Nick was fifty-two years old now, a cheerful heavy-set guy who enjoyed playing bartender, living in a kind of semi-retirement. A reliable soldier with the local organization since he was in his teens, he had stood still for a vehicular homicide rap one time that had really belonged to a very important local guy; he’d served five years and three months, and when he’d gotten out his reward had been Nick’s Place. Downstairs the bar, upstairs the apartment and the unofficial loan operation. He got slices in both places, did very well, had some fun, and enjoyed life.
The loan operation was quiet and simple, and most of the borrowers were people from the straight world: businessmen in a bind, operators who needed some quick short-term cash, people whose square-world credit rating was maybe bad, or credit all used up, or something like that. They could borrow big amounts from Nick, amazingly big amounts, and it didn’t matter much to Nick or the people behind him if the debts were ever paid off. All you had to keep current with was the interest: two percent a month, every month. Miss a month and some guys come to visit and talk. Miss two months and the same guys come back, but not to talk.
With loans going out and interest coming in, there was always quite a bit of cash moving through Nick’s Place, but there wasn’t much to worry about. Nick subscribed to the Vigilant Protective Service, and the local police patrol car knew to keep a special eye on Nick’s Place; and anyway, who would be dumb enough to go after money that belonged to men like Ernie Dulare and Adolf Lozini?
Somebody. The bedroom light went on and Nick opened his eyes and two guys were standing there with hoods and guns. “Holy Jesus,” Nick said, and struggled to sit up. His wife Angela’s heavy arm was across his chest, pinning him to the bed, but he finally managed to shove the arm away and hunch up to a sitting position, blinking in the glare of the overhead light.
“Get up, Nick,” one of the hooded men said. “Get up and open the closet.”
“You’re out of your minds,” Nick said. Squinting, rubbing his eyes, trying to wake up enough to think, he said, “You got to be crazy. You know whose money that is?”
“Ours. Come on, Nick, we’re in a hurry.”
Angela groaned, bubbled, snored, and rolled heavily over onto her other side. One thing you could say for Angela: when she was asleep, she was asleep. Nick, with one tiny corner of his mind grateful that she wasn’t awake to yap and complain and carry on, slowly kicked his legs out from under the covers and over the side of the bed. “Christ on a crutch,” he complained. “What the hell time is it?”
“Move it, Nick.”
The floor was cold. The air-conditioner hummed in the window, making cold air move like invisible fog along the floor. Nick, sitting there in white T-shirt and blue boxer shorts, frowned at the one who was doing the talking, trying to see his face through the hood, trying to recognize the voice that was calling him by first name. He said, “Do I know you?” And then, in the process of asking the question, he suddenly came fully awake and realized he didn’t want to know the answer to it. If a guy has a hood and a gun, then neither one of you wants you to see his face.
Besides, Vigilant had to be on the way. These guys must have busted in here, so that meant Vigilant would be coming, and so would the cops. So all Nick had to do in the meantime was obey orders and be ready to drop to the floor.
Right. He got to his feet, saying, “Forget it. I don’t want to know if I know you.”
“That’s smart. Open the closet, Nick.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He wished he had his slippers. “And the safe,” he said.
“That’s right,” the gunman said.
These people knew a lot. They knew the money was in a safe, and they knew the safe was in the bedroom closet. Thinking about that, wondering how much else they knew and what was letting them be so calm about heisting mob money, Nick opened the closet door and went down on one creaking knee to slowly work the combination dial on the safe. While behind him the two guys stood waiting, guns in their hands. And Angela snored. And Nick wondered how long it would take the Vigilant people to get here.
When the buzzer and light went off in the Vigilant ready room, showing that a break-in had just occurred at Nick’s Place, Fred Ducasse switched it off and went back to the magazine article he was reading on the latest concepts of crowd control, in a trade journal called The Police Chief.
