The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  On the other hand, if he was a white man, his face and hands would shine out in the darkness. So maybe there was some virtue in being a nigger, after all. The thought made him smile, but not for long. He snapped his mouth shut, thinking: But my teeth, goddamn, my teeth are lily white!

  HIS HONOR, THE MAYOR

  Tires squealing, the commissioner’s car swung down the incline from the mansion, and one of the cops on guard at the sentry house fell back into a bed of rhododendrons to escape being run down. The commissioner sat directly behind the driver, with Murray Lasalle in the middle and the mayor, huddled under a plaid blanket, at the other window. As the car straightened into East End Avenue, the mayor produced an explosive sneeze, and the motes danced in the sunlit interior of the car.

  “Use a tissue,” Lasalle said. “You want to make us all sick?”

  The mayor wiped his nose on the blanket. “This is crazy, Murray.”

  “I don’t do crazy things,” Lasalle said coldly. “I have a good reason for everything I do.”

  “Going down into that damp, windy tunnel—that isn’t crazy?”

  “Bundle up nice and warm,” Lasalle said.

  The commissioner was speaking on his confidential radio line. The mayor said to Lasalle, “What’s he doing?”

  “Telling them you’re coming. Look, all you have to do—and it’s the least you can do—is get on a bullhorn and make a dignified plea for mercy.”

  “Suppose they shoot at me?”

  “Stand behind a post. Anyway, they have no reason to shoot at you.”

  Sick as he was, the mayor got off a joke. “You mean they’re out-of-towners?”

  “Relax,” Lasalle said. “Just do your turn, and then we’ll drive you home and you can get back into bed. Think of it as a benefit appearance.”

  “If I thought it would actually help—”

  “It will.”

  “The hostages?”

  “No,” Lasalle said, “you.”

  BOROUGH COMMANDER

  From the borough commander’s command post in the parking lot near the southwest entrance to the Twenty-eighth Street station, the crowd resembled a gigantic uncoordinated cellular organism whose protoplasm was highly agitated but not quite suicidally so. For all its flux it remained a massive entity. The borough commander kept looking at his watch, sometimes openly, sometimes surreptitiously. The minutes were ticking off anarchically, like unmanageable cancer cells. “Three oh three,” the borough commander said. “Ten minutes, and they haven’t even started yet.”

  “If they kill somebody,” the TA police chief said, “I’m for going down there in force and wiping them out.”

  “I’m for doing what I’m told to do,” the borough commander said, “whether I like it or not. If they kill one, there’s still sixteen left. If we go in shooting, they’ll likely all get killed. You want to take a decision like that on your head?”

  “So far,” the TA police chief said, “nobody has asked me to make any kind of decision.”

  The police captain who had given his name to a newspaper reporter as Captain Midnight placed himself squarely in front of the borough commander and saluted. His face was tomato red. “Sir,” he said angrily, “what are we doing?”

  The borough commander said, “We’re standing around and waiting. You have any ideas?”

  “Sir, I don’t like feeling so goddamn helpless. Also, it’s rotten for the men’s morale to see bums getting away with—”

  “Oh, go away, Captain,” the borough commander said wearily.

  The flush spread on the captain’s face, reaching his eyes. He stared murderously at the borough commander, then wheeled abruptly and pushed his way out of the command post circle.

  “I don’t blame him,” the borough commander said. “He may not be smart, but he’s a man. But it’s not a time for men; it’s a time for negotiators.”

  “Sir—” A sergeant, sitting in the rear of the borough commander’s car, with his legs braced on the pavement, held out the hand set. “It’s the PC, sir.”

  The borough commander took the hand set, and the commissioner’s voice said, “Fill me in.”

  “We’re waiting for the money to get here. It isn’t started yet, and I can’t see how it can get here on time. The next move is theirs.” He paused. “Unless my orders are changed.”

  “They’re not,” the commissioner said flatly. “I’m calling from the drive. We’re on our way down. The mayor is with me.”

