Good Behavior

19

Walter Hendrickson sighed. Sooner or later, he would have to speak, but what would he say? For the last five minutes, ever since he’d come into the girl’s apartment, he had sat here silently in the highbacked chair against the window, Saturday noon’s sunshine on the top of his head, while Elaine Ritter had stood across the room, watching and waiting. At first, her face had been fixed in the glare with which she always greeted him, but as his silence had continued minute after minute, her expression had reluctantly and slowly altered; first to surprise, then to curiosity, and at last to skepticism; she must have decided by now this was merely a new deprogramming technique. Walter Hendrickson opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. He sighed.

Elaine Ritter planted her feet somewhat apart, placed her fists on her waist with elbows akimbo, leaned her head forward, and raised one eyebrow: Well? What’s it all about? Really fascinating how she managed to communicate so much without words. On the other hand, without words Hendrickson seemed unable to communicate anything at all, other than a vague unease.

But what words? What should he say?

I am the best, he reminded himself. But even the best can be tripped up, particularly by emotion. Over these past few months, while Elaine Ritter had persistently, unremittingly, implacably resisted him, and while Hendrickson himself had moved from self-assurance through wonder to a calm and amused acceptance of his inevitable defeat, it seemed he had all unconsciously also been breaking the cardinal rule of the deprogrammer; he had become emotionally involved with the subject. The fact was, damn it to hell and back, the fact was he liked Elaine Ritter, liked her spunk, liked her strength, liked the flailing sharpness of her logic on Thursday afternoons. He would miss her.

Elaine put her heels together, displayed her hands palm up, and gazed long-sufferingly at the ceiling: What’s with this yo-yo, God?

Hendrickson sighed. He knew what was keeping him silent; the only words he had were words he didn’t want to use. But the time had come, hadn’t it? There was nothing left for him to say to Elaine Ritter but the truth. “Ah, well,” he said, and sighed.

She looked alert, ready for him to go on.

“Ah, well, ah, well, ah, well.”

Slowly, she shook her head.

“The truth is, Elaine,” he said, then shook his own head and said, “I beg your pardon. The truth is, Sister Mary Grace—”

That did make her eyes widen.

“—the truth is, this is our last meeting.”

Her eyes narrowed: What’s up?

“Your father has decided,” Hendrickson said, and sighed, and went on, “to try a different tack.”

She leaned forward, very intent.

“I’m out, in short,” Hendrickson told her. “Well, we both knew it would happen, didn’t we?”

She made come-on-tell gestures with both hands.

“Yes, you’re right,” he said. “Very well. There’s a new man coming in next week. I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce his name, he’s I think Hungarian, or Bulgarian, or one of those things.” Hendrickson waved a hand loosely toward Eastern Europe. “Before he defected,” he went on, “he was apparently an expert in brainwashing.”

She stepped back, wide-eyed, one hand to her throat.

“Your father...” Hendrickson sighed.

She did her imitation up-chuck.

Hendrickson sighed again. “You’re not entirely wrong,” he admitted. “Your father is a strong-willed man, and he’s getting impatient, and this Rumanian or Ukrainian or whatever he is, he’s been known to convince cardinals to change their minds about God, so that’s the way they’ll try next. There will probably be some physical violence involved, which is not something I would ever do, so I’m out. When I last talked to your father, he was full of what’s necessary when you make an omelet.”

She bunked the heel of her hand against the side of her head.

Hendrickson nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he agreed. “You’re the egg they’re going to break.”

She pointed at him, pointed at herself, pointed her thumb at the door.

He smiled sadly and shook his head. “Can’t. They never let me leave this area by myself. If you tell your father this I’ll deny it, but in fact I would help you escape if I could. Unfortunately, it’s impossible. I’m sorry, Sister Mary Grace, but nobody can help you. My advice is, try to get used to that idea.”

Her lips moved. Hendrickson, peering at her, thought she had mouthed the word John. Saint John the Apostle? Her patron saint, perhaps, to whom she prayed when things looked blackest, such as right now. “John,” he said, and nodded solidarity with her.

She looked startled, then clamped her lips shut.

“Oh, it’s all right,” Hendrickson assured her, pushing down on the chair arms, getting to his feet. He felt very weary. “In the days to come,” he said, “under this new fellow, I imagine you’ll do a lot of talking on days other than Thursday, whether you want to or not.”

She folded her arms and looked mulish.

“We all do our best,” Hendrickson said, as much to himself as to her. “Do you suppose God actually does notice? ‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless this bed of nails that I lie on.’ Good luck, Sister Mary Grace.” He smiled again. “You came close to deprogramming me,” he told her, and went away.

20

And what was this, twitching and winking and jittering around in the lobby of the Avalon State Bank Tower? Bless me if it isn’t Wilbur Howey, flashing smiles and winks and salutes and tips of the Howey hat to every passing female, plus one kilted Scot and a delivery boy in a white apron. Dortmunder, entering the lobby, saw him there and a heavy weight seemed to settle on his shoulders; nevertheless, he went over and said to Howey, “Now what?”

Howey turned away from leering at two transvestites on their way up to their electrolysis appointment. Little sparkly eyes focused on Dortmunder, and he said, “Say! I know you!”

“I can’t deny it,” Dortmunder admitted. “What are you hanging around down here for?”

“This is the place!” Howey did a little two-step, seemed about to twirl, didn’t twirl, and said, “And here I am!”

“Not in the lobby,” Dortmunder told him.

“Say, look,” Howey said, “here’s the story on that. You know that piece of paper, where Tiny wrote everything down?”

“You lost it,” Dortmunder said.

“Avalon,” Howey said, and snapped his fingers. “That much I got. I used to know a girl named Mabel, you know, gee, a whole bunch of time ago. So they sound alike, and—”

Dortmunder said, “They do?”

“Mabel,” Howey said. “Avalon. Get it?”

“Anyway, you’re here.”

“Johnny on the spot, that’s yours truly,” Howey said, and grinned, and popped a salute.

“It’s seven-twelve,” Dortmunder told him. “Come on.”

As they went over to the 5–21 elevators, Howey said, “I never knew any girls with numbers instead of names.”

What was there to answer to a remark like that? Dortmunder maintained an increasingly grim silence as they entered an elevator already containing two slender young women dressed for success in dark blue long-skirted suits, plain white blouses and colorful bunchy neckties. They were talking about diet chocolate-chip cookies from a marketing point of view. “Our main subject is the assuagement of guilt,” one said, and the other said, “Exactly. Of course you’re as fat as a hippopotamus and your husband can’t stand the sight of you, but every time you reach for a diet chocolate-chip cookie it shows you’re seriously trying. No more guilt.”

The doors slid shut, the elevator started up, and Howey leaned toward the nearest young woman, winking as he said, “Hi, Toots. I like a double-breasted suit, you catch my drift?”

The women turned their young serious gazes on Howey, then on Dortmunder, who was facing front, pretending he was on a street corner in Boise, Idaho, waiting for a bus. One of them said to Dortmunder, “Is this with you?”

“We’re a team, Toots,” Howey said, lifting his hat as though about to break into song. “We could double-date!”

Still speaking to Dortmunder, the first young woman said, “Shouldn’t it be on a leash?”

Dortmunder breathed shallowly, looking at the door.

“Be careful,” the second young woman told the first. “It may not have had its shots.”

“Say, you know what I like about women’s lib?” Howey piped up, while Dortmunder closed his eyes. “I love to be free with women! Hotcha!”

The shutters remained closed. Down inside his dark head, Dortmunder heard the first young woman say, “Ouch!” and then the sound of the slap, and then Howey, full of beans, saying, “Say, listen, girlie, didn’t you ever hear of a senior citizen’s pass?”

The elevator bumped to a halt. Dortmunder opened his eyes and saw the doors sliding open, with the seventh floor corridor just beyond. One of the young women was saying, thoughtfully, “You know, Arlene, the Eskimos may have had the right idea after all.”

The other young woman said, “Putting the oldsters out to sea on an ice floe? You bet.”

The doors were open. The irrepressible Howey, as Dortmunder lugged him away by the elbow, called back, “Bring your friend, Toots! I got a lotta catching up to do!”

Then the elevator and the young women were gone and Dortmunder could release the little madman’s elbow. As they made their way down the corridor, Howey said, “Too bad we’re busy, huh, pal? Those two were ready, willing and Betty Grable.”

“The only thing in this world that gives me any pleasure at all,” Dortmunder muttered, “is the knowledge that you’re about to meet J.C. Taylor.”

“Nice fella, huh?”

“In a way,” Dortmunder said, and opened the door leading to Super Star Music, Allied Commissioners’ Courses and — last but not at all least — Intertherapeutic Research Service.

J.C. Taylor was being the receptionist again, typing labels. Today she was in a plaid shirt open halfway to the waist, and designer blue jeans. Glancing up when the door opened, she said, “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. There’s three guys already inside.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said.

Meanwhile, Wilbur Howey was inhaling. He’d been inhaling steadily ever since he’d set eyes on J.C. Taylor, slowly rising up on his toes as though the volume of air he’d taken aboard was turning him into a balloon. Finally, he released a bit of that air: “Tooootts,” he said, half sigh and half croak. His hand moved up to his hat, moving like part of a mechanical figure, and raised it clear of his wisp-covered scalp.

Now she became aware of him. Her fingers slowed and then stopped on the typewriter keys. Her left eyebrow raised, and the corners of her mouth wrinkled in amusement. “Well, look at this,” she said, like somebody finding a really good prize in a Crackerjack box.

“My hat’s off to you, Babe,” Howey said, which was the literal truth. Apparently he’d forgotten he’d doffed his skimmer — as he himself would undoubtedly have put it — and his upraised arm still held it way up there, like a flying saucer observing human mating rituals.

“You’re cute,” J.C. Taylor told him.

Self-confidence never deserted Wilbur Howey for long. Waggling the hat, he returned it at a jaunty angle to his head, patted its crown, winked, and said, “And anything you want to take off for me, Toots, is one hundred percent hunky-dory.”

“Ignore him,” Dortmunder said.

“Why?” she asked, still amused. Slowly she stood, sinuously, moving her hips a lot more than necessary and arching her back and treating Howey pretty much as though he were the back row in the burleycue; she wanted to be sure she reached him. “What’s your name, honey?” she asked, in a sugary voice Dortmunder hadn’t heard her use before.

Howey was bobbing up and down by now, almost skipping, his big watery eyes blinking. “Say, Babe,” he cried, “they call me Wilbur Howey. I’m little, but I’m wiry.”

“And ex-per-ienced.”

“Oh, say, you can’t see, any flies on me!”

With a little reflective half smile on her lips, Taylor reached out her left hand and touched the tip of her first finger gently to the side of Howey’s jaw, just beneath the ear. Eye to eye, leaning just a bit toward him, breathing deeply and regularly, she slowly moved the fingertip and just an edge of fingernail lightly along the line of his jaw. Howey’s bobbing grew more spasmodic, he vibrated all over, and by the time her fingertip had reached the middle of his jaw he was just standing there, spent, mouth hanging open. “Very nice,” she told him, patted his cheek, and said to Dortmunder, “He’ll be all right now for a while.” And she sat down, turning back to her typewriter.

Dortmunder looked at Howey, who continued to stand there, unmoving, dazed, while J.C. Taylor began once again to type. “Come on,” Dortmunder said. “Before you embarrass me.”

A long sigh from Howey suggested the belated return of that long inhale. Once again his eyes had begun to sparkle, once again that cheery oblivious smile was spreading across his face. “Say, Toots,” he said. “You and me could trip the— After the job, why don’t we— Say, couldn’t we just see the world with, uh— Me and you and a roadster built for two— Waikiki Mama!”

Meanwhile, Taylor typed, aware of nothing else, alone in the room.

“Howey,” Dortmunder said, firmly. “We go through this door here.” And he tugged at Howey’s arm.

Howey did permit himself to be led away, but he kept looking back at the unresponsive Taylor, and as Dortmunder pulled him through into the inner office he called back, “Keep them fires hot, Baby, I’ll be right back to stoke ya!”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” Dortmunder grumbled, and shut the door.

In a corner of the inner office there now stood a very large masking-tape-swathed cardboard box which had originally held paper towels. On top of all the stuff piled on top of the piano were two shopping bags from Balducci’s deli down in the Village. Stan Murch stood at the window, looking down at traffic, while Andy Kelp picked out a one-finger version of “Camptown Races” at the piano. Pausing in that occupation, he nodded hello, saying, “How’s it going?”

“It’s been a long day already,” Dortmunder told him.

Tiny Bulcher was seated at the desk, studying a book. He nodded his heavy head at Dortmunder and said, “I’m learning to be a detective.” He showed the front of the book; gilt lettering said it was the textbook of the Allied Commissioners’ Courses.

“That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

Stan Murch, still looking out the window, said, “I wouldn’t want to be making any getaway through that mess down there. Just from here, I can see five separate and distinct gridlocks.”

“The idea is,” Dortmunder reminded him, “we make our getaway completely inside the building. Just to here.”

“That’s the part I love,” Kelp said.

Tiny gave Kelp a look. “You told us,” he said.

The door opened and J.C. Taylor came in, shrugging into a short jacket. To Dortmunder, she said, “Is this everybody?”

At the desk, Tiny closed the detective course book and sat with a belligerent defensive look on his face, as though expecting her any second to demand her desk. Stan’s concentration remained mostly on the traffic seven stories down, but Kelp abandoned “Camptown Races” at the far turn and looked alert, capable, ready to be of assistance. And Howey blinked at Taylor with undisguised lust, which she ignored.

“Yeah,” Dortmunder said. “This is all of us.”

“Okay,” she said. “There’s a couple things we should talk about before I go.”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “Such as.”

“Such as do me a favor and don’t use the phone. And if it rings, don’t answer. And if anybody comes around and knocks on the door, for Christ’s sake don’t any of you birds say you’re J.C. Taylor.”

Dortmunder, thinking of Chepkoff, said, “Process servers?”

“There’s always a little lawsuit or two in this business,” she said. It didn’t seem to bother her much. “Just so J.C. Taylor doesn’t get served any papers, that’s all I ask. Cover your ass is the name of this game.”

