Dog Day Afternoon (23 page)

“Come on, Lana, level with me.”

She splayed her long fingers way out, flashing her dark red nails. “Not that I’m turning down a million,” she went on conversationally, “but all I asked him for was three grand. That’s all it costs.”

Moretti nodded sympathetically. “What costs?”

“The operation. It’s a month in Baltimore or Stockholm, but if you go to Casablanca, it’s only two weeks.”

Moretti closed his eyes. Something he’d read was coming back to him. “The sex-change operation,” he said then, still in his underplayed, sympathetic voice.

“Of course,” Lana said, as if nothing else could have been meant.

Moretti’s eyes opened. “You’re saying he robbed a bank to pay for your sex-change operation?” He could almost read the
Daily News
headlines now.

“He loathes and detests the idea. He wants me as I am.” Her glance lowered seductively. “But I can’t be the person
he
wants. He doesn’t own me. I want to be the person I want. A woman.”

Moretti nodded again, as if this made the greatest sense in the world. “Of course you do,” he said reassuringly. “But once you’re a woman, what’s wrong with the million he’s going to have.”

“Half a million,” she reminded him. “That vicious little Sam gets his cut.”

“Not necessarily.”

Moretti walked over to the door, opened it, and looked out. He had no reason to, but simply wanted Lana to think over the sudden possibility that it wasn’t Sam and Littlejoe against the world, but Lana and Littlejoe against Sam.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Lana demanded after a moment.

“You look like an intelligent wo—person,” Moretti began, correcting himself in mid-word. “I don’t have to tell you that if Sam starts shooting, the whole thing goes up in smoke. There’s a man back there from the FBI who thinks all of them are garbage. He thinks you don’t deal with garbage, you just burn it. If Sam starts shooting, that’s what’ll happen. We have the firepower concentrated on that bank now to burn Sam and Joe into cinders. Unfortunately, four innocent people will die with them. And, more than that, there’s no ransom, no safe conduct, no jet to Casablanca.”

Lana’s wondrous eyelashes flickered up and down like hummingbird wings. “A jet to Casablanca?”

“There is one thing you have to do,” Moretti said. “It’s not hard and it’s not dangerous. Nothing bad can happen to you whether it works or doesn’t work. Even if it fails completely, you’ll still look good in the newspapers and on TV. But if it works, you’ll be a hero.” He started to correct it to “heroine,” but decided it was too late to be that accurate.

Lana’s glance grew calculating. She did this by wrinkling the skin between her eyebrows. “You mean it’s no skin off my ass either way?”

“Right. But if it works, you score big.”

The furrow between her brows deepened. “What do I have to do?”

21

“I
’m suffocating,” Marge complained.

“When they turned off the lights,” Joe explained, “they turned off the air conditioning.”

“Just the news I needed,” Marge retorted.

“What a mouth.” Littlejoe peered through the darkened lobby at the lighted window of the insurance office across the street, where Moretti was now handing a paper cup to Lana. She drank greedily from it.

She looked better now. By rights, Littlejoe thought, I should be with her. But he couldn’t bring himself to face the shouting on the street yet. That word. That ugly label. Those ugly people with their sick need to label everything.

“Littlejoe,” Sam said then, his voice seemingly far away as it came out of the darkness at the rear of the lobby. “You know, in this dark, it ain’t as easy to keep track of these people.”

“They’ll behave,” Littlejoe assured him.

“They better.”

“Stop terrorizing the girls,” Boyle said. He was seated behind his desk, his chin propped on the palms of his hands. “Just stop it. There’s a limit to how much of this abuse we can take.”

“Yeah?” Joe asked. “If I really started abusing you, Boyle, baby, you’d feel it for a week.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Boyle retorted.

“You know,” Marge murmured. “He’s talking dirty.”

“Tell him, Marge,” Joe teased. “Tell him if he isn’t careful, he’ll have to turn tail and play nice little girlie.”

“Stop that,” Boyle snapped.

“I need a cigarette,” Marge moaned.

“Here.” Boyle handed her his pack.

She shook one loose and put it in her mouth. “Got a light?”

