Cops and Robbers

Joe

When Tom and I talked over the Mafia idea, one thing we agreed on right away was that if the mob found out who we were, there was no way we could go through with it. Neither of us wanted mobsters around with that kind of hold over us. Either we could contact Vigano and stay anonymous, or we’d have to give up that idea and try to think of something else.

We took it for granted, the two of us, that Vigano would have Tom followed after their conversation; if he talked to Tom at all. So the first most necessary thing was to break Tom loose from the people tailing him.

The last train to Penn Station from Red Bank pulls in to New York at twelve-forty. There aren’t many people on that train, particularly on a week night, which was part of the reason we’d picked it. Also, where it came in at Penn Station there was only one staircase up to the terminal.

I was in uniform, and I got to the station fifteen minutes ahead of time. We’d rehearsed this three times, and the train had never been anywhere near this early, but we wanted to be absolutely sure. I went to the head of the stairs leading up from that platform, and stood there, waiting.

Standing there, it occurred to me this was the first time in my life I’d worn the uniform when I wasn’t on duty. I’ve never been exactly gung ho for the force. The only reason I was in that uniform at all was because the Army didn’t need any tank drivers the day in basic training when I got classified. The choices open to me were cook or military policeman or something else, I forget what. Something crappy. They were also picking orderly-room clerks and finance clerks that day, but my test profile wasn’t too good in the right areas for those jobs. What I really wanted was to drive a tank, but I wound up an MP.

I was an MP for a year and a half, eleven months of it assigned to the Vogelweh dependent housing area outside Kaiserlautern, Germany. I dug it. I got a kick out of carrying a .45 around on my hip, and doing the target shooting, and driving around town in a jeep at night to keep the white troops and the black troops from beating each other’s head in. I hadn’t had any job at all before I was drafted, I mean nothing that I wanted to get back to, and I never had any interest in college, so when I got out of the Army the question was what would I do for a living, and the answer was plain and simple. Go on the same as before. The uniform changed from brown to blue, the sidearm changed from a .45 automatic to a .38 revolver, and you had to be a little more careful how you dealt with people, but otherwise it was pretty much the same job.

Which was nice at first, it made for a nice transition from soldier to civilian. But after a while the same job gets to be a drag and a bore and a pain in the ass, no matter what it is. Whether you’re carrying a gun or not, driving around the city or not, it doesn’t matter; it gets boring.

For a long time, it seemed as though there was always something else to take up the slack, keep me interested in life even when the job was dull. Getting married, for instance. Having kids. Moving out of the apartment out to Long Island. Those are like the mountains, and the valley is your dull everyday life.

It had been a long time between mountains.

For the last couple years, I’d been thinking about women, about maybe shacking up with somebody somewhere. Get me a girl in town, somewhere in my precinct. I was pretty sure a girl on the side would drain off all this stored-up boredom again, at least for a while, but somehow I never seemed to get started at it. My heart wasn’t in it. I knew it was possible, I personally knew four guys in the precinct who had exactly that kind of arrangement, but it was like I didn’t have the energy to make the first moves, to look around in any way more than just eyeing my friends’ wives and wondering how they’d be in the sack. Maybe I was trying to keep myself from disappointment, maybe down in the bottom of my brain I had the idea a girl on the side would finally be the biggest letdown of all. With no place left to go from there.

I heard the train come in, down below; the way the brakes squealed, they could probably hear it up on 42nd Street. I stood at the head of the stairs, just to one side, looking down. The stairs were concrete, and wide enough for three people abreast, and they were flanked on both sides by amber tile walls.

Tom got to the stairs first, the way he was supposed to. If I hadn’t already seen him in the disguise I wouldn’t have recognized him. The wig was a different hair color, and longer than his usual hair, and it seemed to change the whole shape of his head. Then he had a David Niven kind of moustache, which made his face look younger for some reason. And the horn-rim glasses changed his eyes entirely, so he looked like an accountant somewhere.

As for me, the uniform was my main disguise. People rarely look past the uniform to see the individual man. The only extra disguise I wore was a droopy moustache, like a western sheriff’s, and I’d put that on more for the hell of it than because I thought I really needed it. There wouldn’t be any reason for anybody to tie me up with Tom.

About a dozen other passengers came along behind Tom, the usual number for this train, and it wasn’t hard at all to pick out Vigano’s men from among them. Three of them, all dressed differently but all unmistakably hoods, with hard faces and hunched shoulders.

I was surprised at how hard it hit me, when I saw those three guys among the bunch of people coming up the stairs behind Tom. Up till that second, I guess I really hadn’t believed it; that Tom would go through with it, or that he’d get in to see Vigano, or that Vigano would wind up listening to him and believing him. But it must have happened, or those three guys wouldn’t have taken the train.

Tom was moving fast, coming up the stairs two and three at a time. The three shadows were mixed in with the pack, all of it moving more slowly; when Tom reached the head of the stairs, the nearest other passenger was still eight steps down.

Tom went by me without a look, the way he was supposed to. He went past, and I immediately stepped forward to block the staircase. I held my arms out and said, “Hold up a minute. Hold it, there.”

Momentum kept them coming up a few more steps, but then they stopped and all looked up at me. People obey the uniform. I saw two of Vigano’s men pushing their way up past the other passengers toward me, and the third one going back down the stairs; probably to look for another way up. But there wasn’t any, not from that platform. By the time he found another exit it would be too late, and he’d come up in the wrong place anyway.

They were all milling around on the stairs, a dozen of them packed in tight together. New Yorkers expect that kind of thing, so there wasn’t any major complaint. One of Vigano’s men, having shoved himself up to the front of the pack, where his head was at the level of my elbow, looked past me down the corridor, watching Tom hustle away. He made an irritated face, but tried to keep his voice neutral when he said to me, “What’s the problem, officer?”

“Only be a minute,” I told him.

His eyes kept flicking back and forth between the corridor and me, and I could tell by his expression when Tom turned the corner down there. But still I held them all, while I counted to thirty slowly. The third hood reappeared at the foot of the stairs and trotted up them, looking disgusted.

I stepped to the side, slow and casual. “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”

They streamed past me, Vigano’s men moving at a dead run. I watched them go, and I knew they were wasting their time. We’d practiced this enough, Tom and I, so that we knew how long it would take him to get to the nearest exit and out to where his car was parked, with the special police permit showing on the sun visor. By now, he was probably already making the turn onto Ninth Avenue.

I strolled the other way.