Cops and Robbers Read online

  But I don’t know, the last few years everything seems to be going to hell. Sometimes I think it’s just me getting older, but other times I look around and I notice everybody else has the same attitude. Like New York is getting crappier by the second, and money is getting tighter, and everything is just more tense and troubled and futile than it used to be.

  It’s been coming this way for a long time, I don’t mean this is any sudden change. I mean, the reason I moved my family out to Long Island eleven years ago was because already by then New York was a place where you didn’t want to bring up your children. Everybody else moved out then too. We all knew the city was getting impossible, and we all freely admitted to one another that we were moving out because of the kids.

  Well, now the city is impossible. It isn’t even a place for adults any more. I hate driving in there every workday, I don’t even like to look in that direction. But what am I going to do? You get married, you have kids, you commit yourself to a mortgage on a house, payments on the car and the furniture; all of a sudden there aren’t any more decisions you can make. I couldn’t decide tomorrow morning to stop being a New York City cop. Give up my seniority, my civil-service status? Give up my years toward the pension? And where would I find another job at the same pay? And would it be any better?

  You go along and go along, and it seems as though you’re running your own life, and it never occurs to you that your life has gradually closed around you like a Venus flytrap and it’s running you.

  During this whole period of time, while the idea of the robbery was still theoretical, I found myself remembering over and over what that hippie pusher had said, about all of us having started out different from this. It’s true. I’d find myself sometimes doing things, or saying things, or just thinking things, and I’d suddenly look around at myself and not believe it was me. If I could have looked ahead when I was ten years old to the man I was going to turn out to be, would I have been pleased?

  And I just have this vague feeling that it isn’t necessary, that this isn’t who I have to be. Joe and me both, my partner Ed, all of us, we’ve narrowed ourselves down, we’ve made ourselves blunt and tough because that’s the only way to survive. But what if we were in a different kind of setting? Even that hippie was a ten-year-old kid once. But we all of us get together in that city like hungry animals jammed in together in a pit, and we beat on each other because that’s all we know how to do, and after a while all of us have turned ourselves into people you don’t want to bring your kids up among.

  So you sit in the car on the way to work, and you fantasize a million-dollar robbery, life in a Caribbean island, out and away from all this lousy stuff. They make movies about robberies, and people go to them and love them. Or watch them when they show up on television. And every once in a while somebody tries it in real life.

  A flashlight was coming down the drive from the house. I tensed up, seeing it come. I could still turn around and walk away from this, let it stay in the land of fantasy. I think it was only the idea of facing Joe that kept me from doing it.

  There were several people behind the flashlight, I couldn’t be sure how many. The flashlight didn’t point at me at all now; first it pointed at the ground, and then it pointed at the gate as it was being unlocked. A voice said, “Come in.” It wasn’t the gravel voice from before, but a different one, smoother, oilier.

  I stepped in, and they shut the gate behind me. I was frisked, fast and expert, and then hands held my arms just above the elbows and I was walked up to the house.

  I didn’t get to use the front entrance. They took me around the side and into an entrance with snow shovels and overcoats and overshoes in the small room inside. We went through that into an empty kitchen, and they frisked me again, more thoroughly, going through all my pockets. There were three of them, and two searched me while the other stood off a ways behind me. They were dressed in suits and ties, but they were unmistakably hoods.

  When they finished with the second search, one of the friskers went out of the room. The other two and I waited. I looked around the kitchen, which was like the kind you see in a fairly small restaurant. Big chopping-block table in the middle, with copper pans hanging from racks over it. Stainless-steel ovens and grill and sinks. Apparently Mr. Vigano did a lot of entertaining.

  It had occurred to me there was a possibility Mr. Vigano might decide to kill me. I couldn’t think of any reason for him to do it, but I couldn’t discount the possibility. I admired the kitchen rather than think about that.

  The frisker came back and said to the other two, “We take him to Mr. Vigano.”

