Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1964

The Pink Envelope by Allen Kim Lang

Controversy surrounds the determination of just which of life’s lessons is the most difficult to learn. As our hero can firmly attest, much depends upon the teacher.

No doubt it scandalizes you to have the ex-President of the famed Hayden Street Social & Athletic Club begging you to purchase a pair of tickets at one buck a head to the fabulous dance we’re sponsoring at Braustein’s Basement next Saturday night, music live by the Katzenjammer Six; so I’d better explain how I got a knife in my back in the subway.

As President of the Hayden Street Social & Athletic Club, I’d called my battle-staff together to discuss our most pressing problems, which was fiscal. “A little loot in our kitty,” as Brother Squint phrased it, “would give the Club a new leash on life.”

“I say we ought to hold a dance,” Thing said. “How does the Junior League keep in beer money and postage? They hold society dances, that’s how.” He pushed his box of cigars over for me to open it and take the first one out. I shook a green Corona out of its torpedo, unwrapped the redwood from around it, punched a hole in its tail with a kitchen match, and lit up. I’d as soon not smoke cigars, but as President I had to hold with tradition.

“Dances,” Mouse groaned. His voice had lately changed from squeak to gravel, but it was still fine for snide remarks. “You know what’ll happen, if we sponsor a stupid dance?”

“Lend us the fruits of your wisdom, Brother Mouse,” I invited, granting him the floor.

“OK,” he said. “We get the Acme Print Shop to run us off five hundred tickets. That’s twenty bucks. We tell the Katzenjammers we want ’em to bugle and boom for six hours. They get twenty-five apiece and free beer, which comes to a hundred and a half, plus. We rent a hall. Fifty. Buy ice for beer and soft drinks, on which we won’t make a nickel, since there’s freeloaders besides the band, and you can’t watch everybody. Twenty bucks. So far, we got two hundred and fifty dollars clear, figuring that we sell all the tickets, which we’ll have to lean on people to buy. But what happens when the music starts?”

“What happens?” Squint asked.

“There’s one of our guys starts cutting it up with a doll from Lewiston High,” Mouse said, “and her date thinks our man is moving too close, and he smashes a bottle. The juve squad comes roaring up to cool our rumble, and we get fined twenty-five a head. This dance of Brother Thing’s, I figure, will cost the Hayden Street S&A about eight hundred dollars. Prez, I say we can’t afford that sort of jive.”

“Always knocking,” Thing observed. “Mouse, you get under my nerves.”

“We’re discussing finances,” I said, “and we know the Mouse is a Bernard Baruch from ’way back.”

“OK, financial wizard,” Thing said. “If we don’t raise the dough we need on a dance, how do we get it?”

“Well...” Squint pondered. “We could maybe learn by heart the wanted posters in the Post Office and turn crooks in for rewards.”

“That suggestion is not, Squint, the high level of thought I’ve come to expect from the personnel at this table,” I said. “I would guess there are not more than fifty men in this city with prices on their heads; and as wanted criminals they will hardly be roaming the streets as living temptation to our membership. Try again.”

“How’s come you’re always stomping on my ideas, Prez, when you never hatch one out yourself?” Squint demanded.

“Hear, hear!” Thing shouted.

Mouse wished to speak, but he had accidentally inhaled smoke from his cigar, and was coughing like a flooded outboard.

I banged my gavel. “The function of the Chairman,” I said, “is to assure the right of each and every member of this battle-staff to speak according to parliamentary procedure, and not to show off his personal brains.”

“Who told you so?” Squint asked. “I bet it was Heavy Hanna Henniker, scourge of English-12B.”

“Firstly, it is not fitting to refer to a splendid teacher’s slight overweight,” I said. “Secondly, we are here, gentlemen, to guide the destinies of our famed club, and not to take violent issue with each other.”

“I still say the Prez should come up with a gimmick of his own,” Squint said. “This thing of him knocking my schemes without he’s got any is a bone I got to pitch with him.”

“You want an idea,” I said. “OK, I’ll toss one out. For what is the Hayden Street Social & Athletic Club best known?”

Brother Thing, who is six feet tall and weighs a hundred pounds dressed for blizzards, said, “Handsome men.”

“Parliamentary procedure!” Squint shouts out.

“We’re the biggest S&A Club this side of the Sanitary Canal,” the Mouse suggested.

“It’s a good thing school starts next month,” I said, “because it is evident to the meanest intellect that the grey matter involved at this table during the past few minutes is in dire need of formal training.” I pushed the box of cigars, minus the four we were burning, toward the center of the table. “Brother Thing, where did you get these weeds?”

