Дональд Уэстлейк - Enough [A Travesty (novel) and Ordo (novelette)]

“I have a gun,” I said, drawing it out from beneath my topcoat lapel and then sliding it back out of sight. “You’d better read that note.”

It was a note I’d worked on for nearly fifteen minutes. I’d wanted the strongest possible message in the fewest possible words, and what I had eventually come up with — derived from any number of robbery movies — was printed in clear legible block letters on that piece of paper in the teller’s hand, and what it said was:

MY BABY WILL DIE WITHOUT THE OPERATION. PUT ALL THE MONEY IN THE SACK, OR I’LL KILL US BOTH.

I realize there was a certain ambiguity in that word “us,” that I might have been threatening either to kill the teller and myself or my baby and myself, but I was relying on the context to make the message clear. My baby wasn’t present, but the teller was.

The only sack I’d had available, unfortunately, had originally come with a bottle of champagne in it, and in white lettering on its green side it clearly stated Gold Seal Charles Fournier Blanc de Blancs New York State Champagne . I’d been using it to hold the tiles in my Scrabble set. I knew it wasn’t quite the right image for somebody trying to establish himself as driven to crime by the financial crisis of his baby’s operation, but I was hoping the note and the gun and my own desperate self would carry the day.

I also had the impression, from some newspaper article or somewhere, that banks were advising their employees — telling their tellers — not to resist robbers or raise any immediate alarm. They preferred to rely on their electronic surveillance — the photographs being taken of me at this very instant, for instance — and not risk shoot-outs in banks if they could possibly avoid it.

Well, this time I was ready to have my picture taken. The clear-glass hornrim spectacles on my face were another movie souvenir, the black cloth cap pulled low over my forehead had just been purchased half a block from here, and the pieces of tissue stuffed in on both sides of my face between cheek and lower gum altered my appearance just as much as they’d altered Marlon Brando’s in The Godfather . So click away, electronic surveillance, this is one picture I won’t have to buy back.

In the meantime, the teller was reading. Her eyes had widened when I’d flashed the pistol, but they narrowed again when she studied the note. She frowned at it, turned it over to look at the blank back, picked up the champagne sack and hefted it — an R fell out, dammit — and said to me, “You sure you on the level?”

“Hurry up,” I hissed at her, “before I get nervous and start shooting.” And I flashed the gun again.

“You’re nervous, all right,” she told me. “You got sweat all over your face.”

“Hurry up!” I was repeating myself, and running out of threats. Once a toy gun has been brandished, there’s nothing left to do with it; brandishing is its entire repertoire.

Fortunately, nothing else was needed. With an elaborately unruffled shrug — I envied her calm under pressure — the teller said, “Well, it’s not my money,” (my point exactly) and began to transfer handfuls of cash from her drawer to the sack.

At last. But everything was taking too long. The big clock on the wall read five minutes past twelve and I was a long long way from P. J. Malone’s. (I’d thought it better to do my bank robbing outside my own immediate neighborhood.) I wanted to again urge speed on the girl, but I was afraid to emphasize even more the contrast between her calm and my frenzy so I remained silent, jittering from foot to foot as wads of twenties and tens and fives disappeared into my nice green sack.

She filled it, till it looked like Long John Silver’s Christmas stocking, and then she pulled the little white drawstrings at the top and pushed the sack across the counter to me. “Have a nice day,” she said, with an irony I found out of keeping under the circumstances. She might not be taking this seriously, but I was.

I was three minutes late but Edgarson was still there, lunching at his leisure in a high-sided booth at the back. I slid in across from him and he gave me his encouraging smile, saying, “There you are. I was beginning to worry about you.”

“Save your worry.” In his presence I realized how much I hated him. I’m not used to being helpless, at the mercy of another person, and if I ever had the chance to even the score with this bastard I’d leap at it.

He must have seen something of that in my face, because he became immediately more businesslike, saying, “You have the money?”

“You have the negative?”

“I sure do.” He withdrew from inside his coat a small envelope, opened it, held up an orange-black negative, and then put it back inside the envelope.

“I’ll want to inspect that,” I said. (Scenario: He hands me the negative, I pop it into my mouth and swallow it. Then what does he do?)

But he was smiling at me and shaking his head. Revised scenario: He keeps the negative, mistrusting me. “First you give me the money,” he said. “Then you can inspect this picture all you want.”

“Oh, all right.” Reaching into my pockets, I said, “I didn’t have time to get a cashier’s check. You won’t mind cash, will you?” Fistfuls of the stuff began to pile up on my paper place mat.

Even Edgarson lost his bucolic cool at that. Staring at the money, he said, “Well, I’ll be damned. No, I don’t mind cash, not at all.”

The waiter arrived then, gave the money an astonished look, and said, “Did you intend to order anything, sir?”

“Jack Daniels,” I said. “On the rocks.”

“Just one glass?”

“Ha ha,” I said. Gesturing at the money, I explained, “I robbed a bank.”

“Ha ha,” the waiter said, and went away.

I looked at Edgarson. “I did rob a bank, you know. You’ve put me through a lot today.”

He’d had time to recover. Smiling in bemusement, shaking his head, he said, “You sure are an interesting fella to watch, I’ll say that for you.”

“Don’t bore me with your shoptalk.” I tossed over a small envelope from my publisher’s bank, where I’d cashed his advance check. “There’s fifteen hundred. You can count it, if you want.”

“I might as well,” he said, and proceeded to do so.

I kept dragging out my other money, most of it in twenties and tens with a few fifties sprinkled here and there. The eight-sixty from various pawnshops, the six hundred from the bad checks, the four-fifty from the nostalgia shops, the two seventy-five from the checking account. And another envelope; tossing it to him, I said, “My former savings account. Two thousand seven hundred sixty-three dollars and eighty cents.”

“It’s an amazing thing,” he said, placidly counting, “but most everybody’s worth more than they realize.”

“Fascinating,” I said, and pushed across the pyramid of loose bills. “Here’s another twenty-one eighty-five.”

The waiter, returning, placed my drink where my money had been and said, “How does a person get to be your friend?”

I picked up the drink. “Put this on his bill,” I said.

“I should think so,” the waiter said, and left.

I sipped and Edgarson counted. Then I sipped some more and Edgarson counted some more. Then I sipped some more and Edgarson said, “I make that six thousand four hundred and forty-eight dollars so far.” The bills, upon being counted, had disappeared into his clothing, and now he shoved my eighty cents back across the table to me, saying, “We don’t want to mess with change. But we would like to see some more greenbacks.”

“Out of my green sack,” I said, delving down inside my shirt and bringing out the swag. Propping the sack like a dildo in my lap, I loosened the drawstrings and started pulling out more cash.