There was no one in sight, but I could hear an offset press rattling out in back. "Anyone home?" I called.
The press noise stopped, and a sour-faced man with a limp Pancho Villa moustache came out into the front of the shop. "Yeah?" he said ungraciously.
I showed him the logotype and questions. "I ran out of flyers," I explained. "How much for five hundred of these on fairly good six-by-nine stock?"
"I got no time to wait for you big companies to get around to payin' your bills," he whined. "I got to pay cash for my supplies."
"Cash it is if I can have them tomorrow."
He fingered the logotype. "It'll have to be offset."
"I don't care what it is."
"Eleven A.M., then," he said, and did some figuring with a pencil stub. "Sixteen eighty for five hundred." I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. He made no move to take it. "I got no change here this early in the mornin'."
I found I had seventeen dollars in fives and ones. "No sob story tomorrow," I warned him as I gave him the bills. "I've got to have this material right away."
He grunted something unintelligible as the bills disappeared beneath his ink-smudged apron. He was already on his way to the rear of the shop before I began to climb the iron steps.
I spent the afternoon at the Philadelphia Public Library. In the reading room I went through the past year's issues of the magazine Banking, The Journal of the American Banking Association. I hoped to find some reference to the Thornton Bank that would contain some indication of recent changes in floor plan or equipment. The Schemer had a detailed floor plan of the bank in his kit, but I had to be sure that it was up-to-date.
In the past I had acquired helpful information from a column "The Country Banker" in Banking. It was a chatty affair that mentioned bank remodeling, new vaults, new cashiers' cages, and the like. I found nothing on the Thornton bank, however. I'd still have to check it out, but there was a reasonable chance that nothing had changed there recently.
On my way back to Media I saw a theater marquee advertising Around the World in 80 Days. In the ten years since it was made I'd seen it four times, but I stopped in to see it again. It says something about the economy of this country that the admission charge has been higher each time I saw it. It's a remarkable movie, though. A bench mark in the industry. I enjoy professionalism wherever I see it.
The next afternoon I picked up my Yellow Page flyers. They were ready, somewhat to my surprise. The general atmosphere of the print shop hadn't been such as to induce confidence in promised performance. The flyers looked fine. Sharp black print on good quality paper carries its own authority. I stopped at a drugstore and picked up a clipboard to add an official touch to my survey sham. It assured my professional status.
I arrived in Thornton again at eight thirty A.M. the following morning. My first stop was a lunchroom across the street from the bank. I gave the girl at the cash register one of my flyers at the same time I bought a morning paper from her. "I'll show it to the boss after his breakfast rush dies down," she said after a glance at it. "He's the chef."
"No hurry," I said. "I'm having breakfast myself, and I'll be around town for a few days."
I took a seat at a table for two near a window that commanded a view of the bank's side entrance, which was used only by employees-a fact made known to me by the Schemer's fact-gathering. I spread my paper out in a manner that would discourage anyone from taking the seat across the table from me even if the place became crowded, then hitched my chair around slightly so I could see the bank parking lot without turning my head. At this hour the cars pulling onto the lot would contain employees only. Right now I was interested in their arrival times.
I ordered hotcakes and coffee when the waitress arrived at my table. Mentally I reviewed the descriptions of the bank manager and assistant manager contained in the Schemer's voluminous dossiers. Thomas Barton, the manager, was forty, five feet ten and a soft two hundred pounds, dark-complexioned, and had a quick, nervous way of walking. The Schemer had him down as a Casper Milquetoast type with a pushy, clubwoman type wife whose kids tended to run loose.
George Mace, the assistant manager, was fifty. He was thin, balding, bespectacled, and invariably wore a cardigan sweater to work, changing to a linen duster inside the bank. The Schemer's file on Mace said that the man had worked in the bank for twenty-one years and had refused several offers of a branch bank managership for himself because he didn't want to leave town.
My interest in these two men was elementary: between them they had the combination to the bank vault. I was hoping that if they got to work early enough in the mornings, as bank men often did, that it might be possible to intercept them at the bank's rear entrance and force them to let us enter with them, risky though it might be. It would eliminate the aspect of the Schemer's plan that I liked least, the necessity for manipulating the families if we had to pick up the two men at their homes and take them to the bank with us.
The first morning I saw enough to convince me that the Schemer had the right of it and that my hope was in vain. When my watch showed 8:58 and I hadn't seen either Barton or Mace, I was beginning to think I had missed their arrival. Then a man who was unmistakably Barton from the Schemer's description hurried toward the bank's side entrance from a parked car.
But it was 9:17 before a man in a fuzzy gray sweater who was just as unmistakably Mace alighted from a mud-stained Rambler. He was thin, stooped, and ailing-looking, and he shuffled toward the entrance with a kind of patient weariness. I wondered if the tellers kept cash locked in drawers so they could operate for a few moments in the morning without the vault being opened. If they didn't, there must be some disgruntled bank customers standing around waiting for Mace to contribute his half of the vault combination to the opening of the vault so the day's banking business could get started.
The late arrival convinced me of something else. We were going to have to pick up Barton and Mace and take them to the bank with us. Even at 8:58, when Barton arrived, the majority of the employees were already inside the bank. That was no good as far as we were concerned. We had to be inside first to assure ourselves that we could herd the clerks, cashiers, janitors, and guards where we wanted them to go as fast as they entered. It looked as though the only way we could be sure that Barton and Mace would be there early enough for us to do the job right would be to take them there ourselves. I'd watch them further, of course, but this first viewing was hardly encouraging to my wishful thinking that we might not have to get involved with the families.
I made my hotcakes and coffee last another twenty minutes while I clocked additional customer arrivals at the bank's front entrance. I had already seen that in the first five minutes nine people went inside. This was only slightly fewer than those who entered in the next twenty minutes. The heavy initial traffic gave me additional pause.
We could hardly expect to force Barton and Mace to open the vault, clean it out, and make our getaway in less than eight to ten minutes. And in addition to the regular bank personnel, we couldn't hope to cope with the flow of bank customers I'd seen in the first few moments the front doors were open. We'd have to keep the customers out of the bank somehow. There were ways. It would come down to the question of selecting the best way.