The specter of the bank robbery followed me along the sidewalk, making the already cold air even colder. Scenarios of disaster ran in repertory through my head: the robbery would occur and degenerate into gunplay and I would be shot to death; we would be caught and I’d stand trial for robbery and jailbreak and possibly even murder and be sent up forever; we would get away with it and I’d spend the rest of my life waiting for the axe to fall as inevitably it would; we would get away with it and the gang would insist on more robberies and one of the preceding scenarios would inexorably follow; in the course of the bank robbery I’d be called upon to shoot somebody and would refuse and be shot by my own people; or I’d do it and become a murderer as well as a bank robber; I would attempt some desperate ploy to prevent the robbery from taking place and would be found out by my co-conspirators and would be unloaded; or I’d be found out by the authorities and would be charged with jailbreak and attempted robbery; or . . . The variants were endless, it seemed, and not a happy one in the lot.
Meanwhile, Mary Edna spoke at length on the subject of telephone company training films. No topic was likely to capture much of my interest right now, so telephone company training films were about as useful as anything else to fill in the spaces. I managed an occasional appropriate comment, Mary Edna pointed out occasional poles she had climbed for one purpose or another, and eventually we reached the smallish two-family house in which she lived on the second floor with her widowed mother and two younger sisters.
It was so hard for me to remain aware of Mary Edna’s presence. It wasn’t her fault, it was that damned robbery. I was dimly aware of a slight sense of awkwardness when I said good night to her on her porch and politely waited till she had unlocked the door and gone inside, but it wasn’t until Max asked me the next day how I’d made out that I realized Mary Edna had been anticipating some sort of overture from me. A kiss, at the very least, possibly some groping. Who knew what she might not have had in mind? The next night, lying in my solitary bunk in my cell, the sounds and sighs of sleeping men in their other cells all around me, I thought of how almost any of them-enforced celibates all-would have behaved the preceding night on Mary Edna’s front porch, and my own behavior, or lack of behavior, struck me as very strange.
But on that first date night, spurred on by the caper movie, I just couldn’t think about anything except the robbery. It was scheduled for ten days from now, Tuesday the fourteenth of December. I had first heard about it over two weeks ago, the time was rushing by, and I wasn't getting anywhere. My only forlorn hope was that the gang, who seemed to have everything else thoroughly planned, would never find a way to make that initial entry into Federal Fiduciary Trust, no matter how much surveillance was done. If we couldn’t get into the bank in the first place we couldn’t rob it, could we?
I walked with my fingers crossed.
16
THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, at four-thirty in the afternoon, one week to the day before the scheduled robbery, I myself showed the boys how to get into the bank.
I was on surveillance duty with Billy Glinn this time, the two of us sitting in the usual luncheonette, drinking the usual rotten coffee brought by the usual sleepwalking high school boy, watching nothing happen across the street. I was doing the watching and Billy was telling me a story about a time when he’d found a fellow having intercourse with a girl friend of Billy’s in the back seat of a car out behind a country roadhouse. “He run off into the woods,” Billy was saying, “but I didn’t take out after him right off.”
“You didn’t?"
“First,” he said, “I figured to settle that little girl down a bit, so I pick her up and whump her on the side of the chest. Under the arm, you know, I don’t want to hurt her titties, just bust a couple ribs to slow her down. I figure if she’s in the hospital I’ll know where she is. Then I went after the fella’s car, I pulled off the doors and the fenders and pulled the steering wheel out and messed up the engine a little bit and took and threw the hood up in a tree. Then I went off after the fella himself out through the woods. So when I caught up with him it turn out he took off so fast he left his pants behind-he’s bare-ass naked out there in the woods. Well, I was almighty angry at that fella, so-”
“Uh!” I said. “Typewriter repairman going in.’’
“What say?”
“Typewriter repairman,” I repeated; and immediately could have bit my tongue. I’d made the announcement without thinking, partly because it was so rare for anything at all to happen over there at the bank, but mostly because I really didn’t want to know what Billy had done to the naked man in the woods. I was identifying too completely.
“Typewriter repairman,” he said, finally understanding, and when I glanced at him he was laboriously printing the information in the notebook in his large childlike hand, misspelling magnificently and concentrating on every curve and every straight line. A pink tongue-tip protruded from a corner of his mouth, like a flower on a slag-heap.
It was too late. I knew at once the typewriter repairman was our route into the bank, and I also knew there was no way now to stop the information from getting back to Joe Maslocki and the rest. If only I’d kept my mouth shut Billy, absorbed in the story he was telling, would never have noticed the typewriter repairman at all. But I’d told him about it, and he was writing it down, and in the fullness of time the rest of the group would also know. My last hope was gone, and I’d done it to myself.
If only he wouldn’t think to write down the name of the company.
He said, “What’s the name on the fella’s truck?”
Shit fuck. I looked at the Ford Econoline van out in front of the bank, reading the company name emblazoned there. Did I dare lie? No, I did not dare lie. “Twin Cities Typewriter,” I said.
“Twin,” he said, and wrote it with all the grace and speed of someone etching his initials on cast iron with a rock. “Ci-” he said. “tieeeees,” he said.
While he was working his way through typewriter, the last nail was hammered into my coffin. “Here he comes out,” I said, despairing, all hope gone. “He’s carrying a typewriter.”
“Hee hee,” Billy said. Even he knew what it meant. “Wait till the boys hear about this.”
I was willing to wait forever. I watched the repairman put the typewriter away in the back of his truck, then get behind the wheel and drive away. Billy kept hee-heeing.
I felt so miserable that I forgot and took a sip of the coffee.
17
THERE WAS A CERTAIN morbid fascination in watching the gang put the pieces of the robbery together. Like, no doubt, the condemned man gazing out his cell window as the scaffold is being built.
I lived the next several days in a combined state of dulled terror and fatalistic interest. The caper movies I’d seen over the years had led me to understand that a major robbery was a complicated affair, and yet the movies had somehow glided over those complications; if a gang needed a truck, or a centrifuge, or a Warsaw telephone directory, they simply got one between scenes, when no one was looking. The truth I was living turned out to be equally complicated, but much more difficult.
There were so many elements to the thing. Either some way had to be found to borrow a truck from Twin Cities Typewriter on the afternoon of the robbery, or some other Ford Econoline van would have to be stolen and stored and repainted with Twin Cities’ name and colors. A uniform had to be found for Eddie Troyn to match the uniforms worn by the bank guards. The names and addresses and home phone numbers of the late-staying bank employees had to be learned, to cut down the possibility of a doublecross-a teller, for instance, phoning police headquarters rather than his wife. A typewriter had to be picked up somewhere for delivery to the bank, and it had to be the same color and make as all the other typewriters used there.