Seven Silent Men

by Behn, Noel;

  “… I have to get back to Washington and wanted—”

  “Brew,” Grafton called out to Brewmeister, “this bunghole give you his crime-of-the-century routine? Rave on about it being the slickest loot ever?”

  “That he did, Graf.”

  “There were electric lights in the cave, hundred-watt bulbs,” Corticun said. “A line of them. And a portable scaffold.”

  Grafton turned in his chair, studied Corticun, who backed closer to Quinton. “Look at those two fuckers, would you? Pinstripes. Who would have ever fucking believed pinstripes in the FBI?” He shifted around so he could half-face Brewmeister and partially see Corticun and Quinton. “Okay, you two walking dildos think you got the crime of the century on your hands, I won’t discourage you. Only take notes.” He pointed at Quinton without looking at him. “I want you to report every last word of this back to Washington.”

  Quinton had the stenographic pad out and ready.

  “Everything I told you back at the office checks so far,” Grafton began. “We’ve put together a couple of more things since then, including, a little present or two we brought over for Brew. But now we’ll share.” Grafton beckoned. Cub handed him a large, damp brown paper bag.

  “The robbers probably escaped from under the bank on rubber boats.” Graf’s hand went into the bag. “Big black rubber boats made of this.” Graf tossed a piece of shredded, black heavy-duty rubber at Corticun. “They found this not far from where they found Brew on that delta island. They’ve got the rest of it over at the River Patrol boat house. It’s a six-man boat or what’s left of it.”

  A strand of waterlogged, gray window sashing was tossed at Corticun as Graf explained, “Several of these were connected to inner rungs on the gunnels of the boat. And one of these was connected to the rope.”

  Corticun caught a soggy gray canvas bag in both hands, held it away. A small, open padlock dangled from the zipper opening at the bag’s top. Stenciled on the bag’s side was the name “Brink’s.”

  “Reach inside,” Graf ordered.

  Corticun obeyed, removed a thick packet of one-dollar bills. A water-drenched packet.

  “Guess the crooks were in too much of a hurry to take it along, but it’s Mormon State money okay.” Graf brought the packet of bills to Brewmeister. “Fifty dollars in all, and believe you me, they’re going to miss it dearly.”

  Grafton returned to the chair. “So now we know the crooks not only took in safe-cracking equipment, a scaffold, electricity … oh, by the way …” He tossed a mud-caked orb to Corticun. “There’s a light bulb under that goo. A hundred-watt light bulb. A string of them were tangled in the boat’s rudder, or what remains of the rudder.”

  The paper bag dropped on the floor beside the chair. Grafton bit into a plug of tobacco. “Like I was saying, now we know for pretty damn sure those crooks beat it the hell out of there in rubber boats. That’s why they flooded the tunnels. And if you think they were a slick crowd in cracking the vault, wait till you hear the razzle-dazzle they pulled with the flooding.

  “According to the Sewerage Department, the crooks did a bigger and better job with the flooding than anyone thought. The sewage people think as much as an extra four to eight million gallons came through their pipes over the weekend, only they can’t be sure. The extra water knocked hell out of their monitoring equipment. Ripped lots of it clean away. The water knocked hell out of the sewage system itself too. It wasn’t till Sunday afternoon, with the beginning of those mud explosions over west, that engineers started going down into the tunnels and saw that all hell had broken loose.

  “Another thing about that extra water is they don’t know where it came from exactly. Up north of the city, around the bank, a couple of old irrigation and water systems hook up together or at least intertwine. They link into the city’s water and sewage systems at different places. If you think the riddle can be solved by asking who the hell is missing four to eight million gallons of water, don’t. No place seems to be. What they do know is the area under the bank was probably flooded three times.

  “As for the matter of intelligence, we have two choices. Did the crooks have an inside source of information, a human source, say at Brink’s, to tell them when the money was going to be shipped to the Mormon State National Bank? Did they have someone inside Mormon State itself giving them tips? Or did they rely on the bank’s own monitoring system? Did they tap into the bank’s main monitoring cable and see for themselves when an armored truck pulled up on the street outside and began unloading money … see the money sacks being brought downstairs and put into the vault? There were splice marks found on the main monitoring cable of the bank’s security system.”

