The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

Donald E. Westlake Good Behavior (Except)

Since 1965, when the Chicago Tribune book critic who reviewed Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Fugitive Pigeon noted that it is so good “what can Donald E. Westlake possibly do for an encore?” his fans have suffered from the anxiety that with each succeeding novel, he must have reached his peak. The excerpt that follows from Good Behavior, Westlake’s new novel scheduled for spring 1986 publication by the Mysterious Press, indicates that he will top himself at least once more, yet, from what we have read, it is so good…

Escaping from a bungled burglary, John Dortmunder falls, literally, into a nunnery, where a vow of silence prevails. A nun helps Dortmunder, and he is obliged to return the favor. The scene that follows takes place at the O. J. Bar & Grill, where Dortmunder presents his plan to solve two problems with one scam.

When Dortmunder walked into the O. J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at ten that night a few of the regulars were draped against the bar discussing the weather or something. “It’s ‘Red star at night, Sailor take fright,’ ” one of them was saying.

“Will you listen to this crap,” a second regular said. “Will you just listen?”

“I listened,” a third regular assured him.

“Who asked you?” the second regular wanted to know.

“It’s a free country,” the third regular told him, “and I listened, and you,” he told the first regular, “are wrong.”

“Well, yes,” the second regular said. “I didn’t know you were gonna be on my side.”

“It’s ‘Red star in the morning,’ ” the third regular said.

“Another idiot,” said the second regular.

The first regular looked dazzled with disbelief at the wrongheadedness all around him. “How does that rhyme?” he demanded. “ ‘Red star in the morning, Sailor take fright’?”

“It isn’t star,” the second regular announced, slapping his palm against the bar. “It’s red sky. All this red star crap, it’s like you’re talking about the Russian army.”

“Well, I’m not talking about the Russian army,” the first regular told him. “It happens I was in the navy. I was on PU boats.”

This stopped all the regulars cold for a second. Then the second regular, treading cautiously, said, “Whose navy?”

Dortmunder, down at the end of the bar, raised a hand and got the attention of Rollo the bartender, who’d been standing there with his heavy arms folded over his dirty apron, a faraway look in his eyes as the regulars’ conversation washed over him. Now, he nodded at Dortmunder and rolled smoothly down the bar to talk to him, planting his feet solidly on the duckboards, while behind him the navy man was saying, “The navy! How many navies are there?”

Rollo put meaty elbows on the bar in front of Dortmunder, leaned forward, and said, “Between you and me, I was in the marines.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We want a few good men,” Rollo assured him, then straightened up and said, “Your friends didn’t show yet. You want the usual?”

“Yeah.”

“And the other bourbon’s gonna be with you?”

“Right.”

Rollo nodded and went back down the bar to get out a tray and two glasses and a murky bottle with a label reading, “Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon. Our Own Brand.” Meantime, a discussion of the world’s navies had started up, with references to Admiral Nelson and Lord Byrd, when, in a pause in the flow of things, a fourth regular, who hadn’t spoken before this, said, “I think, I think, I’m not sure about this, but I think it’s ‘Red ring around the moon, Means rain pretty soon.’ Something like that.”

The second regular, the Russian army man, banged his beer glass on the bar and said, “It’s red sky. You got a ring around the brain, that’s what you got.”

“Easy, boys,” Rollo said. “The war’s over.”

Everybody looked startled at this news. Rollo picked up the tray with the bottle and glasses on it and brought it back to Dortmunder, saying, “And who else is coming?”

“The beer and salt.”

“Oh, yeah, the big spender,” Rollo said, nodding.

“And the vodka and red wine.”

“The monster. I remember him.”

“Most people do,” Dortmunder agreed. He picked up the tray and carried it past the regulars, who were still talking about the weather or something. “The groundhog saw his shadow,” the navy man was saying.

“Right,” the third regular said. “Six weeks ago yesterday, so that was six weeks more winter, so yesterday he come out again, you follow me so far?”

“It’s your story.”

