Nobody's Perfect

Chapter 1

Amid the merry flocks of Christmas shoppers, Dortmunder looked like some sort of rebuttal; the wet blanket's answer to Santa Claus. As he stood in the perfume department at Macy's, the word HUMBUG seemed to float in a balloon in the air over his head, and the eye he cast on the salesgirl would have to be called jaundiced. "What's that one?" he said.

The girl was holding a tiny glass phial shaped like a 1920's floor lamp without the shade; a spread-out pancake at the bottom, where the eighth of an ounce of perfume was, and then a long skinny neck with nothing in it at all, except the tube of the atomizer. "Ma Folie," said the girl. "It's French."

"Oh, yeah?"

"It means, 'My Folly.'"

"Yours, huh? Let me smell it again."

The girl had already sprayed a mite on her wrist, which she obediently re-extended in Dortmunder's direction. It felt weird to lean over and rest his nose on some unknown female's wrist – bony, gray-white skin, thin blue vein tracings – and all Dortmunder knew after he'd sniffed was the same as he'd learned last time; the stuff smelt sweet. He wouldn't have known Ma Folie from peach brandy. "How much is it?"

"Twenty-seven fifty."

"Twenty-seven dollars?"

"Foreign currency can be exchanged on the sixth floor," she told him.

Dortmunder frowned at her. "I don't have any foreign currency."

"Oh. I'm sorry, I thought… well, anyway. It costs twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents."

"I oughta knock this place over," Dortmunder muttered, and turned to look around at the store, the customers, the exits, the escalators – kinda casing the joint. But it wasn't any good, of course. They had private cops, closed-circuit TV, electric eyes, all kinds of sophisticated defenses. And the real cash would be kept in the offices, way upstairs; you'd never get out of the building, even if you managed the score.

"Sir?"

But Dortmunder didn't answer. He remained frozen in position, having just that second noticed a face he knew on the Down escalator, descending steadily from the ceiling; a bright cheerful Christmassy face, gazing birdlike this way and that as he glided down that long diagonal. Dortmunder was so taken aback that it didn't occur to him to avert his own face until too late; Kelp had seen him, Kelp had flashed a huge smile, Kelp was up on tiptoe on the escalator waving one hand high over his head.

"Sir?"

"Christ," Dortmunder muttered. He gave the girl a bilious look and she backed away, uncertain whether to be frightened or offended. "All right," Dortmunder said. "The hell with it, all right."

"Sir?"

"I'll take the goddam thing."

Kelp was struggling his way through the multitudes, the bewildered husbands, the snotty-nosed children, the self-absorbed secretaries, the massed family groups, the smirking pairs of teenage girls, the short stout women carrying nine shopping bags, the tall slender women wearing fun furs over their shoulders and yellow-lensed sunglasses on top of their heads, all the flux and flow of gift-time in the metropolis, and Dortmunder, now that it was too late, lifted one shoulder to shield his face while he slipped the girl three crumpled saw-bucks.

"Dortmunder!"

"Yeah," Dortmunder said.

"What a coincidence!" Kelp was carrying a full Korvette's shopping bag; working some dodge, no doubt. "I just called your place about an hour ago, May said she didn't know where you were."

"Christmas shopping," Dortmunder said, as another man might say, "Cleaning the cesspool."

Kelp glanced at the girl, currently putting a fresh perfume bottle in a complicated little cardboard box, and he leaned closer to Dortmunder to say, quietly, "Whadaya wanna buy that stuff for? We hit one of them shopping centers out on the Island, we make a profit on it."

"For a Christmas present?" Dortmunder shook his head. "A Christmas present is different," he said. "A Christmas present is something you buy."

"Yeah?" Kelp received that as though it were a brand-new idea, but one possibly worth further thought.

"Besides," Dortmunder said, "I still got some of that Chauncey money." The five of them had split nearly seven thousand dollars after fencing all the jewelry and other goods from the fiasco.

Kelp was surprised. "You do? That was over a month ago!"

"Well, I'm not a big spender."

The girl came back with Dortmunder's purchase in a bag, and his change. "That's twenty-nine seventy," she said, and dropped a quarter and a nickel into Dortmunder's palm.

"You told me twenty-seven fifty."

"Plus tax."

"Well, shit," Dortmunder said, put his change in his pocket, picked up his parcel, and turned away.

"And Merry Christmas to you," the girl told his back.

"Listen," Kelp said, as they moved away from the counter, "I got to talk to you, that's why I was looking for you. It's too crowded in here, you want a lift home?"

Dortmunder gave him a wary look. "No new capers," he said.

"Nothing new," Kelp said, with funny emphasis. "I promise."

"Okay, then."

They went out to Herald Square. It was nearly six, quite dark, not quite freezing, and slowly, slightly, sloppily snowing. Jammed traffic and roly-poly bundled people were everywhere. "Colder'n hell," Dortmunder said.

"It isn't the cold, it's the humidity," Kelp told him. "The air's so damp, it gets right into your bones. If it'd get down below freezing, dry the air out, we wouldn't feel so cold."

Dortmunder looked at him. "Everything's gotta be the opposite with you," he said.

"I'm just saying."

"Don't. Where's your car?"

"I don't know yet," Kelp said. "Wait right here, I'll be back." And he sloshed away, carrying his Korvette's shopping bag into the swirling crowds and the gathering snow.

It was after Kelp was out of sight that what he'd said ricocheted in Dortmunder's mind. Aloud, he muttered, "He doesn't know yet?" Escape suggested itself, but when he thought about his alternatives – the subway in the Christmas rush, trying to find a cab in Herald Square at six o'clock on a shopping day in December, walking twenty-five blocks home in the snow and the cold – he realized he might just as well stay where he was. So he leaned his back against the wall of Macy's, near the entrance doors, put his hands in his overcoat pockets – his right hand closing around the box of perfume – and settled down to wait. Snow gathered on his shoulders and his black knit cap, snow melted on his forehead and caused little icy rivulets to run down his nose and cataract onto his coat buttons, and icy slush transmitted previews of the grave through his wet shoes to his feet.

He'd been standing there about five minutes when a distinguished gent in an astrakhan hat and white moustache and fur-collared coat paused in front of him, stuffed something into the breast pocket of Dortmunder's overcoat, and said, "Cheer up, old chap. And a merry Christmas to you." And walked on.

Dortmunder stared after him, nonplussed, then fingered his pocket and drew out a neatly folded dollar bill. "Well, Jesus H. Jumping Christ," he said.

A car was honking. Dortmunder looked past the dollar and saw a tan Mercedes-Benz at the curb, and somebody inside it waving. Kelp?

Kelp. And, yes, the Mercedes had MD plates; from Connecticut, as it happened. Dortmunder trotted around to the passenger side, slid into the car, and felt dry warmth bask over him as Kelp shot the Mercedes forward. "Ahhh," said Dortmunder.

"Impossible traffic," Kelp said. "Even Stan Murch wouldn't get anywhere in this stuff. I picked up this beast a block away, can you believe it? Took me that long just to come back." He glanced over. "What's with the dollar bill?"

Dortmunder was still holding it in his hand, and now he shoved it away in his side pocket. "I found it," he said.

"No kidding. Maybe this is your lucky day."

What an idea. "Yeah," said Dortmunder.

"In fact," Kelp said, "this is your lucky day." Dortmunder closed his eyes. He could enjoy the comfort of the car, and just not listen to anything Kelp had to say.

"For instance," Kelp said, "there's that question of the painting, and what happens six months from now."

"Four and a half," Dortmunder said. His eyes were still closed.

"Okay, four and a half."

"And I figure maybe I can leave the country," Dortmunder said. "Go to South America, maybe. Me and May, we could open up a bar or something. Is the guy gonna follow us all over the world for twenty grand?"

"Yes," said Kelp. "So long as they're looking for the painting, they'll look for you, and you know it."

Inside his closed eyes, Dortmunder sighed. "You could let me at least have my little dreams," he said.

"I got something better," Kelp told him. "I got an out."

"You don't."

"I do."

"You don't. Not unless you got the painting, and you don't. When Chauncey comes around and wants it back, there aren't gonna be any outs."

"One," Kelp said, and suddenly flew into a frenzy at the wheel, honking his horn in a mad bebop rhythm of toots, the while yelling, "Move your god darn ass whatsa matter don't you wanna go home?"

Dortmunder opened his eyes. "Take it easy," he said.

"They give anybody a license," Kelp grumbled, subsiding. Then he said, "Listen, I can't talk in this traffic. You got any of that good bourbon left?"

"You're kidding."

"I tell you what," Kelp said. "I'll buy a bottle of bourbon on the way downtown – not Chauncey's brand, but something nice. Something bottled in Kentucky."

"Yeah?"

"Invite me up to your place," Kelp said. "We'll have a drink, I'll give you my idea."

"You know what I think of your ideas," Dortmunder told him.

"Can it be worse than a visit from Chauncey's friend?"

Dortmunder sighed.

"I'll buy two bottles," Kelp said.

Chapter 2

"You remember my nephew Victor," Kelp said.

"The FBI man," Dortmunder said.

"The ex-FBI man," Kelp corrected him. "It makes a difference."

"They threw him out," Dortmunder said, "because he kept putting a suggestion in the FBI suggestion box that they oughta have a secret handshake, so they'd be able to recognize each other at parties."

"That's not necessarily so," Kelp said. "That's just a theory."

"It's good enough for me," Dortmunder told him. "It helps me remember the guy. What about him?"

"I was talking to him at Thanksgiving," Kelp said, "at my grandmother's. She makes the most fantastic turkey, you wouldn't believe it."

What was there to say to a remark like that? Nothing; so that's what Dortmunder said. He settled himself more comfortably in his personal easy chair in his warm dry living room – May was out at the Safeway, where she was a cashier – and he sipped a little more bourbon. It was bottled in Kentucky (as opposed to being distilled in Kentucky, shipped north in railroad cars and bottled in Hoboken) and it was pretty good; a firm stride upward from the stuff at the O.J. Bar and Grill, which was probably also distilled in Hoboken, from a combination of Hudson and Raritan waters.

Kelp was going on with his story. "The point is," he said, "Victor was telling me about a guy that lives in his neighborhood now, that he'd worked on his case back in the FBI. The guy was a counterfeiter."

"Yeah?"

"Only he didn't print the money," Kelp said. "He drew it." He made vague drawing gestures in the air. "One bill at a time. All twenties."

Dortmunder frowned past his glass at Kelp. "This guy drew individual twenty-dollar bills?"

"Apparently he was terrific at it. He'd take a sheet of paper, he'd paint five or six bills on it, cut them out, paint the other side, pass em all over town."

"Strange fella," Dortmunder decided.

"But terrific," Kelp said. "According to Victor, you couldn't tell his bills from the real thing. Every one of them, a work of art"

"Then how'd they get him?"

"Well, a couple ways. First off, he always worked in watercolor. With oils, you get too much build-up on the paper, the texture's wrong. So his bills, they were fine when he first passed them, but pretty soon they'd begin to run."

"This sounds exactly like the kind of guy you'd know," Dortmunder said.

"I don't know him," Kelp said. "My nephew Victor knows him."

"And you know Victor."

"Well, he's my nephew."

"I rest my case," Dortmunder said. "What was the other way they caught this guy?"

"Well, he usually stayed right there in his own neighborhood," Kelp said. "He's a very unworldly sort of guy, he's really an artist, he just did these twenties to keep himself in potatoes and blue jeans while he did his own art. So like, when all these twenties kept getting traced back to the same Shop-Rite, the same drugstore, the same liquor store, the Feds staked out the neighborhood, and that's how Victor met this guy Porculey."