  Grafton nodded to himself, took long and studious notice of Corticun … pointed to an empty chair. “Sit!”

  Corticun came forward and seated himself. Crossed his legs.

  “This sound like the crime of the century so far?” Grafton was less abrasive.

  “… I would say,” Corticun cleared his throat, “it sounds extremely well planned and well executed.”

  Grafton spit tobacco into the potty. “One way or another the crooks knew when that first shipment of money arrived. It was delivered by Brink’s armored truck number 12–311 at four P.M. on Friday, August twentieth, and put in the vault. By Sunday morning, August twenty-second, the shipment was missing from the vault. So was everything the crooks had used to pull the job except for a demolished boat and piece of rope and string of mud-caked, hundred-watt light bulbs.”

  Grafton leaned forward and smiled at Corticun. “Assuming you were me, what would you do now?”

  The legs recrossed. “You mean after going to the assistant United States attorney?”

  “Go to the assistant U.S. attorney? Why?”

  “To receive jurisdiction,” said Corticun.

  “Jurisdiction for what?”

  “To investigate the robbery you just described.”

  “That’s what you would have done, barreled ass right over to the assistant U.S. attorney and got yourself some jurisdiction?”

  “Mr. Grafton, that is what Director Hoover expects to be done. Must be done.”

  “Make this here robbery an official FBI investigation, no matter what, huh?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Grafton looked over at Quinton writing. “You getting all this down, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell you what, Mr. Headquarters Pinstripe Junior G-Man,” Grafton said to Corticun, “you go see the assistant U.S. attorney on your own and claim jurisdiction. Claim it for Edgar Hoover or whoever else sent you sniffing around down here. Claim it and bring in all the photographers and reporters and TV cameras and hire a fine brass band to march up Main Street investigating your crime of the century. My men, they’re keeping as far away as possible from that robbery.” He got up and stretched. “Me personally, I’m keeping a thousand miles far away and pronto. I’m catching the first airplane back to Montana and finishing out a duly earned vacation just like planned. Anything pops up, wire me at Silver Lake.”

  Grafton walked to Brewmeister. “Know what these fancy pinstripe desk jocks forgot to ask? They forgot to ask how much money was in those sacks Brink’s delivered to the bank. How much money was stolen. How much money them dumb bastards who call themselves bank crooks made off with.”

  “How much?” Brewmeister asked.

  “Guess, Brew.”

  “It’s too good to tell you outright,” Cub added.

  Happy was smiling. Cub fought not to smile.

  Brewmeister made a deflated estimate. “Half a million dollars?”

  “Sixty-five hundred dollars!” Grafton broke up. “… Sixty-five lousy hundred dollars …”

  “In singles,” Cub spit out between belly laughs. “… There were only one-dollar bills in those money sacks … only singles.”

  “Those poor dumb crooks did all their labor and digging and planning for probably under a thousand bucks a man.” Happy nearly ch
oked laughing.

  “… Under a thousand in singles.” It was the funniest thing Cub had ever heard.

  “Those dumb clucks would have been better off on unemployment.” Happy doubled over in pain laughing.

  “Sixty-five hundred, oh my God!” Brewmeister nearly ripped down the traction rig laughing.

  “It’s the crime of the century okay …” Grafton pounded his fist against his leg and roared louder than ever, “… the poorest crime of the century.”

  “The Polish crime of the century,” Cub howled.

  Grafton dropped to his knees in laughter, with tears streaking down his face, gasped, “There ought to be a law against doing that to crooks.”

  Happy fell into the wall laughing, laughing even harder he shouted, “Good Lord, I’m peeing in my pants!

