Watch Your Back!

16

IT WAS CALLED the Twilight Lounge, and it was east on Forty-third Street, between a wholesale to-the-trade-only plastic flower showroom and a store that called itself "Sickroom Party Supplies," with an unfortunate display window. Looking at that sign, Kelp said, "Shouldn't that be the other way around?"

"Shouldn't what?" Dortmunder asked. He was feeling skeptical and unobservant.

"Doesn't matter," Kelp said, and pushed through the swinging door into the Twilight Lounge, where they were at once drenched in the crooning of Dean Martin, his voice morphine-laced molasses.

It was J. C. Taylor who'd come up with this joint for their meeting ground, now that the O.J. was becoming increasingly unlikely. "Josey doesn't know the place herself," Tiny had explained to everybody, in various phone calls earlier today, Friday, after Dortmunder had dragged himself out of bed to make his own phone calls to say they needed a place to meet and discuss his discoveries of last night. "A guy down in the post office substation in her building says he goes there; it's quiet, they mind their own business, there's a back room we could use, just say Eddie told us about it."

Well, it was worth a try. Anything, they all agreed, rather than gather in Dortmunder's living room again. So, four o'clock Friday afternoon, here they were in the Twilight Lounge, a sprawling, lowlit joint half full of wage earners taking an indirect route to their suburban homes for the weekend, the whole scene suffused by the umber gurgle of Dean Martin.

There were two bartenders at work: one hardworking, blank-faced guy with his sleeves rolled up, one friendly girl with all the time in the world. Rather than break into the three conversations the girl already had under way, Kelp leaned over the bar and said to the guy en passant, "Eddie sent me.

"Right." The guy never made eye contact, but just kept watching what his busy hands were doing with various objects on the backbar as he said, "Eddie's pal is already back there."

Dortmunder wondered who that might be, but the busy barman was still talking: "Order your drinks, you can carry them back, you can run a tab until you're done."

"Thanks," Kelp said. "I'll have bourbon and ice, two glasses."

"Same," Dortmunder said, and the bartender snapped an efficient nod and went off with what looked like a trayful of piña coladas. True, it was August outside, but where were these commuters going?

As they waited for their drinks, Kelp said, "Well, it's more efficient than the O.J."

Dortmunder thought, is that what we wanted? But he knew he was just in a bad mood, irritated by change simply because it was change, so all he said was, "I wonder who Eddie's pal is."

Kelp shrugged. "We'll find out."

That was wisdom, and Dortmunder nodded to it. Take it as it comes. What the hell. More efficient than the O.J.; maybe that'd be okay.

Efficiently the barman slapped four glasses onto the gleaming wood in front of them. "Around the bar to your left," he said, not looking at them, watching instead the next job his busy hands were concerned with, "then past the rest-rooms, it's on your right."

They thanked his departing back, picked up their glasses, and followed instructions. Past the end of the bar they found themselves in a quietly lit, neat corridor with carpet on the floor and wall sconces and gay-nineties scenes in frames on the walls. The first door on the right said ladies. The second door on the right said GENTLEMEN. The third door on the right was open, and seated in there, looking irritable, was Tiny.

This was a larger back room than the one at the O.J., and more elaborate. The wall-sconce-and-gay-nineties theme continued in here, and there were four small round tables geometrically placed on the maroon carpet, each containing a tablecloth and a stand-up triangular menu of, on one side, our specialty drinks, and on the other, our specialty snacks. Tiny had already tossed onto the floor behind him the menu from his table.

"Hey, Tiny," Kelp said as they entered. "Different here, huh?"

Tiny held up a tall glass of red liquid that looked like, but was not, cherry pop. "They wanted," he said, "to put the vodka and the wine in separate glasses. I told them, they could give me as many glasses as they want, they get one back."

As Kelp put his two glasses at the place to Tiny's right, he said, "We made a kind of a different deal."

"The customer," Tiny informed him, "is always right."

Putting his own store of glasses at the place to Tiny's left, Dortmunder said, "Is Murch's Mom coming? If so, we're five, and this is a table for four."

