like a flickering silent movie, but it gave light enough for Mulligan to crawl on all
fours through the scattered furniture and sprawled guards and rolling nickels
over to the tellers’ counter. He crawled up that and thus reached his feet. Feet
braced wide, both arms stretched out across the counter and fingers gripping the
inner edge, he looked around at the shambles.
Down to his left, Fenton was also clinging to the counter, in the angle where it
made a turn to go past the courtesy desk. Sitting on the floor with his back to
the courtesy desk and his hands braced to both sides was Morrison, wincing at
every bump. Across the way, clutching the neck-high windowsill where the
venetian blind was up, hung Dresner, trying to make some sense out of the night
scenes flashing past the window.
What about the other direction? Block and Garfield were in a tight embrace in
the corner where the counter-with the safe past it-met the wall of the trailer;
sitting there, locked together, half buried under furniture and debris since the
general trend of everything loose was to head toward the rear of the trailer, they
looked mostly like a high-school couple on a hayride.
And where was Fox? Fenton must have wondered the same thing, because he
suddenly yelled, “Fox! Where’d you get to!”
“I’m here!”
It was Fox’s voice all right, but where was Fox? Mulligan gaped around, and
so did everybody else.
And then Fox appeared. His head emerged above the counter, down by the
safe. He was on the other side of the counter. Hanging there, he looked
seasick. “Here I am,” he called.
Fenton saw him, too, since he yelled, “How in God’s name did you get in
there?”
“I just don’t know,” Fox said. “I just don’t know.”
Block and Garfield were now coming back toward the middle space, both
traveling on all fours. They looked like fathers who didn’t yet realize their sons
had grown bored with piggyback and gone away. Garfield paused in front of
Fenton, hunkered back, looked up like the dog on the old Victrola record
labels, and said, “Shall we try to break out the door?”
“What, leave?” Fenton looked enraged, as though somebody had suggested
they surrender the fort to the Indians. “They may have the bank,” he said, “but
they don’t have the money!” He let go with one arm to gesture dramatically at
the safe. Unfortunately, the bank made a right turn at the same instant and
Fenton suddenly ran across the floor and tackled Dresner, over at the window.
The two of them went crashing, and Block and Garfield rolled into them.
Turning his head to the left, Mulligan, who had retained his grip on the
counter, saw Morrison still sitting on the floor against the courtesy desk and still
wincing. Turning his head to the right, he saw that Fox’s head was no longer on
top of the counter, nor anywhere else in view. He nodded, having expected as
much.
From the scramble across the way, Fenton’s voice rose:
“Get off me, you men! Get off me, I say! That’s a direct order!”
Mulligan, his chest against the counter, looked over his shoulder at the rest.
An awful lot of legs were flailing over there, and they still hadn’t sorted
themselves out when suddenly the flickering light stopped, and they were in
darkness again.
“Now what?” Fenton wailed, his voice muffled as though somebody possibly
had their elbow in his mouth.
“We’re not in the city any more,” Morrison shouted. “We’re in the country.
No streetlights.”
“Get off me!”
For some reason it all seemed quieter in the dark, though just as jouncy and
chaotic. Mulligan clung to the counter like Ishmael, and in the darkness they
eventually sorted themselves out across the way. Finally Fenton, panting, said,
“All right. Everybody present?” He then called the role, and each of the six
pantingly answered to his name-even Fox, though faintly.
“All right,” Fenton said again. “Sooner or later they’re going to have to stop.
They’re going to want to get in here. Now, they may shoot the place up first, so
what we have to do is all of us get in back of that counter. Try to keep a desk or
some other piece of furniture between you and any outside wall. They have the
bank, but they don’t have the money, and as long as we’re on the job they
aren’t going to get the money!”
It might have been an inspiring speech if it hadn’t been slowed down by all the
panting Fenton was doing, and if the rest of them hadn’t had to hold onto the
walls and one another for dear life while listening to it. Still, it did recall them all
to their duties, and Mulligan heard them now crawling toward the counter,
panting and bumping into things, but making progress.
Mulligan had to go by his memory of the place, since he couldn’t see his hand
in front of his face. Or wouldn’t have been able to if it was there and not
clutching the counter. As he remembered the layout, the nearest entrance
through the counter was down to his right, toward the safe. He moved that way,
sidling along, keeping both hands firmly on the counter edge.
He too was panting, which he could, surely understand, given the exertion
required simply to keep on his feet, but why should he be so sleepy? He’d been
working a night shift for years; he hadn’t gotten out of bed yesterday until four in
the afternoon. It was ridiculous to feel sleepy. Nevertheless, it would feel very
good to sit down, once he got around behind this counter. Wedge himself in next
to a filing cabinet or something, relax a little. Not actually close his eyes, of
course-just relax.
19
“CALLING all cars, calling all cars. Be on the lookout for a stolen bank,
approximately eleven feet tall, blue and white
20
DORTMUNDER, Kelp and Murch were the only gang members present at
the actual theft of the bank. Kelp, earlier that evening, had picked up a tractor-trailer cab without its trailer near the piers in the West Village section of
Manhattan and had met Dortmunder and Murch with it on Queens Boulevard in
Long Island City, just across the 59th Street bridge from Manhattan, shortly
after midnight. Murch had done the driving after that, with Kelp sitting in the
middle and Dortmunder on the right, resting his elbow on the open windowsill.
Below his elbow read a company name: Elmore Trucking. The cab had North
Dakota plates. Stuffed inside with them, amid their feet as they headed east out
Long Island, were a twenty-five-foot coil of black rubber garden hose, several
lengths of thick heavy chain and a carpenter’s tool kit.
They arrived at the bank at one-fifteen and had to move a car parked in the
way. They pushed it down in front of a fire hydrant and took its place and
waited silently with the lights and engine off until they saw the patrol car-car
nine-drive by just after one-thirty. Very quietly then they backed the cab up to
the trailer and left its engine idling but lights off while they hooked the two parts
together.
Which was a little complicated. The tractor cab was of the sort that fits under
the front of a cargo-carrying trailer equipped only with rear wheels; that is, the
cab’s rear wheels normally served as the front wheels of any trailer it towed,
with the front section of the trailer resting on the low flat rear section of the cab.
But this particular trailer, the bank, being a mobile home instead of a cargo
transporter, wasn’t set up for that kind of rig, having instead a kind of modified
V hitch in front, which was supposed to lock onto a ball at the rear of the towing
vehicle. So Dortmunder and Kelp and Murch had to attach the two together
with the loops of chain, shushing each other at every rattle and clank, squeezing
links shut with the pliers from the tool kit in order to complete the loops and
attach trailer to cab with four heavy circles of chain.
One end of the garden hose was then stuck into the cab’s tailpipe, and while
Kelp wrapped lots of black tape around the hose and that end of the pipe
Dortmunder stood on the rear of the cab and shoved the other end through an
air vent high in the trailer wall, so the cab exhaust would now go into the bank.
More tape was used to fasten that end of the hose in place, and to keep the
length of it flat against the front of the trailer all the way down, and to attach the
extra coils of hose to the rear superstructure of the cab.
All of which had taken only three or four minutes. Murch and Kelp got back