The immediate was the money, and that move was as carefully prepared and timed as an electric circuit.
The Morphy laws stood up well and I remembered them and had even added one. First law: Have no past record. Well, I had none. Number two: No accomplices or confidants. I certainly had none. Number three: No dames. Well, Margie Young-Hunt was the only person I knew who could be called a dame, and I was not about to drink champagne out of her slipper. Number four: Don’t splurge. Well, I wouldn’t. Gradually I would use it to pay bills to wholesalers. I had a place for it. In my Knight Templar’s hatbox there was a support of velvet-covered cardboard, the size and shape of my head. This was already lifted free and the edges coated with contact cement so it could be restored in an instant.
Recognition—a Mickey Mouse mask. No one would see anything else. An old cotton raincoat of Marullo’s—all tan cotton raincoats look alike—and a pair of those tear-off cellophane gloves that come on a roll. The mask had been cut several days ago and the box and cereal flushed down the toilet, as the mask and gloves would be. The old silvered Iver Johnson pistol was smoked with lampblack and in the toilet was a can of crankcase oil to throw it in for delivery to Chief Stoney at the first opportunity.
I had added my own final law: Don’t be a pig. Don’t take too much and avoid large bills. If somewhere about six to ten thousand in tens and twenties were available, that would be enough and easy to handle and to hide. A cardboard cakebox on the cold counter would be the swap bag and when next seen it would have a cake in it. I had tried that terrible reedy ventriloquism thing to change my voice and had given it up for silence and gestures. Everything in place and ready.
I was almost sorry Mr. Baker wasn’t here. There would be only Morph and Harry Robbit and Edith Alden. It was planned to the split second. At five minutes to nine I would place the broom in the entrance. I’d practiced over and over. Apron tucked up, scale weight on the toilet chain to keep it flushing. Anyone who came in would hear the water and draw his own conclusion. Coat, mask, cakebox, gun, gloves. Cross the alley on the stroke of nine, shove open the back door, put on mask, enter just after timeclock buzzes and Joey swings open the door. Motion the three to lie down, with the gun. They’d give no trouble. As Joey said, the money was insured, he wasn’t. Pick up the money, put it in cakebox, cross alley, flush gloves and mask down toilet, put gun in can of oil, coat off. Apron down, money in hatbox, cake in cakebox, pick up broom, and go on sweeping sidewalk, available and visible when the alarm came. The whole thing one minute and forty seconds, timed, checked, and rechecked. But carefully as I had planned and timed, I still felt a little breathless and I swept out the store prior to opening the two front doors. I wore yesterday’s apron so that new wrinkles would not be noticeable.
And would you believe it, time stood still as though a Joshua in a wing collar had shot the sun in its course. The minute hand of my father’s big watch had set its heels and resisted morning.
It was long since I had addressed my flock aloud, but this morning I did, perhaps out of nervousness.
“My friends,” I said, “what you are about to witness is a mystery. I know I can depend on you to keep silent. If any of you have any feeling about the moral issue involved, I challenge you and will ask you to leave.” I paused. “No objections? Very well. If I ever hear of an oyster or a cabbage discussing this with strangers, the sentence is death by dinner fork.
“And I want to thank you all. We have been together, humble workers in the vineyard, and I a servant as you are. But now a change is coming. I will be master here henceforth, but I promise I will be a good and kind and understanding master. The time approaches, my friends, the curtain rises—farewell.” And as I moved to the front doors with the broom, I heard my own voice cry, “Danny—Danny! Get out of my guts.” A great shudder shook me so that I had to lean on the broom a moment before I opened up the doors.
My father’s watch said nine with its black, stumpy hour hand and minus six with its long, thin minute hand. I could feel its heart beat against my palm as I looked at it.
Chapter fifteen
It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever. It is the law in many states, certainly in ours, that it must rain on long holiday weekends, else how could the multitudes get drenched and miserable? The July sun fought off a multitude of little feathered clouds and drove them scuttling, but thunderheads looked over the western rim, the strong-arm rain-bearers from the Hudson River Valley, armed with lightning and already mumbling to themselves. If the law was properly obeyed, they would hold back until a maximum number of ant-happy humans were on the highways and the beaches, summer-dressed and summer-green.
Most of the other stores did not open until nine-thirty. It had been Marullo’s thought to catch a pinch of trade by having me jump the gun half an hour. I thought I would change that. It caused more ill feeling among the other stores than the profit justified. Marullo didn’t care about that, if he ever knew about it. He was a foreigner, a wop, a criminal, a tyrant, a squeezer of the poor, a bastard, and eight kinds of son of a bitch. I having destroyed him, it was only natural that his faults and crimes should become blindingly apparent to me.
I felt old long hand edging around on my father’s watch and I found I was sweeping viciously with tensed muscles, waiting for the moment of swift, smooth movement of my mission. I breathed through my mouth, and my stomach pushed against my lungs as I remember it did waiting for an attack.
For Saturday-morning-Fourth-of-July-weekend, there were few people about. A stranger—old man—went by, carrying a fishing rod and a green plastic tackle box. He was on his way to the town pier to sit all day dangling a limp strip of squid in the water. He didn’t even look up, but I forced his attention.
“Hope you catch some big ones.”
“Never catch anything,” he said.
“Stripers come in sometimes.”
“I don’t believe it.”
A red-hot optimist, but at least I had set the hook in his attention.
And Jennie Single rolled along the sidewalk. She moved as though she had casters instead of feet, probably New Baytown’s least reliable witness. Once she turned on her gas oven and forgot to light it. She’d have blown herself through the roof if she could have remembered where she had put the matches.
“Morning, Miss Jenny.”
“Good morning, Danny.”
“I’m Ethan.”
“Course you are. I’m going to bake a cake.”
I tried to gouge a scar in her memory. “What kind?”