“Just a foul-talking woman, that’s all,” Tiny said. He grumbled it in his low voice, like an earthquake over in the next county, but he could be heard very clearly in this room.

Howey, looking shocked, said, “Say, wait a minute there, Tiny!”

Facing Dortmunder, ignoring the others, Taylor said, “We can always call it off now, if you want.”

“Everything’s just fine,” Dortmunder assured her. “We appreciate the place.”

She hesitated a second, not looking away from Dortmunder, and he knew that if anybody said anything now, no matter what, she’d balk and the deal would be off. But Tiny had crunched down into something the size and shape of an irritable Volkswagen Beetle, and the others clearly all sensed something in the air — even Stan, who had turned away from the window now with an air of mild curiosity — so everybody just stood and waited.

And then J.C. Taylor let out a held breath, and nodded, and said, “Okay. These keys” — she dropped them both in Dortmunder’s palm — “you’ll need. The bigger one’s for the men’s John, down at the end of the hall on the left. The other one’s the office door. I don’t subscribe to any part of the alarm service — I mean, what have I got to steal, right? — so you can go in and out as much as you want.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said.

“I’ll be back Monday morning at eight.”

“We’ll have the goods in this back room here.”

“The mailers you wanted,” she said, “are on the shelves outside.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said. “You got paid?”

“Oh, yes.” Her smile had just a hint of mockery in it. “Mr. Bulcher was very agreeable,” she said.

A low rumble sounded; maybe a subway train going by far below.

J.C. Taylor looked around the room, giving it one last visual check before turning it over to the sub-tenants. “Just try not to bring the cops in here, okay?” she said.

“That’s top of our list,” Dortmunder promised her.

“Okay. Well, break a law,” she said, and left.

Tiny broke the little silence that followed: “That woman,” he grumbled, low and gravelly, as he frowned at the door.

“The office,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Forget the woman, Tiny, look at the office.”

“I can wait,” Tiny said. “But that broad is too unrefined. When this is over, she’s goin to finishing school.”

21

Once upon a time there was a small and mountainous South American nation called Guerrera, run by a small and fat dictator named Pozos, a man who devoted his life to his fellow countrymen; devoted his life to robbing them, torturing them and murdering them. In the capitals of the great world outside, his domestic arrangements mattered not at all. He was welcomed in palaces and parliaments, his Guerrera belonged to alliances and organizations, he received (and pocketed) foreign aid from great powers. What a happy man Pozos was, all in all!

But then, one dark day, he went too far. He annoyed Frank Ritter.

Frank Ritter’s second son, Garrett, was a tall and big-shouldered man of thirty-four, already balding on top and already starting those jowls which would someday be his most salient feature. His body was kept in trim by skiing, sailing and scuba diving, but it seemed there was absolutely nothing he could do to keep his face from rushing toward lax and puffy middle age.

For the past three years, Garrett had been in charge of Mergers & Acquisitions for Templar International, a job that had familiarized him with much of the free world’s industry, many of its top executives and most of its bases of wealth. It was time, Frank Ritter had decided, for Garrett to be introduced to the Greater Reality. Or, as Ritter had described it aphoristically in his commonplace book:

“The real world is just beyond the visible world.”

In his private suite in the Margrave Corporation on the seventy-fourth floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower, that Saturday afternoon, Ritter shared a drink and some of his thoughts with his son Garrett before going on to greet the freedom fighters assembling in the larger conference room. “The essential point is,” Ritter told his son, “the world has changed. The world always changes. I would say that most people in this country still retain a nineteenth-century view of the United States as an independent industrial nation with a republican form of government, wouldn’t you?”

“Well,” Garrett said, his puffy face frowning above his trim body, “that’s what it is, isn’t it?” Like all of Frank Ritter’s children, Garrett walked warily, but had learned that one was always relatively safe to behave as though Dad knew best.

Now, Dad shook his head and said, “Of course it isn’t. And when that’s what America was, in the nineteenth century, people didn’t know it. They thought the United States was still an agrarian democracy with a government run part-time by farmers and lawyers. Reality is always one jump ahead of the masses, Garrett.”

“Okay,” Garrett said, and sipped at his vodka-tonic. Dad didn’t like people who drank too much. On the other hand, Dad hated people who didn’t drink at all. A narrow path, but a sure-footed Ritter child could find it.

Frank Ritter said, “Insofar as America is a major industrial nation, no, it is not. What we are today is the premier technological and service nation. Heavy industry is done in Japan and Germany and Poland. Arms manufacture is done in Brazil and Israel. But American technological preeminence has meant increasing partnerships with these foreign industries. Any partnership that survives is merely a gentlemanly form of absorption, so now we have the multinational corporation, and that’s where power lies today. Not in the UN, certainly, and not in national governments.”

“Gee, Dad,” Garrett said. “No?”

“No. The multinational is in the position of the bank robber in the old West; all he has to do is ride straight and hard to be safe, because the posse can’t cross the border. We have taken over the roles that nations recently held; we wage war, collect taxes through debt service, protect our areas of property and the worker/citizens within those areas, and we distribute power as we see fit.”

Garrett, along with his brothers and sisters, had grown up believing that his father spouted two things fairly constantly; verbal nonsense and lovely money. Accept the former with obvious pleasure, and the flow of the latter was unending. “That all sounds exciting, Dad,” he said. Past his father, across this tastefully anonymous living room, the window showed a pale blue sky with stray clouds. The skiing would be good in Norway now. Oh, to be in Ostersund, now that spring is here!

“It’s more than exciting, Garrett,” Ritter said. “It’s real. The truth is, the pendulum has swung all the way back, several hundred years, and we are today entering upon the next great era of feudalism.”

Garrett blinked. Feudalism was something that had wafted by once or twice in college days, leaving no residue. Doubtfully, he said, “You mean, King Arthur and like that? The Round Table?”

Ritter laughed, a sound that always had a threat in it. “I don’t mean myth,” he said. “I mean reality. Feudalism is a system based not on national citizenship but on loyalties and contracts between individuals. Power lies not in the state but in ownership of assets, and all fealty follows the line of power. Very sensible.”

“I guess so,” Garrett said, blinking slowly.

Ritter said, “Think of it this way. I am the baron. Templar International and Margrave Corporation and Avalon State Bank and so on are the castles I have built in different parts of my territory, for defense and expansion. The subsidiary companies we’ve bought or merged with owe their allegiance not to America but to Margrave. We reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. When necessary, we can protect our most important people from the laws of the state, just as the earlier barons could protect their most important vassal knights from the laws of the Catholic Church. The work force is tied to us by profit-sharing and pension plans. I don’t expect national governments to disappear, any more than the British or Dutch royal families have disappeared, but they will become increasingly irrelevant pageants. More and more, actors will play the parts of politicians and statesmen, while the real work goes on elsewhere.”

“With us, you mean,” Garrett said. His puffy face lit up with excitement. He thought about buying new skis in Scandinavia.

“And in fact,” Ritter said, “this is ultimately a benevolent advance for humanity. Of course, some eggs will get broken in the making of this omelet—”

“Happens,” said Garrett understandingly.

“Yes,” said Ritter, who didn’t like his train of thought interrupted. “But once the omelet is made, this will be a happier, more prosperous, far more peaceful Earth. The test-case of Japanese industry shows us that workers whose primary loyalty is to their employer rather than their citizenship or their union are more contented, more productive, less disease-ridden and longer-lived.”

Frowning, vaguely remembering something he’d read in a newspaper on a plane, Garrett said, “Don’t they commit suicide a lot?”

“Not at all,” Ritter said. “Only among the youngest entrants to the work force, a natural weeding-out process. Japs like to commit suicide anyway, it’s deeply embedded in their culture.”

“Mata Hari,” Garrett agreed, nodding.

“Hara-kiri,” his father corrected, in some annoyance. “Mata Hari was shot by the French government as a traitor.”

Grinning uncertainly, Garrett said, “I guess that’s a level of power we haven’t got to yet, is it?”

“Not in America,” Ritter agreed. “Though we’re close. Consider this building we’re in. Is it in the United States? Or is it within the sphere of Avalon State Bank?”

“Well, both,” Garrett said, brow furrowed. It was so easy to be wrong with Dad.

And apparently he was wrong again. Smiling coldly, Ritter said, “Where does government influence show, Garrett? To begin with, we got a tax abatement in return for setting aside a garden downstairs as a public space, which is so public we get to lock it every night at eight. In this building we have technicians of various kinds who are foreign nationals and who technically can’t work in the United States without government permission; the infamous green card. But their employer of record is some foreign subsidiary of ours, therefore no green card needed. But what about, let us say, invasion?”

Garrett, who’d been nodding along like a good son, was brought up short. “Invasion? You mean the Russians?”

“Certainly not. The Russians are the greatest false threat to this country since the Yellow Peril. I’m talking about physical attack on any part of this building. Let’s say someone was foolish enough to try to rob our bank or one of our tenants, would the police or the FBI be the first line of defense? Absolutely not. A small part of our army is in this building, Garrett, with equipment as up-to-date as any garrison force on Earth. Our sentries would repel attack, and our insurance subsidiary would make good any unlikely loss that might be suffered in this building.”

“So we’re the government here,” Garrett said.

“Exactly. The great task for you children in the next generation will be the new distribution of power, deciding which of the new barons will become the new kings.”

“King Garrett the First,” Garrett said, smiling. He saw himself swooping down a Norwegian glacial slope in an ermine robe and gold crown.

Another thin smile from Dad, who said, “The old terms won’t come back, Garrett, only the old reality. If you’ll always bear in mind that we are now on the threshold of the new feudalism, that today’s CEO is every bit as powerful as yesterday’s duke or marquis, you’ll never be at a loss when business problems arise.”

“I really appreciate all this, Dad,” Garrett said, sounding hearty and sincere, looking puffy and false.

A shadow of doubt crossed Ritter’s face, quickly obliterated. “That’s why,” he said, “family is so important. With the obsolescence of national patriotism, ultimate loyalty to the barons must reside in family connections, blood and marriage.” He sighed. “Which is one of the many truths I can’t seem to get across to your sister Elaine.”

Garrett perked up a little. He actually liked Elaine, even though he thought she was sort of wimpy and silly. “How is the kid?” he asked. “Get over all that religion business?”

“We’re working on it,” Ritter said darkly. A flick of cuff, and he looked at his watch. “Our freedom fighters will be assembling. Time for the pep-talk.”

“Freedom fighters,” Garrett echoed, and couldn’t prevent a slight expression of repugnance to curl his lip. Coming through the Margrave offices to this meeting he had seen them lolling about in the various rooms, telling one another hair-raising anecdotes, nearly sixty hard-bitten mercenaries, merciless veterans of uncounted wars in Africa and Asia and Central America, assembled by Frank Ritter to spearhead the “liberation” movement that would repay that upstart South American dictator Pozos for becoming an annoyance. Garrett considered himself manly, God knows, but he was also civilized, and these “freedom fighters” were nothing but timber wolves in human shape. You could smell the testosterone. He said, “I just don’t understand why you’re assembling that bunch of thugs here.”

“Security,” his father told him. “In any of the more usual staging areas, Florida or Texas or wherever, there’d be too much possibility of information leakage. Most of these men are known to the Federal law-enforcement agencies. If they assemble somewhere, it becomes known. But anybody can assemble in New York City without being noticed, that’s what this town is for. So they come here, and they’ll spend the weekend in these offices and the dormitory, they’ll study our maps and models of the terrain, and they’ll organize their plan of attack. On Monday, two of our buses will take them out to our airfield on Long Island, where our plane will fly them south to Guerrera, refueling along the way at our resort island in the Caribbean.”

This part was fun for Garrett, like playing Dungeons & Dragons back in college. “And when they get there?” he said.

“There’s an anti-government underground already in place,” Ritter said. “Pro-American, oddly enough, but all involved with land reform and that nonsense. With proper financing, they could probably take over on their own, but they’re dirt poor. We negotiated with Mr. Avilez, the rebels’ man in New York pleading their case at the UN, and we’ve arranged a trade of mineral rights for financing, but instead of financing we’ll send our own army. The rebels will cooperate until Pozos is overthrown, and then you’ll fly down and help them decide who runs the next government.”

“So it’s not another Bay of Pigs,” Garrett said.

“Absolutely not,” Ritter said. “We have the people, and we’ll go on having the people until we have the people.” He smiled, and looked around this pleasant room, symbol of his empire, and then frowned, staring at a half-closed door across the way.

“Dad? What is it?”

“I’m not sure.” Ritter got to his feet and strode across the room to shove that door open and look in at a small book-lined research library, with refectory table and four heavy wooden chairs in the middle of the room. The door in the opposite wall was closed. Ritter shook his head and turned away.

Garrett had followed him, and now said, “What’s up?”

“Strangest thing,” Ritter said. “For just a second, I thought I saw Elaine standing in this doorway.”

Garrett looked past his father at the library. “Elaine? Down here?”

“Ridiculous, I know.”

“You think— Do you think she could have heard what we were talking about? The invasion? Would she tell anybody?”

Ritter’s mouth formed a mirthless grin. “She doesn’t talk, remember? Besides, it was just a trick of the light, she’s locked away upstairs. Come along, let’s explain to our freedom fighters what they’re fighting for.”

22

“I think it’s bad luck to whistle in an elevator,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp said, “John, you think everything’s bad luck.” But he stopped whistling.

It was still Saturday afternoon, and so still possible to use the elevators without calling attention to oneself, and J.C. Taylor’s office had already become confining. Wilbur Howey had gone into several minutes of frozen dazzled silence when he’d first come across the Scandinavian marriage secrets book, but ever since, he’d been going through it with the avidity of a teenager with a book on hotrod customizing, popping and snapping in all directions and piping, “Say!” at intervals like a mantel clock. Meantime, Tiny insisted on reading aloud great long sections of the how-to-be-a-detective book with an attempted sarcastic delivery but stumbling along slowly and mispronouncing all the long words, while Stan over at the window produced running commentary on Saturday afternoon’s traffic on Fifth Avenue and the nearby cross-streets, so when Kelp had pointed out that he hadn’t yet seen the places they intended to burgle tonight Dortmunder had immediately said, “I’ll show you.”

