“Why?”
I looked back at him. The question had been asked in a flat tone, as though he were a computer instead of a man, and his face was still expressionless. I said, “You know I’m not going to make the deal until I know for sure what you’ve got in that basket.”
“We have what you want.”
“I’ll have to check it out for myself.”
The other man turned his head and looked at me. Then he faced outward again and said, “Let him.”
The first man nodded. His fish eyes kept watching me. He said, “Go ahead. A few.”
“Fine,” I said. As I leaned forward to reach into the basket, I looked down the road. Joe was due about now.
Joe
I let Tom off at Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, went on up to 90th, made a right turn, and headed over to Central Park West. Then I turned south, and drove slowly down alongside the park to consider the situation.
Everything looked normal, as far as I could see. I didn’t believe it, but that was the way it looked. There’s a long oval road called the Drive that goes all the way around inside the park, and every entrance to it that I saw was blocked with gray Police Department sawhorses; the usual thing for a Tuesday afternoon. People with bicycles were going in past the sawhorses, and wherever I could catch a glimpse of the Drive inside the park it was full of bicycles sailing by. Nobody I saw had a sign on his back that read Mafia.
It took twenty minutes to go down to 61st Street and then come back up again, and when I went past 85th Street it was fine by me that Tom was still sitting there with the newspaper in his lap. I wasn’t ready to leap into action just yet. To tell the truth, I was getting a late case of cold feet.
Maybe it was because everything looked so peaceful. When we’d gone up against the brokerage, there had been people around with uniforms and guns, there’d been closed-circuit television and locked doors to go through and all kinds of things to pit ourselves against. But here there was nothing, just a peaceful afternoon in the park, summer sunshine everywhere, people riding bicycles or pushing baby carriages or just lying on the grass with a paperback book. And yet this was a much tougher situation; the people we were up against were meaner, and we were pretty sure they were out to kill us, and they knew we were coming.
So where were they?
Around; that much I could be sure of. Since I’m on the uniformed force I haven’t had much to do with stakeouts, but I know from Tom that it’s possible to flood an area with plainsclothesmen and not have anything look out of the ordinary at all. And if the Police Department could do it, the mob could do it.
I was supposed to check with Tom every fifteen minutes, so after I saw him I headed over to Broadway and farted around there for a little while. Ran my beat, in fact. I was on duty at the moment, which was the simple straight-forward way I’d gotten hold of a car this time. It had turned out Lou had a girl friend that went to Columbia and lived up near the campus and didn’t have any classes on Tuesday afternoons. So for the last three weeks I’d been giving him a couple hours to shack up with her; drop him off at her place, pick him up later. It was an established pattern now, nothing out of the ordinary, and it gave me a couple of hours alone with the car; with the numbers changed again.
Fifteen minutes. I went back over to the park, passed by Tom again, and he still had the newspaper in his lap.
This time, I didn’t like it. I was still nervous, I still had cold feet, but my reaction when I’m scared of something is that I want to get it done and over with. No stalling around, building it up, making myself even more nervous than I was already.
Come on, Vigano. Make your play, let’s do something.
Because of my nerves, my driving was getting bad. A couple times, if I’d been in a civilian car I would have racked it up for sure; but people pay more attention to police cars, so they saw me in time to get out of the way. But that’s all I needed, was to be involved in some fender-bumping argument over on Columbus Avenue while Tom was making contact in the park; so after the second trip past him I didn’t do much driving at all, just pulled in next to a hydrant on 86th to wait the fifteen minutes out.
I had the radio on, listening to the dispatcher, though I don’t know why. I sure wasn’t going to respond to any squeals, not now. Maybe I was listening for something to tell me the whole thing was off, we’d blown it and could go home and forget the whole thing.
In the back seat, directly behind me, was the picnic basket. It was half full of old copies of the Daily News. On top we’d scattered some fake diplomas and gag stock certificates we’d picked up in a novelty shop on Times Square. They ought to look good enough for a fast peek, which is all we meant to give the other side before we made our play. If things worked out right.
Fifteen minutes. I pulled away from the hydrant, made a loop around, and passed Tom again, and he didn’t have the newspaper on his lap anymore.
All of a sudden I had a balled-up wet wool overcoat in my stomach. I was blinking like a hophead, I could barely make out the numbers and the hands on my watch when I raised my arm in front of my face to check the time. Three thirty-five. All right. All right.
I drove up to 96th Street, the next entrance to the Drive. I stopped with the nose of the car against one of the sawhorses blocking the road, and stumbled and almost fell on my face getting out from behind the wheel. I walked around to the front of the car, lifted one end of the sawhorse, and swung it out of the way. Then I drove through, put the sawhorse back, and angled the car slowly down the entrance road to the Drive.
I was in the only kind of vehicle that could come into the park on a Tuesday afternoon. That was the edge we had; we could drive, and the mob had to walk.
I stopped by the Drive and checked my watch again, and I had three minutes before I should start to move. Tom needed time to make contact.
