The Return of Service

The Penthouse Heist

This is a heist or rehearsal for one. There are six of us in the elevator going to the penthouse floor. The operator is suspicious and calls downstairs for confirmation. “Let half of them go up,” says a mug’s voice over the intercom. “Take the other half to another floor.” I try not to think about what will happen if they catch us. The machine gun has been broken down into three parts, each part hidden under the coat of a different person. If anyone of the three with a fragment of machine gun gets separated from the others, we are without a weapon.

I get off with two of my colleagues, both teenagers, at the penultimate floor, which is the thirty-ninth, while the others continue to the roof. What we will do — it is unspoken but agreed upon — is climb the final flight and rendezvous at the penthouse entrance.

I have this vision of us getting to the top and the roof opening like a flower. Then what? We set up the machine gun and wait. Eventually what we are after will come to us.

There are no stairs or at least no sign of stairs, no door with Exit or Entrance printed across its back. We discuss in whispers what to do. Our first concern is to get the machine gun together and our next is not to be caught.

We take the next elevator down to Lobby — there is no Up elevator on the thirty-ninth floor — and find ourselves confronted by a hostile crowd. To this point, we are innocent, I remind my colleagues.

“Are you a member of the troublemakers’s party?” a plainclothes doorman asks me.

I say we’re here to see a member of the family.

The doorman laughs facetiously. “A blood relation, I’ll bet, I know the man, okay? Against his judgment, he sleeps with a dead horse.”

My cohorts, Gabbo and Pinky, can’t help giggling at the door man’s unpleasant humor. I push the Up button and wait for the elevator’s return.

“What’s the apartment number in which this blood relation resides? I’ll just buzz him first if you don’t mind to let him know you’re on your way.”

“He lives where he sleeps,” I say. “If it’s all the same to you, we’d like to surprise him.”

I can see that the doorman is suspicious of our intent or perhaps doesn’t understand English, merely mouths the few phrases he’s learned by rote.

“No way, no pay,” he says. “Job of doorman is to announce all visitors. The management of this building discourages surprises.”

The elevator arrives and while the doorman is distracted by some other irregularity, we occupy the elevator. The car this time is self-operated and I push P for penthouse and C for close. As the door shuts providentially in the doorman’s red face, his finger is raised to make a point. We will hear from him again, I suppose.

This elevator moves without the urgency of the first, checking into every floor on the way up without opening its doors. Pinky wets his pants, a puddle at his feet. I wonder if we’re in a trap. When we get to the penthouse the daylight is gone and the kids with me have grown up. I’ve never been on an elevator that slow before.

The elevator releases us into the penthouse apartment itself, a surprising place of exit. Our former companions, the other three, are sitting on a thick-napped purple rug, playing cards in a perfunctory manner.

“What took you so long?” the dealer says. “We’ve been bored out of our minds.” His companions yawn, as if on cue, a surly lot.

“Where is the machine gun?” I ask.

They don’t seem to know, look inside one another’s coats, empty out pockets.

“There are three parts,” I remind them. “You have two of them and I have one.”

In the lost time, this bunch seems to have forgotten the arrangements, and though I am only peripherally involved in the heist, a man with a sociological interest in crime, I am obliged to recount the plot to the rest of them. When I finish they stand up and applaud.

“That’s it!” their spokesman says. “How could we forget? When you sit around for years, waiting, sometimes your mind wanders. If you ask me, I think we’ve let opportunity slip through our fingers.”

I take charge in the absence of official command. “Put everything of value in laundry bags and let’s get out of here before we’re discovered.”

I wonder what has happened to the occupant of the penthouse, my nominal relative, but think it’s best not to ask. I hope they had more sense than to kill him, though they seem capable, this crew, of almost any extreme.

What they are not capable of is distinguishing valuables from trash and they manage in their collective fever of greed to loot the house of almost all its portables, filling fifteen laundry bags before they’re through.

I suggest a compromise measure — two bags apiece — and the crew (I stay out of the discussion) argue about what to take and what to leave behind.

“I myself go for stuff with sentimental value,” Pinky says.

“Who’s to decide what stays and what goes?”

“That’s my view too,” says the spokesman for the other three. “The value of an object depends on what it means to who wants it.”

I try to work out a principle that will satisfy all of us. “You blindfold me,” I say. “The three bags I touch will be the three we leave behind. How does that sound?”

My suggestion is rejected, though they decide to blindfold me anyway.

The explanation comes when they are about to leave. “Five goes into fifteen three times,” says the group’s leader. “It is easier to leave a blind leader behind than three valued sacks.” It has come to that.

