Seven Silent Men (6 page)

Again there was no reply from Jessup.

“Still feeling unchatty, are we?” There was a ring of amusement in Billy's tone. “Can't say that I blame you. Right now, if I was listening to all of this, I'd probably be wondering how a punk brick agent could get caught jaybird nude by seven cops and not be booted out of the Bureau in two seconds flat. Part of the answer is I was a flasher for the FBI. I was covert. Underground. Spying on the great American menace gnawing at the fiber of our university system … student radicals. When you look as young and rosy-cheeked and Norman Rockwell dewy-pure as I do, infiltrating campuses is no sweat. I ate and slept and rioted and skinnydipped with them. But I only slept with my wife. I don't know if Mr. Hoover counted on the skinnydipping, but infiltration fattens on the motto, ‘Do what you have to do and don't get caught.' By the way, I met my wife skinnydipping. Not long after, we were married. With our clothes on. She was a coed at Ohio State University. My wife, Tina Beth, wasn't a student radical. She was just in love. So was I. Ever been in love?”

Jessup kept his eyes on the highway. “What about the cops you hit?”

“I was chasing Tina Beth's glorious bottom. The cops caught us and put blankets around us and took us down to the station house. One of the cops at the station house pulled the blanket off Tina Beth to have himself a look. I broke his jaw. I beat up four of the other cops who came at me.” Yates grinned sheepishly. “Now you know who's serving in the trench beside you.”

“… You bulling me, turkey?”

“No, sir.”

Brewmeister was sitting up. “Jez here grows on you, if you have undue patience. Every now and again, a real live beam of human sunshine breaks through that B.S. of his.” He gave Yates a reassuring pat on the back. “Any questions I can help you with?”

Yates thought for a minute. “How much B.S. was his saying this is the boredom capital of America?”

“He exaggerated some,” Brew said. “There was real big excitement around here in 1935. Ma Barker drove right through Prairie Port in 1935 and almost got killed. Not that the FBI knew she was in town or had anything to do with her nearly getting crushed to death. It was those looney-toon mud volcanoes that erupt west of town every ten or fifteen years that knocked Ma's car off the road and turned it upside down. Ed Grafton was the only FBI man in the territory in those days and he heard about Ma's accident pretty fast. Ed could have arrested Ma if he wanted, but he was more interested in who she might be going to meet. So he let her steal another car and keep on traveling. He notified the boys down the line Ma was heading south. And they got her down the line. Had a gun battle at a place in Florida called Lake Wier and shot Ma and her boy Freddie to death. That's when Edgar Hoover took a shine to Grafton, or so the story goes. According to one story, Edgar even thought of adopting Grafton as his own son.”

Jessup slowed the car and prepared to display his FBI credentials at the police roadblock ahead as Brewmeister told Yates, “Maybe you're the lucky charm. Maybe you brought us luck like Ma and mud volcanoes brought Grafton luck way back when. Maybe this bank robbery alert is the real thing. I sure do hope so … most fervently.”

The clifftop mall ran the length of a massive high-rise apartment building at River Rise and had been built to resemble a turn-of-the-century Missouri street. A Sam Clemens street with each storefront a replica of what Huck Finn might have encountered. Fronting the shops were a wooden sidewalk with gas-lamp posts and a brick street. Beyond that ran a wide expanse of thick grass lined with stone benches and shaded by large, graceful trees. Beyond that was a forty-foot drop to the Mississippi River.

Behind each tree and bench, toward the upstream end of the mall, was a helmeted and visored policeman in flak jacket with either a rifle or shotgun aimed. More combat-ready police lay prone behind the benches and trees, their weapons trained on the last storefront of the mall, the one at the corner of the building, directly over the water … the Mormon State National Bank, whose facade was an exact copy of the 1815, long-defunct Mormon State Bank in Chillicothe, Missouri … the bank Jesse James always meant to rob but was afraid to, according to legend.

A solitary policeman in a flak jacket and holding a machine gun squatted on the narrow ledge of bank roof which protruded from the riverside face of the forty-story-high building. In the windows above him, several more armed policemen waited.

