Vangie was out somewhere acquiring capital. The sun was about to go down, which seemed the best time of day for her enterprising ventures-just after suppertime when people were a bit sleepy, slow-moving, and not too sensitive around the pockets.
He had resigned himself to sponging off her. It would only be for a few days more. He needed the time to set things up and check things out. Without Vangie he'd have had to get a job or start rolling drunks, and he didn't want to waste the time.
He'd been busy enough the past several days. He'd walked up and down the hills, wandered the city, studied and thought and observed and pondered. He'd spent a lot of time around the neighborhood of the Mint, studying it from all sides and making inquiries. He picked up bits and pieces of vital information like the number of privies, the fact that it had been built in 1854, and the rumor that one of the guards had a girl friend on Pacific Street as well as a wife in Chinatown. He'd been talking a tough line, particularly where Vangie was concerned, but privately he wasn't sure he could crack it. It was a hell of a forbidding building, that Mint.
Still, the thought of home kept him going. Home, Twill, and Vangie, too-he could hardly back down now; he'd look like a fool in her eyes.
He pulled out his snap-lid watch-Twill's gift-and say it was almost time to go down and meet Vangie at their daily meeting place at Front and Jackson. He began to poke around the hotel room to make sure they hadn't left any possessions behind. Not that there was much to leave. He'd bought a new set of clothes, including a heavy pea jacket to ward off the impressively cold fog that rolled in even more frequently than Vangie had allowed it did. He had also accumulated a spare set of underwear and a few pairs of socks, but they were all wadded into the pockets of the big pea jacket along with his knuckle-duster and the rest of the oddments he'd carried faithfully ever since he'd left civilization. With one last look out the window at the Mint, he left the room to meet up with Vangie.
She was waiting for him at the corner, looking as pert, feisty and cheerful as ever. "Look what I found," she said, drawing him back into the alley mouth to show him her treasure.
It was a silver-plated whisky flask. "Not bad," he said, looking at it as she held it up for him.
"I thought you'd like it. It's a present," she said. She twisted the top to open it, and fired a shot that plugged a hole into the wall next to Gabe's head.
A little later, in another hotel room, when she was a bit calmer, she said, "I just don't know why people walk around with things like that in their pockets. It ought to be against the law. It's making me very nervous."
Gabe, who had taken charge of the flask, was sitting on the bed examining it. "Well, sometimes," he said, distracted by the intricacy of the thing, "it's handy to carry a gun that doesn't look like a gun."
"Well it isn't handy for me," she said with a melodramatic shudder. "What else is going to blow up in my fingers?"
Gabe nodded over the flask. It hald five .25-caliber rounds loaded through the bottom and fired through the top, when the lid was turned counterclockwise. Very ingenious.
"Gabe?"
"Huh? Oh." He put the flask down on the bed and got to his feet. "Well, let's see. You can find guns built into snuffboxes, into pipes, or most anything that can be made of metal and small enough to carry in your pocket."
"What is civilization coming to?"
He grinned at her. "Maybe you better just take wallets from now on."
"Someday," she said bitterly, "a wallet will turn out to be a revolver in disguise."
"Well," he said, "you could always change your ways."
"What?"
"Turn over a new leaf," he explained. "Mend the error of your ways."
She said, "You mean go straight?"
"Sure."
She made a face, to show she was not amused. "If you can't be serious," she said, "there's no point talking about it."
"Stick to wallets," he told her. "You'll be okay." He gestured toward the flask, lying so innocently on the bed. "Mind if I keep that?"
"Well, I don't want it, believe me."
"Thanks," he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Promptly at the start of visiting hours Vangie and Gabe took a guided tour of the Mint.
She knew it was the only way to persuade him of the impossibility of his idea. Nobody had ever robbed the United States Mint. Nobody in his right mind would dare.
It was a fortress, the Mint, surrounded by a high wall. A guide assembled the visitors at the front gates, which were high wrought-iron affairs you couldn't break down with a five-ton battering ram.
