“Part of a police report my mother gave. ‘I was in my bank, doing my normal weekly depositing and wanting to withdraw a little cash. Suddenly behind me I hear “Nobody move, everybody get down, this is a robbery.” Really, in that order—“Don’t move, get down.” What did they think we should do? Because if you can get down without moving, you’re really doing something. It was stupid. Unfair too, for someone could get killed not doing the right thing because of these confusing orders. And if you didn’t speak English which a lot of people in this city don’t, or not well enough to understand that hurried garbled gibberish, what then? But that fits my theories about bank robbers. That they’re all stupid. If they were the least bit smarter they wouldn’t be robbing banks, for one thing. For I’m sure, what with bank guards and plainclothesmen and just armed storeowners bringing in their own money, they have more of a chance of getting shot in one than we do with so many of them robbing banks. But you don’t want my theories, so I’ll stick to as close an account as I can give. This man said “Don’t move, get down, robbery. Pull your coats over your heads or just keep your eyes shut and your face flat against the floor.” Finally we knew. We should get down — for how else can you put your face to the floor? — and not keep our coats over our heads standing up. It sometimes takes cunning to be an innocent bystander. And right after that he confirmed our hunches about what to do by shouting “Now down, down, nobody make a move. First one to pick his head up gets it blown off.” By this time I was already getting down to the floor. I didn’t fly to it. I couldn’t. I got down slowly, one knee, then the other, then spread myself flat on my stomach and chest. If I had tried to get down quicker I might have broken a hip. I knew that and hoped the robbers would know why I was getting down so slowly. They must have. For though I was, from what I saw, the last one to get down by almost a minute, they didn’t complain. And since I had no sweater or coat for my head, though they didn’t say sweater, they just said coat, but I’m sure a sweater would have been all right, I put my arms over it and kept my eyes shut tight for the rest of the time till they left. From what the tellers said later, there must have been six to seven of them. For each line had a man or woman with a handgun, they said, and one who could have been either. And there were five lines operating. I remember that, quickly observing which one was the shortest to get on, when I came in. And behind us were two different men’s voices ordering the customers on line and all around to get down and stay there. Though maybe it was just one man with a couple of different voices: high and low, excited and controlled. Anyway, that was all there was to it for me. They told us to stay put on the floor where we were for ten minutes after they left, but most of us got up the second a teller shouted they were gone. All this a bit hard to believe, wouldn’t you say? Happening in the middle of the city, fifty customers or so in the bank and maybe fifteen bank employees, two of them armed guards in uniforms, plus another five thousand people strolling and pushing strollers and selling umbrellas and things in the street right outside and going in and out of the subway entrance in front of the bank. And to top it off, two policemen from a double-parked police car right across Broadway having a snack in a café. They didn’t go through my pocket book or anybody else’s, the robbers. One man, after everybody got up, did stay on the floor weeping, and a whole bunch of us went over to comfort him. It seemed he’d been robbed something like this — guns, get to the floor! — just a few months before, but in that one he also was kicked when he didn’t unzip his jacket pocket fast enough to turn over his wallet. He was afraid they were the same gang and they’d rough him up and maybe even kill him because he recognized them, besides crying because it happened twice in so short a time. We told him not to worry. That this can’t be the only gang in the city robbing banks. And since this one did it differently than his last one — didn’t take our wallets and watches and things, and waved pistols instead of shotguns behind us — it almost had to be a different gang. He said that suppose it happens again? What’s he to think every time he goes to a bank? I told him that if I’ve been going to a bank about once a week for more than sixty years and this was the first time it happened to me, chances of it happening to him a third time in the next year were slight. Someone else said that the first fifty of those sixty years weren’t such violent ones in the city and so shouldn’t count, but anyway what I said seemed to calm the man. Only other thing I can remember now is how one customer started complaining, about ten minutes after the robbers left, if this meant there wasn’t going to be any bank service here for a few hours. No one else of us did. In fact a group of us said that once the police finished questioning us we’ll share a cab to the nearest Chase branch on Broadway and Sixty-third and maybe even have lunch together after to talk about all this.’”