What's So Funny?

1

WHEN JOHN DORTMUNDER, relieved, walked out of Pointers and back to the main sales floor of the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue a little after ten that Wednesday evening in November, the silence was unbelievable, particularly in contrast with the racket that had been going on when he'd left. But now, no. Not a word, not a peep, not a word. The regulars all hunched at the bar were clutching tight to their glasses as they practiced their thousand-yard stare, while the lady irregulars mostly seemed to be thinking about their canning. Even Andy Kelp, who had been sharing a bourbon with Dortmunder down at the far end of the bar while they waited for the rest of their group to arrive, now seemed to have settled deeply into a search for a rhyme for "silver." All in all, it looked as though a whole lot of interior monologue was going on.

It took Dortmunder about one and six-seventeenth seconds to figure out what had changed while he was away. One of the seldom used side booths, the one nearest the street door, was now occupied by a person drinking something out of a tall clear glass, revealing both ice and bubbles within, which meant club soda, which probably meant nonalcoholic. This person, male, about forty-five, who apparently still permitted his grandmother to cut his thick black hair, wore on his lumpy countenance the kind of bland inattention that did not suggest interior monologue but, rather, intense listening.

A cop, therefore, and not only that but a cop dressed in what he no doubt thought of as civilian attire, being a shapeless shiny old black suit jacket, an emerald green polo shirt and shapeless tan khakis. He also seemed to subscribe to the usual cop belief that the male body was supposed to have bulges around the middle, like a sack of potatoes, the better to hang the equipment belt on, so that your average law enforcement officer does present himself to the public as a person with a lot of Idaho inside.

As Dortmunder moved around the corner from the end of the bar and started past the clenched backs of the interior monologists, two things happened which he found disturbing. First, the lumpy features of the cop over there suddenly became even more bland, his eyes even less focused, the movement of his arm bringing club soda to his mouth even more relaxed and even.

It's me! Dortmunder screamed inside, without letting anything — he certainly hoped — appear on the surface, it's me he's after, it's me he wants, it's me he's got the tag sale duds on for.

And the second thing that happened, Andy Kelp, with such studied nonchalance he looked like a pickpocket on his day off, stood from his barstool, picked up his glass — and the bottle! their shared bottle! — and turned, meeting no one's eye, to sit in the nearest of the side booths, as though to be more comfortable there. Not only that, but, once seated, he contrived to lift his feet under the table and put them on the bench seat on the other side, so that not only was he more comfortable here, he was alone.

They all know it's me, Dortmunder acknowledged to himself. Even Rollo, the meaty bartender, his back to the room as he taped a home-lettered-on-shirt-cardboard-in-red-Crayola WE DON'T ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS sign to the back-bar mirror, even Rollo, by the unusually cementish appearance of those stocky shoulders, made it clear that he too knew why Cap'n Club Soda was here, which happened to be himself, the individual who had just entered the arena.

Dortmunder's first thought was: escape. But then his second thought was: can't. The only exit was just beyond the cop's black wool left elbow; unachievable, in other words. Maybe he should turn around and go back to Pointers, take a seat there, wait the guy out. No; the cop could just follow him in and start talking.

Then what about hiding out in Setters? No, that wouldn't work either; an irregular would be sure to come in and start yelling and carrying on.

Whatever this is, Dortmunder thought, I gotta go through with it. But not without my drink.

So, with barely any break in stride at all for his own interior monologue, he headed down the bar toward that distant but worth the detour drink. And as he went, the cop signaled to him. Not with any blunt stare or finger-point or hey you, none of that. All he did was pick up his glass, smile in an appreciative way at the club soda inside it, then put the glass back down on the table and look nowhere in particular. That's all he did, but more plainly than an invitation edged in black it said, comon over, siddown, let's get acquainted.

First things first. Dortmunder reached his glass, saw there wasn't enough liquid left in the bottom of it to put out a firefly, drained it and turned hopelessly toward the booths, carrying the empty glass. Along the way, not looking at Kelp, who likewise did not look at him, he paused beside that first table to replenish his glass from their bottle — their bottle! — then trudged on down the row of booths to stop next to Mr. Doom and mutter, "This seat taken?"

"Rest yourself," the cop said. He had a soft deep voice, a burr with some gravel in it, as though he might sing the Lord's lines in some church choir somewhere.

So Dortmunder slid in across from the cop, keeping his knees away from those alien knees, and put his head back to sluice down a little bourbon. When he lowered glass and head, the cop was sliding a small card across the table toward him, saying, "Let me introduce myself." He didn't exactly smile or grin or anything like that, but you could tell he was pleased with himself.

Dortmunder leaned forward to look down at the card without touching it. A business card, an ivory off-white, with fancy lettering in light blue, it read in the middle:

JOHNNY EPPICK For Hire

and in the lower right corner an address and phone number:

598 E. 3rd St.New York, NY 10009917-555-3585

East Third Street? Over by the river? Who ever had anything to do way over there? That was a part of Manhattan so remote you practically needed a visa to go there, and if you needed a reason to go there, there weren't any.

Also, the phone number was for a cell phone, that was the Manhattan cell phone area code. So this Johnny Eppick could say he was at 598 East Third Street, but if you called that number and he answered, he could be in Omaha, who's to know?

But more important than the address and the phone number was that line under the name: For Hire. Dortmunder frowned at that information some little time and then, head still facing downward, he swiveled his eyes up to look toward Johnny Eppick, if that's who he was, and say, "You're not a cop?"

"Not for seventeen months," Eppick told him, and now he did grin. "Did my twenty, turned in my papers, decided to freelance."

"Huh," Dortmunder said. So apparently, you could take the cop out of the NYPD, but you couldn't take the NYPD out of the cop.

And now this no-longer-cop did a very cop thing: out of an inside pocket of that black suitcoat he took a photo, color, about twice the size of the business card, and slid it forward beside the card to say, "Whadaya thinka that?"

The picture was what looked like an alley somewhere, grungy and neglected like all alleys everywhere, with what looked like the rear entrances to a row of stores in an irregular line of brick buildings. A guy was moving near one of those doors, carrying a computer in both arms. The guy was all dressed in black and was hunched over the computer as though it were pretty heavy.

Dortmunder didn't really look at the picture, just gave it a skim before he shook his head and said, with regret, "Sorry, I never saw him before."

"You see him every morning when you shave," Eppick said.

Dortmunder frowned. What was this, a trick? Was that himself in the picture? Trying to recognize himself in that burdened figure there, that crumpled-over dark comma against the bricks, he said, "What's goin on here?"

"That's the back of an H & R Block," Eppick told him. "It's Sunday afternoon, it isn't tax season, they're closed. You took four computers out of there, don't you remember?"

Vaguely, Dortmunder did. Of course, when you're at your job, after a while the work all blends together. Carefully, he said, "I'm pretty sure that isn't me."

"Listen, John," Eppick said, then paused to pretend he was polite, saying, "You don't mind if I call you John, do you?"

"Kinda, yeah."

"That's good. John, the point is, if I wanted to turn some evidence on you over to some former co-workers of mine, you'd already be in a place where everything goes clang-clang, you know what I mean?"

"No," Dortmunder said.

"It seems to me pretty clear," Eppick said. "One hand washes the other."

Dortmunder nodded. Pointing his jaw at the picture, he said, "Which hand is that?"

"What you want, John—"

"Well, the negative, I guess."

Sadly Eppick shook his head. "Sorry, John," he said. "Digital. It's in the computer forever. One you won't be carrying anywhere, not even to that fence friend of yours, that Arnie Albright."

Dortmunder raised a brow in surprise. "You know too much," he said.

Eppick frowned at him. "Was that a threat, John?"

