Tangier Bank Heist

by Sean McLachlan

  I took a sip of my Scotch to hide my smile. I already knew how reliable the International Zone’s customs agents could be. No doubt Gerald did too. He was nobody’s fool. That’s why he was talking to me. Normally the cops don’t want a private detective poking his nose into their investigations, but he figured I could get people to talk who wouldn’t talk with a police officer, and he was right.

  “What about the employees?” I asked.

  “Three tellers and a secretary. They say they are as surprised as anyone else. We’re checking on them but I believe them. Two are lodging a complaint. They had money in the bank. All are owed a week’s wages.”

  “What did you find in Pieter Vlamin’s apartment?” I asked.

  “Nothing of note. He did a good job cleaning it out. I’ve already heard from some of the other banks in the International Zone that he had been exchanging credit for currency and bearer bonds. Obviously to gather as much cash as possible before bolting.”

  I snorted. “Because no bank actually keeps enough cash to cover their holdings. What a con. Can I check out the bank, or at least what’s left of it?”

  “Certainly, although there is precious little to see. I’ll walk with you. It’s good that the anxious public sees that I’m on the job.”

  The bank was in a mid-sized storefront on the Rue Goya, right in the commercial district. The bank still had its sign in prominent gold letters above the door, but the door was closed and a native policeman stood guard. A small crowd of foreigners and Moors stood there staring, faces glum, and yet remaining, as if they waited long enough the bank would reappear, they could make their withdrawals, and everything would be all right. I remembered crowds like that in front of American banks when I was a kid. I remembered my mom and dad standing in those crowds.

  The policeman saluted Gerald, gave me a respectful nod, and opened the door for us.

  The lights were on, illuminating an empty room. The counter was there, as well as the painted logo of the bank on the back wall, but there were blank spaces where the clock and exchange board used to be. They had even taken the wooden crest of the bank that hung over the door, now only visible as a lighter spot on the paint. We circled around the counter and looked at the tellers’ stations, three booths all in a row. Some loose leaf paper, a few notepads, a pen or two. We rummaged through these scanty leavings and found nothing of interest.

  Gerald nodded to a door behind us. He opened it to reveal a short hallway. A small office stood to one side. At least I suppose it had been an office. The room was absolutely bare except for a wastepaper basket. At the end of the hallway another door, this one open, led to another, smaller room. Half the room was sectioned off by floor to ceiling bars, looking like an old-style town jail. The door stood open, the key in the lock. The cell was empty. Scrape marks on the concrete floor told me where the safe had been.

  I whistled.

  “Well I’ll be damned.”

  Gerald chuckled. “You’re one of the few in this city who won’t be. Any ideas? I don’t mind admitting I’m at my wit’s end.”

  “I’ll dig around in town. First let’s take another look around.”

  There wasn’t much to see. Pieter Vlamin had cleared out the place pretty good. All I found in his office was a wastepaper basket containing a few scraps of blank paper, a broken pen, and an empty packet of Egyptian cigarettes.

  “Looks like he had a bit of a going away party,” Gerald called from the other room.

  Returning to the front room, Gerald indicated an empty champagne bottle resting in a drawer he had opened. There was no glass.

  I grinned. “Drinking champagne from the bottle? Very classy.”

  Gerald pointed toward the ceiling. “Having a bit of fun with the cork too.”

  I could just make out the cork nestled among the cut glass of the chandelier.

  “You have a good eye, Gerald. Looks like there’s nothing else to see here. By the way, I heard through the grapevine that Pieter was seen talking on a couple of occasions with Ronnie the Pusher. No idea what about.”

  “Thank you. I’ll look into that.”

  “I’ll look into it too. Now listen, Gerald, if I’m in on this case and we break it, I want my clients to get their savings back before the fat cats and banks get their greasy paws into it.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, lighting a cigarette from the stub end of his last one.

  That’s what I liked about Gerald. Most cops would have given me a long song and dance about legal technicalities. Gerald was willing to give and take. Most cops were all take and no give.