“That’s okay, John,” Kelp had said. “It’s the twenty-sixth floor, right? I can find it.”

“I’ll show you,” Dortmunder had said.

To go from the seventh floor to the twenty-sixth floor, because of the wonders of modern technology, it was necessary to take two elevators. They were alone in the first elevator, going down to the lobby, during which ride Kelp, his musical side awakened by the piano in the Taylor office, had started whistling something that might have been “Malaguena” if it had all been in the same key. In the vaulted lobby, with a couple of security guards in pale blue uniforms and black gunbelts chatting casually together over by the closed newsstand, they walked around and took a 22–35 elevator, sharing it with an extremely scruffy four-man rock group arguing about the harmonics. “No,” one of them kept saying, “it’s duh-buh-buh, duh-buh-buh.” Another one was saying, “That’s not even in four-four,” when the elevator stopped at twenty-six. “You want duh-buh, duh-buh,” Kelp told them, as he and Dortmunder got off. The doors slid shut on the rock group’s astounded and revolted faces.

Dortmunder said, “Andy, I don’t think they were looking for your help.”

“Well, they needed it,” Kelp said. “This is it, huh?”

This was it. An office directory faced them from the wall opposite the bank of elevators. They stepped over and studied it:

Dortmunder said, “They’re all wholesalers and importers, so I guess they don’t need a storefront down on the street.”

“Duncan Magic,” Kelp said. “I’ll want to take a look in there, too.”

“I figured you would,” Dortmunder said.

They walked down the corridor together. The left wall was a cream-colored blank, but the right side was a series of plate-glass display windows and glass-paned shop doors, just as though these actually were storefronts down on the street. The first outfit they passed was Dearborn Jade Importers, with figurines and jewelry set out on glass shelves in the windows and the phrase “To The Trade Only” painted in gold letters on the glass door. Beyond them, Asiatic Antique Jewelry had similar displays and the identical statement on the door. Both shops were closed for the weekend.

At this end of the hall was the fire door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. “You open this door after six o’clock,” Dortmunder said, pushing on it, “and you set off the alarm down in the basement.”

They stepped through, the door automatically closed itself behind them, and on its other side was the concrete stairwell painted gray that they knew from upstairs. Pointing to a large metal plate mounted low on the wall next to the door, Dortmunder said, “That’s the alarm system. Everything goes through there, the simple door alarms and the television monitors and everything else. That’s what our friend Howey is supposed to neutralize.”

“Weird little guy,” Kelp said. “But if Tiny says he’s good, he’s good.”

“Let’s hope so,” Dortmunder said, and went on, “The reason we picked this floor is because none of these companies use the closed-circuit television system, so when we do the bypass there won’t be anything missing down in Security Control.”

“Gee, I like this caper,” Kelp said. “Even without the nun, you know?”

Dortmunder glanced up the stairway. “Yeah, well, the nun,” he said.

Kelp said, warningly, “John, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, don’t think it. May would turn you into stew.”

“I know that,” Dortmunder said. “Believe me I do. I wonder how good Howey is at climbing stairs.”

“Well, he’ll have all night to get there,” Kelp said. “Let’s go look at the rest of these places. Where’s that magic store?”

“Down the other way, past the elevators.”

They went through the fire door again and back down the hall. Past the elevators were more display windows, just on the one side, stretching all the way down to the end. Porcelain, jade, unmounted opals, semiprecious stones, ivory. Figurines, chess sets, rings and bracelets and necklaces of beaten gold with inlaid stones. The windows of Duncan Magic, midway along, with their bright red plastic balls and blue intertwined triangles and multi-colored squares of cloth and shiny lacquered boxes, with their top hats and wands in gleaming black and their false faces featuring eyeless grinning red Satans, were a kind of vulgar party-crasher amid all this restrained gaudiness of wealth.

“Very nice,” Kelp said. “Very nice.” But he was standing in front of Duncan Magic when he said it, looking at the bouquets of plastic flowers and the shiny chrome rings. This was the only place on twenty-six open on Saturday afternoon; inside, fathers and sons leaned on the counters to watch the salesman/magicians manipulate the tricks. Kelp looked as though he wanted to join them.

Dortmunder said, “Okay? You seen everything now?”

“Do you suppose these things come with instructions?” Kelp asked. “So you can see how it’s done?”

“Probably so,” Dortmunder said. “Otherwise, who’d buy it?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Kelp nodded at the Satans, who grinned back. “See you later,” he said.

When they got back to the elevators, Dortmunder said, “Let’s walk down.”

“Walk? We’ll do enough of that tonight.”

“We ought to check the territory,” Dortmunder pointed out, “see is there anything along the way might be trouble.”

“What’s gonna be along the way?” Kelp asked. “That’s the fire stairs, by law they got to keep them clear and open.”

“Just to see,” Dortmunder said.

“You saw this part of it,” Kelp reminded him. “That’s what it’ll all look like.”

Dortmunder shook his head. “Andy,” he said, “how much of a hurry are you in to get back to that office down there?”

Kelp thought about that. “Maybe we oughta check the stairwell,” he said.

“Good thinking,” said Dortmunder.

So they walked down eighteen flights of stairs — there was no thirteenth floor, a thing hardheaded New York City real estate developers do to propitiate some very old gods indeed — and Kelp had been correct. Every landing looked like every other landing, the entire stairwell being empty and clear. In the wall at each floor was another of those low metal wall panels concealing the security systems. And, for the last five flights, they were hearing somebody whistle, “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad.” Dortmunder said, “It has to be, you know. It couldn’t be anybody else.”

“I know,” Kelp said.

And it was. When they reached the seventh-floor landing, there was Wilbur Howey himself, seated cross-legged tailor fashion on the floor. He had removed the metal plate over the security system wiring and was now poking around in the green and yellow and red and black spaghetti inside with a screwdriver and a line tester. Various other tools were spread out around him on the floor. He was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t notice Dortmunder and Kelp’s arrival until Dortmunder said, “Howey? What if somebody sees you?”

“Whoop!” cried Howey, and yanked both hands out of the panel. Blinking up at Dortmunder, he said, “Say, there, partner, don’t sneak up on me like that! You don’t want to startle a fellow when he’s in there with the burglar alarms. What if my hand slipped? What if I made a little signal downstairs in Security?”

Dortmunder said, “What if somebody comes along and sees you here?”

Howey grinned and winked and snapped off a salute with the line tester. “Howdy, sir!” he piped. “Howdy, ma’am! Just doing the maintenance here, you know, we never sleep, no sirree!”

Kelp said, “John, he has to clear this door before six o’clock, so we can get into the stairwell later tonight.”

Dortmunder, not wanting to admit he hadn’t thought of that, said, “I just wanted to know did he have a cover story, that’s all.”

“Say, you think I’m green?” Howey demanded.

“No, no,” Dortmunder said. Then, vague memories of British Navy movies unreeling in the back of his mind, “Carry on,” he said, and reached for the doorknob.

“Whoops!” cried Howey. “Don’t touch that! Say, pal, just hold it there, will you, give me a minute here.” He poked deep inside the panel with a screwdriver, while Dortmunder gave the top of his head an unfriendly look, then finally said, “Okay, pal, you can open it now.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Dortmunder said, and he and Kelp went through and down the corridor to Super Star Music, etc. Using the key Taylor had given him, Dortmunder locked the door, which he discovered when he tried to open it. “I guess Howey left it unlocked,” he said, clenching his teeth.

“So he could get back in,” Kelp suggested.

“That must be it.” Dortmunder unlocked the door and they went into the outer office, where the phone on the receptionist’s desk reminded him of an obligation. “Taylor said not to use the phone,” he said, “but this is just a local call.”

“And it’s still kind of business hours,” Kelp said, “lots of offices still open on Saturday afternoon.”

“I promised May I’d call,” Dortmunder explained, reaching for the phone. But when he dialed, there wasn’t any answer.

23

May stood across the street from the battered old warehouse building. Three stories high, of crumbling brick with the mortar flaking out, it had rows of small-paned windows across the front, all of them black with dust, their wooden frames still showing some remnant of an ancient coat of green paint. No lights showed behind those windows, no plants, no curtains, no movement.

But this was definitely the address, in an old corner of Brooklyn that looked as though civilization had been tried here, had failed, and had moved on, leaving behind hulks that were less interesting than but just as dead as any Aztec ruin in the jungles of Mexico. In the six-block walk from the subway, May had seen more cats than people, and none of them, animal or human, had seemed particularly well fed. And now, in front of the warehouse itself, for just a second, her resolve faltered. What hope could there be inside any building that looked like that?

Still, she’d come this far. Taking a deep breath, May reached into her purse for a cigarette, found none, remembered, made a face, and got annoyed at herself. This annoyance carried her across the potholed street, where she had a choice between a lumpy green door in the middle of the facade or a trash-strewn blacktopped driveway running down the side of the building to a loading dock. She turned toward the door, and found thumbtacked to it a 5x7 card still bearing the faded words in once-red magic marker: TIPTOP A-1 CHOICE FOODS — OFFICE. Going up the two flaking slate steps, she pushed open this door, which contained three visible locks, and stepped inside.

Now she found herself in a small square room with gray linoleum on the floor and paneled walls, each sheet of paneling different, presenting an anthology of poor imitations of various woods; cedar, walnut, oak, and something unidentifiable and silver. There was absolutely no furniture in this space, though a lot of cigarette butts and scraps of paper on the floor suggested occasional occupancy and a three-year-out-of-date calendar on one wall was sort of decorative, showing an illustration of boys at a swimming hole over some other August.

A small window in the opposite wall was covered by a clear plastic panel with round holes in it to permit air or conversation to get through. May went over there and looked through into an even smaller space, crammed with filing cabinets and a small wooden table, at which sat a small wrinkle-faced woman in a black sweater, gold necklace chains and earrings and a bright red wig. She was talking intently on the phone, and when she saw May she made a disgusted face and said, “Hold on, Helen.” Shaking her head at May, she called, “Not hiring!”

May put her mouth close to a couple of the airholes and said, slowly and distinctly, “Mr. Chepkoff, please.”

This irritated the woman even more. “Who’s he?” she yelled. Before May could answer, she said into her phone again, “Hold on, Helen.”

“He’s the owner here,” May said, and took the Civil Court document out of her purse to read aloud what it said: “Otto Chepkoff, Tiptop A-One Choice Foods, two seven three dash one four Scunge Avenue, Brooklyn, one one six six six.”

Somehow, the woman’s wig managed to get even more red, as she shouted, “You serving papers?”

“No, no,” May said, and turned the document around to press it against the plastic so the woman could read it. “We were served,” she said. “That’s what I’m here about.”

“Oh, you want to pay,” the woman said, leaping to another wrong conclusion. Saying into the phone once more, “Hold on, Helen,” then switching it to her other hand, she waved largely off toward her left, shouting, “Go round the loading dock!”

“Is Mr. Chepkoff there?”

“Hold on, Helen,” the woman said, and waved again. “Just go round there, go round there, he’s there, just go round!”

“Thank you,” May said. Putting the document away in her bag, she turned toward the door as the woman said into the phone, “Helen, where were we? Helen? Helen?” Glaring at May, she yelled, “She hung up!”

“So would I,” May told her, and left the office and walked around the front of the building and down the filthy blacktop drive to where dog-eared concrete steps led up to one end of the loading dock. Beyond it, through a large wide opening, was a dim storage space filled with cardboard cartons in great piles and the sounds of men shouting. May went in there and waited for her eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom.

Most of the space, and most of the yelling, was off to her left. Looking down that way, she saw aisles formed by great stacks of boxes and mounds of sacks, and in one of the aisles two men were loading crates onto a large wooden cart while a man with a clipboard yelled at a man in a knee-length white lab coat, who yelled just as forcefully back.

May walked down there to join the scene, though at first no one noticed her, and even up close she couldn’t figure out what the yelling was about. The two chunky men loading the crates, who had been ignoring the argument, ignored May as well, while the arguers only had eyes for each other. The clipboard man was big and burly, with a dead cigar in his teeth and a black wool cap pulled down to his eyebrows and a way of slashing the air with his clipboard that suggested he was on the verge of some truly awesome violence. The man in the long white (very dirty) lab coat was small and narrow and older, with a pinched-in gray face and a russet-colored Kennedy-style wig that was, if possible, even more astonishing than the office woman’s red monstrosity. Inside his white coat he was wearing a dark three-piece suit and white shirt and black tie. He was the one who finally noticed May standing there, and his reaction was to point first at the clipboard man and bellow, “SHUT UP!” (astonishingly, the astonished clipboard man shut up) then point at May and bellow, “NOT HIRING!”

“I wouldn’t work for you,” May told him, “for a million dollars an hour.”

The clipboard man gave her a surprised look. “Then you’re crazy,” he said. “For a million dollars an hour, you could put up with certain things.”

“Not rudeness,” May said. “I have an aversion to rudeness.”

The white-coated man said, “That’s why you walk into a private conversation uninvited? That’s why you eavesdrop on a business discussion? That’s why you trespass on private property?”

May looked at him. “I bet you’re Mr. Chepkoff,” she said.

“He’s out today,” the white-coated man said, and the two crate-loaders stopped to give a sardonic laugh. The white-coated man glared at them: “This is a holiday? This is a vacation? Here I am, I’m at the beach, I didn’t know it, I didn’t bring my suntan lotion?” The crate-loaders gave each other long-suffering looks and went back to their work, and the white-coated man glared at May instead. “So he’s out,” he said. “So who should I tell him popped in unannounced and without an appointment, to tell us all about her aversion to rudeness?”

Not trusting herself to speak, May took the Civil Court paper from her pocket and extended it toward Chepkoff — for it was indeed he — who recoiled like a vampire seeing a cross. “Get her away!” he shouted. “Get her away!”

“This isn’t a summons,” May told him, tired of the whole business. “Or, it is, but it isn’t for you. It’s the one you served on John Dortmunder.” She opened it and held it out for him to read. “See?”