"No!" Startled, almost embarrassed, Dortmunder stuttered, "I only meant, you know so much, I don't know how you'd know all that much, I mean, whadaya wanna know all that much about me for, that's all. Not you know too much. So much. You know so much, uh, Mr. Eppick."

"That's okay, then," Eppick said.

At this point there was a slight interruption as the street door beside their booth opened and two guys walked in, bringing with them a touch of the outer nippiness of the air. Dortmunder sat facing that door, while Eppick faced the bar, but if Dortmunder recognized either of these new customers he made no sign. Nor did Eppick seem to notice that fresh blood was walking past his elbow.

The first of the fresh blood was a carrot-headed guy who walked in a dogged unrelenting manner, as though looking for a chip to put on his shoulder, while the other was a younger guy who managed to look both eager and cautious at the same time, as though looking forward to dinner but unsure what that sound was he'd just heard from the kitchen.

These two didn't become aware of Eppick until they'd already entered the place, the bar door closing behind them, and then they both faltered for just a frame or two before moving smoothly on, unhurried but covering ground, passing Andy Kelp with no recognition on either side and making their way without unseemly haste around the end of the bar and out of sight in the direction of Pointers and Setters and the phone booth and the back room.

Hoping Eppick had made nothing of this exit and entrance, and trying to ignore the army of butterflies now investigating the nooks and crannies of his stomach, Dortmunder tried to keep the conversation on track and his voice unbutterflied by saying, "I mean, that's a real question. Knowing all this stuff about me and having this picture and all this. What's the point in here?"

"The point, John, is this," Eppick said. "I have a client, and he's hired me to make a certain retrieval on his behalf."

"A retrieval."

"That's exactly right. And I looked around, and I looked at old arrest records, you know, MOs of this guy and that guy, I still got my access to whatever I want over there, and it seemed to me you're the guy I want to help me in this issue of this retrieval."

"I'm reformed," Dortmunder said.

"Have a relapse," Eppick suggested. "Recidify." Picking up the picture, he returned it to his coat pocket, then pushed the business card closer to Dortmunder, saying, "You come to my office tomorrow morning, ten a.m., you'll meet my employer, he'll explain the whole situation. You don't show up, expect to hear knocking on your door."

"Urm," Dortmunder said.

Rising up out of the booth, Eppick nodded away, grinned in an amiable fashion, and said, "Give my hello to your friend Andy Kelp. But it's just you I want to see in the morning."

And he turned and walked out of the bar to the outer sidewalk, leaving behind a sopping dishrag where there once had been a man.

2

WHEN DORTMUNDER'S BREATHING had returned to normal, he twisted around on the seat to look for Kelp, who had already departed for the back room. He knew he was supposed to follow the others back there now, where, instead of the original agenda, they would expect him to answer a whole lot of questions. He didn't think he'd enjoy that.

Facing the other way — toward the street, in fact — trying to decide what to do, he was in time to see another arrival push through the door, this one distinctive in every way. If people come in sizes, this guy was jumbo. Maybe even colossal. What he looked mostly like was the part of the rocket that gets jettisoned over the Indian Ocean, plus a black homburg. In addition to the homburg, he wore many yards of black wool topcoat over a black turtleneck sweater that made it seem as though his massive head were rising out of a hillside.

This fellow stopped just inside the closing door to lower a very large beetled brow in Dortmunder's direction. "You were talking," he said, "to a cop."

"Hello, Tiny," Dortmunder said, for that was, improbably, the monster's name. "He isn't a cop any more, not for seventeen months. Did his twenty, turned in his papers, decided to go freelance."

"Cops don't go freelance, Dortmunder," Tiny told him. "Cops are part of the system. The system doesn't do freelance. We are freelance."

"Here's his card," Dortmunder said, and handed it over.

Tiny rested the card in his giant palm and read aloud: " 'For Hire. Huh. There's rent-a-cops, but this isn't like that, is it?"

"I don't think so, no."

Tiny with great gentleness handed the card back, saying, "Well, Dortmunder, you're an interesting fellow, I've always said so."

"I didn't go to him, Tiny," Dortmunder pointed out. "He came to me."

"But that's it, isn't it," Tiny said. "He came to you. Not Andy, not me, just you."

"My lucky day," Dortmunder said, failing to hide his bitterness.

"A cop that isn't a cop," Tiny mused, "that you could rent him like a car. And with you he wanted a nice conversation."

"It wasn't that nice, Tiny," Dortmunder said.

"I been in the limo outside," Tiny said, that being his preferred method of transportation, given his immensity, "I spotted you in there, I figured, maybe Dortmunder and this cop want to be alone, then I see Stan and the kid go in, no introductions, no high fives, and now the cop comes out, and turns out, what he wanted with you, he wanted to give you his new card, he's opened shop, cop for lease."

"Not a cop, Tiny," Dortmunder said. "Not for seventeen months."

"I think that transition takes a little longer," Tiny suggested. "Maybe three generations."

"You could be right."

"Again," Tiny agreed. "You wanna talk about it, Dortmunder?"

"Not until I think about it a while," Dortmunder told him. "And I don't really want to think about it, not yet."

"So some other time," Tiny said.

"Oh, I know," Dortmunder said, and sighed. "I know, there will be some other time."

Tiny looked around the bar. "Looks like everybody else is around back."

"Yeah, they went back there."

"Maybe we oughta do likewise," Tiny said. "See what Stan has in mind. It isn't that often a driver has an idea." He gazed down at Dortmunder. "You coming?"

With a second sigh — that made two in one day — Dortmunder shook his head. "I don't think I can, Tiny. That guy kinda knocked the spirit out of me, you know what I mean?"

"Not yet."

"What I think," Dortmunder said, "I think I should go home. Just, you know, go home."

"We'll miss you," Tiny said.

3

"SO, JOHN," MAY said, over the breakfast table, "what are you going to do?"

After a troubled night, Dortmunder had described his meeting with Johnny Eppick For Hire to his faithful companion, May, over his usual breakfast of equal parts corn flakes, milk, and sugar, while she listened wide-eyed, ignoring her half-grapefruit and coffee black. And now she wanted to know what he was going to do.

"Well, May," he said, "I think I got no choice."

"You say he isn't a cop any more."

"He's still plugged in to the cops," Dortmunder explained. "He can still point a finger and lightning comes out."

"So you have to go there."

"I don't even know how" Dortmunder complained. "All the way east on Third Street? How do I get there, take a ferry around the island?"

"There's probably buses," May said. "Across Fourteenth Street. I could loan you my MetroCard."

"That's still a hell of a walk," Dortmunder complained. "Fourteenth, all the way down to Third."

"Well, John," she said, "it doesn't seem worth stealing a car for."

"No, I guess not."

"Especially," she said, "if you're gonna visit a cop."

"Not for seventeen months."

"Uh huh," she said.

The bus wasn't so bad, once he and the driver figured out how he should slide May's mass transit card through that little slot. It was an articulated bus, so he found a seat next to a window in the rear part, beyond the accordion. He sat there and the bus groaned away from the curb, and he looked out the window at this new world.

He'd never been so far east on Fourteenth Street. New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge.

Looking out his window, Dortmunder tried to get a handle on this particular village. He'd never been to Bulgaria — well, he'd never been asked — but it seemed to him this area was probably like a smaller city in that land, on one side or the other of the mountains. If they had mountains.

After a while, he noticed the scenery wasn't bumping past the window any more but was just sitting out there, and when he looked around to see what had gone wrong the other seats were all empty and the driver, way up there in front, was twisted around, yelling at him. Dortmunder focused and got the words:

"End of the line!"

"Oh, yeah. Right."

