Good Behavior

12

Tiny Bulcher picked up the Honda Civic and put it on the back of the flatbed truck. He had to climb up, and push and tug the car a bit, to nestle it in next to the Mustang, but when he was done there was just about enough room left for one more small car; a VW Beetle, maybe, or a Mazda. Tiny got down onto the sidewalk and slogged up to the cab, where he opened the door and said to the stocky red-haired driver, “Okay, Stan.”

“Hey!” said somebody.

Tiny started to heave his bulk up onto the passenger seat of the cab.

“Hey! Hey, you!”

Stan Murch said, “I think that guy’s calling you, Tiny.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tiny put both feet back on the curb and turned to see what the guy wanted. “You yellin at me, fella?”

“That’s my car!” the guy said, sounding very upset, pointing at the Honda Civic. He was tall and slender and had thinning brown hair and a polo shirt that was a little too loose.

Tiny didn’t bother to look at the car; he’d seen it already. “Yeah?” he said.

“Well— Well— That’s my car!” The guy seemed stuck at that point, unable to follow his own thought anywhere. Or maybe he was just distracted by now having this clear view of Tiny Bulcher, who was a kind of mastodon in clothes, a sort of lowland Abominable Snowman, a creature made from the parts rejected by Dr. Frankenstein when he was sewing together his monster. When people found themselves being looked at by this gigantic bad-tempered drill press, generally speaking they did tend to forget what it was they’d been going to say.

After a sufficient silence had gone by, “Okay,” Tiny said, with a voice like two boulders being rubbed together, and he turned back to climb into the cab.

“But—” said the Honda owner. “But, wait a minute.”

Impatience exuded from Tiny like a heavy fog, probably toxic. “What now?” he asked.

“Well—” The Honda owner gestured helplessly, and looked up and down this quiet sunlit cross-street in the seventies on Manhattan’s West Side. “It’s,” he said, “it’s legal.”

“Good,” Tiny said, and turned away again.

“I mean, it’s legal where I’m parked!”

“So?” Tiny said. When his brow furrowed, it looked like a set of shelves in the basement.

“So I’m legal! Am I by a hydrant? What hydrant am I by?”

Tiny considered, then lifted a hand like a beachball with fingers and pointed at a fire hydrant way down at the other end of the block.

“What?” The Honda owner was as outraged as anybody ever gets with Tiny Bulcher. “I’m more than twelve feet from that! You want me to call the Traffic Department?”

“Sure,” Tiny said, and this time he did climb up into the truck cab, while the guy spluttered behind him. Shutting the cab door, he looked down through the open window and said, “What else?”

“I’m geting a tape measure,” the guy announced. Seeing less of Tiny had made him more aggressive.

“Go ahead,” Tiny said.

“You’ll see,” the guy said, pointing at Tiny. “And you’ll owe me an apology, too.” And he went trotting off.

“You done?” Stan Murch asked.

“Pests,” Tiny said. “I hate dealing with the public.”

Stan put the truck in gear, and they drove away from there. They turned right at the corner and went up three and over one and stopped next to a Renault Le Car. Tiny got out and picked it up by the front wheelwells and was putting it in place on the truckbed when a horn sounded. “More aggravation,” he said. The horn sounded again. “Maybe somebody’s gonna eat their horn,” Tiny grumbled, and put the Renault down any which way and went around to see a cab stopped next to the truck on the driver’s side. He went up to discuss the situation, flexing his fingers, but when he got there the cabby was Murch’s Mom, a feisty little woman in a cloth cap, this being her cab and that being what she did for a living, insisting on her independence and not wanting to be a burden on her son, Stanley, who made his living by, among other occupations, collecting things with Tiny Bulcher.

Murch’s Mom was calling out her other-side window and up to her son, saying, “I’m glad I caught you. See? I told you, it’s always a good thing to tell me where you’ll be.”

There was a passenger in the back of the cab, a stout man in a dark suit and loud tie. And loud voice: “Say, there, driver,” he said loudly, “I have an appointment.”

“Hi, Mom,” Stan was saying. “What’s up?”

“Driver, what is this delay?”

Tiny opened the rear door and showed his unsmiling countenance to the passenger. “Shut up,” he suggested.

The passenger blinked a lot. He clutched his attaché case with both hands. Tiny shut the door.

Murch’s Mom said, “John Dortmunder called, just after you left. He says he’s got something.”

“Good,” said Stan.

“For Tiny, too,” Murch’s Mom said.

“Naturally,” Tiny said. (A disbelieving voice from the back-seat of the cab said, “Tiny?” but then shut up when Tiny rolled an eye in that direction.)

“He says,” Murch’s Mom went on, “would you meet tonight at ten at the OJ.”

“Sure thing,” said Stan.

Murch’s Mom gestured at the three cars on the back of the truck. “You taking those down to your guy in Brooklyn?”

“Yeah. Going right now.”

“Well, don’t take the Battery Tunnel,” she advised him, “there’s some kind of congestion there.”

“No, I figured I’d go down Ninth to Fourteenth and over to Second Avenue,” Stan said, “take the Williamsburg Bridge, and then Rutledge and Bedford.”

“That’s good,” Murch’s Mom said. “Or you could also take the Manhattan Bridge, Flatbush and on down Fulton Street.”

“Oh, really,” grumbled the passenger. Tiny looked in at him, and the fellow busily riffled through the papers in his attaché case, looking for something very important.

“I figure I’ll just play it by ear,” Stan told his mom, “adapt to circumstances on the street.”

“That’s a good boy.”

The cab went away. Tiny tidied the Renault and got back in beside Stan, and they headed downtown. “I wonder what Dortmunder’s got,” Stan said. “Something rich, I hope.”

“Dortmunder’s an amusing fella,” Tiny said. His tree-trunk head nodded. “He makes me laugh,” he said.

Stan glanced at him. “Sure,” he said.

13

When Dortmunder walked into the OJ Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at ten that night a few of the regulars were draped against the bar discussing the weather or something. “It’s ‘Red star at night, Sailor take fright,’” one of them was saying.

“Will you listen to this crap,” a second regular said. “Will you just listen?”

“I listened,” a third regular assured him.

“Who asked you?” the second regular wanted to know.

“It’s a free country,” the third regular told him, “and I listened, and you,” he told the first regular, “are wrong.”

“Well, yes,” the second regular said. “I didn’t know you were gonna be on my side.”

“It’s ‘Red star in the morning,’” the third regular said.

“Another idiot,” said the second regular.

The first regular looked dazzled with disbelief at the wrong-headedness all around him. “How does that rhyme?” he demanded. “‘Red star in the morning, Sailor take fright’?”

“It isn’t star,” the second regular announced, slapping his palm against the bar. “It’s red sky. All this red star crap, it’s like you’re talking about the Russian army.”

“Well, I’m not talking about the Russian army,” the first regular told him. “It happened I was in the Navy. I was on P-U boats.”

This stopped all the regulars cold for a second. Then the second regular, treading cautiously, said, “Whose Navy?”

Dortmunder, down at the end of the bar, raised a hand and got the attention of Rollo the bartender, who’d been standing there with his heavy arms folded over his dirty apron, a faraway look in his eyes as the regulars’ conversation washed over him. Now, he nodded at Dortmunder and rolled smoothly down the bar to talk to him, planting his feet solidly on the duckboards, while behind him the Navy man was saying, “The Navy! How many navies are there?”

Rollo put meaty elbows on the bar in front of Dortmunder, leaned forward, and said, “Between you and me, I was in the Marines.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We want a few good men,” Rollo assured him, then straightened up and said, “Your friends didn’t show yet. You want the usual?”

“Yeah.”

“And the other bourbon’s gonna be with you?”

“Right.”

Rollo nodded and went back down the bar to get out a tray and two glasses and a murky bottle with a label reading Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon — “Our Own Brand.” Meantime, a discussion of the world’s navies had started up, with references to Admiral Nelson and Lord Byrd, when, in a pause in the flow of things, a fourth regular, who hadn’t spoken before this, said, “I think, I think, I’m not sure about this, but I think it’s ‘Red ring around the moon, Means rain pretty soon.’ Something like that.”