"Porculey?"

"Griswold Porculey. That's his name."

"It is, huh?"

"Absolutely. Anyway, the Feds nailed Porculey, but all he got was a suspended sentence when he promised not to do it any more."

"They believed him?"

"Well, yeah," Kelp said. "Because it made sense. Once they got him, and they figured out how he was doing those things, they talked to him, and it turned out he was spending five hours just to do one side of one bill. You know, those twenties, they're all full of tricky little stuff."

"Yeah, I've seen some," Dortmunder said.

"Well, anyway, that means ten hours per bill, and not even counting the cost of materials and overhead, paper, paint, depreciation on the brushes, all the rest of it, the most he's making is two bucks an hour. He could do better than that delivering for the Shop-Rite, part time."

Dortmunder nodded. "Crime doesn't pay," he said. "I'm gradually coming to that conclusion."

"Well, the point is," Kelp went on, "this guy used to live up in Washington Heights, he had his studio up there and all, but the rent kept going up, they priced him out of the neighborhood and he moved out to Long Island. Victor ran into him in the shopping center."

"Passing twenties?"

"No," Kelp said, "but he's thinking about it. He told Victor he was looking for some way to do a bunch of bills all at once. Victor figures he's about halfway to inventing the printing press, and he's worried the guy'll get in trouble. And that's where we come in."

"I was wondering where we came in," Dortmunder said.

"We can put a little honest cash his way," Kelp said, "help him avoid temptation."

"How do we do that?"

"You don't get it?" Kelp was so pleased with himself he was about to run around in front and kiss himself on both cheeks. Leaning forward, gesturing with his half-full bourbon glass, he said. "We fake the painting!"

Dortmunder frowned at him past his own half-empty glass. "We what?"

"This is a famous painting, right, the one we copped from Chauncey? So there'll be pictures of it, copies of it, all that stuff. Porculey's a real artist, and he can imitate anything. So he runs up a copy of the painting and that's the one we give back!"

Dortmunder studied Kelp's words one by one. "There's something wrong with that," he said.

"What?"

"I don't know yet. I just hope I find it before it's too late."

"Dortmunder, it's better than getting shot in the head."

Dortmunder winced. "Don't talk like that," he said. Already in anticipation, the last few weeks, he was getting headaches every time he passed a window.

"You gotta do something," Kelp told him. "And this is the only something in town."

Was that true? Dortmunder considered again his dream of escaping to some South American seacoast town with May, opening a little restaurant-saloon – May's famous tuna casserole would make them an instant success – he himself would run the bar; he wasn't sure whether to call it May's Place or The Hideaway. But as he visualized the dream once more, himself behind a gleaming black bar with bamboo fittings – somehow South America was very South Pacific in his imagination – in walks a tall narrow fellow with a bad limp. He ups to the bar and he says, "Hello, Dortmunder," and his hand comes out of his topcoat pocket.

"Un," said Dortmunder.

Kelp looked at him, concerned. "Something wrong? Bourbon no good?"

"Bourbon's fine," Dortmunder said.

Kelp said, "Listen, why don't I call Victor, have him set up the meet? Dortmunder? I'll do that, right? Why don't I?"

May's Place faded, with its unwelcome customer. "Okay," Dortmunder said.

Chapter 3

"I don't see why we had to meet him at a shopping center," Dortmunder grumbled, watching the windshield wipers push snow back and forth on the glass. Today's doctor's car was a silver gray Cadillac Seville, with a tape deck and a selection of tapes by Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and Gary Puckett & The Union Gap. (The Seville was Cadillac's response to the oil crisis and the need for smaller cars; dan de was removed from the middle of the Cadillac Sedan de Ville, resulting obviously in a shorter lighter car: the Seville.)

"What difference does it make?" Kelp said, slithering through the erratic traffic on the Southern State. "We meet Victor at the shopping center, he takes us on to Porculey's place."

"It's Christmastime," Dortmunder pointed out. "That's what difference it makes. We're going out to Long Island in a snowstorm to a shopping center a week before Christmas, that's what difference it makes."

"Well, it's too late to change it now," Kelp said. "It won't be that bad."

As a matter of fact, it was that bad. When they left the parkway, they immediately found themselves in endless clogged traffic, windshield wipers slap-slapping in the headlight-lit darkness all around them, auto windows all steamed up, smeary child-faces peering out every side and back window, people honking furiously and pointlessly at one another, and the same people revving like mad and spinning their wheels when they found themselves on a bit of ice, instead of gently accelerating. And the huge sprawling parking lot of the Merrick Mall, when they reached it, was if possible even worse; in addition to at least as much stalled traffic, there were also millions of pedestrians slipping and sliding around, some of them pushing shopping carts full of Christmas packages and some of them pushing baby carriages full of Christmas packages and babies. "This is terrific," Dortmunder said. "Your nephew Victor is still the same giant brain he always was."

"The Dunkin' Donuts," Kelp said, peering through the windshield and pretending he hadn't heard Dortmunder's comment. "We're supposed to meet him at the Dunkin' Donuts."

The Merrick Mall, in the manner of most shopping centers, was designed like a barbell, with a branch of a major department store at one end, a branch of a major supermarket at the other end, and several zillion smaller stores in between. As Kelp inched along amid the shoppers, the familiar electric logos gleamed out at them from the darkness: Woolworth's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Thom McAn, Rexall, Gino's, Waldenbooks, Baskin-Robbins, Western Auto, Capitalists & Immigrants Trust. Then the record stores, the shoe stores, the ladies' clothing stores, the Chinese restaurants. However, inflation and unemployment have affected the shopping centers at least as much as the rest of the economy, so that here and there among the brave enticements stood a storefront dark, silent, its windows black, its forehead nameless, its prospects bleak. The survivors seemed to beam the more brightly in their efforts to distract attention from their fallen comrades, but Dortmunder could see them. Dortmunder and a failed enterprise could always recognize one another.

"There it is," Kelp said, and there it was: Dunkin' Donuts, with its steamy window full of do(ugh)nuts. Kelp pootled around a while longer, found a parking place at the far end of a nearby row, and he and Dortmunder squelched through the slush and the hopeless vehicles to find Victor seated at a tiny formica table in the Dunkin' Donuts, actually dunking a do(ugh) nut into a cup of coffee.

Kelp's nephew Victor, a small neat dark-haired man who dressed as though he were applying for a job as a bank teller, was more than thirty years of age but looked barely out of his teens. His slenderness and boyishly unlined face helped to give that impression, confirmed by the eager anticipatory quality of his every expression. What he most looked like was a puppy seen through a pet-store window, except he didn't have a tail to wag.

"Mr. Dortmunder!" he said, hopping to his feet and sticking out the hand with the dunked do(ugh)nut in it. "Nice to see you again." Then be realized he was still holding the do(ugh)nut, chuckled sheepishly, stuck the whole thing out of sight in his mouth, wiped his hand on his trousers, stuck it out again, and said, "Muf nur muf."

"That goes for me, too," Dortmunder told him, and shook his sticky hand.

Victor gestured for them to sit at his table, while he hurriedly and noisily swallowed, then said, "Coffee? Donuts? Uncle?"

"Not for me," Dortmunder said. Neither he nor Kelp had taken the invitation to sit.

"Victor," Kelp said, "I think we'd just rather go see this fellow Porculey, okay?" Kelp tended to get a little nervous when in the presence simultaneously of Dortmunder and Victor.

"Oh, sure," Victor said. Standing beside the table, he gulped his coffee down, patted his mouth with a paper napkin, and said, "All set."

"Fine," Kelp said.

Victor led the way outside, and turned right, to walk along the semi-protected sidewalk. The few other pedestrians slogging past weren't even trying to look imbued with Christmas cheer. A roof extended over the walk, but a gusty cold breeze shot little clumps of wet snow in under it from time to time. Kelp, his uneasiness expressing itself in a fitful desire to keep some sort of conversation going, said, "Well, Victor. Still got your old Packard?"

"Oh, yes," Victor said, with his modest little chuckle. "It's a fine car. Ask the man who owns one."

"Do you want us to follow you, or should we all ride in the Packard?"

They were just passing one of the empty stores; black windows, a bit of trash in the doorway. "We're here," Victor said, and stopped.

This was so unexpected that Kelp and Dortmunder kept going, until they realized they'd left Victor behind. When they looked back, Victor was knocking on the glass door of the empty store.

Now what? The door was opening and light was spilling out into the snowy dark. A voice was speaking, Victor was grinning and replying, Victor was crossing the threshold, smiling and gesturing for Dortmunder and Kelp to follow. They did, and entered another world.

The stocky man who shut the door behind them remarked, genially, "Terrible out there tonight," but Dortmunder paid no attention, absorbing the interior of the store. In its most recent commercial manifestation it had apparently been a women's clothing boutique, the long narrow space separated into sections by platforms of various heights, all edged with elbow-high black wrought-iron railings, each platform covered in carpeting of another color, all shades of blue or gray. With the walls covered in burlap painted dark blue and the plate glass windows painted black, the final effect was somewhere between a garden and a garret, flooded in moonlight.

Probably when the platforms had borne racks of skirts and sweaters and jumpsuits the garden effect had been predominant, but now the feeling was much more of a garret, helped by the bits of clothing and old rags draped carelessly over most of the railings. The nearest couple of platforms featured ratty pieces of living-room furniture, while a platform toward the middle bore several plain wooden kitchen chairs and an old trencher table. Toward the rear were two easels, a high stool, and a library table covered with the impedimenta of painting: tubes of color, water glasses full of slender brushes, rags, palette knives. Unframed canvases were stacked in corners and hung on the walls. Above the easels, the standard shop ceiling gave way to a recess containing a domed skylight.

The store was warm after the snowy night outside, and despite its narrow length and endlessly shifting levels, it was somehow cozy. People lived here, you could see that, and had made a place of their own in what had once been a desert of impersonality.

People. Two of them, one a girl of about twenty curled up on the sofa, with an old plaid throw rug draped across her legs. She was slender, but with roundness and softness, like the world's tastiest peach, and her smile made her cheeks plump and delectable. Dortmunder could have gone on looking at her for thirty or forty years, but he forced himself to give some attention to the other person as well.

This was the man who had let them in. He was a roly-poly sloppy man of about fifty, wearing bedroom slippers, paint-stained dark corduroy trousers, a mostly-green plaid shirt and a dark green ratty cardigan sweater with leather elbow patches. He hadn't shaved today, and it was possible he hadn't shaved yesterday.

Victor was making the introductions, announcing each name as though that person were a particular discovery of Victor's own: "Griswold Porculey, I'd like you to meet my uncle, Andy Kelp, and his friend, Mister John Dortmunder."

"W'r'ya," Dortmunder said, shaking Porculey's extended hand.

"How do you do. How do you do. Victor's uncle, eh?"

"His mother is my older sister," Kelp explained.

Porculey gestured at the girl on the sofa, saying, "And this is my friend, Cleo Marlahy, an ever-present comfort."

Throwing off the throw, Cleo Marlahy uncurled her legs and sprang to her feet, saying, "Coffee? Tea? Wine?" Then doubtfully, to Porculey, "Do we have any liquor?"

"We might have vermouth."

"I'd love some coffee," Kelp said. Dortmunder said, "Me, too."

Victor said, "May I have wine? I'm older than I look."

Porculey said, "Red or white?" "Red, please."

"Done," said Porculey. "We don't have any white."

.The girl was wearing black velvet pants and a white blouse. She was barefoot, and her toenails were painted an extremely dark red; the color of drying blood. She bounded away on these feet like the little mermaid, while Porculey directed his guests into chairs and himself dropped with a grunt into the sofa.

