairs, but I can see trucks, okay, only they ain’t armored or white. They got ordinary trucks, and some are parked in there, but nothing from Brink’s. I can see way across the garage. There’s a big truck door in the back that’s closed. I figure it’s probably a metal slide door. I gotta hunch that’s where Brink’s hides her trucks, but I don’t do no stopping.
“I keep going down to the corner [where Hull meets and ends at Commercial] and keep right going across into the park [grassy tract of land beyond Commercial leading down the bank of the Charles River]. I’m circling, see? I circle around out into that Park and keep the peek on the garage door they got there in front [ground level on Commercial]. The doors open a little, and I see a guy sitting right inside at a desk. It’s dark behind him ’cause all they got is one or two of them twenty-five-watt bulbs burning. But I can see a couple of trucks and cars parked between them pillars. Every floor I looked into so far has them cement pillars holding up the roof. You gotta park between ’em. So I’m looking at what’s parked between ’em down there, and it ain’t nothing that belongs to Brink’s. I give a peek to all them windows upstairs, too. The ones covered by the wire. There ain’t no light in none of ’em. The joint’s a morgue.
“Now I do another thing. I take a look up Commercial. Under the bridge [elevated approach], ’cause that’s where the Garden is. There’s a lotta traffic, but none of it’s coming this way. All them cars are going on the bridge or back over to Hanover Street to eat at them good Italian restaurants. Nobody’s coming this way. Only one or two cars come this way. That’s good. This territory’s empty as death.”
Pino angled forward, crossed Commercial Street, took to the sidewalk beyond the partially open garage door, came to the end of the building and turned left into Prince Street. The narrow one-way avenue struck him as being narrower than Hull Street, possibly because it was sparingly lit. The somber wall of North Terminal with its three tiers of grate-fronted darkened windows rose to his left.
A façade of wood or brick apartment houses pressed from the opposite side of the street, stretched as far as the eye could see before slanting around to the right. One streetlight stood in front of a tenement building door a good distance from the Commercial Street corner, a second much farther down on the garage side. Both lamps were dim, and a degree of additional illumination spilling out of apartment windows didn’t increase visibility to any appreciable extent. The brick and spottily asphalt-covered street and the two thin bordering sidewalks was a shadowy place. With the exception of a pair of cars parked along the right-hand curb, it was a desolate place as well.
Tony ambled forward, keeping to the sidewalk adjacent to the garage. Not far from the corner he passed a pair of closed doors—one metal and large and apparently meant for vehicles. The other was also metal and smaller.
“It was a people door that second one,” he explained. “I don’t bother with either one of ’em. I keep going. I ain’t seen a goddamn person on the street yet. And I ain’t seen a car driving by neither. The only way you know people live around here is because you see lights in their windows and hear ’em talking every now and then.
“Okay, I keep going along the building. It’s as long as a goddamn football field.* Now I’m getting up near the end of her, and I spot this old lady up ahead. I know she’s old ’cause she’s kinda bent over and ain’t carrying nothing. She heads into that little store up there. Over to the right there’s this alley [Lafayette Street], and on the corner there’s some dinky little candy store. I can see that now ’cause I’m closer. That’s where the old lady goes.
“Now I see the second door. Maybe ten feet from the end of the building. I see her and I gotta stop, see? She’s a people door and she’s metal and pasted right on her is the signal [Brink’s symbol: a shield]. Up on top of the door is the address, 165, but right there on the signal it says Brink’s and eighteen something. Whenever it went into business.
“I can’t take my eyes off that door. I gotta think, too. I know Brink’s is the chintz of the world. They ain’t gonna spring for no goddamn fancy signal like this unless there’s a reason. I can’t figure out what the reason is.
“I ain’t gonna play with metal doors, see? I didn’t bring my picking tools along, and even if I had some, I’m not touching that door. It’s probably wired straight to J. Edgar Hoover’s desk in Washington.”
Pino walked a few steps, paused until the little old lady left Peppy’s candy shop and started back up the street, then continued to the end of the building. Light spilled down into the playground from the grate-covered windows in the rear of the garage structure. He saw two young boys descending the stepped terraces at the Hull Street end of the paved recreational expanse.
Tony loped forward along the metal fence siding the playground without looking back, passed the two apartment houses at the end of the block, turned left onto Snowhill Street and started climbing the hill. Once he was beyond several more apartment dwellings, his view of the back of North Terminal Garage was obstructed by a high brick wall. Back atop the promontory at the Snowhill/Hull Street intersection he still couldn’t find a vantage point which offered a good view of the illuminated grate-covered windows.
