Tom sat up, grudgingly giving up his leisure. “The story,” he said, “is that they’re very tough.”
“Tell me.” Joe wanted action, he wanted movement, he wanted the sense that something was happening now.
“Well,” Tom said, “half of them are no good to begin with.”
“Why not?”
“In a brokerage,” Tom told him, “there’s two places where they have guards. I mean, in addition to the main entrance. And the two places are the cage and the vault.”
“The cage?”
“That’s what they call the place where they do the paperwork, where they move the stocks and bonds in and out of the company. And the vault is where they store them.”
“So we want the vault,” Joe said. Simplicity, that was what he wanted, simple questions and simple answers.
“That’s right,” Tom said. “We want the vault. But with half of them, the vault is down in the basement and the cage is up on some other floor, and they’ve got closed-circuit TV between them.”
Joe made a face. “Ow,” he said.
“You see the problem,” Tom said. “While we’re taking care of the guards down in the basement, there’s some clown up on the seventh floor watching us do it. And taking pictures of it.”
“Taking pictures?”
“They put it all on video tape.” Tom made a sour smile, and said, “Which they can run for the jury at our trial.”
“Okay,” Joe said. “So the ones with the cage and the vault on different floors, they’re out.”
“With the rest of them,” Tom said, “where the cage and the vault are both on the same floor, you’ve still got guards in both places, plus guards at the entrance, and you’ve still got closed-circuit TV.”
Joe frowned. None of this was making him feel any better. He had, “They’ve all got that?”
Tom nodded. “Any outfit big enough to have what we want,” he said, “has TV. The little companies don’t, but we’re not going to find ten million dollars in bearer bonds lying around at one of the little companies.”
“Then we can’t do it at all,” Joe said. “It just can’t be done.” There was an angry sense of relief in that, in giving it up for good and for all, and knowing there wasn’t any hope.
A voice behind them suddenly said, “Are you robbers?”
They both turned around, and there was a little kid standing there behind them, a little boy of maybe five or six. He had a shovel in his hand, and he was covered with sand, and he was looking at them with bright curious eyes like a parrot. Tom just sat there staring at him, but Joe quickly said, “No, we’re the cops. You’re the robber.”
“Okay,” the kid said. He was agreeable.
“You better take off now,” Joe said, “before you get arrested.”
“Okay,” the kid said again, and turned around, and toddled off through the sand.
They both looked after him. Their hearts were pounding like sixty, it was amazing. “Christ,” Joe said.
Tom said, “We better do our talking in the car from now on.”
“What talking?” Joe was bitter, and he let it show. “You already described the situation, and it can’t be done.”
“Maybe it can,” Tom said. “As long as the cage and the vault are both on the same floor, there’s a chance we can pull it off.”
Joe studied his face. “You think so?”
“People commit robberies all the time. We should be able to.”
“Maybe,” Joe said.
“What bothers me most,” Tom said, “is how we’re going to stash the bonds after we get them. Remember, we kept saying we didn’t want anything we were going to have to hold onto.”
Joe shrugged. “We can only sell Vigano what he wants to buy,” he said. “Besides, we can call him right away afterward, we won’t have to keep the bonds very long at all.”
“I suppose so.”
“The time that bothers me,” Joe said, looking away toward the water, “is the two years.”
Tom gave him a warning look. “We agreed, Joe.”
“Yeah, I know we did. But look what happened to Paul. Shot in the leg. Another eight inches, he’d be shot in the balls. A little higher, he’s shot in the heart, he’s dead.”
Tom shrugged that off, saying, “Paul’s going to be okay, you said so yourself.”
“That isn’t the question,” Joe said. “I don’t want a million dollars buried in the ground, with me buried right next to it.”
“We can’t do it and run, we talked that over—”
Joe interrupted, saying, “Yeah yeah yeah, I know we did. I still think that’s a good idea. But not for two years, that’s too long.”
Tom said, “What, then?”
“One year.”
“What, cut it in half?”
“A year is a long time, Tom,” Joe said. “You want to live like this any longer than you absolutely have to?”
Tom frowned, looking away. He was staring at a girl in a bikini, without seeing her.
“The idea is to get out of this,” Joe said. “Remember?” Tempted against all his resolves, Tom shook his head and said, “Ahhh, Christ.”
“One year,” Joe said.
Tom held out a few seconds longer, but finally he shrugged and said, “All right. One year.”
“Good,” Joe said. He grinned, a lot happier than before, and grudgingly Tom grinned back.
Tom
That was one of the days when our schedules didn’t match. Joe was in the city working, and I had the day off. Naturally it was raining, so I moped around the house and read a paperback and watched some of the game shows on television. Mary took off in the car for the Grand Union in the middle of the day, so when the show I was watching came to an end I wandered back into the bedroom to take a look at my old uniform. If we ever really did do this robbery, that’s what I’d be wearing for my disguise.
I hadn’t worn the uniform in three or four years, but it was still there, hanging in the bedroom closet, pushed way down to one end, behind the raincoat liner for the raincoat I left in a restaurant two years ago. I laid it out on the bed and looked it over for a minute; no holes, no buttons missing, everything fine. I changed into it, and studied myself in the mirror on the back of the closet door.
Yeah, that was me, I remembered that guy. The years I’d worn this blue suit, hot weather and cold, rain and sun. For some damn reason I suddenly found myself feeling gloomy, really sad about something. As though I’d lost something somewhere along the line, and even though I didn’t know what it was I felt its absence. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that; it was a sense of loss I felt.
Well, crap, I didn’t come in here to get the rainy-day blues. I came in here to check out my disguise for the big robbery. And it looked fine, it was in perfect shape, no problem.
I was still standing there, trying to forget that I was feeling sad about something I couldn’t remember, when all of a sudden Mary came walking in, and looked at me with her mouth hanging open.
I’d thought she’d be at the store at least another hour. I turned and gave her a sheepish grin, and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to say to her. But I couldn’t think of a thing, not a single word came into my mind to explain what I was doing here in the bedroom in my old uniform.
After her first surprise, she helped me out of my paralysis by making a joke out of it, coming farther into the bedroom and saying, “What’s this? You’ve been demoted?”
“Uh,” I said, and then finally my brain and my tongue started working again. “I just wanted to see how I looked in it,” I said, and turned to study myself in the mirror again. “See if it still fit.”
“It doesn’t,” she said.
“Sure it does.” I turned sideways and gave myself a good view of my profile. “Well, it’s maybe a little tight,” I admitted. “Not much.”