Nobody's Perfect

Chapter 1

Leonard Blick had been a member of the New York bench for twelve years, seven months and nine days, and the last time he'd been surprised by any occurrence in his court had been some twelve years, seventh months and three days ago, when a prostitute had dropped her pants in front of him in an effort to prove she couldn't have solicited the undercover police officer since it was the wrong time of the month. Having gaveled that enterprising young woman into her clothing and out of his courtroom, Judge Blick had settled down to year after year of ordinary drunks, thieves, wife beaters, non-supportive ex-husbands, traffic-ticket scofflaws and Army deserters, with nothing ever to attract his attention. A few murderers had come before him for their preliminary hearings, but they'd been of no interest; they were the sort of murderer who pulls a knife in the middle of a barroom argument. It was all so dull, so drab, so tediously predictable, that more than once Judge Blick had said to his wife Blanche, in their pleasant airy home in Riverdale, "If I ever get an interesting crook in front of me, I'll let the son of a bitch go." But it had never happened, and of course it never would.

"Thirty dollars or thirty days," he announced to a defendant of such low quality that the fellow actually started adding things up on his fingers. "Next case."

"Bail to be set at five hundred dollars. Remand in the custody of–"

"License suspended for ninety days."

"–to be enjoined from communication of any kind with the said ex-wife–"

"Bail to be set at four thousand dollars. Remand in the custody of–"

"–to be turned over to the military authorities at–"

"Bail to be set at seven hundred fifty dollars. Remand–"

"Bail to be set at forty-seven dollars." (Complaint from the public defender.) "You're quite right, Counselor, I wasn't thinking. Bail to be set at eight hundred dollars. Next case."

The next case, according to the papers on Judge Blick's desk, was a grand larceny. Not very grand; the fellow had been caught stealing television sets from a repair shop. John Archibald Dortmunder, unemployed, forty years of age, two convictions and prison terms for robbery, no other convictions, no known source of income, being represented by an attorney appointed by the court. A loser, obviously. Another dull fellow, another dull crime, another dull two and a half minutes in the judicial career of the Honorable Leonard Blick.

A stir in the courtroom, as of a sudden breeze across a cornfield, caused Judge Blick to look up from his papers at the two men approaching the bench. It was clear which was the defendant; that thin glum-looking fellow in the gray suit with the lumpy shoulders. But who was that striding next to him, causing shock waves of astounded recognition among the pews of drunks and whores and lawyers? Judge Blick frowned once more at the papers before him. "Attorney: Willard Beecom." He looked up again, and that was no Willard Beecom advancing on the bench, that was–

J. Radcliffe Stonewiler! By God, it really was! One of the most famous lawyers in the country, a man whose nose for the glamorous, the wealthy and the powerful was only matched by his instinct for publicity. If an enraged actress smashed a paparazzo on the head with his own camera, it was J. Radcliffe Stonewiler who defended her from the charge of assault. If a rock group was found smuggling heroin into the country, J. Radcliffe Stonewiler was certain to be there for the defense. And who would defend an Arab oil minister from a paternity suit lodged in a Los Angeles court? Who else but J. Radcliffe Stonewiler.

So what in Blackstone's name was the man doing here?

For the first time in his judicial career, Judge Blick was hornswoggled.

And so was almost everybody else in court. The spectators murmured to one another like a crowd scene in a Cecil B. DeMille movie. Never had Judge Blick's court seen such excitement, not even when that hooker dropped her drawers. About the only person not impressed by it all – except the defendant himself, who simply stood there like a ragman's horse, gloomy and fatalistic – was Judge Blick's bailiff, who arose and read out the charge in his usual sloppy-dictioned way, at the finish requesting the defendant's plea.

It was Stonewiler who answered, in a large, round, confident voice, announcing, "Not guilty."

Not guilty? Not guilty? Judge Blick stared. What an idea! The concept of somebody entering his courtroom who was not guilty was so startling as to verge on the physically impossible. Judge Blick frowned at the defendant – who was guilty as hell, you could tell it by looking at the man – and repeated, "Not guilty?"

"Completely not guilty, Your Honor," Stonewiler declared. "It is my hope," he continued, declaiming as though for multitudes, "to prevent, with Your Honor's assistance, a tragic miscarriage of justice."

"With my assistance eh?" Judge Blick narrowed his beady eyes. No funny business in my courtroom, he told himself, and said to the bailiff, "Is the arresting officer here?"

"Yes, Your Honor. Officer Fahey! Officer Fahey!"

Officer Fahey, a huge beefy Irishman in dark blue, came confidently forward, was sworn, and told a simple story. He had been on radio-car patrol with his partner, Officer Flynn, and they had started a routine check of an alley behind a row of stores when they saw the defendant – "That fella right there" – emerging from a doorway with a pair of TV sets in his hands. The fella had frozen in their lights, they had stepped out of the car to investigate, and they had found approximately thirty other TVs and similar appliances stacked just inside the door, apparently for easy removal to the defendant's automobile, parked nearby. The defendant had made no statement, and had been arrested, advised of his rights, brought to the precinct and booked.

Judge Blick listened to this tale with the soothing calm of long familiarity. How nicely policemen testified! Thud thud thud came the facts, each word following inexorably like the brogans of a cop walking his beat. Judge Blick nearly smiled as he listened to it, this gentle lullaby, and at the end said, "That seems very straightforward, Officer."

"Thank you, Your Honor."

Judge Blick turned a suspicious eye on defendant's counsel. "Does Counsel wish to cross-examine?"

J. Radcliffe Stonewiler, smiling and at his ease, bowed his gracious thanks. "If Your Honor pleases, I would reserve the right to question the officer a bit later. Not that I have any argument with his presentation of what he himself observed. I consider that an excellent recital of the facts, and I would like to congratulate Officer Fahey on the clarity and precision of his testimony. Perhaps a bit later we could clear up one or two minor points together, but for now I would like my client sworn, and with Your Honor's permission I would ask him to tell his story."

"Certainly, Counselor," Judge Blick replied and the defendant was duly sworn and seated, and proceeded to tell the following absurd story:

"My name is John Archibald Dortmunder, and I reside by myself at 217 East 19th Street. In my past life I led a life of crime, but after my second fall, when I was on parole, I gave all that up and became a square citizen. I got out the last time three years ago, and while I was on the inside everything changed in the movies. When I went inside, there were two kinds of movies, one kind that you went to a movie and you saw it and one kind that you went to a smoker or some guy's garage and you saw it, and it was people, uh, men and women. But when I got out, there weren't any more smokers, and that kind of movie was in the regular movie houses. I never saw one of them in a movie house, and I was curious about it, so last night I went to a different neighborhood where nobody knew me, and I parked my car in an alley so nobody would recognize it, and I went to look at a movie called Sex Sorority."

(At this point, defendant's counsel interrupted to enter into evidence the movie theater's schedule showing that the final performance of Sex Sorority last night had finished at 12:12, just five minutes before the 12:17 given on the arrest report as the time of the defendant's apprehension. Counsel also offered to have defendant recapitulate the story line and incidents of Sex Sorority to demonstrate that he had actually seen the film, but the bench felt that was unnecessary, and the defendant was instructed to go on with his ludicrous invention.)

"Well, Your Honor, when I got out from seeing Sex Sorority, I went back around to the alley where I left my car, and I saw these two guys with a car doing something at the back door of one of the stores there, and I shouted at them, like this: 'Hey!' And they looked at me, and jumped in their car and took off. So I went down to where I saw them, and it was the back door of this repair place, and they left two TV sets outside in the alley. So I figured, somebody's gonna steal these things if they stay out here, so I picked them up to put back inside the store when the officers came by and arrested me."

Judge Blick gazed with something like disappointment at the defendant, and said, "That's your story? That's it?"

"Yes, it is, Your Honor." But he himself didn't look all that happy with it.

Judge Blick sighed. "Very well," he said. "And would you mind explaining to the court why you didn't tell this very interesting story of yours to the police officers when they apprehended you?"

"Well, Your Honor," Dortmunder said, "like I mentioned before, I used to live a life of crime, and I'm a fellow with a record and all, and I could see the way it must of looked to the police officers, so I just didn't see any point in trying to convince them of anything. I thought I ought to just not say anything, and wait till I had a chance to tell my story to the judge."

"To me, in fact."

"Yes, Your Honor."

Judge Blick turned his attention to J. Radcliffe Stonewiler, saying, almost plaintively, "Is that it? That's what you're here for?"

"Essentially, Your Honor." Stonewiler didn't seem at all abashed. "I'm finished with Mr. Dortmunder," he went on, "and if Your Honor pleases, I would like now to cross-examine Officer Fahey."

The bench so ordered, and while the defendant slunk away to his seat – guilty as all hell, just look at him – Officer Fahey retook the stand, and Stonewiler approached him, smiling, saying, "Officer, I realize we're taking up your free time here, and I'll try to be as brief as possible."

Officer Fahey's heavy-jowled red face was impassive as he glowered at Stonewiler. He could clearly be seen thinking to himself, You won't get around me with your shenanigans. You'll not pull the wool over my eyes.

Stonewiler, undaunted, went on: "Officer, may I just ask you to describe the defendant as he was in the instant when you first saw him?"

"He was coming out the door," Officer Fahey said, "with a TV set in each hand."

"Coming out? Directly into your oncoming headlights?"

"He stopped when he saw us."

"And had he already stopped when you first caught sight of him?"

"He froze there. But he was coming out."

"Before you saw him."

"He was facing out," Officer Fahey announced in some irritation. "He was coming out because he was facing out."

"But he wasn't in motion when you first saw him, Officer, is that right? I just want to have this absolutely clear. Whether he was entering or leaving the store, he had already frozen in place when you first saw him."

"Facing out."

"But frozen."

"Yes, frozen. Facing out."

"Thank you, Officer." Turning to the bench, Stonewiler said, "With Your Honor's permission, I would like to try a small experiment."

Judge Blick frowned on him. "Getting fancy, Counselor?"

"Not at all fancy, Your Honor. Very plain indeed. May I?"

"Proceed, Counselor," Judge Blick said, "but watch your step."

"Thank you, Your Honor."

Stonewiler turned and walked to a side door, which the judge knew led to a small waiting room. Opening that door, Stonewiler gestured to someone inside, and two men appeared, each carrying a television set. They placed these on the floor a few steps into the room, then turned and departed again, leaving the door open behind them. The door, however, was on a spring, and slowly it closed itself, until Stonewiler stopped it with his palm just before it would snick shut. The door remained open half an inch, and Stonewiler returned to the bench to smile impartially upon Officer Fahey and Judge Blick, and to say, "With the court's permission, I would like to ask Officer Fahey's cooperation. Officer?"

Officer Fahey glanced uncertainly at Judge Blick, but the judge was still faintly hoping for something interesting to happen, so all he said was, "It's up to you, Officer. You may assist Counsel if you want."

The officer brooded at Stonewiler, mistrust oozing from every pore. "What am I supposed to do?"

Stonewiler pointed. "Merely pick up those two television sets," he said, "and return them to the other room."

The officer's brow furrowed. "What's the point?"

"Perhaps there is none," Stonewiler acknowledged, with a sudden humble smile. "We won't know till we've tried."

The officer frowned once more at Judge Blick, then at the television sets, and then at the door. He appeared indecisive. Then he looked at the defendant, Dortmunder, slumping hopelessly in his chair, and a sudden confident smile touched his lips. "Fine," he said. "Right."

"Thank you, Officer." Stonewiler stepped back as Officer Fahey rose and crossed the court to the television sets. Picking them up by their handles, and pretending the combined weight didn't bother him, he approached the door. He hesitated, facing the door, his hands full of TV sets. He put one of the sets down, pushed on the door, and it swung open. He picked the set up again, and the door swung closed. Quickly, before it could slam, Officer Fahey turned about and bunked the door with his behind.

"Freeze!" boomed J. Radcliffe Stonewiler, pointing his long manicured finger at Officer Fahey, who obediently froze, a TV set in each hand, his behind stuck out behind him. The door swung open, hesitated, and swung back, lightly spanking Officer Fahey on the bum.

Stonewiler, his pointing finger still calling attention to the frozen Officer Fahey, turned toward Judge Blick. "Your Honor," he cried, in a voice similar to that which Moses heard from the burning bush, "I leave it to the Court. Is that man going out, or coming in?"

Chapter 2

May said, "And the judge believed it?"

Dortmunder shook his head, in slow bewilderment. The whole thing was still too baffling to think about.

May watched him shake his head, and shook her own, frowning, not sure she understood. "The judge didn't believe it," she suggested.

"I don't know what the judge believed," Dortmunder told her. "All I know for sure is, I figure I'm home about six years early."

"What you need is a beer," May decided, and went away to the kitchen to get one.

Dortmunder settled back into his easy chair, kicking off his shoes, relaxing in the scruffy familiarity of his own living room. This was not the address he'd given in court, nor did he live here alone – it was Dortmunder's policy never to tell authority the truth when a lie would do – but it was his home, his castle, his refuge from the buffets and abrasions of the world, and no way had he expected to finish his day in it, shoes off, feet up on the old maroon hassock, watching May carry a can of beer back from the kitchen. "Home sweet home," he said.

"Got a match?" She had a fresh cigarette flopping in the corner of her mouth.

He traded her a book of matches for the beer can, and swigged while she lit. May was a chain-smoker, but she never gave up on a cigarette until the stub was too small to hold, so she could never light the next cigarette from the last, and as a result the Dortmunder-May household was always in a match crisis. Dortmunder was the only burglar in the world who, having finished rifling some company's cash register or safe, would pause to fill his pockets with their promotional match-books.

May settled herself in the other easy chair, adjusted the ashtray to her left hand, puffed, enveloped her head in a cloud of smoke, leaned forward out of the smoke, and said, "Tell me all about it."

"It's crazy," he told her. "It makes no sense."

"Tell me anyway."

"This lawyer came by–"

"J. Radcliffe Stonewiler."

Dortmunder frowned, thinking it over. "I've seen him in the papers or something."

"He's famous!"

"Yeah, I figured. Anyway, he walked in, he threw this court-appointed jerk out on his ear, and he said, 'Okay, Mr. Dortmunder, we got about an hour and a half to cook up a story."

"And what did you say?"

"I said he could cook for a year and a half and it didn't matter what story he came up with, because what was cooked was my goose."

"Didn't you know who he was?"

"I could see he was some rich-type lawyer," Dortmunder admitted. "For a while, I figured he was in the wrong cubicle. I kept telling him, 'Look, my name's Dortmunder, I'm up for B&E.' And he kept saying, 'Tell me all about it.' So finally I told him all about it. The cops had me cold, and I told him so, and he nodded and said, 'That's okay. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.' And I said, 'Yeah, and I know where I'm going, and it's upstate.'"

"That wasn't any way to talk to J. Radcliffe Stonewiler."

"I wasn't feeling cheerful."

"Naturally," May agreed. "So what happened?"

"This Stonewiler," Dortmunder said, "he kept me going over and over the details of what happened, and then he went away to make a phone call, and when he came back he had a skinny little guy with him called George."

"Who's George?"

"Stonewiler said, 'Here's my movie expert. Tell him the story, George.' And George told me the whole story of this movie, Sex Sorority, so I could tell it to the judge in case I was asked. Only I don't think it's legal to even tell a story like that in court. Do they really make movies where a girl takes her–"

"Never mind movies," May said. "What happened next? Where does this door business come into it?"

"It was Stonewiler's whole idea, completely. He even wrote my story down for me, and then made me write it myself, copying from him, so I'd remember it. Not word for word, but so I could tell it smooth and easy when I got to court. I didn't believe in it, you know, because he didn't tell me the part where he was gonna make a monkey out of the cop. He just gave me this song-and-dance about carrying TV sets in instead of out – I mean, you couldn't get away with that one in Sunday school. I kept saying, 'Why don't we make a deal? Why don't we trade them a guilty plea for a lesser charge?' And Stonewiler kept saying, 'Trust me.'"