Kelp said, "This is quite a place. Very clever idea."

"Only rent I could afford," Porculey said, "to get this much space and north light." He gestured toward the skylight. "They gave me a good rent," he went on, "because they had so many empty stores, and because I agreed to make one or two turns around the place after the shops all close. Sort of a night watchman. Cheaper for them, cheaper for me. I'm a night bird anyway, and I walk anyway, so it's no hardship. We took down the partitions in the changing rooms, put our bedroom back there. Only problem's the lack of a kitchen, but we don't need much. Couple of hot plates, little refrigerator, use the sink in the lay. Perfect, really. They give more heat than any landlord in my experience, there's no nosy neighbors to poke and pry, and any shop I want is right outside that door."

Cleo returned, with a mismatched pair of white mugs for Dortmunder and Kelp, and an empty jelly glass for Victor.

Distributing the mugs, she then picked up a gallon jug of Gab Hearty Burgundy from the floor beside the sofa, half filled the jelly glass, gave it to Victor, and said, "Porky? More wine?"

"Don't mind if I do. Don't mind if I do."

Porculey drank from a tapered pilsner glass meant for beer, in which the dark red wine looked like something in a laboratory experiment. Cleo's glass, which she rescued from way under the sofa, was a small glass stein which had originally held mustard. She filled it to the top with hearty burgundy, plopped onto the sofa next to Porculey, raised her stein, and said, "Absent friends."

"May they rot," said Porculey, lifting his pilsner glass in the toast, and took a healthy swig. Then he said, looking at Dortmunder, "I understand you folks have a problem."

"We do," Dortmunder agreed. "We helped a fellow fake an art theft, to get the insurance. He wants the painting back, but we don't have it any more. It got lost. Kelp seems to think you could run up an imitation and we could give that back to the guy instead of the original."

Kelp said, "We'd make it worth your while, of course."

Porculey grunted in amusement. "Yes, I should think you would," he said. The hand not holding the pilsner glass had strayed over to Cleo's near thigh and was massaging it gently. The girl sipped wine and smiled comfortably to herself. Porculey said, "What painting is this?"

"It's called Folly Leads Man to Ruin, by somebody called Veenbes."

"Veenbes." Porculey put his head back, gazing up toward the corner of the ceiling. His hand stroked and stroked. "Veenbes. Folly Leads Man to Ruin. Mm, mm, possibly. Book," he decided, all at once, and released Cleo's leg in order to heave himself out of the sofa and onto his feet.

Book? There were any number of books in sight, though no bookcases. Paperbacks were heaped up in corners and under tables, while large hardcover volumes were stuck between uprights of the railings along platform edges. It was to these that Porculey went, carrying his wine, muttering under his breath as he ran his free hand along their spines. Then he stopped, pulled out one book, set the pilsner glass on the floor, thumbed through the volume, shook his head in annoyance and shoved the book back again.

This might take some time. While waiting, Dortmunder looked around, absorbing this weird dwelling place and noticing here and there on the dark walls unframed paintings, presumably Porculey's. They were all different, and yet they were all the same. In the middle foreground of each was a girl, either naked or wearing something minimal like a white scarf, and in the background was a landscape. The girls were mostly seen full length, and they were always very absorbed in what they were doing. One of them, for instance, sitting on the grass with some ruined castles behind her, plus in the distance a couple of trees and a small pond at which two deer drank, was studying a chess set laid out on the grass in front of her. Another showed a girl on a beach, leaning over the gunwale to look inside a large stranded rowboat, with a huge storm way out at sea in the background. (This was the girl with the scarf.)

The girls were not quite identical. Glancing around, Dortmunder saw maybe four different girls among the paintings, and it was with a sudden shock that he realized one of them was Cleo Marlahy. So that's what she looks like with her clothes off, he thought, blinking at a picture in which, against a background of an apple orchard white with spring flowers, an unsmiling girl was rather leggily climbing over a rail fence.

"Ah hah!"

Porculey had found something. Back he came, lugging a large book, and showed the page to Dortmunder. "That it?"

"Yes," said Dortmunder, looking at the small color illustration taking up half the page. The jester pranced, the people followed, the darkness yawned. Below the illustration were the title, the painter's name and dates, and the words Private Collection.

"Here," Porculey said, dumped the book in Dortmunder's lap, and padded off again.

Kelp, leaning over from his chair, said, "That's it, all right."

Dortmunder looked at him. "You never even saw the thing."

"Well, you described it."

Porculey came back with two more books, both also containing reproductions of the painting. He added these to Dortmunder's lap and returned to the sofa. Cleo, meanwhile, had gone off to rescue the pilsner glass, and now brought it back and handed it to Porculey. "Thank you, my dear," he said, and she patted his cheek and sat down again beside him.

Dortmunder's lap was full of books, all open to illustrations of folly leading man to ruin. He said, "So anyway you know what it looks like."

"There are also larger reproductions available," Porculey said. "Prints. Photographs of the original."

Kelp said, eagerly, "So you can do it?"

"Not a chance," Porculey said.

Even Dortmunder was surprised at that. Not that he'd ever believed, really believed, there was anything in Kelp's idea, but the suddenness with which it had been shot down left Dortmunder for just a second without a reaction.

But not Kelp. Sounding almost outraged, he said, "Not a chance? Why not? You've got the copies, the reproductions, you're the guy can do endless perfect twenty dollar bills!"

"Not from photographs," Porculey said. "Look at those three illustrations. There isn't one color reproduced the same in all three. Which is the original color, or is the original something entirely different? And even if we could be absolutely sure we had every one of Veenbes' dozens of colors right, what about the brush-strokes? How is the paint laid on the surface, how does it reflect light, where is it thick, where thin? The man who owns that painting must have looked at it from time to time, he must know what his painting looks like. I might be able to do something that would fool a buyer, maybe even a gallery operator or a museum curator, but the owner of the painting? I'm afraid not."

Cleo, her smile sympathetic, said, 'Porky really does know about art. If he says it can't be done, it can't be done."

"So that's that," Dortmunder said.

Kelp was frowning so hard he looked like a crumpled piece of paper. "But that can't be that," he insisted. "There has to be a way."

"Sorry," Porculey said.

Dortmunder slugged down the rest of his coffee. "Maybe I will have some wine after all, he said."

Chapter 4

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house floated the aroma of May's tuna casserole. The apartment was filling up with guests, and Dortmunder, a cup of bourbon-spiked eggnog in his hand, sat in his personal chair in the living room – partly because he felt like sitting there, but mostly because if he stood up somebody else would be sure to cop his seat – and contemplated the Christmas tree. He wasn't sure about that tree. He'd been dubious about it from the beginning, and he was still dubious about it.

He'd been dubious, in fact, from before he'd actually seen the thing. Two days ago, when May had walked in with a cardboard carton the right size and shape to hold maybe four rolled-up window shades, and had said, "I bought us a Christmas tree at the hardware store," Dortmunder had been dubious at once. "At the hardware store?" he'd said. "And it's in that box?"

"Yes and yes. Help me set it up."

So then she'd opened the box and taken out a lot of fuzzy silver sticks. "That's no tree," Dortmunder's said. "That's a lot of imitation corncobs."

"We have to put it together," she'd told him, but when they did all they wound up with was a tapering fuzzy silver thing that didn't look at all like a Christmas tree. "There, now," May said. "What does that look like?"

"A man from Mars."

"Wait till we put the ornaments on."

Well, now it had the ornaments on, and a lot of gift-wrapped presents underneath, but it still didn't look like a Christmas tree. In the first place – and this is just the first place, mind, this isn't the whole objection – in the first place, Christmas trees are green.

Still, whatever the thing was it did give off a kind of cheerful glitter, and it made May happy, so what the hell. Dortmunder kept his doubts to himself and his feet up on his old battered hassock, and he grinned and nodded at his guests. A funny thing to have, guests. Not people in to talk about setting up a score, or splitting the take afterward, or anything else in the way of business. Just people to come over and eat your food and drink your liquor and then go home again. Strange sort of idea, when you thought about it. It had been May's idea, like the Christmas tree, intended to cheer Dortmunder up.

One thing about throwing a party; you offer people free food and free drink, they're very likely to show. Astonishing number of familiar faces here, some of them people Dortmunder hadn't seen in years. Like Alan Greenwood over there, a fellow he'd worked with a bunch of times until all of a sudden it turned out Greenwood had been leading a double life; all the time Dortmunder had thought of him simply as a good utility-infielder-type heist man, Greenwood had had this secret life as an actor. Boom, he got discovered, he got his own television series, he didn't need to run around on fire escapes any more. And here he was, in his blue denim leisure suit and his string tie and his lace-frilled shirt, with this incredible gaunt blond beauty named Doreen on his arm. "Nice to see ya, Greenwood."

"What's happening, baby," Greenwood said, and shook hands with his left.

Then there was Wally Whistler, one of the best lock men in the business, just out of prison, having got sent up for absentmindedly unlocking a lock while he was at the zoo with his kids; it had taken hours to get the lion back in his cage. And Fred Lartz, a onetime driver who had given up driving after an experience he had one time when he got drunk at a cousin's wedding out on Long Island, took a wrong turn off the Van Wyck Expressway, wound up on Taxiway Seventeen out at Kennedy Airport, and got run down by Eastern Airlines flight two-oh-eight, just in from Miami. Fred's wife Thelma – the lady out in the kitchen with May, with the funny hat – did all the driving for the family these days.

Also present, and scoffing down the eggnog pretty good, was Herman X, a black man whose other life as a radical political activist in no way interfered with his primary career as a lock-man. The lady he'd brought with him, and introduced as Foxy, was another stunner, tall and skinny and stylish and gleaming black. Foxy and Alan Greenwood's Doreen tended to stalk in slow circles around one another, remote and wary.

The crew from the painting fiasco were present, in force. Roger Chefwick had showed up with his round, pleasant, motherly wife, Maude. Tiny Bulcher was there with a small, sweet-faced, rather plain girl named Eileen, who looked terrified; Dortmunder kept expecting her to slip somebody a note reading, "Rescue me from this man." Stan Murch was there with his Morn, who had come direct from work and so was still in her taxi-driving duds: checked slacks, leather jacket, soft cap. And Andy Kelp was there, of course, with his nephew Victor.

Oh, it was quite a party. Besides the eggnog, there was straight bourbon, or beer in the refrigerator, and a big jug of Gab Hearty Burgundy exactly like the stuff Dortmunder had drunk at the shopping center the other night. Christmas music played on the phonograph, Herman X and Foxy and Greenwood and Doreen danced from time to time, and Stan Murch and Fred Lartz and Wally Whistler sang along with some of the more well-known songs, such as "Jingle Bells" and "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen," and "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." May and Thelma Lartz and Maude Chefwick were putting together a nice buffet supper in the kitchen, and generally people were having a real nice time. Also, most of the guests had showed up with a gift, and from the size and shape of those gifts, now under the poor excuse for a tree, Dortmunder suspected most of them were bottles of bourbon, so the party couldn't be considered a dead loss. All in all, Dortmunder would have to describe the occasion, and even himself, as damn near cheerful.

Over came Munch and Fred Lartz and Wally Whistler, grouping themselves around Dortmunder in his chair, Murch explaining, "We need a fourth, and you're it. All together now. Good King Wen-ces-las–"

Dortmunder knew about half the words, but it hardly mattered. He mumbled along in his throat, his usual singing style, and the other three belted the tune back and forth among them like a medicine ball, occasionally fumbling it enough to make nearby conversations falter. Joy and good cheer flowed like floodwaters through the apartment, and Dortmunder grinned around his eggnog cup and let the flood float him away.

