The Hot Rock

3

"All you had to do was honk," Dortmunder said. He was grousing because his knuckle was stinging where he'd skinned it on Kelp's cheekbone. He put the knuckle in his mouth.

"I was going to," Kelp said, "but things got kind of confused. But they're okay now?"

They were on the express road to New York, the Caddy's speed set at sixty-five miles an hour. Kelp had to keep one hand on the wheel and occasionally glance out front to see they were still on the road, but other than that the car was driving itself.

Dortmunder was feeling aggrieved. Three hundred bucks down the drain, scared out of his wits, almost run down by a damn fool in a Cadillac, and skinned his knuckle, all on the same day. "What do you want, anyway?" he said. "They give me a train ticket, I didn't need no ride."

"You need work, I bet," Kelp said. "Unless you got something lined up."

"I don't have anything lined up," Dortmunder said. Now that he thought about it, that irritated him too.

"Well, I got a sweetheart for you," Kelp said. He was smiling all over his face.

Dortmunder decided to stop grousing. "All right," he said. "I can listen. What's the story?"

Kelp said, "Did you ever hear of a place called Talabwo?"

Dortmunder frowned. "Isn't that one of those South Pacific islands?"

"Naw, it's a country. In Africa."

"I never heard of it," Dortmunder said. "I heard of the Congo."

"This is near there," Kelp said. "I think it is."

"Those countries are all too hot, aren't they? I mean temperature hot."

"Yeah, I guess they are," Kelp said. "I don't know, I never been."

"I don't think I'd want to go there," Dortmunder said. "They got disease too. And they kill white people a lot."

"Just nuns," Kelp said. "But the job isn't over there, it's right here in the good old USA."

"Oh." Dortmunder sucked his knuckle, then said, "Then why talk about this other place?"

"Talabwo."

"Yeah, Talabwo. Why talk about it?"

"I'll get to that," Kelp said. "You ever hear of Akinzi?"

"He's that doctor did that sex book," Dortmunder said. "I wanted to get it out of the library in stir, but they had a twelve-year waiting list. I put my name on, just in case I got turned down for parole, but I never got the book. He's dead, isn't he?"

"That's not what I'm talking about," Kelp said. There was a truck moseying along in his lane, so Kelp had to do some driving for a minute. He steered into the other lane, went by the truck, and got back into his own lane again. Then he looked at Dortmunder and said, "I'm talking about a country. Another country. It's called Akinzi." He spelled it.

Dortmunder shook his head. "Is that in Africa too?"

"Oh, you heard of that one."

"No, I didn't," Dortmunder said. "I just guessed."

"Oh." Kelp glanced at the highway. "Yeah, it's another country in Africa," he said. "There was this British colony there, and when it went independent there was trouble, because there were two big tribes in the country and they both wanted to run it, so they had a civil war and finally they decided to split into two countries. So that's the two countries, Talabwo and Akinzi."

"You know an awful lot about this stuff," Dortmunder said.

"I got told about it," Kelp said.

Dortmunder said, "But I don't see any caper in it yet."

"I'm coming to that," Kelp said. "It seems that one of these tribes had this emerald, this jewel, and they used to pray to it like a god, and these days it's their symbol. Like a mascot. Like the tomb of the unknown soldier, something like that."

"An emerald?"

"It's supposed to be worth half a million bucks," Kelp said.

"That's a lot," Dortmunder said.

"Of course," Kelp said, "you couldn't fence a thing like that, it's too well known. And it would cost too much."

Dortmunder nodded. "I already thought of that," he said. "When I thought what you were going to say was heist the emerald."

"But that is what I'm going to say," Kelp said. "That's the caper, to heist the emerald."

Dortmunder found himself getting irritable again. He took his pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket. "If we can't fence it," he said, "what the hell do we want to lift it for?"

"Because we've got a buyer," Kelp said. "He'll pay thirty thousand dollars a man to get the emerald."

Dortmunder stuck a cigarette in his mouth and the pack in his pocket. "How many men?"

"We figure maybe five."

"That's a hundred fifty grand for a half-million-dollar stone. He's getting a bargain."

"We're getting thirty grand each," Kelp pointed out.

Dortmunder pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard. "Who is this guy?" he said. "Some collector?"

"No. He's the UN Ambassador from Talabwo."

Dortmunder looked at Kelp. "He's who?"

The cigarette lighter popped out of the dashboard and fell on the floor.

Kelp repeated himself.

Dortmunder picked up the cigarette lighter and lit his cigarette. "Explain," he said.

"Sure," Kelp said. "When the British colony split into two countries, Akinzi got the city where the emerald was being kept. But Talabwo is the country where the tribe is that always had the emerald. The UN sent in some people to referee the situation, and Akinzi paid some money for the emerald, but money isn't the point. Talabwo wants the emerald."

Dortmunder shook the cigarette lighter and flipped it out the window. He said, "Why don't they go to war?"

"The two countries are even Stephen. They're a pair of welterweights, they'd ruin each other and nobody'd win."

Dortmunder dragged on the cigarette, exhaled through his nose. "If we cop the emerald and give it to Talabwo," he said, "why won't Akinzi go to the UN and say, 'Make them give us back our emerald'?" He sneezed.

"Talabwo won't let on they got it," Kelp said. "They don't want to display it or anything, they just want to have it. It's symbolic with them. Like those Scotchmen that stole the Stone of Scone a few years ago."

"The one that did what?"

"It's a thing that happened in England," Kelp said. "Anyway, about this emerald heist. You interested?"

"Depends," Dortmunder said. "Where's the emerald kept at?"

"Right now," Kelp said, "it's in the Coliseum in New York. There's this Pan-African display, all sorts of stuff from Africa, and the emerald's part of the display from Akinzi."

"So we're supposed to swipe it from the Coliseum?"

"Not necessarily," Kelp said. "The display's going on tour in a couple weeks. It'll be in a lot of different places, and it'll travel by train and truck. We'll get plenty of chances to get our hands on it."

Dortmunder nodded. "All right," he said. "We cop the emerald, we turn it over to this guy-"

"Iko," Kelp said, pronouncing it eye-ko, accent on the first syllable.

Dortmunder frowned. "Isn't that a Japanese camera?"

"No, it's the name of the UN Ambassador from Talabwo. And if you're interested in the job, that's who we're going to go see."

Dortmunder said, "He knows I'm coming?"

"Sure," Kelp said. "I told him what we needed was an organizer, a planner, and I told him Dortmunder was the best organizer in the business and if we were lucky we could get you to set things up for us. I didn't tell him you were just finishing a stretch."

"Good," Dortmunder said.