Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (11 page)

 
          
They
both had that afternoon off. Tom was mowing his front lawn, wearing just a
bathing suit in the sunshine, when Joe came around from between the houses and
said, “Hey, Tom.” He too was dressed in a bathing suit, and he was carrying two
open cans of Budweiser beer.

 
          
Tom
stopped. He was panting and sweating. “What?”

 
          
“Come
take a break.”

 
          
Tom
pointed at the beer. “Is that for me?”

 
          
“I
even opened it for you,” Joe said, and handed him one of the beers. “Come on,
the kids are out of the pool for once.”

 
          
Tom
took a swig of beer, and they walked down the driveway between the houses and
over into Joe’s backyard. It was a really hot sunny day in July, and the pool
looked great to the both of
diem
. Cool water in a container
of blue, nothing looks better than that on a hot day.
Except
a beer.

 
          
Tom
said, “The filter’s working?”

 
          
Joe
put his finger to his lips. “Easy, it’ll hear you. Come on, cool off.”

 
          
Joe
had a short sturdy wooden ladder in an A shape over the side of the pool; you
went up three steps on one side of the A, and down three steps into the water
on the other side. They both climbed up and over, Joe first, and while Joe
waded around the four-foot-deep water throwing out leaves and sticks and pieces
of paper and dead bugs, Tom sat back on one of the steps of the ladder, so he
was in water up to his neck. With his right hand he held the beer can up out of
the water.

 
          
Joe
looked over at him and laughed. “You look like the Statue of Liberty.”

 
          
Tom
grinned, saluted with the beer, and took a swig. It was tough to drink in that
position, but Joe was watching, so Tom did it for the effect. Then he said,
“You know what I was thinking before? When I was over there with the
lawnmower?”

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“Remember
I told you I used to go to City College nights?”

 
          
Joe
waded over to lean against the side of the pool to Tom’s left. “So?”

 
          
Tom
moved up a step, so the water was only chest-high and it was easier to drink.
“What I was thinking,” he said, “if I’d kept at
it,
you know where I’d be today?”

 
          
“Where?”

 
          
“Right here.
I
still
wouldn’t be a lawyer, not for two more years.”

 
          
“Sure,”
Joe said. He nodded. “You put a penny away every day, at the end of the year
you’re still poor. It’s the same principle.”

 
          
Tom
stared at him. “It is?”

 
          
They
looked at one another, both bewildered, until Tom lost interest in the subject
and changed it, saying, “Listen, what about the wives?”

 
          
Joe
switched his bewilderment to the new topic. “What?”

 
          
“What
do we tell the wives?”

 
          
“Oh,”
Joe said. “About the robbery, you mean.”

           
“Naturally.”

 
          
Joe
didn’t see any problem. He shrugged and said, “Nothing.”

 
          
“Nothing?
I don’t know about you and Grace,” Tom said, “but
if I put Mary in Trinidad, she’s going to know she’s in Trinidad.”

 
          
“Sure,”
Joe said.
“Then.
When we’re ready to move, that’s when
we tell them.
After it’s all over.”

 
          
Tom
hadn’t made up his own mind about that yet. There were times, particularly at
night, when he very strongly wanted to tell Mary about it, talk it over with
her, see what she had to say. Frowning, he said, “Not now at all?”

 
          
“In
the first place,” Joe said, “they’d worry. In the second place, they’d be against
it, you know they would.”

           
Tom nodded; that was what had kept
him quiet up till now. “I know,” he said. “Mary wouldn’t approve, not ahead of
time.”

 
          
“They’d
throw cold water on the whole idea,” Joe said. “If we tell the wives, we’ll
never
do it.”

 
          
“You’re
right,” Tom said. He was disappointed, but he was also relieved that the
question was resolved. “Not till it’s all over,” he said. “Then we tell them.”

 
          
“When
we’re ready to take off out of here,” Joe said. “Right,” Tom said. Then he
said. “The thing is
,
you know we can’t leave the
country right away.”

 
          
“Oh, sure.”
Joe said. “I know that. They’d be on our asses
in five minutes.”

 
          
“What
we’ve got to agree right now,” Tom said, “is that we bury the money and neither
one of us goes near it until we’re ready to leave.”

 
          
“That’s
fine with me.”