  The twin-engine blue and white Cessna 210 airplane dropped through a rip in the early evening cloud cover, banked steeply, leveled off and, maintaining an altitude of five hundred feet, droned downstream above the Mississippi River; passed over a turn in the river known as Cyclone Bend and an enormous gray rock cliff rising from the turgid water of the western bank called Warbonnet Ridge and a patchwork of forest preserve and lagoons and reservoirs and recreational areas; on down above the outer limits of the city of Prairie Port and a midriver current known as the Treachery and riverfront rock palisades on which loomed the construction sites for the Grange Association’s nearly completed high-rise complex and the just-begun Prairie Farmer Industrial Park and the River Rise project, which housed Mormon State National Bank; further downstream over Lookout Bluff and the recently constructed 60,000-seat sports stadium; over the twinkling evening lights of Hennings Wharf and Steamboat Cove and Nigerton and ten blocks of downtown “Old City” and twenty-five modern acres of New City, which was ringed to the north and west by wooded and lush hills of riding trails and hunt clubs and golf courses and fashionable homes and large estates and low, modern industrial buildings housing much of the area’s burgeoning aerospace and electronics industries; on above the river’s delta islands, one of which contained a softball field, and a grand turn-of-the-century waterfront luxury hotel and gabled houses and the university and the last ridge of high ground and horse farms and pastures; on out over the prairie whence the city received its name.

  As the plane banked to start an upstream sweep, the lights of Prairie Port began to dim and raise … dim and raise in geometric clusters of approximately four square blocks each … dim and raise with no cluster in synchronization with the next.

  “Jesus, look at that,” the pilot said, staring down through his side window.

  The two men behind him said nothing, continued unscrewing the side bolts of a metal refrigerator locker.

  “The city looks like a huge blinking checkerboard,” the pilot continued. “A checkerboard run amok.” He glanced back at the pair of men kneeling over the locker. “You oughta see.”

  “You see for us, friend,” the shorter man said. “You keep your eyes straight ahead or down on the city … but not back here.”

  “Sure thing.” The pilot turned back to the controls. He hadn’t liked his two passengers from the moment he picked them up, and their big metal locker, in East St. Louis an hour and a half before. They sure as hell weren’t from East St. Louis or anywhere in the Midwest. They were too close-mouthed, too well dressed, too hard to pin down to suit him. He couldn’t be sure if they were mob guys or big business guys or CIA. He’d flown all of them in his day and could usually sense who was who, sooner or later. But these two on board now eluded him. Ah, what the hell, he told himself, Lieutenant Jake Oferly of the Chicago PD had asked him to take the job, so how bad could the pair be?… anyway, when you fly charter in and around Chicago it’s smart to stay on good terms with Jake. And they did pay in advance, $1,400 on the spot. Why worry?

  “Lose altitude,” the short man ordered.

  The plane dove and leveled off. The two men slid the heavy lead lid from the locker … lifted and lay on the cabin floor a hermetically sealed plastic body bag … unzipped the bag. The corpse of Teddy Anglaterra lay exposed. A naked cadaver that the two men began dressing in a light green initialed work shirt, a dark green tie, dark gray slacks and a dark gray suit jacket. Once the body was dressed, the shorter man moved forward to make sure the pilot continued looking ahead. The taller man strapped a broken watch to the corpse’s wrist, draped a silver crucifix around the discolored neck. A battered wallet without identification went into the rear pocket of the trousers. Keys and change and sixteen dollars in waterlogged bills slid into a side pocket.

  “You’re still too high.” The short man was standing directly behind the pilot.

  “If I go any lower we can’t glide.” The pilot indicated below. “Is that the spot you want?”

  The short man looked down through the window and told him it was.

  The Cessna 210 flew due north and made a wide, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and started back down over the river, flew at wingtip past Warbonnet Ridge and on down over the Treachery and palisade-top construction sites for the Grange Association and Prairie Farmer Association and River Rise Realty Corporation, on beyond Mormon State National Bank and Lookout Bluff and Hennings Wharf.

  “We’re here,” the pilot said.

  The tall man jerked up and opened the trapdoor in the cabin floor, pushed the corpse through, hung his own head down and out and watched Teddy Anglaterra splash into the Mississippi River at a spot not far from where the body of a lunatic lady had been retrieved by helicopter two days earlier.

