He came up beside me, sticking a gun butt in my hand.
“Hide it,” he hissed, and, when I had pocketed that one, gave me another, producing them with his free hand from under his coat.
Then he actually showed me the loot. It was still in the boxes and bags in which it had been carried from the banks. He insisted on opening some of them to show me the money—green bundles belted with the bank’s yellow wrappers. The boxes and bags were stacked in a small brick cell that was fitted with a padlocked door, to which he had the key.
He closed the door when we were through looking, but he did not lock it, and he led me back part of the way we had come.
“That, as you see, is the money,” he said. “Now for those. You will stand here, hiding behind these boxes.”
A partition divided the cellar in half. It was pierced by a doorway that had no door. The place the old man told me to hide was close beside this doorway, between the partition and four packing-cases. Hiding there, I would be to the right of, and a little behind, anyone who came downstairs and walked through the cellar toward the cell that held the money. That is, I would be in that position when they went to go through the doorway in the partition.
The old man was fumbling beneath one of the boxes. He brought out an eighteen-inch length of lead pipe stuffed in a similar length of black garden hose. He gave this to me as he explained everything.
“They will come down here one at a time. When they are about to go through this door, you will know what to do with this. And then you will have them, and I will have your promise. Is it not so?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, all up in the air.