Donald Westlake - Cops and Robbers

I nodded. “All right.”

“When you call,” he said, “you say your name is Mister Kopp. K-O-P-P.”

I grinned a little. “That’s easy to remember.”

“But don’t call me with questions,” he said. “You do it or you don’t. If you take ten million in securities from Wall Street, I’ll read about it in the paper. Otherwise, if I get a message from you I don’t answer.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s okay.”

“Nice talking to you,” he said, and picked up his beer glass again. He hadn’t offered me one.

He wanted the conversation to be finished, so I got to my feet. “You’ll be hearing from me,” I said. I knew it was bravado to say it, and that it didn’t make me look any better, but I went ahead and said it anyway.

He shrugged. He wasn’t interested in me anymore. “That’s fine,” he said.

Vigano watched the visitor leave with his escorts. He waited thirty seconds, brooding, sipping at his Michelob, and then pressed the intercom button on the scoreboard.

Waiting for Marty to come in, he thought back over the conversation. Could the guy have been on the level? It was hard to believe, and yet anything else was even harder to believe. What other reason could he have for pulling a stunt like this, coming here cold with such an off-the-wall idea? There was no profit for any law-enforcement agency in it, and nothing to be gained by any potential competitor.

After all, he wouldn’t ever have anything else to do with the guy unless there really was a multi-million-dollar bond theft on Wall Street. Which would get into the papers and onto the television news, no doubt about it. Anybody calling up and claiming to be Mr. Kopp and claiming to have stolen bonds would be given the brush-off right away unless there had been a robbery to match, one that Vigano knew about from his own sources.

So assume the guy was on the level. What was the likelihood he’d actually go through with a robbery and get away with it? Very very thin. And if he didn’t do it, Vigano wouldn’t have lost anything.

But if he did really pull it off, Vigano would stand to gain a hell of a lot.

It was a nice position to be in. Vigano toasted himself with Michelob, and Marty came in, saying, “Yes, sir, Mr. Vigano?”

Vigano turned to him. “The guy that’s going out now,” he said. “I want his name and address and what he does for a living.”

“Yes, sir,” Marty said, and left again.

It would probably come to nothing. But just in case something good did come out of it, Vigano wanted to have his homework done. It’s the details, he thought, that make the difference between a winner and a punk.

He got to his feet, selected a ball, and bowled a strike.

When Tom and I talked over the Mafia idea, one thing we agreed on right away was that if the mob found out who we were, there was no way we could go through with it. Neither of us wanted mobsters around with that kind of hold over us. Either we could contact Vigano and stay anonymous, or we’d have to give up that idea and try to think of something else.

We took it for granted, the two of us, that Vigano would have Tom followed after their conversation; if he talked to Tom at all. So the first most necessary thing was to break Tom loose from the people tailing him.

The last train to Penn Station from Red Bank pulls in to New York at twelve-forty. There aren’t many people on that train, particularly on a week night, which was part of the reason we’d picked it. Also, where it came in at Penn Station there was only one staircase up to the terminal.

I was in uniform, and I got to the station fifteen minutes ahead of time. We’d rehearsed this three times, and the train had never been anywhere near this early, but we wanted to be absolutely sure. I went to the head of the stairs leading up from that platform, and stood there, waiting.

Standing there, it occurred to me this was the first time in my life I’d worn the uniform when I wasn’t on duty. I’ve never been exactly gung ho for the force. The only reason I was in that uniform at all was because the Army didn’t need any tank drivers the day in basic training when I got classified. The choices open to me were cook or military policeman or something else, I forget what. Something crappy. They were also picking orderly-room clerks and finance clerks that day, but my test profile wasn’t too good in the right areas for those jobs. What I really wanted was to drive a tank, but I wound up an MP.

I was an MP for a year and a half, eleven months of it assigned to the Vogelweh dependent housing area outside Kaiserlautern, Germany. I dug it. I got a kick out of carrying a .45 around on my hip, and doing the target shooting, and driving around town in a jeep at night to keep the white troops and the black troops from beating each other’s head in. I hadn’t had any job at all before I was drafted, I mean nothing that I wanted to get back to, and I never had any interest in college, so when I got out of the Army the question was what would I do for a living, and the answer was plain and simple. Go on the same as before. The uniform changed from brown to blue, the sidearm changed from a .45 automatic to a .38 revolver, and you had to be a little more careful how you dealt with people, but otherwise it was pretty much the same job.

Which was nice at first, it made for a nice transition from soldier to civilian. But after a while the same job gets to be a drag and a bore and a pain in the ass, no matter what it is. Whether you’re carrying a gun or not, driving around the city or not, it doesn’t matter; it gets boring.

For a long time, it seemed as though there was always something else to take up the slack, keep me interested in life even when the job was dull. Getting married, for instance. Having kids. Moving out of the apartment out to Long Island. Those are like the mountains, and the valley is your dull everyday life.

It had been a long time between mountains.

For the last couple years, I’d been thinking about women, about maybe shacking up with somebody somewhere. Get me a girl in town, somewhere in my precinct. I was pretty sure a girl on the side would drain off all this stored-up boredom again, at least for a while, but somehow I never seemed to get started at it. My heart wasn’t in it. I knew it was possible, I personally knew four guys in the precinct who had exactly that kind of arrangement, but it was like I didn’t have the energy to make the first moves, to look around in any way more than just eyeing my friends’ wives and wondering how they’d be in the sack. Maybe I was trying to keep myself from disappointment, maybe down in the bottom of my brain I had the idea a girl on the side would finally be the biggest letdown of all. With no place left to go from there.

I heard the train come in, down below; the way the brakes squealed, they could probably hear it up on 42nd Street. I stood at the head of the stairs, just to one side, looking down. The stairs were concrete, and wide enough for three people abreast, and they were flanked on both sides by amber tile walls.

Tom got to the stairs first, the way he was supposed to. If I hadn’t already seen him in the disguise I wouldn’t have recognized him. The wig was a different hair color, and longer than his usual hair, and it seemed to change the whole shape of his head. Then he had a David Niven kind of moustache, which made his face look younger for some reason. And the horn-rim glasses changed his eyes entirely, so he looked like an accountant somewhere.

As for me, the uniform was my main disguise. People rarely look past the uniform to see the individual man. The only extra disguise I wore was a droopy moustache, like a western sheriff’s, and I’d put that on more for the hell of it than because I thought I really needed it. There wouldn’t be any reason for anybody to tie me up with Tom.