Cynthia

by Howard Fast

  Coventry smiled. “All right, Harvey—we open the outside doors. We break a circuit. What happens?”

  “Well, to begin with, there’s a location board in the central security office.”

  “In the Museum?”

  “That’s right. In the Museum basement—or the ground floor, as they call it. A tiny light pinpoints the point of disturbance, and at that moment, the guard on duty knows only that the circuit has been broken at a certain point. When you open the second set of doors, he can conclude that a deliberate entry has been made. But even before then, he has picked up the night guard in the Junior Museum wing on walkie-talkie and directs him to investigate. There would be a night guard in the Special Exhibition Galleries—that’s the front, downtown wing of the building, and nights he would cover Greek and Etruscan as well—and he’d pick up on the walkie-talkie and cover the stairs, also going down once the night guard in the central nave had joined him. By now, they know it is deliberate entry, so they have their guns drawn, and while your Texas hands are pretty good, they’re pretty good too.”

  “A sort of range war—right, Harvey?”

  “Right,” I agreed. “But that is only the internal situation relating to the guards in the area. The captain of the night guards has meanwhile put a general alarm on the city system and is probably on the phone to the Nineteenth Precinct. He can also switch on the Fifth Avenue floodlights—and if it’s after midnight, any passing prowl car will investigate. He can open the internal lighting to full, and he can activate alarm bells. But even if he does nothing at all, the broken circuits would signal the Nineteenth Precinct and the Pinkerton office. I sort of think they use the Pinkertons—maybe Holmes.”

  “By golly, Harvey, that is an arrangement, ain’t it?”

  “It certainly is, and it doesn’t end there. Somewhere in the room with the models of the buildings of antiquity, there’s an electronic eye. You trigger that and signal your direction. An automatic camera photographs you, and if it misses you there, it will grab you at one of six points up to the Rembrandt Room. You also detail your route on the location board. But all that is window-dressing, because before you ever get to the Rembrandt Room, you will either be dead or in a range war, as you call it, and if you’re not dead, there are already fifty cops around the building and more coming in by the minute—and, well there it is. You just don’t pull a heist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “But that’s sure enough what we intend to do, Harvey, because either we take that painting back to Texas or you and them two little cuties are going to be staked out and just as dead as dead can be. And you don’t think I’m fooling about that, do you, Harvey?”

  “No, sir,” I answered politely. “I don’t think you’re fooling about that at all.”

  “Then, partner,” he said, “figure it out. Just like you said before, Harvey—there never was no place couldn’t be robbed, you put enough muscle and brains into it. Well, sure as hell, you ain’t got the muscle. Let’s see about the brains.”

  I sat there and looked from face to face, and the faces of the ranch hands returned my look with interest and respect. I had laid out a most impressive and intricate picture of how the Metropolitan Museum of Art protected its treasures, but it was an invention from the word go; and the truth of it was that I had no more notion of the Museum’s protective system than these cowboy baboons who faced me. Maybe the Museum indulged in some of the gambits I had mentioned, maybe not. But since these men of the world—southwestern style—believed the Rube Goldberg contraption I had spelled out for them, it might just be that someone else was damn fool enough to build it.

  Why they should dream that an insurance investigator would be privy to the protective measures of one of the world’s greatest houses of art treasures, I couldn’t imagine. Maybe that’s the way it is done in Texas, where insurance is almost as big a moneymaker as oil wells, but that is certainly not the way it is done here; and if I could bluff a knowledge of the Museum’s floor plan, it was only due to the fact that Lucille Dempsey would drag me there occasionally of a Sunday and the fact that I have a good memory for layout. Where the bluff would get me, I had no idea—except a feeling that it postponed the inevitable; but not for a moment did I believe that the inevitable would be different. Sooner or later, the fat man would kill the three of us; and even the pretense of a different conclusion was a pretty obvious pretense. That was the way the fat man’s mind worked, and he knew that I knew it was the way his mind worked. He knew that I would delay it and play along with him as long as possible, hoping for a break—any break, and he also knew that I knew he knew. That was why he knew I would help him steal the picture—the one thing that he could not manage if he killed me; but what he did not know was that I could no more steal that Rembrandt than I could steal the Pope’s Crown. Perhaps he gave me credit for brains. I agreed with him; under any circumstances, I had more sense than he did.

