Nina, the Bandit Queen (5 page)

What came out of all the visionary stuff whirling around in Nina’s head was her theory that if they collected a huge enough amount of money and donated it to rebuilding the school pool, other people might feel the urge to donate some of their own. There is an official, financial term for what she imagined would kick-start this outpouring of generosity — it’s called seed money — but she had never heard of such a thing and neither had anybody else she talked to about it. Some people went so far as to scoff.

“You’re nuts,” JannaRose said.

On top of that, if they could somehow collect enough money to get the pool going again, wouldn’t people naturally start paying attention to them? Enough attention that maybe they could get somebody to talk to the ice cream company? Somebody like the mayor?

“Really fuckin’ nuts.”

If Nina had never heard of seed money, she never thought of the money they’d need to get the project rolling as bank robbery money, either. Anybody could raise money any way that suited them. It just happened that this was the only one that fit her skill set. But it wasn’t until JannaRose started hinting that it would be nice if Nina’s brother’s plan for when he got out of jail included a position that Ed Oataway might fill that the idea of acquiring the necessary money by robbing a bank began jumping up and down in the back of her mind, demanding attention. Filling such a position would get Ed out of hock with the parent company for the Pontiac a whole lot faster than the only other obvious way, which was stealing a bunch of cars from people who didn’t want them stolen. Suspecting where that would lead and not wishing to see her family broken apart caused JannaRose to slam things so hard that Nina could hear it across the street. Nina figured that was probably why JannaRose was doing it, but she also couldn’t help but think that behaving like that would be out of character for JannaRose unless things looked quite a bit worse than usual.

As far as Nina could see, the idea of Frank robbing anything was idiotic. It wasn’t necessarily that he was too dumb — he was smarter than Ed Oataway. Even she had to admit that much. But robbery wasn’t his style. Nina always believed that people gravitated to whatever they were intended to do the way quarters and dimes and so on gravitated through the right holes in those machines that sort coins at the supermarket. It was why Frank leaned toward selling driveway resurfacing to old people and then disappearing with their downpayments. If he’d wanted to squeeze out of them the rest of the money they’d agreed to pay, he’d have had to come back with a barrel of used crankcase oil to brush on the driveway so it looked decent until it dried, by which time he’d have vanished with all their money.

But for this he’d have needed a truck, and if there was one thing that ranked up there with the Law of Gravity in SuEz, it was the situation when it came to trucks. The situation was that anybody in SuEz who had a truck had stolen it in the last hour or so, and the only thing they’d be interested in was selling it — not using it to do something else. A truck was a short-term proposition. Besides that, there would have been the hard work required to brush the fake stuff on some old fart’s driveway, and Frank could live without hard work every bit as well as he could live happily with just their downpayments. Sometimes he’d branch out into landscaping — design and construction. The deal there was the same as driveway resurfacing, especially the part where he told them how it would increase the value of their property. This particularly appealed to people who were going to have to sell soon and move into an old folks’ home. The same business fundamentals were involved: extremely low overhead and a minimum of labour and physical risk.

Frank never cared any more for risk that Ed Oataway did. D.S. used to say that was why Frank never would have made it in legitimate business, where some customer would beat the shit out of you without any warning and you’d be sent home with no compensation, until you were healthy enough to go back to work. According to D.S., if the economy had as many downturns as he did personally, people would still be getting their groceries by sneaking up behind them and hitting them with a rock. When he first said that, Nina was on the verge of remarking, “Would you run that by me again?” but by then she’d been around D.S. long enough to realize life was too short.

It was Frank’s negative attitude toward risk that made Nina think bank robbery was an extremely strange venture for him to undertake. But anybody who thought her opinion on this would have any effect on Frank’s plans, or Ed’s for that matter, was entirely out of touch. Frank had never been even slightly interested in his sister’s opinion about anything, or anybody else’s that she could think of. And Ed had by now definitely decided that Nina couldn’t be a bigger pain in the ass if she was triplets, and the only thing he was interested in hearing from her ever again was maybe a cry for help when a great big hole opened up in the ground and swallowed her and she disappeared forever. “I wouldn’t lift a fuckin’ finger,” he told D.S.