He waved at the guy, and got off the bus. The walk down to Third Street was just as long as he'd been afraid it would be, but then that wasn't even the end of it. Not knowing how long it would take to get to such an out-of-the-way location, he'd given it an hour, which turned out to be fifteen minutes too long, so he had to walk around the block a couple times so he wouldn't be ridiculously early.

But at least that did give him the opportunity to case the place. It was a narrow dark brick corner building, a little grungy six stories high. The ground floor was a check-cashing place, with neon signs saying so in many languages in windows backed by the kind of iron bars they use for the gorilla cages in the zoo.

Around the side on Third Street was a green metal door with a vertical row of buttons next to names on cards in narrow slots. Some of the names seemed to be people, some businesses. There were two apartments or offices per floor, labeled «L» and "R." EPPICK — that's all it said — was 3R.

Stepping back, Dortmunder looked up at the windows that should be 3R, and they were covered by Venetian blinds slanted up to see the sky, not the street. Okay; fifteen minutes. He went for a stroll.

It was still five minutes before the hour when he'd completed the circuit twice, wondering what the proper word was for a Mongolian bodega, but enough was enough, so he pressed the button next to EPPICK and almost immediately the door made that buzz they do. He pushed it open and entered a tiny vestibule with a steep flight of stairs straight ahead and a very narrow elevator on the right. So he took the elevator up, and when he got off at three there were the stairs again, flanked by two doors, these of dark wood and marked with brass figures 3L and 3R.

Another button. He pressed it, and another door gave him the raspberry. This door you had to pull, he soon figured out, but the buzz was in no hurry, it kept buzzing at him until he got the idea.

Inside, the place was larger than Dortmunder had expected, having taken it for granted a building like this would consist of a bunch of little rooms that people would call a "warren of offices." But, no. Many of the warren's interior walls had been removed, a rich burgundy carpet had been laid to connect it all, and on the carpet were separate areas defined not by walls but by furniture.

Just inside the door that Dortmunder was closing was a small well-polished wooden desk facing sideways, to see both the door and the room. Next to the desk stood Eppick, wearing his winner's smile plus, this morning, a polo shirt the same color as the carpet, gray slacks with expandable waist instead of belt, and two-tone golf shoes, though without cleats.

"Right on time, John," Eppick said, and stuck out a gnarly hand. "I'm gonna shake your hand because we're gonna be partners."

Dortmunder shrugged and stuck his own hand out. "Okay," he said, limiting the partnership.

"Lemme introduce you," Eppick said, turning away, keeping Dortmunder's hand in his own, an unpleasant experience, "to our principal."

Dortmunder was going to say he didn't know they had any principles, but then decided not to, because here was the rest of the room. To the right, along the wall under the windows with their upward-slanted Venetian blinds showing strips of pale blue late-autumn sky, was a blond oak conference table with rounded ends, flanked by eight matching blue-upholstered chairs. On the left side, where there were no windows because of the next building in the row, was a conversation area, two dark blue sofas at right angles around a square glass coffee table, and a couple of matching chairs just behind them, ready for overflow. To the rear behind the conversation area was a galley kitchen, with a simple table and six chairs in front of it, and in the final quarter, behind the conference table, stood a StairMaster and other gym equipment. Not what Dortmunder would have guessed from an ex-cop. Not from an ex-cop called Eppick, anyway.

"Around, here, John," Eppick said, and led Dortmunder around in an orbit of the front desk, aiming for the front left corner of the space, where a high-tech wheelchair that looked as though it were ready for spacewalks squatted facing the glass coffee table, opposite one of the blue sofas, with the other sofa against the wall to its left.

Someone or something hunkered in the wheelchair, inside black brogans, black pants, a Navajo-Indian-design throw rug draped over the shoulders, and a scarlet beret on top. It seemed large and soft, just barely squeezing into the available space, and it brooded straight ahead, paying no attention to Eppick as he led Dortmunder forward by the hand.

"Mr. Hemlow," Eppick said, and all at once he sounded deferential, not the self-assured cop at all any more, "Mr. Hemlow, the specialist is here."

"Tell him to sit down. There."

The voice sounded as though it were coming from a bicycle tire with a slow leak, and at first Dortmunder thought Mr. Hemlow had pointed at the sofa to his left with a chicken foot, but no, that was his hand.

Speaking of hands, Eppick finally released Dortmunder's and gestured for him to get to that sofa by walking around behind Mr. Hemlow in his wheelchair, which Dortmunder did, while Eppick went away to take up a lot of the other sofa, crossing one leg over the other as though he wanted to show how relaxed he was, but not succeeding.

Dortmunder sat to Mr. Hemlow's left, leaned forward, rested his forearms on his thighs, looked eye-to-eye with Mr. Hemlow, and said, "Harya doin?"

"I've been better," grated the bicycle tire.

Dortmunder was sure of that. Seen up close, Mr. Hemlow was seven or eight different kinds of mess. He had a little clear plastic hose draped over his ears and inserted into his nostrils to give him oxygen. His face and neck and apparently everything but those chicken-foot hands were bloated and stuffed looking, as though he'd been filled up by a bicycle pump trying to solve the tire leak. His eyes were small and mean-looking, their pupils a very wet blue, so that, under the red beret, he looked like a more than usually homicidal hawk. What could be seen of his skin was a raw-looking red, as though he were originally a very pale person who'd been left out in the sun too long. His posture sucked; he sat on his shoulder blades with his wattles on his torso, which seemed to be shaped more or less like a medicine ball. His right knee twitched constantly, as though remembering an earlier life as a dance band drummer.

While Dortmunder sat absorbing these unlovely details, Mr. Hemlow's watery eyes studied him in return; until all at once Mr. Hemlow said, "What do you know about the First World War?"

Dortmunder thought. "We won," he guessed.

"Who lost?"

"The other people. I don't know, I wasn't there."

"Nor was I," Mr. Hemlow said, and gargled out something that was either a laugh or a death rattle, though probably a laugh, because he went on living, saying, "But my father was. He was there. He told me all about it."

"That musta been nice."

"Illuminating. My father was still fighting in that war two years after it was over, what do you think of that?"

"Well, I guess he must of been a real gung ho type."

"No, he was under orders. And you know who he was fighting?"

"With the war over?" Dortmunder shook his head. "I don't think you're supposed to do that," he said.

"In 1917," Mr. Hemlow said, "the United States entered the war. It had been going on in Europe for three years already. That was the same year as the Russian Revolution. The czar was thrown out, the Communists came in."

"Busy year," Dortmunder suggested.

"The British," Mr. Hemlow said, and apparently spat, though nothing seemed to come out. "The British," he repeated, "kept a great pile of munitions at Murmansk, a deep-water port on the Russian coast of the Barents Sea, north of the Arctic Circle."

"Cold up there," Dortmunder suggested.

"Didn't matter," Mr. Hemlow told him. "All that mattered, after the Revolution, they had to keep those munitions away from the Red Army. So that's why — there's no war declared here, nothing legal about this at all — my father and several hundred other US Army and US Navy personnel went up there to fight alongside the British and keep the goddam Red Army from getting those arms. Stayed there for two years, after the war was supposed to be over. Lost three hundred men. Finally, late in 1920, the Americans came home. Only time American troops ever fought Russian troops on Russian soil."

"I never even heard about it," Dortmunder said.

"Most haven't."

Eppick said, "It was news to me, too, and I thought I knew some history."

"American soldiers," Mr. Hemlow said, with what sounded like satisfaction, possibly even pride, "are a light-fingered group, always have been. Over many a mantel in America hangs stolen goods."

"Spoils of war," Eppick explained.

