Good Behavior

34

“Lie down with wolves, you get up with toothmarks.”

Frank Ritter sat at his desk in the corner office suite of Margrave Corporation and studied this addition he’d just made to his commonplace book. Was that truly an aphorism? Possibly it was merely a low-level epigram or even, God help us, just a joke. Ritter didn’t like crossing things out in his commonplace book, it made for a sloppy appearance, but this particular statement, well...

On the other hand, it wasn’t inaccurate, as his current situation — and the inspiration for the remark — demonstrated. The wolves were the five dozen mercenaries he had employed to ease his irritation vis-à-vis General Pozos of Guerrera; and the toothmarks? Bullet holes in the assembly room door. Several broken seats in there as well, and sixteen men on the injured list (the kneed victim recovered). None needing hospitalization, happily, but all with broken bones and all unavailable for the punitive strike. Shattered morale among the building’s own security forces, there was another toothmark. And from the grim tone in Virgil Pickens’ voice this morning, when he’d requested a meeting with Ritter, there were further toothmarks to come.

It was now not quite nine o’clock on Sunday morning, and Ritter, as usual, had been up for hours. (“The first arrival gets the best seat.”) Family business had kept him at the Glen Cove estate out on Long Island until nearly eight, when the helicopter had flown him in to the pad at East Twenty-third Street, where his car had been waiting to take him through empty Sunday morning Manhattan streets to his own tower. Here and there in high-floor windows of the office buildings along the way lights had gleamed, and Ritter felt a kinship: We are here, we are working, we are not making excuses. “The deadline,” a laughing executive at a company social event had once unwisely remarked to Ritter, “is when you have to have your alibi ready.” Not a Ritter-style aphorism; that executive, if he still laughed, did so with some other corporation.

One single firm rap at the door, military-style. There was no secretary available here on Sunday mornings, unfortunately, but this could only be Pickens arriving, precisely on time, so Ritter put away his commonplace book with the wolf line intact and called, “Come in.” The man himself entered, burly and thick-bodied, but neat as a pin in his pressed and creased camouflage fatigues.

“Good morning,” Ritter said, and gestured at the easy chair across the desk. “Have you had coffee?”

“I’ve had lunch, sir,” Pickens said, and remained standing.

“Sit down, man, you’ll give me a crick in the neck.”

So Pickens sat, uncomfortably, on the edge of the chair, knees together, hands on thighs, as though waiting to see the dentist. Ignoring this overdone Spartan effect, Ritter said, “We’ve lost a lot of men, have we? And the war isn’t started yet.”

“Some limited casualties,” Pickens agreed. “Nothing we can’t live with.”

“Sixteen men!”

“Twelve, as a matter of fact,” Pickens said. “The boys with the broken jaws have all been wired, they’ll be coming along.”

Ritter was astounded. “With broken jaws?”

“You don’t squeeze a trigger with your mouth,” Pickens pointed out. “And none of them speak the language down there, so there won’t be that much to talk about. And a man with a wired jaw is a fearsome thing to look at anyway; good for psychological warfare.”

Could Pickens possibly be pulling his leg? Ritter peered at the man, but nothing at all flawed his military correctness. “So,” Ritter said, “you’ll be going down with forty-eight men instead of sixty.”

“We could probably do the job with forty,” Pickens answered. “We’ve still got a comfortable cushion. No, sir, that’s not the problem, that’s not why I requested this conference.”

More toothmarks, Ritter thought, and asked, “Then what’s the problem?”

“Smith.”

“The interloper, yes.” Ritter sat back in his swivel chair, brooding. “He still hasn’t been found?”

“That’s one of the worrisome parts of it,” Pickens said. “But, to begin with, where did he come from? Who’s he working for? Then, after that, how’d he get in? Of course, I myself let him into these offices, but how did he get to that public hallway out there at that hour of night?”

“Hiding in somebody else’s office until everybody went home for the night,” Ritter guessed. “We share this floor with three other firms, you know.”

“Still,” Pickens said, “who’s he working for? But the most important thing is, where is he now?”

“Escaped,” Ritter suggested. “Reporting at this very minute to somebody five miles from here.”

Pickens shook his head, an unimaginative but stubborn man. “No, sir,” he said. “Smith never got off the seventy-fourth floor of this building. At least, not downward. Building security says so and my men say so.”

“But you haven’t found him.”

“No, sir, not on this floor.” If Pickens were uncomfortable about the subject he was raising, it showed only in an increased stiffness and precision in his bearing. “He didn’t go below this floor, and he isn’t on this floor, and that’s the situation, Mr. Ritter, as it now pertains.”

“I’m not sure I follow you, Pickens,” Ritter said.

“Here’s the question I’ve been asking myself, sir,” Pickens told him, “for the last few hours. Who turned off those lights?”

That’s when Ritter saw it coming. But he didn’t want to see it coming, and he didn’t want to make Pickens’ task any easier, so he said, “Some confederate of Smith’s, I suppose.”

“All right, then, sir,” Pickens said. Those “sirs” were getting thick on the ground as Pickens neared the crux of his complaint. “So now, sir,” he said, “we have two people mysteriously disappeared. And one of them knows these offices well enough to find the right circuit-breaker in the right circuit-breaker box without a whole hell of a lot of lead time. Sir.”

“Then that’s the situation,” Ritter said. “Two disappearing people is no more difficult to believe than one disappearing person. It’s impossible either way.”

“Not impossible, sir,” Pickens said. “Unlikely maybe. But I haven’t yet run across anything in my experience that turned out to be impossible.”

Damn Pickens! It was clear now that he wouldn’t volunteer the next step, that he’d remain perched on the edge of that chair, well pressed and correct and buttoned up tight, until Ritter asked him, if it took a hundred years. “All right,” Ritter said at last, reluctantly. “I take it you have a theory.”

“A possibility, sir,” Pickens said. “The only thing I can think of that makes the impossible possible in this particular case.”

“And it is?”

Pickens took a deep breath. “I assure you, sir,” he said, “it is never my wish to pry into any other man’s personal affairs. We all have our family tragedies, family problems, and they’re nobody’s business but our own.”

Irrelevantly wondering what sort of family problem an automaton like Pickens could have, Ritter said, “Get to the point, man.”

“You have a daughter, sir, as I understand it,” Pickens said, “living on the top floor here.”

So here it was. “Yes, I do,” Ritter said, wondering just how common that knowledge might be.

“I understand she has some sort of problem,” Pickens went on. “I don’t know what. It’s not my business to know what. But I believe she’s there.”

“She’s there,” Ritter agreed. He spent a millisecond considering whether to explain the case of his daughter Elaine to this man, decided the fellow could go to Hell first, and said, “She’s confined to that floor, for her own good, for personal reasons of my own.”

Pickens showed a calloused palm in a traffic-stop gesture. “Not my business, sir. But I wonder, sir, if this daughter of yours might not have come down these here interior stairs into Margrave last night and had some hand in the events taking place.”

“Definitely not,” Ritter said. “I already told you, she’s confined there, locked in. I have private guards up there to see she doesn’t leave.”

Pickens was unmoved. He said, “Mr. Ritter, I’m sorry, but that’s the only direction left. Smith is no longer on this floor. He didn’t go down. That leaves only one alternative.”

“It’s simply not possible,” Ritter insisted. “The security between here and the top floor is of a much more sophisticated nature than in the rest of the building, it would be far easier to go down from here than up. Have you seen the spec books?”

“Which books would those be, sir?”

Ritter got to his feet, his body full of tension, pleased at the opportunity to move, to work off some of the pressure accumulating inside. “Come along,” he said.

The office containing the spec books was nearby, just down the hall, one of the small windowless rooms Pickens had looked at last night, this one lined with plain metal shelving stacked with various records, some office supplies, and shelf after shelf of ledger books filled with manufacturer’s spec sheets on everything in use in this building from the heating plant to the water coolers. Among these were the two black unmarked ledger books filled with the specifications and details of usage of all the security systems in the entire Avalon State Bank Tower.

“Here they are,” Ritter said, reached out for the books on a shelf just at eye-level, grasped them both with the spread fingers of one hand, lifted and pulled, and the books were so startlingly light that his hand jumped and he almost punched himself in the face. As it was, the books spurted from his grasp and fell on the floor, opening flat, face up, lying there like accident victims, spread-eagled on their backs.

And empty.

Ritter stared at the books on the floor, black cardboard covers and gleaming metal rings. Empty!

“Sir? Something wrong?”

Ritter reached out, grabbed another ledger book at random. Full. Another; full. Another; full.

Pickens said, “Sir, were those the security spec books?”

“Yes.” Ritter’s voice was suddenly hoarse; he cleared his throat.

“And all the information is gone, sir?”

Ritter stared again at the fallen books, and into his mind came an idea so forbidden that he refused to believe he’d even thought it: Maybe God is on her side.

Pickens said, “Sir, request permission to conduct a search of the top floor.”

Ritter blinked at him. “Granted,” he said.

35

Wilbur Howey came out of the men’s room with Scandinavian Marriage Secrets under his arm and deep gray circles under his eyes. Nevertheless, his step was light as he hurried down the seventh floor corridor to room 712, rapped on the wood in a secret pattern — two, then one, then one, if you must know — heard the lock click, and was admitted by Stan Murch, who looked at him and said, “All full inside.”

“Say, don’t I know it?” Howey answered. “I had to come out here to shrug.”

Howey squeezed past Stan, who shut and relocked the door and returned to his work, which was taking precious objects out of black plastic sacks and putting them on the receptionist’s desk. Seated in the receptionist’s chair was Andy Kelp, who placed the precious objects in mailers of various sizes, ranging from small padded envelopes suitable for mailing books such as the one under Howey’s arm up to cardboard boxes the store would mail a shirt in. Some objects were too large even for these and were placed in a pile on the floor in the corner behind Kelp to be dealt with later, a pile that was already knee-high and steadily growing.

J.C. Taylor’s office was, at this moment, a madhouse and a mess. It was a little after nine on Sunday morning, and in the two hours since they’d finished looting the stores on the twenty-sixth floor only a minimum amount of order had been brought from the prevailing chaos. Full black plastic bags were piled everywhere, the mounds reaching head-height in some precarious places, and leaving only a twisty narrow route through to the inner room, where Tiny could be heard huffing and puffing, like the Minotaur in his cave.

Kelp looked up from his packing and said, “Aren’t you Wilbur Howey?”

“You just bet I am,” Howey told him. “Howlin’ Howey, ever ready.”

“Then you’re the guy over here working with me,” Kelp told him. “Where’ve you been?”

“Mother Nature called,” Howey said. He was looking around, trying to find somewhere to put the book.

“The next time she calls,” Kelp advised, “tell her to leave a message. Look how much stuff there is here.”

“Say, here I come,” Howey said, edging past Stan and through the stacks of plastic bags and around the desk. “Your troubles are over.”

“Wonderful news,” Kelp said.

A certain backlog had built up in Howey’s absence. It was his job, once Kelp had put each object or group of objects in the appropriate packaging, to seal it with either staples or shipping tape and then carry armloads of completed packages to the next room. Unsealed packages now towered up like a model city on the receptionist’s typing table, weaving and tottering, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Dumping the Scandinavian book in the wastebasket, as being the only place around to put it, Howey went right to work, taping and stapling, and soon had enough to tote a stack of them into the next room.

Where Tiny was a one-man team all his own, surrounded by more high mounds of plastic bags, sorting and packing like mad, tossing sealed packages into the corner between the window and the piano. The great big toilet-paper carton they’d brought in with them, which had at that time contained most of these mailers, had been emptied and placed in the corner to receive the completed packages, but they now filled and overflowed the carton and were gradually turning into a jagged brown cardboard replica of an alp, its peak just under the ceiling.

