They hauled up the rope and walked softly across the roof to the back corner. Roscoe tied the rope to a bolt in the corner and they dropped the length of rope down the back wall. Then they slid down to the paved yard one at a time; Ittzy first, then Roscoe, then Gabe. At the bottom Gabe looked at his red palms. "Next time," he muttered, "gloves."
They walked around the building and at the loading platform separated. Gabe and Ittzy walked innocently to the corner of the building and engaged the attention of the guards; behind them, Roscoe shifted one of the empty Mint wagons into position at the end of the handcart rails on the loading platform. Nobody took any notice; he might have been a Mint employee. When Roscoe finished he joined Gabe and Ittzy at the corner and they walked around into the courtyard to join the guided tour.
"Now and then we stamp an issue of five-dollar half eagles, but it don't happen very often here so if you find a half eagle with our stamp on it maybe you want to hang onto it. They're as rare as a pair of clean socks around a bunkhouse."
Vangie had the metal grating unscrewed. She lifted it out of its frame and set it aside on the ceiling beams. She waited until the minute hand of the watch she'd stolen last week came around to exactly ten-thirty, and then she dropped silently into the vault room.
She slipped across the room, keeping close to the wall. At the front corner she turned, went across to the barred door, and waited just inside it.
The tourists entered the anteroom beyond.
"… rest assured your money's safe. Nobody's ever tried to rob the United States Mint, of course-nobody's ever been stupid enough to try. I reckon someday somebody will, but you probably won't even read about it in the papers because whatever they do they ain't gonna get anywheres near your Government's gold."
Finally the group turned and left the anteroom. When the tourists turned left, Gabe, Roscoe and Ittzy turned right and waited just around the corner until the group was gone.
Vangie stepped to the barred door. She had the flask in one hand and the knuckle-duster in the other.
"Stick 'em up."
The guards whipped around in amazement and stared at her. "Huh?"
"Stick 'em up. These are guns."
They grinned. One of them pointed to the whisky flask. "That one must have quite a kick," he said.
"I mean it. They really are guns."
"Sure they are." The guard lifted his key ring. "I don't know how you got in there, honey, but you're about to come out." He began to unlock the door.
"Don't make me shoot. Don't make me prove it!" Her voice was rising toward a hysterical pitch.
The two guards yanked the barred door open.
That was when Gabe and Roscoe arrived. Gabe said mildly, "Okay, hold it right there." Ittzy came in behind them. All three were holding guns that actually looked like guns.
Vangie, her voice still shaky, said, "I thought you said you'd be right down."
"We got here as fast as we could," Gabe said.
The guards were getting over their surprise. One of them said, "You'll never get away with this."
Vangie said, "That's what I keep telling them."
"Let's move it along," Gabe said. "We're in kind of a hurry."
Roscoe relieved the guards of their weapons and tied them up in a corner of the anteroom while Gabe locked the outer entrance-the steel-plated door that fitted right over the incoming handcart rails. Now they were sealed off from the rest of the Mint.
Ittzy and Gabe climbed into the hole in the ceiling; Roscoe stood guard with his huge pistols. Presently the canisters and the box of dynamite made their way down to the floor, whereupon Roscoe carried the gas canisters out into the anteroom and placed one on each side of the door. Ittzy opened the box of dynamite, removed several sticks, got out his book again, and went thumbing through the pages.
Roscoe returned from the anteroom, wheeling the handcart in. "Okay to turn those valves now?"
Gabe said, "Not yet. Come on."
As Ittzy approached the vault, lip-reading slowly in his dynamite book, Gabe led Vangie out to the anteroom, followed by Roscoe. "We'll wait out here," Gabe said. "Ittzy will set the charges in there and then come out here before they go off."
"I don't know," Vangie said, "how I ever got invol…"
There was a sudden explosion.
The three of them turned, open-mouthed, and stared at the doorway to the vault room. A cloud of smoke puffed out through the doorway, and Ittzy came walking out through it, leafing through the book. He seemed mildly bewildered but otherwise unhurt. "I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "It shouldn't have done that."
Awed, Vangie said, "Ittzy, are you okay?"
He looked up from the book, blushed when he met Vangie's eye, and said, "Fine. Uh, I'm fine. Why not?"
Roscoe said, "What about the vault?"
"Right," said Gabe. He and Roscoe hurried into the next room through the settling smoke, with Ittzy and Vangie right behind them. Inside they found the steel door of the vault sagging wide open like a tin can that had been pried apart with a chisel.
And just inside it were piles and piles of dull yellow metal.
"That's the stuff," Gabe said. "I'd know it anywhere."
Roscoe said, "That's pretty."
"The handcart," Gabe told him.
"Right."
Roscoe wheeled the handcart as close as possible to the ruined door and he, Gabe and Ittzy went to work filling it with the ingots, stacking them with loving care.
Gabe said, "Vangie? Get the valves, will you?"
"Right."
Vangie went back to the anteroom and across to the outer door, took a deep breath, held it, opened wide the valves of both canisters of laughing gas, left them hissing, hurried back to the inner room, slammed the steel door shut behind her, and let out the breath she'd been holding.
Ittzy said, "This stuff's heavy."
"Keep loading," Gabe told him.
Throughout the building armed men were beginning to react to the sound of the explosion. For most of them, the first reaction was to say, "What was that?" And stand looking blankly at one another. But a few had already remembered the gold and were starting to move, and the rest would catch on any second now.
Down on the waterfront, Francis was ambling along, easy and casual, taking the air. Pausing at an intersection, he glanced uphill toward the Mint, indistinct in the fog. He looked at his watch and moved on along the street until he came to a fire-alarm box. He posted himself near it and waited, the snap-lid watch in his hand.
Vangie tried to lift an ingot, but it was too heavy for her. She stepped back and let the men do it. Her face was filled with anxiety.
Guards ran from all directions through the mazed corridors toward the vault.
The first arrivals found the anteroom door locked. Seven men dashed off in seven directions to find a key.
Vangie was hopping up and down with nervousness. "That's enough," she cried. "That's enough. You've got enough!"
"All of it," Gabe said grimly, and dropped another ingot onto the pile in the handcart.
Three guards with three keys crashed into each other at a corridor junction. One was dazed, but the other two rushed into the railway-tracked corridor. After a minor skirmish they got the anteroom door unlocked.