in his middle thirties, wearing a beautifully tailored gray suit and carrying a briefcase of lustrous Italian leather, so thin that it seemed designed to carry two-page letters or maybe contracts. The second man was older, his coat a worn and ageless tweed, and his briefcase was of the voluminous sort that might have held books, or the term papers of a fair-sized class. He was saying, “It’s very disruptive.”
The first man answered, “The work will be done this weekend. By Monday the whole security problem will be solved.” As the two disappeared into the elevator, Chinese Gordon smiled.
WHEN CHINESE GORDON RETURNED to the van it was dark outside and the few cars that passed were moving as quickly toward the campus exit as the narrow, winding street permitted. He opened the door of the van and Immelmann and Kepler climbed out. Both were now wearing gray work shirts like his. Over the left breast pocket each had a patch sewn on that said “Dave.” Immelmann had stolen them from a dryer in a Laundromat.
“Okay,” said Chinese Gordon. “Make it look heavy.”
The two lifted out a large cardboard box that said “HOTPOINT POWER PLUS” on it and followed Chinese Gordon into the building. The hallways were now empty, and the steps of the men echoed on the tiles. Chinese Gordon noted with satisfaction that the elevator was waiting on the first floor. Nobody had gone up, but somebody had come down.
The fourth floor was only dimly lit, another indication to Chinese Gordon that things were going well. He held the box while Kepler and Immelmann flipped a coin to see who would open the door. Kepler picked the two locks and then stood back.
“There must be an alarm. Let’s check it out first,” he whispered.
“I don’t see any lights,” said Chinese Gordon.
“How about strips?” said Immelmann.
“No, but there must be something,” Kepler muttered. “My high school principal had an alarm in his office twenty years ago, for Christ’s sake, and the locks were a hell of a lot easier to pick than this.”
“That was when you were there,” Chinese Gordon whispered. “Besides, maybe he kept more cocaine than these guys.” He pushed past them into the room and set the box on the floor. The others followed.
In the dim glow of the single window, the room looked like the waiting area of a doctor with an impoverished practice. There were couches and mismatched chairs arranged to face a receptionist’s desk. A few worn magazines and crumpled newspapers were inexpertly stacked on a coffee table.
“My turn,” said Immelmann, who knelt to pick the lock on the door to the inner room, then slowly pushed the door open. “No alarm here either, but this could be the place.”
“Why?” said Kepler.
“There’s a little safe in the corner.”
“Of course that’s it,” said Chinese Gordon. “Do you see any other rooms? Watch it with the safe. That’s sure to be wired.”
Kepler and Immelmann walked up to the safe. Kepler chuckled. “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”
“What?” snapped Chinese Gordon.
“Go down and start the engine, Chinese. There aren’t even liquor stores with these things anymore. It’s a joke. It’s wired, all right. Come here.”
He pulled a length of wire from the spool on Gordon’s belt and snipped the wire off, then looped it and taped it to the strip of wire on the wall. Then he yanked off the wire to the safe and said, “Now it’s not.”
“I have something to do,” said Chinese Gordon. “Wait for me here.”
“Don’t take too long,” said Immelmann. “We’ll have the safe in the box in a minute. Just have to cut some bolts.”
Chinese Gordon took the stairs to the third floor. It took him only a moment to find the office he had noticed earlier, and he had no trouble opening the lock. He had expected things to be easy, but this reminded him of a dream he’d once had in which the walls of buildings were made of a thick, soft concoction like cheese.
Inside, he found a line of doors on a long hallway. He studied the doors and the placement of the rooms and decided on the one at the far end of the hall. It would be either a broom closet or the boss’s office. It must be on the corner of the building, so that meant a chance for two windows. The professor he’d seen before was definitely of two-window rank.
He opened the lock and smiled. It was the boss’s office, all right. There was a big desk and an old manual typewriter. No secretary would use a machine like that. The walls were lined with books, the sort of books that cost too much unless you got them free. Chinese Gordon scanned the office. There was no safe, no display case for something rare and valuable. He moved his face close to the painting on the wall, but even in this light he could see it was only a commercially printed reproduction of an Utrillo street scene. He’d stayed in a motel once where the same print hung over the bed.
Maybe it was a waste of time. They could have been talking about bolting down the office machines. He sat on the desk and thought. The younger man wasn’t the type for bolting down typewriters. In a five-hundred-dollar suit he wasn’t selling burglar alarms, either. Whatever it was had to be valuable. Upstairs Kepler and Immelmann were loading a million dollars in cocaine the university had been keeping in what amounted to a jewelry box, but the man hadn’t been up there. He’d been down here.
Chinese Gordon rushed into the hallway and began opening doors. He peered into each room for some sign that it might hold something worth stealing. There was nothing. In the fourth room he stopped. Inside was a computer terminal. Shit, he thought. What if they were just worried that somebody would come in and access their fucking data base? For an instant he considered smashing the screen of the terminal. It would have given him pleasure, but he controlled the impulse.
Everything about the way the rooms were arranged would induce the feeling that the farthest office was the safest. It had to be there.
Chinese Gordon went back to the boss’s office and stood in the doorway. There were books on the desk. When he tried the desk drawers they weren’t even locked, so he didn’t search them closely. Then he noticed the row of filing cabinets. There were four. The lock button was pushed in on the third one only. The time was going by. If this wasn’t it, then he’d have to forget it.
Chinese Gordon picked the lock and flung open the top drawer, which contained nothing. The second drawer was empty too. In the third drawer was a box the size of a ream of paper. He tried the last drawer, and it was empty.
There was no strong reason to take the box, but there wasn’t a strong reason not to, either. God knew he’d done enough work for the damned thing. He left the office with the box under his arm and ran up the stairs to the fourth floor.
IMMELMANN AND KEPLER WERE ALREADY IN THE HALLWAY holding the carton between them. When Chinese Gordon appeared, they moved into the elevator.
“Problems?” asked Kepler. “If there’s a security guard with a broken neck, I’d like to know.”
“No,” said Chinese Gordon. “Just thought I’d pick this up on a hunch. I’ll tell you about it later.”
The elevator door opened and they stepped out. The first-floor vestibule was still empty. Somewhere in a distant hallway they could hear the metallic clanking of a bucket and the squish of a mop wringer. They moved quickly out of the building. As the others made their way down the walk to the van, Chinese Gordon gently guided the door shut. It locked behind them automatically, and he smiled to himself. He liked it when things were as he’d expected them to be.
Chinese Gordon drove along the dark, deserted, winding road across the campus, stopping at every corner to obey the signs that protected the thousands of pedestrians who crowded the walks in the daytime. He started singing, “Look out the way, Old Dan Tucker,” as he made the long curve that led to the exit gate.
He was building to his favorite part when he’d get to sing about old Dan Tucker comin’ to town, when the headlights settled on the figure of a man in the road. It was a uniformed parking attendant, and he was setting up a sign that said “Exit Closed.” As the van drew nearer and the headlights brightened on him, the man raised his hand and squinted. His face and hands looked unnaturally white.
“Shit!” said Kepler. “It’s the same one.” He pulled up his pant leg and grasped the grip of his pistol.
“One of these times you’re going to blow your foot off,” Immelmann observed.
Kepler turned to Chinese Gordon. “You said they’d change shifts.”
Chinese Gordon said, “No problem. See?” The man stepped back and waved them on. “We’re going to make
