Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

43

BY TWO IN THE MORNING, it had become obvious we weren’t going to get into the Western National vault, but Phil and Joe kept refusing to give up, no matter what reports Jerry and Billy staggered out with, and so another hour went by and it was after three before we finally gave up.

Before that we’d had our visit from the police. That was around eleven-thirty. Eddie had just previously come back to report that a patrol car had gone by three times in the last twenty minutes, and that he had seen the two occupants looking curiously at the lit-up interior of Federal Fiduciary. “Don’t worry,” Phil told him. “We’re covered.”

“I’m not worried,” Eddie said.

I didn’t entirely believe him when he said it, but I must admit he carried off the police visit with assurance and calmness. They stopped just in front of the typewriter truck out front, and both of them got out of their car. They walked over to the door, which Eddie unlocked and opened in order to greet them. They asked where Duffy was, and Eddie said Duffy was home with the flu, which was going around again at that time. They asked what was happening to keep people at the bank so late, and Eddie told them it was some kind of audit. Then they just hung around, chatting, and it was obvious that while they weren’t exactly suspicious they weren’t exactly satisfied either.

In the back, Jerry and Billy had suspended operations with the laser, and were panting together near the vault anteroom doorway, where they reminded me of a team of stagecoach horses who have just outrun the band of Indians. At the partition, Phil and Joe and I listened to everything that was happening up front. So, I presume, did our four prisoners.

Finally, Phil muttered, “We got to take care of this.’’ He went over to the man with the sideburns and, speaking quietly, said, “You know the cops on this beat, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course.’’

“And they know you.’’

“I assume so.”

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,” Phil said. “You’re going out where they can see you. Just walk across where they can see you, pick up a piece of paper off a desk or something, turn around and walk back here. On the way over, nod at them. You’d nod at them, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Fine. Nod at them.”

“Very well,” he said, and nodded. “Now?”

“Sure now.”

The man with the sideburns got to his feet, brushed the wrinkles out of his suit, adjusted his tie and his glasses, cleared his throat, and took a step.

Phil said, “I didn’t threaten you.’’

The man with the sideburns stopped, and looked back at Phil.

Phil gave him a grin, from under his mask. It scared even me, and I was on the guy’s side. “I don’t have to threaten you,” he said.

The man with the sideburns was a very calm type. “No, you don’t,” he said, and went out and did exactly what Phil had told him to. He picked up a piece of paper from a desk over there, nodded at the cops, and walked back. “Fine,” Phil said. “Sit down again.”

He gestured with the piece of paper. “I’ll want to put this back again if I may. I don’t want any more disruption of files than absolutely necessary.”

“Sure thing,” Phil said. “Only wait a minute, okay?”

“Of course.”

And by the end of that exchange the cops had left. Seeing a face they knew, in calm circumstances, had convinced them. They went away, the man with the sideburns put the piece of paper back on the desk where it belonged, and we settled down to inactivity and boredom again.

And the beginning of bad news from the vault. A total of ten cartons full of money had been packed from the Federal Fiduciary vault, which was all the cash Jerry and Billy found in there, but progress toward the Western National vault was slower than expected, and very difficult. The removal of the partitions had been a long slow process, requiring frequent intervals of no activity while metal was cooling, and the vault wall when they reached it turned out to be solid concrete, full of metal rods, heavy mesh and cable. Concrete was harder to laser than metal. They couldn’t slice away great pieces of it the way they’d done with the partitions; instead, they had to more or less melt every bit of it, turning it from concrete into lava, boring an ever-widening circle and trying for tiny advantages.

The advantages were few, the disadvantages many. The concrete, in its molten form, ran down over other concrete yet to be melted, where it cooled and hardened again into something glasslike, much tougher than it had been before as concrete. Sometimes this glasslike skin wound up on top of concrete that itself had to be melted, so first the hardened lava had to be remelted again.

Also, the lava was dangerous to be around; it occasionally splashed, sometimes popped, and constantly ran. Jerry and Billy were both pretty well covered with burns before very long, and neither of them was happy about it. They were also getting redder and redder from all the heat in the vault, and sweat was literally running down them like cataracts. They were drinking water by the gallon, but it wasn’t enough; they were both losing moisture, and Jerry in particular could actually be seen losing weight. His red skin hung more and more loosely on his frame, and his face was drooping as though it were made of wax. Even Billy was wearing down, and I wouldn’t have believed that possible.

But failure didn’t enter anybody’s conversation until shortly after midnight, when Jerry came out of one of his five minute sessions in the vault, handed the laser to Billy, and came plodding moistly over to say to Phil, “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

“What?” Phil brushed it away at once. “Sure we’ll make it,” he said. ‘‘You’re tired, sit down a while.”

It was over an hour later, after one o’clock, when Billy for the first time said that it wasn’t going to happen. ‘‘We didn’t hit that other wall yet,” he said to Phil.

‘‘We’ll hit it any minute,” Phil assured him.

Billy shook his head. “We won’t hit it at all,” he said. “We’ll never get through this first wall.” Then he turned and went back inside and took his five minutes.

Between one and two, Phil and Joe gave Billy and Jerry frequent pep talks, which had no effect that I could see, and Eddie drifted back every once in a while to comment to the world at large that he didn’t believe in aborting missions.

As for me, I kept quiet for some time, but eventually it seemed to me I had to start taking some sort of stand, so at the end of one of the pep talks I said to Phil, “You know, it’s almost two o’clock now, and we still aren’t out of this vault, much less into the other one. And we agreed we couldn’t stay after five.”

“They’ll make it,” Phil told me.

I didn’t say anything that time, but twenty minutes later when we had essentially the same conversation I said, “They won’t make it, Phil. We’re just wasting time here, and making those two guys work harder than they have to.”

“We won’t quit,” Phil said.

But we did. Jerry came out at three o’clock, gasping and weaving back and forth, and though Billy held his hand out for the laser Jerry walked right on by him, carried it over to where Phil was sitting at the desk, and dropped the laser onto the desk in front of him. “You do it,” he said.

Phil just looked at him. It was hard to tell with the mask, but I think he was just bewildered, couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“I’m not doing any more,” Jerry said. “And neither is my buddy here. You do it.”

“If there’s a problem-”

“There’s a problem,” Jerry told him. “Go on in and take a look.”

So Phil went in and took a look, and when he came out he seemed very shaken. “All right,” he said. “So it didn’t work out. We got half the dough.”

We’d had possession of half the dough by six o’clock, nine hours ago, which neither I nor anybody else pointed out. Maybe because we were all too tired.

So. Jerry and Billy wearily dressed themselves, while Joe tied and gagged the four prisoners under the watchful gun of Phil. I began carrying liquor store cartons of money up to the front, where I got to be the one to inform Eddie that we were aborting the mission. “I knew we should have held onto those hand grenades,” he said. “Always prepare for the unforeseen, that’s the way to run a successful operation.”

By three-fifteen we were out of the bank. The cartons were in the typewriter truck, which Joe and Phil and I traveled in to the Dombey house. We unloaded the cartons into the basement, the Vasacapa corridor, and as we were finishing Jerry and Billy and Eddie showed up in a car they’d just stolen for the purpose. Joe took the typewriter truck away to return it, Phil took the stolen car away to dump it, and the rest of us crawled through to the gym in the prison, leaving the cartons in the Dombey basement.

And that’s how I helped to rob a bank.