Authors: R.J. Ellory
Christmas Eve had started the way it intended to go on.
A black stripped-out Ford Econoline E-250 cargo van.
Sound of the engine was like something feral, hunched and waiting on the corner of Bethune and Greenwich. Driver was Henry Kossoff, thirty-nine years old, part of the Marcus crew for eleven years, three and a half of which he’d spent visiting friends at Altona and Sing Sing. Did his terms effortlessly, didn’t remember much of it, never really gave it a second thought: it was part of the life.
Back of him, crouched, hooded, each back on his haunches, each clutching M-16s, were Walt Freiberg, Ray Dietz and Cathy Hollander. Van stank like a cheap bordello in summertime, and Kossoff had inched open the forward left window to get some air in there.
It was nine-o-seven a.m. American Investment & Loan was scheduled to open at nine-thirty. Time like that – cramped and armed and frightened, but at the same time experiencing the inimitable rush of anticipation that came with such a thing; looking to the right, ahead, back behind them, eyes the only thing visible in their faces, hearts running ahead of themselves, tension like a live thing in the base of the gut. Time like that, twenty-three minutes last as many hours as a week.
There was nothing they could do but wait.
So wait they did.
*
He had no number but Duchaunak’s.
John Harper stood at the window, American Regent Hotel tenth floor, New York buried beneath him in a distant whitewash of snow. Glanced at his watch: nine-thirteen a.m. Had eaten no breakfast; no appetite; had slept little, restless and agitated all night.
All these people – Marcus and Freiberg, Cathy Hollander, the others that were part of this thing; they were all out there and he felt he had to tell someone.
Three times he’d started dialling Duchaunak’s number, three times he’d hung up before the last digits registered. He was caught; he knew that; caught between darkness and its shadow.
Loyalty to his father? Is that what it was? In some way he felt such a thing could never have been possible, and yet he believed that that was what he was experiencing. Perhaps it was loyalty to Walt Freiberg, even to Cathy Hollander, a woman he’d hoped would mean a great deal more to him than an acquaintance, if only because he’d believed she understood something of what he was feeling. Hell no, it had been more than that. He knew it had meant more than that. She had let him walk a certain route, and when that route had taken him too close she had rejected him. It had made him mad but, perhaps more than that, it had served to highlight and intensify his sense of utter aloneness.
The hotel room was claustrophobic, his feeling of nervous anxiety pervasive and all-encompassing. He tried to smoke, but the cigarette made him nauseous. He paced, agitated and irritable, frustrated with himself for becoming involved in this nightmare, but at the same time aware of the slow-burn nature of what had happened. He had been drawn in, perhaps allowed himself to be drawn in, for hadn’t there been something seductive and alluring about the lifestyle that was represented here? Walt Freiberg and Cathy Hollander had promised him something, something that had been so obviously missing from his own life. He had walked towards it, a moth to a flame, and now, only now – as he stood alone in the hotel room, aware that New York was at some point going to be subjected to whatever Freiberg and Marcus had orchestrated – was he
really
facing the truth of his father.
Edward Bernstein was a thief and a murderer. That was the truth. That was Harper’s heritage, his ancestry, and that would
be his legacy once the old man died. Yet there was something John Harper could not escape: a sense of allegiance. That was the only way he could describe it – a feeling that the old man was somehow due something from him, if only because he
was
his father; nothing, in truth, any more complex than genetics, but nevertheless
something
. Something where previously there had been nothing.
With no-one behind or ahead of you, no parents before, no children to follow, the world was some awful lonely place.
And if he called Duchaunak? What else could he tell him? He had told him everything he knew: the deal, the trade-off, West Twelfth, the three hundred grand he’d been promised for standing proxy for his father at the Marcus meeting. What else was there?
There was nothing.
And Freiberg, Cathy Hollander, the others involved? What of them? Was it right to have played one side against the other, to have made them believe they could trust him, only then to turn and speak to the police? As of this moment, what had they done? They had trusted John Harper, and he had betrayed them. Had they done anything directly and intentionally injurious to him? Truth? No, they hadn’t.