The next album was orchestral music, so the glee club wandered off to refresh its drinks. Kelp came by with a new cup of eggnog for Dortmunder, then hunkered down next to his chair and said, "Nice party."

"Not bad," Dortmunder agreed.

"Listen, do you mind a little discussion for a minute?"

Dortmunder looked at him, uncomprehending. "A little discussion? About what?"

"Chauncey," Kelp said.

Dortmunder closed his eyes. "And just when I was sort of feeling good," he said.

Kelp patted his arm. "Yeah, I know. I'm sorry, I wouldn't break in on the party spirit and all that, but I got an idea, and it means Porculey doing a copy after all, and if you think it's as good an idea as I do then he ought to start right away."

Dortmunder's eyes opened, the better for frowning. "A copy? Porculey said it wouldn't work."

"It'll work with my idea," Kelp told him. "Can I give it to you?"

"You might as well," Dortmunder said, "but my guess is it stinks."

"Just wait," Kelp said, and leaned close to murmur in Dortmunder's ear. Dortmunder listened, his head cocked a bit, his eyes watching his guests moving and talking and dancing and singing all over his apartment, his left hand holding his eggnog cup and his feet up on the old hassock in front of his chair.

At first he seemed pessimistic, but then he looked a bit surprised, and then almost amused, and finally he seemed to be considering the situation, thinking it over. Kelp finished, rocked back on his heels, grinned at Dortmunder's profile, and said, "Well? Whadaya think?"

"Jesus," Dortmunder said. "It's almost dumb enough to work."

"Do I tell Porculey go ahead?"

"Jesus."

"Think about it, Dortmunder." Kelp's excitement was so intense his fingers were jittering.

"I am thinking about it."

"Do I tell him go ahead?"

Slowly Dortmunder nodded, then slowly nodded again. "Yes," he decided. "Let's give it a shot."

"Way to talk!" Kelp told him, and jumped to his feet. "I got a feeling about this one," he said. "Something tells me this is gonna be our finest hour."

Second thoughts could be seen gathering on Dortmunder's face, but at that point May called from the dining-room doorway, "Feedbag's on!" Pointing across the room at Dortmunder, she said, "You stay right there, John, I'll bring you a plate."

"And another eggnog," Kelp said, his hand out for the cup. "Swig that down."

So Dortmunder swigged it down, and he was brought a plate heaped high with steaming food, plus a fresh cup of eggnog, and the living room filled up with people holding plates of food in one hand and drinks in the other, trying to figure out how to pick up their fork.

"To the founder of the feast!" Kelp suddenly cried out. "John Dortmunder!"

"Aw, come on," Dortmunder said, but a full-bodied cheer drowned him out. And then goddam Stan Murch had to start singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," despite "Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem" currently emanating from the phonograph, and everybody else had to join in, and Dortmunder had to sit there like a fool, the hot dish burning his lap, and get sung at.

After which everybody put their plates and glasses and cups and beer cans down and applauded their own singing or something, and turned bright cheery eyes on Dortmunder, who realized he was expected to say something. He looked around and his eye fell on Kelp's sparkling face.

He lifted his fresh eggnog. "God help us," Dortmunder said, "every one."

Chapter 5

Andy Kelp had friends everywhere, even in the Police Department. Shortly after the New Year, he called a police friend named Bernard Klematsky. "Hi Bernard," he said. "It's me, Andy Kelp."

"Well, hello, Andy. Calling to confess?"

Kelp chuckled. "Always the kidder," he said. "Lemme buy you a drink when you come off."

"Why?"

"I wanna pick your brains."

"In that case," Bernard said, "you can buy me spaghetti with clam sauce. At Unfredo's. Ten-thirty."

"I'll be there," Kelp promised, and he was, but Bernard was fifteen minutes late. "Over here," Kelp called, when Bernard at last arrived, and waved at him across the half-empty restaurant from his table in the corner.

It took a while for Bernard to disencumber himself of his fur hat, his silk scarf, his leather gloves and his wool overcoat, storing them all on the hanger-jangly metal rack by the front door, and then he stood revealed as an average-appearing fellow of thirty-something, with bushy black hair, a rather long and fleshy nose, a rumpled dark blue suit with a rumpled dark blue necktie, and the indefinable air about him of a teacher of… mathematics. A lay teacher, in a parochial school. He came over to the table, rubbing his hands together for warmth, saying, "Cold out tonight."

"You mean you want a drink and spaghetti."

"A Rob Roy straight up would be a very nice thing." Kelp caught the eye of Sal the waiter, ordered the Rob Roy, and said, "And another bourbon and soda."

"You wanna order?"

"We might as well," said Bernard. "I'll have the escalope limone and spaghettini on the side, with clam sauce."

"Aw, Bernard," Kelp said, giving him a reproachful look. Bernard didn't care. He was very happy to be indoors in the warm. Smiling at Kelp, he said, "What about the wine? A nice Verdicchio?"

"Bernard, you're holding me up."

"Whoever heard of a cop holding up a robber?"

"Everybody," Kelp said, and told Sal the waiter, "I'll have the chicken parmigiana, spaghetti on the side with the red sauce, and we'll take the Verdicchio."

Sal the waiter went away, and Bernard shook his head, saying, "All that tomato."

"I like tomato. Can we talk now?"

"Wait'll I been bribed," Bernard said. "What've you been up to lately, Andy?"

"Oh, this and that," Kelp said.

"One thing and the other, huh?"

"More or less," Kelp agreed.

"Same old thing, in other words."

"In a manner of speaking," Kelp said.

"Well, you're looking good," Bernard told him. "Whatever you're up to, it agrees with you."

"You look good, too," Kelp said, and the drinks arrived. "Ah, the bribe," Bernard said. He swigged down half his Rob Roy, beamed, patted his belly, and said, "There. Now we can talk."

"Good." Kelp leaned closer over the white tablecloth. "I need a guy's name and address."

"Wait a minute," said Bernard. "You want to pick my brains, or you want to pick Police Department records?"

"Both."

"Andy, fun's fun, but maybe you're about to overstep, you know what I mean?"

Kelp was uncertain on that score himself, and the uncertainty made him nervous. He put away a bit more of his second bourbon and soda, and said, "If you say no, it's no. I wouldn't argue with you, Bernard." He tried a friendly grin. "And I wouldn't ask for the spaghettini back either."

"Or the Rob Roy," Bernard said, and finished it. Then he said, "Okay, Andy, try it on me, and if I say no there won't be any hard feelings on either side."

"That's what I like to hear." Kelp cleared his throat, and blinked several times.

Bernard pointed at Kelp's face. "Whenever you blink a lot like that," he said, "you're about to tell a lie."

"No, I'm not," Kelp said, blinking furiously.

"So let's hear it," Bernard said.

Kelp willed his eyelids to remain up. His eyes began to burn. Looking with great sincerity through his burning eyes at Bernard, he said, "What I'm about to tell you is the absolute truth."

"Relax, Andy," Bernard told him. "Nobody says I have to believe you. If it's a good story, I'll do what I can."

"Fair enough," Kelp said, and permitted himself to blink. "I have this cousin," he said, blinking, "and he's got himself in hot water with some people."

"Would I know these people?"

"For your sake," Kelp said, "I hope not."

"You worry about me. That's nice."

"Anyway," Kelp went on, "you know me, you know my family, we've never been violence-prone."

"That's true," Bernard said. "That's one of the nice things about you, Andy."

"My cousin's the same way. Anyway, he has the idea these people put a hitman on him."

Bernard looked interested. "Really? Does he want police protection?"

"Excuse me, Bernard," Kelp said, "but from what I can see, all police protection ever does for anybody is they get to fall out the window of a better class hotel."

"We won't argue the point," Bernard said, which was what he said any time he lacked arguments on his own side. "Tell me more about your cousin."

"He wants to do his own protecting," Kelp said. "And in order to do it, he has to identify this guy for sure. Now, he knows some things about him, but he doesn't have the guy's name and address. That's where we need help."

Bernard looked somber. He said, "Andy, maybe now you should tell me the truth. Is this cousin of yours figuring to hit the hitman? Because if so, I can't–"

"No no no!" Kelp said, and his eyes didn't blink at all. "I told you, Bernard, non-violence, it's an old family tradition. There's more than one way to skin a cat."

"They all leave the cat dead."

"I swear to God, Bernard," Kelp said, and actually raised his hand in the Boy Scout pledge. "My cousin strictly wants to know for sure who the guy is, and his dealing with the problem will absolutely one hundred per cent not include physical violence."

"He wants to outbid the other side?"

"I have no idea what's in my cousin's mind," Kelp said, blinking like mad.

"All right," Bernard said. "Tell me what you know about the guy."

"He's white," Kelp said. "He's tall, skinny, black haired, he's got a game leg. The right foot's in a big orthopedic shoe, and he limps. Also, he got picked up for something late in October, I don't know for what, and a very famous lawyer called J. Radcliffe Stonewiler got him off."

Bernard frowned deeply. "You know a lot of funny details about this guy," he said.

"Please, Bernard," Kelp said. "Don't ask me where I get my information, or I'll have to make up some cockamamie lie, and I'm no good at that."

"Oh, Andy," Bernard said, "you underestimate yourself." And the food and wine arrived. "Nice," Bernard said. "Let's eat a while, and I'll think about this."

"Great idea," said Kelp.

So they ate, and they drank wine, and at the end of the meal Bernard said, "Andy, can you promise me, if I get you anything on this bird, nothing illegal will happen?"

Kelp stared at him. "Nothing illegal? Bernard, you can't be serious. Do you have any idea just how many laws there are?"

"All right," Bernard said, patting the air. "All right."

But Kelp had momentum, and couldn't stop all at once. "You can't walk down the street without breaking the law, Bernard," he said. 'Every day they pass new laws, and they never get rid of any of the old laws, and you can't live a normal life without doing things illegal."

"Okay, Andy, okay. I said okay, didn't I?"

"Bernard, just off the top of your head, how many laws would you say you broke so far today?"

Bernard pointed a stern finger across the table. "Lay off, Andy," he said. "Now I mean it."

Kelp stopped, took a deep breath, got hold of himself, and said, "I'm sorry. It's a subject that's close to my heart, that's all"

Bernard said, "Let me rephrase it, Andy, okay? No major crimes. No, wait, you'll be talking about industrial pollution in a minute. No violent crimes. Is that a fair request?"

"Bernard," Kelp said, with solemnity, "it is not my intention, or my cousin's intention, to harm one hair of this fellow's head. He won't get killed, he won't get wounded. All right?"

"Thank you," Bernard said. "Let me make a phone call, see what I can do." He pushed his chair back and said, "While I'm gone, order me an espresso and a Sambuca, okay?" And he got to his feet and headed toward the phone booth in the back.

"Bernard," Kelp muttered after his departing back, "you're a highway robber." But he ordered the espresso and Sambuca from Sal the waiter, and the same for himself, and was chewing on one of the coffee beans from the Sambuca when Bernard came back. Kelp gave him an alert look, but first Bernard had to taste his Sambuca, then he had to put a sugar cube in his espresso. Finally, stirring the espresso, he looked seriously at Kelp and said, "Your cousin's tangled with a wrong guy."

"I thought so," said Kelp.

"His name's Leo Zane," Bernard said, "and he has the worst kind of no record."

"I don't think I follow."

"Picked up lots of times, always on very serious stuff – murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, twice for arson – but never convicted."

"Slippery," Kelp suggested.

"Like a snake. And twice as dangerous. If your cousin wants to deal with this guy, he better wear gloves."

"I'll tell him. Did you happen to get an address while you were on the phone?"

