Two for the Money (23 page)

Like Nolan and that bank job, a year ago November. Even with that team of amateurs, Planner thought, Nolan had managed to put together a professional score. Most people these days, when they hit a bank, clean out a teller cage or two or three (picking up mostly bait money, the marked bills every teller keeps on hand for just such occasions) and come off with a grand total of two, maybe three thousand. Shit, Planner thought, Nolan wouldn’t cross the street for three thousand. Because he knew what he was doing, Nolan had knocked that bank the hell over, he’d cleaned that bank’s vault out of every damn cent, choosing the day when the bank would be brimming with cash (the first Monday of the month) and got away with close to eight hundred thousand bucks.

Most of which, Planner thought, swallowing, is back there in that safe of mine. He felt suddenly uncomfortable. His cigar went out and he relit, using an old-fashioned kitchen match. He wished Nolan would call.

“Hey, Unc, I’m talking to you. Snap out of it.”

“Huh?” Planner woke from his reverie and noticed his nephew Jon was standing across the counter from him, grinning. The boy had a mop of curly hair and was wearing a tee-shirt picturing a manlike pig (or piglike man) in a superhero outfit, including cape, under the words “Wonder Warthog.” Planner grinned back at his crazy nephew and said, “What the hell, I didn’t even see you there, Jon. I’m getting old. You say something?”

“I just wanted to know if I got any mail.”

Planner nodded and reached under the counter, pulling out four wrapped packages and a long cardboard tube. Jon
was always getting stuff in the mail; it was that damn fool comic book collecting of his, mostly.

Jon took the bundles in his arms and said, “Great!” His eyes were lit up like a four-year-old on his birthday. The boy nodded toward the long tube and said, “That’s my EC poster, I’ll bet. Made a good haul today.”

“Just take that nonsense away and don’t bother me.”

Jon laughed. “Yeah, I can see how busy you are, Unc. Hey, has Nolan called yet?”

“No.”

“Be sure to say hello to him for me.”

“You know I will.”

“Thanks, Unc.”

The boy disappeared into the back of the store, where his room was stuck way in the back. Planner was glad Jon was living here; he felt better having someone else around what with all the cash in the safe. After all, half of that eight hundred thousand dollars from Nolan’s bank job belonged to Jon. Yes, Planner thought, smiling, relighting his Garcia y Vega once again, remembering how he brought Nolan and Jon together, my nephew’s a very wealthy boy, thanks to his old uncle.

But Planner wouldn’t feel at ease, couldn’t feel at ease, until that money was out of his safe and in some bank where it belonged. There were reasons for keeping it here, sound ones, but he would be glad, glad hell,
overjoyed,
when Nolan’s call came through saying special arrangements’ve been made and the money can be moved.

He was used to keeping money in the safe, and large amounts of it, too. Personally, he didn’t have much faith in banks, having seen too many of them fail in the Depression and having had a hand in the robbing of a goodly number as well. So he usually had twenty to fifty thousand dollars in that big old safe of his in his farthest-back backroom, as well as smaller but still substantial amounts belonging to various clients like Nolan who liked to have little nest eggs stuck here and there for emergencies. But Nolan and Jon’s little
nest egg—eight hundred thousand dollars—Christ! If there was such a thing as too much money, that was it; it hardly fit into the safe, all of it, between it and the other money in there, near a million all together crowded into that poor old safe, and had been for almost a year now.

When Nolan was staying there, Planner hadn’t felt so nervous about the money. At first, when Jon brought Nolan in all shot up like that and that doctor trying to keep Nolan patched together, there had been too much excitement to be nervous. Then, when Nolan was healing up from the wounds, feeling pretty good and able to move around some, Planner felt fairly safe; even under the weather, Nolan was a good man to have around. And of course Jon had moved from his apartment into that room in back of the shop, and Jon was a strong, tough kid, don’t let his size fool you, who’d seen Nolan through a rough spot and proved to his uncle that he could handle himself.

But near a year Nolan had been gone and all that money had been sitting in that safe, brother. Nerve-racking.

Well, Planner thought, doesn’t do any good to sit and worry like some goddamn old maid. Nolan will call today and that money’ll be out of here by tomorrow night. Maybe sooner.

