The three men who entered the office looked like some sort of statistical sampling, a cross-section of America perhaps; the mind boggled at the attempt to see them as a group connected with one another.
The first in was portly, distinguished, with iron-gray hair and black suit and conservative narrow tie. He carried a black attaché case, and fat cigar tips protruded from his breast pocket. He looked to be about fifty-five, prosperous, and used to giving orders.
The second was stocky, short, wearing a tan sports jacket, dark-brown slacks and a bow tie. He had crewcut sandy hair, horn-rimmed glasses, leather patches on the elbows of his jacket, and carried a brown briefcase. He was about forty and looked thoughtful and competent in some specialty.
The third was very tall and very thin, with shoulder-length hair, deep sideburns and Western-sheriff mustache. He was no more than twenty-five and wore a yellow pullover polo shirt, tie-dye blue jeans and white basketball sneakers. He carried a gray cloth bag of the kind plumbers use, which clanked when he put it down on a chair. He grinned all the time and did a lot of bobbing in place, as though listening to music.
The portly man looked around with a tentative smile. “Captain Deemer?”
The captain remained by the map but looked over with brooding eyes and said, “That’s me.”
“I am George Gelding, of C and L.”
The captain gave an irritated frown. “Seeing-eye?”
“Capitalists’ and Immigrants’ Trust,” said Gelding. “The bank you lost.”
The captain grunted, as though he’d been hit in the chest with an arrow, and lowered his head like a bull deciding to get mad.
Gelding gestured to the man with the bow tie and leather elbow patches. “This is Mr. Albert Docent,” he said, “of the company which provided the safe employed in that particular branch of our bank.”
Deemer and Docent nodded at each other, the captain sourly, the safe man with a thoughtful smile.
“And this,” Gelding said, gesturing to the young man with the hair, “is Mr. Gary Wallah, of Roamerica Corporation, the company which provided the trailer in which the bank has recently been housed.”
“Mobile home,” Wallah said. He grinned and nodded and bounced.
“Mobile, at any rate,” Gelding said and turned back to the captain, saying, “We are here to offer you whatever information and expertise may be of help to you.”
“Thank you.”
“And to ask if there have been any further developments.”
“We have them bottled up,” the captain said grimly.
“Have you really?” said Gelding, smiling broadly and taking a step forward, “Where?”
“Here,” the captain said and thumped the map with the back of one meaty hand. “It’s only a question of time.”
“You mean you still don’t know exactly where they are.”
“They’re on the Island.”
“But you don’t know where.”
“It’s only a question of time!”
“It is approximately one hundred miles,” Gelding said, with no attempt to soften his tone, “from the New York City line across Long Island to Montauk Point. In spots, the island is twenty miles wide. In land area, it is larger than Rhode Island. This is the area in which you have them bottled up?”
In moments of stress, the captain’s left eye tended to close, and then open again, and then slowly close again, then pop open once more, and so on. It made him look as though he were winking, and in his youth he had inadvertently picked up more than one young lady that way; in fact, it still did pretty well for him.
But there were no young ladies here now. “The point,” the captain told the banker, “is that they can’t get off the Island. It’s a big place, but sooner or later we’ll cover it.”
“What are you doing so far?”
“Until morning,” the captain said, “the only thing we can do is patrol the streets, hope to find them before they get the thing under cover.”
“It is almost three in the morning, well over an hour since the bank was stolen. Surely they’re under cover by now.”
“Maybe. At first light, we spread out more. Before we’re done, we’ll look inside every old barn, every abandoned factory, every empty building of any kind on the whole Island. We’ll check all dead-end roads, we’ll look into every bit of woods.”
“You’re talking, Captain, about an operation that will take a month.”
“No, Mr. Gelding, I’m not. By morning, we’ll have the assistance of Boy Scout troops, volunteer fire departments and other local organizations all over the Island to help in the search. We’ll use the same groups and the same techniques as when we’re looking for a lost child.”
“The bank,” Gelding said frostily, “is somewhat larger than a lost child.”
“That can only help,” Captain Deemer said. “We’ll also have assistance from the Civil Air Patrol in scanning from the skies.”
“Scanning from the skies?” The phrase seemed to take Gelding aback.
“I say we have them bottled up,” Captain Deemer said, his voice rising and his left eyelid lowering, “and I say it’s only a question of time till we tighten the net!” And he did that chicken-killing gesture again, making Lieutenant Hepplewhite in his unobserved corner wince once more.
“All right,” Gelding said grudgingly. “Under the circumstances, I must admit you seem to be doing everything possible.”
“Everything,” agreed the captain and turned his attention to Gary Wallah, the young man from the mobile home company. The strain of having to deal as allies with somebody who looked like Gary Wallah caused the captain’s head to lower into his neck again and his left eyelid to flutter like an awning in an on-shore breeze. “Tell me about this trailer,” he said, and despite his best intentions the sentence came growling out as though instead he’d said, “Up against the wall, kid.” (He didn’t use bad language in uniform.)
“It’s a mobile home,” Wallah said. “It isn’t a trailer. A trailer is a little thing with wheels that you rent from U-Haul when you want to move a refrigerator. What we’re talking about is a mobile home.”
“I don’t care if you call it a Boeing 747, boy,” said the captain, no longer even caring about the growl in his voice, “just so you describe it to me.”
Wallah didn’t say anything for a few seconds, just glanced around the room with a little smile on his face. Finally he nodded and said, “Right on. I’m here this time to cooperate, that’s what I’ll do.”
Captain Deemer closed his mouth firmly over the several things it occurred to him to say. He reminded himself that he really didn’t want to fight with everybody on his own team, and he waited in controlled impatience for this goddam draft-dodging useless hippie pot-smoking disrespectful radical son of a bitch bastard to say whatever it was he was going to say.
In a neutral tone, Wallah said, “What Roamerica leased to the bank was a modified version of our Remuda model. It’s fifty feet long and twelve feet wide and is usually made up as a two- or three-bedroom home in a variety of styles, but mostly either Colonial or Western. But in this case it was turned over to the bank with no interior partitions and without the usual kitchen appliances. The normal bathroom was put in; that is, the fixtures only, no walls or decor. The modifications done at the factory consisted mostly of installing a full burglar alarm system in the walls, floor and roof of the unit and strengthening the floor at the rear portion. This what you want, Cap?”
Instead of answering directly, Captain Deemer looked over at Lieutenant Hepplewhite to see if he was taking all this down the way he was supposed to; he was taking it down, but not the way he was supposed to. That is, instead of sitting at the desk like a normal human being he was standing beside it, bent over, pencil flying across paper. “Goddamit, Lieutenant,” the captain shouted, “sit down before you get a humpback!”