So we decided the thing to do was make our pitch directly to Anthony Vigano. He was, as he’d said he would be, out on bail, so it should be possible to get to see him. We decided it would be better if just one of us approached him, and since it had been my idea in the first place I was the one who would go. Also, Joe didn’t feel very much like doing it. It wasn’t his kind of thing.
There were files on Vigano downtown, and because of my identification I had simple and easy access to the files. They included Vigano’s address, over in Red Bank, New Jersey, plus a lot of other information about the things he’d been involved with over the years. He’d spent eight months in jail when he was twenty-two years old, for assault with a dangerous weapon. Other than that, he had more arrests than I had hairs on my head, but no convictions. He’d been a union officer a few times in his life, and he had an import-export business for a while, and he was a major stockholder in a New Jersey brewery, and he was a part-owner of a trucking company down in Trenton. The arrests had involved drugs and extortion and receiving stolen goods and bribery and just about every crime on the books except playing hookey. There had even been two attempts to get him on income-tax charges, but he’d wriggled out of both of them, too.
There had been three attempts on his life over the years, the last one nine years before, in Brooklyn. He traveled with bodyguards, one of which had been killed that time in Brooklyn, and so far he didn’t have a scratch on him. And apparently there hadn’t been any more internal disputes since the Brooklyn incident.
His place in Red Bank was an estate near the shore there, a full square block surrounded by a high iron fence and eight-foot-tall hedges. I got the Chevvy and drove over to New Jersey and took a spin around the place once, by day, just checking it out, and through the closed iron gates you could see the black-top road curving in through crew-cut lawn with big oak trees on it, and leading over to a three-story-high brick mansion with white trim and four white pillars on the front. There were two or three expensive-looking cars parked in front of the house, and a casual-looking guy dressed like a gardener was hanging around just inside the iron gates. Gardener, hell.
A part of our thinking in this situation all along had been that in our position we could get supplies for the robbery right from the force itself, from the Police Department, and now for the first time we put that idea into effect. There’s a room upstairs at the precinct full of disguises, including dresses and false stomachs and all kinds of things; I went up and checked out a moustache and a wig and a set of horn-rim glasses with clear lenses. Then I turned over all my identification to Joe, and took the train down to Red Bank. The idea was, I wanted to visit Vigano without him being able to return the favor.
I took a cab from the station to Vigano’s place. If the driver knew anything about the address, he gave no sign of it. I paid him, got out of the car, waited for him to drive away, and then walked over to the gate.
Somebody inside the gate suddenly flashed a light in my eyes. I put my forearm up to block it, and said, “Hey! You don’t have to blind me.”
A voice said, “Whadya want?” It was a gravel voice, the kind you make with pizza and cigars.
I kept my forearm up. I didn’t want all that light on my face out here. I said, “Get that God damn light out of my eyes.”
It took him a couple seconds longer; then he lowered the flashlight beam till it was aimed at about my belt-buckle. I still couldn’t see anything past it, but at least it wasn’t blinding me. And it wasn’t showing my features big and clear to anybody observing.
He said, “I still want to know what you want.”
I lowered my forearm. “I want to see Mister Vigano,” I said. I was suddenly feeling very nervous. I was here without any of the protection I usually carry. Not so much the gun, as the status of being a police officer.
He said, “I don’t recognize you.”
I said, “I’m a New York City cop, with a proposition.”
He said, “We don’t take defectors.”
“A proposition, that’s all,” I said. “I’m willing to go see somebody else.”
Nothing happened for maybe ten seconds, and then all of a sudden the light went out. Now I couldn’t see anything at all. “Wait there,” the voice said, and footsteps went away.
After a minute or so my eyes adjusted to the dark again, and I could make out lights in the house inside there. I didn’t know if there was anybody standing inside the gate or not.
I waited nearly five minutes. That gave me plenty of time to come to the conclusion that I was an idiot. What the hell was I doing here in the first place? This whole robbery thing was just something Joe and I talked about in the car, going into the city and going home. Sometimes we talked and thought as though we were serious about it, but were we? Was I really going to steal something and collect a million dollars and go live in Trinidad? That’s just daydreams.
The reason I became a policeman is because I wanted a civil-service job. I took a couple of the state civil-service exams, and I became a clerk in an Unemployment Insurance office in Queens, and one day when I had nothing to do I read a police-recruiting poster on the billboard in the office. The idea I got from the poster was that being a policeman combined civil service with a little bit of glamour or excitement. The clerk job was too boring to put up with anymore, so I switched over. And the poster didn’t lie. Being a policeman is exactly that; civil service plus excitement.
But I don’t know, the last few years everything seems to be going to hell. Sometimes I think it’s just me getting older, but other times I look around and I notice everybody else has the same attitude. Like New York is getting crappier by the second, and money is getting tighter, and everything is just more tense and troubled and futile than it used to be.
It’s been coming this way for a long time, I don’t mean this is any sudden change. I mean, the reason I moved my family out to Long Island eleven years ago was because already by then New York was a place where you didn’t want to bring up your children. Everybody else moved out then too. We all knew the city was getting impossible, and we all freely admitted to one another that we were moving out because of the kids.
Well, now the city is impossible. It isn’t even a place for adults any more. I hate driving in there every workday, I don’t even like to look in that direction. But what am I going to do? You get married, you have kids, you commit yourself to a mortgage on a house, payments on the car and the furniture; all of a sudden there aren’t any more decisions you can make. I couldn’t decide tomorrow morning to stop being a New York City cop. Give up my seniority, my civil-service status? Give up my years toward the pension? And where would I find another job at the same pay? And would it be any better?
You go along and go along, and it seems as though you’re running your own life, and it never occurs to you that your life has gradually closed around you like a Venus flytrap and it’s running you.
During this whole period of time, while the idea of the robbery was still theoretical, I found myself remembering over and over what that hippie pusher had said, about all of us having started out different from this. It’s true. I’d find myself sometimes doing things, or saying things, or just thinking things, and I’d suddenly look around at myself and not believe it was me. If I could have looked ahead when I was ten years old to the man I was going to turn out to be, would I have been pleased?