Watch Your Back!

23

"I SWITCHED YOUR seat," Medrick said.

At seven-fifteen in the morning, Dortmunder wasn't ready for trick questions like that. "Into what?" he said.

"Another seat." Medrick seemed as bright-eyed and alert at this awful hour as he had while board-gaming Dortmunder into the ground all afternoon yesterday. "I was awake all night thinking about it," he explained, "and now I know what to do. So I need a seat with a phone, and I need you in the seat next to me. So now you got an aisle—"

"I like an aisle," Dortmunder said. He remembered that much, even at an hour like this.

"Well, you got one, and I got the middle, and that's where the phone is."

"Who's got the window?"

"Who knows? Who cares? For two hours and ten minutes, we can put up with it."

"If you say so."

They were on the line at that moment for security inspection, strung along with a whole lot of sleepy, grumpy, badly dressed, overweight people who were traveling even though, from the look of them, nobody would be very happy to see them at the other end. "The plane's gonna be full," Dortmunder said.

"They're all full," Medrick assured him. "Everybody wants to be somewhere he's not, and as soon as he gets there he wants to go home."

"Even when I'm home," Dortmunder told him, "I want to go home."

"When we get through security," Medrick suggested, "we'll have a cup of coffee."

"Probably," Dortmunder said, "I'll be able to find my mouth by then."

The uniformed fat woman at security immediately regretted demanding that Dortmunder remove his shoes; he could tell she did, but she was too professional — or maybe just too stunned — to let it show. With that little triumph over the Security League of the Air behind him, he joined Medrick at a too-small table in an overcrowded franchise, for a cup of rotten coffee, and Medrick said, "I blame smoke signals."

"Uh huh," Dortmunder said.

"For where we are now, I mean."

"Uh huh," Dortmunder said. At this hour, he was prepared just to let the whole shebang slide on over him.

But Medrick had a point and intended to pursue it. "It's communications technologies that did us in," he said. "Now you got your Internet, before that your television, your radio, your newspapers, your telephone, your signal flags, your telegrams, your letters in the mailbox, but it all goes back to smoke signals, the whole problem starts right there."

"Sure," Dortmunder said.

Medrick shook his head. "But," he said, "I just don't think society's ready to go back that far."

"Probably not," Dortmunder said, and yawned. Maybe he could drink the coffee.

"But that's what it would take," Medrick insisted, "to return some shred of honesty to this world."

Dortmunder put down his coffee mug. "Is that what we're trying for?" he asked.

"Right just this minute it is," Medrick told him. "You see, with smoke signals, that was the very first time in the whole history of the human race that you could tell somebody something that he couldn't see you when you told him. You get what I mean?"

"No," Dortmunder said.

"Before smoke signals," Medrick said, "I wanna tell you something, I gotta come over to where you are, and stand in front of you, and tell you. Like I'm doing now. And you get to look at my face, listen to how I talk, read my body language, decide for yourself, is this guy trying to pull a fast one. You get it?"

"Eye contact."

"Exactly," Medrick said. "Sure, people still lied to each other back then and got away with it, but it wasn't so easy. Once smoke signals came in, you can't see the guy telling you the story, he could be laughing behind his hand, you don't know it."

"I guess that's true," Dortmunder agreed.

"Every step up along the way," Medrick said, "every other kind of way to communicate, it's always behind the other guy's back. For thousands of years, we've been building ourselves a liar's paradise. That's why the video phones weren't the big hit they were supposed to be, nobody wants to go back to the eyeball."

"I guess not."

"So that means they'll never get rid of the rest of it," Medrick concluded. "All the way back to smoke signals."

"I don't think they use those so much any more," Dortmunder said.

"If they did," Medrick said darkly, "they'd lie."

"Seating rows six forty-three to six fifty-two," said the announcement, so they boarded the damn plane.

Their third seatmate, next to the window over beyond Medrick, turned out to be okay, a very neat little old lady who put her own robin's egg blue Samsonite bag in the overhead rack, tucked her worn old black leather shoulderbag under the seat in front of her, kicked off her shoes, and opened a paperback novel by Barbara Pym, which she then proceeded to read with such intensity you'd think there was going to be a test on it when the plane reached Newark.

All Dortmunder wanted was the experience over with. He strapped himself in as though this were the electric chair and he'd just received word the governor was on the golf course, closed his eyes to pretend he was unconscious, experienced the rinse cycle of the plane taking off, listened to the announcements even though he knew in his heart he would never willingly associate himself with a flotation device, and at last the stew, who'd warned them ahead of time about futzing around with electronics during takeoff and landing, said, "Electronic equipment may now be used," and Medrick said, "Good."

