Bank Robbers Read online

  Okay, she was ready.

  She had decided that it would be best not to identify herself over the phone to him, so she spent a good ten minutes trying to disguise her voice.

  “MacGregor Pawn and Repair, may I help you?” A young man’s voice came over the wire, and temporarily threw her. She cleared her throat. She was not going to hang up this time.

  “May I speak with Mr. MacGregor?”

  “Speaking.”

  She began to feel her stomach go on her, her hand was sweaty and shaky as she held the receiver to her ear.

  “Mr. Arthur MacGregor, Senior?”

  “Hold on,” There was a muffled sound of someone putting his hand over the receiver, and she heard the voice call, “Pop, pick up line one.”

  She took in a breath and held it. Her free hand wandered over the bag with the makeup in it.

  “Mr. MacGregor.”

  Her knees went weak, and her tongue got all tied up and for a moment she didn’t think she was going to be able to go through with it.

  “Mr. MacGregor here,” he repeated.

  “Arthur MacGregor?” It came out breathy and low, but it came out.

  There was an odd pause, and she heard him exhale.

  “Yeah, that’s me.” His voice sounded odd, as though he was busy thinking of something else while he was talking.

  “I’m looking for a certain item.”

  There was another odd pause, and an exhale. He cleared his throat suddenly, his voice became crisp and businesslike.

  “What kind? We carry all kinds of things.”

  “I would rather come in and discuss it with you.”

  “Can you be here by six-thirty?”

  “Where are you located?”

  He gave her the address. Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

  “So around six-thirty I’ll be expecting you,” his voice said in a businesslike tone.

  “Six-thirty on the nose, Arthur,” she said without thinking, and then froze.

  There was the sound of an exhaled “Huh?” on the other end, and she panicked and immediately hung up.

  Not only had she said his name, but she’d used exactly the same phrase she had always used when they were making plans to meet.

  She put her head down on the table and covered herself with her arms.

  She’d blown it.

  * * *

  HIS EYES were bulging at the phone on the desk. His mouth had dropped open. Was it possible? After all these years?

  Was that what the hang-up had been the night before?

  Or maybe it was someone who sounded just like her … and used the same turn of phrase?

  Oh, why bother playing that game? He knew who it was. It was Dottie all right. He’d known it right after the first sentence. And that had been Dottie on the phone the night before. She hadn’t had the guts even to answer him, she’d just hung up.

  That would make sense. It relaxed him a bit because he’d just been working the hang-up over in his mind.

  He looked through his office doorway and stared at his son’s back. He was hunched over a keyboard attaching a cable. Arthur glanced at his watch. It was almost five-forty. He’d have to hustle Moe out of the shop before six-thirty and make some excuse for not car-pooling it home to Rye with him that night. This was going to be ugly. The kid had spent the entire ride last night lecturing Arthur on the evils of fencing.

  He looked around the outer room. He looked at the tables filled with pieces of computer terminals, keyboards, VCRs and televisions, and watched Moe replace the board and then test the machine.

  He had good hands, his son.

  Just like he had. He watched his son look up at the clock on the wall. He turned off the computer he was repairing and stood up and stretched. He yelled out to Nyles, the Jamaican kid they’d hired, that it was almost six and he could knock off for the night. He turned and frowned at Arthur, and walked into the office. Moe was the spitting image of Arthur at thirty.

  “Hey, Pop. You ready to leave?”

  “Naw. I got some work to do.”

  Frown.

  “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to do anything on the side anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Pop, I’m not stupid. I know when calls come in for you you’re up to something, and we agreed that you weren’t going to do that anymore.”

  “This isn’t for a fence.”

  Moe rolled his eyes and placed his hands on his hips. The thought that he could probably still take Moe crossed Arthur’s mind.

  “I don’t get it. It’s not like you need the money. You’re rich as Rockefeller, it’s like you just do this to get your rocks off—”

  “Hey, let’s clean it up?”