 
          
“The
big advantage we’ve got,” Tom said, “is that we’ve seen every mistake there
is.”

 
          
“That’s
right. And we know how not to make them.”

           
Tom took a deep breath. “Two years,”
he said.

 
          
Joe
winced. “Two years?”

 
          
“We’ve
got to play it cool,” Tom said.

 
          
Joe
looked pained, as though he had an ankle cramp down underwater. He wanted to
argue against it, but on the other hand he had to agree with the theory of it;
so he was stuck. Reluctantly, but giving in, he said, “Yeah, I suppose. Okay,
two years it is.”

 
          
In
the weeks after my visit with Vigano, I got to learn an awful lot about stocks
and bonds, and about brokerages, and about Wall Street. I had to, if we were
going to take ten million dollars away from there.

 
          
Wall
Street itself is only about five blocks long, but the brokerages are scattered
all around that whole area down there below City Hall; on Pine Street and
Exchange Place, on William Street and Nassau Street and Maiden Lane.

 
          
I’ve
heard the Wall Street district described as the only part of New York that
looks like London. I can’t say about that, since I’ve never been to London, but
I do know it has the narrowest and crookedest streets of any part of the dty,
with narrow sidewalks, and the big bank buildings crowding as close to the curb
and each other as they can get. Writers all the time talk about that section in
terms of “canyons,” and I can see why. With the streets so narrow and the stone
buildings so tall and close together, the only time the sun shines on Wall
Street is high noon.

 
          
For
the first time in my life I was beginning to see that breaking the law could be
just as complicated as upholding it. I’d always thought of the police side of
things as being tougher than the crook side, but maybe I’d been wrong; there’s
nothing like standing in the other guy’s shoes to make you sympathize with him.

 
          
There
were so many
details
to figure out.
How to do the robbery, for instance; whether it should be day or night, whether
we should try for a diversion, just exactly how we were going to work it. And
how to be sure we were taking the right bonds; before this, neither one of us
had known zip about stocks and bonds.
And how to make a
getaway after the robbery in those narrow crowded streets.
And how to
hide the loot afterward until we sold it to Vigano; which was ironic, since all
along we’d been telling each other we had to steal something that didn’t need
to be held onto or stowed out of sight.

 
          
But
there it was. And the brokerages didn’t make it any easier. They were guarded
like banks; no, they were tougher than banks.

 
          
Let
me tell you just how tough they were. First of all, there’s a special section
of the Police Department with headquarters down in the Wall Street area that
deals with nothing at all except stock market crime. There are cops in that
section that know more about the financial world than the editor of the
Wall Street Journal
, and those cops keep
tabs on the brokerages all the time, talking to the personnel directors,
talking to the security directors, checking up on their ways of handling things
and protecting themselves, and always no more than one phone call away in case
there’s any kind of trouble.

 
          
And
then
there’s the internal security departments
. All
the big brokerages have them; private uniformed guards, security files,
closed-circuit TV, and all of it run usually by an ex-cop or an ex-FBI man.
Guys that treat a stock brokerage as though it were a top-secret atomic-testing
laboratory, and whose entire job is to see to it that none of the millions of
pieces of paper that flow through Wall Street every day ever gets stolen.

 
          
Of
course, some do. But most stock market robberies are inside jobs, and there’s a
good reason for it. Stocks and bonds, like dollar bills, carry serial numbers.
Usually, the only way to steal securities and get something for your pains is
to be an employee of a stock brokerage and alter the records so the brokerage
isn’t aware that anything has been stolen. With bearer bonds, it’s possible for
somebody like Anthony Vigano, with his expertise and his contacts, to alter the
numbers and peddle the bonds back into legitimate channels, but other than that
an inside job is the only kind of job possible on Wall Street.

 
          
But
even if it weren’t, even if there were any point in breaking into a stock
brokerage and stripping the vault, they’ve gone out of their way to make things
tough. For instance, a couple of years ago a bank down in that area closed
down, and a restaurant was going to move into the space they left vacant.
Before they could, though, they had to pull the vault out, and they had one
hell of a time doing it. Not only was it wired with all kinds of alarms, not
only did it have sixteen-inch-thick concrete walls reinforced with steel rods,
but it actually had two separate walls all the way around the vault, and the
area between the two walls was filled with poison gas. The workmen taking the
vault down had to wear gas masks.

