Later there was indignant wonder that the watchman should have opened the door at all, even for the manager of the branch. And yet it was natural enough.
The man with the manager carried no bundle of any sort. And if his presence with the manager hadn’t been on the level, he would have had to carry something; all the valuables were shut in the massive vault of the bank, at this hour. And the vault couldn’t be opened, because it was worked by a time clock. Therefore, anyone entering the bank with robbery in mind would have had to have blasting material with him. Just a gun, which could be concealed, would do no good.
The man with the manager had nothing remotely large enough on him to tackle that vault door.
Probably the watchman reasoned thus. Anyhow, with his boss motioning for him to open up, he did so.
“I’ve got to get into my desk, Jim,” the manager said to the watchman.
“Right, sir,” the watchman said. He was old but husky — an ex-cop. He stared steadily at the jovial black-eyed man. “And your friend, sir?”
“He’s the reason for my visit,” the manager said. “I have a contract to turn over to him. In my desk.”
The manager moved away from the door, with the black-eyed man behind him. And then the watchman saw.
He saw the bulge of the black-eyed man’s right fist in his coat pocket.
The watchman jerked out an exclamation and whipped out the Police Positive in his belt. But he didn’t have a chance. The black-eyed man shot through his coat. The fabric, and the fact that he had jammed the gun muzzle hard against the watchman’s body, muffled the sound of the shot to a dull ka-chunk. It was loud in here, but inaudible to anyone on the street outside.
The watchman fell, dead before he hit the floor. The bank manager wet quivering dry lips with his tongue.
“You rotten murderer! I wish I’d let you kill me at my door, when you called for me and put a gun in my side. I wish I’d had the guts to—”
The black-eyed man’s gun swished down on the manager’s head, hammering in the derby and the skull beneath it. That ended that.
At the rear of the bank space there was a heavy steel grating from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. A few steps behind that was the big vault, in which safe-deposit boxes were kept all the time and the bank’s cash was kept at night. Ten feet in diameter, of dully gleaming nickel-steel, the vault door shone like a dim moon.
The black-eyed man went to the grating. He didn’t even look at it. He looked through it at the vault door, which could not be opened by the combination till nine next morning.
The man reached gingerly into his trousers pocket and drew out two things that looked like large peanuts, with the shells on.
As far as the average crook was concerned, it would have taken drills, oxyacetylene torches, and a bottle of “soup” to crack this vault. But this man knew something better. With these small metal shells, taking up no more room than a section of his pants pocket, he was going to get the vault open.
He reached through the grating and laid the two small shells on the floor. There was a window pole next to a high, barred side window nearby. The man got the pole. Very gently he shoved the two little shells across the floor inside the steel-barred enclosure till they rested at the base of the great vault door. Then he lit a flashlight and poking with the pole through the bars, shoved it next to the little metal shells so the light shone on them.
After that he walked almost to the opposite end of the bank room.
There was a marble-slab wall, waist-high, where he stopped. The wall divided the main bank room from an enclosure where a dozen flat-topped desks were spaced at neat intervals.
The man knelt down behind the marble barricade, rested his gun on the top, and sighted long and carefully at the little shells spotlighted at the base of the great round disk of the Vault door.
He squeezed the trigger.
The short, sharp crack of the shot was lost in the grinding roar of an explosion whose violence was simply unbelievable when you considered the tininess of the two explosive shells.
That whole section of upper Broadway seemed to rock and tremble. Windows shattered for a hundred yards around. The building above the bank floor seemed to do a stately, reeling dance and finally settle back on its foundations again.
Behind the marble barricade, which was cracked in a hundred places by the explosion’s violence, the black-eyed man lay rolling in agony, for a moment. He had his hands clapped over his ears, dropping the gun with the instant of the shot. But, of course, he couldn’t move quickly enough, and for the time being he was stone-deaf.
He swayed to his knees and tottered toward where the steel grating had been. He recovered rapidly, and was running fairly sure-footedly when he got there.
The grating lay in a twisted mass. Beyond it, the round vault door, two feet thick, was tilted sideways and back in its shattered steel jamb, with space enough for a man to get through.
With frantic haste the man entered the vault. No time for looting, in the real sense of the word. But then he had not had that in mind when he came here.
He sprang without hesitation to one wrenched safety box leaning half out of the wrecked tiers of steel shelves. No time to try to open it, even though the lid was sprung. Anyhow, there was no need to open it. He knew what it held.
An ancient Mexican clay brick, about eight inches long and five wide and three thick.
The box was one of the smaller ones, only about four inches thick. He crammed it under his belt and buttoned his coat over it. He ran to the street door, bare-headed.
There was already a seething jam on the sidewalk. The man unbolted the heavy door, forced it open in its sprung frame, and jumped out. He held his hand over his face, as if the explosion had hurt him. No one seemed to grasp the fact that the gesture also hid his features.
“Police!” he yelled between his fingers. “Fire! The watchman’s lying back in there—”
He ran straight at the crowd.
“Well do something, somebody!” he screamed. “I’m the manager. I want somebody to get the police. Here! Let me through so I can phone them myself.”
The crowd instinctively, witlessly, parted as he ran purposefully for it. He got through. The car, in which he and the manager had come, whirled away from the scene just as the cop on the beat pounded up on one side of the crowd and a squad car turned the corner at the opposite end of the block.
“There’s a man in that wreckage!” cried some woman to the patrolman. “The watchman! The manager just ran out and said he needed help bad—”
The cop ran into the bank. He saw the body of the watchman, hesitated, and then went on to the body of the portly, middle-aged man.
“So the manager ran out, huh!” he blared, looking at the second dead man. “You bunch of dummies! It was the guy that did all this that ran out! The manager’s dead!”
A bank vault blown and the watchman and branch manager murdered! It was quite a few minutes later that the cop and two plainclothes men from the squad car got as far as the second floor — the office of the dentist, Phelps, just above where the vault had been.
The floor of the dentist’s anteroom was blown clear out. A man and two women, waiting there, were in fragments. Beyond the anteroom was the dentist’s office itself. In there had been Dr. Phelps, a pretty girl in white assisting him, and a bald-headed man in the dentist’s chair.
These three were dead, too, though the explosion, by some freak, had scarcely knocked the picture on the wall askew when it made a complete wreck of the anteroom next door.