Nina, the Bandit Queen (6 page)

Since becoming a community activist, Nina had never worked without an accomplice. JannaRose had been right there beside her when she forced the ice cream truck to back down in front of her house. She’d been at her side when she’d launched her attack on the ice cream trucks in the parking lot at the ice cream factory. It was too bad she hadn’t been feeling better the day they scouted the downtown bank to see if it was suitable for robbing, but Nina understood how that could affect JannaRose’s views when it came to the next stage. Sometimes you do something when you’re not feeling well, and you don’t want to do it ever again because it’s associated in your mind with how you felt at the time.

When Nina washed her runners out under the kitchen tap after JannaRose threw up on them, she noticed that the water ran out of the first one where the top part had come unglued from the sole. When she did the other one, it was the same. She hadn’t realized they were that far gone. They were from the year before last, or the year before that, and didn’t smell any worse after she cleaned them than they had before JannaRose let fly. It didn’t matter. They weren’t visible on the famous security videotape that recorded Nina’s next trip to the bank, but then it didn’t get to be famous because she made some kind of fashion statement. The main thing everybody who watched the video noticed was that for a long time her forehead was down on the counter and she was rocking on it from side to side. Meantime, her arms dangled straight down. When she did finally look at the teller, she didn’t stand up straight, she simply tipped her head back so her chin was almost on the counter and gave the impression that she’d just woken up and was surprised to see anybody in front of her at all. By this point, the teller had backed away and looked as if she had already decided the smart thing to do was run. Then Nina said something, or maybe finished saying something, pushed herself back from the counter, and slouched out of the picture.

She told JannaRose she’d felt like somebody in the middle of the ocean who notices their lifeboat is sinking, and the only choice they have left is to swim away. “And I never learned to swim, so forget it.” She didn’t mind telling JannaRose what happened — they still got along the same as before. She didn’t hold a grudge. Even though she’d been abandoned and left all alone to face the toughest moment she’d ever faced, she firmly believed that when it came to getting involved in public service, JannaRose was entitled to follow her conscience the same as everybody else. Nina told her she’d started talking as she approached the counter. And it was hearing what she was saying that caused her to lean her forehead on it.

“What were you saying?” JannaRose asked. “Stick ’em up?”

“No. More like, ‘Oh, fuck, who am I fooling? This is so stupid. They’ll catch me. I’ll go to jail. They won’t believe I was doing it to fix the swimming pool, so they’ll put me in jail forever. My children will starve. D.S. will get a girlfriend that will move in and abuse them. D.S. is a fuckin’ sex maniac. And he does sort of have a job. So every hungry fuckin’ woman in SuEz will start putting out for him and some ignorant twat will think she’s died and gone to heaven because she finally gets her hands on him. The girls will start doing crack. They’ll be up in the towers selling their asses for a nickel a time.’” And so on.

It came out in more or less a steady flow until she leaned her head back and looked at the teller and said, “I’m sorry, but fuck it. That’s all there is to it. Fuck it. I’m sorry. Just forget the whole thing.”

They caught her on the sidewalk. They ran right past her when they went charging in — the holdup squad. Somebody had pulled the silent alarm. There were ten of them with machine guns, grenade launchers, helmets. After a whole lot of yelling at everybody in the bank and pointing their weapons everywhere and making everybody lie down on the floor, the teller caught their attention and explained what happened and they all ran back outside. This could be seen on the video too: Nina standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, not too sure what to do next. Them surrounding her, pointing their weapons, and yelling that she better tell them what she was up to and not make any sudden moves or else. A few minutes of this and they apparently concluded that she was just one more aimless particle of the city’s vast confusion. Maybe after making passengers on subway cars nervous with her blathering, she had expanded her repertoire to blathering in banks and making tellers nervous. Looking decidedly let down, they climbed into their armoured vans and sped away.

It only occurred to her when she was almost home that it was a good thing she hadn’t been frisked, or they’d have discovered the two bunches of Tampax she had wrapped in black tape and stuck on either side of her tummy. She had imagined the teller would think it was dynamite when she pulled up her T-shirt and announced that she was going to blow the place to ratshit if she didn’t get a pile of cash. She drew the line at telling JannaRose about the Tampax.