Dortmunder opened his eyes. The phone was a neat gray plastic hotdog inset in the back of the middle seat ahead. Medrick yanked it out, did some credit card stuff, then did some dialing stuff, and then said, "Frank? Otto. It's nine-seventeen in the morning — what, you don't have any clocks on Long Island? I'm calling you about your son. Well, Frank, I'm in an airplane and I'm headed for Newark, which is not what I had planned for today, but while you been looking around for a clock the last four months your boy Raphael has been robbing me blind. Of course he wouldn't do that, and in fact — Frank, I know he's a good boy, and the reason I know he's a good boy, same as you know he's a good boy, is, he's too stupid to be anything else. Now, listen to me, Frank, I'm not blaming you, and I'm not blaming Maureen, you and me got the same genes inside us, so if there's moon-child genes floating around inside Raphael, which you damn well know there is, they're just as likely to come from our side of the family as hers."

Medrick listened for a minute, nodding impatiently, while a whole lot of nothing went by outside the window, past the Barbara Pym fan, and the stews started serving the beverage from the other end of the plane. Then Medrick said, "I wouldn't be giving you tsouris, Frank, but the fact is, the O.J. is gonna go into bankruptcy in like fifteen minutes unless we do something about it, and I happen to be in this airplane, and you happen to be on the ground, so what you can do— All right, I'll tell you what's going on. Raphael hooked up with some Jersey kid that's mobbed up or something, and he turned over running the joint to that kid, and now the kid—"

More pause. More impatient nodding. Then Medrick said, "I don't doubt that, Frank, Casper the Friendly Ghost is probably a better businessman than Raphael, but there's businessmen and businessmen, and what this businessman is doing, he's bleeding the joint white. If you'll listen to me, Frank, I'll tell you how he's doing it. He's using up the corporation's credit, he's buying stuff, not paying for it, he's gonna strip it all out, sell it to somebody else, walk away. Wait."

Medrick shook his head. Turning to Dortmunder, he said, "Like what is he buying?"

"Well, I happened to notice, four cash registers."

Medrick blinked. "Four cash registers?"

"They're all in the back room."

Into the phone, Medrick said, "Four cash registers, Frank, all in the back room."

"Maybe thirty barstools."

"Maybe thirty barstools."

"Already," Dortmunder said, "they took out a lot of French champagne and Russian vodka for a wedding."

Medrick, phone pressed to the side of his head, turned that head to give Dortmunder an outraged look: "A wedding? Now I'm paying for a wedding?"

"Looks like."

Into the phone, Medrick said, "Thank you, Frank, I'm glad you asked me. So I'll tell you what I want from you. Remember the phony doctor they made Raphael go to when he was on probation? Leadass, that's right, the psychiaquack, Oh, Ledvass, I beg your pardon, Ledvass the distinguished nut doctor. Call him, Frank, call him now, you'll get an answering service, tell them it's an emergency, when Leadass calls back you — I know, Frank — you tell him the diagnosis, and the diagnosis is delusions of grandeur, it's making him buy things he's got no use for, and for his own protection you want Leadass should commit Raphael today, so when I get off this plane—"

"Hurray," Dortmunder said.

"— I can go to all the vendors been unloading this stuff on the O.J., whado they care, I can say, take it all back, you been selling to a fellow mentally deficient, here's the commitment papers. You've got keys to the place, Frank, after you talk to Leadass go there — Frank, you want me to be your dependent? If the O.J. goes down, Frank, I've got nothing but what the government gives me, I got no choice, I'm moving in with you and Maureen."

Dortmunder noticed that several people in nearby seats were openly staring by now, and it seemed to him at least one of them had brought out an audio recording thing, though with the usual airplane background garble it was unlikely he'd wind up with anything he could bring into court. Anyway, the Barbara Pym lady was still deep in her book, and if Medrick didn't care how the whole world knew his business, what skin was it off Dortmunder's nose?

Now Medrick was saying, "So you're going to the O.J., you'll look at all this stuff piled up in there, you'll find the paperwork, receipts, vouchers, invoices, whatever, with all of that you and Leadass can get Raphael committed, and I mean today, I want him inside from now until we get this whole mess straightened out. Frank, it's okay, don't apologize, I understand, we're all busy, like you say. Well, not me, in Florida we're not what you could call busy, but I know you are, and Maureen is, and everybody on Long Island is, and I'm glad you're taking this seriously, Frank, because it is serious, and — No, no, Frank, forget that, don't worry about it, just save me the O.J., and that's where I'm going just as soon as I get off this plane—"

"Hurray."

"— and I'm bringing with me this back-room crook that—"

"Hey."

"— told me about it, he's the one rescued the O.J., if in fact we're getting it in time, we owe him a debt of gratitude, I'll see you at the O.J. before one."

With a certain savage satisfaction, Medrick slammed the phone back into its cave. Ignoring the cry of pain from the seat in front, he said, "Oh-kay."

"Beverage?" asked the stew.

"Yes," said Dortmunder.

"I will have a frosty beer," Medrick said.

"Me, too," said Dortmunder.

"A Bloody Mary for me," said the Barbara Pym lady. Smiling sweetly at Dortmunder and Medrick, she said, "It's called a bust-out joint, and I hope you pin those cocksuckers good."