William McGivern - The Caper of the Golden Bulls

Phillip had demolished the huge head methodically. He had kicked holes through its eyes and forehead, smashed the drum that hung from its neck, ripped off the tricorn hat, and pulled the splintered wood apart with his hands.

The gaping interior of the Cabezuda was empty.

“Where are they?” he asked Angela.

Phillip held her by one arm, as he would a child, and looked into her eyes. Despite his exertions, his voice was gentle and reasonable, but it was the gentleness and reasonableness of a man who had a firm grip on the levers that operated a rack; there was no need to shout or scream, that was the victim’s role. The look in his eyes sent a chill down Angela’s spine.

“I told you the truth,” she said. “Something went wrong. The window at the bank didn’t open.”

“Phillip struck her across the face. “You can make this as difficult as you like. But I want the truth.”

“Stop it, you pig!” She struggled fiercely against the grip of his hand, but she might as well have tried to tear her arm from a vice.

Phillip struck her again, with more authority this time, and Angela’s head snapped about on her shoulders like a flower in an erratic wind-storm.

“Stop it!” she cried. “I told you the truth.”

“Where is Francois?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

There was a sudden glimmer of understanding in Phillip’s eyes. “I should have kept in mind that swine’s talent for betrayal. You must have given him the diamonds on the way from the bank. While I was carting you through the streets and alleys.”

“I swear to God I didn’t Oh listen to me, you great stupid pig! Peter’s tricked us. Don’t you realise that?”

“No, you and Francois are the specialists in that area. So let’s see which you prefer: the diamonds or your pretty face.”

“No, stop it!”

After a while Phillip was forced to consider the possibility that she might be telling the truth. He released her arm, frowned at his watch, and went swiftly through the door, without another glance at Angela, who lay huddled on the dusty floor beside the smashed head of the Cabezuda.

A scream waked Peter. Or so it seemed, as he rolled on to his side and sat up, bracing his weight with a hand against the floor. The silence in the dim interior of the bank was troubled by echoes; it was like the trembling silence in a room in which a telephone has just stopped ringing.

The lump above his ear pulled his right eye into a squint. His head ached dreadfully. He got to his knees and looked through the tool kit, driven to this by the kind of pointless hope that impels a starving dog to return with futile persistence to an empty plate.

But of course it was gone; the can of film was gone. Dear sweet Christ, he thought wearily. That was why Francois hadn’t bothered to kill him. He hadn’t needed to. Peter got to his feet, and breathed slowly and deeply, summoning the last of his strength for what lay ahead of him.

He had been prepared to pick up the cheque, to make amends, to pay the bill with his freedom. But he couldn’t do that now. For when Angela sent the film to the police, the prison doors would swing shut on Bendell and the Irishman too.

It was ten-thirty. Francois had a long start on him. But there was still Phillip, the one last hope, the one threat Francois could have no way of anticipating... Peter lowered himself through the manhole, climbed down into the big drain which ran under the basement of the bank. The cold and dampness now seemed more intense; he could see his breath in the gleam of his flashlight, hazy and white on the heavy fetid air.

He ran along the tunnel until it began to narrow; then he went to his knees to cover the last half-dozen yards. He was quite weak, but his mind was functioning clearly. Nothing very subtle or complex had occurred to him however; find Francois and recover the can of film, those were his simple goals.

And for all practical purposes, Peter achieved both these ends by the unspectacular and unheroic act of pointing the beam of his flashlight down the narrow link between the two mains.

What he saw nearly made him retch. He snapped off the light, but there were still hotly glowing little eyes, and the scratch of claws on slimy stones, to remind him of what horrors had been revealed in the glare of his torch.

Francois had had a long start on him, to be sure, but this was as far as he had got; his body was lodged in the narrow connecting tube, and there it would stay until the fall floods swept it into the next main, and then on to the river.

Peter drew a deep breath and snapped on his light. He forced himself to look down the tube, and then he saw and understood what had happened to Francois: The can of film, tucked under his belt, had become wedged into a crack in the stone surfacing of the tube. One of its flanged rims had been driven deeply into the fissure, and Francois, with his arms thrust ahead of his body, and his weight pressing heavily on the can of film, had been unable to free himself; the confines of the tube had made it impossible for him to shift his weight or move his arms.

With his body slanting downward at a forty-five degree angle, the Frenchman’s cramped hands and feet had been totally impotent against the force of gravity. He couldn’t slide down to the big main ahead of him; and he couldn’t fight his way back up and out of the connecting tube.

All he could do was scream.

And that hadn’t deterred the rats for long... Peter followed the light of his torch back along the tunnel, and up to the basement of the bank.

His capacity for irony was sufficient to allow him to appreciate, if not to relish, the appropriateness of Francois’s fate. But he couldn’t manage a philosophical shrug at the punch line of this bitter joke. For now he was trapped just as helplessly as the Frenchman had been.

Francois’s betrayal had worked out quite neatly, although not in the manner he had intended it to. He had planned to destroy Peter Churchman, and he had managed it by blocking the only route to freedom with his dead body.

There was still the other exit, the shaft they had blasted from the basement of the adjoining warehouse. But this offered little hope now.

It was eleven in the morning, and the plaza and sidewalks in front of the passageway would be clogged with traffic and pedestrians. But Peter made a reconnaissance anyway, crawling through the shaft and peering cautiously from the window into the passageway. His estimate of conditions had been conservative, he saw: Not only were there crowds surging by, but at the juncture of the passageway and the street, stood a broad-shouldered policeman, his back to Peter, his eyes flicking alertly over the people and traffic passing before him. He was fifteen feet from Peter, and despite the fact that he rocked slowly from side to side on his stout boots, he gave the impression of being rooted to the spot as a tree in the ground.

Peter waited hopefully for him to leave. If the policeman went away, he might try to open the window, remove the grille work and climb into the passageway, taking the long, long chance that no one would notice him crawling out of the basement in broad daylight.

But after fifteen minutes he decided it was no use. Peter returned to the second floor of the bank, and sat wearily at a desk near the open vault. Don’t quit, he thought. As long as you can think, there’s a chance. But he found he didn’t really believe this. He felt he had never been a player in this game, but only a pawn. And so what was there to think about? He opened drawers and looked at paper clips and rubber bands and pencils. At ledgers, notebooks, files. He drummed his fingers on the desk, frowning at inkwells, calendars, a telephone, a spike fluttering with flimsy papers.