Tom glanced at him again, then faced front. He felt very cautious now, like a man with a bag of groceries walking on ice. He said, “Remember what you told George last week?”
“Big mouth? No, what did I tell him?”
“That we could get anything we want,” Tom said, “only we restrain ourselves.”
Joe grinned. “I remember. I thought you were gonna tell him about my liquor store.”
Tom wasn’t going to get distracted by side issues now; he’d started moving, and he was going to keep moving. Ignoring the liquor-store remark, he said, “Well, what the hell, why don’t we?”
Joe didn’t get it. “Why don’t we what?”
“Do it!” Tom said. He’d been bottling this up for days, his voice was vibrating with it. “Get everything we want,” he said, “just like you said.”
Skeptical, Joe said, “Like how? Liquor stores?”
Tom took one hand off the wheel to wave that away, impatient with it. “That’s nothing, Joe,” he said, “that’s crap! That stinking city back there is full of money, and in our position by God we really can get anything we want. A million dollars apiece, in one job.”
Joe didn’t believe it yet, but he was interested. “What job?”
Tom shrugged. “We’ve got our choice. Anything we want to work out. Some big jewelry company. A bank. Whatever we want.”
Suddenly Joe saw it, and he started to laugh. “Disguised as cops!”
“That’s right!” Tom said. He was laughing, too. “Disguised as cops!”
The two of them sat in the car and just laughed.
Joe
The subway had fucked up again. Paul and I were positioned at a manhole on Broadway, where the people were coming up. They’d been down there for over an hour, and there’d been some smoke, and now they’d had to walk single file in the tunnel for a ways, and come up a metal ladder, and at last out onto the street. It was nine-thirty at night, traffic was being detoured around us, and we had our patrol car between the manhole and the street, flasher going.
Most of the people coming up were just stunned, all they wanted was to get the hell away from there. A few were grateful and said thank you to Paul or me for helping them up the last few steps. And a few were pissed off and wanted to take it out on a representative of the municipal government, which at the moment was Paul and me. These last few we ignored; they’d make an angry remark or two, and then they’d stomp off, and that would be the end of it.
Except this one guy. He stood around on the other side of us, away from the manhole, and yammered at us. He was about fifty, dressed in a suit, carrying an attaché case. He was like a manager or supervisor type, and all he wanted to do was stand there and yell, while Paul and I helped the rest of the people up out of the manhole.
He went on like this: “This city is a disgrace! It’s a disgrace! You aren’t safe here! And who cares? Does anybody care? Everything breaks down, and nobody gives a God damn! Everybody’s in the union! Teachers on strike, subways on strike, cops on strike, sanitation on strike. Money money money, and when they work do they do anything? Do they teach? Don’t make me laugh! The subways are a menace, they’re a menace! Sanitation? Look at the streets! Big raises, big pay, and look at the streets! And you cops! Gimmie gimme gimme, and where are you? Your apartment gets robbed, and where are you? Some dope addict attacks your wife in the street, and where’s the cops?”
Up till then we ignored him, the both of us; like he was a regular part of the city noise. Which in a way he was. But then he made a mistake, he overstepped himself. He reached out and tugged at my elbow, and he yelled, “Are you listening to me?”
They’re not going to start grabbing me. I turned around and looked at him, and he was so amazed he went back a step. The city had finally noticed him. I said to him, “I’m coming to the conclusion you fell coming up those stairs and broke your nose.”
It took him a second to work it out, and then he back-pedaled some more, and yelled, “You mustn’t care much about keeping that badge of yours.”
I was about to tell him what he could do with the badge, pin first, but he was still backing away, and the hell with him. I turned back and helped Paul with a fat old lady who was having trouble climbing because of bad ankles. But I kept thinking about what the guy had said.
4
It was a hot sunny day, and they were both in Joe’s backyard. Where the barbecue was in Tom’s backyard, Joe had put in a pool; one of those above-the-ground pools, four foot high and ten foot across. They were both drinking beer, Joe was in a bathing suit and Tom was in slacks and shirt, and Joe was trying to fix the pool filter. The damn thing was always getting screwed up one way or another, it was about the most delicate machine ever made. It sometimes seemed as though Joe spent his entire summers fixing the pool filter.
They’d lived next door to one another for nine years now. Tom had bought his house first, eleven years ago, and when Joe wanted to move out of the city after Jackie was born it happened the house next door to Tom was just going on the market. Back then, they’d both been in uniform, and sometimes even partnered. They’d known each other for years, liked one another, it seemed they ought to make good neighbors. And they did.
The houses weren’t the greatest in the world, but they were livable. They were in a development put up right after the war, back when the notion of curving streets was still new. They had three bedrooms, all on one floor, and a smallish attic that a lot of the guys in the neighborhood had converted to a fourth bedroom. Fortunately, neither Tom nor Joe had families big enough to need that, and neither intended to have families any bigger than they already had, so they could keep their attics as attics, and fill them with all that junk everybody gradually collects through life, that nobody has any use for anymore, but that nobody wants to throw away.
The houses weren’t bad. They were old enough to have been built before plastics were really big, which meant they were constructed fairly well, mostly of wood. They had clapboard siding that had to be painted every few years, they had half-basements for the utilities, the backyards were a pretty good size, and there was a detached one-car garage at the rear of each and every property. Gravel driveways separated the houses and defined the property lines, and every house in three or four blocks in all directions looked exactly the same, except for color of paint job or any special additions or changes that anybody might have made. Neither Tom nor Joe had made any special changes, so they both had the original basic house, just the way it had come from the architect’s drawing board; only a little older.
Most people put up fences along the sides of their backyards, mostly to keep little kids inside, but Tom and Joe hadn’t done that. Between Tom and his neighbor on the right there was a basket-weave wooden fence put up by the neighbor, and between Joe and his neighbor on the left there was a chain-link fence covered with vines put up by that neighbor, but between their own two yards there was nothing but the remains of a hedge planted by some previous owner of one of their houses. The hedge had big gaps in it where they walked back and forth all the time, and they could never agree who was supposed to keep it trimmed, so nobody did, and it was gradually dying. And taking years to do it.
In every single house in the development that either of them had ever heard of, the kitchen linoleum was all cracked and buckled. In a lot of houses, including both of theirs, the basement leaked.
They hadn’t done any more talking about the robbery idea since that one time in the car, but they’d both been thinking about it. Not that it was real, not that they thought they would actually commit a major robbery somewhere, but just that it was nice to daydream about a possible way of getting themselves out of this grind.