He let out a sigh and suddenly noticed how nice and cool it was in the shop. That old air-conditioner of his was really putting out. He’d had it a long time, but it was still working like a son of a bitch. Just because a thing is old, he thought, doesn’t mean it’s not worth a damn. He smiled at the thought.

He got out from behind the counter and poked his nose outside the front door. The day was hot, a real scorcher, but the sun was big and yellow in the sky, and the sky was blue without any clouds at all. It was a beautiful day.

Now call, Nolan, damn you.

The ax was embedded in the man’s head, the blood gushing down his forehead, yet somehow he was still standing, implanted there in the doorway, his eyes wide and dead but staring. The other man gasped in horror, the sweat streaming down his face, the guilt apparent in his terror-swollen eyes.

Jon grinned. He laughed out loud.

It was the most beautiful poster he’d ever seen in his life. He held it out in front of him, drinking it all in. He couldn’t believe how fantastic the artwork looked blown up to this huge size; the violent scene had originally appeared as a comic book cover back in the early fifties, and blown up to a 22” by 28” poster, and in full-blooded color yet, was some trip. Almost reluctantly he allowed the poster to roll itself back up, and he tossed it on his as yet unmade bed, to be put up on the wall later that day.

Of course it wouldn’t be easy finding a place to display that beautiful poster: the walls of the little room were full as it was. In its former life, the room had been one of Planner’s storerooms, and after Planner and Jon had cleared and cleaned it, what remained was a dreary cubicle with four unpainted gray-wooden walls and a cement floor.

Jon had met the challenge by papering the gray-wood walls with poster after poster after poster, and the cement floor was covered by shag throw rugs and Jon’s considerable collection of comic books. The comics were neatly boxed, three deep along each wall, with a filing cabinet in one corner that contained the more valuable comics. Planner had contributed a genuinely antique single bed with a carved walnut headboard, and a nonmatching walnut four-drawer chest of drawers. The room was cluttered but
orderly, though against one wall was a wooden drawing easel with an expensive-looking swivel chair such as an executive might have back of his desk, easel and chair surrounded by scattered paper and pencils.

Comic art was Jon’s life. It went far beyond a simple hobby, and Jon was fond of his uncle but thought Planner’s button-gathering was dumb, just not sensible at all. Those precious political buttons of Planner’s were artifacts of a boring and unpleasant reality, while comics were “immortal gateways to fantasy,” as Jon had said in an article he was working on for submission to a fanzine.

He supposed his love for comics had something to do with his fucked-up childhood. Jon was a bastard, he hoped in the literal sense alone, and his mother had liked to think of herself as a chanteuse. What that amounted to was she sang and played piano in bars, and not very well. Because his mother was on the road most of the time, Jon’s childhood had been spent here and there, with this relative and that one, Planner part of the time, and Jon hadn’t lived steady with his mother until those last few years when she was serving cocktails in bars instead of singing in them. She was dead now, hit by a car some three years ago, perhaps by choice. Jon hadn’t known her well enough to get properly upset, and he had occasional feelings of guilt for never having cried over her.

His childhood was a good example, Jon felt, of reality’s general lack of appeal. Either it was boring—like the half dozen or so faceless relatives he’d lived with, the score of schools he’d gone to, the hundreds of kids he’d failed to get to know—or it was so goddamn tragic it was a soap opera and impossible to take seriously.

So why not comic books?

He had built his collection up carefully over the years, at first just hoarding the books he bought off the stands, then gradually, as he got into his teens, he began working on the older titles, seeking out other collectors and swapping, sending increasingly large amounts of hard-earned money
through the mail for rare old issues, even trekking to New York each summer these past four years for the big comics convention. Jon read and reread the books, savoring the stories, studying the artwork. When he finished rereading one of the yellowing classics, he’d seal it back in its airtight plastic bag and carefully return it to its appropriate stack in its appropriate box.

Though he was as yet unpublished, Jon considered himself already to be a full-fledged artist in the field of the graphic story (as comics were called in the more pretentious moments of fans like himself) and he felt this way primarily because he was too old now to say, “I want to draw comics when I grow up.” He
was
grown up, as much as he was going to anyway, and at twenty-one years of age, Jon was more than just serious about his artwork and comic-collecting; it was his lifestyle.

