‘That’s sort of a liberal paper, isn’t it? Is that what you’d say your politics were? Sort of liberal?’
Dortmunder couldn’t help turning and looking at him again, but Victor was still smiling that same smile, so Dortmunder quick looked away again, saying, ‘Sometimes I read the News.’
‘Ah,’ said Victor. ‘I see. Do you find yourself in agreement more often with one paper than the other?’
On Victor’s other side, Kelp said, ‘Lay off, Victor. You quit that job, remember?’
‘What? I’m just talking.’
‘I know what you’re just doing,’ Kelp told him. ‘But it come over like a third degree.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Victor said. He sounded as though he meant it. ‘It’s just a habit you get into. You’d be surprised how hard it is to break.’
Neither Kelp nor Dortmunder commented.
Victor said, ‘Mr. Dortmunder, I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.’
Dortmunder sneaked another look at him, and for once he wasn’t smiling; he was looking concerned and penitent instead. Dortmunder faced him more securely and said, ‘That’s okay. Think nothing of it.’
And Victor smiled again. To the back of Dortmunder’s head he said, ‘I’m sure glad you didn’t take offense, Mr. Dortmunder.’
Dortmunder grunted, watching houses go by.
‘After all, if you don’t want to tell me your politics, there’s no reason why you should have to.’
‘Victor,’ said Kelp warningly.
‘What?’
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘By golly, so I am. Hey, you’re supposed to turn there.’
Dortmunder watched the intersection go by and felt the car slowing.
Kelp said, ‘I’ll just make a U-turn.’
‘Go around the block,’ Dortmunder said.
‘It’s just as easy,’ Kelp said, bringing the car to a stop, ‘to make a U-turn.’
Dortmunder moved his head and gave Kelp a look past Victor’s smile. ‘Go around the block,’ he said.
Victor, not seeming to notice any tension in the air, pointed out front and said, ‘Why not just go down there and turn right? Comes out the same place.’
‘Sure,’ Kelp said, shrugging, as though it didn’t matter one way or the other. The Toronado started forward again, and Dortmunder turned away from Victor’s smile once more and watched suburban houses go by. They went through a couple of small shopping areas, each with its own record store and Chinese restaurant, and stopped at last in front of a bank. ‘There it is,’ Kelp said.
It was an old-fashioned bank, done in stone that had turned dark gray over the years. Like many banks built in the Northeast in the Twenties, it tried its best to look like a Greek temple, the Twenties being the last decade that Americans actually worshipped money. Like many suburban banks, the Greek-temple motif really wasn’t suitable to the size of this building; the four gray stone pillars across the front of it were crammed so close together it was barely possible to get between them to the front door.
Dortmunder spent a few seconds studying that front door, and the pillars, and the sidewalk, and the storefronts on both sides, and then the front door opened and two men in work clothes and construction-crew helmets came out, carrying a tall wooden writing stand, the pens at the end of their chains dangling like remnants of fringe. ‘We’re too late,’ Dortmunder said.
‘Not that bank,’ Kelp said. ‘That bank.’
Dortmunder turned his head again, looking at Kelp past Victor’s smile. Kelp motioned across the street, and Dortmunder ducked his head a little bit – for one awful second he thought Victor was going to kiss him on the cheek, but he didn’t – and looked across the way at the other bank.
At first he didn’t see it at all. Blue and white and chrome, something wide and low – that’s all he could make out. But then he saw the sign, spread in a banner across the front of the thing:
TEMPORARY HEADQUARTERS
Capitalists’ & Immigrants’ Trust
Just Watch Us GROW!
‘What the hell is it?’ Dortmunder said.
‘It’s a trailer,’ Kelp said. ‘What they call a mobile home. Didn’t you ever see that kind of thing before?’
‘But what the hell is it?’
‘It’s the bank,’ Kelp said.
Smiling, Victor said, ‘They’re tearing down the old building, Mr. Dortmunder, and they’re going to put the new one up in the same place. So in the meantime they’re running the bank from over there in that mobile home.’
‘In the trailer,’ Dortmunder said.