Bernard shook his head. "Zane isn't a homebody," he said. "He lives in furnished rooms, residence hotels, he's a loner and moves around a lot."

"Drat."

"There's one thing that might help," Bernard said. "There's a clinic up in Westchester he goes to sometimes. On account of his foot. Apparently, that's the only place he ever goes for treatment, that one clinic."

"What's it called?"

"Westchester Orthopedic."

"Thanks, Bernard," Kelp said. "I'll tell my cousin."

Bernard pointed a serious finger at Kelp. "If anything happens to Zane," he said, "anything at all, I'll connect it back to you, Andy, I swear I will."

Kelp spread his hands in utter innocence. Not a blink marred his eyes. "Don't you think I know that, Bernard? I know you're a straight guy. I wouldn't have called you if I figured to pull something like that."

"All right," said Bernard. Relaxing, he looked down at his Sambuca, smiled, and said, "You ever try this?"

"Try what?"

Bernard took out a pack of matches, lit one, held it over the Sambuca, and a small blue flame formed on top of the liqueur, where the coffee beans floated. Bernard shook out the match, and sat smiling at the blue flame.

Kelp didn't get it. "What's that for?" he asked.

"The idea is," Bernard said, "it like roasts the coffee beans."

"But what's that burning?"

"The alcohol, of course."

"Then why do it?"

Bernard looked startled. "By God, you're right," he said, and blew out the flame.

"I hope you made a wish," Kelp said.

Chapter 6

The scrawny black cat jumped from the floor up to the windowsill, where Leo Zane was pouring milk into the saucer. Setting the milk carton on the table nearby, Zane stood at the window a minute longer, scratching the cat behind the ear as it lapped up milk. A dreary March rain dribbled down the glass, and Zane's foot continued to ache. It was the weather, of course, the dampness of the end of winter, and the trip to the clinic, his first in almost six months, had done no good at all.

He ought to go away for a while, somewhere warm and dry. Maybe Los Angeles, sit in the sun, absorb some warmth into the bones of his foot. Absorb warmth into his body, his entire body was cold and achy now; the damp pain, like death, crept up through his frame from his foot, filling him with chills and cramps. No matter how much clothing he wore, no matter how warm the room or how much hot coffee he drank, the cold torment was still there, deep in his bones.

What was keeping him in New York? Very little, beyond his own lethargy. Every year around this time he made the same vague plans to leave, but he never went, he always found some excuse, he seemed wedded to the climate that made him sick. And this year?

Well, in fact, this year there were one or two jobs still open. The psychiatrist's wife, for instance; she was turning out to be surprisingly difficult to dispatch. Of course, the jobs that had to look like accident or natural causes were always the most difficult. And then there was the Chauncey job, that was still on tap.

Not that Zane expected actually to do anything on the Chauncey job. His one conversation with that fellow Dortmunder, plus the occasional interval of observing the man, had convinced him Dortmunder would try no tricks. Once Chauncey collected from the insurance company – possibly next month, more likely in May – Dortmunder would assuredly turn over the painting, Chauncey would pay Zane the remaining fifteen thousand due on the contract, and that would be that.

The psychiatrist's wife. If only she drove a car. You'd think, in this day and age – Movement beyond the window attracted Zane's attention.

Down below, a man hunched against the rain as he entered his automobile, a dark blue Jaguar sedan, parked by the fire hydrant. It had MD plates, from over in New Jersey, and Zane reflected again on what a dodge that was. Put MD plates on a car, you could park anywhere you wanted, just as though doctors still made house calls. Up at the clinic they were parked all over the – Hadn't there been a Jaguar sedan parked outside the clinic?

Dark blue, like this one?

Down below, the Jaguar's windshield wipers clicked into motion, swiping back and forth. As Zane watched, the Jaguar moved away, rolling sedately down the block, its yellow right directional blinking, an intermittent bright spot in the rain. He wasn't positive it was the same sort of car as he'd seen near the clinic. Same color, perhaps, but a different make?

"Grrowww!" said the cat, and scratched at Zane's wrist.

Startled, Zane released his grip – lost in thought, he'd been strangling the thing – and the cat ran away to hide under the daybed. Zane picked up the milk carton, for something to do, and limped with it to the refrigerator. The cat's eyes peered out at him from under the bed, but he ignored it. His mind was moving again, away from the unanswerable questions about the car, on to other concerns. He sat at the formica table, brooding, his eyes vague, his hands relaxed with curved fingers on the tabletop, the aching in his foot forgotten for the moment, everything forgotten for the moment.

The psychiatrist's wife. An accident, a fall. Hmmmmmm…

Chapter 7

Kelp was so happy he was crowing. "Don't say I never did anything for you, Dortmunder," he said. "Not after this."

"All right," Dortmunder said. Owing a debt of gratitude to another person always made him nervous, and that other person being Kelp didn't improve the situation.

"Over two months I staked out that clinic," Kelp pointed out. "I musta gone through a thousand paperback books. Day after day, three, four days a week, and boy, I finally hit it."

"For sure," Dortmunder said. "This time it's positively for sure." In the last two months Kelp had three times followed limping men home from the Westchester Orthopedic Clinic, a site that by the very nature of things would be bound to provide a certain steady quota of limping men, and all three times Kelp had insisted Dortmunder accompany him on expeditions to remote neighborhoods to look at these guys, and none of them had been even remotely like the killer Dortmunder had met back in November.

But this time Kelp was sure. "Absolutely," he said. "And you know why? Because I waited after he went in his building, and then I followed him and looked at the mailboxes, and there it was: Zane, room thirteen."

"All right," Dortmunder said.

"So we got him."

"We'll have to check every once in a while," Dortmunder said. "Be sure he doesn't move."

"Oh, sure." Kelp then looked slightly pained and said, "Maybe the other guys could do some of that, huh? I spent more time in cars the last two months than A. J. Foyt."

"Oh, naturally," Dortmunder said. "We'll all take our turns."

"Good," said Kelp, and then there was a little silence.

Dortmunder sniffed. He rubbed a knuckle against his nose. He hitched his pants. "Kum, kak," he said, and coughed, and cleared his throat.

Kelp said, "What?" He was leaning forward, looking alert and helpful.

"Urn," said Dortmunder. He stuck his finger in his ear and jiggled it, looking for wax. He took a deep breath. He put his hands behind his back and clasped them together tight. "Thanks, uh, Andy," he said.

"Oh, sure," Kelp said. "Don't mention it."

Chapter 8

"That's pretty good," Dortmunder said.

Griswold Porculey gave him a look. "Pretty good? Dortmunder, I'll tell you what this is. It's a work of genius."

"I said it was pretty good," Dortmunder said.

They were both right. The nearly finished painting on Porculey's easel was an incredible piece of work, a forgery so brilliant, so detailed, that it suggested true genius perhaps did reside within the unlikely corpus of Griswold Porculey after all, just as genius has so often in the past chosen other unlikely vessels for its abode. The paint-smeared hand holding the paint-smeared brush, the bleary washed-out eye observing the work, these had turned a lumpish array of pigment into a painting Jan Veenbes himself might have been proud to claim.

Tacked and taped on the wall to Porculey's left were nearly two dozen representations of Folly Leads Man to Ruin, ranging from full-size photographic reproductions to reduced-size copies torn from art books. The differences in color and detail among these many imitations were enough to discourage the most determined copyist, but somehow Porculey had maneuvered this minefield and had made so many right choices that Dortmunder, looking at the almost-completed work, thought he was seeing an exact duplicate of the painting in Arnold Chauncey's sitting room. He wasn't, of course, but the differences, though pervasive, were minute.

Porculey was contemplating now that darkness in the lower right, where the road curved away and down a dim slope. This was the most difficult part because it was the vaguest, with the least specific detail and yet it was far from being a featureless wash of umbra. It was a peopled gloom, its obscurity filled with faintly seen writhings, hints of grotesquerie, suggestions of shape and form and movement. Porculey's brush moved cautiously over these deeps, touching lightly, pausing, returning, moving on.

It was early April, three weeks since Kelp had finally found the killer, and Dortmunder was back in this garret-boutique for the first time since that night in December when Porculey had thrown such cold water on Kelp's original idea. Dortmunder had wanted to return, several times, to see for himself what Porculey was up to, but his exploratory phone calls to the painter had received unrelenting negatives. "I don't want a lot of amateurs breathing down my neck," Porculey had said, and when Dortmunder had tried to point out it was his own neck that was being breathed down, and by a professional killer at that, Porculey had merely said, "I'll call you when there's something to see," and had hung up on him.

So it came as a surprise this morning, and a very happy one, when Porculey himself had gotten in touch, calling Dortmunder at home and saying, "If you still want to see what I'm doing, come along."

"I will, right away."

"You can bring your partners, if you want."

But Dortmunder hadn't wanted; this painting was too important to him, and he preferred to see it without a lot of conversation going on all over the place. "I'll come by myself," he said.

"Up to you. Bring a bottle of wine, you know the stuff." So Dortmunder had brought a gallon of Hearty Burgundy, some of which Cleo Marlahy had at once poured into the usual disparity of drinking vessels, and now he stood holding his white mug of wine and watching Porculey's brush make small tentative decisions on the surface of the painting. In the last four months, it seemed, laboring away in his shopping-center sanctuary, Porculey had been bringing forth a miracle.

Which he was willing to talk about. Stepping back from the easel, frowning at that troublesome darkness in the lower right, he said, "Do you know how I did it?"

Porculey nodded. "I began," he explained, continuing to brood at the painting as he spoke, "with research. The Frick has one Veenbes, and three more hang in the Metropolitan. I studied those four, and I looked at every copy of them I could find."

Dortmunder said, "Copies? Why?"

"Every artist has his own range of colors. His palette. I wanted to see how Veenbes' other pictures reproduced, to help me get back to the original colors in this one."

"I get the idea," Dortmunder said. "That's pretty good."

Cleo, sipping her wine and musing at Porculey and the painting as though she herself had invented both and was pleased with the result of her labors, said, 'Porky's had a wonderful time with this. He got to rage and carry on and throw things and make disgusting statements about art, and then preen himself at being better than anybody."

"Better than most, at any rate," Porculey said comfortably. His brush tip, having grazed briefly at his palette, darted out at the gloom again, altered it infinitesimally. "Because I did more than just dry research," he went on. "I looked at the paintings, but more than that I tried to look through them, past them. I tried to see Veenbes in his studio, approaching the canvas. I wanted to see how he held his brush, how he stroked the paint into place, how he made his decisions, his changes. Did you know his brush strokes move diagonally upward to the left? That's very rare, you might think he was left-handed, but there are two portraits done by his contemporaries that show him at his easel with the brush in his right hand."

Dortmunder said, "What difference does it make?"

"It changes the way the picture takes the light," Porculey told him. "Where it reflects, and how the eye is led through the story."

All of which was over Dortmunder's head. "Well, whatever you did," he said, "it looks terrific."

Porculey was pleased. Smiling briefly over his shoulder, he said, "I wanted to wait till I had something worth showing. You see that, don't you?"

"Sure. And it's just about done, huh?"

"Oh, yes. Another two or three weeks, probably no more." Dortmunder stared at the back of Porculey's head, then at the painting. "Two or three weeks? That's a whole painting there already, you could fool a lot of people the way it is right now."

"But not Arnold Chauncey," Porculey said. "Not even for a second. I did some research on your customer while I was about it, and you chose a difficult man to fool. He isn't just another culture merchant, buying and selling works of art as though they were coin collections. He's a connoisseur, be knows art, and he certainly knows his own paintings."

"You're making me unhappy," Dortmunder said.