The view from the courtyard inside the high wall was like what the inside view of a prison must be. Stone and masonry thirty feet high surrounded the whole thing. The pair of armed guards at the gate looked as if they'd rather stomp you than eat.
"This branch of the United States Mint opened for business in April of Eighteen and Fifty-four," the guide announced in a pompous voice that made his double chins wobble. "The Government established the Mint here for the purpose of minting gold coinage, because this is where the gold is, haw haw. Now the coins we stamp here are almost exclusively eagles and double eagles, which as you folks know is ten and twenty dollar coins. Now and then we stamp an issue of five-dollar half eagles, but it don't happen very often here. So if you find a half eagle with our stamp on it maybe you want to hang onto it. They as rare as a pair of clean socks around a bunkhouse, haw haw."
Vangie saw that Gabe's beetled glance was fixed on the gateway behind them. It was open and a wagon came in-DORALDO MINE, SONORA-drawn by the customary dozens of mules and surrounded by the customary outriders, who looked like displaced members of Genghis Khan's palace guard. The knot of tourists followed the guide toward the front door but Gabe hung back, watching the wagon as it went along the side of the main building and stopped by a loading platform where uniformed sentries hulked.
She tugged at Gabe's sleeve. "Come on."
"In a minute. In a minute." He was chewing on an unlit cigar, watching as attentively as a lecher watching a nun disrobe. The muleskinner had unhitched the wheel team and half a dozen of the guards were shoving on the wagon tongue to push it back against the loading platform, where more men began to unload the boxes of gold onto a cart.
It looked like the kind of wheeled dumpcart they used in mineshafts-a hand-push cart mounted on railroad wheels. From this angle Vangie couldn't see any rails, but she assumed they must be there, leading back into the building.
"Come on," she whispered insistently and dragged him quickly to the front door, through which the tourists were disappearing. She glanced over her shoulder and saw both gate guards scowling in their direction. She hurried Gabe inside.
"Now the annual production of the mines here in California," the guide was intoning, "is in the vicinity of twenny million dollars. Now folks, that's just a whole lot of dollars. Why if you took twenny million dollars in one-dollar green-jackets, it would stretch from here to… well I don't rightly recollect exactly where, maybe Chicago, but it'd reach pret' near two thousand miles. And that's a long way to walk laying greenjacket bills end to end just to prove a stupid point, haw haw. Now the way the United States Mint operates here, we get shipments of clean-smelted gold ingots in from the mines just about every day, but what we do, we wait till we've got anywheres from one to two million dollars worth of gold to strike before we start up the presses, which I'm just about to show you on over here. So anyhow, three-four times a year we run off a stamping, and every year or two we got to change the mold-plates. Course we could keep the presses running all the time, stamp out coins every day from every little shipment, but that'd be a lot more costly and your Government is lookin' out for your interests by operating in the most economical way. I guess all us citizens apprayshate that, haw haw."
Vangie looked with approval on the great number of armed guards they passed in the hallways. Everywhere you turned, there was a man in uniform with a gun and a grim expression.
Ea
ch time she spotted another guard, she plucked at Gabe's sleeve to make sure he noticed. He kept nodding impatiently and shaking her off.
The guide took them into the pressroom and spent the longest eight minutes she'd ever experienced describing, in more detail than anybody wanted to hear, the process of melting ingots, pouring them into the molds, transferring the blank new discs onto the presses, and stamping the sides. Gabe kept shifting restively from foot to foot and sweeping the ceiling with his glance.
It wasn't really a huge building but the number of turnings and corridors made it seem endless. The bored, rote intonations of the guide's voice kept ringing in stone-bounced echoes and Vangie became eager to get out of this place. It had all the homey comfortable warmth of a Mexican vampire cave, one of which she had once seen. One was too many.
They turned yet another corner. "And this here," the guide announced, "is where the gold comes in from the mines. Now you folks are most fortunate this mornin' because we actually have a shipment coming in right now as you can see. Now mind you don't get run over, haw-that little cart's pretty durned heavy, you better believe me, haw haw."
