Parker looked to his left, down through one of the windows at the platform in the middle of the auditorium. The four musicians who had been there were gone. Bulky stagehands in T-shirts and work pants, looking like citizens of a different planet from everybody else in the auditorium, were spreading a bright red carpet in the middle of the platform, moving the microphones and amplifiers around, and wheeling out a small keyboard instrument like a midget piano. In the middle of the red carpet was the white outline of a triangle, with an eye in it.
Keegan, beside Parker at the window, said, “They shouldn’t be able to get away with that.”
Parker frowned at the platform, not knowing what Keegan was talking about, but didn’t ask.
Keegan said, “That thing on the carpet there, that triangle. That’s off the dollar bill. That’s the kind of thing they do. Dress in the American flag, all that. None of them have any respect.”
Parker walked on to stand beside Briley, and Keegan followed. Briley, nodding at the platform, said, “The headliners are coming.”
According to Morris, the final group would play a minimum of twenty-five minutes. If they were feeling good, if they’d established an enjoyable rapport with the audience—Morris had said, “If the vibes are good”—they might extend that to an hour or more. But twenty-five minutes was the minimum, so that was the deadline.
Parker looked at his watch: one twenty-five. He said, “We have to be out by ten to two.”
Keegan said, “Then we better move.”
“Let’s wait for more noise.”
It was almost quiet out there now, the crowd expectant and waiting. The stagehands finished their adjustments and waddled off, going back to the cigar butts they’d left on table edges. The audience noise tapered off even more, till individual coughs could be heard, and suddenly the auditorium lights went out, and they were looking down into darkness.
Keegan was the only one who moved, making an abrupt jump to the left, past the edge of the window, the toolkit bumping his knee and the wall. Parker and Briley continued to stand there, side by side, looking down; Briley in the guard uniform, Parker in his dark jacket and the hood over his face. The corridor lights above and behind them remained on.
Keegan said, “For Christ’s sake, they can see you!”
“A silhouette,” Parker said. “With the light behind me. Better they see a silhouette standing still than jumping away and trying to hide.”
“I got out of the way before they could see me.”
The darkness wasn’t total down there. A sparse pattern of dull red exit lights glowed. Tiny red and green dots of light from the platform showed that the amplifiers were working; those dots seemed to wink all at once, meaning that people were moving around on the platform.
The sound, when it came, had been anticipated for so long that it seemed unexpected, a surprise and a shock. An electronic crash, a chord of aggressive, whining, insistent notes blended into one detonation, an announcement of entry like the crash of an iron door back against an iron wall. An instant later one bright white beam flooded the platform from the ceiling, and there were now five musicians out there, one at the keyboard instrument, two with electric guitars, one at a complex array of drums, and one standing in the middle of the carpet’s triangle, holding a hand microphone; this last one was dressed completely in red, and when the light came on he opened his mouth wide, held the microphone against his lower teeth, and shrieked loud enough to make distortions in the loudspeakers. The audience shrieked back, the four instrumentalists began a heavy background beat that was most like the sound of a highballing freight train—a sound out of context, since it was unlikely anyone in this audience had ever ridden a train of any kind—and the one in red began to sing/shout into the microphone: ” Tbe-mes-sen-ger-ofDeatb-will-bring-you-down …”
Parker said, “It’s time.”
He and Keegan turned away from the window. Parker counted doors and went to the one he wanted. He turned the knob and walked in, and the man at the desk dropped his pen and cried, “Good God!”
“Take it easy,” Parker said. He took only one step into the room, then moved quickly to his left. Most of the left-hand wall was glass, and he didn’t want to be seen by anyone on the other side of it, not yet. For the same reason, Keegan stayed in the doorway.
The man at the desk was about forty, very stocky in a soft-looking way. He wore horn-rim glasses, a dark gray suit, narrow tie, white shirt with button-down collar. He came from the same planet as the stagehands. He said, “I don’t have any money in here.” His voice was high-pitched and frightened; he might do something fatal simply out of nervousness.
Parker said, his voice as low and calm as possible with the competition of the music, “We know that. We’re not after you, we’re not going to cause you any trouble.”
The man at the desk licked his lips, looking nervously at Keegan and then past Keegan toward the hall. “What did you do with the … what did you do with the man out there?”
“Mr. Dockery is perfectly all right. You’ll be all right, too. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Keegan came one step into the room, moved leftward to Parker’s side, put the toolkit down, shut the door. The man at the desk began to look more frightened again.
Parker said, “You’d be Mr. Stevenson, wouldn’t you?”
“What? I—that’s right. Who are you people?”
“Ronald Stevenson?”
“I haven’t done anything to anybody. Why do you want—?”
“I told you we’re not after you. What do your friends call you? Ron? Ronnie?”
“My—I’m, uh— Most people call me RG.”
“RG. Well, this is a robbery, RG. We’re not here to hurt anybody or scare anybody. We’re just going to take the money. The management is insured against this kind of thing, so it’s nothing for anybody to get killed over. We’d prefer a nice quiet operation, and so would you. So up to a point our interests are the same.”
“But I don’t have any money.”
Keegan said, “Next door they have money.”
Stevenson looked at the glass wall facing his desk. The glass started at waist-height and continued up to within a foot of the ceiling. A three-foot width of ordinary wall was at this end, and a door with a glass panel in it was at the far end.
Parker said, “Anybody looking at you, RG?”
“What?” Stevenson suddenly looked frightened again, and then guilty. “No, not at all.”
“Look down at the paper on your desk, RG. Good. Pick up your pen. Start to write.”
Looking down at his desk top, Stevenson said, “Write what?”
“Anything you want, RG. Just so the people next door see you looking normal.”
“Oh, I see.” Stevenson began to write. He didn’t really look normal, his shoulders were too hunched, the position of his head too tense, but a casual glance from the next room wouldn’t pick up that sort of detail.
Parker gave him half a minute to calm himself, and then said, “Okay, RG, keep writing while I talk to you. There’s three guards next door. What’s the name of the one in charge?”
Still writing, looking down, Stevenson said, “That would be Lieutenant Garrison.”
“First name?”
“I believe— It’s Daniel, I believe.”
“Is he called Dan?”
Stevenson nodded at what he was writing. “I’ve heard him called Dan, yes.” He was a precise man by nature, and now he was using that precision as a means of self-defense, as though to say, If I am very accurate and very proper, nothing bad will happen to me.
It was an idea Parker wanted to encourage. “Good,” he said. “And the other two? What names?”
Stevenson glanced up, looking through the glass into the other room again, as though to refresh his memory, then quickly looked back down at the paper, went on writing, and said, “The younger one is Lavenstein, Edward Lavenstein. He’s called Beau. And the other one is Hal Pressbury.”