Joe looked over at him and laughed. “You look like the Statue of Liberty.”
Tom grinned, saluted with the beer, and took a swig. It was tough to drink in that position, but Joe was watching, so Tom did it for the effect. Then he said, “You know what I was thinking before? When I was over there with the lawn-mower?”
“What?”
“Remember I told you I used to go to City College nights?”
Joe waded over to lean against the side of the pool to Tom’s left. “So?”
Tom moved up a step, so the water was only chest-high and it was easier to drink. “What I was thinking,” he said, “if I’d kept at it, you know where I’d be today?”
“Where?”
“Right here. I still wouldn’t be a lawyer, not for two more years.”
“Sure,” Joe said. He nodded. “You put a penny away every day, at the end of the year you’re still poor. It’s the same principle.”
Tom stared at him. “It is?”
They looked at one another, both bewildered, until Tom lost interest in the subject and changed it, saying, “Listen, what about the wives?”
Joe switched his bewilderment to the new topic. “What?”
“What do we tell the wives?”
“Oh,” Joe said. “About the robbery, you mean.”
“Naturally.”
Joe didn’t see any problem. He shrugged and said, “Nothing.”
“Nothing? I don’t know about you and Grace,” Tom said, “but if I put Mary in Trinidad, she’s going to know she’s in Trinidad.”
“Sure,” Joe said. “Then. When we’re ready to move, that’s when we tell them. After it’s all over.”
Tom hadn’t made up his own mind about that yet. There were times, particularly at night, when he very strongly wanted to tell Mary about it, talk it over with her, see what she had to say. Frowning, he said, “Not now at all?”
“In the first place,” Joe said, “they’d worry. In the second place, they’d be against it, you know they would.”
Tom nodded; that was what had kept him quiet up till now. “I know,” he said. “Mary wouldn’t approve, not ahead of time.”
“They’d throw cold water on the whole idea,” Joe said. “If we tell the wives, we’ll never do it.”
“You’re right,” Tom said. He was disappointed, but he was also relieved that the question was resolved. “Not till it’s all over,” he said. “Then we tell them.”
“When we’re ready to take off out of here,” Joe said.
“Right,” Tom said. Then he said. “The thing is, you know we can’t leave the country right away.”
“Oh, sure,” Joe said. “I know that. They’d be on our asses in five minutes.”
“What we’ve got to agree right now,” Tom said, “is that we bury the money and neither one of us goes near it until we’re ready to leave.”
“That’s fine with me.”
“The big advantage we’ve got,” Tom said, “is that we’ve seen every mistake there is.”
“That’s right. And we know how not to make them.”
Tom took a deep breath. “Two years,” he said.
Joe winced. “Two years?”
“We’ve got to play it cool,” Tom said.
Joe looked pained, as though he had an ankle cramp down underwater. He wanted to argue against it, but on the other hand he had to agree with the theory of it; so he was stuck. Reluctantly, but giving in, he said, “Yeah, I suppose. Okay, two years it is.”
Tom
In the weeks after my visit with Vigano, I got to learn an awful lot about stocks and bonds, and about brokerages, and about Wall Street. I had to, if we were going to take ten million dollars away from there.
Wall Street itself is only about five blocks long, but the brokerages are scattered all around that whole area down there below City Hall; on Pine Street and Exchange Place, on William Street and Nassau Street and Maiden Lane.
I’ve heard the Wall Street district described as the only part of New York that looks like London. I can’t say about that, since I’ve never been to London, but I do know it has the narrowest and crookedest streets of any part of the city, with narrow sidewalks, and the big bank buildings crowding as close to the curb and each other as they can get. Writers all the time talk about that section in terms of “canyons,” and I can see why. With the streets so narrow and the stone buildings so tall and close together, the only time the sun shines on Wall Street is high noon.
For the first time in my life I was beginning to see that breaking the law could be just as complicated as upholding it. I’d always thought of the police side of things as being tougher than the crook side, but maybe I’d been wrong; there’s nothing like standing in the other guy’s shoes to make you sympathize with him.
There were so many details to figure out. How to do the robbery, for instance; whether it should be day or night, whether we should try for a diversion, just exactly how we were going to work it. And how to be sure we were taking the right bonds; before this, neither one of us had known zip about stocks and bonds. And how to make a getaway after the robbery in those narrow crowded streets. And how to hide the loot afterward until we sold it to Vigano; which was ironic, since all along we’d been telling each other we had to steal something that didn’t need to be held onto or stowed out of sight.
But there it was. And the brokerages didn’t make it any easier. They were guarded like banks; no, they were tougher than banks.
Let me tell you just how tough they were. First of all, there’s a special section of the Police Department with headquarters down in the Wall Street area that deals with nothing at all except stock market crime. There are cops in that section that know more about the financial world than the editor of the Wall Street Journal, and those cops keep tabs on the brokerages all the time, talking to the personnel directors, talking to the security directors, checking up on their ways of handling things and protecting themselves, and always no more than one phone call away in case there’s any kind of trouble.
And then there’s the internal security departments. All the big brokerages have them; private uniformed guards, security files, closed-circuit TV, and all of it run usually by an ex-cop or an ex-FBI man. Guys that treat a stock brokerage as though it were a top-secret atomic-testing laboratory, and whose entire job is to see to it that none of the millions of pieces of paper that flow through Wall Street every day ever gets stolen.
Of course, some do. But most stock market robberies are inside jobs, and there’s a good reason for it. Stocks and bonds, like dollar bills, carry serial numbers. Usually, the only way to steal securities and get something for your pains is to be an employee of a stock brokerage and alter the records so the brokerage isn’t aware that anything has been stolen. With bearer bonds, it’s possible for somebody like Anthony Vigano, with his expertise and his contacts, to alter the numbers and peddle the bonds back into legitimate channels, but other than that an inside job is the only kind of job possible on Wall Street.
But even if it weren’t, even if there were any point in breaking into a stock brokerage and stripping the vault, they’ve gone out of their way to make things tough. For instance, a couple of years ago a bank down in that area closed down, and a restaurant was going to move into the space they left vacant. Before they could, though, they had to pull the vault out, and they had one hell of a time doing it. Not only was it wired with all kinds of alarms, not only did it have sixteen-inch-thick concrete walls reinforced with steel rods, but it actually had two separate walls all the way around the vault, and the area between the two walls was filled with poison gas. The workmen taking the vault walls down had to wear gas masks.