Night My Friend (36 page)

I didn’t understand it, but I went along with it. For Laura and $10,000, I’d have gone along with just about anything. Once during that long afternoon I questioned her about my small share of the proceeds, but she had an answer for that, too. After all, she’d done the groundwork, scouted the place, thought up the plan, gotten the truck and uniforms. Besides, she reasoned convincingly, what difference would it make when we were both together, afterwards? The money would all be
ours.

She drove the truck like a professional, the peaked cap hiding her dark hair and shadowing her feminine features. We headed north in the early darkness and crossed the Hudson at the George Washington Bridge. From there it was another hour’s ride to the museum.

Once in New Jersey, we stopped to uncover the Jersey Power Company signs she’d kept covered in the Village. Then it was straight ahead till we were only a mile or so from the museum itself. I got out of the truck and walked over to a manhole she’d indicated. As the heavy cover rolled away and I slid into the depths, she said, “It should be the cable on the right.”

“I know. You’ve told me the whole thing enough times.” It took me only a moment to burn through it with my torch. Up above, along the highway, the lights blinked out as though it was the end of the world.

“That’s it. Come on.”

I climbed back out, guided by her flashlight. “This won’t knock out the lights and alarms around the museum?”

She shook her head. “No such luck. They have their own generator on the grounds. But it’ll give us an excuse for being around.”

“The real power truck will arrive soon, looking for the trouble.”

“All the better. It’ll help us if there’s more than one truck in the area.”

We drove on through the darkness until our lights picked out the high wire fence surrounding the grounds of the museum. There were two uniformed Pinkerton men in a car by the side of the road, and they waved us to a stop. “What’s the trouble?” one of them asked.

Laura let me do the talking, for obvious reasons. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. The road’s dark for a couple of miles back. Probably a wire down somewhere.”

The guard nodded and waved us on. In the rearview mirror I saw him get back in his car and light a cigarette. “We’re all right now,” Laura said. “They won’t check the other building till 9:45. That gives us a good 45 minutes.”

“Not long.”

“Long enough.”

We turned a bend in the road and came to stop beside a locked gate.

“Now what?”

“I told you, Tony. The electric wires on the top have to be disconnected so we can get the gate open.”

I climbed into the plastic basket on the back of the truck and waited patiently while she raised me into position. The thing was sometimes called a “cherry picker,” and when you weren’t picking cherries with it, you could change street lights, repair rockets and replace power lines. The plastic basket would not conduct electricity and, thus ungrounded, I could handle live wires as harmlessly as a bird sits upon them. It took me only a moment to pull the wire free from the gate. Down below, Laura was already working on the lock.

The rebuilt chapel that was our goal sat about 200 yards behind the main building, connected to it by a gently winding road. Four spotlights played upon it from the ground. They’d have been easy to black out, but of course that would have been a dead giveaway to the Pinkerton men. Instead, we approached the chapel from the rear, keeping it between us and the other building.

“There’s the window! Hurry!”

I felt the basket going up once more, and I was suddenly only inches away from a vast stained-glass scene depicting an armored knight in final combat with a grinning, flame-breathing dragon. The window was more than six feet high and perhaps four feet across. It was covered by a screen of fine wire mesh that might have kept out insects, but little else. I cut through it in two minutes flat. With the screen out of the way, I tackled the leading that held the window in place.

First, I attached a suction device such as window installers use, which in turn was attached to a rope and pulley. As soon as the window was free of its frame, the whole thing could be carefully swung down to the bed of the truck, then raised again and leaded into position after I returned. Laura had explained that a couple of spots of lead would hold it well enough till Tuesday—just enough so the window would be in place when the guards passed.

Our time was down to 25 minutes, but I worked quickly. The leading softened swiftly under the heat, and some of it merely fell away when I ran my knife along the edges. The window swung safely away, with Laura working the pulley, and I tossed my knotted rope down the inside wall. She waved me a final okay as I started down.

The interior of the chapel was black with gloom, and the tiny flashlight I allowed myself could pick out only an occasional glint of a reflected glow from the rows of display cases. I found the case Laura had described easily enough, but then something went wrong with our careful planning. The case held only a few ancient coins and a battered cup that might have been made of tin. This was certainly not the jeweled chalice of the photograph.

I hesitated a moment and then decided to follow the plan anyway. I was about to cut through the glass when I heard Laura start the truck. Something had happened. Someone was coming!

I sprinted for the wall where the rope still hung, and climbed hand over hand to the window opening. The Jersey Power truck was just disappearing through the gate. I didn’t wait to spot the Pinkerton men. Pulling up the rope, I made certain it was still secured to the metal window frame and then dropped it down the outside wall. When I was 10 feet from the ground, I let myself fall the rest of the way and took off, running.

We’d worked out a plan for just such an emergency, and I made my way by foot to the prearranged pickup point. She was nowhere in sight. That meant they were on her tail and she’d have to meet me back at the apartment. I set off walking, keeping to the deeper shadows of the darkened highway, hoping at least that she’d made it safely back.

I took a bus the last part of the way into the city, and reached the apartment sometime after 2 in the morning. The duplicate key was still in my pocket. Inside, I saw the change at once. Her books and most of her clothes were gone. So was a large painting that had hung over the sofa. She’d been here ahead of me and taken those things and left. Could they have been that close to catching her? Could they have been so close she hadn’t even had time to leave me a note?

I couldn’t stay there. I took a chance on returning to my own place, where everything seemed normal enough. My sleep was light and troubled, waiting for the phone call that didn’t come.

In the morning I went down to the corner for a late edition of the
Times
. The story was on the front page, near the bottom, with a three-column picture. They always liked museum robberies; there was something cultural about them.

