Fifty-to-One Read online

  “You’re about to witness something few have seen.” His words echoed before fading out and he allowed them time to do so. “A battle in the squared circle unlike any you’ll find anywhere else in this fair city. Now, some of you may have heard of fights down Texas way where ladies box like men—Buttrick and Kugler and all that jazz. And you’ve dismissed it as a passing fad. A bit of gulf madness. Like cockroach races, or those wrestling matches where a man goes up against a bear. But anyone who thinks that is mistaken. I’m here to tell you, it’s nothing less than the future of this sweet science of ours.

  “And we have here for you this afternoon two of the finest figures in the field...two fierce young fighters of the feminine fashion...in short, two women who will wow you with a demonstration of the distaff brand of brutal battery! Are you ready, I say are you ready, to meet the contenders?”

  The crowd roared back in the affirmative, and a door opened just a few feet to Tricia’s left. Three figures came out, a woman in a hooded satin robe followed close behind by two stocky cornermen. Stitched on the back of the robe in sequined letters half a foot high were the words HOUSTON HURRICANE. The woman held up her gloved fists as she passed and pushed the hood back. Her shoulder-length black hair was coiled up and pinned to the top of her head and there were some sort of marks on the side of her face—in the second before the three of them moved past, Tricia couldn’t make out what they were. But it was Stella, all right. No question.

  Stella made her way down a cleared path between the rows of chairs and then pulled herself up to the apron and climbed between the ropes. She shrugged the robe off her shoulders and took a few casual practice punches at an invisible opponent. Somewhere in the crowd someone whistled loudly. Stella had on gray trunks and black canvas shoes with white laces up the front and white athletic socks; on top she was wearing a tight sleeveless jersey with her substantial bosom strapped down beneath it. In place of the placid expression Tricia was used to seeing from her when she was lounging around in her pajamas, Stella wore a steely, determined stare, and the narrow muscles of her arms stood out as she flexed them.

  “Can you believe it,” Tricia whispered to Erin, but turning, she saw that Erin was no longer standing beside her. She felt a tug on her shirt from behind her.

  “Come on,” Erin said, pulling her out into the aisle toward the still-open door.

  “We can’t go in there,” Tricia whispered.

  “Sure we can. We’re like family.” They ducked inside and took a hard right just as another robed and hooded fighter marched by, a trainer and a cutman trailing in her wake. The back of her robe said THE COLORADO KID. She was past before they could get a look at her face.

  “What are we doing?” Tricia said.

  “You’re following me.” Erin led her down the backstage corridor, peeking in open doorways as they went, hurrying past one small office in which a radio was broadcasting the sixth inning of a ballgame out at Yankee Stadium.

  At the end of the hall was a door labeled FIGHTERS ONLY. Erin turned the knob and went in.

  There were two tables, one on either side of the room, each with a wide mirror against the wall surrounded by a border of bare light bulbs. A bank of lockers—four up, four down—stood on the far wall between the tables and a small older man with a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm stood before the lockers, a push-broom in one hand and a dustpan in the other. He’d swept together a small pile of cigarette butts on the floor and had a new one in the making between his lips.

  “Hey,” he said, looking up with the myopic stare of a man who needed glasses but was too embarrassed or stubborn to get them. “Who let you back here? This ain’t Grand Central Station.”

  “Damn,” Erin said, “and here’s us looking for the train to Poughkeepsie. What’s the matter, squinty? You don’t recognize one of the greatest female fighters of our time?”

  “Who? Her?”

  “Yeah, her,” Erin said. “This is Barbara Buttrick, the Mighty Atom of the Ring. Just flew in from Texas.”

  The guy walked up to them, gave Tricia a quick up-and-down glance. “Her?” he said again.

  “She could punch you into next Tuesday,” Erin said. “Want to show him, honey?”

  “That’s all right,” Tricia mumbled. “Wouldn’t want any sort of trouble.”

  “I thought Buttrick was a Brit. You don’t sound like a Brit.”

  “She’s tired,” Erin said. “It was a long trip.”

