Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (9 page)

 
          
Vigano
was watching me. “You got the idea now?” he said.

 
          
Business;
back to business. “Yes,” I said.
“Bearer bonds, no larger
than a hundred thousand dollars.”

 
          
“Right.”

 
          
“Now,”
I said, “about payment.”

 
          
“Get
the stuff first,” he said.

 
          
“Give
me a number to call.
One that isn’t tapped.”
Vigano
said, “Give me your number.”

 
          
“Not
a chance,” I said. “I already said I don’t want you to know who I am. Besides,
my wife isn’t in on it.”

 
          
He
looked at me with a surprised grin. “Your wife isn’t in on it,” he said. The
grin got wider, and then he laughed out loud, and then he said, “Your wife
isn’t in on it. All of a
sudden,
I believe you’re on
the level.”

 
          
Everything
had shifted. He’d made me feel like a fool, and I wasn’t even sure why. Angry,
but trying not to show it, I said, “I am on the level.”

 
          
His
grin faded away and he got serious again. Reaching over to the score table, he
picked up a ballpoint pen and a small blank memo pad. He extended them to me,
saying, “Here. I’ll give you a number to write down.”

 
          
He
wouldn’t put his own handwriting on even a telephone number. I took the pad and
pen and waited.

 
          
He
said, “It’s in
Manhattan
.
Six nine one, nine nine seven oh.”

 
          
I
wrote it down.

 
          
He
said, “You call that number from inside
Manhattan
; no interborough, no long distance. You ask
is Arthur there, they’ll say no. You call from a phone booth, or some phone
you’re sure of. You leave your number, Arthur should call you back. You’ll hear
from me within fifteen minutes. If you don’t, I’m not around, try again later.”

 
          
I
nodded.
“All right.”

 
          
“When
you call,” he said, “you say your name is Mister Kopp.
K-O-P-P.”

           
I grinned a little. “That’s easy to
remember.”

 
          
“But
don’t call me with questions,” he said. “You do it or you don’t. If you take
ten million in securities from Wall Street, Fll read about it in the paper.
Otherwise, if I get a message from you I don’t answer.”

 
          
“Sure,”
I said. “That’s
okay ”

 
          
“Nice
talking to you,” he said, and picked up his beer glass again. He hadn’t offered
me one.

 
          
He
wanted the conversation to be finished, so I got to my feet. “You’ll be hearing
from me,” I said. I knew it was bravado to say it, and that it didn’t make me
look any better, but I went ahead and said it anyway.

 
          
He
shrugged. He wasn’t interested in me any more. “That’s fine,” he said.

 
          
Vigano
watched the visitor leave with his escorts. He waited thirty seconds, brooding,
sipping at his Michelob, and then pressed the intercom button on the
scoreboard.

 
          
Waiting
for Marty to come in, he thought back over the conversation. Could the guy have
been on the level? It was hard to believe, and yet anything else was even
harder to believe. What other reason could he have for pulling a stunt like
this, coming here cold with such an off-the-wall idea? There was no profit for
any law-enforcement agency in it, and nothing to be gained by any potential
competitor.

 
          
After
all, he wouldn’t ever have anything else to do with the guy unless there really
was a multi-million-dollar bond theft on Wall Street.
Which
would get into the papers and onto the television news, no doubt about it.
Anybody calling up and claiming to be Mr. Kopp and claiming to have stolen
bonds would be given the brush-off right away unless there had been a robbery
to match, one that Vigano knew about from his own sources.

 
          
So
assume the guy was on the level. What was the likelihood he’d actually go
through with a robbery and get away with it?
Very very thin.
And if he didn’t do it, Vigano wouldn’t have lost anything.

           
But if lie did really pull it off,
Vigano would stand to gain a hell of a lot.

 
          
It
was a nice position to be in. Vigano toasted himself with Michelob, and Marty
came in, saying, “Yes, sir, Mr. Vigano?”

 
          
Vigano
turned to him. "The guy that’s going out now,” he said. “I want his name
and address and what he does for a living.”

 
          
“Yes, sir,” Marty said, and left again.

 
          
It
would probably come to nothing. But just in case something good did come out of
it, Vigano wanted to have his homework done. It’s the details, he thought, that
make the difference between a winner and a punk.

 
          
He
got to his feet, selected a ball, and bowled a strike.

 
          
When
Tom and I talked over the Mafia idea, one thing we agreed on right away was
that if the mob found out who we were, there was no way we could go through
with it. Neither of us wanted mobsters around with that kind of hold over us.
Either we could contact Vigano and stay anonymous, or we’d have to give up that
idea and try to think of something else.

 
          
We
took it for granted, the two of us, that Vigano would have Tom followed after
their conversation; if he talked to Tom at all. So the first most necessary
thing was to break Tom loose from the people tailing him.

 
          
The
last train to Penn Station from Red Bank pulls in to
New York
at twelve-forty. There aren’t many people
on that train, particularly on a week night, which was part of the reason we’d
picked it. Also, where it came in at Penn Station there was only one staircase
up to the terminal.

 
          
I
was in uniform, and I got to the station fifteen minutes ahead of time. We’d
rehearsed this three times, and the train had never been anywhere near this
early, but we wanted to be absolutely sure. I went to the head of the stairs
leading up from that platform, and stood there, waiting.

 
          
Standing
there, it occurred to me this was the first time in my life I’d worn the
uniform when I wasn’t on duty. I’ve never been exactly gung ho for the force.
The only reason I was in that uniform at all was because the Army didn’t need
any tank drivers the day in basic training when I got classified. The choices
open to me were cook or military policeman or something else, I forget what.
Something crappy.
They were also picking orderly-room clerks
and finance clerks that day, but my test profile wasn’t too good in the right
areas for those jobs. What I really wanted was to drive a tank, but I wound up
an MP.

