by Otto Penzler
Dortmunder gave it a whack.
Dortmunder gave it another whack.
The block of concrete fell onto the floor of the vault. “Oh, thank God,” somebody said.
What? Reluctant but unable to stop himself, Dortmunder dropped sledge and flashlight and leaned his head through the hole in the wall and looked around.
It was the vault, all right. And it was full of people.
A man in a suit stuck his hand out and grabbed Dortmunder’s and shook it while pulling him through the hole and on into the vault. “Great work, Officer,” he said. “The robbers are outside.”
Dortmunder had thought he and Kelp were the robbers. “They are?”
A round-faced woman in pants and a Buster Brown collar said, “Five of them. With machine guns.”
“Machine guns,” Dortmunder said.
A delivery kid wearing a mustache and an apron and carrying a flat cardboard carton containing four coffees, two decafs and a tea said, “We all hostages, mon. I gonna get fired.”
“How many of you are there?” the man in the suit asked, looking past Dortmunder at Kelp’s nervously smiling face.
“Just the two,” Dortmunder said, and watched helplessly as willing hands dragged Kelp through the hole and set him on his feet in the vault. It was really very full of hostages.
“I’m Kearney,” the man in the suit said. “I’m the bank manager, and I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.”
Which was the first time any bank manager had said that to Dortmunder, who said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” and nodded, and then said, “I’m, uh, Officer Diddums, and this is Officer, uh, Kelly.”
Kearney, the bank manager, frowned. “Diddums, did you say?”
Dortmunder was furious with himself. Why did I call myself Diddums? Well, I didn’t know I was going to need an alias inside a bank vault, did I? Aloud, he said, “Uh-huh. Diddums. It’s Welsh.”
“Ah,” said Kearney. Then he frowned again and said, “You people aren’t even armed.”
“Well, no,” Dortmunder said. “We’re the, uh, the hostage-rescue team; we don’t want any shots fired, increase the risk for you, uh, civilians.”
“Very shrewd,” Kearney agreed.
Kelp, his eyes kind of glassy and his smile kind of fixed, said, “Well, folks, maybe we should leave here now, single file, just make your way in an orderly fashion through—”
“They’re coming!” hissed a stylish woman over by the vault door.
Everybody moved. It was amazing; everybody shifted at once. Some people moved to hide the new hole in the wall, some people moved to get farther away from the vault door and some people moved to get behind Dortmunder, who suddenly found himself the nearest person in the vault to that big, round, heavy metal door, which was easing massively and silently open.
It stopped halfway, and three men came in. They wore black ski masks and black leather jackets and black work pants and black shoes. They carried Uzi submachine guns at high port. Their eyes looked cold and hard, and their hands fidgeted on the metal of the guns, and their feet danced nervously, even when they were standing still. They looked as though anything at all might make them overreact.
“Shut up!” one of them yelled, though nobody’d been talking. He glared around at his guests and said, “Gotta have somebody to stand out front, see can the cops be trusted.” His eye, as Dortmunder had known it would, lit on Dortmunder. “You,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.
“What’s your name?”
Everybody in the vault had already heard him say it, so what choice did he have? “Diddums,” Dortmunder said.
The robber glared at Dortmunder through his ski mask. “Diddums?”
“It’s Welsh,” Dortmunder explained.
“Ah,” the robber said, and nodded. He gestured with the Uzi. “Outside, Diddums.”
Dortmunder stepped forward, glancing back over his shoulder at all the people looking at him, knowing every goddamn one of them was glad he wasn’t him—even Kelp, back there pretending to be four feet tall—and then Dortmunder stepped through the vault door, surrounded by all those nervous maniacs with machine guns, and went with them down a corridor flanked by desks and through a doorway to the main part of the bank, which was a mess.
The time at the moment, as the clock high on the wide wall confirmed, was 5:15 in the afternoon. Everybody who worked at the bank should have gone home by now; that was the theory Dortmunder had been operating from. What must have happened was, just before closing time at three o’clock (Dortmunder and Kelp being already then in the tunnel, working hard, knowing nothing of events on the surface of the planet), these gaudy showboats had come into the bank waving their machine guns around.
