Bank Shot

23

“Oh, I can do it,” Herman said. “That isn’t the question.”

“Tell me the question,” Dortmunder said, “because I’m dying to ask it.”

They had come to rest now. Murch had delivered them to an open slot in the rear of the Wanderlust Trailer Park, a kind of nomadic village far out on Long Island. The owners of the Wanderlust lived elsewhere, in a proper house, and so wouldn’t be aware of the freeloader until tomorrow morning; as for the occupants of the other mobile homes here, some of them might have been awakened by the sound of the truck engine going past their units, but it isn’t unheard of for people to arrive or leave a trailer park in the middle of the night.

Murch had now departed with the truck cab, which he would ditch about fifteen miles from here, at the spot where they’d already stashed the Ford station wagon that would be their getaway car. May and Murch’s Mom had finished giving the place a gloss of hominess, and the idea now was that Herman would have been working on the safe since they’d left the football stadium and would have it open by the time Murch got back with the Ford. Only now Herman was saying he wouldn’t.

“The question,” Herman explained, “is time. This is a newer safe than I’ve seen before. The metal is different, the lock is different, the door is different, everything is different.”

“It’ll take longer,” Dortmunder suggested.

“Yes.”

“We can wait,” Dortmunder said and looked at his watch. “It isn’t even three o’clock yet. Even if we’re out of here by six, six-thirty, we’re still all right.”

Herman shook his head.

Dortmunder turned and looked at May. They were still moving around by the light of flashlights, and it was hard to read May’s expression, but it wasn’t hard at all to read Dortmunder’s. “I been kept out of mischief,” Dortmunder said.

“That’s one thing for sure.”

“Herman,” May said, coming forward, the cigarette bobbing in the corner of her mouth, “Herman, tell us. How bad is it?”

“Lousy,” Herman said.

“How lousy?”

“Terrible lousy. Rotten lousy.”

“How long would it take to open the safe?”

“All day,” Herman said.

“That’s wonderful,” said Dortmunder.

Herman looked at him. “I’m as happy about this as you are. I take pride in my work.”

“I’m sure you do, Herman,” May said. “But the point is, sooner or later you could open it.”

“Given time. The original idea was I’d have all the time I wanted.”

Dortmunder said, “We couldn’t find a place to put this goddam thing under cover. All we could do was this — paint, curtains on the windows, put it in a trailer camp. They’ll find the thing this morning, but we should have it camouflaged enough so we’re clear and home and dry before they do. If we leave no later than six, six-thirty.”

“Then we leave without the cash,” Herman said.

May turned to Dortmunder. “Why do we have to leave?”

“Because they’ll find this thing.”

Murch’s Mom came forward, carrying the flashlights. “Why will they?” she wanted to know. “It’s like The Purloined Letter, we’ve got a trailer hidden in a trailer camp. We’ve changed the color, we put license plates on, we put curtains on the windows. How are they gonna find us?”

“Sometime in the morning,” Dortmunder said, “the owner or the manager of this place will come along, and he’ll know this trailer doesn’t belong here. So he’ll come knock on the door. And then he’ll look inside.” Dortmunder waved an arm to indicate what that owner or manager would see.

Murch’s Mom already knew what the interior looked like, but she obediently flashed her light around anyway and said, “Mmmmm.” Not very encouraging. Mobile homes come in a lot of different styles, colonial and French Provincial and Spanish and Victorian, but no one so far has decided to live in a trailer done up as Suburban Bank.

May squinted past cigarette smoke and said, “What if we pay rent on it?”

They all looked at her. Dortmunder said, “I missed a couple words there, I think.”

“No, listen,” she said. “This slot is empty anyway. You look out that door, you’ll see maybe five other empty slots. So why don’t we just stick with the trailer, and when the owner comes around in the morning we pay him his fees? Pay him his rent for a couple days, a week, whatever he wants.”

Herman said, “That’s not bad.”