Tony stepped back and looked down Snowhill Street. No one could be seen. He hurried around a Hull Street gate leading to the top terrace, scurried across, clambered onto the brick wall stretching the length of Snowhill and, on his hands and knees, started crawling. Five windows on the second tier of the garage, stretching in a line from near the Prince Street end of the building to a point midway into the playground, were illuminated. One or two people could be seen moving about inside. Tony was still too far above the second level to have a rewarding observation angle. He crawled farther down the wall top. A man in a white shirt was sitting at a desk behind the third window from the right. Tony crawled a little farther. Something was going on in the last window to the right, but he still couldn’t see exactly what. He crawled farther. Then farther still.
“Mother of God, it was a glory. Here’s a Brink’s guy with his arms full of packages, and where’d you think he’s taking them? He carries them right into the vault. I spent all them years over at Congress trying everything to peek in their pete, and now by climbing on some rotten fence I’m staring her right in the face. The vault’s standing wide open, and this fella’s carrying money into her.”
And as Tony Pino had said long ago on Congress Street: “If you can see a safe face to face, you can crack her.”
*Not exactly—the measurement for the Prince Street side was 255 feet, the Hull Street side 312 feet, playgrou
nd side 266 feet and the Commercial Street side was 231 feet.
Chapter Thirteen
The Twenty-Pound Mask
Seven grate-covered windows were illuminated, not five, as had been seen several nights before. All were in a row along the second floor at the rear of North Terminal Garage, began at the Prince Street corner and stretched to the middle of the concrete building, to a point midway above the playground as well.
Shortly before 6 P.M. the light in the narrowest of the seven windows, a high, thin one closest to Prince Street, went off. Moments later a man wearing the uniform jacket of a Brink’s guard emerged from the ground-level metal door at 165 Prince, the door closest to the playground end of the weather-stained structure. Pino rose from the doorway down the street in which he had been sitting, tucked the lunch pail under his arm, crossed to the opposite sidewalk, rounded the corner, trudged up to the top of Snowhill Street, turned left, passed through the roofless brick gate, descended to the third and lowest and widest terrace, seated himself up against the Snowhill Street retaining wall, took out and began eating a sandwich, kept his eyes on the line of six lit grate-fronted windows.
At approximately 6:45 P.M. the light in the window farthest to the right, the one almost directly in the middle of the building, went dark. The head of a man could be seen moving across two larger windows to the left. It disappeared. Lights went off in the three windows closest to Prince Street, leaving only two windows in front of which the man had passed illuminated.
Pino jammed the partially consumed sandwich into the pail, scrambled to his feet, hurried across the terrace, bounded up the steps and across the middle terrace and up the final staircase to the topmost terrace. His intention was to hurry back down Snowhill and see who left the building through which of the two doors on Prince Street. The upper terrace led directly onto Hull Street, and no sooner did he reach the abutting sidewalk when headlight beams turning out from the second-level garage doors, blinded him. He jumped back behind the building corner. The car passed. The man seated beside the driver wore a cap with which Pino was familiar—the standard hard-beaked uniform cap of Brink’s armored car personnel.
He watched the car take a left onto Snowhill, then descend from sight between a line of low apartment houses and the burying ground’s ancient retaining wall. He walked a few steps farther, turned right, strode down Copps Hill on Snowhill Street. When Snowhill ended at Prince, he crossed over to the far sidewalk, sat in the recessed doorway he had used an hour earlier, gazed off beyond the street and playground and kept his eyes fixed on the two remaining lit windows in the rear of the building—particularly the one to the right, the one behind which he had seen the open vault several nights earlier.
The silhouetted form of a man appeared up the block, a man in a cap. Pino could not mistake the outline of this uniform hat either. It was a foot patrolman turning into Prince from Commercial Street. The officer meandered forward, checked the first two doors of the garage building and continued on as Tony stood up, pressed back against the wood door of the apartment house, felt behind him, found and turned the knob. The door opened, and he kept it open a bit. The policeman reached the North Terminal door at 165 Prince, gave it a casual try, then angled across the street, heading for the same sidewalk where, eight buildings down the street, Pino was hiding. Tony eased the door behind him wider open, stepped back inside, waited for footsteps to pass. None did. Several minutes had elapsed, perhaps as many as five, before he cautiously poked his head outside. The policeman was gone. He gazed off across the playground. The vault room window was dark. So was the one beside it. The time was approximately 7:50 P.M.
In the course of three more surveillances Pino noticed that the last light to go off in the second floor line was always in the fifth window—the window through which he had seen the vault. This, he concluded, meant that Brink’s final operation of the day was locking money and valuables in the vault for overnight safe keeping. This hypothesis was reinforced when he observed that on Tuesday the vault room window went dark a full hour earlier than on Thursday or Friday—and any good crook knew that weekend payrolls were far larger than beginning-of-the-week payrolls.
