An instant after that, both he and Rudy were shot dead by the policewoman behind the shattered window. Kerry Donovan, still in the bank vault stuffing banded stacks of bills into the black case, heard the shots and realized at once that something had gone wrong. He dropped the bills in his hand, rushed out of the vault, saw that the woman in the car teller’s window was armed, and recognized in panic that he could not make his escape as planned. He was running for the revolving doors at the front of the bank when he was felled by bullets from the guns of the three separate detectives manning the interior tellers’ cages.
Outside the bank Angela Gould heard all the shooting and immediately started the car. In her panic she would not have stopped to pick up the Deaf Man even if he’d been waiting on the sidewalk where he was supposed to be. But by that time he was in a taxicab half a mile away, heading for a rendezvous with the second team.
Something was still wrong with the day, only more so.
When Albert Schmitt of the 86th called Carella to report that the attempted robbery had been foiled, Carella was somewhat taken aback.
“What do you mean?” he asked, and looked up at the wall clock. “It’s only ten-thirty.”
“That’s right,” Schmitt said. “They hit early.”
“When?”
“Almost an hour ago. They came in about twenty to ten. It was all over by ten.”
“Who? How many?”
“One guy inside, two outside. I don’t know what the plan was, but how they ever expected to get away with it is beyond me. Especially after all the warning beforehand. I don’t get it, Carella, I really don’t.”
“Who were the men involved in the attempt?” Carella asked.
“Identification we found on the bodies...”
“They’re all dead?”
“All three of them. Rudy Manello, John Preiss, and Kerry Donovan. Names mean anything to you?”
“Nothing at all. Any of them wearing a hearing aid?”
“A what?”
“A hearing aid.”
“No.”
“Any of them tall and blond?”
“No.”
“Then he got away.”
“Who did?”
“The guy who masterminded it.”
“Some mastermind,” Schmitt said. “My six-year-old kid could’ve planned a better caper. It’s like nothing ever happened, Carella. The glazier already had the window fixed before I left. I pulled my people out because even the guys from the security office were leaving. Anyway, we can forget about it now. It’s all over and done with.”
“Well, good,” Carella said, “good,” and hung up feeling mildly disappointed. The squadroom was unusually silent, the windows open to the sounds of light morning traffic. Carella sat at his desk and sipped coffee from a cardboard container. This was not like the Deaf Man. If Carella had figured him correctly (and he probably hadn’t), the “delicate symbiosis” of which he had spoken was composed of several interlocking elements.
Not the least of these was the Deaf Man himself. It now seemed apparent that he worked with different pickup gangs on each job, rather like a jazz soloist recruiting sidemen in the various cities on his tour. In the past any apprehended gang members did not know the true identity of their leader; he had presented himself once as L. Sordo and again as Mort Orecchio, the former name meaning “the deaf one” in Spanish, the latter meaning “dead ear” in Italian. The hearing aid itself may have been a phony, even though he always took pains to announce that he was hard of hearing. But whatever he was or whoever he was, the crimes he conceived were always grand in scale and involved large sums of money.
Nor was conceiving crimes and executing them quite enough for the Deaf Man. The second symbiotic element consisted of telling the police what he was going to do long before he did it. At first Carella had supposed this to be evidence of a monumental ego, but he had come to learn that the Deaf Man used the police as a sort of second pickup gang, larger than the nucleus group, but equally essential to the successful commission of the crime. That he had been thwarted on two previous occasions was entirely due to chance. He was smarter than the police, and he used the police, and he let the police know they were being used, and that was where the third element locked into place.
Knowing they were being used, but not how; knowing he was telling them a great deal about the crime, but not enough; knowing he would do what he predicted, but not exactly, the police generally reacted like country bumpkins on a hick police force. Their behavior in turn strengthened the Deaf Man’s premise that they were singularly inept. Given their now-demonstrated ineffectiveness, he became more and more outrageous, more and more daring. And the bolder he became, the more they tripped over their own flat feet. It was, indeed, a delicate symbiosis.
But the deception this time seemed unworthy of someone of his caliber. The cheapest thief in the precinct could just as easily have announced that he would rob a bank at eleven and then rob it at nine-thirty. Big deal. A lie of such petty dimensions hardly required duplication. Yet the Deaf Man had thought it necessary to tell them all about it twice. So apparently he himself was convinced that he was about to pull off the biggest caper in the history of criminal endeavor, gigantic enough to be announced not only once, but then once again — like 50 DANCING GIRLS 50.
Carella picked up the container and sipped at his coffee. It was getting cold. He swallowed the remainder of it in a single gulp and then almost choked on the startling suddenness of an exceptionally brilliant thought: the Deaf Man had not said everything twice. True enough, he had said almost everything twice, but there had been only one photostat pinpointing the time of the holdup. Carella shoved back his chair and reached for his jacket. He had brought another gun to work with him this morning, the first revolver he’d owned, back when he was a patrolman. He eased it out of the holster now, the grip unfamiliar to him, and hoped he would not have to use it, hoped somehow he was wrong. But it was a quarter to eleven on the face of the squadroom clock, and Carella now thought he knew why there’d been any duplication at all, and it did not have a damn thing to do with his twins or the Deaf Man’s ego.
Oddly, it had only to do with playing the crime game fair.
He came through the revolving doors at ten minutes to eleven, walked directly to the bank guard, and opened his wallet.
“Detective Carella,” he said, “87th Squad. I’d like to see Mr. Alton, please.”
The bank guard studied the detective’s shield pinned to a leather tab opposite an identification card. He nodded, and then said, “Right this way, sir,” and led him through the bank to a door at the far end, adjacent to the vault. Discreetly, he knocked.
“Yes?” a voice said.
“It’s me, Mr. Alton. Corrigan.”
“Come in,” Alton said.
The bank guard entered the office, and came out again not a moment later. “Go right in, Mr. Carella,” he said.
Alton was sitting behind his desk, but he rose and extended his hand at once. “How do you do?” he said.
“How do you do, sir? I’m Detective Carella of the 87th Squad.” He showed his shield and I.D. card again, and then smiled. “How do you feel after all that excitement?” he asked, and pulled a chair up to the desk, and sat.