  “Oh, come on. You know what I’m talking about here. Now what are they?”

  “What?”

  “Whatever it is this woman is coming up for.”

  Arthur leaned forward. “She’s coming up to see me. I grew up with her.”

  He watched Moe’s eyes narrow. “That’s a good one, Pop. Look, I know you’re bored and I can see you sitting here thinking about the good old days—although why you think robbing banks and spending years in jail was such a great way to live—”

  “I enjoyed it. I was good at it.”

  “Then how come you got caught?”

  Arthur leaned forward. “If you look at the number of jobs I pulled versus the number of sentences I got, I got caught maybe two percent. That’s not bad, since it is an occupational hazard. I am waiting for an old friend. I’m going to take her out to dinner down the street, all right? Now why don’t you go home to Doreen and the kids and get your mind out of the gutter?”

  He watched his son shake his head and look disappointed. Arthur stifled a small sigh as Moe turned and walked over to the office door. He looked back at him.

  “Okay, Pop, I’ll go. But I’m warning you: I see so much as one piece of jewelry I can’t identify and I’m out of here. You may think prison is a hot place to be, but Mom raised me, and I got a wife and three kids and a dog and a cat and I’m not losing everything because you can’t rob banks anymore. You hear me?”

  Arthur nodded and waited for him to sweep out of the back room. Moe left the doorway, and after a minute, he heard him pick up the phone outside. After some low murmurs he hung up. Arthur heard the front door open and close behind his son.

  Arthur walked through the repair area in the back and into the front of the shop. He turned off all the lights except the big neon signs hanging in the window and stared across the street.

  The little punk was sitting in his car, parked in front of the bakery, acting as if he were too smart to be seen.

  Nobody trusted anybody in this world anymore, Arthur thought, and walked back to his office. He reached into his bottom drawer, took out a box of cigars and bottle of bourbon and a shot glass. He poured himself a shot and took the glass into the front of the store.

  He surveyed where he wanted to be. He sat down behind the old cash register, which he knew from experience would keep him out of sight when she walked in the door.

  Take her out to dinner. Hell could freeze over.

  He sat in the dark behind the counter, smoking the cigar and drinking his shot and thinking about anything besides that phone call, because if he thought about it he’d explode. So he kept his eyes on the car across the street and thought about how hard he’d tried to give that kid the best life he knew how. He’d sent Moe to good schools and college, where he learned the fine art of computer electronics, and his mother had made sure she’d raised a solid citizen.

  And Arthur could barely stand the self-righteous son of a bitch.

  He’d taken Moe in when the company he worked for went bankrupt. And Moe had given him grief ever since. Of course the money Moe brought in with the electronic repairs was much more than Arthur had ever expected from the business.

  There was a certain symmetry to that; he’d only bought the shop as a concession to Moe’
s mother when she was pregnant. He personally never had much interest in owning a business. But in the end it had worked out well. It made parole easy, it gave him a comfortable life, and also gave him a way to launder what he’d been able to hide from the Feds, of his treasured loot without being conspicuous.

  And Moe’s repair service really gave the shop the aura of being totally legit, but the crap he got when it came to his sideline …

  Yeah, Arthur knew it was stupid he was still fencing things. Moe was right, he didn’t need the money, and actually the money that he did get out of it at this point wouldn’t come close to covering the expenses if he was caught. But old habits die hard.

  He chomped down on the cigar and watched the tip glow brightly. He watched the red neon light bounce off a row of saxophones hanging in the window and bathe the shop in warm red color.

  It was almost romantic. He shuddered, it was too good for her. So he got up and flicked on all the overheads and squinted in the glare.

  That was worse. He angrily turned them all off again, and sat back down on his chair. He couldn’t believe it was Dottie …

  Think of something else.

  His eyes darted up to the front window again. He saw Moe start the car, and then, oddly, he saw the figure of a woman quickly duck into the car, and his son drove away.

