People were yelling around in the two cars ahead of us. We had a good man (Axe) guarding the motorman, the toughest position besides mine, since he’d have to be the last man out to the platform; but I wondered from the noise whether the folks up front had caught on that our guns didn’t have any guts to them.
I shouldn’t have bothered to worry. Planning is everything. Iron-mouth, bagman for Car 1, came rushing out the sliding doors with his shopping bag swinging behind him. His two gunmen were right with him. “Clean sweep in One,” Brother Iron-mouth reported, and triggered the conductor’s switch to open the doors. They slicked open, and the first three members of our gang scattered across the platform. The juniors, waiting outside to run interference for the train team, weren’t busy yet. No one outside our three cars had realized that they were witnessing one of the boldest daylight robberies of all time.
Crisco, bagman for Car 2, reported through with his two gunsels and scampered toward the escalator and daylight. Our turn was next, with luck on our side.
Squint was finishing the looting of our car. “Take off the watch, Mister,” he said. Standing behind Squint, Thing shook his wooden pistol. The man stripped the watch into the shopping bag. They walked back, then, to give their attention to a plump lady who was clutching a beaded purse. “Everybody contributes, Madame,” Squint said, bowing and opening the shopping bag by her knees. Glaring, the woman dumped her change-purse into the bag and let half a dozen bills follow the silver into our treasury.
Then I recognized our latest victim. “Let’s clear,” I said.
“I left nothing here,” Squint agreed, and peeled out the door.
Thing and I backed away. Two men were left in the train besides us, Axe, guarding the motorman, and King Kong, who covered Axe. They eased towards us, walking backwards as soft-footed as tiger tamers in the cage. “Let’s orbit, Prez,” King Kong said, looking like a ’30’s movie menace, all jowls and stubbled beard.
“I’m with you,” I said. I had to be the last man out of the train, of course, or I’d lose face.
What I lost was worse. “Let’s see what Jesse James looks like without his didy,” said the woman who’d given us the rough time at the first. She reached up and, as I turned to dive out to the platform after King Kong, tugged loose my mask.
And as I jumped to freedom, the mask dangling off one ear like I was Ben Casey on his way to the coffee shop after a rugged craniotomy, the fat lady near the front of the car stared me in the eyes.
She was Miss Hanna Henniker, my old freshman English teacher.
I trotted up to Squint and tossed my mask, wadded around my wooden gun, on top of the goodies in his shopping bag.
“Piece of cake,” Brother Squint said, grinning. He’d got that from a Limey movie I guess.
“Yeah,” I said. We double timed up the escalator and scooted across Quigly Avenue. A siren sounded off past the intersection. We’d timed it perfect.
“The best laid plans of mice and men,” as Miss Henniker often pointed out, can lay an egg. Who would guess that she’d be aboard the one train in the city at the one time I was robbing it, and a wise broad pulled off my mask?
I should have grown whiskers for the job, I thought, running down the alley behind Steve’s Smoke Shop. I should have worn one of those masks that fit over your whole head, and come off hard as rubber gloves. It was bitter. Of all the membership of the Hayden Street Social & Athletic Club, only the President had shown his face to his public.
The juniors and the gunmen cut out to establish alibis at movies, home, or swimming-pools. My battle-staff and the bagmen rendezvoused at the clubhouse, where we’d planned to critique our operation and count the take.
Iron-mouth, Crisco and Squint dumped out their shopping bags on the meeting table. “Careful with them watches,” Mouse said.
“If they ain’t shockproof, we don’t want ’em,” Squint explained.
What a mess of loot!
Fourteen hundred dollars, it came to, with a lot of silver. We had twenty-three watches, a camera, and a package Crisco’d picked up on a hunch that held four packs of cards and a red plastic canasta tray.
“On the nose, one thousand four hundred and eighty-three dollars and twenty-four cents,” Treasurer Mouse announced.
“Don’t that beat shuffling around in a stupid dance in Braustein’s Basement?” Thing asked, safe now on the winning side.
“I may have been recognized by one of the passengers,” I said. I picked up the camera to examine it.
My brothers were silent quite a while. Nobody felt like talking.
Then Mouse spoke. “We know you’re no fink, Prez,” he said.
“We’ll bring cigarettes,” Squint said.
“She may not report me,” I told them. “We’d better hold onto the money and other junk for a while, just to be on the safe side. Push comes to shove, we can always chicken out with restitution.”
“Who was it that made you, Prez?” Thing asked.
“Remember the fat woman in the flowered dress?” I asked. “The one with the purse knitted out of beads?” Thing nodded. “Well, that was Miss Henniker, my old English teacher.”
“If I’d knew that,” Squint said, “I’d of asked her for her autograph. Way you talk, she’s pretty famous.”
“Great,” Mouse said. “We’re home free and gone as geese with a bundle like young Fort Knox, except our Prez had to stop and smile at his freshman teach.”
“That fresh dame pulled my mask off,” I explained.
“Don’t fight about it,” Crisco advised. “If the Prez got made, we’d better split.”
“We’ll play it safe,” Mouse said. He rubber-banded the bills into a stack the size of a pregnant brickbat and tossed it into one of our shopping bags, together with the camera and the watches and the canasta set. “I’ll stash our winnings somewhere safe till the heat cools on Prez,” he said.
“Maybe Miss Henniker has forgotten my name,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t recognize me.”
“I lay my share of this loot on no sucker bets,” Mouse said. He hefted the bag and toted it upstairs into the evening.
“How do we know Brother Mouse is safe with all that temptation?” Thing whispered to Squint.
“He’s treasurer, ain’t he?” Squint asked. He rubbed his nose. “All the same, now you bring it up, maybe we’d better get Mouse bonded before our next job.”
That was Friday evening. I didn’t sleep that night for waiting for the phone to ring, inviting me down to the show-up room at the Precinct House, or fuzz fists beating at my old man’s door. Saturday I spent sinking into doorways every time a factory whistle blew, and freezing when I heard the bells play on a Merry Mobile ice cream truck. I came out of my clutch pretty well by Sunday; and on Monday morning I shoved down the hatch enough calories for a team of tag wrestlers. “The condemned man,” as Miss Henniker used to say when she passed out paper for a test, “ate a hearty meal.”
Because there was this letter in the mailbox with my name on it a few hours later, in a pink envelope with PERSONAL printed big below the address. I got the letter out of the box before my mother saw it (she could be the Hayden Street operative of the Central Intelligence Agency), and went up to the roof to get the news.
“Dear Norman,” the letter began.
Who called me Norman, except teachers? Only the draft board. I hoped this was the Army calling me.