by Jack Finney
Go ahead, then. The sooner we start the sooner we'll be through. A hand on her shoulder, I urged her gently toward the door.
She stepped to the door, touched the little knob, then turned to look at us again. She nodded several times, unable to talk; then she swallowed, and her eyes filled with tears. Good luck, she whispered, opened the door, and stepped out.
She was going to the address I'd given her, a boardinghouse, Mrs. Kressman's, some three blocks away. I'd stayed there last summer; it was quiet and decent, and Tina had written for a reservation. There are scores of such places in Reno: private homes that take two or three, four or five, prospective divorcées or summer workers, giving them inexpensive rooms and one meal a day, usually breakfast. Tina carried a small suitcase; she'd tell Mrs. Kressman she'd just arrived by bus. Guy, Jerry, and Brick had their shirts on, and now they began fastening their neckerchiefs. I put on a bright-green shirt over my own, tucked in the tails all around, then pulled them out a little, blousing the shirt to make it harder for anyone to judge my weight. I saw Guy buckle on his fringed holster and toy pistol, the kind they make for kids nowadays: an absolutely real-looking, authentic copy of a Colt .44 revolver. I tied a red neckerchief fairly snug around my neck, then put on a flat-crowned, wide-brimmed Western hat — cheap black felt with an imitation tooled-leather band.
Guy did smile a little — we all did — as we put on our beards. They hooked on with earpieces like a pair of sunglasses, and we'd bent and adjusted the earpieces so the beards fitted snug. Looking at Guy, Brick, and Jerry, I was sure no description of them as they were now would have much connection with the men underneath.
Al? said Jerry gently. All set?
I nodded.
Good luck. You'll be all right. You've got it all in your mind; just allow for a little stage fright at first, and don't try to hurry; take your time. Good luck, Al, he repeated quietly, and held out his hand.
I shook hands with Jerry, wished him luck; then Guy put out his hand and I shook hands with him. I reached up to fiddle with the earpieces of my beard, as though they needed adjusting, then turned toward the door, hoping Jerry and Guy wouldn't notice that I hadn't shaken hands with Brick.
Jerry stepped past me, opened the door, and stepped out, closing it behind him. A moment later we heard the car door close and knew Jerry was at his post, slouched behind the wheel in the darkness, with a clear view of Harold's Club across the tracks, down the street to the south. He had to stay in the car from now on; that was one argument he'd lost. We'd insisted on it, all the rest of us; he'd been seen in Harold's Club too much, too recently.
Half a minute passed; then the horn sounded — just a tap, not loud — and I opened the door; stepped out, closing it behind me; walked on to the sidewalk and turned south on Virginia Street.
I crossed the railroad tracks to Commercial Row, crossed the street, stepped onto the sidewalk; I was now in the sluggish current of people moving up and down Virginia Street and into and out of the casinos, restaurants, and bars. It seemed bright as day, the sidewalk shadowless and crammed with people; you just took your place in the stream and moved along with it. I felt ridiculous in my touristy cowboy outfit and beard, but all around me were dozens of men more or less like me. A few were real cowhands, from working cattle ranches, in dungarees permanently bent at the knees from riding. They seemed drab, their high-heeled boots scuffed and dirt-colored, their hats sweat-stained and worn. But they were in the minority; everywhere, moving along with me and passing in the opposite direction, were gaudy shirts; clean new sombreros; fancy boots; and mustaches, sideburns, chin beards, and full beards, real and false. People glanced at me without interest, no one's gaze lingering. Walking slowly along a crowded street in a bright-green shirt, red neckerchief, and cowboy hat, wearing a black, bushy, obviously false beard, I was actually inconspicuous.
