19 Purchase Street (46 page)

“Are you positive Rodger won't be coming here?” he asked as they reached the house.

“He won't.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Rodger is always where he's supposed to be.”

Gainer assumed by that she meant it was a clause in their arrangement, hers and Rodger's. To avoid embarrassing surprises. Rodger's Bedford house as a base of operations for the three billion robbery had been her idea. And a good one. It was private and only twenty minutes over back roads from Number 19. She had given the permanent servants and groundkeepers three weeks off. The only one who remained was an eighty-year-old foppy retainer who never went anywhere, kept to his quarters over the garage where he enjoyed issues of
After Dark
, drank banana daiquiris and watched late late Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo movies.

“I think,” Leslie said, “first we ought to get a good look at that house.”

“I did, this morning,” Gainer told her.

“I mean a better look.”

Leslie put on shoes and got behind the wheel of her Corniche. Drove to Harrison, the town proper, to the Town Hall on Hillside Avenue. The official building department was on the second floor. Across a hard, high counter, Leslie turned on her best model's smile for a middle-aged clerk and introduced herself as a writer doing research for a book on lovely older Westchester houses. She pretended not to know the precise address and the clerk had her point out the house on a plot map. The clerk looked up Number 19 in his files, found nothing, said he doubted he'd have anything on a house built that many years ago, at least nothing right there on hand. Next thing, against the clerk's built-in bureaucratic resistance, Leslie had him down in the basement storage area searching through files and cartons. She charmed and at the same time challenged him to perform his little heroic for her, and he was up to his crotch in blueprints when, finally, in a file behind a file, yellowed and blotched from age, he came across them.

A complete set of the original architectural plans for Number 19 Purchase Street.

Leslie was delighted, rewarded the clerk with a hug. That threw him way off. Telling her she'd have to sign out for the plans, have them copied and returned by the following day would have spoiled it for him. He just let her take them.

It was close to six o'clock when Gainer and Leslie arrived back at the house in Bedford. They agreed, before anything else, there would have to be dinner. Leslie would fix it.

Why didn't they just go out for a steak or even a pizza? Gainer said.

Leslie was already aproned and ready to get at it. She shooed him out of the kitchen, told him if he wanted to be helpful he could set the table out on the screened porch. The blue Spode china, she suggested.

Gainer's stomach told him to be irritated. He'd had nothing to eat since a light breakfast, was hungrier for more than a bunch of vegetables mushed up in the blender or some mysterious melange like ratatouille. Begrudgingly, almost to the point of grumbling aloud, he found the blue Spode and the silver and set two places. That done, he stole a quick peek into the kitchen, saw her at the huge Garland range, cooking mists seemingly rising from her hands. It was going to take hours, Gainer thought, and sure as hell it would be ratatouille. To divert his mood he went outside and picked some dahlias for the table. Also found some fancy little china placemarkers, used a felt-tipped pen to print WELSH RAREBUTT on hers and couldn't think of anything for his better than what she so often called him, which was LOVER. He printed that and wiped it off, replaced it with HANDYCAPTOR.

Dinner was ready.

Leslie tried to pretend it was an easy spur-of-the-moment thing, merely tossed together. However the curried cream of pea soup had obviously taken some doing in advance. For a main course there was Roquefort stuffed ground sirloin with mustard seed sauce encircled with heaps of pommes Lyonnaise. Warm brioche and chived butter. The wine she had decanted was a Brunello di Montalano 1945.

Gainer loved every mouthful. Who wouldn't?

The mustard seeds were tiny spicy explosions as he chewed, the potatoes crisp but not overdone, the wine like swallows of liquid silk with the flavor of currants and violets.

“Never met anyone else who could both cook and shave,” he told her.

“Never will.”

He complimented the wine, asking about it.

Because it was from Rodger's cellar she didn't tell him it cost a thousand a bottle. “Think I'd make someone a good wife?” she asked.

“By all means.”

“Means aren't everything.”