I apologize for my unfelicitous advice, plead with my former colleagues to reconsider my situation. My abjectness is cement to their hearts. “You’re just lucky we don’t make you really sorry,” their youthful spokesman says.

I am thrust into a closet in which a man and woman, also bound and blindfolded, seem to have prior tenancy.

The reason I can see them is that the jostling and bumping I received has moved my blindfold down over one eye.

“Don’t hurt us,” the woman says. “You are welcome to our valuables. Anything your heart desires is yours.”

“It’s too late for that,” I say.

“You’re not a hardened criminal,” she says, “are you? You have a kind voice, a kind of kind voice, not sticky or false like some. If you untied me, you’d find undying gratitude behind these bonds.”

When I untie the woman, she threatens to call the police, becomes noisy and belligerent. The woman wrestles with me while the husband, his hands tied in front of him, rushes to the phone. I push the woman away, but she comes back, leeching on to my shirt, accusing me of unspeakable crimes. I drag her to the door with me and pull us both out of the apartment.

The woman is still holding on to me, shredding my shirt with her long nails, as I get into the elevator.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I say.

“I’m persistent to a fault,” says my companion.

Halfway down she whispers, “I’ve been planning to leave him for years. I just needed the right occasion.”

“What happens when your husband calls the police?”

“Trust me,” she says, putting a finger to my lips. “There’s more than one way to skin a goose.”

The door opens at the fifth floor and a tall blond man with a Doberman pinscher gets in.

On the third floor a gaggle of women of a certain age present themselves. The penthouse lady and I are pressed to the back of the elevator, the cold nose of the black dog between us.

The crowd ought to make it easier for me to slip away unnoticed, an anonymous figure leaving the building.

When the door opens into the lobby, we are faced by a spotlight, the kind used at old-fashioned Hollywood premieres. The crowd claps politely at our emergence. We are apparently not what they are waiting for. But if not us, who?

“What’s going on?” I ask my companion.

“If anyone asks, you’re with me,” she whispers, walking into the center of the crowd, pretending to be blind or distracted. I follow behind, carrying a briefcase someone in the elevator handed me.

A reporter with a microphone stops us and asks if we would mind answering a few questions. The woman says, “We are just good friends,” and moves on through the crowd past a policeman, who is flanked by two of my former colleagues.

“What’s your part in the heist?” the reporter asks me. “It was my job to drive the elevator,” I say.

“The getaway elevator? Is that what we’re talking about?” He holds me by the thumb as I try to slip away, insists on an answer to his questions. “Was it or was it nor your job to drive the getaway elevator?” he asks.

“No comment.”

“But you don’t deny it, is that right?”

Two lost children pass between us, giving me the occasion to move off. The interviewer, who is perhaps working for the police, follows me through the crowd, challenging me with questions. I prefer not to know him.

The briefcase I carry clangs as if silver is inside, or jewels. Do I hold after all the fruits of the heist? Is it circumstance or calculation? Perhaps, I think, the briefcase was passed on to me as an attempt to frame me for the crime.

I slip the case into another man’s hand, free myself of its burden. I am not in this caper to get caught. There are police at the main door, some uniformed, some in plain clothes. I tremble to go by them, have always been frightened by the law.

No one stops me as I press through the mob to the door, all eyes elsewhere, attention riveted.

One of my former colleagues, the dealer in the card game, is confessing his part in the heist or rather a self-serving version of it. Our eyes meet and he points an accusing finger at me, “There’s one of them,” he calls.

I look behind me, gawk with the crowd at whoever it is at the moment going out the door. In a rush of activity, some benighted figure is dragged inside by the police and carried up to the podium where the television interview is being conducted,

“Do you know each other?” the interviewer asks the two men. “That’s my long lost brother,” says my former partner in crime. “Louis,” says the other, “is it really you?” The two men embrace before the cameras, slap each other’s backs. “What a coincidence that we should meet in the middle of all this confusion.”

“What have you been doing with yourself?”

“The same old grind, export-import, Wall Street and the Potomac, Seoul and Sardinia. And you?”

“A little of this, a little of that. I’ve been pretty much my own boss since Mother passed away. When you work for someone else your heart’s never really in it.”

The interviewer interrupts, separating the microphone from the brothers, summing up the situation for the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, these two men have met here today after not having seen each other in the span of a decade. We are all witness to a privileged moment.”

Applause. Some laughter. A handful of cheers.

