Harlem Shuffle(16)
Bang bang bang.
The rug was freshly vacuumed, which suited the captives, who had their faces in it. The elevator passenger, the man from the twelfth floor, was named Lancelot St. John. He lived two blocks away and his occupation was sitting at the hotel bar until he lit upon a suitable lady from out of town. If his quarry picked up on his euphemisms, Lancelot straightened out the money before he undressed them; if not, afterward he mentioned a present he wanted to buy for his mother, but he was a little short this week. In the service industry you shift your approach depending on the customer. Tonight’s lady had flown in from Chicago to speak to a real estate lawyer about a brownstone she’d recently inherited. Her mother had passed. Perhaps that explained the tears. He’d walked into robberies before—he’d be in bed soon enough. It was almost time for the Theresa to wake to the day and the criminals had to wrap it up.
The elevator operator had done time for stealing a car, and later that day when questioned by detectives he said he didn’t see a goddamned thing.
Arthur smiled. It was good to be out, it was good to be stealing again. Even if a quick glance told him that half the jewelry was paste. Half of it was real, fine-quality stones. He measured his prison time in terms not of years lost but of scores missed. The city! And all its busy people and the sweet things they held dear in safes and vaults, and his delicate talent for seducing these items away. He’d bought farmland in Pennsylvania through a white lawyer and it was waiting for him, this green wonder. Arthur put the pictures the lawyer sent him up in his cell. His cellmate asked him what the hell it was, and he told him it was where he’d grown up. Arthur had grown up in a Bronx tenement fighting off rats every night, but when he finally retired to the nice clapboard house, he’d run through the grass like he was a kid again. Every hammer blow like he was busting through city concrete to the living earth below.
Bang bang bang.
They got two more calls about the banging. It was loud, rebounding on the vault walls, vibrating in the very bones of the building. The excuse about the broken elevator came about after they decided to keep the operator on ice in the office. How many people would call for the elevator between 4:00 and 4:20 a.m.? Maybe none, maybe plenty. How many would take the stairs down and be ushered by Pepper in his gentle way into the office with the other captives? Just one it turned out, at 4:17, a certain Fernando Gabriel Ruiz, Venezuelan national and distributor of handcrafted crockery, who would never visit this city again, after what happened last time and now this, fuck it. And how many guests knocked on the front door to be let into their rooms? Also one—Pepper unlocked the door and marched Mr. Leonard Gates of Gary, Indiana, currently staying in room 807 with its lumpy bed and the hex from the guy who’d had a heart attack, into the back with the rest. Plenty of room in the manager’s office. Stack them like firewood or standing room only if need be.
Given that only two souls had intruded on their scheme, Miami Joe said, “Keep going,” when Arthur told him twenty minutes was up.
He wanted to push their luck.
Arthur kept swinging. Freddie became aware of his bladder. Pepper said, “It’s time.” It wasn’t his visceral distaste for the front desk and the interaction it represented. You tell Pepper it’s twenty minutes, it’s twenty minutes. Arthur kept swinging.
Pepper could take care of himself if it went south. He didn’t know about the rest of the crew and he didn’t care. When the fourth complaint came in about the noise, he told room 405 that the elevator was being fixed and if they bothered him again he’d come up there and beat them with his belt.
Pepper permitted them to empty four more deposit boxes. He said, “It’s time.” It was not his white-boy voice.
They’d filled two valises. Miami Joe said, “Now.” Arthur packed the toolbox and Miami Joe put the index cards inside, too, to mess up the next day’s sorting-out. He almost left the empty valise, then remembered the cops might trace it.
Pepper cut the wire to the police station and Freddie yanked the office phone out of the wall. They weren’t neutralizing the switchboard so this didn’t change their chances materially, but it was a show of enthusiasm that Freddie hoped would serve his cause in the postmortem. In Baby’s Best, Miami Joe might mention it and affirm him. Those melancholy lights roving over him, red and purple. Miami Joe recited the names of the staff—Anna-Louise, the clerk, the night man, the elevator operator—and shared their addresses. If anyone so much as twitched before five minutes was up, he said, it was their job to stop them because he knew where they lived.
The bandits were a mile away when Lancelot St. John sat up and asked, “Now?”
FIVE
The thieves were overdue. Carney had a notion to turn out the lights and hide in the basement. He might fit in the unloved Argent buffet, among the spiders.
“What if one of them tried something?” he said. Referring to the captives.
Freddie shook his head. As if harassed by a fly.
“And what do you expect me to do when they get here?” Carney said. “Check out the stash? Pay them for it?”
Freddie bent over to tie his shoes. “You always want in, in the end,” he said. “That’s why I gave them your name.” But the crew wasn’t supposed to meet up until next week, after the heat died down. He didn’t know what this was about.