  “Fine,” I said. I said it partly because I wanted to be sure my voice was still working.

  The frisker led the way. The other two took my arms again, and we left the kitchen in a group.

  It was a weird sort of stop-and-go method we had, the four of us, traveling through the house. First the frisker would go on ahead through a doorway or around a corner, and then he’d come back and nod to us, and the rest of us would move forward and catch up with him. At which point we’d stop again, and he’d go on to the next phase of the trip. It was like being a piece on a board game, something like Monopoly or Sorry, moving one square at a time. I don’t know if the idea was that they didn’t want me to be seen by members of Vigano’s family who weren’t a part of the mob operation, or if he had Mafia people staying with him that I wasn’t supposed to see and maybe identify. But whatever their intention the result was that I got a slow-paced guided tour of the first floor of Vigano’s house.

  It was a strange house. Either Vigano had bought it furnished from the previous owner, who had been somebody with a lot of good taste, or he’d had the thing done for him by an expensive decorator. We went through rooms filled with obviously valuable antiques, graceful furniture, flocked wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, heavy draperies, all sorts of tasteful and quietly expensive things; just the kind of surroundings I’m happiest among. But then on the wall there’d be hanging some lousy painting of a crying clown, with real rhinestones sprinkled on his hat. Or a lovely marble-topped table would have one of those ashtrays on it made of a flattened gin bottle. Or a modern black parson’s table would have a lamp on it composed of a fake brass statue of two lions trying to climb up the trunk of a tree and the shade would be cream-colored with purple fringe. Or a room with a beautiful wallpaper would have one of those porcelain light-switch plates in a free-form star shape. Absolutely the most amateurishly done bust of President Kennedy I’ve ever seen was sitting on a huge gleaming grand piano, next to a green glass vase with pussy willows in it.

  And finally, at the end of the guided tour, they took me through another door and down a flight of stairs and into a bowling alley.

  It was amazing. A one-lane bowling alley in the basement, a long narrow brightly lighted room like a pistol-practice range. There was the normal kind of curved leatherette settee behind the lane, and Vigano himself was sitting there alone. He was wearing a gray sweatsuit and black sneakers and a white towel around his neck, and he was drinking beer from a Pilsner glass. A bottle of Michelob was on the score table.

  Down at the far end of the lane, a heavy thirtyish guy in a black suit was setting up the pins. He was another hood, like the two who’d brought me in and who now stood back by the door, waiting to be called on.

  I moved forward to the settee. Vigano turned his head around and gave me a heavy smile. He had heavy-lidded eyes; it was as though he only allowed the dead part of his eyes to show, the living parts were hidden away behind the lids. He looked at me for a few seconds, and then put the smile away and nodded at the settee. “Sit down,” he said. It was a command, not hospitality.

  I stepped through the central opening in the settee and sat on the side opposite Vigano. Down at the other end of the lane, the hood in the black suit finished setting up the pins and hoisted himself up onto a seat hidden away out of sight. Only his highly polished shoes showed, hanging down over the black valley where
the ball would stop.

  Vigano was studying me. “You’re wearing a wig,” he said.

  I said, “The story is, the FBI takes movies of your visitors. I don’t want to be identified.”

  He nodded. “The moustache phony too?”

  “Sure.”

  “It looks better than the wig.” He drank some beer. “You’re a cop, huh?”

  “Detective Third Grade,” I said. “Assigned in Manhattan.”

  He emptied the rest of the beer from the bottle into the glass. Not looking directly at me, he said, “I’m told you don’t have any papers on you. Wallet, driver’s license, nothing like that.”

  I said, “I don’t want you to know who I am.”

  He nodded again. Now he did look at me. He said, “But you want to do something for me.”

  “I want to sell something to you.”

  He squinted slightly. “Sell?”

  I said, “I want to sell you something for two million dollars cash.”

  He didn’t know whether he was supposed to laugh or take me seriously. He said, “Sell me what?”

