Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

13

I WAS LETTING a tiny bit of air out of every basketball when Eddie Troyn came over and said, “Let’s organize our rendezvous.”

I looked up at him. His face was as clean and bony as a cow-skull in the desert. The crease in his prison denims was so sharp it made me squint. I said, “What?”

“We have surveillance detail this afternoon,” he said. I knew he talked that way-rendezvous, surveillance- but that didn’t mean I knew what he was talking about.

I said, “What surveillance? What rendezvous?”

He expressed displeased surprise. His eyebrows had some difficulty riding on that bony forehead. “Didn’t Phil tell you?’’

“Nobody told me anything,” I said. I’d been planning to spend this afternoon opening my local bank account, since the check had come from my mother yesterday.

“Breakdown in communication,” he said severely.

I tossed the basketball from my lap back into the bin and got to my feet. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked him.

“Bank surveillance,” he said. “We all take shifts.”

My stomach contracted. Bank surveillance. This had to have something to do with the robbery. Trying for an unconcerned facade, I said, “Sure, Eddie. When do you want me? Now?”

“No, not till they close, at three.”

Oh, that was all right, then. Not all right, but at least I could still open my checking account today. “Fine,” I said. “You want to meet at the bank?”

“You know the luncheonette across the street? I’ll be in a front booth there at three.”

“Right,” I said.

He shot a starched work-shirt cuff and frowned at his watch. “I read,” he said slowly, gazing at the watch, “eleven- twenty-three.” Then he looked at me.

He wanted to synchronize watches! “Oh,” I said, and looked at my watch, and I read eleven-nineteen. “Right,” I said. “I mean, check.”

“See you at three,” he said, and marched off.

I looked at the bin of basketballs, but I didn’t feel like fouling up any more of them, so I went on and did productive things until lunch, and then went out and took care of business at the bank.

I had, of course, my choice between two banks: Western National and Federal Fiduciary. I wasn’t sure which of them I would go to as I walked downtown, and in fact I was leaning toward Western National since I’d been in there once with Phil, but when I got to the banks I remembered it was also Western National where I had pulled my milk box stunt. That bank had been the victim of my first-and so far only-felony, and I felt a certain embarrassment in its presence. So I opened my account at Federal Fiduciary, where they gave me a book of temporary checks and told me my check on the Rye bank should clear in three days.

Returning to the street, I found myself smiling around at the downtown scene with an air almost proprietary. In some damn way, this was becoming my home town. I was a local boy now, with a Post Office box and a bank account of my very own.

And my own civilian clothing, at least partly. I was still wearing the borrowed shirt and pants, but out of my ill- gotten gains I’d bought myself a good wool sweater and a heavy leather jacket. Winter was settling in for a long visit in upstate New York, and I meant to be ready for it.

If only I could be ready for everything else that was going to happen around here. Spending the next hour browsing through the local stores, easing along with the ebb and flow of Christmas shoppers, stopping to look at model railroad displays, I couldn’t stop brooding about the upcoming bank robberies. What was I going to do? What could I do?

Nothing. Wait and see. Ride with events, and hope for the best.

God.