Bank Shot

17

At this hour on a Thursday night there were three police dispatchers on duty down at the station house. They sat in a row at a long continuous table, each one equipped with three telephones and a two-way radio, all three facing a big square panel of lights built into the opposite wall. The panel was four feet on a side, edged with a wooden frame, and looked like the kind of thing hung in the Museum of Modern Art. Against a flat black background, sixteen rows of sixteen frosted red bulbs stuck out, each with a number painted on it in white. At the moment none of the bulbs were lit, and the composition might have been titled “Tail Lights at Rest.”

At 1:37 A.M. a tail light lit up — number fifty-two. At the same time, a very annoying buzzing sound started, as though it were time to get out of bed.

The dispatchers worked in strict sequence, to avoid confusion, and this squeal — which was what the fuzz called the buzz — was the property of the man on the left, who pushed a button that stopped the noise, at the same time saying, “Mine.” Then, while his left hand reached for one of the phones and his right hand switched the radio to send, he quickly glanced at the typewritten list on the table in front of him, under a piece of glass, and saw that number fifty-two was the temporary branch of Capitalists’ & Immigrants’ Trust.

“Car nine,” he said, while with his left hand, still holding the phone receiver, he dialed the number seven, which was the captain’s office, currently occupied by the senior man on duty, Lieutenant Hepplewhite.

Car nine was the regular patrol car past the bank, and tonight the men on duty were Officers Bolt and Echer. Bolt was driving, very slowly, and had driven past the bank just five minutes ago, not long before Joe Mulligan was dealt his three sixes.

Echer, the passenger right now, was the one who answered the call, unhooking the mike from under the dashboard, depressing the button in its side, saying, “Car nine here.”

“Alarm at C and I bank, Floral Avenue and Tenzing Street.”

“Which one?”

“It’s on the corner of both of them.”

“Which bank.”

“Oh. The temporary one, the new one, the temporary one.”

“That one, huh?”

Ambling, it had taken five minutes to come this far from the bank. Flat out, siren screaming, red light flashing, it took less than two minutes to get back. In that time, Lieutenant Hepplewhite had been informed and had alerted the men downstairs on standby, who were playing poker as it happened, though nobody had had a full house all night. “The colds are card,” Officer Kretschmann said in disgust at one point, and the others hardly even noticed; he did that kind of thing all the time.

Two other patrol cars, on beats farther away, had also been alerted and were rushing toward the scene. (The standby men alerted at the station house were not as yet rushing toward the scene, though they had stopped playing poker and had put on their jackets and guns; having been alerted, they were standing by.) The dispatcher who had handled the squeal was staying with it, answering no other calls until car nine should report.

“Uhhhh,” said the radio. “Dispatcher?”

“Is this car nine?”

“This is car nine. It isn’t here.”

The dispatcher felt a sudden instant of panic. The trouble wasn’t there? He looked again at the red light, which was still lit even though the buzzer was off, and it was number fifty-two. He looked at his typewritten sheet, and fifty-two was the temporary bank. “Well, it was there,” he said.

“I know it was here,” said car nine. “I saw it only five minutes ago. But it isn’t here now.”

The dispatcher was by now completely bewildered. “You saw it five minutes ago?”

“Last time we went by.”

“Now wait a minute,” the dispatcher said. His voice was rising, and the other two dispatchers looked at him oddly. A dispatcher was supposed to stay calm. “Wait a minute,” the dispatcher repeated. “You knew about this trouble five minutes ago and you didn’t report it?”

“No no no,” car nine said, and another voice behind it said, “Let me have that.” Then it apparently took over the microphone, becoming louder when it said, “Dispatcher, this is Officer Bolt. We are at the scene, and the bank is gone.”

There was silence from the dispatcher for several seconds. On the scene, Officer Bolt stood next to the patrol car, holding the microphone to his mouth. He and Officer Echer both gazed at the place where the bank had been — Officer Echer in a glazed manner, Officer Bolt in an aggravated and brooding manner.

The low concrete block walls were there, but above them was nothing but space. Wind blew through the air where the bank had been; if you squinted, you could almost see the structure standing there, as though it had become invisible but was still present.

To left and right, wires dangled like hair from the telephone and power poles. Two sets of wooden steps led up to the top of the concrete block wall and stopped.

The dispatcher, his voice nearly as thin as the air where the bank had been, finally said, “The bank is gone?”

“That’s right,” Officer Bolt said, nodding in irritation. From far away he could hear more sirens coming. “Some son of a bitch,” he said, “has stole the bank.”