Bank Shot

14

The railroad-station parking lot had cars in it all night long on weekends, and this was Friday night, so there was no problem. Victor and Herman arrived in Victor’s Packard, parked it and strolled over to the waiting room. This was the Long Island Railroad, which had been the best in the world since November of 1969. The waiting room was open and lit, since late trains came out here from the city on Friday nights, but the ticket office was closed. Victor and Herman wandered around the empty waiting room reading the notices until they saw headlights; then they went back outside.

It was the Javelin, growling contentedly to itself as though it had just eaten a Pinto. Murch was driving and Dortmunder was beside him. Murch slipped the Javelin into a parking space — it was done like a samurai sheathing his sword, the same sense of ceremony — and then he and Dortmunder got out and walked over to join the other two.

Dortmunder said, “Kelp isn’t here yet?”

Victor said, “Do you suppose he had some trouble?”

“Here he comes,” Herman said.

“I wonder what he brought me,” Murch said as the truck headlights made the turn into the parking lot.

The town all around them was fairly well lit but basically empty, like a movie set. Traffic was light to moderate with people homeward bound from their Friday-night outings, and the occasional Nassau County police car was interested in drunken drivers, automobile accidents and potential burglary of downtown stores, not vehicles moving in and out of the railroad-station parking lot.

Kelp pulled to a stop next to the waiting men. His style of driving was in deep contrast with Murch, who seemed to do no physical labor at all but to operate his cars by thought control. Kelp, on the other hand, even after the truck had come to a stop, could still be seen in there for several seconds turning the wheel and shifting the gears, pushing and pulling and shoving and only gradually himself coming to a stop, like a radio that keeps broadcasting for a few seconds after you switch it off, while the tubes cool.

“Well,” said Murch, in the manner of a man withholding judgment but not expecting much.

It was a good-sized truck, a Dodge, with a box about fifteen feet long. The doors and sides carried the company name: Laurentian Paper Mills. In addition, the doors bore the names of two cities: “Toronto, Ontario — Syracuse, New York.” The cab was green, the box dark brown, and it had New York plates. Kelp had left the motor running, and it gug-gugged like any truck engine.

Now, as Kelp opened the door and climbed down to the pavement, carrying a brown shopping bag, Murch said to him, “What was it attracted you to this thing? In particular, I mean.”

“The fact that it was empty,” Kelp said. “We don’t have to unload any paper.”

Murch nodded. “Well,” he said, “it’ll do.”

“There was an International Harvester I saw,” Kelp told him, “with a nice racing stripe on it, but it was full of model cars.”

“This one’ll do,” Murch said.

“If you want, I’ll go back and get that one.”

“No,” Murch said judiciously, “this one will do just fine.”

Kelp looked at Dortmunder and said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever met such an ingrate in my life.”

“Let’s go,” Dortmunder said.

Dortmunder and Kelp and Victor and Herman got up into the back of the truck, and Murch closed the van doors after them. Now the interior was pitch-black. Dortmunder felt his way to the side wall and sat down, as the others were already doing. A second later, the truck lurched forward.

The worst moment was the bump coming out of the parking lot. After that, Murch moved them along pretty smoothly.

In the dark, Dortmunder wrinkled his nose and sniffed. “Somebody’s been drinking,” he said.

Nobody answered.

“I can smell it,” Dortmunder said. “Somebody had a drink.”

“I can smell it, too,” Kelp said. From the sound of his voice, he was just across the way.

Victor said, “Is that what that is? A funny smell, almost sweet.”

Herman said, “Smells like whiskey. Not Scotch, though.”

“Not bourbon either,” Kelp said.

“The question is,” Dortmunder said, “who’s been drinking?” Because it was a very bad idea to drink while out on a job.

“Not me,” Kelp said.

Herman said, “That’s not my style.”

There was a little silence, and suddenly Victor said, “Me? Heck, no!”

Dortmunder, said, “Well, somebody’s been drinking.”

Herman said, “What do you want to do, smell everybody’s breath?”

“I can smell it from here,” Dortmunder said.

“The air is full of it,” Kelp said.

All at once Herman said, “Wait a second. Wait a second, I think I know… Just wait a second.” From the scrambling sound, he was getting to his feet, moving along the wall. Dortmunder waited, squinting his eyes in the darkness but still unable to see a thing.

A thudding. Herman: “Oops.”

Victor: “Ow!”

Herman: “Sorry.”

Victor (garbled a bit, as though he had fingers in his mouth): “That’s okay.”

Then there was a hollow drumming sound, and Herman laughed. “Sure!” he said, obviously pleased with himself. “You know what it is?”