"So you trusted him."

"Not exactly," Dortmunder said. "I thought he was crazy, but on the other hand he looked rich and he acted sure of himself, and what the hell did I have to lose anyway? So finally I said, 'All right, I'll do it. Things can't get worse.' And I did it, and the judge looked at me like he figured maybe it was time to bring back some cruel and unusual punishments, and then Stonewiler did his little number with the cop and the door, and all of a sudden you could see the judge wanted to laugh. He looked at the cop, with his ass stuck out behind him and the TV sets hanging off his hands, and he rubbed his hand over his mouth like this, and he went, 'Rrrumph rrrumph,' and then he said something like, 'Counselor, you have created reasonable doubt, though I still have reason to doubt you. Case dismissed.' And I come home."

May's expression, around the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, combined equal portions of wonder and delight. "What a defense," she said. "Not every lawyer in the world could have pulled it off."

"I'll have to go along with that," Dortmunder admitted.

"But why? Why'd he do it?"

"I don't know."

"What's this gonna cost?"

"I don't know," Dortmunder said. "He didn't say."

"Didn't he say anything at all?"

Dortmunder took an embossed business card from his breast pocket. "At the end there, after he shook my hand, he gave me this, he told me call this guy." Dortmunder frowned at the card, reading off the name as though the sound of the syllables would give him a clue to what was going on: "Arnold Chauncey. What kind of a name is that?"

"Arnold Chauncey." It sounded just as mysterious when May said it. Shaking her head, she asked, "Who's he supposed to be?"

"I don't know. Stonewiler gave me the card, told me to call, said good luck, and went away."

"When are you supposed to call?"

"Today."

"Why don't you do it now?"

"I don't want to," Dortmunder said.

May frowned. "Why not?"

"People don't do people favors just for the fun of it," Dortmunder said. "This guy Chauncey, he wants something."

"So?"

"The whole thing makes me nervous," Dortmunder said. "I'm not gonna call."

"But you've got to–"

"I don't want to," Dortmunder said, and set his jaw. Nobody could be quite as mulish as Dortmunder, when he put his mind to it.

"You took the man's assis–" May started to say, and the phone rang. She snapped it a quick irritated glance, then got up and crossed the room and answered on the second ring. Dortmunder lapped up some more beer, and then May told the phone, "Hold on," and turned to say, "It's for you."

Dortmunder hunched his shoulders, and pushed himself lower in his chair. He wasn't in the mood to talk to anybody on the telephone. He said, "Who is it?"

"J. Radcliffe Stonewiler."

"Oh," said Dortmunder. He hadn't given Stonewiler his phone number or his right home address. "So it's like that," he said, and got to his feet, and went over to take the phone, saying into it, "Stonewiler?"

But it was an English-accented female voice that answered, snippily, saying, "Hold on for Mister Stonewiler, please." And there was a click.

Dortmunder said into the phone, "Hello?" When there was no answer, he frowned at May, saying, "Who's that?"

May, elaborately whispering, told him, "His sec-re-ter-ry."

"Oh," Dortmunder said, and the phone said hello to him with Stonewiler's deep confident voice. "Yeah," Dortmunder answered. "Hello."

"I just spoke with Mr. Chauncey," Stonewiler said. He sounded cheerful, but in charge. "He says you haven't called yet."

"I been thinking about it," Dortmunder said.

Stonewiler said, "Mr. Dortmunder, why don't you drop by Mr. Chauncey's house now for a chat? It's on East 63rd Street, you could be there in half an hour."

Dortmunder sighed. "I suppose that's what I'll do," he said. "Right."

"The address is on the card."

"Yeah, I saw it."

"Goodbye, Mr. Dortmunder."

"Yeah, goodbye," Dortmunder said, and hung up, and turned a bleak eye toward May, who was back in her chair, watching him through cigarette smoke. "He didn't threaten me," Dortmunder said.

May didn't get it. "I don't get it," she said.

"He could have said, 'I got you off the hook, I can put you back on.' He could have said, 'I got weight I could throw around.' There's lots of things he could have said, and he didn't say any of them."

May continued to frown at him. "So?"

"His not threatening me," Dortmunder said, "was a lot more threatening than if he threatened me."

"What did he want?"

"I'm supposed to go see Chauncey at his house in half an hour."

"You'd better go."

"I don't like this, May."

"Still, you'd better go."

Dortmunder sighed. "Yeah, I know." And he sat down, to put his shoes back on.

May watched him, frowning, thinking her own thoughts, and when he stood up to leave she said, "One thing."

Dortmunder looked at her. "What?"

"That business about backing out a door if you're carrying things in both hands. That is true, people do that."

"Sure," Dortmunder said. "That's how I got off."

"Then how come you were facing the police car?"

"It was a different kind of door," Dortmunder explained. "It didn't have a spring closer. I just opened it and picked up the TV sets and walked out."

May's frown deepened. "That's all there was to it?"

"They didn't ask about the door," Dortmunder said. "They might have, if we just talked about it straight out, but the way Stonewiler worked things, he had everybody thinking about that cop's ass."

May nodded, thoughtfully. "You better watch your step with those people," she said.

"I figure to," Dortmunder told her.

Chapter 3

The third time Dortmunder walked past the house, in the raw November afternoon, its front door opened and a guy with long yellow hair leaned out, calling, "Mr. Dortmunder?"

Dortmunder broke stride, but didn't quite stop walking. He quick looked across the street, as though he hadn't seen the man or heard what he'd said, but almost immediately gave all that up and stopped and looked back.

The house was one of a row of four-story brownstones on this tree-lined quiet street off Park Avenue; an expensive house, in an expensive neighborhood. The building was fairly wide, with a dozen broad concrete steps leading up to the front door, at the second level. Flowers and ivy and a couple of small evergreen shrubs were in concrete pots in the space to the right of the steps.

It had taken Dortmunder twenty minutes to get here by subway, and he'd spent the last quarter hour casing the joint and thinking things over. The house was anonymous, beyond the obvious indication that its inhabitants must have money, and no matter how long Dortmunder stared at it he still couldn't figure out why anybody who lived in there would strain himself to get John Dortmunder off the hook on a felony charge, and then invite him over for a chat. He'd walked around the block the first time to get the lay of the land, and the second time hoping to find a way to see the rear of the place – there wasn't any – and the third time he'd simply walked as an aid to thought.

And now some tall slender yellow-haired guy in a dark blue pinstripe suit, white shirt and dark blue patterned tie had come out of the house, called him by name, and was standing up there grinning at him.

Dortmunder took his time. Staying where he was on the sidewalk, he studied the guy the way he'd been studying the house, and what he saw wasn't reassuring. The fellow was about forty, deeply tanned and very fit, and everything about him suggested dignified secure wealth; his banker's clothing, his self-confident smile, the house in which he lived. Everything, that is, except the shoulder-length yellow hair, hanging in long waves around his head, neither sloppy nor pretty, but somehow totally masculine. Like a knight in the Crusades. No; better yet, like one of those Viking raiders who used to play such hell along the English coast. Some Viking barbarian, that's what he was, plus all the civilization money could buy.

He was also clearly willing to let Dortmunder look him over forever. He stood there grinning, studying Dortmunder in return, and it was finally Dortmunder who ended it, calling up to him, "You're Chauncey?"

"Arnold Chauncey," the other one agreed. Stepping to one side, he gestured at his open doorway. "Come on up, why don't you?"

So Dortmunder shrugged and nodded and went on up, climbing the steps and preceding Chauncey into the house.

A wide carpeted hallway stretched to an open doorway at the far end, through which could be seen delicate wooden-armed chairs in a bare-floored gleaming room with tall windows. On the left side of the hallway, a staircase with a red runner and dark-wood banister extended upward. White light filtering down suggested a skylight at the top of the stairs. To the right of the hallway were two sets of dark-wood sliding doors, one near and one far, both shut. A few large paintings in heavy frames were on the pale walls, with a number of spindly occasional tables beneath. A hushed, padded quiet pervaded the house.

Chauncey followed Dortmunder inside, shutting the door behind himself and gestured at the staircase, saying, "We'll go up to the sitting room." He had one of those Midlantic accents that Americans think of as English and Englishmen think American. Dortmunder thought he sounded like a phony.

They went up to the sitting room, which turned out to be a living room without a television set, where Chauncey urged Dortmunder into a comfortable velvet-covered wing chair and asked him what he'd like to drink. "Bourbon," Dortmunder told him. "With ice."

"Good," Chauncey said. "I'll join you."

The bar – complete with small refrigerator – was in the cabinetry in the far wall, beneath an expanse of a well filled bookcase. While Chauncey poured, Dortmunder looked at the rest of the room, the Persian rug and the antique-looking tables and chairs, the large ornate lamps, and the paintings on the walls. There were several of these, mostly small, except for one big one – about three feet wide, maybe not quite so high – which showed a medieval scene; a skinny fellow with a round belly, wearing varicolored jester's clothes and a cap and bells, was dancing along a road, playing a small flute. The road led down in darkness to the right. Following the jester along the road were a whole bunch of people, all of them with tense staring faces. They were apparently supposed to represent a great variety of human types: a fat monk, a tall knight in armor, a short fat woman with a market basket, and so on.

Chauncey brought Dortmunder's drink, saying, "You like that picture?"

Dortmunder neither liked nor disliked pictures. "Sure," he said.

"It's a Veenbes," Chauncey said, and he stood beside Dortmunder's chair, smiling thoughtfully at the painting, as though reconsidering its position on the wall, or his attitude toward it, or even the fact of his ownership of the thing. "You've heard of Veenbes?"

"No." The bourbon was delicious, a very smooth brand. Dortmunder hadn't recognized the shape of the bottle when Chauncey was pouring.

"An early Flemish master," Chauncey said. "A contemporary of Brueghel, possibly an influence, nobody's quite sure. This is Folly Leads Man to Ruin." Chauncey sipped bourbon, and chuckled, nodding at the painting. "Woman, too, of course."

"Sure," Dortmunder said.

"The painting has been valued at four hundred thousand dollars," Chauncey said, the way a man might say the weather was good, or that he'd just bought a pair of snow tires.

Dortmunder looked up at Chauncey's profile – tanned face, sharp nose, long yellow hair – and then he frowned again at the painting. Four hundred thousand dollars? For a picture to cover a water stain on the wall? There were parts of life, Dortmunder knew, that he would never understand, and most of those parts of life had something to do with people being cuckoo.

"I want you to steal it," Chauncey said.

Dortmunder looked up again. "Oh, yeah?"

Chauncey laughed, and moved off to seat himself in another chair, putting his glass on the drum table at his right hand. "I don't suppose," he said, "Stonewiler told you my instructions to him."

"No, he didn't."

"Good; he wasn't supposed to." Chauncey glanced at the picture of Folly again, then said, "Three months ago, I told him I wanted a crook." His bright eyes flickered toward Dortmunder's face. "I hope you don't object to that term."

Dortmunder shrugged. "It covers a lot of people."

Chauncey smiled. "Of course. But there was a very specific kind of crook I wanted. A professional thief, not too young, successful at his profession but not wealthy, who had served at least one term in prison, but had never been convicted or even charged with anything other than larceny. No mugging, murder, arson, kidnapping. Only theft. It took three months to find the man I wanted, and he turned out to be you." Chauncey stopped – for dramatic effect, probably – and sipped more bourbon, watching Dortmunder over the rim of his glass.

Dortmunder also sipped bourbon, watching Chauncey over the rim of his glass. They studied one another over the rims of their glasses for a while – Dortmunder was getting a bit cross-eyed – and then Chauncey put his glass back on the drum table, Dortmunder lowered his own glass into his lap, and Chauncey shrugged as though embarrassed, saying, "I need money."

Dortmunder said, "Who owns the painting?"

That surprised Chauncey. "I do, of course."

"That was legit? You want me to steal it?"

"Let me explain," Chauncey said. "I have a rather good collection of art, fifteenth and sixteenth century mostly, here and in my other places, and of course everything is completely insured."

"Ah," Dortmunder said.

Chauncey's smile now had lost that brief touch of embarrassment. "You see the plot already," he said. "Since I truly love paintings, it isn't necessary for me to display my possessions in public. If I arrange to have a painting 'stolen' from me, at some point when I am very short of cash, then I can collect from the insurance company, hang the painting in some private place, and enjoy both the picture and the cash."

"You don't need a thief," Dortmunder told him. "Put the thing away in a closet and say a burglar got in."

"Yes, of course," Chauncey said. "But there are problems."

Again the trace of embarrassment appeared in his smile, but this time Dortmunder could see the embarrassment was tempered by self-satisfaction, self-indulgence. Chauncey was like a boy who's just been caught making an obscene drawing in the school lavatory; he's embarrassed, but he's also pleased with the skill and the cleverness of the drawing.

Dortmunder said, "What problems?"

"I am very extravagant," Chauncey said. "I needn't give you my autobiography, but I inherited money and I'm afraid I never learned to be a good manager. My accountants are usually furious with me."

Dortmunder didn't even have one accountant. "Is that right," he said.

"The fact is," Chauncey said, "I've already done it twice."

"Done it? Faked a theft?"

"Twice," Chauncey said. "The second time, the insurance company made their suspicions very plain, but they didn't really push the matter. However, if I do it a third time, I can see them becoming cross."

"They might," agreed Dortmunder.

"I imagine," Chauncey said, "they would do their level best to prove it was a fake theft."

"They might."

"So it has to be a real theft," Chauncey said. "Professional thieves actually do have to break into the house and steal the painting."

"While you're out of town."

"Good Lord, no." Chauncey shook his head, and then laughed again, saying, "That's the worst thing I could do."

Dortmunder drank bourbon. "So what's your idea?"

"I will give a dinner party," Chauncey said. "In this house. I will have two couples staying with me at the time, in rooms on the top floor. Very well-to-do people. There should be a lot of valuables in their rooms while they are down to dinner. Because my house guests, and the other guests invited for the dinner, will all be wealthy people, most of the women wearing jewelry and so on, I will have hired private guards for the evening. During dinner, with me very much in the house, and with private guards hired by me in the house, thieves will break in from the roof, rifle the guest bedrooms, rifle my own rooms – carefully, please – steal the Veenbes from this room, and make their getaway."

"With private guards in the house," Dortmunder said.

"Whose attention will be on the persons and jewelry of my guests, downstairs." Chauncey shrugged, smiling in a relaxed and self-approving way. "No insurance company in the world could suggest a fake robbery under the circumstances."

"Will your guests be in on it?"

"Of course not. Nor will the guards."

"What do we do with their stuff?"

"Keep it. Returning mine, of course. And giving me back the painting."

"You mean selling you back the painting," Dortmunder said.

Chauncey nodded, his self-satisfied smile now spreading to include Dortmunder; Chauncey thought they were both terrifically witty and clever. "Of course," he said. "You'll want your own profit out of the transaction."

"That's right."

"You'll get to keep whatever items you find in the guest bedrooms, of course," Chauncey said.

"That stuff doesn't matter."

"No, you're perfectly right. Very well; I told you the insurance valuation, and believe me I'm being accurate. The newspapers will carry the story of the theft, and they'll surely give the valuation themselves."

"Four hundred thousand," Dortmunder said.

"I'll give you twenty-five per cent."

"A hundred thousand."

"Yes."

"When?"

"When I collect from the insurance company, of course. If I had a hundred thousand dollars, I wouldn't need to get into an operation like this."

Dortmunder said, "Then you'd get the painting back when you paid us."