“So it was sunny yesterday,” the third regular said, “so he saw his shadow again, so that’s another six weeks of winter.”

There was a pause while people worked out what they thought about that. Then the fourth regular said, “I still think it’s ‘Red ring around the moon.’ ”

Dortmunder continued on back past the bar and past the two doors marked with dog silhouettes labeled Pointers and Setters and past the phone booth with the string dangling from the quarter slot and through the green door at the back and into a small square room with a concrete floor. None of the walls could be seen, because the room was filled all the way around, floor to ceiling, with beer and liquor cases, leaving only a small bare space in the middle, containing a battered old table with a stained green-felt top and half a dozen chairs. The only illumination was from one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.

Dortmunder liked being first, because whoever was first got to sit facing the door. He sat there, put the tray to his right, poured some brown stuff into one of the glasses, and was raising it when the door opened and Stan Murch came in, carrying a glass of beer in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. “The damnedest thing,” he said, closing the door behind himself. “I took the road through Prospect Park, you know, on account of the Prospect Expressway construction, and when I came out on Grand Army Plaza they were digging up Flatbush Avenue, if you’ll believe it, so I ran down Union Street to the BQE and here I am.”

“Hiya, Stan,” Dortmunder said. “How you doin’?”

“Turning a dollar,” Stan said, and sat down with his beer and his salt as the door opened again and Tiny Bulcher came in, turning sideways to squeeze through the doorway. Somewhere down inside his left fist was a glass containing something that looked like, but was not, cherry soda. “Some clown out there wants to know was I in the navy,” Tiny said, “so I decked him.” He shut the door and came over and sat facing Dortmunder; Tiny didn’t mind if his back was to the door. “Hello, Dortmunder,” he said.

“Hello, Tiny.”

Tiny looked around, heavy head moving like a wrecker’s ball. “Am I waiting for somebody?”

“Andy Kelp.”

“Am I early, or is he late?”

“Here he is now,” Dortmunder said, as Kelp came in, looking chipper but confused. Dortmunder motioned to him, saying, “Come sit down, Andy.”

“You know what there is out there,” Kelp said, shutting the door. “There’s a guy laying on the bar, had some sort of accident—”

“He asked Tiny a question,” Dortmunder said.

“He got personal with me,” Tiny said.

Kelp looked at Tiny, and his smile flickered like faraway summer lightning. “Whaddaya say, Tiny?”

“I say siddown,” Tiny said, “and let’s get to it.”“Oh, sure.” Coming around the table to sit at Dortmunder’s right and pour himself a glass of Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon, Kelp said, “Anyway, the other guys out there are trying to decide, is it a service-connected disability?”

“It’s a brain-connected disability,” Tiny said. “What have you got, Dortmunder?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I have a building.”

Tiny nodded. “And a way in?”

“A way in.”

“And what is in this building?”

“A bank. Forty-one importers and wholesalers of jade and ivory and jewels and other precious items. A dealer in antique silver. Two stamp dealers.”

“ ‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ ” Kelp finished, grinning happily at everybody.

“Holy Toledo,” Stan Murch said.

Tiny frowned. “Dortmunder,” he said, “in my experience you don’t tell jokes. At least, you don’t tell me jokes.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“This isn’t a building you’re talking about,” Tiny said. “This is the big rock candy mountain.”

“And it’s all ours,” Dortmunder said.

“How? You won the lottery?”

Dortmunder shook his head. “I got somebody on the inside,” he said. “I got the specs on every bit of security in the building. I got two great big looseleaf books this thick, all about the building. I got more information than I can use.”

Stan said, “How secure is this information? How sure are you of the inside guy?”

“One hundred percent,” Dortmunder said. “This person does not tell lies.”

“What is it, a disgruntled employee?”

“Not exactly.”

Tiny said, “I would need to talk to this person myself.”

“I definitely plan to arrange that,” Dortmunder told him.

Stan said, “So what’s the idea? We back up a truck, go in, empty everything we can, drive away?”

“No,” Dortmunder said. “In the first place, somebody on the street is gonna notice something like that.”

