Cops and Robbers

by Donald E. Westlake

  Bandell was stocky and short and gray-haired, a man in his sixties, wearing a dark suit and a conservative tie. The three men with him were in their thirties or forties, tanned, all dressed casually in the style of a resort town. Everybody deferred to Bandell, who sat alone on a sofa with his back to a picture window. Vigano was the only one present who called him Joe instead of Mr. Bandell, but he too deferred to the older man, in smaller ways.

  After three or four minutes, Bandell said, “Well, it’s nice to see you again. I’m glad you phoned. I’m glad you could take the time to come visit.”

  He meant the chitchat was done, and he wanted to know the purpose of the trip. Vigano hadn’t attempted to explain anything on the phone, had only suggested he make the trip. (The phone conversation was also in a government file now, at a cost of twenty-three hundred dollars.) Now, in guaranteed privacy, Vigano set aside the drink he’d been given and explained the story of the two possible cops and the twelve-million-dollar stock-market heist.

  Bandell interrupted once, saying, “It’s usable paper?”

  “They took exactly what I said, Joe. Bearer bonds, in amounts between twenty and a hundred grand.”

  Bandell nodded. “All right.”

  Vigano went on, explaining the payoff terms he’d agreed to. When he was finished, Bandell pursed his lips and looked across the room and said, “I don’t know. Two million dollars is heavy cash.”

  Vigano said, “It’ll be back in the bank within two hours.” Because that was the point of this meeting; he couldn’t draw two million cash on his own say-so, he needed Bandell’s approval.

  Bandell said, “Why take it out at all? Use a bag full of newspapers.”

  “They aren’t that dumb,” Vigano told him. “The caper they pulled shows how cute they are.”

  “Then use a dressed roll,” Bandell said. “Take out a hundred thousand or so.”

  Vigano shook his head. “It won’t work, Joe. They’re very cute and very cautious. They’ll have to see the two million before they relax. They’ll reach in and see what’s in the bottom of the basket.”

  Bandell said, “How about wallpaper?”

  “They already talked about that,” Vigano said. “They’re ready for it.”

  Stello, the new man, said, “If they’re that good, how do you know they won’t figure out a way to keep the money?”

  “We’ve got the manpower,” Vigano said. “We can smother them.”

  Another of Bandell’s assistants said, “Why not leave them alive? If they did this first job so good they can do more.”

  “We don’t have anything on them,” Vigano pointed out. “We don’t know who they are, we don’t have any handle on them, and they don’t want to do any more. They were only interested in the one job. They’re amateurs, they said so from the beginning and they acted like it.”

  “Smart amateurs,” suggested Stello.

  “Granted,” Vigano said. “But still amateurs. Which means they could still make a mistake and get picked up by the law, and that leads right directly from them to me.”

  Bandell said, “Are they cops or aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” Vigano said. “We tried to find them in the force, we asked around with our tame cops, nobody knows anything. I myself personally looked at mug shots on twenty-six thousand New York City cops, and I didn’t come up with them, but that doesn’t mean anything because the guy came to me in a wig and moustache and eyeglasses, and who knows what he looks like with his normal face?”

  Bandell’s other assistant said, “Why didn’t you take the disguise off him when you had him?”

  “That was before he pulled the job,” Vigano pointed out. “If I broke his security ahead of time, he never would have gone through with it.”

  Bandell said, “What do you think, Tony? You yourself, personally. Are they cops or not cops?”

  “I just don’t know,” Vigano told him. “The guy who came to me said he was on the force. They pulled the job in uniform and used a police car for their getaway. But I’ll tell you, I don’t know for sure what the hell they are.”

  Stello said, “If they’re cops, maybe it’s not such a good idea to have them hit.”

  “If they’re cops especially I want them hit,” Vigano said. “One of them visited me in my own home, remember.”

  Bandell said, “If you do it, you do it quietly.”

  “Quietly,” Vigano agreed. “But to relax them so I can do it, I need to be able to show them cash.”

  Bandell considered, pursing his lips again and staring at a spot in midair. Then he said, “What’s your setup for the changeover?”

  Vigano clicked his fingers at Andy, who immediately got to his feet, opened his attaché case, and brought out a map of Manhattan. He opened the map and stood there being a human easel, holding the map so everybody could see it, while Vigano pointed at it to explain the situation.

  “I told you they’re cute,” Vigano said, and went over to stand next to the map. “Their idea is,” he said, “that we’ll switch picnic baskets in Central Park next Tuesday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Do you know where the snapper is in that?”

  Bandell didn’t want to guess; he was strictly business. “Tell us,” he said.

  Vigano said, “Every Tuesday afternoon, Central Park in New York is closed to automobiles.” Gesturing at the map, he said, “There’s nothing allowed in there but bicycles.”

  Bandell nodded. “How do you counter?”

  “We can’t use cars, but neither can they.” Vigano started touching the map with his finger, explaining it all. “We’ll put a car at every exit from the park. All the way around, here and here and here. Inside, we’ll have our own men on bicycles, all over the place. They’ll be in touch with one another by walkie-talkie, back and forth.” He turned away from the map, held his hand out in front of himself, palm up, and slowly closed his fingers into a fist. “We’ll have the whole park bottled up,” he said.

