by John Knoerle
I put that in my pipe and smoked it. Maybe the Federal Reserve Police do know all about me. Sir. But they don’t care, no more than the FBI does. I’m just a castoff agent of the hated Oh So Secret. Nothing I could do or say would convince them to lower the drawbridge.
That was what I wanted to say. But I didn’t have the energy. Those four aspirin were burning a hole in my gut and my knees got wobbly when the oompah band that had set up shop above my right temple struck up a German beer hall polka. Somebody caught me before I hit the floor.
Must’ve been Jimmy. My hero.
Chapter Twenty-six
I woke up on a narrow bed in a small spare room with a crucifix on the wall. Someone had stripped me down to boxer shorts and covered me with a sheet and blanket. Had to be Lizabeth. Jimmy would gouge out his good eye before he’d undress me and tuck me in.
I looked out the window. Pink dawn painted the frosted panes as icy winds rattled them. I took inventory. My brass band headache was down to a dull roar, I had feeling and movement in my extremities, I knew my name, rank and serial number. And I was hungry, so hungry my stomach was attempting to digest itself.
I sat up in bed, saw stars and lay back down. There had to be something to eat in this brown brick mausoleum. I took a couple deep breaths and tried again, slowly. That seemed to work so I winched my feet out of bed and set them on the floor. Bare floor, cold floor. It felt good. I took a breath and stood up.
Ha! Who says Hal Schroeder can’t stand on his own two feet? I took a step for the doorway and froze as the door swung open.
Lizabeth, carrying a tray, backed into the room. I sniffed the air hopefully. Bacon? Eggs? Rye toast slathered in butter? Lizabeth turned to face me and I slunk back to bed. All I smelled was Unguentene.
Lizabeth had her jet black hair pulled back. She wore black toreador pants and an untucked man’s white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top two buttons undone.
“I went to nursing school a hundred years ago,” she said as she plopped a thermometer in my mush and swabbed my face with cotton balls soaked in isopropyl. She gently uncurled the crusty bandage on my severed ear and clucked her tongue.
I enjoyed these ministrations, don’t get me wrong. No feverish GI in no improvised field hospital ever fantasized a more fetching nurse. But I was about to expire from malnutrition. I tried explaining this with a mouth full of thermometer. Lizabeth shushed me.
“Breakfast is on the stove,” she said. “We were all out of bacon so I fried up a T-bone with onions. That okay?”
Jeannie, please forgive me but I love this woman.
-----
There is something about early morning that pierces the veil. It’s tough to look tough in a breakfast nook wallpapered with pink primroses, early morning sunshine glancing off the snowy backyard and splashing through the louvered windows. I leaned back in my chair, having polished off a T-bone steak, four eggs, three pieces of toast and a mountain of cottage fries.
The Schooler sat across the table from me, head down, picking at his breakfast. He looked old.
Jimmy padded in in stocking feet, unshaven, sleepy-eyed, squinting against the sunlight and the pink wallpaper. He looked hungover.
Lizabeth bustled in from the kitchen wearing a black and white checkered apron. “Everybody happy?”
I raised my hand. The Schooler grunted. Jimmy poured coffee into a blue and white speckled mug and left the room. I loosened my belt and pushed my chair away from the table. America’s most unlikely homemaker slid me a sideways glance before she returned to the kitchen.
The Federal Reserve job was still two days away. The Schooler wasn’t going to let me return home for a hot shower and a change of clothes. He looked up from his half-eaten breakfast and read my mind.
“Razor and toothbrush in the bathroom upstairs. Couple clean shirts in the closet.”
I nodded and got up to go. Lizabeth returned from the kitchen carrying a roaster pan. More grub? She stood by the door to the back stairs. I opened it for her.
Kingdog the wolf came galloping through the snow. Lizabeth stood on the top step and dumped the contents of the pan, a raw five-pound capon suitable for Sunday dinner at Grandma’s, into the snow. The wolf attacked it as if it were still alive.
I went upstairs to shower up, any thoughts of attempting to slip out the door and sneak down the drive banished from my mind.
