“We don’t know if there’s a room under this one,” Parker said. “Or if anybody’s in it. They’d hear something that heavy hit the floor.”
“No problem, anyway,” Briley said, squatting down beside the hole. “Here, hold the flash, Keegan.”
Keegan took the flashlight, and Briley took the linoleum knife. He chipped away a little at the stationary part of the end-line, so there’d be room for his fingers, then put the linoleum knife to one side, reached down to grasp the end of the sagging section of the sheetrock, and pulled it slowly upward. It curved, but wouldn’t split.
Parker stood beside him and took one corner in both hands. “Get a better grip.”
“Thanks.” Briley, still holding the sheetrock, got to his feet and then shifted his hands to the other corner. “When you’re ready.”
They pulled upward, and the sheetrock cracked along the fourth side with a flat sound like two pool balls hitting. They leaned it back at an angle against the edge of the cleared section, like an open trapdoor.
Morris called, “Something happening down below.”
All three went over to look. They were about fifty feet from the ground, the equivalent of a six-story building. There were windows in the top two stories, but below that the wall was blank. Black metal doors led out to the fire escape on the top two landings. By day, the wall was made of grimy gray-tan bricks; by night, it was simply darkness, with an illuminated blacktop alley at the bottom. Down there, near the bottom of the fire escape, a pair of large black metal doors led inside somewhere; all equipment for the shows put on here came through the wrought- iron gates at the sidewalk end of the alley, down across the blacktop and through those metal doors. At the far end, the alley was stopped by a blank brick wall. The opposite side of the alley was the rear wall of the Strand, a shut- down movie theater. The Strand and the Civic Auditorium stood back to back at opposite ends of a long block, all of which would come down, starting Monday. A sixty-eight-story office building covering the whole block was due to go up, starting next year.
Down below now, the wrought-iron gates over by 11 the sidewalk were standing half-open, and someone was moving around with flashlights. Two of them, with two flashlights.
“Now how the hell did they get onto us?” Keegan said. He didn’t sound surprised.
“They’re not onto us,” Morris said. He was still sitting on the wall, half-twisted around, with his shoulder braced against the curving top rail of the fire escape as he looked down.
“They’re cops, though,” Briley said.
“Looking for groupies,” Morris said.
Keegan turned an exasperated frown on Morris. Things he didn’t understand he liked even less than things he did understand. “Groupies? What the hell’s a groupie?”
“Rock-and-roll fan. Mostly girls.”
Briley laughed and said, “Looking for autographs?”
“Looking to get laid.”
A flashlight beam arched upward in their direction, and they all leaned backward. They waited a few seconds, and then Morris took a look and said, “They’re all done.”
“Just so they don’t come up the fire escape,” Keegan said.
Parker looked over the edge, and the flashlights were moving back toward the wrought-iron gates.
Morris said, “Just an easy check. Now they’ll put a man outside the gates, so nobody climbs over.”
“By God,” said Keegan irritably, “what if they see something on the Strand door?”
They wouldn’t, because there was nothing to see, but nobody bothered to answer him.
They had gotten here through the Strand. At four thirty this afternoon they’d driven up to the entrance of the Strand in a gray-and-white Union Electric Company truck, all four of them wearing gray one-piece coveralls with the company name in white on the back. It had been simple to get through the lobby doors of the Strand, carrying three toolkits, the third containing sandwiches and a Thermos container of coffee. Briley and Keegan and Morris had played blackjack to pass the time, betting the expected proceeds from this job, but Parker had slept for a while, walked around the dusty-smelling empty theater for a while, and sat for a while in darkness in the manager’s office, looking out at the city. He’d watched the crowds form for the early show, all the bright colors after the gray centuries of Reason, and then the traffic. Then he’d left the office to walk some more.
He had a woman, named Claire, that he found himself thinking about while waiting. She was somewhere in the Northeast now, buying a house; the thought of having a woman who owned a house was a strange one. He’d been married once, to a woman named Lynn, but they’d lived in hotels; his life, and she’d adapted to it. She was dead now; she’d been hard, but pressure had come to her, and she’d broken. The new one, Claire, was not hard, but Parker thought she wouldn’t break.
Morris said, “There they go,” and the wrought-iron gates closed, and there was no longer any light down there except the one yellow globe suspended from a metal pipe jutting out of the Civic Auditorium wall. “I doubt they’ll be back.”
Parker said, “Watch. Just in case.”
“Oh, I will.”
Parker and Briley and Keegan went back to the hole they’d made and squatted down on their haunches, and Briley shone the flashlight down into the room below.
So far, the map they’d bought had been absolutely right. Right about the Strand, the alley, the fire escape, the roof. And now, right about the room. They’d chopped where the map said to chop, and it had led them to an empty office. “Public Relations,” the map had told them; “already moved to temporary offices in another building.”
Sometimes jobs were done this way, from a map— a package, really, like a do-it-yourself radio kit—bought from a middleman who had bought it from someone on the inside, a non-professional who simply laid out the particulars of the case. Years before, most of John Dillinger’s jobs had been done that way, bought as a packet from a middleman, and it was still sometimes the best way to get set up.