  “So long,” I said, walking out the door. The crowd outside barraged me with questions. I shouldered my way through, not answering.

  The thing with Ronnie the Pusher and Pieter had me stumped. It didn’t fit with what little I knew about Pieter, or Ronnie. Those two moved in separate worlds. Someone who lived in Ronnie’s world might be able to shed some light on it.

  It was time to talk to Bill Burroughs.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Spanish boys all called Bill El Hombre Invisible. He was a private individual, lived alone and had few friends. When he did go out, he had this way of burying himself in his coat, thin bony face tucked under a hat with the brim pulled low, gliding through the crowd so unobtrusive and silent that no one noticed him. That’s the way he liked it. He’d come to Tangier for the cheap paregoric you could get in any pharmacy without a scrip and for the cheap boys you could get on any street corner. He did not chatter at the cafes and he did not try to ingratiate himself into the popular cliques. Other than the pharmacy, the only place you were likely to see him was Librairie des Colonnes, the only good bookstore in Tangier, where he went regularly to buy a stack of volumes by authors ranging from Gide to Spillane.

  Bill lived above a male brothel at the end of an alley leading off from the Boulevard Pasteur. I’d never been inside the business part of the building but they must have had the goods because a lot of the homos went there. Not Bill. He had them sent up to his place like a steak and eggs ordered from room service.

  I climbed a grimy flight of stairs that smelled of mildew and knocked on his door, giving myself of fifty-fifty chance of being ignored. That’s how Bill treated his friends. It wasn’t anything personal. He was just unconscious half the time.

  A Spanish kid of about seventeen opened the door. Fine features, straight black hair, lean body, liquid eyes, the trace of a smile on full lips.

  “You here for Meester William?” he asked.

  “Kent!” I heard Bill’s gentle voice call from the gloom. “Come on in.”

  The room had no light, only a bit of daylight slicing through the broken slats of the blinds. As usual, the air was stale and stank of body odor. The junk Bill shot up every day made it so that he couldn’t stand the feel of water on his skin. He hardly ever bathed except when he was taking the cure, and that never lasted long.

  The floor was covered with pages torn from notebooks, and the pages were covered with writing. At the far end of the room, past this snowdrift of scribbling, Bill lay on a cot. His skeletal face and hands looked pale next to the dark green blanket. He sat up but did not rise to greet me.

  “Come on over. Good to see you,” he said.

  I tried to steer a path through the papers without stepping on any.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Bill told me.

  “It’s your writing.”

  “The footprint of an honest man would do it some good.”

  “You’re being too kind,” I said, stepping on several pages as I made my way to him. A rickety old wooden chair stood next to the bed. I cleared it of books and papers and a hypodermic, all of which I set on the floor.

  I sat down.

  “Kiki, go over to Wong’s and get the man a beer.” Bill told the Spanish kid.

  “Anything for you, Meester William?”

  “No.”

  “Not something for to eat? You are very thin.”

  “I’m fine
. Just get the beer, and something for yourself.”

  “Yes, love.”

  The smile Kiki gave Bill almost made me believe the word.

  Kiki went out.

  “A bit old for you, isn’t he?” I asked.

  Bill smiled, and for the first time since I had met him he didn’t look worn out.

  “He’s the real thing, Kent. Never thought I’d find it here.”

  “Glad you finally did.”

  The doubt must have been obvious in my voice, because Bill said, “Tangier is the flesh shop of Africa, the Interzone between rich cock and poor ass. Love here is only an advertising slogan, a gimmick to bring in the rubes. At least that’s true nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of ten thousand. But I struck the jackpot, my friend. I swear I did. Kiki’s a good boy. His parents own a fishing boat that his big brother works on, but Kiki is a gentle soul. He hates to take a life, even that of a fish. But enough about that ray of sunlight. You look like a man who’s here on business.”

  “I am. Cigarette?” I offered him one. I needed to light up just to mask the smell of his body.

