By Jessie Seigel

It was eleven o’clock at night. I was sitting alone in the one-room office of the Podunk Herald. This newspaper’s one newshound (myself) had just finished yet another article on a recent rash of bank robberies in our fair burgh, and I was waiting for my boss, the owner, to come in for his midnight approval before we went to press. I was proud of the piece and knew he was going to be well pleased with it. But my self-congratulations were unceremoniously interrupted by a loud crash followed by the cave-in of the establishment’s back door and the appearance of Mr. Notorious—the subject of my recent articles.

Notorious was not a tall man, but he had a fearsome scowl on his face and an intimidating bulge protruding from inside his suit jacket, a dark pinstripe dressed up with wide collar and wide tie. If there had been any passersby at that hour, they would have seen him through the glass windows fronting our office. But Notorious didn’t seem to care.

“You’ve been writing bad stuff about me,” he said, “and it’s no fair.”

I took in a sharp breath. “Is there something in particular you want to address, sir?” I spoke very politely, my eye on that bulge under his suit jacket, my mind concentrated on the avoidance of any possible gunplay.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’ve been calling me a bank robber, for one thing.”

“Are you saying you’re not a bank robber?” Mr. Notorious had robbed many banks.  There were witnesses.

Notorious waved my question away. “Nah. That’s beside the point. Them bankers are all robbers too. But you’re picking on me.”

“Um…well..you did break the law.”

“Hey! What are laws but rules? And rules are meant to be broken. General Doug MacArthur said that. If somethin’ has to be made a rule, it ain’t necessary, just a preference. General Doug MacArthur said that too.”

I stared in wonder at the idea of Mr. Notorious knowing anything about an historical figure like General Douglas MacArthur.

He shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I read.”

Mr. Notorious then sat himself down in a chair and propped his feet up on my desk. He pulled a news clipping from an inner coat pocket. I could clearly see the butt of the revolver in his holster. The weapon wasn’t my imagination, then. He really had one.

“It’s like here,” he said, pointing a finger at a phrase he’d circled in red. “You write that when I robbed the First National bank, I hid the money ‘to prevent exposure of my crime.’ You shoulda wrote I hid it to keep it safe, ‘cause it would be embarrassing if some lowlife stole it from me.”

He pointed to another item he’d circled. “And waddaya mean, it’s a crime? Everybody knows it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup. And I ain’t covering up nothin’. I’m a bank robber—I robbed the First National Bank, the Second National Bank, the Third National Bank, the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth National Banks. I’m proud of my accomplishments. And, anyhow, nobody’s never ‘proved’ I robbed nothin’.”

I couldn’t tell whether Mr. Notorious was getting himself riled up or simply enthusiastic about his subject. As for me, every muscle was tight. But I looked at the clock—less than an hour until midnight, when the boss was due. If he saw my predicament through the front window, he’d go for help.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Notorious said. “We’re gonna go through your lingo, bite by bite, and we’re gonna fix it.” He picked up the piece I had just finished. “You been calling all my robberies abnormal. Well that ain’t right. I looked it up in a dictionary. An’ the dictionary says abnormal means ‘deviating from what’s normal or usual.’” The man’s lower lip curled over his upper, like he might punch me. “I ain’t no deviate. That’s in the first place.  And in the second place, since I’ve robbed at least six banks, I’d say banks getting robbed is pretty usual, wouldn’t you?”

Reluctantly, I nodded. “I guess it is. Now.”

“So, we’re gonna change this.” Notorious took a pen off my desk.

“But—”

“But what?”

“But,” I said, timidly, “you must admit, Mr. N., it is a devia—a change from the usual order of life—you know—laws being enforced….”

“Okay,” Notorious said, “so we’ll do this.” He crossed out the word “abnormal,” and replaced it with the phrase, “the new normal.”

I was afraid to say that robbing banks should never be considered normal. Under the circumstances, discretion seemed the better part of valor, and I am nothing if not the better part of valorous. Accordingly, I stayed silent, and Mr. Notorious went on.

“Now, what’s this stuff about my actions bein’ suspicious or illegal, and my boasts about my crimes being outrageous? That’s all gotta go.”

“But robbing banks is illegal.” I could hear the pathetic whine in my own voice. “And boasting about one’s crimes— ”

“I don’t wanna be unreasonable,” Notorious said. He stood up and came around to my side of the desk, placed the paper on the desk in front of me, and leaned over my shoulder. I could feel his breath like a hot wind on my neck.

“I tell ya what. Here, where it says bank robbing is illegal. Let’s change that to ‘Some consider bank robbing inappropriate behavior.’ And here, where you wrote that me being at the teller’s window with my pistol lying on the counter is ‘suspicious,’ we’ll change that to ‘a pistol on the counter is unprecedented’.” He handed me the pen.  “Go on,” he said.

As I crossed the words out and wrote the new ones, I tried to keep my hand from shaking.

“And here,” he added. “Where you wrote ‘outrageous.’ Let’s change that to ‘unusual.’”

“Unusual?” I said.

“Well,” Notorious said. “What do you think, then?”

“Maybe,” I whispered, hoarsely, “deeply disturbing?”

Notorious frowned. “I don’t like it…but I’m not gonna be pigheaded. Okay. ‘Disturbing’ —but no ‘deeply’.” Notorious looked at his edited version of my article. “I like it,” he said. “Yeah. That’s better. That’s good.”

I had a sudden cheering thought, and screwed up my courage.  “I just realized something,” I said.

“What?” said Mr. Notorious.

“It doesn’t matter what changes you make me make. My boss won’t go for this. He’s not going to let the subject of an article dictate what we write about them.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mr. Notorious said. He opened his jacket and pulled out stack after stack of hundred-dollar bills—as if he were a magician doing a conjuring trick—and placed them in a row on the desk. My eyes opened wide.

“I am the boss. I own this joint.”

The clock struck midnight and my boss, the owner of the Podunk Herald, walked through the front door. To my astonishment, he greeted Mr. Notorious with a sly smile and a cordial handshake, while barely acknowledging my presence.

Notorious gave my now former boss a grin and nodded to the ill-gotten bills stacked on the desk, ready for him to pocket. “You might wanna put that in a bank,” he said. “For safekeeping.”

Jessie Seigel is an associate editor at the Potomac Review and writes book reviews for the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Ontario Review; Gargoyle; Élan; Response, A Contemporary Jewish Review; Daily Science Fiction, Peacock Journal, Every Day Fiction, and the anthology Electric Grace. Seigel has twice received a fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, was a finalist for a grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation, and a semi-finalist for the William Faulkner Creative Writing Award for the Novel. She lives in Washington, D.C. More on her background and views on writing can be found at The Adventurous Writer, www.jessieseigel.com.