* * *
The problem was, there was only so much you could do with a pinochle deck. So long as Philly Webb had been here they could use the deck for its original purpose—pinochle—and play three-handed, Ducasse and Handy McKay and Webb. But Webb had left half an hour ago to drive for Wiss and Elkins, who were running the job with the stockbroker, Leffler, and that had been the end of it for cards. Ducasse and Handy had tried gin rummy, war, blackjack, ah hell and casino, and not a one of them was worth a damn with a pinochle deck.
So they’d finally hunted around for something to read instead, and in an inner office with a cluttered desk and paneled walls they’d found a shelf full of magazines, all of them specialized law-enforcement or security-agency trade journals. With nothing else to do, and time hanging heavy on their hands. Ducasse was reading about crowd control and Handy was reading about closed-circuit-television security systems.
About five minutes after the Nick’s Place buzzer had sounded, the phone all at once rang. Ducasse and Handy looked at one another, and Ducasse said, “Parker?”
“Maybe not. We better put our boy to work.”
The guard they’d kept out was tied and blindfolded in a chair by a desk with a phone on it. Handy went over there and rested his hand on the guard’s shoulder. “Time for you to go to work,” he said.
The guard licked his lips, but didn’t say anything. Handy could feel the muscles tensed in the man’s shoulder. Rapping the shoulder with his knuckles, gently but firmly, he said, “Remember what we talked about. You bring trouble here, you’ll get unhappy.”
“I remember.” The guard’s voice sounded rusty, like someone locked in solitary for a week. “Clear your throat.”
“I’m all right.”
The phone had rung three times by now; that was enough. “Here we go,” Handy said. He picked up the receiver and held it to the guard’s head, holding it at a slight angle so the guard could feel it against his skin yet Handy would be able to hear what the caller had to say.
There was a very slight hesitation, and then the guard said. “Vigilant.”
”Hello, is this Harry?” “Uh— No, it’s Gene.”
“Whadaya say. Gene? This is Fred Callochio, downtown. Anything shaking?”
“Not here. Not for a couple hours.”
“Nice and quiet, huh? That’s good.”
“How about you?”
“Nothing much. You know, Monday night.”
“Right. Same here.”
“So I’ll see you. Gene.”
“Right, Fred. So long.”
Handy, crouched close to the blindfolded guard so he could hear the conversation, waited for the click of the other man hanging up, then cradled the receiver and said, “What was that all about?”
“He’s a cop.” the guard said. “A desk sergeant downtown. Police Headquarters.”
Ducasse had come over. He said, “Is that normal, him calling you?”
It wasn’t; they could both see it in the guard’s hesitation. Finally he said, “Not every night. Sometimes he calls.”
Ducasse and Handy looked at one another. Handy said, “They know something’s happening. They’re looking around for where it is.”
Ducasse offered a pale grin. “Let’s hope they don’t find it.”
“They won’t,” Handy said. He squeezed the guard’s shoulder in a congratulatory way. “You did very nice,” he said. The guard had nothing to say.
Handy and Ducasse were walking back across the room toward their magazines when the alarm went off again. They both looked at it, startled, and then Ducasse checked the number on the light with the chart on the console in front of
it. Then, switching the alarm off, he turned with a grin to Handy and said, “The stockbroker.”
* * *
When Andrew Leffler realized the gangsters were taking him to the brokerage, he knew there was no longer anything to worry about. They had brought along his key ring from the dresser, apparently intending simply to unlock the front door and walk in, not realizing that no one at all could enter the place at night, not even Leffler himself using a key, without setting off an alarm at the protective agency. Within minutes the police and the private protective agency’s guards would be swarming all over the place here, and surely these men were too professional to put up a dangerous kind of resistance. So it would all be over very, very soon.
When they had left their house, they had been put in the back seat of an automobile waiting in the driveway, with a third gunman at the wheel. Leffler and his wife had been ordered to get down on the floor of the car and huddle there during the entire trip; probably to keep them from seeing the faces of their captors, who took their hoods off for the drive through the city streets.
