Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

42

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER tried it, let me say right now that bank robbery is a very boring occupation. So boring, in fact, that by six-thirty, a scant hour into the job, I had been bored completely out of terror, moral qualms and legal considerations, and dulled down into a torpid state of acceptability. So we were robbing a bank; what else was new?

The phone calling and other pre-arrangements had taken about half an hour, so it was just after six when Billy and Jerry started to work with the laser. Phil remained seated at the desk by the phone, the gun lying handy to his hand. Joe and I sat in swivel chairs, our guns resting in our laps as we continued to watch our four prisoners, who were sitting on the floor against a side wall. Eddie stayed up front, moving around like any bank guard.

Whenever any of our prisoners had to go to the toilet, it was my job to escort them, and to wait outside the door, once it had been established that neither bathroom had any windows large enough to permit an escape. And whenever one of them had to go, it was usually the guard. That man had kidneys every bit as bad as his nerves. Up and down, up and down; he punctuated my boredom with intervals of irritation.

Still, I suppose it would have been even worse just to sit there hour after hour, with no excuse at all for getting to my feet. What I really minded about all those trips to the men’s room, I must admit, was the weight of the gun. I was toting one of the Colt .45 automatics Eddie and I had stolen from the Army, and it was amazing just how much that gun weighed. Or maybe it wasn’t; the thing was, after all, made out of solid metal. Still, in movies people run around with guns in their hands as though the things weigh no more than a soft drink straw. This automatic was the first handgun it had ever been my misfortune to hold, and it was heavy. Particularly because I didn’t feel it was psychologically proper to let it hang straight down from the end of my arm, not with the prisoners watching. So whenever I walked around at all, following the bank guard or whoever on a potty run, I always made sure to keep the gun pointing fiercely at the person I was guarding. The strain on my wrist and thumb was really grinding after a while.

Then there was the mask. I don’t mean it itched or anything as specific as that, but it was foreign, it was not a natural part of me. It pressed on the bridge of my nose, the eye-holes weren’t absolutely aligned with my eyes, and every time I fussed with it the elastic band around the back of my head shifted around and started pulling hairs out. That can hurt.

All in all it was a very discomforting business, robbing banks, and I was looking forward to it being over just as rapidly as possible.

Which wasn’t going to be all that rapid. Billy and Jerry were taking turns with the laser, spending five minutes on and five off, and they were evidently having slow going. They’d started at six, and by six-thirty they’d both stripped down to their jockey shorts. It was apparently getting very hot in there, in a fairly confined and mostly metal space, running a laser which was in essence melting a hole through the metal.

Through a lot of metal. A line of locked storage boxes, all containing stock certificates, covered the rear wall of the vault. First the doors of several of these had to be burned off and the smoking metal remnants carried out to cool in the anteroom. Then the partitions had to be burned away in further smoking chunks-enough partitions to make it possible for a man to move through there. After that the wall itself had to be burned through, leading to the wall of the Western National vault, plus God alone knew what further cabinets or other obstructions we’d find on the other side of that second wall.

Originally the idea had been to cut completely through into the second vault before assembling any of the money, but when the storage box doors were all burned away the leading edges of the exposed partitions were all too hot to touch. The air-conditioning system in the vault was working full blast, but not making much headway, and it was impossible for either Billy or Jerry to reach in among the partitions to do the work with the laser. So, while waiting for the metal to cool off, they began to fill the empty liquor store cartons that Joe and I brought in from the typewriter truck. Jerry and Billy, standing there in their masks and underpants, sweating like a metal bucket on a hot day and beginning to look a bit red, not unlike lobsters, held our guns pointed at the man in the red tie and the man with the sideburns and the bank guard with the kidneys and the woman in the tweed suit while Joe and I went out to the truck and got the cartons. Six of them that first time, three apiece. Eddie held the door for us, exactly like a real bank guard.

This happened a little after seven. Jerry and Billy loaded stacks of bills into the cartons until seven-thirty, and then went back to work with the laser again, cutting away the partitions.

That took until nearly eleven. Before that, around nine o’clock, the man with the sideburns said to me, “May I speak?” Until then, except for murmured conversation among themselves, the prisoners had all been very quiet, none of them talking to us at all. Not even to tell us we wouldn’t get away with it, or any of the stock lines in this situation that they all surely must have heard enough times on television to be letter perfect in them.

But now one of them had spoken to one of us-the man in the sideburns to me, requesting permission to speak. “Sure,” I said, though I did glance sidelong at Joe, sitting near me. I thought of myself as merely an apprentice in this operation after all, maybe an auxiliary; the real pros should do any of the talking required.

But it was me the man in the sideburns had chosen to talk to; perhaps the portions of my face not covered by the mask looked less intimidating than the portions of Joe’s face not covered by his mask. “As you know,” he said to me, “none of us has been permitted to go home for dinner. I don’t know about my companions, but I’m getting hungry. Would it be all right for us to have something to eat?”

How the hell did I know? I said, “Do you have any food here?”

“No, but we could send out,” he said.