“The police say they have seven to eight men trapped inside,” Cub Hennessy explained as Jessup and Yates and Brewmeister moved forward and lay beside him on the lawn. All four FBI agents were observers at the scene, voluntary observers who had encountered resistance trying to cross the police line blocking off the mall. “Six men are downstairs. One or two on the staircase leading up the bank proper.”

“According to who?” asked Brewmeister.

“According to the scanner,” Hennessy answered. “They've got that new Thermex ultrasonic scanning system on the premises. That heat and space variation gadget. It's usually accurate when it's been thoroughly checked out. Only this one hasn't been totally checked. The bank doesn't officially open until the day after tomorrow. The scanner was due for one last inspection and adjustment.”

A SWAT team, with rifles upraised, dashed past and deployed.

“We are asking you for the last time to come out and surrender,” a helmeted officer said through his electric-powered, handheld amplifier. “For the last time, come out and surrender.”

Jessup recognized the two men behind the officer. The shorter of the pair was Ned Van Ornum, head of detectives for the Prairie Port PD. The taller man was Chief of Police Frank Santi.

The officer with the bullhorn and Van Ornum turned to Santi. Santi, tugging at an earlobe, regarded the ground. He said something to Van Ornum. Van Ornum cocked a finger and pointed. A flak-jacketed policeman in tennis shoes rushed from cover and zigzagged across the brick street and dove forward on the wooden sidewalk below the bank's front window, rolled on his back, training his weapon on the glass above. Moments passed. He reached up and tried the handle of the front door. It was locked. He signaled as much to Van Ornum. Van Ornum motioned the cop on the rooftop away, waved to the police in the windows above to get back … cocked his finger at the bank facade. The man on his back removed a glob of plastic from his flak jacket, slapped it to the bank's door, stuck in a detonating pin, rolled over and ran for cover.

The explosion was muted. The front door disintegrated. A wave of police stormed through. Then a second and third wave. The ground-level floor on the bank premises was secured within moments. Not a crook was to be found.

Ned Van Ornum, over the objections of Frank Santi, decided to lead the assault on the basement vault room. Rigged out with a flak jacket and combat helmet and bulletproof visor, he took a shotgun and started down the steps alone, his back sliding against the wall. Sharpshooters at the head of the stairwell aimed their weapons beyond and below him. Once near the open door at the bottom of the steps, Van Ornum stopped, cocked his finger up at the battery of guns.

The officer with the electric bullhorn moved in behind the poised sharpshooters, implored the criminals in the vault room to give up.

No response came from the open door.

Van Ornum crouched as low as a ski jumper at trestle top, keeping low, bounced up and down on his haunches. Once more he cocked a finger at the head of the stairs. Before the bullhorn officer could get out more than an amplified word or two, Van Ornum dove through the open door with shotgun raised. Landed on the cement floor on his elbows, ready to fire.

The large room was empty. The burnished metal walk-in vault stood in the middle of the chamber with its huge hydraulic door securely locked.

Chief Frank Santi and Ned Van Ornum and a robbery squad detective by the name of Hogan conferred near the vault with the bank's manager, who said there could be no doubt someone unauthorized had violated the premises, since all the doors leading down to the vault room were opened instead of being closed as they should have been. The official pointed out that not only had all those doors been electronically locked, they were electronically programmed to remain locked until nine o'clock the next morning. Hurrying down into the sublevel chamber was the assistant bank manager, the ranking expert on ultrasonic alarm systems, who imparted, urgently, that while the vault door looked unopened, even untouched, one of the many control panel dials upstairs indicated that someone had definitely been inside the vault … could, conceivably, still be inside.

Flak-jacketed police were rushed in to keep their machine weapons trained on the vault door. When the area engineer for the Northern California-based ultrasonic alarm company could not be found, H.L. Jessup, the seniormost FBI agent at the scene, was asked to join the vault room confab. Jessup, after hearing the specifics of the situation, confessed to having little knowledge of ultrasonic alarm systems and volunteered to phone Bureau headquarters in Washington for expert advice. Detective Hogan said if someone was trapped inside, they'd best try to contact whoever it was before the person suffocated. Hogan had seen too many vaults to suspect this one of being booby-trapped. His offer personally to check for explosives and try to contact anyone inside was accepted.

