The Hot Rock

2

Nine o'clock Wednesday evening, two days after the meeting in Major Iko's office, Dortmunder walked into the O. J. Bar and Grill and nodded to Rollo, who said, "Good to see you again."

"Anybody else here?"

"Everybody except the beer and salt. The other bourbon has your glass."

"Thanks."

Dortmunder walked through to the back room, where Kelp and Greenwood and Chefwick were sitting around the round table under the green-metal-shaded light. The table was covered with indictable evidence of a crime being planned, meaning photographs and sketches and even blueprints of the 46th Street and Fifth Avenue branch of the Capitalists amp; Immigrants National Bank (whose television mascot was a German shepherd with the slogan "Let C amp;I be the seeing-eye to all your banking needs").

Dortmunder sat down in front of the empty glass, exchanged hellos with the others, and poured some bourbon. He drank, put the glass down, and said, "Well? What do you think?"

"Bad," said Kelp.

"Rotten," said Greenwood.

"I agree," said Chefwick. "What do you think, Dortmunder?"

The door opened and Murch came in. Everybody said hello, and he said, "I made a mistake this time." He sat down in the vacant chair and said, "I thought it might be a good idea to take Pennsylvania Avenue to the Interborough, and then Woodhaven Boulevard to Queens Boulevard and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, but it didn't work out. You got a lot of bad traffic there, especially on Queens Boulevard, the kind that just mopes along but takes up all the lanes to do it, so you can get caught by the lights a lot. Otherwise I'd of been here ahead of time."

Dortmunder said to him, "The question is, what do you think of this bank job?"

"Well, you're not going to make a getaway," Murch told him, "that's one thing for sure. Now, Forty-sixth Street is one way eastbound, and Fifth Avenue is one way southbound, which gives you only half the usual directions just to begin with. Then there's the problem of traffic lights. There's a traffic light at every intersection in Manhattan, and they're all red. If you go over Forty-sixth toward Madison, you'll get all tied up in the middle of the block somewhere. If you go south on Fifth Avenue, you might be able to keep moving because they've got staggered lights, but even so they're set for something like twenty-two miles an hour, and you just don't make a getaway at twenty-two miles an hour."

Dortmunder said, "What about at night?"

"Less traffic," Murch said, "but just as many lights. And there's always cops around midtown, so you don't want to run any lights, and even if you do you'll get hit by a cab in the first ten blocks. Day or night, you don't make any getaway by car."

Greenwood said, "Helicopter again?"

Kelp answered him, saying, "I thought about that, but it's no good. It's a forty-seven-story building, with the bank on the ground floor. You can't put the helicopter in the street, and if you put it on the roof you've got to make a getaway by elevator, which is also no good, because all the cops have to do is turn off the power to the elevator while we're in it and come collect us like canned sardines."

"Right," Murch said. "There is no method to make a getaway from Forty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, and that's all there is to it."

Dortmunder nodded and said to Chefwick, "What about locks?"

Chefwick shook his head. "I haven't been down in the vault," he said, "but just from what I could see up on the main floor they don't have the kind of locks you pick. It would take blasting, probably some drilling. A lot of time, and a lot of noise."

Dortmunder nodded again and looked around at Kelp and Greenwood. "Any suggestions? Any ideas?"

Kelp said, "I thought about going through walls, but it can't be done. You take a look on that blueprint there, you'll see not only is the vault underground, surrounded by rocks and telephone company cable and power lines and water pipes and God knows what all, but the walls are eight-foot-thick reinforced concrete with sensor alarms that ring at the local precinct house."

Greenwood said, "I spent some time working out what would happen if we just walked in and pulled guns and said this is a stick-up. In the first place, we'd get our pictures taken, which any other time is all right with me, but not in the middle of a heist. Also, everybody in the joint has foot alarms under where they work. Also, the downstairs entrance to the vault is always barred shut unless there's somebody going down there on legitimate business, and there's two barred doors with a room in between, and they never have both doors open at the same time. I also think they have other stuff that I'm not sure of. Even if we could work out some kind of getaway, there's no job in there to make a getaway from."

"That's right," Dortmunder said. "I came to the same conclusion as you guys. I just wanted to hear did any of you think of something I missed."

"We didn't," Chefwick said.

"You mean that's it?" Kelp said. "We give it up? The job can't be done?"

"I didn't say that," Dortmunder said. "I didn't say the job couldn't be done. But what we've all said is that none of us could do it. It isn't a place for a frontal attack. We've hit up Iko for trucks, for a helicopter, for a locomotive, I'm sure we could hit him up for just about anything we'd need. But there's nothing he could give us that would do the trick. He could give us a tank and it wouldn't help."

"Because we'd never get away in it," Murch said.

"That's right."

"Though it might be fun to drive one," Murch said thoughtfully.

Kelp said, "Wait a minute. Dortmunder, if you say none of us could pull this job, you're saying the job can't be done. What's the difference? We're shot down whatever way you say it."

"No, we're not," Dortmunder said. "There's five of us here, and none of the five of us could get that emerald out of that bank. But that doesn't mean nobody in the world could do it."

Greenwood said, "You mean bring in somebody new?"

"I mean," Dortmunder said, "bring in a specialist. This time we need a specialist outside the string, so we bring one in."

"What kind of a specialist?" Greenwood said, and Kelp said, "Who?"

"Miasmo the Great," Dortmunder said.

There was a little silence, and then everybody began to smile. "That's nice," Greenwood said.

Kelp said, "You mean for Prosker?"

"I wouldn't trust Prosker," Dortmunder said.

Everybody stopped smiling, and looked baffled instead. Chefwick said, "If not Prosker, who?"

"An employee of the bank," Dortmunder said.

Everybody started smiling again.