This time, what they wanted was Eastpoole’s office, and that’s what they got. They walked there, and the outer office was empty, and they went directly on through. Eastpoole’s secretary, who should have been at the desk in the outer office, was in here, looking out a window at the parade. Her own room didn’t have any windows in it.
Eastpoole’s office looked like half of a living room and half of a rich man’s den. It was a corner office, with windows in two walls, and near the juncture of those two walls was the desk, a big free-form mahogany thing with an onyx desk set and two telephones — one white, one red — and only a few neatly stacked pieces of paper. A couple of chairs with upholstered seats and backs in a blue-and-white vertical-stripe cloth were near the desk, and a large antique refectory table was over against the inner wall.
Down at the end of the room opposite the desk there was a white latticework divider that separated off about a third of the floor space. Behind it was a glass and chrome diningroom table, several chrome chairs with white vinyl seats, and a bar with fluorescent lights on each shelf. Some kind of real ivy growing out of pots on the floor had been trained to grow up the latticework, giving the glass-and-chrome section behind it the look of a special private nook, the kind of secret place that shows up in children’s stories.
In front of the latticework on this side was a long blue sofa, with an octagonal wooden coffee table in front of it, and a pair of armchairs nearby. There were lamps and end tables and heavy ashtrays. Spotted on the walls around the room were half a dozen paintings, probably original, probably valuable. And amid them, positioned for easy viewing from the desk, was the double rank of six television screens. Tom and Joe looked at those screens the instant they walked into the room, and there was no unusual activity showing on any of them. So far, so good.
They both noticed that there were now two guards showing on the screen for the reception area.
Eastpoole’s secretary belonged in this setting. She was a tall, cool, beautiful girl in a beige knit dress. She turned away from the window now and came walking over, saying to her boss, “Mr. Eas—”
Eastpoole, angry, not wanting to hear whatever normal business the secretary had been about to discuss with him, interrupted her, gesturing over his shoulder at the two cops and saying, “These people are—”
Not that way. Tom overrode him, pushing forward and saying, “It’s okay, Miss. Nothing to worry about.”
The secretary, looking from face to face, was beginning to get alarmed, but not yet really frightened. Addressing the question to all of them equally, she said, “What’s the matter?”
Bitterly, Eastpoole said, “They aren’t really police.”
Tom made a kind of joke of it, to keep the girl from going into panic. “We’re desperate criminals, mam,” he said. “We’re engaged in a major robbery.”
Whenever Joe was confronted by a woman he wanted to get into bed with and knew it wasn’t possible to he got hostile, and showed it in a kind of angry smiling manner. As he did now, coming forward and saying, “They’ll ask you questions on TV, just like a stewardess.”
With an unconscious automatic gesture, she reached up and patted her hair. At the same time, her eyes were getting more frightened, and there was a tremor in her voice when she said, “Mr. Eastpoole, is this really—”
“Yes, it’s really,” Tom said. “But you yourself are in absolutely no danger. Mr. Eastpoole, you sit down at your desk.”
The secretary stared at everybody. “But—” she said, and then ran down, unable to formulate the question. She moved her hands vaguely, and stared, and looked frightened.
Eastpoole did what he was told. Sitting down behind the desk, he said, “There’s no way you can get away with this, you know. You’re just endangering people’s lives.”
“Oh, my God,” the secretary said. Her right hand fluttered upward to her throat.
Joe pointed at the guards on the TV screens, and said to Eastpoole, “Any of them gets excited while we’re here, you’re all through.”
Eastpoole tried to give him a scornful stare, but he was blinking too much. “You don’t have to threaten me,” he said. “I’ll let the authorities pick you up later.”
Nodding, Tom said, “That’s the way to think, all right.”
Joe pulled one of the blue-and-white striped chairs around behind Eastpoole’s desk, so he could sit beside him. But he didn’t sit yet; instead, he stood next to the chair and said to Eastpoole, “You and me are going to wait here. My partner and your lady friend are going to the vault.”
The secretary’s head jerked back and forth. “I–I can’t,” she said, in a thin voice. “I’ll faint.”
Reassuring her, Tom said gently, “No, you won’t. You’ll do just fine, don’t worry about a thing.”
Joe told her, “You just do what your boss tells you to do.” Then he gave Eastpoole a hard meaningful look.
Eastpoole’s response was surly, but defeated. Gazing down at his neat desktop, he said, “We’ll do what they want, Miss Emerson. Let the police handle it later.”
“Right,” Joe said.
Tom, looking at the secretary, gestured toward the door.
“Let’s go, Miss,” he said.
She gave one last appealing look in Eastpoole’s direction, but Eastpoole was still brooding at his desktop. Her hands fluttered again, as though in accompaniment to the statement she hadn’t quite found the words for; but then she turned and walked obediently to the door, and she and Tom went out together.
Tom
Until the second Joe reached out and grabbed Eastpoole’s elbow and said, “Hold it,” I still hadn’t been one hundred per cent sure we were actually going to go through with this. Maybe it had been necessary that I keep some doubt in my mind, maybe that was what had made it possible for me to go on moving along through all the preparations and then get out of bed today and come to New York and in real life start step by step to do the things we’d decided on. That small uncertainty had been a kind of escape hatch for me, I suppose, to keep me from getting too nervous and frightened of what we had in mind.
Well, now the escape hatch was gone. We were in it now, we’d started. If there was anything we hadn’t thought of, it was too late to think of it. If there was any fact that we should know that we hadn’t picked up in our studies, it was too late to find it out. If there was any flaw in our plan, anything at all, it was too late now to fix it. It would fix us instead.
The first part, escorting Eastpoole to his office and keeping him calm and tractable, hadn’t been too bad. It wasn’t that different, really, from dealing with a suspect about whose guilt you weren’t really sure, but who could possibly make things very tough if he weren’t handled just right. It was like a variation on a part of my job I already knew about, so I could almost let automatic responses do it for me.
Besides, Joe and I had been working together at that point. I don’t know if my presence made things easier for him, but his presence definitely made things easier for me. Seeing him in the same position I was in, knowing we were locked into this together, had made it easier to keep moving.
But now I was on my own. Eastpoole’s secretary, that he’d called Miss Emerson, was walking with me through offices filled with people. What if she suddenly panicked, started to scream? What if her fright was only an act, and she was just waiting her chance to pull a fast one? What if a thousand different things happened that weren’t supposed to happen? I hadn’t the first idea how I’d handle it if she didn’t obey orders, and I wasn’t sure anymore what was the best way to treat her to make sure she would obey. Her physical being, walking beside me, terrified me, and all I knew for sure was that I couldn’t let her know how nervous I was. It would either throw her into a complete panic or make her start thinking she could outsmart me, and I didn’t want either of those things to happen.