The handcart was coming along the rails, carrying the boxed gold down a wide corridor. At the far end was the loading platform they'd seen from outside. The rails crossed in front of them and went into another room.
Two guys were pushing the handcart and half a dozen guards walked along beside it. As they passed the tourist group they began to turn, so that finally most of them were walking backwards. One of them backed right into the doorjamb and some of the tourists snickered. The guard got very red in the face and ducked out of sight through the doorway, but it quickly became clear that wouldn't save him because the guide was leading the party right in through the same door, following him.
"Now this here's the anteroom to our storage vault," the guide told them. "Can everybody see back there?"
The people in back murmured that they could see. Not that it mattered to Vangie, since she and Gabe were no longer among the people at the back. From hanging around at the very rear of the group all through the first part of the tour, Gabe had now insisted on shoving his way up to the very front. And Vangie knew why; that damned vault was calling to him with its siren song, all about gold.
The anteroom was just an empty square space surrounded by walls without windows. The tracks went on through and out another doorway on the opposite side; the gold shipment with all its guards was just leaving the anteroom as the tour group filed in.
The guide waited till everybody was in before going on with his spiel. "Now," he said, "we ain't allowed past this point, so I'll just let each of you come over here close to the door and peek past my shoulder if you'd like to see the vault. It's right through here, this doorway. Now mind you, not too close-these here boys get right nervous if they see anybody leanin' too passionately toward that gold inside, haw haw."
Gabe was the first to step forward and finally Vangie had to drag him aside to let the other people have a look. She herself got only a glimpse into the vault.
It didn't look extraordinary. Just a ten-by-ten room with a big steel door at the far end of it, into which ran the handcart rails. The guards were unloading the boxes and stacking them on shelves inside the vault at the far side of the room. The big steel door was open. A guard now came across from the steel door and slammed shut an open-grille door of steel bars, like a jail cell door, of which Vangie had seen one or two in her time. It didn't block anyone's view, but the steel bars looked about three inches thick. It was obvious nobody was going to open that door without a key and a lot of friends.
She began to feel a little better about things. Gabe's idea was clearly impossible after all.
"Now this here barred door is closed and locked virtually at all times, folks, except when there's a cart going through, as you just seen. And of course at these times we keep a minimum force of twenny armed guards in these two rooms, not to mention all the guards you saw around the rest of the Mint. So you can rest assured your money's safe, haw haw. Nobody's ever tried to rob the United States Mint, of course-nobody's ever been stupid enough to try. I reckon someday somebody will, but you probably won't even read about it in the papers, because whatever they do they ain't gonna get anywheres near your Government's gold."
Vangie was absolutely positive the guide had said that strictly for Gabe's benefit. But Gabe was smiling faintly as if his head were filled with pleasant faraway visions. He didn't seem to be listening to the guide any more. He was looking up at the corners of the anteroom, just under the ceiling. Vangie looked up that way, but she couldn't see anything but walls and ceiling.
The guide reached over to touch the heavy steel panel beside the barred door. "And this here solid steel door-this is armor plate, by the way-this is kept closed and locked at all times except visiting hours."
Gabe obviously wasn't listening at all any more. His glance swiveled back from the vault room, and Vangie, following the direction of his gaze, didn't see anything that looked important. He was just looking out the corridor toward the loading platform at the far end.
It was all one long straight line, she noticed. From the loading platform the rails came straight through the building, through the anteroom, and right into the vault.
The guide took them out through the office-lined corridors that led to the front door. There seemed to be a guard at every turning.
By the time they got out to the main gate, Vangie was feeling highly relieved. It was obviously impossible to crack this place. Now Gabe would have to give up the idea completely.
Gabe nodded judiciously as they walked out through the gate. "Well," he said, "that shouldn't be too tough."
He didn't seem to notice the look Vangie gave him.
