Then suddenly I heard the faint scuff of a shoe, just outside. He had already passed the area I was watching, was almost to the door. I wheeled around just as he stepped inside the washroom, pushing the door back towards me. He was clear of it and starting to bend over the wash-basin to turn the water off.
I hit the door with my elbow and slammed it shut at the same time I threw the blanket over him. He straightened, tried to turn, and screamed. There was no chance he had seen me. He fought the blanket wildly, trying to get his arms up. I pulled them down, took two turns around him with the line, and tied it off, then pulled his feet from under him and set him on the floor and threw two half-hitches around his ankles. He was still yelling, the sound muffled inside the blanket.
I had the knife out. I pulled the blanket away from his lower face and quickly cut a hole in it around his mouth. Grabbing a paper towel out of the container on the wall, I rolled it into a tight ball and the next time he opened his mouth to scream I shoved it inside, hard, and plastered a strip of adhesive tape across it. I straightened, and wiped the sweat off my face. It had taken a month.
He could breathe all right, but he couldn’t yell. It was a lot of trouble, but if I’d tried slugging him I might have killed him. He was too old.
I opened the door a crack and peered out. It was clear. No one was in sight anywhere. I grabbed the coat and stepped out and closed the door. I was in plain sight of the street now. It was like being naked in a dream. I made it to the gate in the railing, and then I was in the vault.
Maybe I’d expected it to be full of currency stacked everywhere on the floor like cordwood. It threw me for a second. I didn’t see anything except ledgers, papers, filing cabinets, and drawers. I started yanking the drawers open. Some of them were locked. I got one open at last that was full of currency in bundles, fastened with paper bands. I didn’t look at the denominations. Time was running; I could feel it going past me like the tide. I jerked the undershirt out of my coat pocket; it had been tied off with a cord to form a bag, and I started cramming in the bundles.
I came out of the vault and ran up in back of the tellers’ cages, bent over and hidden from the street by the ground glass screen and the counter. In another thirty seconds I’d be out of here. It was beginning to get me now. I cleaned out the first one, and moved to the other. It was just a few seconds now. Then I stopped dead still and listened, feeling the pulse jump in my throat. There was somebody on the sidewalk outside.
I dropped, squatting below the counter, trying to listen above the roaring of blood in my ears. The footsteps were going on past. Would whoever it was look inside and wonder why no one was in sight? Then I froze. I could feel the icy wind blowing right up my spine. The shuffling footsteps hadn’t gone past. They had come in. Somebody was inside the bank, right on the other side of the counter.
I tried to stop the sound of my breathing. And then, in an agonizing flashback of memory, I thought of the thing I had done that day when I hadn’t seen anybody here. I had looked down inside the cages.
He hadn’t said anything. Why didn’t something happen? I fought desperately to hold myself still, not give way to the awful compulsion to break and run for it. Then he moved again. And now I began to get it. There was another sound beside the scrape of his shoes. It was the tap, tap, tap of a cane.
“Mister Julian? You theah, Mr. Julian? Wheahbouts the fiah?”
I could feel myself weaken all over and the sigh coming up out of my lungs like a balloon collapsing. I throttled it and tried to hold my breath as I came slowly to my feet.
It was awful. It could break your nerve. We were facing each other across the counter and I was looking right into the dark glasses three feet in front of my eyes. I was robbing a bank with a witness standing there so near he could reach out and touch me, a witness who could send me to the penitentiary for practically the rest of my life except for the fact that he was blind.
“That you, Mister Julian?” he asked.
How did he know somebody was here? Did he know it? I didn’t dare move. And I couldn’t speak. That was the way he identified people, by their voices. And I couldn’t stand there forever. He was reaching out an arm, groping for me. I leaned back, not moving my feet, and the fingers passed an inch away from my tie.
“Ain’t like you, Mister Julian, makin’ fun of ol’ Mort.” I had to get out. I couldn’t stand it. I moved one foot back, picking it up and lowering it carefully and utterly without sound, crepe rubber against tile. Then I moved the other one. I repeated it. I was out of the cage. I held the bag out from my legs so I wouldn’t brush against it. I was past the other cage now, in the railed-off area where the desk was.
I looked at him, and that was when I began to go to pieces. It wasn’t human. He had moved. He had walked along the front of the counter and now he had stopped beside the railing, and he was tracking me. He couldn’t see me, and no pair of ears on earth could have detected any sound, but he was following me as unerringly as radar. I moved, and the gaunt black face and sightless eyes moved with me. “You got no business in heah!” he said. I ran.
8
The street was clear, and there was no one in the alley. I got the trunk of the car open, threw in the bag, tossed the coat on the back seat, and made a U turn, throwing gravel, and shot across Main Street. This way I’d come in behind the Taylor building. They’d have the other street blocked by now, and I had to get into the thick of it without anyone’s seeing me drive up. I slammed ahead two blocks and turned left.
Smoke was pouring into the sky. I hit a jam of abandoned cars, pulled over to the curb, and got out. The crowds were all ahead of me in the street and beginning to push on to the vacant lots around the rear of the building. The fire engine was around in front, in the middle of the worse jam. I circled, keeping to the rear of the crowd. Nobody paid any attention to me. The whole second floor of the building was roaring now, throwing flames into the air. I shoved my way into the knot of people pressed around the fire engine. They had a hose run out, playing a stream on the roof on the other side, and now they were trying to get one on this side. Everybody was yelling and getting in the way. I saw the chance I was looking for and latched on to the hose, up near the nozzle, as they fought to get it strung out through the crowd.
They gave us the pressure before we got set. The hose stiffened, bucked, and threw the man who was carrying the nozzle. The man next in line went for it, got his hands on it, but he was too light and it slapped him off. Two more lunged for it. I piled into them.
“Look out!” I yelled. “Let me at the damned thing!”
I collided with one of the men, knocked him off his feet, and then fell over him on to the hose. I was soaked, drowned, covered with churned-up mud. It was perfect. It was just what I wanted. I got both hands on the nozzle, dug my feet in, and got up. I held it, and started going forward. I could hear the crowd yell.
We had two streams on the fire now, but we might as well have been squirting a burning oil well with water pistols. The whole thing was going up like a Roman candle. A big section of the roof caved in and sparks and embers went exploding upwards in the smoke. The crowd was pushing in across the vacant lot all around us. I swung my head and through all the confusion I could see the deputy sheriff and two more men running along the line trying to force them back. I jerked my head at the two men behind me.