The second regular, the Russian army man, banged his beer glass on the bar and said, “It’s red sky. You got a ring around the brain, that’s what you got.”

“Easy, boys,” Rollo said. “The war’s over.”

Everybody looked startled at this news. Rollo picked up the tray with the bottle and glasses on it and brought it back to Dortmunder, saying, “And who else is coming?”

“The beer and salt.”

“Oh, yeah, the big spender,” Rollo said, nodding.

“And the vodka and red wine.”

“The monster. I remember him.”

“Most people do,” Dortmunder agreed. He picked up the tray and carried it past the regulars, who were still talking about the weather or something. “The groundhog saw his shadow,” the Navy man was saying.

“Right,” the third regular said. “Six weeks ago yesterday, so that was six weeks more winter, so yesterday he come out again, you follow me so far?”

“It’s your story.”

“So it was sunny yesterday,” the third regular said, “so he saw his shadow again, so that’s another six weeks of winter.”

There was a pause while people worked out what they thought about that. Then the fourth regular said, “I still think it’s ‘Red ring around the moon.’”

Dortmunder continued on back past the bar and past the two doors marked with dog silhouettes labeled POINTERS and SETTERS and past the phone booth with the string dangling from the quarter slot and through the green door at the back and into a small square room with a concrete floor. None of the walls could be seen, because the room was filled all the way around, floor to ceiling, with beer and liquor cases, leaving only a small bare space in the middle, containing a battered old table with a stained green felt top and half a dozen chairs. The only illumination was from one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.

Dortmunder liked being first, because whoever was first got to sit facing the door. He sat there, put the tray to his right, poured some brown stuff into one of the glasses, and was raising it when the door opened and Stan Murch came in, carrying a glass of beer in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. “The damnedest thing,” he said, closing the door behind himself, “I took the road through Prospect Park, you know, on account of the Prospect Expressway construction, and when I came out on Grand Army Plaza they were digging up Flatbush Avenue, if you’ll believe it, so I ran down Union Street to the BQE and here I am.”

“Hiya, Stan,” Dortmunder said. “How you doin?”

“Turning a dollar,” Stan said, and sat down with his beer and his salt as the door opened again and Tiny Bulcher came in, turning sideways to squeeze through the doorway. Somewhere down inside his left fist was a glass containing something that looked like, but was not, cherry soda. “Some clown out there wants to know was I in the Navy,” Tiny said, “so I decked him.” He shut the door and came over and sat facing Dortmunder; Tiny didn’t mind if his back was to the door. “Hello, Dortmunder,” he said.

“Hello, Tiny.”

Tiny looked around, heavy head moving like a wrecker’s ball. “Am I waiting for somebody?”

“Andy Kelp.”

“Am I early, or is he late?”

“Here he is now,” Dortmunder said, as Kelp came in, looking chipper but confused. Dortmunder motioned to him, saying, “Come sit down, Andy.”

“You know what there is out there,” Kelp said, shutting the door. “There’s a guy laying on the bar, had some sort of accident—”

“He asked Tiny a question,” Dortmunder said.

“He got personal with me,” Tiny said.

Kelp looked at Tiny, and his smile flickered like faraway summer lightning. “Whadaya say, Tiny?”

“I say siddown,” Tiny said, “and let’s get to it.”

“Oh, sure.” Coming around the table to sit at Dortmunder’s right and pour himself a glass of Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon, Kelp said, “Anyway, the other guys out there are trying to decide, is it a service-connected disability?”

“It’s a brain-connected disability,” Tiny said. “What have you got, Dortmunder?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I have a building.”

Tiny nodded. “And a way in?”

“A way in.”

“And what is in this building?”

“A bank. Forty-one importers and wholesalers of jade and ivory and jewels and other precious items. A dealer in antique silver. Two stamp dealers.”

“And a partridge in a pear tree,” Kelp finished, grinning happily at everybody.

“Holy Toledo,” Stan Murch said.

Tiny frowned. “Dortmunder,” he said, “in my experience, you don’t tell jokes. At least, you don’t tell me jokes.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“This isn’t a building you’re talking about,” Tiny said. “This is the big rock candy mountain.”

“And it’s all ours,” Dortmunder said.

“How? You won the lottery?”

Dortmunder shook his head. “I got somebody on the inside,” he said. “I got the specs on every bit of security in the building. I got two great big looseleaf books this thick, all about the building. I got more information than I can use.”

Stan said, “How secure is this information? How sure are you of the inside guy?”

“One hundred percent,” Dortmunder said. “This person does not tell lies.”

“What is it, a disgruntled employee?”

“Not exactly.”

Tiny said, “I would need to talk to this person myself.”

“I definitely plan to arrange that,” Dortmunder told him.

Stan said, “So what’s the idea? We back up a truck, go in, empty everything we can, drive away?”

“No,” Dortmunder said. “In the first place, somebody on the street is gonna notice something like that.”

“There’s always nosy Parkers,” Tiny agreed. “One time, a guy annoyed me and annoyed me, so I made his nose go the other way.”

“In this building,” Dortmunder said, “there are also seventeen mail-order places, different kinds of catalogue outfits and like that. I’m checking, I’m looking around, I’m being very careful, and what I want to find is one of these mail-order people we can make a deal with.”

Kelp said to Stan and Tiny, “I love this part. This is why John Dortmunder is a genius.”

“You’re interrupting the genius,” Tiny pointed out.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“The deal is,” Dortmunder said, “we’d go into the building on a Saturday night and we wouldn’t leave till Monday morning. We’d take everything we could get and carry it all to the mail-order place and put it all in packages and mail it out of the building Monday morning with their regular routine.”

Tiny thoughtfully nodded his head. “So we don’t carry the stuff out,” he said. “We go in clean, we come out clean.”

“That’s right.”

“I just love it,” Kelp said.

Tiny leveled a gaze at Kelp. “Enthusiasm makes me restless,” he said.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“We’ll have to pick and choose,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Even if we had a week, we wouldn’t be able to take everything. And if we took everything, it’d be too much to mail.”

Stan said, “You know, John, all my life I wanted to be along on a caper where there was so much stuff you couldn’t take it all. Just wallow in it, like Aladdin’s Cave. And this is what you’re talking about.”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Dortmunder agreed. “But I’m gonna need help in the setup.”

“Ask me,” Stan said. “I’ll help. I want to see this thing happen.”

“Two things,” Dortmunder told him. “First, the mail-order outfit. It ought to be somebody that’s a little bent already, but not so bent the FBI’s got a wiretap.”

“I can ask around,” Stan said. “Discreetly. I know some people here and there.”

“I’ll also ask,” Tiny said. “Some people know me here and there.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said. “The other thing is, a lockman. We need somebody really good, to follow the schematics I got and shut down all the alarms without kicking them on instead.”

Tiny said, “What about that little model train nut guy from the pitcha switch? Roger Whatever.”

“Chefwick,” Dortmunder said.

“He retired,” Kelp said.

Tiny looked at him. “In our line of work,” he said, “how do you retire?”

“You stop doing what you were doing, and you do something else.”

“So Chefwick stopped being a lockman.”

“Right,” Kelp said. “He went out to California with his wife, and they’re running this Chinese railroad out there.”

“A Chinese railroad,” Tiny said, “in California.”

“Sure,” Kelp said. “It used to run in China somewhere, but this guy bought it, the locomotive and the Chinese cars and even a little railroad station with the roof, you know, like hats that come out?”

“Like hats that come out,” Tiny said.

“Like a pagoda,” Kelp said. “Anyway, this guy put down track and made an amusement park and Chefwick’s running the train for him. So now he’s got his own lifesize model train set, so he isn’t being a lockman anymore, so he’s retired. Okay?”

Tiny thought about it. “Okay,” he said, reluctantly.

Stan said, “What about Wally Whistler? I know he’s absentminded and all, but—”

Tiny said, “He’s the guy let the lion out at the zoo, isn’t he?”