Chauncey looked startled. "But – My dear Mr. Dortmunder, I am a respectable citizen, very well established, I have this house, other properties, I'm not going to simply up and disappear. You can trust me for the money."

Dortmunder said, "You're robbing an insurance company. You're inviting your own friends to your house so I can steal their goods. I wouldn't trust you with a ham sandwich in a phone booth for five minutes."

Chauncey burst into loud laughter, apparently genuine. "Oh, my God," he said, "Stonewiler did himself proud! Mr. Dortmunder, we can do business, you and I, we understand one another very well."

"Maybe we can," Dortmunder said.

Chauncey finished his laughing jag, and became suddenly serious, pointing a stern finger at Dortmunder and saying, "Can you hold on to the painting that long? Without damage, without having it stolen from you?"

"How long?"

"In my previous experience, it takes the insurance company about six months to finish its investigation and process the claim."

"Six months? Fine. I'll hold on to the painting six months, then you'll give me the hundred thousand, I'll give you the painting." Dortmunder turned to look at the picture again, visualizing it over the sofa in May's living room. Sure, why not? Look good there.

"I'll have to think about that," Chauncey said. "Table that for the moment. Otherwise, do we have a partnership?"

Dortmunder said, "You want a complete legit theft. That means no inside help, no doors left open, nothing like that."

"Absolutely not," Chauncey said. "I can give you some help ahead of time, let you look the house over-casing the joint, isn't that it? I can show you where the burglar alarm wires are, things like that."

"Burglar alarm?"

"Oh, yes. All the doors and windows are hooked up to an alarm system. Watson Security Services. If a door or window is opened, or a wire is cut, it triggers an alarm in the Watson offices down on 46th Street. They phone the police, and also send a car of their own."

"That's great," Dortmunder said.

"Surely you know how to bypass alarms," Chauncey said.

"To break into a private house? If I was the insurance company, I'd smell a rat."

"No, I don't believe you would," Chauncey said, speaking judiciously, as though he'd considered this point himself at some length. "I'll have a few famous wealthy people here, you know. A princess, an heiress, an oil sheikh and so on. The gossip columns will mention the house party, and the dinner, before they take place. All certainly enough to attract the attention of an enterprising team of burglars."

"If it really does get in the paper," Dortmunder said, "then okay."

"It will, I guarantee. Possibly only 'Suzy Says' in the Daily News, but the public prints nevertheless."

Dortmunder sat back, swirling the remaining bourbon in his glass, thinking it over. In a way it was a crazy deal, stealing a man's goods and then giving them back, but in another way it was just a simple straightforward B&E with inside help; except that in this case the inside help wasn't a disgruntled maid or hungry plumber, it was the mark himself. The burglar alarm wouldn't be that much of a problem, not with Chauncey pointing out where the wires ran, and if the guards did actually stay downstairs they'd be no trouble either. And a hundred thousand dollars, plus whatever jewelry or other valuables were in the guest bedrooms, would come in very handy right now. Dortmunder had been living on May's salary as a cashier down at the Safeway supermarket for so long he was almost forgetting to be embarrassed about it; the time had come to bring some money of his own into the house.

And that painting really would look okay in the living room, for the next six months.

Chauncey said, "Well, what do you think? Can we work together?"

"Maybe," Dortmunder said. "I got to look the house over first, and I got to see what kind of string I can put together."

"String?"

"The people to work with me. This isn't a one-man job."

"No, of course not. Have you ever stolen a painting before?"

"Not a big one like that."

"Then I'll have to show you how it's done," Chauncey said. "It's a delicate operation, really, you don't want to harm the painting in transporting it."

"We'll just carry it away," Dortmunder said.

"Indeed you will not," Chauncey told him. "You'll do a professional job of it. You'll cut the picture out of its frame–"

"We don't take the frame?"

"Certainly not. An art thief uses a razor blade, cuts the painting out of the frame, carefully rolls it into a cylinder, being sure not to crack or break the paint in the process, and finishes with something that can be readily transported and hidden."

"So the frame stays here." Dortmunder looked at the painting again, wondering if Woolworth's had frames that big. Or maybe they could just thumbtack it to the wall.

"I'll show you all that," Chauncey said. "But would you like to see the rest of the house first?"

"And can I freshen your drink?"

Dortmunder looked at his glass. Nothing but an amber echo around the bottom. "Yes," he said.

While Chauncey was pouring more bourbon, Dortmunder walked over to look at the painting closer up, seeing the lumps and streaks of paint on the canvas. That could be a little tricky to carry around.

Chauncey brought the fresh drink, and stood next to him a moment, smiling at the painting, finally saying, "It is good, isn't it?" His tone was fond, almost paternal.

Dortmunder hadn't been looking at the painting at all, just at the paint. "Yeah, it's fine," he said, and turned to frown at Chauncey. "You got to trust me, don't you?"

Raising an eyebrow, Chauncey grinned on one side of his mouth and said, "In what way?"

"That I won't just walk off with this, and not bring it back."

Chauncey smiled broadly, nodding. "That is a consideration, but there are two things that ease my mind. The first is, with a painting as well-known and valuable as this one, you couldn't possibly find another buyer to give you more than the twenty-five per cent I'm offering. And the other is, the list of requirements I gave our friend Stonewiler."

"Such as?"

"In fact, I asked Stonewiler to find me two men," Chauncey said. "The first, which turned up you, was for a professional thief without a record of violence. You are not a dangerous man, Mr. Dortmunder."

Nobody likes to be told he isn't dangerous. "Um," said Dortmunder.

"The other man I asked him to find," Chauncey went on, "was a professional killer." His smile was very bright, very sure of itself. "It was amazing," he said. "That part took practically no time at all."

Chapter 4

When Dortmunder walked into the O.J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at eleven that night, three of the regulars were deep in discussion with Rollo the bartender about private versus public education. "I tell ya what's wrong widda private schools," one of the regulars was saying. "You put your kid in there, it's like a hothouse, ya know what I mean? The kid don't get to know all kinds a people, he don't get prepared for real life."

One of the others said, "Real life? You wanna know about real life? You put your kids in a public school they get themselves mugged and raped and all that shit. You call that real life?"

"Sure I do," the first one said. "Meeting all kinds, that's what real life is all about."

The second one reared back in disbelieving contempt. "You mean you'd put your kid in a school with a lotta niggers and kikes and wops and spics?"

"Just a minute there," the third regular said. "I happen to be of Irish extraction myself, and I think you oughta just give me an apology there."

The other two stared at him, utterly bewildered. The main offender said, "Huh?"

"Or maybe you'd like a swift left to the eye," said the Irishman.

"Not in here," Rollo the bartender said, and he left the discussion to stroll down the bar and say to Dortmunder, "How you doin?"

"Just fine," Dortmunder said.

"You're a double bourbon," Rollo told him, and made a generous drink, from a bottle labeled Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon–"Our Own Brand." Pushing it across to Dortmunder, he said, "Settle up on your way out."

"Right. Anybody here?"

"A vodka-and-red-wine." Rollo nodded his head toward the rear, saying, "He went on back."

"Fine," Dortmunder said. "There'll be two more. The sherry – you haven't seen him for a while–"

"Little skinny fella? Professor type?"

"That's the one. And the draft-beer-and-salt."

Rollo made a face. "He's terrific for business, that one."

"He doesn't like to drink too much," Dortmunder explained. "He's a driver."

"I'm an advocate of mass transit myself," Rollo said. "I'll send them back when they show."

"Thanks," Dortmunder said. Picking up his bourbon, he walked on by the discussion group – they had switched from education through ethnics to religion by now, and tempers were beginning to fray – and headed for the bar's back room. Going past the two doors with the dog silhouettes on them (POINTERS and SITTERS), and past the phone booth (which smelled as though some pointers had missed their turnoff), he went through the green door at the end and into a small square room lined to the ceiling all around with beer and liquor cases. On the concrete floor in the middle of the small open space stood a battered old table with a green felt top and half a dozen chairs. Over the table hung a bare bulb with a round tin reflector, the only light source in the room. And sitting at the table was a monster in semi-human form, his great hairy hand wrapped around a tall glass holding what looked like cherry soda.

Dortmunder, closing the door behind himself nodded at this prodigy and said, "Whadaya say, Tiny?"

"Hello, Dortmunder." Tiny had the voice of a frog in an oil drum, but less musical. "Long time no see."

Dortmunder sat opposite him, saying, "You look good, Tiny," which was a palpable lie. Tiny, hulking on the little chair, his great meaty shoulders bulging inside his cheap brown suit, a shelf of forehead bone shadowing his eyes, looked mostly like something to scare children into going to bed.

But Tiny apparently agreed with Dortmunder that he looked good, because he nodded, thoughtfully and judiciously, and then said, "You look like shit, on the other hand. You looked better in stir."

"Things have been a little slow," Dortmunder admitted. "How long you on the street?"

"Ten days." Tiny wrinkled a fistful of his own suit lapel, saying in disgust, "I'm still in the state's threads."

"I think I've got a good one," Dortmunder told him. "But wait'll the others get here, so we'll go over it just once."

Tiny lifted his shoulders in a shrug – seismograph needles trembled all over the Northern Hemisphere – and said, "I got nothing but time." And he knocked back about a third of the red liquid in his glass.

"How have things been inside?" Dortmunder asked.

"Bout the same. You remember Baydlemann?"

"Yeah?"

Tiny chuckled, like far-off thunder. "Fell in a vat of lye."

"Yeah? Get hurt?"

"His left thumb come out pretty good."

"Well," Dortmunder said, "Baydlemann had a lot of enemies on the inside."

"Yeah," Tiny said. "I was one a them."

There was a little silence after that, while both men thought their own thoughts. Dortmunder sipped at his drink, which didn't taste even remotely like the nectar called bourbon that Chauncey had given him. Maybe there'd be a bottle or two of the stuff upstairs the night of the heist; not to drink on the job, but to take away for the celebration afterwards.

Dortmunder was tasting one kind of bourbon, and dreaming about another kind, when the door opened and a stocky open-faced fellow with carroty hair came jauntily in, carrying a glass of beer in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. "Hey, there, Dortmunder," he said. "Am I late?"

"No, you're right on time," Dortmunder told him. "Tiny Bulcher, this is–"

The newcomer said, "I took a different route. I wasn't sure how it'd work out."

"Your timing is good," Dortmunder assured him. "Tiny, this is Stan Murch – he'll be our–"

"You see," said Stan Murch, putting his glass and shaker on the table and taking a chair, "with the West Side Highway closed it changes everything. All the old patterns."

Tiny said to him, "You the driver?"

"The best," Murch said, matter-of-factly.

"It was a driver got me sent up my last stretch," Tiny said. "Took back roads around a roadblock, made a wrong turn, come up behind the roadblock, thought he was still in front of it. We blasted our way through, back into the search area."

Murch looked sympathetic. "That's tough," he said.

"Fella named Sigmond. You know him?"

"I don't believe so," Murch said.

"Looked a little like you," Tiny said.

"Is that right?"

"Before we got outa the car, when the cops surrounded us, I broke his neck. We all said it was whiplash from the sudden stop."

Another little silence fell. Stan Murch sipped thoughtfully at his beer. Dortmunder took a mouthful of bourbon. Tiny Bulcher slugged down the rest of his vodka-and-red-wine. Then Murch nodded, slowly, as though coming to a conclusion about something. "Whiplash," he commented. "Yeah, whiplash. That can be pretty mean."

"So can I," said Tiny, and the door opened again, this time to admit a short and skinny man wearing spectacles and a wool suit, and carrying a round bar tray containing the bottle of Amsterdam Liquor Store bourbon, plus a glass with something that looked like but was not cherry soda, and a small amber glass of sherry. "Hello," said the skinny man. "The barman asked me to bring all this."

"Hey, Roger!" Stan Murch said. "Where you been keeping yourself?"

"Oh," said the skinny man, vaguely. "Just around. Here and there." He put the tray on the table and seated himself, and Tiny reached at once for his new vodka-and-red-wine.

Dortmunder said, "Tiny Bulcher, this is Roger Chefwick." Tiny nodded over his glass, and Roger said, "How do you do?"

Dortmunder explained to Tiny, "Roger is our lock-and-alarm man."

"Our terrific lock-and-alarm man!" Stan Murch said.

Roger Chefwick looked pleased and embarrassed. "I do my best," he said, and delicately lifted his sherry from the tray.

Tiny washed down some red stuff and said, "I'm the smash-and-carry man. The terrific smash-and-carry man."

"I'm sure you're very good at it," Chefwick said, politely. Then he pointed at the glass of red stuff and said, "Is that really vodka and red wine?"

"Sure," said Tiny. "Why not? Gives the vodka a little taste, gives the wine a little body."

"Ah," said Chefwick, and sipped sherry.

Murch said, "Roger, somebody told me you were in jail in Mexico."

Chefwick seemed both embarrassed and a bit annoyed at the subject having come up. "Oh, well," he said. "That was just a misunderstanding."

"I heard," Murch insisted, "you tried to hijack a subway car to Cuba."

Chefwick put his sherry glass on the felt surface of the table with some force. "I really don't see," he said, "how these silly rumors spread so far so fast."

"Well," Murch said, "what did happen?"

"Hardly anything," Chefwick said. "You know I'm a model-train enthusiast."

"Sure. I seen the layout in your cellar."

"Well," Chefwick said, "Maude and I were in Mexico on vacation, and in Vera Cruz there were some used New York City subway cars awaiting shipment to Cuba, and I– well– I actually merely intended to board one and look around a bit." A certain amount of discomfort was evident in Chefwick's face now. "One thing led to another," he said, "and I'm afraid the car began to move, and then it got out of control, and the first thing I knew I was on the main line to Guadalajara, having a great deal of difficulty staying ahead of the two-thirty express. But, so far from hijacking a subway car to Cuba, the Mexican police at first accused me of stealing the car from Cuba. However, with Maude's help we got it all straightened out in a day or two. Which," Chefwick concluded petulantly, "I'm afraid I can't say for the rumors and wild stories."

Tiny Bulcher abruptly said, "I did a bank job once with a lock man that thought he was a practical joker. Give me a dribble glass one time, exploding cigar one time."

Dortmunder and Murch both looked at Tiny a bit warily. Dortmunder said, "What happened?"

"After we emptied the vault," Tiny said, "I pushed him in and shut the door. He thought he was such hot stuff, let him get himself out from the inside."

Dortmunder said, "Did he?"

"The bank manager let him out, Monday morning. I hear he's still upstate."

"That wasn't very funny," Roger Chefwick said. His expression was very prim.

"Neither was the cigar," Tiny said, and turned to Dortmunder, saying, "We're all here now, right?"

"Right," Dortmunder said. He cleared his throat, sipped some more bourbon, and said, "What I got here is a simple breaking and entering. No fancy caper, no helicopters, no synchronize-your-watches, just come in through an upstairs window, take what we pick up along the way, and go after our main thing, which happens to be a painting."

Tiny said, "Valuable painting?"

"Four hundred thousand dollars."

"Do we have a buyer?"

"That we got," Dortmunder said, and went on to explain the whole story, finishing, "So our only problems are the burglar alarm and the private guards, but we got the best kind of inside help, and a guaranteed buyer."

"And twenty-five thousand a man," said Stan Murch.

"Plus," Dortmunder reminded him, "whatever we pick up on the upper floors."

Tiny said, "I don't know about that six-month wait. I like my money right away."

"The guy has to get it from the insurance company," Dortmunder said. "He said to me, and it makes sense, if he had a hundred thousand cash on him he wouldn't have to pull anything like this."

Tiny shrugged his huge shoulders. "I guess it's okay," he said. "I can make a living in the meantime. There's always heads to crack."

"Right," Dortmunder said, and turned to Roger Chefwick. "What about you?"

