Дональд Уэстлейк - Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

“Good luck to you, too, Harry.”

But it was going to take more than luck.

With my mind so completely distracted by the problem of the authorship of the “help” messages, plus the further distraction of Andy Butler’s departure, I still hadn’t come up with a bank robbery stopper by Monday afternoon. So once again, for the fifth time, here I was in the luncheonette with Phil and Jerry and Billy, waiting for the red typewriter truck to arrive at five-thirty.

(It was the fifth time I was here, and the sixth time the others were here, but it was actually the seventh robbery attempt. The time of the great snowstorm, a month ago, we hadn’t bothered to come to the luncheonette at all.)

My mind will not fail me, I thought. Four o’clock, four-fifteen, four-thirty. My mind will not fail me. I’ve come up with last-minute solutions before this, and I’ll do it again.

But not the same solutions. I didn’t dare repeat any of those earlier ploys, for fear the repetition would click something in Phil Giffin’s mind. I was straining coincidence to the breaking point as it was, though in fact two of those instances, the bank party and the snowstorm, were simply natural occurrences that nobody could have set up in advance. But three of the remaining four had involved bombs of one sort or another — stink, smoke and scare — and that was permitting the ice to get a trifle thin.

That’s all right, I told myself, as five o’clock came by, you’ll think of something. You’ll think of something, Harry. You always think of something.

Not a bomb. Nothing to the truck. Not a phone call.

Tip the police? Tell them a robbery was about to happen?

No. They wouldn’t rush to the scene with sirens blaring, they’d sneak up and capture us the instant we made our move.

I’ll think of something. I’ll think of something.

Five-fifteen. Five-twenty-five.

If I pretended a heart attack? No, they’d go on anyway, and I couldn’t afford to be taken away in an ambulance to some hospital’s emergency ward, where they’d request identification.

Five-thirty.

I’ll think of something.

The typewriter repair truck arrived. It was a new truck, also a red Ford Econoline van just like the old one; I must have really done a good job on that earlier truck.

So I can do a good job now. I’ll think of something in just a second.

Joe got out of the truck, walked to the back door, opened it.

Maybe the Third World War will start. Or we’ll get a visitor from outer space.

Joe took out the typewriter, carried it over to the Fiduciary Federal door. Eddie, overcoat on over his guard uniform, climbed out of the truck and walked over to stand with Joe.

“I don’t believe it,” Phil said. I looked at him, and his expression was awed, as though he were seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary, who was telling him how to attain Peace on Earth.

The bank door opened. Joe and Eddie walked in.

“Let’s go,” Phil said.

I’ll think of something, I thought. I got to my feet with the others, and we trooped out of the luncheonette and across the street.

I’ll think of something. Wait a second now.

Eddie Troyn opened the door to us. He’d taken off his overcoat, revealing his guard uniform, and I had to admit he looked perfect in the part. “Everything’s fine,” he assured us, and it took me a second to realize he’d said that exactly the way a bank guard would. He was calm, quiet, a bit hushed.

There was just something about Eddie and a uniform. Whenever he put one on, he assumed the personality that went with it.

I’ll think of something, I told myself, and the four of us stepped into the bank, and Eddie closed and locked the door behind us. And over to the right Joe Maslocki had put down the typewriter and had taken out a gun — one of the automatics Eddie and I had stolen from Camp Quattatunk — and was holding it aimed at the real guard, who was standing without moving.

It’s too late, I thought. I couldn’t believe it. We’re robbing the bank, I thought.

I stood and pointed a gun at the woman in the tweed skirt and the man with the red tie while the man with the sideburns phoned his wife. Phil was pointing a gun at the man with the sideburns. Joe was pointing a gun at the bank guard, who had been relieved of his own gun, which Jerry now had in his pocket. Eddie, in his guard uniform, was standing by the front door, acting precisely like a bank guard; I was sure he thought he was a bank guard, and I hoped he wouldn’t blow the whistle on us. Jerry and Billy, who would be operating the laser which Joe had brought in from the typewriter repairman’s truck, were standing around waiting for the phone calls to be made before either of them could get started.

When the man with the sideburns finished telling his wife about the sudden unexpected audit that might keep him at work in the bank all night — he’d had to keep assuring her that there was no suspicion that he himself was an embezzler — he came over and took the place of the woman in the tweed skirt. That is, he became one of the two people I was pointing a gun at, and the woman in the tweed skirt became the person Phil was pointing a gun at, in the course of which she made a phone call to her husband explaining the business about the audit. In her case, the suspicion evinced at the other end seemed to have nothing to do with embezzlement: “You can call me right here at the bank any time you want,” she said, with some asperity, “all night long.” She seemed quite annoyed when she hung up and came back to be gun-pointed at by me again, while the man with the red tie took her place in front of Phil and at the phone.

None of the employees seemed more than annoyed or perhaps slightly worried by our presence, in fact, except the bank guard, who had been just about petrified with fear until he’d been disarmed, after which he calmed down considerably. But he still did twitch from time to time, and lick his lips, and look around nervously for somebody to appease.

Once we had all entered the bank and moved behind the partition to the area which held the private offices and the vault, we had immediately put on the black masks from the five-and-ten that Phil had bought back in December. They were ordinary domino masks, of the type the Lone Ranger wears. I don’t know what I looked like, but the others looked like characters from nineteen-thirties comic strips rather than the Lone Ranger. Rough clothing, masks. Only the fact that we were all clean-shaven and had no speech balloons over our heads saved us from out-and-out obsolescence.

The man with the red tie, on the phone with his wife, had to follow up the story of the audit with a rather weary defense of his choice of banking as an occupation. “You knew I worked in a bank when you married me,” he said at one point. Some sort of dinner party involving members of his wife’s family had apparently been scheduled for this evening, and his wife was clearly of a mind that he was using the audit as an excuse for non-attendance. He denied this consistently, and ultimately with some vehemence, but I noticed that when he finished the call and came back over to be gun-pointed at by me again he did seem to have a faint smile hovering in the general vicinity of his lips.

Finally the guard, a somewhat pudgy elderly man with a red roll of fat around his neck, was escorted by Joe over to the telephone, and therefore made his phone call under the watchful guns of two tough guys with masks on. It did seem a bit excessive.

That is, he made his phone calls . First he had to call his wife and tell her not to hold dinner because of the audit, etc., etc. Then he had to call his daughter-in-law and tell her he couldn’t babysit for her and her husband that evening because of the audit, etc., etc. Then he had to call somebody named Jim and tell him not to come over for checkers at his, the guard’s, daughter-in-law’s house this evening because he, the guard, would not be present because of the audit, etc., etc. It seemed a complicated social life for such an old man.