Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (26 page)

 
          
“Quietly,”
Vigano agreed. “But to relax them so I can do it, I need to be able to show
them cash.”

 
          
Bandell
considered, pursing his lips again and staring at a spot in midair. Then he
said, “What’s your setup for the changeover?”

 
          
Vigano
clicked his fingers at Andy, who immediately got to his feet, opened his
attache case, and brought out a map of Manhattan. He opened the map and stood
there being a human easel, holding the map so everybody could see it, while
Vigano pointed at it to explain the situation.

 
          
“I
told you they’re cute,” Vigano said, and went over to stand next to the map.
“Their idea is,” he said, “that we’ll switch picnic baskets in Central Park
next Tuesday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Do you know where the snapper
is in that?”

 
          
Bandell
didn’t want to guess; he was strictly
business
. “Tell
us,” he said.

 
          
Vigano
said, “Every Tuesday afternoon, Central Park in New York is closed to
automobiles.” Gesturing at the map, he said, “There’s nothing allowed in there
but bicycles.”

 
          
Bandell
nodded. “How do you counter?”

 
          
“We
can’t use cars, but neither can they.” Vigano started touching the map with his
finger, explaining it all. “We’ll put a car at every exit from the park.
All the way around, here and here and here.
Inside, we’ll
have our own men on bicycles, all over the place. They’ll be in touch with one
another by walkie-talkie, back and forth.” He turned away from the map, held
his hand out in front of himself, palm up, and slowly closed his fingers into a
fist. “We’ll have the whole park bottled up,” he said.

 
          
Stello
said, “You’ll have a thousand witnesses.”

 
          
“We
can smother them,” Vigano said. “When we have them at the spot where we make
the switch, we can just surround them with our own people. There won’t be
anybody to see a thing, and we carry them the hell out of there afterwards, and
nobody going by on bicycles is going to know a thing about it.”

 
          
Bandell
was frowning at the map. “You have this clear in your mind, Tony? You’re sure
of yourself?”

 
          
“You
know me, Joe,” Vigano said. “I’m a careful man. I wouldn’t get involved in this
if I wasn’t sure of myself.” “And it’s twelve million.
In
bearer bonds.”

 
          
“Just under.”
Vigano looked around at them all and said,
“It’s a good big pie to slice up.”

 
          
Bandell
nodded slowly. He said, “You want to take the cash out of our accounts in New
York, put it together to make two million, show it to them, and then put the
cash right back again.”

 
          
“Right.”

 
          
“What’s
the chance of losing the two million to somebody else?”

 
          
Vigano
gestured at his young men. “Andy and Mike will be with it all the way. And the
other soldiers in the operation don’t have to know what’s in the basket at
all.” Bandell shifted position on the sofa, half-turning so he could look out
the picture window behind him. The seconds went by, and he continued to show
the room only the back of his head. Vigano gestured to Mike, who quietly folded
the map again and put it away. Still Bandell looked out at the city.

 
          
Finally
he turned back. He gave Vigano a level look and said, “It’s your
responsibility.”

 
          
Vigano
smiled. “Done,” he said.

 
          
Joe
let me off at Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, and I walked the one block over
to Central Park West. I crossed with the light, and the park was now directly
in front of me, the grass separated from the sidewalk by a knee-high stone
wall.

 
          
There
are benches along this part of Central Park West with their backs against that
low wall, so that if you sit in one of them you’re looking at the apartment
buildings across the way. I’ve never understood why anybody would want to sit
on a park bench facing away from the park, but there are always plenty of
people sitting on them in the warm weather, so there must be an attraction to
it that I don’t understand. Maybe they like to count the cabs.

 
          
Today,
I joined them. I sat on an unoccupied bench and counted cabs, and found nothing
exciting in it.

 
          
I
spent nearly an hour sitting there, with a newspaper in my lap and a moustache
on my face, waiting for the mob to show up. It was a humid day and the
moustache tickled like crazy, but I was afraid to scratch it for fear it would fall
off. Every once in a while when it got to be more than I could stand I’d twitch
my upper lip around like a beaver, but I tried to limit that relief to moments
of true emergency, since for all I knew that too would make the damn thing
break loose, and I didn’t want a moustache in my lap when Vigano’s people
arrived.

 
          
The
reason I was thinking about the moustache and park benches so much is that I
was afraid to think about Vigano and his mobsters, and what we were here to do.

