Past me in the mirror I could see her smiling at me and shaking her head. She’d kept her own figure almost exactly the same, in spite of having kids and being a housewife for years, so she was in a good position to be thinner-than-thou if she wanted. And even though it was ridiculous, I felt defensive on the subject. I turned and said, “Listen, I could still wear it. If I had to, I could. It wouldn’t look that bad.”
“No, you’re right,” she said. “It isn’t terrible.” I couldn’t tell if she meant it or if she was humoring me.
Being agreed with was just as bad as having an argument. I patted my stomach, looking at it in the mirror, and said, “I’ve been drinking too much beer, that’s the trouble.”
She made an I-wouldn’t-argue-with-you face, and walked over to the dresser. I watched her in the mirror. She picked up her watch from the dresser top and headed for the door, winding it. In the doorway, she looked back at me and said, “Lunch in fifteen minutes.”
I said, “I’ll have iced tea today.”
She laughed. “All right,” she said.
After she went out, I gave myself another critical look. It wasn’t that bad. A little tight, that’s all. Not bad.
10
There’s a strange sense of dislocation in leaving one’s family at ten or eleven o’clock at night and going off to work. There’s more of a feeling of leaving them, of a deep break between family life and job life. Neither Tom nor Joe had ever gotten over that atmosphere of loss, but it was another of the things they’d never discussed together.
Maybe if they’d worked the midnight-to-eight shift all the time they would have gotten used to it, and not felt any stranger about it than a guy who leaves for work at eight in the morning. But constantly switching around from shift to shift the way they did, they never really got a chance to become used to the idiosyncracies of any one schedule.
Since the incident with the little kid out at Jones Beach, they’d done most of their talking about the robbery in the car on the way to or from work, and they both seemed to prefer for that the drive at eleven o’clock at night, heading in toward the city. The sense of dislocation from home and family probably helped, and so did the darkness, the interior of the car lit by nothing but the dashboard and oncoming headlights. It was as though they were isolated then, separate from everything, capable of concentrating their minds on the question of committing the robbery.
This night, they were both quiet for the first ten or fifteen minutes in the car, westbound on the Long Island Expressway. Traffic was moderate coming out of the city, but light in the direction they were going. There was plenty of leisure to think.
Joe was driving his Plymouth, his mind only very slightly on the road and the car, but mostly away, on Wall Street, in brokerage offices. Suddenly he said, “I go back to the bomb scare.”
Tom’s mind had been full of his own thoughts, involving burying the bonds and calling Vigano and figuring out the safest way to make the switch for the two million dollars. He blinked over toward Joe’s profile in the darkness and said, “What?”
“We ought to be able to do that,” Joe said. “Phone in, tell them there’s a bomb in the vault, then answer the squeal ourselves.”
Tom shook his head. “Won’t work.”
“But it gets us in, that’s the beauty.”
“Sure,” Tom said. “And then a couple other guys come to answer the squeal before we get out again.”
“There ought to be a way around that,” Joe said.
“There isn’t.”
“Bribe a dispatcher to give the squeal to us instead of one of their own cars.”
“Which dispatcher? And how much do you bribe him? We get a million and he gets a hundred? He’d turn us in within a week. Or blackmail us.”
“There’s got to be a way,” Joe said. The bomb-scare idea appealed to him on general dramatic grounds.
“The problem isn’t to get in,” Tom said. “The problem is to get away afterwards with the bonds, and where we stash them, and how we make the switch with Vigano.”
But Joe didn’t want to listen to any of that. He insisted on the primacy of his own area of research. “We’ve still got to get in,” he said.
“We’ll get in,” Tom said, and all of a sudden the idea hit him. He sat up straighter in the car, and stared straight ahead out the windshield. “Son of a bitch,” he said.
Joe glanced at him. “Now what?”
“When’s that parade? Remember, there was a thing in the paper about a parade for some astronauts.”
Joe frowned, trying to remember. “Next week sometime.” It had been on Wednesday, he remembered that. “Uhhh, the seventeenth. Why?”
“That’s when we do it,” Tom said. He was grinning from ear to ear.
“During the parade?”
Tom was so excited he couldn’t sit still. “Joe,” he said, “I am a goddam mastermind!”
Skeptical, Joe said, “You are, huh?”
“Listen to me,” Tom said. “What are we going to steal?”
Joe gave him a disgusted look. “What?”
“Give me a break,” Tom said. “Just tell me, what are we going to steal?”
Shrugging, Joe said, “Bearer bonds, like the man said.”
“Money,” Tom said.
Joe nodded, being weary and long-suffering. “Okay, okay, money.”
“Only not money,” Tom said. He kept grinning, as though his cheeks would stretch permanently out of shape. “You see? We still got to turn it over before it’s money.”
“In a minute,” Joe told him, “I’m going to stop this car and punch your head.”
“Listen to me, Joe. The idea is, money isn’t just dollar bills. It’s all kinds of things. Checking accounts. Credit cards. Stock certificates.”
“Will you for Christ’s sake get to the point?”
“Here’s the point,” Tom said. “Anything is money, if you think it’s money. Like Vigano thinks those bearer bonds are money.”
“He’s right,” Joe said.
“Sure, he’s right. And that’s what solves all our problems.”
“It does?”
“Absolutely,” Tom said. “It gets us in, gets us out, solves the problem of hiding the loot, solves everything.”
“That’s fucking wonderful,” Joe said.
“You’re damn right it is.” Tom played a paradiddle on on the dashboard with his fingertips. “And that,” he said, “is why we’re going to pull off that robbery during the parade.”
Joe
I drove the squad car down Columbus Avenue to a Puerto Rican grocery near 86th Street. I pulled in to the curb there and said to Lou, “Why don’t you get us a coke?”
“Good idea,” he said. He was a young guy, twenty-four years of age, his second year on the force. He wore his hair a little too long, to my way of thinking, and I almost never saw him without razor cuts all over his chin. But he was all right; he was quiet, he minded his own business, and he had no bad habits in the car. At one time or another I’ve had them all, the farters and the nose-pickers and the ear-benders and everything else. Lou wasn’t the good friend that Paul was, but I have done a lot worse.
I’d picked a Puerto Rican store because it would take him longer in there to buy two cokes than in a regular store. The little Puerto Rican groceries all over town are filled with men and women, all of them four feet tall, most of them sitting on the freezer case, all of them yammering away at top speed in that language they claim is Spanish. Before anybody can hit a cash-register key and take your dollar and give you your change, he has to yell louder than everybody else for a minute or two, to make sure he’s got his point across. Then, with your change in his hand, he thinks of the clincher argument and starts to yell again. So I was going to have all the time I needed.