Cleo, friendly and sympathetic, was immediately at his elbow, holding up the glass jug of wine. "Have some more," she suggested. "Everything'll work out. Porky's doing you proud."

"It isn't Pork, uh, Porculey I'm worried about," Dortmunder told her. "I got talked into another Andy Kelp Special, that's what I'm worried about."

"Seems like a nice fellow, Kelp," Porculey said.

"Doesn't he," said Dortmunder.

Porculey stepped back to give his work the critical double-O. "You know," he said, "I really am quite good at this sort of thing. Better even than those twenties. I wonder if there's a future in it."

"There's ten thousand from us," Dortmunder reminded him, "if the scheme works and we get Chauncey's money. That's the only future I know about."

"Ah," Porculey said, "but what if I took my knowledge of Veenbes, his subject matter, his palette, his style, and what if I did a Veenbes of my own? Not a copy, but a brand-new painting. Unknown old masters crop up all the time, why not one by me?"

"I wouldn't know," Dortmunder said.

Porculey nodded, thinking it over. "A lot better than drawing twenties," he said. "Very dull, that was. No palette at all. A few greens, a black, and that's it. But a Veenbes, now." His eyes were half-closed, no longer seeing the semi-Veenbes in front of him. "A medieval convent," he said. "Stone walls and floor. Candles. The nuns have just removed their habits… ."

Chapter 9

Eight days later, Dortmunder entered the main borough office of the Unemployment Insurance Division and waited his turn to be inspected by the guard just inside the door. The guard was examining the purse of a woman client in search of guns or bombs or other expressions of political discontent, and he was in no hurry to finish. Dortmunder was dressed today in dark green work pants, a flannel jacket and a heavy workman's belt festooned with tools, and he was carrying a clipboard.

The woman client, whose brown skin and surly manner had made her a prima facie subject for official suspicion, had proved too clever for Authority this time, having left all her guns and bombs at home. The guard reluctantly let her through, then turned to Dortmunder, who plunked his clipboard onto the rostrum and said, "Typewriter repair."

"Which department?" Since Dortmunder was tall and male and white and not a client and not carrying any packages that might conceal guns or bombs, the guard had no reason to suspect him of anything.

"Beats me," Dortmunder said. Running a finger down the top sheet on his clipboard, he said, "They just give me this address, that's all. The typing pool, it says."

"We got four typing pools in this building," the guard said.

"I'm just the guy they send around," Dortmunder told him.

"Well, how do I know what department?"

"Beats me," Dortmunder said.

There's a difference between a client and a workman, and the difference holds true everywhere, not merely in the Unemployment Insurance Division of the Department of Labor of the State of New York. The difference is, the client is there because he wants something, but the workman doesn't give a damn what happens. The workman won't extend himself, won't try to help, won't provide explanations, won't in fact do anything but just stand there. The client wants to be liked, but the workman is just as willing to go back to his boss, shrug, and say, "They wouldn't let me in."

Everybody knows this, of course, including the guard on the door, who looked unhappily into Dortmunder's unhelpful eyes for a moment, then sighed, and said, "All right. I'll call around." And he picked up his phone from the rostrum, simultaneously scanning his list of interior phone numbers.

The guard struck gold the first try, which didn't surprise Dortmunder at all. "I'll send him right up," he told the phone, cradled it, and said to Dortmunder, "Osro."

"What?"

"Out-of-State Resident Office, upstairs. Go to the end of that hall there, take the elevator to the third floor."

"Right."

Dortmunder, following instructions, eventually found himself in Osro, a large room full of desks and clerks and typewriters, semi-separated from one another by clusters of filing cabinets. He went to the nearest desk, bearing the sign INFORMATION, and told the girl there, "Typewriter repair. They just called up from downstairs."

"Oh, yes." She pointed. "The typing pool. Down past the second bunch of filing cabinets and turn right."

"Fine," Dortmunder said, and went to the typing pool, where the woman in charge, a tall gray-haired person with a face and body the texture of concrete, frowned at him, and said, "Do you know it's been nearly three weeks since we put in our Form Two-Eighty-B?"

"I just do my job, lady," Dortmunder said. "Where is it?"

"Over here," she said, grumping, and led the way.

Of course, every large bureaucracy has many typing pools, and every typing pool's typewriters break down from time to time, and no request for repairs ever takes less than four months to filter through that particular bureaucracy, so the woman in charge should have been grateful to Dortmunder for being so prompt, instead of complaining; but there's too little gratitude in this world.

The woman left Dortmunder alone at the typewriter, a large Royal electric. He plugged it in and turned it on and the thing buzzed at him. He hit a few keys in his normal terrible typing style, and found that the machine's problem was a refusal to automatically return when the automatic return button was pushed. He spent another two or three minutes fiddling with it, then unplugged it, picked it up – the thing weighed a ton – carried it over to the ungrateful woman's desk, and said, "I'll have to take it to the shop."

"We never get machines back that go to the shop," the woman said, which was probably true. It was certainly true of the last machine Dortmunder had taken from this building, about two years ago.

Dortmunder said, "I'll leave it if you want, but it needs work in the shop."

"Oh, very well," she said.

"Do I need a pass or something with the guard on the door?"

"I'll phone down."

"Okay."

Dortmunder carried the typewriter downstairs, where the guard nodded hello and waved him through. Outside, he put the machine on the passenger seat of the Plymouth he'd stolen for this trip, then drove back to Manhattan and to a friend of his who ran a pawn shop off Third Avenue. This man had never been known to ask anybody any question other than, "How much?" Dortmunder handed him the machine, accepted forty dollars, and went out to the street.

It was a pleasant day late in the month of April, one of the few days all month without rain, so Dortmunder decided to leave the Plymouth where he'd parked it and walk home. He'd gone about half a block when he suddenly realized he was looking at Stan Murch through the windshield of a car parked next to a fire hydrant. He started to grin and wave a big hello, but Stan made a tiny negative gesture with his head and the hand on the steering wheel, so Dortmunder converted his own movement into a cough, and walked on.

May wasn't at home, since she had the afternoon shift down at the Safeway, but a note was Scotch-taped to the front of the TV set: Call Chauncey.

"Oog," said Dortmunder, and went out to the kitchen to pop open a can of beer. He stayed in the kitchen, not wanting to be reminded of that message on the TV, and was working on his second beer when the doorbell rang.

It was Stan Murch. "Yeah, I'd love one," he said, looking at the beer in Dortmunder's hand.

"Sure. Sit down."

Dortmunder brought a beer from the kitchen to the living room, where Murch was now seated, looking at the TV. "You call yet?"

"He wasn't home," Dortmunder lied. "How come you give me the office out there?"

"I was following Zane," Murch said, and swigged some beer. "Oh." Since they believed that so far Zane hadn't positively identified any of Dortmunder's partners in the robbery, the group had been taking turns occasionally trailing Leo Zane around, trying to find the right handle to use on him later.

Then Dortmunder frowned. "What was he doing down around there?"

"Following you," Murch said. "Someday you'll have to tell me how you do that typewriter bit."

"Following me?"

"Yeah." Murch drank beer and said, "I'm following him and he's following you. Pretty funny, in a way."

"Hysterical," Dortmunder said, and went to the phone to call Chauncey.

Chapter 10

Chauncey had called Zane first, upon arrival in New York:

"Chauncey here."

"You got it, did you?" Zane's rather weedy voice, empty of strength or emphasis, suggested a kind of wasting menace that Chauncey found thrilling; like a Brueghel allegory.

"Yes, I did." This time, apparently, the robbery had been so unreproachably real that the insurance investigation had been barely a formality, bringing settlement much sooner than anticipated. "And your pet?" Chauncey asked. "How has he been keeping?"

"In his cage. He doesn't even want to fly away."

"Good. I'll see him soon. You'll keep an eye out?"

"I'll follow him," Zane said, "until you're finished. You won't see me, but I'll be there."

"Exactly right."

"When do you do it?"

"As soon as possible," Chauncey said. "I'll call you back." And he phoned Dortmunder, leaving a message with the rather dry-voiced woman who answered the phone.

It was nearly three hours before the man called back, and then his voice had such a grudging surly quality that Chauncey became at once suspicious, despite Zane's assurances. "The painting's all right?"

"Sure it is," Dortmunder said. "Why wouldn't it be?"

"Then you'll bring it here. I have the money."

"In cash?"

Chauncey grimaced. Nobody uses cash any more, unless buying a newspaper, so Chauncey hadn't thought at all about the actual physical transfer of funds from himself to Dortmunder. But of course he couldn't very well offer the man a check, could he? And even if he could, Dortmunder certainly couldn't accept it. Nor was Dortmunder likely to be on Diners Club or Master Charge.

"Chauncey?"

"I'm thinking," Chauncey told him. "Wait there, Dortmunder, I'll have to call you back." But when he tried, half an hour later, the line was busy, and this was why:

"I'm telling you, Dortmunder, it isn't finished."

"And I'm telling you, Porculey, the goddam man is in New York and he wants his goddam picture back."

"You can't give it to him unfinished."

"I have to turn it over, period."

"You told me I had till May."

"He's here now, and he wants his painting."

"It isn't ready."

(And so on, for several minutes, more and more of the same, while Chauncey kept dialing Dortmunder's number and getting the same infuriating busy signal, until Dortmunder finally asked the following question:)

"How long?"

"What?"

"How long to get it done?"

"To do it right. Two weeks. Two weeks minimum."

"Not to do it right. Come on, Porculey, help me on this."

There was a brief pause. The faint slobby sound in Dortmunder's ear was Porculey sucking on his lower lip, as an aid to thought. Finally Porculey sighed, another distasteful sound, arid said, "Friday. It won't be perfect, but–"

"This is Tuesday."

"I know what day it is, Dortmunder."

"Three days?"

"I have to bake it, antique it, it has to dry. Do you want it to smell of fresh paint?"

"Three days," Dortmunder insisted. "You can't make it shorter."

"Shorter? Dortmunder, d-d-d-d-do you ree-ree-ree–"

"Okay, okay. I'll take your word for it."

"I mean, after all."

"I believe you," Dortmunder said.

"Friday."

"Friday night."

"Aw, come on."

"Friday night."

"Eight o'clock."

"Ten o'clock."

"Eight-thirty."

"Avoid the rush-hour traffic, Dortmunder. Ten o'clock."

"The rush hour doesn't go that late. Nine o'clock."

"Make it nine-thirty."

"Nine," Dortmunder said, and slammed the phone down, and it rang at him.

It was of course Chauncey, dialing yet again, ready to bite the receiver in half if he got a busy signal one more time, and being so astonished when he got the ring sound instead that at first he didn't say anything at all when Dortmunder said, "Hello?" Then, when Dortmunder said it again – "Hello?" – even though Chauncey recognized the voice and knew it was the person he was trying to call, his surprise made him say, "Dortmunder?"

"Chauncey."

"You've been on the phone."

"It's a friend's birthday," Dortmunder said. Chauncey was again surprised, this time pleasantly. Sentimental comradeship in the criminal classes; how charming. "That's nice," he said.

"About the money," Dortmunder said. Apparently sentiment didn't leave much of an afterglow with the man.

"Yes." Chauncey cleared his throat and said, "It turns out cash is a difficult thing to acquire, at least without creating questions."

Dortmunder, sounding exasperated, said, "Chauncey, after all this, are you saying you don't have the money?"

Chauncey was too concerned with his own problems to wonder what after all this referred to. "Not at all," he said. "I have the money, but I don't yet have the cash."

"Money and cash are the same thing," said Dortmunder, who apparently lived in a much simpler world.

