I frowned, and remembered not to look away from the bank. “How do you know a thing like that?”
“Our team,” he said, “has friends in the local building trades. Remember, that’s how the tunnel was constructed in the first place.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Radio silence,” he said.
I couldn’t help it; I looked away from the bank. I stared in bewilderment at Eddie and said, “Huh?”
He gave a meaningful head nod. I looked to my left, and damn if the high school boy wasn’t back, with our coffees. He put them down without looking at either of us, stood frowning at them for a few seconds, and then drifted aimlessly away, like a paper boat in a puddle.
I looked back at the bank.
Eddie said, “The Western National vault is wired against tunneling from every side, except where it is conjunctive with the Federal Fiduciary vault. In effect, the two vaults share a common wall and a common alarm system excluding that wall.”
“Oh,” I said. I could see it coming.
“Once we have breached the Federal Fiduciary vault,” Eddie said, “we will in a way be behind the lines of the Western National vault. We will tunnel through the wall from vault to vault.”
“Ah,” I said. But it seemed to me that bank vaults, with or without alarm systems, did tend to have very thick and very solid walls. I said, “How long does this tunnel take to dig?”
“Perhaps three hours.”
I glanced at him, glanced away, and he said, “You are relieved.” I glanced at him again, and he was watching the bank, having pushed the notebook and pen back over toward me.
I picked up the pen, had nothing to write, and put it back down I said, “Three hours? I thought it would take a lot longer than that.”
“Not with the laser,” he said.
I looked at him. “Laser?”
“The one we’ll take from Camp Quattatunk,” he said.
I said, “Camp Quattatunk.”
“The Army base,” he said, as though that explained everything.
I remembered having heard there was an Army base around here somewhere, but this was the first time I’d heard its name. Or that we would be getting a laser from it. I said, “A laser. That’s one of those burning ray machines, isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“And we’re going to get one at this Army base.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Steal it,” he said.
Of course. I said, “We’re going to pull a robbery at an Army base so we can pull a robbery at two banks.”
“Positive,” he said.
Positive. I said, “When do we do this Army base robbery?”
“The night before the banks.”
Monday, December thirteenth. Two and a half weeks from now. I picked up the coffee and sipped it and it tasted like my future: cold, bleak, thin and not very sweet.
“Two female employees exiting,” he said, “at three thirty- seven.”
I looked at my watch. Three thirty-three. “Check,” I said, and wrote in the notebook “2 fem emp X 3:37”. Then I looked out the window and saw two girls, bulky in their carcoats, walking away from Federal Fiduciary Trust, as the guard locked the door again behind them.
If only it looked harder to get into. Or easier.
I didn’t want to think about the Army camp at all.
15
IN THE MIDST OF MADNESS we are in apparent normalcy. Nine days after my stakeout duty with Eddie Troyn I had a Saturday night date. With a telephone repairman named Mary Edna Sweeney.
It was actually a double date, set up by Max Nolan, involving him and another local girl, named Dotty Fleisch. Max had broached the subject of finding me a date earlier in the week, and I had expressed immediate interest. “I’m not talking about great stuff,” he had cautioned me. “All the good gash goes out of town to college. In the summer around here you can write your own ticket, but this time of year you take what you can get.”
“I’ll take it,” I had said.
There was nothing wrong with Mary Edna Sweeney. On the other hand, there was nothing right with her either. She was twenty-five, deeply involved in her telephone company job, and she’d apparently had three boy friends in a row who’d joined the Army, been shipped to unlikely places, and promptly married girls they’d found in the foreign clime. Including one who had been sent to some remote radar station up around the Arctic circle and immediately married an Eskimo.
All of these departures had made Mary Edna just a bit nervous; she tended to look startled at sounds like doors closing or car engines starting. Otherwise, however, she was a placid girl, a bit heftier than my usual tastes, with large, sweet, dark eyes and masses of black hair. “I have to keep my hair tied up when I’m working,” she told me, “but boy, as soon as I get home I let it fly.”
“I never met a lady telephone repairman before,” I said.
“The telephone company is an equal opportunity employer,” she said, with that primness which unimaginative people reserve for nobler thoughts they’ve memorized. “They’re experimenting with male operators,” she said. “And I’m an experiment the other way.”
“A repairlady.”
“A repair person” she said.
I said, “You do all that repairperson stuff? Climb the poles and everything?”
“Sure,” she said. “Of course, I can’t wear a skirt.” And she blushed. Girls in small towns still blush.
This conversation took place in the Riviera Restaurant & Cocktail Lounge after the movie. We had had an absolutely traditional first date; Max and I had crawled through the tunnel at just after seven o’clock, had met the girls in front of the Strand Theater, there had been introductions, and we had gone at once into the darkness to sit next to one another without touching while we watched a double feature. A double feature. Unfortunately the first picture was a caper movie about a bank robbery, full of hardened criminals and violent action-including the pursuit, beating and painful death of a squealer-and it left me a little limp. It took the entire second feature, a comedy about a giraffe that swallowed an experimental formula and became a super-genius, to bring me out of my doldrums and make it possible for me to exchange dialogue with Mary Edna Sweeney at the Riviera, to which we had repaired for cheeseburgers and a pitcher of beer.
Mary Edna was a friendly enough girl, but she wasn’t someone I would have crossed a crowded room for. Nor an empty room either. But she did have one absolutely first-rate quality which put her above every other girl I d ever gone out with: she thought my name was Harry Kent.
Dotty Fleisch was more of the same, without being quite an exact carbon copy. Paler, plumper, more given to bursts of speech or outbreaks of giggle, she was definable from Mary Edna without being any more or less desirable. Max had apparently been dating her off and on for several months, having told her he was a civilian employee out at Camp Quattatunk who lived in quarters on the base; I was now given the same background, and in the course of the conversation I learned for the first time that Camp Quattatunk wasn’t an Army base in the usual sense of the word but was an arsenal, a storage depot for military equipment. Thus, no doubt, the laser.
Which led to thoughts of robbery. Certain scenes from the caper movie came vividly back into my imagination, in perfect color. I flung myself into conversation, trying not to look over my shoulder.
At one point, in the men’s room, I discovered that the paper towel dispenser could be rigged so as to bring the entire load of paper towels out when the first one was tugged, but other than that it was just impossible to think about anything except the robbery. The caper movie had made it all much more real and much more desperate.
Finally we all left the Riviera and separated, Max and his Dotty going off in one direction arm in arm, Mary Edna and I trailing away in the other, walking side by side but not touching. The streets we walked along were tree-lined, but at this time of year the trees were leafless, bony grasping things reaching out from the streetlights, branches clutching together over my head like medieval punishments.