Plunder Squad (13 page)

Half afraid this whole trip was a cruel joke on Renard’s part, Griffith paid the driver and went inside, where a heavy-set middle-aged woman with a bust you could have set a checkerboard
on gave him a pseudo-bright look and said, “May I help you?”

Hesitantly, his mind full of the practical-joke idea, he said, “My name is Leon Griffith. I believe I’m supposed to see somebody here?” And he couldn’t help making it a question at the very end.

But she said, “Oh, yes, we’ve been expecting you. Mr. Smith will see you. Through that door there.”

He went past half a dozen empty scarred desks to the door at the rear of the room, and through it into a small crowded seedy office reeking with the aura of poverty. The thin fiftyish man at the desk had the look of a failed lawyer: shiny suit, wrinkled tie, dandruff on his shoulders, watery eyes behind bent-rimmed glasses. And yet, when he glanced over at Griffith in the doorway, there was something unexpected in his face, some assurance or confidence that didn’t go with his appearance or his surroundings.

Griffith gave his name again, and the man at the desk smiled, more in personal satisfaction than in greeting. “Come on in,” he said. “I’m Mr. Smith. Sit down.”

I shouldn’t be here
, Griffith thought.
I should get out of here
. But it was too late for that, it had been too late for months now.

“You come well recommended,” Mr. Smith said. He was pulling forms out of drawers. “If you’ll fill these out—”

They seemed to be ordinary loan application forms: name, occupation, income, bank accounts, references. In silence Griffith filled them out, and then pushed them across the desk toward Mr. Smith, who went through them slowly and carefully. Griffith sat there, watching Mr. Smith read and wondering what the man was thinking. Nothing showed in his face at all.

Finally Mr. Smith nodded and put the forms down and said, “Well, you seem fine, Mr. Griffith. Now, you understand the terms of the loan?”

“I think so.”

“Two percent per month.”

“Yes.”

“With a minimum of six months’ interest.”

Griffith said nothing. He stared at Mr. Smith.

“You didn’t know that?”

“No.” Six months’ interest: eighty-four hundred dollars. Almost ten thousand dollars.

Mr. Smith’s smile was sympathetic. “In that case,” he said, “I imagine you also didn’t realize the first six months’ interest is taken in advance.”

“In ad—” Griffith shook his head, unable to understand.

“If you borrow seventy thousand dollars,” Mr. Smith said, being gentle and friendly, “you’ll actually receive sixty-one thousand six hundred. But of course your interest is paid for the first six months.”

“But I need seventy.”

“In that case,” Mr. Smith said, “I suggest you borrow eighty. That way, you’ll receive in cash seventy thousand, four hundred dollars.”

“How much—uh, how much interest?”

“Nine thousand, six hundred dollars.”

An incredible amount. Griffith licked his lips. Faintly, he said, “And then I have to pay the principal in six months?”

“No no, not at all. So long as you continue to pay the interest, you don’t have to worry about the principal.”

“Sixteen hundred dollars a month?”

“That’s right.”

“Every month, as long as I want, until I pay the principal.”

Mr. Smith nodded.

Griffith saw the doom opening up in front of him. Almost two thousand dollars a month. It would keep him off-balance, keep him from getting very far ahead, probably keep him from ever paying off the balance.

Ever? God, no. He’d have to get the eighty thousand together sometime. Within a year, anyway. Somehow or other. Once this current mess was straightened out, he’d be able to work on the problem of the loan.

Mr. Smith said, “Do you want to go ahead?”

Nervously, Griffith nodded. “Yes,” he said.

The show closed in Indianapolis at eight P.M. on Monday. It was ten after the hour when the last visitor trailed out and the guards could lock the door and turn the gallery over to the moving men, who came streaming in with their wooden boxes and plastic padding and clipboards and trolleys and canvas gloves, and went to work dismantling the display.

Nearly two dozen men were now distributed through the three rooms of the temporary gallery, more than had been in here at any one time all day. There were five uniformed and armed private guards. There were eight local moving men, working under the supervision of two experts in art transportation imported from New York. There were two suited and sober representatives from the insurance company, and two men from the government-associated foundation sponsoring this tour. The local museum official who had been the foundation’s Indianapolis contact was present, for no particular reason, and so was one plainclothes city detective.

The packing job was brisk and efficient, but it still took a long time for each individual piece. A painting was carefully taken off the wall and laid face down on a bed of clear air-filled plastic padding in a shallow wooden box. More padding was put around the edges, and another layer of it on top, and then the lid
of the box was fastened in place with bolts and nuts. The name of the painting was already inscribed on the lid and sides of the box, and now that same name was checked off on two clipboards, one held by a man from the foundation and the other by a man from the insurance company. Next, the box was carried over and stacked near the door to the loading platform outside, to wait for all the rest of the paintings to be stowed away and ready for transit. During the time this packing was being done, no one left the gallery and no one attempted to enter it.

