Gangway! (9 page)

    He came in and looked around, and it seemed to her she could detect disapproval in his expression. It was true it wasn't a very good room, definitely one of the cheaper accommodations in this hotel-very small, with a pockmarked brass bed that looked more than ordinarily lumpy, and a narrow window that looked out on nothing but another wall half a dozen feet away. The porcelain pitcher and bowl were both cracked, the dresser drawers were missing half their handles, and there wasn't so much as a throw rug on the wide plank floor.

    "It isn't much of a room," she said, suddenly awkward and sheepish with this fellow she'd met only today, even though this was hardly the first time she'd been alone in a hotel room with a man.

    "It's all right," he said, shrugging and moving to look out the window.

    "I'm sorry it doesn't have a view," she said. "I'll try to do better tomorrow."

    He nodded, turning away from the window. "Yeah, I'd like that," he said. "I'd like a view."

    "You would?"

    "Yeah. A view of the Mint."

    Feeling both irritated and disappointed, she said, "Aren't you ever going to give that up?"

    "Not for a second," he said. He shucked out of his coat and hung it neatly on the back of the room's only chair. "In fact," he said, "you can take me up there and show me the place. Do they have tours for the public, anything like that?"

    "Gabe, I wish you'd…"

    "Do they?"

    She sighed and nodded. "Yes."

    "Good."

    "Maybe it's just as well," she said. "You'll see for yourself it's impossible to break in there."

    He grinned as though he didn't believe it. "Then I'll give up, won't I?"

    "I don't know. Will you?"

    He came over, still grinning, and touched the line of her jaw with two fingertips. His finger pads were smooth and soft, not like the horny calluses of most men out here; though the feeling couldn't be described as feminine either. Touching her that way, still grinning, he said, "You seem to be fretting over me."

    She felt foolish and more than a little weak. "Damn it anyway, Gabe," she said, and tried to turn her face away from his touch.

    "Vangie?" His fingers slid along the line of her jaw, under her ear, and pushed into her hair, insistent and yet gentle. His fingers and palm cupped the back of her head, enmeshed in her hair, and drew her slowly but unresistingly forward until their lips touched.

    It was a long kiss but not a violent one. She wanted to reach up and put her arms around him, but she held back, afraid of being too easy, boring him, or scaring him away. When at last they separated, she whispered, "It wouldn't be the first saddle I've known, Gabe."

    His voice more hoarse than usual, he said, "Did I ask you?"

    "No. But I wanted you to know."

    "Neither one of us wants to waste time on a greenhorn," he said, drawing her close again. This time her arms reached up and wrapped around him.

    

    

    The Mint hulked on its hilltop in the light of the evening sun.

    At the window of their new hotel room Gabe stood sizing it up like a trainer of circus animals peering through the bars at a tiger he isn't sure he can handle.

    Vangie was out somewhere acquiring capital. The sun was about to go down, which seemed the best time of day for her enterprising ventures-just after suppertime when people were a bit sleepy, slow-moving, and not too sensitive around the pockets.

    He had resigned himself to sponging off her. It would only be for a few days more. He needed the time to set things up and check things out. Without Vangie he'd have had to get a job or start rolling drunks, and he didn't want to waste the time.

    He'd been busy enough the past several days. He'd walked up and down the hills, wandered the city, studied and thought and observed and pondered. He'd spent a lot of time around the neighborhood of the Mint, studying it from all sides and making inquiries. He picked up bits and pieces of vital information like the number of privies, the fact that it had been built in 1854, and the rumor that one of the guards had a girl friend on Pacific Street as well as a wife in Chinatown. He'd been talking a tough line, particularly where Vangie was concerned, but privately he wasn't sure he could crack it. It was a hell of a forbidding building, that Mint.

    Still, the thought of home kept him going. Home, Twill, and Vangie, too-he could hardly back down now; he'd look like a fool in her eyes.

