Bank Shot

26

“Frankly,” May said, the cigarette bobbing in the corner of her mouth, “I could make better coffee than this if I started with dirt.” She dropped a seven of hearts on the eight of diamonds Dortmunder had led.

“I took what they had,” Murch said. “It was the only place I could find open.” He carefully slid a five of diamonds under the seven of diamonds.

“I’m not blaming you,” May said. “I’m just commenting.”

Murch’s Mom put down her own coffee container, frowned at her hand and at last gave an elaborate sigh and said, “Oh, well.” She played the jack of diamonds and drew in the trick.

“Look out,” Murch said. “Mom’s shooting the moon.”

His mother gave him a dirty look. “Mom’s shooting the moon, Mom’s shooting the moon. You know so much. I had to take that trick.”

“That’s okay,” Murch said calmly. “I got stoppers.”

May was sitting by the partially open door of the trailer, where she could look out and see the blacktop street all the way down to the court entrance. It was now ten after seven in the morning and fully light. Half a dozen seedy cars had left here in the last half hour, as residents went off to work, but no one had as yet arrived to question this new trailer’s presence — neither a trailer-court manager nor the police.

While waiting, May and Murch’s Mom were running a rousing game of hearts in the pseudo-breakfast nook they’d set up by the door toward the front end of the trailer, farthest from the safe. Back at the other end, hidden behind a new floor-to-ceiling partition created from sections of counter, Herman was working away steadily at the safe, assisted by the men in groups of two. Kelp and Victor were back there with him now, while Dortmunder and Murch were sitting in at the card game. At eight o’clock, the men would switch.

So far, there had been two small crump sounds from the other side of the counter as Herman had tried minor explosions which had failed to accomplish anything, and occasionally there was the whir of a power tool or the buzz of a saw intermixed with the steady rasp of the circular drill, but up till now very little seemed to be happening. Ten minutes ago, when Dortmunder and Murch had finished their six-to-seven shift, May had asked them how things were going. “I won’t say he hasn’t made a dent in it,” Dortmunder had said. “He’s made a dent in it.” And he’d rubbed his shoulder, having spent most of the previous hour turning a handle in a large circle.

In the meantime, the bank had been made more livable and homelike. The electricity and bathroom were both working, the floor had been swept, the furniture rearranged and the curtains put up on the windows. It was only too bad the bank hadn’t come equipped with a kitchen; the hamburgers and doughnuts Murch had brought back from the all-night diner were almost edible, but the coffee was probably against the anti-pollution laws.

“Anything?” Dortmunder asked.

May had been gazing toward the street, thinking about kitchens and food and coffee. She switched her attention to Dortmunder and said, “No, I was just daydreaming.”

“You’re tired, that’s why,” Murch’s Mom said. “We all are, staying up all night. I’m not as young as I used to be.” She played the ace of diamonds.

“Ho ho,” her son said. “Not shooting the moon, huh?”

“I’m too clever for you,” she told him. “While you big-mouth, I get rid of all my dangerous winners.” She had taken her neck brace off, despite her son’s complaints, and was now hunched over her cards like a gambling squirrel.

“Here comes somebody,” May said.

Dortmunder said, “Law?”

“No. The manager, I think.”

A blue-and-white station wagon had just turned in at the entrance and stopped beside the small white-clapboard office shack. A smallish man in a dark suit got out of the car, and when May saw him start to unlock the office door she put down her cards and said, “That’s him. I’ll be back.”

Murch said, “Mom, put the brace on.”

“I will not.”

They still didn’t have steps for the trailer. May clambered awkwardly down to the ground, flipped a cigarette ember away from the corner of her mouth and lit a new one as she walked down the row to the office.

The man at the sloppy desk inside had the thin, nervous, dehydrated look of a reformed drunk — the look of a man who at any instant may go back to sleeping in alleys while clutching a pint bottle of port. He gave May a terrified stare and said, “Yes, Miss? Yes?”

“We’re moving in for a week,” May said. “I wanted to pay you.”

“A week? A trailer?” He seemed baffled by everything. Maybe it was just the early hour that was getting to him.

“That’s right,” May said. “How much is it for a week?”

“Twenty-seven fifty. Where’s the, uh, where do you have your trailer?”

“Back there on the right,” May said, pointing through the wall.

He frowned, bewildered. “I didn’t hear you drive in.”

“We came in last night.”

“Last night!” He leaped to his feet, knocking a pile of forms slithering from the desk to the floor. While May watched him in some amazement, he raced out the front door. She shook her head and stooped to pick up the fallen papers.