  “Once you’ve tried junk, tobacco is like a five-penny whore in the harsh light of day after you’ve rolled with Adonis in the fields of Arcadia under a full moon.”

  I’d forgotten. Bill didn’t smoke anymore. He didn’t drink anymore either. Just junk, lots and lots of that crap shot up his veins every day and every night. I don’t know why I was friends with someone like him, but I was. I cared about the guy. Under all the bluster and depravity he had a good heart. Pity he didn’t see it.

  “You hear about the South Continental Bank?” I asked.

  “What about it?” Bill was always the last to know anything that didn’t involve drugs or boys.

  “It’s gone. The guy who opened it, a photographer named Pieter Vlamin, vanished, and so did the bank. He even took the furniture.”

  Bill smiled. “A fine con, to be sure. As ballsy as the South Sea Bubble. Wish I’d have thought of it.”

  “It’s a con that took in a bunch of people I like.”

  Bill looked at me. “Not Melanie?”

  “Afraid so.”

  He grimaced and shook his head. “That’s a hard ride, son. Not many good women in the world. Most will suck the life out of you quicker than you can say ‘Medusa’, but Melanie is one of the good ones. A regular Salt Chunk Mary of North Africa.”

  I’d actually met Bill through Melanie. She had been trying to save him. Now she had given up. I hadn’t.

  “Melanie said that Pieter Vlamin was seen with Ronnie the Pusher. Had a couple of quiet meetings at her cafe.”

  “Ronnie doesn’t sell in cafes,” Bill said. “He delivers. Has a boy fetch the money and then a different boy delivers the goods.”

  “Seems an awful lot of trouble.”

  “He did a stretch in San Quentin. Made him paranoid.”

  “So if he wasn’t selling to Pieter, what was he doing?”

  “Dunno. Pieter wasn’t on the game anyway. I know every junkie in this town, from high to low and everything in between, and he wasn’t one of them.”

  “He was flush. He could have hid it.” As long as a junkie got a small daily fix, they could function just fine. The degeneration came when they couldn’t get it regularly, or if they took too much for too long.

  Bill scratched the inside of his elbow, which was dotted with needle marks. “A junkie can smell the junk on any user within a hundred yards. We’re like hunting dogs sniffing at each other’s ass, hoping for an eighth of a grain to drop out of the bunghole like a dislodged Dingleberry.”

  “What else is Ronnie up to besides pushing?”

  “Now Kent, you know I can’t squeal.”

  “Ronnie is a jerk. You owe him nothing.”

  Bill shrugged his bony shoulders. “Yeah, he’s a jerk all right. But I don’t know what he’s up to, I swear. One thing I can say, though, is that he’s been hanging around the docks a lot lately. Heard that from Patty.”

  “Patty” was Patrick O’Mallory, an Irishman with a taste for short skirts and sailors, both on him.

  “Think he’s waiting for a shipment?” I asked. Despite opioids being freely available in the pharmacies, some junkies preferred the harder street stuff, which came in doses the pharmaceutical companies said were too dangerous for medical use. Even if you make the stuff legal, the drug fiends will go after something harder. That’s just how people are.

  Bill thought for a moment. “I guess it’s possible he’s waiting on a shipment. But it’s not his style to be on the scene and as far as I know he’s not in the import business anyhow. He’s strictly local sales.”

  “You know where Ronnie lives?”

  “Now, Kent…”

  “A lot of people got gipped, Bill.”

  He laughed. “A Commie like you caring about the fortunes of a bunch of investors? I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t care about them. I care about the regular folks who got the shaft. People I care about. Not only did they get Melanie, they got Ricardo.”

  Ricardo was a piano player down at a little beach bar called El Paraíso. One of Bill’s few friends.

  Bill smiled. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’re a real Johnson, my friend. Not many like you these days. Pity you’re a Red. That’s just another wavelength of mindfuck like every other –ism. Opiate for the masses. Can that hypnosis, kid.”