    He pulled out his snap-lid watch-Twill's gift-and say it was almost time to go down and meet Vangie at their daily meeting place at Front and Jackson. He began to poke around the hotel room to make sure they hadn't left any possessions behind. Not that there was much to leave. He'd bought a new set of clothes, including a heavy pea jacket to ward off the impressively cold fog that rolled in even more frequently than Vangie had allowed it did. He had also accumulated a spare set of underwear and a few pairs of socks, but they were all wadded into the pockets of the big pea jacket along with his knuckle-duster and the rest of the oddments he'd carried faithfully ever since he'd left civilization. With one last look out the window at the Mint, he left the room to meet up with Vangie.

    She was waiting for him at the corner, looking as pert, feisty and cheerful as ever. "Look what I found," she said, drawing him back into the alley mouth to show him her treasure.

    It was a silver-plated whisky flask. "Not bad," he said, looking at it as she held it up for him.

    "I thought you'd like it. It's a present," she said. She twisted the top to open it, and fired a shot that plugged a hole into the wall next to Gabe's head.

    A little later, in another hotel room, when she was a bit calmer, she said, "I just don't know why people walk around with things like that in their pockets. It ought to be against the law. It's making me very nervous."

    Gabe, who had taken charge of the flask, was sitting on the bed examining it. "Well, sometimes," he said, distracted by the intricacy of the thing, "it's handy to carry a gun that doesn't look like a gun."

    "Well it isn't handy for me," she said with a melodramatic shudder. "What else is going to blow up in my fingers?"

    Gabe nodded over the flask. It hald five .25-caliber rounds loaded through the bottom and fired through the top, when the lid was turned counterclockwise. Very ingenious.

    "Gabe?"

    "Huh? Oh." He put the flask down on the bed and got to his feet. "Well, let's see. You can find guns built into snuffboxes, into pipes, or most anything that can be made of metal and small enough to carry in your pocket."

    "What is civilization coming to?"

    He grinned at her. "Maybe you better just take wallets from now on."

    "Someday," she said bitterly, "a wallet will turn out to be a revolver in disguise."

    "Well," he said, "you could always change your ways."

    "What?"

    "Turn over a new leaf," he explained. "Mend the error of your ways."

    She said, "You mean go straight?"

    "Sure."

    She made a face, to show she was not amused. "If you can't be serious," she said, "there's no point talking about it."

    "Stick to wallets," he told her. "You'll be okay." He gestured toward the flask, lying so innocently on the bed. "Mind if I keep that?"

    "Well, I don't want it, believe me."

    "Thanks," he said.

    

    

    Promptly at the start of visiting hours Vangie and Gabe took a guided tour of the Mint.

    She knew it was the only way to persuade him of the impossibility of his idea. Nobody had ever robbed the United States Mint. Nobody in his right mind would dare.

    It was a fortress, the Mint, surrounded by a high wall. A guide assembled the visitors at the front gates, which were high wrought-iron affairs you couldn't break down with a five-ton battering ram.

    The view from the courtyard inside the high wall was like what the inside view of a prison must be. Stone and masonry thirty feet high surrounded the whole thing. The pair of armed guards at the gate looked as if they'd rather stomp you than eat.

    "This branch of the United States Mint opened for business in April of Eighteen and Fifty-four," the guide announced in a pompous voice that made his double chins wobble. "The Government established the Mint here for the purpose of minting gold coinage, because this is where the gold is, haw haw. Now the coins we stamp here are almost exclusively eagles and double eagles, which as you folks know is ten and twenty dollar coins. Now and then we stamp an issue of five-dollar half eagles, but it don't happen very often here. So if you find a half eagle with our stamp on it maybe you want to hang onto it. They as rare as a pair of clean socks around a bunkhouse, haw haw."

    Vangie saw that Gabe's beetled glance was fixed on the gateway behind them. It was open and a wagon came in-DORALDO MINE, SONORA-drawn by the customary dozens of mules and surrounded by the customary outriders, who looked like displaced members of Genghis Khan's palace guard. The knot of tourists followed the guide toward the front door but Gabe hung back, watching the wagon as it went along the side of the main building and stopped by a loading platform where uniformed sentries hulked.

