wind, he couldn’t help it; something he hated to do in the presence of a woman. If only it would be quiet; squeezing it out, he heard a horrible long muffled Bronx cheer from behind him. “Jesus,” he said, embarrassed and angry and upset and frightened and relieved and hungry and worried and wishing he didn’t have this goddam phone call to make. “Jesus Jesus Jesus.”
“Frank?”
Angie backed away from him, looking at him as though he’d betrayed her. He knew what it was, he knew he was supposed to comfort her, put his arms around her, that whole number, but good Christ, first things first!
A voice came on the line.
“Yeah,” Faran said. “This is Frank Faran, down at the New York Room. I have to talk to Mr. Lozini. Yeah, well, you better wake him up, this is important. Yeah, I know, I know, but do it anyway. It’s my responsibility. He’ll want to hear this.”
Eight
Two-thirty a.m. In the watchman’s shed by the main gate, Donald Snyder put down his paperback book, got to his feet, and reached for the flashlight and key ring. Time to make his half-hour rounds through the plant. He left the yellow brightness of the watchman’s shed for the red-tinged darkness outside and plodded across the blacktop loading area toward the main building. Great red neon letters on the roof of the three-story plant spelled out KEDRICH BEER brightly enough to obscure the splinter of moon above them in the sky, and brightly enough so that Snyder didn’t need to use his flashlight at all until he was inside the main building.
Kedrich was a strictly local brand of beer, unknown fifty miles from Tyler but nevertheless a successful brewery for over seventy years. It was an ordinarily good beer, about the same as most others, but its success didn’t depend on its excellence. The unstated but generally understood fact was that no bar in Tyler could obtain or keep a liquor license unless it carried Kedrich beer on tap. “We all want to support local business” was the way the Kedrich salesmen described the situation to newcomers.
Unlocking the side door, Snyder stepped into the building, switched on the flashlight, and aimed it down the long empty corridor. No trouble, everything as quiet as ever.
Good. He strolled on down the corridor, flashing his light to both sides, expecting nothing wrong and seeing nothing wrong. Both corridor walls were lined with small-paned windows, and through the glass Snyder’s flashlight shone on bottling equipment to the left and brewing equipment to the right. Everything fine on the first floor.
And on the second. The raw materials were stored here, in large cool low-ceilinged rooms lined with rows of fluorescent lights. Snyder opened each door he came to, flicked on the wall switch that turned on all the lights, and saw every time the same proper silent emptiness, the rows of boxes or bins or bales, the clean concrete floors. No smell of smoke, no scampering sounds of rats, no trouble. Unbroken silence and peace.
Third floor. Here were the offices, all the white-collar workers and the bosses. Some of the executives, down at the far end, had really plush suites to themselves, with big picture windows overlooking the river, plus paintings on the walls and thick carpets on the floors and their own private bathrooms and kitchens. Snyder would never touch anything he wasn’t supposed to, but he did like sometimes to walk around in those offices, just looking, enjoying the aura of warmth and security that always surrounds well-spent money.
At the near end, though, were all the clerical offices: crowded, busy, brisk, filled with metal desks and filing cabinets, still with their original small-paned windows looking out on the loading area or the parking lot or the secondary buildings. Snyder strolled along, opening doors, flashing his light inside, and at one point as he was walking down the corridor he became aware that there was somebody walking beside him.
He thought his heart would stop. His moving foot fumbled, the flashlight wobbled, he had to touch the wall next to him for balance. Then, blinking repeatedly in fear, he turned his head to look at the man beside him.
He was tall, slender, dressed in dark clothing. Over his head and face he wore one of those wool ski masks, the way terrorists did in photos in the newspaper. He had no weapons in his hands, and he wasn’t making any threatening gestures, yet he was terrifying.
Snyder couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He was afraid to shine the flashlight directly at the man, but still kept it pointed more or less down the corridor, showing the emptiness down there. Light-spill from the smooth walls was enough to see the man, to watch him nod and make a small strange half-saluting gesture, like the hero of a movie comedy from the thirties. “I hope I didn’t startle you.”
It was such an absurd statement, said so quietly and casually, that for a few seconds Snyder could make no sense out of it at all. He just stood there, until the man leaned slightly toward him, obviously concerned, saying, “Are you all right?”
“I—” Snyder moved his hands vaguely, the light beam swinging this way and that. His fright and confusion left him speechless, until he managed to distill it all into one central question; he blurted it out like an actor onstage belatedly remembering his line: “Who are you?”
“Ah.” It seemed somehow that the man was smiling, though the mouth-hole in the mask was too small and the light too bad for Snyder to be sure. “I am,” he said, “a thief. And you are a night watchman.”
“A thief?”
“My partner is breaking into your safe right now.”
Snyder looked down the empty corridor. The finance section was ahead on the left, with its big boxlike safe in the corner of the room. The door there was closed, like all the others along the corridor.
The thief was saying, “And you are making your rounds.”
Snyder frowned. “There’s no money in there,” he said.
“Of course there is,” the thief said. “All day today the Kedrich beer trucks made their bar deliveries for the weekend. Because there’s a blue law in this state prohibiting the sale of liquor on credit, the drivers were paid on delivery. They all turned their payments in at the end of the workday, and the payments were stored in the safe for the weekend, since it was too late either to do the bookkeeping entries or to make a deposit at the bank.”
“But that’s all checks,” Snyder said.