Howey added his new armload to this ever-growing slope and gathered up another stack of empty packages from atop the piano. As he was going out, Tiny looked over at him, paused, and said, “Wilbur.”

“Here I am,” Howey told him, peering over the top of the mailers.

“When we get done here,” Tiny told him, “take a look through those two books of security specs.”

Howey said, “Sure thing. You want to go up look for Dortmunder, huh?”

Tiny glowered. “There is no Dortmunder,” he said. “There’s only us. And what you’re gonna do is find us another floor with good stuff in it that we can hit tonight.”

Howey gaped at him. “Tonight? Say, Tiny, you want more?”

“Yes,” Tiny said simply.

“Well, but, say, listen,” Howey said, the stack of mailers wobbling in his arms. “When do we grab some shuteye?”

Tiny grinned. “When we get to Bermuda,” he said.

36

In his dream, Dortmunder walked a tightrope between two tall towers. Instead of a balancing pole, he carried a long heavy lance, tipping first to the left and then to the right. And the tightrope itself was made of long blonde hair. In the arched window at the top of the stone tower out in front he could see the girl whose hair this was, still attached to her head, long and braided and looped between the two towers; from the strained and painful expression on her face, she didn’t much like what was going on.

But what could he do? Looking down, he saw a jousting arena laid out on the bare tan ground between the towers. Men on horseback tilted at one another down there, but instead of knight’s armor they were dressed in green-shaded camouflage uniforms, and the weapons they jousted with were Valmets. Each pair started far apart, then rode madly together on their horses, whacking and whamming at each other with the rifles, never firing them.

Other green-clad men off to the side were setting up a catapult, and beyond them stood a company of archers. In bleachers farther away, a group of nuns silently applauded. As Dortmunder watched, the archers nocked an arrow into their bows, took a stance, and at a signal from their commander — the burly man who’d led Dortmunder into Margrave — a volley of arrows arched into the air and came straight at him! Yi! he tried to shout, but couldn’t make a sound. He ducked and wiggled, his feet shuffling back and forth while the girl in the tower window grimaced and grabbed at her hair to ease the strain, and the arrows went whiff-whiff-whiff on by.

Thwack! A great boulder came curving up from the catapult. Dortmunder dropped his lance and fell forward onto the braids, and the boulder brushed his back as it went by.

Dortmunder clung to the braided tightrope. The archers were readying a second volley. Another big boulder was being tipped into the catapult. The silent nuns jumped up and down in excitement. The jousting men all stopped lambasting one another to point their pennant-tipped Valmets at Dortmunder. And now they were shooting! Bullets ripped through the hair-rope, breaking it, Dortmunder was losing his grip and falling, and somebody pinched his nose hard. His eyes popped open, he stared at Sister Mary Grace leaning over him, and he said, “Oh, thank you! I needed that.”

Wide-eyed, she put a warning finger to her lips, then pointed a thumb toward the doorway.

Dortmunder had been sleeping in the big beige marble bathtub, the surface softened by a couple of layers of terrycloth towels and with a tan terrycloth robe thrown over him for comfort. Now he tried to sit up, bumping his elbow on bare marble and his knee on a faucet, and whispered, “Somebody’s coming?”

She nodded. She pretended to open a door and look in, to raise a chest lid and study the interior, to pull a curtain aside and peer past it.

“They’re searching?” His whisper was so loud and harsh that she made the shush-shush gesture with finger to lips again. More quietly, he whispered, “Here? Up here?”

Emphatic nod. Then she tugged at his wrist.

“Okay, okay, here I come.”

He crawled and struggled up out of the bathtub, not aided by the fact that terrycloth slides on marble, and when at last he was more or less erect and on his feet he found he was just as stiff and sore as if the surfaces he’d slept on had been of more plebeian matter. “Whoosh,” he commented, and pressed knuckles into his back.

She was over by the bedroom door, gesturing dramatically for him to come on. He looked around the bathroom, and said, “Uh. Do I have two minutes?”

Her face was agitated, but then she nodded briskly and hurried from the room, pulling the door shut, and two minutes later Dortmunder followed her.

A clean and simple bedroom. The twin bed stood high enough from the ground and was so unostentatiously covered that the well-swept floor beneath it was in plain sight. A small wooden chest of drawers, a modest bedside table and an armless wooden chair completed the furnishings. The closet door stood open, revealing an almost empty interior. “There’s no place to hide,” Dortmunder pointed out.

She was over by the hall door. She nodded agreement, touched finger to lips, and cautiously opened the door, looking out. Dortmunder heard male voices, and slid over to peek past the top of Sister Mary Grace’s head.

A short hall. Half a dozen tough guys in camouflage uniforms out of Dortmunder’s dream were just entering a room down to the right. They weren’t carrying their Valmets, but on the other hand they didn’t have to.

The instant the last of the searchers disappeared into that room, Sister Mary Grace was out the bedroom door and moving away to the left, gesturing for Dortmunder to follow. He did, both of them jogging on the balls of their feet, and she led them into the kitchen.

Large, airy, very elaborate and modern, with a big double-ovened electric stove. Side-by-side refrigerator-freezer, with icewater dispenser. Butcher block island in the middle of the room, with copper pans hanging above. Blond wood cabinets, white tile floor. Twin stainless steel sinks. Dishwasher, with a small magnetic sign on the front reading, SUCIO — DIRTY. Lots of unopenable windows letting in the morning light here a thousand feet closer to Heaven. Dortmunder opened a narrow wooden door and found a broom closet crammed with brooms and mops and buckets. There was nowhere to hide.

Sister Mary Grace had made one brisk circuit around the room, staring and frowning at everything, then abruptly hurried to the dishwasher and turned the magnetic sign around so it read, LIMPIO — CLEAN. A hell of a time for tidying up.

But now what? Opening the dishwasher, which was less than a quarter full, she started pulling out used glasses, coffee cups, plates, forks, everything. Opening cabinets, she stowed it all away, dirty dishes with the clean. Not only that, she gestured urgently for Dortmunder to come over and help.

So Dortmunder went over and helped. “What’s this for?” he asked, putting glasses with milk scum on their bottoms on a shelf with clean glasses.

She pointed at him. She pointed at the dishwasher.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I couldn’t fit in, that’s nothing I could, no way I’m gonna...”

She was very good at ignoring him, when she was of a mind to. The dirty dishes dealt with, she pulled the lower rack out of the dishwasher, reached in and lifted the propeller-like water dispenser out of the bottom and dropped it in the rack, then carried the rack over to the stove. The wide oven ate the rack as though it were no more than a thirty-pound turkey or three pies.

Hardly believing he was doing it, Dortmunder removed the dishwasher’s top rack and brought it over to Sister Mary Grace, who fed it to the other oven. Meantime, Dortmunder was saying, “See, it’s this phobia, I can’t, there’s a phobia with places like that.”

Well, there’s about a million phobias in connection with getting inside a dishwasher; about the only phobia that doesn’t come into play is the fear of heights. But there’s claustrophobia, the fear of small enclosed spaces; nyctophobia, the fear of the dark; dysmorphophobia, the fear of being bent out of shape; lyssophobia, the fear of going crazy; hydrophobia, the fear of someone turning the dishwasher on to rinse cycle...

Sister Mary Grace pointed at the dishwasher, her mouth a stern grim line. Dortmunder paused to marshal further arguments, and heard male voices out in the hall, crossing to search the bedroom. It wouldn’t take long at all to search that bedroom, nor the bathroom beyond it. “I’ll try,” Dortmunder said. “If I can’t fit in, I’ll just give myself up or something.”

Shoo, shoo, she gestured, and he went over to the dishwasher and tried to figure out how to get into it. If he stepped on the open door, it would break. Finally, he turned his back to the thing, spread his legs wide like a parody of a cowboy on a horse, and backed up slowly, shins brushing the sides of the door, while Sister Mary Grace held one arm to help him keep his balance.

Tight, very tight. Dortmunder sat down in the dishwasher, hit the back of his head, scrinched around, hit the back of his head, drew his left leg up inside, hit the back of his head, drew his left leg up inside, hit the back of his head, wriggled farther and farther back while his spine found an interesting curve it had never known it could make before, and then there he was, head bent down to look at his own stomach, legs tied in a granny knot, and body generally speaking doing a Lon Chaney imitation.

But he was in it, by golly, inside the dishwasher. By looking as far upward as possible, past his own eyebrows, he could see the dishwasher door closing. “Not all the way!” he said.

Not all the way. In fact, it rested gently on the top of his head just a quarter-inch from being completely closed, so there was even a bit of light in here. So much for nyctophobia. But what if I get a cramp in here, he wondered, so there’s another one: crampophobia.

The dishwasher smelled of sour milk. Also something vaguely Mexican or South American. Dortmunder heard the faint rustle of Sister Mary Grace leaving the kitchen, and he spent a moment in extreme discomfort, sniffing, trying to place that somehow Latin odor, and the kitchen filled up with men talking, walking around, banging into things. “Goddamnit,” one voice said, “there’s just nobody here.”

A voice that sounded to Dortmunder like the leader, the guy who’d been up on the stage last night, said, “He’s got to be, boys. I doped it out, and that little quiet girl there has to be the one that helped him with the lights, and up here is the only place she could bring him.”

“Well, she won’t talk.”

“I know she won’t talk,” the leader’s voice said. “She’s took a vow of silence.”

“Vow of silence? Is that spreading around among women?” asked another voice; he sounded hopeful.

“Mr. Pickens,” said another voice, “the fella just isn’t here. We’ve searched every room. We’ve left a man on duty in every room, so the fella couldn’t do a flanking movement and get around behind us. He just plain and simple isn’t up here.”

“And yet,” said the leader’s voice, who must be Pickens, “he just has to be. I don’t get it.”

Another voice suggested, “Maybe we oughta do another sweep down on seventy-four. And in that apartment on seventy-five.”

“We’ve done all that,” Pickens complained, but he could be heard weakening.

Go do it again, Dortmunder thought. I can’t stay scrunched up in here much longer.

A sound of water running. Now what?

“Long as we’re here,” a voice said, “anybody else want coffee?”

37

It was curiosity that brought J.C. Taylor back to her office on Sunday morning, but she told herself her motives were hard-headed and realistic. She wanted to be sure they weren’t doing any irreparable damage to her place, for one thing, and she also wanted to be damn certain there wouldn’t be any evidence on her territory linking her to whatever burglaries those plug-uglies were committing. But besides that, and at bottom, it was curiosity.

On Sunday, you had to sign in at the lectern in the lobby. J.C. knew the blue-uniformed security guard — she occasionally did come in anyway on Sundays, to get caught up with the mailing — and he gave her a happy smile of greeting, saying, “A real nice day.”

So nothing’s gone wrong yet with their plans, she thought, no excitement or trouble. “A very nice day,” she agreed, scrawled J.C. Taylor, 712, 10:50 AM on the sheet, and went away to the 5–21 elevators and on up to seven.

The Avalon State Bank Tower always felt different on Sunday, huge and cavernous and echoing. There was something timeless about it then, as though it had existed forever on some asteroid out in space and human beings had just recently started to inhabit it. J.C. listened to the magnified tock-tock of her footsteps as she walked down the corridor from the elevator, and she could just feel the emptiness in the offices all around her.

Not total emptiness, though. Unlocking the door to 712, she stepped into the middle of a touring company production of The Thief of Bagdad. Inlaid chests, amphorae, statuettes, the smoothness of ivory, the glitter of jade, amethyst, alexandrite, aquamarine, drapes of necklace, bangles, armlets, anklets, pendants, gleam of garnet, jasper, peridot, heliotrope, a rainbow of crimsons and golds and fierce greens strewn about her office furniture and floor as in some Hollywood Technicolor bazaar. All it lacked was Maria Montez.