 
          
This
one was worse than the robbery, a hundred times worse. That other time, we’d
been operating against decent civilized human beings, who at the very worst
would arrest us and try us and put us in jail. This time, we were operating
against thugs who were going to try to kill us no matter what we did. Last
time, we were pitting our one-shot plan against a normal company’s normal
routine. This time, we were pitting our lives against the experience and
manpower and malevolence of the mob.

 
          
When
I did think about it, I simply thought we were crazy. If I’d worked it all out
back in the beginning, say when I’d been on the train going to talk to Vigano,
if I’d figured it out then that sooner or later we would be making ourselves
murder targets for the Mafia, I never would have gone through with it. And Joe
the same, I’m sure of it. But all we could concentrate on in the beginning was
stealing the bonds, and not what would happen afterwards. And when it did occur
to me what Vigano’s natural reaction would have to be, I was still so caught up
in the other thing that all I thought about was how much easier that would make
things for us, since we didn’t really have to steal the bonds, just make it
look as though we had.

           
It was the morning after the
robbery, while suffering that hangover in Joe’s car on the way to work, that
I’d first looked the thing full in the face. We had done part one, and we’d
done it pretty well. But part two was the crunch. Part two was where death
waited for us if we weren’t very smart and very careful and very lucky.

 
          
But
if we didn’t do part two, there was no point in our having done part one.

 
          
I
was in a real funk for a while after that I couldn’t even think about the
problem, couldn’t concentrate on it. It just seemed more than I could deal
with, reaching into the trap and pulling out the two-million-dollar piece of
cheese without getting the spring across the back of my neck.

 
          
I’d
been coming out of it anyway, spurred on by the scene with the homosexual in
the park—very near here, in fact—but it was Joe who finally goosed me back into
action again. I think Joe probably has less imagination than I do, but that’s a
good part of his strength. If you can’t imagine the things that might go wrong,
you won’t be afraid of them.

 
          
I
don’t mean that Joe wasn’t scared of the mob. Any sane man would be,
particularly if he meant to sell them a lot of old newspapers for two million
dollars. It’s just that Joe was never paralyzed by his fear the way I’d been
paralyzed by mine. Joe dealt more with specific things that he could touch and
taste. What made me the most nervous was the mob, but what made him the most
nervous was that we’d done part one and didn’t have anything to show for it. It
really pained him when we ripped up those bonds, I know it did.

 
          
Well,
we’d committed ourselves again. We could still turn around, of course, we could
still cop out, but I didn’t think we would. We were at the stage now equivalent
to when, in the robbery, we’d met Eastpoole but Joe hadn’t grabbed his arm yet.
We’d set things up with Vigano, we were both in position, but we hadn’t yet
made contact, we could still change our minds at the last second.

 
          
Joe
made his first pass twenty minutes after
Fd
sat down,
but I didn’t give him the signal because Vigano’s people hadn’t showed up yet.
I watched
him
drive by, and then I counted cabs some
more,
and fifteen minutes later he went by again, and still they hadn’t showed up.

 
          
Weren’t
they going to? If after all this, after nerving ourselves up to it and working
out the best scheme we could think of, the mob didn’t show up this time for the
transfer, I didn’t know what Fd do. I wouldn’t be able to stand it, that’s all.
To have to start all over again, phone Vigano again, set up another meeting,
Fd
have an ulcer before it was over.
Or a
nervous breakdown.

 
          
But
what if they weren’t coming at all? What if they’d decided the hell with it,
they didn’t want to buy the bonds?

 
          
Christ, that
would be something. Then Joe would really be
sore, and at me.
Because if we actually had the bonds, and
the mob reneged on us, we could maybe go fence them to somebody else.
But Vigano was the only person on earth to whom we could sell the
idea
of the bonds. It was him, or
nobody.

 
          
The
arrangement Joe and I had was that he would come by every fifteen minutes until
I gave him the signal. Then our second timing sequence would begin, with me
making the first move. We hadn’t made a contingency plan for what we’d do if
the mob never showed up, but I figured if Joe was still circling the
neighborhood an hour from now we might as well throw in the towel and go away
and see what we could do next.

 
          
Get
drunk, most likely.