“No,” Dortmunder said. He was getting very irritated that the drinker wouldn’t own up to what he’d done and starting to suspect it was Herman, now trying to distract them all from the question with a lot of foolishness.

Herman said, “It’s Canadian!”

Kelp sniffed loudly and said, “By God, I think you’re right. Canadian whiskey.”

More hollow drumming, and Herman said, “This is a fake wall. Up here behind the cab, it’s a fake wall. We’re in a goddam smuggler’s truck!”

Dortmunder said, “What?”

“That’s where the smell’s coming from, back there. They must have broken a bottle.” Dortmunder said, “Smuggling? Prohibition’s over.”

“By golly, Herman,” Victor said excitedly, “you’ve stumbled on something important!” Never had he sounded more like an FBI man.

Dortmunder said, “Prohibition’s over.”

“Import duties,” Victor explained. “That isn’t directly the Bureau’s responsibility, that’s Treasury’s department, but I do know a bit about it. There are outfits like this strung all across the border. They smuggle Canadian whiskey into the States and American cigarettes up into Canada, and they make a pretty profit in both directions.”

“Well, I’ll be,” said Kelp.

“Uncle,” Victor said, “where exactly did you get this truck?”

Kelp said, “You’re not in the Bureau any more, Victor.”

“Oh,” Victor said. He sounded slightly confused. Then he said, “Of course not. I was just wondering.”

“In Greenpoint.”

“Of course,” Victor said musingly. “Down by the piers.”

There was another thud, and Herman cried, “Ouch! Son of a bitch!”

Dortmunder called, “What happened?”

“Hurt my thumb. But I figured out how to get it open.”

Kelp said, “Any whiskey in there?”

Dortmunder said warningly, “Wait a minute.”

“For later,” Kelp said.

A match flared. They could see Herman leaning through a narrow partition in the front wall, holding the match ahead of himself so they could make him out only in silhouette.

“Cigarettes,” Herman said. “About half full of cigarettes.”

Kelp said, “True?”

“Swear to God.”

“What brand?”

“L and M.”

“No,” Kelp said. “I’m not mature enough for them.”

“Wait, there’s some others. Uhhh, Salem.”

“No. I feel like a dirty old man when I try to smoke a Salem. Springtime fresh and all, girls in covered bridges.”

“Virginia Slims.”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s May’s brand,” Dortmunder said. “I’ll take some of them with me.”

Kelp said, “I thought May got them free at the store.”

“That’s right, she does.”

“Ow,” Herman said, and the match went out. “Burned my finger.”

“You better sit down,” Dortmunder told him. “You’re choppin’ up your hands pretty good for somebody’s gonna open some locks.”

“Right,” Herman said.

They rode along in silence awhile, and then Herman said, “You know, it really stinks in here.”

Kelp said, “Everything happens to me. I looked at this truck, it said ‘paper’ on the side, I figured it would be nice and clean and neat.”

“It really smells bad,” Herman said.

“I wish Murch wouldn’t jounce so much,” Victor said. He sounded small and distant.

Dortmunder said, “How come?”

“I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Wait,” Dortmunder urged him. “It’s only a little farther.”

“It’s the smell,” Victor said miserably. “And the jouncing.”

“I’m beginning to feel that way, too,” Kelp said. He didn’t sound healthy.

Now that the idea had been suggested, Dortmunder too was starting to feel queasy. “Herman,” he said, “maybe you ought to rap on the front wall, signal Murch to stop a minute.”

“I don’t think I can get up,” Herman said. He too was sounding very unhappy.

Dortmunder swallowed. Then he swallowed again. “Just a little longer,” he said in a strangled voice and kept on swallowing.

Up front, Murch drove along in blissful ignorance. He was the one who’d found this place, and he’d worked out the fastest and smoothest route to reach it. Now he saw it, up ahead, the tall green fence around the yard, surmounted by the sign reading, “Lafferty’s Mobile Homes — New, Used, Rebuilt, Repaired.” He slowed to a stop in the darkness just beyond the main entrance, got out of the truck, walked around to the back, opened the doors, and they shot out of there like they’d been locked in with a lion.

Murch said, “Wha …” but there wasn’t anybody to ask; they’d all run across the road to the fields on the other side, and though he couldn’t see them, the sounds they were making reminded him of clambakes. The endings of clambakes.

Puzzled, he looked into the interior of the truck, but it was too dark to see anything in there. “What the hell,” he said, making it a statement because there was nobody around to ask a question of, and walked back up to the cab. In his usual check of the glove compartment he’d seen a flashlight, which he now got and carried back to the rear of the truck. When Dortmunder came stumbling across the road again, Murch was playing the light around the empty inside of the truck and saying, “I don’t get it.” He looked at Dortmunder. “I give up,” he said.

