“Evelyn del Rio,” he yelled, once again in his own English accent. “What grace is seated on her brow! I’ll tell you, lad, if I was ever to completely lose my mind and marry, Evelyn del Rio is the woman for me. What poise! What self-possession!”
“She hated you,” Owen yelled back. “I saw her face! She was wishing you were dead the whole time!”
“A palpable lie! She was cool as a waterfall. Fresh as a crystal stream!”
Pookie swerved the boat into a deserted city maintenance wharf. They tied up, and climbed into the Taurus he had rented. Here they all removed their various wigs and moustaches and dropped them into a garbage bag.
“Evelyn del Rio,” Max sighed, wiping the last of the glue from his eyebrows. “I feel love’s keen arrow. Evelyn del Rio and Magnus Maxwell. We’d be the envy of the world.”
“You old lecher,” Pookie said. He had been disguised with a dark wig, thick eyebrows and a too-long moustache that made him resemble a Wild West sheriff. But now he was the old Pookie, with his baby face, pale blue eyes and alopecia so thorough that he was entirely devoid of eyebrows, indeed of hair of any kind. “You’re so insensitive, you can’t even tell when a woman is harbouring negative thoughts against you.”
“I was robbing her, Pookie. Of course she was harbouring negative thoughts. But she would have warmed to me over time,” Max said, “even granite warms in sunlight. She would have come to appreciate my intelligence and sense of humour.”
“Hah!” Pookie said. “Good one.”
“Pay the thug,” Max said to Owen. “It’s this kind of negative thinking that keeps you down, Pookie. Cynicism is the flag of despair.”
Owen handed over ten hundred-dollar bills and Pookie counted them slowly. He had a big, gaudy pinky ring on his right hand-a death’s head with fake ruby eyes that flashed in the street light. Like Roscoe, Pookie was not a partner, he was strictly freelance: a fee was agreed upon up front and that was what he received, no matter how the job went. But he worked with Max and Owen every year.
“How’d you do upstairs?” Pookie asked.
“Not bad,” Owen said. “Pretty good, in fact.” There was no point lying about it. Thieves were obsessive about reading up on their crimes. Pookie would hear about the jewels in a day or two.
“You mean I’m underpaid again, right?”
“Pookie,” Max said, “think of all the times we’ve paid you your exorbitant fee even when we came up empty. I’ve paid you for jobs where I lost thousands. Those occasions found you oddly mute.”
Pookie, like many criminals somewhat childish, stuck out his tongue.
“Which country gave the world the Panama hat?” Roscoe said out of the blue. He was a trivia addict, and you couldn’t spend more than ten minutes with him without being questioned on points of geography, history or entertainment. He was six-four and built like a linebacker, but his only true passion in life, as far as Owen could determine, was Jeopardy.
“Panama?” Owen said, counting out another thousand.
“Ecuador,” Pookie said.
“Ecuador is correct,” Roscoe said solemnly.
“Had some business in Ecuador once,” Max said. “Sullen little country. No sense of humour.”
“I thought the jammer worked well tonight,” Owen said.
“It’s not the worst idea,” Pookie said. “But those sirens still came up awful fast.”
“Yeah,” Owen said. “I guess we should still collect all the cellphones.”
Roscoe folded his money into his pocket. “Smooth job, I thought.”
“Our shows are always smooth,” Owen said. “It’s called preparation.”
“Preparation,” Max agreed, “and a friendly, respectful attitude. Respect the other man and he’ll respect you, it’s as simple as that.”
“Most people don’t recognize being robbed as a mark of respect,” Pookie said. “You were too busy dancing your fat ass off to-”
“Fat! The bald bandit dares to call me fat! I am goodly portioned. I am what in better times was referred to as a fine figure of a man.”
“If you believe that,” Pookie said, “you’re living on your own small planet.”
“He is a small planet,” Owen said, and they both laughed.
“Haw-haw-haw,” Max mimicked them. “Haw-haw-haw. O thou monster ignorance. I tell you, aside from courtesy in action, it’s being willing to spend money to earn money that makes a successful thief.”
“His Munificence speaks,” Roscoe said.
Owen was impressed that Roscoe knew the word, but Roscoe Lukacs knew lots of things you wouldn’t expect from a criminal.
“O base Hungarian,” Max said, raising a plump forefinger. “How many men do you know who will hire goons like yourselves simply to stand in front of the exits and look menacing? I’m out of pocket, I tell you. I won’t see a dime out of the whole venture. I’ll have to pull another job to buy my way out of this one.”
This brought a chorus of derision that even Max couldn’t shout down.
A few minutes later, Pookie dropped Max and Owen at the entrance to a public parking lot. There they got into their own car, another Taurus, and drove themselves to the Redwood Trailer Park, lot 61, and parked beside an enormous and aged Winnebago. Max had won it years ago in a poker game, and they had referred to it affectionately ever since as the Rocket-though less affectionately now that the price of fuelling it had become extortionate.
They were surrounded by acres of trailers-trailers of every manifestation, from the kind that fold out into semi-tents to massive, wheeled bungalows. But few could boast the dog-eared grandeur of the Rocket. It was the size of a semi, deep blue with bands of stainless steel in blinding diagonals, a giant Adidas running shoe. Thirty-five feet long, eight and a half wide, give or take. Inside, Star Trek-size leather seats faced the windshield. Behind these, the interior stretched in a glory of gold and tan. A couch was fitted to one side, and across from this a set of stairs led to a roof deck that could be furnished with chaise longues, table, umbrella and even a few plants, should they ever stay in one place long enough to warrant it.
The Rocket also boasted a Hitachi hi-def TV with built-in satellite, deep-pile carpeting of marmalade colour, a fold-up kitchen table, a fridge, washer-dryer, and a cozy wooden dining booth across from a set of bunk beds. Owen always slept on the top bunk; Max slept in splendour on a queen-size bed in the bedroom at the rear of the coach.
This was how they travelled every summer across America, towing the car behind them like a faithful goat. At the end of the trip, car and trailer went into storage on whatever coast they happened to finish.
Owen dumped the swag onto the dining table to survey the take. They had netted roughly six thousand in cash from downstairs, maybe sixty thousand in jewels. Owen’s upstairs haul was thirty grand in cash-“My personal best!” he said, waving the packets at Max-and about $200,000 in jewels, but they would not receive anything close to that from their fence, the discount on stolen merchandise being severe. Max looked all set to pout until Owen pulled the emerald earrings out of his pocket.
“Oh, my.” Max held one up to the light. “Can’t even put a price on these beauties. Never seen their like.” He examined the setting. “You see each of these tiny diamonds? These are not chips, my son-no, no, no. Each one of these is perfectly cut, perfectly identical. This is work of brilliant, painstaking craftsmanship. It makes my heart glow to look on ’em.”
“Too bad they’re going to be so hard to fence,” Owen pointed out.
“Thou sayest right, lad. Setting’s utterly unique, and therefore recognizable. Split these dazzlers up, they lose eighty percent of their value. Shame.”
“Still, great show tonight. How about my entrance? I finally get why you showed me all those pirate movies.”