Memoir From Antproof Case (39 page)

If only I had seized those moments, but I was almost always too shy. A ticket, though, to some public event—a baseball game, a lecture, a concert—might allow the woman to whom you presented it to reflect at length upon her short memory of you on some public conveyance, and perhaps to be enchanted. And if she didn't show, you could at least enjoy a baseball game, a lecture, or a concert, sitting next to a mournfully empty seat.

Smedjebakken was no woman, and the sight of him sitting in Yankee Stadium, with a cardboard box of baseball food on his lap, jarred me from my revery.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to the food in the box.

"This is food," he answered. "You've heard of it?"

"What kind of food?" After years of expense accounts I was unused to any but the most elegant restaurants, and at home I subsisted almost entirely on fish, rice, and vegetables.

"Beer," he said, handing me a paper cup. "My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer."

"It smells like a urine sample," I said, sniffing at it.

"Yes," he said. "One of them is a urine sample that I'm supposed to deliver to my urologist. And one is beer. Who knows which is which?"

"What's
that
thing?"

"A kosher beef dog," he said, handing it to me.

"And what's this crap on it?"

"It's a yellow thing that most people in America call mustard."

"It doesn't look like mustard. It's too bright. It looks like paint." I tasted it. "And it tastes like shit."

"Blame it on the Bronx," Smedjebakken said.

"And what are those things?"

"These things are called French fried potatoes. How long have you lived in this country?"

"They're so little," I said. "I like potatoes either julienned or the size of a kosher beef dog."

The beer was a light pilsner, the kosher beef dog still hot fifteen minutes from the aluminum roller, and the French fries had flavor such as I had not experienced since my days at Monastir, when we used to fry potatoes in olive oil and season them with local herbs. It wasn't the Pavilion, but it wasn't bad!

The Yankees came out, followed by a huge cheer, and then their opponents jiggled sheepishly onto the field and stood like animals in the yard of a slaughterhouse. After the national anthem, the game started quickly and the radio announcers high in their booths spoke like mental patients into the void of empty space before them. At the first pitch the bat sang with the unique and perfect sound that is neither a crack nor a pop but somewhere in between. The ball had the faint, ghostly glow of an artillery shell that goes just slowly enough to be seen, and then it hit an apartment building beyond the elevated tracks.

"Goddamn!" Smedjebakken screamed, jumping to his feet,
punching the air, and casting the tray of food to the ground. "Did you see that! It'll never happen again!"

"Good shot!" I said, prompting everyone around me to turn.

Smedjebakken so enjoyed my comments, the food, and the game that I couldn't imagine he would reject the scheme, for what is more enjoyable than robbing a vault packed with the money of evil men? And, after all, it was he who had asked me to meet him at the baseball game.

At the top of the sixth inning, he said, "Angelica would never let me rob a bank." I hadn't brought up the subject, and he did so only when the Yankees had taken such a huge and demoralizing lead—rather like the United States vis-à-vis the rest of the world at the time—that the stadium had begun to empty.

"You need her permission?" I asked, considering the colorful tableau before us and the surflike noise of the remaining crowd.

"In regard to things like robbing a bank, enlisting in the Foreign Legion, or climbing Mount Everest, I would, yes, consult with her."

"So why are you here, or, rather, why am I here?"

"Put it this way: I don't think I can do it, but I can't stop thinking about it."

"Why?"

"My daughter, and the mechanical challenge."

"How old is your daughter?"

"Eleven."

"That's a lovely age for a girl."

"It would have been. Unfortunately, for her all ages are too much the same."

"Why?"

"The name of the affliction probably would mean nothing to you. But she can't walk, she can't control her arms, she writhes, and makes faces, and tosses her head involuntarily. She was never able to hold a doll."

What could I have said?

"At age eleven," Smedjebakken went on, "she has spent a lifetime of suffering, and she will suffer until she dies."

"But you love her. You love her."

"I want to die for her. I wish I could die for her, to make her whole."