“Just fiddling with the lock on the cage,” Stan said. “Absentminded, that’s all.”

“No good,” Kelp said. “Wally’s in Brazil, without any extradition.”

“Without what?” Dortmunder asked.

“In Brazil?” Tiny asked.

“He was helping some people at Customs down in Brooklyn,” Kelp told them. “You know, people that didn’t want to tie up the government with a lot of red tape and forms and stuff, so they were just going to get their imports at night and leave it at that, you know the kind of thing.”

“You said Brazil,” Tiny reminded him.

“Yeah, well, Wally, what Wally’s problem is, he’s just too good at his line of business.” Kelp shook his head. “You show Wally a lock, he just has to caress the thing, and poke at it, and see how it works, and the first thing he knew he went through a door, and then a couple more doors, and like that, and when he tried to go back the ship had sailed.”

“The ship,” Dortmunder said. It didn’t seem to him there’d been a ship in the story up till then.

“That he was on,” Kelp said, “that he didn’t know it. They were just leaving, and one of those doors he went through was into the ship from the warehouse, and it turned out they had some reasons of their own to leave in the middle of the night, so they didn’t want to go back to let him off, so he rode along and now he’s in Brazil without extradition.”

“That was the word,” Dortmunder said. “Explain that.”

“Well, most places in the world,” Kelp explained, “you find yourself broke and you don’t speak the language and all, you go confess to a crime in, like, Duluth or St. Louis or somewhere, and then the governments get together and do a lot of legal paper on you and they extradite you and the government pays your air fare and you get to St. Louis or Duluth or wherever it was, and you say, ‘Oops, my mistake, I didn’t do that after all,’ and you’re home. Only with Brazil, we got no treaty, they won’t extradite, so Wally’s stuck. And he says Brazil is so poor, most places don’t have locks, so he’s going crazy. So he’s trying to get to Uruguay.”

“For the extradition,” Dortmunder guessed.

“You got it.”

Stan said, “How about Herman X?”

Tiny, who had been observing Kelp so carefully that Kelp was beginning to fidget, now swiveled his head around to look at Stan. “Herman what?”

“X,” Stan said.

“He’s a black power radical,” Dortmunder explained, “but he’s also a good lockman.”

“He was with us that time we took the bank,” Stan said.

“Now, the problem with Herman,” Kelp started, and everybody turned to look at him. “Don’t blame me,” he said. “I’m just telling you the situation.”

“Tell us the situation,” Tiny suggested.

“Well,” Kelp said, “the problem with Herman is, he’s in Africa.”

Dortmunder said, “Without extradition?”

“No, Herman doesn’t need extradition. He’s vice-president of Talabwo.”

Tiny said, “Is that a country?”

“For now,” Kelp said. “There’s a lot of unrest over there.”

Dortmunder said, “Talabwo. That’s the country wanted the Balabomo Emerald that time.”

“That’s right,” Kelp said. “And you gave Major Iko the paste emerald and he brought it home and when they found out it wasn’t real they ate him, I think. Anyway, there was trouble back and forth, and Herman was with his radical friends at the UN to steal some secret documents that proved the drought was a plot by the white people, and they came on this assassination attempt, and Herman helped the guy they were trying to kill, and it turned out he was the next president of Talabwo, which is why they were trying to put him out that window, so when he got home he invited Herman over as a thank you, and that’s when Herman found out the vice-president was figuring on a coup, so now Herman’s vice-president, and he says he enjoys it a lot.”

Dortmunder said, “He does, does he?”

“Yeah. Except he isn’t Herman X anymore, now he’s Herman Makanene Stulu’mbnick.”

Tiny said, “I am growing weary.”

“Well, that’s all I know anyway,” Kelp said. He poured himself some more Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon.

Tiny said, “I know a guy, for the locks. He’s a little unusual.”

Dortmunder said, “After those stories? Your guy is unusual?”

“At least he’s in New York,” Tiny said. “His name’s Wilbur Howey.”

“I don’t know him,” Dortmunder said.

“He just came out of the slammer,” Tiny said. “I’ll have a word with him.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said. He hesitated, and cleared his throat.

“Here it comes now,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder gave him an innocent look. “Here comes what, Tiny?”

“The butcher’s thumb,” Tiny said. “You know what I do with the butcher’s thumb?”

“There’s nothing wrong, Tiny,” Dortmunder said. “The deal is exactly as I said it was. Only, there’s just one more little element.”

“One more little element.”

“While we’re in the building,” Dortmunder said, “take no time at all, we go up to the top floor, handle one extra little piece of business. Nothing to it.”

Tiny viewed Dortmunder more in sorrow than in anger. “Tell me about this, Dortmunder,” he said. “What is this extra little piece of business?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said. He knocked back a little Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon, coughed, and said, “The fact is, uh, Tiny, while we’re in there anyway, uh, it seems we have to rescue this nun.”

14

“How did it go last night?” May asked.

Dortmunder paused with a spoonful of Wheaties in midair. He nodded thoughtfully, pondering the question, and then said, “Well, there was a chancy minute or two when I mentioned the nun, but then it worked out.”

“What was the chancy minute?”

“Tiny. He didn’t like it.”

May was making herself instant coffee, standing in a dapple of morning sunshine reflected twice before coming in the airshaft window. She said, “What didn’t he like about it?”

Dortmunder had taken that load of Wheaties on board. He chewed and chewed and swallowed and said, “Nuns. Tiny says nuns remind him of a movie called Come to the Stable, and he’s mad at that movie.”

“Come to the Stable?” May poured hot water over brown dust. “Why would he be mad at a movie?”

“Apparently, he was in an armored car job once, and it got screwed up, and he hid inside the air ducts in a movie house for a week. Late at night he’d come out of the ducts and go down and eat the candy and drink the soda, but he could never leave the building because the cops knew a couple guys in the job were still in the neighborhood somewhere, and they were doing a house-to-house search and maintaining a presence on the street and all that. So it was a revival house, and that week they were showing Come to the Stable, with Loretta Young and Celeste Holm as these two nuns that were very good to everybody all the time, and smiled a lot. Tiny saw that movie twenty-seven times that week, and he says he’s never felt quite the same about nuns ever since.”

The phone rang, in the living room. Dortmunder said, “I’ll get it,” and went away to the living room to get it. Andy Kelp kept wanting to give him a free extension phone in the kitchen, Kelp having access to a place with telephone equipment, but Dortmunder felt one phone was enough in a person’s life and frequently too much. Besides, he needed the exercise.

It was Tiny Bulcher. “Yeah, hi,” Dortmunder said. “I was just talking about you.”

“You don’t want to do that,” Tiny said. Even on the phone he sounded large, like an approaching cold front.

“Just with May,” Dortmunder told him.

“Okay, then. I got my lockman, I thought we’d come over look at those books you got.”

“Sure.”

“Half an hour.”

“I’ll be here,” Dortmunder said, and hung up, and the phone rang. “Saves me steps,” he commented, and answered, and it was Chepkoff, the caviar man. “Oh, it’s you,” Dortmunder said.

“About my three hundred bucks,” Chepkoff said. On the phone he sounded little and mean, which is also the way he looked in person.

“Don’t be stupid,” Dortmunder said.

“I’m not letting this go, Dortmunder,” Chepkoff said. “I want my three hundred dollars.”

“Sue me,” Dortmunder said, and hung up, and went back to the kitchen, and told May, “Tiny’s coming over pretty soon with a lockman he knows.”

May was drinking coffee and scratching herself through her cardigan pocket. She said, “Should I leave? I don’t go to work till noon.”

“No, no, stick around,” Dortmunder said. “Listen, you got an allergy or something?”

“An allergy?” May looked bewildered. “Why?”

“The last few days, you’ve been scratching a lot.”

May looked at the hand in her cardigan pocket as though it belonged to somebody else. “Oh,” she said. “No, it’s nothing. When is Tiny coming?”

