Bank Robbers (4 page)

Go back down to Medicaid? Spend another day sneaking in and out of this building for fear of running into the super—or, heaven forbid, the landlord—because she owed so much back rent? She'd lost her last job, an off-the-books job in a small coffee shop on Fourteenth Street, when she was in the hospital. And no one now seemed willing to hire her at her age, off-the-books or on, even though she could do most office work. Social Security flatly refused to begin her survivor's benefits early, disability didn't even cover the rent, so it would be another two years before she … How was she expected to survive?

Right!

This time she was not going to sit around waiting for things to get better, waiting for some miracle, the way she had with Nathan. Oh, Nathan will be better, give him a month, oh, Nathan will stop gambling, give him a year; oh, Nathan will, Nathan will—but Nathan never did. She'd even scratched Nathan's name off the mailbox, that was how angry she'd been when he first died. She'd bent and bent and bent until she thought she was going to break, and what for? What the hell had it been for?

She was alone and desperate, and scared. And now she was out of time.

Hesitating to call about a gun? Was she crazy? She walked over and picked up the phone. She dialed the first number and patiently waited for the other end to pick up.

All she had to do was make sure she'd meet whoever this thug was in broad daylight, somewhere where there were lots of people and she'd feel safe.

A recording came on announcing that the number had been disconnected.

She placed the receiver back on the cradle and looked at the second number.

She inhaled deeply. All right, just do it.

She grabbed the phone quickly, dialed, and felt her breath get shaky.

The line picked up, and a voice, oddly familiar from memory, came across the line.

“Arthur MacGregor, Pawn and Repair. May I help you?”

She dropped the phone.

Oh my God, it was
Arthur.

*   *   *

H
E LISTENED
for a moment after the click, trying to see if he heard any noises. At last Arthur MacGregor slammed down the receiver and glared at it.

Goddammit!

He watched his son turn around on his chair and frown at him. He was suspicious of anyone who called the shop.

“Pop?”

He just waved his hand at him, and watched Moe turn back to the repair bench.

Tapping his phone again, after all this time? Who did they think they were? He could call his lawyer about this. He'd been a legitimate businessman for seven years now.

Seven years … Arthur contemplated this. He had been pristine—a veritable saint. Seven years of steady, honest work, arriving with his son and opening the shop by nine in the morning, Mondays through Fridays. One hour for lunch at Gianni's, back by one, closed down by six. Hell, he didn't even jaywalk.

Seven years.

The seven longest, most boring years of his life, he thought contemptuously. But he'd done it! Nobody was going to send him back to prison. And now they were going to tap his phone again, after all this time? The United States government never ceased to amaze him.

He exhaled loudly and chomped down on the unlit cigar in his mouth, chewing the end so voraciously he could feel the fibers begin to dissolve. He rose from his desk and walked into the bathroom and spit a tarred mouthful of cigar juice into the sink and ran water in it. He walked back into what his son called “his office.”

It was a windowless room that had originally been a second storage area behind a big backroom that now served as the repair area of the shop. The space was roughly a ten-by-six room—eerily, almost the same dimensions as the cell in which he'd spent nearly fifteen years at Auburn.

Even worse, his cell at Auburn had been downright homey in comparison. At least there he'd had a window and sunlight.

The walls of his office, which had been white once, had aged to an ugly brownish gray. The plaster was cracked here and there. It was dark, always damp, and smelled of mildew, although a string of plumbers of every nationality had been unable to explain exactly why it was so damp. Arthur had called the plumbers in when he had finally faced the fact that he had to be there every day.

It was a stipulation of parole. He had to show evidence that he was gainfully employed. At first each week he'd had to trek down to the parole office and sit in the waiting room with all the young gorillas. Men like the kind he'd spent fifteen years with.