There were other things to be seen. Shortly after the vault room window went dark, two or three men left the building through the door on Prince Street closest to the Commercial Street corner—the one numbered 165. The two or three men had always left Prince via Commercial. The foot patrolman wasn’t observed again, not between 6:30 and 10:30 P.M. on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at least.
Of utmost importance was the possible existence of cleaning personnel and night watchmen in the Brink’s office. The hack or watchmen might not turn on the overhead lights to make rounds, might very well use a flash beam. Cleaning people would simply turn on the lights. Pino had looked for precisely this, but between the time the vault room went dark and 10:30 P.M., he had not observed the vaguest indication of battery- or generator-powered illumination behind the line of grate-fronted windows over the playground.
The weather was foul beyond working possibilities. Mike Geagan, his yellow oilskin, hip-hugging fisherman’s boots and yellow nor’easter already splattered with rain, tugged the yellow storm cap down over the front of his face, lowered his head, moved out from the safety of the pier warehouse and slogged out into the gale. He caught up with the group of longshoremen near the storage building just inside the main gate, but because their faces were all but hidden under tightly pulled hoods, he couldn’t tell which one was Richardson. Only after entering the low concrete floor structure where the perennial crap game was in progress was he able to locate Sandy and take him right back outside.
“What’s the word from Tony?”
“Haven’t heard from him,” Richardson, still a one-third owner of the dice game inside, replied.
“It’s been a week.”
“I know.”
“I better give him a call,” Mike suggested.
“I’ve been trying. Nobody answers at the apartment, and all I get over at the diner is some drunk who keeps hanging up on me.”
“Maybe he’s in trouble.”
“I’d say no. I’d say he’s probably on to something.”
“The Brink’s?”
Sandy’s hooded head nodded. “I wish he’d forget that goddamn outfit. I wish we could wash it off his system for good—just bend him over and shove a hose up his behind and wash it for good.”
“Hot water or cold?”
Stalled headlights spanned the Charles River atop the Charlestown Bridge. Distant honking was audible, but generally obscured by the roar of heavy fast-moving homeward traffic on Commercial Street. Between 5 and 5:15 P.M. three Brink’s trucks were noticed going up Hull Street and turning into the second-level door. Few vehicles were observed using Prince Street, nor was pedestrian traffic movement particularly large. The peak period was from 5:20 to 5:35 P.M., when twenty-odd men and women were seen entering the various buildings between the Commercial Street corner and down beyond the entrance to Snowhill Street. On no occasion were they seen taking out keys to unlock the front door of the apartment houses. In no instance did they seem to notice a short, stocky man in a soft hat, leather jacket and baggy trousers walking along the sidewalk, watching them enter through doors.
At 7 P.M. Tony was standing on a rooftop of a building opposite the playground watching the lights go out in the first, second and third large windows nearest the Prince Street corner of North Terminal Garage. The fourth window was partially illuminated. The fifth window—the one fronting the vault—remained lit for another twenty minutes. When it went dark, so did the fourth.
Jazz Maffie sipped a cup of after-dinner coffee at his usual table in Jimmy O’Keefe’s restaurant and announced he would be going to the basketball game at the Boston Garden.
“I’ll go with you,” his wife said.
“Huh?”
“I said, I’ll go to the basketball game with you.”
“Oh, well, I only got one ticket.”
“Buy another.”
“Oh, sure. But you see, I’m sitting with the boys.”
“If I sit and have dinner with the boys every night at this table, why can’t I sit with them at the basketball game?”
“I didn’t think you like basketball.”
“I always liked basketball. You always took me to basketball games before we were married.”
“Hey, look, there’s Danny. I think I’ll go buy Danny a drink.”
It wasn’t because Jazz was trying to avoid a confrontation with his wife or because he wanted to talk to Danny that he excused himself from the table. He had seen Gusciora enter and head for the bar. Gus was no unfamiliar face around Jimmy O’Keefe’s. The young, burly, smiling ex-convict was in several nights a week—usually accompanied by an attractive, if not somewhat flashy, young lady—of late usually a lady as well as Specs O’Keefe. Tonight he was settling for a lady alone.
“How are you?” Jazz asked, ambling up to the bar. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Sure, thanks,” Gus replied, then introduced Stella to Maffie.
Stella had on long, dangling metallic earrings—the type that tended to tinkle on the slightest movement. Stella didn’t talk all that much, but she was very given to smiling. When she smiled, she usually giggled. When she giggled, she usually nodded her head.
“Heard anything from Stretch?” Gus casually asked after the drinks had arrived.
“Oh, no. I haven’t heard anything from Stretch,” Jazz answered. “Have you heard anything?”
“Who’s Stretch?” Stella asked.