  “Whatever you want to buy,” I told him.

  I could see him deciding to get annoyed. “What bullshit is this?”

  I talked as fast as I knew how. “You buy things,” I said. “I’ve got a friend, he’s also a cop. In our position, with what we know about how things work, we can go anywhere in New York you want and get you anything you want. You just tell us what it is you’ll pay two million dollars for, and we’ll go get it.”

  Shaking his head, seeming to be talking more to himself than to me, Vigano said, “I can’t believe any DA in the world would be this dumb. This is a stunt you worked out for yourself.”

  “Sure it is,” I said. “And how can it hurt you? Your boys frisked me on the way in, I don’t have a recorder on me, and if I did it’s entrapment. I’m not crazy enough to just hand stuff over to you and expect two million dollars in cash right back, so we’ll have to work out intermediaries, safe methods, and that means you can’t possibly get picked up for fencing stolen goods.”

  He was studying me hard now, trying to work me out. He said, “You mean you’re actually offering to go steal something, anything I want.”

  “That you’ll pay two million for,” I said. “And that we can handle; I’m not going to get you an airplane.”

  “I’ve got an airplane,” he said, and turned away from me to look toward the pins set up at the far end of the lane.

  I could see him thinking it over. I felt I hadn’t said enough, hadn’t explained it right, but at the same time I knew the best thing to do right now was keep my mouth shut and let him work it out for himself.

  The fact was, he had nothing to lose, and he should be smart enough to see it. If I was crazy or stupid or just a horse’s ass kidding around, it still wouldn’t cost Vigano anything to tell me what he’d be willing to buy from me. So long as I didn’t ask for an advance payment, it was strictly to Vigano’s advantage to play along with me.

  I saw that understanding come into his face before he said anything. I watched him work it out, slowly and cautiously, looking for traps and mines the way somebody in his position would have to do, and I saw him come around finally to the understanding that there was nothing hidden underneath at all. I had come here asking a question, which it wouldn’t hurt him to answer. And if I was telling him a straight story, it might eventually profit him to answer. So why not?

  He gave a sudden decisive nod, and looked at me with his heavy-lidded eyes, and said, “Securities.”

  The word didn’t immediately make sense to me. All I could think of was security guards in stores and banks. I said, “Securities?”

  “Treasury bonds,” he said. “Bearer bonds. No common stocks. Can you do it with an inside man?”

  I said, “You mean Wall Street?”

  “Sure Wall Street. You know anybody in a brokerage?”

  I had been thinking all along it would be something in our own precinct, where we knew the territory. “No, I don’t,” I said. “Do I have to?”

  Vigano shrugged and waved it away. His hands were surprisingly big and flat. “We’ll change the numbers,” he said. “Just make sure you don’t get me anything with a name on it.”

  I said, “I don’t follow you.”

  He breathed heavily, to show me how patient he was being. “If a certificate has the owner’s name on it,” he said, “I don’t want it. Only papers that say, ‘Pay to the bearer.’ ”

  “Did you say Treasury bonds?”

  “Right,” he said. “Them, or any other kind of bearer bond.”

  I found myself interested in this in a separate way from the question of stealing things. I’d never heard of bearer bonds. I said, “You mean they’re like a different kind of money.”

  Vigano grunted, with a little smile. “They are money,” he said.

  I felt happy at the thought, the way I’d been happy in that rich woman’s apartment on Central Park West. “Rich people’s money,” I said.

  Vigano grinned at me. I think we were both surprised at how well we were getting along with one another. “That’s right,” he said. “Rich people’s money.”

  I said, “And you’ll buy them from us.”

  “Twenty cents on the dollar,” he said.

  That startled me. “A fifth?”

  He shrugged. “I’m giving you a good price because you’re gonna deal in volume. Usually it’s ten cents on the dollar.”

  I’d meant the percentage was low, not high. I said, “If it’s pay to bearer, why don’t I sell it myself?”