It didn’t lack Sabu, however; here he came from the inner office, in the person of Wilbur Howey, carrying a teetering stack of mailers, while the ones called Kelp and Murch worked industriously away at J.C.’s desk, sorting and stowing, like minor elves in Santa’s workshop, to blur the metaphor just a bit.

It was Sabu — that is, Howey — who noticed her first, gaped with surprise and delight over the top of his stack of cardboard, and cried out, “Say, Toots!”

That made the elves look up. “Chicky,” said Kelp, “it’s the landlord.”

“I guess this must be success,” J.C. said. Something deeply acquisitive in her nature, something magpie-ish, some instinctive turning toward luxury and comfort and sybaritic satisfaction, some softness she invariably kept locked away so deeply she remained barely aware of its existence, made her reach out and pick up a smooth ivory bracelet, a simple oval, very delicately carved with a floral design. The fingers that typed the mailing labels gently caressed the design, the eyes that looked without emotion at the photographers softened as they looked at the soft white of the ivory. “Not too tough to take,” she murmured, and cleared her throat, and put the bracelet down again before these birds got the idea she was trying to steal it. Or noticed any flaw in her armor. Looking around, she said, “Where’s the rest of the team?”

“Say, I’ll tell you,” Howey said, dumping the empty mailers on the floor next to Kelp, “Tiny’s back there,” with a thumb toward the inner door.

“And the other guy? The one with the worry lines on his head.”

“You mean Dortmunder,” Kelp told her.

“If you say so,” she said, and was becoming aware of an awkwardness in their silence when the monster appeared in the inner office doorway, glowering at her from under those throw rugs he used for eyebrows, and saying, “What’s this? You come back on Monday, that’s the story the way I heard it.”

“I wanted to check on things,” she said, and shrugged. Monsters didn’t intimidate her, she’d worked with them all her adult life. “Where’s the other one?” she repeated. “Dort-whatever.”

“Munder,” Kelp said.

“Gone,” Tiny Bulcher said. “Like you. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Gentle down, big fella,” she told him, and turned to Howey, the most malleable of them. “Where is he, Wilbur?”

“Well, say,” Howey told her, and threw a worried glance at Tiny, “he’s gone, you know?”

“No, I don’t know.”

Tiny said, “He went upstairs to get the nun and he didn’t come down, so that’s it.”

“Nun?”

Kelp said, “It’s very simple,” and then proceeded to tell her a story that wasn’t simple at all. For some strange reason, there was a nun imprisoned at the top of this tower. For some other strange reason, Dortmunder had to go rescue her. The whole robbery business was to pay for partners to help in the rescue of the nun. Last night, Dortmunder went away to rescue the nun, and so far he hadn’t come back.

J.C. said, “And?”

Everybody shifted around uneasily. The others all glanced at Tiny Bulcher, who said, belligerently, “And nothing. He’s on his own.”

Slowly she looked him up and down. “So that’s why they call you Tiny,” she said. With a graceful sweeping gesture of the arm that she’d learned in ballet class at the age of four — J.C. Taylor was not always as we see her now — she indicated the king’s ransom strewn helter-skelter around the room. “Dort-whatever brought you all this,” she said, voice dripping with scorn, “and now you’re going to just leave him.”

38

Virgil Pickens sipped cooling coffee. “I just don’t like it,” he said.

The four troops sitting around the kitchen table with him were getting so bored with all this they were beginning to let him know it. “Whether you like it or not, Mr. Pickens,” one of them said, “that fella Smith just isn’t up in this apartment.”

Pickens brooded, watching the Guatemalan cook who’d arrived just a few minutes ago — came to work at eleven, apparently — and who’d been throwing evil-eye hostile looks at the men gathered in her kitchen ever since. Wants us out of here so she can clean up, Pickens supposed, though with the number of half-dirty cups they’d found in the cabinets when making their coffee she wasn’t exactly the best housekeeper money could buy.

Was that the story with the towels as well? When they’d looked through the Ritter girl’s bathroom the tub had been half full of towels. Now, that could have been simple sloppiness, as everybody else suggested, but it did seem to Pickens he hadn’t seen a whole hell of a lot of sloppiness anywhere else in this girl’s quarters — except here in the kitchen, of course — and the alternative that had come to him was that somebody had used that tub to sleep in.

No, everybody said. The fella isn’t here, everybody said. You can theorize all you want, everybody said, but until you have a fact or two to support your theories, essentially what you are is full of horseshit.

The Ritter daughter is closed away in her room. Every inch of this place has been searched. Smith isn’t here.

“Oh, well,” Pickens said, and finished his coffee. Rising, he said, “I hate to be wrong when I so feel that I’m right. Still...”

The cook, plainly in a hurry to be rid of them, picked up Pickens’ cup, carried it to the dishwasher, opened it, and the dishwasher reached arms out to close itself again.

“What bugs me,” Pickens said, and became aware of the cook. She had frozen in one place like Lot’s wife, staring round-eyed. At the dishwasher.

Pickens frowned, trying to remember what he’d just seen. “Arms?” he asked.

The dishwasher sighed.

39

The public garden in the ground floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower, so green, so lovely, so productive of tax abatements, was closed on Sunday. The few passersby on Fifth Avenue on that day of rest could still look through the tall plate-glass wall and refresh themselves with the views within of slender trees and graceful shrubbery and the cafe’s delicate wrought-iron white chairs, but that was all. However, on this particular sunny Sunday in spring, just a bit after eleven in the morning, a really sharp-eyed passerby might have noticed — though none did — a few shadowy figures darting through those trees, pausing behind a bush, rushing to a copse of birch and a clump of beech, infiltrating the woods like a Civil War raiding party just before Shiloh.

Howey, with the appropriate spec sheets from the ledger books in his pocket, and with Stan Murch along as bearer of his toolbag, had led the way down the stairwell from the seventh floor, out to the silent lobby, and past the broad aisle at the far end of which the security guard sat on a stool, facing the other way, leaning on the lectern where people signed in. A little past that aisle, out of the guard’s sight, was a wide door labeled OPEN SLOWLY, which was not actually openable at all today, since, being the door to the garden, it too was kept locked on Sunday. Howey snickered slightly when he saw this door, passed his hand over its mechanisms, and the door gaped wide without further ado. In they went; Howey, Stan, Kelp, Tiny and J.C. Taylor herself, who had broken down the last shred of Tiny’s resistance to the rescue operation by volunteering to take part.

Kelp had to lead the way through the woods, Howey not having previously seen the MAINTENANCE door which actually opened to the special elevator. Once there, while the others huddled around him, glancing from time to time through the intervening trunks and leaves and branches toward the empty sunlit street, Howey studied the door, studied the spec sheet, studied the door some more, and said, “Now they’re getting serious.”

“You get serious, too,” Tiny suggested.

“Say, you know me,” Howey reminded him. “Show me a lock, and I’ll show you an open door.”

It wasn’t quite that simple. It took three minutes and four tools and a lot of low irritable whistling from the kneeling Howey until at last he popped up onto his feet, tossed his tools with a clank into the open bag held by Stan Murch, and said, “She’s yours.”

Kelp opened the door to what seemed a bare closet. But the rear wall was a sliding door, with a telephone-style keypad beside it. Soft amber light came from a recessed ceiling fixture. “Now, that’s gonna take a few seconds,” Howey said, nodding at the keypad. “I’ll need somebody to hold the light.”

“Me,” Stan told him.

“Fine. The rest of you fellas and gals, just wait outside there, we’ll knock when we’re ready.” Howey winked at J.C. “Don’t you go too far, Toots.”

“I always go too far,” she told him, and he blinked and giggled and took that thought into the closet with him.

Inside, while Stan held the flashlight — “Say, pal, not on my knuckles, you know, on my work” — Howey brought out a small battery-operated drill and made two holes in the cover plate of the keypad, above the numbers 1 and 3. The narrow ends of a line tester were inserted, and the line tester lit up. So did Howey, saying, “Say, there, I got it in one. Listen, am I my mama’s favorite child, or what?”

“Or what,” Stan told him.

“Sez you,” Howey riposted.

Outside, Kelp hunkered behind a planter, watching the street, remembering a war movie called Guadalcanal Diary that he’d seen on TV. The American Marines were hunkered like this in their foxholes. Low thick fog cover on the ground, all you could see was the shiny dark round helmets on the Japanese, crawling toward the Marine position. Scary. Kelp peered through shiny-leaved shrubbery and tall slender tree trunks, and out on the sunny sidewalk a Japanese tourist family of four went by, in their Sunday best, taking one another’s pictures.

Tiny and J.C. leaned against the wall near MAINTENANCE and near each other. Breaking a long silence, Tiny muttered, “I didn’t want to embarrass him, that’s all.”

J.C. considered this. “Oh?”

“Dortmunder,” Tiny explained. “Maybe he don’t need to be rescued.”

“He’ll be glad to see us, just the same.”

“Maybe so,” Tiny said reluctantly. His brow was extremely furrowed. He was trying to be conciliatory, a thing he’d never attempted before. “Maybe,” he said, “it was good to get another point of view. Somebody come in, see it like with new eyes.”

Aware of the strain of Tiny’s efforts, J.C. decided to meet him halfway. “Thank you, Tiny,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to think I was just being nosy or bossy or anything.”

“Aw, naw,” Tiny assured her. “Like I said, a second opinion. It’s good with doctors, why not with everybody?”

“That’s true.”

Which was as far as Tiny could carry good fellowship without relief. Moving away from the wall, he glared at MAINTENANCE and said, “What’s taking that scrawny chicken so goddamn long?”

“He’ll get there,” J.C. said.

He was, in fact, almost there. Stan Murch’s flashlight now shone on a contraption of wires messily sticking out of the two holes Howey had made, and Howey’s tongue was between his teeth, poking out the corner of his mouth, as he held two ends of bare wire just apart from each other. He moved his tongue out of the way long enough to say, “Well, here goes nothin.”

“I don’t like to hear things like that,” Stan told him.

Howey put the wire ends together. Far off, something, some machine, went chuh-uhhhhhhhhhh. “Say,” Howey said, grinning, his relieved eyes dancing, “you like to hear things like that? That’s our elevator coming.”

40

“Straighten up when I talk to you,” Virgil Pickens said.

“I can’t,” Smith said.

So Pickens sat down at the kitchen table, where his head was at least at the same level as Smith’s. Somewhere else in the apartment, the Guatemalan cook could be heard, still sobbing, while the Ritter girl tried to console her. The ten men of Pickens’ search unit were gathered in the kitchen, along with the three private guards normally assigned here, all of them studying this crumpled-up man they’d found in the dishwasher.

Smith. Still Smith, unfortunately, since he carried no identification and so far refused to give any other name. “I’ll tell you, Smith,” Pickens said, gazing severely at the top of Smith’s head, “I hate torture as much as the next man.”

“So do I,” said Smith.

“So that’s why,” Pickens told him, “I’m hoping you’re gonna cooperate with me and — goddamnit, man! I can’t talk to your head!”

“Let’s straighten him,” said one of the troops. A couple of the boys picked Smith up and unbent him somewhat, but when they put him down again he slowly folded back to his former shape, like plastic after you heat it.

“Well, shit,” Pickens said. “Seat him in a chair here, then. It’s goddamn unorthodox, questioning a prisoner, having the prisoner sit down, but maybe— There. That’s better.”

It seemed to be better for Smith, too; he sighed a bit, and settled, like an old house on muddy ground. Seated on the chair, he almost looked like a normal human being, with only a slight curvature around the neck and shoulders to suggest he’d been through anything unusual.

Pickens brooded, studying this sorry specimen. There’s some way or another to break any human being in the world, and from the look of this fellow every one of those ways ought to work this time around. On the other hand, there was a kind of fatalism in Smith’s bearing that was maybe more than dishwasher slump. A man who’s already despaired before you ever start on him can sometimes be a very tough nut to crack. Probing for an opening, Pickens said, “You’ve run out your string, Smith, and there’s nobody gonna come help, so you might as well tell us the whole story.”