D.S. said that was entirely up to Ed. After getting a face-full of hubcap that night, he’d decided that whatever was going on between Ed and Nina was their business and he was better off staying out of it.

Then again, Frank had been locked up for three years, and who could say? Something could have happened to him the way it apparently sometimes did in jail. Nina didn’t know many people other than Ed and Frank who had ever done time. They weren’t all over the place in SuEz the way they were in the towers, where D.S. used to say there were three kinds of folks: the ones who just got out of jail; the ones who were in jail at the moment — probably this was the reason so many of the apartments were unoccupied; and finally the ones who were trying to think of something they could do that would get them sent to jail. Down where he and Nina and the girls lived, everybody was generally too busy doing whatever it took to get through the day to spend the time necessary to put together the sort of deal that would get the police tactical squad introducing itself by asking them to lean their hands against the wall and spread their legs. The chances of that weren’t quite as long as any of them entering their yacht in the next America’s Cup, but pretty close. Criminal-type things did occur, of course, but they were almost always unpremeditated.

Nina said in those cases jail amounted to a big time out. Everybody got a chance to cool off, on top of which a convict could treat the time behind bars as a developmental experience, during which they could catch up on the movies they’d missed since the TV got stolen from their house. And there were some people who just plain benefited from the routine that went with being locked away. She looked straight at Merlina when she said this, although Merly believed it was because she was the only other person in the family who realized that her sisters didn’t know the meaning of responsibility.

Frank was as good-looking as the guys in those Bud Light commercials. What he wasn’t, however, was anywhere near as ambitious as even the Bud Light guys. This was another thing that made his plan to hold up a bank sort of curious, because from the way Ed talked, it sounded as if there was more to it than simply getting out of jail and sticking up some branch in a plaza the way a person might if they happened to be walking by one and it occurred to them that since they were broke, they might as well whip in and rob it.

The only time he ever had anything like ambition, it had led directly to winning what D.S. called a full scholarship to Hard-Time U. He wouldn’t have landed in jail if he hadn’t gotten involved with a woman who was remarkable for a number of reasons that would also include, when he got out, being the registered owner of a five-hundred-thousand dollar Porsche sports car. To show how much he loved her — and this was maybe the most remarkable thing about this woman, because before meeting her, Frank was always entirely satisfied to let his girlfriends show how much they loved him — anyway, to show his love for her, he felt obliged to improve his financial standing. This led him to become a major operator, contracting to do high-end condominium developments, pave and landscape them, the whole deal. But other than make the numbers he quoted bigger, he didn’t even slightly change the approach he’d used to fleece old retired people. That’s why it didn’t take the individuals who were bankrolling these projects long to start asking themselves what was up with this guy. Unless he was some kind of mental case who was so far off his meds that he was flying at an altitude where even birds couldn’t breathe, then somebody must be shaking them down. And for some reason or other, whoever it was had sent this wiener to put his foot in the door. What made it really confusing was that they couldn’t figure out how this scheme Frank was fronting was supposed to pay off for whoever was behind it, because, as their accountants said when they got them to look at the estimates he’d given them, the whole thing was too stupid for words.

Was Nina surprised? When it rained, did her roof leak? The way she looked at it, Frank was lucky he never got too many ideas, because whenever he came up with one, he’d just go with it. For instance, he’d never bothered to figure out that the difference between dealing with these people and with the old farts who made up his former clientele was that he should avoid irritating these people in any way at all. In fact, he should go to great lengths to keep them from feeling even a tiny itch.

Nina said this was because of the way he processed information. When something useful blew into his head, there was no place for it to land, so it just blew around for awhile and blew out again, like a candy wrapper. The big money in these deals was unaware of this, however, and until Frank showed up, they were under the impression that they had paid off all the necessary interests so nobody would try to muscle in on their ventures. For their part, the necessary interests were under the impression that they were the only necessary interests, so they could relax, since the only thing they had to think about was how they could muscle the big money out and take over for themselves.

Every one of these people had concluded that Frank was pissing in their soup.

Men of this calibre had long since put violence behind them as a business technique except as a last resort, but who wanted to use violence against some guy with nothing more than a smile and a shiny suit when the organization behind him was so mysterious they couldn’t even get a read on it and might risk everything in a fruitless bloodbath?