And not just waving them, either. Lines of ragged punctures had been drawn across the walls and the Lucite upper panel of the tellers’ counter, like connect-the-dot puzzles. Wastebaskets and a potted Ficus had been overturned, but fortunately, there were no bodies lying around; none Dortmunder could see, anyway. The big plate-glass front windows had been shot out, and two more of the black-clad robbers were crouched down, one behind the OUR LOW LOAN RATES poster and the other behind the OUR HIGH IRA RATES poster, staring out at the street, from which came the sound of somebody talking loudly but indistinctly through a bullhorn.
So what must have happened, they’d come in just before three, waving their guns, figuring a quick in and out, and some brownnose employee looking for advancement triggered the alarm, and now they had a stalemate hostage situation on their hands; and, of course, everybody in the world by now has seen Dog Day Afternoon and therefore knows that if the police get the drop on a robber in circumstances such as these circumstances right here, they’ll immediately shoot him dead, so now hostage negotiation is trickier than ever. This isn’t what I had in mind when I came to the bank, Dortmunder thought.
The boss robber prodded him along with the barrel of his Uzi, saying, “What’s your first name, Diddums?”
Please don’t say Dan, Dortmunder begged himself. Please, please, somehow, anyhow, manage not to say Dan. His mouth opened, “John,” he heard himself say, his brain having turned desperately in this emergency to that last resort, the truth, and he got weak-kneed with relief.
“OK, John, don’t faint on me,” the robber said. “This is very simple what you got to do here. The cops say they want to talk, just talk, nobody gets hurt. Fine. So you’re gonna step out in front of the bank and see do the cops shoot you.”
“Ah,” Dortmunder said.
“No time like the present, huh, John?” the robber said, and poked him with the Uzi again.
“That kind of hurts,” Dortmunder said.
“I apologize,” the robber said, hard-eyed. “Out.”
One of the other robbers, eyes red with strain inside the black ski mask, leaned close to Dortmunder and yelled, “You wanna shot in the foot first? You wanna crawl out there?”
“I’m going,” Dortmunder told him. “See? Here I go.”
The first robber, the comparatively calm one, said, “You go as far as the sidewalk, that’s all. You take one step off the curb, we blow your head off.”
“Got it,” Dortmunder assured him, and crunched across broken glass to the sagging-open door and looked out. Across the street was parked a line of buses, police cars, police trucks, all in blue and white with red gumdrops on top, and behind them moved a seething mass of armed cops. “Uh,” Dortmunder said. Turning back to the comparatively calm robber, he said, “You wouldn’t happen to have a white flag or anything like that, would you?”
The robber pressed the point of the Uzi to Dortmunder’s side. “Out,” he said.
“Right,” Dortmunder said. He faced front, put his hands way up in the air and stepped outside.
What a lot of attention he got. From behind all those blue-and-whites on the other side of the street, tense faces stared. On the rooftops of the red-brick tenements, in this neighborhood deep in the residential heart of Queens, shar
pshooters began to familiarize themselves through their telescopic sights with the contours of Dortmunder’s furrowed brow. To left and right, the ends of the block were sealed off with buses parked nose to tailpipe, past which ambulances and jumpy white-coated medics could be seen. Everywhere, rifles and pistols jittered in nervous fingers. Adrenaline ran in the gutters.
“I’m not with them!” Dortmunder shouted, edging across the sidewalk, arms upraised, hoping this announcement wouldn’t upset the other bunch of armed hysterics behind him. For all he knew, they had a problem with rejection.
However, nothing happened behind him, and what happened out front was that a bullhorn appeared, resting on a police-car roof, and roared at him, “You a hostage?”
“I sure am!” yelled Dortmunder.
“What’s your name?”
Oh, not again, thought Dortmunder, but there was nothing for it. “Diddums,” he said.
“What?”
“Diddums!”