"Well, not exactly," Chauncey told him. "The thing is, it'll take me a while to get the cash together. I'm sorry, I hadn't really thought about the problem before."

"Meaning you'll have it when?"

"This isn't a stall, Dortmunder, I do have the money."

"When do I get it?"

"Not till Friday, I'm afraid."

"This is Tuesday."

"I realize that. I apologize, and I've started on it, but the fact is I can't take that much cash from any one source. I'll need several business days to do it. I've made a beginning, and by Friday I'll have it all."

"Make it Friday night."

"Fine. You remember the passage from my back yard to the next street?"

"Sure."

"You come there Friday at midnight, and I'll let you in."

"Good." Then Dortmunder said, "I won't be alone."

"You won't? Why not?"

"We're talking about a lot of cash," Dortmunder reminded him. "The rest of my string'll be with me."

Chauncey wasn't sure he liked that idea, his house filling up with crooks. "How many?"

"The driver stays outside. Me and three others come in."

"Four of you? Dortmunder, don't misunderstand me, I trust you but how can I be sure of these other people?"

"I vouch for them," Dortmunder told him. "You can trust them completely."

Chapter 11

Friday night. Leo Zane, in his own car, his only permanent possession, a black Mercury Cougar with a special stirrup-like accelerator so he could drive without too much pain in his right foot, was following Dortmunder and an unidentified man in a bright red Volkswagen Rabbit through the rain-splashed streets of Manhattan. The windshield wipers splashed back and forth, the cold damp spread through the metal frame of the car, and Zane peered steadily at the Rabbit taillights out ahead.

Presumably, Dortmunder was on his way to the meeting with Chauncey at midnight, half an hour from now, but in that case why was the Rabbit aiming itself so completely downtown? Appropriately enough, the Rabbit was heading for that warren of streets south of 14th and over by the Hudson River known as the West Village. The westernmost part of Greenwich Village, this area is almost nothing but trucking companies and warehouses, because of the proximity of the docks and the Holland Tunnel.

The Rabbit traveled south on Washington Street, ever deeper into this maze, the streets lined with parked trucks, no pedestrians out in the rain except the occasionally lonely gay hoping to meet a new friend; in the gay world this neighborhood was known as The Trucks, and with no local residents to complain, a certain vibrant street life often took place here after dark. But not on a chilly wet night like this; the few solitary strollers slogging along with their hands in their jacket pockets looked more like homeless cats than liberated swingers.

At last the Rabbit turned off Washington Street, but in the rainy dark Zane couldn't make out exactly what street he was following it onto. Was it somewhere near Charles Lane, or Weehawken Street? Or farther south around Morton or Leroy Streets? For all he knew, in this poor visibility, with his eyes so exclusively on the taillights of the Rabbit ahead of him, they were south of Canal Street by now, down around Desbrosses or Vestry Streets.

And not every trucker or shipper or warehouse, apparently, was completely closed for the weekend; ahead of Zane, a large tractor-trailer was backing and filling, taking up most of the width of the street, facing from left to right, trying to back into position somewhere on the left. A great bulky monster of a man, in a rain-slick poncho and knit cap, was standing in the middle of the street, directing the tractor-trailer in its movements, and he'd flagged down the Rabbit, stopping it so the big truck could keep juggling itself left and right across the cobblestones.

Drat. Not wanting to be too close to the Rabbit, Zane slowed the Cougar, stopped several car lengths back, and waited for the jam-up to end. But the burly man in the street came trotting through the puddles, waving at Zane to move forward. With mighty gestures he informed Zane to get farther over to the left, where a large delivery van was parked half up on the sidewalk. Following directions, Zane tucked in beside the parked van, his door handle almost touching the van's olive-green side.

Next, the big man motioned for the Rabbit to back up, urging it also to move in close against the side of the van. Zane ducked his head, shielding his face with one hand as the Rabbit approached, its white reversing lights gleaming. When those lights clicked off, the Rabbit was still perhaps a car length ahead, but too close for Zane's comfort.

And now what were these people up to? While headlights in his rear-view mirror told him some other car was becoming involved in this mini traffic jam, the huge tractor-trailer that was causing all the trouble pulled completely out into the street, turning in his direction, apparently intending to start all over again in its effort to pull into the alley or loading dock or whatever it was up there. Sweeping out and around, it angled in from Zane's right until it was as close to the Cougar on that side as the delivery van was on his left, except that the tractor-trailer was headed the other way.

When would they get this over with? The tractor-trailer just stood there, apparently unable to figure out its next move, and Zane didn't realize anything was wrong until the lighting suddenly began to change.

First, the Rabbit's taillights went out. It was hard to tell from here, but its headlights seemed to have been switched off as well.

Second, the Rabbit's interior light went on, because somebody had opened its door. Both doors, in fact; Dortmunder and the driver were both getting out of their car, only the back half of which was jammed between the delivery van and the tractor-trailer.

Third, as Dortmunder and the driver shut their doors behind themselves, so that the Rabbit's interior light snapped off again, the headlights in Zane's rear-view mirror also went out.

Where were Dortmunder and the other one going? Was this their destination? What in hell was going on?

Some other vehicle was out front, something much larger than the Rabbit. Slowly, that vehicle was pushing the Rabbit toward Zane's Cougar. Zane instinctively switched into reverse, but with that other car behind him there was nowhere to go. Then he shifted into drive, but if he tried to push back against that larger vehicle he would simply smash his own car against the Rabbit.

The Rabbit stopped. The other vehicle – a truck of some sort – remained where it was.

Nothing at all happened.

"This is ridiculous," Zane said. He honked his horn: yap yap yaaaaap. The sound disappeared in the rain. The Rabbit made no response, nor did the tractor-trailer on his right, nor did the car behind him, nor did the delivery van on his left.

"Well," he said, and opened the door. It opened about half an inch, and then it stopped.

At last Zane got the picture. Quickly switching off the Cougar's engine, releasing his foot from the stirrup-accelerator, he slid across to the passenger door, pushed it open, and heard the thunk when it hit the side of the tractor-trailer.

Wider on this side; almost a full inch.

With the engine off, the windshield wipers had stopped, and it was through tears of rain on the glass that Zane looked out at the Rabbit, with the truck parked beyond it. No way to push through. Twisting around, he tried to look through the water-smeared rear window, but though he could make out little about the vehicle blocking him from behind, he was certain in his heart about one thing: it would have too much weight for his Cougar to move it.

Trapped. Dortmunder was up to something, that son of a bitch. He'd trapped Zane here, he was pulling something, he was doing something right now. "When I get out of here," Zane muttered, and thumped the dashboard with a closed fist.

When he got out of here? Good God. Zane knew when he'd get out of here. When the real operators of these trucks came back to work, that's when, and not a second before.

On Monday.

Chapter 12

At exactly midnight, Arnold Chauncey put the key into the inside lock of the passage door, turned it, opened the door, and nobody came in.

What? Holding the door ajar, blinking in the misty rain, Chauncey peered out at the street and saw no one and nothing. Where was Dortmunder? Much more important, where was the painting?

All right; no reason to panic. Anyone can be a bit late. Keeping the door partway open, turning up the skimpy collar of his suede jacket against the rain and the chill, Chauncey settled himself to wait. Dortmunder would be here. And if something went wrong with Dortmunder, then Zane would take over. Not to worry.

The passage behind Chauncey's house was unheated, and in fact unroofed, the top only lightly covered with a trellis overgrown by vines. This offered less than no protection; the vine leaves, rather than stopping the rain, merely collected the tiny droplets into large gushes, which were dumped all at once down the back of Chauncey's neck. Meantime, his suede jacket and silk ascot and calf-height calf-leather boots, all of which had been designed primarily for indoor stylishness, were proving themselves effete and inadequate in the harsh reality of the outside world; rather like the French aristocrats of 1789.

Fortunately, Chauncey didn't have very long to wait, shivering in the darkness just inside the passage, peeking through the slightly open door, ducking back at the appearance of every non-Dortmunder pedestrian. After barely five minutes of this, a large dark car arrived, double-parked itself outside there, and Dortmunder's unmistakable figure – fairly tall, very narrow, stoop-shouldered, with lowered head – hopped out and hurried tippy-toe in his direction, trying to avoid puddles and dogshit at the same time. Three others emerged scrambling from the car in Dortmunder's wake, and followed his progression through the minefield, but Chauncey's eye was primarily taken by the long cardboard tube in Dortmunder's hand. Folly, home from the wars.

Dortmunder bounded through the doorway Chauncey held open for him, turned his collar down, and immediately turned it back up again, saying, "It's raining in here."

"There's no roof," Chauncey told him, and reached for the cardboard tube. "Shall I hold that?"

But Dortmunder held the tube out of reach, saying, "We'll switch inside."

"Of course," said Chauncey, disappointed, and led the way to the house. At the back door, Dortmunder paused, saying, "Doesn't this trigger the alarm?"

"I told Watson I'd use this door tonight."

"Okay."

The house was wonderfully warm and dry. They climbed the two flights of stairs to the sitting room where Chauncey, sounding rather more regretful than host-like, said, "I suppose you'd all like drinks."

"You bet," everybody said. They were standing around rubbing their hands together, working their shoulders up and down, grimacing and twitching the way people do when they leave the cold and wet for the warm and dry.

Chauncey took drink orders – they all wanted bourbon, thank you – and while he poured he said to Dortmunder, "You were late."

"We had a little chore to take care of first."

Chauncey handed around glasses, then raised his own in a toast: "Success to all our schemes."

"Hear, hear. Okay. I'll drink to that."

They did, and Chauncey had his first real opportunity to study Dortmunder's "string." And what a motley collection they were, all in all, dominated by a man monster with a face like a homicidal tomato, plus a skinny sharp-nosed bright-eyed fellow who looked like a cockney pickpocket, and a mild-mannered gent who looked like a cross between a museum curator and a bookkeeper out of Dickens. So these four – with the driver outside – were the team of burglars, were they? Except for the monster, they looked perfectly ordinary. Chauncey, who had been rather nervous at the prospect of having these people all together in his house, was almost disappointed.

But mostly his thoughts were on Folly. He sipped at his drink, waiting impatiently for the others to finish their first tastes – with many aaahhhs and lip-smackings – and then he said, "Well. Shall we get to it?"

"Sure," Dortmunder said. "You got the money?"

"Of course."

From another cabinet near the liquor supply he brought out a small black attaché case. Opening this on a side table, Chauncey revealed stacks of bills, all fifties and hundreds, neatly filling the interior of the case. "I suppose you'll want to count this," he said.

Dortmunder shrugged, as though it didn't matter, saying, "It couldn't hurt." He nodded to the cockney pickpocket and the museum curator, who stepped over to the money, little smiles on their faces, and started flipping through the stacks. Meanwhile, Dortmunder was removing the rolled painting from its cardboard tube. "Hold this, Tiny," he said.

Tiny? As Chauncey stared in disbelief at the monster, who apparently did answer to that name, Dortmunder handed the fellow one corner of the painting and then backed away, unrolling it. Tiny (!) held two edges, Dortmunder held the other two, and there was Folly, revealed in all his splendor.

Not exactly, of course. There were still creases and curves in the surface, from the rolling-up, and the light struck it differently from this angle, making everything seem slightly different, slightly strange. But it was his Folly, all right, and Chauncey smiled in welcome as he stepped toward it, leaning forward to get a better look at the details. Odd how different that market basket looked in this – "Hold it right there!"

The voice, cold and loud and aggressive, came from the doorway behind Chauncey, and when he spun around he was absolutely astounded to see the room filling up with terrorists.