  “Wonderful,” the borough commander said. “I’ll hold the crowd for him.”

  The commissioner’s breathing was labored for a moment. “When he arrives, His Honor will make a personal appeal to the hijackers.”

  Speaking with control, the borough commander said, “Anything else, Commissioner?”

  “That’s all,” the commissioner said heavily. “That’s all there is, Charlie.”

  THE FED

  Although minutes are not kept of such trivial matters, there is little doubt that never before in the sixty-year history of the Federal Reserve Bank had the chairman of a great member bank of the stature of the Gotham National Trust phoned the president of a Federal Reserve Bank about so undignified an amount as a million dollars. In the normal course of events, requests for cash deliveries, many far in excess of that amount, are made through regular channels, much as the ordinary depositor in a bank makes a withdrawal. The member bank sends along an authorization—not much more complicated than the average withdrawal slip at a neighborhood bank, although the figures are astronomically larger—signed by a bank officer, the Fed counts out the money, dumps it into a canvas sack, and signs it out to the armored car service dispatched by the member bank.

  That’s really all there is to it, and that’s why the Fed, in its homespun way, refers to itself as a bank for banks. On a more sophisticated level, of course, the Fed functions as an extragovernmental agency in controlling the flow of money in order to keep the national economy in equilibrium. That is to say, roughly, it increases the supply of money in periods of recession and unemployment and decreases it in periods of prosperity and inflation.

  The Fed does not ruffle easily; in fact, it is virtually unflappable. Yet it underwent a mild case of nerves in the wake of the call from the chairman of the Gotham National Trust to its president. Not because of the call, however unique it might have been, but because of the tradition-flouting instructions concerning the handling and packaging of the money. The Fed ordinarily has one way, and one way only, of making up the huge levies of cash it services to its member banks: all money is put up in packets of one hundred bills each, which are bound by a strip of paper width-wise; these are then collected into packs of ten, which are tied with white string and known as bundles. New, mint-fresh bills come wrapped in wrapping paper, are known as a brick, and resemble a ream of inexpensive bond paper.

  The Fed does not put bills up in packets of two hundred; it does not bind them in rubber bands; and it does not select used bills to order. Normally, it makes up its packages randomly from whatever bills are available at the moment, usually a mixture of both new and used.

  But of course, when the order comes from its own president, the Fed does do what it normally does not.

  All incoming and outgoing cash is handled on the third floor of the Federal Reserve Building at 33 Liberty Street in the center of New York’s great financial district. The building is an impregnable fortress, a square block of monolithic stone, with barred windows on its lower floors. The visitor to the third floor—there are not many—enters through a massive gate watched over by an armed guard and, as long as he remains, is scrutinized by closed-circuit television cameras. After passing through another gate, he finds himself in a corridor, long, rather ordinary, containing a few wooden trunks on wheels; these are used to transport sums of money throughout the building, to and from the vault. Armed guards stand about. On the visitor’s left, behind gates, are the security elevators in which money is taken down to the loading platforms on the
Maiden Lane side of the building. Farther along the corridor, behind grilled windows, is Paying/Receiving; behind panes of glass, Sorting/Counting.

  Paying/Receiving is the depot for a constantly flowing two-way traffic in cash. Receiving clerks accept and sign for incoming sacks of bills sent to the Fed by member banks, and then pass them along to Sorting/Counting across the aisle. Paying clerks make up outgoing packages for withdrawal by member banks, sack them, and turn them over to the bank’s armed guards for delivery.

  Sorting/Counting processes the money sent to the Fed by its member banks. The counters, mostly men and immured in individual cages, break open the seals on the canvas money bags (when new the bags are white, but they quickly turn a dirty gray to match the color of the New York air) and count the number of packets in each, but not the number of bills in a packet.