“There’s always nosy Parkers,” Tiny agreed. “One time, a guy annoyed me and annoyed me, so I made his nose go the other way.”

“In this building,” Dortmunder said, “there are also seventeen mail order places, different kinds of catalogue outfits and like that. I’m checking, I’m looking around, I’m being very careful, and what I want to find is one of these mail order people we can make a deal with.”

Kelp said to Stan and Tiny, “I love this part. This is why John Dortmunder is a genius.”

“You’re interrupting the genius,” Tiny pointed out.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“The deal is,” Dortmunder said, “we’d go into the building on a Saturday night and we wouldn’t leave till Monday morning. We’d take everything we could get and carry it all to the mail order place and put it all in packages and mail it out of the building Monday morning with their regular routine.”

Tiny thoughtfully nodded his head. “So we don’t carry the stuff out,” he said. “We go in clean, we come out clean.”

“That’s right.”

“I just love it,” Kelp said.

Tiny leveled a gaze at Kelp. “Enthusiasm makes me restless,” he said.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“We’ll have to pick and choose,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Even if we had a week, we wouldn’t be able to take everything. And if we took everything, it’d be too much to mail.”

Stan said, “You know, John, all my life I wanted to be along on a caper where there was so much stuff you couldn’t take it all. Just wallow in it, like Aladdin’s Cave. And this is what you’re talking about.”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Dortmunder agreed. “But I’m gonna need help in the setup.”

“Ask me,” Stan said. “I’ll help. I want to see this thing happen.”

“Two things,” Dortmunder told him. “First, the mail order outfit. It ought to be somebody that’s a little bent already, but not so bent the FBI’s got a wiretap.”

“I can ask around,” Stan said. “Discreetly. I know some people here and there.”

”I’ll also ask,” Tiny said. “Some people know me here and there.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said. “The other thing is, a lockman. We need somebody really good, to follow the schematics I got and shut down all the alarms without kicking them on instead.”

Tiny said, “What about that little model-train nut guy from the pitcha switch? Roger Whatever.”

“Chefwick,” Dortmunder said.

“He retired,” Kelp said.

Tiny looked at him. “In our line of work,” he said, “how do you retire?”

“You stop doing what you were doing, and you do something else.”

“So Chefwick stopped being a lockman.”

“Right,” Kelp said. “He went out to California with his wife, and they’re running this Chinese railroad out there.”

“A Chinese railroad,” Tiny said, “in California.”

“Sure,” Kelp said. “It used to run in China somewhere, but this guy bought it, the locomotive and the Chinese cars and even a little railroad station with the roof, you know, like hats that come out?”

”Like hats that come out,” Tiny said.

Like a pagoda,” Kelp said. “Anyway, this guy put down track and made an amusement park and Chefwick’s running the train for him. So now he’s got his own life-size model-train set, so he isn’t being a lockman anymore, so he’s retired. Okay?”

Tiny thought about it. “Okay,” he said, reluctantly.

Stan said, “What about Wally Whistler? I know he’s absentminded and all, but—”

Tiny said, “He’s the guy let the lion out at the zoo, isn’t he?”

“Just fiddling with the lock on the cage,” Stan said. “Absentminded, that’s all.”

“No good,” Kelp said. “Wally’s in Brazil, without any extradition.”

“Without what?” Dortmunder asked.

“In Brazil?” Tiny asked.

“He was helping some people at Customs down in Brooklyn,” Kelp told them. “You know, people that didn’t want to tie up the government with a lot of red tape and forms and stuff, so they were just going to get their imports at night and leave it at that, you know the kind of thing.”

“You said ‘Brazil,’ ” Tiny reminded him.

“Yeah, well, Wally, what Wally’s problem is, he’s just too good at his line of business.” Kelp shook his head. “You show Wally a lock, he just has to caress the thing, and poke at it, and see how it works, and the first thing he knew he went through a door, and then a couple more doors, and like that, and when he tried to go back the ship had sailed.”

