Bank Shot

8

When Dortmunder walked into the 0. J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at eight-thirty the next night, there was nobody in the place but three subway motormen, the television set high up on the wall, and Rollo, the bartender. The television set was showing three people scaling a wall, all burdened down with coils of rope and little hammers and walkie-talkies; they were a Negro, a Jew, and a beautiful blond Swedish girl. The three subway motormen, all Puerto Rican, were talking about whether or not there were alligators in the subway tunnels. They were shouting back and forth at the top of their voices, not because they were mad at each other — though they were — but because their jobs had got them used to talking at that volume. “It’s in the sewers you got the alligators,” one of them shouted.

“Them scum tunnels we got, you don’t call them sewers?”

“People bring up alligators from Florida,” the first one yelled, “little alligators for pets, they get tired of them, they flush them down the toilet. But in the sewer, not in the tunnels. You don’t flush toilets into subway tunnels.”

“Not much, you don’t.”

The third one, the gloomiest of them, shouted, “I run over a rat the other day, down by Kingston-Throop, this big.” And knocked over his beer.

Dortmunder strolled on down to the end of the bar while Rollo sopped up the spilled beer and drew a new one. The motormen started shouting about other animals that were or weren’t in the subway tunnels, and Rollo came heavily along the bar toward Dortmunder. He was a tall, meaty, balding, blue-jawed gent in a dirty white shirt and dirty white apron, and, when he reached Dortmunder he said, “Long time no see.”

“You know how it is,” Dortmunder said. “I been living with a woman.”

Rollo nodded sympathetically. “That’s death on the bar business,” he said. “What you want to do is get married, then you’ll start coming out at night.”

Dortmunder nodded his head toward the back room. “Anybody there?”

“Your friend, the other bourbon,” Rollo said. “Along with a no-proof-of-age ginger ale. They got your glass.”

“Thanks.”

Dortmunder left the bar and headed for the rear, past the two doors with the dog silhouettes on them and the sign on one door POINTERS and on the other door SETTERS and past the phone booth and through the green door at the back and into a small square room with a concrete floor. None of the walls were visible because practically the whole room was taken up floor to ceiling with beer cases and liquor cases, leaving only a small opening in the middle big enough for a battered old table with a green felt top, half a dozen chairs and one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.

Kelp and Victor were seated at the table side by side, as though waiting for a big-stakes poker game to start. A bottle of bourbon and a half-empty glass stood in front of Kelp, and a glass with ice cubes and something sparkly and amber stood in front of Victor.

Kelp, cheerful and optimistic, said, “Hi! Murch isn’t here yet.”

“So I see.” Dortmunder sat down in front of the other glass on the table, which was still empty.

“Hello, Mr. Dortmunder.”

Dortmunder looked across the table. Victor’s smile made him squint, like too much sunlight. “Hello, Victor,” he said.

“I’m glad we’ll be working together.”

Dortmunder’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile, and he gazed down at his big-knuckled hands on the green felt of the table.

Kelp pushed the bottle toward him. “Have one.” The bottle claimed to be Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon — “Our Own Brand.” Dortmunder splashed some in his glass, sipped, made a face and said, “Stan’s late. That isn’t like him.”

Kelp said, “While we wait, why don’t we work out some of the details on this thing?”

“Just like it was really going to happen,” Dortmunder said.

“Of course it’s going to happen,” Kelp said.

Victor managed to look worried while still smiling. “Don’t you think it’ll happen, Mr. Dortmunder?”

Kelp said, “Of course it’ll happen.” To Dortmunder he said, “What about the string?”

Victor said, “String?”

“The crew,” Kelp told him. “The group engaged in the Operation.”

“We don’t have the job planned out yet,” Dortmunder said.

“What plan?” Kelp asked. “We back up a truck, hook on, drive the thing away. Dump the guards at our leisure, take it someplace else, bust into the safe, go on about our business.”

“I think you skipped over a few spots,” Dortmunder said.

“Oh, well,” Kelp said airily, “there’s details to be worked out.”

“One or two,” Dortmunder said.

“But we have the general outline. And what I figure, we here can handle it, plus Stan to do the driving and a good lockman to get into the safe.”

“We here?” Dortmunder asked. He gave Kelp a meaningful look, glanced at Victor, looked back at Kelp again.

