Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (12 page)

 
          
I
didn’t much like visiting Paul in the hospital. I don’t like hospitals anyway,
but I particularly don’t like them when there’s a brother officer in there. I
don’t like that reminder.

 
          
Did
you ever watch pro football on television, and notice what happens when one of
the players gets hurt? He’s laying there on the ground, moving his knees a
little, and maybe one or two other players go over to see what the story is,
but all the rest kind of walk off by themselves and pretend they have a problem
with their shoes. I know exactly how they feel, I do. It isn’t they’re
heartless or anything, it’s just they don’t like to be reminded how easy it
could turn out to be one of them.

 
          
Same with me.
I had plenty of chances to visit Paul, but
until I was feeling really good and guilty I wouldn’t go at all. Then I’d
finally go and there’d be nothing to say, and we’d sit around and watch soap
operas together for half an hour. It’s a funny
thing,
we always had plenty to talk about in the car, but not in the hospital. The
hospital is death on conversation.

 
          
So
I was there again, going back and forth at the foot of the bed. Paul was in a
semiprivate room, but the other bed was empty right now. His windows gave a
good clear view of a brick wall. If you stood right next to the window and
looked down you could see green grass, but if Paul could have stood.
next
to the window he wouldn’t have to be in the hospital,
and from the bed what you saw was brick wall.

 
          
The
television set mounted on the wall was turned on, but the sound was off. Paul
was sitting up in bed, newspapers and magazines all around him, and he kept
sneaking glances at the TV.

 
          
I
was trying to think of something to say. I hate long uncomfortable silences.

 
          
Paul
said, “Listen, Joe, if you want to get back out there,
it’s
okay.”

 
          
I
stopped walking, and tried to look interested. “No, no, this is fine. What the
hell,
let Lou drive around a while.” Lou was Paul’s
replacement in the car, a rookie.

 
          
Paul
said, “How’s he doing?”

 
          
“He’s
okay,” I said. I shrugged, not much caring. Then I tried to keep the
conversation alive, saying, “He’s too gung ho, that’s all. I’ll be glad to get
you back.”

 
          
“Me too.”
He grinned and said, “Can you believe it? I
want
to go to work.”

 
          
“A
couple of times,” I told him, “I would have traded places with you.”

 
          
All
of a sudden he started scratching his leg through the covers. “They keep
telling me it won’t itch any more,” he said.

 
          
“I
haven’t seen the doctor yet,” I said, “
that
knew his
ass from his elbow.” I nodded at the other bed. “At least you don’t have the
old geek around any more. They send him home?”

 
          
“Naw,”
Paul said. “He died.” He was still scratching through the covers.

 
          
“That
must have been fun.”

 
          
“Middle of the night.”
He stopped scratching, and yawned.
“He fell right out of bed,” he said.
“Woke me up.
Scared the crap out of me.”

 
          
“Nice
little vacation for you,” I said. And I thought,
Nice
little conversation we’re having
.

 
          
“Oh,
it’s great,” he said.

 
          
I
didn’t have anything else I wanted to say about an old man falling out of bed
and dropping dead, so the silence came back again for a while. I looked up at
the television set, and it showed a guy in a rowboat floating around in a
toilet tank. Television is fucking incredible sometimes.

 
          
Paul
shifted around in the bed, kicking his legs out this way and that, and a couple
of his magazines slid off onto the floor.
Like
the old man,
I thought. “Boy, my ass gets to hurting,” he said. He couldn’t
seem to decide what position he wanted to be in. “Pins and needles, you know?”

 
          
“I
know,” I said. I picked the magazines up and tossed them on the bed again. “You
ought to roll over on your other side,” I told him. “Lie on a nurse, that’ll
help.”

 
          
“Have
you seen the beasts around here?”

 
          
“I’ve
seen them.”

 
          
And so much for that conversation.
I looked at the
television set again, and the commercial was over—I
hope
that was a commercial—and what was up there on the screen?
A hospital room, one guy in the bed and one guy walking around the
room, talking to him.
“We’re on television,” I said.

 
          
Paul
said, “The guy in the bed has amnesia.”

 
          
I
looked at him. “Where’d you get it?”

 
          
He
grinned at me. “I forgot.”

 
          
No
place to go from there either. Christ, conversation is impossible in the
hospital, it really is.

 
          
Paul
glanced over at the empty bed. He had a thoughtful look on his face, and he
said, “You know what used to get me about him?”

 
          
“What,
the old guy?”

 
          
“He
was always saying he hadn’t done anything yet.” Paul gave me a look, with this
strange-looking kind of crooked smile on his face. He said, “He’d wasted his
life, that’s what he thought, he hadn’t done anything with himself. He was
older’n hell, but all he wanted was to get healthy and get out of here, so he
could start doing something.”