And now there it was, directly across the street: Harold's Club, brilliant and unreal as a movie set. I stepped out of the crowd into a darkened doorway leading up to a group of second-floor offices; then I stood staring across the street. From the roof of Harold's Club search-lights probed the sky endlessly, blue-white and intense, their ends hinged to the roof, their edges as sharply defined as a ruler's edge. Senselessly they swept the sky, their ends fading into the night far above. Below the lights began the immense, fantastic painting covering the entire front of Harold's Club to the very top edge of the entrances. It was two stories high and twice as long, the figures in it gigantic. Running across the painting's top edge were the red-neon words “Dedicated in all humility to those who blazed the trail”; and as I had the first time I'd seen them, I shook my head in wry amazement. For the giant figures of the vivid painting below this mock-humble sentiment were a group of men and women in frontier costumes: pioneers making camp in a half circle of covered wagons. Above them the painted sky was orange — it was sunset; to the side, hidden from their sight by a whitely perfect waterfall, Indians hid on a rock cliff, watching, and, I assumed, preparing to attack. What this scene had to do with Harold's Club and the activities inside it I couldn't imagine, but I doubted if Reno cared. Maybe, I thought, the Indians symbolize Harold's Club; and the pioneers are the arriving tourists, ready for scalping.
At street level, below the great painting, the windows were opaque, painted with humorous Western scenes. There were three entrances spaced along the front, one of them at the corner of Virginia Street and the alley, Douglas Alley, which ran beside the casino's north wall. Above this corner entrance, soaring beyond the roof, was the giant red sign: “Harold's Club,” it said; “Harold's Club.”
Now I crossed the street, threading my way through the slow-moving stream of cars toward the corner entrance. On the curb, just outside the stream of pedestrians, I stopped and looked idly around. To the north, on the Commercial Row corner, a short block away, Guy stood; I spotted his red shirt first, then recognized him. His thumbs were hooked in his belt, and he was gazing around him. I lifted my hand, adjusted my hat, and a moment later saw Guy do the same thing in response. Then I cut across the current of people on the walk, pushed open the plate-glass doors of the corner entrance, and stepped inside.
In that moment what I had to do seemed utterly beyond me; I was overwhelmed and helpless. The place was an incredible roar of sound: hundreds of voices, the shuffling of countless feet, all the movement of human beings in mass, plus the steady clatter of great silvery banks of slot machines, the little sounds of whirling roulette balls, the dry rattle of the bingo cage, and — strangely audible through all this — the shuffle and slap of cards at the panguingue and blackjack tables.
The sound tore at the senses, and people moved through every aisle and open space like ocean currents made visible. The moment I stepped in I was being pushed. Constantly my balance was shifted, my feet forced to move, by the unceasing nudging of shoulders, hips, and elbows moving in through the doors after me or going out past me. I had to actually struggle back to the wall at one side of the doors in order to stand still and look the place over. In that moment, if our plan had called for any least action from me, I'd have had to give up — to turn and walk out, abandoning the thing.
The place was too big; the great room stretched out before me, crammed with potential enemies clustered around every green-topped table like flies on lump sugar, packing the slot-machine aisles solid. Every kind of human being was there, in rodeo costumes, expensive summer outfits, shabby old clothes; and I knew that every one of them — young boys, old men, housewives, and silver-blondes in shorts — was automatically my enemy the moment I moved.
But Jerry had warned me; I had all the time I wanted. Nothing started till I was ready; so I stood beside the doors, building up my nerve and confirming last summer's memory of what this building contained.
Beside me were the old men at the panguingue tables. There was a bar at my right along the wall, every stool occupied, with as many more people standing behind or leaning between them, elbows on the bar, glasses in hand. Crap
, roulette, and blackjack tables filled the center of the room; slot machines lined the walls. To my right, on past the bar, I could look through a wide archway into the next room, filled with more of the same plus an escalator, every step occupied, carrying an endless line of people to the floor above — where there were still more crap tables, more roulette and blackjack, slot machines, bars, people, noise, and money, money, money, constantly changing hands, most of it staying here, very little leaving.
Guy strolled in through the archway from the other room, according to plan, carried along in a slow current of people; he'd come into the casino by one of the alley entrances. I was startled. For the first time I saw him in costume from a distance, and the false beard and Western hat, which should have made him absurd, did nothing of the sort. From across the room his gaze passed casually over me, and the somber brown eyes between the wide tan hatbrim and black moustache of his beard looked cool and competent. He raised a hand to adjust his hat, telling me he'd seen me, and I was suddenly calm and able to move. I stepped out from the wall, to move slowly through this room, then on into the next, beginning my search.