Send out? In the middle of a bank robbery? Helplessly, I said, “I don’t think-”

“It’s a fairly common practice,” he assured me. “I suppose you’ve cased the joint-that is what you say, isn’t it?” I’d never said any such thing in my life. “That’s what we say,” I agreed.

“Then you know,” he said, “that whenever we’re going to be working here, we do order out for food.”

Then Joe said, “I’m getting a little hungry myself.” He turned to Phil. “What about you?”

“Good idea,” Phil said. “We’ll order from the luncheonette.”

The man with the sideburns said, “The place across the street? That’s terrible. Durkey’s is better, around the corner on Massena Street.”

“Okay,” Phil said. “You got the number?”

“I believe it’s on the Rolodex on that desk there,” the man with the sideburns said.

“Right.” Phil found the Rolodex, twirled it, and apparently found the number. “Right,” he said again, and pointed at me. (We weren’t using names with one another.) “Take everybody’s order,” he said.

So I took everybody’s order. The man with the sideburns recommended the roast beef plate, which Joe and I both took, and the woman in the tweed skirt said the turkey diet plate was first-rate for anyone concerned with calories; Jerry took that. For the rest, it was a standard run of hamburgers, BLTs, and so on. Plus the usual run of coffees, with two teas; Jerry, and the man in the red tie.

I turned the list over to Phil, who looked at it, picked up the phone, turned to the Rolodex, stopped, looked at the list again, hung up the phone, and said, “I’m not gonna order out for ten people. There’s only three, four people here at night. They’ll know something’s going on.”

“Excuse me," the man with the sideburns said. “You could certainly go out and get the food yourselves, but in fact we occasionally do have up to a dozen people here through the dinner hour, in connection with audit or internal inventory or other procedures."

I knew I’d be the one sent out, I just knew it. So I said, “What do they care at the luncheonette? They’ll just bring the order over, that’s all."

“Not the luncheonette," the man with the sideburns said. “Durkey’s, around the corner on Massena Street."

“I know," I said. “Durkey’s.’’

Joe also came over to the desk where Phil was sitting. We three were clustered together now, with the four prisoners way the heck over on the other side of the room. Joe said, “You know, we better send out. We’ve seen them in the evening, you and me we both have, and they really do send out. And if we don’t tonight, with the lights on in the bank and all, maybe somebody’ll notice something and get a cop to check into it."

“The last thing we want," the man with the sideburns said, “is a shoot-out, or a hostage-type situation."

That was the last thing I wanted, too. I said, “I tell you what. Order for five, and I’ll go out and get for the other five."

“Don’t go to the luncheonette," the man with the sideburns advised me. “Go to Dur-’’

“I know, I know. Durkey’s, around the corner on Massena Street."

I thought he was slightly offended-not used to being interrupted, from the look of him. “That’s right," he said stiffly.

Meanwhile, Phil was thinking over my proposition. “Fine," he said at last. “You get five, I’ll call for five."

“Right."

So then we sat down and split the list into two parts, so that Phil would phone for all the larger items like roast beef plates, and I'd be getting the hamburgers. “I won't call for five minutes," Phil said. "Give you a little lead time."

"Fine." I put the list in my pocket and glanced at the man with the sideburns, but he didn’t tell me to go to Durkey's, around the corner on Massena Street. In that silence I walked up front again where I explained to Eddie -he was one of the hamburgers and regular coffees-that I was going out to collect a partial order, but that the rest would be delivered. He said, "Where do I get the money to pay for it?"

"Ask Phil." I had cash on me, and planned to be reimbursed.

"Okay," he said, and unlocked the door to let me out. As I was going through he said, "Take your mask off."

"Oh! Right."

So I went around the corner to Durkey's and put in my order. People were sitting around, eating, waiting for food. I’m in the middle of committing two bank robberies, I thought; what do you people think of that? They didn’t think much of it.

I considered calling Marian, telling her to pack a bag and gas up the VW, and then the two of us would make a run for the border. Into Canada, get a job, establish a new name, make a new life. Never return, never be a party to this bank robbery again.

My package was handed to me. I paid for it, and went back to the bank. As I was sorting it out on one of the desks, and figuring out who owed me what, the other half was delivered, and Eddie came back to get the cash to pay for it. So Phil walked into the vault and came out with two twenty dollar bills. "Don’t give him too big a tip," he warned Eddie, and handed me the other twenty. "Here. You paid out of your pocket, right?"

“This is too big a tip,” I said.

He laughed. “Take it, take it,” he said. So I took it, and he said, “See? You get nervous ahead of time, but not during the job. Am I right?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“I got you figured out pretty well, Harry,” he said.

“You sure do,” I said. Then we all sat down and ate, and as I said to the man with the sideburns later, he was absolutely right: there was no comparison between Durkey’s and the luncheonette. “This roast beef plate is delicious,” I told him, as I was finishing it. “Thanks for recommending it.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “We may have differences of opinion on some financial matters, but that doesn’t mean we can’t treat one another like human beings.”

It’s really encouraging to hear a banker talk like that.