To the office. The men put their hoods back on, hustled the Lefflers in their robes and slippers across the dark empty sidewalk to the storefront office, and one of them put his key in the lock and opened the door. Leffler almost smiled when he saw that.
And still he hadn’t thought of the back room. This was the Tyler office of Rubidow, Kancher & Co., a New York brokerage firm, and he was the man in charge here; he took it for granted these men were after negotiable securities, bearer bonds and paper of that sort, and that he had been brought along to open the vault, with Maureen’s presence to assure his cooperation. But as to the back room, he almost never thought about that himself, and so few other people were even aware of its existence that there was never any conversation about it and no reason to anticipate its mention by anyone. In fact, probably because of his own slightly uneasy conscience toward it, Leffler generally made a conscious effort not to be overly aware of the back room.
It had begun, a dozen years ago, with his next-to-youngest boy, Jim. All of his five children were doing well now, grown and married and scattered across the United States, none of them a cause for worry or upset, but that hadn’t always been true. Jim had gone through a troubled adolescence, involving drugs and theft and other things the Lefflers had never wanted to know too much about, and if it hadn’t been for a man named Adolf Lozini, there wasn’t any question but that Jim Leffler would be in prison today, or at the very best an ex-con out on parole, his record smeared and his future prospects ruined.
An attorney named Jack Walters had been the one to suggest, during that bad time, that Adolf Lozini might be able to help somehow. Leffler hadn’t wanted to put himself in debt to a man who was a known criminal, a syndicate gangster, but what was the alternative? He couldn’t permit Jim to go to prison, not if there was any chance at all to save him.
There had been that chance. And all in all the price Lozini had demanded had not been a hard one to pay; in the course of his dealings with legitimate businessmen over the years, Leffler had more than once been asked to skirt much closer than that to the edge of the law. Because all Lozini had wanted was the back room.
Most people who own stock do not keep the certificates physically in their own possession. Their broker holds the paper for them, both for safety—he will either have a vault on his own premises or will lease vault space from a nearby bank—and for convenience when the inevitable moment comes to sell the stock again. Rubidow, Kancher & Co. being a large firm with a large and aggressive local office in Tyler, the brokerage did have its own vault, a double-roomed structure at the rear of the company’s offices on the first floor of the Nolan Building on London Avenue. The vault shared a wall with the bank next door but had its own security system, installed and maintained by Vigilant. The larger front room of the vault was used for storage of most stocks and bonds, as well as company records. The small inner section, called the back room, was reserved for seldom-used papers, for the more delicate private transactions, for U.S. Treasury bonds and other highly negotiable securities, and for Adolf Lozini.
Lozini kept money there. So did several of Lozini’s associates, men named Buenadella and Schroder and Dulare, Simms and Shevelly and Faran. And Jack Walters, too, the attorney who had originally brought Leffler and Lozini together.
For these men, the back room of Rubidow, Rancher’s vault had a great advantage over either a foreign bank account or an American safety deposit box. Unlike the foreign account, there was never any problem about transporting the funds to or from the back room, nor was there that slightly uneasy feeling of being, after all, at the mercy of European banks and European governments which could at any time alter their politics, change their laws, redefine their banking practices.
As to a local safety deposit box, that was reasonably secure so long as a man was alive; though even so, it was possible for a district attorney with sufficient cause to get a court order and have such a box opened. But if a man should die, that’s when the true flaw in the safety deposit box would reveal itself; as a portion of the dead man’s estate, the box was required by law to be opened in the physical presence of the executor of the estate and a representative of the bank and an official from the Internal Revenue Service.
In the back room at Rubidow, Kancher, such problems didn’t exist. Adolf Lozini and his partners could add or subtract funds at any time, and if one of them should die, the others would take care of things. For Leffler, there was no risk, nor even any inconvenience.