“I thieved them, Prez, as well you know,” Thing said. “I got a couple of the Club’s juniors to stage a diversion in front of Sieve’s Smoke Shop, and seeped in behind the counter while Big Steve was making peace with his broom handle.”

“Squint, where did this table come from?” I asked.

“It was on the stage of the school auditorium when you said we needed it,” he said. “I got eight of the membership and moved it downstairs and out the street door during lunch period.”

“And my gavel?” I asked.

“You swiped that from the Junior Chamber of Commerce,” Mouse told me, “right after they gave you that fifteen dollar check for the best extemporaneous speech on the topic, What I Believe.”

“As Miss Henniker might say, Q.E.D.,” I said. “We are thieves, are we not?”

“Clever ones,” the Mouse boasted.

“Never busted once,” Squint pointed out.

“And never made a dime off it,” Thing said, always eager to stone the bluebirds.

“That’s all over now,” I said. “The most skilled boosters this side of the Sanitary Canal...”

“... either side,” Squint said.

“... will refresh their treasury at public expense,” I said. “We will pull off a job that will go down in history with the Brinks Robbery.”

“Prez, do you recollect where the guys that pulled that caper are hanging out their laundry nowadays?” Thing asked. “For a hint, I’ll tell you they’re wearing numbers on their backs.”

“They were not smart as we will be,” I predicted.

“Smart ain’t everything,” Squint said.

“I can picture us holding our first battle-staff meeting after your big project in the Recreation Room at the State Reformatory for Boys,” Thing said.

“If you gentlemen have got thin blood, nothing more need be discussed,” I said. “We can send the juniors and the girls’ auxiliaries out to swipe empty pop bottles, which we will sell for the two-cent deposits; and never mind that we are the laughing stock of the city’s younger set.”

“I move that the Prez be required to give us the details of his epoch-making heist,” the Mouse said. “We can give it our considered thought, that way, before we vote it down.”

“I second the movement,” Brother Squint said. “Tell us what’s on your mind, Prez.”

“It is simple,” I said. “We will rob a train.”

“Maybe I do have thin blood, after all,” Mouse remarked. “I’d as soon keep it bottled up inside me, though, and not spill it over any railroad tracks now, or any time.”

“I hope you propose to give our business to the Pennsylvania or the B&O, and not one of the short-haul outfits,” Thing said. “Shall I pick us out a railroad from the Dunn & Bradstreet?”

“Some people could not notice a brilliant notion if it bit them in the thigh,” I said.

“This one’s got teeth,” Squint admitted. “I think maybe the Club needs more practice swiping small stuff before we hold any train robberies, Prez.”

“As my old English teacher back in freshman year, Miss Hanna Henniker, used to say,” I quoted, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

“Is she going to be in on this caper?” Squint asked.

I ignored him. “Listen to my plan,” I said, and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper on which to draw diagrams and list the equipment we’d need to make my dream a rich reality.

I had hoped to keep the secret plans of the train robbery among the senior members of the Hayden Street Social & Athletic Club; but hardly anyone outside the Girls’ Auxiliary knew how to sew well enough to make masks that didn’t droop, and the juniors were the only ones who could use the band-saw at the YMCA to turn out our artillery. As Miss Henniker once said, talking about poetic imagery, when you toss a pebble into a pool, the ripples go out to the furthest verge. Twenty of the juniors, whose fare is cheap, rode trains every day, for instance, counting people in each car and timing the ride between each stop with watches our track team had lifted from the coach’s locker at school.

The choice of the railroad to rob, I admit, was a lightning stroke of genius. We were going to hold up the subway.

There have been said things about Dwight D. Eisenhower in my hearing that suggest disrespect. Now, though, after I have myself borne the burden of command, of building an organization into a tight-knit machine, of maintaining security from the enemy (i.e., our parents and the fuzz) till H- Hour of D-Day, I feel the closest kinship with that man.

But, “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,” as Miss Henniker used to say when mentioning her dream to retire and write lyric poetry in rural Mexico. It was my task to x-ray out the flaws in our project before committing my forces; to impress my troops with the need for post-caper silence (I shuddered to think of one of the younger kids compromising the entire membership, for instance, by maybe writing his first essay after school began on, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”). Moreover, I had to plan so as to avoid bloodshed, which must be a consideration in any major crime, such as ours would be.

My lieutenants and I synchronized our watches and took off at noon on D-Day to take up our positions along the Quigly Avenue Line. We were to board the train we’d picked from stops in the east and the central parts of the city, so as not to alert the Subway employees by a sudden rush of riders they did not recognize.