-----
“We’ll give Hal a gun and send him up the front steps on 6th Street,” said The Schooler to Jimmy and me couple hours later. We were sitting around a burled walnut dining table in a room with a matching sideboard. A small statue of the Virgin Mary looked down upon us from a corner cabinet and a crucifix hung from the back wall.
Odd. I hadn’t figured The Schooler for a Holy Joe.
“Hal will ID himself through the intercom and insist on speaking to the Police Commander on duty. It’s Frederick Seifert on Thursday nights. He’s a twenty-year vet who thinks he’s long overdue for a promotion. He’ll jump at the chance.”
“What chance?” grumbled Jimmy, still swilling java from that speckled blue and white mug. He was Turkish maybe. Turks were addicted to coffee.
Mr. Big ignored him. “Hal will tell Frederick Seifert, breathlessly, that the Fulton Road Mob is coming hard, in full force, that they sent him ahead to talk his way in and take Seifert hostage. At which time Commander Seifert will send his troops into the tunnels that run to the statues outside.”
“Why?” said Jimmy.
“I’ll get to that,” said The Schooler. “Once the Federal Reserve police are dispersed Hal will put a gun to Seifert’s back and march him downstairs to open the side delivery gate on Rockwell. At which time Jimmy and the boys will drive to the loading dock, gather up the cash from the counting room, wheel it to the waiting vehicle and take off.”
Jimmy inhaled the dregs of his coffee and belched. He looked formidable again, head down, chin prowed out like a cowcatcher, his good eye searching the room like a locomotive’s rotating head beam. “What I’m hard swallowing is this Seifert sending his boys to tunnels outside the bank. The place is a fort, why leave it?”
“Because Frederick Seifert is a lot like me. He’s been waiting for this opportunity a long time.”
Jimmy shook a Lucky from his pack and thumbed his lighter. “He in on this?”
The Schooler shook his head. “But if Seifert simply bars the door and calls the cops to come clean up the mess he has blown his big chance.”
Jimmy sucked down half his cig in one drag and flicked the hanging ash into his cupped hand. “ What chance?”
“His chance to be a hero.”
“You got it all worked out,” said Jimmy, jabbing at me with his burning pill. “‘Cept you gotta send the G-man up those steps on 6th Street and trust he’s not gonna sell us out.”
I could have washed out my socks and underwear in the upstairs sink in the time it took The Schooler to say, “There are no rewards without risks Jimmy.”
The Schooler took another pause. Jimmy filled his cupped hand with ash. I examined my fingernails in order to avoid making eye contact with Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
“I believe we can trust Mr. Schroeder,” said The Schooler. “He told the truth. He didn’t know the previous heist money was counterfeit. In fact he has a big chunk of it stashed in a safe deposit box at National City Bank.”
What in the hell? I hadn’t been tailed to National City Bank. I had made sure!
“Mr. Schroeder was duped by the FBI just as he was hung out to dry by the OSS. Two years of high-risk service without so much as a letter of commendation. Tsk tsk. I believe we can trust Mr. Schroeder because he feels the federal government owes him a large debt. And he needs our help to collect it.”
Jimmy and The Schooler swiveled their mugs in my direction. I met their looks and then some. I was hacked off. That The Schooler’s estimation of my particulars was dead nuts on only made me more so. They were waiting on my answer, my affirmation, m
y pledge of loyalty.
I let them.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The library was a snug room in the left front corner of the brown brick building, on the opposite side of the parlor. It had a bay window and ceiling-high bookcases crammed with leather bound volumes. And a crucifix. I had coaxed the pot bellied stove in the corner to life. It was late, I was dealing solitaire.
I had finally given in and pledged my fealty to The Schooler and his cockeyed plan. He seemed to buy it. Why not? What other choice did I have?
I slapped down card after card on the reading table, finding no joy. What other choice did I have? The way The Schooler laid it out made some sense, Frederick Seifert might take a chance for glory. Still, an awful lot of dominoes had to fall in precise order at the proper time. I scooped up my losing hand and reshuffled the deck.