Kelp patted the air in a secretive way, hiding it from Victor. “We can talk about all that,” he said. “The question now is the lockman. We know we’ll need one.”

“How about Chefwick? The model-train nut.”

Kelp shook his head. “No,” he said, “he isn’t around any more. He hijacked a subway car to Cuba.”

Dortmunder looked at him. “Don’t start,” he said.

“Start what? I didn’t do anything; Chefwick did. He got to run that locomotive in that job with us, and he must’ve flipped out or something.”

“All right,” Dortmunder said.

“So he and his wife went to Mexico on vacation, and at Vera Cruz there were these used subway cars that were going on a boat to Cuba, and Chefwick —”

“I said all right.”

“Don’t blame me,” Kelp said. “I’m just telling you what happened.” He brightened suddenly, saying, “That reminds me, did you hear what happened to Greenwood?”

“Leave me alone,” Dortmunder said.

“He got his own television series.”

“I said leave me alone!”

Victor said, “You know someone with his own television series.”

“Sure,” Kelp said. “He was on a job with Dortmunder and me one time.”

“You wanted to talk about a lockman,” Dortmunder said. Somehow his glass was empty. He splashed in some more of the Amsterdam Liquor Store’s Own Brand of bourbon.

“I have a suggestion,” Kelp said. He sounded doubtful. “He’s a good man, but I don’t know…”

“Who is it?” Dortmunder asked.

“I don’t think you know him.”

“What’s his name?” When dealing with Kelp, Dortmunder just got more and more patient as time went along.

“Herman X.”

“Herman X?”

“The only thing,” Kelp said, “he’s a spade. I don’t know if you’re prejudiced or not.”

“Herman X?”

Victor said primly, “Sounds like a Black Muslim.”

“Not exactly,” Kelp said. “He’s like in an offshoot. I don’t know what they call themselves. His bunch is mad at the people that were mad at the people that were mad at the people that went off with Malcolm X. I think that’s right.”

Victor frowned into space. “I haven’t kept up with that area of subversion,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the Pan-African Panthers, would it?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“The Sons Of Marcus Garvey?”

“No, that’s not right.”

“The Black Barons?”

“The Sam Spades?”

Kelp frowned for a second, then shook his head. “No.”

“Probably a new splinter,” Victor said. “They keep fractionalizing, makes it extremely difficult to maintain proper surveillance. No cooperation at all. I can remember how upset the agents used to get about that.”

A little silence fell. Dortmunder sat there holding the glass and looking at Kelp, who was mooning away at the opposite wall. Dortmunder’s expression was patient, but not pleased. Eventually, Kelp sighed and shifted and glanced at Dortmunder and then frowned, obviously trying to figure out what Dortmunder was staring at him for. Then all at once he cried, “Oh! The lockman!”

“The lockman,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Herman X.”

Dortmunder nodded. “That’s the one.”

“Well,” Kelp said, “do you care about him being black?”

Patiently Dortmunder shook his head. He said, “Why should I care about him being black? All I want him to do is open a safe.”

“It’s just you never know about people,” Kelp explained. “Herman says so himself.”

Dortmunder poured more bourbon.

“Should I give him a call?”

“Why not?”

Kelp nodded. “I’ll give him a call,” he said, and the door opened and Murch came in, followed by his Mom, wearing her neck brace. They were both carrying glasses of beer, and Murch was also carrying a salt shaker. “Hey, Stan!” Kelp said. “Come on in.”

“Sorry we’re late,” Murch said. “Usually, coming back from the Island, I’d take the Northern State and Grand Central and Queens Boulevard to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, but figuring the time of day it was, and I was coming uptown — sit down, Mom.”

“Victor,” Kelp said, “this is Stan Murch, and this is Murch’s Mom.”

“What happened to your neck, Mrs. Murch?”

“A lawyer,” she said. She was in a bad mood.

“So I figured,” Murch said, once he and his Mom were both seated, “I’d just stick with Grand Central and take the Triborough Bridge to a hundred and twenty-fifth Street and over to Columbus Avenue and straight down. Only what happened —” His Mom said, “Can I take this damn thing off anyway in here?”

“Mom, if you’d leave it on you’d get used to it. You take it off all the time, that’s why you don’t like it.”

“Wrong,” she said. “I have to put it on all the time. That’s why I don’t like it.”

“Well, Stan, did you go take a look at the bank?”