  “Because you see, Harvey, there’s two things against us, and you are going to figure a way around those two things.”

  “Oh? Two things? There are forty things—”

  “No, sir, Harvey. Two things. Getting into the building and the alarm system. Just them two things.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “I’m with you. The first is easy. We can’t get into the building after it closes, and we sure as hell can’t do anything about the alarm system until we’re in the building. So the answer leaves us no alternative. We have to be in there when it closes and we have to be hidden well enough to remain safely after it closes.”

  Joey Earp’s face lit up with pleasure. Freddy Upson forgot himself and grinned. It was a relief to know that one of the hands could smile.

  “He’s all right, boss,” Joey Earp said. “He’s a pretty miserable little squirt, but he’s smart.”

  I just want to put it down here, for the record, that I am five feet and ten inches tall—short perhaps for a Texan—but a height I have always considered respectable enough.

  “Maybe,” said the fat man. “Where do we hide, Harvey?”

  “For that,” I replied, “I would want to stroll around the Museum for a bit and work on it.”

  “Are you some kind of nut, Harvey?” he asked, dropping the cowboy talk completely for the first time. “You don’t leave this hotel or our sight until we go out to make our hit on the place.”

  “No?”

  “No, Harvey.”

  “Oh. Well, then it’s got to take some thinking.”

  “That’s what you’re here for, Harvey. You think. Otherwise we don’t need you. Otherwise, the laundry chute—like the count.”

  “I’ll think,” I agreed.

  “Good.”

  I thought about it for the next ten minutes, while they waited. It was not easy. Try it some time. Take the Museum and figure out a place to hide—a place you can get into and out of without attracting undue attention. It’s not easy, and it’s got to come up ridiculous—as ridiculous as the rest of it. It had to and it did. After ten minutes, I told him I had it.

  “Where, Harvey?”

  “Under the beds.”

  “Don’t put me on, Harvey. I don’t like that.”

  “I’m not putting you on,” I protested. “Listen to me. Back of the uptown end of the Museum, there’s an elbow they call the American Wing. It’s full of old rooms from Colonial times, and in these rooms are beds, and under these beds is one of the only spots in the building that a man could hide. Or two men.”

  “Or six, Harvey?”

  “Or six. Six?”

  “Just get this straight, Harvey, in case you’re playing games with me. You go into that building with Joey Earp and Freddy here, and the two girls go with you. One squeak, one false move, and it’s all over for the girls.”

  “My God,” I protested, “that’s one sure way to louse it up. You can’t pull this off dragging two dames around.”

  “He’s right, boss,” Freddy Upson put in. “Any dame’s a maverick. You ask me, put some tape
on their kissers and set them in the car outside.”

  “I’ll think about it,” the fat man admitted grudgingly. “Let’s talk about that alarm system you spelled out, Harvey.”

  I invented and contrived desperately. Who knew whether the Museum had a Rube Goldberg alarm system? Probably they had some kind of alarm system or maybe they depended on a night patrol of guards. I didn’t even know that.

  “Well, Harvey?” the fat man prodded.

  “Yes. That’s it,” I said. “You see, it’s like a good many of the old buildings in New York—two kinds of current, AC and DC. DC is the old current. They use it to run their elevators and their ventilating system—”

  “Mighty peculiar they don’t modernize it and switch to AC,” Joey Earp put in. “Down our way—”

  I just had to be blessed with someone who knew more about electricity than I did. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “they’ve had modernization plans drawn up for years, but it’s got to cost them something over a million dollars and they’re too damn chintzy to spend the money.” I talked very rapidly. “The important thing is that it comes in over one hundred-amp fuses, same as the alternating current. Every two fuses locked in together gives them the draw on two hundred-amp service, that is the alternating current which feeds the alarm and the lighting system—”

  “Say that again, Mr. Krim?” Joey Earp asked, frowning.