He was back a minute later, saying, “You’re right. I never even noticed it when I … Here, you don’t have to do that.”

“All done,” May said. Straightening, she put the pile of forms back on the desk, causing some sort of seismic disturbance, because another stack of papers promptly toppled off the desk on the other side.

“Leave them, leave them,” the nervous man said.

“I think I will.” May moved over to let him get back to his seat behind the desk, and then she sat in the room’s only other chair, facing him. “Anyway,” she said, “we want to stay for a week.”

“There’s some forms to fill out.” He started opening and slamming desk drawers, doing it far too rapidly to see anything inside them in the milliseconds when they were open. “While you’re doing that,” he said, opening and closing, opening and closing, “I’ll go hook up the utilities.”

“We already did that.”

He stopped, with a drawer open, and blinked at her. “But it’s locked,” he said.

May took the padlock out of her sweater pocket, where it had been stretching the material even worse than her usual cigarettes. “This was on the ground beside it,” she said and reached forward to put it on a pile of papers in front of him. “We thought it might be yours.”

“It wasn’t locked?” He stared at the padlock in horror, as though it were a shrunken head.

“Nope.”

“If the boss …” He licked his lips, then stared at May in mute appeal.

“I won’t tell,” she promised. His nervousness was making her nervous, too, and she was in a hurry to get finished with him and out of here.

“He can be very …” He shook his head, then glanced down at the open drawer, seemed surprised to see it open, then frowned at it and drew out some papers. “Here they are,” he said.

May spent the next ten minutes filling out forms. She wrote that the trailer had four occupants: Mrs. Hortense Davenport (herself); her sister, Mrs. Winifred Loomis (Murch’s Mom); and Mrs. Loomis’ two sons, Stan (Murch) and Victor (Victor). Dortmunder and Kelp and Herman did not exist on the forms May filled out.

The manager grew gradually calmer as time went by, as though slowly getting used to May’s presence, and was even risking shaky little smiles when May handed over the last of the forms and the twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. “I hope your stay at Wanderlust is just great,” he said.

“Thank you, I’m sure it will be,” May said, getting to her feet, and the manager suddenly looked terrified again and moved all his extremities at once, causing great land shifts of paper on his desk. May, baffled, looked over her shoulder and saw the room filling with state troopers. May stifled a nervous start of her own, but she didn’t need to; the manager’s contortions had riveted the troopers’ attentions.

“Well, bye now,” May said and walked through the troopers — there were only two of them after all — toward the door. The thump behind her was either the padlock or the manager hitting the floor; she didn’t turn to see which, but kept going, and strode hurriedly up the gravel drive toward the bank. As she approached it, she saw it suddenly rock slightly on its wheels, and then settle down again. Another of Herman’s explosions, she thought, and a few seconds later a puff of white smoke came out a vent on the trailer roof. They’ve picked a Pope, she thought.

Dortmunder was waiting in the doorway to give her a hand up. “Whoop, thanks,” she said. “The cops are here.”

“I saw them. We’ll get back of the partition.”

“Right.”

Murch’s Mom said, “Let’s not get those cards mixed up. Everybody hold onto your own hand.”

Murch said, “Mom, will you please put the brace on?”

“For the last time, no.”

“You could blow the whole case for us right here.”

She stared at him. “I am standing in a stolen bank,” she said, “which is about nine felonies rolled into one already, and you’re worried about a lawsuit with an insurance company?”

“If we get picked up on this thing,” Murch said, “we’ll need all the cash we can lay our hands on for the defense.”

“That’s a cheerful thought,” May said. She was standing by the door, looking out toward the office.

Dortmunder had gone around behind the partition to join Herman and Kelp, and now all sound stopped from back there. A second later, Victor came out and said, “So they’re here, are they?” He had a big smile on his face.

“Just coming out of the office,” May said. She shut the door and went over to look out a window instead.

“Remember,” Victor said, “they can’t come in without a warrant.”

“I know, I know.”

But the troopers made no attempt to come in. They walked down the gravel roadway between the lines of trailers, looking this way and that, and gave the green-painted bank no more than a passing glance.

Victor was watching out another window. “It’s starting to rain,” he said. “They’ll want to get back in their car.”

It was, and they did. A slight sprinkle had developed, and the troopers walked a bit faster on their way back down the line of trailers toward their car. May, looking up, saw heavy clouds coming on fast from the west. “It’s really going to come down,” she said.