They were hard, ignorant men, the kind who would do two years on the inside, learn absolutely nothing, not even how to be better criminals, and then get released. About eighteen months would go by and there they'd be, in the cafeteria again one afternoon. And they'd smile and wave at him as if he were their father and they'd just come home from summer camp. Arthur would watch them pick up their trays and move over to him. They'd plop down next to him and they'd say, “Hey, Pop, how's it been? Whatcha been doin'? You fill me in on what's been goin' on.”

He could look at a man now and tell if his entire life was going to be spent shuffling between two places on the planet—jail and a parole office.

Arthur didn't mind the trips to the office. He had a twenty-nine-year-old parole officer who seemed to feel honored at having been assigned Arthur MacGregor. They'd sit in his office, and the kid would stamp his little booklet, hardly even bothering to look at his check stubs. He just wanted to talk about robbing banks.

It seemed they'd had a whole course in Arthur MacGregor at John Jay at one point.

So, he'd tried to fix up his little corner of hell, since he was honor-bound to do five years in it. Arthur had his desk and a large leather swivel, which was actually comfortable and gave him the only pleasure in the place. A green glass banker's light sat on the desk. Across from the desk was a small cheap bookcase, crammed with books. Books were also piled up on the floors. He was a insatiable reader, a habit he'd picked up his first time in jail and had carried with him. Two dark wooden chairs sat facing his desk for the odd customer, usually there to buy something under the table or sell it.

Behind his desk was a picture of Arthur taken in front of the store. It pictured him, Moe's mother, to whom he was married for a year, and Moe, about five years old. If you didn't know of the years Arthur had spent as a bank robber, you'd swear, from the photo, that he'd been a solid citizen all his life.

He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and took several long, deep breaths. He had overreacted to a hang-up, and now he felt stupid, having ruined the end of his cigar over it. It seemed he was quick-tempered all the time now. He usually chalked it up to something that happens with age, but that as a ploy had not only begun to wear thin, he'd begun to take it as an insult as well.

He was sixty-one, not a hundred and one.

He sat down heavily in his chair and stared out to the main repair room at the back of the shop. He could see his son bent over the repair table, soldering a microchip on a board. He could see small puffs of smoke rise from over his shoulder and he could smell the acrid metallic burning of each solder.

Arthur looked at the phone again.

On the other hand, it could just have been someone nervous on the other end. Because, the truth was, he did do the occasional fence on the side.

But Arthur barely counted that.

That was nothing. Compared to what he'd been capable of … it was just to keep the boredom from killing him.

“Okay, Pop, it's ten of six,” his son yelled in to him, and Arthur ground his back teeth together and could feel the muscles in his jaw tighten.

He was going to get the usual lecture. Moe was going to be a pain in the ass all the way up to Rye. As if the hang-up meant something.

A bank robber. The way Moe said it just hit Arthur in his gut. As if he were some kind of low-class criminal.

He was not
just
a bank robber.

He was Vincent van Gogh.

He was an artist. In all the years, and after the hundreds of banks he'd hit, no one had gotten shot, no one died, no one got maimed, no one suffered—except, of course, the Feds and the insurance companies. And as far as Arthur was concerned, having grown up on the wrong side of the American financial system, until they made sure that at least every small child was taken care of and had a decent meal each day, the greedy bastards deserved it.

“Just” a bank robber.

Maybe if he'd had more education he'd have been a great painter or writer or musician instead of a bank robber. But he'd only made it through the ninth grade. Not that he was stupid, or ill-read.

Ah, well. He didn't regret for one second any of his life, well,
almost
any of his life … You had to be a little crazy on the edge to be an artist.

For most people, safety was the number-one issue.

For Arthur, excitement was the number-one issue. From the minute he began planning a job till the minute he divvied up the take, he was in a constant state of excitement. Nothing, short of sex maybe, could come near to it.

Safety was like a death sentence.

His career in crime had begun quite honestly with a job he'd gotten in a repair shop.

The shop was owned by a man named Hymie Schwartz. He was a big, obese man whose clothes were always stained and greasy. He stank of cigar smoke and whitefish salad.