  He narrowed his eyes, peered closely at Tricia. “She looks awful young.”

  “They all do in her family,” Erin said. “Now, you want to leave us alone so she can change? Or were you hoping for a free peep show?”

  He headed for the door, leaving his sweepings where they lay. As he went, he pitched his new butt onto the pile. “Ain’t got much to show, has she?”

  “Never mind him, honey,” Erin said. “Probably prefers watching the men anyway.”

  “Some of ’em got bigger tits than her,” the guy called over his shoulder.

  “And bigger pricks than you,” Erin said, but he’d swung the door shut, muttering.

  “Do you think he believed you?” Tricia said, after a second.

  “Sure,” Erin said. “Why not? What else would we be doing here?”

  “What are we doing here? Why not wait for her outside?”

  “Where outside? There have got to be at least three exits from this building, maybe more. Besides, how long do you think we could stand on the sidewalk before somebody noticed?”

  “So we’re just going to wait here,” Tricia said.

  “No,” Erin said, “we’re not just going to wait. We’re going to look through her things, see if we can find anything that—” Erin had been sifting through the various cans and jars on the nearer tabletop as she spoke, moving rolls of gauze and tape out of the way. She grabbed something from under one pile, held it up triumphantly. It was a copy of I Robbed the Mob!, the tassel of a bookmark lodged about three-quarters of the way in. Erin tossed it to Tricia. “How about that? She bought her own copy.”

  Tricia opened the book to the marked page. It was the start of Chapter 10. Her heart began to race. With a mixture of pride and dismay she read her own words on the page: The afternoon of the heist was hot, as hot as hell, but I was wearing gloves and had my collar up...

  10.

  Plunder of the Sun

  The afternoon of the heist was hot, as hot as hell, but I was wearing gloves and had my collar up.

  It was easier to keep my collar up than my spirits.

  I’d done many bad things in my career, to many people, but never anything like this. Today I’d be a rich man or a dead man—there was no in-between.

  Mr. N kept his hands clean when it came to goings on at the Sun. You could walk around the place all day and if you didn’t know where the secret rooms were you’d never find them. Entrance to his private suite was by invitation only. Money did change hands on the premises, but only between trusted old friends. If you were a member of the general public and wanted to play a hand of poker or put your paycheck down on a roll of the dice, or put a little something in your nose that didn’t belong there, you had to go to one of Mr. N’s other clubs. The Moon. The Stars. There were others. I don’t think any of us knew what all of them were. Except maybe his accountants. Maybe.

  Anyway, those other clubs were where the big bucks were made and lost. Made by Mr. N—lost by everybody else. That’s where the cash flowed like water, and all in one direction. And once each day, after everyone closed up, each of those little streams flowed back to the main river. One by one, each of the clubs made a delivery to the Sun, handing over the lion’s share of any ill-gotten gains they’d collected, minus only the thin sliver they were permitted to keep for themselves. Then, once each month, on the last Thursday of the month, the contents of the big safe at the Sun were trucked out to a secret spot where Mr. N kept his private stash. Except this month that wouldn’t happen because when the truck showed up, the big
safe would already have been emptied.

  By me.

  I pulled my coat tighter around myself, tugged my hat down lower on my brow.

  All I had to do was get in, get out, and live to tell about it.

  Which was like saying all I had to do was fly to the moon, drink the ocean and catch a bullet in my teeth.

  But, hell. I had to try. After what he’d done to me, I owed him. I owed him big. He deserved to have this happen to him—and damn it, I deserved it, too.

  I went over the plan in my mind as I turned onto 49th Street.

  The first delivery of money each night took place at 2AM, and they kept coming until 9 or 10. The men on duty stayed in the counting room till noon, sometimes 1PM. By then they were tired and eager to call it a day, so they shut the safe, spun the big dial on the front to lock it, shut off the lights, locked the door of the counting room, and left the Sun in the care of the afternoon cleaning crew. Around 4PM the rest of the staff would start filtering in and at 6 the place would open for business and the whole cycle would start over again. But between 1 and 4, the only protection the place had was the cleaning crew. That and a pair of security guards sitting outside the locked front door, and one more in a little wooden booth on the street downstairs.