"That's what they call it," Mr. Hemlow said. "Now, near the end of the invasion, a platoon of American soldiers, nine lads including my father, and their sergeant, Alfred X. Northwood, came across a surprising item in a port warehouse in Murmansk. It was a chess set, a gift for the czar, from I don't know whom, which had been shipped in by sea just in time to meet the Bolshevik Revolution, and it was the most valuable thing those boys had ever seen in their lives."

Dortmunder said, "A chess set."

"The pieces were gold, inlaid with jewels. It was too heavy for one man to lift."

"Oh," Dortmunder said. "That kind of chess set."

"Exactly. It was worth millions. In the chaos of war and revolution, nobody even knew it existed, packed away in a wooden crate."

"Pretty good," Dortmunder said.

"Most of the boys in that expeditionary force," Mr. Hemlow said, "were from Ohio and Missouri, so they made an agreement. They would take that chess set back to the States and use it to finance a dream they'd been sharing, to open a chain of radio stations across the Midwest. If they'd done it, they would've died rich men."

"Uh huh," Dortmunder said, noticing that "if."

"Sgt. Northwood," Mr. Hemlow went on, "took the ivory-and-ebony chessboard. One of the lads took the teak box that held the pieces. The other eight, including my father, took four chessmen each, knowing each of them could smuggle that much home."

"Sounds good," Dortmunder agreed.

"Back in the States," Mr. Hemlow said, "out of the army at last, they met with ex-Sgt. Northwood in Chicago, and all gave him their part of the loot, for him to convert into the loans they needed."

"Uh huh," Dortmunder said.

"They never saw Northwood or the chess set again."

"You know," Dortmunder said, "I kinda saw that coming."

"They searched for him, for a long while," Mr. Hemlow said. "Fewer and fewer of them over the years. Finally just my father and three of his friends. Their sons all were told the story, and when we seven boys were grown we took what time we could from our regular lives to look for Northwood and the chess set. But we never found either one." Mr. Hemlow shrugged, which was more like a generalized tremor. "The generation after us didn't care," he said. "It was all ancient history. Two of the boys from my generation are still alive, but none of us is in any condition to go on with the search."

Delicately, Dortmunder said, "This Sgt. Northwood, he probably isn't around any more either."

"The chess set is," Mr. Hemlow said. "The boys were going to call their company Chess King Broadcasting. One of them drew up a very nice logo for it."

"Uh huh," Dortmunder said, hoping Mr. Hemlow wasn't about to show him the logo.

He wasn't. Instead, he lowered his head, those watery eyes now turning to ice, and he said, "I am a wealthy man. I am not in this for the money. Those boys were robbed of their dreams."

"Yeah, I get that," Dortmunder agreed.

"Now, unexpectedly," Mr. Hemlow said, "I seem to have an opportunity, if I live long enough for it, to right that wrong."

"You know where the chess set is," Dortmunder suggested.

"Possibly," Mr. Hemlow said, and sat back in his wheelchair to fold his chicken feet over his paunch. "But for a moment," he said, "let us talk about you. What did you say your name was?"

4

"DIDDUMS," DORTMUNDER SAID, and winced, because that was an alias he loathed that nevertheless bounced out of him at the most unfortunate moments, like his own private Tourette's.

Mr. Hemlow gazed on him. "Diddums?"

"It's Welsh."

"Oh."

Smoothly, Eppick said, "John uses a number of different names, it goes with his specialty."

Could a gourd on a medicine ball look grumpy? Yes. "I see," Mr. Hemlow said. "So what we know so far is that this gentleman's name is not Diddums."

"It's probably not even Welsh," Eppick said.

"It's definitely John," Dortmunder said.

Eppick smiled and nodded. "That's true. Something like me. You never been a Johnny, have you?"

"No," Dortmunder said.

"That's where the pizzazz is," Eppick assured him. "You saw it on my card. John Eppick' wouldn't have done anywhere near as much."

"I can see that," Dortmunder agreed.

"Of course you can. Johnny Eppick. It's something to aspire to. Johnny Guitar."

"Uh huh."

"Johnny Cool. Johnny Holiday. Johnny Trouble."

"Johnny Belinda," put in Mr. Hemlow, surprisingly.

Eppick didn't want to disagree with his employer, but he didn't want Johnny Belinda either. "That's a special case, sir," he said, and hurriedly turned back to Dortmunder, saying, "Johnny Rocco. Johnny Tremain. Johnny Reno."

"Johnny Mnemonic," suggested Mr. Hemlow, a man who probably didn't so much go to look at movies as have movies come to look at him.

"Sir, I don't think that one's up there with the others," Eppick suggested.

Dortmunder, who didn't go to the movies unless his faithful companion May insisted, nevertheless did have something of a grab-bag mind, which he now realized contained a movie title belonging to this crowd: "Johnny Got His Gun."

Neither of the others liked that one. Eppick said, "John, we are talking in the order of Johnny Yuma, Johnny Midnight, Johnny Jupiter, Johnny Ringo."

"Johnny Appleseed, " Mr. Hemlow added.

"Wel-ll," Eppick said, "that's a little far afield, Mr. Hemlow."

Dortmunder said, "Johnny Cash?"

"Johnnie Walker," announced Mr. Hemlow.

Dortmunder turned to him. "Red or Black?"

"Oh, Black," Mr. Hemlow said. "Definitely Black. But that isn't the point." Shifting his mass in the general direction of Eppick, he said, "The point is, you do vouch for this man."

"Oh, absolutely," Eppick said. "I have used the entire resources of the NYPD to research the kind of specialist we need and, of those not currently counting the days on the inside, John here is just about the best you can get. He's a thief when he wakes up in the morning, and he's a thief when he goes to sleep at night. An honest thought has never crossed his brain. If he were any more crooked, you could open wine bottles with him. In his early days he did some time, but he's learned how to avoid that now. I guarantee him to be the least trustworthy, most criminal scalawag you'll ever meet."

"Well," Dortmunder said, "that's maybe a little overboard."

Still talking to Mr. Hemlow, Eppick said, "You trust me, and I trust John, but it's even more than that. You know where to find me, and I know where to find John. He'd double-cross us in a minute if he—"

"Aw, hey."

"— thought he could get away with it, but he knows he can't, so we can all have perfect trust in one another."

"Excellent," said Mr. Hemlow, and nodded his head at Dortmunder a while, not in rhythm with his twitching knee, which was a distraction. "So far," he said, "I like what I see. It would seem that Johnny has chosen well. You keep your own counsel. You don't bluster, but you do stand up for yourself."

Dortmunder could not remember ever having been the center of attention to this excruciating a degree, not even in a court of law, and he was beginning to chafe under it. Itch. Not like it so much. He said, to try to shorten the interview if at all possible, "So you want me and somebody else to go get this chess set for you, so all you—"

Mr. Hemlow said, "Somebody else?"

"You said it was too heavy for one man to lift."

"Oh, yes." Mr. Hemlow did that nodding thing some more. "That's what my father told me, that impressed me at the time. I hadn't thought of the implications, but you're right. Or, could you do it in multiple trips?"

"When you're burglaring," Dortmunder told him, showing off a little expertise, "you don't do more than one trip."

"Yes, of course, I do see that." Turning to Eppick, he said, "How long will it take you to find a second person?"

"Oh, I think John could come up with somebody," Eppick said, and grinned at Dortmunder. "Your friend Andy, maybe."

"Well," Dortmunder said, "he'd probably have to look in his appointment book, but I could check, yeah." To Mr. Hemlow he said, "So it looks to me like there's only two questions left."

"Yes?" Mr. Hemlow cocked that puffy head. "Which questions are those?"

"Well, the first is, where is it."

