“We’ll burn them later,” Joan said. “Okay, let’s get started. This sort of has the feel of our one Venice job.”
“Venice!” Frances said on a dreamy sigh. “Nowthatwas a good time, wasn’t it? Until Irene decked me.”
“You should have expected it,” Irene said.
Edie’s mind wandered back to Venice and that grand old hotel with the vintage safe that held the valuables of Europe’s elite, including stacks of cash. Before ATMs and international credit cards, rich people traveled with traveler’s checks and cold hard cash. And a lot of it. They’d heard about the casino in Venice from a girl they’d met in Spain. She was slim, with coal-black hair and dark brown eyes. She said she was Greek, and she knew a lot about Europe’s elite. She especially knew about a man from Italy who was quite wealthy and quite abusive. The black eye the girl sported was testament to that.
The way that girl (her name escaped Edie now) described Venice, it sounded too good to be true. The four of them decided to go for it. Edie and Frances dropped out of that semester in college and away they’d gone, flush with money from another job and ready to party.
The heist had been simple enough after Joan somehow managed to get a job in the casino’s laundry with access to all areas of the building, including the lower rooms where the vault was housed.
Edie had pretended to be a reporter fromLifemagazine and had convinced the concierge to give her a tour of the casino, which is how she managed to lay eyes on the safe. They’d spent several days planning the job. On the designated night, Frances and Irene were to provide the diversion. They’d dressed in their skimpiest dresses. At the time, Irene’s hair was long and sleek, andFrances’s hair had been a stunning shade of red, a color she’d given herself the night before.
“I remember how heads turned when you and Irene walked into the lounge,” Edie reminisced.
Irene laughed. “There was a stretch of time in there that I wanted to look like you and Frances, long and lanky and sexy.”
“It worked,” Frances said. “You were so exotic.”
“You’re not supposed to say that anymore,” Irene said with a chuckle. “But I did look good, didn’t I?”
As the story went, men had plied them with drinks. “And let their hands wander,” Frances added, with a roll of her eyes. “Was there a man alive back then who didn’t believe a purchase of a drink bought at least one free grope? And then there were those who suggested we could have a lot more fun upstairs in a penthouse or the presidential suite, or a local apartment.”
“Things were pretty rape-y in the seventies,” Joan said.
“Eh,” Frances said with a flick of her wrist. “I can’t blame it all on men. I wasn’t exactly a shrinking wallflower.”
“Remind us how it went down in the lounge,” Edie said. She knew very well how it went, but it was fun to relive it.
“Well, we were leading a drunkfest until we got the signal,” Frances said.
“Which was Joan walking by,” Irene chimed in. “That was our clue to cause a scene.”
“I thought we’d agreed that the scene would be accusing one of the men of something terrible. But Irene took it to mean a fight,” Frances said.
“Oh, Franny. Did you really think we were going to dance around? It had to be abigdiversion.”
“You might have warned me. It was my real hair you pulled, you know. And you damn sure didn’t have to sock me in the mouth.”
“For the thousandth time, I didn’t intend to hit you in the mouth. I was going for your shoulder. My aim was off.”
Joan began to laugh. Edie, too. And then the four of them were laughing. Wheezing, really, bent over the table and their laps, remembering the near catastrophe that was Venice.
Edie didn’t remember how it had all ended, precisely. She remembered running toward the vault, yelling at the security guards that there was a terrible brawl in the lounge and the manager wanted them. She remembered slipping into the vault with the key Joan had stolen and duplicated. She remembered how her heart had beat so hard she could hardly keep her fingers from shaking, but somehow, she’d managed to open that safe, had managed to stuff her satchel with money and even some jewelry, and flee before the fight was broken up.
She was in a cab with Joan before Irene was pulled off Frances and hauled into the entrance hall. Frances held a clump of black hair in her hand, her chest heaving. She told them later that some guy tried to dab her breasts with a napkin. She hit him, too.
“How did we get away with so much?” Edie asked, breathless from laughing.
“We were good at it!” Irene said.
“Were we?” Frances asked. The four of them looked around at each. Laughter suddenly broke out again. Deep belly laughs. “No,” Edie wheezed.
When the laughter had subsided, Joan said it was time to get to work. “The casino has that old-fashioned safe Grandpa Vitali was so proud of. There is an entire room dedicated to the history of the casino, with photos and memorabilia going back to the forties. And a photo of the safe, next to a placard that says it has been in the Vitali family network of casinos since 1957 and is impenetrable.”
“No pressure,” Frances said with a wink for Edie.
“It’s got a wheel lock,” Joan said to Edie. “I pulled up a couple of examples.” She turned the laptop around to show Edie.
