Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

41

I STOOD AND POINTED a gun at the woman in the tweed skirt and the man with the red tie while the man with the sideburns phoned his wife. Phil was pointing a gun at the man with the sideburns. Joe was pointing a gun at the bank guard, who had been relieved of his own gun, which Jerry now had in his pocket. Eddie, in his guard uniform, was standing by the front door, acting precisely like a bank guard; I was sure he thought he was a bank guard, and I hoped he wouldn’t blow the whistle on us. Jerry and Billy, who would be operating the laser which Joe had brought in from the typewriter repairman’s truck, were standing around waiting for the phone calls to be made before either of them could get started.

When the man with the sideburns finished telling his wife about the sudden unexpected audit that might keep him at work in the bank all night-he’d had to keep assuring her that there was no suspicion that he himself was an embezzler-he came over and took the place of the woman in the tweed skirt. That is, he became one of the two people I was pointing a gun at, and the woman in the tweed skirt became the person Phil was pointing a gun at, in the course of which she made a phone call to her husband explaining the business about the audit. In her case, the suspicion evinced at the other end seemed to have nothing to do with embezzlement: “You can call me right here at the bank any time you want,” she said, with some asperity, “all night long.” She seemed quite annoyed when she hung up and came back to be gun-pointed at by me again, while the man with the red tie took her place in front of Phil and at the phone.

None of the employees seemed more than annoyed or perhaps slightly worried by our presence, in fact, except the bank guard, who had been just about petrified with fear until he’d been disarmed, after which he calmed down considerably. But he still did twitch from time to time, and lick his lips, and look around nervously for somebody to appease.

Once we had all entered the bank and moved behind the partition to the area which held the private offices and the vault, we had immediately put on the black masks from the five-and-ten that Phil had bought back in December. They were ordinary domino masks, of the type the Lone Ranger wears. I don’t know what I looked like, but the others looked like characters from nineteen-thirties comic strips rather than the Lone Ranger. Rough clothing, masks. Only the fact that we were all clean-shaven and had no speech balloons over our heads saved us from out- and-out obsolescence.

The man with the red tie, on the phone with his wife, had to follow up the story of the audit with a rather weary defense of his choice of banking as an occupation. “You knew I worked in a bank when you married me,” he said at one point. Some sort of dinner party involving members of his wife’s family had apparently been scheduled for this evening, and his wife was clearly of a mind that he was using the audit as an excuse for non-attendance. He denied this consistently, and ultimately with some vehemence, but I noticed that when he finished the call and came back over to be gun-pointed at by me again he did seem to have a faint smile hovering in the general vicinity of his lips.

Finally the guard, a somewhat pudgy elderly man with a red roll of fat around his neck, was escorted by Joe over to the telephone, and therefore made his phone call under the watchful guns of two tough guys with masks on. It did seem a bit excessive.

That is, he made his phone calls. First he had to call his wife and tell her not to hold dinner because of the audit, etc., etc. Then he had to call his daughter-in-law and tell her he couldn’t babysit for her and her husband that evening because of the audit, etc., etc. Then he had to call somebody named Jim and tell him not to come over for checkers at his, the guard’s, daughter-in-law’s house this evening because he, the guard, would not be present because of the audit, etc., etc. It seemed a complicated social life for such an old man.

Finally, though, the bank guard’s arrangements for the evening had been thoroughly rearranged and he left the phone and came over to stand with the woman in the tweed skirt and the man with the red tie and the man with the sideburns, all of whom had guns pointed at them by Joe and me, while Phil sat near the phone in case of problems, Eddie stayed up front doing his bank guard imitation, and Jerry and Billy took the laser into the vault to go to work.

All of this was what was happening on the surface. What was happening inside me was:

EEEEEE!!!