Gainer broke off a piece of a brioche, dipped it into his wine and took it to her mouth. “Communion,” he said.

“We'll always have it. Don't you believe we'll always have it?”

“One way or another,” Gainer replied.

Leslie reached over and stabbed up one of his potatoes. She still had some on her plate but wanted one of his. Offhand she asked, “Who is Millicent?”

“Who?”

“Millicent.”

“Only Millicent I know is one of Mrs. Darrow's old friends.”

“How old?”

“Sixty-some.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, why?”

Leslie took a note-size envelope from her dress pocket. “This was slipped under your door at Number 19. I forgot to give it to you.”

Gainer read the note that said: “Dear Andrew—Perhaps next time? Millicent.”

Leslie knifed up a dab of butter for her tongue.

Gainer slipped the note into his shirt pocket, sipped wine and asked: “Been taking your Rescue? Seems to me you haven't. At least not that I've noticed.”

Leslie allowed that to be absorbed by silence, then asked: “Perhaps what next time?”

“I about ten percent promised to teach her how to watch football.”

“And she about ninety percent wanted to play.”

“Don't be crazy.”

“You really go for older women, don't you?”

Gainer reached over and with a finger gently widened the opening of Leslie's unbuttoned dress front. Appreciated matters in there a moment and then told her, “No.”

After dinner they went upstairs with a tray containing desserts, the architectural plans for Number 19 and the manila envelope Sweet had given Gainer. Clothes off, propped up by many extra pillows on another of Leslie's luxurious beds, they kissed once good and long and went over the Sweet material together.

Sweet's handwriting was inconsistent, in places large and loopy, at other places smaller and crammed. It also changed within a syllable from slant to backhand. Nevertheless, Sweet had done a thorough job of it. There were thirty pages, including several ruler-drawn diagrams with some measurements indicated to the inch. An accurate detailed description of the security setup that guarded The Balance at Number 19, as well as a timetable of operation.

Now, Gainer and Lesie were brought to realize what they were up against.

The wall that bordered the grounds was at no point less than nine feet high. Along the top of the wall, running continuously from relay to relay was an arrangement of photovoltaic detectors. Unlike ordinary electronic eye alarm devices that throw a line of light, these were specially designed with stacks of multiple phototransistors so the beam created was a band of light an inch thick and twenty inches high. Any mass that penetrated the beam could be measured and evaluated. A bird or squirrel, for instance, would not activate the alarm.

The rear grounds, from the base of the outer wall to the terrace and from the far corner of the garage on the north to the fence of the tennis court on the south, was considered a crucial area. (Fifty-two feet, wall to terrace; two hundred feet, garage to court.) It was believed that if ever an attempt was made on The Balance it would come from that direction. Therefore an elaborate grid of undersurface pressure sensors had been incorporated throughout the garden in this section of the grounds. The pressure sensors were time-set, automatically put on alarm from dusk to dawn. Originally they had been hooked up with undersurface explosive devices, but those were removed when a forgetful gardener and a drunk security man had lost three legs between them. Now the pressure sensor alarm was connected to the water sprinkler system that serviced the rear lawns and gardens. Activated, these water sprinklers worked with a second system of sprinklers to give off an unavoidable mist of H
₂
S
₂
O
₇
or fuming sulfuric acid. Anyone caught in the mist would probably be burned to death, or at the least, permanently blinded. The amount of weight necessary to set off the pressure system was fifty pounds. Which would exempt, say, most stray dogs and small children.

Sweet had parenthetically noted that the enclosed diagram of the pressure sensor grid beneath the rear grounds was only an estimate, could be as much as a foot or two off.

The roof of the house was sealed. The dormer windows not openable, their frames made of one-piece steel. The entire roof surface was equipped with a pressure alarm that would activate whenever anything in excess of ten pounds came down on it. That allowance to again avoid false alarms caused by birds or squirrels.

Inside the house.

The upper corridor of the north wing.

