Cops and Robbers

Joe

I let Tom off at Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, went on up to 90th, made a right turn, and headed over to Central Park West. Then I turned south, and drove slowly down alongside the park to consider the situation.

Everything looked normal, as far as I could see. I didn’t believe it, but that was the way it looked. There’s a long oval road called the Drive that goes all the way around inside the park, and every entrance to it that I saw was blocked with gray Police Department sawhorses; the usual thing for a Tuesday afternoon. People with bicycles were going in past the sawhorses, and wherever I could catch a glimpse of the Drive inside the park it was full of bicycles sailing by. Nobody I saw had a sign on his back that read Mafia.

It took twenty minutes to go down to 61st Street and then come back up again, and when I went past 85th Street it was fine by me that Tom was still sitting there with the newspaper in his lap. I wasn’t ready to leap into action just yet. To tell the truth, I was getting a late case of cold feet.

Maybe it was because everything looked so peaceful. When we’d gone up against the brokerage, there had been people around with uniforms and guns, there’d been closed-circuit television and locked doors to go through and all kinds of things to pit ourselves against. But here there was nothing, just a peaceful afternoon in the park, summer sunshine everywhere, people riding bicycles or pushing baby carriages or just lying on the grass with a paperback book. And yet this was a much tougher situation; the people we were up against were meaner, and we were pretty sure they were out to kill us, and they knew we were coming.

So where were they?

Around; that much I could be sure of. Since I’m on the uniformed force I haven’t had much to do with stakeouts, but I know from Tom that it’s possible to flood an area with plainsclothesmen and not have anything look out of the ordinary at all. And if the Police Department could do it, the mob could do it.

I was supposed to check with Tom every fifteen minutes, so after I saw him I headed over to Broadway and farted around there for a little while. Ran my beat, in fact. I was on duty at the moment, which was the simple straight-forward way I’d gotten hold of a car this time. It had turned out Lou had a girl friend that went to Columbia and lived up near the campus and didn’t have any classes on Tuesday afternoons. So for the last three weeks I’d been giving him a couple hours to shack up with her; drop him off at her place, pick him up later. It was an established pattern now, nothing out of the ordinary, and it gave me a couple of hours alone with the car; with the numbers changed again.

Fifteen minutes. I went back over to the park, passed by Tom again, and he still had the newspaper in his lap.

This time, I didn’t like it. I was still nervous, I still had cold feet, but my reaction when I’m scared of something is that I want to get it done and over with. No stalling around, building it up, making myself even more nervous than I was already.

Come on, Vigano. Make your play, let’s do something.

Because of my nerves, my driving was getting bad. A couple times, if I’d been in a civilian car I would have racked it up for sure; but people pay more attention to police cars, so they saw me in time to get out of the way. But that’s all I needed, was to be involved in some fender-bumping argument over on Columbus Avenue while Tom was making contact in the park; so after the second trip past him I didn’t do much driving at all, just pulled in next to a hydrant on 86th to wait the fifteen minutes out.

I had the radio on, listening to the dispatcher, though I don’t know why. I sure wasn’t going to respond to any squeals, not now. Maybe I was listening for something to tell me the whole thing was off, we’d blown it and could go home and forget the whole thing.

In the back seat, directly behind me, was the picnic basket. It was half full of old copies of the Daily News. On top we’d scattered some fake diplomas and gag stock certificates we’d picked up in a novelty shop on Times Square. They ought to look good enough for a fast peek, which is all we meant to give the other side before we made our play. If things worked out right.

Fifteen minutes. I pulled away from the hydrant, made a loop around, and passed Tom again, and he didn’t have the newspaper on his lap anymore.

All of a sudden I had a balled-up wet wool overcoat in my stomach. I was blinking like a hophead, I could barely make out the numbers and the hands on my watch when I raised my arm in front of my face to check the time. Three thirty-five. All right. All right.

I drove up to 96th Street, the next entrance to the Drive. I stopped with the nose of the car against one of the sawhorses blocking the road, and stumbled and almost fell on my face getting out from behind the wheel. I walked around to the front of the car, lifted one end of the sawhorse, and swung it out of the way. Then I drove through, put the sawhorse back, and angled the car slowly down the entrance road to the Drive.

I was in the only kind of vehicle that could come into the park on a Tuesday afternoon. That was the edge we had; we could drive, and the mob had to walk.

I stopped by the Drive and checked my watch again, and I had three minutes before I should start to move. Tom needed time to make contact.

Bicycles streamed by me, heading south, the same direction I would go. There’s no law about it, but most people who ride bicycles in the park treat the Drive as a counter-clockwise one-way street, the way it is the rest of the week for cars. Every once in a while somebody would come up in the other direction like a salmon going upstream — usually it was a teen-ager — but most of the traffic was south-bound. Even the women pushing baby carriages were all heading south.

I didn’t want any shooting in here today. Aside from what would happen to Tom and me, they could really rack up a score on women and children.

Time. I shifted into drive and joined the stream of bicycles and matched their pace on down toward Tom.