by Howard Fast
Coventry with Ringo and Billy the Kid would be outside. They would have a seven-passenger limousine, one of the enormous special-order cars that you see around town and look like yachts on wheels. In the car, they would have the girls, appropriately gagged and bound. In this, they would drive up to the 81st Street entrance to the Museum at the appropriate time to pick us up with the painting—us being Freddy Upson, Joey Earp and myself. I didn’t have enough sense to let them break into the Museum; I had to invent a razzle-dazzle of knowledge that proved it was impossible, and thereby forego the chance of having them caught in the act then and there. Instead, the three of us would be in the American Wing, hiding under a bed, until seven o’clock.
At seven, we would emerge from under the bed. I would extract fuses from somewhere, and then we would walk over to the Rembrandt Room, eliminating any guards that stood in our way, either with pacifiers or silencers, take down the picture, carry it to the 81st Street entrance, exit with it, step into the limousine—which would be somewhat crowded by now but not too much so—and take off for the Bronx. In the Bronx, on East 171st Street, there was a garage Coventry owned and in the garage a trailer truck. The picture would be deposited in the trailer truck along with other merchandise and begin its journey to Texas. On our own next moves, the fat man was understandably vague; and at that point I would not have written insurance on us—that is, the girls and myself—if the premium was even ninety per cent of the payout.
Such was the plan. Whether it worked or not, our own chances of survival were reduced to practically nothing.
All of this and a good deal more went through my mind as I was driven to the Museum with those two pioneers of Texas culture, Freddy Upson and Joey Earp. It was now Tuesday afternoon, and this whole thing had started five days before with an unloved rich girl who became enamoured of computer dating. I still had untouched, unused, my own secret weapon, infinitely preferably to forty-five caliber automatics, Berettas, stillettos and other instruments of mahem—namely, eighty-five thousand dollars in traveler’s checks; and the possibility of using them now occurred to me. But since Billy the Kid was driving the car which transported us, the fat man next to him, I decided that there was time enough. For the moment, I was in the hands of fate; I had nothing in particular to do except be scared.
Coventry underlined this. “The important thing for you to remember, Harvey, is that you’re a sort of prairie flower at this moment.”
“That’s just how I feel,” I assured him.
“I mean, if you make a break for it and Joey and Freddy don’t get you, why we sure enough got the girls.”
“I’ll remember that,” I promised him.
“On the other hand, Harvey, you got to keep thinking that you’re a sort of wave of the future. That’s the Texas way to look at things. This here business of kowtowing to the Mafia is over. The new boss of the Mafia is at the bottom of the Hudson River. This here is a return to native American values, Harvey. You follow me?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Coventry. I follow you.”
“The fat man squirmed around in his seat and studied me. We were almost at the Museum now, turning the corner of 83rd Street to come into the Museum driveway. He studied me thoughtfully for a moment or two and then said, “You look peaked, Harvey—mighty pale around the gills. Your hands are shaking. We don’t want your hands shaking, Harvey.”
I took hold of my left hand with my right hand and explained that my hands had a tendency to shake a bit when I got excited. “It’s just coming in for the kill that does it.”
“Just get a grip on yourself, Harvey. Zero hour.”
“Right.”
“Remember. Seven—you go. It should take no more than fifteen minutes at the most. Seven-fifteen, we’re at the 81st Street exit. Out and into the car.”
Just like that.
We got out of the limousine, and with Upson and Earp towering on either side of me, we entered the Museum. We tried to look like tourists, and I can’t imagine much else that we could have looked like. We had a go at Egyptian art, but my Texas colleagues were not very impressed.
“It’s pretty old stuff and mostly not in the best condition,” Earp said.
“I know an old Mex who cuts tombstones in El Paso,” Freddy Upson recollected.
We turned left and passed through a collection of Japanese armor. From there, we went into the main hall of arms and armor, and though both men had made previous visits to the Museum, this was new to them.
“How about that!” said Joey Earp.