WINDOW OF ST. GEORGE

STOLEN IN DARING

MUSEUM ROBBERY

The Window of St. George, a stained-glass masterpiece created in the early 16th century by Guglielmo de Marcillat, was stolen last night in a daring museum robbery at the Institute for Medieval Studies near Lyntown, N.J. The window, transported here from Italy in 1926, is valued by collectors at more than $50,000.

I folded the paper and dropped it into a trash basket. There was no need to read any further. I already knew I wouldn’t be seeing Laura Ring again. As I said in the beginning, she was a girl like Cathy.

T
HE ENGINE COUGHED ONCE
and then caught, throbbing to life as I eased down on the accelerator. Then I was traveling, heading across town to the expressway where I could really open her up. The dark came late on these summer nights, and even now at past nine-thirty a sort of red-orange glow lingered in the western sky, as if reluctant to vanish completely.

I had all the windows open and the breeze felt good, and I wondered where I was going. Not that it mattered. It never mattered when I was behind the wheel, feeling the power of the engine as we tore through the night—just it and me. Maybe that was the only taste of power—real power—I got in an otherwise dull life. Five days a week I could work away like all the other jerks, and walk the streets during the lunch hour with that set expression of pleasant boredom, but when Friday nights came I was master of myself, driving two tons of steel along a gray ribbon of highway.

It was at times like this that I knew what the air aces of the First World War must have felt when they took to the sky in their Spads and Fokkers and Sopwith Camels. This right here now, speeding along the expressway at seventy miles an hour, was what life is all about. I flipped on the radio but then turned it off again. I didn’t need it. I didn’t need anything but the speed and the power and the certainty that I was going somewhere.

But where tonight? I jacked up the speed to eighty-five, taking a long low hill as if it didn’t exist, roaring down the other side with all the fury of the night around me. I passed a little sports car with a girl at the wheel, turned sharply in front of her and debated having some fun. But no, I had other things on my mind. She might remember me, or the license number, and report it to the cops later. I couldn’t take a chance on anything like that.

Further along, pressing ninety, I caught an animal in the road—a rabbit, probably—and pinned him to the pavement before he knew what hit him. All right, all right. No faster, or they might pick me up. I slowed it back gradually, seeing the lights of the city off on my right.

And turned off into downtown. The city reminded me of the resort season in Florida. Flowering sport shirts, girls in shorts, open-topped convertibles prowling the streets. Friday, Friday night, the beat beat beat of the rock place as I passed. “Hey, cat.” Sure. I remembered Florida, and the old man I’d caught on the crosswalk there.

Friday night was alive, with the blood of the city throbbing in its veins, and I was its master, as long as I stayed behind the wheel, as long as I saw it all only through the windshield speckled with the guts of a dozen dead bugs.

I cruised some more, thinking about where to go. Maybe down to the Negro section. I could hit a kid in the street and keep on going. They’d see a white man driving away and that would be enough for a nice riot on a hot Friday night. Or maybe down to the beach, where there’d be a crowd even after dark. They were never individual people when I had them in my sights, never men or women or children when I gunned the car forward in that final second. They were only objects like bags of sand.

Some kids in a pickup truck yelled at me as they went by, and I followed them for a while until I got tired of it. Then I swung around to follow the circling red flasher of an ambulance as it roared through the night. I figured it would be an accident and I was right. A couple of hot rodders piled into each other on a turn. The one kid was screaming when they lifted him out, and I watched it for a long time through my windshield.

Pretty soon I was heading back toward the expressway, hungry for another taste of the speed. A few big drops of rain glanced off the glass in front of me, and I rolled up the windows as the full fury of a brief downpour hit the road ahead. It was good, and I liked driving in the rain. I remembered the first car I’d ever owned—a supercharged French job with an eight cylinder engine. My father had bought it for my eighteenth birthday, back when the family had money, and it had rained the first day I drove it. They’d taken it away from me soon after that, because of the accident and my father’s death, but I always had the memory of that first drive in the rain.

Now my tastes ran to American cars, because the foreign ones were too distinctive. Someone might remember, reports might be compared. I was very, very careful—always.

Two girls loomed up in my headlights as the rain abated. They had a flat tire and they huddled under a single black raincoat while they debated what to do. I sped past them, then cut back to the exit lane and left the expressway at the next feeder. It took me only a few minutes to double back and get on again where I had before. This time I turned off my headlights.

The rain had stopped and they were trying to do something with the tire. I could see them clearly in the reflected glow from the distant lights, but they didn’t see me. The car hummed along like a silent bat swooping through the night. I pushed it to the speed limit and held it there—no faster, because they might be able to tell later. No faster… careful…

The girl in the raincoat glanced up at the last instant, her dim face a mixture of surprise and then terror. As I felt the car crunch against them, I slammed on the brakes and switched on my headlights. It would look good, even if they searched for skid marks on the wet pavement. It would look fine.

I got out then and looked at them. It was the first time I’d ever tried two at once.

The police came finally, with their spotlights cutting little arcs in the night. There was no need for the ambulance that came along too. “God, officer, I never saw them. Not till it was too late. That black raincoat, and they didn’t have any lights…”

“It wasn’t your fault, buddy. It was just one of those things.”

I turned away, covering my face, feeling the exhilaration flood through my veins. All right, all right for now. In a few months, in another state, with a different name and a different car, I’d be ready again.

That’s
what life is all about…

D
AVY KNOWLES HAD SPENT
most of the summer hanging around the Star Drug Store, playing the pinball machine and talking to the new blonde behind the lunch counter. He had one more year of high school, one more year of dozing in class and smoking during the lunch hour and chasing around town in Tom Hasker’s convertible. Sometimes he wondered if it was worth it. He wondered especially if it was worth the nightly battles with his father and the crying scenes with his mother.

“How are things, Davy?”