"Yes, of course," said Mr. Hemlow, a little impatiently. "And the second?"

"Well, you might not think it to look at me," Dortmunder told him, "but I got a family crest."

"Have you?"

"Yeah. And it's got a motto on it."

"I am anxious to hear this motto."

"Quid lucrum istic mihi est."

Mr. Hemlow squinted; the red-headed hawk in flight. "I'm afraid my Latin is insufficient for that."

"What's in it for me," Dortmunder translated.

5

MR. HEMLOW ROARED with laughter, or at least tried to, with various noises emanating from his head area that might, with redubbing, have added up to a roar. Then he said, "Well, what would be in it for you might be millions, I suppose, if you were to manage to elude Johnny here. A rather more modest sum if you do your part like a good boy."

"Plus continued life in the free world," Eppick added.

So they were cheapskates, these two, it had all the earmarks. Dortmunder had seen it before, guys with big ideas who just needed a little bit of his help, his knowledge, his experience, but didn't want to pay for it. Or didn't want to pay enough.

On the other hand, if he announced he wasn't going along with these birds, that alley photo could very well come back to bite him on the hind parts. So, at least for now, he would follow Mr. Hemlow's advice and do his part like a good boy. Therefore, he said, "Without knowing where this thing is, or how it's guarded, or anything about it, I don't know how much trouble I'm gonna have to get my hands on it, or what expenses I'm gonna run up, or if it's maybe more than two people needed for the thing, or whatever. So right now, I'm with you, but I gotta tell you, Johnny Eppick here says I'm the specialist you want, and if I decide, being the specialist, that it can't be done, or it can't be done without too much danger to me, then I'm gonna have to tell you now, I'm gonna expect you to go along with how I see it."

Eppick frowned, clearly not liking the broadness of this escape clause, but Mr. Hemlow said, "That sounds fair to me. I think you will find the task worthy of your skills, but not to include a level of peril that might incline you to forgo what would certainly otherwise be a very profitable endeavor."

"That's good, then," Dortmunder said. "So where is it?"

"I'm afraid I'm not the one who's going to tell you that," Mr. Hemlow said.

Dortmunder didn't like that at all. "You mean, there's more of you in on this? I thought everybody else died or got old or didn't care."

"Except," Mr. Hemlow said, "my granddaughter."

"Now a granddaughter," Dortmunder said.

"It is true," Mr. Hemlow said, "that the generation after mine took no interest in the stolen chess set, nor the ruined dreams of their grandparents. It was all just history to them. However, Fiona, the daughter of my third son, Floyd, takes a deep interest in the story of the chess set, precisely because to her it is history, and history is her passion."

Dortmunder, whose grasp on history was usually dislodged by the needs of the passing moment, had nothing to say to that, so he merely did his best to look alert.

Which was apparently enough, because Mr. Hemlow almost immediately went on, "Fiona, my granddaughter, is an attorney, mostly in estate planning for a midtown firm. She's the one who took an interest in the story of the chess set, came to me for what details my father might have given me, did the research and found, or at least believes she's found, the chess set."

"Believes," Dortmunder said.

"Well, she hasn't seen it personally, of course," Mr. Hemlow said. "None of us will, until you retrieve it."

Eppick said, "The granddaughter was just happy to figure she solved the mystery, there it is, case closed. It was Mr. Hemlow explained to her the lost dreams and alla that."

"She agreed, at last," Mr. Hemlow said, "to a retrieval of the chess set, for the future good of the family, to make up for the ills of the past."

"Got it," Dortmunder said.

"But she has conditions," Mr. Hemlow warned.

What have I gotten into here, Dortmunder asked himself, and was afraid he was going to find out the answer. "Conditions," he said.

"No violence," Mr. Hemlow said.

"I'm in favor of that," Dortmunder assured him. "No violence, that's how I like it every day."

"One of the reasons I picked you, John," Eppick told him, "is how you don't go in much for strong-arming against persons."

"Or property," Mr. Hemlow said.

Dortmunder said, "Property? Come on, you know, sometimes you gotta break a window, that's not violence."

Conceding the point, Mr. Hemlow said, "I'm sure Fiona would accept that level of mayhem. You can discuss it with her if you wish."

"Or not bother her about it," Eppick advised.

"So I'm gonna see this Fiona," Dortmunder said, and looked around. "How come I'm not seeing her now?"

Eppick said, "Mr. Hemlow wanted to vet you, wanted to reassure himself that I'd made the right choice, before sending you on to the granddaughter."

"Oh, yeah?" To Mr. Hemlow Dortmunder said, "So how am I? How do I vet?"

"That I have mentioned my granddaughter's name," Mr. Hemlow said, "means I have agreed with Johnny's judgment."

"Well, that's nice."

Mr. Hemlow said, "Johnny, would you phone her?"

"Sure." Eppick stood, then paused to say to Dortmunder, "You free this afternoon, if she can make it?"

"Sure. I'm between engagements."

"Maybe not any more," Eppick said, and grinned, and said, "You wanna write down the address?"

"I do," Dortmunder told him, "but I don't have anything to write with or on."

"Oh. Never mind, I'll do it."

Eppick went over to the desk by the front door, sat at it, played with a Rolodex a minute, then dialed a number. While he waited, he started to write on the back of another of his cards, then paused to punch out four more numbers, then finished writing, then said, "Fiona Hemlow, please. Johnny Eppick." Then another pause, and then he said, "Hi, Fiona, it's Johnny Eppick. Just fine. I'm here with your granddad and we got the guy we think is gonna help us with that family matter. I know you wanna talk to him. Well, this afternoon, if you got some free time." Cupping the phone, he said to Dortmunder, "She's checking her calendar."

"For this afternoon?"

Eppick held up a finger, and listened to the phone, then said, "Yeah, that should be long enough. Hold on, lemme see if he's clear." Cupping the phone again, he said to Dortmunder, "This afternoon, four-fifteen to four-forty-five, she can fit you in."

"Then that's good," Dortmunder said. "I happen to have that slot open." In truth, he himself did not live that precise a life, but he understood there were people who did.

Into the phone, Eppick said, "That's fine. He's— Hold on." Another cupping, and he looked at Dortmunder to say, "Do you really still wanna go on being Diddums?"

"No, do the name," Dortmunder said. "The only one I didn't wanna know it was you, so that's too late, so go ahead."

"Fine. Fiona, his name is John Dortmunder, and he will see you at four-fifteen. Give me a call after you talk to him, okay? Thanks, Fiona."

He hung up, stood up, and brought to Dortmunder the card he'd written on the back of, where it now read:

Fiona Hemlow

C&I International Bank Building

613 5th Ave

Feinberg, Kleinberg, Rhineberg, Steinberg, Weinberg & Klatsch

27

Dortmunder said, "Twenty-seven?"

"They got the whole floor," Eppick explained. "Hundreds of lawyers there."

"We're all very proud of Fiona," Mr. Hemlow said. "Landing at such a prestigious law firm."

Dortmunder had had dealings with lawyers once or twice in his life, but they mostly hadn't come with the word «prestigious» attached. "I'm looking forward," he said.

6

IN CONVERSATION OVER breakfast with his Mom, before she went off for a day of driving her taxi for the benefit of an ungrateful public, Stan Murch gradually came to the conclusion that he wasn't just irritated by what had happened last night, or what in fact had not happened, but he was really very pissed off about it and getting more so by the minute, and who he blamed for the whole thing was John Dortmunder.

At first his Mom didn't get it: "He wasn't even there."

"That's the point."