In each man’s pocket was a silk mask and a wooden pistol, the former lovingly stitched by the girls of the Auxiliary, the latter blackened and polished to a high gloss with lubricating graphite from a lock greaser. We had each made the trip on the Quigly Avenue Line many times, and knew the route better than the track crews.

At the Quigly Avenue Station, our underground contingent was disposing itself for its part in the operation. Boys had gathered outside the entrance, above ground, and had clustered beside the newsstand downstairs by the turnstiles. Several lurked on the platform, as though waiting for our train, having spent the last few pennies of the club’s treasury on their fares. In charge of this last group, whose function it would be to tangle up the legs of any pursuers, was the Mouse. He had explained to me that he had troubles getting train sick.

Rattling along in the three-car train, my still-naked face hidden behind a copy of the evening paper, I felt queasy myself, like an infantryman in a landing craft off foreign shores. Each car in the train was occupied by three or more of my best men. We had practiced every step of the robbery so many times we could do it in our sleep. I had nothing to worry about. I kept repeating that in my mind.

The wooden gun in my hip pocket felt big as a water-cooled machine gun, but it didn’t have enough weight to have real authority. I felt like in one of these dreams where you’re standing on a table in the school cafeteria, set to make a speech, and discover all at once you’re only wearing undershorts. Insecure. I felt sure some joker would laugh as I stuck my phony pistol in his belly, and that he’d bust my wrist taking the gun away from me.

Fortunately, my troops were unaware of their leader’s pusillanimous (that’s one of Miss Henniker’s favorite words) thoughts.

The train slowed through the tunnel that led out to the Quigly Avenue Station. My cue. I worked the wooden gat and my silk mask out of my pockets, crinkling the newspaper as if I wanted to call attention. I looked at my watch. I glanced up to make sure that the red “EMERGENCY ONLY” lever was within reach of my right hand.

As they say in the military, the balloon was up, the minute our train started out of the station. We wanted the first two cars nosed into the far tunnel, and the rear door of my car the only exit to the Quigly Avenue Station. Our G-2 had established that the next train was due here in four minutes, which would give us time to collect our booty and cut out to the streets and alleys upstairs before the trainmen knew they’d been played for patsies.

I strapped on my mask and reached up, still huddled behind my newspaper, to the Emergency lever. The lights of the platform slid past. “Geronimo!” I whispered, and grabbed hold.

The train squealed to a stop just where we’d put: it in our battle-staff blueprints. I dropped the paper and jumped to my feet, the wooden gun pointed at the left side of the car. Brother Thing, working this car with me, covered my side. “Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt,” Thing yelled. Very good.

“This is a stickup,” I added.

“Hallowe’en,” a woman across the aisle remarked, “is the end of October. Isn’t it early for trick-or-treat?”

“Just for cracking wise, you’re first,” Squint said through his mask. Squint was bagman for this car, and had his shopping bag at the ready. “Let’s have that purse, Lady,” he said.

“I should say not,” she snapped.

“What’s going on here?” the conductor demanded, sliding through the door from the car ahead. “Who bought that sudden stop for fifty bucks, or don’t you know there’s a fine for fooling with the emergency?”

“Cool it,” I said, walking up close enough to the conductor so that he can see my gun clearly, but not so close that he will recognize that it’s made out of the ends of orange-crates.

Squint snatched the stubborn woman’s purse from off her lap and was rifling through it while she swatted at his head with a folded newspaper. Squint wasn’t flustered. He eased the bills out of her wallet into his shopping bag, then dropped the billfold on the deck near the woman’s feet. We had this idea, that anyone would be so anxious to get back his wallet, even empty, that they’d ignore us for a few seconds while they picked it up. “Divide and conquer,” as Miss Henniker has said.

People were yelling around in the two cars ahead of us. We had a good man (Axe) guarding the motorman, the toughest position besides mine, since he’d have to be the last man out to the platform; but I wondered from the noise whether the folks up front had caught on that our guns didn’t have any guts to them.

I shouldn’t have bothered to worry. Planning is everything. Iron-mouth, bagman for Car 1, came rushing out the sliding doors with his shopping bag swinging behind him. His two gunmen were right with him. “Clean sweep in One,” Brother Iron-mouth reported, and triggered the conductor’s switch to open the doors. They slicked open, and the first three members of our gang scattered across the platform. The juniors, waiting outside to run interference for the train team, weren’t busy yet. No one outside our three cars had realized that they were witnessing one of the boldest daylight robberies of all time.

Crisco, bagman for Car 2, reported through with his two gunsels and scampered toward the escalator and daylight. Our turn was next, with luck on our side.