Dortmunder placed himself in front of the Wheaties again. “Half an hour,” he said, and half an hour later the doorbell rang, and when Dortmunder went to answer in came Tiny Bulcher with a little shriveled-up wiry old geezer who looked as though somebody had crumpled him and then partly smoothed him out again.

“This is Wilbur Howey,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder looked at the doorway to see if there was any more to him, but apparently not. “How are ya?” he said.

“Terrific,” Wilbur Howey said, and cackled.

Dortmunder led the way to the living room, where May sat reading the latest issue of Working Woman. Howey tossed a salute in her direction, winked, and said, “Hi, Toots.”

“Hi,” May said, putting the magazine down and getting to her feet. “Hi, Tiny. Anybody want coffee? A beer? Anything?”

“Just an hour with you on a doubledecker bus, Toots,” Wilbur Howey said, and cackled again.

“Shut up, Wilbur,” Tiny said. “They ain’t no more double-decker buses.”

“How about bunkbeds, huh, Toots?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Dortmunder said.

Tiny took Wilbur Howey by the elbow and shook him a little, but Howey didn’t seem to mind. He kept cackling and grinning and winking at May. Tiny said, “Take it easy, Wilbur, that’s our host’s lady friend.”

“Say, what’s the dif?” Howey wanted to know, and winked at Dortmunder. “We’re all just boys together, you know what I mean?”

“No,” said Dortmunder.

“I told you last night,” Tiny explained to Dortmunder, “Wilbur just got out. He was inside kind of a long while.”

“Forty-eight years,” Howey said, and winked at everybody, grinning and chirruping as though that was quite an accomplishment.

Dortmunder stared at him. “Forty-eight years? What did you do?”

“Well, it was just a nickel-dime to begin with,” Howey said, “for a lumberyard safe. But I kept escaping. That’s me, the escape artist.”

“He’s good with locks,” Tiny pointed out. “The problem is, he’s not so good with anything else.”

Dortmunder said, “Meaning what?”

“Meaning,” Tiny said, “he’d bust out of someplace and go maybe half a mile down the road and then he wouldn’t know what to do next.”

“It’s a big world out there,” Howey said, and winked.

“Usually,” Tiny said, “when they sent the dogs out, they’d find Wilbur knee-deep in water in a culvert under some state highway somewhere.”

“That’s where I got my arthuritis,” Howey said, and tossed another salute at May.

“Then they’d add a couple years on the end of the sentence,” Tiny said, “for the escape. Wound up, it took him forty-eight years to serve a ten-year sentence that he should of got out in three.”

“But I kept them on their toes,” Howey said, and cackled, and clicked his heels together.

“He’s not used to the street yet,” Tiny said.

“Wimmin,” Howey said, and smacked his lips, and rubbed his hands together. “I got a lotta catchin up to do. Know what I mean, Toots?”

“Not with me, you don’t,” May said. “I’ll see you later, John, I’m going to work.”

“You can work with me anytime, Toots.”

May rolled her eyes for Dortmunder’s benefit and left the living room. On her way by Howey, he gave her a friendly pat on the behind and cackled. She stopped, turned, and pointed a finger at him, saying, “If you do that again, you’ll be very sorry.”

“Just here to have a good time, Toots,” Howey said, and clicked his heels.

“Brother,” May commented, and left the room.

Tiny said, “You’re embarrassing me, Wilbur. If I didn’t need your fingers, I’d put them in your nose. Sit down and be good.”

“You bet,” Howey said, and settled on the only uncomfortable wooden chair in the room. He sat there, very upright, feet dancing, fingers playing piano arpeggios on his knees, and grinned and winked in various directions.

Tiny said, “I told you he was unusual. You remember that?”

“I remember,” Dortmunder said. “I’ll go get the books.”

In the bedroom, Dortmunder found May being furious and scratching herself. “They let him out too soon,” she said.

“No,” Dortmunder said, getting the two looseleaf books out from their hiding place in the closet. “Not too soon, too late. Way too late.” He went back to the living room, where Howey hadn’t moved from the wooden chair but now Tiny was seated on most of the sofa. “Here’s the stuff.”

“Say, let’s have a look at that,” Howey said.

Dortmunder gave him the books, and watched dubiously as Howey began to leaf through one of them. “Well, uh,” Dortmunder said. “You know all this later stuff, huh?”

Howey gave him a scornful look. “Whadaya think we got in the pen? Thongs?”

“He knows his stuff, Dortmunder,” Tiny said. “He maybe oughta live under a rock, but he knows his stuff.”

Dortmunder, still dubious, settled himself in his chair to watch. Several minutes of silence went by — punctuated at one point by May’s departure from the apartment, shutting the front door a bit more emphatically than necessary — and then Howey shut the second book, evened them both on his lap, and said, “Well, this is the goods, okay. And it’s guaranteed up-to-date, huh?”

“Yes,” said Dortmunder.

“Well, there’s no problem here.” Howey cackled, and did a drumroll on the cover of the top book on his lap, and grinned at Tiny, saying, “If I could get ahold of a tomato the way I can get ahold of this building, whoa, boy, look out, Charlie!”

Tiny said, “Well, Dortmunder? What do you think?”

“I think we’ll have to keep him away from the nun,” Dortmunder said.

Tiny shook his head. “I’m gonna keep away from the nun,” he said. “So Wilbur can stay with me.”

Howey tapped his fingers and danced his feet and grinned at everybody. “It’s a nun got you all this stuff, huh?”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“How’d she do it?”

“Beats me.”

“Huh,” Howey said, and bobbed his head, and clicked his tongue, and thought his own thoughts. “Must be a frisky little nun, huh? Huh?”

15

One of the nice things about being quiet most of the time is that after a while you become sort of invisible, too. Sister Mary Grace (née Elaine Gwen Ritter), small and slender, in flat-heeled soft-soled shoes, wafted through her apartment/prison like the ghost of a nun walled up in a medieval castle. Her large eyes saw everything, her delicate ears heard every word, and most of the time people didn’t even know she was there.

Take the matter of the locks. The doors leading to the two stairwells were both armed with very sophisticated electronic locks, using not keys but computers, with a small pad like a Touch-Tone telephone’s buttons, built into the wall beside each door. Hendrickson the deprogrammer, who lived down one flight on seventy-five, used one of those doors, and the guards, whose offices were in the Margrave Corporation space two flights down on seventy-four, used the other. Any number of times Sister Mary Grace had observed — while remaining herself unobserved — those doors being used, and she saw that what the guards and Hendrickson did was punch out a four-number code to unlock each door. Unfortunately, she could never get quite close enough to see which four numbers they punched out, nor in what sequence; that unobservant they weren’t.

The possibilities were mathematically daunting. The ten buttons on the pad contained the numerals 0 through 9. There were one thousand six hundred possible combinations of any four of those numbers. With the dark-suit-and-necktie guards constantly roaming about, day and night, she would never have long enough to try every combination on one of those doors.

Then, one day in the kitchen, about a month after her imprisonment began, she thought of a possible solution to the problem. What if she could at least learn which four numbers were used, regardless of sequence? There are only twenty-four possible combinations of any specific four-number group, and that many variants she could easily try. And a little something in the kitchen told her how to find out which were the four numbers.

The little something was a spray can called Pam, containing a hydrogenated vegetable oil to be sprayed into frying pans in lieu of butter or other shortening. If you spray Pam onto a smooth surface and then wipe it off with a cloth, it leaves long skinny streaks behind, visible in the reflected light when you look at the surface at an angle. If you then touch your finger to that surface and lift the finger without sliding it, what you see when you study the surface at a sharp angle is little bubbles of Pam, raised and left behind by your fingertip.

Sister Mary Grace borrowed the Pam and brought along a paper towel, and sprayed the keypad beside Hendrickson’s door, wiping off as much as she could, leaving those long streaks. She then suffered in silence another session of Hendrickson’s deprogramming — at least this insufferable fat man had long since given up any reference to God, and now limited himself to discussions of her duty toward her insufferable father — and after he had at last departed she studied the buttons and on four of them clearly stood those bubbles: on 3, and 4, and 7, and 8.

3 - 4 - 7 - 8. No.

