Cops and Robbers

Tom

Joe let me off at Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, and I walked the one block over to Central Park West. I crossed with the light, and the park was now directly in front of me, the grass separated from the sidewalk by a knee-high stone wall.

There are benches along this part of Central Park West with their backs against that low wall, so that if you sit in one of them you’re looking at the apartment buildings across the way. I’ve never understood why anybody would want to sit on a park bench facing away from the park, but there are always plenty of people sitting on them in the warm weather, so there must be an attraction to it that I don’t understand. Maybe they like to count the cabs.

Today, I joined them. I sat on an unoccupied bench and counted cabs, and found nothing exciting in it.

I spent nearly an hour sitting there, with a newspaper in my lap and a moustache on my face, waiting for the mob to show up. It was a humid day and the moustache tickled like crazy, but I was afraid to scratch it for fear it would fall off. Every once in a while when it got to be more than I could stand I’d twitch my upper lip around like a beaver, but I tried to limit that relief to moments of true emergency, since for all I knew that too would make the damn thing break loose, and I didn’t want a moustache in my lap when Vigano’s people arrived.

The reason I was thinking about the moustache and park benches so much is that I was afraid to think about Vigano and his mobsters, and what we were here to do.

This one was worse than the robbery, a hundred times worse. That other time, we’d been operating against decent civilized human beings, who at the very worst would arrest us and try us and put us in jail. This time, we were operating against thugs who were going to try to kill us no matter what we did. Last time, we were pitting our one-shot plan against a normal company’s normal routine. This time, we were pitting our lives against the experience and manpower and malevolence of the mob.

When I did think about it, I simply thought we were crazy. If I’d worked it all out back in the beginning, say when I’d been on the train going to talk to Vigano, if I’d figured it out then that sooner or later we would be making ourselves murder targets for the Mafia, I never would have gone through with it. And Joe the same, I’m sure of it. But all we could concentrate on in the beginning was stealing the bonds, and not what would happen afterwards. And when it did occur to me what Vigano’s natural reaction would have to be, I was still so caught up in the other thing that all I thought about was how much easier that would make things for us, since we didn’t really have to steal the bonds, just make it look as though we had.

It was the morning after the robbery, while suffering that hangover in Joe’s car on the way to work, that I’d first looked the thing full in the face. We had done part one, and we’d done it pretty well. But part two was the crunch. Part two was where death waited for us if we weren’t very smart and very careful and very lucky.

But if we didn’t do part two, there was no point in our having done part one.

I was in a real funk for a while after that. I couldn’t even think about the problem, couldn’t concentrate on it. It just seemed more than I could deal with, reaching into the trap and pulling out the two-million-dollar piece of cheese without getting the spring across the back of my neck.

I’d been coming out of it anyway, spurred on by the scene with the homosexual in the park — very near here, in fact — but it was Joe who finally goosed me back into action again. I think Joe probably has less imagination than I do, but that’s a good part of his strength. If you can’t imagine the things that might go wrong, you won’t be afraid of them.

I don’t mean that Joe wasn’t scared of the mob. Any sane man would be, particularly if he meant to sell them a lot of old newspapers for two million dollars. It’s just that Joe was never paralyzed by his fear the way I’d been paralyzed by mine. Joe dealt more with specific things that he could touch and taste. What made me the most nervous was the mob, but what made him the most nervous was that we’d done part one and didn’t have anything to show for it. It really pained him when we ripped up those bonds, I know it did.

Well, we’d committed ourselves again. We could still turn around, of course, we could still cop out, but I didn’t think we would. We were at the stage now equivalent to when, in the robbery, we’d met Eastpoole but Joe hadn’t grabbed his arm yet. We’d set things up with Vigano, we were both in position, but we hadn’t yet made contact, we could still change our minds at the last second.

Joe made his first pass twenty minutes after I’d sat down, but I didn’t give him the signal because Vigano’s people hadn’t showed up yet. I watched him drive by, and then I counted cabs some more, and fifteen minutes later he went by again, and still they hadn’t showed up.

Weren’t they going to? If after all this, after nerving ourselves up to it and working out the best scheme we could think of, the mob didn’t show up this time for the transfer, I didn’t know what I’d do. I wouldn’t be able to stand it, that’s all. To have to start all over again, phone Vigano again, set up another meeting, I’d have an ulcer before it was over. Or a nervous breakdown.

But what if they weren’t coming at all? What if they’d decided the hell with it, they didn’t want to buy the bonds?

Christ, that would be something. Then Joe would really be sore, and at me. Because if we actually had the bonds, and the mob reneged on us, we could maybe go fence them to somebody else. But Vigano was the only person on earth to whom we could sell the idea of the bonds. It was him, or nobody.