The posters on his walls reflected this. More than half of them were recreations of classic comic book and strip heroes, drawn with black marker pen and water-colored, Dick Tracy, Batman, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Captain Marvel, Buck Rogers. The latest poster was a finely detailed face of an old witch, a withered old crone with a mostly toothless grin and a single bloodshot, popping eye, and was an indication that Jon’s taste in comic art was undergoing a transition. Once the ax poster was put up, and one of the superheroes taken down, the shift from heroes to horror would become even more apparent.

He sat on the bed and began eagerly opening his other packages. One of them was from California and was filled with underground comics. Jon smiled as he examined the cover of the latest issue of Bill Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead.” Not much else of the underground art was up to Griffith’s high standard of absurdity, in this batch of books anyway. He had once thought the undergrounds were where he could make his first splash, but their heyday—when Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton were making “Mr. Natural” and the “Freak Brothers,” respectively, into house-
hold words—had passed into the ancient history that was the ’70s.

Two of the other packages turned out to be rejections. Jon was very disappointed. It wasn’t so much that he’d expected to sell these “graphic stories,” but that he hadn’t realized that this was what the packages contained. He was disappointed that their contents hadn’t been more old comics or fanzines, dozens of which he’d paid for by mail order and should be showing up any day now. Both of the rejected stories were horror tales, and he was told, in a polite note from one editor, that he drew well but his style was too derivative of “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, and if he could just develop a more original style, they would be interested in seeing more. The other publisher included no note, but Jon was not surprised the story was coming back, because he’d heard through the fan grapevine that this company had gone out of business recently.

The other package perked him up considerably. It was chock-full of EC’s, and he’d half expected the ad he had responded to was a hoax, since these EC’s had been incredibly low in price, costing only five to six dollars a piece. There were four “Vault of Horror,” two “Tales from the Crypt” and one “Crime SuspenStories.” He flopped down on the bed and one by one opened each plastic bag and eased out the comic inside. He didn’t read the stories, he just thumbed through the magazines, window-shopping.

He had just got into the EC horror comics in the last six months or so. He’d heard of them, of course, but had never delved into the “Vault of Horror” because the prices were stiff for books printed as recently as the early fifties. And Jon’s primary interests had been the superheroes of the Golden Age of Comics, which ran roughly from 1937 to 1947, and issues reprinting newspaper strips like Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers.

But lately he’d gone sour on superheroes. They didn’t seem relevant to his life anymore. He guessed it had something to do with knowing Nolan, meeting him, working with him.

He smiled, remembering the first time he and Nolan had met. He glanced at the posters over his bed, which were the only noncomic art posters in the room: photos of Leonard Nimoy as Spock, Buster Crabbe in his serial days, and Lee Van Cleef decked out in his “man in black” gun-fighter apparel. Nolan had looked over Jon’s series of posters and had noticed especially the one of Lee Van Cleef, studying the black-dressed Western figure with the high cheekbones and narrow eyes and mustache, and Jon had told him who Van Cleef was, adding, “Looks something like you, don’t you think?” Nolan had shaken his head no, smiled crookedly and pointed a finger at Buster Crabbe, saying “Flash Gordon’s more my style.”

In a way,
both
Van Cleef and Flash Gordon were Nolan’s style. Nolan was the sort of man Jon had always hoped to meet but never thought he really would. The sort of man Jon had admired in fantasy. Nolan was Flash Gordon, and Bogart and Superman, too. Nolan was Dick Tracy and Clint Eastwood and Captain America. Oh, he wasn’t as pretty as any of the fantasy heroes. His face was lean, hard, cruel, and his body was so scarred from bullet wounds he looked as if he’d been used for a year as some medical student’s cadaver. And Nolan could be a bastard at times, could be a real bastard, really an altogether unpleasant person to be around.

Which was maybe why those fantasy guys didn’t satisfy Jon anymore. Nolan was everything they were and more: he was real, both perfect and imperfect, everything. A superhero couldn’t come up to Nolan’s standards.