Hymie had hired him as an errand boy at first, and then, as the shop got busy, he'd been asked to help with the repairs. It started out slowly, “Put the back on the watch,” or “Open up the bottom of the toaster.” But as Hymie realized Arthur was good with his hands and a quick study, he was given more and more to do. And Hymie began to teach him everything he knew.

And that was considerable.

Hymie Schwartz repaired everything from jewelry clasps and radios and watches to lamps. All of the ordinary household appliances. And then some.

Like burglar alarms. And safe locks. He had a booming business as a locksmith.

Soon, another boy was hired to do the errands and Arthur spent his days learning all he could.

He put his whole heart into his work.

He began spending time at the library, reading up on the newest security devices. Soon Hymie was sending him out on simple locksmithing jobs, and allowing him to assist in the delicate matters of safe opening and burglar-alarm repair.

Arthur loved it. And, needless to say, the temptation to try out his new skills became too much.

He could still pick a lock faster than some people could use their keys.

He was the number-one wanted man on the FBI list for five years running. His credentials were impeccable.

All this snotty-nosed kid of his could see was some lowlife who'd spent his entire childhood either on the lam or in jail.

Maybe he had a point.

On the other hand, Arthur's father had always been around, and that had been no picnic. His father had been an abusive, lying drunk who smacked him around at least twice a week, whether he deserved it or not.

He stared back down at the desk again and began to think about this constant stream of tension he felt these days. In all his years he'd never felt this kind of degrading tension. He took pleasure in absolutely nothing. For the first five years he'd been there, the end of the day had given him a feeling of freedom. A kind of thank-God-this-is-over feeling, and there would be a spring in his step as he'd leave the dusty little shop. And Moe and he would drive back up to Rye, in Westchester. Moe would drop him off at his house and he'd bounce up the front steps, open the door, holler his hellos to Eva, his housekeeper.

He'd trot up the stairs, maybe lift some weights, or run on the treadmill, just to loosen up the muscles that were stiff from sitting behind a desk all day. Arthur was a large man, six feet two, with a barrel chest, sturdy, long legs, and a shoulder span a weight lifter would've been proud of. His body had always required physical activity.

Jeez, he couldn't imagine how people spent their lives behind a desk like that. He'd have just shot himself in the head if he'd spent his life cooped up in some office. He needed to be out in fresh air.

All right, so he might have been running around with a gun in his hand half the time, but at least he got to see the sunlight. And his hours were set to
his
needs, not to some lousy manager's timetable.

So Arthur would stretch out his stiff muscles and then he'd shower, shave, and most evenings hit Jack's Bar for a drink.

Jack's Bar had been a landmark in Rye. It had opened in 1951, and they blessedly hadn't changed the decor. It reminded him of the bars of his youth. And it was filled with some of the more lively if not shady characters of the town. And once in a while a woman would be at the bar and he'd buy her drinks, maybe have a few laughs for a couple of weeks or the night.

But Jack's had closed two years ago, and was now a video store. None of the other bars he went to seemed right. They either had blasting garbage the kids called music, so his head throbbed after ten minutes, or they were that kind of air-fern bar where people ordered nothing but Perrier with lime or white wine spritzers. He'd lost interest in finding a new place to go to.

Arthur stared catatonically at the scratched dark wood desktop in his office and gave a sad exhale. Because tonight he was going to do exactly what he had done the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that. Moe was going to drive him back to his big empty house in Rye and he was going give a tired yell to Eva, then tromp into the living room. And he'd make himself a bourbon, turn on the idiot box, and he'd lose himself in the same shows. Eva would silently place a tray of dinner in front of him and look concerned the way she did when she took the time to notice and was not rushing out the door to pick up one of her kids or something. And when he'd hear her bustle through the hallway and the door slam closed after her, he'd give a little sigh at how it would be to have someplace to rush off to, or people who needed you.