  The sorters, most of whom are women, occupy a large office of the bullpen type. The sorters’ technique consists of taking a batch of bills, creasing it lengthwise, and then, almost faster than the eye can see, distributing it according to denomination into various slots in a machine; a tachometer automatically counts the bills as they are fed in. Despite their dazzling speed, the sorters spot worn and damaged bills and mark them for destruction and even pick out counterfeits, which the tellers at the banks are supposed to spot but frequently overlook.

  The bad bills, with a tinge of humor, or perhaps merely distaste, are known as mutts.

  The special order for a million dollars requested by the chairman of the Gotham National Trust was filled by a Paying clerk in just a few minutes. Suppressing his annoyance at the unorthodox departure from procedure, he selected ten bundles of fifties, each bundle consisting of ten packets of one hundred fifties; and five bundles of hundreds, each bundle consisting of ten packets of one hundred hundreds. He then systematically cut the strings of the bundles, and proceeded to pair packets and tie them with a thick rubber band. Each new packet of two hundred bills was approximately an inch thick. When piled neatly together, the total of fifteen thousand bills made a block approximately twenty inches high and twelve inches deep.

  When he was finished, the clerk put the block of bills into a canvas bag, which he then pushed through his raised window to two guards waiting in an adjoining room. The guards hurried out of the room with the money, which weighed about twenty-five pounds, and bustled down the corridor to their right. Another guard opened a gate leading to the security elevators, and they rode down to the street-level loading platform.

  PATROLMAN WENTWORTH

  Cops in the Special Operations Division were not unaccustomed to improvisation, even on a grand scale, but Patrolman Wentworth, sitting behind the wheel of a “small truck” parked on the sidewalk in front of the loading bays of the Federal Reserve on Maiden Lane, was nevertheless impressed by the lavishness of the occasion. His partner, Patrolman Albert Ricci, was practically shocked into silence by it, which Wentworth accounted a blessing. Ricci was a nonstop talker with a single theme: his large and volatile Sicilian family.

  Wentworth looked with pleasure at the eight men of the motorcycle detachment sitting astride their bikes, booted, goggled, and leathered, occasionally goosing their engines with a little touch of the accelerator. His own engine was running, too, and from time to time he raced it. It was smooth and powerful, but nothing to compare with the deep stutter of the cycles.

  A voice came over the radio, important and impatient, demanding to know whether they had the money yet. It was the fifth such call in the last five minutes. “No, sir, not yet, sir,” Ricci said. “Still waiting, sir.” The voice cut out, and Ricci, shaking his head, said to Wentworth, “Something. Really something.”

  Pedestrians negotiating the narrow old street kept glancing at the truck, especially at the motorcycle escort. Most of them moved on without stopping, but one little group had formed across the street. They carried cases chained to their wrists, and Wentworth figured them to be runners with, probably, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, in securities in their cases. He saw a couple of kids stop and talk to the motorcycle cops, eyeing their bikes with awe. But they moved on when they were met with cold stony silence from the cops.

  “You feel honored having the Gestapo for an escort?” Wentworth said to Ricci.

  “Something,” Ricci said. “Really something.”

  “Not only that,” Wentworth said, “but a cop at every intersection all the way uptown. Don’t say, ‘Something, really something.’”

  “You think we got a chance of making it?” Ricci looked at his watch. “What’s taking them so long in there?”

  “Counting,” Wentworth said. “You realize how many times you have to wet your thumb when you’re counting out a million?”

  Ricci gave him a suspicious look. “You’re shitting me. They must have a machine or something.”

  “Right. A machine that wets their thumbs.”

  Ricci said, “We can’t make it. It’s a physical impossibility. Even if they was to come out with the money right this minute—”

  Two guards came running out of the bay, each holding an end of a canvas bag, each with a drawn gun. They ran to Wentworth’s window.

  “Other side,” Wentworth said, and gunned his motor. Ricci opened his door. The guards tossed the bag into his lap and slammed the door shut. The motorcycle cops were starting to move, shoving off with their right foot, their sirens already building volume. “And away we go,” Wentworth said. He heard Ricci reporting on the radio.