"I only talked to the son," Tiny said, and Stan Murch himself walked in, a glass of beer in one hand, and a little shallow bowl with wavy blue designs on it in the other. "I'm glad my Mom isn't coming," he informed them. "If she could see the traffic in Manhattan. What's this, I got to sit with my back to the door?"

"You get to close the door," Tiny suggested.

So Stan put his glass and his bowl at the remaining spot at the small table and turned about to shut the hall door. When he turned back, Kelp said, "What's the bowl?"

"They say, salt." Stan sat, sipped beer, frowned upon the bowl without affection, and said, "I asked for a saltshaker, they don't have saltshakers here, they got these little bowls."

Leaning forward to look at the grains of white salt almost completely filling the bowl, Kelp said, "That's gotta be wasteful. You won't use hardly any of that."

"They don't throw it out," Stan told him. "I saw on the tables out there, they just leave them around."

Kelp said, "You mean, everybody's fingers in the same salt?"

Stan shrugged. "What are you gonna do? I figure, the alcohol in the beer'll kill the germs. The problem with Manhattan, on the other hand, it's August, nobody's here, it's full of tourists."

Dortmunder said, "Then whadaya mean, there's nobody here?"

"There's nobody here that belongs here," Stan explained. "The real New Yorkers go away for the summer. Right now, there's nobody driving in the city that knows how to drive in the city. You got people now, they're from some other continent, they come here in the summer, they got a special deal, hotel and a car rental, they're so pleased with themselves. They come to New York City to drive a car? Drive a car at home in Yakburg, not here, you'll never figure out what you're doing here, a week in circles, lost, they go home, their friends say, 'So how'd you find New York? they say, 'We didn't. "

"We're here," Tiny said, "for Dortmunder to tell us how he found the O.J."

"I'm ready," Stan said. With thumb and forefinger, he delicately sprinkled a few grains of salt onto his beer, which enthused.

When Dortmunder finished watching Stan and his salt, he said, "Okay, I went in there last night," and he told them about the wedding party and the basement and the SLA and the Medrick family saga.

Kelp said, "A nephew."

"Not one of the better ones," Dortmunder suggested.

Tiny rumbled, "There are good nephews?"

Kelp said, "My nephew Victor isn't so bad."

"Victor," Tiny repeated. "The FBI guy."

"Ex-FBI," Kelp said.

Dortmunder said, "They threw him out. He wanted the FBI to have a secret handshake."

Stan said, "I thought they did have a secret handshake."

Tiny said, "Kelp's nephew Victor is not the point. The O.J.'s nephew Medrick is the point."

"Raphael Medrick," Dortmunder said, taking from his shirt pocket the two folded documents he'd liberated from the O.J.'s safe. "He's in Queens."

"We don't know what he was on probation for," Kelp pointed out.

"Nonviolent," Dortmunder said. "It's probably not that he's mobbed-up to begin with, he's just some schmuck, got in trouble, his family helped out, his uncle wants to retire, you can see it now. It's great for everybody, the old guy can go retire in Florida, the young guy is gonna be fine once he's got some responsibility to be responsible for, the family's gonna keep an eye on him—"

"Sure," Kelp said.

"They always do," Stan said.

Tiny said, "You know, all this is after it's over. It's over."

Dortmunder said, "The O.J.'s still open."

"If you call that open," Tiny said. "But the goods have been bought, Dortmunder, the credit line's used up. The place is a shell, it's going down. What we're supposed to be thinking about is that place on Fifth Avenue, full of good things that Albright is gonna pay us all this green."

"We're thinking about it," Kelp assured him. "We're working on it. Aren't we, John?"

"In a way," Dortmunder said.

"Let's think about it some more," Tiny suggested.

"Definitely," Dortmunder said.

Stan said, "Just for the heck of it, though, why don't we go and take a look at this Raphael?"

"Well, yeah," Tiny said. "Sure we're gonna go look at Raphael. Just don't think anything's gonna be done about the O.J."

Kelp said, "In that case, why bother to go see him at all?"

Tiny smiled; the others flinched. "Because," Tiny said, "I wish to attract his attention."