“Sure,” Murch’s Mom said. “Then it really is The Purloined Letter. They’ll be looking for us, and looking for the trailer, and we’ll be in the trailer in a trailer camp.”

“I don’t know about puh-purlayed letters, whatever it is,” Dortmunder said. “But I do know about robbery. You don’t — when you knock over a bank, you don’t live in it after you knocked it over, you go away someplace else. I mean that’s just the way it’s done.”

Herman said, “But wait a minute, Dortmunder. We haven’t knocked it over yet. That goddam safe is giving me trouble. And if we stay here, we can hook into the electricity supply, I can use decent tools, I can really do a job on that mother — uh, on that safe.”

Dortmunder frowned, looking around the interior of the bank. “It makes me nervous to stay here,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you, maybe it means I’m old-fashioned, but it makes me nervous.”

May said, “It isn’t like you to give up. It just isn’t your style.”

Dortmunder scratched his head and looked around some more. “I know,” he said. “But this is not a traditional robbery. You go in, you get what you came for, you go away. You don’t set up housekeeping.”

“Just for one day,” Herman said. “Just till I get into that safe.”

Dortmunder kept scratching, then suddenly stopped and said, “What about connecting up? The electricity and the plumbing. When they do it, what if they have to come inside?”

“We don’t need the plumbing,” Murch’s Mom said.

“After a while we will.”

May said, “They have to connect it up; it’s the sanitary laws.”

“There you are,” Dortmunder said.

Herman said, “We’ll do it ourselves.”

Dortmunder looked at him with true annoyance. Everytime he’d safely relegated the idea to the Impossible shelf, somebody had to come along with another suggestion. He said, “What do you mean, do it ourselves?”

“Connect everything up,” Herman said. “You and me and Murch, we can do it ourselves right now. Then it’s all done, and when the manager comes around in the morning Mrs. Murch goes out, or May goes out, somebody, and we pay him off. And if he wants to know how come everything’s already connected up, we tell him we got in late at night, we didn’t want to disturb anybody, so we did it ourselves.”

May said, “You know, if we took this counter apart, and put this piece on top of that piece, and ran it across here, then you could open this door and somebody outside wouldn’t see anything strange at all. Just like a corridor in the trailer.”

Murch’s Mom said, “Down here, we could move this stuff out of the way, and take that chair and that chair and that table, and put them around this way like this, and then somebody could stand outside this door, too, and what would it be?”

“A disaster,” Dortmunder said.

“A breakfast nook,” Murch’s Mom said firmly.

“They can’t search every trailer on Long Island,” Herman said. “They may come around to the trailer parks, the cops —”

“You just know they will,” Dortmunder said.

“But they won’t be looking for a green trailer with Michigan license plates and curtains in the windows and a couple nice middle-aged ladies that answer the door.”

“And what if they say they want to come in?”

“Not now, Officer,” May said, “my sister’s just come out of the shower.”

“Who is it, Myrtle?” Murch’s Mom called in a high falsetto. “Just some police officers,” May called back, “wanting to know if we saw a bank go past here last night.”

Dortmunder said, “You two ladies could get accessory. You could wind up working in a state-pen laundry.”

“Federal pen,” Murch’s Mom said. “Bank robbery is a Federal rap.”

“We’re not worried,” May said. “We’ve got everything figured.”

“I can’t tell you,” Dortmunder said, “how many guys I met behind bars that said the exact same thing.”

Herman said, “Well, I’m going to stay, that’s all. That goddam safe is a challenge to me.”

“We’re all going to stay,” May said. She looked at Dortmunder. “Aren’t we?”

Dortmunder sighed.

“Somebody coming,” Herman said.

Murch’s Mom doused the flashlights, and the only illumination was the red glow of May’s cigarette. They heard the car approach, they saw its headlights flash by the windows. The engine stopped, the door opened and closed, and a few seconds later the bank door opened and Murch stuck his head in. “Set?” he called.

Dortmunder sighed again as Murch’s Mom switched the flashlights back on. “Come on in here, Stan,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s talk.”