He had to explain it all about seven times before she saw what he was aiming at, but at last she did see it, and it was really very simple and, straightforward. At the O.J. last night, they had been a little group of people who would come together like that from time to time for what they hoped would turn out to be profitable expeditions and employments, and there was always at least that one preliminary conversation to kick it off, to see if this new project sounded like it might work, to see if everybody wanted to come on board. Each of them in the group had his own specialty — Tiny Bulcher, for instance, specialized in lifting large and heavy objects, while he himself, Stan Murch, was the driver — and John Dortmunder's specialty was in laying out the plan.

Now, it wasn't often that Stan brought the original idea to the group, but this time he had one, and it was a good one, and if Dortmunder had been there he would definitely have understood the concept and started working out how to make it a reality, and all of that, and by now they'd be on their way. Instead of which, Dortmunder isn't even at the meeting, he's out in the bar with some cop.

But everybody else wants to know what the idea is. So Stan tells them, and they hate it. Because Dortmunder isn't there to tell everybody how it could work, the idea gets shot down like a duck. So it's all Dortmunder's fault.

After his Mom took off in her cab, Stan continued to brood a while longer, and then he decided the thing to do was call John and see if he's ready to take a meeting now, just the two of them, and after that they could get everybody else to come around. So he called John, but got May, who said, "Oh, you just missed him, and I'm halfway out the door myself, I got to get to work."

"Do you know where John went?"

"He had a meeting at ten this morning—"

"With the cop?"

"Oh, did he tell you?"

"Not yet. Where's the meeting, do you know?"

"Lower East Side, some funny address. John had never been anywhere around there before, he was going to take a bus."

"You got the address?"

"He wrote it down a couple places, so he wouldn't forget. I'll look, Stan, but I don't have much time. I don't wanna be late. They're short on cashiers at the Safeway as it is. Hold on."

So he held on, and about three minutes later she came back and said, "It's 598 East Third, and the cop is named Eppick. He says he's retired."

"Then why does he want to talk to John?"

"You'll have to ask him."

"I intend to."

If you only need a car for a few hours, there's nothing better, after taking the subway up out of Canarsie, than to go to the parking garage under one of the big Manhattan office buildings, where they have sections set aside for employees of the various businesses upstairs, so the car you choose will not be missed before five p.m., by which time you've returned it. Also, being in white-collar employment, they tend to drive pretty nice cars. All you need is to find somebody who leaves his parking-space ID in the car, which many people do.

It was in a recent Audi 9000, forest green, 17K on the odometer, that Stan cruised the area of 598 East Third Street, a neighborhood not used to seeing cars of that quality abroad on its streets. Being New York, though, everybody in the district was cool about it.

May had said the meeting was scheduled for ten, and Stan got there at quarter past, so it should still be going on. In the check-cashing place? Unlikely; more probably somewhere upstairs. Motor running and flashers on, to assure the world he was not abandoning this nice car, Stan left it beside a handy fire hydrant long enough to run over and look at the names for the upstairs tenants, and found it right away: EPPICK. He hadn't known it was spelled that way.

It was a long meeting John was having with this cop, as Stan waited in the car next to the fire hydrant, now with flashers on but engine off. Ten fifty-two read the very nice dashboard clock when at last John came out and started to walk away. Stan honked, but John just kept walking, so Stan had to start the engine, open his window, chase John around the corner, and yell, "Hey!"

Nothing. John just kept plodding forward, head down, arms and legs moving as though the machinery were a little rusty, and apparently now operating without functioning ears.

"Hey!" Stan yelled again, and honked, all of which had the same effect as before. Nil.

"John! Goddam it!"

Now John stopped. He looked alert. He stared up at the sky. He stared at the building he was going past. He stared back the way he'd come.

What is this? You hear a horn, you don't look at the street? Stan pressed the heel of his palm against the horn and left it there, until at last John turned to gape, then pointed at Stan as though telling somebody, "I know that guy!"

Having captured his subject's attention, Stan released the horn and called, "Come on over. Get in."

So John came around and took the passenger seat and said, "What are you doing around here? This one of your routes?"

"I wanted to talk to you," Stan said, driving forward. "Where you headed?"

"You wanted to— You mean— How did you—"

"I called and talked to May. Where you headed?"

"Oh. Well, I got a meeting up in midtown this afternoon, that's all."

"All of a sudden, you take a lot of meetings."

"Not my idea," John said.

Stan figured he'd find out sooner or later what was going on. Meanwhile, there was his own little scheme to consider. He said, "Whadaya say, I drive you up there, put this car back, we grab a bite."

"Sure. Why not?"

There was nowhere to eat on Park Avenue. There was nowhere to eat on Fifth Avenue. On Sixth Avenue and Seventh Avenue the streets were filled with tourists standing on line to eat in places exactly like the places they'd eat in back home in Akron or Stuttgart or Osaka, except back there they didn't have to stand on line.

Stan and John eventually found a dark bar with food on a side street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, where the plump but not soft waitress said, "How you fellas today?"

"Hungry," Stan said. "We just walked across Manhattan."

"I hear they got buses now," she said, and distributed menus. "You want a drink while you read?"

They both wanted beer. She went away and they studied the menus, and John said, "Can you tell the difference between ostrich burger and bison burger?"

"Bison's got four legs."

"Burger."

"Oh. No. Turkey burger I can tell. All those others I think they come outa the same vat, back there in the kitchen."

"I can remember," John said, "when 'burger' only meant one thing, and the only word you ever had to stick in front of it was 'cheese. »

"You're showing your age, John."

"Yeah? That's good. Usually I show twice my age."

The waitress having returned, Stan ordered the bison burger and John the ostrich burger, and then John said, "You wanted to talk to me."

"Well, with all these meetings you got, you didn't get to our little meeting last night."

"No, that cop come along."

"And he's still along, I guess."

"It looks like it's gonna be a long story, I'm not sure. I know you wanna know what it's all about."

"Naw, John, I don't poke and pry in somebody else's business."

"Nevertheless," John said, "to make up for it, my not getting to the meeting last night, I'll tell you the story so far. The ex-cop is working for this rich guy that wants to what he calls 'retrieve' something that got stolen from his father eighty years ago."

"Wow. That's a long time."

"It is. So this afternoon," John said, "I'm supposed to meet the rich guy's granddaughter, because she's the one knows where it is. So I'm not even sure if it's possible, or if it's real, but you don't just say no to a cop. Or an ex-cop either."

"No, I get that," Stan said.

"So now," John said, "tell me yours."

"What I wanna do," Stan said, and the waitress appeared, with two platters, and said, "Who had the ostrich burger?" and they couldn't remember. So she just put the platters down, accepted an order for another couple beers, and went away, which meant they didn't know exactly what they were eating, but that was okay.

Around a mouthful of either ostrich or bison, John said, "You were gonna tell me what you wanna do."

"I wanna hand to you," Stan said, and paused for a beer delivery, and said, "the idea I was presenting to everybody — except you — last night."

"Sure. I wanna hear it."

"It's out in Brooklyn."

John looked pained. "I dunno, Stan," he said. "That place I went to today was Brooklyn enough for me."

"That's the trouble with all you guys," Stan told him. "You're all Manhattancentric."

John looked at him. "What kinda word is that?"

"A word from the newspaper," Stan said. "And therefore authentic."

"Okay."

"It isn't all Manhattan, you know. There's four other boroughs."

"Maybe three," John said.

"What? Who you throwin out?"

"Staten Island. It's over in New Jersey someplace. You can't even get there on the subway. Any place you have to go to by boat is not part of New York City."

"Governors Island."

"So? That's an island."

"So's Staten."

Looking exasperated, John said, "You moving to Staten Island? Is that the news you wanted to bring me?"

"No, I'm very happy in Canarsie."

"Just a little defensive. So tell me the idea. Did everybody else love it?"

"Let me tell it to you, okay?"