At least, there never had been. But tonight, once Leffler and his wife were inside the office with the two hooded gunmen— the third man had stayed outside with the car—one of the men immediately said, “Okay, Mr. Leffler, let’s go take a look at the back room.”
It wasn’t until later that Leffler thought how impossible it was for these people to know that familiar in-office term; at the moment he only felt the shocked realization that it must be the Treasury bonds they were after. And his immediate response was to try to save the bonds by lying: “I can’t do that. There’s a time lock on the door.”
“You get one try at being stupid,” the gunman said, “and that was it. There’s no time lock on the vault. You do your back-room business at night.”
Leffler stared. Lozini, he thought, but couldn’t believe it. A streetlight outside the plate-glass window filled the front office with a deceptively dark pink glow; in that light, Leffler tried to read the featureless hoods and the stances of the bodies. How much did these two know?
Everything. One of them said, “That’s right, Mr. Leffler, it’s the mob’s money we want.”
It’s caught up with me, Leffler thought, sagging at once into despair, and he moved along uncomplainingly when one of them took him by the elbow and steered him deeper into the office, away from the pink sheen of the streetlight and toward the darkness of the vault.
* * *
Nick Rifkin wished his wife wouldn’t snore like that. It was humiliating to him, in front of these bastards. He stood beside the bed, barefoot, feeling chilly, and watched one of them fill a leather bag with the money from the safe while the other one stood back by the dresser and kept an eye and a gun on Nick. And Angela, undisturbed by light, by conversation, by anything at all, just lay there on her back with her mouth open and snooooored. Christ, she was loud.
Finally he couldn’t take it any more. To the one by the dresser, he said, “You mind if I turn her over?”
“You should turn her off,” the guy said. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” Nick said, but he kept the sarcasm muted. Turning, he put one knee on the bed, leaned over, and poked Angela on the shoulder and the upper arm until she snorted and cleared her throat and complainingly rolled over onto her side. And became silent.
Nick straightened up again, to see the other one coming out of the closet, carrying the closed and full leather bag. Nick looked at the bag, sorry to see all that money go. No matter what happened, n
o matter who else got blamed for this, some of the shit was bound to fall on his own head and he knew it. “You guys are really making me a mess,” he said.
The one by the dresser said, “I’ll give you inside information. You won’t even be noticed in the rush.”
Nick gave him a sharp look. For the first time it occurred to him that maybe something more than a simple heist was taking place here. He’d heard rumbles the end of last week, some kind of trouble, a guy that was being looked for—could this be connected?
Uh uh; that was something else he didn’t want to know. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said.
The one with the bag said, “You’re such a smart individual, Nick. You’re really okay.”
”Don’t bother to give me a reference,” Nick told him. The other one said, “I’ll give you something better, Nick. A little suggestion.”
Nick watched him, waiting for it.
“Pretty soon,” the guy said, “you’ll want to make a phone call, tell somebody about this.”
“More than likely.”
“Call Dutch Buenadella,” the guy said.
Nick frowned. “Why?” “He’ll be interested, Nick.”
The one with the bag said, “Nick, you have to come for a walk with us now.”
Nick said, “Why don’t I just sit down here and count to a million?”
The one by the dresser said, “Humor us, Nick. Do it our way.”
They’d given him advice about who he should call, so they mustn’t be planning on killing him, or injuring him very badly. Something like a knock on the head he could live with. “Okay,” he said. “It’s your act, why should I horn in?”
As they were leaving the bedroom the snoring started again. Nick shook his head but didn’t say anything, and walked on downstairs, the guy with the money ahead of him, the other one bringing up the rear.
Downstairs they strolled through the bar, and it occurred to Nick to wonder why he wasn’t hearing from the Vigilant people.
So they must have cut the wires, these two.
They opened the front door, and Nick stood to one side for them to go out, saying, “Come back soon.”
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