  “So there the danged boys are, Ed Grafton and Cub Hennessy, hunkering over the office desk and sniffing away like they can’t tell something dead from something hissing.” Billy Yates, his face lathered with aerosol soap, spoke into the motel suite’s bathroom mirror as he stood in neatly ironed pajama bottoms shaving with a straight blade. “They were telling the rest of us what happened at the hospital with Brewmeister. Telling, hell, they were putting on a full production. Partying too. They brought a half case of white lightning in with them. I mean, real mountain moonshine. The kind that peels paint off fenders. And they’d been drinking pretty fierce before they came barging into the office. I didn’t know what to expect. It was old hat to the other agents. Most of ’em ate it up. A few didn’t. There’re some real tight butts up there.

  “So anyway, Ed Grafton and Cub Hennessy are telling us about talking to Martin Brewmeister and the Brass Balls. Brass Balls is what they call anything from Washington, D.C., around here. They don’t say SOG or Seat of Government or Headquarters or even Washington if they can help it. Everything’s Brass Balls or Brass-Balled Monkeys to them.”

  A long and languid “Ohhh” emanated from the dark bedroom beyond the open door.

  “Actually, it’s Ed Grafton who’s telling what went on,” Yates amended. “Cub Hennessy’s passing around white lightning. Right in the middle of a sentence, Ed Grafton stops talking and gets this expression on his face and hunkers over and starts sniffing. Sniffing and sniffing all around. Cub Hennessy hunkers and starts sniffing too. They sniff and sniff, the two of them. Ed Grafton makes like a hunting hound, leaps up on top of a desk and gets on all fours, points his nose at the conference room door and lifts his hind leg and freezes. Cub Hennessy, he starts in howling at the moon. Then they both take out these toy pistols, these cap guns, and they sneak up on the door. Whammo, they pull open the door and guess what bursts out, Tina Beth!”

  “… What bursts out?” Yates’s wife, Tina Beth, asked from the unlighted bedroom.

  “Happy de Camp does.”

  “Who?”

  “Happy de Camp. He’s the agent whose son burned his draft card.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “And guess what Happy’s wearing, Tina Beth? Nothing! He’s bare-bottom naked ’cepting for a pinstripe jacket and a one-dollar bill tied around his you-know-what. Happy bursts out and goes racing round the office letting out these war whoops with Ed Grafton and Cub Hennessy snappin
g caps at his naked behind.”

  Yates grinned off into the darkness of the bedroom. “Remind you of anything, Tina Beth?”

  “Shush up, naughty boy.”

  Shaving resumed. “Then Ed Grafton stands on another desk and proposes a toast to Denis Corticun and Harlon Quinton. They’re the two Brass Balls up in Martin Brewmeister’s hospital room who thought the bank robbery was the crime of the century. Pretty soon everybody starts in toasting everything and even the tight-butt agents are a little loaded and having a good time. It was crazy up there, Tina Beth, and getting crazier. Only around here they like to say looney-toon for crazy.

  “They’re drinking white lightning and warning Ed Grafton he better shag out if he’s going to catch the evening plane back to Montana. Ed Grafton’s enjoying the toasting too much to leave. They’re toasting some things two or three times. Toasting Denis Corticun and Harlon Quinton and all the Brass Balls at headquarters. Toasting Frank Santi, the chief of police, and all the Prairie Port cops who went chasing the bank robbers. Toasting the bank’s alarm system which said the crooks were trapped in the vault. Most of all, they’re toasting the crooks themselves, who went to all that trouble to make so little money.

  “The scuffle kinda started when they toasted going over to the assistant U.S. attorney’s office and getting jurisdiction to investigate the robbery. Somebody or other said the assistant U.S. attorney never did catch the softball when the lights went out the other night. I don’t know what the hell they were talking about, Tina Beth, but Cub Hennessy got good and mad about it. Someone was accusing the assistant U.S. attorney of dropping a softball in the dark and finding it on the ground and holding it up when the lights came on, saying he caught it all the time. Cub Hennessy said the assistant U.S. attorney was the only public official he knew who never lied and that if he said he caught it in the dark, he sure t’hell caught it in the dark. Arguing turned to shoving, and that’s when Ed Grafton announced he’s got to go catch the plane for Montana. He put an arm around the agent who was arguing against the ball getting caught in the dark, Lester Kebbon, and says, ‘Come on, you’re driving me to the airport.’