"I've seen Watson Security Services and their installations," Chefwick said, with some disdain. "The easiest thing in the world to get through."

"So you're with us?"

"With pleasure."

"Fine," Dortmunder said. He looked around at his string – an erratic genius lock-and-alarm man, a compulsive one-track-mind driver, and a beast from forty fathoms – and found it good. "Fine," he repeated. "I'll work out the timing with the owner, and get back to you."

Chapter 5

Dortmunder was sitting on the sofa with his feet up on the coffee table, a beer in his right hand and a luncheon-loaf sandwich on white with mayo in his left hand, his sleepy eyes more or less focused on Angels with Dirty Faces, being screened this afternoon on WNEW-TV, channel five, when the doorbell rang. Dortmunder blinked slowly, but otherwise didn't move, and a minute later May walked through the living room, trailing a thin wavy line of smoke from the cigarette in the corner of her mouth as she dried her sudsy hands on a dishtowel. She crossed the line of vision between Dortmunder and the television set – he blinked again, as slowly as before – and went on out to the foyer to open the door.

A loud and rather angry voice cut through the background music of Angels with Dirty Faces: "Where is he?"

Dortmunder sighed. He filled his mouth with bread and mayo and luncheon loaf, sat up a bit straighter on the sofa, and waited for the inevitable.

Out in the foyer, May was saying something soothing, which was apparently not doing its job. "Just let me at him," insisted the loud angry voice, and then there were heavy footsteps, and in came a wiry sharp-nosed fellow with a chip on his shoulder. "You!" he said, pointing at Dortmunder.

May, looking worried, followed the sharp-nosed fellow into the room, saying, in a ghastly attempt at cheeriness, "Look who's here, John. It's Andy Kelp."

Dortmunder swallowed white bread and luncheon loaf and mayo. "I see him," he said. "He's between me and the TV set."

"You got a job!" Kelp yelled, in tones of utter outrage.

Dortmunder gestured with his sandwich, as though shooing a fly. "Would you move over a little? I can't see the picture."

"I will not move over." Kelp folded his arms firmly over his chest and stamped his shoes down onto the carpet, legs slightly spread, to emphasize his immobility. Dortmunder could now see about a third of the screen, just under Kelp's crotch. He scrunched down in the sofa, trying to see more, but then his own feet on the coffee table got in the way.

And Kelp was repeating, "You got a job, Dortmunder. You got a job, and you didn't tell me."

"That's right," Dortmunder said. He sipped beer.

"I brought you a lotta jobs," Kelp said, aggrieved. "And now you got one, and you cut me out?"

Stung from his lethargy, Dortmunder sat up straighter, spilled beer on his thumb, and said, "Oh, yeah, that's right. You brought me jobs. A kid that kidnaps us."

"He never did."

"A bank," Dortmunder said, "and we lose it in the goddam Atlantic Ocean."

"We took over two thousand apiece out of that bank," Kelp pointed out.

Dortmunder gave him a look of disgusted contempt. "Two thousand apiece," he repeated. "Remind me, was that dollars or pesos?"

Kelp abruptly shifted gears. Switching from antagonism to conciliation, he spread his hands and said, "Aw, come on, Dortmunder. That isn't fair."

"I'm not trying to be fair," Dortmunder told him. "I'm not a referee. I'm a thief, and I'm trying to make a living."

"Dortmunder, don't be like that," Kelp said, pleading now. "We're such a terrific team."

"If we were any more terrific," Dortmunder said, "we'd starve to death." He looked at the sandwich in his left hand. "If it wasn't for May, I would starve to death." And he took a big bite of sandwich.

Kelp stared in frustration, watching Dortmunder chew. "Dortmunder," he said, but then he just helplessly moved his hands around, and finally turned to May, saying, "Talk to him, May. Was it my fault the bank fell in the ocean?"

"Yes," said Dortmunder.

Kelp was thunderstruck: "B-b-b-b-b- How?"

"I don't know how," Dortmunder said, "but it was your fault. And it was your fault we had to steal the same emerald six times. And it was your fault we kidnapped some child genius that boosted the ransom off us. And it was your fault–"

Kelp reeled back, stunned by the number and variety of charges. Hands spread wide, he lifted his head and appealed to Heaven, saying, "I can't believe what I'm hearing in this room."

"Then go to some other room."

Having had no help from Heaven, Kelp appealed again to May, saying, "May, can't you do something?"

She couldn't, and she must have known she couldn't, but she tried anyway, saying, "John, you and Andy have been together so long–"

Dortmunder gave her a look. "Yeah," he said. "We just been reminiscing."

Then he stared at the television set, which was now showing a commercial in which ballerinas in tutus danced on top of a giant can of deodorant spray, to the music of Prelude a l'après midi d'un faune.

May shook her head. "I'm sorry, Andy."

Kelp sighed. His manner now was stern and statesmanlike. He said, "Dortmunder, is this final?"

Dortmunder kept watching the ballerinas. "Yes," he said. Kelp drew his tattered dignity about himself like a feather boa. "Goodbye, May," he said, with great formality. "I'm sorry it ended like this."

"We'll still see you around, Andy," May said, frowning unhappily.

"I don't think so, May. Thanks for everything. Bye."

"Bye, Andy," May said.

Kelp exited, without looking again at Dortmunder, and a few seconds later they heard the front door slam. May turned to Dortmunder, and now her frown showed more annoyance than unhappiness. "That wasn't right, John," she said.

The ballerinas had at least been replaced by the angels with dirty faces. Dortmunder said, "I'm trying to watch this movie here."

"You don't like movies," May told him.

"I don't like new movies in movie houses," Dortmunder said. "I like old movies on television."

"You also like Andy Kelp."

"When I was a kid," Dortmunder said, "I liked gherkins. I ate three bottles of gherkins one day."

May said, "Andy Kelp isn't a gherkin."

Dortmunder didn't reply, but he did turn away from the television screen to give her a look. When they'd both contemplated May's remark for a little while, he returned his attention to the movie.

May sat down next to him on the sofa, staring intently at his profile. "John," she said, "you need Andy Kelp, and you know you do."

His lips tightened.

"You do," she insisted.

"I need Andy Kelp," Dortmunder said, "the way I need ten-to-twenty upstate."

"Wait a minute, John," she said, resting a hand on his wrist. "It's true the big jobs you've tried in the last few years didn't go well–"

"And Kelp brought me every one of them."

"But that's the point," May told him. "He didn't bring you this one. This is yours, you got it yourself. Even if he is a jinx in his own jobs – and you know you don't really believe in jinxes, any more than I do – but even if–"

Dortmunder frowned at her. "What do you mean, I don't believe in jinxes?"

"Well, rational people–"

"I do believe in jinxes," Dortmunder told her. "And rabbit foots. And not walking under ladders. And thirteen. And–"

"Feet," May said.

"–black cats crossing your – What?"

"Rabbits' feet," May said. "I think it's feet, not foots."

"I don't care if it's elbows," Dortmunder said. "I believe in it whatever it is, and even if there aren't any jinxes Kelp is still one, and he's done me enough."

"Maybe you're the jinx," May said, very softly.

Dortmunder gave her a look of affronted amazement. "Maybe what?"

"After all," she said, "those were Kelp's jobs, and he brought them to you, and you can't really blame any one person for all the things that went wrong, so maybe you're the one that jinxes his jobs."

Dortmunder had never been so basely attacked in his life. "I am not a jinx," he said, slowly and distinctly, and stared at May as though he'd never seen her before.

"I know that," she said. "And neither is Andy. And besides, this isn't you coming in on a job he found, it's him coming in on a job you found."

"No," Dortmunder said. He glowered at the TV screen, but he didn't see any of the shadows moving on it.

"Damn it, John," May said, getting really annoyed now, "you'll miss Andy and you know it."

"Then I'll shoot again."

"Think about it," she said. "Think about having nobody to talk it over with. Think about having nobody on the job who really understands you."

Dortmunder grumped. He sat lower and lower in the chair, staring at the volume button instead of the screen, and his jaw was so clenched his mouth was disappearing up his nose.

"Work with him," May said. "It's better for both of you." Silence. Dortmunder stared through a lowered curtain of eyebrow.

"Work with him, John," May repeated. "You and Andy, the same as ever. John?"

Dortmunder moved his shoulders, shifted his rump, recrossed his ankles, cleared his throat. "I'll think about it," he muttered.

"I knew you'd come around!" Kelp yelled, bounding in from the foyer.

Dortmunder sat bolt upright. He and May both stared at Kelp, who leaped around in front of them with a huge smile on his face. Dortmunder said, "I thought you left."

"I couldn't go," Kelp said. "Not with that misunderstanding between us." He grabbed a chair, towed it over to the sofa, sat at Dortmunder's left and leaned eagerly forward. "So what's the setup?" Then he suddenly sat back, looking concerned, glancing toward the TV. "No, not yet. Watch the rest of your movie first."

Dortmunder frowned almost wistfully at the screen. "No," he said. "Turn it off. I think it ends badly."

Chapter 6

"Linda," murmured Arnold Chauncey, snuggling the girl closer to his side.

"Sarah," she responded, and bit him rather painfully on the cheek, then got out of bed.

"Sarah?" Rubbing his cheek, Chauncey gazed up over the jumbled sheets and blankets at the tapered bare back of the girl reaching now for her blue jeans draped on a Louis Quinze chair. Astonishing how much Sarah and Linda look alike, he thought, at least from a back view. But then, so many attractive women have that elongated-cello look from behind. "How beautiful you are," he said, and since lust had very recently been satiated it was purely the comment of a connoisseur.

"Whoever I am." She was really quite angry, as she showed by her clumsiness when stepping into her bikini panties; lavender, a very wrong color for her.

Chauncey was about to say "don't go" when he noticed the clock on the mantel: nearly ten-thirty at night. The appointment with Dortmunder was half an hour from now, and if it hadn't been for that slip of the tongue he might well have lazed himself right through it. As it was, his carelessness had saved him once again from his carelessness, and what he did say to poor Sarah was, "Must you go?"

She gave him a resentful glare over her shoulder, and he saw that her nose was much blunter than Linda's. Same forehead, though, same eyebrows. Same shoulder, if it came to that. Woman may have an infinite variety, but each man's taste is rather circumscribed. "You are a bastard," she said.

Chauncey laughed, hiking himself up to a sitting position amid the pillows. "Yes, I suppose I am," he said. With so many Lindas in the world, why placate the Sarahs? He watched her dress, her movements eloquent of outrage and humiliation as she paused at the mirror to touch her hair, touch up her face. Seeing that pouting face framed in the rococo gilt of the mirror, he suddenly realized how common she looked. That exquisite seventeenth-century looking glass, its darkly gleaming surface surrounded and supported by gilded twining rose bushes and cherubim, was meant to reflect more regal faces, more substantial brows, more stately eyes, but what had he placed before it? A series of pinched beauties, faces meant for reflection in commonplace mirrors in gas-station rest rooms, next to the hot-air blower. "I am a bad man," Chauncey said, mournfully.

Immediately she turned away from the mirror, misinterpreting what he'd said. "Yes, you really are, Arnie," she said, but already forgiveness was implicit in her voice.

"Oh, go away, Sarah," Chauncey said, abruptly irritable, angry at himself for being such an endless wastrel, angry at her for reminding him, angry in general because he knew he wouldn't change. Thrashing up out of the bed, he stalked past her astonished expression, and spent the next five minutes calming himself in a too-hot shower.

It was his Uncle Ramsey Liammoir who had defined Arnold Chauncey, years ago while Chauncey was still a boarding school boy in softest Massachusetts. "Wealthy families begin with a sponge and end with a spigot," Ramsey had written to Chauncey's mother, in a letter Chauncey never saw till he was going through her papers after the wicked old woman's death. "Our sponge was Douglas MacDouglas Ramsey, who founded our fortune and made it possible for half a dozen generations of Ramsey's and MacDouglases and Chauncey's to live in stately and respectable comfort, with here a life peerage and there a board chairmanship. Our spigot, who will piss away his patrimony before he's twenty if he's given his head, is your son Arnold."

Which was undoubtedly one of the reasons the old lady's will had ringed Chauncey's patrimony (matrimony? since it had come from his mother?) with so many strings of barbed wire. Three accountants and two attorneys had to be brought in for approval before he could tip more than fifteen per cent; an exaggeration, but not by much.

On the other hand, he was far from poor. Chauncey's actual income – as opposed to what it said along about page 63 of his tax return – was in fact quite substantial. The year he didn't clear three hundred thousand dollars was a bad year indeed, and usually he was comfortably above that. Or would have been comfortable were he not, in the words of his own interior monologue, such a wastrel. Piss away his patrimony he did, proving his now-departed uncle right by engaging in every kind of squander known to man. He had married badly, and paid too much for the divorce. He had supported an auto-racing stable, and had even done some driving himself until he realized he was mortal. He maintained fully staffed houses or apartments in New York, London, Paris, Antibes and Caracas. His love of beauty in furniture, paintings, sculpture, in all the fine arts, led him to purchases he could barely afford even if he were to scrimp elsewhere, and he had never been able to scrimp anywhere.

Thus it was that Chauncey was forced from time to time into risky alternative methods of balancing his books, of which false insurance claims – such as the plot currently in preparation – was only one. Arson, bribery, blackmail, procuring and simple unadorned theft had been other techniques by which over the years he had kept himself and his expensive tastes afloat. He had, for instance, stolen about forty per cent of the royalties supposed to be paid to Heavy Leather, the rock band he had managed back in the late sixties, when running with rock musicians was the thing to do. He hadn't wanted to steal those benighted Glaswegians' money, but at the time it had seemed to him his need was greater than theirs; certainly his arithmetic was. But how his conscience had pricked him, as it pricked him now, standing in the steamy heat of his shower cursing himself for a weakling and a wastrel and a spendthrift. A spigot, in fact, just as dear departed Uncle Ramsey had said, the old fart.

It took five minutes of hot spray to soothe Chauncey and make him forget again his disrespect for himself (he'd forgotten Sarah the instant he'd left her), and then he returned to the bedroom (Sarah was gone, of course), toweled himself dry, used the blower on his long blond hair – naturally yellow, and the envy of all his friends, male and female – and dressed himself completely in dark colors. Black suede moccasins and black socks. Black slacks and a navy blue cashmere sweater with a turtleneck. Then down the stairs (he almost never used the elevator) to the front-hall closet, where he put on a dark blue pea jacket and tucked his yellow hair inside a black knit cap, which made his tanned face look bonier, tougher. Black leather gloves completed his costume, and then he went down one more flight to the ground door, which in front was actually somewhat below ground level but which in back opened onto a small neat flagstone-covered garden. Flowering shrubs and bushes and small trees, all planted in large ornamental concrete pots, stood about in formal array. Ivy climbed the rear of the house and covered the eight-foot-high brick walls surrounding the garden on the other three sides. Now, in November, the garden was all bare branches and black stumps, but in the summer, when Chauncey was almost never in New York, it was a place of beauty.

Chauncey was a darker shape against the dark as he crossed the garden to the knobless door in the corner of the rear wall. A key from the cluster in his pocket opened this door, and he slipped through into utter blackness. This was a passage through a thick wall separating two properties that fronted on the next street. The wall, apparently left over from some earlier construction, was actually double, two thicknesses of old chalky brick with less than three feet of space between. A trellis had been laid across the top at some later date, and a jumble of vines crawled over the trellis, making a thick and leafy roof.

The footing underneath was treacherous with broken bits of stone and brick, but Chauncey slid along on the balls of his feet, his shoulders brushing the walls on both sides, dangling ivy branches occasionally catching at his knit cap.

At the far end was another featureless wooden door, which Chauncey opened with the same key, stepping out to a brick floored areaway in front of a townhouse very like his own. The door he'd emerged from looked as though it belonged to this house, was perhaps a basement entrance, though in fact there was no direct link between them.