He squinted. He took heavy black-rimmed glasses out of his lab coat and put them on and leaned forward and squinted again. “Ah,” he said. Stepping back, he put the glasses away and said, “So you’ll come into my office.”

The clipboard man, bristling, said, “Wait a minute. What about—”

Chepkoff rounded on him: “What about?” he yelled, outraged. “What about what? Look at your order form! You paid for shit! You’re getting shit!” And he spun around, in a swirl of white coat-tail, and stomped away, while the clipboard man gaped after him, dead cigar sagging down onto his chin.

Assuming she was to follow, May followed, and Chepkoff led her to an open space in the middle of the warehouse, the hub of all the aisles, where a small glass room had been constructed, containing a cramped but functioning office. Chepkoff yanked open the glass door to this cubicle, gestured impatiently for May to precede him in, followed her, slammed the glass door with a sound one decibel below total destruction, and said, quietly for him, “So you’ve got my three hundred dollars.”

“No, Mr. Chepkoff, I—”

“No?” Chepkoff’s eyes bulged, as though he were being strangled. “Noooo??? What are you doing here?”

“I thought we could talk about the—”

“Talk? Listen, whoever, Mrs. Dortmunder, whoever you are, there’s an expression, I want to know do you know this expression, you’ll tell me if you’ve ever heard an expression along the lines of this expression, I’m gonna tell it to you right now, are you listening?” He stared. “Well?”

“I’m listening,” May said.

“Good.” Chepkoff opened his mouth wide and enunciated with great elaboration, at the same time writing the letters in the air with the first finger of his right hand. “Mon-ney,” he said, and paused, and said, “talks. You got it? You heard this somewhere?”

The clipboard man, having followed, now started pounding on the glass door out there, waving his clipboard and yelling. May said, “Mr. Chep—”

“You don’t talk,” Chepkoff told her. “I don’t talk. John Dortmunder doesn’t talk. This asshole here” — with a gesture at the furious clipboard man — “doesn’t talk. Money talks.”

“You don’t understand the business John’s in,” May said. “He takes a—”

“I know the business this John is in,” Chepkoff said, “but do you know the business I’m in?”

“Mr. Chep—”

“Just look, just take a look,” Chepkoff invited, waving his arms at the warehouse all around them. “You see what we got out there?”

“Food,” May said. “But what I’m—”

“Details,” Chepkoff insisted. “Not just food, but what food? Let me tell you what I got out there, let me just give you a rundown on this. Let’s have a meeting of minds here.”

“You don’t have to—”

But he was going on, unstoppable: “What I got in this building, lady, whoever you are, let me tell you what I got in my business, what with what I make my living.” While the clipboard man continued to shout and yell and bang on the glass outside, Chepkoff pointed this way and that at the merchandise, saying, “I’ll tell you what I got. I got dented canned goods. I got week-old bread. I got frozen foods that thawed in the train, packager over-runs, hijacked toilet paper, grade Z vegetables, meat they didn’t want at the orphanage, and dairy goods with doctored dates. That’s what I got here, you follow me?”

“Mr. Chep—”

Leaning closer to May, his eyes as mad as Raskolnikov’s, Chepkoff said, “Lady, I work with a margin narrow enough to slit your wrist. Are you getting the sense of this? I do not give three hundred dollars to somebody, he should maybe bring me some salable merchandise. I get delivery, or I get—” And abruptly he spun around and screamed through the glass at the clipboard man, “Shaddap shaddap shaddap!”

The clipboard man didn’t shaddap. He yelled instead something about not accepting delivery, and Chepkoff yelled something back, and May stepped a bit closer to the desk. Examples of various kinds of forms on the desk she put in her purse, then stepped closer to Chepkoff and politely said, “Excuse me.”

Chepkoff paid no attention. He and the clipboard man were back at it full-tilt by now, hampered not at all by the sheet of glass between them. “Excuse me,” May said again, and when Chepkoff still ignored her she kicked him in the ankle.

He jumped, spun around, stared at her in astonishment, stared at his ankle, stared at her. “You—” he said. He was overcome with horror. “You— You touched my body!”

“I’ll wash my shoe later,” she assured him. “I’m trying to leave now, you see, and you’re blocking the door.” She stepped around him — he continued to stare, not believing it — and opened the door. The clipboard man was also silent, trying to figure out what was going on. May stepped through the doorway, looked back at Chepkoff, and said, “I was hoping we could have a civilized discussion, but no. John should never have had dealings with you.” To the clipboard man she said, “Neither should you.” And she walked away toward the loading dock, leaving a lengthening silence in the background.

As she passed the crate-loaders, one of them grinned and winked and handed her a can of chicken gumbo soup, but the ends of it were a little bulged so when she got to the street she threw it away.

24

Dortmunder smelled mayonnaise. Opening his eyes, he saw the small jar not far from his nose and thought: Why is there a bottle of mayonnaise in bed? “May—” he said, and sat up, and his back gave a terrible twinge of pain as he realized he wasn’t in bed after all, he was asleep on a desk under the flat white glare of a fluorescent ceiling fixture. Sleeping on a desk, seated on a chair, slumped forward, next to a bottle of mayonnaise.

J.C. Taylor. Receptionist’s desk. Avalon State Bank Tower. Burglary of an entire floor. Rescue of Sister Mary Grace. Got it.

Dortmunder had been sitting here, at J.C. Taylor’s receptionist desk, waiting for midnight. He remembered closing his eyes because the light was so strong, and then there was a fuzziness, and then the smell of mayonnaise, and now here he was again, and the small digital clock on J.C. Taylor’s desk said 2:11. And where the hell was everybody else? Gone off to pull the caper without him?

No. Across the way, seated on the floor, Coors cap pulled forward over his eyes, asleep with his mouth open in a revolting way, was Wilbur Howey, a copy of Scandinavian Marriage Secrets open facedown on his lap. And the sound from the other room that was like a Winnebago’s tanks being emptied must be somebody snoring.

2:11. In fact, 2:12 already. Time to get going. Dortmunder stood up, and immediately sat down again, because his back seemed to have fused into some position he’d never known before. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, boy.” He rocked slowly back and forth, lifting first this shoulder, and then that, and when the clock reached 2:14 he tried again. This time he made it to his feet, though he did keep some fingertips in contact with the desktop just to be on the safe side. “Howey,” he said, rasping, then cleared his throat and said, “Howey,” and the little man jerked in his sleep like a dog dreaming, moving his legs so that the book fell off his lap onto the floor and closed.

“Where the hell is everybody?” Dortmunder demanded. For answer, Howey closed his mouth and made smacking sounds.

Limping a bit, Dortmunder made his way around the desk and across the office and on into the next room, which looked like the aftermath of a reform school reunion. Tiny Bulcher, the snorer, lay sprawled atop the desk, arms outflung and cheek against the green desk blotter, massive body dwarfing the swivel chair. Andy Kelp slept twisted like a vine through the metal folding chair in front of the piano, while Stan Murch had dragged the old brown leather chair over to the window and was draped unconscious on it like an abandoned set of overalls. Half-sandwiches and empty yogurt containers and soda cans were scattered everywhere.

“Couldn’t anybody stay awake?” Dortmunder demanded of the room at large, and Andy Kelp shifted on the folding chair, his elbow brushing the piano and producing a quote from Wozzeck, which in turn made Tiny rumble and change position, knocking a phone book onto the floor. Stan Murch sat up straight, clutching for a non-existent steering wheel, crying, “I’m awake, I’m awake! Stay in your own lane!” Kelp then jolted up, wide-eyed and glassyeyed, attempting to stand without disentangling himself from the folding chair, which meant he toppled over into the piano — excerpt from Bartok’s Mikrokosmos — before tumbling to the floor. All of this racket roused Tiny, who reared up like a walrus, flinging his arms wide, clearing the desk of everything that had been on it, before lunging away in astonishment, causing the swivel chair to over-balance and tip him backwards onto the floor, huge thick legs waving in air. Meantime Stan, desperately trying to make a left turn, hurtled out of the leather chair and into the side of the desk, just under where a lot of staplers and pens and desk calendars and memo pads were falling.

There then followed a brief silence, with dust motes. Dortmunder looked around. “Are you finished now?” he asked.

“Say!” shouted Howey from the other room, followed by a crash that was probably a full rack of metal shelves going over, with several thousand books.

“Hand-picked,” Dortmunder commented to himself. He looked at his own right hand with dislike. “Hand-picked,” he repeated.

25

Dortmunder hunkered down next to Howey and said, “You’re sure you know this stuff.”

“I’m sure,” Howey said. It was nearly three in the morning, they were all awake now, they’d all visited the men’s room, they’d all washed their faces and slicked their hair, the worst of the chaos in Taylor’s office had been cleaned up, and now here they were on the landing up on twenty-six, waiting for Howey to make it possible to open the fire door.

Dortmunder said, “It isn’t I doubt you or anything.”

“Good,” Howey said. He had seated himself on the floor in front of the panel concealing the alarm systems, his tools in a magic circle around him as he removed first the top left screw from the panel, and then the bottom right, dropping both into his shirt pocket. Tiny and Stan and Kelp sat on the steps watching, sometimes yawning.

Dortmunder said, “It’s just there’s a lot more security on this floor than down on seven.”

“I know,” Howey said. He loosened the bottom left screw but not all the way.

Dortmunder said, “I mean, this is a pretty critical moment right here.”

“Sure is,” Howey said. Tugging the top left corner of the panel away from the wall, he inserted the orange plastic handle of a screwdriver in the space and slid it down as close to the bottom of the panel as possible, forcing the top left corner to bend farther away from the wall.

Dortmunder said, “This’d be a hell of a time to have something go wrong.”

Howey took a deep breath and turned away from his work. “Say, listen, pal,” he said. “Don’t I hear your mother calling?”

“Huh?” Dortmunder actually listened for a second, before giving Howey a very squinty look. “Meaning what?” he demanded.

Howey gestured a thumb over his shoulder at the rest of the crew, saying, “You know, you ought to be over there with the peanut gallery.”

Dortmunder pointed at the orange-handled screwdriver stuck partway behind the panel. “Just as an example,” he said, “just to make me more easy in my mind, what’s that for?”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you,” Howey said, taking a screw out of his shirt pocket. Reaching past the top left corner of the panel, he slipped the screw back into its hole. Tightening it with another screwdriver, he said, “You see, what the story is here, the way this system is set up, according to those diagrams you got, if anybody takes both of these top screws out after six P.M., that automatically all by itself sets off an alarm down in Security. You see what I mean?”

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “So they’ll know if somebody’s tampering.”

“Say, by golly, you do catch on right away,” Howey said. “So what I’m doing here...” He now finished removing the bottom left screw, loosened the top right screw just barely one turn, and pivoted the whole panel around on that screw till it cleared the space behind it. Then he tightened the top right screw again, and the panel stayed where it was, out of the way. “That’s what I’m doing,” he said.

“That’s pretty good,” Dortmunder said, admiring it.

Howey grinned and nodded, then said, “Now, listen, I know you’re the boss of this outfit and all that, but while I’m down here, you know what I mean? Amscray.”

From over on the stairs, Tiny said, “Dortmunder, come over here. I can’t see through you what he’s doing.”

Well, this actually was a very different and more reliable-seeming Howey than they’d been dealing with before. He’d left that marriage secrets book behind without even a murmur, he’d climbed the eighteen flights of stairs without a fuss, and he was getting down to work here with apparent competence and no fooling around. Deciding it would be safe enough at this point to delegate responsibility, Dortmunder said, “Okay, then, you’re on your own,” and went over to sit with the others and watch Howey go to work.

This clearly was a more complicated setup than the one down on seven. Inside the panel, rows of printed circuits on thick board — soldered roadmaps on one side, color-coded spaghetti of wires on the other — were packed in together in vertical lines like a robot’s library. Howey’s fingers and narrow-nosed tools prowled carefully among it all, touching a wire here, a connection there, a plastic-enclosed chip somewhere else. Poking delicately into the innards, he altered some links, severed others, and made new connections with the help of wire of his own plus a blue-gray sticky stuff that looked like chewing gum or Playdoh. From time to time, he used a line tester, and it always lit up.

It took awhile, even without Dortmunder’s help. After ten minutes or so, Howey began to make clucking sounds of annoyance and grunts of frustration every time the line tester was used and again came up positive. “Say, you’re a cutey, ain’tcha?” he was heard to mutter at one point. But finally he pushed himself back from the panel, turned to the others, and said, “Another Wilbur Howey special, gents. It’s all yours.”

Everybody else stood up and stretched, while Dortmunder said, “You’re positive.”

Still seated on the floor amid his tools, Howey gave Dortmunder an exasperated look, saying, “Say, do stars fall on Alabama? Go ahead and open it.”

“Sure,” Tiny said, and went over to the fire door, but Dortmunder noticed that Howey kept alertly staring into the alarm system while Tiny pulled it open, and it wasn’t till the door was ajar that Howey gave a great big smile of satisfaction — and relief — and busied himself putting his tools away.

First Tiny, then Kelp, then Stan, then Dortmunder, and finally Howey with his full tool kit came through the fire door, Howey letting it close gently behind them. Just on their right were the display windows of Asiatic Antique Jewelry. The lights in there were off, but the corridor lights still burned, and in their illumination the colored jewels gleamed, each clutched in a tiny fist of silver or gold. “I call that beautiful,” Tiny said.

They walked to Asiatic Antique’s entrance and Howey said, “You want me to open this one?”

“I’ll take care of that,” Tiny said, approaching the door. “Anticipation,” he said, biting down on the word as though it were an apple. “It’s always been tough for me to wait. When I was very young, all the time, two-three weeks before Christmas, I’d go downtown and shoplift some toys.” Lifting his right foot, he kicked the door open.