‘They do that kind of thing all the time,’ Kelp said. ‘Didn’t you ever notice?’
‘I guess so.’ Dortmunder frowned past their two faces and through the side window and past the traffic and across the opposite sidewalk and tried to make some sense out of what he was looking at, but it was difficult. Particularly with Victor smiling right next to his left ear. ‘I can’t see anything,’ Dortmunder said. ‘I’ll be right back. You two wait here.’
He got out of the Toronado and walked down the block, glancing into the old bank building on the way by. It was nearly five o’clock by now, but the interior was full of men with construction helmets on, ripping things apart in the glare of the work lights. The bank must be in a hell of a hurry to get the old building down and the new one up if they were willing to pay that kind of overtime. Probably nervous about being in the trailer.
At the corner, Dortmunder turned left, waited for the light, and then crossed the street. Turning left again, he strolled along the sidewalk toward the trailer.
It was at the end of the block, in the only vacant lot on the street. It was one of the biggest mobile home units Dortmunder had ever seen, being a good fifty feet long and twelve feet wide. Set back a yard or so from the regular building line, it filled the width of the lot, one end flush against the side of a Kresge five-and-dime and the other end almost reaching the sidewalk on the cross street. The surface of the lot was crushed brick rubble, showing that some other building had also recently been torn down; the bank had probably timed its own reconstruction to the availability of a lot nearby.
There were two entry doors along the front of the trailer, each with a heavy set of temporary wooden steps leading up to it, and the ‘Temporary Headquarters’ sign strung between them. Concrete blocks made a gray foundation wall from the ground up to the bottom edge of the blue and white metal shell, and all the letter-slot-style windows were covered on the inside by Venetian blinds. The bank was closed now, but lights could be seen through slits in the blinds.
Dortmunder looked up as he strolled by. A thick sweep of wires connected the trailer to telephone and power poles both on the main avenue and the cross street, as though the trailer were a rectangular dirigible, moored there by all those lines.
There was nothing more to see, and Dortmunder had reached the corner. He waited on the curb for the light again, then crossed the street and went back to the Toronado, shaking his head as he glanced at the rear of the car. He got in and said, ‘Can’t tell much from the outside. You thinking about a day operation or a night operation?’
‘Night,’ Kelp said.
‘They leave cash in there overnight?’
‘Only on Thursdays.’ It was Victor who told him that.
Reluctantly, Dortmunder focused on Victor. ‘How come on Thursdays?’
‘Thursday night the stores are open,’ Victor said. ‘The bank closes at three, but then opens again at six and stays open till eight-thirty. At that hour of night, there’s no simple direct way to get the cash to some other bank. So they lay on more guards and keep the money in the bank overnight.’
‘How many more guards?’
‘A total of seven,’ Victor said.
‘Seven guards.’ Dortmunder nodded. ‘What kind of safe?’
‘A Mosler. I believe they have it on lease, along with the trailer. It isn’t much of a safe.’
‘We can get into i
t fast?’
Victor smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘time really isn’t a problem.’
Dortmunder glanced across the street. ‘Some of those wires,’ he said, ‘are alarms. I figure they’re tied into the local precinct.’
Victor’s smile broadened. Nodding as though Dortmunder had just displayed great brilliance, he said, ‘That’s just what they are. Anything that happens in there after banking hours is recorded down at the police station.’
‘Which is where?’
Victor pointed straight ahead. ‘Seven blocks down that way.’
‘But time isn’t a problem,’ Dortmunder said. ‘We’re going in against seven guards, the precinct is seven blocks away, and time isn’t a problem.’
Kelp was grinning by now almost as widely as Victor. ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ he said. ‘That’s the stroke of genius Victor’s come up with.’
‘Tell me,’ Dortmunder said.
‘We steal the bank,’ Victor said.
Dortmunder looked at him.
Kelp said, ‘Isn’t that a beauty? We don’t break into the bank, we take the bank away with us. We back up a truck, hook onto the bank, and drive it away.’
