When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (20 page)

With the light on, I thinkwe all three felt vulnerable, almost naked. I know I did, and there was a tension in their stance that indicated the same feeling. The one with the gun was not exactly training it on me, but neither was he pointing it in another direction altogether. Darkness had protected all three of us, and now we'd flicked it aside.

"The trouble is we're afraid of each other," I told him. "You're afraid we'll try to get the books without paying for them. We're afraid you'll rip us off for the money and give us nothing in return, hold us up again with the books or peddle them to somebody else."

The tall one shook his head. "This is a one-time deal."

"For both of us.We pay once and that's all. If you made a copy of the books, get rid of it."

"No copies."

"Good," I said. "You have the books here?" The short one with the dark wig shoved a navy-blue laundry bag across the room with his foot. His partner heftedit, put it back on the floor. I said it could be anything, it could be laundry, and would they show me what was in the bag.

"When we see money," the tall one said, "you get to see the books."

"I don't want to examine them. Just take them out of the sack before I tell my friend to bring the money."

They looked at each other. The one with the gun shrugged. He moved the pistol to cover me while the other one worked the drawstring on the laundry bag and withdrew a hinged-post bound ledger similar to the set of fake books I'd seen on Skip's desk.

"All right," I said. "Flick the light on and off three times."

"Who are you signaling?"

"The Coast Guard."

They exchanged glances, and the one by the light switch worked it up and down three times. The fluorescent fixture winked on and off in ragged fashion. The three of us stood awkwardly and waited what seemed like a long time. I wondered if Skip had seen the signal, wondered if he'd had enough time alone in the car to lose his nerve.

Then I heard him on the stairs and at the door. I called out to him to come in. The door opened and heentered, the attache case in his left hand.

He looked at me,then caught sight of the two of them in their beards and wigs and masks.

"Jesus," he said.

I said, "Each side will have one man to make the exchange and one to cover him. That way nobody will be able to take anybody off and the books and money will pass at the same time."

The taller one, the one at the light switch, said, "You sound like an old hand at this."

"I had time to think about it. Skip, I'll back you up. Bring the case over here, set it down by me. Good. Now you and one of our friends can set up a table in the middle of the room and clear some of the other furniture out from around it."

The two of them looked at each other, and predictably the taller one kicked the laundry bag over to his partner and came forward. He asked what I wanted him to do and I put him and Skip to work rearranging the furniture.

"I don't know what the union's going to say about this," he said. The beard hid his mouth, and the mask covered him around the eyes, but I sensed he was smiling.

At my direction, he and Skip positioned a table in the center of the room, almost directly beneath the overhead light fixture. The table was eight feet long and four feet wide, placed to divide their side of the room from ours.

I got down on one knee, crouched behind a nest of chairs. At the far end of the room, the one with the gun was similarly concealing himself. I called Skip back for the case full of money, sent the tall yellow-haired fellow for the books. Movingdeliberately, each carried his part of the bargain to one end of the long table. Skip set the case down first, worked the buttons to release the catches. The man in the blond wig slipped the set of books out of the bag and put them down gently, then stepped back, his hands hovering.

I had each of them retreat a few yards, then switch ends of the table. Skip opened the heavy ledger, made sure the books were the ones he'd negotiated for. His opposite number opened the attache case and took out a banded stack of bills. He riffled through it, put it back, took up another stack.

"Books are okay," Skip announced. He closed the heavy volume, got it into the laundry bag, hoisted it and started back toward me.

The one with the gun said, "Hold it."

"What for?"

"Stay where you are until he counts it."

"I got to stand here while he counts fifty grand? Be serious."

"Take a fast count," the one with the gun told his partner. "Make sure it's all money. We don't want to go home with a bag full of cut-up newspaper."

"I'd really do that," Skip said. "I'd really walk up into a gun with a case full of fucking Monopoly money. Point that thing somewhere else, will you? It's getting on my nerves."