3 - 7 - 4 - 8. No.

3 - 7 - 8 - 4. No.

3 - 4 - 8 - 7. No.

3 - 8 - 4 - 7. No.

3 - 8 - 7 - 4. No.

4 - 3 - 7 - 8. No.

4 - 7 - 3 - 8. No.

4 - 7 - 8 - 3. No.

4 - 3 - 8 - 7. No.

4 - 8 - 3 - 7. Yes!

The door opened. Propping it slightly ajar with a wad of balled-up Kleenex, just in case it became necessary to get back and the keypad on the other side of the door had a different combination, Sister Mary Grace tiptoed down the broad gray-painted metal stairs to the next floor, and there was the gray metal door to Hendrickson’s apartment, with a keypad beside it. She tried 4 - 8 - 3 - 7, but it didn’t work, so she went on down the stairs one more flight to the same closed and locked mesh screen gate that Dortmunder and Kelp would be studying two months later. This gate defeated her. She could see the hall door down on the landing, but if she were to shout, and if someone passing by were to hear her out there in the public hall, what were the chances of that someone being connected to the Margrave Corporation?

Excellent.

So she retreated from the mesh gate, as Dortmunder and Kelp would do later, and went back up to her apartment/prison on seventy-six, where she picked up the Pam again. Back down to seventy-five she went, and sprayed the keypad for Hendrickson’s apartment door, and just to be a completist she sprayed the keypad on the outside of her own apartment/prison door as well.

By the next evening, she knew her own door was 4 - 8 - 3 - 7 on both sides, and Hendrickson’s door used the numbers 2 - 5 - 8 - 9. After long trial, the right combination turned out to be 9 - 5 - 8 - 2, but then Hendrickson’s door was bolted, from the inside! The only time it wouldn’t be bolted was when Hendrickson was upstairs pestering her, when she’d be unable to get away and come down here. If he were in his own apartment, or anywhere out in the world (using the apartment’s front door), this door would be bolted, from the inside, and impassable.

The guards’ door was in much more frequent use, which made things trickier, but that was the only other alternative. The Pam trick got her through it, and down the narrow carpeted stairs with the wood-paneled walls, down two flights — there were only bare walls at the landing on seventy-five — to the back entrance to the Margrave Corporation. Pam again, and into Margrave.

Which was never empty. Never. Sister Mary Grace sneaked down there over and over, day and night, risking exposure a dozen times, and it was permanently just no good. There were several offices she could prowl through more or less safely at night, but toward the front of the area there were always people on duty. Men sat at consoles and studied closed-circuit television screens. Men talked on phones. Men unlocked gun cabinets and took out guns or put guns away. Beyond all these men, just glimpsed, women staffed a reception area, day and night, facing the only exit to the public hall. It was impossible to get through.

One of the many reasons Sister Mary Grace needed to escape from this tower was that it was so filled with the occasions of sin. During her two verbal hours every Thursday afternoon, she constantly overstepped herself, committing sins of anger and disrespect, and in her head for the rest of the week she was frequently uncharitable, unforgiving and proud. But the worst was when she had finally accepted the fact that all her cleverness with the keypads had come to naught, that she had merely expanded her prison without escaping from it, and that the farther barriers were absolutely impassable; at that point, and for some time after, she was guilty of the deadly sin of despair.

It wasn’t that she exactly contemplated suicide, although she did find herself asking God in her prayers why He didn’t simplify matters by drawing her now to His Bosom. And she was, without noticing it, eating less and less, until poor Enriqueta Tomayo finally made such a fuss one day, carrying on and crying in two and a half languages (some Indian dialect got in there), that Sister Mary Grace gave up anorexia at once.

Giving up despair, however, took a little longer. She was trapped, probably forever, in a high tower, surrounded by people who did not and would not understand her and who were determined to turn her into something she could never be. She was the butterfly, and this was the rack, and they would eventually break her, but to no one’s satisfaction.

She had always felt herself to be different, both from her siblings and from the rest of the world she knew. She didn’t care about what the others cared about. She didn’t want things. She didn’t know what she did want until, when she was sixteen, she visited a sanatorium operated by nuns where her mother was “resting.” Asking about a separate building she’d noticed on the property, she was told that was where the cloistered members of the order lived, those who had renounced the world entirely and devoted themselves exclusively to contemplation of the All-Powerful.

Around Elaine’s house, until then, the concept of all-powerful had meant only the Ritter family, personified by Frank Ritter himself. Her older brothers and sisters, great galumphing things, bowled one another over for the privilege of serving this ideal. But was there a better ideal? Was there a better way to spend one’s only transit here on Earth?

She sought counsel and instruction, and bided her time. Six years it had taken to be sure of her vocation, to be sure she believed in God and loved God and wanted to serve Him contemplatively the rest of her life. Six years, in short, to be absolutely sure she wasn’t merely running away from her father.

She was twenty-two, legally and allegedly an adult and capable of making her own decisions, when she went back to that sanatorium and applied to enter the cloister. But the order’s rules were that service in the community came first; only after so many years would the cloister be open to her. Frank Ritter’s daughter was a semi-public figure; if she were to break from the world it would have to be completely and all at once. And that led her to the Little Sisterhood of St. Filumena and the convent on Vestry Street from which, three months ago, on her biweekly turn to go to the neighborhood grocery store, she was kidnapped by her father’s goons and locked away in this tower.

Why shouldn’t she despair? But she fought against it, as she fought against Hendrickson and her father and every other target she could find, and at last the news had come from Mother Mary Forcible: a man named John would rescue her. Blessed John! Was there anything she could do to help?

Down in the Margrave Corporation, in one of the offices she could prowl at night, were the thick looseleaf books showing the tower’s security systems. Would those help? Similar books, though empty, were in a supplies closet. She took the records, left the blank books in their place, and Enriqueta smuggled them out beneath her voluminous skirts. And now Sister Mary Grace waited, despair all gone, for Blessed John to appear.

On the surface, she was silent. But inside, she sang.

16

Dortmunder and Tiny Bulcher walked up Fifth Avenue together, the Avalon State Bank Tower rising up ahead of them, bleak and gray and stern. When they reached the tower, a green-uniformed man was washing the glass entry doors to the lobby. “That means rain,” Tiny said. “Never fails.”

They went on inside, and over to enter one of the 5–21 elevators, joining two Orientals in expensive black topcoats, holding attaché cases and talking together very earnestly in Japanese. They paused briefly to look at Tiny, and one of them muttered something that sounded like “Godzilla.” Then they went back to their conversation.

Tiny pushed the button for the seventh floor and said, “Now, remember. I don’t know this bozo myself. Maybe it’s no good.”

“So what did your friend say?”

“Nothing. Just told me to come see J.C. Taylor and said he’d phone ahead to set me up. But he acted a little funny.”

The elevator door closed. The two Japanese kept talking together, secure in their native tongue. Dortmunder said, “What kind of funny?”

Shrugging, Tiny said, “I don’t know for sure. Just a feeling I had.”

“I don’t want to walk into anything stupid.”

“No, no,” Tiny said. “This guy wouldn’t do anything like that. People don’t do humorous things to me, they know I don’t appreciate it. I just had a little funny feeling, that’s all, the way he talked.”

The elevator stopped at seven, and they stepped out to the hall. Behind them, the door slid closed and the Japanese gentlemen rode on up.

The office directory facing the elevators listed far more firms than were on the floors higher up. A ramshackle conglomeration of small companies had rented space on this non-prestige lower floor, leaving richer businesses to pay the higher rents that went with a higher address.

“Seven-twelve we want,” Tiny said. “Down this way.”

The corridor walls were dotted with doors showing obscure names on their doors. The door of room 712 listed three:

Dortmunder said, “Which one do we want?”

“J.C. Taylor, that’s all I know.”