The woman who rode in the elevator with me takes my arm as if she had some claim on it. “We’re on next,” she whispers. “Straighten your hair before you go on.”

“I don’t have a comb.”

“Take mine.” She hands me a jewel-studded comb, which looks too valuable to use on one’s hair.

Three policemen remove the brothers from the stage, cracking each a blow on the back of his head with a nightstick before leading them into a wagon parked outside the back door. The crowd separates to let them through. There are no protests.

“A moment ago they were celebrities,” I say to my companion.

“Now they’re police fodder. There’s no future in going on stage.”

“I’d like to do it anyway,” she says. “How many shots at fame do you have?”

She pulls me over to the podium and announces that we’re ready to go on. The announcer seems skeptical.

“What’s your story?” he asks off microphone. “It’s got to be fresh or I can’t use you.”

“I met this man in a closet,” she says, clasping my arm as I try to slip away. “In the beginning it didn’t seem as if we’d ever get together. Eventually, as you can see, we fell hopelessly in love.”

“It’s been done,” says the announcer, “It’s been done to a turn.”

“That’s not the whole story,” she says, desperately improvising.

“This man you see here with me and I were childhood sweethearts who hadn’t seen each other in lo these eighteen years.”

“There’s a credibility gap there, madam. You look old enough — don’t take offense — to be this man’s mother.”

“Well!”

“That’s unacceptable on national television. Please step down so I can talk to someone that might fire the public imagination.”

“What if I told you that this man and I planned the heist together. It was the only way we could meet without my husband getting wise.”

“Now you’re talking, big lady. Step closer to the microphone and I’ll introduce you to our national audience…Ladies and gentles, we have an unusual couple with us today. The man who plotted the penthouse heist and the lady he did it for.”

“He didn’t do it for me; he did it to me,” she says, leaning toward the microphone, “This man had an irresistible longing for my jewels.”

I can see that trouble awaits me here but for the moment all escape routes are blocked.

“There’s something heroic about a crime of passion,” the announce intones. “Don’t you think so? Something movingly pathetic. A man risking his very freedom for the married woman he adores. What did you guys do with the old man? Did you waste him in a trail of blood? Put poison in his soup?”

“We just forgot about him,” the lady says.

The announcer claps his hands with pleasure. “One of your cases of benign neglect, am I right? If the mistreated husband is in the audience, would you please, sir, come to the microphone and give us your story.”

I force my way to the microphone. “None of what this woman says has a grain of truth.”

“Step right up, sir. Are you the neglected husband?”

I can see that whatever I say this public whore will distort for his own uses, so I say nothing, merely clear my throat of the debris of irritation.

“Is it possible,” he says with characteristic melodrama, “that you’re both the neglected husband and the enterprising and unscrupulous lover? Ladies and genitals, the plot thickens.”

I am given the microphone and asked to tell my story, am about to put together a sentence when the woman I am with clamps a hand over my mouth.

“This man has taken a vow of silence,” she announces. “I think it would be in bad taste to press him further. I’ll answer any questions you have concerning him.”

The television cameras dolly over to another part of the lobby.

The interviewer turns his back on my companion, looks around for something more to his taste.

“This man holds the key to the heist,” she shouts after him.

“You’re missing out on the biggest story of the decade.”

“What did you mean by a vow of silence?” I ask her.

She shakes her head at me and stomps off in the direction of the television cameras. “If we’ve blown it, I’ll never forgive myself,” she mutters.

Last seen she is doing a seductive dance for the eye of one of the TV cameras, fixing her hair, shouting that she has been misunderstood.

I decide — the confusion presents me with the opportunity — to return to the penthouse and finish what I had started. To avoid crowds, I go around the back and take the service elevator. An odd coincidence: two of my former partners appear in the same elevator. “We saw you on television,” they say with undisguised jealousy.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” I ask.

Gabbo says, “We’re returning to the scene of the crime, which is traditional. Is it the same with you?”

I push another floor number but the elevator refuses to acknowledge my request, slides past my stop as if better informed of my intention than I am myself. We are caged in this pen together for the duration of the ride.

I try to forgive them their betrayal of me but it is easier to say than feel. We reminisce about our last elevator ride together.

“God, were we scared,” says Pinky. “I was afraid I would mess my pants I was so scared. I didn’t think we’d ever pull it off, did you?”

I tell them how it was with me. “While we were riding in the elevator I couldn’t remember a single detail of the plan. The only image that came to mind was that when we got to the top the police would be waiting for us with handcuffs. What a humiliation that would have been.”