Harper paced. He cursed, he sat down, stood up again. He closed his eyes and imagined that it had all been some insane, fractured nightmare, a throwback from his own imagination, what he’d remembered of Evelyn and Garrett and Walt and his mother . . .
‘Aah, Jesus Christ!’ he shouted, and with force sufficient to break it he hurled a heavy glass ashtray against the wall.
His mother had killed herself – and he didn’t know why. To escape? Or to demonstrate that her loyalty to Edward Bernstein was greater than the value of her own life?
Harper did not know. Believed that if his father died he would never know.
And
if
his father died, then who? Evelyn? Harper believed that she knew only some of the truth, and what was to prevent her from continuing to lie? If not Evelyn, then . . . then Walt Freiberg?
Harper paused. He closed his eyes. Walt had answered every question he’d been asked. Until this point he had not lied to
Harper, at least not that Harper had been aware of. Not like Evelyn, who seemed to have lied about everything, and then once faced with the truth of her own lies had lied yet again to evade confrontation.
Perhaps Walter Freiberg was the only man alive who could really,
really
answer all of Harper’s questions.
And where was Freiberg? Freiberg was on his way to wherever – possibly even West Twelfth – right into the line of fire that would be so ably and expediently provided by Duchaunak and the police.
Harper, hesitating for just a heartbeat, asked himself if warning Freiberg about Duchaunak was the right thing to do. The
right
thing?
John Harper believed that the right thing did not exist, and if it did then he was possibly the last person on earth who would recognize it.
He grabbed his jacket from the edge of the bed and hurried out of the room.
Nine-sixteen a.m.
Associated Union Finance on West Broadway.
Man called Richard Amundson leaves his car in the parking lot and walks around the corner of the building to the ATMs. There are queues. He glances at his watch, peers through into the bank and notices the lines for the internal machines are significantly smaller. He hurries along the sidewalk and enters the bank through the front door.
By this time it is nine-seventeen. Due at work at nine-thirty, Amundson is employed by the New York City Educational Board as an inspector for school catering facilities. This morning he is en route to St Mary Magdalene School on Lispenard Street.
He waits patiently in line. Ahead of him a large Hispanic woman is listening to something on a Walkman. Every once in a while she utters a single word in Spanish, and then nudges her hips to the right and left as if dancing with someone.
Amundson smiles. He is a man who often recognizes the simplicities of people, the way in which their idiosyncrasies and oddities are actually the things that make them human. Without such things there would not be a great deal left to like.
The Hispanic woman then destroys the effect by jamming the cash machine. A security guard is on hand; he speaks Spanish, fluently, and while he calms the over-emotional woman, while he tries to catch the attention of one of the bank assistants, Amundson steps to the plate glass window and looks down to the corner. The queues for the external machines, if anything, have merely doubled in his absence.
Amundson glances at his watch: nine-twenty-one. He turns and hurries to the counter.
Had he used the machines outside, had he been fractionally more patient, had he recognized that Murphy’s Law dictated
that whatever change he made to his position in one queue it would merely be replicated in the next, he would have driven out of the car lot behind the Associated Union Finance Bank on West Broadway at approximately nineteen minutes after nine.
At that precise moment he would have been turning right onto Duane and heading up Church towards the Lispenard junction.
But he wasn’t.
At nine-twenty-two, Christmas Eve morning, as he steps to the counter with his bank card in his hand, three men burst through the front doors of the building and start screaming at the tops of their voices. Led by Charlie Beck, the other two are Lewis Parselle and Sol Neumann. Neumann carries an M-16 and a heavy cloth-wrapped metal pipe. He swings it like a baseball bat, takes one of the security guards down by bringing it around back of the man’s knees. The guard goes down, Neumann sideswipes him with the butt of the assault rifle, and then stoops to remove the handgun from the man’s holster. The man doesn’t move, won’t for a good eighteen minutes.
Four blocks east, on West Twelfth Street, a second black Ford Econoline, this time driven by Maurice Rydell and carrying Victor Klein, Larry Benedict and Leo Petri, swerves violently to avoid a red Berlinetta coming out of a sidestreet, and screeches to a halt outside the East Coast Mercantile and Savings Bank.
