by Sam Millar
The deli worker was still at the back door, shaking his head in disbelief, obviously thinking how lucky I was to have got out of there with my life. In a way, I was lucky. Lucky to have met a man whose name was unknown, but who put things, for me, in their proper perspective. Suddenly my isolation in the great city was no longer complete. I was free again, and I knew exactly what I would do if – when – the time came to enter a heavily armed building without first knocking for permission to come in.
It was all a matter of time. And timing.
CHAPTER FORTY
A Telling of Truth
DECEMBER 1987
A coward turns away but a brave man’s choice is danger.
Euripides
To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him – two.
Norman Douglas, Almanac
Things progressed slowly. I took whatever jobs I could find, while Ronnie opened a tiny store in Soho, selling silk scarves and ties. The rent was $8,000 a month, but he wasn’t paying a penny. The landlord had fallen for his golden gab, just like scores before him. So there he was, in the glass showroom, sandwiched between art dealers and high-priced restaurants, his tiny stock of fake designer labels resting on cardboard boxes.
And as for Marco? All he could think about was all that money. It was driving him mad. But there was nothing either of us could do, until we found a suitable and willing third man – if ever.
I was beginning to doubt if another person could be found, and in desperation I put forward the only name open to me.
“We need a van,” I told him as I fingered some of his wares. “One that can be hidden until everything is ironed out.” I already had a car hidden away, but was finding it impossible to get my hands on a van.
I told Ronnie as little as possible, allowing him only the faintest whiff of potential. The less he knew, the better. I hadn’t yet said it was an armoured-car depot. I didn’t think he was ready for that just yet.
“No problem, mate. Know just the place where I can get one.”
Just the place was a car showroom on the West Side.
We went straight up the stairs to where new vans were on display.
“I hope you’re not thinking of stealing one of those?” I said, hoping he wasn’t, knowing he was.
Before he could answer, a young black salesman approached us.
“Hello, my good man,” said Ronnie, hamming it, his broad Liverpool accent completely gone, replaced by the Don of Oxford. “I’m looking for a new van. Would you be so kind as to show me what is available?” He looked the part, with his three-piece suit and gold-rimmed glasses, an empty leather briefcase tucked under his arm.
“Certainly, sir. Our latest models are on the second floor. If you’d just follow me …”
For the next hour, the salesman did a tour of the best they had in stock. I kept in the background while Ronnie opened up the engine, pretending to have a clue how it worked. Each time the salesman opened his mouth, Ronnie would reply, “Now, that is really lovely. I’m very impressed, my good man.”
Before we left, he shook the demented man’s hands, telling him that he certainly would be visiting again, and what an asset the man was to the company. Oh, and have you ever read Marcus Aurelius? No? You really must …
“That was a waste of fucking time,” I said when we reached the corner of the street. “What was all that nonsense about, pretending to buy a van? Surely you know someone up in Harlem who could get one for us?” Ronnie’s estranged wife lived in Harlem, and he knew a couple of second-hand car dealers there.
He just smiled and winked. “What’s this then, mate?”
He tapped a key to my nose. I could still smell the newness of the metal.
“What is that?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“While you were hidin’, I was watchin’. I couldn’t believe they just left the keys dangling on a hook, askin’ to be pinched. Probably an insurance scam. Bet that’s what it is. Be back in a tick.”
Without hesitation, away he went, back to the showroom.
Less than ten minutes later he pulled up alongside me, his face beaming like the red paint on the new van. “What are you waiting for, twat? Hop in.”
The confidence he had shown in obtaining the van strengthened my belief in him. But had he the “bottle” for it – as he liked to say? We would soon find out.
We walked over to Washington Square and hid the van. Dark clouds appeared from nowhere as we stood in the doorway of Edgar Allan Poe’s old lodgings.
“Bet this place could tell a story or two,” Ronnie said, peering in the window. “A lot of nutcases hang out here at night, hoping to see Poe’s ghost. Probably the reason there is so much killin’ in this city.”
Before he became too morbid, I decided it was time to tell him what exactly was in store should he decide to come onboard.
It was then that the rain came down in great buckets, making us run for the shelter of a small café. I should have seen the rain as an omen, but I wasn’t seeing too clearly.
“You’ll probably have to smack one or two of the guards with that knock-out punch you have,” I said, sipping a cup of coffee, watching for his reaction.
He was wearing a grin on his face, but his eyes contradicted it.
“Yeah,” he said, eventually. “We got to do what we got to do. The old one-two should do the trick.”
Suddenly, he stood up from the table and, with everyone in the café watching, he started doing the Ali shuffle, complete with upper cuts and left and right jabs aimed at an invisible opponent. Everyone in the place was in stitches, except me.
“Will you sit the fuck down?” I hissed.
He eventually did, but not before the grand finale of a Michael Jackson Moon Walk.
“Shouldn’t really be any problems, though,” I said, blowing gently on the hot coffee.
“Wee buns.”
“No problem,” he agreed. “Wee buns.”