They stared fascinated at the iron figures seated on the dummy horses, and Earp finally asked me, “What are they up to, Harvey?”
“They just go at each other with the big stickers.”
“They are the knights of King Arthur’s table, you ignorant bastard,” said Freddy Upson, and then we passed on into the American Wing. We paused to examine some cases of long flintlock guns, and then we went on to the rooms. We passed a guard and he observed us without curiosity; and I said to myself that if I were running the Museum, my first act would be to have that guard fired. Anyone who could see two tall, cadaverous cowboys with a catatonic insurance investigator between them and not be curious deserved to be fired.
We passed a room with a bed, and then another. We went upstairs one flight, and there were other rooms with beds.
“What kind of a bed do you like?” I asked them.
“We figure to bow to your preference, Harvey.”
One thing you have to admit about Texans—they are polite. I picked a room that was momentarily free from observation—guards or citizens—and I pointed to the bed.
“OK, partner,” Earp said.
A moment later, the three of us were crawling under the bed. I was all right, but I could see that the Texans’ fancy boots stuck out.
“Your feet are sticking out.”
“Oh?”
Upson and Earp pulled up their bony knees, so that I was gripped in a sort of vise.
“That’s not very comfortable,” I told them.
“It ain’t for long, Harvey.”
“It stops the circulation.”
“Feller like you, Harvey, he can do for a little while without circulation.”
Footsteps sounded and we stopped talking, and from my low slit of vision, I saw a guard pass through the room. It was toward closing time already and citizens—as opposed to guards—were scarce. It was also very close under the bed and sort of gamey. The Texans were well groomed but there was a healthy stable smell to them—maybe out of using the same boots for walking and riding, or maybe out of my imagination. I have been in one or two strange situations during my life, but nothing as bizarre as hiding under an eighteenth-century bed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with two bony Texans whose combined IQ could not have been much more than one hundred and fifty. It was a very philosophical situation, and I tried to take it philosophically and even to make a little bit of whispered conversation in the forlorn hope that it might attract the attention of a guard with good hearing, and even more forlorn hope that said guard might get the drop on my two idiot counterparts of Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickcock. I observed that the situation was a little uncommon.
“That’s the way the brand falls, Harvey.”
“You mean, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
“Ah mean that’s the way the brand falls, Harvey, and you just better not raise your voice or me and Joey here, we’ll break a rib or two, and that would pain me, that would.”
“It would pain me worse,” I whispered hoarsely. “But this is a bit outside of the regular line of work of you boys, isn’t it? I mean, heisting art?”
“We specialize in banks,” said Joey Earp, “but we can turn our hand to most anything. Right, Freddy?”
“Right,” Freddy agreed.
Both had their faces up against mine and both could have used a good mouthwash. Cowboys run very strong in cigarette advertisements, but you never hear about a cowboy needing a mouthwash.
“You don’t reckon Coventry takes unless he’s got a taker?”
“I don’t know.”
Footsteps again. We held our silence and I breathed their breath. The footsteps passed.
“Who?” I hissed.
“Who?”
“He wants to know who.”
“Tell him who,” said Freddy.
“Tell him?”
“Oh, what the hell difference does it make?”
They weren’t bright. It made no difference because I wasn’t going anywhere—probably no further than the 81st Street exit to the Museum. I pulled the fuses. They took the painting. Then goodby to Harvey—and goodby to anyone else who got in their way.
“All right, Harvey. You’re a right fine lad. Coventry’s going to sell that there painting to Mr. Elmer Cantwell Brandon—just old E.C. Brandon who came up here from Dallas and taught you Yankees a thing or two about turning a dollar.”
“Who?” I almost forgot to whisper.
“E.C. Brandon.”
“You mean the same one whose kid you got back there?”
“Right the first time, Harvey.”
“His kid—oh, no, you goofed this.”
“Hell, no, Harvey. Mr. Coventry, he don’t goof. No, sir.”
