Which was all well and good, and what he was paid for, but sometimes—and particularly on the night shifts—he found himself with a real hankering for action, for an end to peace, for something to happen.
Well, nothing ever did. And nothing would tonight, either. Hoffman walked up and down the cloth-shrouded aisles, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of coins, maybe millions of dollars’ worth, and nothing happened, except that every now and then George Dolnick came in from the security room next door and they threw the bull a little, and every hour Pat Schuyler came knocking on the door and Hoffman opened it and they exchanged the code words that meant everything was—invariably—all right.
Hoffman also liked to look out the window and watch the traffic go by, but as the night grew later the traffic grew lighter, and by the time of Pat Schuyler’s one-o’clock check there was practically nothing happening out in the street. Still, it was sometimes more pleasant to look out at the empty street than in at the rows of tables all covered with white cloths, like long lumpy rows of slabs in a futuristic morgue.
Hoffman was looking out the window at about ten before two when the power-and-light truck arrived and came to a stop almost exactly outside the window. Hoffman watched with bored interest as two men in work jumpers climbed out of the truck and set up barriers around a manhole and then took the manhole cover off. It only took them a few minutes to get set up, moving right along, but then nothing happened at all. One of the two men, the larger one, went away down the street to the right, out of Hoffman’s vision, and the other one went down to the left and sort of stood around on the sidewalk there, under the hotel marquee, as though he had nothing on earth to do.
Union labor, Hoffman thought, and nodded to himself. He might be an employee himself, but he was down on the kind of union you read about in the papers these days; always going on strike for more money or fewer hours, but never lifting a finger to see that the members did an honest day’s work for all those wages.
Hoffman kept watching, wondering just how long those two would dawdle around, probably getting time and a half for being on the job so late, but when the code knock came at the door at two o’clock the one under the marquee still hadn’t moved and the other one still hadn’t come back.
Hoffman opened the door and Pat Schuyler was there, holding a small brown paper bag. They exchanged the no-trouble phrases and Schuyler handed over the paper bag, saying, “We got us a looker down in the lobby tonight.”
“Is that right?”
“You can see her from here.”
Hoffman looked past Schuyler, at an angle down through the railing into the lobby, and nodded. “So she is,” he said. “Now what do you suppose she’s waiting for?”
“No old fogies like us,” said Schuyler, “I can tell you that.”
“You speak for yourself,” Hoffman told him, and they grinned at each other, and Hoffman shut the door.
When he turned, George Dolnick had come in from the security room, carrying his own brown paper bag. Dolnick said, “Another exciting night, eh, Fred?”
“I don’t think I can stand the pace,” Hoffman said.
They went over to the small cleared table near the windows and sat down. They opened their bags and a harsh voice said, “Freeze.”
Hoffman looked around, and a lot of masked men were coming through the wall.
Four
OTTO MAINZER felt good. He felt tall, strong, smart, and capable. The Colt Trooper .357 Magnum in his right hand was as small and light as a peanut, but it was his lightning-fast snake, his poison dart. He moved on the balls of his feet, coming in fast behind Parker, through the gap in the wall and through the heavy drapes, moving to the left as Parker moved to the right, seeing Lempke out of the corner of his eye, coming in third, moving along the wall after Parker.
The two private fuzz were sitting at a table near the window, their open mouths full of food. They’d turned their heads at Parker’s barked one-word command, but after that neither of them had moved a muscle.
The mask restricted Mainzer’s vision just slightly, cutting down his peripheral vision so that he had to move slowly, his left hand out to the side testing for tables or other obstructions. While Parker and Lempke were moving along the drapes to the front wall, Mainzer headed away at a sharp angle to the left, going down the aisle between the display tables till he came to the cross-aisle halfway down, then going across to the other side of the room and heading back toward the fuzz.
Now he and Parker were at two points of a triangle, with the Pinks at the third, and Lempke could go in and disarm them without obscuring everybody’s line of fire at once. Mainzer stood with cocked hip, smiling inside his mask, while Lempke stripped the Pinks of their hardware, putting the guns on the table with the half-eaten sandwiches.
Lempke then backed away toward the open door of the security room, motioning at the cops to follow him. They did, both of them looking shaky and disgusted with themselves. Mainzer followed them into the other room, while Parker stayed out in the ballroom.
Lempke had rope and tape. As Mainzer stood guard, Lempke put the fuzz down on the floor, tied them, and taped their mouths. Then they went back outside and Lempke pulled off his mask, saying, “Hot in there.”
Parker already had his off. “Go get Billy,” he said.
“Right.” Lempke hurried away across the room.
Mainzer still had his mask on. He liked the feel of it. He said, “There’s a couple suitcases in the other room.”
“We’ll ask Billy. You want to take that off before you go outside.”
Mainzer felt sudden embarrassment and anger, as though he’d been caught doing something dirty. He felt his face grow red inside the mask, making it impossible for him to take it off yet. “I will,” he said stiffly, trying to hide both the embarrassment and the anger. “Don’t worry about me.”
Lempke came back through the hole with Billy, who was white with terror and stumbling over his own feet. Billy stood just inside the drape, looking around big-eyed, and whispered, “Where are they?”
“We chopped them up,” Mainzer said, feeling a surge of contempt for this soft fool, “and put the pieces in suitcases.”
Parker said, “Let’s get started. Billy, where’s the chart?”
Billy had to fumble around in pockets, but he finally did come up with the chart and they went to work. Billy and Lempke packed, Parker carried the full cases through the wall to the tour office, and Mainzer brought them downstairs to Carlow, who stowed them away in the truck.
Mainzer didn’t remove the mask until he was out of the ballroom, just before making his first trip to the street. In the darkness of the tour office he tugged the mask off and shoved it into a pocket. He could feel his face still flaming red, but in the darkness it might go unnoticed.
He kept thinking of things he should have said to Parker, things he still could say. Every trip up and down the stairs his mind was full of cutting remarks, clever answers, tough challenges; he mouthed them as he went along, glowering.
From time to time he would run into Parker in the tour office, the both of them arriving there simultaneously, Parker with more filled cases, Mainzer empty-handed, and every time he was on the verge of saying something, just at the edge of making an issue, but it never quite happened. He told himself it was better not to start anything now. They were working on a tight schedule, too tight for anything extraneous. Afterwards they could have it out, just the two of them. Parker was too much of a hard-nose, he was going around looking for a broken head, and, Mainzer figured, he might be just the boy to give it to him, one way or another.
At the other end of his route was Carlow, and there too a tight-lipped truce was in effect. The truce had more violent overtones here, though, because both of them were aware of its existence. Mainzer and Carlow spoke to one another only when it was absolutely necessary, and then in the fewest possible number of syllables. Driving downtown together in the truck they hadn’t said a word to one another, and both knew they were only waiting for the job to be finished before they got down to their private disagreement.