“So do I,” said Dortmunder. He looked disgusted. “If I ever tie up with Kelp again, may I be put away. I swear to God.”

Now the others were coming back. Herman was saying, “Boy, when you go out to steal a truck, you pick a real winner.”

“Is it my fault? Can I help it? Read the truck for yourself.”

“I don’t want to read the truck,” Herman said. “I never want to see the truck again.”

“Read it,” Kelp insisted. He went over and banged the side. “It says paper! That’s what it says!”

“You’re gonna wake everybody in the neighborhood,” Herman said.

“It says paper,” Kelp whispered.

Murch said to Dortmunder quietly, “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me about this.”

“Ask me tomorrow,” Dortmunder said.

Victor came back last, rubbing his face and mouth with a handkerchief. “Wow,” he said. “Wow. That was worse than tear gas.” He wasn’t smiling at all.

Murch shone the flashlight around the inside of the truck one last time, and then shook his head and said, “I don’t care. I don’t even want to know.” Still, on the way back up to the cab, he did pause to read the side of the truck, and Kelp had been absolutely right; it said “paper.” Murch, looking put-upon, got into the cab again and shut the door behind him. “Don’t tell me,” he muttered.

Meanwhile the other four, also looking put-upon, were getting their gear from inside the truck; they’d traveled light the first time out of it. Herman had a black bag similar to the kind doctors used to carry, back when they made house calls. Dortmunder got his leather jacket and Kelp got his shopping bag.

They all went from the truck over to the fence, where Kelp, looking pained, reached into the shopping bag and pulled out half a dozen cheap steaks, one at a time, and threw them over the fence. The others all faced the other way, and Kelp’s nose wrinkled at the smell of food, but he didn’t complain. Very quickly after he started throwing the steaks over, they heard the Doberman pinschers arrive on the other side and start snarling among themselves as they gobbled the meat. Murch had counted four of them in his daytime visit here; the other two steaks were just in case he’d missed a couple.

Now Herman carried his black bag over to the broad wooden gate in the fence, hunkered down over the several different locks, opened the bag and went to work. For quite a while, the only sound in the darkness was the tiny clink of Herman’s tools.

The idea was, this operation must not exist. The people who worked at Lafferty’s Mobile Homes were not to realize tomorrow morning that they’d been burgled tonight. This meant that Dortmunder and the others couldn’t just bust through the locks but had to open them in such a way that they would still be usable afterward.

While Herman worked, Dortmunder and Kelp and Victor sat on the ground nearby, their backs against the green wooden fence. Gradually their breathing grew more regular and they got some flesh tone back in their faces. None of them spoke, though once or twice Kelp looked on the verge of a declamation. However, he didn’t deliver it.

This part of Long Island, quite a distance out from the city, was semi-rural between the patches of housing developments. The private estates were on the north side; down here, junkyards, car dealers, small assembly plants and Little League baseball diamonds were interspersed amid weedy fields and off-brand gas stations. There were housing developments within a mile of here in three different directions, but no residences in this particular area at all.

“All right,” Herman said quietly.

Dortmunder looked along the fence. The gate was hanging slightly open, and Herman was putting his tools away in his black bag. “Okay,” Dortmunder said, and he and the others got to their feet. They all went inside and pushed the gate closed behind them.

Murch had made the right count on the dogs; all four of them were sound asleep, and two of them were snoring. They would wake up in an hour or so with a splitting headache, but the Lafferty’s people wouldn’t be likely to notice anything tomorrow morning, since dogs like this never do have much by way of a sweet disposition.

The interior of Lafferty’s looked like an abandoned city on the moon. If it hadn’t been for the big boxes of the mobile homes spaced here and there, it would have been an ordinary junkyard, with its piles of used parts, some mounds of chrome reflecting the dim light and other mounds of grimy dark machinery parts like a wrecked spaceship a thousand years after the crash. But the mobile homes looked almost like houses, with their high walls and their narrow windows and doors, and the way they were canted and leaning here and there around the lot made it look as though this city had been abandoned after an earthquake.

There were floodlights mounted on fairly high poles around and about, but they were so broadly scattered that most of the interior was in a kind of fitful semi-darkness. However, there was enough light to see the paths through the rubble, and Dortmunder had been here with Murch yesterday afternoon, so he knew what spot to head for. The others followed him as he walked straight up the main road, gravel crunching under their feet, and then made a right turn at a pile of chrome window frames and headed straight for a mountain of wheels.

Victor suddenly said, “You know what this is like?” When nobody responded, he answered his own question, saying, “It’s like those stories where people suddenly shrink and get very small. And here we are on the toymaker’s bench.”