I was hunting the man, whoever he might be, who would either now or later be pushing a little cart through these rooms, the man and the cart in Jerry's photographs. A part of the great crowd, I moved with the currents till I'd explored the entire first floor. I didn't find the cart; I hadn't expected to. It was on one of the other floors, perhaps, in which case I wasn't yet interested in it; or it was in the cashroom. Toward the back of the casino, at the south wall near the Lincoln Alley side, I stopped beside a poker table to wait for the cart. Not twenty feet from my elbow, though I didn't look at it directly, was the steel-barred door of the little corridor leading into the cashroom. In plain sight of anyone who cared to glance at them were the two barred doors behind which lay a fortune. I stood looking at the poker players seated at a round felt-covered table, but the first barred door lay just within my vision.
Every instant I was aware of the mirror glass covering the wall beside me and a part of the ceiling above, though I never looked up at the ceiling. There were paintings on the glass: historical scenes of the early West. But they were sketchy; there was much more mirror than paint, the greater part of those surfaces reflecting the throng of people and the gambling equipment beside or underneath them. I knew those mirrors were one-way-vision glass, and that behind them men were continually watching. Just behind those walls and the ceiling they maintained never-ending guard, watching the people, the gamblers, and their own dealers. And — always — waiting for the time when, someday maybe, a man would make a move to rob this place.
It was hard not to glance at the ceiling, but I didn't; I knew what was there: catwalks prowled by the guards. From the floor the walks looked like large beams, ornamentally enclosed by the mirrored, painted glass. You might come into Harold's Club a hundred times and never guess what they were. I kept my chin down, eyes on the poker game, my face hidden from the ceiling by the wide brim of my hat. From the side only my eyes and nose, in the shade of the wide hatbrim, were visible; the beard covered the rest of my face.
A girl wearing riding breeches and a fringed black vest, “Harold's Club” embroidered on its back, walked to the steel-barred door at my right; she pressed the bell on the wall beside it. It was too noisy to hear it ring out here, but now the barred gate opened slowly and I heard the hiss of air under pressure. She stepped through the door into the dark little corridor beyond it, then stood waiting. The air hissed again, the door closed and clicked shut behind her, and she was trapped in the little corridor between the two barred doors. Then the second door swung slowly open, and she walked on, into the cashroom, turning to the left and out of sight. Perhaps a minute passed; then she reappeared, a slip of paper in her hand. Again the door opened, letting her into the corridor. Only when it closed and locked behind her did the next door open, allowing her to walk into the main room once again. I realized now, as never before, how right Jerry had been; the only possible way of getting at the cash in that room was the way he had figured out.
Somehow I'd expected to wait a long time, hours if I had to, before the little cart appeared. But in perhaps less than a minute I heard the air pressure hiss, and from the corner of my eye I saw a big heavy-set man, wearing a white shirt, black tie, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, exposing powerful forearms, wheel the metal cart from the cashroom into the dark little corridor. Now he stopped, hands on the tube-metal handle, and waited. The door closed behind him, clicked shut. A moment passed, the outer door opened, and he came wheeling his cart out into the room. Edging it into the crowd, he turned right, toward the front of the casino.
I kept my eyes on the poker game for a good five minutes longer. Then, the cart long since out of sight, I turned idly away, glanced around as though wondering where to go next, then turned and drifted along with the crowd toward the front room.
In the front room the cart stood by a blackjack table, the man in shirt sleeves waiting while the girl dealer, bent over the table, signed a receipt. I knew what had happened: There'd been a run on her table; she was short of silver dollars and had signaled for more. Now the man with the cart had brought them out to her from the cashroom; that was the cart's purpose. Every large club has a cart like it, of metal or wood, enclosed to protect the silver in transit from snatch thieves. It wasn't worth an armed robbery attempt; at most it carried a few hundred bulky silver dollars.