“I was thinking about what I would do with the money,” recalls Pinky. “I thought I’d get the kid a pair of shoes and the rest of us would take a vacation.”

“I was going to open a swank boutique,” says Gabbo. “Quit the 9 to 5 job and go into business for myself.”

“What did you do with the money?” I ask.

“Inflation ate it up,” says Pinky. “Debts and taxes got the rest. I don’t believe I spent a nickel of that loot on my own comforts.”

“Still, we brought it off,” says Gabbo. “The success of the idea was the important thing.”

I recall riding up in the elevator at the speed of eighty feet per second, the recollection as vivid as if it were being lived at the moment, fragments of machine gun under, the coats of three of my colleagues. I recall trying to remember who had the various parts. There were six of us in the elevator, seven including the operator, an old man with a European accent who listened to English-speaking programs on the radio to improve his pronunciation.

Pinky, Gabbo, and I got off at the penultimate floor, the other three electing to go all the way. There was nothing for us to do on the thirty-ninth floor, nothing serious or important. We disguised our disappointment.

“It was our modesty,” says Gabbo, “that made us get off first.

Why us and not the other three? When we finally got to the top, all the excitement was over.”

The other three were playing cards when we finally arrived, a witless game of their own invention, our circumstantial hosts imprisoned in one of the closets.

It was a relief to find that everything had been taken care of, but at the same time it meant that we were only of peripheral consequence in the affair. One wants to be of some use.

The card playing seemed a reality-denying tactic. It was as if, having gotten this far successfully, they had willfully forgotten the point of it all. This is a heist, I had to remind them. I took charge since someone had to, got them up and moving, ordered them to collect whatever was of value. Our anonymous tipster had told us that the apartment was filled with priceless jewels.

Gabbo’s version is different from mine. In Gabbo’s version, he is the central figure, the well-meaning if tragically limited hero. “As soon as I stepped into that upper-middle-class jungle, I knew it was a mistake. Why should we want what they had? It was only material wealth, nothing enduring or nourishing. Their lives were more impoverished than my own. I was prepared to go to the closet and release them. Then I thought it would not be a real favor, would only return them to the same empty life. It struck me that stripping them of their most valued possessions would force them into a new life. Was that presumptuous, do you think? At the same time, I didn’t want what they had, wanted none of it. I resolved to go along for the sake of my companions and for no other reason.”

Pinky has no separate vision of the event. “I’ll do anything,” he says, “if it seems like fun.”

Why was I in it? I am not like Pinky or Gabbo or the other three, men with limited respect for the integrity of others. I wanted to do something surprising for once, something no one would expect me to do. And the money was attractive. I won’t deny that I wanted the money, was in it for the quick killing. My share, if all went according to plan, was to be upwards of two years’ salary. And the people we were heisting were themselves reputed to be ethically suspect, fingers in the till here and there, eyes looking the other way. Perhaps I’m inventing reasons as a way of explaining to myself behavior that has no rational explanation. Frankly, I don’t understand my involvement in the heist. It was fitting that I ended up in the closet with our circumstantial hosts.

We have five more floors to travel. “Tell you the truth, I’m more nervous this time,” says Pinky.

“I want to see if it’s the way I remember it,” says Gabbo. “I expect to be disappointed.”

It may be, I think, that it hasn’t happened yet. It may be that we imagined the heist the first time, a way of deflecting pressure, and when we enter the penthouse, as we will, our engagement in the actual caper begins. It is possible of course, no less possible perhaps than the notion that we are returning to the scene of the crime.

It’s only the imagination that ever returns to the scene of a crime, erasing one’s guilt by canceling it out.

The elevator will arrive at the penthouse floor in a matter of seconds. It will not open right away, but will wheeze to a stop before the sliding doors release us, the machine not without its own mechanical remorse.

The penthouse will not be as we remember it, will not be the same in, a single significant detail. There will be no card players on the rug this time.

There will be a family this time around the dining table, a mother, father, grandmother, and three sons, eating what looks like a Sunday dinner. The father is slicing the roast beef with an electric carving knife when we come in from the elevator.

“This is a heist,” Gabbo will say. “If everyone behaves himself, no one will get punished. I hope I’ve made myself understood.”

“Where are the bloody jewels?” Pinky will ask.

I will construct the machine gun from its parts, set it up so that everyone at that table is in its sights.

The family will go about their business, eating and drinking, laughing about this and that, untouched by the impact of our presence.

Their blind unconcern, which I don’t believe for a moment, which I refuse to believe, puts the whole daring enterprise into perspective.