Stello said, “You’ll have a thousand witnesses.”
“We can smother them,” Vigano said. “When we have them at the spot where we make the switch, we can just surround them with our own people. There won’t be anybody to see a thing, and we carry them the hell out of there afterwards, and nobody going by on bicycles is going to know a thing about it.”
Bandell was frowning at the map. “You have this clear in your mind, Tony? You’re sure of yourself?”
“You know me, Joe,” Vigano said. “I’m a careful man. I wouldn’t get involved in this if I wasn’t sure of myself.”
“And it’s twelve million. In bearer bonds.”
“Just under.” Vigano looked around at them all and said, “It’s a good big pie to slice up.”
Bandell nodded slowly. He said, “You want to take the cash out of our accounts in New York, put it together to make two million, show it to them, and then put the cash right back again.”
“Right.”
“What’s the chance of losing the two million to somebody else?”
Vigano gestured at his young men. “Andy and Mike will be with it all the way. And the other soldiers in the operation don’t have to know what’s in the basket at all.”
Bandell shifted position on the sofa, half-turning so he could look out the picture window behind him. The seconds went by, and he continued to show the room only the back of his head. Vigano gestured to Mike, who quietly folded the map again and put it away. Still Bandell looked out at the city.
Finally he turned back. He gave Vigano a level look and said, “It’s your responsibility.”
Vigano smiled. “Done,” he said.
Tom
Joe let me off at Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, and I walked the one block over to Central Park West. I crossed with the light, and the park was now directly in front of me, the grass separated from the sidewalk by a knee-high stone wall.
There are benches along this part of Central Park West with their backs against that low wall, so that if you sit in one of them you’re looking at the apartment buildings across the way. I’ve never understood why anybody would want to sit on a park bench facing away from the park, but there are always plenty of people sitting on them in the warm weather, so there must be an attraction to it that I don’t understand. Maybe they like to count the cabs.
Today, I joined them. I sat on an unoccupied bench and counted cabs, and found nothing exciting in it.
I spent nearly an hour sitting there, with a newspaper in my lap and a moustache on my face, waiting for the mob to show up. It was a humid day and the moustache tickled like crazy, but I was afraid to scratch it for fear it would fall off. Every once in a while when it got to be more than I could stand I’d twitch my upper lip around like a beaver, but I tried to limit that relief to moments of true emergency, since for all I knew that too would make the damn thing break loose, and I didn’t want a moustache in my lap when Vigano’s people arrived.
The reason I was thinking about the moustache and park benches so much is that I was afraid to think about Vigano and his mobsters, and what we were here to do.
This one was worse than the robbery, a hundred times worse. That other time, we’d been operating against decent civilized human beings, who at the very worst would arrest us and try us and put us in jail. This time, we were operating against thugs who were going to try to kill us no matter what we did. Last time, we were pitting our one-shot plan against a normal company’s normal routine. This time, we were pitting our lives against the experience and manpower and malevolence of the mob.
When I did think about it, I simply thought we were crazy. If I’d worked it all out back in the beginning, say when I’d been on the train going to talk to Vigano, if I’d figured it out then that sooner or later we would be making ourselves murder targets for the Mafia, I never would have gone through with it. And Joe the same, I’m sure of it. But all we could concentrate on in the beginning was stealing the bonds, and not what would happen afterwards. And when it did occur to me what Vigano’s natural reaction would have to be, I was still so caught up in the other thing that all I thought about was how much easier that would make things for us, since we didn’t really have to steal the bonds, just make it look as though we had.
It was the morning after the robbery, while suffering that hangover in Joe’s car on the way to work, that I’d first looked the thing full in the face. We had done part one, and we’d done it pretty well. But part two was the crunch. Part two was where death waited for us if we weren’t very smart and very careful and very lucky.
But if we didn’t do part two, there was no point in our having done part one.
I was in a real funk for a while after that. I couldn’t even think about the problem, couldn’t concentrate on it. It just seemed more than I could deal with, reaching into the trap and pulling out the two-million-dollar piece of cheese without getting the spring across the back of my neck.
I’d been coming out of it anyway, spurred on by the scene with the homosexual in the park — very near here, in fact — but it was Joe who finally goosed me back into action again. I think Joe probably has less imagination than I do, but that’s a good part of his strength. If you can’t imagine the things that might go wrong, you won’t be afraid of them.
I don’t mean that Joe wasn’t scared of the mob. Any sane man would be, particularly if he meant to sell them a lot of old newspapers for two million dollars. It’s just that Joe was never paralyzed by his fear the way I’d been paralyzed by mine. Joe dealt more with specific things that he could touch and taste. What made me the most nervous was the mob, but what made him the most nervous was that we’d done part one and didn’t have anything to show for it. It really pained him when we ripped up those bonds, I know it did.
Well, we’d committed ourselves again. We could still turn around, of course, we could still cop out, but I didn’t think we would. We were at the stage now equivalent to when, in the robbery, we’d met Eastpoole but Joe hadn’t grabbed his arm yet. We’d set things up with Vigano, we were both in position, but we hadn’t yet made contact, we could still change our minds at the last second.
Joe made his first pass twenty minutes after I’d sat down, but I didn’t give him the signal because Vigano’s people hadn’t showed up yet. I watched him drive by, and then I counted cabs some more, and fifteen minutes later he went by again, and still they hadn’t showed up.
Weren’t they going to? If after all this, after nerving ourselves up to it and working out the best scheme we could think of, the mob didn’t show up this time for the transfer, I didn’t know what I’d do. I wouldn’t be able to stand it, that’s all. To have to start all over again, phone Vigano again, set up another meeting, I’d have an ulcer before it was over. Or a nervous breakdown.
But what if they weren’t coming at all? What if they’d decided the hell with it, they didn’t want to buy the bonds?
Christ, that would be something. Then Joe would really be sore, and at me. Because if we actually had the bonds, and the mob reneged on us, we could maybe go fence them to somebody else. But Vigano was the only person on earth to whom we could sell the idea of the bonds. It was him, or nobody.