“What do we care?” Victor said. “We’re warm and dry inside this bank here.” He looked around with that big smile on his face and said, “They even have electric baseboard heat.”

Murch’s Mom said, “Are they gone?”

“Just getting in their car,” May said. “There they go.” She turned from the window, and now she too was smiling. “I suddenly realize,” she said, “that I was very nervous.” She took the stub of cigarette from her mouth and looked at it. “I just lit this,” she said.

“Let’s play cards,” Murch’s Mom said. “Dortmunder! Come on out and play cards.”

Dortmunder came out, Victor went back in with Herman and Kelp, the four outside sat down to play cards again, and Murch’s Mom shot the moon. Murch said, “See? See? I told you!”

“So you did,” Murch’s Mom said. She smiled at her son and riffled the cards as she shuffled.

Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. Everybody at the table stared, and May quickly got up to look out the nearest window. “It’s somebody with an umbrella,” she announced. It was really pouring out there now, puddles everywhere.

“Get rid of him,” Dortmunder said. “I’ll go back by the safe again.”

“Right.”

May waited till Dortmunder was out of sight, then opened the door and looked out at the nervous manager, more nervous than ever and miserable-looking under the black umbrella. “Uh,” May said. How could she avoid inviting him in, with all that rain?

He said something, but the drumming of the rain on both the bank roof and his umbrella drowned out the words. May said, “What?”

Shrilly, he yelled, “I don’t want any trouble!”

“That’s wonderful!” May shouted back. “Neither do I!”

“Look!”

He was pointing down. May leaned forward, getting her hair wet, and looked at the ground beside the trailer, and it was pale green. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said and looked to left and right. The bank was blue and white again. “Oh, good Christ,” she said.

“I don’t want any trouble!” the manager shouted again. May took her head in from the rain. “Come on in,” she invited.

He took a step back, shaking his head and his free hand. “No no. No trouble.”

May called to him, “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t want you here!” he yelled. “The boss would kick me out! No trouble, no trouble!”

“You won’t call the police?”

“Just go away! Go away and I won’t call them and it never happened!”

May tried to think. “Give us an hour,” she said.

“Too long!”

“We have to get a truck. We don’t have a truck here.”

His quandary was making him so nervous he was hopping from foot to foot, as though he had to go to the bathroom. Maybe, with all the rain beating down, he did. “All right,” he yelled at last. “But no more than an hour!”

“I promise!”

“I’ll have to unhook you! The water and electricity!”

“All right! All right!”

He fidgeted out there until she realized he was waiting for her to shut the door. Should she thank him? No, he didn’t want thanks, he wanted reassurance. “You won’t have any trouble!” she yelled at him, and waved, and shut the door.

Dortmunder was standing beside her. “I heard,” he said.

“We’ll have to take it somewhere else,” she said.

“Or give up.”

Herman and Kelp had wandered out from behind the partition. Herman said, “Give up? I’ve just begun to fight!”

Kelp said, “What’s the problem? How’d he tip to us?”

May told him, “We used water-base paint. The rain washed it off.”

Herman said, “We can’t give up, that’s all. We just have to take it someplace else.”

Dortmunder said, “With every cop on Long Island out looking for it. And with the green paint gone. And with no place in mind to put it.”

Murch said, “And no truck to drive it anywhere.”

Kelp said, “That’s never a problem, Stan. Trucks are never a problem. Trust me.”

Murch gave him a glum look.

Victor said, “In this rain, there won’t be much of a search.”

“When you’re looking,” Dortmunder said, “for something fifty feet long and twelve feet wide, colored blue and white, you don’t need much of a search.”

May had been silent during all this, thinking about things. She had no particular craving for money herself, and so didn’t care so much about the contents of the safe as that the job be successful. Dortmunder was gloomy enough in his natural state; life with him if this robbery failed would be about as cheerful as a soap opera. “I tell you what,” she said. “I got us an hour here.”

The lights went off. Gray and rainy illumination seeped in through the windows, depressing everyone even further.

“An hour,” Dortmunder said, “is just enough time for us all to go home and get to bed and make believe none of this ever happened.”

“We have two cars.” May said. “We can spend that hour looking for someplace to move. If we don’t find anything, we give up.”

“Fine,” Herman said. “And I’ll keep working on the safe.” He hurried back behind the partition.

“It’s getting cold in here,” Murch’s Mom said.

“You’d be warmer with the brace on,” her son said.

She gave him a look.

Dortmunder sighed. “The thing that scares me,” he said, “is that we probably will find a place.”