Cops and Robbers

9

They both had that Saturday off, so they took the families to Jones Beach, using both cars. The beach was hot and crowded, the way it always is, but the kids liked the chance to run around in the sand sometimes instead of just jumping in and out of the pool in the backyard, and the wives liked any excuse at all that would get them out of the house. And Tom and Joe liked to look at women in bathing suits.

After a while, the two men were the only ones left on the blankets, spread out well back from the ocean. Mary and Grace were both down by the water’s edge with the smallest kids, and the other kids were all off running around somewhere, pestering people. Tom was sprawled on his stomach on the blanket with his chin propped on his forearms so he could look at the girls in bikinis, and Joe was sitting cross-legged on the next blanket over, reading the News.

The planning of the robbery had settled into a sort of hobby they had, like two guys who operate a model railroad set together. Tom had been casing the brokerages and the general Wall Street area, checking out possible getaway routes, collecting maps of the financial district and writing out long descriptions of the security arrangements at various brokerages. Joe had been raiding the Police Department files downtown for information on burglar alarms and any special police surveillance arrangements there might be in that area. The two of them had maps and charts and memos and lists enough to choke a whale, a huge growing pile of paperwork they kept locked away in the liquor closet in the game room in Tom’s basement. They’d thought it over and decided that was the best place to keep it all because nobody ever went down into the game room, and Tom was the only one with a key to that closet. Mary had had a key at one time, but she’d lost it a couple of years ago and hadn’t ever replaced it because she didn’t have any need for it.

In a way, the planning of the robbery had by now become an end in itself. When they’d first started talking about it there hadn’t been any reality in the plans at all, it had just been a funny and interesting thing to talk about on the way to work. But gradually it had become more real to both of them, and the way it had become real was that now they were really doing the preliminaries. They would go out and talk to the Mafia, they would study different brokerages, they would make lists and keep records, they would talk over various plans for the robbery; they would do everything except the robbery itself. Although they never acknowledged that to themselves, not consciously.

The thought of the robbery was never very far from either of their minds these days; it gave them an interest in life. Including while they were at the beach.

“Well, here’s one thing,” Joe said, tapping the newspaper. “We don’t do it the seventeenth.”

Idle, unalert, still looking at girls in bikinis but automatically knowing what Joe was talking about, Tom said, “How come?”

“Parade for the astronauts.”

A vision came into Tom’s head; narrow streets, filled with crowds and bands. “Oh, yeah,” he said.

Joe folded the paper and put it down. He was feeling vaguely irritable, as though some of the sand here had gotten into his brain. He said, “When the hell are we gonna do it?”

Tom shrugged one shoulder, and kept on watching the bodies all around him. “When we figure out how,” he said. “Look at that one with the volley ball.”

“Fuck the one with the volley ball,” Joe said. He didn’t feel like listening to a lot of horseshit.

“Gladly,” Tom said.

Joe said, “Listen, I’m serious.” He said it low-voiced and tense, and held his newspaper tight in his right fist.

Tom rolled over onto his side and gave Joe a look. He was vaguely surprised, and still feeling lazy and at peace with the world. He said, “What happened to you all of a sudden?”

What had happened to Joe, he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind the vision of the old man in the hospital, dying and falling out of bed. It seemed to him when he thought about it that the old man had been making one last desperate leap toward life, and had fallen, and it had been all over for him; too late. Usually, Joe was more interested even than Tom in looking at girls in bikinis, but for the last few days it seemed that all he could think about was time going by.

But he couldn’t very well talk about all of that, Tom would think he was crazy. Or turning into a weak sister. He shrugged, irritable and angry and frustrated, and said, “Nothing happened to me. We just keep fucking around on the fringes, that’s all.”

Tom frowned. Joe was talking very tough and mean, and Tom wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted to take offense or not. Holding that issue in abeyance for a second, he said, “So what do you want to do?”

“The robbery,” Joe said. “Or at least get moving on it.” He slapped the newspaper down onto the blanket with a disgusted gesture.

“Fine,” Tom said. He was beginning to get a little irritated himself. “Like how?” he said.

“You’ve been checking out the brokerages. What’s the story?”

Tom sat up, grudgingly giving up his leisure. “The story,” he said, “is that they’re very tough.”

“Tell me.” Joe wanted action, he wanted movement, he wanted the sense that something was happening now.

