Ed Mackey said, “There’s old armories like that all over the country.”
Marcantoni nodded. “And we got this one. And finally the government decided to turn a dollar on the thing, and they sold it to some local developers. It’s a big building, it’s a city block square. They put some high-ticket apartments on the upper floors, with views out over the city and the plains and all, but it was tough to know what to do with the main floor, where the parade field was. The outside walls were four feet thick, with little narrow deep windows, ready to repel an attack like if the Indians had tanks. You couldn’t put street-level shops in there, nobody wanted an apartment down in there, and even for a bank it was too grim.”
Williams said, “I was in there sometimes when I was a kid. They used it for track and field. I remember, it was like a fort.”
“It is a fort,” Marcantoni told him. “That’s the point. One of the developers was a guy named Henry Freed-man, got his money from his father’s wholesale jewelry business, which was on two floors of an office building downtown, upper floors for the security but a pain in the ass for the salesmen and the deliveries. So they worked it out, they’d lease part of the main floor of the armory to Freedman’s father, he’d move his wholesale business in there; on the street, but even more secure than the office building. The rest of the space they leased to some dance studio.”
Parker said, “You worked on the refit.”
“That’s just right,” Marcantoni said. “And I found the secret entrance.”
That got the blank looks he’d anticipated. He said, “I looked it up afterward, that’s what they used to do. Like they’re getting ready for a siege, they put in a little back entrance nobody knows about.”
Flat, Williams said, “A secret entrance.”
“No, it’s true,” Marcantoni told him. “I had free time on the job there, I liked to poke around, see what was what, and there was this locked metal door in the basement, no knob, just a keyhole. I wondered, what’s back there? Maybe government gold, everybody forgot about it. So I managed a look at the blueprints in the site office, and there was no door there. It wasn’t on the plans.”
Williams said, “Did you get it open?”
“Sure. I took a bar down, and popped two bricks next to the door so I could pull it open, and I put my flashlight in there, and it was a tunnel, brick all around, like five feet wide, maybe six feet high, going straight out.”
Williams said, “To where?”
“A pile of trash, blocking it,” Marcantoni told him. “Part of the thing fell in some time, who knows when. So I put the door back, put the bricks back, and later I figured out where it had to go, if it was a straight line, and it had to go to the library across Indiana Avenue. That was the first public library here, federal money, built around the same time as the armory.”
Parker said, “You looked over there.”
“I had to break into the library,” Marcantoni said. “But libraries are not tough to break into. I went in three nights, and I finally found it, with storage shelves built up in front of it. They didn’t know anything about it either. I got through that door, and went along the tunnel as far as where it was broken in, and I don’t think there can be more than five or ten feet where it’s blocked. You know, they pulled up the trolley tracks along there maybe fifty years ago, it could be they screwed up the tunnel then, never knew they did it.”
Parker said, “Your idea is, we go in there, clear it, have all night in the wholesaler’s.”
Marcantoni grinned, he was so pleased with the whole thing. He said, “I told myself, wait at least five years, so nobody’s thinking about the crews did the makeover.”
Williams said, “How do you know, when you’re pulling that rubble out of the way, there won’t be some more come down? I don’t like the idea of tunnels that already fell in once.”
“It’s only that one short part,” Marcantoni assured him. “My idea is, we’ll take two or three of those long tables from the reading room in the library, they’re not far away. We clear stuff, shove the tables ahead of us, we go on all fours under them, just that one part of the route. Anything else falls down, they’re sturdy tables, they’ll keep it clear.”
Williams said, “Guns. Alarms.”
“I can tell you about that,” Phil Kolaski said. “I was looking into it before Tom tripped. Because the building’s so solid, the only way into the jewelry place—”
“The only way they think,” Marcantoni corrected.
“Sure,” Kolaski agreed. “But that is what they think. The front door on the street, that’s all they worry about. There’s three separate entrances, for the jewelry operation, the dance studio, the apartments upstairs. They’re right next to each other, and there’s a doorman around the clock for the apartments. The dance studio just has a couple regular locks, you could go in that way except for the doorman. The jewelry operation has an alarmed front door plus a barred gate plus an articulated steel door comes down over the whole thing.”
Williams said, “No motion sensors inside.”
“They really don’t expect anybody inside,” Kolaski said. “Except through that front door. It looks solid.”
There was a little pause and then Williams said, “What are the hours, in this library?”
Marcantoni answered that one: “Sunday they close at five P.M.”
Angioni said, “And Sunday, the jeweler isn’t open at all.”
Williams said, “You want to do it this Sunday, or a week and a half from now?”
“This Sunday,” Marcantoni said. “Who wants to hang around?”
“Nobody,” Parker said.
3
When he heard the first news on his police scanner, Goody popped a call to Maryenne, cellphone to cellphone. “You home?”
“No, I’m at the family center.”
All the mamas read to their babies at the family center. “Read to him tomorrow,” Goody said. “I’ll meet you your place. I got news for you.”
“What news?”
“Tell ya when I see ya, lovey,” Goody said, and broke the connection, because this wasn’t the kind of news you’d talk about, chat away, back and forth, on a cellphone, where any fool in the world can be listening in.
Goody shut off the scanner, started the Mercury, and drove away from the post where he’d been sitting the last hour and a half, one of the few cars moving in this miserable slum neighborhood. Three blocks later he made a left onto a one-way street and stopped next to the Land Rover parked at the left curb, where Buck sat in the backseat with his two bodyguards up front. The bodyguards eyeballed him, but they knew Goody, and looked down the street again instead.
Goody lowered his window and Buck did the same thing on the other side, saying, “You leavin early? Somethin wrong back there?”
“No, I got a family emergency,” Goody told him. He picked up the shopping bag from between his feet, with the merchandise and the money in it, and passed it over to Buck. “I’ll be back tomorrow, same as ever.”
“I didn’t hear nothin on the scanners,” Buck said. He frowned like he was trying to work out what he should be suspicious about.
“No, I got it on my cell,” Goody told him, and raised the phone from the seat to show it. “Family business,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”