Butcher's Moon

Eight

Two-thirty a.m. In the watchman’s shed by the main gate, Donald Snyder put down his paperback book, got to his feet, and reached for the flashlight and key ring. Time to make his half-hour rounds through the plant. He left the yellow brightness of the watchman’s shed for the red-tinged darkness outside and plodded across the blacktop loading area toward the main building. Great red neon letters on the roof of the three-story plant spelled out KEDRICH BEER brightly enough to obscure the splinter of moon above them in the sky, and brightly enough so that Snyder didn’t need to use his flashlight at all until he was inside the main building.

Kedrich was a strictly local brand of beer, unknown fifty miles from Tyler but nevertheless a successful brewery for over seventy years. It was an ordinarily good beer, about the same as most others, but its success didn’t depend on its excellence. The unstated but generally understood fact was that no bar in Tyler could obtain or keep a liquor license unless it carried Kedrich beer on tap. “We all want to support local business” was the way the Kedrich salesmen described the situation to newcomers.

Unlocking the side door, Snyder stepped into the building, switched on the flashlight, and aimed it down the long empty corridor. No trouble, everything as quiet as ever.

Good. He strolled on down the corridor, flashing his light to both sides, expecting nothing wrong and seeing nothing wrong. Both corridor walls were lined with small-paned windows, and through the glass Snyder’s flashlight shone on bottling equipment to the left and brewing equipment to the right. Everything fine on the first floor.

And on the second. The raw materials were stored here, in large cool low-ceilinged rooms lined with rows of fluorescent lights. Snyder opened each door he came to, flicked on the wall switch that turned on all the lights, and saw every time the same proper silent emptiness, the rows of boxes or bins or bales, the clean concrete floors. No smell of smoke, no scampering sounds of rats, no trouble. Unbroken silence and peace.

Third floor. Here were the offices, all the white-collar workers and the bosses. Some of the executives, down at the far end, had really plush suites to themselves, with big picture windows overlooking the river, plus paintings on the walls and thick carpets on the floors and their own private bathrooms and kitchens. Snyder would never touch anything he wasn’t supposed to, but he did like sometimes to walk around in those offices, just looking, enjoying the aura of warmth and security that always surrounds well-spent money.

At the near end, though, were all the clerical offices: crowded, busy, brisk, filled with metal desks and filing cabinets, still with their original small-paned windows looking out on the loading area or the parking lot or the secondary buildings. Snyder strolled along, opening doors, flashing his light inside, and at one point as he was walking down the corridor he became aware that there was somebody walking beside him.

He thought his heart would stop. His moving foot fumbled, the flashlight wobbled, he had to touch the wall next to him for balance. Then, blinking repeatedly in fear, he turned his head to look at the man beside him.

He was tall, slender, dressed in dark clothing. Over his head and face he wore one of those wool ski masks, the way terrorists did in photos in the newspaper. He had no weapons in his hands, and he wasn’t making any threatening gestures, yet he was terrifying.

Snyder couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He was afraid to shine the flashlight directly at the man, but still kept it pointed more or less down the corridor, showing the emptiness down there. Light-spill from the smooth walls was enough to see the man, to watch him nod and make a small strange half-saluting gesture, like the hero of a movie comedy from the thirties. “I hope I didn’t startle you.”

It was such an absurd statement, said so quietly and casually, that for a few seconds Snyder could make no sense out of it at all. He just stood there, until the man leaned slightly toward him, obviously concerned, saying, “Are you all right?”

“I—” Snyder moved his hands vaguely, the light beam swinging this way and that. His fright and confusion left him speechless, until he managed to distill it all into one central question; he blurted it out like an actor onstage belatedly remembering his line: “Who are you?”

“Ah.” It seemed somehow that the man was smiling, though the mouth-hole in the mask was too small and the light too bad for Snyder to be sure. “I am,” he said, “a thief. And you are a night watchman.”

“A thief?”

“My partner is breaking into your safe right now.”

Snyder looked down the empty corridor. The finance section was ahead on the left, with its big boxlike safe in the corner of the room. The door there was closed, like all the others along the corridor.

The thief was saying, “And you are making your rounds.”

Snyder frowned. “There’s no money in there,” he said.

“Of course there is,” the thief said. “All day today the Kedrich beer trucks made their bar deliveries for the weekend. Because there’s a blue law in this state prohibiting the sale of liquor on credit, the drivers were paid on delivery. They all turned their payments in at the end of the workday, and the payments were stored in the safe for the weekend, since it was too late either to do the bookkeeping entries or to make a deposit at the bank.”

“But that’s all checks,” Snyder said.

“Mostly,” the thief said. “Listen, why don’t we walk while we talk? You’d walk this whole corridor now, wouldn’t you?”

“What?”

“Your rounds. You go down here to the end. Then what do you do?”

Snyder was having trouble thinking straight. He said, “After what?”

Patiently the thief said, “After you finish your rounds on this floor. Where do you go next? Do you check the trucks, one of the other buildings? What do you do?”

“Oh. I go back to . . . I go back to the shed. I do the rest of it at three o’clock. The main building on the half-hour, everything else on the hour.”

“Fine. And do you have to punch a clock anywhere, to show you’ve really done the rounds?”

“No, I just do them,” Snyder said. He was answering questions mechanically, trying to figure out what was happening.

“That’s fine,” the thief said. “An honest man. There aren’t too many left like you.”

Two years ago, when he’d been the winter watchman at Fun Island, Snyder had run afoul of some tough guys who’d for some reason broken in; now, remembering them, it suddenly occurred to him this self-declared thief was all wrong. He didn’t act or talk like a thief at all; in fact, except for the ski mask he didn’t even look like a thief.