  Arthur sat very still for a moment. It didn’t look like Doreen’s silhouette … Well, he wasn’t going to jump to conclusions.

  Arthur tapped his cigar ash into an ashtray he’d brought up to the glass counter. His eyes briefly fell on the contents of the top shelf of the case.

  Diamond rings. Rows of them. Would’ve made him drool when he was young.

  He stared at his watch, and then looked at the door.

  So now she was coming to him to buy something on the sly, a ring or a fur coat.

  No call. No explanation of what took her thirty years.

  What had he ever seen in her anyway? Arthur blew out a ring of cigar smoke and watched it dissolve in the air. And his mind helplessly wandered back to Rivington Street.

  He’d been young and prime, and it had been summer on Rivington Street.

  During the dog days of July and August you could literally see all the inhabitants of Rivington Street. The kids, and merchants with carts and stalls on the streets. And you could look up through waves of drying sheets, hanging like banners from fire escapes or from one building to another across the street. The fire escapes were thickly padded with mattresses, pulled out onto the metal landings through bedroom windows. People would sleep outside on the landings when the apartments got too stifling hot. And on either side of the fire escapes old women in apartment windows, resting their elbows on pillows, formed a wall of eyes, policing the kids on the street below. And there were arguments and brawls in every language imaginable, from Yiddish to Chinese to the heavy brogue of the newly immigrated Irish. And down at the corner you could see the true hoods who ran the games in the alleys, and shook down the dock workers and the newsstands, the men Arthur unapologetically admired.

  And Dottie had been just another kid visiting—oh, what was her friend’s name? Arthur tapped his index finger against the glass countertop. He could see the girl’s face … a little brown-haired girl who lived on the second floor of Arthur’s building. A big family it was, and they all had perfect Irish first names and a perfect Italian last one … The one whose mother would ask Arthur to fix their old radio that was falling apart. Something Spinoza.

  Eileen Spinoza.

  Dottie didn’t live there; no, she lived in the better section of the East Village. But she’d been around … for how many years? Playing with the Spinoza kids in the streets, until he that one summer.

  And then, suddenly, Dottie had a figure, and you took notice of her. Well, she’d always had a figure, just maybe he’d never noticed it. But that year, whenever she passed, it set him on fire.

  And during that summer he’d spend whole days praying Mrs. Spinoza’s radio would go on the blink, as it often did, and she’d yell up the fire escape for him to come fix it. He’d take his little tool kit given to him by Hymie Schwartz and trot down, and if he was lucky, Dottie would be there.

  She’d stand over his shoulder and watch him, and ask him questions. She was smart, smarter than the Spinoza kids. As he would explain what he was doing, she would lean against him, and he’d eventually give her the job of handing him the tools as he needed them. He’d make sure she’d have to reach across him to get them. And he’d take a very long time, sometimes literally taking the whole thing apart, whether it needed it or not.

  And then he’d lean his head back. He could feel her breasts and stomach up against his shoulders and back, and by then he could hardly talk anymore, his heart was going so fast, and he was aching in his hips.

  “And that’s how you replace a tube,” he’d manage to breathe out.

  And she’d be very slow to answer, “I see, I see.”

  And then some kid, usually Eileen’s younger brother, Doyle Spinoza, would start making all kinds of snotty comments and Dottie would immediately step back from Arthur.

  He hated that kid.

  He made sure he always went to Nicholson’s for his afternoon smoke so she’d see him—that and because old man Nicholson was crooked as the day was long and had sold him cigarettes at two cents apiece since he was twelve without even thinking about it.

  So he’d stand on the corner, boldly smoking his cigarette, and watch the little kids splash around in the open fire hydrant in front of Nicholson’s. And down the street you could watch the bigger boys play games of stickball, and the girls playing intricate clapping games and rhythmically singing:

  “Miss Mary Max, Max, Max

  All dressed in Black, black, black

  With silver buttons, buttons, buttons,

  All down her back, back, back.”