"Your wife devotes herself to the child."

"When you saw Angelica, they had come home from therapy. For my little girl, water is the most merciful thing. They go to the pool three times a week. I wish it could be twice a day."

"I had thought that Angelica was pursuing a career."

"She dresses up when she takes Connie in. We've discovered that doctors are kinder and more attentive to people who appear to be wealthy, educated, and well connected."

"Connie?"

"Yes."

"Constance?"

"Yes. Why?"

"My former wife is named Constance."

"It's a nice name, and when she was born we thought that
Connie Massina
had a lovely ring to it. And
Constance
was elegant. Do you think I haven't thought of robbing a bank?"

"Everyone thinks of robbing a bank."

"Not as a daydream."

"For her care?"

Smedjebakken nodded.

"Does it take that much money?" I asked.

"It doesn't now," he said, "but what if I die tomorrow? How is Angelica going to work and take care of Connie? If we both
die, Connie goes to Welfare Island. Have you been to Welfare Island? It's hell. And even if we both live 'til we're eighty, Constance would be fifty. What happens to her after that? Our savings would be used up in a few years."

"Then why didn't you rob a bank?"

"I don't want to take other people's money."

"Well," I said, "I've got news for you. If you rob a bank, you've got to take other people's money. That's the way it is."

"What if
I
get killed, or caught? Where are Connie and Angelica then?"

"What you need, obviously, is a bank that's filled with the money of despots, that you can rob surreptitiously without the risk of confrontation, and that you can knock over without the slightest chance of getting caught."

I was beginning to talk like a criminal, and I liked it.

"The first two, I grant you," he said, "but there's always a chance of getting caught, which is why I'll never do it."

"No. The reason you're still interested is that you think that...."I interrupted myself to be more precise. "You're flirting with the idea of not getting caught. I don't think we will get caught, but it's true that you can't afford to take the chance. Even if we work on the plan until it's perfect, we still might be caught."

"Right."

"So what you need is not assurance of not getting caught—because it doesn't exist—but a very good chance of pulling it off, and insurance in case you don't."

"Yeah," Smedjebakken said, "bank robbers' insurance. I didn't know they had that. Do they have savings-bank bank robbers' insurance—SBBRI?"

"No bank robber meticulous enough to buy insurance would bother to rob a savings bank."

"Forget it," Smedjebakken said. "You made a good point. The way I am ... because of my situation, I wouldn't even consider robbing a bank without first getting insurance."

"How much do you need?" I asked as the Yankees kept hitting home runs.

"Come off it," Smedjebakken ordered.

"How much?"

"How much? Enough to buy an apartment in an elevator building on the Upper East Side. Enough for a trust fund—managed by a bank that I couldn't rob—to support Angelica and Connie, and, eventually, just Connie: it would have to cover nursing care, hospital fees, and God knows what else. And I'd need a Steinway D in the apartment, and somebody to play it, because the one thing in the world that takes her from her lot is music, and what she requires is, more or less, the test studio. She's been listening since her birth. It would also be nice if, when they engineer them, and I'm sure they will someday, she could have a Victrola that played perfectly. And, oh yes, she'd have to be able to go to therapy twice a day, every day except Sunday, for the rest of her life. That's a lot of money, isn't it?"

"It is a lot of money, considering what you have to tip the doormen at Christmas," I said.

"We have a savings account in the Seaman's Bank," he said. "We've been saving all our lives."

"How much do you have?"

"Six thousand."

"Okay," I proposed, clearing my throat. "I own an apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. It's a quick ride to the hospital. There's an elevator, a doorman, the whole thing. It's got three bedrooms, a formal dining room, a big living room with a fireplace and French doors that open onto a sunny terrace.
It's on the sixteenth floor, very quiet. I'll give that apartment to you, with a Steinway D. I'll give you, in addition, half a million dollars in cash, and I'll establish a million-dollar trust. Everything can be/ in the name of your wife and daughter, the trust will be with Morgan or UST—which we won't rob—and I'll have it set up far enough in advance of even our very first steps that you'll be able to absorb the shock and believe in the reality of it."