These days, instead of violence, they used lawyers, but what good were lawyers when, far from being able to identify this guy’s backers, all they could find out was that he appeared out of and disappeared back into the stink and misery of SuEz? So the only thing left for them was to turn the matter of Frank Carson over to the courts. Several of these individuals got in touch with the senior police officers they kept on retainer for various purposes such as corporate and government relations. The charges these police officers came up with in turn were so obviously trumped up that the judge couldn’t help but assume that the accused must have done something extremely wrong. Whoever was fucking him up the ass had a lot of influence, and why else would they have gone to this much trouble? On those grounds, eleven years seemed about right.

When Ed Oataway got back from visiting the penitentiary and mentioned Frank’s plans, the things that began to cross Nina’s mind were quite understandable when you consider that her familiarity with her brother and his shortcomings went back to the day he was born, and then take into account the astounding things she was starting to discover about her own capabilities. She was so wrapped up in working out all the implications that she sat on the porch for ages the next morning, her legs dangling over the side, and didn’t even notice the ice cream truck rolling toward her.

“Cassie,” it was blaring, “you didn’t buy that Marshmallow Whizzard we had for you yesterday. That makes us very, very sad, because we made it for you and nobody else. You don’t really want us to be sad, do you Cassie?”

And, “Leo Lee Roy, you told us yesterday you didn’t have any money to pay for your Mount Ever-Ice. And we told you to go and talk to your mama and tell her how embarrassed you would be when everybody on the street finds out why she’s too cheap to buy you a treat. Here, we brought a brand-new one for you today. We sure hope you’re ready this time.”

And, “Trafford? We don’t see you. Are you hiding, Trafford? Get out here and get this Devil’s Frost-D-Lite. You don’t want us to take your name off our list, do you? If we do that you’ll never be able to get back on it. You’ll be gone forever.”

She didn’t even look up when her girls came out to watch heaven on wheels go rolling by. Not even when Merlina said “Mom?” — which was something the others urged her to do every time the truck came along, because she had a gift for saying it in a way that made Nina feel like the most useless mother who ever lived, so useless it was hard to understand why the authorities didn’t put her children out for adoption.

This time Nina didn’t even hear her. It was because that way-down-deep-inside-her spirit that had guided her into the ice cream company parking lot — and had led her, she now finally realized, to do what she’d done in the confrontation with the ice cream truck in front of her house — it was because that same spirit that made her breath get so short and her skin tingle like her nerves were full of static electricity was speaking to her again, only with a whole lot more determination than it had those other times.

“That fuckin’ moron,” the spirit was saying, referring to her brother Frank Carson. “That fuckin’ moron could never rob a bank.”

Then it paused. And cleared its throat to make sure it had her undivided attention. And when it saw she was listening with every single part of her body, it said, very pointedly, “But I could.”

There were things about Frank Carson’s plan to rob a bank that, if Nina had known them, would have made her think twice about her own. As it was, she hardly even thought about it once.

Unless you count the conversation she had with JannaRose after JannaRose casually mentioned that she’d always thought Nina was opposed to stealing. Nina asked whatever had given her that idea, and JannaRose said it was based on everything she’d ever heard her say. This forced Nina to come up with a revised ethical position on the spot.

“Okay. When you steal something, you have it, and the person that originally had it doesn’t,” was how it began, and it could be it had a few rough edges, because it was put together on such short notice.

“Of course they don’t have it,” JannaRose said. “You stole it from them. What the fuck are you talking about?”

“What you should do,” Nina continued, “is shut up and let me finish. My point isn’t who doesn’t have it. My point is, let’s say for instance there’s just one of whatever it is — the one you have that the other person doesn’t have any more, meaning the one that the other person had. That now they don’t.”

“I don’t fuckin’ believe this,” JannaRose said.

“But with banks it’s different,” Nina said. “That’s because of bank insurance. When you steal money from a bank, the bank insurance pays it back right away. So it isn’t stealing in the way people think of usually, where what was somebody’s once is suddenly somebody else’s. Now,” she said, “it’s more like there are two things where there only used to be one, and you happen to have one of them. And so does the bank.”

“Somebody doesn’t have it any more. The insurance company doesn’t.”

