Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (3 page)

“But I don’t. I’ve never had the knack, it’s one of the things my father’s always hated about
me. He’s the squirrel, I’m the grasshopper.”

He frowned, deeply. “What was that?”

“I don’t save up my nuts,” I
explained, “or whatever grasshoppers save up. You know, you know, the
children’s story. I’m the one that doesn’t save.”

“Well, Mr. Thorpe,” he said,
“it seems to me you should have listened to your father.” And,
turning away, he crossed the room toward the front door.

I should have killed him,
that would have been the most sensible thing to do. Picked up something
heavy—that can containing
North By Northwest
, for
instance—and brained him with it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sufficiently used to
being a killer, so what I did was grit my teeth and get to my feet and say, “Wait.”

He waited, turning to look at me again, the
same patient smile on his face, letting me know I could have all the time I
needed. But that’s all I could have.

I said, “I’m not sure I can do it. I’ll
have to borrow, I’ll have to—I don’t know what I’ll have to do.”

“Well, sir,” he said, coming back to
me, “I don’t want to make things difficult for you if I can possibly avoid
it. Here’s my card.”

His card. I took it.

He said, “You call me at that number before
eleven-thirty if you decide to pay.”

“You mean, if I
can
pay.”

“Any way you want,” he said.
“I’d mostly like a cashier’s check, made out to bearer.”

“Yes, I suppose you would.” I looked
at the card he’d given me. Blue lettering read
Tobin-Global Investigations
Service—Matrimonial Specialists
. In the lower left was a phone number, and in
the lower right a name: John Edgarson.

“If you do call,” John Edgarson told
me, “ask for Ed.”

“I’ll do that.”

“And Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “do try to look on the bright side.”

I stared at him. “The
bright side?”

“You’ve had an early warning,” he
told me. “If you decide not to pay, you’ve got almost three hours’ head
start.”

*

It’s amazing what you can do in an hour when
your life depends on it. By eleven o’clock, I’d converted into cash the following:

Eleven o’clock. Five after eleven. I was back in my apartment, my pockets
full of cash. But where was I going to get three thousand five hundred
fifty-one dollars and six cents?

My grandmother’s trust fund?
Not a chance. I’d cried wolf with the people at the bank two or three times
already, and they’d made it perfectly clear
my
well-being didn’t matter to them
one one-hundredth as much as the fund’s well-being.

My father? Another blank. He had the money, all right, and plenty to
spare, but even if he was willing to help—which he wouldn’t be—the cash would
never get here from Boston in the next twenty-four minutes. Besides, if I did ask him the first
thing he’d say—even before
no
—would be
why
.

Would Edgarson take less? Six thousand dollars
in the hand was surely better than ten thousand dollars in the bush. I dialed
the number on the card he’d given me, and when a harsh female voice answered
with the company’s name I asked for Ed. “Minute,” she said, and
clicked away.

It was a long minute, but it finally ended
with a too-familar voice: “Hello?”

“Edgarson?”

“Is that Mr. Thorpe? You’re a few minutes
early.”

“All I can raise is, uh, six thousand,
uh, dollars. And four hundred. Six
thousand four hundred dollars.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he said.
“And you’ve still got twenty minutes to get the rest.”

“I can’t. I’ve done everything I
could.”

“Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “I
thought we had an understanding, you and I.”

“But I can’t
raise
any more!”

“Then if I were you, Mr. Thorpe, I’d take
that six thousand four hundred dollars and buy a ticket to some place a long
way from here.”

South America. The
Lavender Hill Mob
.
But I liked the life I had here in New York, my career, my girl friends, my name on
books and magazines. I didn’t want to run away to some absurd place and learn
how to be somebody else.

“Well, goodbye, Mr. Thorpe,” the
rotten bastard was saying, “and good luck to you.”

“Wait!”

The line buzzed at me; Edgarson, politely
waiting.

“Somehow,” I told him. “Somehow
I’ll do it.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he said.
“I’m really relieved to hear that.”

“But it might take a little longer. You
can give me that much.”

He sighed; the sound of a just and merciful
man who knows he’s being taken advantage of but who is just too darn
goodhearted to refuse. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Thorpe,” he
said. “Do you know a place in your neighborhood called P. J.
Malone’s?”

“Yes, of course. It’s three or four
blocks from here.”

“Well, that’s where I’ll have my lunch.
And I’ll leave there at twenty after twelve to go turn in my report. Now, that’s the
best I can do for you.”

An extra twenty minutes; the man was all
heart. “All right,” I said. “I’ll be there.” And I broke
the connection.

And now what? I went
to the John to pop another Valium—my second this morning—and then I sat at my
desk in the living room, forearms resting where my typewriter used to sit, and
waited for inspiration. And nothing happened. I blinked around at my pencils
and reference books and souvenirs and trivia, all the remaining bits and pieces
of the life I was on the verge of losing, and I tried to think how and where to
get the rest of that damned money.

From my brother Gordon?
No. My sister Fern? No. Not Shirley, not Kit, none of
my friends here in New York. It was too much money, just too much.

What story could I tell my father?
“Hello, Dad, I want you to wire me four thousand dollars in the next ten
minutes because—” Finish that sentence in twenty-five words or less and
win…a free trip…a free chance to stay home.

There was a pistol on my desk; not a real one,
a mock-up that had been used in a movie called
Heller In Harlem
. I’d watched some of the filming uptown, for a piece in
Third World
Cinema
, and the producer had given me this pistol as a kind of thank-you. His
name and the name of the movie and my name and a date were all inscribed on the
handle.

I picked up this pistol, hefted it, turned it until I was looking into the barrel. Realistic
little devil. If it actually were real I could kill Edgarson with it.

But it wasn’t real. So there was only one
thing to do.