I knew what the shirt-sleeved man would do now. While he had the little cart out on the floor, he'd replenish the silver-dollar supply at any table that might need it, or take away any excess gathered in. As far as I knew, he did not handle paper money.
Near the wide archway leading out of this room and back toward the cashroom, I leaned against one of the few wall surfaces not lined with slot machines; the little cart had to pass here to leave. Five yards from my elbow Guy stood playing a slot machine; I knew he'd seen me and was ready.
The metal cart paused at a roulette table; the croupier said something to the big shirt-sleeved man, who laughed, replied, moved on again. He glanced around the room, searching for any other dealer who might signal him, and when none of them did, began wheeling his cart toward the archway and me.
People glanced at him in mild curiosity as he passed, and I glanced at him too; it would have been unnatural to ignore him. And now, for the first time, I really saw what he was like, and I looked quickly away, wishing he were smaller. His size, I told myself, actually didn't matter, but it intimidated me all the same. The man was well over six feet tall, with the heavy neck and bulky, beefy, almost fat build of great physical strength. He was thirty-five, perhaps, his hair black and thick, his face square and chunky. He looked tough, not in a movie-gangster sense — his expression was pleasant enough — but his eyes and the set of his face were cool and hard, very knowledgeable and dangerous. He looked to me as though he knew all there was to know — about gambling, legal and illegal, and all the other tougher aspects of life — and I felt like a boy and wondered what I'd do if he just sneered in my face.
I tried to fight the feeling, telling myself some wordless version of The bigger they come the harder they fall. I told myself I was here to do what had to be done, that it would be done, to this man and by me. Then I made myself look at him again, moving toward me, my glance deliberately contemptuous, forcing myself to feel able to handle him; and it worked. I was ready.
Moving slowly with the crowd, the front of his cart now was an inch from my toes. I turned toward him, glanced idly at his face; as his eyes met mine my face lighted up with sudden recognition, and I pushed myself from the wall, eagerly yet a little awkwardly and bashfully. Hi! I said, smiling at him tentatively, as though I weren't sure he'd remember me. He'd never seen me before in his life, and he stared for a moment, eyes faintly puzzled, a little bored. Then he nodded without recognition, said, Hi, and when I put out my hand, he had to stop and shake hands.
Smiling, bobbing my head eagerl
y, I began to talk. I was certain that — talking to the man with the money cart — I was being invisibly watched from the ceiling overhead; and I wanted this to look like a scene that happens often in a place like this. I wanted to look like the tourist who'd been here before, trying to re-establish a fleeting acquaintance with a man who meets so many people he can't possibly remember them.
Shrugging bashfully, I said, my tone faintly disappointed, I guess you don't remember me; Mr. Gunderson introduced us, but that was some time ago. Gunderson was just a name I'd picked out of the air.
Well — he smiled, being polite to a customer — you meet a lot of people.
Oh, sure, sure, I said quickly. It's just that — Well, I wanted to talk to you. It's sort of important, if you could spare just a minute. I smiled brightly.
Trying not to look irritated, the big man stepped back to the wall with me, edging his cart just out of the stream of passing people. I kept the foolish grin on my face; anyone still watching us could imagine precisely the kind of conversation we were having.
He looked at me inquiringly. Still smiling away, hands shoved into my belt at the back, obviously harmless and not planning a holdup, I dropped my voice and said, Don't look too quickly, but if you turn your head a little to the right, you'll see a man in a red-checkered shirt and a beard. I grinned fatuously, as though I were inquiring about his family or something. For a moment the man continued to stare at me; then he turned his head slightly and saw Guy. Not four yards away Guy stood leaning against this same wall on the point of one shoulder. Half facing us, one hand negligently resting on the butt of his holstered pistol, he was apparently idly watching the crowd. As the man in shirt sleeves glanced at him, Guy moved his eyes, his head remaining motionless, to stare out from under the brim of his hat straight into the big man's eyes. For a moment the two stared; then the big man turned back to me, frowning a little. Well? What about him?