Smith looked around at the troops. His expression said he’d expected to meet up with them sooner or later; he wasn’t surprised. He didn’t even seem particularly troubled by it all. Frank Putter’s three private guards, having elected not to deal themselves into this hand, stood to one side with folded arms and impassively watched.

Pickens leaned forward to tap a knuckle on Smith’s knee, recapturing his attention. Looking Smith in the eye, speaking very softly, he said, “You’re all alone with us, Smith. And you’re gonna stay alone with us. And we’re not your friends.”

Smith sighed.

The five people crowded into the elevator stared past one another’s ears at their dim amber reflections in the copper walls. All was silent, save for the hum of machinery, until J.C. Taylor calmly said, “I know that was you, Wilbur, and if you do it again, I’ll ask Tiny to sit on your head when we get out of here.”

“Say, Toots, can’t a fella, gunnngg!” Howey said.

Tiny nodded, and shifted position a second time. “He won’t bother you no more,” he said.

“That’s right,” said a high-pitched voice. Everybody looked around, then realized it had come from Howey. “Say,” he said, sounding somewhat more normal, “I know when I’m not wanted.”

“Good,” said Tiny.

Non culpar, Sister Mary Grace wrote on the notepad, wishing her Spanish were better, and underneath did it in English as well: It’s not your fault. Gently tugging the dish towel away from Enriqueta Tomayo’s eyes, Sister Mary Grace waved the notepad in front of the weeping woman’s crumpled face until Enriqueta focused on it, gazing ruefully and tearfully at the words, then shaking her head, her face crumpling even more, tears running down her round cheeks. Once again the dish towel, now sopping, was pressed to that wet face.

The two women sat on the narrow vinyl sofa in the plain and Spartan reception room, where the elevator opened. To their right was the doorway leading to the combination living/dining room where most of her encounters with the departed Walter Hendrickson had taken place, and beyond that the rest of the apartment, and at last the kitchen, where poor John was now surrounded by her father’s hired mercenaries and assassins.

It was my fault. I should have found a way to, Sister Mary Grace wrote, and paused, listening. Hhhmmmmmmmmm... The elevator. She gazed at its door, across the room, and wondered who this might be. More reinforcements for the mercenaries? Possibly even her father himself, who she knew was in the building? Her face stiffened, and she sat hunched on the sofa, watching the elevator door. Enriqueta, aware less of the approaching elevator than of the difference in Sister Mary Grace, slackened in her weeping, peered over the top of the dank dish towel at the girl, then followed her gaze to the elevator.

Which opened, and out from it emerged the motleyest crew this side of the yellow brick road. A man monster came first, with a face like the radiator of a 1933 Ford and two clenched fists like angry basketballs. He was followed by a skittering little dancing old man, popping up and down on his toes, eyes searching in thirty directions at once. An extremely exotic-looking woman followed, very attractive and sensual but also hard, as though one could strike a match on her; not convent material, Sister Mary Grace thought. After her came a sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, skinny man who looked like the untrustworthy small animal in a Disney cartoon; the pack rat or weasel. And last out was a red-haired chunky man who looked around with great interest and attention, as though expecting to be given a memory test on the contents of this room later.

Enriqueta gasped, and stared wide-eyed, and clasped the soggy dish towel to her throat. Everybody looked at everybody else, while the elevator door slid shut, and then the man monster came over, glowering as though he felt Sister Mary Grace were to blame for something, and growled, “You the nun?”

Could this be—? Quickly, Sister Mary Grace wrote, Are you John’s friends? and held up the notepad.

“That’s the nun, all right,” said the sharp-nosed man.

Could they be heard in the kitchen? Warningly, Sister Mary Grace put her fingers to her lips.

They misunderstood, unfortunately; the man monster said, “You’re the one with the vow of silence, lady, not us.” Meantime, the skittery little old man peeked bright-eyed around the man monster’s elbow and said, “Say, there, Sister Toots. Heard any good prayers lately?”

The man monster frowned at the little man. “Wilbur,” he said, “I don’t need you to open any locks anymore. You go on annoying me, I’m gonna unlock your nose and watch your brains fall out.”

The little man, Wilbur, blinked at the man monster, daunted for a second, but then he turned aside and gave Sister Mary Grace a surreptitious grin and wink.

Meantime, the sharp-nosed man had understood the reason for Sister Mary Grace’s desire for quiet. Pointing at the doorway leading to the rest of the apartment, he said in a low voice, “They got Dortmunder back there?”

Dortmunder? Not knowing that name, Sister Mary Grace wrote on her pad, John? and showed it to them.

“Yeah,” the man monster said, sounding very irritable. “Saint John, that’s him.”

Sister Mary Grace nodded, and pointed at the doorway, and nodded again.

The sharp-nosed man said, “Who else is with him?”

10 armed mercenary soldiers, Sister Mary Grace wrote, and 3 armed private guards.

They looked at that note when she held it up, then looked at one another, and Sister Mary Grace could see them comparing the forces arrayed against them with themselves: four extremely varied men, and three extremely varied women. No wonder everyone looked a bit apprehensive, and that the little man, Wilbur, sounded shakier than before when he said, “Well, Tiny? How strong do you feel?”

That was the man monster, oddly enough. He took a deep breath, for answer, and gazed at the doorway, clearly intending to simply march in there and do his best. Sister Mary Grace wrote fast, and held up the note:

Excuse me. I have a suggestion.

41

Dortmunder gazed at Pickens’ heavy and unsympathetic face, and saw little to like there. Just what sort of story would this guy believe? It seemed perfectly clear that Pickens wouldn’t for a second believe the truth, that John Dortmunder was merely a professional burglar doing some nuns a favor by rescuing Sister Mary Grace. So what sort of story might he be likely to believe?

The question had some urgency, because Pickens was talking about torture again. “It’s kind of amazing,” he was saying, “just how many things there are in the ordinary kitchen that can cause a fella pain, if that fella isn’t polite enough to answer a decent question. That electric stove over there, for instance. Jocko, go turn on the left front burner about halfway.”

One of the tough guys went over and turned on the left front burner, about halfway. Dortmunder didn’t watch, because his head wouldn’t turn in that direction, but he knew it was happening.

“Now, in just a few seconds, Smith,” Pickens said, “you’re not gonna want to touch that burner at all. You know what I mean?”

“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said.

“But you are gonna touch it,” Pickens said, “or you’re gonna answer my questions, one or the other.”

“Faucet,” said a tough guy.

“That’s good,” Pickens said, nodding judiciously, approving of a bright student. “That’s another one,” he told Dortmunder. “We turn the water on in the kitchen sink and then we put some part of your head in the way. Your nose, for instance, or your mouth, or your ear.”

“Hot water,” suggested another one.

“That’s also good,” Pickens said.

“Burner’s turning red,” said the one called Jocko, over by the stove.

“Burner’s turning red,” Pickens told Dortmunder.

Dortmunder nodded. “I heard,” he said.

“So now,” Pickens said, leaning forward again, looking very serious, “let’s start with your real—”

“Hey!” said a tough guy, and another one said, “What the—” and another one said, “Jesus!”

Pickens, slightly annoyed, looked up at his troops. Dortmunder tried to, but his head wouldn’t lift that far. Cocking it at an angle like a bird, he looked upward slantwise and saw some of the tough guys, the ones who’d been facing the doorway, staring that way in astonishment. Pickens was already twisting around to look at the doorway, and Dortmunder turned his aching body sufficiently to look, too, and it was empty. Just a doorway.

“Now what?” Pickens said.

“There was a...” one of the tough guys said, and waved his arms, and said, “There was a woman there.”

“The daughter,” Pickens said. “We know about her.”

“Not the daughter,” the tough guy said. “I saw the daughter before and believe me, Mr. Pickens, that was not the daughter.”

“Then the cook,” Pickens said. He was getting really annoyed. “Don’t interrupt the interrogation.”

The tough guy said, “Mr. Pickens, this was a different woman completely. She was a, you know, a kind of a, she was kind of a...”

“Knockout,” said one of the other tough guys.

“She blew a kiss,” said a third.

“Mr. Pickens,” said a fourth, sounding awed, “she was topless!”

Pickens glared at his troops. “What the hell is all this guff?”

Those who had seen the vision told him what the guff was, volubly, agreeing with one another. Pickens shut them with a barked, “Enough!” and turned to one of the three private guards leaning against the side wall. “Who else is up here?” he demanded.

They shifted uneasily, glancing at one another. They didn’t have a leader, and hadn’t expected to do anything but observe. Finally, one of them said, “Nobody else.”

“Did you see this so-called topless woman?”

“Nope,” the spokesman said, and the other two nodded agreement with him.

“Maybe,” Pickens suggested, his jaw bunching with repressed anger, “maybe you birds ought to check out your territory.”

The three guards looked at one another. They were in civilian clothing, neat jackets and ties, but their manner was semi-military, and they clearly didn’t like taking orders from somebody outside their chain of command. Still, if a topless woman was wandering around their allegedly secure area, they ought to check it out, so finally the spokesman said, “Come on, boys, let’s see if there’s anything to it.”

“Oh, there’s something to it,” he was assured by one of the guys who’d seen the topless woman. “There’s a lot to it.”

Carefully blank-faced, the three guards left the kitchen, and Pickens turned back to Dortmunder, saying, “Before we were so rudely interrupted, we were talking about accidents that can happen in the home to people who don’t answer questions. As I remember, we hadn’t even got around to the whole subject of knives.”

“No, we hadn’t,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Smith,” Pickens said, “I’m tired of calling you Smith. Tell me your name.”

“Ritter,” Dortmunder said. “William Ritter.”

Pickens reared back to stare at him. “Ritter?”

“I’m the black sheep uncle,” Dortmunder explained. “Sister Mary Grace’s uncle.” He wished he could remember Sister Mary Grace’s other name, her family name; an uncle would be expected to know something like that.

Pickens squinted, as though trying to see Dortmunder more clearly. “You’re telling me,” he said, “you’re Frank Ritter’s brother?”

“No-good brother,” Dortmunder said, and then just sat there and looked at Pickens, allowing his patent no-goodness to substantiate his claim.

Pickens said, “That is the most ridiculous—”

“Goddamn it!”

It was one of the tough guys who’d seen the topless woman, and he was staring at the doorway again. Pickens squinted at him. “You seeing things again, Ringo?”

“I saw—” Ringo turned to the guy next to him, and pointed at the doorway (it was empty). “Didn’t you see it?”

“Little guy,” the other one said.

“That’s right. Little old geezer.”

Dortmunder became very still.

“Now, goddamn, wait a minute,” Pickens said. “This wasn’t the topless woman? This was somebody else?”

“Little old geezer,” said the guy who’d said it before.

“And was he topless, too?” Pickens asked, with heavy sarcasm.

“No, sir, Mr. Pickens. He was bottomless.”

Ringo said, “He mooned us, sir.”

Pickens’ hands were bunched into fists on his knees. He said, “Mooned you?”

“You know, sir,” Ringo said. “When a fella turns his back and drops his pants and bends over and wiggles his ass at you.”

Pickens turned around and stared at the empty doorway. Then he turned back and stared at Ringo. “You’re telling me,” he said, “that a little old man came to that doorway and turned around and dropped his pants and bent over and wiggled his ass at you?”

“Bony old guy, too,” said Ringo.

“Say, I am not neither!” cried a voice from somewhere else in the apartment; it had the sound of the voice of a little old geezer, probably bony.

“There he is!” cried Ringo. “Hear him?”

“I heard him.” Pickens gave Dortmunder the fisheye. “What do you know about this, Ritter, or Smith, or whoever you are?”

Poker face, Dortmunder told himself; you’ll never have a better opportunity to practice your poker face. “Nothing,” he said.