 
          
That
isn’t merely being tough; it’s being insane.

 
          
Still,
Joe and I had an edge over the normal safecracker or the normal dishonest
employee. We had the facilities of the Police Department to help us, to provide
us with material for the robbery and specific information—such as blueprints of
alarm systems and other security measures—on whichever brokerage we finally
decided to concentrate on.

 
          
There
was one that looked promising, called Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Co. They
were in a building near the corner of John and Pearl streets, and I went down
there one day to check them out. The building had the typical small lobby of
that area—they really don’t like to waste space, those financial people—and
three elevators. Parker, Tobin, Eastpoole & Co. was on the sixth and
seventh and eighth floors, but I alreadv knew it was the seventh floor I
wanted, since I’d checked out the alarm-system on file at Police Headquarters
downtown.

 
          
The
elevator was pretty full, and three of us got off together at the seventh
floor. Which was good: it gave me a chance to hang back and look at things
while the other two went forward to the counter.

 
          
The
elevator had opened onto a fairly large room, much wider than deep, divided the
long way by a chest-high counter. The security arrangements seemed to be
typical for a large brokerage. Two armed and uniformed private guards were on
duty behind the counter. On the wall in back of them was a large pegboard with
maybe twenty plastic ID tags hanging from it, plus room for about a hundred
more. Each tag had a color photograph on it of the person it belonged to, plus
a signature written underneath. Mounted on the short wall down to the right
were six closed-circuit television sets, each showing a different area of the
brokerage, including one showing this reception area I was standing in. Above
the sets was the TV camera, turning slowly back and forth like a fan. On the
other short wall, the one down to my left, was a second pegboard, smaller than
the first, holding about twenty-five ID tags marked in big letters: VISITOR.
Doorways at both ends of the room led into the work areas.

 
          
There
was a steady stream of activity around the counter. Arriving employees were
picking up their ID tags, departing employees were turning them in,
messengers
were delivering manila envelopes. I got to stand
there for maybe a full two minutes, checking things out

 
          
The
first thing I noticed was that only one of the guards dealt with the people who
came to the counter. The other one stood back by the rear wall, keeping an eye
on things; watching the people, looking over at the television sets, staying
alert while his partner did the detail work.

 
          
Then
there were the television sets. They were in black-and-white, but the pictures
were crisp and clear. You could see the people moving around in different
rooms, and you could make out their faces with no trouble at all. And I knew
this bank of six sets would be repeated probably three or four other places on
this floor; in the boss’s office, in the security chief’s office, in the vault
anteroom, maybe one or two other places.

 
          
It
was also more than likely to be going on video tape. They have video tape now
that can be erased and recorded on again, the same as regular sound tape, and
that’s what they’d have. They might keep the tape for a week or a month or
maybe even longer, so that if it turned out later that somebody had pulled a
fast one, they could run the tapes through again and see who was where at what
time.

 
          
“Can
I help you?”

 
          
It
was the guard, the one who dealt with people, looking across the counter at me.
He was brusque and impatient, because of the amount of work he had to do, but
he wasn’t suspicious. I stepped forward to the counter, trying for the world’s
most innocent and stupid smile. Pointing at the television sets, I said, “Is
that me?”

 
          
He
gave a brief bored look at the screens. “That’s you,” he said. “What can I do
for you?”

 
          
“I’ve
never been on television before,” I said. I looked at the screen as though I
was fascinated; and to tell the truth, I was. I’d worn the moustache again, and
I was amazed at what I looked like with a moustache.
Totally
different.
I wouldn’t have recognized me if I met me walking down the
street.

 
          
The
guard was getting impatient. He looked me over for manila envelopes and said,
“You a messenger?”

           
I didn’t want to hang around and
pester him for so long that I became memorable. Besides, I’d seen all I was
going to see out here, and there was no way I was going to get inside. Not
today. I said, “No, I’m looking for the personnel office. I’m supposed to come
to work here.”

 
          
“That’s
on the eighth floor,” the guard said, and jabbed a thumb toward the ceiling.

 
          
"Oh,”
I said.
“Then Tm in the wrong place.”

 
          
“That’s
right,” he said.

 
          
“Thanks,”
I said, and went back over to the elevators and pushed the button. While
waiting, I looked around some more. You sure had to admire their security. And
yet, this was the likeliest prospect.