A brief pause: “Diddums?”
“It’s Welsh!”
“Ah.”
There was a little pause while whoever was operating the bullhorn conferred with his compatriots, and then the bullhorn said, “What’s the situation in there?”
What kind of question was that? “Well, uh,” Dortmunder said, and remembered to speak more loudly, and called, “kind of tense, actually.”
“Any of the hostages been harmed?”
“Uh-uh. No. Definitely not. This is a…this is a…nonviolent confrontation.” Dortmunder fervently hoped to establish that idea in everybody’s mind, particularly if he were going to be out here in the middle much longer.
“Any change in the situation?”
Change? “Well,” Dortmunder answered, “I haven’t been in there that long, but it seems like—”
“Not that long? What’s the matter with you, Diddums? You’ve been in that bank over two hours now!”
“Oh, yeah!” Forgetting, Dortmunder lowered his arms and stepped forward to the curb. “That’s right!” he called. “Two hours! More than two hours! Been in there a long time!”
“Step out here away from the bank!”
Dortmunder looked down and saw his toes hanging ten over the edge of the curb. Stepping back at a brisk pace, he called, “I’m not supposed to do that!”
“Listen, Diddums, I’ve got a lot of tense men and women over here. I’m telling you, step away from the bank!”
“The fellas inside,” Dortmunder explained, “they don’t want me to step off the curb. They said they’d, uh, well, they just don’t want me to do it.”
“Psst! Hey, Diddums!”
Dortmunder paid no attention to the voice calling from behind him. He was concentrating too hard on what was happening right now out front. Also, he wasn’t that used to the new name yet.
“Diddums!”
“Maybe you better put your hands up again.”
“Oh, yeah!” Dortmunder’s arms shot up like pistons blowing through an engine block. “There they are!”
“Diddums, goddamn it, do I have to shoot you to get you to pay attention?”
Arms dropping, Dortmunder spun around. “Sorry! I wasn’t—I was—Here I am!”
“Get those goddamn hands up!”
Dortmunder turned sideways, arms up so high his sides hurt. Peering sidelong to his right, he called to the crowd across the street, “Sirs, they’re talking to me inside now.” Then he peered sidelong to his left, saw the comparatively calm robber crouched beside the broken doorframe and looking less calm than before, and he said, “Here I am.”
“We’re gonna give them our demands now,” the robber said. “Through you.”
“That’s fine,” Dortmunder said. “That’s great. Only, you know, how come you don’t do it on the phone? I mean, the way it’s normally—”
The red-eyed robber, heedless of exposure to the sharpshooters across the street, shouldered furiously past the comparatively calm robber, who tried to restrain him as he yelled at Dortmunder, “You’re rubbing it in, are ya? OK, I made a mistake! I got excited and I shot up the switchboard! You want me to get excited again?”
“No, no!” Dortmunder cried, trying to hold his hands straight up in the air and defensively in front of his body at the same time. “I forgot! I just forgot!”
The other robbers all clustered around to grab the red-eyed robber, who seemed to be trying to point his Uzi in Dortmunder’s direction as he yelled, “I did it in front of everybody! I humiliated myself in front of everybody! And now you’re making fun of me!”
“I forgot! I’m sorry!”
“You can’t forget that! Nobody’s ever gonna forget that!”
The three remaining robbers dragged the red-eyed robber back away from the doorway, talking to him, trying to soothe him, leaving Dortmunder and the comparatively calm robber to continue their conversation. “I’m sorry,” Dortmunder said. “I just forgot. I’ve been kind of distracted lately. Recently.”
“You’re playing with fire here, Diddums,” the robber said. “Now tell them they’re gonna get our demands.”
Dortmunder nodded, and turned his head the other way, and yelled, “They’re gonna tell you their demands now. I mean, I’m gonna tell you their demands. Their demands. Not my demands. Their de—”
“We’re willing to listen, Diddums, only so long as none of the hostages get hurt.”