Pickens stared at him a second longer, then turned to his men and pointed, giving out assignments. “Ringo, Turk, Wyatt, Pierce, go out there and get me that guy. And the topless woman. And find out where the hell those private guards got off to.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Pickens,” they said, and trooped out of the room.

“This place is supposed to be secure up here,” Pickens grumbled. “Most sophisticated security money can buy, and we’re loadin up with tourists. If this is Margrave employees having fun, I’m gonna get a whole bunch of people fired.” He glared around at his troops, but no one had anything to add to that sentiment, so he gave his attention once again to Dortmunder. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I could phone Frank Ritter, he’s just two stories down from here, in his office. I could phone him and ask him if you’re his brother. But if I do, and he says you’re not his brother, I’m gonna break both your arms and both your legs. You want me to go ahead and make that call?”

“Frank, uh, disowned me a while ago,” Dortmunder said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t blame him,” Pickens said, and leaned back, and said to his troops, “Do you suppose we could get his hand on that burner and his nose under that faucet at the same time?”

“We could anyway try,” one of them said.

“That’s the spirit.” Pickens nodded at Dortmunder as the tough guys laid a whole lot of hands on him. “Anytime you want to talk with me,” he said, as Dortmunder was carried away toward the appliances, “just let me know.”

“Mr. Pickens!”

Everybody stopped, and turned to look at the doorway, the tough guys still holding on to Dortmunder, who sagged at waist-height among them like a rolled-up rug they were throwing away. They didn’t drop him, but their hands tightened on him, as they all saw their comrade Ringo in the doorway. He was naked, standing there with his hands over his crotch, and he looked utterly miserable.

Pickens rose slowly from his chair, staring. “Ringo,” he said. “What’s out there?”

Ringo didn’t move. He said, “Mr. Pickens, I’m told to ask for your surrender.”

“Surrender!” Pickens cried. “Never!” He sounded shocked at the idea. “Surrender to who?”

“Whom,” said a voice from the corridor.

“Mr. Pickens,” Ringo said, “these people— They say they want to avoid bloodshed, if they can.”

“Well, I don’t,” Pickens said, and turned to point at Dortmunder, saying, “Put that fella on the stove. Let’s let everybody listen to him holler.”

The troops hustled Dortmunder closer to the stove. “Say, uh...” he said. He could see the dull red glow of the burner.

“Mr. Pickens, please,” Ringo said, and when they all turned to look at him again he was still in the same position as before, but now an arm had extended out from beside the doorway, and was pressing the barrel of a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber Official Police revolver against Ringo’s right ear. Blinking a lot, but not moving his head, Ringo said, “Mr. Pickens, they got Turk and Wyatt and Pierce locked up in a room. They got those guards in there, too. They say they don’t want to kill anybody, but they will if they have to.”

“Who says?” Pickens demanded.

“These people, uh, holding this gun to my head, Mr. Pickens.”

“Surrender to an enemy I can’t even see?” Pickens took a stomping step toward the doorway.

“Oh, no, Mr. Pickens!” Ringo said, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet. “If you come over here, they’ll just shoot me, and then they’ll shoot you, and then they’ll shoot everybody!”

Pickens stopped. He pointed at Dortmunder, hanging from his troops’ hands. “I’ve got my own hostage, goddamnit!” He was so mad he was punching the air with both fists, but he wasn’t moving toward the doorway anymore.

“Mr. Pickens,” Ringo said, “I think they’re kinda getting impatient.”

“They are, are they? Getting impatient, are they?” Pickens put both hands on his hips, and leaned toward Ringo and the doorway, and said, “I tell you what I’m going to do. You people hiding back there, do you hear me?”

A woman’s dulcet voice said, “Oh, we hear you, Mr. Pickens.”

“One-on-one,” Pickens shouted, and started pulling hand-guns out of his clothing and slapping them down on the butcher block island in the middle of the kitchen; three guns in all. “A fair fight, goddamnit,” he yelled, “like the old days, like the knights! Send out your best man, damn you to hell and back, no guns, no weapons at all! I’ll meet him one-on-one, and if I beat him you’ll surrender to me, whoever the hell you are! But if he beats me, I’ll surrender my entire company!”

Ringo moved backward, and from around the corner came Tiny Bulcher, stepping into the doorway, filling it, arms at his sides, carnivorous eyes on the blanching Pickens. “You called?” Tiny asked.

42

New York Police Department recording, 11:22:45 A.M., Sunday, a call to the emergency number, 911:

43

“As time is the fourth dimension of space, so patience is the fourth dimension of confidence.”

Leafing through his commonplace book, waiting for Virgil Pickens to return from upstairs — he’d phoned down awhile ago that someone had been found up on seventy-six and the investigation was continuing — Frank Ritter came across that aphorism on the subject of patience, done at some time in the past, and he considered it without pleasure. It was too long, too many words, and the analogy seemed strained.

Or was it merely that this was a moment when he didn’t feel like hearing patience extolled? He wanted to know what was going on upstairs, he wanted to hear about it, and he wanted it to be done and over with. Skipping past his previous wisdoms to the most recent page, just beyond, “Lie down with wolves...,” he wrote, “Patience is sloth ennobled.” There; that took care of it.

A knock on the door. Pickens at last! “Come in,” Ritter called.

But it wasn’t Pickens. It was a middle-aged woman, the Sunday receptionist and telephone answerer whose post was at the desk just within the Margrave Corporation entrance. Ritter frowned at her, had time to notice her worried expression, and then she said, “Mr. Ritter, the police are—”

And two uniformed New York City patrolmen came in, sloppy young men with black hair over their collars and scuffed shoes and ill-fitting dark blue trousers. “Frank Ritter?” one of them said.

Ritter got to his feet; he was used to dealing with men in livery. “Yes, officers? What can I do for you?”

“We have a report,” one of the policemen said, “of a paramilitary organization assembling in these offices, armed with illegal weapons.”

Ritter’s spine stiffened. “I beg your pardon,” he said coldly. “This is a legitimate business office, with some respect and, if I may say so, influence in the world at large.”

“And lots of activity on a Sunday,” the second police officer said, unabashed.

The first one was also unabashed. “We have to follow up a report like this,” he said.

Ritter glared. “And do your superiors know you’re following up such an absurd accusation?”

A female police officer, just as sloppy as the males, with blonde hair messily over her collar, appeared in the doorway (where the worried receptionist still lingered, fretfully washing her hands) and said, “Door down here to some kind of theater, all shot up.”

The first policeman cocked an arrogant eye at Ritter. “Running off a few practice rounds?”

“You people can’t do this!” Ritter insisted. “Come marching in here— Do you have a warrant?”

“We have probable cause,” the second policeman said.

“You most certainly do not!” Ritter still believed he could drive these interlopers out by force of will alone. “A man’s office is his castle!” he declared. “You can’t trample on my rights like this! Your law stops in the lobby!”

“Right now, Mr. Ritter,” the first policeman said, “in this office, we are the law.”

A second female police officer, this one with red hair curling over her collar, appeared carrying a Valmet with both hands. “There’s a bunch of them,” she said. “No ammo.”

A third male police officer, even younger than the others, and looking flushed with excitement, appeared and said to his comrades, “This army couldn’t wait to get started. A report just came in of looting in this building last night.”

That last remark made no sense to Ritter, and he was too bedeviled by the things he did understand to think about it. He put his hand on his telephone, glaring at the first policeman, whom he had decided was in charge of this farrago. “The mayor of this city is a personal friend of mine,” he said. “What do you suppose he’ll say to you if I call him now and tell him what’s happening here?”

The policeman grinned at the Valmet, and grinned at Ritter. “I think he’d call me sergeant,” he said.

44

Stan Murch, forehead pressed to the unopenable glass in the window in J.C. Taylor’s inner office, watched the activity on the street seven stories below. “There goes the last busload,” he said, as another Department of Corrections bus, dark blue with barred windows, pulled away from the curb in front of the Avalon State Bank Tower, taking the last of Pickens’ Army away to its final ignominious defeat.

“Hey, Stan,” Kelp called from the floor, “come on back to work, huh?”

Kelp was a little out of sorts because, while J.C. Taylor had been phoning the police, he was the one who’d been chosen to go back downstairs with Howey to the special elevator and back up to the top floor, carrying one plastic bag of swag to be distributed around the apartment up there; salting the felony mine, as it were. It had been Dortmunder’s idea, once he’d gotten over the personal humiliation of having been rescued twice by the putative rescuee, and everyone agreed it was a good one. It would distract the police, give them every reason to suppose there were no crooks in the building except the ones they already had, and suggest the rest of the loot had already been exfiltrated from the building via elevator.

All well and good. What had Kelp’s nose out of joint was the fact that when he and Howey had been coming back down in the elevator, it had all at once stopped, somewhere in the middle of the vertical tunnel between the basement and the roof. It turned out later that some building maintenance man had seen the mess of wires sticking from the keypad in MAINTENANCE — what was he doing in there? — and echoing that Watergate guard who removed the burglars’ black tape from the door latch without telling anybody, had taken away the wires, merely to tidy up.

It wasn’t so much that Kelp had immediately panicked, bouncing around the stalled elevator like a neutrino in a lab experiment, loudly declaiming that they would be stuck there until Kingdom Come or, even worse, until De Police Come, while Howey methodically unscrewed the control panel plate and got them moving again. No, what really browned Kelp’s toast on both sides was the fact that when they returned safely to J.C.’s office Howey had reported Kelp’s panic, complete with piping laughter and exaggerated imitations of Kelp in full cry. Howey had continued this entertainment for some time, until Tiny closed a hand around his head and quietly suggested he stop.

That was more than an hour ago, but Andy Kelp was still to some extent a bird of ruffled plumage, which was why, rather than argue, Stan Murch simply said, “Here I come, Andy,” left the window, and went back over to sit on the floor beside Kelp and return to addressing packages.

They were all addressing packages now, Dortmunder and Tiny at J.C.’s desk, Kelp and Stan seated on the floor, and on the floor in the other room Wilbur Howey, with J.C. Taylor and Sister Mary Grace at the receptionist’s desk out there. Some discussion had taken place as to whether it was appropriate for Sister Mary Grace to be an accessory to grand larceny by addressing packages full of stolen goods, but she had resolved the issue herself with a note reading: I obey a higher law. It says I can address packages in a good cause.

There were nine different convenience addresses to which the packages were being sent, various cousins and attorneys who would restrain their curiosity. Now, when each of the addressers completed a batch, he or she carried them to the table in the inner room with the scale and meter, and added the appropriate postage. Then the packages were stored here, there and everywhere, ready to start going out, some tomorrow, some later in the week. In the days to come, packages would be retrieved from those convenience addresses and turned over to one of four different fences alerted and waiting. Very soon now, in a matter of just a few weeks, everybody in these rooms — except Sister Mary Grace, of course, another of whose vows embraced poverty — would be very rich.

Not rich rich RICH! But not bad, either.

45

Howey didn’t want to take his clothes off. “Say, listen,” he protested, “do I got my dignity or what?”

“Or what,” Stan Murch told him.

“Sez you.”

“Try not to panic, Wilbur,” Kelp said nastily.

“Look, Wilbur,” Dortmunder explained. “The odds are, Sister Mary Grace’s father has people out looking for her already. Including he’d certainly have a couple guys hanging around the lobby, just in case she didn’t get away yet. So the thing to do is disguise her as somebody else, and you’re the only one around her size.”

“And you don’t want those rotten rags anyway,” Kelp told him.

“Say, I like these duds,” Howey complained, looking down to admire himself in his baggy tan chinos and penny loafers and bright plaid polyester shirt. “When I got out of the big house, the state gave me that suit, you know, that suit they give you, that suit was out of style when I went in. I went out to this snazzy new place in the suburbs, this K mart place, I got the latest threads. I need these togs, I got a front to keep up.”