It was two and a half blocks to the meeting place with Dortmunder and the alarm specialist, and as Chauncey neared it, coming south on Madison, he moved very slowly, determined to see Dortmunder and the other one before they saw him. It was just after eleven now, the streets were full of hurtling cabs and blundering buses and cowering private cars, and the sidewalks were virtually empty. Chauncey's breath steamed in the air and he came to a complete halt partway up the block, frowning, looking forward at all four corners of the intersection. Dortmunder wasn't there.

Had something gone wrong? Chauncey believed be understood Dortmunder, the man's low-key style, his low expectations and defeatist outlook. A man like that was ripe for direction from a stronger personality, which was the way Chauncey saw himself. He had been pleased with Stonewiler's choice, and convinced he could deal with Dortmunder without fear of being outfoxed.

Not that he intended to default. He would pay the man his hundred thousand, and welcome to it.

On the other hand, where was he? Not sure what was going on, Chauncey backed into the darkened entranceway of a nearby boutique, and his left heel came down on something soft, which moved. "Ouch!" yelled a voice in Chauncey's ear. "Get off my foot!"

Chauncey spun about, astonished. "Dortmunder! What are you doing in here?"

"The same thing you are," Dortmunder said, and limped out to the sidewalk, followed by a skinny scholarly looking man wearing large spectacles and carrying the kind of black leather bag doctors used when doctors made house calls.

Dortmunder glared back over his shoulder at Chauncey, saying, "Well? You coming?"

Chapter 7

Dortmunder and Chefwick nosed their way around the roof of Arnold Chauncey's house like a pair of hunting dogs in search of the scent. Illuminated by light angling up through the open trapdoor, Chauncey stood and observed, a faint expectant smile on his face.

Dortmunder wasn't sure about this fellow Chauncey. It was all right, for instance, for Dortmunder and Chefwick to hang around in dark corners, that was more or less part of their job, but Chauncey was supposed to be a straight citizen, and not only that, a wealthy one. What was he doing lurking in doorways?

It was Dortmunder's belief that in every trade with glamour attached to it – burglary, say, or politics, movies, piloting airplanes – there were the people who actually did the job and were professional about it, and then there were the people on the fringe who were too interested in the glamour and not enough interested in the job, and those were the people who loused it up for everybody else. If Chauncey was another clown leading a rich fantasy life, Dortmunder would have to rethink this entire proposition.

In the meantime, though, they were here and they might as well look the thing over. Even if the Chauncey deal fell through, it could be useful to know how to get into this place at some later date.

This was one of a row of ten attached houses built shortly before the turn of the century, when New York's well-to-do were just beginning to move north of 14th Street. Four stories high, twenty-five feet wide, with facades of stone and rear walls of brick, they shared one long continuous flat roof, with knee-high brick walls delineating each property line. Three of the houses, including Chauncey's, featured roof sheds housing elevator mechanisms, added later. Television antennae sprouted like an adolescent's beard on all the roofs, but many of them were tilted or bent or utterly collapsed, marks of the spread of cable TV. The roof construction was tar over black paper. The front parapet showed marks of a fire escape, since removed.

While Chefwick studied the wires that crossed to the roof from the nearby power and telephone poles, clucking and muttering and peering through his spectacles, Dortmunder took a stroll down the block, stepping over the low brick walls, crunching on one tarred roof after another until be reached the end of the row, where he stood facing a blank brick wall. Or, not entirely blank; here and there the outlines of bricked-in windows could be seen.

What was this building? Dortmunder went to the front, leaned over the parapet – trying not to see, from the corner of his eye, the sidewalk forty feet below – and saw that it was some kind of theater or concert hall, which faced onto Madison Avenue. What he could see from here was the side of the building, with its fire exits and posters of coming attractions.

Leaving the edge, Dortmunder backed off to study that blank wall, which rose another fifteen or twenty feet above the level of the row-house roofs. Near the top of the wall were several grilled vents, but none of them looked useful for a human being seeking passage.

Finished, Dortmunder retraced his steps, finding Chauncey still waiting by the open trapdoor and Chefwick now dangling off the rear of the building, head hanging down, humming happily to himself as he fingered the wiring. A line tester glowed briefly, showing Chefwick's earnest absorbed face.

Dortmunder continued on, walking to the other end of the row of houses, and there he found a ten-foot open space across a driveway, with an apartment building on the far side, its drapes and curtains and Venetian blinds and Roman shades and Japanese screens and New England shutters all firmly closed. The vision of a board stretched across that open space from one of those windows to where he was standing was followed immediately in Dortmunder's mind by a vision of himself crawling across that board. Turning his back on both vision and building, he returned to the Chauncey roof, where Chefwick was cleaning his hands on a Wash'n'Dri from his leather bag. "We'll come from down there," Dortmunder said, pointing toward the blank back of the concert hall.

"Our best bet would be the elevator shaft," Chefwick said. To Chauncey he said, "It would be easier if the elevator weren't on the top floor."

"It won't be," Chauncey promised.

"Then there's really no problem," Chefwick said. "Not from my point of view." And he looked a question at Dortmunder.

It was time to clear the air. Dortmunder said to Chauncey, "Tell me about that passage we came through, the one into your back yard."

"Oh, you won't be able to use that," Chauncey said. "You'd have to go right up through the house, all full of people."

"Tell me about it anyway."

"I'm sorry," Chauncey said, moving closer, away from the trapdoor illumination, "but I don't understand. Tell you what about it?"

"What's it for?"

"Originally?" Chauncey shrugged. "I really don't know, but I suspect it began merely as a space between walls. I understand my house was a speakeasy at one point during Prohibition, and that's when the new doors were added."

"What do you use it for?"

"Nothing really," Chauncey said. "A few years ago, when there were some rock musicians hanging about, a certain amount of dope came in that way, but normally I have no use for the thing. Tonight was different, naturally. I don't think I should be seen with suspicious characters just before my house is robbed."

"Okay," Dortmunder said.

Chauncey said, "Now let me ask a question. What prompted the interest?"

"I wanted to know if you were a comic-book hero," Dortmunder told him.

Chauncey seemed surprised, then amused. "Ah, I see. No romantics need apply, is that it?"

"That's it."

Chauncey reached out to tap a finger against Dortmunder's upper arm, which Dortmunder hated. "Let me assure you, Mr. Dortmunder," he said, "I am no romantic."

"Good," said Dortmunder.

Chapter 8

One of the regulars was flat on his back atop the bar at the O.J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue when Dortmunder and Kelp walked in on Thursday evening. He was holding a damp filthy bar rag to his face, and three other regulars were discussing with Rollo the best way to treat a nosebleed. "You put an ice cube down the back of his neck," one said.

"You do and I'll flumfle your numble," the sufferer said, his threat lost in the folds of the bar rag.

"Give him a tourniquet," another regular suggested.

The first regular frowned. "Where?"

While the regulars surveyed the body of their stricken comrade for a place to put an anti-nosebleed tourniquet, Rollo came down the bar, nodded at Dortmunder and Kelp over his impaired customer's steel-toed work boots, and said, "How you doing?"

"Better than him," Dortmunder said.

"He'll be okay." Rollo dismissed the Death-of-Montcalm scene with a shrug. "Your vodka-and-red-wine is here, your sherry is here, your beer-and-salt is here."

"We're the last," Dortmunder said.

Rollo nodded hello to Kelp. "Nice to see you again."

"Nice to be back," Kelp told him.

Rollo went off to make their drinks, and Dortmunder and Kelp watched the first-aid team. One of the regulars was now trying to stuff paper bar coasters into the bleeder's nose, while another one was trying to get the poor bastard to count backwards from one hundred. "That's for hiccups," said the third.

"No no," said the second, "you drink out of the wrong side of the glass for hiccups."

"No, that's for when you faint."

"No no no, when you faint you put your head between your knees."

"Wrong. If somebody faints, you slap their face."

"You do and you'll stumbun with me," said the patient, who now had bar rag and paper coasters in his mouth.

"You're crazy," the second regular told the third. "You slap somebody's face if they've got hysterics."

"No," said the third regular, "if somebody's got hysterics, you have to keep them warm. Or is it cold?"

"Neither. That's for shock. You keep them warm for shock. Or cold."

"No, I've got it," the third regular said. "You keep them warm for hysterics, and you keep them cold if they've got a burn."

"Don't you know anything?" asked the second regular. "For a burn you put butter on it."

"Now I know!" the third regular cried. "Butter's for a nosebleed!"

Everybody stopped what they were doing to stare at him, even the bleeder. The first regular, his hands full of paper coasters, said, "Butter's for a nosebleed?"

"You stuff butter up the nose! Rollo, give us some butter!"

"You won't dumrumbin my nose!"

"Butter," said the second regular in disgust. "It's ice he needs. Rollo!"

Rollo, ignoring the cries for butter and ice, carried a tray past the invalid's feet and slid it across the bar toward Dortmunder. It contained a bottle of Amsterdam Liquor Store bourbon, two empty glasses with ice, and a glass containing, no doubt, vodka-and-red-wine. "See you later," he said.

"Right." Dortmunder reached for the tray, but Kelp got to it first, picking it up with such eagerness to be of help that the bourbon bottle rocked back and forth, and would have gone over if Dortmunder hadn't steadied it.

"Thanks," Kelp said.

"Yeah," Dortmunder said, and led the way toward the back room.

But not directly. They had to stop for a second so Kelp could throw in his own contribution with the medics. "What you do for a nosebleed," he told them, "is you take two silver coins and put them on both sides of his nose."

The regulars all stopped squabbling among themselves to frown at this outsider. One of them, with great dignity, pointed out, "There haven't been any silver coins in circulation in this country since 1965."

"Oh," said Kelp. "Well, that is a problem."

"Sixty-six," said another regular.

Dortmunder, several paces ahead, looked back at Kelp to say, "Are you coming?"

"Right." Kelp hurried in Dortmunder's wake.

As they went past POINTERS and SETTERS, Dortmunder said, "Now, remember what I told you. Tiny Bulcher won't be happy about you because you're costing him five grand, so just be quiet and let me do the talking."

"Definitely," Kelp said.

Dortmunder glanced at him, but said nothing more, and then went through the green door and into the back room, where Stan Murch and Roger Chefwick and Tiny Bulcher were all seated at the green-felt-topped table, with Tiny Bulcher saying, "…so I went to his hospital room and broke his other arm."

Chefwick and Murch, who had been gazing at Bulcher like sparrows at a snake, looked up with quick panicky smiles when Dortmunder and Kelp came in. "Well, there you are!" Chefwick cried, with a kind of mad glitter in his eyes, and Murch actually spread his arms in false camaraderie, announcing, "Hail, hail, the gang's all here!"

"That's right," Dortmunder said.

Talking more rapidly than usual, his words running together in his haste, Murch said, "I did a new route entirely, that's why I'm so early, I was coming from Queens, I took the Grand Central almost to the Triborough–"

Meanwhile, Kelp was putting the tray on the table and placing Bulcher's fresh drink in front of him, cheerily saying "There you go. You're Tiny Bulcher, aren't you?"

"Yeah," Bulcher said. "And who are you?"

"–then I got off, and turned left under the El, and, uh…" And Murch ran down, becoming aware of the new tension in the room as Kelp, still cheery, answered Bulcher's question.

"I'm Andy Kelp. We met once seven or eight years ago, a little jewelry-store job up in New Hampshire."

Bulcher gave Kelp his flat look. "Did I like you?"

"Sure," Kelp said, taking the chair to Bulcher's left. "You called me pal."

"I did, huh?" Bulcher turned to Dortmunder. "What's my pal doing here?"

"He's in," Dortmunder said.

"Oh, yeah?" Bulcher looked around at Murch and Chefwick, then back at Dortmunder. "Then who's out?"

"Nobody. It's a five-man string now."

"It is, huh?" Bulcher nodded, glancing down at his fresh vodka-and-red-wine as though there might be some sort of explanation engraved on the glass. Looking at Dortmunder again, he said, "Where does his cut come from?"

Same as everybody else's. We'll get twenty thousand a man."

"Uh huh." Bulcher sat back – the chair squealed in fear – and brooded at Kelp, whose cheery expression was beginning to wilt. "So," said Bulcher, "you're my five thousand dollar pal, are you?"

"I guess so," Kelp said.

"I never liked anybody five grand worth before," Bulcher said. "Remind me; where were we pals?"

"New Hampshire. A jewelry–"

"Oh, yeah." Bulcher nodded, his big head going back and forth like a balancing rock on the mountain of his shoulders. "There was a second alarm system, and we never got into the place. All the way up to New Hampshire for nothing."

Dortmunder looked at Kelp, who did not look back. Instead, he kept smiling at Bulcher, saying, "That's the one. The finger screwed up. I remember you hit him a lot."

"Yeah, I would of." Bulcher took a long slow taste of his fresh drink, while Kelp continued to smile at him, and Dortmunder brooded at him, and Murch and Chefwick went on doing their hypnotized-sparrow number. Putting the glass down at last, Bulcher said to Dortmunder, "What do we need him for?"

"I already been at work," Kelp said, bright and eager, and ignoring Dortmunder's shut-up frown.

Bulcher observed him. "Oh, yeah? Doing what?"

"I checked out the theater. Hunter House, it's called. How we get in, how we get out."

Dortmunder, who was wishing Kelp would get laryngitis, explained, "We get to the roof through a theater nearby."

"Uh huh. And we're paying this guy twenty grand to go find out how we get in a theater." Bulcher leaned forward, resting one monstrous forearm on the table. He said, "I'll tell you the secret for ten grand. You buy a ticket."

"I bought tickets," Kelp assured him. "We're gonna see the Queen's Own Caledonian Orchestra."

Dortmunder sighed, shook his head a bit in irritation, and paused to pour some Our Own Brand bourbon into one of the glasses on the tray. He sipped, watched moodily as Kelp poured his own drink, and then said, "Tiny, I make the plan. That's my job. Your job is to carry heavy things and to knock people down that get in the way."

Bulcher jabbed a thumb the size of an ear of corn in Kelp's direction. "We're talking about his job."

"We need him," Dortmunder said. Under the table, he crossed his ankles.

"How come we didn't need him the first time we got together?"

"I was out of town," Kelp said brightly. "Dortmunder didn't know where to find me."

Bulcher gave him a look of disgust. (So did Dortmunder.)

"Bull," he said, and turned back to Dortmunder, saying "You didn't mention him at all."

"I didn't know yet I needed him," Dortmunder said. "Listen, Tiny, I've been to the place now. We have to get in through the top of an elevator shaft, we got a fifteen- or twenty-foot brick wall to go down and then back up, and we don't have all night to do it. We need a fifth man. I'm the planner, and I say we need him."

Bulcher turned his full attention on Kelp again, as though trying to visualize a circumstance in which he would find himself needing this person. His eyes still on Kelp, he spoke to Dortmunder, saying, "So that's it, huh?"

"That's it," Dortmunder told him.

"Well, then." A ghastly smile turned Tiny's face into a cross between a bad bayonet wound and a six-month-old Halloween pumpkin. "Welcome aboard, pal," he said. "I'm sure you're gonna be very helpful."

Dortmunder released held breath, his shoulders sagging in relief. So that was over. "Now," he said, "about tomorrow night. Stan Murch will drive us to this Hunter House a little before eight-thirty…"

Chapter 9

The hall was full of Scotsmen. Hundreds of them gamboled in the aisles and thronged the lobby, with more arriving every minute. Some were in kilts, some were singing, some were marching arm in arm, most were clutching mugs, flasks, bottles, cups, glasses, jars, demijohns, goblets and jugs, and all were calling out to one another in strange and barbarous tongues. Around many necks and trailing down many backs were long scarves in the colors of favorite soccer or rugby teams. Tam o' Shanters with bright wool balls on top were jauntily cocked over many a flashing eye. Hunter House bulged with Highland bonhomie.

