“It also cost you one hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “But that’s not what you’re complaining about.”
“Something’s missing,” Wiedstein said.
“What?”
“Four pages.”
“From where?”
“From this journal,” Procane said, again indicating the volume that he had let fall to his desk with the faint crash.
“That’s the current one, right?” I said.
He nodded. “It covers 1970 to 1974.”
“I noticed that it takes you about four pages to outline a single job,” I said.
He nodded again.
“So four pages means that the plans or recipe for one theft are missing.”
Procane didn’t even nod this time. He simply looked at me and for a moment I almost thought that I was being let in on his system of silent communication. I stared back at him and my throat began to grow dry so I drank the last of my drink.
“When were you going to do it?” I said. “Next week? Next month?”
This time Procane shook his head slowly from side, to side. “The planning for it has taken six months.”
I rattled the ice in my drink. “All right,” I said, “when was it set for?”
“Tomorrow,” Procane said. “We are going to steal a million dollars tomorrow night.”
11
“Good-bye,” I said as I rose and headed for the door. Before I reached it, Miles Wiedstein moved in front of me. If I wanted to leave the room, I would have to ask his permission. I don’t think he would have given it. I was about to ask anyway when he reached out and removed the forgotten glass from my right hand. “Let me fix that drink for you, Mr. St. Ives,” he said.
I had to decide then between the door and the drink. But there was more to the decision than that and both Wiedstein and I knew it. I stared at him for a long moment as he stood there in front of the door, blocking my way without really seeming to. He gave me a small, polite smile and I returned it, noting that he was a little taller than I and a little heavier and quite a bit younger and no doubt in one hundred percent better shape. He made a small, inquiring gesture with the glass, probably reading my mind.
“Scotch and water,” said St. Ives, the craven.
Seated once more in the chair in front of Procane’s desk with the face-saving drink in my hand, I waited for someone to tell me why I should do something that I was sure I wouldn’t want to do. Procane accepted the assignment.
“A million dollars, Mr. St. Ives, is a great deal of money.”
There was nothing I could add to that so I only watched as he leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and again looked up at the ceiling. It was the act of a man who felt that he had something complicated to say and who needed to gather his thoughts before he said it
“A million dollars,” he told the ceiling, “is usually equated with success and happiness in this country. It’s always been a rather mystical figure. If a man somehow acquires a million dollars, he should never again be financially insecure. Invested conservatively, it can provide him with an income of fifty or sixty thousand a year, which could be sufficient to his needs, even in New York.”
He lowered his gaze from the ceiling, frowned a little, and then smiled briefly, the way a man does who has sorted out his thoughts so that they form a sensible pattern. “A thief’s dream, of course, is to steal a million dollars. In cash. All at once. It’s been done a few times. The Brinks robbery in Boston in 1950 comes to mind. The cash in that one was a little over one point one million. More than one and a half million was taken in 1962 from the mail truck in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And, of course, there was the great British train robbery the next year. That was worth seven million, I believe. Dollars.”
Procane paused to shake his head as if in mild regret. “Many of these thieves were eventually caught, most of them before they could enjoy spending what they stole. Psychiatrists, of course, will tell us that they wanted to be caught, to be punished, as it were. I must confess that I have never suffered from that malady and I should add that I’ve explored it thoroughly with a most competent professional.”
I wanted to make sure that I understood him. “You mean you’ve sought psychiatric help to find out whether you’re the type of thief who has a subconscious desire to be caught?”
Procane raised his eyebrows. “Is that so surprising?”
“Yes. I’d call it that. Surprising.”
“I became quite interested in the subject several years ago. I did as much research on it as I could. After that, I put myself into the hands of an interested analyst and together we explored the entire question.”
“And the answer was that you didn’t have any problem.”
Procane let his eyes wander over to one of his paintings. I followed the glance. The painting was of a tall old oak that rose from a forest clearing. It seemed to be spring, but the oak looked dead, killed either by light or age. Once again Procane had caught the sunlight well. Bright shafts of it seemed to bounce off the oak. He looked at me again.
“None of us, of course, is without problems,” he said, “but a subconscious desire to be caught is not one of mine. Nor, I think I should add, is it a problem of either Mr. Wiedstein or Miss Whistler.”
“The same guy checked me out,” Wiedstein said, a grin brightening his face. “If that’s what you call it. He already knew that Janet was okay.”
“There’s something that bothers me,” I said.
“What?” Procane said.
“You say you steal only from those who won’t go to the law. I’ve been trying to think of a crook that you could steal a million from.”
Procane smiled. “Have you come up with any?”
“I’m still working on it.”
“If the problem were only stealing a million,” he said, “the most logical victim would be an armored-car company. I sometimes wonder about those firms’ personnel practices. The majority of their help seems totally incompetent. Take last fall, for example. An armored car was hijacked and that really started me thinking about how best to steal a million.”
“In Queens?” I said.
He nodded. “The truck had three guards who were delivering cash payrolls to three large firms. The guards stopped around six in the morning at a diner and two of them went in for coffee. The third remained in the truck. When one of the guards in the diner came back to let the one in the truck go for coffee, the thieves struck. Three of them. They made off with the truck, the two guards, and four hundred and six thousand dollars. What I marveled at was the laxity of the guards and the brilliant simplicity of the theft.”
“The thieves later switched the money to a couple of cars and nobody’s heard from them since,” I said.
“And they won’t,” Procane said, “unless the thieves become careless.”
“Or unless they want to get caught,” Janet Whistler said.
Procane nodded. “Exactly. But if they don’t, there’s only a slight chance that they’ll be apprehended through the efforts of the police or the FBI. Only one chance in twenty, in fact, according to the latest figures.”
“I’m sometimes surprised that more people don’t try it,” I said.
Procane opened a desk drawer, brought out a clipping, and tapped it with a forefinger. “According to this story in the Times, only four point three percent of reported burglaries and four point two percent of reported grand larcenies result in arrests. Not convictions, mind you, but arrests.”
“That means the average thief has a ninety-five percent chance of success,” I said. “Not bad odds.”
“Better than those that are faced by the man who wants to start his own business,” Procane said. “But the odds shift dramatically when you want to steal a million dollars. I’d say that it’s far more difficult to steal a million than it is to make it honestly. Especially if you want to steal it from someone who won’t, as you say, Mr. St. Ives, go to the law.”