  Stello said, “You’ll have a thousand witnesses.”

  “We can smother them,” Vigano said. “When we have them at the spot where we make the switch, we can just surround them with our own people. There won’t be anybody to see a thing, and we carry them the hell out of there afterwards, and nobody going by on bicycles is going to know a thing about it.”

  Bandell was frowning at the map. “You have this clear in your mind, Tony? You’re sure of yourself?”

  “You know me, Joe,” Vigano said. “I’m a careful man. I wouldn’t get involved in this if I wasn’t sure of myself.”

  “And it’s twelve million. In bearer bonds.”

  “Just under.” Vigano looked around at them all and said, “It’s a good big pie to slice up.”

  Bandell nodded slowly. He said, “You want to take the cash out of our accounts in New York, put it together to make two million, show it to them, and then put the cash right back again.”

  “Right.”

  “What’s the chance of losing the two million to somebody else?”

  Vigano gestured at his young men. “Andy and Mike will be with it all the way. And the other soldiers in the operation don’t have to know what’s in the basket at all.”

  Bandell shifted position on the sofa, half-turning so he could look out the picture window behind him. The seconds went by, and he continued to show the room only the back of his head. Vigano gestured to Mike, who quietly folded the map again and put it away. Still Bandell looked out at the city.

  Finally he turned back. He gave Vigano a level look and said, “It’s your responsibility.”

  Vigano smiled. “Done,” he said.

  Tom

  Joe let me off at Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, and I walked the one block over to Central Park West. I crossed with the light, and the park was now directly in front of me, the grass separated from the sidewalk by a knee-high stone wall.

  There are benches along this part of Central Park West with their backs against that low wall, so that if you sit
in one of them you’re looking at the apartment buildings across the way. I’ve never understood why anybody would want to sit on a park bench facing away from the park, but there are always plenty of people sitting on them in the warm weather, so there must be an attraction to it that I don’t understand. Maybe they like to count the cabs.

  Today, I joined them. I sat on an unoccupied bench and counted cabs, and found nothing exciting in it.

  I spent nearly an hour sitting there, with a newspaper in my lap and a moustache on my face, waiting for the mob to show up. It was a humid day and the moustache tickled like crazy, but I was afraid to scratch it for fear it would fall off. Every once in a while when it got to be more than I could stand I’d twitch my upper lip around like a beaver, but I tried to limit that relief to moments of true emergency, since for all I knew that too would make the damn thing break loose, and I didn’t want a moustache in my lap when Vigano’s people arrived.

  The reason I was thinking about the moustache and park benches so much is that I was afraid to think about Vigano and his mobsters, and what we were here to do.

  This one was worse than the robbery, a hundred times worse. That other time, we’d been operating against decent civilized human beings, who at the very worst would arrest us and try us and put us in jail. This time, we were operating against thugs who were going to try to kill us no matter what we did. Last time, we were pitting our one-shot plan against a normal company’s normal routine. This time, we were pitting our lives against the experience and manpower and malevolence of the mob.

  When I did think about it, I simply thought we were crazy. If I’d worked it all out back in the beginning, say when I’d been on the train going to talk to Vigano, if I’d figured it out then that sooner or later we would be making ourselves murder targets for the Mafia, I never would have gone through with it. And Joe the same, I’m sure of it. But all we could concentrate on in the beginning was stealing the bonds, and not what would happen afterwards. And when it did occur to me what Vigano’s natural reaction would have to be, I was still so caught up in the other thing that all I thought about was how much easier that would make things for us, since we didn’t really have to steal the bonds, just make it look as though we had.

  It was the morning after the robbery, while suffering that hangover in Joe’s car on the way to work, that I’d first looked the thing full in the face. We had done part one, and we’d done it pretty well. But part two was the crunch. Part two was where death waited for us if we weren’t very smart and very careful and very lucky.

  But if we didn’t do part two, there was no point in our having done part one.

  I was in a real funk for a while after that. I couldn’t even think about the problem, couldn’t concentrate on it. It just seemed more than I could deal with, reaching into the trap and pulling out the two-million-dollar piece of cheese without getting the spring across the back of my neck.

  I’d been coming out of it anyway, spurred on by the scene with the homosexual in the park—very near here, in fact—but it was Joe who finally goosed me back into action again. I think Joe probably has less imagination than I do, but that’s a good part of his strength. If you can’t imagine the things that might go wrong, you won’t be afraid of them.

  I don’t mean that Joe wasn’t scared of the mob. Any sane man would be, particularly if he meant to sell them a lot of old newspapers for two million dollars. It’s just that Joe was never paralyzed by his fear the way I’d been paralyzed by mine. Joe dealt more with specific things that he could touch and taste. What made me the most nervous was the mob, but what made him the most nervous was that we’d done part one and didn’t have anything to show for it. It really pained him when we ripped up those bonds, I know it did.

  Well, we’d committed ourselves again. We could still turn around, of course, we could still cop out, but I didn’t think we would. We were at the stage now equivalent to when, in the robbery, we’d met Eastpoole but Joe hadn’t grabbed his arm yet. We’d set things up with Vigano, we were both in position, but we hadn’t yet made contact, we could still change our minds at the last second.

