Ed Mcbain - The Heckler

“Sure,” Pop said.

“You a new man?”

Pop hesitated. “How do you mean?”

“Used to be another fellow here,” Genero said. “When they were first building the center.”

“Oh, yeah,” Pop said.

“What was his name?” Genero asked.

For a moment, Pop felt as if he’d walked into a trap. He did not know the name of the man who’d preceded him. He wondered now if this cop knew the name and was testing him, or if he was just asking a simple question to make conversation.

“Freddie, wasn’t it?” Pop said.

“I forget,” Genero replied. He glanced over at the center. “They sure put these things up fast, don’t they?”

“They sure do,” Pop answered, relieved. He did not look toward the back yard. He did not want this stupid cop to think anything unusual was happening back there.

“The supermarket opened yesterday,” Genero said, “and the drugstore, too. Bank’s moving in tomorrow afternoon, be ready for business on the first. It’s amazing the way they work things nowadays.”

“It sure is,” Pop said.

“A bank is all I need on my beat,” Genero said. “Another headache to worry about.” He studied Pop for a moment, and then asked, “You going to be here steady?”

“No,” Pop answered. “I’m just on temporary.”

“Until all the stores are in, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Too bad,” Genero said, grinning. “You’da made my job easier.”

The light behind the ice-cream store went out suddenly. Genero looked toward the back yard.

“Guess they’re finished,” he said.

“I wish I was,” Pop answered. “I’ll be here all night long.”

Genero chuckled. “Well, keep an eye on the bank for me, will you?” he said. He clapped the old man on the shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you.”

Whistling, he walked up the street past the ice-cream store, turned the corner, and moved out of sight.

The time was 12:00 midnight.

The truck behind the store now belonged to Chelsea Pops, Inc.

The three men who’d fastened the new signs into place went back into the store, and down into the basement, and then into the tunnel they’d dug across the back yard.

The tunnel was no makeshift job. They had, after all, been working on it for a very long time. It was high and wide, and shored up with thick wooden beams which braced the ceiling and the walls. It had been necessary to make a sturdy tunnel because men and equipment had been working aboveground all the while the tunnel was being dug. The deaf man had been certain they were deep enough to avoid any cave-ins, but he’d made the tunnel exceptionally strong anyway.

“I don’t want anyone dropping in on us,” he had punned intentionally, and then grinned with the other men and got back to work.

The construction work aboveground, the legitimate work that went into the building of the shopping center, had really been an excellent cover for the daylight digging of the tunnel. With all that noise and confusion on the surface, no one even once imagined that some of the noise was coming from below the ground. During the night, of course, the men had to exercise a little more caution. But even then, they’d been protected by their phony night watchman.

The interesting part of the job, the deaf man thought, was that their construction of the tunnel had kept pace with the legitimate construction of the bank. The construction aboveground was open to all viewers. Painstakingly, the deaf man had watched while the vault was being built, had watched while the all-important wiring box for the alarm system had been imbedded in the concrete floor of the vault and then covered over with another three-foot layer of concrete. The alarm, he knew, would be of the very latest variety. But he also knew there wasn’t an alarm system in the world which Rafe could not render useless provided he could get at the wiring box.

The men had proceeded to get at the wiring box. As the shell of the bank took form and shape around the impregnable vault, the tunnel drove relentlessly across the back yard and then under the vault itself, and finally into the concrete until the underside of the vault was exposed. A web of steel had been crisscrossed into the vault floor between layers of concrete. The steel was almost impregnable, the rods constructed of laminated layers of metal, the grain of one layer running contrary to the grain of the next. A common hack saw would have broken on those laminated steel rods in the first thirty seconds of sawing. And the crisscrossing web made the task of forcible entry even more difficult since it limited the work space. Set an inch apart from each other, crossed like a fisherman’s net, each laminated rod of steel became a separate challenge defying entry. The steel mat was like an army of die-hard virgins opposing an undernourished rapist. And beyond the mat, embedded in the second layer of concrete, was the wiring box for the alarm system. Assuredly, the vault was almost impregnable.

Well, almost is not quite.

The men had a long time to work. They used acid on the steel, drop by drop, eating away each separate rod, day by day, working slowly and surely, keeping pace with the shell of the bank as it grew higher over their heads. By the twenty-sixth of April they had cut a hole with a three-foot diameter into the mat. They had then proceeded to chip away at the concrete until they reached the wiring box. Rafe had unscrewed the bottom of the box and studied the system carefully. As he’d suspected, the system was the most modern kind, a combination of the open- and closed-circuit systems.

In an open-circuit alarm system, the cheapest kind, the alarm sounds when the current is closed. The closed-circuit system operates on a different electrical principle. There is always a weak current running through the wiring and if the wires are cut, the alarm will sound when that current is broken.

The combination system works both ways. The alarm will sound if the current is broken, and the alarm will also sound when contact is established.

Anyone with a pair of shears can knock out the open-circuit system. All he has to do is cut the wires. The closed-contact system is a little more difficult to silence because it requires a cross-contacting of the wires. Rafe knew how to knock out both systems, and he also knew how to take care of the combination system—but that would have to wait until the evening of the thirtieth. It was the deaf man’s contention that the alarm system would be tested when the money was put into the new vault. And when it was tested, he wanted it to sound off loud and clear. So the cover was screwed back onto the wiring box—the box was left exactly the way it had been found—and the men ignored it for now, hacking away at the concrete floor until they were some four inches from the inside of the vault. Four inches of concrete would hold anyone standing on it, the deaf man figured. But at the same time, four inches of concrete could be eliminated in ten minutes with the use of a power drill.

The belly of the vault was open.

When the alarm was set on the day the bank opened, no one in the world would be able to tell that the vault, for all practical purposes, had already been broken into. The belly of the vault was open.

And so was its mouth. And its mouth was waiting for the more than two million dollars which would be transferred from the Mercantile Trust Company under Dave Raskin’s loft to the new bank at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.

Tonight as the men chipped away at the concrete floor, the deaf man grinned securely. Pop was outside and waiting to turn away any curious eyes. Authority loved other authority, and a night watchman, in the eyes of the police, somehow became an automatic honorary member of the force.