by Giles Blunt
The great hall seemed to darken, although the lights stayed on. There were murmurs and catches of breath and questioning, worried looks.
“Rest assured that I myself, not to mention the able assistants you see at various points around the room, are fully-by which I mean lethally-armed. Still-”
A couple of men started to speak up, but Max silenced them by pulling out a.38 Special, which he did not point at anybody. He didn’t have to.
“Still,” he continued, “there is no reason in the world why this has to be a totally negative experience. I urge you-strongly urge you-to simply drop your valuables into the sack we’ll be bringing around. Watches, brooches, necklaces, jewellery of any kind. We’re not brutes-wedding rings are not required unless extraordinarily valuable-worth, say, over five thousand.”
“Bullshit,” someone said. Owen didn’t see who it was; he was more worried about a small, lean man moving slowly, almost imperceptibly toward Max from behind. Owen unhooked the elegant velvet rope that reached upward to the skylights all the way from the lower floor. He took a pair of leather gloves from his pocket, put them on, and slowly slid down the rope to the floor below, planting himself firmly between Max and the approaching man. Pure Errol Flynn.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said, and the man went still.
Max handed Owen a sack emblazoned with a red Republican elephant. Owen began going to each of the women in turn, holding it open.
“No tricks, mister,” Max said to the man, still in his East Coast accent. “The usual rules will be strictly enforced. Nobody moves, nobody leaves. This’ll only take a few minutes.”
The lean man was now edging toward a door.
“Don’t spoil it for everybody,” Max said to him, gesturing with the gun. “This is very much a money-or-your-life situation.”
“Try and stop me.”
Roscoe, one of Max’s caterers, reared up to his full height, which was considerable, and the man veered toward a different exit. Pookie, Roscoe’s colleague, stepped forward. The man kept coming. Pookie reached for his weapon, but Max fired first, a single shot into the ceiling that made an enormous noise. The smokeless blanks they always used were even louder than the real thing, and made Owen jump every time.
The man stopped and turned back to face them, very pale.
“The next one won’t be a warning.”
“Look,” Evelyn del Rio said, “I think everybody needs to calm down. Especially you, sir.”
“Your humble servant, madam,” Max said with a bow. “Consider me becalmed.”
“If we’re going to be robbed anyway,” she added, “we should at least have some music. Giorgio?”
“You expect me to play?” said the bear. He seemed more shook up than his diva.
“What else are we going to do?” she said. “I’m damned if I’m going to crumple up and cry.”
“Marvellous,” Max said. “And I know that a woman who sings like you has just got to be a magnificent dancer. I beseech you, Giorgio-a waltz.”
The bear shook his head, but turned back to the keyboard and started to play. Owen recognized the tune, though he couldn’t have named it.
Max put his gun away and took Evelyn del Rio’s hand. As Owen stepped from guest to guest accepting “donations,” Max twirled around the floor with the soprano, who looked as cool as ivory.
“The ring, too,” Owen said to the girl in front of him. She was about twelve-a red-haired vision in Calvin Klein who started to cry and handed it over.
“It’s just a ring,” Owen said. “A material object. There’s no reason to get so worked up.”
“My daddy gave me that ring,” she said, a Southern girl, maybe Arkansas, “’fore he died. It was my momma’s engagement ring.”
“Well, why isn’t your mother wearing it, then?”
“Because she’s dead too, you snake.”
Owen took her hot little fist and opened it, placed the sparkling ring into her palm, and folded her fingers over it. “You don’t know me well enough to call me that,” he said.
Max was still spinning around the floor with Evelyn del Rio. There was an abstracted air on his face that worried Owen. Lately the old man had been having spells of vagueness-usually not more than a few minutes-during which he forgot where he was and what he was doing. Max should have been collecting loot in a second bag, thus doubling their speed, but instead he was dancing with an opera star. Not good.
A couple of the men glared as if they would take him apart, but the rest were exceedingly co-operative. One of the things that had surprised Owen when he had first become involved in the lively pursuit of robbery was that men were generally as terrified as women. They didn’t cry and carry on, but they trembled a lot. He wished they wouldn’t; he wished they understood how truly safe they were, provided they didn’t try anything.