 
          
Five
minutes before he was due to come by for the third time, the mob arrived. A
black limousine came up Central Park West and pulled to a stop in the entrance
to the roadway. Gray police sawhorses blocked the road to automobiles this
afternoon, and the limousine stopped broadside to the sawhorses, out of the way
of northbound Central Park West traffic. Nothing happened for a few seconds,
and then the rear door opened and four people got out; two men and two women.
None of them looked like the kind of people who normally travel around in
limousines. Also, the general practice with limousines is that the chauffeur
gets out and opens the door for the passengers, but this time the chauffeur
stayed behind the wheel.

 
          
A
man came out first. He was stocky and tough-looking, and despite the heat of
the day he was wearing a light zippered jacket closed about halfway up. He
looked around warily and cautiously, and then motioned for the other people to
come out.

 
          
The
two women appeared. They were both in their twenties, both a little too full in
hip and breast, both wearing plaid slacks and ordinary blouses, both in full
night-style make-up, and both with big bouffant hairdos.

           
One of them was chewing gum. They
stood around like collies waiting their turn to appear at a dog show, and the
other man came out of the car after them.

 
          
Ho
was tho one. He looked like the first guy, and he too wore a half-zippcrcd
jacket, but the important part was that he was carrying tho picnic basket. From
the way ho held it, the thing was heavier than hell.

 
          
Let
it be full of the real thing, I thought. Ixt them not try that kind of fast
one, I don’t want to go through this twice.

 
          
The four of them mado very unlikely picnickers.
There didn’t
seem to be any coherent connection among them; the men didn’t hold the women’s
hands or elbows, and thcro wasn’t any conversation back and forth. Nor could
you figure out which woman was supposed to be with which man. The four of them
seemed as arbitrarily joined together as four strangers in an elevator.

 
          
They
walked off in a group into the park, tho second man struggling with the heavy
picnic basket. They disappeared from sight, but tho limousine stayed where it
was. Thin exhaust showed from the tailpipe.

 
          
I
took the newspaper off my lap and tossed it down to tho other end of the bench.
In less than a minute a thin old fellow came along and picked it up and walked
oil with it, reading the stock reports.

 
          
Joe
came by right on schedule. I didn’t look directly at him, but I knew he would
sec that I didn’t have tho paper in my lap any
moro
.
That was tho signal. He would dope out for himself what the limousine meant,
parked sideways in the entrance.

 
          
After
Joe passed, I got to my feet and walked on into the park. Strolling down tho
asphalt path, I saw tho four picnickers sitting in a bunch down near the
traffic light on tho interior road, where I’d said they should be. They had the
picnic basket on the ground and they were sitting in a tight circle around it.
They weren’t talking among themselves, they were all fncing and concentrating
outward, not even pretending to have a picnic together. They looked like
Conestoga wagons waiting for Indians.

 
          
Vigano
would have other people
In
the area, to guard the
basket and try to keep us from going away with it. Walking around, I spotted
four of them, guys sitting or standing at strategic locations where they could
watch the picnickers. Therc’d
bo
moro of them, I was
sure of that, but four was all I’d seen so far.

           
I’d probably see more later, whether
I wanted to or not. I kept an eye on my watch. It would take Joe a while to get
into position. At the right time, I walked forward across the grass and down a
gentle slope toward the picnickers.

 
          
They
watched me coming. The one who’d first gotten out of the car put his hand
inside his half-open jacket I walked up to them. I had a smile tacked to my
face, as phony as the moustache. I hunkered down in front of the first man and
said, quietly, "I'm Mr. Kopp.”

 
          
He
had the eyes of a dead fish. He studied me with them and said, “Where’s your
stuff?”

 
          
“Coming,”
I said. “But first Fm going to reach into the basket and take some bills out.”

 
          
His
expression didn’t change. He said. “Who says?” Both women and the other man
kept looking away from us, outward; watching for Indians.

 
          
I
said, “I have to check them out.
Just a few.”

 
          
He
was thinking it over. I glanced away to my left and saw one of the guys I’d
spotted earlier, and he was closer now. He w
^r
asn’t moving at the
moment, but he was closer. “Why?”

 
          
I
looked back at him. The question had been asked in a flat tone, as though he
were
a computer instead of a man, and his face was still
expressionless. I said, “You know Fm not going to make the deal until I know
for sure what you've got in that basket.”

 
          
“We
have what you want”

 
          
“I’ll
have to check it out for myself.”