Tom was moving fast, coming up the stairs two and three at a time. The three shadows were mixed in with the pack, all of it moving more slowly; when Tom reached the head of the stairs, the nearest other passenger was still eight steps down.
Tom went by me without a look, the way he was supposed to. He went past, and I immediately stepped forward to block the staircase. I held my arms out and said, “Hold up a minute. Hold it, there.”
Momentum kept them coming up a few more steps, but then they stopped and all looked up at me. People obey the uniform. I saw two of Vigano’s men pushing their way up past the other passengers toward me, and the third one going back down the stairs; probably to look for another way up. But there wasn’t any, not from that platform. By the time he found another exit it would be too late, and he’d come up in the wrong place anyway.
They were all milling around on the stairs, a dozen of them packed in tight together. New Yorkers expect that kind of thing, so there wasn’t any major complaint. One of Vigano’s men, having shoved himself up to the front of the pack, where his head was at the level of my elbow, looked past me down the corridor, watching Tom hustle away. He made an irritated face, but tried to keep his voice neutral when he said to me, “What’s the problem, officer?”
“Only be a minute,” I told him.
His eyes kept flicking back and forth between the corridor and me, and I could tell by his expression when Tom turned the corner down there. But still I held them all, while I counted to thirty slowly. The third hood reappeared at the foot of the stairs and trotted up them, looking disgusted.
I stepped to the side, slow and casual. “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”
They streamed past me, Vigano’s men moving at a dead run. I watched them go, and I knew they were wasting their time. We’d practiced this enough, Tom and I, so that we knew how long it would take him to get to the nearest exit and out to where his car was parked, with the special police permit showing on the sun visor. By now, he was probably already making the turn onto Ninth Avenue.
I strolled the other way.
7
There was a certain amount of leeway in setting up the work schedules at the precinct, so Tom and Joe could usually adjust things around to be on duty at the same hours. They got cooperation from the precinct because it was understood they had a car pool together. If they’d both been patrolmen, or both on the detective squad, they could probably have worked it out one hundred per cent of the time, but operating out of two different offices the way they did there were bound to be times when the work schedules were in conflict, with nothing to be done about it.
Because of one of those conflicts, it was three days before they got to talk about Tom’s meeting with Vigano, and when at last they did get together Joe was too worn out to pay much attention. He’d been on a double shift, sixteen hours straight, caused by some special activity over at the United Nations. In fact, it was the stuff at the United Nations, involving a couple of African countries and the Jewish Defense League and some anti-Communist Polish group and who knows what all, that had created the conflict in the work schedule in the first place.
It wasn’t that Joe himself had had to go over to the UN, but a lot of uniformed men from the precinct had been sent down there for the duration of the special circumstances, and that meant the guys who were left had to double up to cover the territory.
That was one of the big differences between the patrolmen and the detective squad. The detectives were chronically short-handed, and used to it, but there was never any time when orders would come down that would strip out half the men from the squad and leave the rest to take up the slack. The patrolmen though, were under normal circumstances up pretty close to full strength, until every once in a while the phone would ring in the Lieutenant’s office, a couple of buses would pull up out front to take the boys away, and the ones left would have to start scrambling. Like today.
Today, the result was that they rode back together in Tom’s car that afternoon with Tom excited and ready to talk, and Joe just sitting there as though he’d been hit by a fire hydrant. In fact, having come to work eight hours before Tom, he had his own car in the city, the Plymouth, and was just leaving it there, because he didn’t think he had the stamina to drive it all the way home. He’d come back in with Tom tomorrow, and drive the Plymouth home tomorrow night, if all went well.
At first, Tom didn’t realize just how far out of it Joe was. They got into the car together and Tom headed for the tunnel, and as they drove he gave a quick rundown on what Vigano had said. Joe didn’t make any response, mostly because he was barely listening. Tom tried to capture his attention by talking louder and faster, trying to push some of his own enthusiasm into Joe’s ear. “It’s simple,” he said. “What are bonds? They’re just pieces of paper.” He glanced over at Joe. “Joe?”
Joe nodded. “Pieces of paper,” he said.
“And the great thing is,” Tom said, “we can actually do it.” He gave Joe another look, with some annoyance in it. “Joe, you with me?”
Joe shifted around in his seat, moving his body like a sleeper who doesn’t want to wake up. “For Christ’s sake, Tom,” he said, “I’m dead on my feet.”
“You aren’t on your feet.”
Joe was too tired for humor; it just made him grouchy. “I been on my feet,” he said. “Double shift.”
“If you pay attention to me,” Tom said, “you can say good-bye to all that.”
They were just entering the Midtown Tunnel. Joe said, “You really believe in this?”
“Naturally.”
Joe didn’t make any answer, and Tom didn’t say anything else while they were in the tunnel. Coming out the other side, Tom said, “You got change?”
Joe roused himself and patted his pockets, while Tom slowed for the toll booths. Joe didn’t have any change, so he got out his wallet. “Here’s a dollar,” he said.
“Thanks.” Tom took the dollar, gave it to the attendant, got the change back, and passed it to Joe, who sat there looking at the coins in his palm as though he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with them.
Driving away from the booth, Tom said, “How’d you like a job like that?”
“I don’t want any job at all,” Joe said. He dropped the coins in his shirt pocket and rubbed his face with his palm.
“Just standing there all day,” Tom said, “taking money in.”
“They all rake off a little,” Joe said.
“Yeah, and they get caught.”
Joe squinted at him. “We won’t?”
“No, we won’t,” Tom said.
Joe shrugged, and looked out the side window at the black buildings and brick smokestacks of Long Island City.
Tom said, “The big difference is, we won’t do it over and over. One big job, and quit. I go to Trinidad, you go to Montana.”
Joe turned his head to Tom again. “Saskatchewan,” he said.
Tom, thrown off the track, frowned at the trucks he was driving among, and said, “What?”
“I thought it over,” Joe told him. He was beginning to wake up despite himself, though he was still in a bad mood. He said, “What I’d really like to do is get Grace and the kids out of this country entirely. But completely out, before it goes to hell altogether.”
“Where’s this you want to go?”
“Saskatchewan.” Joe made a vague gesture, as though pointing northward. “It’s in Canada,” he said. “They give you land if you want to be a farmer.”
Tom gave him a grin of surprise and disbelief. “What do you know about farming?”
“A hell of a lot less than I’ll know next year.” They were now on that part of the Expressway lined on both sides with cemeteries, and Joe brooded out at it all. It’s like somebody’s idea of a sick joke, all those tombstones stretching away on both sides of the Expressway just a couple miles from Manhattan; like a parody of a city, in bad taste. Neither of them had ever mentioned it to the other, but those damn cemeteries had bugged them both from time to time, over the years of driving back and forth. And the funny thing was, they bothered the both of them more in the daytime than at night. And more on sunny days than rainy days. And more in the summer than in the winter.