There was no answer. Skip held his position, balanced on the balls of his feet. My back was cramping and my knee, the one I was kneeling on, was giving me a little trouble. Time came to a stop while the yellow-haired one flipped through the packets of money, assuring himself that none of it consisted of cut paper or one-dollar bills. He probably did this as quickly as he could but it seemed forever before he was satisfied, closing the case and engaging the clasps.

"All right," I said. "Now the two of you-"

Skip said, "Wait a minute. We get the laundry bag and they get the attache case, right?"

"So?"

"So it seems uneven. That case was close to a hundred bucks and it's less than two years old, and how much could a laundry bag be worth?A couple of bucks, right?"

"What are you getting at,Devoe?"

"You could throw in something," he said, his voice tightening. "You could tell me who set this up."

They both looked hard at him.

"I don't know you," he said. "I don't know either of you. You ripped me off,fine, maybe your kid sister needs an operation or something. I mean everybody'sgotta make a living, right?"

No answer.

"But somebody set this up, somebody I know, somebody who knows me. Tell me who. That's all."

There was a long silence. Then the one with the brown wig said, "Forget it," flat, final. Skip's shoulders dropped in resignation.

"We try," he said.

And he and the man in the yellow wig backed away from the table, one with the attache case and one with the laundry bag. I called the shots, sending Skip to the door he'd come in, watching the other move not surprisingly through a curtained archway in the rear. Skip had the door open and was backing through it when the one in the dark wig said, "Hold it."

His long-barreled pistol had swung around to cover Skip, and for a moment I thought he was going to shoot. I got both hands on the.45 and took a bead on him. Then his gun swung to the side and he raised it and said, "We leave first. Stay where you are for ten minutes. You got that?"

"All right," I said.

He pointed the gun at the ceiling, fired twice. The fluorescent tubes exploded overhead, plunging the room into darkness. The gunshots were loud and the exploding tubes were louder, but for some reason neither the noise nor the darkness rattled me. I watched as he moved to the archway, a shadow among shadows, and the.45 stayed centered on him and my finger stayed on the trigger.

WE didn't wait ten minutes as instructed. We got out of there in a hurry, Skip lugging the books in the laundry bag, me with the gun still clutched in one hand. Before we could cross the street to the Chevy,Kasabian had put his car in gear and roared down the block, pulling up next to us with a great screech of brakes. We piled into the backseat and told him to go around the block, but the car was already in motion before we got the words out.

We took a left and then another left. OnSeventeenth Avenue, we found BobbyRuslander hanging on to a tree with one hand, struggling to catch his breath. Across the street, Billie Keegan took a few slow steps toward us,then paused to cup his hands around a match and light a cigarette.

Bobby said, "Oh, Jesus, am I out of shape. They cametearin ' out of that driveway, had to be them, they had the case with the money. I was four houses down, I saw 'embut I didn't want to run up on 'emright away, you know? I think one of 'emwas carrying a gun."

"Didn't you hear the shots?"

He hadn't, nor had either of the others. I wasn't surprised. The dark-haired gunman had used a small-caliber pistol, and while the noise was loud enough in a closed room, it wouldn't have been likely to carry very far.

"They jumped into this car," Bobby said, pointing to where it had been parked, "and they got out in a hurry and left rubber. I started moving once they were in the car, figuring I could get a look at the plate number, and I chased 'emand the light was rotten and-" He shrugged. "Nothing," he said.

Skip said, "Least you tried."

"I'm so out of shape," Bobby said. He slapped himself across the belly. "Nolegs, no wind, and my eyes aren't so good, either. I couldn't referee a real basketball game, running up and down the court. I'dfuckin ' die."

"You could have blown your whistle," Skip suggested.

"Jesus, if I'd had it with me I might have. You think they would have stopped and surrendered?"

"I think they'd probably have shot you," I said. "Forget the plate number."

"At least I tried," he said. He looked over at Billie. "Keegan there, he was closer to them and he didn't budge.Just sat under the tree like Ferdinand the bull, smelling the flowers."

