Outside, the parade noises were getting louder; mostly the crowd noises, nearly blotting out the sounds of the bands. Turning his head for a fast look at the windows, Tom saw bits of paper already starting to flutter down. And less than a quarter of the bonds had been ripped up so far.
The two of them stood there, ripping paper. Shouting and yelling from down below. Then, in a different broken rhythm, a foot started thudding against the bathroom door.
They looked at one another. Tom said, “Will it pop open?”
“Christ.”
Joe dropped the paper in his hands and ran down to the other end of the office. Eastpoole was kicking steadily and strongly at the door; apparently with the flat bottom of his shoe, sole and heel together. The door itself seemed solid enough to hold against that, but the catch could pop at any time and the door swing open.
What Joe would have liked mostly would have been to open the door and start doing some kicking himself; but there was a chance Eastpoole and the girl would be able to see through the latticework what Tom was doing. And the point of all this was that everybody think the crooks had gotten away with the bonds.
Joe looked around, grabbed one of the chairs away from the dining room table, and propped the back of it under the doorknob. He kicked the rear legs to jam them more firmly into the carpet, then stood back and watched. Inside, Eastpoole was still kicking at the door, but there wasn’t even a tremor showing around the knob or the chair.
Tom was still ripping paper, back by Eastpoole’s desk. Joe trotted over and said, “Fixed. It won’t open now.”
“Good.”
There was a mound of ripped paper on the desk, all little irregular pieces no more than an inch square. Joe grabbed a double handful, carried it over to the window, and leaned his head out slightly first to see if the other cop was still visible down to the right. He was, but he was turned the other way, watching the roofline across the street.
Down below, through thousands of descending specks of paper, Joe could see the three convertibles in a row, each one with an astronaut sitting up on the back, waving and smiling. The lead car wasn’t quite opposite this building yet, and they were all moving very slowly, no more than three miles an hour. The air was full of cheers and paper.
Joe grinned, and tossed his handful of ripped-up bonds out the window. The mass went out like a snowball, and disintegrated at once, all the pieces mixing with the rest of the torrent of paper coming down.
Tom’s thumbs and wrists were getting sore. The bonds had been printed on heavy paper, and he’d been tearing them up as quickly as he could, the stacks as thick as he could manage. Now he took a break, grabbing up a handful of shreds and turning toward the window.
Joe was coming back. “Be careful leaning out,” he said. “There’s a cop down the row to the right. Waved at me.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Tom tossed the paper out without showing himself, or trying to see the cop at the other window. When he turned back, Joe was picking up more paper. Tom hurried over, saying, “No, not that. Smaller pieces, smaller. They aren’t ready yet.”
Joe nodded at the window. “They’re going by, Tom. The cars are going by right now.”
“Small, Joe,” Tom said. “So nothing shows.” He pushed a little stack of paper together. “Take this.”
Joe gave an irritable impatient shrug, gathered up the stack Tom had made, and carried it over to the window. Tom went back to ripping, and when Joe came to the desk again he also started shredding the bonds that were still left.
For the next minute or so the two of them stood side by side at the desk, tearing the last of the bonds into tiny remnants. Then they threw them all out, double handfuls fluttering down through the paper-filled air, disappearing. The three convertibles had all gone by, were all in the next block by now, but there was still enough paper coming down from all the buildings in this block so that Tom and Joe’s contribution didn’t show.
Tom gathered up the last few pieces left on the desk, hurried to the window, and tossed them out. Joe walked slowly around the desk, searching the floor, and found half a dozen pieces that had fallen in their hurry to be done. Tom spent time looking at the floor around the window, and found three more pieces that he picked up.
When Joe came over to the window with the few scraps he’d just gathered up from the floor, Tom said, “We can’t leave any.”
“We won’t,” Joe said. He tossed the last scraps out. “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s time to get out of here.”
But Tom kept prowling around, frowning down at the floor. “If we leave even one little piece for them to find,” he said, “it blows the whole thing. They’ll know what we’ve done, and that kills it.”
“We’ve got them all,” Joe insisted. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Hah!” Tom pounced on one last bit of paper midway between desk and window. He hurried to the window, where the snowfall of paper was starting to thin, and tossed the final piece out. “Now,” he said.
Joe was already opening desk drawers. He found a stack of typewriter paper in one and pulled out a handful. Tom joined him at the desk, opened the blue laundry bag, and Joe dumped the paper into it. Then they both took a quick last look around.
“Okay,” Tom said.
Joe was looking at the television screens. All quiet. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They walked out of Eastpoole’s office together, through the secretary’s office, and down the corridor toward the reception area and the elevators. Tom carried the laundry bag over his shoulder. It was very obvious there, but that was the point; they had to be seen carrying the loot out with them.
Walking along, Tom said, “I wish we knew a way out that wouldn’t take us past any of those damn cameras.”
Joe nodded. “I know. It’d be better if the guards didn’t know we were coming.”
“We could try,” Tom said. They’d come to an office entrance now, but Tom stopped and said, “There’s a camera in there. Why don’t we go down this other way instead? Maybe we can go around, come at it from the other side.”
“Get lost in here? Wander around until we get picked up?”
“It isn’t that big,” Tom said. “And if we get lost, we just stop somebody and ask.”
Joe grinned at him. “You get funny ideas,” he said. “Okay, let’s try it, what the hell.”
So they went off into new territory. They both had a pretty good sense of direction, and they had a general idea of the way things were set up around here. If they kept to the right for a while, then made a left farther on, they should come at the reception area from the opposite side.
It worked, all right, insofar as getting them to the reception area along a different route was concerned. But it didn’t do any good when it came to avoiding television cameras. There had been two along the old route, which left a third, and they found that halfway to the reception area.
They didn’t notice it until they were already in the room with it, with the damn thing pointing at them. Then Joe said under his breath, “You see what I see?”
“I see it,” Tom said.
They walked through that office, casual and unconcerned, then began to move faster once they were away from the camera. They already knew there was a rule around here that visitors didn’t travel unescorted, even if the visitors were policemen in uniform. They were traveling unescorted, from Eastpoole’s office; the guards on duty in the reception area might not leap to the conclusion they were thieves, but they’d suspect something was wrong, and they’d start right away to look into it.
First they’d try phoning the boss. They wouldn’t get any answer, either from Eastpoole or his secretary, and that would upset them even more. But making the phone call would take time, maybe all the time needed for Tom and Joe to cover the rest of the ground and get them under control.