  Bill had a habit of talking like he was older than everyone around him. The drugs sure made him look the part. In fact, he was ten years younger than me.

  “So can you give me a lead on Ronnie the Pusher?” I asked.

  “He lives at 21 Avenue Hassan I, apartment 6. Don’t tell anyone I told you. How’s Melanie holding up? She hasn’t been by in a while. She ever mention me?”

  I’m sick of trying to help that no-good junkie and hearing nothing but excuses and dirty stories, was the last thing she had said to me about him.

  “She was doing fine until this bank caper. She says hi. You should go over and say hello sometime.”

  “I’m needed downstairs. I’ve hired myself on as their business manager. Dutch Tony doesn’t have any vision. I’ve been talking to him about sprucing up the place. New floor plan. Tasteful paintings of nude boys on the walls. Reproductions of Greek statues. Turning it into a proper peghouse.”

  “Peghouse?”

  Bill sat up straighter and I could tell I’d been roped into a lecture. He did this sometimes.

  “The peghouse started back in the days of the Ottoman Empire, when the only way to separate the men from the boys was with a crowbar. It was a brothel where the John would be led into a front room to examine the merchandise. Standard procedure, you might say, but they had a gimmick that made it something better than your typical lineup. The boys would sit on pegs arranged along a bench, all in a row from the smallest peg to the largest. A peg of the same size stuck out of the front of the bench between the boy’s legs. The John could go down the row, examining the pegs and comparing them to his own. That way he could find the perfect fit.”

  I shook my head.

  “You aren’t going to offend me, Bill. I’ve seen it all.”

  “You ain’t never seen a peghouse, pardner,” he said with a drawl taken straight from some Poverty Row Western.

  “I’ve seen friends burn to death inside of tanks. Some lice-ridden kid skewering himself on a stick is small change next to that.”

  Bill chuckled. “I love you, Kent, I really do, but you don’t got no appreciation for beauty. Enough about the tanks. It’s always about your damn tanks and the war and the class struggle. The world will dance its demons before you. There’s no need to go looking for them unless you need new material.”

  I looked around at the loose pages scattered like giant flakes of dandruff all over the floor.

  “How’s the book going?”

  “Telepathic transmissions from pan-Galactic civilizations of highly intelligent grasshopper
s. The female of the species, after enticing a male to mate, bites off his head and plants her fertilized eggs in the open wound of the neck. The eggs hatch and the pupae feed off papa, growing through the larval stage, squiggling about in father’s now-putrid corpse alongside a dozen different species of mite and housefly and ant, all vying for the richest tidbits with their hungry suckers. The larvae eventually grow into adults and move out for more prey, having learned to feast on flesh from the carcass of their own father.”

  “You’re writing a book about insects? I thought it was a novel.”

  “Vast swamps of erogenous oils that sigh and palpitate to the touch. Wading through this region will send the entire habitat into a powerful orgasm with enough psychic energy delivered to the traveler’s cerebral cortex to drive the most depraved sex fiend mad.”

  “Wait, so what you’re saying is—”

  “Flick knives hidden in rubbers, set to spring into the urethra with the attempted use of the prophylactic device. Bawdy shows that end with a bang, the entire gyrating and fleshy cast explodes on cue, showering the trench-coat-wearing audience with gristle and spangled shoes.”

  “So is it almost finished?” A cruel way to stop the conversation, but I had to get him back on track.

  Bill stiffened, rocked back and forth a little. He glanced at a hypo sitting on top of a nearby stack of books and mumbled. “Alan is supposed to be coming from New York. He’s going to help me collate it.”

  “You mean Ginsberg? The queer Jew with the Coke bottle glasses? I remember him.”

  “Great poet. One of the best minds of his generation. And he’s got connections. A mainline into the vein of forward-looking publishers.”

  “Sounds like you got it made.” It was good to encourage him in something. Maybe keep him off the junk a little.

  Not that he had any more chance at becoming a published writer than I did getting elected President of the United States.