6
When May got home from Bohack’s, Dortmunder wasn’t there yet. She stood just inside the front door and yelled, ‘Hey!’ twice, and when there wasn’t any answer she shrugged and slopped on through the apartment to the kitchen, carrying the two shopping bags of groceries. Being an employee at the supermarket, she in the first place got a cut rate on some items and in the second place could lift other items with no static, so the shopping bags were pretty full. As she once told her friend Betty at the store, another cashier, ‘I eat all this stuff and it ought to make me fat, but I have to carry it all home, and that keeps me thin.’
‘You ought to make your husband come get it,’ Betty had said.
Everybody made the same mistake about Dortmunder being May’s husband. She’d never said he was, but on the other hand she never corrected the mistake either. ‘I like to be thin,’ she’d said that time and let it go at that.
Putting the two shopping bags down on the kitchen counter now, she became aware of the fact that the corner of her mouth was warm. She was a chain smoker and kept the current cigarette always propped in the left corner of her mouth; when that area got warm, she knew it was time to start a new cigarette.
There was a small callus on the tip of her left thumb, caused by plucking cigarette embers from her lips, but for some reason her fingertips never callused at all. She flipped the half-inch butt from her mouth into the kitchen sink with one practiced wrist movement, and while it sizzled she took the crumpled pack of Virginia Slims from the waist pocket of her green sweater, shook one up, folded the corner of her mouth around the end and went looking for matches. Unlike most chain smokers, she never lit the new one from the old, because the old one was never big enough to hold onto; this meant a continuing problem with matches, smilar to the continuing problem of water in some Arab countries.
She spent the next five minutes opening drawers. It was a small apartment – a small living room, a small bedroom, a bathroom so small you’d scrape your knees, a kitchen as big as the landlord’s reservation in Heaven – but it was full of drawers, and for five minutes it was full of the swish-thap of drawers being opened and closed.
She found a book of matches at last, in the living room, in the drawer in the table with the television set on it. It was a pretty nice set, in color, not very expensive; Dortmunder had gotten it from a friend who’d picked up a truckload of them. ‘The funny thing about it,’ Dortmunder had said when he’d brought the thing home, ‘all Harry thought he was doing was stealing a truck.’
May lit the cigarette and dropped the match in the ashtray next to the T.V. She’d been concentrating on nothing but matches for five minutes, but now as her mind cleared she became aware again of the things around her, and the closest was the T.V. set, so she turned it on. There was a movie just starting. It was in black and white and May preferred to watch things in color since it was a color set, but the movie had Dick Powell in it, so she waited a while. Then it turned out it was called The Tall Target, and in it Dick Powell played a New York City policeman named John Kennedy who was trying to stop an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln. He was on a train, Dick Powell was, and he kept getting telegrams, so trainmen kept coming down the corridor shouting, ‘John Kennedy. John Kennedy.’ This gave May a pleasant feeling of dislocation, so she backed up until her legs hit the sofa bed and sat down.
Dortmunder came home at the most exciting part, of course, and he brought Kelp with him. It was 1860 and Abraham Lincoln was going to his first inauguration, and that’s where they wanted to assassinate him. Adolph Menjou was the mastermind of the plot, but Dick Powell – John Kennedy – was too quick for him. Still, it wasn’t certain how things would come out.
‘I just don’t know about Victor,’ Dortmunder said, but he was talking to Kelp. To May he said, ‘How you been?’
‘Since this morning? On my feet.’
‘Victor’s okay,’ Kelp said. ‘Hi, May, how’s your back?’
‘About the same. It’s my legs the last few days. The groceries!’
They both looked at her as she lunged to her feet, the cigarette in the corner of her mouth giving a puff of smoke like a model train as she exhaled. She said, ‘I forgot to put the groceries away,’ and hurried for the kitchen, where everything in the shopping bags was wet from the frozen foods defrosting. ‘Turn up the sound, will you?’ she shouted and quickly put things away. In the living room they turned up the sound, but they also talked louder. Also, the sound was mostly sound effects, with little dialogue. Then a heavy voice that sounded as though it had to be Abraham Lincoln said, ‘Did ever a President come to his inauguration so like a thief in the night?’