  Three men. Mr. N figured he didn’t need more security than that, and for all these years he’d been right. Because who in his right mind would try to rob Salvatore Nicolazzo?

  Who.

  Me.

  I saw the security booth from half a block away, saw Roy Tucci sitting inside it, trying to look vigilant when, in fact, he was always on the point of nodding off. It wasn’t an exciting job and the man was in his sixties. Besides which, the booth had no ventilation and the heat was brutal. Even with the door propped open, you’d cook in there.

  But for once I didn’t walk over and commiserate, the way I had so often before. Instead, I walked past on the far sidewalk, my pulled-up collar and pulled-down hat leaving little of my face for him to see or recognize. At the corner I crossed the street. The Sun occupied the top two floors of a twelve-story gray stone building and there was another building just like it next door—but not right next door. Wedged in between them was a narrow one-story building occupying the ground floor space of what was, above it, the airshaft that provided ventilation to the buildings on either side. All over town they rented out these little ground-floor spaces to one-man operations catering to the drop-in trade: shoe repair shops, locksmiths, places like that. This one was the shop of a glorified news peddler, offering candy out of a wooden tray and papers and magazines from a rack on the wall. There was a tiny counter inside with three wooden stools crammed in front of it, where you could get a soda on a hot day or a coffee on a cold one. For a nickel extra Jerry’d put a slug of something he called bourbon in the coffee, but it wasn’t bourbon really and you were better off blowing the nickel on one of the dirty books he kept behind the counter.

  When the coffee ran its course you could hold it till you got back to your office, wherever that was, or you could use the little toilet in a closet at the back. Jerry could be counted on to have his hands full opening coke bottles, breaking dollar bills for parking meters, and—this time of day—watching all the cute secretaries going by on their way back from lunch. So he didn’t pay much attention when you went to use the can. Or when you came back.

  Or when you didn’t.

  The toilet was filthy and dim, but not completely dark despite having no bulb overhead, and not completely airless, either. What there was overhead was a piece of frosted glass laced through with chicken wire. This piece of glass was hinged at one side and wedged open about an inch, letting in what little light and ventilation the room got.

  I swung the lid of the toilet down, climbed onto the seat and then onto the tank, and pressed both hands—both gloved hands, I was taking no chances—against the glass. And shoved.

  It took three tries before the hinge creaked open far enough for me to pull myself up through the opening. I used my heel to swing it shut again behind me. The surface of the roof was caked with bird droppings and piled with years of refuse thrown from windows higher up. Behind one such pile I saw a long-tailed rat eying me hungrily, its whiskers twitching. “You’re on your own, friend,” I told it.

  I’d been up here once before, when casing the job, and I knew where the rain gutter was. It was a narrow pipe that ran the height of the building and you’d have to have been a Chinese acrobat to climb it if a pipe was all there was. But the pipe was clamped to the stone every three feet with a sturdy metal bracket and those brackets had just about enough room on either side to hold a carefully placed shoe-tip. There was also a bare inch or so of space between the pipe and the wall and I’d worn a girder-man’s safety belt around my waist. I threaded the buckle behind the pipe and clicked its latch shut. I’d have to re-open and close it one-handed every three feet all the way up, but it was worth the extra effort. A fall from ten feet up might only break my leg—from fifty, it’d kill me for sure.

  Or else leave me wishing it had, when my long-tailed friend came to feed.

  I climbed.

  Eleven stories may not seem like much when you’re riding up in an elevator; even climbing stairs, it’s no more than a good work-out. But let me tell you, climbing eleven stories one handhold and toehold at a time is agony. Your fingers seize up. Your calves start to ache. You want to let go, but you can’t, not even for a moment, because what if the belt’s not strong enough to hold you after all?