Squint was finishing the looting of our car. “Take off the watch, Mister,” he said. Standing behind Squint, Thing shook his wooden pistol. The man stripped the watch into the shopping bag. They walked back, then, to give their attention to a plump lady who was clutching a beaded purse. “Everybody contributes, Madame,” Squint said, bowing and opening the shopping bag by her knees. Glaring, the woman dumped her change-purse into the bag and let half a dozen bills follow the silver into our treasury.

Then I recognized our latest victim. “Let’s clear,” I said.

“I left nothing here,” Squint agreed, and peeled out the door.

Thing and I backed away. Two men were left in the train besides us, Axe, guarding the motorman, and King Kong, who covered Axe. They eased towards us, walking backwards as soft-footed as tiger tamers in the cage. “Let’s orbit, Prez,” King Kong said, looking like a ’30’s movie menace, all jowls and stubbled beard.

“I’m with you,” I said. I had to be the last man out of the train, of course, or I’d lose face.

What I lost was worse. “Let’s see what Jesse James looks like without his didy,” said the woman who’d given us the rough time at the first. She reached up and, as I turned to dive out to the platform after King Kong, tugged loose my mask.

And as I jumped to freedom, the mask dangling off one ear like I was Ben Casey on his way to the coffee shop after a rugged craniotomy, the fat lady near the front of the car stared me in the eyes.

She was Miss Hanna Henniker, my old freshman English teacher.

I trotted up to Squint and tossed my mask, wadded around my wooden gun, on top of the goodies in his shopping bag.

“Piece of cake,” Brother Squint said, grinning. He’d got that from a Limey movie I guess.

“Yeah,” I said. We double timed up the escalator and scooted across Quigly Avenue. A siren sounded off past the intersection. We’d timed it perfect.

“The best laid plans of mice and men,” as Miss Henniker often pointed out, can lay an egg. Who would guess that she’d be aboard the one train in the city at the one time I was robbing it, and a wise broad pulled off my mask?

I should have grown whiskers for the job, I thought, running down the alley behind Steve’s Smoke Shop. I should have worn one of those masks that fit over your whole head, and come off hard as rubber gloves. It was bitter. Of all the membership of the Hayden Street Social & Athletic Club, only the President had shown his face to his public.

The juniors and the gunmen cut out to establish alibis at movies, home, or swimming-pools. My battle-staff and the bagmen rendezvoused at the clubhouse, where we’d planned to critique our operation and count the take.

Iron-mouth, Crisco and Squint dumped out their shopping bags on the meeting table. “Careful with them watches,” Mouse said.

“If they ain’t shockproof, we don’t want ’em,” Squint explained.

What a mess of loot!

Fourteen hundred dollars, it came to, with a lot of silver. We had twenty-three watches, a camera, and a package Crisco’d picked up on a hunch that held four packs of cards and a red plastic canasta tray.

“On the nose, one thousand four hundred and eighty-three dollars and twenty-four cents,” Treasurer Mouse announced.

“Don’t that beat shuffling around in a stupid dance in Braustein’s Basement?” Thing asked, safe now on the winning side.

“I may have been recognized by one of the passengers,” I said. I picked up the camera to examine it.

My brothers were silent quite a while. Nobody felt like talking.

Then Mouse spoke. “We know you’re no fink, Prez,” he said.

“We’ll bring cigarettes,” Squint said.

“She may not report me,” I told them. “We’d better hold onto the money and other junk for a while, just to be on the safe side. Push comes to shove, we can always chicken out with restitution.”

“Who was it that made you, Prez?” Thing asked.

“Remember the fat woman in the flowered dress?” I asked. “The one with the purse knitted out of beads?” Thing nodded. “Well, that was Miss Henniker, my old English teacher.”

“If I’d knew that,” Squint said, “I’d of asked her for her autograph. Way you talk, she’s pretty famous.”

“Great,” Mouse said. “We’re home free and gone as geese with a bundle like young Fort Knox, except our Prez had to stop and smile at his freshman teach.”

“That fresh dame pulled my mask off,” I explained.

“Don’t fight about it,” Crisco advised. “If the Prez got made, we’d better split.”

“We’ll play it safe,” Mouse said. He rubber-banded the bills into a stack the size of a pregnant brickbat and tossed it into one of our shopping bags, together with the camera and the watches and the canasta set. “I’ll stash our winnings somewhere safe till the heat cools on Prez,” he said.

“Maybe Miss Henniker has forgotten my name,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t recognize me.”

“I lay my share of this loot on no sucker bets,” Mouse said. He hefted the bag and toted it upstairs into the evening.