“Keep this crap up,” Tiny told him, “you’re not gonna have any front at all. Strip.”

Howey looked around at the grim determined faces ringing him about. Dortmunder, Tiny, Kelp, Murch. These were, after all, desperate men, hardened criminals. If they wanted his grade-A best casual attire, they were going to get it. “Say, I’m gonna look like some fruitcake,” he muttered unhappily, starting to undo his belt buckle, “going out of here in my skivvies.”

“You’ll get her stuff,” Dortmunder assured him. “And it isn’t skirts or anything, it’s regular blue jeans and a shirt.”

Howey thought about that. “The stuff she’s wearing right now, huh?”

Stan Murch shook his head. “This man is disgusting,” he said. “Don’t ever cross the street in front of me, Wilbur.”

“Wha’d I say? Wha’d I say?”

They wouldn’t tell him what he’d said. Finally his clothing was off, and then there was a brief argument about the Coors cap — “To put her hair in,” Dortmunder pointed out, while Tiny ostentatiously mimed the wringing of a chicken’s neck — and then Dortmunder took the rolled-up duds to the closed door leading to the outer office and knocked on it. J.C. opened it partway and said, “That took long enough. We’ve been ready a long time out here.”

“There was some discussion,” Dortmunder said, handing over the clothing. J.C. went away and came back with another little pile of clothing, and Dortmunder closed the door again.

Howey didn’t like Sister Mary Grace’s clothes after all. He said the shoes were too tight, and the blue jeans were too tight around the knees but too loose around the hips, and the blouse was too loose around the torso but too tight around the shoulders. And he felt naked without a hat. “You could wear the wastebasket if you want,” Tiny told him, so then he shut up and just stood there, looking in the high-necked long-sleeved black blouse and oddly baggy jeans like a defrocked Druid.

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?”

“Say,” Howey said, “I don’t want to get in the habit, do I?” But his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

J.C. appeared in the doorway. “Okay,” she said.

They all trooped out there, Howey last, to discover that Sister Mary Grace had been less severely dealt with by the transformation. J.C. had glued some of the girl’s own cut-off hair onto her upper lip, which at first glance looked enough like a moustache to pass. With the rest of her hair tucked up inside the Coors cap, and wearing Howey’s shirt and chinos and loafers, the worst you could say for her was that she looked like a tourist from Eastern Europe. But male.

“It’s a different guard down there now,” J.C. said, “so I’ll sign out like we came in together. Just remember,” she told the girl, “to let me do the talking.” Then she shook her head: “Sorry. I forgot.”

Sister Mary Grace went over to Dortmunder, smiled up at him, and held out her hand. Dortmunder shook it, and said, “Thanks for rescuing me.” She did a graceful pointing-finger-rolling-over-pointing-finger gesture: Thanks for rescuing me, too.

Everybody then told the sister goodbye. “Pleasure,” Tiny told her, briefly engulfing her hand and forearm in his version of a handshake. “If you take a cab,” Stan Murch told her, “tell him to go straight down Ninth.” Andy Kelp said, “It was fun, you know?” And Howey, lingering over the handshake, said, “I gotta admit it, Sister Toots, you look better in that rig than I do myself.”

J.C. said, “I’ll be back around nine tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll probably be gone,” Dortmunder told her.

Tiny said, “Listen, Josie, I’ll stick around, right? Help you mail this stuff.”

Josie? Everybody looked at Tiny with astonishment, but he ignored them, grinning at J.C, who smiled casually back and said, “Sure, Tiny, that’d be nice.”

Hmm, everybody thought.

46

“And here’s the thing,” Dortmunder said. “It’s over, you know? And nothing went wrong.”

“John,” Kelp told him, “sometimes things work out, okay?”

“But I don’t understand this,” Dortmunder said, looking around J.C. Taylor’s now-clean outer office. It was ten minutes since J.C. and Sister Mary Grace had left, and a pleasant calm had descended everywhere. In the other room, Stan Murch watched early Sunday afternoon traffic out the window, Tiny Bulcher was taking the Allied Commissioners’ Course final exam (and cheating), and Wilbur Howey was trying to decide if he looked worse with his shirt — that is, Sister Mary Grace’s shirt — tucked in or hanging out. “We got the loot,” Dortmunder pointed out. “We saved the nun. Nobody in our bunch got hurt or killed or even caught by the law. We’re home free.”

Kelp said, “Well, that was the plan, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, but—” Dortmunder shook his head. “I just don’t get it.”

The door opened, and J.C. and the nun came in. The nun looked very pale and round-eyed, and J.C. looked grim. “Trouble,” J.C. said, closing the door, and the nun nodded.

“Ah,” Dortmunder said. “Now I get it.”

Kelp said, bright with false hope, “What, you need carfare, something like that?”

“Big trouble,” J.C. said, and the nun nodded hugely. She looked mainly like a deer who’d just heard a gunshot.

“Tell me,” Dortmunder said. “Tell me every bit of it.”

“There’s policemen at the exits,” she said, “checking everybody’s ID. I sweet-talked the security man at the desk down there, and he told me what’s going on. The police know there’s a lot of stuff missing from the robbery, and they’re not sure they got every one of those soldiers up there, so they’re doing a sweep.”

“A sweep,” Dortmunder said. Tiny and Stan and Wilbur had come out from the other room to listen.

“They got a quick warrant to search the entire building,” J.C. went on. “They’re starting at the top and sweeping down. They figure it’ll take hours.”

Dortmunder looked around this little two-room suite; a moment ago, a safe haven, but now a mousetrap and they the mice. “We can’t get out of the building,” he said, “because they’re checking IDs at the exits. And we can’t stay here, because they’ll find us when they sweep through.”

“I’m the only one signed in,” J.C. said. She looked and sounded bitter. “I could get out of the building, but what good does it do me? They’ll find you clowns, and then they’ll find my offices full of stolen property, and then they’ll find me. And I never did look good in gray.”

Tiny said, “Josie, if it’s any consolation at all, I promise you that before the law gets here I will personally run Dortmunder through the pencil sharpener.”

Kelp said, “Tiny, that isn’t fair! John did every—”

“John, huh?” Tiny lowered his head and gazed without love at Kelp. “John and his Sisters,” he said. “We had a nice simple little robbery, very sweet and very smart, we could come in, we could go out, not a problem in the world. But your John here, he has to go up to the tower and knock over a hornet’s nest. All the trouble we got, we got it because of John and this nun. It’s Come to the Stable all over again. And your pal Dortmunder’s the one brought in the nun.”

Kelp turned desperately to Dortmunder. “John,” he said, “there’s a way out, right?”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Dortmunder told him. He was wondering if Tiny actually did have a method whereby he could run a human being through a pencil sharpener. Knowing Tiny, it was possible.

“No, no,” Kelp said, jittering. “I mean, you’ve got a way out, right? A solution? You know what we can do?”

“We could give ourselves up, I guess,” Dortmunder said. “End the suspense.” He sat down at the receptionist’s desk and waited to be taken away.

“John,” Kelp said. “You’re the one with the plans, the ideas. Come up with something.”

“There isn’t anything,” Dortmunder told him. “It’s all over.” There was a certain relief, a kind of relaxation, in giving in to despair.

“Say,” Wilbur Howey said, bobbing up and down, glinting and winking, “prison ain’t so bad, once you get used to it. Maybe we could all get in the same cellblock. Say, I was with a swell bunch this last time. We all got together and subscribed to Playboy, read all about hi-fi sets and everything, time passes before you know it.”

Tiny growled, “Wilbur, you are gonna pass before you know it.”

“Nothing to drive,” Stan Murch said. His voice was so sepulchral it seemed to have an echo in it.

“From time to time,” the irrepressible Howey assured him, “we could escape for a while, the whole bunch of us together. You could drive then.”

“The same cellblock,” Kelp said, looking with horror first at Tiny and then at Howey. “John,” he said, “think about it.”

Dortmunder was thinking about it. He sighed. No rest for the wicked. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it. Tiny’s pencil sharpener is one thing, but forty-eight years in a cellblock with Wilbur Howey? No way.”

“John?” Hope glittered madly in Kelp’s eyes. “You’ve done it? You found it?”

“I’m thinking,” Dortmunder told him, “but people keep interrupting.”

“Stop interrupting,” Tiny told Kelp.

“That’s right,” Stan said.

J.C. said, “Everybody just pipe down.”

“Say,” Wilbur said, “give this fella room.”

“Everybody’s interrupting me,” Dortmunder said.

So then everybody shut up, and just looked at him. Dortmunder sat there at the receptionist’s desk and thought. He looked at J.C., and then at Sister Mary Grace, and then at Tiny, and then at Wilbur, and then at Kelp, and then at Stan Murch, and he thought. He got up and wandered into the back room and looked at everything there, and thought. He looked out the window at the carefree people driving down Fifth Avenue in their cars, going anywhere they wanted, and he thought. He went back to the other room, where twelve eyes looked at him, and Wilbur Howey shifted position, and a pin was heard to drop. “Sister,” Dortmunder said. “Is there a telephone down there in that convent?”

Wide-eyed, she nodded.

“Is there somebody with a, whadaya call it, a, a, compensation, decoration...”

Sounding almost timid, J.C. said, “You mean dispensation?”

“That’s the thing,” Dortmunder said. To the nun he said, “Does somebody have one of those down there, so they can break the vow of silence and talk on the phone if it rings?”

She nodded.

Dortmunder pointed at the telephone. “Call the convent,” he said.

Sister Mary Grace, holding her breath, picked up the phone and started dialing.

Tiny looked disgruntled. “More nuns?” he said.

Dortmunder nodded. “More nuns.”

47

There was a time when Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna (pronounced Maloney) of the New York Police Department didn’t have to come into the goddamn city on a Sunday in May no matter what happened. That was when the chief inspector had been the top cop of the City of New York, master of all he goddamn surveyed and you’d better not forget it. But then, some little time ago, the chief inspector stubbed his toe on a case, let the object of a massive manhunt slip through his massive fingers, got mad, punched a TV reporter on camera, and in general behaved counter-productively. He didn’t so much blot his copybook as crap all over it. He was still powerful enough to be let off with a mere slap on the wrist, but in effect he was no longer the top cop of the City of New York, and he knew it, and everybody else knew it. Until the stink faded, Mologna was on display duty, which was wearin, time-consumin and humiliatin.

This is display duty: Whenever some major crime occurs in the City of New York — not some second-rate murder or bank robbery or an arson confined to one side of one block, but a major big-time big city felony — whenever a crime occurs so large and interestin that the media show up, it is necessary to have present there a high-rankin uniformed police official with braid on his hatbrim to conduct the investigation. This display inspector or display captain is usually somebody so old and so dumb and so racked by alcohol they won’t let him have bullets for his gun anymore, and for Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna to be given such duty cut deep. Deep.

And now here it was springtime, out in his home in Bay Shore on Long Island. Mologna’s motorboat was in the water of the Great South Bay, just beyond his own backyard. His tomato plants and geraniums were in their beds in that yard. The sun was warm, the days were growin longer, and today was Sunday. And here in the middle of Manhattan, in the Avalon State Bank Tower, displayin his bulk to the media (but not punchin any goddamn reporters, oh, no), stood the fat and perspirin Francis X. Mologna, walkin around under his hat with the braid on the brim.

A hell of a mess, this one. Mologna was just glad he wasn’t actually conductin the investigation, because the parts of this story didn’t fit. Up on the top of the buildin were a whole lot of soldiers of fortune, mercenaries enough to change the administration in Hell. On the twenty-sixth floor were half a dozen burglarized importers. Some of the burglary loot was on the top floor with the mercs, who claimed to know nothin about it. And in fact, burglary was not their MO; slaughter of the innocents was more along the lines of their trade.

