“You pronounced it wrong,” I said stiffly. “It’s Ee-vo. You said Eye-vo.”
“Ee-vo, Eye-vo, Nee-vo, Nye-vo, let’s call the whole thing off.”
“Eh?” said Harold. “No one’s calling nothing off.”
“It’s just one of Wiggy’s jokes,” I said, patting his arm. “What are you doing here?” I asked Wiggy. “We were supposed not to meet until…”
“Come inside,” Wiggy said, looking past my shoulder. “Hurry, the CCTV camera’s swinging in this direction.”
“Huh?” said Harold. Wiggy took one arm, I tugged the other, and we whisked him into the pub before he became visible and bellicose.
“We’ve run into a problem,” Wiggy explained, pointing to the slumped figure of The Gent at a table in a dark corner of the barroom.
“I’ll have a pint since you’re offering,” Harold said. “One won’t hurt.”
I hurried over to The Gent.
“It’sh my tooth,” he said, covering the lower part of his face with his hand.
“Not his wisdom tooth, obviously,” Wiggy said. “He was supposed to go to the dentist last week but he funked it.”
“I don’t think I can do the job,” The Gent said. And indeed, he looked yellowish and extremely unwell.
“Oil of cloves,” I said, rummaging in my handbag.
“Now’s not the time for your portable pharmacopoeia,” Wiggy said. “He’s already rattling, the number of pills he’s necked since lunch.”
“I don’t want to hold you back,” moaned The Gent. “I really am sho shorry.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Harold sat down heavily, slopping his pint.
“Tooth rot.”
“Huh?”
“Forget it,” Wiggy said. “The only way I can see out of this is if The Gent waits in the car and does the driving instead of Elsie, Elsie is lookout instead of Harold, and Harold comes up to the betting shop with me instead of The Gent.”
“Huh? Say again.”
“The Gent waits in the car…”
“Shut up,” I said, “anyone could hear you.” Except Harold.
“So what’s going on?” And that’s another thing about Harold — even before his hearing failed he never listened.
“Are you quite sure you want Harold on shtage with you at showtime?” The Gent was speaking through considerable pain.
“Huh?”
“Do we have any alternative? Or should we just abort?”
I would have pressed for standing us all down — it’s what any sensible woman would have done. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life eating lunch at the YMCA cafeteria. I’d rather go back to chokey, I thought. At least there, bad food comes free. Because when times were good, Wiggy, The Gent, and I had often lived high in the sky in foreign cities where hotel suites were more spacious than English houses. Rhubarb and custard at the YMCA isn’t the worst thing life can throw at you, but if I thought it was all life had to offer from here on in, I think I’d want to top myself.
As it turned out, I went on stage with Wiggy, The Gent waited in the car, and Harold kept his job as lookout. It wasn’t possible to explain a change of plan to him without a bullhorn. And shouting your plans through a bullhorn when you’re making changes to a heist on a betting shop is not advisable.
“Take my coat,” The Gent said, “the mashk ish in the left pocket, the plashtic gun ish in the other.”
Wordlessly I took the coat and gave him my small bottle of oil of cloves in return. Wordlessly, Wiggy handed over the car keys. “Show time,” The Gent said with a brave smile. “Shparkle, guysh. I know you’ll be shplendid.”
We left him in the car park behind Cristettes Kitchenware and Novelties. The great thing about Cristettes is that the main door opens onto the High Street and you can walk all the way through to the car park at the back. The shop is hugger-mugger with too many shelves and stacks and there are no surveillance cameras. It’s a great place if you want to get off the street in a hurry.
Preston’s is a small betting shop above a newsagent at the corner of Grosvenor Road and High Street. We reached the newsagent five minutes before the betting shop was due to close and left Harold pretending to read the small ads in the early evening paper. He seemed edgy.
Halfway up the narrow flight of stairs Wiggy and I paused to put on our masks and raise the hoods of our coats. It was only then that I realised how much condition Wiggy had lost on his last spell away. For a big man he was always fit and pretty fast, but now he sounded like a hinge that needed a squirt of oil.
“What’s up?” I muttered, trying to make the coat of a much taller man zip over a much fuller bosom.
“Just an allergy,” Wiggy wheezed back. “These stairs haven’t been swept.” His mask was an elaborate affair that could have graced a Venetian ball.
“Decongestant?”
“Not now, Elsie,” he said patiently. Which was just as well, as I’d left my bag in the car with The Gent.
The Gent’s mask was a simple but elegant thing his wife had knitted especially for him from a silk and wool mix. I pulled it over my head and topped it with the hood.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said. “The hood’s ruining my hair.”
“Let your coat hang open,” Wiggy wheezed. “You still look too much like a woman.”
“And you look like a real hunk,” I snarled back.
“Let’s go. And leave the talking to me.”
But after climbing to the top of the stairs he didn’t have enough breath to blow out a birthday candle, and the staff behind the grilles didn’t even look up as he stood there panting and swinging his baseball bat. So I took over.
“Everybody freeze!” I yelled. Instantly everyone stopped what they were doing. Oh, the power! No one had taken this much notice of me since my daughter was too small to talk back.
“The money!” I shouted. “Give us the money and no one gets hurt.”
“The gun,” Wiggy hissed, his chest heaving. “It’s still. In your. Goddamn pocket.” To cover for me he strode to the counter and whacked the baseball bat against the grille. The man and the woman behind the counter cowered in shock. The manager started towards the back.
I fumbled the plastic gun out of my pocket and pointed it at him. “Don’t move a muscle,” I bellowed. “Instruct your people to fill our bags or I’ll put two bullets in your fat gut. Believe me, I can’t miss.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Wiggy push a bunch of crumpled plastic bags through the grille. They came from Safeway and I swear they’re the same ones we used on our last job. Wiggy never throws anything away.
By now he’d recovered his breath enough to say, “Fill the bags. Quickly. Unless. You want. To see. Your boss. Shot.” He sounded eerily like an automaton. The woman started to cry, but she began to stuff bundles of money into the bags.
The manager stood, feebly protecting his paunch with his hands. I kept the gun trained on him while I screamed at the other, younger man. “Help her! Now!” and he suddenly jerked into life and started stuffing bags too.
I was jubilant. Energy surged through every cell of my body. I had no idea what a sense of self-worth there was to be gained from pointing a plastic gun.
“Tie the bags,” Wiggy growled, “and throw them. Over. The grille.”
Bags sailed over the grille and dropped at our feet.
We’d done it. All we had to do was pick up the bags and leave.
Or not.
The door at the top of the stairs swung open and a man in SecureCorps uniform walked through humming a tune from Guys and Dolls.