  Joe made his first pass twenty minutes after I’d sat down, but I didn’t give him the signal because Vigano’s people hadn’t showed up yet. I watched him drive by, and then I counted cabs some more, and fifteen minutes later he went by again, and still they hadn’t showed up.

  Weren’t they going to? If after all this, after nerving ourselves up to it and working out the best scheme we could think of, the mob didn’t show up this time for the transfer, I didn’t know what I’d do. I wouldn’t be able to stand it, that’s all. To have to start all over again, phone Vigano again, set up another meeting, I’d have an ulcer before it was over. Or a nervous breakdown.

  But what if they weren’t coming at all? What if they’d decided the hell with it, they didn’t want to buy the bonds?

  Christ, that would be something. Then Joe would really be sore, and at me. Because if we actually had the bonds, and the mob reneged on us, we could maybe go fence them to somebody else. But Vigano was the only person on earth to whom we could sell the idea of the bonds. It was him, or nobody.

  The arrangement Joe and I had was that he would come by every fifteen minutes until I gave him the signal. Then our second timing sequence would begin, with me making the first move. We hadn’t made a contingency plan for what we’d do if the mob never showed up, but I figured if Joe was still circling the neighborhood an hour from now we might as well throw in the towel and go away and see what we could do next.

  Get drunk, most likely.

  Five minutes before he was due to come by for the third time, the mob arrived. A black limousine came up Central Park West and pulled to a stop in the entrance to the roadway. Gray police sawhorses blocked the road to automobiles this afternoon, and the limousine stopped broadside to the sawhorses, out of the way of northbound Central Park West traffic. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then the rear door opened and four people got out; two men and two women. None of them looked like the kind of people who normally travel around in limousines. Also, the general practice with limousines is that the chauffeur gets out and opens the door for the passengers, but this time the chauffeur stayed behind the wheel.

  A man came out first. He was stocky and tough-looking, and despite the heat of the day he was wearing a light zippered jacket closed about halfway up. He looked around warily and cautiously, and then motioned for the other people to come out.

  The two women appeared. They were both in their twenties, both a little too full in hip and breast, both wearing plaid slacks and ordinary blouses, both in full night-style make-up, and both with big bouffant hairdos. One of them was chewing gum. They stood around like collies waiting their turn to appear at a dog show, and the other man came out of the car after them.

  He was the one. He looked like the first guy, and he too wore a half-zippered jacket, but the important part was that he was carrying the picnic basket. From the way he held it, the thing was heavier than hell.

  Let it be full of the real thing, I thought. Let them not try that kind of fast one, I don’t want to have to go through this twice.

  The four of them made very unlikely picnickers. There didn’t seem to be any coherent connection among them; the men didn’t hold the women’s hands or elbows, and there wasn’t any conversation back and forth. Nor could you figure out which woman was supposed to be with which man. The four of them seemed as arbitrarily joined together as four strangers in an elevator.

  They walked off in a group into the park, the second man struggling with the heavy picnic basket. They disappeared from sight, but the limousine stayed where it was. Thin exhaust showed from the tailpipe.

  I took the newspaper off my lap and tossed it down to the other end of the bench. In less than a minute a thin old fellow came along and picked it up and walked off with it, reading the stock reports.

  Joe came by right on schedule. I didn’t look directly at him, but I
knew he would see that I didn’t have the paper in my lap anymore. That was the signal. He would dope out for himself what the limousine meant, parked sideways in the entrance.

  After Joe passed, I got to my feet and walked on into the park. Strolling down the asphalt path, I saw the four picnickers sitting in a bunch down near the traffic light on the interior road, where I’d said they should be. They had the picnic basket on the ground and they were sitting in a tight circle around it. They weren’t talking among themselves, they were all facing and concentrating outward, not even pretending to have a picnic together. They looked like Conestoga wagons waiting for Indians.

  Vigano would have other people in the area, to guard the basket and try to keep us from going away with it. Walking around, I spotted four of them, guys sitting or standing at strategic locations where they could watch the picnickers. There’d be more of them, I was sure of that, but four was all I’d seen so far.

  I’d probably see more later, whether I wanted to or not.

  I kept an eye on my watch. It would take Joe a while to get into position. At the right time, I walked forward across the grass and down a gentle slope toward the picnickers.

  They watched me coming. The one who’d first gotten out of the car put his hand inside his half-open jacket.

  I walked up to them. I had a smile tacked to my face, as phony as the moustache. I hunkered down in front of the first man and said, quietly, “I’m Mr. Kopp.”

  He had the eyes of a dead fish. He studied me with them and said, “Where’s your stuff?”

  “Coming,” I said. “But first I’m going to reach into the basket and take some bills out.”

  His expression didn’t change. He said, “Who says?” Both women and the other man kept looking away from us, outward; watching for Indians.

  I said, “I have to check them out. Just a few.”

  He was thinking it over. I glanced away to my left and saw one of the guys I’d spotted earlier, and he was closer now. He wasn’t moving at the moment, but he was closer.