“Well,” Tom said, “half of them are no good to begin with.”

“Why not?”

“In a brokerage,” Tom told him, “there’s two places where they have guards. I mean, in addition to the main entrance. And the two places are the cage and the vault.”

“The cage?”

“That’s what they call the place where they do the paperwork, where they move the stocks and bonds in and out of the company. And the vault is where they store them.”

“So we want the vault,” Joe said. Simplicity, that was what he wanted, simple questions and simple answers.

“That’s right,” Tom said. “We want the vault. But with half of them, the vault is down in the basement and the cage is up on some other floor, and they’ve got closed-circuit TV between them.”

Joe made a face. “Ow,” he said.

“You see the problem,” Tom said. “While we’re taking care of the guards down in the basement, there’s some clown up on the seventh floor watching us do it. And taking pictures of it.”

“Taking pictures?”

“They put it all on video tape.” Tom made a sour smile, and said, “Which they can run for the jury at our trial.”

“Okay,” Joe said. “So the ones with the cage and the vault on different floors, they’re out.”

“With the rest of them,” Tom said, “where the cage and the vault are both on the same floor, you’ve still got guards in both places, plus guards at the entrance, and you’ve still got closed-circuit TV.”

Joe frowned. None of this was making him feel any better. He had, “They’ve all got that?”

Tom nodded. “Any outfit big enough to have what we want,” he said, “has TV. The little companies don’t, but we’re not going to find ten million dollars in bearer bonds lying around at one of the little companies.”

“Then we can’t do it at all,” Joe said. “It just can’t be done.” There was an angry sense of relief in that, in giving it up for good and for all, and knowing there wasn’t any hope.

A voice behind them suddenly said, “Are you robbers?”

They both turned around, and there was a little kid standing there behind them, a little boy of maybe five or six. He had a shovel in his hand, and he was covered with sand, and he was looking at them with bright curious eyes like a parrot. Tom just sat there staring at him, but Joe quickly said, “No, we’re the cops. You’re the robber.”

“Okay,” the kid said. He was agreeable.

“You better take off now,” Joe said, “before you get arrested.”

“Okay,” the kid said again, and turned around, and toddled off through the sand.

They both looked after him. Their hearts were pounding like sixty, it was amazing. “Christ,” Joe said.

Tom said, “We better do our talking in the car from now on.”

“What talking?” Joe was bitter, and he let it show. “You already described the situation, and it can’t be done.”

“Maybe it can,” Tom said. “As long as the cage and the vault are both on the same floor, there’s a chance we can pull it off.”

Joe studied his face. “You think so?”

“People commit robberies all the time. We should be able to.”

“Maybe,” Joe said.

“What bothers me most,” Tom said, “is how we’re going to stash the bonds after we get them. Remember, we kept saying we didn’t want anything we were going to have to hold onto.”

Joe shrugged. “We can only sell Vigano what he wants to buy,” he said. “Besides, we can call him right away afterward, we won’t have to keep the bonds very long at all.”

“I suppose so.”

“The time that bothers me,” Joe said, looking away toward the water, “is the two years.”

Tom gave him a warning look. “We agreed, Joe.”

“Yeah, I know we did. But look what happened to Paul. Shot in the leg. Another eight inches, he’d be shot in the balls. A little higher, he’s shot in the heart, he’s dead.”

Tom shrugged that off, saying, “Paul’s going to be okay, you said so yourself.”

“That isn’t the question,” Joe said. “I don’t want a million dollars buried in the ground, with me buried right next to it.”

“We can’t do it and run, we talked that over—”

Joe interrupted, saying, “Yeah yeah yeah, I know we did. I still think that’s a good idea. But not for two years, that’s too long.”

Tom said, “What, then?”

“One year.”

“What, cut it in half?”

“A year is a long time, Tom,” Joe said. “You want to live like this any longer than you absolutely have to?”

Tom frowned, looking away. He was staring at a girl in a bikini, without seeing her.

“The idea is to get out of this,” Joe said. “Remember?” Tempted against all his resolves, Tom shook his head and said, “Ahhh, Christ.”

“One year,” Joe said.

Tom held out a few seconds longer, but finally he shrugged and said, “All right. One year.”

“Good,” Joe said. He grinned, a lot happier than before, and grudgingly Tom grinned back.