 
          
“Like
what?”

 
          
“He
didn’t
know,
the poor old fart.” Paul shrugged. “Just something different, I guess.”

 
          
I
looked at the other bed. I could almost see the old man falling out of it onto
the floor. I wondered what he’d done for a living.

           
They both had that Saturday off, so
they took the families to
Jones
Beach
, using both cars. The beach was hot and
crowded, the way it always is, but the kids liked the chance to run around in
the sand sometimes instead of just jumping in and out of the pool in the
backyard, and the wives liked any excuse at all that would get them out of the
house. And Tom and Joe liked to look at women in bathing suits.

 
          
After
a while, the two men were the only ones left on the blankets, spread out well
back from the ocean. Mary and Grace were both down by the water’s edge with the
smallest kids, and the other kids were all off running around somewhere,
pestering people. Tom was sprawled on his stomach on the blanket with his chin
propped on his forearms so he could look at the girls in bikinis, and Joe was
sitting cross-legged on the next blanket over, reading the
News.

 
          
The
planning of the robbery had settled into a sort of hobby they had, like two
guys who operate a model railroad set together. Tom had been casing the
brokerages and the general Wall Street area, checking out possible getaway
routes, collecting maps of the financial district and writing out long
descriptions of the security arrangements at various brokerages. Joe had been
raiding the Police Department files downtown for information on burglar alarms
and any special police surveillance arrangements there might be in that area.
The two of them had maps and charts and memos and lists enough to choke a
whale, a huge growing pile of paperwork they kept locked away in the liquor
closet in the game room in Tom’s basement. They’d thought it over and decided
that was the best place to keep it all because nobody ever went down into the
game room, and Tom was the only one with a key to that closet. Mary had had a
key at one time, but she’d lost it a couple of years ago and hadn’t ever
replaced it because she didn’t have any need for it.

 
          
In
a way, the planning of the robbery had by now become an end in itself. When
they’d first started talking about it there hadn’t been any reality in the
plans at all, it had just been a funny and interesting thing to talk about on
the way to work. But gradually it had become more real to both of them, and the
way it had become real was that now they were really doing the preliminaries.
They would go out and talk to the Mafia, they would study different brokerages,
they would make lists and keep records, they would talk over various plans for
the robbery; they would do everything except the robbery itself.
Although they never acknowledged that to themselves, not
consciously.

 
          
The
thought of the robbery was never very far from either of their minds these
days; it gave them an interest in life.
Including while they
were at the beach.

 
          
“Well,
here’s one thing,” Joe said, tapping the newspaper. “We don’t do it the
seventeenth.”

 
          
Idle,
unalert, still looking at girls in bikinis but automatically knowing what Joe
was talking about, Tom said, “How come?”

 
          
“Parade for the astronauts.”

 
          
A
vision came into Tom’s head; narrow streets, filled with crowds and bands. “Oh,
yeah,” he said.

 
          
Joe
folded the paper and put it down. He was feeling vaguely irritable, as though
some of the sand here had gotten into his brain. He said, “When the hell
are
we gonna do it?”

 
          
Tom
shrugged one shoulder and kept on watching the bodies all around him. “When we
figure out how,” he said. “Look at that one with the volley ball.”

 
          
“Fuck
the one with the volleyball,” Joe said. He didn’t feel like listening to a lot
of horseshit

 
          
“Gladly,”
Tom said.

 
          
Joe
said, “Listen, I’m serious.” He said it low-voiced and tense, and held his
newspaper tight in his right fist.

 
          
Tom
rolled over onto his side and gave Joe a look. He was vaguely surprised, and
still feeling lazy and at peace with the world. He said, “What happened to you
all of a sudden?”

 
          
What
had happened to Joe, he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind the vision of
the old man in the hospital, dying and falling out of bed. It seemed to him
when he thought about it that the old man had been making one last desperate
leap toward life, and had fallen, and it had been all over for him; too late.
Usually, Joe was more interested even than Tom in looking at girls in bikinis,
but for the last few days it seemed that all he could think about was time
going by.

 
          
But
he couldn’t very well talk about all of that, Tom would think he was crazy.
Or turning into a weak sister.
He shrugged, irritable and
angry and frustrated, and said, “Nothing happened to me. We just keep fucking
around on
the fringes, that’s
all.”

 
          
Tom
frowned. Joe was talking very tough and mean, and Tom wasn’t sure yet whether
he wanted to take offense or not. Holding that issue in abeyance for a second,
he said, “So what do you want to do?”

 
          
“The
robbery,” Joe said. “Or at least get moving on it.” He slapped the newspaper
down onto the blanket with a disgusted gesture.

 
          
“Fine,”
Tom said. He was beginning to get a little irritated himself. “Like how?” he
said.

 
          
“You’ve
been checking out the brokerages. What’s the story?”