Undercarriages. Stacked up higher than their heads, and spreading out sloppily to left and right, were dozens of undercarriages salvaged from defunct mobile homes. Over to the right was another pile of separate wheels, without their tires — to follow Victor’s toymaker analogy, the stack of round metal wheels looked like markers in some board game similar to checkers — but it was the complete undercarriages that Dortmunder had in mind. These too were minus tires but were otherwise complete — the two wheels, the axle, the metal framework to attach the whole thing to the bottom of a trailer.

Dortmunder was wearing his leather jacket now, and from the pocket he took a metal tape measure. Murch had given him minimum and maximum dimensions, both in width and height, and Dortmunder started with the easiest undercarriages, the ones off to the side of the main heap.

Most, it turned out, were too small, generally in the way of being too narrow, though Dortmunder did find one good set among those just lying on the ground. Kelp and Herman rolled that one away from the rest, so they could keep track of it, and then all four of them started dismantling the hill of undercarriages, Dortmunder measuring each one as they got it down. The damn things were very heavy, being totally metal, and for the same reason made a lot of noise.

Finally another set came within the usable range of measurements, and that too was set aside. Then they rebuilt the hill — aside from being heavy and loud, the undercarriages were also all dirty and grimy, so that by now all four men were heavily grease-smeared — and when they were done Dortmunder stepped back, panting, and surveyed their work. It looked just about the same as before, the removal of two sets of wheels not changing the appearance of the pile in any significant way.

All that remained now was to roll the undercarriages down to the gate and out. They pushed them along, Dortmunder and Kelp on one and Victor and Herman on the other, and they clattered and banged and made one hell of a lot of noise. It disturbed the dogs, who groaned and moved around in their sleep but didn’t quite wake up.

Murch was standing by the open rear of the truck when they came out. He had the flashlight in his hand again, but tucked it away in his jacket pocket when he saw them. “I heard you coming,” he said.

They were still rolling the wheels over from the gate to the truck. “What?” shouted Dortmunder, over the racket.

“Forget it,” Murch said.

“What?”

“Forget it!”

Dortmunder nodded.

They loaded the wheels into the back of the truck, and then Dortmunder said to Murch, “I’ll ride up front with you.”

“So will I,” Herman said very fast.

“We all will,” Kelp said, and Victor said, “Darn right.” Murch looked at them all. “You can’t fit five people up there,” he said.

“We’re going to,” Dortmunder said.

“It’s a floor shift.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kelp said.

Herman said, “We’ll manage.”

“It’s against the law,” Murch said. “Two people in the front seat of a floor-shift vehicle, no more. That’s the law. What if a cop stops us?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dortmunder said. He and the others turned and headed for the cab, leaving Murch to shut the rear doors. Murch did and came around to the left side of the cab to find the other four all jammed into the passenger seat like college students in a phone booth. He shook his head, made no comment, and stepped up behind the wheel.

The only real problem was when he tried to shift into fourth; there seemed to be six or seven knees in that spot. “I have to shift into fourth now,” he said, speaking with the even patience of somebody who has decided he isn’t going to run amok after all, and a lot of grunting and grumbling took place from the mass beside him as it retracted all its knees, leaving him just enough room to move the shift lever into high.

Fortunately, there weren’t many traffic lights on the route he’d worked out, so he didn’t have to change gears very often. But the jumble beside him gave a four-throated groan every time they went over a bad bump.

“I am trying to figure out,” Murch said conversationally at one point, frowning out the windshield as he spoke, “how this up here can be better than that back there.” But he wasn’t surprised when no one answered him, and he didn’t repeat the remark.

The bankrupt computer-parts factory that Dortmunder and Kelp had found was at last up ahead on the left. Murch drove in there and around to the loading platform at the back, and they all got out again. Herman got his bag of tools from the interior of the truck, unlocked the loading platform door, and by the light of Murch’s flashlight they cleared enough space in the rubble for the two sets of wheels. Then Herman locked the place up again.

When it was time to go, they found Murch walking around the interior of the truck, shining his flashlight in the corners. “We’re ready,” Kelp told him.

Murch frowned at them, all four standing on the loading platform looking in at him. “What’s that funny smell?” he said.

“Whiskey,” Kelp said.

“Canadian whiskey,” Herman said.

Murch gave them a long look. “I see,” he said very coldly. He switched off the flashlight, came out onto the platform and shut the rear doors. Then they all got into the cab again, Murch on the left and everybody else on the right, and headed back for where they’d left their cars. Kelp would bring the truck back to where he’d picked it up.

They drove for ten minutes of grunting silence, and then Murch said, “You didn’t offer me any.”

“What?” said the hodgepodge beside him.

“Never mind,” Murch said, aiming at a pothole. “It doesn’t matter.”