“Hey,” Sam interrupted. “I thought you never smoked before.”

“I never did.”

“Don’t start,” he begged her. “You’re clean. Stay that way.”

“What?”

“I mean it, Marge,” Sam pleaded with her. “Once you start, you’re hooked. But you’ve stayed pure all these years. Just hold on. Just hang in there and stay pure.”

“All what years?” Marge snapped back. “I’m not that old. And as for pure . . .”

“It’d be a real crime if you started smoking now,” Sam insisted.

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Marge announced to the darkened room. “It’s okay to rob a bank but it’s not okay to smoke?”

“I’m serious,” Sam said.

She stared into the darkness in the direction of his voice. Then, to Joe: “Got a light?”

Boyle snapped his lighter for her. “Here, Marge. One time can’t kill you.”

“What do I do?” she asked. “Just pull in smoke?”

“Till it’s lit.”

“Marge.” Sam’s voice sounded terribly down.

“You’re not my father,” Marge called to him.

The telephone began to ring. Joe picked it up. “What?”

“Kill them all,” the same peculiar voice whispered.

He slammed down the telephone. “Every creep in New York is on the phone,” he muttered. “This is their night. This is all for them, what we’re going through, so they can get their jollies. Sam, you realize what we’ll be in a few hours?”

“Free?”

“Men without a country. We’ll never be able to go back to the U.S. after this.”

“ ’S all right with me, Littlejoe.”

“You’re taking it awful easy. It’s a lot to give up,” Littlejoe mused. “I fought for this country. I might’ve died for it.” He tried to see what was happening with Lana across the street. “I was born here,” he maundered on. “There’s a lot wrong with it, but there’s no better place, is there?”

“Tell ’em, Littlejoe,” Marge mused. “You’re quite a patriot.”

At that moment, as if a box of flashbulbs had exploded all at once, the street outside flared brilliant white, and intense glare struck into the depths of the lobby.

“Searchlights!” Sam yelped, as if in pain.

“Cool it,” Littlejoe said. “It’s a trick.”

“To do what?” Boyle asked.

“To psych us out.”

As if the searchlights weren’t sharply enough focused, the cops began to move the beams of light this way and that. Abruptly the door of the insurance office opened. Moretti came out, holding Lana by her arm to help her teeter across the pavement on her high platform shoes.

Several of the searchlight beams zeroed in on the two of them as they started across the street, moving slowly, as if down an aisle to an altar. With her spun-floss hair and sleek figure, Lana looked dressed for some festivity, but perhaps not this one.

Littlejoe watched them come toward him with mixed feelings. He wanted to talk to Lana, but not in front of the whole world.

“Sucky-suck-suck!” someone yelled at the top of his lungs.

“Faaa-guht!”

Joe went to the door of the bank, which had remained unlocked for some time now. He swung it wide and propped open the heavy Herculite glass with a massive floor-type cigarette receptacle. The outside air was cooler than inside. But there was no breeze to waft it into the bank. Moretti and Lana were halfway across the combat zone now, passing over the center line.

Joe glanced back into the lobby and saw that Sam had singled out Ellen as a kind of superhostage. He had her sitting straight up in a chair while he stood behind her. With his left hand he cradled her face. His other hand held the .45 automatic against her right eye. She had stopped crying or saying anything some time ago.

Joe took a stride out into the street.

“Fag-got, fag-got, fag-got!”

“Joe sucks!”

“Burn, faggot, burn!”

He stood there blinking in the hot lights, one hand shading his eyes, the other holding the .38. His appearance now, for some reason, stirred the dozens of police around him to renewed attention. They seemed to remember him suddenly, and raised their various weapons to draw a bead. He could see muzzles of every caliber pointed at him like so many hungry snouts sniffing the wind for blood. Maybe the searchlights hadn’t had any luck psyching him out, Joe thought, but they seemed to rouse the hunter in the cops again.

“Look at this street,” he called to Moretti. “Wall-to-wall pig.”

“That word.”

“I haven’t heard you toning down the crowd’s language.”