Tiny pushed open the door, and they stepped into a small cluttered receptionist’s office. All the available wall space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling gray metal shelves, piled high with small brown cardboard cartons. A door in the opposite wall was marked with the one word PRIVATE. The receptionist, typing labels on an old black manual typewriter on a battered gray metal desk, was a hard-looking brunette of about thirty. She was wearing a pale blue blouse and tight black slacks over black boots. She glanced up when Dortmunder and Tiny walked in, looked back down at her work, finished the label she was typing, and swiveled from the typing side of her desk to the side with the telephone and the Rolodex and the clutter of correspondence and pencils and general trivia. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said. She was brisk and efficient and in an apparent hurry to be rid of them, so she could get back to her typing. “What can I do for you?”

Tiny said, “J.C. Taylor, please.”

“I’m afraid he isn’t in right now. Did you call for an appointment?”

“I don’t like phones,” Tiny said. “My friend told me just come over.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Your friend?”

“Fella named Murtaugh,” Tiny said. “Pete Murtaugh.”

“Ah.” Her attitude changed, became both more interested and more guarded. “And your name?”

“Mr. Bulcher. My friend said he’d call here, talk to Taylor for me.”

“Yes, he did.” She glanced quickly at Dortmunder, as though making up her mind about something, then said briskly to Tiny, “One moment, please,” and got to her feet.

Tiny nodded toward the door marked PRIVATE, saying, “You mean, maybe Taylor’s in after all?”

“It could be,” she said, and suddenly grinned, as though at some private joke. The grin eased the hardness out of her features and made her much better looking. “I’ll be with you boys in just a minute,” she said, and walked around the desk and through the inner door, closing it behind herself.

Tiny glanced at Dortmunder and said, “What do you think?”

Dortmunder said, “Is this the same kind of funny feeling you got from your friend?”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Tiny said. Then he frowned and gestured at the telephone on the desk. “That button just lit up.”

“They’re making a call,” Dortmunder said. “Checking on us with your friend. Did you tell him there’d be a second guy?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Then that’s what it is.”

The light on the telephone remained on a minute longer, during which time Tiny browsed amid the cartons on the metal shelves. “Hey, look at this,” he said, and turned toward Dortmunder with a book in his hand. “Some kind of dirty book.”

Inside the book’s brown paper wrapper was a maroon pebbled cover, with the title in gold lettering: Scandinavian Marriage Secrets. The title page explained that the book was an illustrated sex manual intended for the use of psychiatrists, marriage counselors “and other professionals” in the course of their work. It also said the text had been translated from the Danish.

There wasn’t much text, but there were a lot of illustrations. Tiny leafed slowly through them, nodding in agreement, then stopped and said, “Hey. Isn’t that her?”

“Who?”

“The receptionist. That’s her.”

Dortmunder looked. The emphasis of the photograph was on other parts of the two bodies, but the girl’s face was clear enough to be recognizable. “That’s her,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Son of a bitch.” Tiny studied the picture some more. “Underneath here,” he said, “it calls the guy ‘the husband’ and her ‘the wife.’ She didn’t have any rings on, did she?”

“I didn’t notice.” Dortmunder looked over at the desk. “They’re off the phone,” he said.

“Oh.” With guilty haste, Tiny closed the book and moved to put it back where he’d found it. He was just bringing his hand back when the inner door opened and the girl came out. She glanced at Tiny’s moving hand and guilty face, but kept her own face expressionless. She looked briefly at Dortmunder, and said to them both, “You can come in now.”

“Right,” Tiny said. He seemed to be finding himself even larger and more awkward than usual; he had trouble getting around the edge of the desk. But then he made it and went on to the inner office, Dortmunder following him and the receptionist holding the door.

The inner office was also small and cluttered. A large scarred wooden desk stood in front of a big dusty window with a Venetian blind half-lowered over it. Large cardboard cartons were stacked up everywhere. A library table against one wall contained envelopes, a postage scale and postage meter, a stamp pad and various rubber stamps, and other necessities for a mailing operation. A small upright piano on the opposite wall was crammed between a tall narrow bookcase and a gray metal filing cabinet. A large audio cassette player and speaker stood atop the piano. The bookcase was packed full, mostly with what seemed to be law books, and the filing cabinet featured a complicated rod-and-padlock locking arrangement. There were only three places to sit: an ordinary old swivel chair behind the desk, a tattered brown leather chair with wooden arms in front of the desk, and a metal folding chair open in front of the piano. There was no one in the room.

Tiny and Dortmunder stopped in the middle of the clutter and looked back at the receptionist, who had followed them in and was closing the door behind her. Tiny said, “What’s going on? Where’s Taylor?”

Dortmunder pointed at the receptionist, who was grinning again, looking almost but not quite like a schoolgirl playing a joke. “You’re it,” he said.

Tiny said, “What?”

“That’s right,” the receptionist said, and edged past them to move around behind the desk. “Grab chairs,” she invited.

Tiny said, “What’s going on?” He was beginning to look as though he wanted to bite somebody.

Dortmunder, gesturing toward the girl now seated behind the desk, said, “That’s J.C. Taylor.”

She said, “Josephine Carol Taylor, at your service. Sit down, fellows.”

Dortmunder turned the folding chair in front of the piano around to face the desk, sat in it, and said, “You called this Murtaugh guy to check on us.”

“Naturally. He hadn’t said there’d be two.” She was just as briskly efficient as before, when she’d been in her receptionist role, but now without the air of disinterested impatience.

Tiny belatedly dropped into the leather chair, which groaned once and sagged in defeat. “Pete should of told me,” he said. “I’m going to mention this to him a little later.”

“I guess he thought it was a joke,” she said. Her smile turned down at the corners, to show she didn’t necessarily agree.

Dortmunder said, “How much did Murtaugh tell you?”

“He said there was a fellow named Bulcher coming over, had a proposition for me, using my office for something on the gray side.”

“He didn’t say what?”

Tiny said, “He didn’t know what. I didn’t give him any details he didn’t need.”

“Same thing he did for you,” J.C. Taylor pointed out. She sounded amused.

Dortmunder said to her, “So you don’t know if it’s something you’ll go along for.”

She shrugged and said, “As long as I don’t have to screw anybody or kill anybody, I don’t much care what you do.”

“All right.” Dortmunder glanced at Tiny to see if he’d take it from here, since he was the one who’d made the first contact, but Tiny was still too dazed by J.C. Taylor’s changes of pace, from cold receptionist to hot porno star to cool businesswoman. He sat frowning at the girl with great intensity, as though he’d been given till sundown to either figure her out or go before the firing squad.

So Dortmunder explained it himself: “We’re going to do a little burglary.”

She was surprised, and showed it. “Oh, that kind of thing,” she said. “I had the idea you were maybe con artists, you needed a store to show the mark, something like that. That’s why you two guys surprised me, you just don’t look the type.”

“We’re not,” Dortmunder agreed. “We’re going to hit some jewelry places upstairs. We need a place—”

“Some places?”

Tiny said, “A couple floors’ worth.” He’d apparently recovered from his befuddlement enough to decide the thing to do with this woman was impress her.

He succeeded. “Well,” she said, “you fellows think big.”

Dortmunder said, “We need a place to operate out of beforehand, so we can be in the building through the night. And then we need a place to stash the goods after the job. And then we’ll want to mail the stuff out with your own regular goods.”

“Accessory before,” she said, “and accessory after. What are you offering for these services?”

“Ten percent of what we get from the fence.”

“Minimum?”

Dortmunder couldn’t be sure yet, so he made a low guess: “Ten thousand.”

“When?”

“When we get it.”

A smile without humor touched her lips and went away again. She said, “How much in front?”

“Nothing.”

“No deal.”

“If we had money in front,” Dortmunder said, “we wouldn’t be in this. Either you trust that guy you called on the phone or you don’t. If you trust him and he vouches for Tiny, you know you’ll get paid.”

She frowned. “Vouched for who?”

“Mr. Bulcher.”

“They call me Tiny.”

She grinned at Tiny, and looked him slowly up and down. “Now, I wonder why,” she said.

“Never mind that,” Tiny told her.

