Bank Shot

4

“Everybody freeze,” Victor snarled. “This is a stickup.”

He pushed the stop button on the cassette recorder, rewound, and played it back. “Everybody freeze,” the cassette snarled. “This is a stickup.”

Victor smiled, put the recorder down on his work table, and picked up both other recorders. All three were small, about the size of a tourist’s camera. Into one of them Victor said, in a high-pitched voice, “You can’t do this!” Then he played that from one recorder into the other, at the same time giving a falsetto “Eeek!” The scream and the high-pitched remark were then played back from recorder number three to recorder number two, while in a deep voice Victor said, “Look out, boys, they’ve got guns!” Gradually, working back and forth between the recorders, he built up an agitated crowd response to the stickup announcement, and when he was satisfied with it he recorded it onto the first Cassette.

The room Victor was in had started life as a garage but had veered. It was now a cross between a den and a radio repair shop, plus some Batcave. Victor’s work table, littered with recording equipment, old magazines and odds and ends, was against the rear wall, which was completely papered with covers from old pulp magazines, pasted on and then shellacked. At the top of the wall was a rolled-up motion-picture screen, which could be pulled down and hooked to a gizmo at the back of the work table.

The wall to Victor’s left was lined with bookcases, filled with pulp magazines, paperback books, Big Little Books, comic books, and elderly hardcover boys’ books — Dave Dawson, Bomba, the Boy Allies. The wall to his right was also lined with shelves, these containing stereo components and records, mostly old sixteen-inch transcription records of radio shows like “The Lone Ranger” and “Terry and the Pirates.” On a small shelf at the bottom were a line of new cassettes, identified in neat lettering in red ink with such titles as The Scarlet Avenger Meets Lynxman and “Rat” Duffy’s Mob Breaks Out.

The last wall, where the garage doors had once been, was now given over to motion pictures. There were two projectors, an eight-millimeter and a sixteen-, and shelf after shelf of canned film. Stray bits of unused wall around the room sported posters for old movie serials — Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe — and box tops from old cereals — Kellogg’s Pep, Quaker Puffed Rice, Post Toasties.

There were no doors or windows visible anywhere in the room, and most of the central floor space was taken up by fifteen old movie seats, in three rows of five, all facing the rear wall, the rolled-up screen, the littered work table, and Victor.

Being just thirty years of age, Victor hadn’t yet been born when most of the material in the room had first appeared. He’d discovered the pulps by accident when he was in high school, had started collecting, and had gradually spread out to all the sources of adventure in the decades before World War Two. It was history to him, and a hobby, but not nostalgia. His own youth had been highlighted by Howdy Doody and John Cameron Swayze, and he had as yet discovered no twinge of nostalgia within him for either.

Maybe it was his hobby that kept him young. Whatever it was, he didn’t look his age. At the most, he might be taken for twenty, but generally the people he met assumed he was a teenager, and he was still routinely asked for proof of age whenever he went into a bar. It had frequently been embarrassing, back when he was with the Bureau, to identify himself to some pinko as an FBI man and have the pinko fall on the floor laughing. His looks had hampered his Bureau activities in other ways, too; for instance, he couldn’t infiltrate a college campus because he didn’t look old enough to go to college. Nor could he grow a beard, except some straggling thing that made him look as though he was suffering from radiation sickness. And when he let his hair grow long, the best he could look like was the Three Musketeers’ mascot.

He sometimes thought the reason the Bureau had let him go was just as much his appearance as the business about the handshake. Once, when he’d been assigned to the Omaha office, he’d heard Chief Agent Flanagan say to Agent Goodwin, “We want our men to look clean-cut, but that’s ridiculous,” and he’d known they were talking about him.

But the Bureau hadn’t been the right place for him anyway. It wasn’t anything like The FBI in Peace and War, or G-Men, or the rest of the literature. They didn’t even call themselves G-men; they called themselves Agents. Every time he’d called himself Agent, Victor had gotten the mental image of himself as an undercover humanoid from another planet, part of the advance guard sent to enslave mankind and turn Earth over to the Green Goks from Alpha Centauri II. It had been a disturbing mental image and had played havoc with his interrogation technique.

Also, consider: Victor had been with the Bureau twenty-three months, and not once had he held in his hands a submachine gun. He hadn’t even seen one. He’d never broken down a door. He’d never held a loud-hailer to his mouth and bawled, “All right, Muggsy, we’ve got the house surrounded.” What he’d mostly done was call Army deserters’ parents on the telephone and ask them if they’d seen their son recently. And he’d also done a lot of filing — really, one hell of a lot of filing.

No, the Bureau hadn’t been the right place for him at all. But where — other than this garage — was the right place? He had his law degree, but he’d never taken the bar exam and had no particular desire to become an attorney. He made a small living these days as a dealer in old books and magazines, completely mail order, but it wasn’t a really satisfying existence.

