Marcantoni just naturally taking his place at the head.
When everybody was seated, he grinned around at them all and said, ‘I waited six years for this job, and it was beginning to look as though I was gonna have to wait sixty, but here we are. Ed, did these two fill you in?’
‘Halfway,’ Ed Mackey said.
‘Okay, then, I’ll do it from the top.’ Talking mostly to Parker and Williams, he said, ‘Six seven years ago, I was on parole, I had to have a day job, I worked construction here in town. Downtown there’s this big old armory building, brick, from Civil War days. The army still used it for like National Guard and shit until the sixties. Then it just sat there. Every once in a while, the city would borrow it and use the parade field in there indoor, hardwood floor, you know what I mean for a charity ball, something like that.’
Ed Mackey said, ‘There’s old armories like that all over the country.’
Marcantoni nodded. ‘And we got this one. And finally the government decided to turn a dollar on the thing, and they sold it to some local developers. It’s a big building, it’s a city block square. They put some high-ticket apartments on the upper floors, with views out over the city and the plains and all, but it was tough to know what to do with the main floor, where the parade field was. The outside walls were four feet thick, with little narrow deep windows, ready to repel an attack like if the Indians had tanks. You couldn’t put street-level shops in there, nobody wanted an apartment down in there, and even for a bank it was too grim.’
Williams said, ‘I was in there sometimes when I was a kid. They used it for track and field. I remember, it was like a fort.’
‘It isa fort,’ Marcantoni told him. ‘That’s the point. One of the developers was a guy named Henry Freedman, got his money from his father’s wholesale jewelry business, which was on two floors of an office building downtown, upper floors for the security but a pain in the ass for the salesmen and the deliveries. So they worked it out, they’d lease part of the main floor of the armory to Freedman’s father, he’d move his wholesale business in there; on the street, but even more secure than the office building. The rest of the space they leased to some dance studio.’
Parker said, ‘You worked on the refit.’
‘That’s just right,’ Marcantoni said. ‘And I found the secret entrance.’
That got the blank looks he’d anticipated. He said, ‘I looked it up afterward, that’s what they used to do. Like they’re getting ready for a siege, they put in a little back entrance nobody knows about.’
Flat, Williams said, ‘A secret entrance.’
‘No, it’s true,’ Marcantoni told him. ‘I had free time on the job there, I liked to poke around, see what was what, and there was this locked metal door in the basement, no knob, just a keyhole. I wondered, what’s back there? Maybe government gold, everybody forgot about it. So I managed a look at the blueprints in the site office, and there was no door there. It wasn’t on the plans.’
Williams said, ‘Did you get it open?’
‘Sure. I took a bar down, and popped two bricks next to the door so I could pull it open, and I put my flashlight in there, and it was a tunnel, brick all around, like five feet wide, maybe six feet high, going straight out.’
Williams said, ‘To where?’
‘A pile of trash, blocking it,’ Marcantoni told him. ‘Part of the thing fell in some time, who knows when. So I put the door back, put the bricks back, and later I figured out where it had to go, if it was a straight line, and it had to go to the library across Indiana Avenue. That was the first public library here, federal money, built around the same time as the armory.’
Parker said, ‘You looked over there.’
‘I had to break into the library,’ Marcantoni said. ‘But libraries are not tough to break into. I went in three nights, and I finally found it, with storage shelves built up in front of it. They didn’t know anything about it either. I got through that door, and went along the tunnel as far as where it was broken in, and I don’t think there can be more than five or ten feet where it’s blocked. You know, they pulled up the trolley tracks along there maybe fifty years ago, it could be they screwed up the tunnel then, never knew they did it.’
Parker said, ‘Your idea is, we go in there, clear it, have all night in the wholesaler’s.’
Marcantoni grinned, he was so pleased with the whole thing. He said, ‘I told myself, wait at least five years, so nobody’s thinking about the crews did the makeover.’
Williams said, ‘How do you know, when you’re pulling that rubble out of the way, there won’t be some more come down? I don’t like the idea of tunnels that already fell in once.’
‘It’s only that one short part,’ Marcantoni assured him. ‘My idea is, we’ll take two or three of those long tables from the reading room in the library, they’re not far away. We clear stuff, shove the tables ahead of us, we go on all fours under them, just that one part of the route. Anything else falls down, they’re sturdy tables, they’ll keep it clear.’
Williams said, ‘Guns. Alarms.’
‘I can tell you about that,’ Phil Kolaski said. ‘I was looking into it before Tom tripped. Because the building’s so solid, the only way into the jewelry place’
‘The only way they think,’Marcantoni corrected.
‘Sure,’ Kolaski agreed. ‘But that is what they think. The front door on the street, that’s all they worry about. There’s three separate entrances, for the jewelry operation, the dance studio, the apartments upstairs. They’re right next to each other, and there’s a doorman around the clock for the apartments. The dance studio just has a couple regular locks, you could go in that way except for the doorman. The jewelry operation has an alarmed front door plusa barred gate plusan articulated steel door comes down over the whole thing.’
Williams said, ‘No motion sensors inside.’
‘They really don’t expect anybody inside,’ Kolaski said. ‘Except through that front door. It lookssolid.’
There was a little pause and then Williams said, ‘What are the hours, in this library?’
Marcantoni answered that one: ‘Sunday they close at five P.M.’