She didn’t make the holdup squad’s logbook, either. It called the episode a false alarm, and nobody thought about it again, except for one person.

It went like clockwork. Apart from when he fired the warning shot into the ceiling. It was the first time he’d ever fired a gun, and it was so loud he nearly shit. The chief executive of the bank was named Milner, and Frank had one arm around his neck at the time. Milner actually did shit.
Now
that
lends a touch of realism to the proceedings,
Frank thought, skrinching up his nose. Right on schedule, as set out in the agreement, Milner’s assistant handed over a big Nike bag full of cash, but instead of putting the gun under Milner’s chin and steering him to the door, where he was supposed to push him aside brutally, Frank took into account the accident the man had just had and improvised a little bit, pushing him aside brutally right there. Outside, he discovered the driver of the getaway car was dealing with an accident of his own, only this one presented a bigger problem than Milner’s. He was in the middle of a shouting argument with the driver of a beat-up green Toyota Corolla who’d misjudged the angle when he was pulling in to the curb and ended up wedged across the getaway car’s left front fender. The fender was so badly crunched that the driver of the getaway car was no longer able to get away, or anywhere else. The steering wheel wouldn’t turn at all. Frank’s jaw dropped. The driver of the getaway car had been trying to keep an eye out for him, and when he finally spotted him, he looked as if he was about to have such an explosive coronary, it wouldn’t leave a piece of him big enough to pick up with tweezers. Frank squinted, peering this way and that, taking in the scene, checking to see if any more complications were headed their way. Then he made a big, reassuring show of getting himself completely under control. In case anybody needed proof that the recommendations of Herbert, the jailhouse headhunter, were rock solid, that did it. He made a there-there gesture to the driver of the getaway car: take it easy. He made an I’ll-give-you-a-phone-call gesture. He gave a thumbs up. And finally, in a manner that was cool and businesslike, he swung along the sidewalk and disappeared into the subway station at the corner.

What the driver of the getaway car got from all this was a clear indication that the guy he’d been driving was switching to some kind of Plan B that had been carefully worked out in advance, and if nobody had briefed him on it, he wasn’t surprised. That’s how things went in his business. He didn’t even know the guy’s name. Meanwhile, the moron who’d run into him hadn’t shut up for one minute, and for about the fourth time was explaining to him how, because the Toyota’s passenger-side mirror was broken, he’d ended up misjudging the angle, which had caused the getaway driver to yell at least three previous times, “What the fuck does the passenger-side mirror have to do with parking a fuckin’ car?” But now that he wasn’t going to be driving the bank robber any more, two things occurred to him. One was that he didn’t give a fuck what excuse the Toyota driver had for bending his fuckin’ fender, and the other was that he should get himself the fuck out of there, too. So without a word, without so much as looking at the moron, he walked away, leaving the getaway car’s motor running.

Ed Oataway was serious. The passenger-side mirror was broken, although he hadn’t noticed it until after he stole the Toyota that morning. But it was too good a development not to use when he explained to the getaway car driver what had caused the accident that made it impossible for the getaway car to get away. Now, though, he was hearing sirens from all directions, and since everybody else had left, he decided there was no reason for him to stick around. So, giving the toyota a goodbye pat — it was a good car, a 1997, one he would have been happy to steal as part of his job — he headed for the subway station Frank had disappeared into.

One question about Frank had never gone away: how dumb was he really? As things turned out, it never would go away. Given the way he generally operated, there was a bit of speculation that he was no more interested in putting his brain to work than any other part of his body. His sister had always kind of suspected this might be the case, since she never considered herself to be particularly dumb. There just wasn’t anything going on in her life that she could do much about, so why waste brainpower on it. To her, Frank was one more individual who’d grown up in SuEz and never thought about improving his situation because it never occurred to him that it could be improved. At least it never occurred to him until he fell in love with that high-priced whore. Although what he’d done as a result didn’t qualify as even close to smart in Nina’s book.