“I suppose you want credit cards too,” said one fellow-he had a lot of freckles. He looked like the type of guy you’d enjoy tossing a Frisbee with.
“Just cash and jewellery,” Owen told him. “But thank you for asking.”
“Fuck you.”
“Settle down, man. It’ll all be over soon, and you’ll have a great story to tell your grandchildren.”
Another two minutes and it was done. Owen signalled to Max, but Max was still lost in his dancing, a blissful smile on his face. Pookie had to bull his way through the crowd and take Max by the elbow to get him back down to earth. Max bowed deeply and kissed Evelyn del Rio’s hand.
They took the Lexus at a stately pace along Shore Road, until Pookie said, “Turn here, turn here.” They drove around a mock Tudor house, which was empty and up for sale, and abandoned the Lexus behind it. They jogged down to the private jetty, where Pookie and Roscoe had moored the motorboat which, like the Lexus, they had stolen earlier in the evening. They heard sirens and saw police lights flashing on Shore Road, but by then they were plowing across the bay toward the lights of San Francisco.
It was cold on the water. Owen pulled the lapels of his dinner jacket together against the wind. The boat was a mid-size outboard, a seventy-five horse on the back. Pookie and Roscoe were up front, since they knew where they were going. Max was in the rear, shouting over the racket of the motor.
“Evelyn del Rio,” he yelled, once again in his own English accent. “What grace is seated on her brow! I’ll tell you, lad, if I was ever to completely lose my mind and marry, Evelyn del Rio is the woman for me. What poise! What self-possession!”
“She hated you,” Owen yelled back. “I saw her face! She was wishing you were dead the whole time!”
“A palpable lie! She was cool as a waterfall. Fresh as a crystal stream!”
Pookie swerved the boat into a deserted city maintenance wharf. They tied up, and climbed into the Taurus he had rented. Here they all removed their various wigs and moustaches and dropped them into a garbage bag.
“Evelyn del Rio,” Max sighed, wiping the last of the glue from his eyebrows. “I feel love’s keen arrow. Evelyn del Rio and Magnus Maxwell. We’d be the envy of the world.”
“You old lecher,” Pookie said. He had been disguised with a dark wig, thick eyebrows and a too-long moustache that made him resemble a Wild West sheriff. But now he was the old Pookie, with his baby face, pale blue eyes and alopecia so thorough that he was entirely devoid of eyebrows, indeed of hair of any kind. “You’re so insensitive, you can’t even tell when a woman is harbouring negative thoughts against you.”
“I was robbing her, Pookie. Of course she was harbouring negative thoughts. But she would have warmed to me over time,” Max said, “even granite warms in sunlight. She would have come to appreciate my intelligence and sense of humour.”
“Hah!” Pookie said. “Good one.”
“Pay the thug,” Max said to Owen. “It’s this kind of negative thinking that keeps you down, Pookie. Cynicism is the flag of despair.”
Owen handed over ten hundred-dollar bills and Pookie counted them slowly. He had a big, gaudy pi
nky ring on his right hand-a death’s head with fake ruby eyes that flashed in the street light. Like Roscoe, Pookie was not a partner, he was strictly freelance: a fee was agreed upon up front and that was what he received, no matter how the job went. But he worked with Max and Owen every year.
“How’d you do upstairs?” Pookie asked.
“Not bad,” Owen said. “Pretty good, in fact.” There was no point lying about it. Thieves were obsessive about reading up on their crimes. Pookie would hear about the jewels in a day or two.
“You mean I’m underpaid again, right?”
“Pookie,” Max said, “think of all the times we’ve paid you your exorbitant fee even when we came up empty. I’ve paid you for jobs where I lost thousands. Those occasions found you oddly mute.”
Pookie, like many criminals somewhat childish, stuck out his tongue.