An ultrasonic vibration alarm unit was situated ten feet from the entrance to The Balance Rooms. It was inset in the opposing walls of the corridor and consisted of oscillators that generated compressional waves capable of picking up any vibration above the frequency of twenty thousand cycles per second. Thus, anything more than the slightest stirring in that atmosphere would cause the alarm to go off.

The door to The Balance Room was automatically opened or locked by an electronic tonal combination transmitted directly to the door-bolting mechanism from a touch-tone telephone located in Darrow's bedroom suite. Only Darrow, as Custodian, knew the combination.

The door itself was constructed of a steel alloy material, a space-age by-product, impervious to anything less than an 84mm recoilless antitank gun. The walls between The Balance Room and other rooms were internally reinforced with that same material, as were the floors of The Balance Room.

Within The Balance area itself was what everyone considered the ultimate feature of the security system. Heat sensor alarm units installed in the ceilings and walls. They were the refined application of the ordinary household thermostat. Far more sensitive, of course, they responded to the most infinitesimal change in the temperature of the atmosphere in the room. When The Balance area was bolted, the air in the room was quickly conditioned to sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit by special air cooling units. That temperature was precisely maintained. If, for example, someone were able to merely expose their hand in the room, the heat sensors would react as though they had detected a four alarm fire. Furthermore, they were entirely remote, functioned without wiring. There were four such units in The Balance area, two fixed to the ceiling where the money was kept, two in the ceiling where it was processed. The heat sensor alarms were the reason why the men responsible for security at Number 19 relaxed at night—and why Darrow had one less, large worry.

The monitoring center for all alarms and prohibitive devices was located in the room above the garage. Indicators hooked up to the various phases were incorporated into an electronic console that was observed every second. A minimum of six security men were on duty at all times. There were eighteen altogether. They doubled as servants and answered only to the Custodian. Most of these men had come over to the private sector from government intelligence service, had that sort of training behind them. Such as the ability to kill swiftly with hands or with just about any object. An arsenal of conventional weapons, including automatic rifles and sidearms, was kept at the monitoring center above the garage.

The final page of Sweet's documentary was devoted to a map of Number 19 hand drawn by him out of scale but with dimensions noted. In the right hand bottom corner of the page was an unencouraging postscript.

Leave me your watch.

Gainer felt unable to move. His mouth must have been open because Leslie put a Teuscher champagne chocolate truffle in it. He thought maybe he should have carried to Zurich. Thought he ought to call Chapin and tell him to forget about it. He got up, went across the room and dropped Sweet's report in the bottom drawer of a Regence chest. Shoved the drawer shut, locked it with its silk tasseled key. Tossed the key under the bed. Leslie understood. She felt much the same about the report. No use having it around reminding them of how it had ruined everything.

Well, not really everything.

Leslie lay on her side. Gainer lay on his side. They pressed together. Face to face, their breaths seemed dependent, hers into his, his into hers, and every so often one tongue or the other moistening the other's lips. For as long as it took for the chrysalis of passion to enclose them. They parted, split like the matching halves of some elongated fruit. Two hands each were not enough for so much at once gentle avarice and generosity, but then no hand was needed for him to find her with himself, join himself straight to her.

The walls of her clamped but their own slip let him nearly escape. He kept coming back in to risk capture.

He was in and also into.

Filling and full.

Gone past the line of separateness so that each of her pleasant little swellings that increased and broke convulsively over her were as much his.

Blessed convolution of Gainer and Leslie. So many times let up and recommenced.

“Love me sore,” she said.

And with that he lost hold and she knew, pulled the sweet string from him, one after one after one knots of excruciating, loving pleasure.

N
EXT
morning they didn't speak of robbery. Not a word. Around ten she remarked that she needed to buy some shoes, as though she was down to her last pair. They drove to the city to Maud Frizon. Leslie tried on while Gainer waited. Thirty pair that he thought all looked better on her than they ever would on anyone. She had it in mind to charge ten pair but cut that down to four when Gainer insisted on paying for them. At that, the bill came to twelve hundred and some. Snapshot winnings.