Nevertheless, he wasn’t so dumb that he couldn’t figure out that he might not stay alive for very long once he turned the 1.18 million over to whoever had hired him to pretend to steal it. And he wasn’t so dumb that he didn’t realize that if for some reason they didn’t knock him off, they would at least knock him over the head and take off with all the money, including the seventy-five hundred he’d been given as an advance against the fifteen thousand he’d agreed to do the job for. Neither was he dumb enough to imagine that he’d ever get the rest of that fifteen thousand unless he had the entire bundle all to himself in a private place to make sure it was divided up fairly. And, although this might sound dumb, he really did mean fairly. He would take the seven thousand five hundred he was still owed. Then, on top of that, he’d also take the 1.165 million that was left over, since he believed that was the amount he was genuinely entitled to. He was the one who had taken all the risks, and besides, they were playing him for being dumber than a hammer that the handle fell off. Far from it. He was nowhere near dumb enough to think the people who’d hired him wouldn’t have somebody other than the driver of the getaway car outside the bank keeping track of what went on.

In fact, if a train was arriving in the subway station when he dashed down with the money, he wasn’t even dumb enough to think he would board it. Instead he dashed right along to the end of the platform, jumped over the barrier, and jogged along to the next station. It turned out to be a scary thing to do. The drivers of half a dozen trains that came along blared their horns at the amazing sight of an unauthorized person humping what looked like a gym bag along the rickety catwalk beside the tracks. Finally, he dashed up to ground level and ran like a crazy man. When he’d gone over the details with Ed Oataway at their final planning session, he’d said that once he was out in the street again he would know everything was going to be okay, because then he’d have all the freedom he needed to manoeuvre.

And it went like clockwork. As far as Frank could tell.

As the single father of three children who were abandoned by their mothers shortly after each one was born, Jarmeel Tolbert took his responsibilities seriously. He struggled to meet the demands this placed on him while attempting to cope with the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that the army refused to admit he’d become the victim of during his military service. Instead they gave him a dishonourable discharge for dereliction of duty, which meant he’d refused to obey orders and spent all his days playing video games in the soldiers’ recreation centre. He said he couldn’t help it. It was a symptom of his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The way he looked at it, one thing was for sure: he had been dealt a bad hand. No sooner had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder come along as a sure-fire guarantee of a medical discharge with a full pension, than everybody who could dream up something they could blame on it was parading in front of the doctors claiming they no longer had the regulation number of marbles. There ended up being so many fake victims that when the genuine article like Jarmeel showed up, nobody was interested in believing him. The doctors said they had trouble with the idea that someone who had never been in combat could come down with PTSD. Jarmeel not only hadn’t been in combat in the combat sense, he hadn’t seen any other kind either, such as the kind military personnel sometimes got into on a peacekeeping mission, say, or defending the embassy from insurgents.

Jarmeel had never been out of the country. His military career consisted of changing the oil in trucks and armoured personnel carriers and such at the big base a couple of hours north of the city. He was a lubricant specialist. Like any demanding occupation, it could take its toll, so Jarmeel figured he was already on the verge of feeling stress when something happened that was seriously traumatic.

A buddy of his was working in one of the lubrication bays. He was on a dolly under a big truck changing the oil. And while he lay there watching the old oil drain out, and in contravention of every rule in the book as well as the signs posted everywhere in the repair shop, he lit a cigarette.

What happened next stuck forever in Jarmeel’s mind. The
whomp!
The ball of flame that had once been a truck. The terrifying knowledge that his buddy was in the swooshing blaze under it. If Jarmeel had been there when it happened, it probably would have been even worse. But in spite of being off sick with a sore throat that could easily have become pneumonia, it was still more than he could handle. Every time he dollied under a vehicle after that, he got clammy with sweat, his hands trembled, he was swept by waves of nausea and dizziness, he couldn’t breathe in, he couldn’t breath out, his bowels wouldn’t move for the next twenty-four hours. It was perfect. Except when he got in line at the psychiatric clinic, the other soldiers bragged of having such sensational symptoms, he knew his wouldn’t stand a chance. He went back to being off sick with possible pre-pneumonia, gave the matter more thought, and eventually had a powerful insight.

If he could no longer remember what lubricants went where, like antifreeze and battery acid, it would definitely be a crippling symptom. Next he had to figure out how something like this could happen. And it came to him that it could happen quite easily if the space aliens who kept the base under constant surveillance noted that, as a result of a painful experience, one of the soldiers stationed there had become terribly vulnerable.

