“I’m persistent to a fault,” says my companion.
Halfway down she whispers, “I’ve been planning to leave him for years. I just needed the right occasion.”
“What happens when your husband calls the police?”
“Trust me,” she says, putting a finger to my lips. “There’s more than one way to skin a goose.”
The door opens at the fifth floor and a tall blond man with a Doberman pinscher gets in.
On the third floor a gaggle of women of a certain age present themselves. The penthouse lady and I are pressed to the back of the elevator, the cold nose of the black dog between us.
The crowd ought to make it easier for me to slip away unnoticed, an anonymous figure leaving the building.
When the door opens into the lobby, we are faced by a spotlight, the kind used at old-fashioned Hollywood premieres. The crowd claps politely at our emergence. We are apparently not what they are waiting for. But if not us, who?
“What’s going on?” I ask my companion.
“If anyone asks, you’re with me,” she whispers, walking into the center of the crowd, pretending to be blind or distracted. I follow behind, carrying a briefcase someone in the elevator handed me.
A reporter with a microphone stops us and asks if we would mind answering a few questions. The woman says, “We are just good friends,” and moves on through the crowd past a policeman, who is flanked by two of my former colleagues.
“What’s your part in the heist?” the reporter asks me. “It was my job to drive the elevator,” I say.
“The getaway elevator? Is that what we’re talking about?” He holds me by the thumb as I try to slip away, insists on an answer to his questions. “Was it or was it nor your job to drive the getaway elevator?” he asks.
“No comment.”
“But you don’t deny it, is that right?”
Two lost children pass between us, giving me the occasion to move off. The interviewer, who is perhaps working for the police, follows me through the crowd, challenging me with questions. I prefer not to know him.
The briefcase I carry clangs as if silver is inside, or jewels. Do I hold after all the fruits of the heist? Is it circumstance or calculation? Perhaps, I think, the briefcase was passed on to me as an attempt to frame me for the crime.
I slip the case into another man’s hand, free myself of its burden. I am not in this caper to get caught. There are police at the main door, some uniformed, some in plain clothes. I tremble to go by them, have always been frightened by the law.
No one stops me as I press through the mob to the door, all eyes elsewhere, attention riveted.
One of my former colleagues, the dealer in the card game, is confessing his part in the heist or rather a self-serving version of it. Our eyes meet and he points an accusing finger at me, “There’s one of them,” he calls.
I look behind me, gawk with the crowd at whoever it is at the moment going out the door. In a rush of activity, some benighted figure is dragged inside by the police and carried up to the podium where the television interview is being conducted,
“Do you know each other?” the interviewer asks the two men. “That’s my long lost brother,” says my former partner in crime. “Louis,” says the other, “is it really you?” The two men embrace before the cameras, slap each other’s backs. “What a coincidence that we should meet in the middle of all this confusion.”
“What have you been doing with yourself?”
“The same old grind, export-import, Wall Street and the Potomac, Seoul and Sardinia. And you?”
“A little of this, a little of that. I’ve been pretty much my own boss since Mother passed away. When you work for someone else your heart’s never really in it.”
The interviewer interrupts, separating the microphone from the brothers, summing up the situation for the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, these two men have met here today after not having seen each other in the span of a decade. We are all witness to a privileged moment.”
Applause. Some laughter. A handful of cheers.
The woman who rode in the elevator with me takes my arm as if she had some claim on it. “We’re on next,” she whispers. “Straighten your hair before you go on.”
“I don’t have a comb.”
“Take mine.” She hands me a jewel-studded comb, which looks too valuable to use on one’s hair.
Three policemen remove the brothers from the stage, cracking each a blow on the back of his head with a nightstick before leading them into a wagon parked outside the back door. The crowd separates to let them through. There are no protests.
“A moment ago they were celebrities,” I say to my companion.
“Now they’re police fodder. There’s no future in going on stage.”
“I’d like to do it anyway,” she says. “How many shots at fame do you have?”
She pulls me over to the podium and announces that we’re ready to go on. The announcer seems skeptical.
“What’s your story?” he asks off microphone. “It’s got to be fresh or I can’t use you.”
“I met this man in a closet,” she says, clasping my arm as I try to slip away. “In the beginning it didn’t seem as if we’d ever get together. Eventually, as you can see, we fell hopelessly in love.”
“It’s been done,” says the announcer, “It’s been done to a turn.”
“That’s not the whole story,” she says, desperately improvising.
“This man you see here with me and I were childhood sweethearts who hadn’t seen each other in lo these eighteen years.”
“There’s a credibility gap there, madam. You look old enough — don’t take offense — to be this man’s mother.”
“Well!”
“That’s unacceptable on national television. Please step down so I can talk to someone that might fire the public imagination.”
“What if I told you that this man and I planned the heist together. It was the only way we could meet without my husband getting wise.”
“Now you’re talking, big lady. Step closer to the microphone and I’ll introduce you to our national audience…Ladies and gentles, we have an unusual couple with us today. The man who plotted the penthouse heist and the lady he did it for.”
“He didn’t do it for me; he did it to me,” she says, leaning toward the microphone, “This man had an irresistible longing for my jewels.”
I can see that trouble awaits me here but for the moment all escape routes are blocked.
“There’s something heroic about a crime of passion,” the announce intones. “Don’t you think so? Something movingly pathetic. A man risking his very freedom for the married woman he adores. What did you guys do with the old man? Did you waste him in a trail of blood? Put poison in his soup?”
“We just forgot about him,” the lady says.
The announcer claps his hands with pleasure. “One of your cases of benign neglect, am I right? If the mistreated husband is in the audience, would you please, sir, come to the microphone and give us your story.”
I force my way to the microphone. “None of what this woman says has a grain of truth.”
“Step right up, sir. Are you the neglected husband?”
I can see that whatever I say this public whore will distort for his own uses, so I say nothing, merely clear my throat of the debris of irritation.
“Is it possible,” he says with characteristic melodrama, “that you’re both the neglected husband and the enterprising and unscrupulous lover? Ladies and genitals, the plot thickens.”
I am given the microphone and asked to tell my story, am about to put together a sentence when the woman I am with clamps a hand over my mouth.
“This man has taken a vow of silence,” she announces. “I think it would be in bad taste to press him further. I’ll answer any questions you have concerning him.”