“That’s good!” Dortmunder agreed, and turned his head the other way to tell the robber, “That’s reasonable, you know, that’s sensible, that’s a very good thing they’re saying.”
“Shut up,” the robber said.
“Right,” Dortmunder said.
The robber said, “First, we want the riflemen off the roofs.”
“Oh, so do I,” Dortmunder told him, and turned to shout, “They want the riflemen off the roofs!”
“What else?”
“What else?”
“And we want them to unblock that end of the street, the—what is it?—the north end.”
Dortmunder frowned straight ahead at the buses blocking the intersection. “Isn’t that east?” he asked.
“Whatever it is,” the robber said, getting impatient. “That end down there to the left.”
“OK.” Dortmunder turned his head and yelled, “They want you to unblock the east end of the street!” Since his hands were way up in the sky somewhere, he pointed with his chin.
“Isn’t that north?”
“I knew it was,” the robber said.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Dortmunder called. “That end down there to the left.”
“The right, you mean.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Your right, my left. Their left.”
“What else?”
Dortmunder sighed, and turned his head. “What else?”
The robber glared at him. “I can hear the bullhorn, Diddums. I can hear him say ‘What else?’ You don’t have to repeat everything he says. No more translations.”
“Right,” Dortmunder said. “Gotcha. No more translations.”
“We’ll want a car,” the robber told him. “A station wagon. We’re gonna take three hostages with us, so we want a big station wagon. And nobody follows us.”
“Gee,” Dortmunder said dubiously, “are you sure?”
The robber stared. “Am I sure?”
“Well, you know what they’ll do,” Dortmunder told him, lowering his voice so the other team across the street couldn’t hear him. “What they do in these situations, they fix a little radio transmitter under the car, so then they don’t have to follow you, exactly, but they know where you are.”
Impatient again, the robber said, “So you’ll tell them not to do that. No radio transmitters, or we kill the hostages.”
“Well, I suppose,” Dortmunder said doubtfully.
“What’s wrong now?” the robber demanded. “You’re too goddamn picky, Diddums; you’re just the messenger here. You think you know my job better than I do?”
I know
I do, Dortmunder thought, but it didn’t seem a judicious thing to say aloud, so instead, he explained, “I just want things to go smooth, that’s all. I just don’t want bloodshed. And I was thinking, the New York City police, you know, well, they’ve got helicopters.”
“Damn,” the robber said. He crouched low to the littered floor, behind the broken doorframe, and brooded about his situation. Then he looked up at Dortmunder and said, “OK, Diddums, you’re so smart. What should we do?”
Dortmunder blinked. “You want me to figure out your getaway?”
“Put yourself in our position,” the robber suggested. “Think about it.”
Dortmunder nodded. Hands in the air, he gazed at the blocked intersection and put himself in the robbers’ position. “Hoo, boy,” he said. “You’re in a real mess.”
“We know that, Diddums.”
“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I tell you what maybe you could do. You make them give you one of those buses they’ve got down there blocking the street. They give you one of those buses right now, then you know they haven’t had time to put anything cute in it, like time-release tear-gas grenades or anyth—”
“Oh, my God,” the robber said. His black ski mask seemed to have paled slightly.
“Then you take all the hostages,” Dortmunder told him. “Everybody goes in the bus, and one of you people drives, and you go somewhere real crowded, like Times Square, say, and then you stop and make all the hostages get out and run.”
“Yeah?” the robber said. “What good does that do us?”
“Well,” Dortmunder said, “you drop the ski masks and the leather jackets and the guns, and you run, too. Twenty, thirty people all running away from the bus in different directions, in the middle of Times Square in rush hour, everybody losing themselves in the crowd. It might work.”
“Jeez, it might,” the robber said. “OK, go ahead and—What?”
“What?” Dortmunder echoed. He strained to look leftward, past the vertical column of his left arm. The boss robber was in excited conversation with one of his pals; not the red-eyed maniac, a different one. The boss robber shook his head and said, “Damn!” Then he looked up at Dortmunder. “Come back in here, Diddums,” he said.