Well, maybe this business with his uncle Kelp would turn out to be something. Time would tell.

“You can’t get away with that!” he said in a manly voice into the master cassette, then overlay a high, squealing, “No, don’t!” Then he put down the recorders, opened a drawer of the work table, and took out a small.5-caliber Firearms International automatic. He checked the clip, and it still contained five blanks. Switching on a recorder, he fired two quick shots and then a third, at the same time shouting, “Take that! And that!”

“Uh,” said a voice.

Victor turned his head, startled. A section of bookcase in the left-hand wall had opened inward, and Kelp was standing in the doorway, looking glazed. Behind him was a wedge of sunlit back yard and the white clapboard side wall of the neighbor’s garage. “I, uh …” said Kelp and pointed in various directions.

“Oh, hi,” Victor said cheerfully. He waved the gun in a friendly fashion and said, “Come on in.”

Kelp pointed in the general direction of the gun. “That uh…”

“Oh, it’s blanks,” Victor said easily. He switched off the recorder, put the automatic away in the drawer and got to his feet. “Come on in.”

Kelp came in and shut the bookcase. “You don’t want to startle me,” he said.

“Golly, I’m sorry,” Victor said concernedly.

“I startle easy,” Kelp said. “You shoot a gun, you throw a knife, any little thing like that will set me right off.”

“I’ll sure remember that,” Victor said soberly.

“Anyway,” Kelp said, “I found the guy I was telling you about.”

“The planner?” Victor asked with quickening interest. “Dortmunder?”

“That’s the one. I wasn’t sure you wanted me to bring him in here. I know you like this place kept private.”

“That’s good,” Victor said approvingly. “Where is he?”

“Down the drive.”

Victor hurried to the front of the room where the movie projectors and cans of films were located. A small framed poster for the George Raft The Glass Key was at eye level on a clear patch of wall; it was hinged at the top, and Victor lifted it up out of the way and stood close to peer through a small rectangular pane of dusty glass at the world outside.

What he was looking at was the weedy driveway beside his house, with its two narrow ribbons of old cracked concrete leading down to the sidewalk and the street. This was an older section of Long Island than either Ranch Cove Estates or Elm Valley Heights. It was called Belle Vista; the streets were all straight, and the houses ran mostly to two-story, one-family affairs with front porches.

Down at the sidewalk Victor saw a man. He was walking slowly back and forth, he was looking down, and he was taking occasional quick puffs on a stub of cigarette he held in his cupped hand. Victor nodded, pleased at what he saw. Dortmunder was tall and lean and tired-looking; he had the worn look of Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra. Victor did a Bogart twitch with the left side of his mouth, leaned back, and lowered the movie poster again. “That’s fine,” he said amiably. “Let’s go out and meet him.”

“Sure,” Kelp said.

Victor opened the bookcase and bowed Kelp through ahead of him. On the other side, the bookcase was an ordinary door, with a dusty window in it covered by a chintz curtain. Victor pulled the door shut and walked with Kelp around to the front of the garage and down the driveway toward Dortmunder.

Victor couldn’t help looking back, when he was halfway down the drive, and admiring his handiwork. From the outside it looked like a perfectly ordinary garage, except that it was more old-fashioned than most, with its pair of side-hinged doors padlocked in the middle. Anybody who went up to those doors and looked through the small dusty windows would see nothing but blackness; it was black felt against plywood six inches from the glass, but he wouldn’t know that. He’d think it was simply dark in there. Victor had tried rigging up a blow-up photograph of a 1933 Ford in there, but he just couldn’t ever get the perspective right, so he’d settled for darkness instead.

He faced front again, smiling, and walked with Kelp the rest of the way to meet Dortmunder, who stopped on the sidewalk, gave them both a sour look and flicked his cigarette butt away.

Kelp made introductions: “Dortmunder, this is Victor.”

“Hello,” Dortmunder said.

“Hello, Mr. Dortmunder,” Victor said eagerly and stuck his hand out. “I’ve sure heard a lot about you,” he said admiringly.

Dortmunder looked at the hand, then at Victor, and finally shook hands with him, suddenly saying, “You heard a lot about me?”

“From my uncle,” Victor said proudly.

Dortmunder gave Kelp a look that wasn’t easy to define and said, “Is that right?”

“General things,” Kelp said. “You know, just general things.”

“This and that,” Dortmunder suggested.

“That kind of thing, yeah.”

Victor smiled at both of them. Dortmunder was just fine, in appearance and voice and attitude and everything. Just fine. After the disappointment of the Bureau, he hadn’t known exactly what to expect, but so far Dortmunder was everything Victor could have hoped for.

He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Well,” he said happily, “shall we go take a look at it?”