Bicycles streamed by me, heading south, the same direction I would go. There’s no law about it, but most people who ride bicycles in the park treat the Drive as a counter-clockwise one-way street, the way it is the rest of the week for cars. Every once in a while somebody would come up in the other direction like a salmon going upstream—usually it was a teen-ager—but most of the traffic was south-bound. Even the women pushing baby carriages were all heading south.
I didn’t want any shooting in here today. Aside from what would happen to Tom and me, they could really rack up a score on women and children.
Time. I shifted into drive and joined the stream of bicycles and matched their pace on down toward Tom.
17
They had rehearsed this, they’d gone through it over and over again, they both knew their parts; and still, when Tom looked up from the picnic basket and saw the police car threading its way toward him through the bicycles, he was amazed at the relief he felt. Now that Joe was actually here, Tom could admit to himself the fear he’d been carrying in the back of his mind that for one reason or another Joe would fail to show up.
Joe hadn’t had that worry about Tom. The only unacknowledged fear he’d been ignoring was that Tom would already be dead before the patrol car got there. Seeing Tom alive relieved Joe’s mind a little, but not much; they were still just at the beginning of this ride.
Joe eased the car to a stop near the picnickers. Tom had half a dozen bills from the basket clenched in his right fist, taken from the top and the middle and the bottom—they didn’t want the fakery with old newspapers done right back at them—and now he said to the picnickers, “Take it easy. I’ll be right back.”
They didn’t like it. They were looking at the patrol car and at each other and up the hill toward their friends. They obviously hadn’t figured on the patrol car, and it was making them upset. The first man, with his hand still inside his jacket, said, “You better move very slow.”
“Oh, I will,” Tom said. “And when your hand comes out from under there, it better move slow, too. My friend sometimes gets nervous.”
“He’s got reason,” the picnicker said.
Joe was looking past him at the picnickers, watching their tense faces. He looked tense himself, the muscles bunched like a lumpy mattress along the sides of his jaw. He said, “How we doing?”
Tom dropped the handful of bills onto the seat. “I spotted five guys so far,” he said. “There’s probably more.”
Reaching for the microphone, Joe said, “They really don’t want us to get paid.”
“If there’s enough of them,” Tom said, “we’re fucked.”
Into the microphone Joe said, “Six six.” To Tom he said, “That’s the chance we took. We worked it out.”
“I know,” Tom said. He rubbed perspiration from his forehead onto the back of his hand, and from there to his trouser leg. Half-turning, staying bent, keeping one elbow on the windowsill, he looked around at the sunny day and said, “Christ, I wish it was over.”
“Me, too.” Joe was blinking again, having trouble seeing things. Into the microphone, he said, “Six six.”
The radio suddenly said, “Yeah, six six, go ahead.”
Picking up the money from the seat, Joe said, “I got some bills for you to check out.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
Joe held one of the bills close to his face, and squinted so he could read the serial number. “This one’s a twenty,” he said. “B-five-five-eight-seven-five-three-five-A.”
The radio read the number back again.
“Check,” Joe said. “Another twenty.” He read off the number, listened to it repeated, and then did the same thing with a third bill, a fifty.
“Give me a minute,” the radio said.
Tom muttered, “If we have a minute.”
Joe put the microphone away under the dashboard and held one of the bills up by the open window to study it with the light behind it. Squinting at it, focusing with difficulty, he said, “Looks okay to me. What do you think?”
The grin twitched on Tom’s face again. “I was too nervous to look,” he said, and reached into the car to pick up one of the bills from the seat. He studied it, felt the paper between thumb and first finger, tried to remember the signs of a phony bill. Over on his side of the car, Joe was checking another of the bills, seeing this one a little more easily; he was beginning to settle down, now that something was happening.
“I guess it’s all right,” Tom said. Irritably he tossed the bill back on the seat. “What’s taking him so long?”
Joe dropped the bill and rubbed his eyes, then said, “Go talk to the people.”
Tom frowned at him. “Are you really as cool as all that, or is it bullshit?”
“It’s bullshit,” Joe said. “But it’ll do.”
Tom’s grin turned a little sickly. “I’ll be back,” he said, and left the car, and walked over again to the picnickers, who were watching him with great suspicion. He hunkered down where he’d been before, and talked directly to the first man, who seemed to be the leader of the group. He said, “I’ll be going back over by the car. When I give a signal, one of you carry the basket over there.”
The first man said, “Where’s the trade?”
“The other basket’s in the car,” Tom said. “We’ll do the switch there. But only one of you come over, the rest stay right here.”
The first man said, “We’ve got to look it over.”
“Sure,” Tom said. “You bring the basket, you get in the car, you check the other one, you get out again.”
The second man spoke up, saying, “In the car?” He frowned at his friend, not liking that.
Tom said, “Let’s not make it any more public than we have to.” Which was an argument they should appreciate.
They did. The first man said to the second, “It’s all right. It’s better inside.”
“Sure,” Tom said. “You stick tight, I’ll let you know when.” He got to his feet, trying to look nonchalant and sure of himself, and walked back over to the car. Leaning in again, he said, “Anything yet?”