“Which country gave the world the Panama hat?” Roscoe said out of the blue. He was a trivia addict, and you couldn’t spend more than ten minutes with him without being questioned on points of geography, history or entertainment. He was six-four and built like a linebacker, but his only true passion in life, as far as Owen could determine, was Jeopardy.
“Panama?” Owen said, counting out another thousand.
“Ecuador,” Pookie said.
“Ecuador is correct,” Roscoe said solemnly.
“Had some business in Ecuador once,” Max said. “Sullen little country. No sense of humour.”
“I thought the jammer worked well tonight,” Owen said.
“It’s not the worst idea,” Pookie said. “But those sirens still came up awful fast.”
“Yeah,” Owen said. “I guess we should still collect all the cellphones.”
Roscoe folded his money into his pocket. “Smooth job, I thought.”
“Our shows are always smooth,” Owen said. “It’s called preparation.”
“Preparation,” Max agreed, “and a friendly, respectful attitude. Respect the other man and he’ll respect you, it’s as simple as that.”
“Most people don’t recognize being robbed as a mark of respect,” Pookie said. “You were too busy dancing your fat ass off to-”
“Fat! The bald bandit dares to call me fat! I am goodly portioned. I am what in better times was referred to as a fine figure of a man.”
“If you believe that,” Pookie said, “you’re living on your own small planet.”
“He is a small planet,” Owen said, and they both laughed.
“Haw-haw-haw,” Max mimicked them. “Haw-haw-haw. O thou monster ignorance. I tell you, aside from courtesy in action, it’s being willing to spend money to earn money that makes a successful thief.”
“His Munificence speaks,” Roscoe said.
Owen was impressed that Roscoe knew the word, but Roscoe Lukacs knew lots of things you wouldn’t expect from a criminal.
“O base Hungarian,” Max said, raising a plump forefinger. “How many men do you know who will hire goons like yourselves simply to stand in front of the exits and look menacing? I’m out of pocket, I tell you. I won’t see a dime out of the whole venture. I’ll have to pull another job to buy my way out of this one.”
This brought a chorus of derision that even Max couldn’t shout down.
A few minutes later, Pookie dropped Max and Owen at the entrance to a public parking lot. There they got into their own car, another Taurus, and drove themselves to the Redwood Trailer Park, lot 61, and parked beside an enormous and aged Winnebago. Max had won it years ago in a poker game, and they had referred to it affectionately ever since as the Rocket-though less affectionately now that the price of fuelling it had become extortionate.
They were surrounded by acres of trailers-trailers of every manifestation, from the kind that fold out into semi-tents to massive, wheeled bungalows. But few could boast the dog-eared grandeur of the Rocket. It was the size of a semi, deep blue with bands of stainless steel in blinding diagonals, a giant Adidas running shoe. Thirty-five feet long, eight and a half wide, give or take. Inside, Star Trek-size leather seats faced the windshield. Behind these, the interior stretched in a glory of gold and tan. A couch was fitted to one side, and across from this a set of stairs led to a roof deck that could be furnished with chaise longues, table, umbrella and even a few plants, should they ever stay in one place long enough to warrant it.
The Rocket also boasted a Hitachi hi-def TV with built-in satellite, deep-pile carpeting of marmalade colour, a fold-up kitchen table, a fridge, washer-dryer, and a cozy wooden dining booth across from a set of bunk beds. Owen always slept on the top bunk; Max slept in splendour on a queen-size bed in the bedroom at the rear of the coach.
This was how they travelled every summer across America, towing the car behind them like a faithful goat. At the end of the trip, car and trailer went into storage on whatever coast they happened to finish.
Owen dumped the swag onto the dining table to survey the take. They had netted roughly six thousand in cash from downstairs, maybe sixty thousand in jewels. Owen’s upstairs haul was thirty grand in cash-“My personal best!” he said, waving the packets at Max-and about $200,000 in jewels, but they would not receive anything close to that from their fence, the discount on stolen merchandise being severe. Max looked all set to pout until Owen pulled the emerald earrings out of his pocket.
