would be able to hear what the caller had to say.
There was a very slight hesitation, and then the guard said. “Vigilant.”
”Hello, is this Harry?” “Uh— No, it’s Gene.”
“Whadaya say. Gene? This is Fred Callochio, downtown. Anything shaking?”
“Not here. Not for a couple hours.”
“Nice and quiet, huh? That’s good.”
“How about you?”
“Nothing much. You know, Monday night.”
“Right. Same here.”
“So I’ll see you. Gene.”
“Right, Fred. So long.”
Handy, crouched close to the blindfolded guard so he could hear the conversation, waited for the click of the other man hanging up, then cradled the receiver and said, “What was that all about?”
“He’s a cop.” the guard said. “A desk sergeant downtown. Police Headquarters.”
Ducasse had come over. He said, “Is that normal, him calling you?”
It wasn’t; they could both see it in the guard’s hesitation. Finally he said, “Not every night. Sometimes he calls.”
Ducasse and Handy looked at one another. Handy said, “They know something’s happening. They’re looking around for where it is.”
Ducasse offered a pale grin. “Let’s hope they don’t find it.”
“They won’t,” Handy said. He squeezed the guard’s shoulder in a congratulatory way. “You did very nice,” he said. The guard had nothing to say.
Handy and Ducasse were walking back across the room toward their magazines when the alarm went off again. They both looked at it, startled, and then Ducasse checked the number on the light with the chart on the console in front of it. Then, switching the alarm off, he turned with a grin to Handy and said, “The stockbroker.”
* * *
When Andrew Leffler realized the gangsters were taking him to the brokerage, he knew there was no longer anything to worry about. They had brought along his key ring from the dresser, apparently intending simply to unlock the front door and walk in, not realizing that no one at all could enter the place at night, not even Leffler himself using a key, without setting off an alarm at the protective agency. Within minutes the police and the private protective agency’s guards would be swarming all over the place here, and surely these men were too professional to put up a dangerous kind of resistance. So it would all be over very, very soon.
When they had left their house, they had been put in the back seat of an automobile waiting in the driveway, with a third gunman at the wheel. Leffler and his wife had been ordered to get down on the floor of the car and huddle there during the entire trip; probably to keep them from seeing the faces of their captors, who took their hoods off for the drive through the city streets.
To the office. The men put their hoods back on, hustled the Lefflers in their robes and slippers across the dark empty sidewalk to the storefront office, and one of them put his key in the lock and opened the door. Leffler almost smiled when he saw that.
And still he hadn’t thought of the back room. This was the Tyler office of Rubidow, Kancher & Co., a New York brokerage firm, and he was the man in charge here; he took it for granted these men were after negotiable securities, bearer bonds and paper of that sort, and that he had been brought along to open the vault, with Maureen’s presence to assure his cooperation. But as to the back room, he almost never thought about that himself, and so few other people were even aware of its existence that there was never any conversation about it and no reason to anticipate its mention by anyone. In fact, probably because of his own slightly uneasy conscience toward it, Leffler generally made a conscious effort
It had begun, a dozen years ago, with his next-to-youngest boy, Jim. All of his five children were doing well now, grown and married and scattered across the United States, none of them a cause for worry or upset, but that hadn’t always been true. Jim had gone through a troubled adolescence, involving drugs and theft and other things the Lefflers had never wanted to know too much about, and if it hadn’t been for a man named Adolf Lozini, there wasn’t any question but that Jim Leffler would be in prison today, or at the very best an ex-con out on parole, his record smeared and his future prospects ruined.
An attorney named Jack Walters had been the one to suggest, during that bad time, that Adolf Lozini might be able to help somehow. Leffler hadn’t wanted to put himself in debt to a man who was a known criminal, a syndicate gangster, but what was the alternative? He couldn’t permit Jim to go to prison, not if there was any chance at all to save him.
There had been that chance. And all in all the price Lozini had demanded had not been a hard one to pay; in the course of his dealings with legitimate businessmen over the years, Leffler had more than once been asked to skirt much closer than that to the edge of the law. Because all Lozini had wanted was the back room.
Most people who own stock do not keep the certificates physically in their own possession. Their broker holds the paper for them, both for safety—he will either have a vault on his own premises or will lease vault space from a nearby bank—and for convenience when the inevitable moment comes to sell the stock again. Rubidow, Kancher & Co. being a large firm with a large and aggressive local office in Tyler, the brokerage did have its own vault, a double-roomed structure at the rear of the company’s offices on the first floor of the Nolan Building on London Avenue. The vault shared a wall with the bank next door but had its own security system, installed and maintained by Vigilant. The larger front room of the vault was used for storage of most stocks and bonds, as well as company records. The small inner section, called the back room, was reserved for seldom-used papers, for the more delicate private transactions, for U.S. Treasury bonds and other highly negotiable securities, and for Adolf Lozini.
Lozini kept money there. So did several of Lozini’s associates, men named Buenadella and Schroder and Dulare,