"Well, now what the hell?" said Dortmunder.

Tiny Bulcher said, "That guy's wearing a dress."

"It's a kilt," Roger Chefwick told him. A level crossing of English manufacture in one part of Chefwick's model-train lay-out featured a man in a kilt who would glide out and wave a red flag every time a train went by. Chefwick was very familiar with kilts. "These are all Scotsmen," he explained.

"I don't know," Dortmunder said. "I don't know about this."

"I've got the tickets," Kelp said, in a hurry to get them all upstairs and on about their business. "Follow me."

Except it wasn't quite that easy. Kelp tried to lead, but everywhere he turned there were another six Scotsmen in his path. Also, the two fifty-foot rolls of vinyl clothesline he had tucked inside his coat didn't increase his maneuverability. For all his efforts they remained becalmed, four innocent bystanders abroad on a roiling sea of Scotsmen.

And now some of them were fighting. Over there by the head of the second aisle, two or three lads were rounding and punching and clutching at one another, while another half dozen tried to either stop them or join in, hard to tell which. "What are they fighting about?" Kelp cried.

A passing Scot paused to answer: "Well, you know," he said, "if it's neither football nor politics, it's more than likely religion." And away he waded, to join the discussion.

Dortmunder, sounding ominously bad-tempered, said, "Kelp, give me those tickets."

What was be going to do, ask for his money back? Apprehensive, Kelp gave him the tickets, but Dortmunder immediately turned and handed them to Tiny Bulcher, saying "You lead the way."

"Right," Bulcher said. Clutching the tickets in one enormous fist, he waded forward, moving his shoulders and elbows, tamping startled Scotsmen left and right, the other three in his wake.

When they reached the balcony, it was so full they couldn't possibly open the door leading to the roof stairs without being noticed. "We'll sit down and wait," Dortmunder decided, and Bulcher ushered them through the throng to their seats. "You'd make a wonderful locomotive," Chefwick told him as they sat down.

Chapter 10

In Wednesday's New York Post – in the section that in the unenlightened past was known as the Woman's Page, but which today operates under a discreet anonymity, offering Fashion, Social Notes, and Recipes to an audience presumably no more than fifty-two per cent female – the following item appeared:

What a dinner party, what a ghastly affair. Arnold Chauncey sat at the head of the table, behind his false-face host's smile, and observed his guests with all the affability of Dortmunder observing the Scotsmen. Mavis and Otto Orfizzi, to begin with, hated one another so uncordially, so spitefully, and with such unremitting verbal venom, that no one could be said to be truly safe in their presence, while MuMu and Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville were both too absorbed in themselves to be much help under the best of circumstances. As for the dinner guests, they approached the unbearable, except for Major General (Ret.) and Mrs. Homer Biggott, both of whom seemed merely to be dead. Sheikh Rama, on the other hand, was very much alive, cheerfully and suavely insulting everyone his glittering oily eye lit upon, making jokes about the West's incipient decline and the Arab world's upcoming dominance, name-dropping shamelessly and endlessly, and generally behaving like the well-educated (Cambridge) snotty little nouveau riche he was.

But the worst of all was Laura Bathing. "I don't mind a bit, sweetheart," she'd said upon arrival, when Chauncey had apologized for her inadvertent omission from the item in the Post, and in the last two hours she had made perfectly clear just how little she'd minded by breaking three glasses, two plates, an ashtray and a table lamp, all in small clumsy accidents, smearing whiskey, wine and gravy in her wake, and screaming almost without respite at Chauncey's staff, until be had very nearly been driven to point out that these days servants were much harder to find than dinner guests. It wasn't much help that both Lance Sheath and MuMu deCharraiveuneuirauville were quite obviously courting – no, probably stalking was the better word – cosmetics heiress Martha Whoopley, a stocky stodgy fortyish styleless frump with the face of a TV dinner and the personality of a humidifier and the ownership of eleven million dollars in her own right. MuMu was obviously interested in marrying up, but Chauncey had planned Lance for Laura Bathing, unaware that Lance was currently in search of backing for a film. Laura, placed at table between the insulting sheikh and the back of Lance Sheath (whose front was determinedly toward Martha Whoopley, on his other side), was not taking her situation calmly. In fact, Laura more and more seemed determined to strip Chauncey's house of all its breakables before the meal was finished.

Otto Orfìzzi having attempted unsuccessfully to form an alliance with the sheikh by telling an anti-Semitic joke at which no one had laughed – not because it was anti-Semitic, but because it had been told badly, and because two of the guests happened in fact to be Jewish, and because in any case it wasn't very funny – Mavis Orfizzi turned her imitation-pitying smile toward Chauncey, saying, "I do apologize for Otto. He can be such an incredible boor."

It was only the thought that these witches and toadies were about to be burgled through his own intervention that kept the smile on Chauncey's face. "Oh, well, Mavis," he said. "Don't trouble yourself on my account. I think we should all take life as it comes."

"Do you?" An imitation-self-pitying smile took its place on Mavis's lips. "It must be comforting to have that philosophy."

"It is," Chauncey assured her. "After all, we never know what misfortunes may be heading our way, do we?" And for the first time all evening, the smile he bestowed on his guests was absolutely genuine.

Chapter 11

Stately, plump Joe Mulligan paused in the privacy of the hallway to pull his uniform trousers out of the crease of his backside, then turned to see Fenton watching him. "Mp," he said, then nodded at Fenton, saying, "Everything okay down here."

Fenton, the senior man on this detail, made a stern face and said, "Joe, you don't want any of them princes and princesses see you walking around with your fingers up your ass."

"Aw, now," Mulligan said, embarrassment combining with a trace of indignation. "They're all at table up there. Besides, every man has to give a tug to his trousers from time to time."

"Stately plump men more than others," said Fenton, himself a skinny little dried-up man with porcelain teeth in his head. A bit of a martinet and a stickler for regulations, he liked the boys to call him Chief, but none of them ever did.

"Have another look at that back door while you're down here," he added, gave a sort of casual one-finger-to-forehead salute, and turned back to the stairs.

Joe Mulligan was one of the team of seven private guards on duty in the Chauncey house tonight, dressed like the others in a dark blue police-like uniform with a triangular badge on the left shoulder reading Continental Detective Agency. In his flatfooted walk and meaty bigness, Mulligan himself was police-like, as well he might be, having spent twelve years on the New York City force before deciding to get out of the city and joining Continental's Long Island office in Hempstead.

It used to be that policemen who displayed ineptitude or stupidity were sent from the city to the boondocks – "Pounding a beat on Staten Island" was the popular version of the threat – but as the Swinging Sixties swung more and more in the manner of a wrecker's ball, that usual direction of transfer became reversed. The quiet safe Staten Islands of duty became more highly prized, while the terrifying city lost its former attraction. For instance, Mulligan and his team were working in Manhattan now as direct punishment for having lost a bank out on Long Island two years ago. None of them had quit, all seven were still together, and Fenton himself had summed it up for all of them: "We'll do the job the same as ever. We're good men and we know it, and sooner or later we'll get back to the top. Out of New York and back to Long Island where we belong."

So they treated every unimportant minor assignment, every wedding, dog show and book fair, as though it were the D-Day landing. Tonight, they operated in three two-man teams, with Fenton roving among them. Each team was responsible for one area of the house, including the upper floors, though this last part was against the stated wishes of the client, who'd said, "Concentrate on the entrances downstairs, and let the upstairs go." But, as Fenton had told the team, "The reason they hire us is because we know the job and they don't."

Also, the teams traded places every half hour, to keep from becoming stale, too used to a single environment. Mulligan was alone now because his partner, Garfield, had gone to the second floor to replace Morrison and Fox, who would transfer to the first floor, releasing Dresner and Block to come down here, so Mulligan could go upstairs and rejoin Garfield.

But first the rear door, which continued as locked and unsullied as ever. Mulligan peeked through the tiny diamond-pane window at the dark back yard, saw nothing, and let it go at that.

Footsteps on the stairs; Mulligan turned and here came Dresner and Block. "Hello, boys," Mulligan said.

Block nodded. "What say?"

Dresner said, "All quiet?"

"I believe we could have phoned in our part," Mulligan said. "See you, boys." And, with a certain amount of puffing he made his way up two flights of stairs to where Garfield, whose law-enforcement career had begun when he was a Military Policeman in Arizona and Paris, and who sported a Western-Marshall moustache of amazing ferocity, was practicing his quick draw before the full-length mirror in Chauncey's bathroom. "Well, now," Mulligan said, a bit out of sorts from the combination of Fenton's remarks and the long climb upstairs, "it's Wyatt Earp you're expecting, is it?"

"Has it ever occurred to you," Garfield said, holstering his pistol and fingering his moustache, "that I'd be a natural for the movies?"

"No," Mulligan said. "Let's make our rounds."

So they went up another flight of stairs. The top floor, oddly enough, was grander than any of the others, possibly because its being strictly for guests had meant the decorators hadn't needed to worry overmuch about comfort and function. Chauncey's own bedroom suite on the next floor down was also sumptuously furnished, of course, but it was clearly a working bedroom, whereas the rooms on the top floor, with their delicate chairs and tables, canopy beds, Persian carpets, hand-ironed cotton curtains, complementary wallpapers and upholstery and bedspreads, were like display models in a museum; one expected a plush rope across each doorway, permitting the visitor to look without touching.

Two of the suites were in current occupancy – by utter pigs. Garments, cosmetic jars, open luggage, pieces of paper and other litter formed a kind of archaeological layer over the original impersonality. Mulligan and Garfield strolled through these rooms, commenting to one another on stray artifacts–"I didn't know women wore brassieres like that any more," Garfield said, and Mulligan replied, "They don't"–and also discussing their hopes for an early return to Long Island. "Two years is long enough," Mulligan said truculently. "It's time we got out of New York and back to the bigtime."

"You couldn't be more right." Garfield said, touching his moustache. "Fenton ought to go see the Old Man for us, argue our case."

"Absolutely," Mulligan agreed. The two of them were returning to the central corridor then, and it was at that point Mulligan suddenly felt the unmistakable pressure of a gun barrel thrust against the middle of his back, and heard the quiet voice behind him speak the words of doom. Long Island flew away on mighty wings, and the voice said:

"Stick em up."

Chapter 12

It seemed to Dortmunder, looking at the faces of the two private guards through the eyeholes of the ski mask covering his own face, that he'd seen them somewhere before, but that was both unlikely and irrelevant, so he dismissed it from his mind. He and Bulcher hustled the two disarmed guards into a closet in the unused guest room; locked the door, removed their ski masks, and returned to the central corridor, where an evidently nervous Kelp said, in a jittery whisper, "I thought the guards were supposed to stay downstairs."

"So did I," Dortmunder said. That had been quite a shock, as a matter of fact, when they'd come in from the elevator shaft to hear the sounds of conversation from one of the nearby rooms. Expecting no trouble, and not wanting to make any extra trouble for themselves in case of problems outside, none of them was carrying a gun, but fortunately a pair of socket wrenches from Chefwick's black bag had done just as well, convincing the guards long enough for Dortmunder and Bulcher to relieve them of their own artillery and put them away.

"Let's get going," Bulcher said, the commandeered revolver toy-like in his mammoth fist, "before anything else happens." And he tucked the pistol into his hip pocket.

"Right," Dortmunder agreed. "The stairs are this way. Chefwick and Kelp, you hit the bedrooms. Tiny and I'll get the painting."

The robbery itself was quickly accomplished. Dortmunder and Bulcher removed the painting from the wall, turned it around, slit the canvas just beyond the edge of the painting all the way around, rolled it carefully into a tube shape, and fixed it with three rubber bands. Meanwhile, upstairs, Kelp and Chefwick were filling their pockets with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, watches, tiepins, a golden dollar sign money clip clutching nearly eight hundred dollars, and whatever other sparkly items attracted their magpie eyes. Bulcher and Dortmunder, with Dortmunder carrying the rolled painting, did the same for Chauncey's bedroom, where the pickings were surprisingly slim. Back in the sitting room, Dortmunder found two full bottles of that bourbon that had so impressed him his first time here, tucked them inside his leather jacket, and then he and Bulcher rejoined the other two on the top floor. "Some nice stuff," Kelp whispered, grinning, his nervousness forgotten now.

Dortmunder saw no reason to whisper. "Good," he said. "Let's get out of here."

Chefwick used one of his handy tools to open the elevator door, and Kelp went in first, reversing the route they'd used before. The elevator shaft was concrete-lined and about six feet square, with an open grid work of metal beams inside it to support the elevator equipment. Kelp made his way via a horizontal beam on the left wall to another horizontal beam at the rear, and from there to the metal rungs set in the rear wall just opposite the doorway. Up the rungs he went, sidling past the electric motor and the chains and pulleys at the top, and out through the opened panel in the housing. Lowering a length of clothesline back through the opening, he waited while Chefwick tied his bag and the painting to the end, and then drew both up to the roof. (Dortmunder watched this part gimlet-eyed, waiting for Kelp to drop the goddam painting to the bottom of the elevator shaft – or rather to the top of the elevator, two stories below – but astonishingly enough Kelp did everything right.)

Chefwick himself went next, over to the metal rungs and up to the roof, followed by Bulcher. Dortmunder went last, pausing on the first metal beam to release the door, allowing it to slide closed, and the faint snick of the electric lock was immediately followed by a sudden whirring sound, and the small clanking of chains.

Yes? Dortmunder looked all around, and saw the elevator cables in motion. In motion? He looked down, and the top of the elevator was coming this way. The elevator was coming this way, sliding and clicking upward through its shaft.

God damn, but it was coming fast.

Chapter 13

"I wonder if you've heard this one, Sheikh," Prince Elector Otto Orfizzi of Tuscan-Bavaria called across the table, his round-red-apple face thrust out among the candles.

"I should think I probably had," Sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El responded, and turned to Laura Bathing to say, "Have you been in London recently?"

"Not for a year or so. Oops."

The Sheikh blandly watched her sop up red wine with her most recent napkin, while the black hand and white-clad arm of their host's serving boy reached through between them to pick up the shards of wine glass. "I was there two weeks ago," the Sheikh said.

"Watch out, you clumsy fool!" Laura shrieked at the servant. "You'll get glass in my meat!"

"I was buying a house in Belgravia," the Sheikh went on, unperturbed. His softly oiled chuckle came and went. "The poor English," he said pleasantly. "They can't afford their own capital any more, you know. They're all living in Woking and Hendon."

The Prince Elector, meanwhile, was trying to tell his joke to Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville, who was ignoring him while grimly watching her husband, MuMu, thrust himself upon cosmetics heiress and frump Martha Whoopley. "What I've always felt about St. Louis," MuMu was saying, "is that it's somehow more real than most of the places I know. Do you feel that?"

Martha Whoopley used her tongue to clear brussels sprouts into her cheek pouches, then said, "More real? How d'ya mean?"

"After all the flitter of New York, Deauville, Paris, Rome–" MuMu gestured gracefully, candlelight sparkling on his rings and bracelets, a fraction of his collection. "All of this," he summed up. "Isn't it somehow more, more, oh I don't know, more real to get back to St. Louis?"

"I don't think it's more real," Martha said. She shoved a lot of French bread into her mouth and went on talking. "I grew up there. I always thought it stunk."

"But you still live there."

"I keep a house out by the plant. You've got to keep your eye on those manager people."

Film star and environmental activist Lance Sheath, a rugged escarpment at Martha's right, leaned toward her with his virile confidentiality, saying in the deep voice that had thrilled billions, "You oughta spend some time in Los Angeles. Get to know the future."