 
          
Tom
sat up, grudgingly giving up his leisure. “The story,” he said, “is that
they’re very tough.”

 
          
“Tell
me.” Joe wanted action, He wanted movement, he wanted the sense that something
was happening
now.

 
          
“Well,”
Tom said, “half of them are no good to begin with.”

 
          
“Why not?”

 
          
“In
a brokerage,” Tom told him, “
there’s
two places where
they have guards. I mean, in addition to the main entrance. And the two places
are the cage and the vault”

 
          
“The cage?”

 
          
“That’s
what they call the place where they do the paperwork, where they move the
stocks and bonds in and out of the company. And the vault is where they store
them.”

 
          
“So
we want the vault,” Joe said.
Simplicity, that
was
what he wanted, simple questions and simple answers.

 
          
“That’s
right,” Tom said. “We want the vault. But with half of them, the vault is down
in the basement and the cage is up on some other floor, and they’ve got
closed-circuit TV between them.”

 
          
Joe
made a face. “Ow,” he said.

 
          
“You
see the problem,” Tom said. “While we’re taking care of the guards down in the
basement, there’s some clown up on the seventh floor watching us do it.
And taking pictures of it.”

 
          
“Taking pictures?”

 
          
“They
put it all on video tape.” Tom made a sour smile, and said, “Which they can run
for the jury at our trial.”

           
“Okay,” Joe said. “So the ones with
the cage and the vault on different floors, they’re out.”

 
          
“With
the rest of them,” Tom said, “where the cage and the vault are both on the same
floor, you’ve still got guards in both places, plus guards at the entrance, and
you’ve still got closed-circuit TV.”

 
          
Joe
frowned. None of this was making him feel any better. He had, “They’ve
all
got that?”

 
          
Tom
nodded. “Any outfit big enough to have what we want,” he said, “has TV. The
little companies don’t, but we’re not going to find ten million dollars in
bearer bonds lying around at one of the little companies.”

 
          
“Then
we can’t do it at all,” Joe said. “It just can’t be done.” There was an angry
sense of relief in that, in giving it up for good and for all, and knowing
there wasn’t any hope.

 
          
A
voice behind them suddenly said, “Are you robbers?” They both turned around,
and there was a little kid standing there behind them, a little boy of maybe
five or six. He had a shovel in his hand, and he was covered with sand, and he
was looking at them with bright curious eyes like a parrot. Tom just sat there
staring at him, but Joe quickly said, “No, we’re the cops.
You’re
the robber.”

           
“Okay,” the kid said. He was
agreeable.

 
          
“You
better take off now,” Joe said, “before you get arrested.”

 
          
“Okay,”
the kid said again, and turned around, and toddled off through the sand.

 
          
They
both looked after him. Their hearts were pounding like sixty, it was amazing.
“Christ,” Joe said.

 
          
Tom
said, “We better do our talking in the car from now on.”

 
          
“What
talking?” Joe was bitter, and he let it show. “You already described the
situation, and it can’t be done.”

 
          
“Maybe
it can,” Tom said. “As long as the cage and the vault are both on the same
floor, there’s a chance we can pull it off.”

 
          
Joe
studied his face. “You think so?”

           
“People commit robberies all the
time.
We
should be able to.”

 
          
“Maybe,”
Joe said.

 
          
“What
bothers me most,” Tom said, “is how we’re going to stash the bonds after we get
them. Remember, we kept saying we didn’t want anything we were going to have to
hold onto.”

 
          
Joe
shrugged. “We can only sell Vigano what he wants to buy,” he said. “Besides, we
can call him right away
afterward,
we won’t have to
keep the bonds very long at all.”

 
          
“I
suppose so.”

 
          
“The
time that bothers me,” Joe said, looking away toward the
water,
“is the two years.”

 
          
Tom
gave him a warning look. “We agreed, Joe.”

 
          
“Yeah,
I know we did. But look what happened to Paul. Shot in the leg. Another eight
inches, he’d be shot in the balls. A little higher, he’s shot in the heart,
he’s dead.” Tom shrugged that off, saying, “Paul’s going to be okay, you said
so yourself.”

 
          
“That
isn’t the question,” Joe said. “I don’t want a million dollars buried in the
ground, with me buried right next to it.”

 
          
“We
can’t do it and run, we talked that over—”

 
          
Joe
interrupted, saying, “Yeah yeah yeah, I know we did. I still think that’s a
good idea. But not for two years, that’s too long.”

 
          
Tom
said, “What, then?”

 
          
“One
year.”

 
          
“
What,
cut it in half?”

 
          
“A
year is a long time, Tom,” Joe said. “You want to live like this any longer
than you absolutely have to?”

 
          
Tom
frowned, looking away. He was staring at a girl in a bikini, without seeing
her.