26

When things first started to go wrong at the nuclear plant in Pennsylvania called Three Mile Island in March of 1979, various dials and gauges reported the fact, but nobody would believe them. Sometimes dials and gauges break down, and then people go through a lot of trouble and difficulty, and at the end it turns out it was just another dial or gauge breaking down. When you come along with your clipboard every day, and the dials and gauges always stay in the same range, then that’s what you’re used to, and what you expect to see. So when the Three Mile Island dials and gauges began to say that something was wrong, people tapped the glass fronts of the dials and gauges with their fingernails and waited to see what happened, and decided that once again the only thing that was wrong was the dials and gauges. After all, nothing seriously wrong had ever happened before.

When things started to go wrong at the chemical plant in Bhopal, India, in January of 1985, various dials and gauges reported the fact, but nobody would believe them. Sometimes dials and gauges break down, and then people go through a lot of trouble and difficulty, and at the end it turns out it was just another dial or gauge breaking down. When you come along with your clipboard every day, and the dials and gauges always stay in the same range, then that’s what you’re used to, and what you expect to see. So when the Bhopal chemical plant dials and gauges began to say that something was wrong, people tapped the glass fronts of the dials and gauges with their fingernails and waited to see what happened, and decided that once again the only thing that was wrong was the dials and gauges. After all, nothing seriously wrong had ever happened before.

The Avalon State Bank Tower, in addition to stretching seventy-six stories into the sky, also extended four stories down into the ground, nestling itself into a sliced-out pocket in the bedrock of Manhattan Island. The bottom two floors were all machinery and metal ladders, like the bowels of a great ocean-going passenger liner — which in many ways is what a skyscraper is, massive and self-contained and compartmented, except that the skyscraper is always moored in the same place, and of course it’s standing on end, and come to think of it skyscrapers don’t float, and maybe they aren’t anything like each other at all. Forget the whole thing.

The third story up from bedrock was storage, including fire-proof and earthquake-proof and presumably nuclear-destruction-proof warehousing of files and documents and negotiable paper and certain embarrassing videotapes. Also on that floor were fire-fighting and mob-fighting equipment and three entire rooms of extra desks. And the level just below the street was Security.

Security, in addition to locker and shower rooms, gym, dormitory, several offices and three detention cells, also included a large General Operations Room in which there was a background hum all the time and the walls were lined with closed-circuit TV monitors and banks of red lights (none of them glowing) and all sorts of dials and gauges. Half a dozen men were on duty in GenOps through the night, dressed in the livery of Frank Ritter’s service, being light blue uniforms with “Global Security Service” curled around a globe on their shoulder patches. These men sat at long tables covered with more dials and gauges, with telephones and intercoms and radios ready to hand, and at 3:04 on this Sunday morning in spring one of these men frowned down at an indicator on the table in front of him, and said, “Huh?”

It had been quiet for some time in GenOps, so now most of the other men in the room glanced over at the first man, and one of them said, “What’s up?”

“I got me a blip,” said the first one. He frowned more and more deeply at that indicator, a small square window with a small circular rod within, painted red on one side and green on the other. Always until now, except for two brief periods when the system had been undergoing intensive tests, the green side of that rod had faced up. But now, since twenty-seven flights up a man named Wilbur Howey had just slightly misread a schematic and didn’t realize that the removal of either top screw from the wallplate over the security feed would trigger a reaction down in Security, that circular rod had just flipped over, like a tiny slot machine, and now showed red.

Nobody else in the room got really what you could call excited; nobody came over to look at this blip. After all, nothing had ever gone really wrong in this building, and all anomalies had eventually had their explanation. One of the guys across the room said, “What kind of blip?”

“Just a—” The man with the blip tapped the glass with his fingernail, but the rod remained red side up. “Just one little indicator here,” he said, and looked up at the walls full of indicators. Nothing wrong on any of them. “Something up on twenty-six,” he said, where at that moment Wilbur Howey had paused in his work to explain what he was doing to Dortmunder, thus delaying things and keeping that disturbing little indicator red.

One of the other men frowned at all the television monitors. When you have seventy-four floors to think about, you aren’t necessarily going to remember every detail of which floors do and which floors do not employ the closed-circuit TV scanning option. “I don’t see anything moving,” this man said.

Another man said, “You want to call the lobby, send somebody up to look?”

The first man shook his head at the red indicator. Wilbur Howey, finally having been left alone by Dortmunder, reinserted the missing screw as the man reached out and tapped the glass again with the same fingernail, and the rod flipped back to green. “There it is,” the security man said. “It’s okay now.”

“Keep an eye on it,” one of the other men suggested. “If it does it again, leave a note for Maintenance on Monday.”

The first man tapped the glass. The indicator stayed green, and upstairs Tiny Bulcher kicked open the door to Asiatic Antiques. “No problem now,” the security man said. “Everything’s fine.”

27

On the sixtieth floor, Howey wanted to stop again. “We’ve only got the weekend, you know,” Dortmunder told him, disgusted.

Howey looked like a man full of snappy answers, of which he would unburden himself once he caught his breath. Meantime, he sat on the top step at the sixtieth floor landing, fanning his blotchy red-and-white face with his Coors cap, glancing bright-eyed but speechless up at Dortmunder from time to time, and breathing like an obscene phone caller in a hurry. Dortmunder’s watch, which was always a few minutes either fast or slow, read around ten minutes to four. It had been his plan to get up to the top of the tower, rescue Sister Mary Grace, and bring her back with him to J.C. Taylor’s office by six, before anybody was up and about, but Howey was slowing things considerably. Almost four in the morning, and they still had another fourteen flights ahead of them just to reach the doors Howey was supposed to open so Dortmunder could begin. “Any time you’re ready,” Dortmunder said. Of course, he didn’t want the fella to become totally incapacitated, or dead, or anything of a real problem nature like that, but on the other hand there was a certain sense of urgency here that wasn’t being aided by a member of the string who has to sit down and take it easy every couple minutes.

“Say,” Howey said, but that was it; he went back to breathing.

“Write me a note,” Dortmunder suggested. “Take a vow of silence.”

“By golly,” Howey said, and quit again to breathe. Then he slapped his Coors cap on his head, took a deep breath, grabbed the railing with both hands preparatory to pulling himself to his feet, and said, “Say... you couldn’t find a... nun... in a dungeon, could ya?”

“Tower,” Dortmunder said unsympathetically. “That’s all I’ve got.”

“Whoosh,” said Howey, and heaved his butt up off the metal stair. On his feet, he held the railing and gazed up the endless stairwell, Adam’s apple bobbing in a scrawny throat that looked like a beer can somebody had squeezed with his hand. “I never was a mountain climber,” he announced. “Wimmin, that’s all I ever wanted to climb.”

“Think how easy it’ll be on the way down,” Dortmunder told him.

“Sixteen times... how many floors? Seven to seventy-four, but no thirteen, that’s, uh, uhhh...”

Dortmunder said, “Can you do math and climb stairs at the same time?”

“Maybe,” Howey said, and at last started off, trudging up the steps, bony hand gripping the metal rail. Dortmunder hefted Howey’s toolbag — Howey couldn’t carry it himself, of course — and followed.

Fourteen flights ensued — very, very slowly. Dortmunder kept switching the toolbag from hand to hand. Occasionally, Howey would wheeze out a “Say,” or a “Whooey,” and once he stopped entirely in the middle of a flight to announce, “One thousand and fifty-six!”

Dortmunder, just changing hands with the toolbag, collided with Howey’s back, lost his balance, did not fall down a flight of stairs, and said, “Now what?”

“That’s how many steps!” Howey said, turning around, giving Dortmunder a triumphant look, which then faded to a frown as he said, “I think it is, anyway. Let’s see...”

“Walk,” Dortmunder told him.

Howey turned and walked, one step up at a time, planting his feet solidly like a man in magnetic boots crossing a metal ceiling, and without further incident the two travelers corkscrewed on up the unchanging stairwell to the seventy-fourth floor, where Howey gasped, looked at the gate closing off the top two floors, pointed at it, gasped, shook his head in contempt, panted awhile, pointed at the gate again, and said, “Two minutes. Open it right up.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said. “And in three minutes you’ll have a whole lot of new friends with guns in their hands.” He pointed at the usual security panel low beside the hall door. “We go through there.”

Howey frowned at the gate. “Why not this way? Straight up the stairs.”

Dortmunder put Howey’s toolbag down by the security panel and said, “Didn’t you look at the specs? From here on up, it’s a different security system. You can’t touch it at all.”

“Is that so, now?” Howey seemed quite pleased by this piece of news. Scratching his grizzled jaw with his knuckles, gazing at the gate with new respect, he said, “They must really like that little nun up there, you think so?”

“They want to keep her anyway,” Dortmunder said. His watch said around quarter to five. “Come on, Wilbur,” he said.

The use of the first name was apparently just the personal touch that was needed; with no further ado, Howey assumed his cross-legged seated position in front of the security panel, did the maneuver with the screws—

(“Goddamn!” said the same fellow down in security in the basement, “there goes another one!” He bunked the glass with a knuckle, and the rod flipped back from red to green. “No, it’s okay,” he said. “Goddamn things.”)

— and poked briefly inside among the wiring and control sheets, whistling, “Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do,” between his teeth. “Hardly a thing up here,” he commented at one point. “No security at all.”

Dortmunder knew that to be true, from the ledger books Sister Mary Grace had smuggled out. The engineering and architectural firms on this floor used only simple-level alarms on their main entrances, the law firm used a little heat-activated and voice-activated stuff in a couple of rooms, and the Margrave Corporation didn’t use any of the building’s security at all. There was also, according to the plans, another staircase up to seventy-six from Margrave; that’s the way Dortmunder would go, once Howey cleared the way.

It was hard to tell exactly what Margrave itself was, except it was a corporation, it had offices, and it was tied in with other of Frank Ritter’s holdings. But whatever it might be, the way Dortmunder had things figured, he wasn’t likely to run into anybody doing business inside there at five in the morning, and once within Margrave it shouldn’t be impossible to make his way up to where the nun was being held. Generally speaking, Dortmunder thought of himself as a kind of utility infielder in the smash-and-grab line, not a specialist like Wilbur Howey but someone who could go past ordinary locks and security devices without too much trouble. So when Howey sat back on the floor, smiling with the satisfaction of a craftsman at the height of his powers — seventy-fourth floor, after all — and said, “She’s all yours,” Dortmunder said, “That’s fine, Wilbur. Close the panel up again so it doesn’t look like anybody’s come through, then go on back down. I’ll take it from here.”

Howey said, “Sure you don’t want me to do the office door?”

“I’ve seen the specs,” Dortmunder assured him, opening the fire door to the hall (nothing went wrong down in Security’s basement). “That Margrave door’s a breeze. It’ll open all by itself when it sees me coming.” Touching his temple in a little half-salute of farewell to Howey, saying, “See you in a little while with Sister Mary Grace,” Dortmunder stepped through to the hall, letting the fire door ease itself closed behind him. Almost whistling — like Howey — he went around the corner to Margrave.

Where the office door opened itself for him and a burly man in camouflage gear, holding a Russian AK-47 assault rifle casually in his right hand, looked out at Dortmunder and said, in exasperation, “Another straggler. Come along, fellow.”

“Um,” said Dortmunder.

“Come on, come on,” the burly man said, making shooing motions with the rifle as though it were a broom, sweeping Dortmunder in. “We’re late as it is,” he said.

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “Uh huh.” He walked into Margrave.

28

The trouble with these ruthless-killer types, Virgil Pickens thought as he led the final straggler down the halls of Margrave to the assembly room, is they’re not so good on discipline. Here’s this fellow wandering around the public corridors when he’s supposed to be learning the tools of his trade.

The error, made by The People Upstairs, was that all the political orientation lectures had been done first, and for people like this crowd the politics and the social situations are utterly without interest. All they want to know is, what does our side look like, what does the other side look like, and what do I kill them with? We’re to that part now, Virgil Pickens thought, but the boys are already turned off.

Well, it was his job to turn them back on. Walking into the assembly room, a brightly lit small theater with seating for about a hundred in rows of red plush movie-house seats (but no tilt to the floor) all facing a small stage with a movie screen mounted on the rear wall, Pickens saw that less than half the troops were in conversation, in small clusters in the aisles, and those conversations stopped the instant he appeared, the talkers turning hooded, watchful, unfriendly eyes in Pickens’ direction, he representing The People Upstairs. The rest of the boys meanwhile sat around singly or in pairs, silent, brooding at the blank movie screen, smoking from cigarettes held cupped in their palms, scratching their old tattoos, and looking mutinous. They were all just recently up and had their breakfasts, and were still sleepy and feeling mean. These, as Pickens well knew, were not folks to bore; these were folks to react to boredom by making a little excitement in the area.

“Grab a pew,” Pickens told the straggler — a deceptively mild-looking fellow — and headed for the stage, saying loudly, “Find your seats, gents, we’re gonna talk about death and destruction.”

A low general growl answered him, probably composed of equal parts appreciation and irritation. Pickens went up the four steps to the stage and over to the card table standing in front of the movie screen. Something lumpy on the table was covered with a red-white-and-blue flag composed of various triangles and stars. Standing behind the table, facing the crowd, Pickens held the AK-47 aloft, gripping it just forward of the magazine — if the screen behind him had been red, he’d have looked exactly like a Bolshevik poster of the early twenties — and said, “Some of you know this weapon, do you?”

“Shit, yes,” said a lot of voices, while a few others said, “AK,” some said, “Rooshen,” and one voice called out, “Where’s it from?”

“This one,” Pickens told the questioner, smiling, because the idea here was to arouse everybody’s interest, “this one’s from Czechoslovakia. It’s a good one.”

“That’s nice,” said the questioner.

It was nice. The odd thing about it, even though the AK-47 was a Russian design — with some help from captured German designers and engineers after the Second World War, the Russians having been very impressed by the Wehrmacht’s Maschinenpistole MP44 — the examples of it made in the Eastern European factories of the Warsaw Bloc tended to be a lot better than the ones actually made in Russia. Waggling this Czech-made rifle, Pickens grinned at his troops and said, “You’ve taken more than one of these away from little brown people here and there, haven’t you, boys?”

