“Well, yes. Of course.” Her fright was fading, and she was now becoming bewildered.
“Good. Mary, I want you to get that book, and sit down at Edith’s desk there, and copy down some phone numbers for me. Will you do that like a good girl?”
“The book’s in the desk drawer.”
“Well, then, get it.”
She went over and sat behind the desk, and looked at him doubtfully. “It’s all right for me to open the drawer?”
“Mary, you don’t have a gun in that drawer. And if you do, you have more sense than to show it to me. Go ahead and open the drawer.”
She opened the drawer, and put the phone book on the desk.
“Good girl. Now, give me the phone number for police headquarters. Got it? Now the firehouse.”
She looked up. “Do you really have my uncle prisoner, too?”
“Tut, tut! Prisoner me no prisoner, nor uncle me no uncle.” Though she couldn’t see it under the hood, he smiled, then said, “A paraphrase of Shakespeare. Your uncle is in good hands. Write down the number, and maybe later you can talk to him.”
She wrote down the number.
“Let’s see. One more. The night phone at the refinery.”
She wrote that one, too.
“Good girl. Just leave the paper there, and rise and go to yon computer, if you would. Resume your seat there.” He sat down at the desk, put the rifle down on its top, and pointed to the phone in front of him. “Can I work this? Or do you have to do something there?”
“You can work it.”
“Fine.” He picked up the receiver, and dialed police headquarters.
It was answered after one ring: “Police headquarters, Officer Nieman.” The officer’s voice sounded a little thin and strained.
“Hello, Fred, let me talk to E. The man with the machine gun.” He felt the women’s eyes on his face as he said the last words, and even though he wore a hood he forced himself not to smile.
Edgars came on the line, sounding wary. “Yeah?”
“G here at the phone company. Everything’s fine. You can reach me at 7-3060. Got that?”
“Got it. Everything’s under control here, too. You’re the first call.”
“May I be the only.”
“Right.”
Grofield broke the connection and called the firehouse. The shaky voice this time said only, “Hello?”
“Hello, George. I want to talk to C.”
“Who?”
“The man with the rifle.”
“Oh. Oh!”
Chambers came on, saying, “How’s it going, man?”
“Fine. Everything under control. Let me give you the number here, in case you have to reach me.”
“Hold on. George, give me a pencil. And a sheet of paper. Okay, go ahead.”
Grofield gave him the number, and then hung up and got to his feet. He took the walkie-talkie off, set it on the desk, next to the rifle, and hunched his shoulders to get the stiffness out of them. He looked over at Mary Deegan and said, “Mary, you got direct distance dialing here?”
“Not yet.”
“If anybody wants to call out of town, they’ve got to go through you, right?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He picked up the rifle and walked across the room to her. “If anybody calls you, I want to listen in. How do we work that?”
“You could sit there, I guess. Put that headset on, and plug that jack in there.”
“Fine. Now we’re set, aren’t we?”
“I suppose so.”
Grofield leaned back in the chair, feeling the unfamiliar closeness of the headset against his ears. The music had a high richness to it now, and he was bringing it back from over Germany, the co-pilot dead in the seat beside him. They’d said daylight low-level precision bombing was impossible, but he’d helped to prove them wrong. Radio silence, radio silence. The earphones were silent on his head.
Six years, eleven jobs. Every one of them had had the moments of high drama, complete with music and camera angles and dramatic lighting effects but they’d all had stretches like this, too, of waiting, silence, and boredom.
Twenty thousand. Maybe more. Too late to get into summer stock now, but there was always winter stock in Florida or Texas or somewhere. This time, why not spend the money the smart way? Produce. Get into the money end of the damn racket for once.
But you couldn’t produce stock and act in it both. He’d already tried it, in Maine, three summers ago. But he liked to act and he hated paperwork, and the summer had been a disaster. So he’d do the same as always, act for peanuts in winter stock, throw away the dough on a convertible and a good apartment and good times, and by the end of the season he’d be broke again, looking around for another job. Number twelve.
All except number one had been fine. Competent professional jobs, because he was working with the right people. The first one had been a mess. Begun as a gag, actually gone through with only because nobody wanted to be the first to quit, and successful by pure luck.
In Pennsylvania it was. A repertory company, twelve of them on a shares basis, and the company not even earning enough to maintain itself. Four of the guys had started talking about stealing, as a gag: “If business keeps up this lousy, we’ll have to knock over a gas station or two.” Then the gag got specific; a supermarket in a suburban area forty miles away.
When it stopped being a gag and started being reality Grofield couldn’t say for sure. But it became reality, as they worked out plan after plan for weeks, and then they went ahead and did it, wearing masks, carrying prop guns loaded with blanks, in an old beat-up Chevrolet with mud smeared on the license plates. They got forty-three hundred dollars, and they never were caught.
That was number one, and afterward Grofield swore it would never happen again; you couldn’t bank on dumb luck forever. But he was still in general contact with a guy he’d known in the army, and one time he mentioned the supermarket score to him the only one he’d told about it, up till then and the guy laughed and offered him a spot driving in a jewelry store heist. It was just driving the car, and he was broke again, summer stock being over and nothing having turned up in the city. So he did it.
And he was still doing it. He was probably the only actor in the United States who could really afford to work at Equity minimum.
Over on the desk, the walkie-talkie spoke, in a tin imitation of Parker’s voice, saying, “Radio station taken care of. Nobody was there.”
Wycza’s voice said, “Shall we start?”
“Wait till we get the west gate.”
“It’s almost twelve-thirty.”
“I know.”
Mary Deegan said, suddenly, “You’re going to steal the payroll, aren’t you?”
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. I tell you what, let’s play Twenty Questions. You know how to play Twenty Questions?”
“Wha what?”
“Twenty Questions. Do you know how to play it?”
She nodded, doubtfully.
“Good.” He looked around, saw the walkie-talkie. “I’m thinking of something mineral.”
All at once she started to cry. She ducked her head and whispered, “I’m, I’m sorry. It’s my nerves.”
“That’s all right, Mary. It’s just stage fright, don’t worry about it.”
4
Kerwin didn’t take any part in wrecking the radio station equipment. For himself, he didn’t even think it was necessary, but Parker and the others did, so let them do it.
He stood in the doorway, watching the street. The prowl car was parked there, at the curb, with the station wagon behind it. There was absolute silence from the street, but from inside there were the crashes of metallic breakage.
Kerwin liked metal. He liked machinery, liked to watch it work, liked to fiddle with it and learn about it and understand it. At home, he was a ham radio operator, and a do-it-yourselfer. He owned two prewar cars, and they both ran like watches. In one corner of his basement there was a model train layout, full of drawbridges and complex signal systems; he ran the model railroad with his neighbor, and two pipes under the driveway between their houses carried track which linked their systems.