“Oh, my.” Max held one up to the light. “Can’t even put a price on these beauties. Never seen their like.” He examined the setting. “You see each of these tiny diamonds? These are not chips, my son-no, no, no. Each one of these is perfectly cut, perfectly identical. This is work of brilliant, painstaking craftsmanship. It makes my heart glow to look on ’em.”
“Too bad they’re going to be so hard to fence,” Owen pointed out.
“Thou sayest right, lad. Setting’s utterly unique, and therefore recognizable. Split these dazzlers up, they lose eighty percent of their value. Shame.”
“Still, great show tonight. How about my entrance? I finally get why you showed me all those pirate movies.”
“A touch over the mark, lad. Spectacle over substance.”
“I’m over the mark? We could have been out of there twice as fast if you hadn’t got lost in dreamland.”
“Rubbish. I was sharp as a laser.”
“Max, it looked like you forgot where you were.”
“Bollocks. I engineered another exceptional show-worthy of the Pontiff himself.”
They took off their evening wear and changed into more casual clothes. Their dinner jackets went onto hangers and into dry cleaning plastic. Max was a stickler for keeping kit in good shape, particularly wigs. The black curls and the ginger rug went onto Styrofoam heads and then into boxes. Max’s cover, should he be required to produce one, was wig salesman and distributor, and he’d already visited several customers. San Francisco was home to some of his biggest accounts: theatre troupes, gay cabarets and college drama classes.
“If the Pontiff’s so damn brilliant,” Owen said, hanging up his white T-shirt, “how come he’s in prison and we’re out here on the road?”
“He’s not in prison anymore. I told you, they’ve put him in hospital, where he’s probably going to die.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Why did he end up in the brig? Very simple. An ill-chosen associate made a colossal blunder. Gun goes off, and a security guard ends up dead. Not John-Paul’s fault. But what a string of successes the man had! Wells Fargo, Chemical Bank, Lufthansa-no one can touch him. And character! The Pontiff is your quintessential gentleman of the road. No friend of his ever went hungry while he had a dime in his pocket. Looked after families when his brothers went up to Oxford. A great soul, that man, a great soul.”
Owen combed his hair, naturally brown, and inspected his face for any remaining traces of spirit gum. “I don’t know about you, but I was ready for dinner about an hour ago.”
Max turned to him from the mirror, tweed jacket, khaki pants, polo shirt. “How do I look?” he
said. “Old money?”
“Old perv is more like it.”
“Nonsense. I’m a splendid specimen of manhood.” He slapped his belly. “Not bad for sixty-four.”
“Sixty-four!”
“Doubting your loving uncle yet again. Tsk, tsk. Suspicion is the habit of a guilty mind. Causes ulcers, cancer, all manner of plague and carbuncle. A healthy mind is free and open, willing to be informed.”
“Max?”
“What, boy?”
“Can we please go eat?”
THREE
“It’s Four o’clock,” the Elvis clock said, “and I’m all shook up.” It was a passable imitation of the King’s voice, but it still gave Zig Zigler the creeps. Apparently his partner Clem didn’t like it either, because he threw his apple core at it and cursed when he missed.
Their acquaintance Melvin Togg was into Elvis in a big way. He had vinyl copies of all the King’s albums on a beautiful shelving unit built around his stereo. The shelves and the stereo were the only things in this grunge pit of an apartment that didn’t make you want to hang yourself. First off, it was a basement joint, hardly any light squeezing through its two windows. Second off, it was in one of the noisiest neighbourhoods in Las Vegas, jet planes blasting overhead every five minutes. Third off, the ceiling was low, meaning that if you actually employed the hot plate for any cooking you’d be inhaling your curry or whatever for the next month. Not to mention bathroom smells.
“Melvin,” Zig said, “how can you live in a pathetic little hole like this? Don’t you got any self-esteem?”
“It isn’t that bad, man. Rent’s real low.”
“Vegas ain’t New York, pal. You could do a lot better.”
“I got room for all my stuff. I know one day I’ll need a bigger place, but this fulfills my needs right now.”
“That would be your need for Elvis crap?” Clem said, picking up an Elvis mug from the row that lined one shelf.