“The ship,” Dortmunder said. It didn’t seem to him there’d been a ship in the story up till then.

“That he was on,” Kelp said, “that he didn’t know it. They were just leaving, and one of those doors he went through was into the ship from the warehouse, and it turned out they had some reasons of their own to leave in the middle of the night, so they didn’t want to go back to let him off, so he rode along and now he’s in Brazil without extradition.”

“That was the word,” Dortmunder said. “Explain that.”

“Well, most places in the world,” Kelp explained, “you find yourself broke and you don’t speak the language and all, you go confess to a crime in, like, Duluth or St. Louis or somewhere, and then the governments get together and do a lot of legal paper on you and they extradite you and the government pays your air fare and you get to St. Louis or Duluth or wherever it was, and you say, ‘Oops, my mistake, I didn’t do that after all,’ and you’re home. Only with Brazil, we got no treaty, they won’t extradite, so Wally’s stuck. And he says Brazil is so poor, most places don’t have locks, so he’s going crazy. So he’s trying to get to Uruguay.”

“For the extradition,” Dortmunder guessed.

“You got it.”

Stan said, “How about Herman X?”

Tiny, who had been observing Kelp so carefully that Kelp was beginning to fidget, now swiveled his head around to look at Stan. “Herman what?”

“X,” Stan said.

“Hes a black power radical,” Dortmunder explained, but he’s also a good lockman.”

“He was with us that time we took the bank,” Stan said.

“Now, the problem with Herman,” Kelp started, and everybody turned to look at him. “Don’t blame me,” he said. “I’m just telling you the situation.”

“Tell us the situation,” Tiny suggested.

“Well,” Kelp said, “the problem with Herman is, he’s in Africa.”

Dortmunder said, “Without extradition?”

“No, Herman doesn’t need extradition. He’s vice-president of Talabwo.”

Tiny said, “Is that a country?”

“For now,” Kelp said. “There’s a lot of unrest over there.”

Dortmunder said, “Talabwo. That’s the country wanted the Balabomo Emerald that time.”

“That’s right,” Kelp said. “And you gave Major Iko the paste emerald and he brought it home and when they found out it wasn’t real they ate him, I think. Anyway, there was trouble back and forth, and Herman was with his radical friends at the UN to steal some secret documents that proved the drought was a plot by the white people, and they came on this assassination attempt, and Herman helped the guy they were trying to kill, and it turned out he was the next president of Talabwo, which is why they were trying to put him out that window, so when he got home he invited Herman over as a thank-you, and that’s when Herman found out the vice-president was figuring on a coup, so now Herman’s vice-president, and he says he enjoys it a lot.”

Dortmunder said, “He does, does he?”

“Yeah. Except he isn’t Herman X anymore, now he’s Herman Makanene Stulu’mbnick.”

Tiny said, “I am growing weary.”

“Well, that’s all I know anyway,” Kelp said. He poured himself some more Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon.

Tiny said, “J know a guy, for the locks. He’s a little unusual.”

Dortmunder said, “After those stories? Your guy is unusual?”

“At least he’s in New York,” Tiny said. “His name’s Wilbur Howey.”

“I don’t know him,” Dortmunder said.

“He just came out of the slammer,” Tiny said. “I’ll have a word with him.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said. He hesitated, and cleared his throat.

“Here it comes now,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder gave him an innocent look. “Here comes what, Tiny?”

“The butcher’s thumb,” Tiny said. “You know what I do with the butcher’s thumb?”

“There’s nothing wrong, Tiny,” Dortmunder said. “The deal is exactly as I said it was. Only, there’s just one more little element.”

“One more little element.”

“While we’re in the building,” Dortmunder said, “take no time at all, we go up to the top floor, handle one extra little piece of business. Nothing to it.”

Tiny viewed Dortmunder more in sorrow than in anger. “Tell me about this, Dortmunder,” he said. “What is this extra little piece of business?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said. He knocked back a little Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon, coughed, and said, “The fact is, uh, Tiny, while we’re in there anyway, uh, it seems we have to rescue this nun.”