They were saying good-bye in the heat out on Columbus when a beige panel truck pulled up with a skreek of rubber and double-parked in front of Tontine’s crimson canopy. Six furtive figures wearing camouflage jumpsuits and ski masks hopped out of the van’s side door and hurried toward the restaurant. One of the figures collided with Maggie and spun her around as though they were performing a clumsy ballroom dance move from the 1940s. For a moment their eyes interlocked, and Maggie was sure she had seen the brown-flecked hazel irises somewhere before. It was as though they belonged to a former lover, someone with whom she had known the most powerful intimacy. The figure made a strange gerbil-like gleeping sound that was also vaguely familiar. Then he roughly disengaged himself and followed the others inside. Maggie was still caught up in the bewilderment of the encounter when she realized that the camo-clad figures had been carrying firearms.
She grabbed Christy’s hand and ran uptown on Columbus. At Eighty-second Street, with Christy in tow, Maggie ducked inside a shop that specialized in expensive acrylic decor: clocks, pepper mills, photo frames, telephones, and the like.
“Call the police,” Maggie shrieked to a clerk with an arresting pink hairdo, who looked like a piece of fluorescent plastic decor herself. “They’re robbing Tontine!”
The clerk lunged for a phone, dialed 911, and, enunciating very clearly and calmly, reported the robbery in progress. Maggie was impressed. It was the kind of grace under pressure she prized in her own kitchen employees.
“You’re not from here, are you?” Maggie observed.
“Salisbury, Maryland,” said the girl, who couldn’t have been over twenty-five. “It’s real different down there.”
“Do you cook, by any chance?”
“I make the best smothered chicken on the Upper West Side, if I do say so myself,” the girl replied. “And a darn good chess pie.”
Maggie was thrilled. “Let’s talk later,” she said, extracting a card from her handbag. “The pink hair has got to go, though.”
“Whatever …” the girl said with a shrug.
“Hey, they’re coming out,” Christy reported from the door.
The three women peered down the avenue and saw the masked figures briskly exit the restaurant with their boxy machine guns and sacks of loot. Moments later their beige van swerved out into southbound traffic and vanished.
Maggie and Christy hurried back down to the scene. The police cruisers skidded up a good seven minutes later. Half of Tontine’s patrons had spilled out onto the sidewalk. They percolated with that same odd mixture of giddy excitement and indignation Maggie had observed after the Four Seasons robbery months earlier.
“I saw the getaway car,” she volunteered to a cadaverous-looking detective.
“That’s nice,” the cop said.
“It was a beige van.”
“Super.”
“You don’t even care.”
“Lady, we know this bunch. They use a different vehicle on every job. All stolen right before and ditched right after. Next time, do me a favor and shoot out the tires.”