A low chuckle went around the room; they were warming up. The AK-47, particularly the model like this one with the metal folding butt so it can be reduced to a concealable twenty-four inches long, has been in the last thirty years the absolute favorite weapon of guerrillas, terrorists, freedom fighters, mercenaries and other bloodthirsty types all over the world, with only the Israeli Uzi even approaching it in popularity. Pickens smiled warmly at his boys, smiled warmly at the weapon in his hand, and said, “So here it is. And now” — with pause for dramatic effect — “you can forget the goddamn thing!” And he flung it side-arm, straight away from himself and off the stage to his right, where it crashed into the wall and fell on the floor behind the side curtain.

That woke them up. Simple minds, simple pleasures; Pickens knew how to deal with rough boys like this, it was his living. Still smiling, he picked up the flag from the table by two of its corners, and displayed it, saying, “By the way, this is the Guerrera flag. When we get down there, if you see anybody wearing this or waving it or standing next to it, cut him down. That’s our meat.”

The boys purred, looking at the flag. One of them called out, “What’s our side look like?”

“Green armbands, whatever rags and patches they might be wearing.” Pickens still held up the flag. “Our friendly forces down there are very irregular, boys, stand well back if they decide to fire on something.”

That produced the comfortable laugh of the professional thinking about amateurs, which Pickens ended, in his carefully paced presentation, by balling up the Guerreran flag, hurling it offstage in the same direction as the rifle, and showing another assault rifle lying on the card table. He picked this one up, held it out in front of him, and said, “Gentlemen, the Valmet.”

“That’s that Finnish fucker!” cried a voice.

“Very good,” Pickens told him, grinning as though he didn’t at all mind having his surprise spoiled. “That’s just what this is, the Finnish M-60 Valmet. Essentially, this is the design of the AK-47 adapted to the needs of Finland. It’s like an AK-47, but it isn’t an AK-47, so it isn’t as familiar as you might think, and if you don’t keep the differences in mind, the head you blow off may be your own.”

He had their attention now. Weapons, travel and money were the only things these fellows cared about, probably in that order. Holding the Valmet out, pointing to its features, Pickens said, “In the first place, you’ll notice it’s all metal, much of it plastic-coated, it doesn’t have the AK’s wooden stock or handguard. That’s fine in a cold country like Finland, but we’re going to a hot country, so keep this thing in the shade. The other thing, you’ll notice it doesn’t have any trigger guard, just this little piece of metal out in front here and nothing down under the trigger at all. The later model, the M-62, they added a skimpy little guard on the bottom, and some of you’ll have those, but mostly we’ve got the original, the M-60. And you see also there’s almost no curve to the trigger itself. Now, the reason for all that is, the Finnish troops have to be able to fire this thing with big heavy mittens on, because of the cold you got up there in Finland. And what it means to you is, you don’t have that guard there where you’re used to it, to protect you if your mind wanders. And your finger wanders.”

A voice from the auditorium called out, “Why the fuck are we taking some fucking North Pole fucking weapon to the fucking tropics?” A lot of other voices growled agreement with the sentiment.

“Well, now, that’s The People Upstairs,” Pickens said. “They make the decisions, I just implement them. They didn’t want to use Warsaw Bloc weaponry because they don’t want anybody saying the revolution’s Cuban supplied. And they didn’t want to use NATO weapons because they don’t want anybody saying we’re fronting the CIA. And maybe they got a price on these Valmets, I don’t know.”

“It’s always the same fucking thing,” cried a disgusted voice. “They want us to fight the wrong fucking war with the wrong fucking weapons on the wrong fucking terrain at the wrong fucking time of the year.”

“You’re goddamn right!” several voices cried, with variants. More and more of them got into the thing, some rising in their places to make their points, shaking their fists, yelling out their professional opinions.

It was becoming bedlam out there. Pickens hunched his head down into his shoulders, and waited for the storm to subside.

It wasn’t easy, dealing with homicidal maniacs.

29

Dortmunder’s mouth was dry. His hands were wet. So far, the seat was dry. He was up here looking for a nun, and all of a sudden he’s in this absolute army of killers. Attila would be happy to come back and hang out with these guys; all Dortmunder wanted them to do was disappear.

They were an excitable crowd, too. Almost anything might set them off; disliking the weapon they were supposed to use in their upcoming slaughter, for instance. There was no telling how excited they’d get if they found out there was a noncombatant among them; a sheep, in wolf’s clothing.

Dortmunder did his best not to think about any of the various things that might happen to him if they found out the truth. He tried very hard not to visualize himself being torn limb from limb, and then the limbs being gnawed on by a lot of guys with heavy jaws and big teeth. He tried and tried and tried not to imagine the burly man leaping off the stage, foaming at the mouth, M-60 Valmet swinging in the air above his head as he came charging up the aisle. He worked hard to avert his mental gaze from images of himself being tromped into a welcome mat under all these tight-laced paratrooper boots. He struggled and strained to keep these triptychs of his own martyrdom absolutely out of his mind. He failed.

The nearest desperado, two seats to Dortmunder’s right, was now on his feet, shouting toward the stage and waving an arm decorated with a tattoo of a snake entwined with a woman in what appeared to be an improbable sex act. Suddenly this fellow stopped, glared over at Dortmunder, and yelled, “You like that fucking snowman weapon?”

Dortmunder looked around. His seat was on the aisle, three quarters of the way back, and from here he could see he was just about the only person still seated. Everybody else was up and yelling at the stage, or at least arguing with his neighbor. Don’t be conspicuous! Leaping to his feet, “Heck, no!” Dortmunder told the guy with the snake and the woman. “I mean, hell, no! I mean, shit, no!”

“Fucking-A well told!” the guy announced, and punched the air. When he made a muscle, the woman and the snake interacted.

Join in, Dortmunder told himself. Waving an arm with no tattoo on it at all, he yelled toward the stage, “Hell, no, we won’t go!”

The snake-and-woman man reared back. “What the fuck you mean, we won’t fucking go? We don’t fucking go, man, we don’t get fucking paid!”

“Right,” Dortmunder said. Waving his other arm — no tattoo on that one, either — he yelled, “We’ll go, but we want a better gun!”

“Weapon,” the snake-and-woman man said.

“Weapon!”

The snake-and-woman man took a step closer to Dortmunder, eying him with a certain repelled curiosity. “Listen, fella,” he said. “Where do you—?”

Crash.

Everybody stopped, including the snake-and-woman man. Silence fell. Dortmunder blinked, and looked toward the stage, where the burly man, evidently having had enough, had pounded his Valmet assault rifle like a gavel onto the card table, which had done the card table no good at all. It had crumpled, and the burly man had pounded the floor right through the table, making a racket bigger than the racket coming at him. Into the startled silence he’d created, he said, “Goddamnit, boys, I don’t like The People Upstairs any more than you do, but they hired us for this thing, and we’re taking their goddamn shilling, and that’s it. This is the hand we’ve been dealt, and we either fold or play. It happens this is what I do for a living, so I’m gonna stay and play. You gonna fold?”

The raucous and colorful responses he got this time were generally along the lines that everybody intended to blankety-blank stay and play the blankety-blank hand. “I never fold a bad hand!” Dortmunder shouted, getting into the swing of things, and immediately felt the snake-and-woman man’s eyes on him again. What did I do wrong now?

Fortunately, there was another distraction, because the burly man followed up his challenge by saying, “Any more questions?” and somebody behind Dortmunder and off to the right yelled out, with a voice you could use to scour frying pans, “When do we get our hands on those fucking Finnish nose-ticklers?”

“As a matter of fact,” the burly man said, grinning as though he’d been waiting for this question, “how about right now?” Then he called, “You in the back there, open the door and let them in.”

A stir of interest, as everybody turned to look, and an extra stir of interest from Dortmunder, who suddenly saw a way out. I’m near the back, he told himself, and I’m on the aisle, and I’m already standing. Quick as anything, he turned and stepped into the aisle, happy to do the burly man’s bidding right up to the point where he would step through the door he’d opened, and run like hell.

Except not. Somebody from the half dozen rows behind Dortmunder had also moved, and was already reaching for the door handle. Heck. Hell. Shit! Stepping back in from the aisle, pretending to be unaware of the snake-and-woman man’s eyes on him, Dortmunder watched that other son of a bitch open the door.

Several building security men came in, neatly pressed and creased in their blue uniforms with their handguns in polished leather holsters on their belts. Never had legitimate authority — even fairly legitimate authority — looked so good to Dortmunder. I’ll surrender to those guys, he thought, I’ll throw myself on their mercy because they just might have some mercy to throw myself on. But even as he thought that and inhaled the deep breath prior to making a mad dash for capture, he heard the snigger going around the room, among all these suddenly grinning tough guys; the sound of leopards looking at house cats. Forget it; there’d be no safe harbor for Dortmunder there.

The security men sensed the atmosphere, too, and moved stiffly, frozen-faced, maintaining their dignity even though pushing large wheeled luggage carriers down the aisle to the front of the room. Wooden crates, their tops already pried off, were piled on the luggage carriers, and when they reached the front the burly man took a folded sheet of typing paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and said, “Okay, everybody sit down.”

Everybody sat down. They do obey, Dortmunder thought.

“I’ll call off your names now,” the burly man said, “and when I do you come up and sign out your weapon, then stand along either side wall.”

Call off your names? Dortmunder stared at that piece of paper in the burly man’s hand. His name wasn’t on that paper. No name he’d ever used or could possibly answer to was on that paper.

Talk about slow death. Sixty people were now going to get their names called, one at a time. They were going to get up, one at a time, and walk to the front of the room and sign whatever name had just been called. One at a time they would get their assault rifles, and then they would go stand along the side wall, until every name had been called and every rifle had been given out and every seat had been emptied.

Except one.

Wait a minute. Stand along the side wall? How come? Dortmunder felt a sudden little trace of irritation, tucked away inside his larger and more pervasive sense of doom and destruction. Why did everybody have to stand along the side wall? If they all came back to their seats with their Valmets, at some point Dortmunder would simply pretend he’d already gotten his, and maybe, just maybe, just slightly possibly, he would get away with it. Even with the gimlet eye of the snake-and-woman man so frequently on him. But not if everybody’s going to wind up standing along the side wall, holding their guns. Weapons.

Somebody else apparently had the same question, if not the same problem: “How come we stand against the wall?” came the shout.

The burly man shook his head, grinning almost fondly at these ruffians and rowdies. “I don’t want you bringing your toys to your seats,” he said, “where maybe the guy next to you doesn’t have his yet, he’s a little impatient, he wants to look at yours. We’re all gonna remain calm.”

That’s what you think, Dortmunder thought.

Was there a way out, any way at all? Could he raise his hand and be excused to go to the bathroom? Not very likely, though, in fact, given his current situation he sort of did have to go to the bathroom. Well, how about this? In the middle of the weapons distribution, could he get to his feet as though responding to his name and then back up the aisle to the exit, pretending to walk forward toward the stage? No. Could he wait till most of the names had been called, and then quietly slide under his seat and crawl under the rows of seats to the exit and... open the door in full view of everybody? No.

A voice on the other side of the room called, “We get the ammo now?”

That drew a laugh, for some reason. The burly man smiled, and let the laugh work itself out before saying, “No, I don’t think so, boys. You’ll get cartridge clips on the plane, same time you get your green armbands.”

“When do we get to practice with the fucker?” the snake-and-woman man shouted.

“When you land in Guerrera,” the burly man told him. “Just shoot at people till you hit one; then you’ll know it works.”

“Why don’t we shoot at these little blue boys here?” somebody asked, and everybody else laughed deep in their throats, and the security men blinked a lot, looking as stern as they knew how and pretending they weren’t dressed in blue.

“These are friendlies, boys,” the burly man said indulgently, but it was obvious to everybody in the room, including Dortmunder and the security men that the “boys” might just as readily as not rip these friendlies into little pieces just for the fun of it.

But now the burly man cried out, “Let’s get on with it, boys,” and consulted his list, and called, “Krolikowsky!”

A guy with scars on his face and a missing ear got up and went forward to sign for his Valmet.

“Gruber! Sanchez!”

Maybe somebody didn’t show up, Dortmunder thought, slumping in his seat. Why not? It happens. Some guy misses the bus, or forgot to set his alarm. You get any group together, you get somebody calling the roll, there’s always some name that gets called and nobody at all says, “Yo,” and everybody looks around, and the person calling the roll makes a disgusted mouth and notes something on his clipboard and that missing guy is in trouble.

Well, not trouble. Not real trouble. Not like this trouble. But the point is, why wouldn’t that happen now? (Probably because this group had already been assembled some time ago and everybody knew who was or wasn’t here, but let’s ignore that possibility.) If it did happen, if the burly man called out a name and nobody responded, then just as the burly man was looking around the room, ready to make a disgusted mouth and note something on that piece of paper, Dortmunder would leap to his feet and march forward and sign himself out an assault rifle.

Okay. A plan. Dortmunder sat tensely in his seat and waited for the little man who wasn’t there.

“Messerschmidt! Booneholler!”

It wasn’t taking long at all, not nearly as long as it should. Dortmunder slumped deeper and deeper into his seat as the army armed itself, trying to think of an alternate plan just in case the first one didn’t pan out. Shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater? Not this time; somebody would fire... a gun.

“Barbaranda! Peabody!”

Peabody? The snake-and-woman man was named Peabody? Dortmunder moved his knees out of the way and Peabody marched on down the aisle to get his weapon. The tattoo on his other arm involved a woman and an eagle.

“Mordred! Gollum!”

Fewer and fewer remained in their seats, more and more were lined up along the walls on both sides. They looked meaner standing up. They looked a lot meaner with assault rifles in their hands.

Could he pretend to have amnesia? No.

Could he rise at the same instant as somebody else and then claim he was Slade or Trask or whoever, and the other guy was the impostor? No; not for more than about eleven seconds.

“Zorkmeister! Fell! Omega!”

And that was it. And this was a party to which everybody had come; there were no no-shows here. There were only the now-empty wooden crates, the half dozen nervous security men, the burly man with his list up on stage, thirty armed barbarians lining each side wall, and Dortmunder. Seated. Alone. In the middle.