The street led directly downhill from the Mint's main gate to the Bay, which spread out before them in all its sunlit glory. They strolled down toward the center of the city, Gabe off in unguessable plans and speculations, Vangie fretting and fuming and wondering just how serious Gabe was about putting his head into this particular noose.
A block or two from the Mint they passed a policeman and Vangie recognized him as Officer McCorkle, with his red hair sticking out from under his bobby helmet as though it were a wig. He was the one who'd arrested that fellow in the Golden Rule that time, the fellow who'd tried to shoot Ittzy Herz.
Apparently Officer McCorkle thought he recognized Vangie and Gabe as well. He gave them both a searching glance as they passed him by, and when she looked back at him he had taken an enormous notebook from his hip pocket and was flipping through the pages. He selected one, took a stub of pencil from his shirt pocket, wetted it on his tongue preparatory to taking notes, and glanced again toward Vangie and Gabe.
Vangie guiltily faced front. Beside her, Gabe walked blissfully along, unaware of everything. But she could practically feel that pencil writing away on the back of her head.
He's just waiting for us to get in trouble, Vangie thought. It was obvious that McCorkle had his eye on them. Should she say something to Gabe? No, he'd just think she was trying to scare him out of planning this Mint robbery.
Troubled, oppressed, but for the moment keeping her own counsel, Vangie walked along beside her man.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Francis' pleasure in the day was about to be spoiled. "I don't understand," he complained, "why you want to go out to that awful place."
Gabe said, "It's just a nice ride in the country, think of it that way."
"A ride into disaster, you mean." Francis was sulky because the cancan shows were still forcibly shut down and none of his other potential projects had come through-the dress boutique, for instance, or the tea shoppe.
Vangie said, "Oh, come on, Francis, it'll be fun. Fresh air and sunshine."
Feeling betrayed by the girl, Francis said to her, "Why, I thought you didn't approve of all this."
"I don't," she said. "But I wouldn't pass up a beautiful day in the country. Besides, you don't care about
that old mine anyway."
He did, in fact, he minded terribly, but he only sighed and said, "Oh, very well. If we must, we must."
They were walking along through a light fog, of a pearly thinness so translucent that it hardly counted as a fog at all in San Franciscan terms. As they strolled down Front Street to Hansen's Livery, the fog rolled in more heavily from the Bay, entirely obscuring the world in white for thirty seconds or so, then whisking itself away like smoke in a magic act, revealing-a corral full of nags for rent.
Francis, feeling a bit better now that he'd resigned himself to visiting the mine of his undoing, said, "My, that is a stirring sight, isn't it?"
"I look best on a black horse," Vangie said.
"Yes, you're right," Francis told her. "That would go with your coloring."
Gabe said, "I look best in a buggy, so that's what we'll get."
Pouting, Vangie said, "But I want to ride."
Gabe said, "Vangie, I've never been on top of a horse in my life and I'm not about to start now."
Vangie gave him a contemptuous stare. "You are a dude, aren't you?"
"Horses are for pulling things," Gabe said. "I don't sit on them, and they don't sit on me."
"Tenderfoot."
"Better a tender foot," Gabe told her. "We'll take a buggy. Of course, if you want, you can stay here in town."
Francis, seeing a battle brewing, made an attempt to soothe it. "Oh, really," he said, "sometimes a victoria can be fun. The breeze in one's face, a pleasant ride. Don't you think so, Vangie?"
Vangie looked doubtful and mutinous. She seemed to be working out the exact phrasing of a statement that Francis was sure he didn't want to hear, so he hurried on, saying, "Come on, dear, we'll see if they have something interesting. Something really ladylike and nice."
Vangie permitted herself to be led away by Francis, who took her around the side of the corral to where a number of bedraggled buggies and gigs were lined up along a muddy stretch beside a railed fence. Forcing himself to be lighthearted in the teeth of all this depressing naturalism, Francis said, "Well, do you see anything you like?"
Gangway! Page 7
