Memoir From Antproof Case (42 page)

"To scout it out?"

"No. To do the job."

"Don't be ridiculous," he said. "We're going to have to practice for a month. I've never seen the painting, I don't even know the plan."

"I have been practicing for a month," I said pompously. "And it will go just like that." I snapped my fingers.

"You've been in bed for a month, totally incapacitated, while I've been turning my house into a factory and making hollowed-out wheelchairs."

"Don't you understand?" I asked.

"Don't I understand what?"

"Where I get my capacities."

"No. I don't understand where you get your capacities. Where do you get your capacities?"

"From my
in
capacities."

"You get your capacities from your incapacities."

"Yes."

"Well, that's great. As for me, I get my capacities from my capacities."

"Then you've got a level road ahead of you. You're probably quite happy."

"As happy goes."

"The road for me has deep hollows," I told him, "and high hills. I can get to the top of the hills because I've been to the bottom of the hollows. By the way, do you have a wire-tool that produces a jagged cut?"

He looked at me without understanding. "Yes, though not deliberately: I've been too cheap to throw it away."

"Good. That's what we need. I'll explain the plan on the subway. Wear an overcoat that's very baggy."

"Okay. I have one left from my muffin craze. But why?"

"For the cat. Catch a cat."

"Catch a cat," he mumbled. There is no question in my mind that at that moment he was certain that we were both going to grow old in jail, but he stuck to my guns.

"Get the reproduction."

Smedjebakken brought up the chair, pushed the button, and lifted the painting from the cradle.

"Look at the back," I said.

Varnished to the back of the canvas was a row of parallel gold wires, all of which were connected in series to two copper wires about a foot and a half in length.

"I did it this morning before you got up," I said. "The wires still need to be snipped at the ends with your wire-tool."

"It looks professional."

"This is how the more valuable paintings at the Met are alarmed. I know because Constance is on the board, we went to many meetings, I asked, and they showed me."

"I see," Smedjebakken said, his confidence in me apparently beginning to return, "but did you say that we have to catch a cat?"

 

The cat, a huge gray and mother-of-pearl Manx that we scooped up from the back of a pizza place in Astoria, went into
Smedjebakken's coat at Madison and Eighty-sixth. For the few blocks to the museum and until I pushed the wheelchair into the Renaissance-Italian rooms, the cat fought like a Tasmanian devil, but Smedjebakken was so tough that he merely grimaced. Now and then a mother-of-pearl-colored paw would shoot from between Smedjebakken's lapels, he would cough and stuff it back in, and we would continue on our way. No one noticed, because people tend to avert their eyes from someone in a wheelchair, a fact of which Smedjebakken was well aware.

That was the hard part, the cat putting huge welts in Smedjebakken's torso, which bloodied him like a bird.

We came to the
Madonna
and waited until the room was empty. Smedjebakken gratefully opened his coat, and the cat leapt out and ran forward at about sixty miles an hour. We had aimed him at the adjacent room, where a guard was stationed: every three rooms had a sleepy old man in uniform, who was not allowed to sit down at any time, and to whom nothing ever happened.

"Get that cat!" I screamed at the top of my lungs. As the cat flew by, the guard instinctively gave chase. Smedjebakken rose from the chair, the pliers in his right hand, and I lifted the painting from the wall. I had opened the box already. As I removed the painting, Smedjebakken cut the wire, and every bell in the world began to ring.

He lifted the replica from the cradle and fell against the wall. I put the original in its place, closed the door with my foot, and toppled the wheelchair. In the last few seconds, I opened Smedjebakken's overcoat to reveal his blood-stained front. "Moan," I commanded.

"There's no one here yet," he whispered.

"
Ars gratia artis,
" I said.

He began to moan. It all had taken less than ten seconds. We waited and waited, until, finally, we heard the pounding of many feet. Just before a phalanx of guards arrived—two with shotguns—Smedjebakken interrupted his moaning to say, "We had so much time we could have done the crossword puzzle."

"Moan!" I said. "This is the moment of truth."

The first thing they did was lift the painting from Smedjebakken's hands, and as the bells rang and Smedjebakken (purely from excitement) began to scream, I too began to scream. "He was attacked by a cat! He was attacked by a cat!"