The groceries were away. May walked back into the living room, saying, ‘Do you suppose he really said that?’
Dortmunder and Kelp had still been talking about somebody named Victor, and now they both turned and looked at her. Dortmunder said, ‘Who?’
‘Him,’ she said and gestured at the television set, but when they all looked at it the screen was showing a man standing knee deep in water in a giant toilet bowl, spraying something on the under part of the lip and talking about germs. ‘Not him,’ she said. ‘Abraham Lincoln.’ She felt them both looking at her and shrugged and said, ‘Forget it.’ She went over and switched off the set and said to Dort-munder, ‘How’d it go today?’
‘So-so,’ he said. ‘I lost my display. I’ll have to go get another.’
Kelp explained, ‘Some woman called the cops on him.’
May squinted through cigarette smoke. ‘You getting fresh?’
‘Come on, May,’ Dortmunder said. ‘You know me better than that.’
‘You’re all alike as far as I can see,’ she said. They’d met almost a year ago, when she’d caught Dortmunder shoplifting at the store. It was the fact that he hadn’t tried any line at all on her, that he hadn’t even asked for her sympathy, that had won her sympathy. He’d just stood there, shaking his head, with packages of boiled ham and American cheese falling out of his armpits, and she just hadn’t had the heart to turn him in. She still tried to pretend sometimes that he couldn’t pierce her toughness, but he could.
‘Anyway,’ Kelp said, ‘we’re none of us gonna have to work that penny-ante stuff for a while.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Dortmunder said.
‘You’re just not used to Victor,’ Kelp said, ‘that’s the only problem.’
‘May I never get used to Victor,’ Dortmunder said.
May dropped backward into the sofa again; she always sat down as though she’d just had a stroke. ‘What’s the story?’ she said.
‘A bank job,’ Kelp said.
‘Well, yes and no,’ Dortmunder said. ‘It’s a little more than a bank job.’
‘It’s a bank job,’ Kelp said.
D
ortmunder looked at May as though hoping to find stability and reason there. ‘The idea is,’ he said, ‘if you can believe it, we’re supposed to steal the whole bank.’
‘It’s a trailer,’ Kelp said. ‘You know, one of those mobile homes? The bank’s in there till they put up the new building.’
‘And the idea,’ Dortmunder said, ‘is we hook the bank onto a truck and drive it away.’
‘Where to?’ May asked.
‘Just away,’ Dortmunder said.
‘That’s one of the things we’ve got to work out,’ Kelp said.
‘Sounds like you’ve got a lot to work out,’ May said.
‘Then there’s Victor,’ Dortmunder said.
‘My nephew,’ Kelp explained.
May shook her head. ‘I never saw a nephew yet,’ she said, ‘that was worth his weight in Kiwanis gum.’
‘Everybody’s somebody’s nephew,’ Kelp said.
May said, ‘I’m not.’
‘Every man.’
‘Victor is a weirdo,’ Dortmunder said.
‘But he comes up with good ideas.’
‘Like secret handshakes.’
‘He doesn’t have to do the job with us,’ Kelp said. ‘He just pointed to it.’
‘That’s all he has to do.’
‘He’s got all that F.B.I. experience.’
May looked alert. ‘The F.B.I.’s after him?’
‘He was in the F.B.I.,’ Kelp said and waved his hand to indicate he didn’t want to explain any more. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ Dortmunder said. He sat down wearily on the sofa beside May. ‘What I prefer,’ he said, ‘is a simple hold-up. You put a handkerchief over your face, you walk in, you show guns, you take the money, you walk away. Simple, straightforward, honest.’
‘It’s getting tougher these days,’ Kelp said. ‘Nobody uses money any more. There aren’t any payroll jobs because there aren’t any payrolls; everybody pays by check. Stores are on credit cards, so they never have any cash either. A bag of money is a very tough thing to find these days.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ said Dortmunder. ‘It’s all very depressing.’
May said to Kelp, ‘Why don’t you go get yourself a beer?’
Bank Shot Page 3