  At the corner a cop waved to them and they turned right into Nassau Street, one of the narrowest thoroughfares in the city. But cars were pulled up on the sidewalks, and they sailed uphill past John Street, leveled off and roared by Fulton, Ann and Beekman. At Spruce, where Nassau Street ended, they circled to the right, and entered Park Row, on the wrong side of the street, with City Hall just to their left.

  It was beautiful, Wentworth thought, roaring against the stopped traffic, the bike cops opening everything up with their sirens and the roar of their motors.

  “Don’t spill the money, Al,” Wentworth said, laughing with exhilaration.

  “Them bastards tossed it right square on my balls,” Ricci said. “It aches like a bastard.”

  Wentworth laughed again. “If they have to cut it off, the mayor will pay a sympathy call at the hospital. You’re a lucky cop.”

  “We can’t make it,” Ricci said. “No way.”

  At the Municipal Building, Wentworth swung over to the right side of the street. Traffic coming off Brooklyn Bridge was being held up on the ramp. Beyond Chambers Street, he whipped into Centre Street in the wake of the motorcycles and raced past the white-pillared Federal Court Building, the old City Courthouse, filthy with city grime but still handsome, and the huge pile of the Criminal Courts Building. At Canal they turned left, whipping between pulled-over cars and trucks, and zigzagged to Lafayette, where they turned north again.

  Wentworth had only half believed that there would be a cop at every intersection, but it was true. The number of cops tied up in the operation was staggering. The streets must have been empty of police elsewhere, and burglars and muggers were probably having a field day. The brake lights of the motorcycles twinkled red, and he saw up ahead of them a car blocking an intersection. He tapped his brake, but the bikes drew away from him, and he realized that they had no intention of stopping, that their braking had been instinctive. He shifted his foot back to the accelerator. A cop was holding the side of the stalled car, seemed to be pushing it, but the car didn’t budge. Then, just as the cycles seemed about to smash into it, the car started up with a roar and pulled away. Wentworth cleared the corner in the wake of the motorcycles.

  “One more like that,” he said, “and we’ll all have crushed balls.” He was shouting to make himself heard over the medley of sirens, motors and echoing windslip.

  “We can’t make it,” Ricci shouted back.

  “I’m not even gonna try. Next corner, as soon as the bikes clear it, I’m turnin
g left, and keep on going, and you and me, we got ourselves a million dollars.”

  Ricci shot a look at him, combining uncertainty, fear, and—Wentworth was certain of it—wistfulness.

  “Think of it as a gratuity,” Wentworth said. “Your share is a half a million. You realize how many tons of pasta that would buy? It could feed that fucking dago family of yours for the rest of their miserable lives.”

  “Look,” Ricci said, “my sense of humor is as good as your sense of humor, but I don’t like racial slurs.”

  Wentworth grinned as another corner and another guardian cop went by in a blur. The broad avenue ahead was Houston Street.

  BOROUGH COMMANDER

  At 3:09 the small truck containing the ransom money reported an accident crossing Houston Street. To avoid hitting a pedestrian who was defiantly crossing in front of them—possibly because he viewed the shrieking sirens as an infringement of his constitutional guarantees as a New Yorker—the two lead motorcyclists had swerved sharply and sideswiped each other. Both riders were thrown. Before they had stopped rolling, Ricci was on the radio. Central signaled the borough commander. Instructions? The borough commander ordered two cyclists to drop off to help the injured policemen. Everyone else to keep going. Keep going. Elapsed time, ninety seconds.

  The group surrounding the command post in the parking lot shook their heads helplessly. Captain Midnight was pounding the fender of a car with his fist. He was crying.

  A roar from the crowd half a block away caught the borough commander’s attention. The helmets of the TPF cops began to bob antically, and he could see them straining to contain sudden bulges in the crowd front. Rising on his toes, he caught a glimpse of the mayor, bareheaded but wrapped in a blanket. He was smiling and nodding his head, and the crowd was booing him. The commissioner was by his side, and they were heading toward the command post with the help of a half dozen TPF cops.