Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

by Donald E. Westlake

  Nothing. Wait and see. Ride with events, and hope for the best.

  God.

  14

  At three o’clock I met Eddie Troyn in the luncheonette, at a front booth by a window facing the street. He looked at his watch as I slid into the seat opposite him, and said, “Four minutes after.”

  I looked at my own watch, which read three on the button. “Check,” I said.

  Looking out the window, he said, “You understand the mission?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He gave me a quick pursed-lip glance, then looked out the window again. The whole world was run too sloppily for his taste. “Communication in this outfit is hopeless,” he said.

  “Nobody told me anything,” I agreed.

  “We watch Fiduciary Federal,” he said. “We mark everybody who goes in or out between closing time and the departure of the last employee.”

  I looked over at Fiduciary Federal. Through the big windows I could see there were still several customers inside. A guard was standing just inside the mostly glass doors, letting each customer out when they were finished. “Right,” I said.

  “Not counting those customers,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  He glanced away from the bank long enough to push a notebook and ballpoint pen toward me. “You’ll write down what I tell you,” he said. “Every fifteen minutes we’ll reverse assignments.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I opened the notebook and poised the pen, and nothing happened. I watched Eddie, and Eddie watched the bank, and nothing at all happened. After a while my fingers began to cramp and I put the pen down. After another while my eyes began to water and I looked away from Eddie—out the window, in fact, in the general direction of the bank.

  After about ten minutes a waiter came to take our orders. He was a high school boy with an after-school job, and he did not have his entire heart and soul in this activity. It took him a long while to understand that we wanted two cups of coffee, and when he wandered away I was fully convinced we’d never see him again. With or without coffee.

  As a place to have a quick snack, this luncheonette wasn’t maybe the best in the world. As a place in which to establish a stakeout without drawing any attention to ourselves, it was ideal. We couldn’t have drawn that boy’s attention if we’d set ourselves on fire.

  At three-fifteen I said, “My turn.” Since I was already looking at the bank, that simple statement was all I had to do in order to take over the watch.

  Peripheral vision told me that Eddie had taken back the notebook and ballpoint pen.

  This was very boring. Partly for something to do, and partly because I was morbidly interested in the details of the felony I’d been committed to, I asked after a while, “How are we going to do this thing anyway? Those banks look pretty solid.”

  “You haven’t been told the plan?”

  “As you pointed out,” I said, while still watching nothing happen at the bank across the street, “communication is not this outfit’s strong suit.”

  I could hear the doubt in his voice, as he said, “We operate pretty much on a need-to-know basis.”

  I looked at him. “I’m a member of this gang, aren’t I?”

  “Watch the bank,” he said.

  I watched the bank. The last customer had departed ten minutes ago, and nothing else had happened since. Nevertheless, I watched the bank. I said, “I’m a member of this gang, aren’t I?”

  “Of course,” he said. “We’re all on the same team.”

  “Then I need to know,” I said.

  “You’re probably right,” he said. I could hear him coming to a fast yet solid decision. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll begin with an unauthorized entry into Fiduciary Federal following the close of the business day.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “This observation of routine is helping to establish that question,” he said.

  Sometimes it took a few seconds to get through Eddie’s words to what he was saying. The military prism through which he viewed the world made him at times a bewildering conversationalist. But very neat. Working my way through this one, I came to the kernel of thought at the center, and suddenly realized the gang didn’t yet know how they were going to get into that bank.

  Hope blossomed in me, out of season.

  Eddie said, “Having gained access to the interior, we will then require the personnel remaining in the bank to telephone their homes and explain to their next of kin that an unexpected state audit of the bank’s records will necessitate their working late, possibly through the night.”

  I nodded. Nobody went in or out of the bank. Inside there, clerks moved back and forth, involved with the closing activities of the day.

  Eddie said, “We will then induce the senior officer present to open the vault.”

  That word ‘induce.’ I didn’t like that word ‘induce.’ Eddie said, “You can’t watch the bank with your eyes closed.”

  I opened my eyes. “Just blinking,” I said. “Your eyes get tired when you keep looking like this.”

  “Four minutes left to your tour,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “What about the other bank?”

  “Just watch Fiduciary Federal,” he said.

  “No, I meant the robbery. How do we get into Western National?”

  “Ah,” he said. “That’s the brilliance of the scheme. Joe Maslocki deserves the citation for that.”

  “Fine,” I said. I thought dark thoughts about Joe Maslocki.

  “When the Fiduciary Federal building was put up, seven years ago,” Eddie said, “it was necessary to short-circuit a part of the alarm system used in the Western National vault.”

  I frowned, and remembered not to look away from the bank. “How do you know a thing like that?”

  “Our team,” he said, “has friends in the local building trades. Remember, that’s how the tunnel was constructed in the first place.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Radio silence,” he said.

  I couldn’t help it; I looked away from the bank. I stared in bewilderment at Eddie and said, “Huh?”