While seated in his chauffeured official car, takin a break from displayin himself, restin in the open door with his feet on the curb while he brooded unhappily about the clear and beautiful and sunlit water of the Great South Bay, Mologna was approached by a young black police officer with the righteous dew of the Police Academy still gleamin in his eyes and shinin on his forehead. This whippersnapper saluted and said, “Sir, we have a woman.”

Mologna never returned salutes; he just nodded and kept them. Noddin, he said, “Good for you.”

“She’s right over there, sir.”

Mologna frowned. Was he actually expected to do somethin? “What is she?” he asked. “A burglar or a soldier?”

“A song producer, sir.”

Mologna considered this young black police officer. He was too young to know better and too black to yell at and unlikely to be pullin even a display inspector’s leg. “And just what, in the Holy Virgin’s holy name,” he wanted to know, “should I be doin with a song producer?”

“It’s about some nuns,” the young man said, blinkin rapidly. “Maybe she ought to tell you herself.”

“Nuns? Why would I—” But then his eye caught sight of a woman over by the Avalon Tower entrance, and he stopped, and for a second he just stared. Years and years ago he’d met a judo instructor who’d looked like that. By the good lord harry, but that woman could contort herself! That’s one of the ones Mrs. Mologna never did find out about. “Her?” Mologna asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And what would she be havin’ to do with nuns?”

“She wants to make a record with them, sir.”

“That’ll be a hell of a record,” Mologna decided. “That’ll get into Guinness for sure. Bring that record producer over here.”

“Yes, sir.” The young man saluted (Mologna nodded) and off he went, returnin in a moment with the woman, sayin, “Mrs. Taylor, sir.”

The woman smiled, seductive but not coarse, and said, “How do you do, Chief Inspector?”

Mologna had already struggled out of the car and onto his feet, and now he smiled his avuncular smile and put out his hand, and she placed a card in it. He’d expected a hand, not a card, but recovered and read it: Super Star Music — J.C. Taylor, President. The address was this Avalon Tower here. “Was you robbed, too?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she said. “I’m hoping there won’t be any trouble about these Sisters coming to see me.”

“They’ll be in no danger,” Mologna assured her. “The crimes here are all over for the moment.”

“Then I can bring them in?” Mrs. Taylor smiled again, radiantly, and seemed about to end the conversation.

“Wait a minute,” Mologna said. The fear of makin another mistake was still very much alive in his breast. “Maybe you better tell me the whole story.”

“I’m an independent record producer,” J.C. Taylor said, “and I’d arranged to do a demo tape today with a group of nuns from a convent down in Tribeca.”

“So you want to go down there?”

“No, they’re on their way here. It was arranged weeks ago. Their contact at the archdiocese offices is Father Angelo Caravoncello.”

Mologna bowed his head, as though he’d heard the holy name. The New York Police Department and the New York Archdiocese tend to be pretty tight. Well, in the first place, they are after all on the same side in the war between good and evil. And in the second place they both tend to assay out at a high percentage of Irish and Italian. And in the third place, they share the same turf, so they goddamn well better get along. Mologna didn’t know Father Angelo Caravoncello, but just hearin the name and the connection with the archdiocese offices was good enough for him. “I see,” he murmured.

“The idea,” she said, “is a nun’s chorus doing a pop album, like that French nun who did ‘Amazing Grace’ several years ago. Top of the charts, with a bullet.”

Mologna frowned. “Bullet?”

“Oh, that’s just trade talk,” she said. “When a record moves very fast, up through the sales charts, we say it’s with a bullet.”

“We police have trade talk like that, too,” Mologna told her. “Only when we say somethin’s with a bullet, it usually isn’t movin at all. So when do these sisters of yours get here?”

“About half an hour.”

The young black policeman piped up, sayin, “The building records show Mrs. Taylor signed in this morning, well after the robbery, and wasn’t in the building at all last night.”

“Well, of course I wasn’t,” she said, smilin again, her eyes twinklin at Mologna. “I don’t love my job that much.”

“Sure you don’t,” Mologna agreed, smilin back. He wished they’d had an actual handshake. “A pretty woman like you,” he said, “you’ll be wantin a private life of your own.”

“Oh, now, Chief Inspector,” Mrs. Taylor said, gigglin and wagglin a naughty-naughty finger at him. “You just never mind my private life.”

The woman’s flirtin with me! “Oh, I mean nothin at all by it, Mrs. Taylor,” he said, turnin red in the face, pleased all over. “Why,” he said, “I’m old enough to be your big brother.” Aware of somethin more acute, possibly even ironic, suddenly present in the young patrolman’s eyes, Mologna ended the conversation, sayin, “You run along now, and when these Sisters of yours arrive we’ll escort them right to your door.”

“Thank you, Chief Inspector,” Mrs. Taylor said, and now she did extend her hand, and Mologna happily shook it, and it was just as warm and soft and enjoyable as he’d anticipated.

An interestin walk the lady had, too, returnin to the buildin. Exactly like that judo instructor. Mologna sighed and gave himself over to thoughts of yesteryear, and just about half an hour later a battered old ex-school bus pulled up immediately behind his car. Still painted yellow, but with its original identification replaced by black letters readin SILENT SISTERHOOD OF ST. FILUMENA, it was driven by a large round-faced nun and contained a whole bunch more. Traditional nuns, Mologna was happy to see, still in the old black-and-white habit, several luggin satchels undoubtedly filled with their sheet music. Strugglin again out of his car, Mologna signaled a nearby patrolman and gave him orders to escort the nuns to their recordin session.

One of the nuns, a wiry little old woman with a look of holy command, came over to beam upon Mologna and show him a driver’s license and a library card both givin her name as Sister Mary Forcible. She seemed too bashful to speak. “Oh, that’s all right, Sister,” Mologna told her, pattin her bony claw. “I couldn’t doubt you for an instant. I’m an old parochial school boy myself, you know.”

Sister Mary Forcible smiled and put her ID away, and off they all went into the buildin, sweet and harmless, about to give the grace of music to a dirty and unhappy world. A lesson to us all, Mologna thought, and went back to his car and his memories of the judo instructor.

48

“Tiny,” Dortmunder said, “think about it. You don’t want to be in jail.”

“I don’t want to be in this nun suit either,” Tiny snarled, and turned to point a threatening finger at Wilbur Howey, warning him, “And one more stupid line from you about getting in the habit, and what you’ll be is black and white and red all over.”

“Say,” Wilbur answered, shying away from that finger, “can’t you take a joke?”

“No.”

Some joke. Sister Mary Forcible, having accepted Dortmunder’s contention that his efforts on Sister Mary Grace’s behalf did make it legitimate to call upon the convent for help, had gathered together fifteen of her fellow nuns and uptown they’d come, bringing a bunch of spare habits in large and extra-large, as well as a cassette of an a cappella recording of the Vienna Boys’ Choir singing Christmas favorites: “The Little Drummer Boy,” “Agnus Dei,” “Silver Bells.” This tape was now cued up in the cassette player atop the piano in the suite’s back room. The nuns were crowded everywhere in both rooms, some of them seated all unknowing on cartons of Scandinavian Marriage Secrets, every copy of which had been carefully stashed out of sight before their arrival. Sheet music that had been sent to Super Star Music by hopeful amateurs wanting the addition of lyrics had been distributed to everyone as props for the alleged recording session, and those of the nuns who could read music were studying these submissions with great dubiousness. And the Dortmunder gang was down in black and white.

Very strange. When nothing shows but your face, enclosed by the white oval of a wimple and the featureless black of a nun’s costume, you wouldn’t expect much by way of individual character to show through, but it did, it did. Sister Mary Grace, for instance, back in her own chosen garb, looked completed and radiant, while Tiny, whose face mostly consisted of knuckles anyway, was barely plausible as the kind of false nun who, in the Middle Ages, poisoned and robbed unwary travelers. Stan Murch looked like a pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales, probably the one with ideas for alternate routes to Canterbury, and Wilbur Howey had the look of someone whose parents had turned her over to the nunnery fifty years ago because she was a little too dangerously peculiar for life in the outside world. Kelp was surely someone whose sister was the pretty one, while Dortmunder looked mostly like a missionary nun who was already among the cannibals and headhunters before realizing she’d lost her faith.

But whatever they looked like, and however they felt about it, this was their only chance and every one of them knew it. They’d all shaved in the men’s room down the hall, and fortunately none of them were wearing high heels. And now all they had to do was wait for the sweep to go by. In the meantime, J.C. had trained Dortmunder in the use of the cassette player and had explained to the nuns, both real and make-believe, how to look like a chorus. The three small microphones which were all she had here had been placed prominently around the front room. And Andy Kelp stood in the open hall doorway, looking away to the right toward the elevators, waiting for the red down-pointing arrow to light, announcing that the sweep had finally reached the seventh floor.

For over an hour they’d been ready to give their performance. How long could it take a squad of cops to search an empty building, even one seventy-six stories high? Dortmunder didn’t want his people overtrained and careless when the moment finally came.

He hadn’t mentioned robbery in his phone conversation with the convent, feeling it was better to let sleeping moral issues lie. After all, he wasn’t asking the nuns to participate in any burglaries or to help move or stash the loot. He had gone at their request to rescue their stolen Sister, he had done so with the help of these other people here, and now the Silent Sisterhood was merely being asked to rescue the rescuers. Simple. Clean. Virtually honest.

“Here they come!” Kelp hissed this announcement, looking excitedly back at the room, and there was a great rustling of skirts as everybody reacted. “Any second,” Kelp said, still looking out and down the hallway, “any second now.”

“Then close the goddamn door!” Dortmunder told him. “The door, I mean. Close the door.”

So Kelp closed the door, on the outside of which was taped a hand-written notice: QUIET — DO NOT ENTER OR KNOCK — RECORDING SESSION IN PROGRESS. Lifting his skirts with both hands, Kelp scurried across the room to his place. Dortmunder, in the back room, hit the play button on the cassette player, and the clear sweet tones of the boys’ choir filled both rooms with Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” The nuns and pseudo-nuns held their sheet music up near their faces — very near their faces, in some instances — and, as J.C. had rehearsed them, they lip-synced along with the tape. And the police, as Dortmunder had anticipated, ignored the sign on the door and the sound of singing from within and pounded on the glass for entry.

As Dortmunder peeked around the edge of the inner room doorway, keeping one hand on the cassette player while he watched, J.C. crossed the room, put an angry expression on her face, opened the door just far enough for the law to see all those singing nuns behind her, and whispered the prepared line: “Sssshhh! Can’t you read?”

Dortmunder counted four cops. They looked tired, sweaty, dusty. They had started on the seventy-sixth floor and this was the seventh, and they hadn’t found a goddamn thing. By now, they surely didn’t really expect to find anything, but they and the other squads in the sweep had to go through the motions anyway, and had to go through them thoroughly, just in case. Dortmunder could see it all in their faces, even from back here, and could see the one cop wearily nod and say something quietly to J.C, no doubt apologizing, no doubt explaining he was only doing his job, no doubt insisting he had no choice but to interrupt the recording session for just a minute or two.

The boys’ choir was coming near the end of the pre-arranged line. Dortmunder’s fingertip, touching the stop button, had started to sweat. How could a fingertip sweat? What if he missed when the instant came, and his finger slid off, and everybody out there stopped mouthing words while the goddamn boys’ choir went right on singing? If it weren’t for that goddamn vow of silence, they wouldn’t all have to go through this rigmarole, they could just—

“Then we might as well stop,” J.C. said loudly, sounding very irritated. She turned and made a down-chopping arm movement, and Dortmunder closed his eyes and pushed. Everything stopped. He opened his eyes, and the nuns were all shuffling around, looking at one another, rattling their sheet music, avoiding direct eye contact with the cops. Dortmunder slipped through the doorway and joined them as the cops walked in, their leader saying, “Yes, ma’am, we heard all about you people from Chief Inspector Mologna.”