At least, they looked like terrorists. Three of them, all wearing ski masks and brown leather jackets and all carrying machine pistols with those skimpy-looking tubular metal stocks. They moved very professionally, one hurrying to the left, one to the right, the leader remaining in the doorway, the barrel of his pistol moving lazily from side to side, prepared to stitch a line of bullets across the entire room. From his hands he was a black man, while the other two were white.

"Good God?" Chauncey cried, and these people looked so exactly like terrorists in the weekly newsmagazines that at first he thought it was a coincidence, that he was about to be kidnapped as a capitalist oppressor and held until Outer Mongolia, say, or Lichtenstein, had released a selected list of fifty-seven political prisoners.

But then he heard a thwap behind him, and knew that either Dortmunder or Tiny had released his end of the painting, allowing it to snap back into a roll, and all at once he understood. "Oh, no," he said, almost under his breath. "No."

Yes. "We'll take that," the leader was saying, gesturing with the machine pistol past Chauncey, at Dortmunder behind him. Then the machine pistol angled toward Dortmunder's two partners over by the attaché case, their hands full of stacks of bills, their faces showing the most complete – under other circumstances comical – surprise. "That, too," the leader said, and the satisfaction in his voice was like molasses.

"You son of a bitch," Dortmunder said, his voice almost a growl.

"Dortmunder," Chauncey said, warning him. Life is better than death, said the tone of his voice. This is merely one battle, not the whole war. All of those sentiments, however expressed over the centuries, were summed up in the tone of Chauncey's voice when he spoke Dortmunder's name. And Dortmunder, who had been teetering forward on his toes, hands clenched, shoulders bunched, now slowly relaxed, settling onto his heels once more.

From here, everything moved with professional speed and assurance. It was Tiny who held the re-rolled painting, and at the leader's orders he put it into its cardboard tube and turned it over to the man on the left. The attaché case was refilled, closed, and given to the man on the right. Those two backed from the room, leaving the leader in the doorway. "We'll watch this door for ten minutes," he said. "Check your watches. Anybody through too soon gets shot." And he was gone.

The stairs were carpeted, so the people in the room wouldn't hear the trio leave, or know when they left, or how many stayed behind. Chauncey just stood there, gaping at the empty doorway, and the true fact of his loss – the painting and the money – didn't come home till Dortmunder was suddenly in front of him, glaring.

"Who'd you tell?"

"What? What?"

"Who did you tell?"

Tell? Tell someone about the insurance fraud, about the exchange of painting and money here tonight? But he hadn't told anyone. "Dortmunder, I swear to God – Why would I, man, think about it."

Dortmunder shook his head: "We're pros, Chauncey, we know our job. Not one of us would say a word to anybody. You're the amateur."

"Dortmunder, who is there for me to tell?"

"There they go!" cried the cockney pickpocket. He and the other two were over by the front windows, looking out into the rain. "Dortmunder!"

Dortmunder hurried to the windows, Chauncey following him. Tiny was saying, "One, two, three. They didn't leave anybody."

"Four!" cried the cockney pickpocket. "Who's that?" Chauncey stared out the window. He couldn't believe what he was looking at. Over there, diagonally across the way, near the streetlight, three men in brown leather jackets had crowded around a fourth. Their faces were bare, now, but too far away to see. One carried the cardboard tube, another the attaché case. But it was the fourth man who held Chauncey's attention, held him frozen. Tall, narrow, dressed in black…

"He can't move fast with that limp," Tiny was saying. "Come on, Dortmunder, we'll trail them, we'll get our goods back."

"Z-z-z-z-z," said Chauncey, but stopped himself before making that mistake. The limping man and the other three hurried away toward the corner, out of the light.

Dortmunder's men were running from the room. Dortmunder had paused, was staring now into Chauncey's eyes as though to read his mind. "You're sure," Dortmunder said; "You told nobody. You don't know how this happened."

How could he admit it? What would happen to him? "Nobody," he answered, and looked Dortmunder straight in the eye.

"I'll get back to you," Dortmunder said, and ran from the room.

Chauncey sat down and drank half a bottle of bourbon.

Chapter 13

It was Christmas all over again, in May's new apartment. The same crowd as at Christmastime, the same tasty aroma of tuna casserole wafting through the air, the same spirit of joy and good fellowship.

The gifts this time, though, weren't booze and perfume, they were solid cash and a sense of solid accomplishment, and maybe even the renewed gift of life itself. The lost painting was dealt with, Chauncey was cooled out and would be sending around no more hired killers, and on that table where once had stood the miserable fake tree the attaché case now yawned wide, gleaming with crisp new greenery.

Dortmunder sat in his personal chair with his feet up on his old hassock and a glass of bourbon-on-the-rocks in his left hand, and he damn near smiled. Everything had worked out exactly, even the moving of all the furniture and goods from May's old apartment to this new one six blocks away. And now everybody was relaxing here, less than half an hour since they'd left Chauncey's house, and all Dortmunder could say was, it was the best worked-out goddam plan he'd ever seen in his life.

Andy Kelp came by – good old Andy – with an open bourbon bottle in one hand, an aluminum pot full of ice cubes in the other. "Top up your drink," he said. "It's a party."

"Don't mind if I do." Dortmunder topped up his drink, then found himself, actually grinning at good old Andy Kelp. "Whadaya think?" he said.

Kelp stopped, paused, grinned, cocked his head to one side, and said, "I'll tell you what I think. I think you're a goddam genius. I think you been operating under a cloud too long, and it was about time your true genius shone through, and it did. That's what I think."

Dortmunder nodded. "Me, too," he said simply.

Kelp went away, to top up other drinks around the room, and Dortmunder settled down to sip and smile and consider the harvest, at long last, of his own genius. The original notion had been Andy's, but the plan had been all Dortmunder.

And how well it had worked! Dortmunder always planned well, nobody could argue that, but things never worked out the way they were supposed to. This time, though, the pieces had clicked into place one after the other like a stunt drill team.

It was at the Christmas party that Kelp had suggested to the other guests they could do an old buddy a favor and at the same time pick up some pocket money for themselves, and once they'd understood the situation they'd all agreed. Wally Whistler, the lock man whose absentmindedness in releasing a zoo lion from its cage had resulted in an only-recently-completed involuntary vacation upstate, had followed Roger Chefwick's route in bypassing Chauncey's alarm system and coming down through the elevator shaft while Dortmunder, purposely late, had kept Chauncey out of his house. Fred Lartz, the former driver who had quit driving after he'd got run down by Eastern Airlines flight two-oh-eight, and Herman X, the radical black lock man, had completed the terrorist trio, and their timing, manner and efficiency just couldn't have been bettered. (Dortmunder raised his glass thrice: to Herman X, dancing once more with his sleek girl friend Foxy to an Isaac Hayes record; to Fred Lartz, comparing routes in a corner with Stan Murch; and to Wally Whistler, absentmindedly fumbling with the catch on the spring-leaf table. Whistler and Lartz raised their glasses in return. Herman X winked and raised his right fist.)

A strange string, that; two lock men and a non-driving driver. The driving for that bunch, in fact, had been done by Fred Lartz's wife, Thelma, the lady in the crazy hat out in the kitchen helping May. Thelma did all Fred's driving for him now that he'd quit, but this was her first time driving professionally, and she'd been cool and reliable all the way. (Dortmunder raised his glass to Thelma, who couldn't see him because she was in the kitchen. Three or four other people saw him, though, and grinned and raised their glasses back, so that was all right.)

But the coup de grace had been the little play put on for Chauncey's benefit on the street outside. And for that, who better than an actor? Alan Greenwood, the former heist man and now television star, had been delighted at the idea of playing the limping killer, Leo Zane. "It's the kind of role an actor can get his teeth into," he'd said, and he'd made a special trip back from the Coast just to appear in Dortmunder's private production. And what a job he'd done! For just a second, seeing him out there under that streetlight, Dortmunder had actually believed he was Zane, somehow free of the trap and ready to blow the gaffe on all of them. Wonderful performance! (Dortmunder raised his glass to Greenwood, also dancing. At first, he'd thought Greenwood was here with Doreen again, the girl from Christmas, but this time Greenwood had introduced her as Susan, so maybe she was somebody different. Anyway, they were dancing, and over Susan's shoulder Greenwood gave the English thumbs-up salute and smiled with several hundred teeth.)

So now they had it all. Porculey's copy of Folly Leads Man to Ruin looked terrific thumb tacked over the sofa, and the attaché case full of money looked just as terrific on the table across the room. One hundred thousand dollars, every last dollar of it present and accounted for. The money had to be spread a bit thinner than if the original robbery had worked out, but so what? The point was, they'd done the job at last and they had the money. Ten thousand would go to Porculey for the fake, and the man had earned every penny of it. One thousand each would go to Wally Whistler and Fred Lartz and Herman X as a token payment of appreciation, and one thousand to Alan Greenwood to cover his expenses in coming to town just for this gig. It had been agreed by everybody concerned that May should get a thousand, both to help fix up the new apartment and also as a kind of testimonial to her world-renowned tuna casserole. And that left eighty-five thousand dollars. Split five ways (Kelp would give his nephew Victor a little something as a finder's fee out of his own piece), it left Dortmunder and Kelp and Murch and Chefwick and Bulcher a solid reasonable seventeen thousand dollars each. What was wrong with that? Nothing. (Dortmunder raised his glass to the attaché case. It didn't offer any visible response, but it didn't have to. Its presence was enough.)

Of course, there was something a little strange about the fact that, when success finally did arrive, it came in the form of a fake robbery of a fake Old Master, but just so long as the money was real – and it was, they'd looked it over very carefully – what the hell. Right?

And here was Kelp – good old Andy Kelp – back with more bourbon and more ice cubes. Dortmunder was astounded to realize his glass was practically empty; nothing in it but one naked ice cube. He added a second, Kelp filled the glass to the top, and the party went on.

Dortmunder was never exactly sure afterward when the party did come to an end. After a while May and Thelma brought out the food, and then a while later the money was divvied up – May took her share and Dortmunder's share away to the bedroom, where she'd already worked out this apartment's hiding place – and then a while later Wally Whistler's absentminded fiddling with the catch on the spring-leaf table resulted in a lot of dishes and glasses and peanuts clattering to the floor with a hell of a racket when the table collapsed to Wally's utter embarrassment, and a while after that people started going home, all of them stopping to thank Dortmunder for a nice party and to say a word or two about tonight's success. Dortmunder just smiled at them all, and nodded happily whenever his glass was refilled, and somewhere in through there he must have fallen asleep, because you can't wake up unless you've been asleep, and just like THAT Dortmunder woke up. He stared around an empty room gray with daylight, and he said out loud, "What's going wrong?"

Then he heard the echo of his own voice, and sat back in his chair. He had the fuzzy mouth and the muzzy headache that come from sleeping sitting up in a chair with your clothes on after you've had just a bit too much to drink. Moving his tongue around inside his head as though it were a sock he was trying to put away somewhere, he silently answered his own question: Nothing's going wrong. Chauncey was cooled out. Zane was certainly not cooled out, but his credibility was destroyed in Chauncey's eyes because Chauncey didn't know Dortmunder knew what Zane looked like, and in any event Dortmunder was going to make himself very hard to find for the next few months. Besides moving their apartment, he and May intended to take some of that money and have a real vacation, a real spree for themselves, and by the time they came back this whole business would have blown over. Why would a professional like Zane spend the rest of his life, with no employer, on a manhunt that had no profit in it? Zane would eventually stop being upset, he'd get back to his own life, and that would be the end of that.

So what could go wrong? Nothing. This job was done, and it had been a complete success.

Dortmunder closed his eyes. Ten seconds later, the left eye opened halfway, and watched the empty room.