J.C. Taylor was one of the very few people Dortmunder had ever seen who didn’t just automatically stand in awe of Tiny Bulcher. On the other hand, she didn’t look as though she much stood in awe of anybody. She said, to Dortmunder, “What if you people get caught?”

“Then nobody gets paid.”

“And I wind up with twenty years in a prison laundry.” She shook her head. “My mama didn’t raise me to be a dyke.”

“You don’t have to be here while it’s happening,” Dortmunder told her. “It can be set up to look like we broke in. Take a week’s vacation.”

“No chance,” she said. “This is a mail-order business, I have to be on top of it all the time.”

“Then if push comes to shove, we forced you into it at gunpoint.”

She looked dubious. “Maybe,” she said.

Dortmunder said, “But now I’ve got a question.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“What’s your operation here? All those names on the door; which one is you?”

“All of them.” She held up a finger and said, “Super Star Music. You send us your lyrics, we’ll find a melody to fit. On the other hand, you send us your melody, we’ll produce the lyrics to suit. In either case, find fame and fortune in the booming music industry.” A second raised finger: “Allied Commissioners’ Courses; be a detective, send for our one-volume correspondence course. No tests, no instructors, no salesman will call. Free handcuffs and badge included as a special bonus if you act now. Endorsed by police chiefs and police commissioners all across the country.”

Dortmunder said, “Endorsed?”

“They have trade magazines for police chiefs,” she said. “There’s some over there in the bookcase. They do obituaries when a chief or a commissioner dies, and that’s endorsement enough for me. You go prove a dead man didn’t give me an endorsement, and then come back and we’ll talk.”

“Ha,” Tiny said. “That’s nice, lady, that’s really nice.”

She gave him a short nod and a brief smile and said, “Thanks.”

Dortmunder said, “And the third company.”

“Intertherapeutic Research Service. Be a better lay. Get your marriage working right by studying the detailed illustrations in this marital sex manual, endorsed by famous physicians and marriage counselors and sent to you in a plain brown wrapper.”

Dortmunder nodded. He said, “Ever have any questions from the law?”

She shrugged. “Post Office people. Back when I used to do blind mailings to bought mailing lists. But not anymore. Now I stick strictly to magazine advertising. It’s safe, it’s legal, and it brings them in.”

“Who backs you?”

“Me,” she said, and she sounded a bit annoyed at the question. “I put in my time as meat,” she said, “and I saved my money. I started with nothing but the sex book, two magazine ads, and three months’ paid-for desk space down on Varick Street. I don’t owe a penny to anybody but Uncle Sam, and as long as he gets his twelve percent he doesn’t complain.”

“All right,” Dortmunder said. “So it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“The problem,” she said, “is cash. I promised my mother on her deathbed I’d never put out without the money on the dresser, and I’ve never had anything happen to make me think she was wrong.”

Tiny said, abruptly, “Hell, honey, money’s no problem.”

Dortmunder said, “It isn’t?”

Turning to Dortmunder, Tiny said, “We can get this little lady some cash, can’t we?”

Dortmunder looked at Tiny in astonishment. Where was the bad-tempered mammoth, the Sherman tank with a grudge? This was a Tiny transformed. His brow was as clear as such a corrugated surface could get, his expression was agreeable and hardly terrifying at all, and there might actually be something damn near mellow deep down inside those ball-bearing eyes. From grizzly bear to honey bear in one smooth motion; astounding.

And trouble. “Tiny,” Dortmunder said, “we don’t have ten thousand dollars.”

The girl said, “Wait a minute, I’m not asking for the whole ten. But I am talking about cash, some cash, green paper I can hold in my hand and look at, no matter what happens next.”

Tiny, being expansive, his gravel-on-a-conveyor-belt voice practically mellifluous, said, “You want a couple thousand, honey, is that it?”

“That’ll do,” she agreed.

Tiny shrugged the problem away. Looking at Dortmunder, being sweet and kindly but not in a mood to be argued with, he said, “I’m good for it, Dortmunder. I’ll give her a couple Gs now, we’ll straighten it out after the job. I’ll get my money back out of her ten percent, no vigorish, no nothing.” With a gallant gesture, as though sweeping off a Three Musketeers kind of plumed hat, he told the girl, “Just to help out, make things smooth and nice between friends.”

“You give me two thousand in cash,” she said, “you can stable sheep in here.”

“I’ll stick to girls,” Tiny said, and gave her a big grin.

Which she ignored, pointedly, saying to Dortmunder, “Anything else?”

“Not from me,” Dortmunder said, and got to his feet. “Tiny’s going to give you the cash. The job’ll be sometime in the next few weeks, we’ll let you know a couple days ahead.”

“Fine.” She stood up behind the desk, saying, “I’ll show you out.”

Tiny said, “You got a home number? I’ll call you when I got the cash.”

“You can bring it to me here,” she said.

She led the way to the outer office, Dortmunder following, the new Tiny shambling in the rear, saying, “We don’t have to be all business, do we?”

“As a matter of fact, we do,” she told him.

Dortmunder could see the new Tiny drowning in a sea of bewilderment, the old Tiny just beginning to snarl his way back to the surface. “I figured...” Tiny said.

“I know you did,” she told him, and opened the hall door. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you, gents.”

Tiny wasn’t quite ready to let go: “Do you ever eat dinner?” he asked.

She looked at him. “Are you a burglar or a caterer?”

“Come on, Tiny,” Dortmunder said, and led the baffled giant out to the corridor. She closed the door behind them.

A few minutes later, out on the sidewalk, the old Tiny, walking flat-footed and angry, said, “I hate that kind of foul-talking woman. It ain’t feminine.”

“The office looks good,” Dortmunder said.

“We’d be better off working with a man.”

“We’re not gonna get a smoother setup than that one,” Dortmunder pointed out. “She’s a pro, Tiny. If we leave her alone, she won’t make us any trouble.”

“Two thousand dollars,” Tiny said. He sounded bitter.

“Well, Tiny, that was your idea,” Dortmunder said cautiously.

“I know that, Dortmunder.” Tiny sounded as though he was thinking about blaming somebody for something.

“You’ve got two thousand dollars?”

“I’ll get it.” Tiny sounded really bitter. “Don’t worry. I’ll get it.”

17

Andy Kelp sipped his seventh cup of cappuccino and watched three more burly men walk through the grove of trees and board the elevator, crowding in together as they pulled closed behind themselves the brushed-chrome door marked MAINTENANCE. Kelp looked at his watch and wrote on the notepad beside his cup, “2:27 PM ///,” with an arrow pointing upward.

“Another cappuccino, sir?” the waitress asked.

Kelp leaned forward to survey the bottom of his cup, lightly covered with tan bubbles. “Sure.”

The waitress looked at him with something like awe — eight cappuccinos! — but made no remark as she took his empty cup away. Kelp went back to his observation of that obscure door across the way.

He was in the ground-floor garden of the Avalon State Bank Tower, surrounded by tall and slender trees, seated on a white wrought-iron chair at a small round white metal table in the garden’s little cafe. To his left was Fifth Avenue, seen through a tall wall of glass, busy and self-important in the sun. To his right was an artificial waterfall, a black stone wall twenty feet wide, down which water poured with a gentle plashing sound, so that the noises of the city disappeared, even when the glass doors to the street were opened; except, of course, for horns and sirens, of which Fifth Avenue is full. Straight ahead, through steel-sheathed pots of cherry and quince, past copses of ficus and bamboo, stood the brushed-chrome wall separating the garden from the lobby and reflecting vaguely the garden’s greenery, as in some medieval tapestry that had been washed far too often. And on that wall, barely noticeable, was the door marked MAINTENANCE, which, according to those incredible looseleaf books the nun had smuggled out, led directly to the private elevator that serviced only the seventy-fifth and seventy-sixth floors.

Today was Friday, eight days after Dortmunder and May had been given those books, six days since Tiny and Stan had been brought aboard, five days since Wilbur Howey had come dancing and winking into their midst, three days since Dortmunder and Tiny had made their deal with the mail-order company in this building — Kelp wondered offhandedly why they were both so reluctant to talk about that outfit — and the seventh day of occasional surveillance of that elevator. (Between eight in the evening and seven in the morning, when the garden was closed and its entrances locked, elevator traffic had to be watched less comfortably and more sporadically from a car parked across the street.) And of all those days and nights of surveillance, today was the busiest, with very few people coming out but a whole lot of guys who looked like moving men going in.