I heard the clocking of soft heels on hardwood. I turned to see Lizabeth standing in the doorway. She wore a sheer, pale green chiffon nightgown over a satin sheath and high-heeled mules with feathers at the toe. She had her hair down.
“The old man’s sawing logs,” she said, languidly. “May I join you?”
“Sure.”
Lizabeth pulled up a chair across the reading table. “There’s another deck in that drawer,” she said, indicating a round lamp table with a green felt top. I dug it out and handed it over. She side shuffled the deck in her hands. “You ready for some double solitaire?”
I tried to concentrate on the game as Lizabeth’s filmy peignoir dissolved in the light from the table lamp. She buzzed through her deck in no time, kinged the aces and said, “Would you like a nightcap?”
What was I supposed to say to that? No?
She crossed to one of the ceiling-high bookcases and slid a panel of leather-bound book spines aside, revealing a liquor cabinet. “They took a vow of silence, not sobriety.”
“Who’s that?”
“The monks. This was a monastery not so long ago.”
“Of course. I wondered about all the crucifixes.”
Lizabeth handed me a snifter of brandy. “Henry won’t let me take them down. He says it’s bad luck.” She raised her glass. “Here’s how.”
We clanked and drank. We reshuffled our decks and started over.
“So how does it feel to be a kept man?”
“It stinks. Royally”
“You get used to it. It gives you time.”
“To do what?”
“To think, to speculate about things,” said Lizabeth, raining cards down on the reading table. “And get really good at solitaire.”
She was that. I tossed my deck on the table and raised my hands in surrender. Lizabeth reached down and produced one of her skinny black cigarettes. Did she keep them in her garter belt? I wondered this with a greater degree of curiosity than the question seemed to warrant.
“Got a light?”
I did not. But the way she said it made me wish I had. I searched the drawers of the lamp table, eyed the fading embers in the potbellied stove. “Allow me.” I removed the perfumed cigarette from her fingers and returned with a lit cig and singed knuckles.
“Thank you kind sir,” said Lizabeth, inhaling deeply, swelling her breasts.
It had grown cold in the room as the fire ebbed. Or so I surmised from the stiffening of Lizabeth’s nipples against her satin undergarment. I felt quite warm myself. Lizabeth smiled through a shroud of perfumed smoke.
I took a slug of brandy. Enough of this foolishness. “Why is he doing this? The Schooler. Henry. Mr. Big. This crazy bank heist?”
Lizabeth sat back. “Crazy?”
“Seems that way to me.”
Lizabeth flicked her ashes on the floor and crossed her legs. Didn’t they have any ashtrays in this place?
“He’s a very smart man, my Henry. I’ve never known him to do anything crazy.”
“Crazy’s the wrong word then. But it seems like a huge gamble for an old gent with a lot of money in the bank.” I paused. Lizabeth smoked. “If he wants to call it quits why not just cash out and sail away?”
Lizabeth lowered her chin and regarded me through long eyelashes that glimmered at the tips. “And be remembered as Henry Voss, king of the vending machines? No, I was wrong when I said that old men only care about money. Henry cares about his reputation. He wants to go out in a blaze of glory.”
If Lizabeth was attempting to reassure me about the Federal Reserve heist her words were poorly chosen. Going out in a blaze of glory was not on my to-do list.
Lizabeth leaned forward and clasped her hands on the table, her black cigarette wedged between her fingers. “Was I wrong about young men too?”
“You were wrong about this young man. I’ve had power. All I want now is a fat wallet and a villa in the South Seas.”
“With JJ?”
“Of course.”
The ashes from Lizabeth’s upturned cigarette had dribbled down onto her alabaster fingers. I reached over and gently dusted them off. Lizabeth curled her index finger around mine.
“I hope that works out for you,” she purred.
I willed my hand away from hers but it paid no attention. I heard a soft clunk from under the table and felt a warm foot on my ankle, creeping upwards. Sweat beaded on my upper lip.
“If it doesn’t, you let me know.” Her toes found my bare shin. “Will you do that?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was having trouble concentrating. I do know that when Lizabeth got up to go I rose with her and walked her to the doorway. We stopped there.