  “You don’t know how to change the numbers,” he said. “And you don’t have the contacts to get the paper back into legitimate trade.”

  He was right, on both counts. “All right,” I said. “So we’ll have to take ten-million-dollars’ worth to get two million from you.”

  “Nothing too big,” he said. “No certificate over a hundred thousand.”

  “How big do they get?” I asked him. This whole thing was heady stuff.

  “U.S. Treasury bonds go up to a million,” he said. “But they’re impossible to peddle.”

  I couldn’t help it; I was awed and I had to show it. “A million dollars,” I said.

  “Stick to the small stuff,” Vigano told me. “Hundred grand and down.”

  A hundred thousand dollars was small stuff. I felt my mind shifting around to that point of view, and doing it with the greatest pleasure. Years ago there was a show on Broadway called Beyond the Fringe and they did a bit from it on television one time that I saw. (I’ve never seen a Broadway show.) The bit was a monologue by an English miner, and at one point he said something like, “In my childhood I wasn’t surrounded by the trappings of luxury, I was surrounded by the trappings of poverty. My problem is I had the wrong trappings.” That line stayed with me over the years because it was exactly the way I felt; I was surrounded by the wrong trappings. And any time I found myself in the midst of the right trappings, it made me very happy.

  Vigano was watching me. “You got the idea now?” he said.

  Business; back to business. “Yes,” I said. “Bearer bonds, no larger than a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Right.”

  “Now,” I said, “about payment.”

  “Get the stuff first,” he said.

  “Give me a number to call. One that isn’t tapped.”

  Vigano said, “Give me your number.”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “I already said I don’t want you to know who I am. Besides, my wife isn’t in on it.”

  He looked at me with a surprised grin. “Your wife isn’t in on it,” he said. The grin got wider, and then he laughed out loud, and then he said, “Your wife isn’t in on it. All of a sudden, I believe you’re on the level.”

  Everything had shifted. He’d made me feel like a fool, and I wasn’t even sure why. Angry, but trying not to show it, I said, “I am on the level.”

  His grin faded a
way and he got serious again. Reaching over to the score table, he picked up a ballpoint pen and a small blank memo pad. He extended them to me, saying, “Here. I’ll give you a number to write down.”

  He wouldn’t put his own handwriting on even a telephone number. I took the pad and pen and waited.

  He said, “It’s in Manhattan. Six nine one, nine nine seven oh.”

  I wrote it down.

  He said, “You call that number from inside Manhattan; no interborough, no long distance. You ask is Arthur there, they’ll say no. You call from a phone booth, or some phone you’re sure of. You leave your number, Arthur should call you back. You’ll hear from me within fifteen minutes. If you don’t, I’m not around, try again later.”

  I nodded. “All right.”

  “When you call,” he said, “you say your name is Mister Kopp. K-O-P-P.”

  I grinned a little. “That’s easy to remember.”

  “But don’t call me with questions,” he said. “You do it or you don’t. If you take ten million in securities from Wall Street, I’ll read about it in the paper. Otherwise, if I get a message from you I don’t answer.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s okay.”

  “Nice talking to you,” he said, and picked up his beer glass again. He hadn’t offered me one.

  He wanted the conversation to be finished, so I got to my feet. “You’ll be hearing from me,” I said. I knew it was bravado to say it, and that it didn’t make me look any better, but I went ahead and said it anyway.

  He shrugged. He wasn’t interested in me anymore. “That’s fine,” he said.

  Vigano

  Vigano watched the visitor leave with his escorts. He waited thirty seconds, brooding, sipping at his Michelob, and then pressed the intercom button on the scoreboard.

  Waiting for Marty to come in, he thought back over the conversation. Could the guy have been on the level? It was hard to believe, and yet anything else was even harder to believe. What other reason could he have for pulling a stunt like this, coming here cold with such an off-the-wall idea? There was no profit for any law-enforcement agency in it, and nothing to be gained by any potential competitor.