Mologna! Dortmunder almost jumped out of his habit at the name. He’d had a run-in with Chief Inspector Mologna himself awhile ago and had barely got out of it with a whole skin. He, John Dortmunder, was in a way kind of sorta almost responsible for some public trouble that had come to Chief Inspector Mologna around that time. As though Mologna were right there in the room with him now — awful thought — Dortmunder could hear the man’s voice, threatening him that time on the telephone: “When I get my hands on you, you’ll fall downstairs for a month.”

Ugh.

Meantime, the leader of this squad of cops was still talking to J.C, saying, “We do got to take a quick look through here, just in case there’s somebody hiding in the place and you don’t even know about it.”

“In here?” J.C. said scornfully, waving a hand to indicate the small, cramped, crowded quarters.

“We’ll be very quick, ma’am,” the cop promised.

This was the tough part, standing here amid the nuns, hoping their presence would keep the cops from believing they had to search inside every box and carton and drawer for loot from the burglaries. Tiny and Stan had both argued that they should leave before the sweep reached this floor, do a quick make-believe recording session and then slide out of the building with the legitimate nuns, but that would leave the loot still in these offices, and if this space were empty the cops would have no reason to hurry and be sloppy and take things for granted.

Still, this was the tough part, and Dortmunder was glad the cops were buying the whole nun-chorus story. They said they’d be quick in their search, and as it turned out they were. While the other three stood just inside the door, looking around, one of them, eyes modestly down, tugging respectfully at the bill of his uniform cap, worked his way through the nuns to the door to the inner room, looked around in there, re-emerged, and told his friends, “Nobody. You couldn’t hide a peanut in here.”

“Okay, fine,” the leader said, and gave J.C. a kind of half salute, touching his cap. “I’m sorry about the interruption, ma’am,” he said. “Hope you get a number-one hit here.”

“Thank you,” J.C. said, though coldly.

The cops filed back out again, but then the leader stopped and looked back at the nuns — Dortmunder shrunk down inside himself, so that the only thing left in the outer world was his nose — and then at J.C. He said, “One thing.”

The tension in the room could have provided electric power for Cleveland for a week. J.C. said, “Yes?”

“You gonna do a video?”

“Well, uhh...” J.C. dithered, then shrugged and said, “We’re, uh, thinking about it.”

“That’s what you gotta do these days,” the cop told her. “If you want to reach the kids, you know? You gotta do a video.”

“Good idea,” J.C. said.

“Good luck,” the cop said, and went out, and closed the door.

The sigh that went up from all the assembled nuns was almost audible; on the very edge of a vow-breaker. But framed within their wimples, all those faces were flushed and sparkling and having fun; this was a lot different from the usual Sunday down at the convent.

Dortmunder hurried back to the inner room and pushed play and the boys’ choir took up again where they’d been so rudely interrupted. And Tiny said, “Video. I’d like a video of that clown, falling out an airplane.”

Sister Mary Forcible was near Tiny. She tapped his forearm, and when he looked down at her she smiled at him and shook her finger disapprovingly, then quickly took a pen out of her habit and scrawled a couple of words on the back of her sheet music. She showed this note to Tiny.

He studied it, then spoke slowly: “Christian cha-rit-y.” He nodded, leaning over the nun like a landslide about to happen. “I tell you what, Sister,” he rumbled, “he should fall out an airplane over water, okay? Warm, soft water, so he could land in it.” They smiled at each other and Tiny turned away, heading for the inner room. Passing Dortmunder, he muttered, “Shark-infested water.”

49

Displayin himself in the main front entrance to the Avalon State Bank Tower while TV lights enhanced the wanin rays of the late afternoon sun and TV cameras recorded every immortal moment, Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna listened to the depressin news from his boys in blue. The sweep had swept through, right on down the buildin from top to bottom, and had produced nothin.

Well, not entirely nothin. An illegal horse parlor had been exposed on thirty-seven and a Virgin Islands pro-independence terrorist group’s bomb factory had been turned up on nine and two prison escapees from Massachusetts, the professional arsonist Matlock twins, had been found livin in a chiropodist’s office on fifty-two, but none of the valuables stolen from the importers on twenty-six had been located. Also, a surprisin amount of sexual hanky-panky between people married to people other than the people they were hanky-pankyin with had been discovered, but no more mercenary soldiers had appeared, nor had any burglars. The men who had done the sweep had made their reports to their immediate commanders, and these three commanders, bein two lieutenants and a captain, were now passin the reports on to the chief inspector, leanin too close to be sure they got into the TV pictures.

“So it looks,” Mologna growled, leanin back away from his subordinates, “as though we got all the meres there were.”

“Looks that way, Chief Inspector,” said a lieutenant, talkin to a spot about a foot and a half to Mologna’s right so the camera could catch his profile. “There isn’t anybody in there now except the legitimate people signed in at the record book in the lobby.”

“Except for the Matlock twins,” said the other lieutenant, whose team had made that discovery.

“Except for them,” the first lieutenant agreed, leanin to his left to block the other lieutenant from the cameras.

“And it also looks,” Mologna went on, “as though whoever else was in on this ruckus, they took the rest of the stuff out that private elevator into the garden over there and made good their getaway before we arrived on the scene.”

It was too bad, damnit. If the men under Mologna’s command — even the spurious command of a display inspector — had come up with the rest of that loot or whoever had actually masterminded the burglary, it would have gone a long way toward rehabilitatin Mologna back toward the top cop status that was rightfully his. Somewhere, he knew, there was somebody who’d put this whole plan together, somebody who knew just what the hell had been goin on here in this tower, and what a feather in Mologna’s cap it would have been if he could have got his hands on that someone. I’d squeeze him till he sang “Dixie,” Mologna thought.

But it was not to be.

The captain said, “Chief Inspector, I wouldn’t be surprised if whoever made the telephone tip that brought us here was another member of the gang. A falling out among thieves, you know.”

“The same idea had occurred to me,” Mologna lied, noddin thoughtfully. That would be the ringleader, for sure, the one Mologna would love to have a little conversation with.

The first lieutenant said, “Chief Inspector, Building Security wants to know if they can take charge of the place. Are we finished here?”

The mastermind is long gone, probably out of the city entirely by now. Mologna said, “There’s nothin left to— Wait, hold on. Move out of the way there.”

They all moved to the side, away from the doorway, and out came the singin nuns, blinkin into the TV lights. Poor unworldly creatures, they seemed startled by all the attention. “Here, you fellas,” Mologna called to the TV crews, “let these little ladies pass. Get them lights and cameras out of their faces. They’re not used to all this carryin on. You,” he told the obnoxious lieutenant with the profile, “escort these ladies to their bus.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant complained, and moved away with the nuns, some of whom weren’t such little ladies at all. Well, the pretty ones didn’t go into a convent, did they? Except sometimes they did.

Mologna caught sight of Sister Mary Forcible, the head nun who’d identified herself on the way in. “Sister Mary,” he said, gesturin to her, “you want some free publicity for that record of yours?”

Stage fright kept the little nun silent, with a glassy and terrified grin. Then Mrs. Taylor came along, smilin, self-confident, sayin, “Chief Inspector, that’s so nice of you, but the Sisters are silent except when they’re singing. But you get us some publicity when the record comes out, and we’ll remember you in our prayers.” She laughed, liltinly, very like that judo instructor of yore, and turned to Sister Mary Forcible, sayin, “Won’t we, Sister?”

The nun nodded, spastically. She was still scared, poor thing, confused by the lights and the cameras and the big burly policemen all over the place. A big difference from all them drugged-out rock groups, Mologna thought, and said, “You go on along, Sister Mary,” and watched beamin as Sister Mary and Mrs. Taylor — I’ll remember you in my prayers, Mrs. Taylor — hurried across the sidewalk to join her friends in the bus. Turnin back to his team, displayin for the TV cameras both the forcefulness and the loneliness of command, Mologna said, “Well, boys, we ain’t doin shit here, we might as well just—”

Bang! That was a hell of a big crack, like a rifle shot, and policemen and buildin security people all over the place quickly crouched down and reached fast for their sidearms. Mologna looked at them all, looked at the thick belch of dirty gray smoke comin out of the nuns’ bus’s tailpipe, and laughed at them all. “That was a backfire, boys,” he called. “Take it easy.” Shakin his head, he displayed the amused calm of command. “Scared of a bunch of nuns,” he said.

50

(letter from Elaine Ritter to Rafael Avilez, Guerrera Popular Independence Party, c/o United Nations, NY — hand-delivered)

(letter from May Walker, calling herself May Dortmunder, to Otto Chepkoff, Tiptop A-1 Choice Foods, 273-14 Scunge Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11666)

(letter from Sister Mary Grace to John Dortmunder, sent via one of the convenience addresses)

51

Dortmunder came up out of the water onto the thinly populated beach. In a swimsuit, he looked like something in anatomy class. He paused, gave the green Caribbean a look, and walked across the white sand of Aruba to where May reclined with a copy of Newsweek on a beach towel featuring a large picture of Betty Boop. Dortmunder dropped, as though a sniper had got him, onto the other towel (Elmer Fudd, with a shotgun), and just lay there awhile, facedown, cheek on the warm cloth, eyes studying individual grains of sand.

“Hmmmm,” said May.

Dortmunder noticed that each grain of sand was alike. The sun on his shoulder blades was like honey. Some distance away, people were laughing, their voices muffled by the sun and the gentle rush of the sea.

“Guerrera,” said May.

Dortmunder’s eyelids grew heavy.

“You don’t want to burn,” May said.

This was true. Dortmunder rolled over and sat up. Now the whole world looked green, so he put on dark sunglasses, which made him look like a person with a horse he wanted to tell you about.

“This country Guerrera,” May said, “it’s in the Newsweek here.”

“This is Aruba,” Dortmunder said.

“Guerrera’s the country where Sister Mary Grace made the contribution for the revolution,” May reminded him.

“Contribution,” Dortmunder said. “Huh.” Two months, and that still rankled a little.

“Well, they had their revolution,” May said.

“Good for them.”

“‘General Anastasio Pozos, from his well-guarded estate near Miami,’” May read from the magazine, “‘assured loyal Guerrerans that he would soon return to oust the Communist-inspired revolutionaries.’”

“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said.

“‘The United States has recognized the new government in Guerrera. A State Department spokesperson today—’ I guess that would be Tuesday, or Monday, or some time. Anyway, ‘—spokesman today said the United States was hopeful of a new era of stability in the region.’ So that’s nice.”

“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said.

“It’s nice to know the money went in a good cause.”

“I’m a good cause,” Dortmunder said.

“John, we did very well out of that experience,” May told him, and gestured widely with the magazine. “Look at the vacation we’re taking. And there’s still thousands and thousands of dollars left. Years of taking it easy. John, do you know what we have?”

“Sunburn?”

“Leisure time! Sociologists all say it is extremely important to have leisure time, to expand ourselves. When we get back to the city, we can go to museums, theaters, gallery openings, we can get caught up on our reading...”

“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said.

May cast a suspicious glance at Dortmunder, but couldn’t read his face because of those big dark sunglasses. “John,” she said, “you won’t be going out to the track, will you?”

“Maybe once,” Dortmunder said. “Maybe twice.”

May considered delivering a lecture, then calculated its probable effect, then decided not to. She said, “It’s almost lunchtime, isn’t it?”

“Just a second,” Dortmunder said, and bent down and cocked his ear to listen to his stomach. It obligingly made a small gurgle sound. “Yes,” he said.

“I like that lobster tail,” May said. “I know I have it every day, but I like it. What about you?”

Dortmunder lay back on Elmer Fudd, with his hands under his head. Through the dark glasses he looked at the blue sky. The lines of his face shifted themselves around, making accommodation for a smile. “I think I’ll have caviar,” he said.