"We have a packaging facility in Los Angeles," Martha told him. "Out in Encino. I don't like it much out there. All that white stucco hurts my eyes."

Prince Otto was finishing his joke to whoever would listen. It concerned a Jewish woman checking in at the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, asking for bellboys to get the luggage from the car, and then requesting a wheelchair for her husband. "'Of course,'" said the desk clerk," concluded the Prince. "'I'm terribly sorry, can't your husband walk?' 'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank God he doesn't have to.'"

While the Prince laughed heartily at his own joke, Chauncey's mind delivered him, intact, a variant beginning, "A sheikh's wife enters the Dorchester Hotel in London–" and ending, "'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank Allah he doesn't have to.'" Should he wait ten minutes or so, and then straight faced tell that variant? No; revenge enough was already under way.

Meanwhile, Mavis Orfizzi was clutching her own bony breast in assumed horror at her husband's gaucherie. "I can't stand it any more," she cried, for the benefit of the table at large, and surged to her feet, knocking over her chair, and so upstaging Laura Bathing that one gave off screeching at Thomas Jefferson, the serving boy, and gaped in astonishment. "Otto," Mavis announced over the other guests' heads, "you are as clumsy and oafish at table as you are in bed."

"In bed?" demanded the Prince Elector, stung out of his raconteur's role, "I'm afraid to touch you in bed for fear of cutting myself," he declared.

"I can't stand it!" Mavis cried out, but then, apparently realizing she'd become reduced to repeating herself, she clutched her brow with both hands, screamed, "No more!" and fled the room.

Her intent didn't occur to Chauncey until, in the astounded hush at the table following her exit, all at once be heard from afar the busy whirr of machinery. Elevator machinery. "No!" he cried, half rising from his seat, arm stretching out toward the doorway through which the damned posturing woman had made her melodramatic exit. But it was too late. Too late. Arm dropping to his side, Chauncey sagged back into his chair, and from the distance the sound of whirring stopped.

Chapter 14

"I've been shafted," Dortmunder said.

Well, he had. He'd moved as fast as he could to the metal ladder rungs at the rear of the elevator shaft, but there just hadn't been time to get up and out of the way. The elevator remorselessly rose, like an engine of destruction in an old Saturday-afternoon serial, and before he could climb a single rung the thing had overtaken him, pinning him to the wall.

It was those damn bourbon bottles that trapped him. The top of the elevator had a lip around the edge, an overhang which had brushed its way up the back of his legs, shoved his rump aside, grazed his shoulder blades, and bunked him gently on the back of the head before halting just above him. There was a bit more room below the lip, but when he tried to climb the rungs to freedom he discovered that the bottles under his jacket gave him just that much extra thickness, front to back, and he couldn't clear the goddam lip. Nor did he have enough room to use his hands to open the jacket and remove the bottles. He could sidle up the rungs, bit by bit, until his head and shoulders were above the top of the elevator, but at that point he was stuck.

From above, the harsh whisper of Kelp floated down: "Come on! Dortmunder, come on!"

He looked up, but couldn't get his head back far enough to see the top of the shaft. Speaking to the concrete wall, he half whispered back, "I can't."

And then, from somewhere not too far away, a woman screamed.

"Terrific," Dortmunder muttered. Louder, he called up to Kelp, "You people go on! Stash the painting!"

"But what about you?"

"Go on!" And, to end the argument, Dortmunder crab-crawled his way down the ladder rungs again, putting his head out of Kelp's sight.

By now the woman had stopped screaming, but all at once more voices sounded, male and female. Turning his head as far as possible, Dortmunder could just see an air vent, and through it the interior of the elevator, the open elevator door, and a bit of hallway. And as he looked, and listened to the raised male and female voices, one of those goddam private guards – the fat one – suddenly ran by the open elevator door.

There was only one thing to do, and Dortmunder did it. Down he went, sidling past the back wall of the elevator, down as rapidly as he could into almost impenetrable darkness, lower and lower into the elevator shaft. Because who knew when it would occur to somebody to use the goddam elevator again.

Whirrrrrrrrr.

Yike. Zip zip zip zip went Dortmunder, descending and descending, but nowhere near as fast as the elevator, whose cables shushed and binkled near his right elbow, and whose dirty black metal bottom dropped toward him like an anal retentive's worst nightmare. He could sense it above his head, dropping and dropping, inexorable, closing down and down.

Whirrrrr-clump.

It stopped. Dortmunder's head, withdrawn like a turtle's into his neck, remained a good clear quarter-inch below the bottom of the elevator as he listened to the doors chunk open and heard the resonance of feet pounding outward; one or more of the private guards, gone to report. Meaning this was not the ground floor, but the main floor above it. Good thing they hadn't gone all the way down.

"All right, all right," Dortmunder whispered to himself, "let's not panic," and immediately the question came into his mind, Why not?

Well. He struggled for an answer, and finally found one:

"Don't want to fall."

Very good. Not panicking, Dortmunder made his way down the rest of the ladder to the bottom of the shaft, which was in such utter blackness that he knew he'd arrived only when he started to reach his left foot down for the next rung, and slammed his toes into something solid at least three inches before he'd expected anything. "Ow!" he said aloud, and the well-like walls gave the word back to him.

So here he was at the bottom of things. Releasing the rungs, he began to move around this Stygian space and a sudden pain in his knee told him it was occupied. Another Ow went the circuit, and then he began to feel about, this way and that, and finally came to the conclusion that what was at the bottom of this elevator shaft was some sort of huge spring. Could that be right? He visualized it in his mind, like a pink cross-section drawing from The Way Things Work: elevator shaft, elevator, elevator slips its gears and plummets, hits giant spring and goes ba-roooong-a, spring absorbs major portion of impact. By God, it might even work.

Whirrrrr.

Oh, no. Here the son of a bitch came again, heading this way. Dortmunder dropped to the oily, cruddy floor, wrapping himself like an open parenthesis around the base of the big spring, while the elevator descended to ground-floor level, the doors opened, male voices engaged in a conference of some kind, the doors closed, and the elevator whirred its way back up to the first floor.

Dortmunder stood, beginning to get pissed off. That crowd of Scotsmen at the theater, that was one thing, the accidents of life, you learned to roll with punches like that. But what was happening in this house was utter bullshit. He'd been promised no guards on the top floor, and there'd been two of them. He'd been promised the elevator would stay down and out of his way, and now the damn thing was treating him like an apple in a cider press. Was he going to tolerate this?

Probably.

Unless he could get the hell out of here. And now that his eyes had grown more accustomed to the dark, he could see breaks in the black, lines of light just over there, indicating a closed door, the bottom of which would be not very far above his head. The ground-floor door. If he could get through that, then somehow he'd manage to clear out of this house. Anyway, it was worth a try. And anything, finally, was better than just sitting forever in the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Circling the giant spring, Dortmunder approached the lines of light, touched the door, and tried to slide it open. It wouldn't go. He pushed harder, and it still wouldn't go.

Of course not. An electric lock was holding it in place, so long as the elevator was elsewhere. He had to get at that lock, which was about five feet up on the door judging from the one he'd seen at the top level.

Dortmunder sat on the spring – human beings are quickly adaptable to any environment, which makes them a fine stock for those interested in animal husbandry – to consider his present resources. Aside from his ski mask, clothing and those damned bourbon bottles, what did he have on his person?

Money. Keys. He would have had cigarettes and matches, but somehow May's chain-smoking had discouraged him, and about four months ago, after nearly thirty years of smoking Camels, he'd simply stopped. There'd been none of the usual withdrawal symptoms, no nervousness or bad temper, in fact not even much desire to quit. He'd simply awakened one morning, looked at the Everest of matches and butts in the ashtray on May's side of the bed, and decided not to have a cigarette just yet. Habit had kept him carrying his crumpled Camels another two weeks, but finally he'd realized he simply wasn't smoking any more, and that was the end of it. So he didn't have cigarettes, but more importantly under the circumstances, he also didn't have matches.

Yes, but what did be have? He had his wallet, with driver's license, money, blood-type card (you never know), a couple of credit cards he didn't dare use and a library card May had got him for obscure reasons of her own. In other pockets he had several cufflinks and tiepins belonging to Arnold Chauncey. He had – Credit cards. Credit cards are tough plastic, they can be slipped between door and jamb to force open a latch. Could a credit card be inserted between the electric lock box and the metal plate on the elevator door, unlocking it?

There was only one way to find out. Clutching a credit card between his teeth like a pirate's sword, Dortmunder scrambled up the ladder and around the horizontal beams to the door. Credit card in position. Credit card pushed forward. Credit card pushed harder, pushed, pushed, wriggled, edged, pushed, sidled, pushed into the goddam space between box and plate, shoved in there until all at once it went, and there was a tiny click.

Yes? Holding on to the credit card – he didn't want to lose that into the darkness below, covered with his fingerprints – Dortmunder leaned forward against the concrete wall and used his other hand to push on the door.

Which slid open.

Chapter 15

Arnold Chauncey sipped bourbon, stared at the spot on the wall where Folly Leads Man to Ruin had so lately hung, and tried not to look as pleased as he felt. The house was full of policemen, guests were shrieking in every corner, and somehow or other the plot seemed to have gone simultaneously completely wrong and completely right.

The dismay Chauncey had felt when Mavis Orfizzi had taken off in that elevator had been nothing to the cold acid-bath of doom that had washed o'er him when he'd discovered that two private guards, in direct contradiction of his express orders, had taken up posts on the top floor. As for his own behavior, he had to give himself low marks and consider himself extremely lucky that in the clatter of events nobody seemed to have noticed any of the false notes in his performance. His crying out, "No!" for instance, when Mavis entered the elevator. Then there'd been his reaction on seeing the guards come down from upstairs: an angry cry of, "What were you doing up there?"

Fortunately, after that last clinker Chauncey had finally got hold of himself and settled down to more or less appropriate behavior: initial shock and outrage, commiseration and apology toward his guests, helpful determination toward the policemen when they arrived, and stoic fortitude when counting up his own "losses" from his bedroom (Dortmunder & Co. had been damned efficient in there, by God). Statements had been taken from the dinner guests first, after which they'd been allowed to leave: Laura Bathing so startled she forgot to tip over a vase on the way out, Major General (Ret.) and Mrs. Homer Biggott limping out to be stacked into their Lincoln by their chauffeur, Sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El departing with a smiling comment about "petty crime increasing as civilizations decline," Martha Whoopley the only one in the household to eat her portion of baked Alaska before departure, Lance Sheath helping her into her fur and leaving with her, chuckling mannishly deep in his throat. Chauncey himself had given the authorities a brief statement – the truth, that he had been at dinner with his guests until the screaming started.

And now the police were dealing with the houseguests, one by one, while the staff awaited their turn in the kitchen and the shamefaced private guards cooled their heels in the first floor lounge next to the dining room in which the interviews were being held.

There was nothing left for Chauncey to do but wait for the dust to settle, and in the morning to call his insurance agent. Nobody could claim this was a faked theft; the closeting of the private guards, in fact, dangerous though their presence had been, adding yet another touch of verisimilitude to the affair. The first bourbon on the rocks he'd given himself had been medicinal in nature, a prescription for his jangled nerves, but the second had been in acknowledgment of a sense of relief, and the third was a toast to a dangerous crossing successfully accomplished. Cheers!

Chauncey was just draining this congratulatory tot when Prince Elector Otto Orfizzi wandered in, fresh from his interview with the police, saying, "Ah, there you are."

"Here I am," Chauncey agreed. His mood was becoming agreeably mellow.

"Bad timing, that," Orfizzi said, gesturing upwards with his thumb.

Not sure what the man meant, Chauncey said, "Was it?"

"If the damned woman had gone up there ten minutes earlier," the Prince explained, "the blighters might have shot her." He shrugged, evidently irritated at his wife's perverse insistence on remaining alive, then rallied himself and changed the subject. "I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw those policemen."

Now what? "I'm not sure I follow," Chauncey admitted. "The man in charge." Prince Otto leaned forward, dropping his voice confidentially. "Black as the ace of spades."

"Ah, yes," Chauncey said, and the combination of nerves and liquor made him add, "Well, at least he isn't Jewish."

The Prince considered that. "I don't know," he mused. "With a Jew, you'd be certain in any event the fellow wasn't in league with the thieves."

"That's true," Chauncey said, and got to his feet, feeling the strong need of another drink.

"Would that be bourbon?" asked the Prince.

"It would. May I offer?"

"You certainly may. Say what you will about jazz, the Hollywood movie, the Broadway musical or the short story, I say America's contribution to the arts is bourbon."

"I agree with you," Chauncey said, in some surprise, and reached for the bottle, only to discover it was empty. And when he looked in the lower cabinet among the extras there was no bourbon to be seen. "Sorry," he said. "I'll have to go downstairs for more."

"Oh, don't bother, I'll be perfectly happy with Scotch. As happy as one can be with that woman in the house, of course."

"It isn't any bother," Chauncey assured him. "I'd rather stick to bourbon myself." And it would be pleasant to be away from the Prince for a few minutes.

But that was not to be. "I'll stroll along with you," the Prince announced, and did.

The main liquor storage was in a closet on the ground floor, next to a similar closet converted to a wine cellar, the latter with its temperature and humidity maintained at a dry fifty degrees. Chauncey and Orfizzi rode down together in the elevator, and to fill the time Chauncey described the wine cellar, as it was a recent conversion. "I'd like to see it," the Prince said.

"I'll show it you."

On the ground floor, they walked together down the corridor, and about halfway to the rear exit Chauncey stopped at a pair of doors on the right-hand side. "Liquor storage is on the left," he explained, "and this is the wine cellar." And he opened the door to look at the bleak eyes and shivering body of Dortmunder. "Ump!" Chauncey said, and quickly shut the door again, before the Prince could get around it to look inside.

"I didn't see it," said the Prince.

"Urn, yes," Chauncey said. "I, urn, I've just had an awful thought."

"You have?"

"I may be out of bourbon. Let's see." And Chauncey opened the other door, which displayed a floor-to-ceiling rank of horizontal bottle – storage spaces made of criss-crossed wooden slats, about two-thirds filled with liquor and liquor bottles. "Oh, of course," he said. "I have plenty." And he grabbed two bottles and put them in the startled Prince's hands, then took a third from the stacks for himself, the while gesturing with his free hand, saying, "You see the style. The wine cellar is identical, except of course for the humidity and temperature controls. Not needed in here, naturally."

"Naturally," agreed the Prince. He was holding the two bottles by the neck, as though they were small dead animals and he wasn't quite sure what he was expected to do with them.

Closing the door, Chauncey took the Prince by the elbow and led him off toward the elevator. "Now to our drink, eh?"

"But–" The Prince looked back over his shoulder at the closed wine-cellar door. "Oh," he said doubtfully, as Chauncey continued to propel him away. "Identical. Yes, urn, right."

Back to the elevator they went, boarded, and Chauncey pushed the button before the door closed. But then, as the door was sliding into place, he suddenly thrust the third bourbon bottle into the Prince's arms, said, "Join you in a minute. Something I have to take care of," and slipped out of the elevator.

"But–" The Prince's startled face disappeared behind the closing door, and the elevator whirred upward as Chauncey tore down the hall, flung open the door, and cried, "What are you doing in there?"

"Freezing to death," Dortmunder told him. "Can I come out?"

Chauncey looked both ways. "Yes."

"Good." He emerged, and as Chauncey closed the door he said, "Get me out of here."

"I don't under– Yes, of course." Chauncey frowned up and down the corridor, chewing the inside of his cheek.

"We had guards," Dortmunder said. "Not to mention elevators."