 
          
I
was an MP for a year and a half, eleven months of it assigned to the Vogelweh
dependent housing area outside
Kaiserlautem
,
Germany
. I dug it. I got a kick out of carrying a
.45 around on my hip, and doing the target shooting, and driving around town in
a jeep at night to keep the white troops and the black troops from beating each
other’s head in. I hadn’t had any job at all before I was drafted, I mean
nothing that I wanted to get back to, and I never had any interest in college,
so when I got out of the Army the question was what would I do for a living,
and the answer was plain and simple. Go on the same as before. The uniform
changed from brown to blue, the sidearm changed from a .45 automatic to a .38
revolver, and you had to be a little more careful how you dealt with people,
but otherwise it was pretty much the same job.

 
          
Which
was nice at first, it made for a nice transition from soldier to civilian. But
after a while the same job gets to be a drag and a bore and a pain in the ass,
no matter what it is. Whether you’re carrying a gun or not, driving around the
city or not, it doesn’t matter; it gets boring.

 
          
For
a long time, it seemed as though there was always something else to take up the
slack, keep me interested in life even when the job was dull.
Getting married, for instance.
Having
kids.
Moving out of the apartment out to
Long Island
.
Those are like the mountains, and the
valley is your dull everyday life.

 
          
It
had been a long time between mountains.

 
          
For
the last couple of years, I’d been thinking about women, about maybe shacking
up with somebody somewhere. Get me a girl in town, somewhere in my precinct.

 
          
I
was pretty sure a girl on the side would drain off all this stored-up boredom
again, at least for a while, but somehow I never seemed to get started at it.
My heart wasn’t in it. I knew it was possible, I personally knew four guys in
the precinct who had exactly that kind of arrangement, but it was like I didn’t
have the energy to make the first moves, to look around in any way more than
just eyeing my friends’ wives and wondering how they’d be in the sack. Maybe I
was trying to keep myself from disappointment, maybe down in the bottom of my
brain I had the idea a girl on the side would finally be the biggest letdown of
all. With no place left to go from there.

 
          
I
heard the train come in, down below; the way the brakes squealed, they could
probably hear it up on
42nd Street
. I stood at the head of the stairs, just to one side, looking down. The
stairs were
concrete,
and wide enough for three people
abreast, and they were flanked on both sides by amber tile walls.

 
          
Tom
got to the stairs first, the way he was supposed to. If I hadn’t already seen
him in disguise I wouldn’t have recognized him. The wig was a different hair
color, and longer than his usual
hair,
and it seemed
to change the whole shape of his head. Then he had a David Niven kind of
moustache, which made his face look younger for some reason. And the horn-rim
glasses changed his eyes entirely, so he looked like an accountant somewhere.

 
          
As
for me, the uniform was my main disguise. People rarely look past the uniform
to see the individual man. The only extra disguise I wore was a droopy
moustache, like a western sheriff’s, and I’d put that on more for the hell of
it than because I thought I really needed it. There wouldn’t be any reason for
anybody to tie me up with Tom.

 
          
About
a dozen other passengers came along behind Tom, the usual number for this train,
and it wasn’t hard at all to pick out Vigano’s men from among them. Three of
them, all dressed differently but all unmistakably hoods, with hard faces and
hunched shoulders.

 
          
I
was surprised at how hard it hit me, when I saw those three guys among the
bunch of people coming up the stairs behind Tom. Up till that second, I guess I
really hadn’t believed it; that Tom would go through with it, or that he’d get
in to see Vigano, or that Vigano would wind up listening to him and believing
him. But it must have happened, or those three guys wouldn’t have taken the
train.

 
          
Tom
was moving fast, coming up the stairs two and three at a time. The three
shadows were mixed in with the pack, all of it moving more slowly; when Tom
reached the head of the stairs, the nearest other passenger was still eight
steps down.

 
          
Tom
went by me without a look, the way he was supposed to. He went past, and I
immediately stepped forward to block the staircase. I held my arms out and
said, “Hold up a minute. Hold it, there.”

 
          
Momentum
kept them coming up a few more steps, but then they stopped and all looked up
at me. People obey the uniform. I saw two of Vigano’s men pushing their way up
past the other passengers toward me, and the third one going back down the
stairs; probably to look for another way up. But there wasn’t any, not from
that platform. By the time he found another exit, it would be too late, and
he’d come up in the wrong place anyway.

 
          
They
were all milling around on the stairs, a dozen of them packed in tight
together. New Yorkers expect that kind of thing, so there wasn’t any major
complaint. One of Vigano’s men, having shoved himself up to the front of the
pack, where his head was at the level of my elbow, looked past me down the
corridor, watching Tom hustle away. He made an irritated face, but tried to
keep his voice neutral when he said to me, “What’s the problem, officer?”

 
          
“Only
be a minute,” I told him.

 
          
His
eyes kept flicking back and forth between the corridor and me, and I could tell
by his expression when Tom turned the comer down there. But still I held them
all, while I counted to thirty slowly. The third hood reappeared at the foot of
the stairs and trotted up them, looking disgusted.

 
          
I
stepped to the side, slow and casual. “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”

 
          
They
streamed past me, Vigano’s men moving at a dead run. I watched them go, and I
knew they were wasting their time. We’d practiced this enough, Tom and I, so
that we knew how long it would take him to get to the nearest exit and out to
where his car was parked, with the special police permit showing on the sun
visor. By now, he was probably already making the turn onto
Ninth Avenue
.

 
          
I
strolled the other way.