“Let me tell you what happened,” Murch said. “Just leave it on, okay, Mom? So we came across Grand Central, and there was a mess this side of La Guardia. Some kind of collision.”

“We got there just too late to see it,” his Mom said. She was keeping the neck brace on.

“So I had to go along the shoulder and push a cop car out of the way at one point, so I could get off at Thirty-first Street and go down to Jackson Avenue and then Queens Boulevard and the bridge and the regular way after that. So that’s why We’re late.”

“No problem,” Kelp said.

“If I’d done my regular route, it wouldn’t have happened.”

Dortmunder sighed. “You’re here now,” he said. “That’s the important thing. Did you look at the bank?” He wanted to know the worst and get it over with.

Murch’s Mom said, “It was a beautiful day for a drive.”

“I looked at it,” Murch said. He was being very businesslike all of a sudden. “I looked it over very carefully, and I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

Dortmunder said, “The bad news first.”

“No,” Kelp said. “The good news first.”

“Okay,” Murch said. “The good news is it has a trailer hitch.”

Dortmunder said, “What’s the bad news?”

“It doesn’t have any wheels.”

“Been nice talking to you,” Dortmunder said.

“Wait a minute,” said Kelp. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What do you mean it doesn’t have any wheels?”

“Underneath,” Murch said.

“But it’s a trailer, it’s a mobile home. It’s got to have wheels.”

“What they did,” Murch said, “they put it in position, and jacked it up, and took the wheels off. Wheels and axles both.”

“But it had wheels,” Kelp said.

“Oh, sure,” Murch said. “Every trailer has wheels.”

“So what the hell did they do with them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the company that owns the trailer has them.”

Victor suddenly snapped his fingers and said, “Of course! I’ve seen the same thing at construction sites. They use trailers for field offices, and if it’s a long-term job they build foundation walls underneath and remove the wheels.”

“What the hell for?” Kelp asked. He sounded affronted.

“Maybe save strain on the tires. Maybe give it more stability.”

Murch said, “The point is, it doesn’t have wheels.”

A little silence fell on the group. Dortmunder, who had just been sitting there letting the conversation wash over him while he basted in his own pessimism, sighed and shook his head and reached for the bourbon bottle again. He knew that May believed that planning even an idiot job that wouldn’t ever happen was better than doing nothing at all, and he supposed she was right, but what he wouldn’t give for news right now about a factory that still paid cash.

All right. He was the planner — that was his function — so it was up to him to think about the details as they came along. No wheels. He sighed and said to Murch, “The thing is sitting on those concrete block walls, right?”

“That’s right,” Murch said. “What they must have done, they jacked it up, took the wheels off, put the concrete blocks in place, and lowered the trailer down onto them.”

“The concrete blocks are cemented to each other,” Dortmunder said. “The question is, are they cemented to the bottom of the trailer?”

Murch shook his head. “Definitely not. The trailer’s just resting there.”

“With concrete block all around underneath.”

“Not on the ends, just along the two sides.”

A tiny flicker of interest made Dortmunder frown. “Not at the ends?”

“No,” Murch said. “The one end is against the Kresge’s next door, and the other end they’ve just got a wooden lattice across it. So they can get in at it, I guess.”

Dortmunder turned his head to look at Victor. For a wonder, Victor wasn’t smiling; instead, he was watching Dortmunder with such intensity he looked paralyzed. It wasn’t much of an improvement. Squinting, Dortmunder said, “Is there ever any time when the bank is empty? No guards at all?”

“Every night,” Victor said. “Except Thursday, when the cash is in it.”

“They don’t have a night watchman in there?”

“They don’t keep any cash there at all,” Victor said, “except on Thursdays. Otherwise, there’s nothing to steal. And they’ve got all the normal burglar alarms. And the police patrol the business streets pretty often out there.”

“What about weekends?”

“They patrol weekends, too.”

“No,” Dortmunder said. “What about guards on the weekends? Saturday afternoon, for instance. The thing’s empty then?”

“Sure,” Victor said. “With so many shoppers going by on Saturday, what do they need with guards?”

“All right,” Dortmunder said. He turned back to Murch and said, “Can we get wheels someplace?”

“Sure,” Murch said. No hesitation at all.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely positive. There is totally nothing in the automotive line that I can’t get you.”

Dortmunder said, “Good. Can we get wheels that will lift the damn thing up off those concrete blocks?”