  He gave me a meaningful head nod. I looked to my left, and damn if the high school boy wasn’t back, with our coffees. He put them down without looking at either of us, stood frowning at them for a few seconds, and then drifted aimlessly away, like a paper boat in a puddle.

  I looked back at the bank.

  Eddie said, “The Western National vault is wired against tunneling from every side, except where it is conjunctive with the Fiduciary Federal vault. In effect, the two vaults share a common wall and a common alarm system excluding that wall.”

  “Oh,” I said. I could see it coming.

  “Once we have breached the Fiduciary Federal vault,” Eddie said, “we will in a way be behind the lines of the Western National vault. We will tunnel through the wall from vault to vault.”

  “Ah,” I said. But it seemed to me that bank vaults, with or without alarm systems, did tend to have very thick and very solid walls. I said, “How long does this tunnel take to dig?”

  “Perhaps three hours.”

  I glanced at him, glanced away, and he said, “You are relieved.” I glanced at him again, and he was watching the bank, having pushed the notebook and pen back over toward me.

  I picked up the pen, had nothing to write, and put it back down. I said, “Three hours? I thought it would take a lot longer than that.”

  “Not with the laser,” he said.

  I looked at him. “Laser?”

  “The one we’ll take from Camp Quattatunk,” he said.

  I said, “Camp Quattatunk.”

  “The Army base,” he said, as though that explained everything.

  I remembered having heard there was an Army base around here somewhere, but this was the first time I’d heard its name. Or that we would be getting a laser from it. I said, “A laser. That’s one of those burning ray machines, isn’t it?”

 
“Of course.”

  “And we’re going to get one at this Army base.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Steal it,” he said.

  Of course. I said, “We’re going to pull a robbery at an Army base so we can pull a robbery at two banks.”

  “Positive,” he said.

  Positive. I said, “When do we do this Army base robbery?”

  “The night before the banks.”

  Monday, December thirteenth. Two and a half weeks from now. I picked up the coffee and sipped it and it tasted like my future: cold, bleak, thin and not very sweet.

  “Two female employees exiting,” he said, “at three thirty-seven.”

  I looked at my watch. Three thirty-three. “Check,” I said, and wrote in the notebook “2 fem emp X 3:37.” Then I looked out the window and saw two girls, bulky in their overcoats, walking away from Fiduciary Federal Trust, as the guard locked the door again behind them.

  If only it looked harder to get into. Or easier.

  I didn’t want to think about the Army camp at all.

  15

  In the midst of madness we are in apparent normalcy. Nine days after my stakeout duty with Eddie Troyn I had a Saturday night date. With a telephone repairman named Mary Edna Sweeney.

  It was actually a double date, set up by Max Nolan, involving him and another local girl, named Dotty Fleisch. Max had broached the subject of finding me a date earlier in the week, and I had expressed immediate interest. “I’m not talking about great stuff,” he had cautioned me. “All the good gash goes out of town to college. In the summer around here you can write your own ticket, but this time of year you take what you can get.”

  “I’ll take it,” I had said.

  There was nothing wrong with Mary Edna Sweeney. On the other hand, there was nothing right with her either. She was twenty-five, deeply involved in her telephone company job, and she’d apparently had three boyfriends in a row who’d joined the Army, been shipped to unlikely places, and promptly married girls they’d found in the foreign clime.

  All of these departures had made Mary Edna just a bit nervous; she tended to look startled at sounds like doors closing or car engines starting. Otherwise, however, she was a placid girl, a bit heftier than my usual tastes, with large, sweet, dark eyes and masses of black hair. “I have to keep my hair tied up when I’m working,” she told me, “but boy, as soon as I get home I let it fly.”

  “I never met a lady telephone repairman before,” I said.

  “The telephone company is an equal opportunity employer,” she said, with that primness which unimaginative people reserve for nobler thoughts they’ve memorized. “They’re experimenting with male operators,” she said. “And I’m an experiment the other way.”

  “A repairlady.”

  “A repairperson,” she said.

  I said, “You do all that repairperson stuff? Climb the poles and everything?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Of course, I can’t wear a skirt.” And she blushed. Girls in small towns still blush.

  This conversation took place in the Riviera Restaurant & Cocktail Lounge after the movie. We had had an absolutely traditional first date; Max and I had crawled through the tunnel at just after seven o’clock, had met the girls in front of the Strand Theater, there had been introductions, and we had gone at once into the darkness to sit next to one another without touching while we watched a double feature. A double feature. Unfortunately the first picture was a caper movie about a bank robbery, full of hardened criminals and violent action—including the pursuit, beating and painful death of a squealer—and it left me a little limp. It took the entire second feature, a comedy about a giraffe that swallowed an experimental formula and became a super-genius, to bring me out of my doldrums and make it possible for me to exchange dialogue with Mary Edna Sweeney at the Riviera, to which we had repaired for cheeseburgers and a pitcher of beer.

  Mary Edna was a friendly enough girl, but she wasn’t someone I would have crossed a crowded room for. Nor an empty room either. But she did have one absolutely first-rate quality which put her above every other girl I’d ever gone out with: she thought my name was Harry Kent.