"Go."

"Because I'm in Canarsie," Stan said, "I drive a lot, which people in Manhattan don't do. So I see things that people in Manhattan don't see. So out along the Belt Parkway, they're building this mosque, you can see it from the road."

"Mosque."

"Yeah, you know, a religious place that—"

"I know what it is, Stan."

"Okay. So they're building it, I read about it in the paper—"

"The Manhattancentric paper."

"Maybe the same one, I dunno. It said, they're getting a lot of Arab oil money for this mosque, they're building one that's gonna be like the big one in London with the golden dome, only, this being New York City, they ran into some problems."

"Naturally."

"Cost overruns, extra permits they didn't know about, unions they never heard of, the whole thing grinds to a halt."

"Of course it does," John said. "Didn't they know that?"

"Well, they're religious people," Stan said, "and they're immigrants, and nobody ever tells anybody how New York works, everybody just does it."

"I almost feel sorry for these people," John said.

"Well, don't feel too sorry. They shut down now, but they're gonna start up again next spring, with some more oil money, and now they know a little more about the system, so this is just a delay is all."

"I'm happy for them," John said. "But up till now I don't see your idea in here."

"The dome," Stan said.

John just looked at him, ostrich or bison visible in his open mouth. So Stan said, "The dome got delivered before they shut down, and it's gold. Not solid gold, you know, but not gold paint either. Real gold. Gold plate or something. It's sitting out there on this empty construction site, it was delivered when the walls were supposed to be up, but of course the walls weren't up, so it's sitting there, with this crane next to it."

"I think I'm getting this," John said. "It's your idea, we use the crane, we pick up this dome— How big is this dome?"

"Fifteen feet across, twelve feet high."

"Fifteen feet across, twelve feet high. You wanna pick this up and take it away."

"With the crane, like you said."

"And where you gonna stash this thing?"

"That's part of what we gotta work out," Stan said.

"Maybe you can take it to Alaska," John said, "and paint it white, and make everybody think it's an igloo."

"I don't think we could get it that far," Stan told him. "All the bridges. And forget tunnels."

John said, "And who's your customer, the American Dental Association?"

"John, it's gold. It's gotta be worth I don't know how much."

"You don't have a place to hide it," John said. "You take it down the street with this crane, you don't have any way to disguise it, camouflage it. You don't have a customer for it. So who at the O.J. last night liked the idea?"

"There were some naysayers," Stan admitted.

"How many?"

"Well, all of them. But I figured, you could see the possibilities."

"I can," John agreed. "Just this morning, that cop — who, by the way, isn't a cop any more, not for seventeen months — just this morning he was telling the rich guy about me, how I took a couple falls in the early days but learned how to have that not happen any more, and this is part of the learning. I don't go down the street with a fifteen-foot-wide, twelve-foot-tall hot golden dome out in front of me." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Stan. I can see how it was for you, you looked at this great big gold thing out there beside the Belt, you read about it in the paper, all you could think about was the gold. It's my job to think about the problems, and what this dome is is one hundred percent problem.".

"Maybe I'll go do it on my own," Stan said. He was really feeling dumped on.

"One thing," John said. "If you do it on your own, don't get your Mom involved."

His Mom was the only other gang he could think of. Stan said, "Why not?"

"Because she'd rather drive her own cab than do the state's laundry. I gotta go." Standing, John said, "If you're gonna want me to talk with you about an idea like that, you pay for lunch. See you later."

7

IT TURNED OUT, the C&I International Bank Building, up there on Fifth near Saks, was operating under an alias, or at least a later modification of its original name, which you could read inside in the lobby. On a marble side wall was a big black board in a gold frame with all the tenants listed in white block letters in alphabetical order, and across the top of this board it said Capitalists & Immigrants Trust. So, somewhere along the line, somebody stopped liking that name and decided C&I International would go down smoother, though mean less. Maybe the capitalists and immigrants had stopped trusting.

Feinberg, Kleinberg, Rhineberg, Steinberg, Weinberg & Klatsch was indeed, according to this board, on the twenty-seventh floor, so Dortmunder took a 16–31 elevator with a couple messengers and looked at the reception area while they transacted their businesses with the receptionist.

It was a large though low-ceilinged place with gray carpet and gray furniture in the two seating areas and black desk space in front of the receptionist and along the wall behind her. The walls, a soothing dusty green, were mostly covered with big swirling pieces of abstract art in non-startling colors, so you could feel you were hip without having to do anything about it.

The receptionist, once the messengers cleared the area and Dortmunder could step forward in their place, was just exactly too beautiful to be real, though she seemed unable or unwilling to move any part of her face. She looked at Dortmunder's hands for the package, didn't see one, and finally made eye contact, so Dortmunder could say, "Fiona Hemlow."

She reached for a pen: "And you are?"

"John Dortmunder."

She wrote that on a pad, applied herself to her phone bank, murmured briefly, then said, "She'll be out in a moment. Do have a seat."

"Thanks."

The seating area had gray glass coffee tables among the gray sofas, but nothing to read, so Dortmunder sat on a sofa and looked at the paintings and tried to decide what they looked like. He'd just about come to the conclusion that what they mostly resembled was the bowl after you've finished the ice cream when a very short young woman in black skirt, black jacket, high-necked plain white blouse and low-heeled black shoes marched in from a side aisle, looked around, gave Dortmunder a real estate agent's smile and strode over, hand out: "Mr. Dortmunder?"

Rising, he said, "That's me."

Her handshake was firm but bony. Her black hair was short, curled around her neat small ears, and her face was narrow; good-looking in an efficient sort of way. She looked to be in her mid- to late twenties, and there was no point even looking for a familial resemblance between her and the medicine ball in the wheelchair.

She said, "I'm Fiona. You met my grandfather."

"This morning, yeah. He gave me the background. Well, some of it."

"And, I," she said, being perky in somehow a subdued fashion, which was maybe how girl lawyers effervesced, "will give you the rest. Come along, I'll escort you back."

He followed her down a hall with doors on one side, all open and showing small cluttered offices, each with a neat middle-aged man or woman at a desk, intently concentrating on the phone or the computer or a bunch of pages. Then she went through an open doorway at the end of this hall into a much larger space all broken up into small pieces, like an egg carton, with chest-high walls every which way so you could see what everybody was doing. The people at the machines in these little cells were generally younger than the ones in the private offices, and Dortmunder had already come to suspect that Fiona Hemlow's work environment was in this mob scene somewhere when she said, "I arranged a small conference room for us. Much more private. No distractions."

"Good."

To get to this small conference room, she had to lead him a zigzag route through the people-boxes, and he was surprised the black composition floor wasn't covered with lines of breadcrumbs left by previous people afraid they wouldn't be able to find their way back.

A perimeter of the boxes was reached, and Fiona led the way along a wall to the left with alternating closed doors and plate-glass windows, through which he could see the conference rooms within, some occupied by two or more people in intense head-thrust-forward conversation, some empty.

Into an empty one she led the way, shut the door, and said, with a smile, "Sit anywhere. A beverage? Coke? Seltzer?"

Dortmunder understood that in the business environment it was considered a gesture of civilization to offer the guest something to drink without booze in it, and probably a hostile act to refuse it, so he said, "Seltzer, yeah, sounds good."

She went away to a tall construction on the end wall that contained everything necessary to life: refrigerator, a shelf of glasses, TV, DVD, notepads, pens, and paper napkins. She poured him a seltzer over ice and herself a Diet Pepsi over ice, brought him his drink and a paper napkin, and at last they could sit down and have their chat.

"So you found this thing," Dortmunder began. "This chess set."

She laughed. "Oh, Mr. Dortmunder, this is too good a story to just jump in and tell the end."