  “Come to think of it, the alarm system is on the direct current, and it feeds out of a single hundred-amp DC circuit.”

  “DC?” Joey Earp asked.

  “Right. It just happens to be damn lucky that they got the DC there, because this location board, which is a by-product of our rocket research, and which was installed last year by Texas Instruments, has to have DC.”

  “Texas Instruments?” the fat man asked with a show of respect.

  “Right.”

  “You follow all this, Joey?” he asked Earp.

  “Sort of. Tell you the truth, Boss, I can wire a house and change a fixture, but this here electronic stuff is way out in the pasture for me. I guess if Harvey says so, that’s the way it is.”

  “The point is,” the fat man said, “to know where the fuses are. Do you know that, Harvey?”

  I nodded sagely.

  “Can you pull them?”

  I nodded again.

  “That’s it. OK, Harvey, I want you to take a few hours, think about it, and set your plans. The Museum closes at five. It’s three now. We’ll leave in about thirty minutes.”

  That was great, simply great. I was not wholly sure what a hundred-amp fuse was or looked like—much less its location.

  Chapter 13

  Back in the Bridal Suite, Cynthia sat at a table bent over a sheet of paper, while Lucille observed her without joy. Billy the Kid played happily with his automatic, standing with legs spread, while he twirled the gun and sighted at imaginary targets here and there in the room.

  “Like a happy child,” the fat man said when we had come through the door. “That’s Billy.”

  “Afternoon, Mr. Coventry,” Billy said politely, covered a spot on the ceiling, pursed his lips and went, “Pow!”

  “Will you please tell that cretin to stop!” Lucille snapped.

  “I am fluent in (a) Spanish, (b) German, (c) French, (d) Yiddish, (e) Italian,” Cynthia said. “If you would only not abuse him, you might find that there is a better side to him, as indeed there is to every human being—” This to Lucille.

  “Maybe a little Spanish,” Billy the Kid said.

  “What on earth is she doing?” I asked Lucille.

  “My race is (1) Caucasian, (2) Negro, (3) Oriental, (4) Eurasian, (5) Kanaka,” Cynthia said.

  “She’s giving him a dating test,” Lucille explained.

  “Pow,” went Billy in Lucille’s direction. “What in hell’s a Caucasian, ma’am?” he asked Cynthia.

  “Where does she find dating tests?”

  “You tell that runt,” Lucille said to the fat man, “that if he points that gun of his at me again, I am going to break him in two.”

  “Wouldn’t a little kindness pay?” Cynthia demanded.

  “Billy’s just Billy,” Coventry said. “He sure don’t mean no harm. He’s just full of good clean fun, ain’t that the case, Billy?”

  “Sure enough.”

  “As for those computer tests,” Lucille said, “she carries them around with her.”

  “No.”

  “And I have had enough of this whole thing,” Lucille said. “Are you going to rob the Museum for them?”

  “That’s a peculiar way to put it.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Harvey, I think you are absolutely out of your mind.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you, Miss Dempsey,” the fat man said, “that you are a damned talkative woman. Don’t you ever shut up?”

  “Most people consider me (a) introverted, (b) extroverted, (c) moody—”

  “Will you stop with that stupid test?” I said to Cynthia. “Goddamn it, don’t you have any sense. You’re two steps away from being scragged and sent down the laundry chute, like your friend the count, and I’m involved up to my neck in a lunatic robbery, and all you can think about is giving that murderous little bastard a computer test.”

  Billy the Kid spun around, took two quick steps, and jammed the pistol into my stomach. “Nobody gets away with that.”