“But when he finds out you snatched the kid?”
“He don’t find out, Harvey.”
“You mean—?”
“You talk too Goddanin much, you do,” Freddy said to his partner. “You sure as hell talk too much.”
“Harvey’s one of us,” whispered Joey Earp. “He knows just the same as the rest of us the little lady’s insured. He works for the insurance company.”
“You mean Brandon’s in this? You mean he knows you got his kid and—”
“Bless you, no, Harvey,” Joey Earp interrupted, breathing warmly into my face. “E.C. Brandon don’t know one little cotton-picking thing about all this, but don’t he stand to collect a pretty penny when his daughter turns up, stiff as a little old board?”
“’Cause she’s insured,” Freddy Upson whispered. “Oh, she’s insured right up to the hilt, Harvey.”
“Don’t either of you have any heart?”
“Nope.”
“Just kill anyone—like that? In cold blood?”
“Hell, Harvey,” Earp protested, “we never killed no one, without we was paid for it. We don’t kill for pleasure.”
“Anyway, it ain’t us gonna do the killing,” said Freddy, but Billy the Kid.”
“And what about me? And Miss Dempsey?”
“Oh, you two are sure enough going down south with us, Harvey—you can be sure of that. It’s just that Cynthia girl’s too much trouble for us to know what to do with her but put her away quietly.”
I tried to think, but it was too quiet to think; and a moment later I realized that the Museum was closed, and possibly had been closed for a while now. It seems impossible that any place in New York City could be as silent as that. Joey Earp moved his arm, so that he could look at the luminous dial of his watch. A few minutes of silence, and then he looked at it again.
“Time to hit the trail,” he said.
They rolled out, one from each side, and then I crawled out after them. We weren’t clean, and whoever cares for the housekeeping at the Museum might make a note about it. As far as I was concerned, I could pass my last couple of minutes on earth dusty as well as clean but the Texans were fussy about their suits and kept patting and dusting and wiping.
“Maybe you wouldn’t think so, Harvey,” Freddy Upson explained, “but this here suit of mine cost $422 at Neiman-Marcus.”
I was praying so hard that a guard would walk into the room that I couldn’t even think of some properly clever rejoinder.
“Now you lead us to that fuse box, Harvey,” Joey Earp said.
I led them straight through into the main building toward the Art of India. I had only the most primitive of plans—namely, to lead them in a big circle, through Islamic Art and Far Eastern Art, past the French Sculpture, past Etruscan Art into the special exhibition galleries, where, if by now no guard had turned up, I would make a break for it, and try to outrun their bullets and make enough uproar while doing so to set off whatever alarms there were in the place.
Such was my plan, but it never faced the possibility of being put into effect. We had taken no more than ten steps into the main building when Freddy Upson pointed to a green box on the wall and said.
“I got to give you credit, Harvey old hoss—there’s your fuse box, sure enough.”
Chapter 15
I heard the footsteps of a guard, and we all froze, and with the same invisible gesture of a magician, Joey Earp’s gun was in his hand and the muzzle was touching my ear. I stopped breathing, and the steps went away. There was evidently agreement among all the guards in that place to avoid us. No guards, no alarms, no bells. I tried the green box, and it was locked.
“See,” I pointed out to them, “no use. It’s locked.”
“We are burglars,” Freddy Upson replied, not without a note of pride, and then he took a little buttonhook sort of thing out of his pocket and he fiddled around the box and the door was open. There were three fat fuses in it. I pulled each of them out and handed them to Freddy Upson for safekeeping. There were also two large switches, both of which I opened. Nothing happened. Nothing happened when I pulled the fuses. Nothing happened when I opened the switches. The dim night lights did not even flicker.
“Well, that cuts the alarm,” I said.
“Your voice is a mite shaky, Harvey.”
“Well, bless my soul, wouldn’t your voice be a mite shaky if you were here with two oversized Texans who were planning to blow your brains out the moment your usefulness to them was over?”