The burly man’s frown pressed against Dortmunder like a heavy wind, even from this far away. “Say, there, fellow,” he called, holding up his piece of paper and rattling it, “how come your name isn’t on this list?”

Think of something, Dortmunder ordered himself. “Uhh,” he said, and thought of nothing. “Yeah,” he said, aware of all those eyes, all those weapons. “Um,” he said.

The burly man turned his own Valmet around and pointed it in Dortmunder’s direction, saying, “This piece of armament, fellow, has a full clip in its belly. Name, rank and serial number, boy, and don’t hesitate.”

Dortmunder hesitated; he couldn’t help it. But he had to say something. “Well, uh, my name is Smith.”

“Haw,” said some of the people on the sides, but the burly man and his Valmet didn’t seem amused. Why did I say Smith? Dortmunder asked himself. It’s just gonna make them madder.

“On your feet, Mr. Smith,” the burly man said. “I am about to display the Valmet’s recoil action. Up!”

Dortmunder stood. He was still looking for a plan. Pretend to have a heart attack? Claim to be a policeman, and put them all under arrest? How about... how about... how about if he said he was from the company sold these people the Valmets, and the check bounced, and he was here to repossess them?

“Out in the aisle, Mr. Smith,” the burly man said, and Dortmunder obeyed, and the burly man said, “Now, boys, you’ll notice the recoil of this weapon is mainly rearward, with not much barrel rise, so you can place just about as many rounds as you want in a narrow target area without pause. Any last words, Mr. Smith?”

“I can explain,” Dortmunder said — my last words are a lie! he thought despairingly — and the lights went out.

Click. Snap. Darkness, pitch-black, just like that. Dortmunder wasted a full hundredth of a second being startled before he turned and ran like a chicken thief in the general direction of the door.

Whack! The door was closed. Dortmunder knocked it open with his forehead, nose, knees, elbows, knuckles and belt buckle, and the hall lights were out, too. Behind him, a whole zoo of noises suddenly erupted, roaring and squawling and braying and barking, and over those noises came a rapid BAP-BAP-BAP-BAP, huge and echoing in the enclosed air of that room. The door shuddered, hit by a couple of rounds, and Dortmunder caromed off it, arms flailing wildly as he reeled into the blackness of the hall, where a small cold hand closed around his wrist.

“YIIIII!!!” Vampires, ghouls, things that go bump in the night. This was even worse than the Valmet!

A second hand groped for his mouth, to shut it, found his nose instead, and squeezed. “Ngggg,” Dortmunder said, and the first hand tugged at his wrist while the second hand released his nose, patted his cheek, and departed.

A friend? In this madhouse?

Well, somebody turned off the lights, right?

Dortmunder allowed himself to be drawn away from the yelling and shouting back in the theater, pulled along at a half-trot by this small but strong hand encircling his wrist. They made a turn, the sounds in the background grew fainter, and then a pale light appeared back there, showing behind them at the corridor turn. “They’ve got the lights on,” Dortmunder said, and in the dimness peered at his rescuer.

A girl. Early twenties. Short, slender, in blue jeans and high-necked long-sleeved full-cut black blouse. Grim-faced and fiery-eyed she was, as she glanced back toward the light, then pushed open a door on the left side of the hall. They entered an ordinary office, empty, brightly illuminated by ceiling fluorescents. Slamming the door, leaning against it, taking a deep breath, the girl looked at Dortmunder, held up her right hand with one finger pointing up, tapped two fingers of her right hand to her raised left forearm, held up one finger again, tugged her earlobe, and blew him a kiss.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Dortmunder told her. “Kiss, sounds like sis, you’re Sister Mary Grace.”

She nodded and smiled, making an A-OK circle of thumb and forefinger.

“I’m, uh,” Dortmunder said, but what the hell, might as well admit it. “I’m John Dortmunder.”

She nodded again, patting the air: She too had figured things out.

Dortmunder sighed; it had to be said. “I’m here to rescue you.”

She raised an eyebrow, grinning ever so slightly, but otherwise refrained from comment.

Noise out in the hall; moving this way. “Here they come,” Dortmunder said.

Sister Mary Grace listened for a second, then nodded, and headed across the room toward the other door, gesturing for Dortmunder to follow. He followed.

30

“You notice Dortmunder takes the easy part,” Tiny Bulcher said, hefting a black plastic bag filled with about fifty pounds of jade, gold, ivory and other nice things, which he then tossed over his left shoulder. With a second black plastic bag, similarly filled, on his right shoulder, he looked like the rebuttal to Santa Claus.

“Aw, come on, Tiny,” Andy Kelp said, stripping rings from his fingers and bells from his other fingers to go into the next plastic bag to be filled. “You didn’t want to go up there with the nun, you said so yourself.”

“We bust and break and carry and schlep,” Tiny said, unappeased, “and he drinks tea with some nun.”

Wilbur Howey, holding with both hands a six-inch-tall ivory reproduction of a piece of erotic statuary from Angkor Wat, said, “Wants to keep that little nun all to himself, does he?”

“Listen, Wilbur,” Tiny said, “you been holding that statue ten minutes now. You’re supposed to pack it, so I can carry it downstairs.”

“Oh, sure,” Howey said. Then, as Tiny continued to gaze upon him, Howey reluctantly bent and put the statue away in the half-full plastic bag, stroking it a lingering goodbye before the black consumed it.

Stan Murch came out to the hall from Macaran Ivory Co. with an armload of netsuke, which he dumped without ceremony into the plastic bag, then looked around and said, “We knocking off now?”

“No, no,” Kelp said. “I’m right with you, Stan.”

“So’s Wilbur,” Tiny said. “While I’m carrying all this stuff downstairs, and Dortmunder’s up there playing footsie with the nun.”

“You don’t play footsie with nuns, Tiny,” Kelp said.

Howey looked startled at that, but then he frowned, as though prepared to listen to a second opinion.

“Work,” Tiny advised, and turned around to plod away, the bulging black bags on his back making him look as though he were on his way to Vulcan’s forge.

Stan went back into Macaran Ivory, past the sagging door that Tiny had kicked open a while back. Howey followed, bright-eyed, looking for more reproductions. Kelp paused, watched Tiny disappear through the stairwell door at the end of the hall, and then skipped lightly into Duncan Magic, next door to Macaran. He was there three minutes, deeply involved in the process of turning a long black cane into a bouquet of bright-colored plastic flowers, when Stan came in and said, “Andy, we been pals a long time.”

“Okay, okay,” Kelp said, and put the cane down on the counter. “I’m just coming now.”

“But if you come in here again,” Stan said.

“No, no,” Kelp assured him. “Not till we’re done with everything else.”

“I’m just gonna have to ask Tiny for advice,” Stan finished.

“You don’t have to do that, Stan, honest. Look, here I am, I’m going out to the hall. You coming?”

“Of course I’m coming,” Stan said, but in fact he was glancing back at the long black cane lying on the counter. How do you turn something like that into a bouquet of flowers?

No. Don’t even ask. Stan firmly turned his back on the cane and left Duncan Magic.

31

Pickens brooded, glowering. He was mad enough to eat the bark off a Saint Bernard.

“He’s got to be somewhere on this floor,” the head security wimp said. He was obviously made nervous by Pickens’ silence.

“That’s fine,” Pickens said, standing there next to the assembly room door with his hands on his hips. “Why don’t you show him to me, then?”

“We’re working on it,” the head security wimp said.

Working on it. They were all working on it; that is, the survivors were working on it. The scene in the assembly room had deteriorated badly once the lights went out. It had been a mistake to start blasting away with that Valmet. Pickens knew it full well and quite bitterly accepted the blame for the whole thing. He’d been aiming at the fellow purely as a threat — you don’t kill a man who hasn’t answered your questions yet — but the sudden darkness had startled him, and his finger was on that trigger anyway — no trigger guard, just as he’d pointed out to the troops — and his automatic reaction had been to squeeze.

Actually, it had almost worked out. Smith — call him Smith, that’s the only name they had on the son of a bitch so far — had made a run for it out that back door, this door here, and Pickens afterward had counted seven big raggedy holes in this door, meaning he must have missed Smith by no more than inches.

But by however narrow a margin it might have been, miss Smith he had, and by firing off his weapon in that darkened room he’d set loose some of the worst instincts of the troops in his command. By the time the lights had come back on there were at least half a dozen spontaneous brawls and fistfights and wrestling matches already going on, and maybe ten handguns were out and being waved this way and that. Before Pickens had managed to restore order, the roll call was four broken jaws, three broken arms, nine hands with broken bones, and one fellow who’d been kneed so hard he might never straighten out again. Which reduced Pickens’ forces from sixty men to forty-three, all of whom were right now out and about the seventy-fourth floor, looking for Smith.

He had to still be here, somewhere on this floor. The security wimps had checked with their comrades in the basement — which is what had brought this white-haired red-faced head security wimp hotfooting it up — and there had been no breach of security to the public stairwell since Smith had disappeared. There was no possible way he could get through Margrave’s interior door to the separate stairway up to seventy-six, but on the other hand it was pretty certain by now he was no longer within these Margrave offices. Windows up here didn’t open, and no elevator had come up to this level for several hours except the one bringing the head security wimp, so that meant Smith must have gone to ground in the territory of one of the other companies with space on this floor. That’s where Pickens’ troops were right now, doing a room-by-room search. It was only a matter of time.

“It’s only a matter of time,” the head security wimp said.

“I need my time for other things,” Pickens told him. “And I need to know who that Smith is, who he’s working for. Is he just a newspaper reporter? Is he FBI, or CIA, or Customs? That’s our big worry, you know, Customs.”

“Customs? What the hell have they got to do with anything?”

“If you mount an armed insurgency against a nation with which the United States is at peace,” Pickens told him, “and if you gather and provide weapons for your forces on American territory and then transport them to the war zone from American territory, you are committing a Federal crime. And enforcement of that Federal crime comes under the jurisdiction of Customs. I feel you ought to know your situation here,” Pickens finished.

“Not my situation,” the head security wimp said, but he did look worried.

“You’re part of it, my friend,” Pickens assured him. “It’s just as important to you as it is to me to catch this Smith and find out who and what he is. Maybe he’s working for the Guerreran government, and they already know we’re on our way. If so, I’d like to know about it.”

“I suppose you would,” the head security wimp agreed.

Pickens shook his head, disgusted at himself. “If only I’d winged the son of a bitch,” he said, “so we could have ourselves some blood to follow.”

“We’ve got plenty of blood already,” the head security wimp said, sounding disapproving. He was still mad about Pickens having let off his weapon in the house like that, but didn’t dare come right out and say so.

One of the other security wimps now approached them down the hall, his face all blotchy in red and white; angry, or scared, or maybe both. They watched him approach, and the head security wimp said, “You got news, O’Brien?”

“Some of those guys knocked out O’Toole,” O’Brien said. He wouldn’t look at Pickens.

“Well, um,” the head security wimp said. He and O’Brien stared fixedly at each other, both waiting for Pickens to say something, but Pickens didn’t feel he had anything to say. He turned instead and studied the raggedy holes in the assembly room door. Nice tight pattern. Good weapon, the Valmet. Pity Smith hadn’t gone through this doorway just a bit farther to the right.

“Well,” the head security wimp finally said, “how’s O’Toole now?”

“Laying there,” O’Brien said. His eyebrows were way up high on his forehead, expressing mute outrage, which was the only kind of outrage he was permitting himself to express.

“Well, there’s probably an explanation,” the head security wimp said.

Pickens went right on having nothing in particular he wanted to say.

O’Brien, voice trembling with unexpressed outrage, said, “They just knocked him out, that’s all.”

“Call downstairs,” the head security wimp said. “Tell, uhhhh, tell O’Leary to come on up and take his place. Then tell O’Toole to go on down—”

“He’s unconscious! I told you that!”

“When he gets conscious again!” the head security wimp snapped, getting mad at the messenger. “When he can listen, you tell him to go on downstairs, have a cup of coffee. Tell him to have O’Marra take a look at him.”

O’Brien nodded, then shook his head. He was growing calmer, but still ached with an unresolved need for satisfaction. “I’m telling you, Chief,” he said, man to man, “they just up and knocked him down.”

“Message received, O’Brien,” the head security wimp said, being very stern about it because he had no intention of taking any action. “But the message I want to receive,” he went on, “is that you found that fella Smith.”

“Oh, we’ll find him,” O’Brien said, “if we’re let alone to do it,” and at last sneaked an angry look at Pickens, who gazed at him mildly. After a few seconds, O’Brien snorted and shook his head and marched away, very stiff-backed.

The head security wimp gave Pickens a sidelong glance. “Doesn’t appear to be such good discipline in that bunch of yours,” he said.

“Oh, I’ve got no complaints,” Pickens said amiably. “Do you?”

The head security wimp thought about that. “I’ll see how my boys are getting along,” he decided, frowned at Pickens as though he might deliver himself of an exit line, thought better of it, and went stumping away toward the exit from Margrave to the public hall.

Which was, Pickens realized, off to the right from here. But if Smith went out the left side of this doorway here, pushing open a door that opens from left to right, with 62 millimeter slugs chunking into the wood just next to him on his right side, and if he was going out to a hallway just as pitch black as the room he was leaving, would he turn and go around that door and into the line of fire and off to the right? Or would his natural tendency be to go to the left? And if he went to the left, what would he find down there and how would he get himself back to the Margrave exit?

Pickens’ troops and the security wimps had gone all over Margrave first, keeping a guard on the only exit, and had found nothing. Still, what would be lost by Pickens himself trying to reconstruct the route taken by Mr. Smith?

Nothing.

Right hand casually resting on the butt of the Belgian Browning 9mm automatic in the open holster at his waist, Pickens strolled on down the hall. At the end, another hall went off to the left, with doors on both sides and a double door at the very end. Pickens went along there, opening the doors on the right, seeing a line of small square offices with windows looking out at a blue-gray pre-dawn sky. None of the offices had second exits or led to anywhere else. The door at the end of the hall opened to a three-room suite, including a large and elaborate corner office, but this too was self-contained, leading only back to its own entrance.