The instant they zeroed in on him, the aliens had taken him aboard their ship and probed him for military secrets. And here’s what really scared him: up till then he didn’t know he had any. But he did! All those lubricants! What they were. The grades of motor oil used in various vehicles. How long before it had to be changed. Tire pressures — Jarmeel had a subspecialty of putting air in tires. He was a walking computer with all this information in it. And they’d stolen it all and left him blank. He discovered this when he returned to Earth and all of a sudden he felt a lot lighter — exactly the way people do who have been weighed down by secrets they have been forced to keep, then something happens and they don’t have to any more. What a relief! Except it wasn’t really. Although he was in a weakened state after being kidnapped into space and probed, now he had to deal with the fear that if the army replaced the information, he would get taken aboard that alien ship and probed clean a second time.

“As I understand it —” the psychiatrist spoke without looking up from the pad he’d been making notes on, “your concern is that you are an, um —” he ran the tip of his ballpoint under the words, “— an intergalactic security risk.”

“
My
concern? It isn’t just
my
concern.” Jarmeel had been lying at attention on the couch, but now he pulled himself even straighter. Patriotism glowed from deep within him. “It is my
country’s
concern. It is the
free world’s
concern. In fact, it is also the concern of the
unfree
world. No way these space aliens care even a tiny, little bit for the well-being of us humans, no matter what our political inclination is, no matter if we live free or as slaves bound by the tyrant’s chains.
My
concern doesn’t count for squat compared to these other concerns that concern me. That,” Jarmeel said, “is why I hate to think it could be that I’m the one that ends up giving them the piece of the puzzle they’ve been rooting all around trying to find, from one end of the universe to the other. The final piece that shows exactly where our true, deep-down weaknesses lie. That allows them to finally
invade
us! That brings about domination of our world by these cruel —”

He inhaled raggedly to show that he was more familiar with their cruelty than he cared to be.

“I see,” the psychiatrist said.

They all said it. Eventually. All the psychiatrists and the psychoanalysts and the psychologists and the psychophysicists and the psychometricians and the psychotherapists. Even the pro bono lawyers who defended Jarmeel and the brigadier general who was the senior officer on the court martial that heard his case.

The important thing, however, is the more Jarmeel thought about it, and in the years that followed he thought about it every minute he could spare, the more he came to believe it all must have happened: the aliens, the kidnapping, the intergalactic spacecraft, the probing, the spilling of the beans unwittingly. It had to. Because it explained everything. Originally he’d made it up, this was true. But what if making it up was a coincidence? What if something happened to you that you forgot all about because your memory tracks got wiped clean by space aliens? And what if your mind came up with a hypothetical version that filled the gap? And what if it filled it perfectly? Who’s to say it wasn’t what had actually happened?

Sometimes theories do turn out to be the way things are. Jarmeel never stopped telling this to everybody he met.

The people who were attracted to his new religion might not at first understand how what had happened to them was a religious experience. That would be his job as the founder — to dream up why it had been and explain it to them. If their experiences had been anything like his, they had been purified and were no longer doubled over by their burdens. This was, after all, a standard experience in other religions. And none of these other religions had anything going for them to compare with extraterrestrial probing.

The more he thought about it, the more it occurred to him that these aliens were God’s messengers, hovering around, checking out the action, picking suitable candidates for salvation. For one thing, the realm they inhabited — outer space — was a lot higher up in the sky, and therefore a lot closer to God’s own personal realm — heaven — than the one humans inhabited. This could be what had got them interested in the Planet Earth in the first place. All those souls whizzing up through space on their way from this world to heaven could have made them wonder what was going on. Jarmeel said that if people started using your backyard as a shortcut and you had no idea who they were or where they came from, it would be entirely normal for you to be curious, too.

Jarmeel had been going around saying stuff like this for awhile, but the first time Nina paid any attention was when he came to her house one day dressed very strangely and put a handful of money on the table in front of her.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Seventy-one dollars,” he said.

It was the second time in her whole life that somebody had thrust cash at her, and she was alarmed. The first time had been only a couple of days earlier when her daughter had done it, and the person doing it this time had even more screws loose than Merlina. “What for?” she said, nervously.

“It’s your share.”

“Of what?”

“This morning’s collection at my church. Your swimming pool is our first community project.”

“Holy shit.”