They left the room, and out in the office Madge said, ‘Done so soon? Slick around, we’ll talk, it’s a slow night.’
‘Got to be going, Madge,’ Negli said. ‘Wish I could stay, but that’s how it is.’ To Parker he said, ‘Tomorrow night, nine o’clock.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Madge started talking again, urging them to stay and that. Parker assumed she was talking to Negli instead of him, and went straight back to his room. He switched the television on without the sound, left the room lights off, and lay on the bed to watch and think.
Sometimes there was an advantage in doing a job in the middle of a crowd, and if Negli and Kifka actually did have a way into this stadium, there was no reason why they couldn’t figure a way out again. It all depended on the details.
The next night, at nine, he was in Kifka’s apartment. There was no cheerleader there that time. Instead, there was Little Bob Negli and Arnie Feccio. Feccio was a florid moustachioed type with a beer-barrel torso and oily black hair. He looked more Greek than Italian, and whichever nationality he looked he had to be a restaurant owner. He’d tried to substantiate his looks a few times, but his restaurants always went broke and he always had to go back to his regular profession to get himself out of debt.
The four of them sat around a table in Kifka’s living room, and Kifka, with the help of maps and diagrams, told Parker what they had:
‘It’s Monequois Stadium, just outside town on Western Avenue. Monequois’s one of them hoity-toity Ivy League colleges, nothing but money, and this is their new stadium. Saturday, the sixteenth of November, is their big game against Plainfield, the big deal for the whole-season. And the nice thing, it’s what they call inter-conference - it don’t count in their regular season, they play in different conferences.’
Parker said, ‘What makes that nice?’
‘The gate receipts are different,’ Kifka told him. ‘It ain’t a regular season game, so the gate receipts go to some charity or fund or something, and season tickets don’t count. Also, no mail orders, no advance sales at all. It’s a big deal, see what I mean? Like the World Series. The box office opens at six in the morning the day of the game, and there’s always these clowns that stay up all night to buy the first tickets.’
Little Bob Negli said, ‘You see the beauty, Parker? Except for student tickets, student passes, whatever they call them, every seat in the house is paid for cash on the barrelhead the day of the game. And all that cash has to be right there in the stadium when the game starts.’
Parker nodded. ‘So it’s a big score,’ he said. ‘If we can get at it.’
‘We can get at it.’ Kifka spread out a diagram on the table, facing so Parker could see it best. ‘This is the stadium. They got three box offices where they sell tickets, North Gate, East Gate, and South Gate. These squares here with the X’s in them. About once an hour the cash is collected and brought around to the stadium building here at the west end of the stadium. All your offices and locker rooms and everything are in this building. Now, your finance office is on the second floor, and that’s where the money’s delivered.’
Parker said, ‘How?’
‘Armed guards in pairs. They walk it along a corridor under the stands. They wouldn’t be that tough to hit, but they never carry more than a couple grand at a time anyway.’
Parker nodded.
‘Now,’ Kifka said, ‘in the finance office the cash is counted and stacked and banded and put in money boxes to go to the bank. They get it done by the time the last quarter is starting so the armored car can get out of there before the traffic jam starts. The armored car doesn’t come till they phone for it, so it isn’t there very long, just long enough to fill up and take off. It’s bracketed by municipal police in riot cars all the way to the bank. The bank has a special deal where it has people down there even though it’s Saturday, and the money goes in and gets checked all over again right away.’
Parker said, ‘What sort of guard in the finance office?’
‘You got four armed men in there, private police, plus six employees. The way in, you pass through a locked guarded door into a corridor and along the corridor is the finance office. You knock there and they check you with a peephole before they open up.’
Parker nodded. ‘What about the size of it? It’s going to he mostly small bills.’
Arnie Feccio answered, saying, ‘We figure two big suitcases ought to do it.’
‘That’s a lot of weight.’
Negli smiled and said, ‘We don’t want to have to run with it anyway, Parker.’
Parker said, ‘We’ll see.’ To Kifka he said, ‘I understand you’ve got a way in.’
‘A beauty,’ Kifka told him. ‘A natural.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘We go in on Friday.’ He stopped and grinned at Parker, waiting for Parker to do cartwheels. When Parker just sat there and looked at him, Kifka belatedly went on with it: ‘We go in Friday afternoon,’ he said. ‘We get into the finance office then and we spend the night there. Saturday we collar every employee the minute he walks through the door. We’re on top of the situation from the beginning. The cash is brought in; we have the employees stow it right in our suitcases.’
Feccio said, ‘What do you think, Parker?’
‘I don’t know yet. How do you get in?’
‘At the entrances,’ Kifka told him, ‘they got these ornamental gates, you know? With the spear points on top and all that jazz. So they don’t quite reach to the top of the entranceway. I can get Bob up high enough, and he can squeeze through.’
‘Like an eel,’ said Negli. He demonstrated by wriggling his hand through the air.
‘There’s doors here and there in the wall,’ said Kifka, ‘besides the gates themselves. They’re kept locked, but you can unlock them easy from inside.’
‘What if somebody sees you and Bob at the gate?’
Kifka grinned. ‘Early birds. First ones on line at the North Gate. We got this all worked out, Parker, believe me. The South Gate is where the newspaper photographers always take the pictures of the nuts, and the East Gate is right on the main drag, so we do it around at the North Gate. Monequois Park is across the road there, and if anybody drives by what are they going to see?’
‘All right. Then what?’
‘We got three locks to get through and we’re in the finance office. Then we wait till morning.’
Negli said, ‘It’s good, Parker, you know it is. It’s worth your time coming here.’
”If it plays like Dan says it does, and if there’s a way out.’
Kifka said, ‘So what do you want to do?’
‘Is there anything doing out to the stadium tonight or tomorrow morning?’
‘Middle of the week? Nothing.’
‘Then we do a run-through,’ Parker said. ‘Tonight. We want lock impressions anyway, so we can move faster when the time comes.’
‘Good idea.’
They ran it through later that night, and it worked just as Kifka had said it would. Negli went over the North Gate and a minute later let the other three through a green door in the brick wall about ten paces away to the left. They were under the grandstand in a kind of concrete tunnel. Lighting their way with flashlights, they followed the tunnel around to the right and came out in the basement of the stadium building, next to a metal staircase. They went up two flights and Arnie Feccio worked silently and speedily on a locked door. There was no alarm system here, and no guards inside the stadium at night, although private police did patrol the general area by car.
Kifka led the way past the first locked door to the second, which led onto the corridor to the finance office. Feccio got them through this door, too, and then through the third, and they were in the finance office.