The cat, it seems, had gone straight out the main entrance and disappeared into the Upper East Side. Most of the guards had seen him, even if only as a blur, and Smedjebakken's wounds were nothing if not genuine: his blood made the floor around us as slick as ice.

The guards had absolutely no idea what to do. Having secured what they thought was their painting, they were faced with what they thought was the victim of a cat attack. One of them announced that he was going to call an ambulance, and ran off into an infinity of Flemish landscapes.

Then appeared a preppy in an expensive suit—the assistant director. (The director was, of course, in Florence.) "What happened?" he asked of the ranking guard. As he was briefed, I petrified. This was a classmate of mine from Harvard—Cuckoo Prescott, famous for having switched his major (we called it "concentration") from ornithology to fine arts in the last term of his senior year. His thesis was entitled "Evolutionary Raptor Flight Structures in the Paintings of Sir Thomas Boney." I recognized him, and he had just as good a chance of recognizing me, except that he was off balance.

I feared that his memory of me might be quite vivid, as I had punished, him for drinking coffee, by reading him the Abbé Bobigny-Soissons-Lagare's
Les Mais da Café,
prior to which I
had chloroformed him and wrapped him in real mummy tape that I obtained from the Department of Art & Archaeology.

What could I do? I messed up my hair, grimaced, and began to speak as if I were a Hollywood version of a Mexican bandit. (I'm afraid that Cuckoo Prescott was looking at me as I prepared for this role.)

"De cat almos keel my son!" I screamed. "We weel not forgeh dis!"

Cuckoo looked at us in astonishment. "Who are these people?" he asked.

"Visitors," was the reply.

All Cuckoo's flaccid genes strained to be responsible, worried, and polite. I could see that many whaling captains were spinning in the graveyards of Salem and Gloucester, sending out mystical transmissions about liability. It worked: his apologies were so profuse that they overwhelmed his suspicions. I tried not to look at him directly, and cursed myself when my Mexican bandit turned into a vaudeville Italian. I couldn't help it. One just slid into the other.

"Hey! Itsa no matta. We go to de hosp and itsa okay."

"Where are you from?" Cuckoo asked, his subconscious working meticulously.

To which Smedjebakken answered, "The District of
Colombia.
"

What could Cuckoo say? The ambulance attendants arrived and put Smedjebakken back in the wheelchair. Then we received a royal escort through the museum, with offers of lifetime membership and huge discounts at the café and gift shop.

At Lenox Hill Hospital a doctor painted Smedjebakken's chest with Mercurochrome and gave him a tetanus shot. When he was discharged, we went straight to the apartment, showed the painting to Angelica, who was very impressed, and then wrapped it in tissue paper and green ribbon. When evening fell I went outside and walked through the clear dusk as orange and yellow lights blazed across Manhattan. I brought my package to the main desk of the museum just before closing time.

"This is a package for Mr. Prescott," I said to the receptionist, who was very gracious. "Would you take down a message for him?"

"Certainly," she said, seizing paper and pencil.

"One: It's always better for a museum to display originals, and this is the original.

"Two: He can keep the replica.

"Three: Coffee is bad."

After we stole—and returned, the
Madonna del Lago
—we were ready for the real thing.

 

On the day of the robbery, I was as excited as ever I have been in all my life. When I arose in newly greened Astoria on the fourth of June, I felt I would be leaving this academy of forfeiture and regret, and going on to another world at once more forgiving, more precise, and new. I imagine it is the feeling that one has when at age eighteen one is graduated from high school and all the world is ahead. I never was graduated from high school. My higher education was anxious and tumultuous, and when I finished I felt only that I had jumped from a merry-go-round.

This was all forgotten that sunny morning when I left the Astoria house and turned the key in the lock, knowing that I would never enter again. Inside, on a table in the hall, was a drugstore bequest leaving the tools to a vocational school and the house to the Campfire Girls. I had always liked the Campfire Girls, because when pitted against the Girl Scouts they were such underdogs.

It was so cool that the blues overhead were like flowing water. The shade was warmer than the shade of fall, but just as deep and just as tranquil. As the subway shuttled forth along the elevated tracks, I remembered my youth, when during the summer I would start my days on the train as the Hudson gleamed in a coat of sparkling mist. Then, I had the same sense of excitement and well being that I now possessed, but I had it every day, and I had it not because I was about to rob the biggest bank in the world but merely because I was going to work in it.