“How do we know Brother Mouse is safe with all that temptation?” Thing whispered to Squint.

“He’s treasurer, ain’t he?” Squint asked. He rubbed his nose. “All the same, now you bring it up, maybe we’d better get Mouse bonded before our next job.”

That was Friday evening. I didn’t sleep that night for waiting for the phone to ring, inviting me down to the show-up room at the Precinct House, or fuzz fists beating at my old man’s door. Saturday I spent sinking into doorways every time a factory whistle blew, and freezing when I heard the bells play on a Merry Mobile ice cream truck. I came out of my clutch pretty well by Sunday; and on Monday morning I shoved down the hatch enough calories for a team of tag wrestlers. “The condemned man,” as Miss Henniker used to say when she passed out paper for a test, “ate a hearty meal.”

Because there was this letter in the mailbox with my name on it a few hours later, in a pink envelope with PERSONAL printed big below the address. I got the letter out of the box before my mother saw it (she could be the Hayden Street operative of the Central Intelligence Agency), and went up to the roof to get the news.

“Dear Norman,” the letter began.

Who called me Norman, except teachers? Only the draft board. I hoped this was the Army calling me.

The letter went on. “I was shocked to recognize as one of the hooligans holding up the Quigly Avenue subway train last Friday evening a boy for whom I’d predicted better things.” I could hear her voice, reading this to me. Hefty Henniker, without a doubt. “My duty as a citizen is obviously to impart my knowledge to the authorities,” she went on. I moaned, and read further. “However, rather than interrupt what I am certain will be a splendid career, Norman, I will be satisfied if you and your companions mail to me (Registered, please) all the money and other goods stolen in your little adventure. I will see that proper disposition is made of your ‘loot’, and promise that your name will not enter the picture if you do the Right Thing. Should I fail to receive this parcel by Wednesday morning, Norman, I will (more in sorrow than in anger) telephone the police and tell them the identity of the ‘Brains’ behind the train robbery. Yours very sincerely,” and she finished with her name, (Miss) Hanna Henniker, and her address.

I convened the battle staff to arrange our surrender. “Who’s President of this lash-up?” I asked, opening the meeting.

“You are,” Brother Thing said. “Maybe we need a fresh election,” Mouse said, clutching his shopping bag to his lap.

“If you were a cop, and picked me up, who would you finger for my partners in crime?” I asked. “Be reasonable. Hips Henniker hasn’t only got me nailed to the wall, she’s got the whole Hayden Street Social & Athletic Club under her heel.”

“You mean you’d fink?” Squint asked me.

“I wouldn’t have to,” I said. “You’d be in cells right down the hall to mine in fifteen minutes, even if I didn’t give the johns anything but name, rank, and serial number.”

“How would they prove that we were anywheres near the subway when the heist came off?” Thing demanded.

“Fingerprints,” I said. “We must have left some prints on the wallets and that other stuff we handled.”

“Now the Presidential mind is perking,” Mouse said. “Five days late, true; but it’s perking.” He set the shopping bag on the meeting table. “We’ll all watch you, Prez, while you wrap it up; then we’ll walk you down to the Post Office to mail it,” he said.

“Thank you for your unquestioning trust, Brother Mouse,” I said. “For the benefit of the other brethren, I suggest we audit the take before we ship it back to its original owners.”

Believe me, a grand and a half plus enough gadgets to stock a hockshop isn’t the easiest package to watch a civil servant stamp and toss into the Registered Mail sack.

As the mail went out, I walked home alone, figuring in my head that my crime of the century, which lacked only my talent for keeping a rag over my snout, had cost me twenty bucks personal money.

We had two more meetings that week. One was to bounce me out as Prez (Brother Thing got the gavel and First Cigar); the other was to plan for that stupid dance. I was delegated to get the tickets printed, which I hope you’ll buy two or more of, one dollar contribution each, now you know the whole story behind our money raising projects.

Almost the whole story.

The rest I haven’t told the membership of the Hayden Street Social & Athletic Club, even. Maybe I never will.

It was this letter, pink envelope, “PERSONAL” and all, with a foreign stamp, that I got this morning. The postmark said San Juan Del Monte, Morelos, Mexico.

Inside was this snapshot of Miss Henniker, standing in the sunshine and smiling. “Dear Norman,” began the note she’d written on the back of her photo. “My lyric poetry will, I believe, flourish splendidly in these salubrious climes. Give my thanks to your companions, and ‘Put not thy trust in Woman.’ ” She signed it, Sincerely.

So come on, buddy, take a couple tickets. That Katzenjammer Six is no New York Philharmonic, but I guarantee they’re loud.