“Now we don’t take kindly to that kind of talk, Harvey,” Joey Earp said.
“I don’t take kindly to dying.”
“You keep making such a fuss about dying, Harvey. Don’t you fret now. Did I say anything about dying? Did Freddy? Now you just take us to where that old Dutch painting is hanging and we’ll get down to the business we’re here for.”
I nodded glumly and led them on. We turned right, past the twentieth-century American painting, left and then right again, and there we were, in the Rembrandt room, with the noble painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer square in the center of the wall to the right. Now we walked forward slowly, and the three of us ranged ourselves in front of the painting, standing and staring at it. After a long moment, I played my last card.
“What does the fat man pay you for a job like this?”
“He don’t cotton to being called the fat man, Harvey.”
“He pays pretty damn good, Harvey.”
“I pay pretty good.”
“Come on, Harvey,” said Joey Earp, “don’t be foolish. If we come out of here without that painting, even Texas ain’t large enough to hide us.”
“I’m thinking about me, not the painting,” I said. “To me, I’m worth a lot more.”
“That’s reasonable, Harvey.”
“I could buy out,” I said.
“Harvey!”
“Eighty-five thousand dollars for me, Miss Dempsey and Cynthia.”
“Harvey!”
“Real money,” I said desperately.
There was a pop at that moment, a hollow pop that was choking with menace. It’s a hard sound to describe if you never heard a silencer. Joey Earp, who was looking at me, stopped looking at anything and he collapsed on the floor. Freddy Upson spun around, clawing for his gun, but the second pop was quicker. It was a staged trick, an astonishing illusion. At one moment there were two live Texans; the next moment, two dead ones. They lay there on the floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joey Earp with a hole in his white-on-white pleated shirt that had cost him $42.50 at Neiman-Marcus, and Freddy Upson with a hole between his eyes and his own Ne
iman-Marcus shirt untouched. Myself, I remained motionless, uncertain as to whether I was alive or dead, and unwilling to make any sudden motion that would precipitate one condition or the other. It seemed to me that I remained in just this position for quite a while, until a voice said, “All right, Harvey. Turn around—slow and steady, because it is better to be standing than slumbering there with those two slobs on the floor. Am I right, Harvey?”
“Right. But I don’t carry a gun.”
“I know, Harvey. Just turn easy.”
I made a picture for myself of a glass of beer standing squarely on the top of my head, and then I turned so carefully that not one drop of the beer spilled—and came face to face with a man of thirty years or so, a well-knit, good-looking, brown-skinned, hard-faced man, dressed meticulously in what was probably a Brooks Brothers’ gray flannel suit and holding in his right hand a Luger pistol fitted with the newest, five-inch German silencer.
“All right, Harvey—right there. Hold it.”
“I don’t intend anything personal,” I said, “but you seem to know my name—”
“Harvey, they wired the hotel—we wired the hotel.”
“They?”
“The shmucks from Texas. Harvey, do I have to draw you a picture?”
“Then Cynthia was right. He was a real count—”
“He was a real count, Harvey. Gambion de Fonti, poor little bastard.”
“And you’re Valento Corsica.”
“Bright, Harvey. The boys said you are stupid. You’re not stupid. Maybe a little slow on the pickup, but not stupid, Harvey.”
“But no accent—the way you talk, the way you dress—”
“Harvey, the world changes. I spent four years at New York University—School of Commerce, business administration. A year of graduate work at Harvard. The rackets are different, buddy. We don’t intimidate—we administrate. And the rough stuff is gone—except at moments.”
“And this is a moment?”
“Well, what the hell do you think, Harvey? We hear this fat half-wit from Texas is bent on taking over, so we lay a little intriguing trail with poor Count Gambion. Who ever thought they’d knock over the poor little feller! Well, that’s the way it crumbles, but we didn’t push it that way. The fat man likes to own hotels, and we would have tied a financial knot around him that he would never unravel. But it didn’t go that way, and now I got you on my hands.”