  And four stories up, the windows start. Windows into offices, and unlike nightclubs, offices have people in them at two in the afternoon. You pray they’ll be empty or if, when you glance in, they’re not, you pray the people inside will leave quickly. Or if they don’t, you pray they won’t look your way.

  And you keep climbing. Praying and climbing. And your fingers cry out with pain and stiffness, and your back and shoulders, and your ears from the tunneling wind of the airshaft around you, and your head’s about to burst, and your bladder too because you didn’t bother to actually use the toilet before climbing on top of it—and then you realize with a start that you’ve made it.

  And then the real fun begins.

  I reached into my jacket pocket and took out the fist-sized stone I’d picked up on the way downtown. No fancy devices for me. I smashed it into the window, used it to knock out some particularly nasty shards of glass, then dropped it down the airshaft. I had to grope for a second before I found the latch. Raising the window from the position I was in turned out to be harder than I’d expected, but once it was open I had no trouble climbing inside. I took a moment to let my eyes get used to the darkness of the room and my breathing return to normal. I flexed my fingers inside the gloves, tried to work out the kinks.

  Then I made my way to the door.

  The room I was in was the storage room behind the kitchen. Boxes of canned food and bottled beer were stacked from floor to ceiling, like in a warehouse. I pulled down one of the boxes and started taking bottles out of it, stacking them on the floor.

  I carried the empty box with me into the kitchen.

  Here, the remnants of the morning’s work were tidied up: rows of metal pots and saucepans, washed and lined up face-down to dry; sacks of kitchen whites that were headed to the laundry because after a night of cooking they weren’t so white anymore; wooden packing boxes like the one I was carrying, some broken down for disposal and others filled with empty bottles or other trash and stacked by the dumbwaiter for pick-up. I set the box down and tugged at the dumbwaiter rope till the little compartment surfaced, then tied the rope off so it couldn’t go down again.

  I listened at the swinging doors to the main dining room, heard the labored wheeze of a carpet sweeper being pushed back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I knew the girl pushing it, a scarred twenty-year-old Belgian by the name of Heaven LaCroix whom all the other girls on the cleaning crew—bohunks and Slavs, every one of them, and none too attractive thems
elves—made a point of calling ‘Heavy’ to her face. So she was carrying a few pounds—what business was it of theirs? Looked like it was all muscle anyway, the sorts of labor they had her doing.

  I glanced at her through the circular window in the kitchen door, then ducked when she turned in my direction. I’d figured she’d be finished with the dining room by now, but it looked like she still had plenty to go. I’d have to take the long way around.

  Hefting the box, I picked my way to the far side of the kitchen, past the cold storage room where steaks and butter and ice were kept, past the grills and deep industrial sinks, past the trestle table where the dancers and musicians bolted their suppers between shows, to the door that led backstage. This door was locked overnight but everyone who worked at the Sun knew where the key was kept. I pried up the cover of the light switch with one fingernail, fished out the key, and used it to open the lock. The area beyond ran behind the orchestra platform and the dance floor, past the wings, and to a corridor that, during working hours, always had a man in it, someone to keep any straying patrons—or employees, for that matter—from straying too far. This time of day it was empty. I made my way to the far end.

  And here I faced another locked door.

  This was the one that counted.

  It could all end here. Or it could all begin.

  I knelt in front of the keyhole. From the inside pocket of my coat I took a rolled-up square of felt, cinched around the middle with twine. I drew the knot open and unrolled the cloth. It clanked lightly against the floor.

  There were three narrow pockets, and from two of them I drew a machinist’s hammer and a broad-edged chisel. The head of the hammer was a barrel-shaped slug of metal and heavy as hell. I wedged the chisel point into the groove where the shaft of the doorknob met the wooden surface of the door, then swung the hammer down, hard.

  It took four blows before the knob came off. I paused after each, certain the clang of metal against metal had been heard. But this deep into the floor the place was silent and still. I went back to work like some ghostly blacksmith, hammering and pausing and hammering again in the darkness until the metal shaft bent and then snapped off, its counterpart falling to the floor on the other side of the door.