“Uh huh,” I said.
“I’ll let you know pretty soon.” Then he grinned, in his hunted-weasel way, ducking his head and looking up at me as though peering out of a hole, and added, “Maybe a celebration dinner after today, huh?”
“Aaa,” I said, wildly trying to remember how to smile. “Mmm,” I said, while my lips twitched this way and that around my head. “Well, I’ve got to-” I said, and wandered away in search of some grave to fling myself into.
Ten minutes later I was in the room where the baseball equipment was stored off-season, putting a good big dollop of Vaseline inside every glove, when salvation hit me like a paper bag full of water dropped from an upstairs window. “Ah!” I said, and lifted my head to stare in sudden wonder at the light that had appeared at the end of the tunnel. Could I? I could! Delighted, I slapped my palm to my forehead and thereby covered my face with Vaseline. Drat. After I washed the stuff off-which takes forever-I went back to chat with Bob Dombey again, and to say after a minute, very casually, “Well, I guess I’ll go on through now. See you later.’’
“Good luck,” he said.
“Thanks.”
It wasn’t yet two o’clock when I crawled through the tunnel and emerged once more in the free world. Still, there was a lot to do before the bank closed, and I left the Dombey residence at the fastest possible walk, heading downtown.
I had two stores to stop at, a pharmacy and a five-and- ten. Then I closed myself in a gas station men’s room for a while to do the assembly. I was fumble-fingered and hasty, and not absolutely sure what I was doing. How could such a thing be timed with the necessary accuracy? If it happened too soon, it probably wouldn’t help. If it happened too late-I didn’t even want to think about that.
Finally I left the men’s room, with my two small packages in my jacket pockets. I walked to the bank, wrote a check for twenty-five dollars, walked around the bank a bit looking it over, cashed the check, and went out to the street. It was ten minutes to three. I proceeded to the bar called Turk’s and gave the owner back some of the money I’d taken from him with the milk box.
23
AVOIDING THE TEMPTATION to get drunk, I left Turk’s at four and walked back to the bank, where nothing unusual was happening. Discouraged but not despairing, I walked across the street to the luncheonette, where I found Phil and Jerry and Billy already seated at our regular table by the window. I joined them and Phil gave me his hard grin and said, “Well, today’s the big day.”
Smile, I told myself. “Sure is,” I said.
They were talking about football. Jerry had played it in high school and the Army, generally as a tackle, Billy had hung around at one time with some former professional football players running a strike-breaker service in the Tennessee-Kentucky-Carolina area, and Phil ran a lively book in the prison on the pro games. Phil was at the moment discussing percentage points in the upcoming Jets- Oiler game, Jerry was describing things that could be done on the playing field to an opponent who had become annoying, and Billy was telling cheerful mountain tales of broken arms, back, and heads.
I seemed to be blinking again. While the other three talked, I brooded out the window at the bank, where nothing continued to happen. Whenever I did glance at my tablemates, my blinking got a lot worse, yet through it I could still see them, all too plainly. I was sitting next to Billy, and his near arm looked to be the size and density of a caveman’s club. His head was a boulder partially sculpted into what might with charity be called a face. His shoulders looked like football pads, but they weren’t; they were shoulders.
Opposite me were Jerry and Phil. Jerry was another monster, in size if not in appearance. In fact, there was something almost baby-faced about Jerry, despite the great bulk of him, and his flesh appeared to be no harder or colder than normal human flesh. Still, his football field tales of snapping ankles and ripping nostrils made it clear he could be decisive if aroused. As to Phil, he didn’t have the mass of the other two, but there was a quick, mean intelligence about him and a wiry strength that was in its own way even more intimidating. Jerry and Billy might be able to dismember me more completely, but Phil was the likeliest to realize I ought to be dismembered.
Around four-thirty the anthropomorphic high school boy floated by like a bottle with a note in it, was given an order for four coffees, and disappeared forever. I gazed at the bank past Billy’s rocky profile, and now my left cheek was twitching. Nothing was happening over there. Nothing.
Phil said, “Getting a little netvous, Harry?”
Startled, I thrashed about, facing him. If that fool of a boy had brought coffee I would have dumped it on myself. “Nervous?” I said, blinking, twitching, scratching my left elbow with my right hand. “Me? No. Not a bit. Not at all”
Grinning, he said, “I know lots of guys get nerved up ahead of time, and not a one of them ever admits it.” “Is that right?” I said. By keeping one eye closed, I could control a bit the twitching in the other.
“I knew a guy,” Jerry said, “solid as a rock before a job, he’d always throw up right afterwards.”
“Sure,” Phil said. “It hits different guys different ways.” “Can you imagine?” Jerry said. “You stop a getaway car so a guy can throw up.”
Phil laughed at that, responded with a remembrance of his own, and I was safely out of the conversation again. I looked some more at the bank. Why wouldn’t anything happen?
And why was I so nervous? In setting up my own little tricks, where there was almost always some chance of getting caught, I was invariably calm, almost casual. So why, this time, was I fidgeting and blinking and twitching and scratching and swallowing and feeling a sudden pulse pound in the side of my throat? Why, in short, was I becoming a nervous wreck?
Because this was different, that’s why. Because in the first place it wasn’t one of my little tricks, it wasn’t my kind of thing at all. And because in the second place this was serious and maybe even deadly, a movement in which I was trying to put something over on society and these tough guys all at the same time, and all completely over my head. And because, goddamit, nothing was happening over there in the goddam bank!
Whenever I could manage to refocus my eyes from Billy Glinn’s awesome profile, I could see directly across the street and through the big windows of Federal Fiduciary Trust right into the brightly-lighted yellow interior, where absolutely nothing was taking place. Most of the employees had gone home by now, leaving the uniformed guard standing by the door, and possibly three people moving around behind the teller's counter, finishing the bookkeeping for the day. Everything normal. Damn. Damn. Damn.
Ten to five.
Five to five.
Five.
Five oh five.
I saw it when it started, and I froze at once-all except the twitch in my cheek-trying not to give it away that I'd noticed anything. But the guard just inside that glass door had suddenly jerked, as though he were a puppet operated by strings and somebody had just jostled his operator’s elbow. I watched him turn, look, peer this way and that through the interior of the bank, then suddenly dash over to one side and bend over by the desk where I had filled out my twenty-five dollar check.
I knew what he was doing. I also understood why the bank official in the dark gray suit suddenly came dashing out from behind the counter, waving his arms and obviously shouting angrily in the general direction of the guard, who had now straightened up again, holding a wastebasket.
Phil and Jerry and Billy continued to chat together, about football and robbery and the mangling of bodies. I tried to remain very quiet, to appear to be looking at nothing in particular. The longer I could stall their discovery of what was happening, the more comfortable I would feel.