Three hours were spent in crating the paintings, the last one being finished just before eleven-thirty. When that part was done, one of the art-transportation experts reported the fact to one of the foundation men, who passed the news on to the city detective, who got on the phone and called headquarters to say they were ready for the next phase in the operation.

Which was loading the truck. On a short-term lease from a major nationwide moving and storage company, the truck was a heavy-duty red Mack cab and a long silver Fruehauf trailer with a step-down behind the rear axle. The interior walls and floor of the trailer were completely padded in dark green, and lengths of rope attached to hooks in the walls could be strung across to fix any amount of cargo in place. The driver, a union man who did no work other than operating the truck, had been sitting in the cab outside the loading platform since a little after ten, listening to an Indianapolis pop music station on his transistor radio and reading the latest Travis McGee. He was called back briefly from the Florida coast by the sound of the loading-platform doors opening, but when he saw in his left-side rear-view mirror that it was just the moving men starting to bring the boxes out, he went right back to his book.

The trailer doors were shut and locked, and one of the foundation men had the key. He unlocked the doors, and as they were being opened, a patrol car of the Indianapolis city police came down the side street next to the loading platform and stopped nearby. The city detective jumped down from the platform and went over to talk to the cops in the patrol car.

The local moving men had unloaded this truck at the beginning of the show here in town, but this was only their second experience with this trailer and this cargo, so they followed the instructions of the two art-transportation experts, loading the crates in the exact sequence and exact positions they were told, tying portions of the load with specific ropes in specific ways, so that when they were finished, the trailer would be loaded in precisely the way it had been when it had brought the paintings into town ten days ago.

While the truck was being loaded, the patrol car remained parked nearby, and the five guards stood around on the loading platform watching the work and the surrounding darkness. Indianapolis goes to bed early on a week night, and this was a side street; traffic had just about stopped happening.

Because of the care that had to be used, and the specific blueprint that had to be followed, it took over an hour to load the paintings onto the truck. It was nearly one in the morning when at last the trailer doors were shut and the foundation man locked them and called up to the driver to switch on the burglar alarm—a siren that would wail like a coyote if anyone tried to open the trailer without the key in the foundation man’s possession.

Two of the guards now walked away around the corner, coming back a minute later in a pair of identical dark green Plymouths rented by the foundation, like the truck, for the duration of the tour. A second guard got into the front seat of each Plymouth, and the remaining fifth guard climbed up into the cab of the truck with the driver. The two insurance men got into the back seat of one of the Plymouths, and a foundation man and art-transportation expert got into the back of the other, leaving one foundation man and one expert, who would travel separately and arrive in St. Louis an hour or so ahead of the main party, to make sure everything was ready at that end.

This particular road show was now traveling from its fifth to its sixth city, but most of the people involved in it had shepherded other touring art displays over the years, and the method
was by now standard and routine. They had done so far everything exactly as they had done it in the trip coming to Indianapolis, and the trip before that, and the trip before that.

The local moving men now departed, and so did the two advance men. The city detective got into the back seat of the patrol car, and the truck driver started his engine, turned his wheel with mighty lunges of his shoulders, and the rig moved slowly out away from the loading platform and into the street. The patrol car rolled out in front of it, and the Plymouth containing two guards, one foundation man and one expert came second. Then the truck, followed by the other Plymouth, with the last two guards and the two insurance men.

The four-vehicle fleet traveled slowly over to Meridian Street, and stayed on Meridian till the ramp to Interstate 70. They took 70 west, and as they approached the city line, one of the cops in the patrol car radioed to State Police Headquarters, just a mile or two ahead, to the south of the highway.

The State Police had been alerted ahead of time, and were waiting for the call. By the time the convoy reached the city line, a State Police car was there, waiting to take over from the city cops, who took the Morris Street exit to make their turnaround and go home.

The vehicles were maintaining a speed of forty-five miles an hour, way under the permissible limit but the maximum permitted by both the foundation and the insurance company. With two hundred fifty miles of road between downtown Indianapolis and downtown St. Louis, it would take nearly six hours to make the run; they should expect to pull in and be ready to start unloading by seven in the morning. Unpacking and hanging the paintings on the walls would take a good four hours, which would still leave plenty of leeway for the one o’clock press preview and the four o’clock cocktail party. Everything was going along according to schedule.

It was seventy-five miles to Terre Haute, and another ten beyond that to the Illinois border. The first State Police car was replaced by a second at Cloverdale, about halfway to Terre Haute. There was very little traffic this late at night, mostly
other big rigs on long hauls, some of them moving even more slowly than the convoy, but for reasons of weight, not insurance.

There was a hundred-sixty-five-mile swing across the State of Illinois from Terre Haute, Indiana, to St. Louis, Missouri. The Illinois State Police took over escort duty at the town of State Line, and four different cars would guard them on their way, a new one taking over at about every forty miles.