This would be my last subway ride. At its end I would take my last walk amid the canyons of Wall Street before the stone was heated by the summer sun, for when I emerged that evening the walls of granite would be returning the day's heat to the air.

It was my last elevator ride down to the vault, the last weigh-in, the last "Good morning, Sherman," to Oscovitz, and when I greeted him I did so with such sparkle that he shyly averted his eyes, for he was flustered by anything that varied from the routine to which he was permanently bonded.

"Good morning, Sherman! What a beautiful day! It's the day of days!" In a movie, this might have alerted him. In real life, nothing could alert him. He bent his head closer to his desk and pretended to read
The Daily News.

"Sherman! Be it known to the stars and moon above, that Sherman Oscovitz is in love. And it was for her, the darling lass, that Cupid's arrow struck your ass! So, go with her to the South Pacific, where the girls are naked, and the sex terrific!"

Poor Sherman Oscovitz, who had never kissed a woman and never been held, and who had passed a million women who had never been kissed and never been held, who had not dared look at them long enough to make eye contact, and who had once said, "It snowed about an inch and a half in Brooklyn. That's what I call a
penis
snow," and blushed until he looked like a boiling jam pie.

"Sherman, Sherman," I said. "How many years do you have left? Why don't you cut the knots? Go waterskiing. Go to the state fair in Syracuse. They have kissing booths. Buy a kiss from a woman in a kissing booth: Sherman, before the grave."

About to flee, he said, "You're cracked!" He was quite agitated.

"Sherman!" I screamed. "For Christ's sake, get on the train to Syracuse! Do it today!"

"My job," he said.

"Fuck your job," I whispered.

"He said
fuck!
" he announced, as if to an invisible judge.

"Yes, I did."

"You said it. You said it. I'm going to tell Mr. Piehand. I'm going to tell him."

"Mr. Piehand is in Formosa," I stated, knowing, in fact, the whereabouts that day of every officer in the bank.

"I'll tell him when he gets back."

"Do that."

I left Sherman Oscovitz, now grape-colored, and went into Cage 47. One of Smedjebakken's chief worries was that after devoting our lives to tunneling into Cage 47 I would be shifted to another site. I assured him that this would not happen.

"How do you know?"

"I'm absolutely certain that I can stay in Cage 47, if need be, for eternity. Oscovitz doesn't understand time. Time requires at least two things—movement and variation. If everything were still, time could not pass, it would not exist. Without variation, movement would not exist, and, by extension, time. For Oscovitz, there is neither movement nor variation. He's a bureaucrat. If you dropped him in amber, and the amber was cracked
after ten billion years, he wouldn't even blink. Believe me, if no one died and nothing happened for the next million years, he would show up every day except bank holidays and Yom Kippur, and he wouldn't even notice.

"I can take as long as I want in Cage Forty Seven, forever, if I choose, to finish restacking the gold, and Oscovitz will never give it a thought."

It was quite true. I stayed in 47 from the time we began to plan the robbery until the day of its execution—ten months—all to do a job that should have taken no more than a week.

Other problems were more serious and more vexing, but no matter, Smedjebakken's engineering genius solved each of them. He was a man of an era that has passed, and as with everyone in that position, his ill-fittedness sometimes became illumination.

He was made for the age of Edison, Brunei, and John Dee. I often confuse him with John Dee, for although they did not resemble one another they had been kissed by the same rebellious angel, and their enterprises, if not similar, were united by the verisimilitude of their approach. In mid-century the products of engineering that defined the mechanics of the time were not as cold, or as unfriendly, or as potent as they are now. They were still made of metal and wood. They still smelled of machine oil, cradled fires, spat-out steam, or were propelled by water or air or open magnets spinning on a gleaming shaft. They did not seem to contradict or evade natural law. They were quite different in spirit from those horrible dullard boxes called computers. They were crucibles of earth, water, wind, fire, gravity, and magnetism. You could smell them, hear them, feel their vibrations in the ground. They didn't just sit there like static dimwits until they exploded away a city. They didn't glow at you insolently in moronic green, overly patient, totally without voice or vulnerability.