It was then, just as the richness of the coffee flooded my mouth, that I knew we had problems. Big-as-a-house problems.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Wrong Turn? Wrong Person?
No coward soul is mine.
Emily Brontë, No Coward Soul is Mine
When I see a spade, I call it a spade.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
We left for Rochester two days later, early in the morning, when darkness still held the upper hand. We had an eight-hour drive in front of us, so the sooner we started, the better. I drove in front, in the car, and Ronnie followed in the van. A large fall of snow was forecast, and we knew we’d have to make good time or risk being stranded somewhere upstate.
We headed out of Manhattan via the snowy expanse of Park Avenue, punctuated along its entirety by soldier-like Christmas trees. Each tree was heavily garnished with fairy lights, glowing eerily like mermaids and iridescent insects in the dark. My eyes flickered to the trees outside each building. Their cambric branches of lighting streaks were heavy with snow and looked precariously close to snapping and falling on people below.
The wind was starting up again, swirling scuffs of white snow into tumbleweeds with flakes the size of butterflies, all the while skidding off the frozen East River, wickedly hunting down victims. Cars, debilitated, were caked in ice like displays in a fishmonger’s. Bing Crosby was on the radio and Santa was everywhere, yo-ho-hoing.
We kept strictly within the speed limit, despite the teasing vastness of the New York thruway, just crying out to be tested. I hoped fervently that Ronnie wouldn’t give in to its challenge, knowing that New York State troopers would be all over us in seconds.
Everything was going fine until halfway through the journey, when I happened to glance in my mirror just in time to see Ronnie exit the thruway. He had taken the wrong exit.
Fuck! I couldn’t get off the thruway until the next exit, about thirty miles away.
I banged the steering wheel with my fist, calling him all the stupid bastards under the su
n. All he had to do was follow me, but as usual he couldn’t do something simple, everything had to be complicated in his book. By the time I got off the thruway and backtracked the thirty-odd miles, he was nowhere to be seen.
I didn’t realise it then, but that’s what he intended.
With no other choice, the plan was immediately cancelled. I returned to New York with barely enough money to pay for the petrol and toll booths, seething with rage, angry with myself for putting my trust in Ronnie when I should have known better.
A few days later I went to meet him, to tell him what I thought of him. On the subway in, I couldn’t take my eyes off the doe-eyed waif from a poster advertising Les Miserables on Broadway. A local wit had scrawled: Do I look miserable? Answer: More or less.
My sentiments exactly, I thought, as I stepped from the train and headed towards his shop.
“You’re one gutless bastard,” I said, entering the shop, loud enough for two customers to hear me. I wanted to wreck the place, to throw his dubious wares out into the street, followed by him.
“Calm down, mate,” he replied, quickly easing the two customers out the door, telling them I was a great kidder. Ha! Ha! Ha!
“Calm down? You gutless bastard. That’s all you are. A typical fucking gutless Brit.”
He took exception to being called a Brit, and requested that I withdraw the offensive term.
“I’m an Englishman, a Liverpudlian to be precise.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck if you’re one of the Beatles.”
“I know how it must look, mate. But the truth is, I got confused with the length of time on the road and all that snow. It was blinding me. I thought I saw your car pull off at that exit, and followed you. As God is my witness, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t you. Finally, I got back on the thruway, and managed to make my way up to Rochester. But you weren’t there, mate.”
The last sentence was an accusation, and his face bore the anguish of a betrayed dog deserted by its callous owner.
Had he gone to Rochester? Obviously, there was no way of clarifying this, or his indecisiveness. Was that what he was betting on?
“It’s all academic now, anyway,” I said. “It’s finished. The opportunity will never come again. We fucked it up.”
“Don’t say that, mate. We’ll think it out better the next time. We rushed it. It would have been a disaster if we’d –”
“Don’t. Okay? Don’t say another fucking word. Understand?”
He didn’t, and I left, never looking back at him, the moth who simply wanted to boast of touching the flame without being burned; to be guilty by association.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Showtime!
5 JANUARY 1993
Meredith, we’re in!
Fred Kitchen, The Bailiff
Hollywood couldn’t have done it better.
New York’s Irish Voice
370 South Avenue is a red-cement block building housed in a desolate industrial area close to Interstate Highway 490. It was the sort of building you would never give a second glance to. No one could imagine this one-storey, prosaic building to be an Aladdin’s cave, the Brinks Incorporated armoured-car cash repository.
That was the whole point.
Brinks Incorporated, established in 1859, is the oldest and largest secure transportation company in the world, with 160 branch operations in the US and forty in Canada, and affiliates in fifty countries around the globe. It has a nice neat history, and I was planning to become part of that history. I had hoped we would get it done before Christmas. Instead, it was now 5 January 1993, five days before my birthday. The time was shortly after 4pm. By 7pm it would turn out to be the happiest or saddest birthday I ever had.