    She tugged at Gabe's sleeve. "Come on."

    "In a minute. In a minute." He was chewing on an unlit cigar, watching as attentively as a lecher watching a nun disrobe. The muleskinner had unhitched the wheel team and half a dozen of the guards were shoving on the wagon tongue to push it back against the loading platform, where more men began to unload the boxes of gold onto a cart.

    It looked like the kind of wheeled dumpcart they used in mineshafts-a hand-push cart mounted on railroad wheels. From this angle Vangie couldn't see any rails, but she assumed they must be there, leading back into the building.

    "Come on," she whispered insistently and dragged him quickly to the front door, through which the tourists were disappearing. She glanced over her shoulder and saw both gate guards scowling in their direction. She hurried Gabe inside.

    "Now the annual production of the mines here in California," the guide was intoning, "is in the vicinity of twenny million dollars. Now folks, that's just a whole lot of dollars. Why if you took twenny million dollars in one-dollar green-jackets, it would stretch from here to… well I don't rightly recollect exactly where, maybe Chicago, but it'd reach pret' near two thousand miles. And that's a long way to walk laying greenjacket bills end to end just to prove a stupid point, haw haw. Now the way the United States Mint operates here, we get shipments of clean-smelted gold ingots in from the mines just about every day, but what we do, we wait till we've got anywheres from one to two million dollars worth of gold to strike before we start up the presses, which I'm just about to show you on over here. So anyhow, three-four times a year we run off a stamping, and every year or two we got to change the mold-plates. Course we could keep the presses running all the time, stamp out coins every day from every little shipment, but that'd be a lot more costly and your Government is lookin' out for your interests by operating in the most economical way. I guess all us citizens apprayshate that, haw haw."

    Vangie looked with approval on the great number of armed guards they passed in the hallways. Everywhere you turned, there was a man in uniform with a gun and a grim expression.

    Each time she spotted another guard, she plucked at Gabe's sleeve to make sure he noticed. He kept nodding impatiently and shaking her off.

    The guide took them into the pressroom and spent the longest eight minutes she'd ever experienced describing, in more detail than anybody wanted to hear, the process of melting ingots, pouring them into the molds, transferring the blank new discs onto the presses, and stamping the sides. Gabe kept shifting restively from foot to foot and sweeping the ceiling with his glance.

    It wasn't really a huge building but the number of turnings and corridors made it seem endless. The bored, rote intonations of the guide's voice kept ringing in stone-bounced echoes and Vangie became eager to get out of this place. It had all the homey comfortable warmth of a Mexican vampire cave, one of which she had once seen. One was too many.

    They turned yet another corner. "And this here," the guide announced, "is where the gold comes in from the mines. Now you folks are most fortunate this mornin' because we actually have a shipment coming in right now as you can see. Now mind you don't get run over, haw-that little cart's pretty durned heavy, you better believe me, haw haw."

    The handcart was coming along the rails, carrying the boxed gold down a wide corridor. At the far end was the loading platform they'd seen from outside. The rails crossed in front of them and went into another room.

    Two guys were pushing the handcart and half a dozen guards walked along beside it. As they passed the tourist group they began to turn, so that finally most of them were walking backwards. One of them backed right into the doorjamb and some of the tourists snickered. The guard got very red in the face and ducked out of sight through the doorway, but it quickly became clear that wouldn't save him because the guide was leading the party right in through the same door, following him.

    "Now this here's the anteroom to our storage vault," the guide told them. "Can everybody see back there?"

    The people in back murmured that they could see. Not that it mattered to Vangie, since she and Gabe were no longer among the people at the back. From hanging around at the very rear of the group all through the first part of the tour, Gabe had now insisted on shoving his way up to the very front. And Vangie knew why; that damned vault was calling to him with its siren song, all about gold.