Moretti paused and removed his hand from Lana’s arm. “Here,” he said then, “this is the first part of your demands. Paid and delivered.”

Lana gave Moretti a haughty look and then turned the same look on Joe. He felt his heart constrict slightly. The strange animal that lived under his heart seemed to stir in its sleep. She could do that to him. Worse yet, she knew it.

“Well,” Lana said then.

“Hi, baby.”

“What an unreal, insane mess that Sam has dragged you into.”

“Huh?”

“I thought you were smarter than to let a little shit like that use you,” Lana went on.

“Christ,” Joe agonized, “keep your voice down. If he hears you—”

“Let him. Nasty little animal.”

“That’s what he calls you,” Joe said then. He had started to get very jumpy, with Lana coming on as salty as she was. She had never bad-named Sam before, and now was exactly the wrong time to start. “Just cool it, bitch. Sam isn’t using me. I’m u—” He stopped himself. Wrong approach.

Lana closed the gap between them so that her breasts touched him. The crowd hooted so deafeningly that individual shouts were drowned out. “He’s using you to settle a grudge against the world, baby.”

Joe’s hand clamped down on her slender arm, halfway between wrist and elbow. He knew from past experience that if he squeezed hard enough he’d leave her with a bruise. She knew it too, so she stopped talking.

“What kind of shit did Moretti pump into you?” Joe demanded, his glance swerving for a moment to the detective. “He’s standing there right now like a fucking peeping tom, getting off his rocks watching you do his dirty work for him.”

“That’s so much shit,” Lana said. “The sooner you cut loose from Sam, the b—”

He stopped her simply by clamping harder on her arm. “You stir up Sam,” he said grimly, “and the first slug is for you, bitch. You got a nerve. The only reason I’m in this mess is because of that crazy operation you have to have.”

“The operation you don’t want me to have,” Lana retorted. Her last word was spoken in a gasp as Joe tightened his grip. “You’re deliberately doing that,” she moaned. “It’ll be all purple tomorrow morning.”

“In the morgue,” Joe asked, “who cares?”

“You’re not shooting anybody,” she said in a low voice. “It’s Sam who wants to kill people. But you’ll end up dead because of him.”

The obvious truth of this stopped Joe from saying anything further. He glanced past Lana at Moretti, trying to pull his head together. “She does a great job for you, copper. You really programmed her, huh?”

“She’s got your best interests at heart, Littlejoe.”

“And that’s bullshit too,” Joe responded.

He felt better trading insults with Moretti. It was easier than trying to find answers for Lana. She was right: If he ended up dead, it would be because of Sam.

But he couldn’t betray the kid. He’d talked him into the job to begin with. He’d
conned
him into it with his horseshit about Mafia coverage and all that crap. Now he couldn’t abandon him, not the way Sam felt about going back into stir. Worse than that, he couldn’t even let Sam suspect he was thinking of such things, because the kid would start shooting.

“Just think it over is all we’re asking,” Moretti said, using a version of the same low-pitched voice he had used with Lana.

Joe’s eyes narrowed. He could see through Moretti’s bluff. He knew Moretti’s game. Let everyone else get frustrated and start making bad choices. Let Moretti play cool man in town. It didn’t have to be true so long as it looked and sounded true.

“Oh, God, Moretti,” Joe heard himself complain, “the world is so full of bullshit.”

The detective nodded in agreement, but said nothing. “I don’t think I ever heard anybody level with me in ten fucking years,” Joe went on, more to himself than either Moretti or Lana. “It’s all bullshit, meant to score one-up on you. Or make themselves bigger. Nobody levels. Flo, Tina, nobody. Not even you, Lana. You know the times I’ve caught you cheating.”

“I like that,” she said petulantly. “The way you stud it up for anything that’ll hold still for it.”

“That’s different,” Joe explained. “A man takes whatever comes along. That’s what makes him a man. And I’ll tell you something, both of you. I know Sam gives head. I know he works the trucks. But that kid is a man, you understand? He gave me his word and I gave him mine. And that’s it.” He could feel the anger rising in him, even though neither of them had said anything.