Joe was twitching like a wind-up doll. Waiting was the worst thing in the world for him. “No,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “Their friends haven’t come down from the hills yet, so I guess we’re still ahead.”
“Maybe,” Joe said, as the radio suddenly said, “Six six.”
They both started; as though they hadn’t been expecting that sound. Joe grabbed the microphone and said, “Yeah, six six.”
“On those bills,” the radio said. “They’re clean.”
Joe’s face suddenly opened into a big wide smile. It was going to be all right, he all at once knew that as a positive certainty. “Okay,” he said into the microphone. “Thanks.” Putting the microphone away, he turned and gave Tom the big smile and said, “We go.”
Tom hadn’t been affected the same way. The fact that the money was real just confirmed for him the knowledge that the mob was out to kill them. Counterfeit money or stolen money with traceable numbers might have meant the mob would be content merely to cheat them, but real money meant their lives were definitely at stake. Having trouble breathing, Tom responded to Joe’s big smile with a small nervous grimace, and then turned away to make a little waving gesture toward the picnickers.
The women over there were looking a little green, as though the situation had become trickier than they’d been led to believe. They were sitting staring outward, waiting for disaster to strike or relief to come at last. The two men looked at one another, and the first man nodded. The second one got reluctantly to his feet, picked up the basket, and carried it toward the car.
It took him forever to make the trip. Joe kept staring across the car and out the open side window at him, willing him to move faster. Tom watched the slope up toward Central Park West; three of the guys he’d spotted before were clustered together up there now, talking things over. They seemed excited. Was that a small walkie-talkie one of them had in his hand?
“They’ve got an army,” Tom said. All at once, he saw how hopeless it was; the two of them against an army, with army equipment and an army disregard for life.
Joe ducked his head, trying to see Tom’s face. “What?”
The guy with the picnic basket was too close. Tom said, “Nothing. Here he comes.”
“I see him.”
Nervousness could have made both of them irritable right then. If it hadn’t been for the pressure of what else they were doing, they could have turned on each other instead, bickering and snarling like a couple of dogs in a vacant lot.
The guy with the basket reached the car. Tom opened the rear door, and saw the guy’s face register that he’d seen the other basket in there. But he didn’t make a move to enter.
“Get in,” Tom said. Up the slope, one of the trio was using the walkie-talkie.
“Tell your friend to open the basket. Lift the lid.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Tom said, and called in to Joe, “Did you hear him?”
Joe was already twisting around in the seat, reaching over the back of it for the basket. “I heard him,” he said, and lifted the lid. The gag certificates with their fancy designs showed indistinctly in the shadows.
The men up the hill were moving this way; casually, not hurrying yet. Some other men were also strolling this way from other directions. Tom, trying to keep his voice calm and assured, said, “You satisfied now?”
For answer, the guy shoved his basket ahead of himself onto the back seat, and immediately slid in after it, reaching across it toward the other basket to get a closer look at the papers in there.
Tom slapped the door shut, pulled the front door open, and slid in. “They’re coming,” he said.
Joe already knew that; there were more of them coming up from the other side of the road, he coul
d see them through the bicycle riders. He had the car in gear already, and at once they rolled forward.
The guy in the back seat yelled, “Hey!”
Tom’s hand patted the seat between himself and Joe, found the .32 there where it was supposed to be, and came up with it. Turning in his seat, seeing the guy back there reaching into his jacket, Tom laid the pistol atop the seatback, aiming at the guy’s head. “Take it easy,” he said.
Vigano
Vigano sat in an office on Madison Avenue with an absolutely clean phone; guaranteed. He had an open line to a pay phone on the corner of 86th Street and Central Park West, across the street from the park. He had a man in the booth, pumping change in, keeping the line open. A second man, outside the booth with a small walkie-talkie no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, was the relay between Vigano and the one hundred and eleven men he had scattered in and around the park. From the phone to the walkie-talkie, he could get an order to any man in the park in less than half a minute.
Aside from the transverse roads, the ones that simply cross the park and don’t connect with the interior road, there are twenty-six entrances to and exits from the Drive. Every one of them was covered, with either one or two cars, and a minimum of three men; including the one-way entrances that no vehicle was supposed to use in leaving the park, such as the one at Sixth Avenue and 59th Street and the one at Seventh Avenue and West 110th. His people with the two million dollars in the picnic basket were completely surrounded by Vigano’s men, and six others roamed the general vicinity on bicycles. If the two amateurs with the bearer bonds tried to get away by bicycle they’d be stopped at a park exit. If they tried to cut across the park on foot they wouldn’t get twenty yards.
Vigano had the interior people all in position before the basket was delivered, but he held off blocking the park exits until after contact was made with the amateurs; no point scaring them off. He had a conference call hook-up on the phone, so that it broadcast into the room and he could reply without holding the speaker to his mouth, and he sat back in the desk chair, his hands up behind his head, and smiled at the thought that he was the spider, and his web was out, and the flies were on their way.
Cops and Robbers Page 20