Hogan moved toward the vault. The others in the room moved back, far back. The detective, without touching, studied the hydraulic door. Finding no indication of booby-trapping, he began feeling it with his hands … tapped on it with a finger … made a fist and knocked on it … knocked again hard.

A rumbling occurred. The room quivered. Hogan jumped back. Others bolted up the stairway. A mighty and echoing crack resounded. The vault tilted to one side. A second, louder cracking reverberated. Atilt, the vault sank straight down into the cement floor. Stopped after a foot's descent. The cement cracked further. The vault sank deeper. Tilted more. Stopped.

THREE

Martin Leo Brewmeister was a native-born Prairie Portian. Like many other boys of the area, he had spent a goodly part of his childhood at the Mississippi River. He swam there and boated there and, on two occasions, took courage by the flying mane and rode the Treachery. Much more time had been given to the river's western bank. Specifically, the sheer rock-faced palisades running from Warbonnet Ridge down past Lookout Bluff. Martin, from the earliest of years, had been an inveterate spelunker. Hardly a cave existed on the cove side of Lookout Bluff he hadn't explored. His prepubescent thirst for suspense and discovery was slaked by these often perilous forays into uncharted darkness. The passion later mingled with a more sophisticated interest, geology. He had briefly entertained hopes of going to the Colorado School of Mines, where, among other electives, two lecture courses in speleology were offered. Martin's parents, a proud and proper Hessian married to a, proud and practical Junker, which was which didn't matter all that much, counseled their seventeen-year-old son that whereas geologists and speleologists were each a stalwart and noble breed, examining rocks and exploring caves was hardly an endeavor to provide bread for the table of the children they expected him to have after wedding Elsie Heeren that coming June. If he wished to be a criminal lawyer, as he always professed he wanted to be, or attend a proper agricultural college, the family would see to many of his and his wife-to-be's needs during the ensuing years of higher education. But he might as well stay home on the family farm for all the good a university degree in anything else, speleology included, would do him, for all the help he would get from his parents. Or his betrothed's parents, who were lifelong friends of his parents. Though he was reverential toward his family, threats of such disenfranchisement hadn't mattered to Martin. What had were his future wife's desires. He explained to Elsie that he might like becoming a geologist. That geology, even more than criminal law, had been a devotion. He told Elsie he had no idea where a geologist could work or live in this day and age or how much money the two of them would have in the beginning. But he thought it best she should know how he felt. He asked her opinion on their future. What she wanted, expected. Elsie told him she possessed but one desire after their marriage … to have children as soon as they could afford to.

Martin Brewmeister married his childhood sweetheart, Elsie Louise Heeren, and sired their first son his freshman year at Illinois Central College and their second his first year of law school. He passed his bar exams and spent twenty-one months working for a Springfield, Illinois, attorney in an office across the street from a parking lot reputed to be the location of a building in which young Abe Lincoln had once practiced law. Just before a scheduled move to Chicago to take a position with a distinguished criminal law firm on Michigan Avenue, he accidentally got Elsie pregnant. There was no consideration of abortion. Both parents loved and wanted their unborn child. But Elsie was frugal and Martin was practical. They had barely managed to get by on what Martin earned from the Springfield law job. The Chicago position, being more prestigious, paid less than Springfield, was, more than anything, a career move. Sustaining themselves in Chicago would be costlier than in Springfield. Nor would Martin entertain going ahead alone, separating the family for even a short period. Martin and Elsie were fiercely self-reliant. Borrowing money from their parents, even though they could, was out of the question. Every month since taking his Springfield job, Martin had paid back a small amount of what he owed his father for financing his education. Another mouth to feed simply meant that Martin must forgo both Springfield and Chicago and find a better-paying law job. Elsie grew larger. Martin shopped vigorously for a position in criminal law. Elsie gave birth to twin girls. Martin joined the FBI, had another son and served with the Bureau in three other cities before being assigned to the resident office in Prairie Port. In the six months since arriving home, Brewmeister had had little interest in, and less time for, spelunking.