At four-thirty in the morning Illinois Highway Patrol car S-562, Trooper Jarvis driving, Trooper MacAndrews accompanying, drove up onto route 70 from U.S. 40 at Bluff City. Trooper MacAndrews was in radio communication with the car currently escorting the art shipment, and knew they would reach mile marker 93 in approximately ten minutes. An official-use-only U-turn was down by that marker; Trooper MacAndrews informed the other car that they’d await them in that U-turn.

It was a two-minute run to the U-turn, and when they got there a car was sitting in it. “What the hell is that?” Trooper MacAndrews said. There wasn’t supposed to be any civilian use of the U-turns at all, including parking.

“Fifty-eight Chevrolet,” Trooper Jarvis said. “Busted-up old clunker, shouldn’t be on the road at all. Prob’ly broke down, they shoved it in here.”

“Not supposed to be in here,” Trooper MacAndrews said.

“We’ll check it out,” Trooper Jarvis said, making the turn to stop beside the Chevrolet, and damn if there wasn’t a couple screwing on a blanket next to the car.

“Son of a bitch!” Trooper MacAndrews said.

The bare ass of the boy stopped humping when the light hit it, and he stared over his shoulder in astonishment at the car two yards back of his feet. He was as shaggy and hairy as a mountain goat.

“One of them hippies,” Trooper MacAndrews said.

“We’ll see about this,” Trooper Jarvis said grimly, and carefully put on the emergency brake before getting out of the car.

While the troopers were climbing out of their vehicle, the
boy was climbing off the girl. The girl squinted in the light and shielded her eyes with her hands, like an Indian scout, but made no attempt to shield anything else.

The troopers walked forward, hitching their gun belts, frowning in judicious disapproval. The boy was squatting now beside the girl, squinting up with a hopeful little grin on his face, as though somehow prayer would keep this from turning into a bad situation. His trousers and underpants were wrapped around his right ankle, but he was otherwise dressed.

The girl was sort of dressed, too. From the waist up she was covered by a thin shirt that showed she didn’t wear a bra, and the area of her waist itself was covered by her bunched-up skirt. Below that, though, she was the nakedest thing Trooper MacAndrews had ever seen. Her legs were spread and one knee was lifted, and Trooper MacAndrews had never even seen his wife as clearly and frankly as that. He wanted very much to stare at that crotch, in fascination rather than lust, but with an effort of will he stared at the boy’s eyes instead. They were blinking, watery, hopeful, hopeless, apologetic, pleading, and a few other things.

“Well, now,” Trooper Jarvis said.

Trooper MacAndrews had nothing to say. Trooper Jarvis was older, and more used to dealing with the public. Trooper MacAndrews simply observed, but just the boy.

“Uh,” said the boy. His nervous grin flashed on and off, on and off, like a busted neon sign.

“I wonder, boy,” Trooper Jarvis said, “if you realize just how many laws you’re breaking out here.”

“Well, uh—We were just, we kind of—” The boy grinned nervously some more, and said, “We just got excited, I guess, and we wanted to screw.”

The word “screw” said in front of the half-naked girl startled Trooper MacAndrews more than he would have guessed. He found himself enraged by the boy, and wishing there was a reason to paste him one. He was also troubled by a physical change in himself that he couldn’t entirely understand; he didn’t lust after the goddam girl, he knew he didn’t, so why—? She
looked filthy, anyway, and she was probably diseased, and no more than twenty, and utterly depraved. He couldn’t possibly want her.

Trooper Jarvis, meantime, was saying, “Easy with the language, boy. Don’t make it tougher on yourself.”

The boy decided to try bravado: “Well, it isn’t against the law to screw, is it?”

“It is on the public highway,” Trooper Jarvis told him. “And in any case, this U-turn here is for official use only. You can’t come in here at all, much less come in here to . . . uh, fornicate.”

“I’ll check out the car,” Trooper MacAndrews said. He needed to get away from that girl for a few seconds.

Trooper Jarvis nodded, and kept frowning at the boy.

As Trooper MacAndrews moved away, the boy started the inevitable this-is-the-first-time-can’t-we-just-forget-it number. Well, maybe they could and maybe they couldn’t. Partly it would be determined by what, if anything, Trooper MacAndrews found in their car. And he was inclined to believe he would find either liquor or marijuana, and most likely marijuana.

The girl’s body was too close to the right side of the car for comfort, so Trooper MacAndrews walked around to the left. It was a two-door model, with busted glass in the side windows and Kentucky license plates; amazing it was permitted on the road in any state in the Union. Trooper MacAndrews shook his head in disgust as he walked up to the driver’s door and opened it, and looked in at the man crouched on the floor on the right-hand side. He was big, crowded in there, and he looked very mean. So did the pistol in his hand, which was pointing straight at MacAndrews’ head.

“One move,” the man said, “and you’ll never live again.”