A joke? Snyder peered suspiciously at the eyes within the mask, trying to read comedy there. “Just what’s going on?” he said.

“We’re going for a stroll,” the thief said. He touched Snyder’s elbow gently, suggesting that he start to walk.

Snyder obeyed, walking slowly forward but continuing to stare at the other man’s eyes. There was humor in them, but also a glint of something else. No, this wasn’t a joke.

Nevertheless, Snyder was no longer afraid. As they walked he said, “Where are we going?”

“On your rounds,” the thief told him. “Right on down to the end of the corridor.”

Snyder paused by the finance section’s door. “On my rounds,” he said, “I open these doors, check inside.”

The thief laughed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look. My partner won’t mind.”

The idea of a surprise birthday party flashed idiotically through Snyder’s mind. But his birthday was in the spring, and there was no one in any case to do such an elaborate surprise; and besides, this wasn’t a joke. Nevertheless, he was braced for almost any lunatic possibility when he opened the door and shone the flashlight in, and it was almost a relief to see the dark figure hunched over in front of the safe in the far corner. The man turned his head over there, and he too was wearing a ski mask, a black one with green zigzag stripes. He glanced briefly toward Snyder and the light, and then turned back to his work, absorbed and unconcerned. He was doing something obscure in the area of the combination dial.

Behind Snyder, the other man said, gently but firmly, “I think that’s long enough.”

Snyder stepped back, shutting the door. “Now what?”

“We walk down the hall.”

They walked down the hall, approaching the executive offices. Snyder said, “Those checks won’t do you any good in there. They’ll all be made out to the brewery.”

“Absolutely right,” said the thief. He didn’t seem troubled at all. “But there will be a little cash,” he said. “A few hundred, anyway.”

“You’re going through all this for a few hundred dollars?”

Once again the thief laughed; he seemed as easy and untroubled in his mind as if he and Snyder were just strolling along the street somewhere, not involved in grand larceny at all. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’” he said, “‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” He declaimed the line, just the way an actor would.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Snyder said, “and I don’t want to know.”

“Very intelligent.” The thief paused and opened a door. “What’s back here?”

“That’s Mr. Kilpatrick’s office. Vice-president in charge of marketing.”

“Fine,” the thief said. “Let’s go look.”

Snyder stepped through the doorway, flashing the light ahead of himself, and from back down the corridor came the sound of an explosion: a sudden flat crump that sounded low and serious and authoritative.

Snyder looked over his shoulder, startled, but the thief was directly behind him, urging him forward. Moving, walking across the secretary’s office toward the inner suite, Snyder said, “Was that the safe?”

“Definitely. Do you ever turn the lights on in here?”

“Sometimes.”

They went through another door to the inner suite. The thief patted the wall, found the light switch, and a large rectangular room suddenly blossomed into existence, created by soft indirect lighting. They had entered on one of the short sides, and directly across the way green wall-to-wall draperies covered an expanse of glass giving, by day, a beautiful view of the river. A free-form desk dominated the left side of the room, with a white sofa and several overstuffed chairs forming a conversation area on the right. Down near the green draperies stood a glass-topped dining table flanked by half a dozen chrome-and-black-plastic chairs.

“How mod-dren,” the thief said, with what sounded like mockery in his voice. “Do you suppose there’s a bathroom?”

Snyder pointed to a flush door just past the desk. “That’s it, there. The door beyond it is to the kitchen.”

“The bathroom will do,” the thief said. “Come along.”

They walked across the cream carpeting, and Snyder opened the bathroom door. They stepped in and the thief turned on the lights, and a row of chrome spots gleamed down onto a long chrome counter containing two sinks. The entire wall above the sinks was mirrored.

“Lovely,” the thief said, and took a set of handcuffs from his pocket. “Now you put your hands behind your back.”

Fright touched Snyder again, and once more his memory of that other time came back. “You don’t have to tie me up,” he said, his voice rising. He was blinking again, and backing away.

The thief seemed disappointed, as though Snyder had failed to give a useful performance in a simple role. “There’s nothing to it,” he said. “We just need half an hour or so lead time.”

“I don’t want to be tied up!”

The thief sighed. “I don’t have to show you a gun, do I? I thought we had such a good relationship going.”

Snyder watched him mistrustfully. He couldn’t seem to stop blinking. “You aren’t going to blindfold me,” he said.

“I wouldn’t think of it. I’ll put the cuffs on, leave you in here, pull the desk over in front of the door to slow you down a bit, and that’s the end of it. All we want is time enough to get away from here.” The thief patted Snyder’s arm and gave him a confidential smile, half obscured by the mask. “Come on, now,” he said. “Let’s not make trouble for one another.”

Snyder reluctantly turned around, putting his hands behind his back, and felt the chilly metal bands close around his wrists. His shoulders were hunched and his head ducked down, as though he expected to be struck from behind.

He wasn’t. The thief took him by the arms, turned him gently around, and helped him to sit down on the fuzzy-covered toilet seat. “There,” he said. “Comfy? That’s fine. Now, we have a message for you to give to Lozini.”

Snyder frowned up at him. “What?”

“Lozini,” the thief repeated. “Adolf Lozini.”

Snyder shook his head. “I don’t know who you mean,” he said.

“You never heard of Adolf Lozini?”

“Never in my life.”

The thief pondered that for a few seconds, then shrugged and said, “Doesn’t matter, he’ll get the idea. Been pleasant talking to you. Good night.”

Snyder sat hunched on the toilet seat. A thing like this shouldn’t happen to a man, certainly not twice.

The thief paused in the doorway. “I’ll leave the light on,” he said, and waved, and closed the door.

It took Snyder twenty-five minutes to get out of the bathroom and make the phone call.