Paul Theroux: Murder in Mount Holly

Out back, Miss Ball checked her watch. She stared at it for a full minute, and then took the antenna, the searchlight and the two buckets of water from the back seat. These she put some distance from the car in a little pile together with her policeman’s hat. She walked about twenty-five feet away from the pile, which was now be-tween her and the car. She checked her watch again and smiled. Keep cool, she thought.

Mr. Gibbon walked toward the teller’s cage.

“White folks move aside,” he said.

There were some protests. “Aw, let the old coot have his own way,” someone grumbled.

Mr. Gibbon looked hard at the teller and said, “Okay, hand over the money.”

The man behind the counter cocked his head and then smiled, “Have you filled out a withdrawal slip, sir?”

Mr. Gibbon put his face up against the bars of the teller’s cage so that his nose and chin stuck through. “Hand over the money, all of it, you hear? This is a stickup.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A stickup,” said Mr. Gibbon. “You’re being stuckup. By me. Understand?”

“Perhaps you’d like to have a word with the manager,” the teller said.

Miss Ball checked her watch again. It was almost time. She edged over to the pile of equipment, the hat, the light, the bucket. A man appeared next to her. “Got a fare?” he asked. Miss Ball smiled, but did not answer. The man got into the back of the car and opened his newspaper.

Mrs. Gneiss sneaked a look at Harold Potts’s replacement and felt in her purse. As soon as she did so Harold Potts’s replacement looked inside, almost involuntarily. Mrs. Gneiss quickly took out her Nougat Delite and, grinning, offered him some. “Much obliged,” he said, “but no thanks.”

“This is the last time I’m gonna tell you. This is a stickup, now hand over the cash! ”

The people who had been in line in back of Mr. Gibbon started backing away. They looked at him with the kind of nervous puzzlement that arrives as a smirk. The smirks vanished when Mr. Gibbon pulled Old Trusty from his shopping bag and flashed it around. Some people started for the door, but Mrs. Gneiss stepped away from the guard and took aim with her Nougat Delite. “Don’t move,” she said.

She heard laughter, and then she heard very plainly, “Just a couple of old cranks. Might as well humor them — they don’t mean any harm. Just two old farts.”

Mrs. Gneiss dropped her Nougat Delite into her purse and yanked out the policeman’s.38 caliber Colt, looked for the source of the voice, and dropped him in his tracks with one shot.

She waved Harold Potts’s replacement away from the door and gestured for the people to back up against the wall.

Oddly, the moment Mrs. Gneiss fired her gun everyone in the bank raised their arms over their head; even the girls sitting at typewriters many feet away did so. All talking ceased. Just like on television, thought Mrs. Gneiss.

Mr. Gibbon pushed his shopping bag over the counter to the teller. The teller stuffed it with big bundles of money wrapped with paper bands and gave the bulging sack back to him.

At this moment a little brown man shuffled around front and, with his hands high above his head, said, “Don’t anyone panic. Just do what the man says. We’re insured against theft.”

Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of the rock-hard heroism that is smack in the belly of every good bank manager, the little brown man smiled and nodded obligingly to Mr. Gibbon.

Mr. Gibbon sucked in air and snarled, “I don’t want any of your cheap lip!” And he shot the little brown man dead. Like a toy the man gurgled, flapped his dry little hands and went down.

The people in the bank straightened their arms and held them higher.

It was time. Miss Ball picked up a bucket of water and splashed it against the left front door of the car. mount holly police complete with telephone number and badge appeared from under the running whitewash. She did the same with the right front, and on this trip around the car popped the antenna and the searchlight in place. Then she snatched the hat and put it on, pushed up the knot of her tie, got into the car, released the brake, flicked on the siren and started rolling down the little hill to the front of the bank.

The man in the backseat did not look up. He said, “Oak Street,” and kept on with his paper.

Mr. Gibbon was standing next to a huge pile of bills when Miss Ball pushed through the door and said with stage gruffness, “Okay, don’t anyone move. Drop your guns and get your hands up.”

With a clang the guns hit the marble floor of the Mount Holly Trust Company.

“What happened to him ?” asked Miss Ball, gesturing toward the little brown bank manager curled up in his own blood.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” said Mr. Gibbon.

“Tell that to his widow,” Miss Ball said, in a good imitation of Broderick Crawford. She motioned for Mr. Gibbon and Mrs. Gneiss to move on. “Take the money,” she said to Harold Potts’s replacement. “We’ll need it for evidence.”

Harold Potts’s replacement put the stack of money in the backseat and then got in to guard Mr. Gibbon. The man with the newspaper murmured and made room. Mrs. Gneiss got in front.

Miss Ball released the emergency brake, flicked on the siren again and, as Mr. Gibbon said “Easy does it,” the car began rolling faster and faster and then coasting at a good rate away from the bank and down the long slope which gave the little burg of Mount Holly its name.

There is a painting called The Spirit of ’76 (but better known as “Yankee Doodle”) that hangs in the Town Fathers’ meeting-room in Abbot Hall in Marblehead, Massachusetts. It is well known throughout the length and breadth of the United States. The thought of this picture alone is enough to reduce your average American to helpless saluting.

This painting, executed by A. M. Willard, depicts a battlefield strewn with the rubbish of war, a broken wagon-wheel, some pieces of charred skin, a blackened keg. The sky churns with the fresh soot of recently exploded bombs. In the midst of all this rubbish are three figures marching abreast: a sturdy fellow, his head swathed in a bloody bandage, his lips pursed on a flute, marches on the right; a clean little boy in a blue tri-corner hat and beating a drum struts on the left. In the center, wearing a remarkably clean shirt, his head a riot of white hair, a very old man marches. He is prognathic and he is tapping a big drum. At the lower right a wounded soldier raises his trunk out of the quagmire to wave his filthy cap at the musicians and the tattered flag seen fluttering just beyond their heads.

Although nearly three thousand miles from Marblehead, the citizens of Mount Holly know this painting well. And so it was no accident that the day after the robbery of the Mount Holly Trust Company, in what came to be known as “Herbie’s Parade,” Mrs. Gneiss, Miss Ball, and Mr. Gibbon, marching right, left, and center respectively (Mrs. G. with her head bandaged) and carrying two drums and a flute, and all of them dressed the part, strode through the streets of Mount Holly. It was their wish. Unlike the trio in the famous painting, they did not march in step, for clasped firmly around their ankles were leg-irons. And although it was something they had not bargained on, they had to play their tunes to the clink of their dragging chains.