“No. It doesn’t work like that.” Nina was drawing a lot of diagrams in the air to illustrate how it did work. “Bank insurance isn’t paid by a company, it’s paid by the government. The
government!
” She underlined “government” with her index finger. “And when the government needs money to fill the gap that was left by paying off some bank insurance, it just prints more. Governments can do this any time they like.”

“You don’t believe this either,” JannaRose said.

“I do so. Absolutely.” Nina hadn’t spent years listening to D.S. argue without learning a thing or two. “You ever heard of victimless crimes? Robbing banks is the biggest one of all.”

It was very important that JannaRose not back out on her, and especially not because some complex issue like stealing made her start thinking. Without her for support, Nina would never have the nerve. This was one thing she absolutely did know for sure.

JannaRose backed out on her halfway through Nina’s explanation of how bank insurance worked. She never exactly said she did, but it became obvious when she started hmming loudly and staring at the ceiling every time Nina mentioned anything about the trip they’d made the week before to scout out the bank.

“What about a bake sale?” JannaRose had said the morning of that expedition.

She’d been hanging back — so far back it was hard to hear her. Nina knew it wasn’t because she was looking up in awe at the office buildings that rose sixty storeys and more that she was moving so slowly. She had hardly lifted her eyes off the ground since they got off the subway.

Nina turned and waited. “What?” she shouted when JannaRose got within hailing distance.

“Lots of groups have them,” JannaRose said, “parents’ groups. When they want to raise money. For the school. Or, you know, for trips to the zoo.”

“A bake sale?” When Nina got exasperated with somebody, she had to struggle to keep from sounding as if she had doubts about their intelligence. She didn’t always pull it off.

“I don’t know,” JannaRose said.

“Do you know anybody that knows how to bake?”

JannaRose’s voice had become so faint it was barely a whisper. “I don’t know.”

“Trips to the fuckin’ zoo. Jesus Christ.” Nina had to struggle to keep from saying it out loud.

What worried her was knowing that JannaRose didn’t know whether she’d be too chicken to help her rob a bank. JannaRose never said anything about this, but it was something she would more or less have made it a point not to mention even to herself. There were other things she was like this about, such as her husband Ed Oataway being a criminal. She did everything she could not to think about that, because now that they had children, if Ed went to jail again it would be The End as far as their happy family life was concerned. And how come he was in a line of crime where, even though he was extremely successful, he didn’t bring in enough for them to live on unless they were both on welfare? If Nina came right out and asked her about this, JannaRose would have answered, “I don’t know,” so she never did.

The most important thing to do right there was reassure her. “We have as much right to be here as anybody,” Nina said.

“What?” JannaRose said.

The picture most people see when they think of the city is the downtown skyline, and that’s where they were, in the middle of it, right down at the very bottom of all those bank buildings. Nina felt some kind of reassurance was called for, because she knew the other thing upsetting JannaRose was that they were the only people wearing sweats and T-shirts. As far as Nina knew, JannaRose had never been anyplace where nobody else was dressed like that.

“Us being here,” Nina said. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter that we’re the only ones wearing sweats.”

“What’re you
talking
about?”

“About you standing here in the middle of the sidewalk not moving.”

The crowd flowed around them as if the women had been in that exact spot for years and everybody was used to them.

“I’m fine,” JannaRose said. This could be considered an odd thing for anybody to say who had been with Nina on what Nina had said was going to be a scouting expedition to the lot where the ice cream company parked its trucks, making it sound as if the only thing she had in mind was checking it out. When they were getting on the subway at The Intersection, Nina had kept calling this morning’s expedition a scouting expedition, too.

“Are you going to be sick?”

“No.”

“Then come on.”

JannaRose threw up. She stared at her dripping hand as if it was the most repulsive thing she’d ever laid eyes on. Then she looked at the puddle on the sidewalk. “I’m fine,” she said.

A minute later they were through the front doors. The bank’s security videotapes would show, just inside the lobby, two thirtyish women of less than average height and more than average weight, although only Nina was thirty. JannaRose was four years younger.