  Dotty Fleisch was more of the same, without being quite an exact carbon copy. Paler, plumper, more given to bursts of speech or outbreaks of giggle, she was definable from Mary Edna without being any more or less desirable. Max had apparently been dating her off and on for several months, having told her he was a civilian employee out at Camp Quattatunk who lived in quarters on the base; I was now given the same background, and in the course of the conversation I learned for the first time that Camp Quattatunk wasn’t an Army base in the usual sense of the word but was an arsenal, a storage depot for military equipment. Thus, no doubt, the laser.

  Which led to thoughts of robbery. Certain scenes from the caper movie came vividly back into my imagination, in perfect color. I flung myself into conversation, trying not to look over my shoulder.

  At one point, in the men’s room, I discovered that the paper-towel dispenser could be rigged so as to bring the entire load of paper towels out when the first one was tugged, but other than that it was just impossible to think about anything except the robbery. The caper movie had made it all much more real and much more desperate.

  Finally we all left the Riviera and separated, Max and his Dotty going off in one direction arm in arm, Mary Edna and I trailing away in the other, walking side by side but not touching. The streets we walked along were tree-lined, but at this time of year the trees were leafless, bony grasping things reaching out from the streetlights, branches clutching together over my head like medieval punishments.

  The specter of the bank robbery followed me along the sidewalk, making the already cold air even colder. Scenarios of disaster ran in repertory through my head: the robbery would occur and degenerate into gunplay and I would be shot to death; we would be caught and I’d stand trial for robbery and jailbreak and possibly even murder and be sent up forever; we would get away with it and I’d spend the rest of my life waiting for the axe to fall as inevitably it would; we would get away with it and the gang would insist on more robberies and one of the preceding scenarios would inexorably follow; in the course of the bank robbery I’d be called upon to shoot somebody and would refuse and be shot by my own people; or I’d do it and become a murderer as well as a bank robber; I would attempt some desperate ploy to prevent the robbery from taking place and would be found out by my co-conspirators and would be unloaded; or I’d be found out by the authorities and would be charged with jailbreak and attempted robbery; or… The variants were endless, it seemed, and not a happy one in the lot.

  Meanwhile, Mary Edna spoke at length on the subject of telephone company training films. No topic was likely to capture much of my interest right now, so telephone company training films were about as useful as anything else to fill in the spaces. I managed an occasional appropriate comment, Mary Edna pointed out occasional poles she had climbed for one purpose or another, and eventually we reached the smallish two-family house in which she lived on the second floor with her widowed mother and two younger sisters.

  It was so hard for me to remain aware of Mary Edna’s presence. It wasn’t her fault, it was that damned robbery. I was dimly aware of a slight sense of awkwardness when I said good night to her on her porch and politely waited till she had unlocked the door and gone inside, but it wasn’t until Max asked me the next day how I’d made out that I realized Mary Edna had been anticipating some sort of overture from me. A kiss, at the very least, possibly some groping. Who knew what she might not have had in mind? The next night, lying in my solitary bunk in my cell, the sounds and sighs of sleeping men in their other cells all around me, I thought of how almost any of them—enforced celibates all—would have behaved the preceding night on Mary Edna’s front porch, and my own behavior, or lack of behavior, struck me as very strange.

  But on that first date night, spurred on by the caper movie
, I just couldn’t think about anything except the robbery. It was scheduled for ten days from now, Tuesday the fourteenth of December. I had first heard about it over two weeks ago, the time was rushing by, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. My only forlorn hope was that the gang, who seemed to have everything else thoroughly planned, would never find a way to make that initial entry into Fiduciary Federal Trust, no matter how much surveillance was done. If we couldn’t get into the bank in the first place we couldn’t rob it, could we?

  I walked with my fingers crossed.

  16

  The following Tuesday, at four-thirty in the afternoon, one week to the day before the scheduled robbery, I myself showed the boys how to get into the bank.

  I was on surveillance duty with Billy Glinn this time, the two of us sitting in the usual luncheonette, drinking the usual rotten coffee brought by the usual sleepwalking high school boy, watching nothing happen across the street. I was doing the watching and Billy was telling me a story about a time when he’d found a fellow having intercourse with a girlfriend of Billy’s in the back seat of a car out behind a country roadhouse. “He run off into the woods,” Billy was saying, “but I didn’t take out after him right off.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “First,” he said, “I figured to settle that little girl down a bit, so I pick her up and whump her on the side of the chest. Under the arm, you know, I don’t want to hurt her titties, just bust a couple ribs to slow her down. I figure if she’s in the hospital I’ll know where she is. Then I went after the fella’s car, I pulled off the doors and the fenders and pulled the steering wheel out and messed up the engine a little bit and took and threw the hood up in a tree. Then I went off after the fella himself out through the woods. So when I caught up with him it turn out he took off so fast he left his pants behind—he’s bare-ass naked out there in the woods. Well, I was almighty angry at that fella, so—”