The sexual tension of that moment could have lit up the Ohio Valley from Akron to Zanesville. I wanted to kiss her, I wanted to kiss her so bad you can’t believe it. But I wanted something else even more, difficult as it was to rate anything above drowning myself in Lizabeth’s deep lush slightly-trembling purple lips.
I slipped my arm around her waist, resting my hand on the soft saddle of her hip. She didn’t pull away. When the blood hammering in my ears subsided to the point where I could hear myself think I said, “The Schooler knew where I deposited my end of the armored car heist, the satchel of money he gave me at Moreland Courts.” I steeled myself and peered directly into those oversized aquamarine eyes. “How did he know that?”
Lizabeth didn’t appear offended at this crude interjection of business. In fact she leaned in and planted a long sticky wet kiss that stiffened my spine and other places.
Then she clocked off in her high-heeled slippers, saying, over her shoulder, “Who called the taxi?”
Chapter Twenty-eight
I returned to the reading table and shuffled up a deck. Seven up, twenty-one down. I was going to win a hand if I had to stay here all night. Lizabeth had left her cigarette butt on the table, standing upright on its filter tip. I got up and tossed it in the potbellied stove.
There. That was better.
I sat back down. I knew what her parting ‘Who called the taxi’ meant of course. The Schooler didn’t need to have me tailed. All he had to do was call a hackie who was on the pad.
Smart, Schroeder, well done and executed. I slapped a black two on a red three, a red eight on a black nine. I turned over an ace. About time.
The question was why The Schooler cared. My trip to National City Bank told him something important. I cast my mind back to the Moreland Courts. Something hadn’t fit. I remembered my excitement, the fat pigskin satchel. And momentary suspicion. The Schooler keeping a big bag of hot snaps on the premises. Why risk it?
There was only one logical explanation. He wouldn’t. He knew, the son of a bitch knew from day one!
A sharp guy like The Schooler wouldn’t have trusted the FBI. He would have had the money from my Society for Savings job checked out right away. He let Jimmy make the announcement, let him have his little moment of triumph, but Henry Voss knew from the get-go that the cash was worthless. He used his paid-for hackie to find out if I was in on the joke. Needless to say, I was not.
So why put Jimmy and the troo
ps at risk in the armored car heist if The Schooler knew it was all funny money from day one?
I slammed my cards down on the reading table, cursed and drained my brandy. I knew why.
All I need is you.
The Schooler had been plotting his grand exit for a long time. When I walked in the tumblers clicked. He approved the armored car heist so that I would maintain my bona fides with the FBI. When I demanded Jimmy’s ouster The Schooler refused out of loyalty. That and he needed the big thug to lead the assault on the Federal Reserve Bank. When his on-the-pad hackie called to say that I had deposited my satchel of bogus bucks at National City Bank, Henry Voss knew he had his patsy.
Yours truly.
I got up and warmed my hands at the potbellied stove. I poked at the embers. There wasn’t any more wood in the tin-derbox so I gathered up my losing hand and tossed it in. The cards smoked and smoldered, then crackled to life in a burst of waxen flame. I soaked up the quicksilver heat and tried to wedge the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle into place. Why did The Schooler wait for Jimmy to tell me about the counterfeit cash?
Jimmy would be an unhappy chappy to know that he had faced the muzzle of an FBI Tommygun just to put the G-man in solid with his superiors. The Schooler must have dropped hints to insure Jimmy made the discovery on his own, after the armored car job. Counting up the take maybe, saying, ‘I sure hope this is coin of the realm.’
Henry Voss wanted Jimmy Streets to take credit for discovering the phony dough so that Harold Schroeder wouldn’t suspect what Harold Schroeder now knew. Both The Schooler and the FBI had played him like a drum. I hunted up that sliding panel in the bookcase. The monks had a sense of humor. The liquor cabinet was concealed behind the collected works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I poured myself another stiff brandy, tossed more playing cards into the potbellied stove and sat down at the reading table.
Jimmy had been making nice in recent days. I didn’t understand why but could be it was simple. The Schooler treated him like a brainless, if loyal, mutt. Maybe Jimmy wanted most what he couldn’t get - respect for his smarts.