*

“This is a stick-up,” I said.

The teller, a skinny young black girl with her
hair in rows of tight knots like a fresh-plowed field, looked at me in amused
disbelief. “You’re putting me on, man.”

“I have a gun,” I said, drawing it
out from beneath my topcoat lapel and then sliding it back out of sight.
“You’d better read that note.”

It was a note I’d worked on for nearly fifteen
minutes. I’d wanted the strongest possible message in the fewest possible
words, and what I had eventually come up with—derived from any number of
robbery movies—was printed in clear legible block letters on that piece of
paper in the teller’s hand, and what it said was:

MY BABY WILL DIE WITHOUT THE OPERATION. PUT
ALL THE MONEY IN THE SACK, OR I’LL KILL US BOTH.

I realize there was a
certain ambiguity in that word “us,” that I might have been
threatening either to kill the teller and myself or my baby and myself, but I
was relying on the context to make the message clear. My baby wasn’t present,
but the teller was.

The only sack I’d had available,
unfortunately, had originally come with a bottle of champagne in it, and in
white lettering on its green side it clearly stated
Gold Seal Charles Fournier
Blanc de Blancs New York State Champagne
. I’d been using it to hold the tiles in my
Scrabble set. I knew it wasn’t quite the right image for somebody trying to
establish himself as driven to crime by the financial crisis of his baby’s
operation, but I was hoping the note and the gun and my own desperate self
would carry the day.

I also had the impression, from some newspaper
article or somewhere, that banks were advising their employees—telling their
tellers—not to resist robbers or raise any immediate alarm. They preferred to
rely on their electronic surveillance—the photographs being taken of me at this
very instant, for instance—and not risk shoot-outs in banks if they could
possibly avoid it.

Well,
this
time I was ready to have my picture
taken. The clear-glass hornrim spectacles on my face were another movie
souvenir, the black cloth cap pulled low over my forehead had just been
purchased half a block from here, and the pieces of tissue stuffed in on both
sides of my face between cheek and lower gum altered my appearance just as much
as they’d altered Marlon Brando’s in
The Godfather
. So click away, electronic
surveillance, this is one picture I won’t have to buy back.

In the meantime, the teller was reading. Her
eyes had widened when I’d flashed the pistol, but they narrowed again when she
studied the note. She frowned at it, turned it over to look at the blank back,
picked up the champagne sack and hefted it—an R fell out, dammit—and said to
me, “You
sure
you on the level?”

“Hurry up,” I hissed at her, “before I get nervous and start shooting.” And I flashed
the gun again.

“You’re nervous, all right,” she
told me. “You got sweat all over your face.”

“Hurry up!” I was repeating myself,
and running out of threats. Once a toy gun has been brandished, there’s nothing
left to do with it; brandishing is its entire repertoire.

Fortunately, nothing else was needed. With an
elaborately unruffled shrug—I envied her calm under pressure—the teller said,
“Well, it’s not my money,” (my point exactly) and began to transfer
handfuls of cash from her drawer to the sack.

At last. But
everything was taking too long. The big clock on the wall read five minutes past
twelve and I was a long long way from P. J. Malone’s. (I’d thought it better to
do my bank robbing outside my own immediate neighborhood.) I wanted to again
urge speed on the girl, but I was afraid to emphasize even more the contrast
between her calm and my frenzy so I remained silent, jittering from foot to
foot as wads of twenties and tens and fives disappeared into my nice green
sack.

She filled it, till it looked like Long John
Silver’s Christmas stocking, and then she pulled the little white drawstrings
at the top and pushed the sack across the counter to me. “Have a nice
day,” she said, with an irony I found out of keeping under the
circumstances. She might not be taking this seriously, but I was.

*

I was three minutes late but Edgarson was
still there, lunching at his leisure in a high-sided booth at the back. I slid
in across from him and he gave me his encouraging smile, saying, “There
you are. I was beginning to worry about you.”

“Save your worry.” In his presence I
realized how much I hated him. I’m not used to being helpless, at the mercy of
another person, and if I ever had the chance to even the score with this
bastard I’d leap at it.

He must have seen something of that in my
face, because he became immediately more businesslike, saying, “You have
the money?”

“You have the negative?”

“I sure do.” He withdrew from inside
his coat a small envelope, opened it, held up an orange-black negative, and
then put it back inside the envelope.

“Ill want to inspect
that,” I said. (Scenario: He hands me the negative, I pop it into my mouth
and swallow it. Then what does he do?)

But he was smiling at me and shaking his head.
Revised scenario: He keeps the negative, mistrusting me. “First you give
me the money,” he said. “Then you can inspect this picture all you
want.”

“Oh, all right.” Reaching into my
pockets, I said, “I didn’t have time to get a cashier’s check. You won’t
mind cash, will you?” Fistfuls of the stuff began to pile up on my paper
place mat.

Even Edgarson lost his bucolic cool at that.
Staring at the money, he said, “Well, I’ll be damned. No, I don’t mind
cash, not at all.”

The waiter arrived then, gave the money an
astonished look, and said, “Did you intend to order anything, sir?”

“Jack Daniels,” I said. “On the rocks.”

“Just one glass?”

“Ha ha,” I said. Gesturing at the
money, I explained, “I robbed a bank.”

“Ha ha,” the waiter said, and went
away.

I looked at Edgarson. “I did rob a bank,
you know. You’ve put me through a lot today.”

He’d had time to recover. Smiling in
bemusement, shaking his head, he said, “You sure are an interesting fella
to watch, I’ll say that for you.”

“Don’t bore me with your shoptalk.”
I tossed over a small envelope from my publisher’s bank, where I’d cashed his
advance check. “There’s fifteen hundred. You can count it, if you
want.”

“I might as well,” he said, and
proceeded to do so.