Cynthia Manson (ed) (30 page)

“I’ll bring them along,” he said
vaguely.

“Sooner the better, Mr. Payne,
sooner the better.”

Mr. Payne did not like being
reminded of the bicycle incident. He gave Danny half a crown instead of the ten
shillings he had intended, crossed the road again, and walked into the side
entrance of Orbin’s, which called itself unequivocally “London’s Greatest
Department Store.”

This end of the store was quiet. He
walked up the stairs, past the grocery department on the ground floor, and wine
and cigars on the second, to jewelry on the third. There were rarely many
people in this department, but today a small crowd had gathered around a man
who was making a speech. A placard at the department entrance said: “The
Russian Royal Family Jewels. On display for two weeks by kind permission of the
Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Moldo-Lithuania.”

These were not the Russian Crown
Jewels, seized by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, but an inferior
collection brought out of Russia by the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess, who had
long since become plain Mr. and Mrs. Skandorski, who lived in New Jersey, and
were now on a visit to England.

Mr. Payne was not interested in Mr. and
Mrs. Skandorski, nor in Sir Henry Orbin who was stumbling through a short
speech. He was interested only in the jewels. When the speech was over he
mingled with the crowd round the showcase that stood almost in the middle of
the room.

The royal jewels lay on beds of
velvet—a tiara that looked too heavy to be worn, diamond necklaces and
bracelets, a cluster of diamonds and emeralds, and a dozen other pieces, each
with an elegant calligraphic description of its origin and history. Mr. Payne
did not see the jewels as a romantic relic of the past, nor did he permit
himself to think of them as things of beauty. He saw them as his personal
Christmas present.

He walked out of the department,
looking neither to left nor right, and certainly paying no attention to the
spotty young clerk who rushed forward to open the door for him. He walked back
to his bookshop, sniffing that sharp December air, made another little joke to
Miss Oliphant, and told her she could go out to lunch. During her lunch hour he
sold an American a set of a Victorian magazine called
The
Jewel Box.

It seemed a good augury.

In the past ten years Mr. Payne had
engineered successfully—with the help of other, and inferior, intellects—six
jewel robberies. He had remained undetected, he believed, partly because of his
skill in planning, partly because he ran a perfectly legitimate book business,
and partly because he broke the law only when he needed money. He had little
interest in women, and his habits were generally ascetic, but he did have one vice.

Mr. Payne developed a system at
roulette, an improvement on the almost infallible Frank-Konig system, and every
year he went to Monte Carlo and played his system. Almost every year it
failed—or rather, it revealed certain imperfections which he then tried to
remedy.

It was to support his foolproof
system that Mr. Payne had turned from bookselling to crime. He believed himself
to be, in a quiet way, a mastermind in the modern criminal world.

Those associated with him were far
from that, as he immediately would have acknowledged. He met them two evenings
after he had looked at the royal jewels, in his pleasant little flat above the
shop, which could be approached from a side entrance opening into an alley.

There was Stacey, who looked what he
was, a thick-nosed thug; there was a thin young man in a tight suit whose name
was Jack Line, and who was always called Straight or Straight Line; and there
was Lester Jones, the spotty clerk in the Jewelry Department.

Stacey and Straight Line sat
drinking whiskey, Mr. Payne sipped some excellent sherry, and Lester Jones
drank nothing at all, while Mr. Payne in his pedantic, almost schoolmasterly
manner, told them how the robbery was to be accomplished.

“You all know what the job is, but
let me tell you how much it is worth. In its present form the collection is
worth whatever sum you’d care to mention—a quarter of a million pounds perhaps.
There is no real market value. But alas, it will have to be broken up. My
friend thinks the value will be in the neighborhood of fifty thousand pounds.
Not less, and not much more.”

“Your friend?” the jewelry clerk
said timidly.

“The fence. Lambie, isn’t it?” It
was Stacey who spoke. Mr. Payne nodded. “Okay, how do we split?”

“I will come to that later. Now,
here are the difficulties. First of all, there are two store detectives on each
floor. We must see to it that those on the third floor are not in the Jewelry
Department. Next, there is a man named Davidson, an American, whose job it is
to keep an eye on the jewels. He has been brought over here by a protection
agency, and it is likely that he will carry a gun. Third, the jewels are in a
showcase, and any attempt to open this showcase other than with the proper key
will set off an alarm. The key is kept in the Manager’s Office, inside the
Jewelry Department.”

Stacey got up, shambled over to the
whiskey decanter, and poured himself another drink. “Where do you get all this
from?”

Mr. Payne permitted himself a small
smile. “Lester works in the department. Lester is a friend of mine.”

Stacey looked at Lester with
contempt. He did not like amateurs.

“Let me continue, and tell you how
the obstacles can be overcome. First, the two store detectives. Supposing that
a small fire bomb were planted in the Fur Department, at the other end of the
third floor from Jewelry— that would certainly occupy one detective for a few
minutes. Supposing that in the department that deals with ladies’ hats, which
is next to Furs, a woman shopper complained that she had been robbed—this would
certainly involve the other store detective. Could you arrange this, Stace?
These—assistants, shall I call them?—would be paid a straight fee. They would
have to carry out their diversions at a precise time, which I have fixed as ten
thirty in the morning.”

“Okay,” said Stacey. “Consider it
arranged.”

“Next, Davidson. He is an American,
as I said, and Lester tells me that a happy event is expected in his family any
day now. He has left Mrs. Davidson behind in America, of course. Now, supposing
that a call came through, apparently from an American hospital, for Mr.
Davidson. Supposing that the telephone in the Jewelry Department was out of
order because the cord had been cut. Davidson would be called out of the
department for the few minutes, no more, that we should need.”

“Who cuts the cord?” Stacey asked.

“That will be part of Lester’s job.”

“And who makes the phone call?”

“Again, Stace, I hoped that you
might be able to provide—”

“I can do that.” Stacey drained his
whiskey. “But what do you do?”

Mr. Payne’s lips, never full, were
compressed to a disapproving line. He answered the implied criticism only by
inviting them to look at two maps—one the layout of the entire third floor, the
other of the Jewelry Department itself. Stacey and Straight were impressed, as
the uneducated always are, by such evidence of careful planning.

“The Jewelry Department is at one
end of the third floor. It has only one exit—into the Carpet Department. There
is a service lift which comes straight up into the Jewelry Department. You and
I, Stace, will be in that. We shall stop it between floors with the Emergency
Stop button. At exactly ten thirty-two we shall go up to the third floor.
Lester will give us a sign. If everything has gone well, we proceed. If not, we
call the job off. Now, what I propose...”

He told them, they listened, and
they found it good. Even the ignorant, Mr. Payne was glad to see, could
recognize genius. He told Straight Line his role.

“We must have a car, Straight, and a
driver. What he has to do is simple, but he must stay cool. So I thought of you.”
Straight grinned.

“In Jessiter Street, just outside
the side entrance to Orbin’s, there is a parking space reserved for Orbins’
customers. It is hardly ever full. But if it is full you can double park there
for five minutes—cars often do that. I take it you can—acquire a car, shall I
say?—for the purpose. You will face away from Oxford Street, and you will have
no more than a few minutes’ run to Lambie’s house on Greenly Street. You will
drop Stace and me, drive on a mile or two, and leave the car. We shall give the
stuff to Lambie. He will pay on the nail. Then we all split.”

From that point they went on to
argue about the split. The argument was warm, but not really heated. They
settled that Stacey would get 25 per cent of the total, Straight and Lester 12½
per cent each, and that half would go to the mastermind. Mr. Payne agreed to
provide out of his share the £150 that Stacey said would cover the three
diversions.

The job was fixed six days ahead—for
Tuesday of the following week.

Stacey had two faults which had
prevented him from rising high in his profession. One was that he drank too
much, the other that he was stupid. He made an effort to keep his drinking
under control, knowing that when he drank he talked. So he did not even tell
his wife about the job, although she was safe enough.

But he could not resist cheating
about the money, which Payne had given to him in full.

The fire bomb was easy. Stacey got
hold of a little man named Shrimp Bateson, and fixed it with him. There was no
risk, and Shrimp thought himself well paid with twenty-five quid. The bomb
itself cost only a fiver, from a friend who dealt in hardware. It was guaranteed
to cause just a little fire, nothing serious.

For the telephone call Stacey used a
Canadian who was grubbing a living at a striptease club. It didn’t seem to
either of them that the job was worth more than a tenner, but the Canadian
asked for twenty and got fifteen.

The woman was a different matter,
for she had to be a bit of an actress, and she might be in for trouble since
she actually had to cause a disturbance. Stacey hired an eighteen-stone Irish
woman named Lucy O’Malley, who had once been a female wrestler, and had very
little in the way of a record—nothing more than a couple of drunk and
disorderlies. She refused to take anything less than £50, realizing, as the
others hadn’t, that Stacey must have something big on.

The whole lot came to less than
£100, so that there was cash to spare. Stacey paid them all half their money in
advance, put the rest of the £100 aside, and went on a roaring drunk for a
couple of days, during which he somehow managed to keep his mouth buttoned and
his nose clean.

When he reported on Monday night to
Mr. Payne he seemed to have everything fixed, including himself.

Straight Line was a reliable
character, a young man who kept himself to himself. He pinched the car on
Monday afternoon, took it along to the semilegitimate garage run by his
father-in-law, and put new license plates on it. There was no time for a
respray job, but he roughed the car up a little so that the owner would be
unlikely to recognize it if by an unlucky chance he should be passing outside
Orbin’s on Tuesday morning. During this whole operation, of course, Straight
wore gloves.

He also reported to Mr. Payne on
Monday night.

Lester’s name was not really
Lester—it was Leonard. His mother and his friends in Balham, where he had been
born and brought up, called him Lenny. He detested this, as he detested his
surname and the pimples that, in spite of his assiduous efforts with ointment,
appeared on his face every couple of months. There was nothing he could do
about the name of Jones, because it was on his National Insurance card, but
Lester for Leonard was a gesture toward emancipation.

Another gesture was made when he
left home and mother for a one-room flat in Notting Hill Gate. A third
gesture—and the most important one—was his friendship with Lucille, whom he had
met in a jazz club called The Whizz Fizz.

Lucille called herself an actress,
but the only evidence of it was that she occasionally sang in the club. Her
voice was tuneless but loud. After she sang, Lester always bought her a drink,
and the drink was always whiskey.

“So what’s new?” she said. “Lester-boy,
what’s new?”

“I sold a diamond necklace today.
Two hundred and fifty pounds. Mr. Marston was very pleased.” Mr. Marston was
the manager of the Jewelry Department.

“So Mr. Marston was pleased. Big
deal.” Lucille looked round restlessly, tapping her foot.

“He might give me a raise.”

“Another ten bob a week and a
pension for your fallen arches.”

“Lucille, won’t you—”

“No.” The peak of emancipation for
Lester, a dream beyond which his thoughts really could not reach, was that one
day Lucille would come to live with him. Far from that, she had not even slept
with him yet. “Look, Lester-boy, I know what I want, and let’s face it, you
haven’t got it.”

He was incautious enough to ask, “What?”

“Money, moolah, the green folding
stuff. Without it you’re nothing, with it they can’t hurt you.”