Be a real mess if they moved the nun, just when things were almost set to save her.

Whoops; there came two more of them, tall, big-shouldered guys with close-cropped hair and bunchy jaws. Even before they went over to MAINTENANCE, even before they took a hard look left and a hard look right and then unlocked the door and went through, Kelp was already writing, “2:36 PM //,” with the arrow pointing up.

“Your cappuccino, sir,” the waitress said, at the same instant that Stan Murch appeared and said, “You got beer?”

“This isn’t beer,” Kelp told him, and the waitress said, “No, sir. We have coffee, espresso, cappuccino, tea, herb tea, peppermint tea—”

“No beer,” Stan summed up.

“No, sir.”

Stan sat down to Kelp’s right, where he could look out at the street. He liked traffic. “What’s that?” he said, pointing at Kelp’s cup.

“Cappuccino.”

“And?”

The waitress said, “It’s coffee, whipped cream and cinnamon.”

“Sounds weird,” Stan said.

“It’s really very good,” the waitress assured him. “That’s your friend’s eighth.”

“Oh, yeah?” Stan considered, then nodded. “I’ll have one of those,” he said. “And bring me some salt, will you?”

The waitress hesitated, decided not to ask, and left. Kelp said, “Stan, what do you want with salt?”

“You know what I do with salt,” Stan told him, and pointed to the whipped cream on Kelp’s cappuccino. “Look, you’re losing the head already.”

“That works with beer,” Kelp said. “You put the salt in, the head comes back. This is whipped cream.”

“So?” Brushing that aside, Stan said, “Midtown is impossible, you know? I took the Battery Tunnel because they quit on the construction today, I was fine coming up the FDR Drive, but then how do you get to the middle?”

“Tough,” Kelp agreed.

“So I got off at the UN,” Stan said, “I went up to Forty-ninth Street, I waited for the bus.”

“Smart,” Kelp said. “Just leave the car and take the bus.”

“I didn’t leave the car,” Stan said, “I followed the bus. Those bus drivers are the most fearless people on the planet Earth, Andy, they don’t care what’s happening, people, cars, trucks, they just pull out in that huge monster and go. They got a schedule, they got to get across town to the Hudson so the dispatcher can check them off on his clipboard. So what I do, I tuck in behind the bus, I just go where he goes. Fastest way across town.”

“But then when you get here, what?” Kelp asked him. “Where do you park?”

Gesturing, Stan said, “Right now, I’m in front of a fire hydrant around the corner.”

“They’ll tow you.”

“Well, no,” Stan said. “When I’m coming to midtown, I bring along a little bottle of green radiator fluid. There’s always a place to park in front of a fire hydrant, so then I pour the radiator fluid on the street under the front of the car, and open the hood, and take away the radiator cap.” He took a radiator cap from his jacket pocket, as illustration.

Kelp nodded judiciously. “Might work,” he said.

“For maybe an hour,” Stan said. “The cops come along to tow, they see all this, they start thinking about liability.”

“They figure you’re off calling AAA.”

“Exactly,” Stan said.

The waitress said, “Cappuccino,” putting it down in front of Stan, “and salt.” The last part wasn’t quite a question.

“And a check,” Stan told her.

Kelp looked at him in surprise: “You just got here.”

“We’re both going,” Stan told him, while the waitress stood over them, adding numbers. “Dortmunder says we can quit looking the joint over now, because we’re going in. Tomorrow.”

“Well, good,” Kelp said, and looked at the check the waitress gave him. “I would call this expensive,” he said.

“That’s what it costs,” the waitress said. “It says so on the menu.”

“Yeah?” Kelp shook his head. “At this price, I should get to keep the cup.” He covered the check with a lot of money, which the waitress took away.

Stan, whipped cream on his upper lip, said, “This is coffee.” He sounded like somebody who’d been cheated.

“Yeah,” Kelp agreed. “That’s what we said. Ten cents worth of coffee, two cents worth of whipped cream and a tenth of a cent of cinnamon, for two dollars and seventy-five cents.”

“I’ll stick to beer,” Stan decided, and put the cup down. “You ready?”

“Hold it.” Kelp raised his pencil and watched two bruisers cross the garden, looking around, searching for something. One saw MAINTENANCE and poked the other and they both went over. “Last two,” Kelp said, making the notation. “There must be an army up there by now. Okay, let’s go.” But then the pencil kind of jumped out of his hand and fell on the floor.

“What’s the matter?” Stan asked him. “You nervous about something?”

“I am kind of jittery,” Kelp admitted. “I think it’s all that cinnamon.”

18

“Now, be sure you phone, John,” May said, removing lint from the lapels of Dortmunder’s black business jacket.

“When I get a chance,” Dortmunder said.

“You’ll have plenty of chance,” May told him. “You’re going to be in that building over the whole weekend.”

“I’ll call,” Dortmunder promised. The bedroom clock said five minutes to eleven; it was Saturday morning, and he wanted to be in the building and safely tucked away in the offices of J.C. Taylor by noon. “I got to go, May,” he said.

She walked him to the front door, tugging at the tail of his jacket to make it sit better on his shoulders. Something inside the jacket went chink. “Good luck,” she said.

“Thanks, May.”

“Wait,” she said suddenly. “Let me get my key.”

Dortmunder looked at her. “May? You’re not coming with me.”

“I want to look for the mail.”

So Dortmunder waited, and they went downstairs together, and Dortmunder waited again by the mailboxes, where May went through the bills and insurance offers and said, “This is for you. From something called Civil Court.”

Dortmunder frowned. “Civil Court? There’s no such thing.”

Handing him the envelope, May said, “Is there something you haven’t told me about, John?”

“No,” he said, and looked at the official return address. “Civil Court. Hmmm.”

“Why don’t you open it?”

Because he didn’t want to open it, that’s why. Still, if he was ever going to get uptown by noon, he’d have to move on from this vestibule first, so he turned the envelope over, slit it open with the side of his thumb, and took out the legal document within. He studied it a long time. After he understood it, he studied it all over again, and he still didn’t believe it.

“John? What is it?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, “it’s Chepkoff.”

“Who?”

“The guy I was getting the caviar for. He said he wanted his three hundred advance payment back, and I told him, ‘So sue me,’ because that’s what you say to a guy in a situation like that, am I right?”

“And?”

“And I better phone him,” Dortmunder said, pushing back into the building.

May followed, saying, “John? You don’t mean it!”

“Oh, yes, I do,” Dortmunder said. “This is a summons. Chepkoff’s taking me to small claims court to get his three hundred back.”

“But he gave you that money to commit a crime!”

“I’m going to point that out to him,” Dortmunder said, “when I get upstairs.”

Which he did, finding Chepkoff at his office on this Saturday morning, but Chepkoff immediately answered, “What I said in my complaint was I gave you three hundred dollars to perform professional services which you didn’t perform. If you want to go into court and say those professional services were a felony, that’s up to you. All I’m saying is, professional services, and I got the canceled check with your signature on the back, and I want the return of my three hundred.”

“People don’t do this,” Dortmunder complained.

“I do it,” Chepkoff said. “I’m a businessman, and I will not be stiffed for three hundred fish.”

“Everybody takes chances!”

“I don’t.”

“Listen,” Dortmunder said. “I’m late for an appointment, I’ll get back to you, you just don’t understand the situation here.”

“Yes, I do,” Chepkoff said. “You owe me three Cs.”

“I don’t! I can’t talk now, I got to go.”

“Listen, Dortmunder,” Chepkoff said, “be careful out there. Don’t wind up in jail. I wouldn’t want you to miss our court date.”

Dortmunder hung up, and looked at May. “If the scientists,” he said, “ever do find life on some other planet, I’m going there. It can’t be as weird as this.”