The one in the dark blue sweats with the white piping and the maroon T-shirt was standing facing the one in the light green sweats and light green T-shirt, holding her by both shoulders. The one in the light green sweats had her head down and was shaking it sadly. The one in the blue sweats appeared to be talking earnestly to her. The one in the green sweats threw up on the shoes of the one in the blue sweats. The one in the blue sweats looked at her shoes and threw both hands in the air. Then she dragged the one in green sweats back through the front door and out of camera range.

When JannaRose backed out on her, it left Nina with no choice but to press ahead on her own. If she didn’t, the swimming pool wouldn’t get fixed and her daughters wouldn’t have any outlet apart from the usual ones available to girls in their part of town. But it wasn’t as if she didn’t have a lot of other things she could be doing, such as getting squared away with the welfare department.

“Welfare giveth, and sometimes welfare taketh away even more than —”

“Blow it out your ass, D.S.”

“What’d I do now?”

“Nothing.” Big time. Not a single goddamn thing.

Whether Nina was right when she said her brother couldn’t rob a bank really didn’t matter. The bank he would be dealing with had been pre-robbed the same way a TV dinner is pre-cooked, and any bank robbing skills he might or might not have had were irrelevant. If the loot had been a TV dinner instead of 1.18 million in cash, his job amounted to taking it out of the oven when it was ready and jumping into a getaway car with it.

That he had the talent to do this had been noticed in prison, where Frank turned out to be something he’d never been on the outside — a solid citizen. This probably wasn’t surprising when you consider that for the first time in his life he didn’t have to worry about making a living. Not that he’d ever worried about it, but in prison the pressure was cranked down to zero. Naturally he had to be careful about a few things. Making eye contact with other inmates when it wasn’t appropriate, for example, could lead to a spectrum of possibilities running from the fatal to an invitation to get romantically involved that you had to accept even if you would rather die, which you might if you didn’t. It was good for him that he couldn’t be bothered to deal drugs, which would have angered drug dealers, and that he had enough good manners not to win too much at poker, because there were inmates who resented it if they were the ones who lost. Added to that were inmates who got interested in big winnings even if they never played the game, but considered themselves entitled to a cut because that’s the kind of guys they were, and because they had the kind of friends who took a peculiar delight in dealing with individuals who thought this wasn’t fair.

There was one guy in there who made a good living as a headhunter for a number of outside organizations. He saw early on that Frank was presentable and sensitive to his environment and that he kept whatever was on his mind to himself without being a prick about it. The guy’s name was Herbert, and Herbert had a feeling that Frank would be an ideal prospect for one of his clients down the road. One thing he wrote in Frank’s file was that Frank had absolutely no ambition. What this indicated to Herbert was that he might not be bone dumb, which a lot of inmates figured he was, based on the crime he’d been sent up for. You could be smart as hell and not have any ambition; it just meant you fucked the dog to a different drummer.

So Herbert listed him as a solo operator with no identifiable goals who could be valuable in an enterprise where you needed somebody you could count on to do what they’d been told and not be even slightly interested in getting creative. Frank actually made Herbert sad that his clients represented such a narrow range of employers. He could have made a ton of money selling him as one of those guys who read the news on TV. They always had truly exceptional haircuts. Herbert thought this was because they paid a great deal to get it cut that way, but here he saw Frank getting his hair cut by the same inmates who cut everybody else’s hair, and his haircut always looked like one of those anchormen haircuts. Until Frank came along, it had never occurred to Herbert that those haircuts he saw on TV were the result of some inner quality.

When the opening for the job at the bank turned up a couple of months before he was due to get out, having done three of his eleven years, Frank figured it would be a snap. Walk in, wave the gun around in a threatening manner, grab a bank executive named Milner and put the gun to his head after firing a bullet into the ceiling so everybody in the place realizes it’s a real gun and he means real business. Milner’s personal assistant would make a big show of bustling around filling a gym bag with cash. The bank would have far more cash on hand than it usually did, because Milner would have ordered extra to supply the advance requests he had forged from a number of depositors who planned to make large withdrawals on the same day, coincidentally. When the bag was handed to him, Frank was to race out of the building and be driven to an arranged destination. Herbert was as confident about recommending him as he’d ever been about anybody. His long experience as a human resources consultant made it clear to him that here was one of those truly rare individuals. Not only could he be trusted, but when he got blown away after the loot was delivered, nobody would give a shit. He was just some fuckhead from SuEz with no connections.