  And he’d keep one eye out for Dottie O’Malley and another out for his father, the drunken bastard, who’d come and whack him down the street if he saw Arthur was spending money on cigarettes—not out of any parental care that Arthur was smoking, but because he always assumed Arthur had stolen the money from him.

  But the money was from the jobs Charlie the Cheat and Joe were taking him on as lookout. He was making good money, which he stashed in the one place he knew his father would never look: his mother’s Bible.

  And after the first heist, a small jewelry store in midtown, as part of the celebration, Charlie and Joe took him over to Brooklyn. To the Navy Yards, and Sands Street.

  All along Sands Street were bars and whorehouses that catered to the sailors, longshoremen, the dockworks, and a gang called the Navy Yard Boys who would roll the drunks who passed out in the street.

  They got him drunk, drunker than he’d ever be again. He remembered throwing up in the street, and then laughter and being pushed into a building, into a room where a sad-angry looking woman was.

  She took him to bed, telling him to make it fast, and the only reason he got through it was that the vision of Dottie came into his head, and he closed his eyes and got on with it.

  And the next morning, dizzy and sick and lying in cold water in a washtub in the middle of the kitchen in the apartment on Rivington, he decided to make his move on Dottie.

  So he waited until the weekend, two days later, when Dottie would stay over at the Spinozas’. He’d gotten her to say she’d meet him up on the roof to see the pigeon coops. It didn’t matter that he didn’t own any of the birds himself. He had sat so still in the dark, waiting for her to come up on that roof.

  He remembered the moon was full and big and it almost looked like day out. He was standing behind the pigeon coops and listening to the birds coo. It was soft and breezy up on that roof. It almost seemed pastoral to Arthur.

  Or at least it was as pastoral as Rivington Street could get in August.

  And he heard the creaking of the rusty iron roof door and pressed himself against the chimney behind the coops and watched her st
ep out onto the roof. He could see her dress, this kind of filmy cotton blowing in the breeze. When she walked in a certain direction it became almost transparent and he could see the outline of her thighs and the whiteness of her panties through it. And when she passed by he’d pulled her against the chimney stack and kissed her as hard as he could.

  She pushed him away and whacked him one, right across the jaw.

  “Get the hell off me. What are you, crazy?”

  “Don’t give me that. I see how you watch for me at Nicholson’s grocery. I seen you run an entire two blocks trying to make sure you’d be there when I stop by. And I see the smart-ass way you answer me, and how you always lean against me when I’m fixing that radio.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I hate you, Arthur MacGregor.”

  “And I hate you, Dottie O’Malley.”

  And he’d pulled her into him again and whispered in her ear that he wanted her and how he wanted her and how he cared for her, not that he ever imagined he wasn’t going to get whacked again for what he was saying. He felt her begin to shake as he kissed her up and down.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck suddenly, kissed him hard, and he knew that it was all right. She shook as if it was the most special thing in the world to be touched by him.

  He took a swig and finished his shot of bourbon. He watched the empty space Moe’s car had been in. He almost wished the kid would have stayed out there so he could make this short, and not have to think anymore about her.

  And, oh, God, that room he had near Chinatown. And the years he’d come in from work and she’d be there waiting for him.

  He tapped the cigar ash into the tray, and the image of her lying back in the Murphy bed overwhelmed him. And a ritual they’d had, when he’d get up to run out and get them something from the deli on the corner because the stove in the apartment was too dangerous for words. The ritual went like this:

  When he would dress he would glance up at her, startled sometimes to see a kind of resentment. And suddenly, covering his body from her sight seemed to be an act of treason. Her eyes would get dark and flash at him grimly. It seemed unfair that he was performing this perversity in front of her. He’d turn away, and feel oddly ashamed and thrilled at it. Then he’d give her a kiss and leave.