Now Pickens worked back down the hall, opening the doors on the other side. Smaller offices, windowless. The third of these had a door on its far side, which Pickens opened, and which led him into a large dark space. He found light switches, clicked them on, and looked at a very large rectangle divided into a lot of tiny cubicle offices, with windows down the right wall. If he had the geography of this place worked out, the left wall of this space would have the stage of the assembly room on its other side.

A straight central aisle led down through the labyrinth of cubicles, and at the end were three doors, one leading to a storage room full of stationery supplies, one to a small room containing two copying machines, and one to a narrow room, barely more than a closet, with the door to the interior staircase on its other side.

Pickens frowned. So far, he had seen no trail, no spoor, no indication that Smith had come this way at all. On the other hand, he had seen no circular route that would get Smith back to the Margrave exit once he’d turned left from the assembly room. If he turned left.

The door to the interior staircase was supposed to be kept locked. Pickens went over and tried it, and the lock was firm. There was no sign of forced entry. The keypad beside the door showed no indication of tampering. Pickens keyed in the four-digit number that unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped through to the bottom of a simple stairwell with carpeted steps and dark paneled walls and round ceiling globes kept permanently lit. Still no spoor.

Pickens looked up the stairs. He knew there was no entrance on the next floor, at seventy-five, where he himself now slept — whenever he had a chance to sleep — since some sort of religious fellow had been kicked out of there day before yesterday. (Good thing he hadn’t been asleep up there, that religious boy, when the Valmet went off!)

Two flights up, at the top of the tower, was the private apartment owned by the boss of bosses, Mr. Frank Ritter. Pickens, having tracked down a rumor with his usual thoroughness, now knew that Ritter had a daughter locked away up there, a loony or something, that the religious fellow had been praying over or trying to exorcise the devils out of or some such thing. She was locked away and a couple of private guards were on duty up there at all times; better men than the security wimps, but not as all-out homicidal as Pickens’ boys.

Was it time to think the unthinkable? If Smith turned left — that’s the key point right there, if the son of a bitch turned left — then the narrow end of the funnel was this stairwell. Did Smith have access to the four-digit lock code? If not, how would he get through this door? And what would happen when he got to the door upstairs? And then what would happen when he got to the private guards up there?

Was Smith linked to Ritter in some way?

Double-dealing did always have to be allowed for.

Pickens stood at the bottom of the stairwell, frowning, thinking it over, and came to a conclusion. All right. If Smith turned right from the assembly room, and went straight out the Margrave exit, there’s a lot of places he could be, all on the seventy-fourth floor, and we’ll look in every one of them. And if he doesn’t turn up...

Pickens brooded at the carpeted stairs. “I sure wish I’d winged you, friend,” he said aloud. “I could use just one little drop of blood right now. But if we don’t find you back the other way, then you damn well had to come this way, and I don’t care if it’s possible or not. And when I find you, Mr. Smith, you can tell me yourself just how you did it.”

32

“I think I’m bleeding,” Dortmunder said. On the right side of his neck, just about where a vampire would get him — remembering that scary moment in the dark hall when Sister Mary Grace’s hand had closed around his wrist — just about at that spot, there was a growing itchiness, and when Dortmunder touched it his fingertip came away with a drop of blood. A tiny, faint, almost invisible drop of blood, but still. Dortmunder held it out for the good Sister to see.

They were in a bathroom, a strange place to be with a nun, but she’d insisted, pushing and prodding him as though he were a big piece of furniture like a chiffonier she was trying to get through a door, and he supposed she was right. Here was about the only place in this apartment where the guards wouldn’t just knock and walk in.

The bathroom was very expensive-looking, with brown-flecked white marble everywhere, and a special beige bathtub the size of a Toyota Tercel, plus a walk-in shower larger than Dortmunder’s closet at home, and lots of big fluffy tan towels, and lights all around the mirrors, and a very soft tan terrycloth-covered stool on which Dortmunder sat and looked at a drop of his own blood on his fingertip.

Sister Mary Grace had led the way up to the top of the tower from Margrave, going ahead at every turn and every door, making sure the guards were nowhere in sight, then motioning him on, and Dortmunder had ducked and skittered and jumped around like people in war movies undergoing sniper fire, and eventually here they were in the bathroom together with the door locked and Sister Mary Grace prowling back and forth on the terrycloth rug over the marble floor, brooding, apparently trying to figure out some way to get out of this tower with her rescuer, who at the moment happened to be bleeding.

She looked over at him, one eyebrow raised, then crossed to look at the fingertip. Dortmunder tilted his head to the side and pointed with his other hand, saying, “Right around there.”

She studied his neck, having to get very close to see whatever it was, suggesting it wasn’t really very large. Then she nodded, held one finger up, and abruptly started furiously to run in place.

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “Sure, uh... Run. Jog, trot, dash, sprint, gall— Sprint?”

She nodded, then made a gesture like pulling taffy, with both hands. Dortmunder observed this, then said, “Stretch it?” She nodded. “Spriiiiiiinnnnnttt,” he said, and she shook her head and looked at him more in sorrow than in anger. “Oh,” he said. “You mean, add parts to it or something.” She nodded. He thought. “Sprint-ing. Sprint-able. Sprint-er. Yeah? Sprinter?”

Now she did the earlobe thing: Sounds like.

“Oh, sure,” Dortmunder said. He was getting so good at this, he amazed himself. “Splinter! I got a splinter in my neck!”

She beamed at him. He beamed back. They both beamed happily about his having a splinter in his neck, until he frowned and said, “How do you get a splinter in your neck?”

She shrugged.

“Oh, I know how. When the guy was shooting, and I was going out, some bullets hit the door.”

Stiff-fingered, she jabbed the side of her own neck.

“That’s just what happened,” Dortmunder agreed.

She went away, and pulled on one section of the mirror, which opened to a medicine chest. Back she came with Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid, and Dortmunder said, “That isn’t going to sting, is it?”

She grimaced at him: Big baby. Then she tilted her head to one side to show him how he should do it, and he did it, and the Mercurochrome didn’t sting at all. She put the Band-Aid on, and he looked at himself in the mirror, and now instead of vampires he reminded himself of Frankenstein’s monster. Meantime, the Sister put her tools of mercy away, closed the medicine chest, and turned to spread her hands, point at him, point at herself, and make a gesture like diving over the side of something.

“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “I’d love to get us both out of here, but things aren’t— Well, this wasn’t the plan.”

She pantomimed shooting a machine gun.

“Yeah, those guys,” he agreed. “I didn’t know they were there, I figured I’d just come up through Margrave late at night, pick you up, go back down.”

She folded her arms and very slowly shook her head.

“Well, I know that now,” he said. “Who are those guys?”

She marched in place, saluting.

“An army. They’re going down to South America somewhere, overthrow a country or something?”

She nodded.

“For your father?”

She pretended to throw up, quite realistically, over the toilet.

Dortmunder said, “Well, they’re between us and getting out of here. Plus the regular security guys, plus the guards up here.”

She nodded, accepting the grimness of the outlook.

“They’re all gonna be looking for me,” Dortmunder said, “and—” Struck by a sudden thought, he said, “Oh, boy! I hope they don’t find my friends.”

Question?

“Well,” he said, “some people I’m working with.”

She looked hopeful and eager and pointed at herself.

“Well, not exactly,” he said. “I’m the only one actually coming up here to, uh, rescue you.”

Quizzical frown, pointed downward.

“Well, what they’re doing,” Dortmunder said, hemming and hawing, “they’re kind of— Well, they’re doing other parts of it.”

She frowned, not getting the picture, then all at once gave a big knowing nod. Holding one finger up for him to attend, she tiptoed over to the sink, sneakily looked in both directions, picked up the soapdish, held it tucked in under her armpit, and sneaked away, then stopped to give him a raised-eyebrow question.

“Well, yeah,” Dortmunder admitted. “They are, uh, stealing. I mean, it’s what we do. And I needed help to get into the building and all.”

She waggled a naughty-naughty finger at him.

Dortmunder said, “Anyway, everybody’s insured these days, right?”

She thought about that, then suddenly smiled all over.

“What’s up?”

She pantomimed throwing up in the toilet, then pantomimed dealing out dollar bills.

“You mean, your father has to make good on losses in this building?”

Emphatic nod.

Relieved, Dortmunder said, “So it’s okay, then.”

She thought that over and did a teeter-totter motion with one hand; morally ambiguous.

Dortmunder would accept that. For him, morally ambiguous was a lot better rating than usual.

She looked alert, pointed to her own head: Idea. Pointed downward, then with both hands did fingers walking up steps.

“You mean, my friends will come up and get me?” Dortmunder considered this idea, matching it to the characters of his associates. “Well,” he acknowledged, “they will notice I didn’t come back. And they wouldn’t have all this profit and everything if it wasn’t for me. And you.”

She spread her hands: Ergo.

“You could be right,” Dortmunder said, not wanting to shatter either of her beliefs; in rescue, or in the human race. Then he said, “How about a phone? Can we make a call?”

Sadly, she shook her head and made a listening-in gesture.

“Well,” he said, “that army’s got to leave for South America sooner or later.”

She nodded, and held a hand up. Then she looked very wide-eyed, then pretended to sleep, then looked wide-eyed again, pretended to sleep again, looked wide-eyed once more, then did flapping motions with her arms.

“They fly away day after tomorrow. Monday.” Dortmunder nodded. “Of course, that still leaves building security and your private guards.”

She pointed at him, then did the fingers walking up the stairs.

“Oh, sure. And my friends.”

She pointed at her wrist.

“In the meantime...”

Covered her face with her hands, peeked out between the fingers, then pointed at him.

“...I should hide...”

Fingers walked up stairs.

“...until my friends get here.”

Big wide smile, hands stretched out with palms up.

“Simple. Uh huh.” Dortmunder made a smile.

33

“I’m gonna tell you one thing about Dortmunder,” Tiny Bulcher said. “He’s on his own.”

The army platoon in camouflage fatigues and assault rifles had continued on up the stairwell now, and Tiny had caught his breath, but his face was still just as red as when he’d come tumbling back in here with a hundred pounds of precious objets d’art bouncing on his back. Andy Kelp looked at that face and didn’t particularly want to disagree with it, but he just felt somebody ought to defend Dortmunder and it didn’t look as though either Stan or Howey was interested in the job, so that left it up to him. “Gee, Tiny,” he began.

“Enough,” Tiny said, and lowered an eyebrow in Kelp’s direction.

Kelp closed his mouth. In truth, he couldn’t really blame Tiny, because what had just occurred pretty well had to be connected somehow with Dortmunder’s activities up in the tower, and if Dortmunder was going to knock over this kind of hornet’s nest he really should give his partners a little bit of advance warning.

Here’s what had just occurred: It was nearly six in the morning, they’d finally broken into the last store on twenty-six, being Kobol & Kobol, and Tiny was taking yet another load of booty away. He’d carried the hundred pounds’ worth in two plastic sacks down the stairwell and had reached the landing at the eleventh floor when all of a sudden he heard a door clang below him, and then the sound of a lot of boots on the metal stairs, and voices, and a whole lot of people were coming up. He couldn’t see them yet, but he knew there was a whole crowd of them, and he knew they were climbing those stairs at a good steady rapid pace, and he further knew there was absolutely no way for him to make it down to the seventh floor and out of the stairwell before those people reached seven from below.

So he did the only thing he could do: He turned around and ran back up the stairs. And because he didn’t dare leave the plastic bags full of booty for these new arrivals to find, he ran from the eleventh floor to the twenty-sixth floor carrying them on his back.

And when he made the turn at the landing on the twenty-third floor was when he first heard the second group coming down from above. Two groups in a pincers movement, and Tiny in the middle. He kept going, carrying one hundred pounds up two hundred twenty-four steps as fast as he physically could go, and even Tiny Bulcher flagged under that strain and had slowed considerably by the time he reached twenty-six. The guys below were no more than two flights away by then, with the ones above somewhat farther off.

What they were doing, they were double-checking the remotest of possibilities. Security down in the basement remained absolutely one hundred percent positive no one had gone in from the stairwell to any other floor (another man was on duty now at the dial that had made trouble earlier), so if the fellow they knew as Smith somehow or other had managed to get out to the stairwell, he would still be there. Therefore, one platoon had gone down to the lobby in the elevator that had brought the security chief upstairs, while another platoon had entered the stairwell on the seventy-fourth floor, just outside the Margrave offices, and now they swept both up and down, looking for signs of forced entry (just in case Security in the basement had its head up its behind), hoping to squeeze Smith between them, and damn near finding more than they’d bargained for.

Tiny burst into the corridor at twenty-six, dropped the sacks in the corner, didn’t even notice the long black cane turning into a bouquet of flowers in Andy Kelp’s hand midway down the corridor, and hissed at him, “Everybody shut up!” Then, while Kelp hotfooted away to make everybody shut up, Tiny ran back out to the corridor, reassured himself that Wilbur Howey had left the security panel neat and trim and looking undisturbed, and risked a quick look over the railing at the guys coming up. Which was when he saw the camouflage uniforms and the assault rifles, and made his guess that there were seven guys, maybe eight, in that platoon. And more coming from above.

Back into twenty-six he went, silently shut the door, and leaned against it, listening, while Kelp and Stan and Howey came out of Kobol & Kobol at the other end of the corridor and walked silently down to stand near Tiny and watch and wait and wonder.

They all heard the boots go by. Tiny opened the door a few seconds later, and they all saw the boots — paratrooper style, with bloused camouflage pants-legs tucked into them — tramping on up out of sight to the next landing. They all listened with the door open, and heard the two groups meet and talk things over, though the echo in this metal stairwell was too severe to make out any of the words. Then they heard both groups thump away upstairs, slowly fading, and that’s when Tiny shut the door and faced the others and announced that Dortmunder could now consider himself on his own.

Kelp considered friendship. Then he considered reality. What could one lone man do up there against what was apparently some sort of organized army? Nothing. But if Andy Kelp on his own, without the rest of the string, were to go up and try to help Dortmunder out of this fix, what could two lone men do against that same army?

“It’s a pity,” Kelp said sadly, and turned the bouquet back into a cane.