"If you have money like that, why do you want to rob a bank?"

"That, plus the working capital to do the job (about six hundred thousand) is all I've got."

"You haven't answered the question."

"First of all," I said, "the money we've just been talking about is small change compared to what's at stake. It's my venture capital. Secondly, the bank has treated me very badly for absolutely no reason, and even if they hadn't I would have had to do it anyway. Suffice it to say that, despite the fact that I de-nounced them in full-page ads in
The New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal,
they refused to ban coffee in the building. This went on for more than a month, day after day. It cost me a fortune, and they serve coffee all over the place even now. So there's that. And then there's Constance—my Constance. I hated living off her, and I'd rather like her to know that I'm financially independent. I'll never match her billions, but as she didn't earn a penny of them I figure that a couple of hundred million will do.

"And, then, there's your Constance. I haven't met her, but if I spend the next forty years in jail, what better way could there be to make use of the money that I now have than to give it to her? And if I don't go to jail, I won't need the money. The sums in question here are so enormous that I won't even ask for reimbursement of the seed capital or my grant to you. It all fits together very neatly."

By that time the game had ended and we were alone in the stadium except for the ground crew and the cleanup men. Neither of us had watched very carefully, but we assumed the Yankees had won. The Yankees always won.

"I like what you say," Smedjebakken said. "I think the benefits for Connie are worth the risk, but I'd die if I knew I couldn't see her for forty years...."

"I'll take the fall," I said. "If we get caught, I'll tell them only name, rank, and serial number. You make a deal," I went on, unable to avert my eyes from the sides of his head, "and sing their ears off."

"What happens if we succeed, and I have to leave the country?"

"Then your daughter will have her own therapist, and her own pool, and you can build a piano factory on the grounds of your estate."

 

I was there when he asked Angelica. I had to be. I had to tell her the plan, and weather her hostile cross-examination. This woman should have been a customs inspector: absolutely nothing could get by her. She assigned probabilities to each action in the operation, dividing her fault analysis into several categories—an active mistake on our part, an omission, a deliberate discovery by bank security or others, an accidental discovery, the unplanned intercession of a third party, the possibility of machines not working, mismeasurement, illness at a crucial moment, and several other categories that, frankly, I do not remember.

Not being an engineer, I had failed to build redundancies into my plan. In fact, I had just the plan, and nothing to protect it—no precautions, alternative routes, or anything of that sort.

But there was the beauty of dialectics. I presented my raw thesis, Angelica countered with the brutal antithesis, and Smedjebakken—with his always constructive nature, woodchuck-like industriousness, and phenomenal engineering brilliance—the synthesis. For every task he had two machines, each tested beforehand and one merely waiting in pristine splendor. Where I had simply said, "Drill through the rock," he specified half a dozen types of bit and a dozen replacements for each. Where I had called for a landing field, he provided for two, and an alternate, and where I had envisioned drums of fuel at the side of the runway, he buried them.

His life, after all, had been devoted to maintaining the reliability of a highly complex mechanical system subject to more variables than anyone could imagine. In those days, the subway was efficient, and you could actually rely on it. After Smedjebakken left, it appears to have gone downhill.

Had I not happened upon a brilliant and experienced systems engineer and his critical, safety-conscious wife, I would have been caught at the very beginning. And even had I not been, I would not have been able to move what I had stolen. Gold is very heavy. That I knew, of course, but I was used to handling it one brick at a time. I hadn't considered adequately what it would be like to transport a thousand bars in one load.

We had stayed up all night, and the sun was beginning to rise. It was Indian summer. The night air was hot and dry. A stiff breeze blew from the north and brought an acrid, coffeelike smell from the Bronx, and on this ill wind crows were carried like the first and fastest troops of an army in panicked retreat. In such a high wind they had no choice but to be shot southward, and they cawed as if to announce an approaching megalossus.