The plans had changed drastically. No more excuses. Deep down, I knew it was total madness, but it had become a monkey on my back – no, a fucking great big hairy ape, a Siren, calling me, teasing me with untold wealth. Whatever happened from here on in, there would be no turning back, for either Marco or myself. Oh, there was one thing I had yet to mention to him. I had brought replica guns.
“What the fuck are these? Are you yanking my chain? This wasn’t part of the fucking deal?”
“It’s essential that no one gets hurt. And they won’t, provided you have faith in me. We don’t need the real thing,” I said, trying to calm him with my logic. “The guards in there will shit their fucking pants when they see these shoved quickly into their faces.”
We stood in the freezing snow and wind, staring at each other. He kept shaking his head in disbelief.
“No wonder that friend of yours got cold feet,” he eventually said, breaking the terrible silence. “You’re fucking nuts.”
“Trust me. We can do this without anyone being hurt. In an hour or so, you’ve won the lotto. What do you say?”
“Fucking mad Irish bastard!” was what he said.
The first thing we needed to do was find a parking spot, as near to the building as possible without being in the eye of any cameras in the area. I was becoming frantic. What little space there was had been allocated to the few homes in the area, leaving one side of a tiny street available. The problem with this was that the van would have to be moved before the designated time, when the local alternate-side-of-the-street parking law came into effect. We could not afford to get a parking ticket, which might come back to seriously haunt me later. With no other choice, I parked the van in the company of the trees that lined the street, and prayed no one would be looking out their window on a freezing night like this.
Most of the money would be coming down from the Federal Reserve Bank in Buffalo, to be distributed locally in cash machines. The last armoured car from Buffalo had just made its stop at Brinks. I watched it pull in as I walked briskly towards the building.
The freezing, wet weather was perfect for our hooded jackets and balaclavas, allowing us to blend in with the few people heading home. We were all duplicates, as if we had purchased our clothes from the same Army ’n’ Navy store in Brooklyn.
The approaching dark brought tiny bats of trepidation scurrying about in my stomach as the chalky headlights of 490’s traffic lit up the Brinks depot. A voice in my head tried to reason with me, asking what the hell I was doing here. But I already had the answer to that. I had a million of them.
Reaching the car park of Brinks, Marco quickly slid into Tom’s tiny car, parked between two elephantine armoured cars. I had spotted Tom’s car from the highway, and smiled. Tom kept it in the same spot every working day. I was banking on another of his habits. He also normally left the doors to his car unlocked, as did most people living upstate.
Marco squeezed himself into the back of it, hiding in its shadows, while I watched from a safe distance, communicating with a walky-talky. I knew when the last truck would leave, but more importantly I knew that the guards always sent someone out, just to make sure the grounds were clear, before they commenced the work of placing money in the vaults. When I spotted the guard coming out, I would radio to Marco to take him just as he was about to re-enter the building.
Timing was crucial. We both had to instil confidence in each other. He depended on me to get it right at the correct moment, and I depended on him to carry it out to the letter. One slip-up, and we were both finished and penniless, with only prison as our reward. Get it right, and we would both be laughing all the way to the bank, or in this case, all the way to the Brinks.
“The last truck is leaving,” I whispered into the walky-talky.
Marco didn’t answer, so I whispered it again. “The truck is pulling out.”
Then came his sarcastic whispery reply. “Damn it, I know. I’m right beside it.”
The truck moved out slowly. Within the next few minutes, a guard would appear.
“Someone’s coming out,” I whispered into the walky-talky. The icy wind was cutting the face off me, and I was finding it difficult to hear Marco’s reply. “Can you hear me? Someone’s out, looking about.”
The guar
d went to the side of the building, then, to my horror, walked gingerly towards Tom’s car. From my distance, I couldn’t make out what he was up to. His hand seemed to go to his hip. Had he seen something? Heard my voice from Marco’s walky-talky and gone to investigate? Was his hand going for a gun on his hip?
For a heart-stopping moment, the guard stopped beside Tom’s car. I wondered had Marco heard my instructions? I couldn’t communicate, fearing the guard would hear the muffled static.
I was conscious of only two sounds as I stood in the dark with the wind whistling up my arse: my heartbeat, and a clock in my head warning that time was ticking away. I had to move the van in twenty minutes, or risk getting a parking ticket. Worse, it might be towed. Now that would be fun.
Nothing was moving at the Brinks. The guard seemed to be peering into the car. It was then that I made the reckless decision to walk towards the Brinks, and take the guard before he captured Marco.
I walked calmly, but briskly. The guard still hadn’t moved. His back was to me. Ten seconds and I would have him.
Marco was moving slowly, easing himself from the car. He hadn’t needed my help.
“Don’t raise yer hands, pal,” he softly commanded, pointing his replica gun at the shocked guard. “Keep them in your pocket. No heroics. Understand?”
The guard nodded.
“Now, turn around, nice and slow, pal. We’re all going to visit the rest of your pals in there, like one big, happy family. Behave, and all this will be over before you even know it. Understand?”
“Sure,” said the guard, turning to face me. “Just don’t hurt any of us.”
