Except that, Swagger saw now, as the action began and two strangers came in and suddenly, from postures both too influenced by movies and too freighted with uncertainty, drew guns, it wasn’t Jack and Mitzi. Not at all. Oh, they were radical hippies, yes, in Army surplus, watch caps, a droopy mustache on the fella, the gal with her hair all frizzed up as if electrified and a watch cap to encapsulate it, both wearing shades, but both not Jack or Mitzi, by body type, by coloring, by gracelessness, by the clutch of fear that enveloped them as they screamed at the poor girl behind the counter, as the other customers backed away in their own fear, the tall boy last, and the camera watched numbly from its perch above it all.
So that’s why old Ozzie Harris, on his deathbed, wanted to will the thing to Jack and Mitzi; it proved undisputedly that they were not the perps of the bank holdup, who were some other, not this particular radical couple. That would take the cloud of interpersonal violence off the necks of Jack and Mitzi, remove the taint of murder for money. It was, in the way the imagination of the public sometimes works, possible that it would end their hated exile to the left and gain them readmittance to the parade of Normal Life. So it was a great gift old Ozzie thought he was bestowing on his friends, the only people who attended him as he neared death.
What Ozzie couldn’t have guessed, however, was that for a reason not yet clear, the tape had a bigger importance to Jack and Mitzi, represented some kind of opportunity they could not turn down, a temptation they could not ignore. So that was the road they chose to follow, not to redemption but, like so many a tarnished pilgrim before them, to the bucks. Their final creed had not been Revolution Now or Give Peace a Chance but Show Me the Money. They tried to go big time and, like many a rat with ambition, ended up with brains on the windshield and cops eating doughnuts over their body bags.
As for the true brigands in the scene, Bob knew that if he spent a few minutes on the Internet going through the radical rogues’ gallery that some Web sites had accumulated, he could tease out the names. But then Anto saved him the trouble.
“I’m told by himself that the couple with the peashooters is Miles Goldfarb and his girlfriend, Amanda Higgins, soon to be dead in a shootout in San Francisco with FBI and police types. They’d fled the East for the West, and on unrelated charges were sought, betrayed, required to surrender, and shot to pieces when they refused. So is justice sometimes served.”
Bob watched the drama unspool in the haunted, blurred silent imagery of a film that was nearly forty years old. It continued; the girl behind the counter got ahold of her senses and began to shovel money across the teller’s counter before her, as Amanda leaped forward to scrape it into a bag so movielike it should have had the helpful $ imprinted on it. Meanwhile Miles, with a long-barreled.38, stood behind nervously, waved the gun, shouted contradictory orders, stomped his feet, tried to control bladder and colon and hyperventilation difficulties, and waited for the bag to get heavy enough to signal success.
It was such a different time and place. The two-handed shooting thing, invented in the sixties and seventies in the far West and popularized on Starsky and Hutch, hadn’t caught on yet, so all the gun handling was one-handed, and on the film it looked childish, particularly that big thing in the right hand of bandit Miles, and he seemed as scared of it as the others were. He kept waving it this way and that, hopping up and down like a clown with a cold pickle up his ass, very nearly out of control. Meanwhile, slightly higher up the coordination tree, Amanda scooped the bills into the bag, even stooping to retrieve a crumple that had fallen to the floor.
A rule of the world: when the shit happens, it happens fast. And so it was in suburban Boston in the Nyackett Federal Bank and Trust, February 10, 1971. A blur suddenly exploded behind very-nervous Miles, as the men involved moved faster than 24 frames per second, and when stopped, they revealed themselves to be two Boston armored car guards, who had been alerted by passers-by. They too were one-handed revolver gunners, in their Ruritatian Elite Guard uniforms, complete to braiding and double-breasted tunics; they too were scared and excited; they too gestured foolishly with their weapons, but they did, or so it seemed, have the drop.
As if he anticipated failure, Miles gave up without a twitch and yielded to the momentum of the transaction. His hands shot up before he even turned to see if the adversaries were armed, and that probably saved his life, for had he turned, almost certainly the very nervous truck guards would have fired away and dropped him, Amanda, the clerk, and any other poor soul whose body came to be in the line of their twelve-shot panic fusillade. Then Amanda turned, dropping the bag; her hands came up. And for just a second, the blurry frenzy turned to tableau: downward forty-five-degree angle freezing five human beings-clerk, two robbers, two guards-in perfect stillness while the moment downticked, or so it seemed, from violence. The poor clerk didn’t even have the thought to now duck, as her presence in that same line of fire was no longer required.
Then it all changed.
More blur, more craziness, more seventies mayhem. A person separated himself from the herd of frightened customers who’d fallen back to form a clot at the bank’s wall, his one hand out in some unusual fashion that one didn’t usually see in bank customers. That was because it held a gun, another revolver, surely a Colt or a Smith from right there in New England. It was the tall hippie boy first glimpsed at the teller’s window, now in the shape of pure counterculture wraith-a Prince Valiant hank of hair that flopped over ears, an out-of-place Zapata mustache-and he was himself in the costume of the day, the tight jeans, the Army field jacket, the crunching black of Navy blue watch cap pulled low. He looked like any kid in those days, except that now he held a revolver. He held it low, cowboy style, clearly an untrained shooter, but he was so close-less than six feet from the furthest of the uniformed men-he couldn’t miss. He fired six times in a second, discharging all his ammo, and he shot faster than the film itself ran through the camera, so that shots three, four, and five were not seen between frames, and only one, two, and six were documented. The powder was clearly smokeless, but it still produced a great fog of gun haze by today’s standards, and the muzzle flash illuminated itself as blades of sheer incandescence against the otherwise grainy texture of the filmed reality, as it spurted, then vanished. The guards, blindsided from the right, never had a chance, and Bob knew from reports that five of the six.38 bullets struck them, moving right to left, through biceps into chest cavity and blood-bearing organs. One simply yielded to death like a sack falling off a truck and went down graceless and stupefied, dead before he hit the floor. The other tried to respond and was halfway into turning to return fire when his knees pointed out to him that he was dead by giving way, and he went down to ass on floor, though still upright, then curled over in the fetal and died.
Another moment of stillness, though in the back you could see the knot of terrified customers recoiling further into themselves; the clerk put her hands to her ears, because the gunfire was so loud. Miles hopped up and down in feckless panic; Amanda stood still, frozen by the eruption of killing violence so close. Then, again almost too fast, Miles and Amanda leaped over the fallen guards and bolted out the door, presumably to the getaway car. It was the new shooter who had the brains to dash to the counter and pick up the fallen sack of money, turn, command the customers to remain rigid; he did so by pointing a now-empty gun at them, although they didn’t seem to notice. Then he knelt, picked up Miles’s dropped revolver, and instead of fleeing in panic, backed out coolly, keeping the gun on the crowd. He pivoted and was gone.