Victor Klein is not as young as he once was, but even as the doors of the Econoline open he is running across the sidewalk, M-16 in his hand, and comes through the front double doors of the bank like a tornado. He steps aside, holding the door open for Benedict and Petri, and before the security guards understand what is happening Klein has come up behind the other two men and taken a woman by the hair. Young woman, name is Trudi Mostyn, once did a stint at Bloomingdale’s on the nail-care counter; today she is the primary hostage in a violent armed robbery. Three months’ time she will sue the bank for damages, the cost of counselling to support her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but her case will fail. Twelve months from now she still won’t go in a bank, no matter the time of day, no matter who is with her.
Nine-twenty-eight a.m., West Ninth and Washington. Three men – Joe Koenig, Albert Reiff and Karl Merrett – thunder across
the foyer of the New York Providence Bank. They are dressed head-to-foot in black, all-in-one coveralls, heavy boots hammering a staccato on the marble flooring, the sound of labored breathing, faces closed up inside balaclavas, eyes wide and white, looking like a nightmare coming at sixty miles an hour. Each of them is armed, once again M-16s, and Karl Merrett, unstable at the best of times, figures that he’s always wanted to shoot some motherfucker and today will be as good a time as any. Merrett is part of the Marcus crew, a wild card, a flying ace, and when he passes through the inner door and is confronted by one of the security staff he believes his time has come.
In his coveralls pocket he has a back-up piece, a snub-nosed .38. It is with this that he shoots the security guard through the left eye. The rush of blood that is jettisoned from the back of the man’s head showers a white artificial Christmas tree standing behind the door.
People start screaming, screaming like fire sirens, and they keep on screaming until Joe Koenig releases a burst of rounds into the ceiling.
The bank is silent, deathly so.
‘On the floor, motherfuckers!’ Albert Reiff is shouting. ‘On the floor. No sound. No movement. One down, plenty more to go!’
The people drop like bowling pins.
Somewhere, out of sight, a woman tries to calm a crying baby.
Nine-twenty-nine a.m.
McLuhan stands in the narrow toilet adjacent to his office when he hears the phone shrilling at him. In his hurry to zip up he pisses on his own shoes, the legs of his pants.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he mutters as he hurries out of the toilet and across the corridor. He snatches the receiver from his desk. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s him, Captain.’
‘Well, for fuck’s sake put him through.’
A second’s silence, and then:
Captain McLuhan . . . been trying to get you since last night
.
‘So I hear. What is going on with you now, Detective?’
Heists
.
‘You what?’
Heists Captain . . . several of them simultaneously
.
‘What in fuck’s name are you talking about Duchaunak?’
Haven’t got time to explain. Only one I know about for definite is on West Twelfth. It’s going to be one of a number of armed robberies that Freiberg and Marcus are going to pull off at the same time. West Twelfth, that’s all I know. I need as many people as you’ve got down there immediately
.
‘Right . . . you need as many people as I’ve got.’
Captain, this is no fucking joke. This is it . . . what I’ve been telling you about. Two, maybe three armed robberies simultaneously today . . . Christmas Eve—
‘I know what day it is, Detective—’
You have to get some squad cars down there . . . SWAT, whatever the fuck you can lay your hands on
.
‘I don’t
have
to do a fucking thing, Detective, not until you tell me exactly what you know and exactly how you came by this information.’
Harper
.
‘Who?’
John Harper
.
‘Bernstein’s son?’
Yes, Bernstein’s son. He went to a meeting yesterday with Freiberg and Marcus. Marcus is buying Bernstein’s territory. That was the plan before Bernstein got hit. Freiberg needed Harper in New York to stand for his father at the meeting—
‘Okay, enough already Duchaunak . . . this is just fucking Alice in Wonderland shit. You need to come in right now and see me. You need to get your ass in a fucking car and come down here right fucking now and tell me what the fuck is going on. I also need you to tell me where Faulkner is, because as God is my fucking witness when you pair are involved in anything together someone’s going to get damaged.’