"Things happened," Chauncey said, distracted by his own thoughts. "Come with me." He took Dortmunder by the arm, and as he led him down the corridor toward the back there was a faint clink from inside his leather jacket. A vision of two full bourbon bottles in the sitting-room storage cabinet came clear to Chauncey's mind, and he offered Dortmunder a sidelong jaundiced glance, saying, "I see."

Dortmunder seemed too disgusted by events to reply, and the two of them progressed as far as the mudroom by the back door, where Chauncey took out his key ring, slipped one key off, and handed it over, saying, "This unlocks the door to the passage. Also the one at the other end. Get it back to me later."

Dortmunder gestured at the door beside them. "Won't we set off the alarm when we open this?"

"I'll say it was me, I thought I saw something in the garden. Hurry, man."

"All right." Dortmunder took the key.

Struck by sudden doubt, Chauncey said, "Are there any more of you still in here?"

"Only me," Dortmunder said, as though the fact spoke volumes about his life.

"What about the painting? It's gone, isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah," Dortmunder said, looking surly. "That part went okay." And he left.

Chapter 16

When Dortmunder's head disappeared for the last time behind the elevator, Kelp withdrew his own head from the open panel in the housing and said to the others, "What do we do now?"

"What he told us," Bulcher answered. "We get the hell out of here."

"But what about Dortmunder?"

Chefwick said, "Andy, he'll either get away or he won't. But it won't do him any good if we stand around on the roof and get caught with him."

Kelp cast another worried glance into the elevator shaft, where there was nothing to be seen. "He's going to blame me for this," he said. "I know he will."

"Come on, Kelp," Bulcher said, and he picked up the rolled painting from the tarred roof and strode away.

So Kelp left, with many backward looks, and joined the other two on the return journey across the roofs and up the rope and back into the theater building and down the stairs to the balcony. Bulcher led all the way, and he was the one who opened the door at the foot of the stairs.

Unfortunately, it was intermission time within, and the rear of the balcony was once again full of Scotsmen. When Bulcher unexpectedly shoved open the door, he knocked one Scotsman's full cup of whiskey all over another Scotsman's kilt. Ignoring the damage, he made to push between them and go on about his business, but the empty-cupped Scotsman put a restraining hand on his chest and said, "Here, now. What do you think you're at?"

"Get out of my way," said Bulcher, who was in no mood for distractions. Behind him, Chefwick emerged from the stairs.

"By the Lord Harry you're a rude fellow," declared the drenched Scot, and he hauled off and punched Bulcher a good one on the ear. So Bulcher hit him back, and for good measure he then hit the other one, who staggered back into three more, spilling their drinks.

By the time Kelp got through the doorway the fight was merrily blazing away. People who had no idea what the brawl was all about were determinedly slugging people who had even less connection with it. "Well, for God's sake," Kelp said, standing in the doorway, gaping at a scene of surging fury and flashing knees and wildly swinging fists. Battle cries whooped and wailed above the fray, and somebody's rock-hard hand glanced off Kelp's forehead, causing him to stagger backward and sit down heavily on the steps.

What a view. In his dark stairway, there was a kind of muffled quality to the noise, and the belligerents staggering and swirling by the open doorway were like something in a 3-D movie. Kelp sat there a minute or two, bemused by the scene, until he suddenly realized that the white sticklike object he was from time to time seeing lifted in the air and then smashed down on one or another head was in fact the rolled-up painting, wielded in absentminded irritation by Tiny Bulcher.

"Not the painting!" Kelp came boiling out of the stairwell once more, plowing and bashing his way across the battlefield toward Bulcher, ignoring every buffet and deflection along the way, finally lunging upward like one of the figures in the Iwo Jima flag photo (which was posed, by the way, a later reconstruction; it's so hard to tell fiction from fact these days), wrenching the tubed painting out of Bulcher's great fist, screaming in his ear, "Not the painting!" and then abruptly bending double as about eleven different Scotsmen all let him have it at once in the breadbasket.

What a different perspective you get on the floor amid a sea of swirling kilts. Knees are knobbly, huge, dangerous-looking things, but over there was a pair of black stovepipes; Chefwick, in trousers. Kelp forced himself upward, climbing up handy sporrans to find that Bulcher had been swept away but indeed Chefwick was over there to the left, pressed defensively against the wall, clutching his black bag to his chest with both arms. Even in the middle of the fray, people recognized the true noncombatant when they see him, and so Chefwick remained like a rock in the ocean; it all swirled around him, but it never quite got him.

"Chefwick!" Kelp cried. Around him, a lot of Scotsmen wanted to play. "Chefwick!"

Light flashed from Chefwick's glasses as he turned his head.

"The painting!" Kelp cried, and launched it like a javelin, and went under for the second time.

Chapter 17

Stan Murch eased the Caddy around the corner and came to a stop in front of Hunter House. As far as he was concerned, this job was a piece of cake. Nothing to do but sit here like some hired chauffeur out front of a concert hall, then when the guys came out drive calmly away. Piece of cake.

The car itself was a piece of sponge cake, with MD plates. Kelp had picked it up for Murch this afternoon. A pale blue Cadillac, it was loaded with options. Kelp preferred doctors' cars whenever available, believing that doctors baby themselves by buying cars loaded with every power-assisting gadget and padded with every creature comfort known to the engineers of Detroit. "Driving a doctor's car," he sometimes said, "is like taking a nice nap in a hammock on a Sunday afternoon. In the summer." He could wax quite lyrical on the subject.

Movement attracted Murch's attention, and he glanced over toward the concert hall, on his right. Was something happening in there? It seemed to him, looking through the row of glass doors, that activity of some sort had begun in the lobby; a lot of running around or something. Murch squinted, trying to see more clearly, and one of those doors snapped open and a body sailed out like a glider without wings, hit the pavement, rolled, popped to its feet and ran back into the lobby.

Murch said, "What?"

By golly, there was a fight going on in there. The same body – or another one – hurtled out again, this time followed by three men struggling and reeling in one another's arms like a rugby scrum, and then all at once the entire dispute boiled out of the theater and spread all over the sidewalk.

"Holy Jesus!" said Murch, and watched a body bounce off the hood of the Caddy and back into the fray.

A face appeared at the windshield, and because of the face's contortion and his own astonishment it took Murch a minute to realize it was Kelp, struggling to get away from a whole lot of people who wanted him to stay. Murch honked the horn, which startled Kelp's friends, and Kelp scrambled off the hood and ducked into the Caddy.

Murch stared at him. Kelp's clothing was ripped, his cheek was smudged, and he looked as though he might be getting a black eye. Murch said, "What in hell is going on?"

"I don't know," Kelp said, gasping for breath. "I just don't know. Here comes Chefwick."

And so he did, tiptoeing across the sidewalk, clutching his black bag to his chest, moving like a ballet dancer in a minefield, and when at last he slipped into the Caddy and shut the door behind himself all he said, wide-eyed, was, "Oh, my. Oh, my."

Kelp asked him, "Where's Bulcher?"

"Here he comes," Murch said.

Here came Bulcher. He could be awesome when he was annoyed, and at the moment he was very annoyed. He had two of his opponents by the neck, one in each great ham-fist, and he was using them as battering rams to clear a path for himself through the melee, poking the two bodies out ahead of himself as he walked, battering them against raiding parties at his flanks, and generally cutting a swath. The path he'd bulldozed on his way into the hall was as nothing to the scorched-earth March To The Curb he effected on the way out. Reaching the Cadillac, he flung his assistants back into the riot while Chefwick opened a rear door for him. Then he hopped into the Caddy, slammed the door, and said, "That's enough of that."

"Okay, Stan," Kelp said. "Let's go."

"Go?" Murch looked around, at Kelp beside him on the front seat and Chefwick and Bulcher in back, and said, "What about Dortmunder?"

"He's not with us. Come on, Stan, they'll take the car apart next. Drive somewhere and I'll tell you on the way."

The car was rocking more than somewhat, from the bodies bouncing off it, and a few of Bulcher's recent playmates were beginning to look hungrily at him through the windows, so Murch put the Caddy in gear, pressed on the horn, eased away from the curb, and drove them away from there.

It took Kelp two right turns and a red light to explain Dortmunder's situation, finishing, as they headed downtown, "We can only hope he'll figure something."

"He's stuck in an elevator shaft, with private guards running around?"

"He's been in tighter spots than that before," Kelp assured him.

"Yeah," Murch said. "And wound up in jail."

"Don't talk defeatist. Anyway, the guy who lives there is on our side. Maybe he can give Dortmunder a hand."

"Yeah, maybe," Murch said doubtfully. Then, deciding to look on the bright side, he said, "But anyway, you did get the painting, right?"

"That part was easy," Kelp said. "Except when Bulcher thought it was a baseball bat."

"I got carried away," Bulcher said.

"All's well that end's well," Kelp said. "Let's see it, Roger."

Chefwick said, "Beg pardon?"

Kelp turned a suddenly glassy smile on Chefwick. "The painting," he said. "Let's see it."

"I don't have it."

"Sure you do. I gave it to you."

"No, you didn't. Bulcher had it"

"Kelp took it away from me," Bulcher said.

"That's right. And I threw it to Roger."

"Well, I didn't get it." Chefwick was sounding prissier and prissier, as though defending himself against unjust accusations.

"Well, I threw it to you," Kelp insisted.

"Well, I didn't get it," Chefwick insisted.

Kelp glared at Chefwick, and Chefwick glared at Kelp, and then gradually they stopped glaring and started frowning. They looked each other over, they frowned at Bulcher, they looked around the interior of the car, and all the time Bulcher watched them with his head cocked to one side while Murch tried to concentrate simultaneously on the Friday-night traffic and the events Inside the car.

It was Murch who finally said the awful truth aloud. "You don't have it."

"Something–" Kelp lifted up and looked beneath himself, but it wasn't there either. "Something happened," he said. "In that fight. I don't know, all of a sudden there was this huge fight going on."

"We don't have it," Bulcher said. He sounded stunned. "We lost it."

"Oh, my goodness," Chefwick said.

Kelp sighed. "We have to go back for it," he said. "I hate the whole idea, but we just have to. We have to go back."

Nobody argued. Murch took the next right, and headed uptown.

The scene in front of the theater was not to be believed. The police had arrived, ambulances had arrived, even a fire engine had arrived. Platoons of Scotsmen were being herded into clumps by wary policemen, while other policemen in white helmets trotted into the hall, where the controversy was apparently continuing.

Slowly Murch drove past Hunter House along the one lane still open to traffic, and was waved on by a cop with a red-beamed long flashlight. Sadly Kelp and Chefwick and Bulcher gazed at the concert hall. Kelp sighed. "Dortmunder is going to be very upset," he said.

Chapter 18

Dortmunder took the subway to Union Square, then walked the rest of the way home. He was in the last block when a fellow came out of a doorway and said, "Pardon me. You got a match?"

"No," said Dortmunder. "I don't smoke."

"That's all right," the man said. "Neither do I." And he fell into pace with Dortmunder, walking along at his right hand. He had a very decided limp, but seemed to have no trouble keeping up.

Dortmunder stopped and looked at him. "All right," he said. The man stopped, with a quizzical smile. He was an inch or two taller than Dortmunder, slender, with a long thin nose and a bony sunken-cheeked face, and he was wearing a topcoat with the collar turned up and a hat with the brim pulled down, and he was keeping his right hand in his topcoat pocket. Some sort of black orthopedic shoe was on his right foot. He said, "All right? All right what?"

"Do whatever you're here to do," Dortmunder told him, "so I can knock you down and go home."

The man laughed as though he were amused, but he also stepped back a pace, twisting on the lame foot "I'm no holdup man, Dortmunder," he said.

"You know my name," Dortmunder mentioned.

"Well," said the man, "we have the same employer."

"I don't get it."

"Arnold Chauncey."

Then Dortmunder did get it. "You're the other guy the lawyer found for him. The killer."

The killer made a strangely modest gesture with his left hand, while the right remained in his pocket. "Not quite," he said. "Killing is sometimes part of what I do, but it isn't my real job. The way I like to think of it, my job is enforcing other people's wishes."

"Is that right."

"For instance," the killer said, "in your case, I'm being paid twenty thousand dollars, but not to kill you. I get paid whether you live or die. If you give back the picture, that's fine, you live and I collect. If you don't, if you make trouble, that's not fine, and you die and I collect." He shrugged. "It makes no difference."

Dortmunder said, "I don't want you hanging around me the next six months."

"Oh, don't worry," the killer said. "You'll never see me again. If it's thumbs down, I'll drop you from a distance." Grinning, he took his right hand out of his pocket, empty, made a pistol shape with the fingers, pointed it straight-arm at Dortmunder's face, closed one eye, grinned, sighted along his arm, and said, "Bang. I'm very good at that."

Somehow, Dortmunder believed him. He already knew that he himself was precisely the kind of reliable crook Chauncey had asked for, and he now believed that this fellow was precisely the kind of reliable killer Chauncey had asked for. "I'm happy to say," he said, "that I don't intend to do anything with that painting except hold on to it till I get paid, then give it back to Chauncey. Fancy is not my method."

"Good," said the killer, with a friendly smile. "I like getting paid for doing nothing. So long." And he started away, then immediately turned back, saying, "You shouldn't mention this to Chauncey."

"I shouldn't?"

"He doesn't want us to meet, but I thought we should have one chat." His grin flickered. "I like to see my people," he said. His eyes glittered at Dortmunder, and then once again he turned away.

Dortmunder watched him go, tall and narrow and dark, body twisting as he strode on his game leg, both hands now in his topcoat pockets, and he felt a faint chill up the middle of his back. Now he understood why Chauncey had said Dortmunder wasn't dangerous; it was because he'd had that fellow as a comparison. "Good thing I'm an honest man," he muttered to himself, and he walked on home, where he found Kelp and Murch and Chefwick and Bulcher and May all waiting for him in the living room.

"Dortmunder!"

"John!"

"You made it! I knew you would!"

They gave him cheers and pats on the back, and he gave them Chauncey's bourbon, and then they all sat down with glasses of the stuff – terrific bourbon, almost worth the trouble it caused – and Kelp said, "How'd you do it? How'd you get away?"

"Well, I went down to the bottom of the elevator shaft," Dortmunder started, "and then…" And he stopped, struck by something vaguely wrong. Looking around at the attentive faces, he saw they were more glazed than attentive. Bulcher's and Kelp's clothes were all messed up, and Kelp maybe had the beginnings of a black eye. There was a kind of subterranean tension in the room. "What's the matter?" he said.

May said, "John, tell us how you got out of the elevator shaft."

He frowned at May, he frowned at the others, he listened to the silence, and he knew. Looking at Kelp, he said, "Where is it?"

"Now, Dortmunder," Kelp said.

"Where is it?"

"Oh, dear," said Chefwick.

Murch said, "There was a fight in the theater."

"It wasn't anybody's fault," said Kelp.

Even Tiny Bulcher was looking abashed. "It was just one of those things," he said.

"WHERE IS IT?"

An electric silence. Dortmunder watched them stare at the floor, and finally it was Kelp who answered, in a tiny voice:

"We lost it."

"You lost it," Dortmunder said.

Then all of them were talking at once, explaining, justifying, telling the story from a thousand different directions, and Dortmunder just sat there, unmoving, stolid, letting it wash over him until at last they all ran down. In that next silence, Dortmunder sighed, but didn't speak, and May said, "John, can I freshen your drink?"

Dortmunder shook his head. There was no heat in him. "No, thanks, May," he said.

Kelp said, "Is there anything we can do?"

"If you don't mind," Dortmunder told him, "I'd like to be alone for a while."

"It wasn't anybody's fault," Kelp said. "It really wasn't."

"I'm not blaming you," Dortmunder said, and oddly enough it was the truth. He didn't blame anybody. Fatalism had captured another victim. "I just want to be alone for a while," he said, "and think about how I've got six months to live."