  “I’m sorry. I apologize.”

  “I got away with it,” Lucille said.

  “For God’s sake, don’t make him angry.” I begged her. “He’s my friend.”

  “The hell I am,” said Billy the Kid.

  “Be his friend, Billy,” the fat man said generously. “He’s going to lead us in and out. He’s one of us. He’s how we take the picture. No Harvey, no picture.”

  “Him?”

  “That’s right—Harvey.”

  “I wouldn’t trust that noaccount bastard as far as I could throw him.”

  “That’s how far,” the fat man said good-naturedly.

  “Are you interested in this analysis or are you not?” Cynthia asked Billy the Kid.

  “Drop dead,” he said to her.

  She had spirit, no question about that, and she shed her love in two seconds flat, leaped to her feet, took two long steps toward Billy the Kid and let him have a good, solid one in the direction of his face. But like so many women, she telegraphed her slap, and he dodged it, grabbed her arm and twisted.

  “Let go of her, you crumby little bastard!” I shouted.

  He let go of her and put his gun in my stomach again. “Ah got to kill him,” he pleaded with the fat man. “Ah got to.”

  I entered my counter plea with much more desperation, pointing out to Coventry that if I went, so did his hopes to lay his pudgy hands on the Rembrandt. “Am I or am I not a member of your outfit? And furthermore, his finger’s shaking. Please—all I am asking is to get that gun out of my stomach.”

  “Put the gun away, sonny,” Coventry said. “Work first—then fun.”

  Lucille allowed him to put the gun back into his shoulder holster this time before she said, “Oh, yes, indeed—work first and then fun. Harvey, have you lost your senses? Do you think they’re going to let you get away after this, Harvey? Do you think they’re going to trust us and allow Cynthia and me to walk away from all this. They are not!”

  “Women are mistrustful critters,” Coventry observed. “Madam, be sensible. Harvey is one of us. To inform on us is to inform on himself—and I reckon that’s the last thing he has on his mind.”

  It was—but only because too many other things preceded it, namely: (a) Even if by some miracle I managed to survive in this gang of Texas lunatics, the chances of the girls surviving were absolutely nil. (b) My own survival would be a miracle indeed, for I couldn’t even remember properly whether there was a bed in the American Wing of the Museum, much less one that could be crawled under. (c) I had no notion o
f where a fuse box might be, and less notion of what to do with one if I located it. (d) The whole scheme of stealing the Rembrandt was an idiocy.

  Those were only a few of the details that would precede any inclination on my part to inform on them. I could also add Lieutenant Rothschild’s reaction when he discovered my own part in the imbecilic transaction. But I suppose that what disturbed me most was a fairly firm belief on my part—and born out of a good deal of experience—that most crooks were nutty as hell and that the reason so many of their schemes worked was that the normal mind—even the normal police mind—was utterly incapable of following or anticipating their reasoning. I had the strange feeling that this might just possibly work.

  Chapter 14

  As the fat man outlined his plans to me, I experienced more and more acutely a sinking feeling that they might succeed. I supposed that during the course of my life in New York, I have been in and out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art thirty or forty times. Who counts and who attempts to remember? Try it. Where is the Bache Collection? Where is English eighteenth Century? Where is Ingres and Goya and David? However well you know the Museum, just try to map it out in your mind and come up with any sane picture of that enormous warren. Are the American paintings on the way to the American Wing, or do you go by the Art of India? I made a few guesses, which might or might not be right; but at the same time I could recollect no noticeable measures that the Museum took to protect its property. Of course they must take measures, but all I could recollect was an impression of a sleepy, uniformed guard standing here or there.

  Suppose they took no measures, I asked myself? Suppose it just worked out the way the fat man planned it, and there I was with two million dollars worth of Rembrandt that I had maneuvered to steal? There was nothing in Coventry’s plan that was actually impossible, and its virtue was that it possessed the simplicity that only an idiot could contrive. It would work like this: