Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (16 page)

 
          
They
both noticed that there were now two guards showing on the screen for the
reception area.

 
          
Eastpoole’s
secretary belonged in this setting. She was a tall, cool, beautiful girl in a
beige knit dress. She turned away from the window now and came walking over,
saying to her boss, “Mr. Eas—”

 
          
Eastpoole,
angry, not wanting to hear whatever normal business the secretary had been
about to discuss with him, interrupted her, gesturing over his shoulder at the
two cops and saying, “These people are—”

 
          
Not
that way. Tom overrode him, pushing forward and saying, “
It’s
okay, Miss.
Nothing to worry about.”

 
          
The
secretary, looking from face to face, was beginning to get alarmed, but not yet
really frightened. Addressing the question to all of them equally, she said,
“What’s the matter?”

 
          
Bitterly,
Eastpoole said, “They aren’t really police.”

           
Tom made a kind of joke of it, to
keep the girl from going into panic. “We’re desperate criminals, mam,” he said.
“We’re engaged in a major robbery.”

 
          
Whenever
Joe was confronted by a woman he wanted to get into bed with and knew it wasn’t
possible to he got hostile, and showed it in a kind of angry smiling manner. As
he did now, coming forward and saying, “They’ll ask you questions on TV, just
like a stewardess.”

 
          
With
an unconscious automatic gesture, she reached up and patted her hair. At the
same time, her eyes were getting more frightened, and there was a tremor in her
voice when she said, “Mr. Eastpoole, is this really—”

 
          
“Yes,
it’s really,” Tom said. “But you yourself are in absolutely no danger. Mr.
Eastpoole, you sit down at your desk.”

 
          
The
secretary stared at everybody. “But—” she said, and then ran down, unable to
formulate the question. She moved her hands vaguely, and stared, and looked
frightened.

 
          
Eastpoole
did what he was told. Sitting down behind the desk, he said, “There’s no way
you can get away with this, you know. You’re just endangering people’s lives.”

 
          
“Oh,
my God,” the secretary said. Her right hand fluttered upward to her throat.

 
          
Joe
pointed at the guards on the TV screens, and said to Eastpoole, “Any of them
gets excited while we’re here, you’re all through.”

 
          
Eastpoole
tried to give him a scornful stare, but he was blinking too much. “You don’t
have to threaten me,” he said. “I’ll let the authorities pick you up later.”

 
          
Nodding,
Tom said, “That’s the way to think, all right.” Joe pulled one of the
blue-and-white striped chairs around behind Eastpoole’s desk, so he could sit
beside him. But he didn’t sit yet; instead, he stood next to the chair and said
to Eastpoole, “You and me are going to wait here. My partner and your lady
friend are going to the vault.”

 
          
The
secretary’s head jerked back and forth. “I—I can’t,” she said, in a thin voice.
“I’ll faint.”

 
          
Reassuring
her, Tom said gently, “No, you won’t. You’ll do just fine, don’t worry about a
thing.”

 
          
Joe
told her, “You just do what your boss tells you to do.” Then he gave Eastpoole
a hard meaningful look. Eastpoole’s response was surly, but defeated. Gazing down
at his neat desktop, he said, “We’ll do what they want, Miss Emerson. Let the
police handle it later.”

 
          
“Right,”
Joe said.

 
          
Tom,
looking at the secretary, gestured toward the door. “Let’s go, Miss,” he said.

 
          
She
gave one last appealing look in Eastpoole’s direction, but Eastpoole was still
brooding at his desktop. Her hands fluttered again, as though in accompaniment
to the statement she hadn’t quite found the words for; but then she turned and
walked obediently to the door, and she and Tom went out together.

 
          
Until
the second Joe reached out and grabbed Eastpoole’s elbow and said, “Hold it,” I
still hadn’t been one hundred per cent sure we were actually going to go
through with this. Maybe it had been necessary that I keep some doubt in my
mind, maybe that
was what had made it possible for me to go
on moving along through all the preparations and then get out of bed today and
come to New York and in real life start step by step to do the things we’d
decided on. That small uncertainty had been a kind of escape hatch for me, I
suppose, to keep me from getting too nervous and frightened of what we had in
mind.

 
          
Well,
now the escape hatch was gone. We were in it now, we’d started. If there was
anything we hadn’t thought of, it was too late to think of it. If there was any
fact that we should know that we hadn’t picked up in our studies, it was too
late to find it out. If there was any flaw in our plan, anything at all, it was
too late now to fix it. It would fix us instead.

 
          
The
first part, escorting Eastpoole to his office and keeping him calm and
tractable, hadn’t been too bad. It wasn’t that different, really, from dealing
with a suspect about whose guilt you weren’t really sure, but who could
possibly make things very tough if he weren’t handled just right. It was like a
variation on a part of my job I already knew about, so I could almost let
automatic responses do it for me.

 
          
Besides,
Joe and I had been working together at that point. I don’t know if my presence
made things easier for him, but his presence definitely made things easier for
me. Seeing him in the same position I was in, knowing we were locked into this
together, had made it easier to keep moving.

 
          
But
now I was on my own. Eastpoole’s secretary, that he’d called Miss Emerson, was
walking with me through offices filled with people. What if she suddenly
panicked,
started to scream? What if her fright was only an
act, and she was just waiting her chance to pull a fast one? What if she
fainted, or refused to do what I wanted? What if a thousand different things
happened that weren’t supposed to happen? I hadn’t the first idea how I’d
handle it if she didn’t obey orders, and I wasn’t sure any more
what was the best way to treat her to make sure she would obey
.
Her physical being, walking beside me, terrified me, and all I knew for sure
was that I couldn’t let her know how nervous I was. It would either throw her
into a complete panic or make her start thinking she could outsmart me, and I
didn’t want either of those things to happen.

 
          
There
was a sexual element, too, which surprised me; I hadn’t expected anything like
that. I don’t mean my sexual instincts are dead, or that my awareness is
limited to Mary. I covet other women as much as any man, and in fact several
years ago I had an affair with a woman in the neighborhood. She lived down the
block from us, her husband worked for Grumman Aircraft. They’re gone
now,
they left a few years ago and moved out to California.
It happened in the fall, early in October, and it was possible because of the
funny shifts I work that have me around the house a lot in the daytime. This
woman— Nancy, her name was—came around one day setting up a car pool for
something with the kids. Mary wasn’t home but I was, and Nancy had just the
night before had a big fight with her husband, and all of a sudden there we
were screwing on the living-room floor. It was amazing.

 
          
It
was also the only time we made it in my house. From then on, if I was home in
the daytime and felt like it, I’d drift on down to her place and we’d have sex in
her bedroom, on the bed. She had slightly different preferences and manners
from Mary, and newness makes things exciting, and for a while I was really
pleased with myself, having two women on the same block. Then the holidays came
along, and there was a whole different mental attitude developed in both our
minds, where we both grew much more interested in our own families again, and
it all sort of faded away. We never had a fight or anything, we never
officially broke it off, but by the middle of December I wasn’t making any more
visits and she wasn’t calling up—as she’d done a couple times in October and
November—to suggest it was a nice day for a bounce on the bed.

 
          
Nevertheless,
good-looking women definitely still turn me on, and I can get a real letch for
something tall and slender with a good figure and a good walk, all of which is
a pretty good summation of Miss Emerson. I’d noticed her in the usual sexual
way when I’d first walked into Eastpoole’s office, but then my mind had been
distracted by the problems of dealing with Eastpoole, and in the normal course
of events that would have been the end of it.

 
          
Which was why I was so surprised and troubled at the sexual aura
that hung between us now.
It was a different sort of thing from my usual
awareness, it was both stronger and unhealthier, and the most embarrassing
thing about it was that I knew what was doing it. She was my prisoner. “Ah, me
proud beauty, you are in my power!” It was that number. It wasn’t really true
that she was my prisoner in the sense that I could do anything I wanted with
her, but there was a feeling of that between us, of her actually being in my
power and of me being in the role of the villain.

 
          
And
of course, I
was
in the role of
villain, wasn’t I? I was there to commit, as I’d told her, a major robbery.
Which helped to make the situation different from those rare times
when I actually have had good-looking female prisoners in my control, in the
course of my working life.
In those instances I haven’t been the
villain, I’ve been on the good guy’s side. Also, I’ve been limited by the rules
of my profession and the laws of the land. None of which applied this time.

 
          
Well,
I wasn’t going to rape her, though God knows she had a body I would have liked
to touch. But it was much more important to keep her calm than to satisfy
irrelevant bodily urges of my own that I didn’t really want to have in the
first place. So I wanted to talk to her, to ease her tension a little, but I
wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t just increase the sexual discomfort
hanging around us, so for too long a time I walked beside her in silence; which
couldn’t have been very reassuring.

 
          
Finally
I decided the best thing to do was be brisk and businesslike, so I said, “I’m
going to tell you exactly what we want. You’ll have to go into the vault alone,
so I’ll tell you what to get from it.”

 
          
She
didn’t look at me. Facing front as she walked along next to me, she nodded and
said, “Yes.” Her face showed strain, the skin stretched tight over her
cheekbones,
her eyes open a little too wide.

 
          
I
said, “We want bearer bonds. You know what I mean?”

 
          
“Yes,”
she said.

 
          
Of
course she knew what I meant, she worked here. “Right,” I said. “Now, we don’t
want any of them with a face value over a hundred thousand dollars, and nothing
under twenty
thousand,
and we want them all together
to add up to ten million.”

 
          
She
gave me a surprised look then, but immediately faced front again and nodded and
said, “All right.”

 
          
I
said, “Now, I know you’re going to be smart and do things right, but I just
want to remind you. My partner’s in your boss’s office, and he can see the
vault on one of the TV screens there, and the vault anteroom with the guard. If
you try talking to the guard, or doing anything you shouldn’t in the vault,
he’ll be able to see you.”

 
          
“I
won’t do anything,” she said. She sounded terrified again, and on the verge of
tears.

 
          
“I
know you won’t,” I said. “I just thought I should remind you,
that’s
all, but I know you won’t do anything.”

 
          
We’d
been passing through one of the big offices with all the empty desks and
crowded windows. Thirty or forty people in the room, all with their backs to us
, looking
out the windows at the parade going by. I was
still marching along in time to the drums, whether I liked it or not, but Miss
Emerson was walking in an erratic sort of way, quick steps and then an
occasional slow step, no consistent rhythm at all. I supposed it was part of
her nervousness that made her walk like that, and I did my best to adjust my
speed to hers, though I still paced myself to the sound of the parade.

 
          
In
the doorway, leaving that office and entering a corridor that led away to the
right, she suddenly stumbled. I automatically reached out to grab her arm and
help her keep her feet, and she pulled away from me, terrified, wide-eyed.
Keeping her balance by fear alone, she staggered backwards across the corridor
and brought up against the wall on the other side.

           
I followed her into the corridor,
looked down to the right, and saw we were alone. “Take it easy,” I said, fast
and low. I was afraid there was a scream in her throat just dying to come out.
‘Take it easy, nobody’s going to hurt you.”

 
          
Her
right hand went up to her throat again, as it had in the office. I could see
her forcing herself to take long deep breaths, to get control. She was really
very
good,
she got hold of the reins herself and
pulled the whole thing back together. I stood there, waiting it out, and
finally she said, in a low voice, “I’m all right now.”

 
          
“Of
course you are,” I said. “You’re doing fine. There’s nothing to worry about, I
promise you. All we want is money, and none of it is yours, so what’s there to
be afraid of?” I grinned at her, spreading my hands.

 
          
She
nodded, and came away from the wall at last, but she wouldn’t respond to my
grin, and as much as possible she avoided meeting my eye. How much of that was
simple fear and how much the sexual overlay I don’t know, but there was no
point trying to calm her entirely. It wouldn’t have been possible anyway, and
all I really needed was her functional and rational.

 
          
Which she was, again.
We walked down the corridor together,
and then she gestured at a closed door ahead of us and said, “That’s the
anteroom.”

 
          
Where the vault guard would be stationed.
The vault itself
would be just beyond. “I’ll wait out here,” I said. “Now, you know what I want”

 
          
Not
looking at me, she nodded her head, a sudden jerky movement.

 
          
I
said, “Tell me. Take it easy, don’t get upset,
just
tell me what I said.”

 
          
She
had to clear her throat before she could talk. Then she said, “You want bearer
bonds.
Nothing over a hundred thousand dollars, nothing less
than twenty thousand.”

 
          
“Adding
up to?”

 
          
“Ten
million dollars,” she said.

 
          
I
nodded. “That’s right,” I said. “And remember, my partner can watch you.”

 
          
“I
won’t do anything,” she said. She still didn’t look at me. “Should I go in
now?”

 
          
“Sure.”

 
          
She
opened the door and went inside, and I leaned against the wall to wait; either
for ten million dollars or the roof to fall in.