The arrangement Joe and I had was that he would come by every fifteen minutes until I gave him the signal. Then our second timing sequence would begin, with me making the first move. We hadn’t made a contingency plan for what we’d do if the mob never showed up, but I figured if Joe was still circling the neighborhood an hour from now we might as well throw in the towel and go away and see what we could do next.

Get drunk, most likely.

Five minutes before he was due to come by for the third time, the mob arrived. A black limousine came up Central Park West and pulled to a stop in the entrance to the roadway. Gray police sawhorses blocked the road to automobiles this afternoon, and the limousine stopped broadside to the sawhorses, out of the way of northbound Central Park West traffic. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then the rear door opened and four people got out; two men and two women. None of them looked like the kind of people who normally travel around in limousines. Also, the general practice with limousines is that the chauffeur gets out and opens the door for the passengers, but this time the chauffeur stayed behind the wheel.

A man came out first. He was stocky and tough-looking, and despite the heat of the day he was wearing a light zippered jacket closed about halfway up. He looked around warily and cautiously, and then motioned for the other people to come out.

The two women appeared. They were both in their twenties, both a little too full in hip and breast, both wearing plaid slacks and ordinary blouses, both in full night-style make-up, and both with big bouffant hairdos. One of them was chewing gum. They stood around like collies waiting their turn to appear at a dog show, and the other man came out of the car after them.

He was the one. He looked like the first guy, and he too wore a half-zippered jacket, but the important part was that he was carrying the picnic basket. From the way he held it, the thing was heavier than hell.

Let it be full of the real thing, I thought. Let them not try that kind of fast one, I don’t want to have to go through this twice.

The four of them made very unlikely picnickers. There didn’t seem to be any coherent connection among them; the men didn’t hold the women’s hands or elbows, and there wasn’t any conversation back and forth. Nor could you figure out which woman was supposed to be with which man. The four of them seemed as arbitrarily joined together as four strangers in an elevator.

They walked off in a group into the park, the second man struggling with the heavy picnic basket. They disappeared from sight, but the limousine stayed where it was. Thin exhaust showed from the tailpipe.

I took the newspaper off my lap and tossed it down to the other end of the bench. In less than a minute a thin old fellow came along and picked it up and walked off with it, reading the stock reports.

Joe came by right on schedule. I didn’t look directly at him, but I knew he would see that I didn’t have the paper in my lap anymore. That was the signal. He would dope out for himself what the limousine meant, parked sideways in the entrance.

After Joe passed, I got to my feet and walked on into the park. Strolling down the asphalt path, I saw the four picnickers sitting in a bunch down near the traffic light on the interior road, where I’d said they should be. They had the picnic basket on the ground and they were sitting in a tight circle around it. They weren’t talking among themselves, they were all facing and concentrating outward, not even pretending to have a picnic together. They looked like Conestoga wagons waiting for Indians.

Vigano would have other people in the area, to guard the basket and try to keep us from going away with it. Walking around, I spotted four of them, guys sitting or standing at strategic locations where they could watch the picnickers. There’d be more of them, I was sure of that, but four was all I’d seen so far.

I’d probably see more later, whether I wanted to or not.

I kept an eye on my watch. It would take Joe a while to get into position. At the right time, I walked forward across the grass and down a gentle slope toward the picnickers.

They watched me coming. The one who’d first gotten out of the car put his hand inside his half-open jacket.

I walked up to them. I had a smile tacked to my face, as phony as the moustache. I hunkered down in front of the first man and said, quietly, “I’m Mr. Kopp.”

He had the eyes of a dead fish. He studied me with them and said, “Where’s your stuff?”

“Coming,” I said. “But first I’m going to reach into the basket and take some bills out.”

His expression didn’t change. He said, “Who says?” Both women and the other man kept looking away from us, outward; watching for Indians.

I said, “I have to check them out. Just a few.”

He was thinking it over. I glanced away to my left and saw one of the guys I’d spotted earlier, and he was closer now. He wasn’t moving at the moment, but he was closer.

“Why?”

I looked back at him. The question had been asked in a flat tone, as though he were a computer instead of a man, and his face was still expressionless. I said, “You know I’m not going to make the deal until I know for sure what you’ve got in that basket.”

“We have what you want.”

“I’ll have to check it out for myself.”

The other man turned his head and looked at me. Then he faced outward again and said, “Let him.”

The first man nodded. His fish eyes kept watching me. He said, “Go ahead. A few.”

“Fine,” I said. As I leaned forward to reach into the basket, I looked down the road. Joe was due about now.