“We may have to rig something,” Murch said. “They’ve got those walls up pretty high. There may not be any wheels-and-axle combination that big. But we could attach the axle to a kind of platform and then attach the platform to the bottom of the trailer.”

“What about jacks?”

Murch shook his head. “What about them?”

“We can get heavy enough jacks to lift that thing?”

“We don’t have to,” Murch said. “It has its own jacks, four of them, built up into the undercarriage.”

Victor said, “Excuse me, Mr. Murch, but how did you —”

“Call me Stan.”

“Thank you. I’m Victor. How did you —”

“Hello. How did you find out about the jacks? Did you crawl under the bank and look?”

Murch grinned and said, “Naw. Down in the corner there’s the company name that built the thing. Roamerica. Didn’t you notice that?”

“I never did,” Victor said. He sounded impressed.

“It’s a little silver plate near the back,” Murch said. “Near Kresge’s.”

His Mom said, “Stan has a wonderful eye for detail.”

“So we went to a place that sells them,” Murch said, “and I took a look at the same kind of model.”

“With wheels,” Kelp said. He was still taking the business of the wheels as a personal insult.

Murch nodded. “With wheels.”

“They’re really very nice inside,” his Mom said. “More roomy than you’d think. I liked the one with the French Provincial motif.”

“I like where we live now,” Murch said.

“I’m not saying buy one. I just said I liked it. Very clean, very nice. And you know what I thought of that kitchen.”

Dortmunder said, “If we got wheels on it, could you drive it away from there?”

Murch’s beer was only half gone, but the head was gone entirely. Musing, he shook a little salt into the glass, which restored some head, and passed the shaker to his mom. “Not with a car,” he said. “It’s too heavy for that. With a truck. The cab of a tractor-trailer — that would be best.”

“But it could be done.”

“Oh, sure. I’d have to stick to main streets, though. You’ve got a twelve-foot width. That’s pretty wide for going down back roads. Cuts your possibilities for a getaway route.”

Dortmunder nodded. “I figured that.”

“Also time of day,” Murch said. “Late at night would be best, when there’s not so much traffic around.”

“Well, we’d figure to do it then anyway,” Dortmunder said.

“A lot depends,” Murch said, “on where you want to take it.”

Dortmunder glanced at Kelp, who looked very defensive and said, “We can work that out, we can work it out. Victor and me.”

Dortmunder grimaced and looked back at Murch. “Would you be willing to try it?”

“Try what?”

“Driving the bank away.”

“Sure! Naturally, that’s what I’m here for.”

Dortmunder nodded and sat back in his chair. He didn’t look specifically at anybody, but brooded at the green felt tabletop. Nobody spoke for half a minute or so, and then Victor said, “Do you think we can do it, Mr. Dortmunder?”

Dortmunder glanced at him, and the intense look was still there. This was originally Victor’s notion, of course, so it was only natural he wanted to know if he had a workable idea or not. Dortmunder said, “I don’t know yet. It begins to look as though we can take the thing away, but there’s still a lot of problems.”

Kelp said, “But we can go forward, right?”

Dortmunder said, “You and Victor can look for a place to stash the bank while —” He stopped and shook his head. “A place to stash the bank. I can’t believe I’m saying a thing like that. Anyway, you two do that, Murch sets up wheels and a truck or whatever, and —”

“There’s the question of money,” Murch said. “We’re gonna need some deep financing on this job.”

“That’s my department,” Kelp said. “I’ll take care of that.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said.

Murch’s Mom said, “Is this meeting over? I got to get home and get this brace off.”

“We’ll be in touch with each other,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp said, “You want me to call Herman X?”

Murch said, “Herman X?”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “Give him a call. But tell him it isn’t a definite set-up yet.”

Murch said, “Herman X?”

“You know him?” Kelp said. “A lockman, one of the best.”

Victor suddenly jumped to his feet and extended his ginger-ale glass over the table. “A toast!” he cried. “One for all and all for one!”

There was a stunned silence, and then Kelp gave a panicky smile and said, “Oh, yeah, sure.” He got to his feet with his bourbon glass.

One by one the others also stood. Nobody wanted to embarrass Victor. They clinked their glasses together over the middle of the table, and again Victor said, loud and clear, “One for all and all for one!”

“One for all and all for one,” everybody mumbled.