"Smelling thedogshit," Keegan said. "We have to work with the materials at hand."

"Been working on thoseminibottles, Billie?"

"Just maintaining," Keegan said.

I asked Bobby if he got the make of the car. He pursed his lips, blew out,shook his head. "Dark late-model sedan," he said. "They all look alike these days anyway."

"That's the truth,"Kasabian said, and Skip agreed with him. I started to form another question when Billie Keegan announced that the car was a Mercury Marquis, three or four years old, black or navy blue.

We all stopped and looked at him. His face carefully expressionless, he took a scrap of paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it. "LJK-914," he read. "Does that mean anything to any of you?" And while we went on staring at him, he said, "That's the license number.New Yorkplates. I wrote down all the makes and plate numbers earlier to keep from dying of boredom. It seemed easier than chasing cars like a fucking cocker spaniel."

"Fucking Billie Keegan," Skip said with wonder, and went over and hugged him.

"You gentlemen will rush to judgment of the man who drinks a bit," Keegan said. He took a miniature bottle from a pocket, twisted the cap until the seal broke, tipped back his head and drank the whiskey down.

"Maintenance," he said. "That's all."

Bobby couldn't get over it. He seemed almost hurt by Billie's ingenuity. "Why didn't you say something?" he demanded. "I could have been writing down numbers the same time, we could have covered more of them."

Keegan shrugged. "I figured I'd keep it to myself," he said. "So that when they ran past all these cars and caught a bus onJerome Avenue I wouldn't look like an asshole."

" Jerome Avenue 's in theBronx," somebody said. Billie said he knew whereJerome Avenue was, that he had an uncle used to live onJerome Avenue. I asked if the pair had been wearing their disguises when they emerged from the driveway.

"I don't know," Bobby said. "What were they supposed to look like? They had little masks on." He made twin circles of his thumbs and forefingers, held them to his face in imitation of the masks.

"Were they wearing beards?"

"Of course they were wearing beards. What do you think, they stopped to shave?"

"The beards werefake," Skip said.

"Oh."

"They have the wigs on, too?One dark and one light?"

"I guess. I didn't know they were wigs. I- there wasn't a hell of a lot of light, Arthur. Streetlamps here and there, but they came out that driveway and ran to their car, and they didn't exactly pause and hold a press conference, pose for the photographers."

I said, "We'd better get out of here."

"Why's that? I like standing around in the middle ofBrooklyn, it reminds me of hanging out on the corner when I was a boy. You're thinking cops?"

"Well, there were gunshots. No point being conspicuous."

"Makes sense."

We walked over toKasabian's car, got in, and circled the block again. We caught a red light, and I gaveKasabian directions back toManhattan. We had the books in hand, we'd paid the ransom, and we were all alive to tell or not tell the tale. Besides that, we had Keegan's drunken resourcefulness to celebrate. All of this changed our mood for the better, and I was now able to provide clear directions back to the city andKasabian, for his part, was able to absorb them.

As we neared the church, we saw a handful of people in front of it, men in undershirts, teenagers, all of them standing around as if waiting for someone. Somewhere in the distance, I heard the undulating siren of a blue-and-white.

I wanted to tellKasabian to drive us all home, that we could come back tomorrow for Skip's car. But it was parked next to a hydrant, it would stand out. He pulled up- he may not have put the crowd and the siren together- and Skip and I got out. One of the men across the street, balding and beer-gutted,was looking us over.

I called out, asked him what was up. He wanted to know if I was from the precinct. I shook my head.

"Somebody busted into the church," he said."Kids, probably. We got the exits covered, the cops coming."

"Kids," I said heavily, and he laughed.

"I think I was more nervous just now than I was in the church basement," Skip said, after we'd driven a few blocks. "I'm standing with a laundry bag over my shoulder like I just committed a burglary and you've got a forty-five in your belt. I figured we're in great shape if they see the gun."