Dortmunder hated stories that were that good, but okay, once again no choice in the matter, so he said, "Sure. Go ahead."

"When I was growing up," she said, "there was every once in a while some family talk about a chess set that seemed to make everybody unhappy, but I couldn't figure out why. It was gone, or lost, or something, but I didn't know why it was such a big deal."

She drank Diet Pepsi and give him a warning finger-shake. "I don't mean the family was full of nothing but talk about this mysterious chess set, it wasn't. It was just a thing that came up every once in a while."

"Okay."

"So last summer it came up again," she said, "when I was visiting my father at the Cape, and I asked him, please tell me what it's all about, and he said he didn't really know. If he ever knew, he'd forgotten. He said I should ask my grandfather, so when I got back to the city I did. He didn't want to talk about it, turned out he was very bitter on that subject, but I finally convinced him I really wanted to know what this chess set meant in the family, and he told me."

"And that made you find it," Dortmunder said, "when nobody else could."

"That's right," she said. "I've always been fascinated by history, and this was history with my own family in it, the First World War and invading Russia and all the rest of it. So I took down the names of everybody in that platoon that brought the chess set to America, and the other names, like the radio company they wanted to start, Chess King Broadcasting, and everything else I thought might be useful, and I Googled it all."

Dortmunder had heard of this; some other nosey parker way to mind everybody else's business. He preferred a world in which people stuck to their own knitting, but that world was long gone. He said, "You found some of these people on Google."

"And I looked for brand names with chess words," she said, "because why wouldn't Alfred Northwood use that kind of name, too? A lot of the stuff I found was all dead ends, but I'm used to research, so I kept going, and then I found Gold Castle Realty, founded right here in New York in 1921, and then it turned out they were the builders of the Castlewood Building in 1948. So I looked into Gold Castle's owners and board of directors, and there's Northwoods all over it."

"The sons," Dortmunder said.

"And daughters. But mostly now grandsons and granddaughters. It had to be the same Northwood, came here from Chicago when he stole the chess set, used it to raise the money to start in real estate, and became hugely successful. They are very big in New York property, Mr. Dortmunder. Not as famous as some others, because they don't want to be, but very big."

"That's nice," Dortmunder said. "So they've got this chess set, I guess."

"Well, here's where it gets even better," she said, and she so liked this part she couldn't stop grinning. "The original Alfred X. Northwood," she said, "married into a wealthy New York family—"

"Things kinda went his way."

"His entire life. He died rich and respectable, loved and admired by the world. You should see the obit in the Times. Anyway, he died in 1955, aged seventy, and left six children, and they grew up and made more children, and now there are seventeen claimants to Gold Castle Realty."

"Claimants," Dortmunder said.

"The heirs are all suing each other," she said. "It's very vicious, they all hate each other, but every court they go into they get gag orders, so there's nothing public about this information at all."

"But you got it," Dortmunder said, wishing she'd quit having fun and just tell him where the damn chess set was.

"In my researches," she said, "I came across inklings of some of the lawsuits, and then it turned out this firm represents Livia Northwood Wheeler, Alfred's youngest daughter, who's suing everybody in the family, no partners on her side at all." Leaning closer to him over the conference table, she said, "Isn't that delicious? I'm looking for the Northwoods, and everything you could possibly want to know about their business for the last eighty years is in files in these offices. Oh, I've done a lot of after-hours work, Mr. Dortmunder, I can assure you."

"I'm sure you have," Dortmunder said. "Now, about this chess set."

"It used to be," she said, "on display in a bulletproof glass case in the corporate offices of Gold Castle Realty in their thirty-eighth floor lobby of the Castlewood Building. But it is an extremely valuable family asset, and it is being violently fought over, so three years ago it was removed to be held by several of the law firms representing family members. Four of these firms are in this building, For the last three years, the chess set has been held in the vaults in the sub-basement right here, in the C&I International bank corporation vault. Isn't that wonderful? What do you think, Mr. Dortmunder?"

"I think I'm going back to jail," Dortmunder said.

8

SHE BLINKED. "I'M sorry?"

"Don't you be sorry," be said. "I'll be sorry for both of us."

"I don't understand," she admitted. "What's wrong?"

"I know about banks," he told her. "When it comes to money, they are very serious. They got no sense of humor at all. You ever been down to this vault?"

"Oh, no," she said. "I'm not authorized."

"There it is right there," he said. "Do you know anybody is authorized?"

"The partners, I suppose."

"Feinberg and them."

"Well, Mr. Feinberg isn't alive any more, but the other partners, yes."

"So if — Wait a minute. Feinberg's name is there, head of the crowd, and he's dead?"

"Oh, that's very common," she said. "There are firms, and not just law firms either, where not one person in the firm name is still alive."

"Saves on new letterhead, I guess."

"I think it's reputation," she said. "If a firm suddenly had different names, then it wouldn't be the same firm any more, and it wouldn't have the reputation any more."

Dortmunder was about to ask another question — how a name could sport a reputation without a body behind it — when he realized he was straying widely away from the subject here, so he took a deep breath and said, "This vault."

"Yes," she said, as alert as a dog who's just seen you pick up a ball.

He said, "Do you know what it looks like? Do you know how you get there? Does it have its own elevator?"

"I don't know," she said. "I suppose it could."

"So do I. These partners that can get down there, can you talk to them about this? Ask 'em what it's like?"

"Oh, no," she said. "I've hardly ever even seen one of the partners."

"The living ones, you mean."

"Wait," she said. "Let me show you something." And she stood, went over to the construction that contained everything, and came back with a sheet of paper. She slid it across the table to him and it was the company's letterhead stationery. Pointing, she said, "These names across the top, that's the name of the firm."

"Yeah, I got that. All the way to Klatsch."

"Exactly. Now these names down the left side, those are the actual current partners and associates."

"The ones that are alive."

"Yes, of course."

He looked, and the names were not in alphabetical order, so they must be in order of how important you were. "You're not here," he said.

"Oh, no, I'm not — Those are the partners and associates, I'm—" She laughed, in a flustered way, and said, "I'm just a wee beastie."

Dortmunder waved a finger at the descending left-hand column. "So these guys—"

"And women."

"Right. They're the ones can go down to the vault, if they got business there."

"Well, the top ones, yes."

"So not even all of them." Dortmunder was trying not to be exasperated with this well-meaning young person, but with all the troubles he now found staring him in the face it was hard. "So tell me," he said, "this chess set being down there in that vault, how is this good news?"

"Well, we know where it is," she said. "For all those years, nobody knew where it was, nobody knew what happened to it. Now we know."

"And you love history."

Sounding confused, she said, "Yes, I do."

"So just knowing where the thing is, that's good enough for you."

"I… I suppose so."

"Your grandfather would like to get his hands on it."

"Oh, we'd all like that," she said. "Naturally we would."

"Your grandfather hired himself an ex-cop to help him get it," Dortmunder told her, "and the ex-cop fixed me up with a burglary charge if I don't bring it back with me."

"If you don't bring it back?" Her bewilderment was getting worse. "Where's the burglary if you don't bring it back?"

"A different burglary," he explained. "A in-the-past burglary."

"Oh!" She looked horribly embarrassed, as though she'd stumbled upon something she wasn't supposed to see.

"So the idea was," he told her, "I come here and you tell me where the chess set is, and I go there and get it and give it to your grandfather, and his ex-cop lets me off the hook." I see.

"This vault under this— What is this building, sixty stories?"

"I think so, something like that."

"So this vault way down under this sixty-story building, probably with its own elevator, with a special guest list that your name has to be on it or you don't even get to board the elevator, in a building owned by a bank that used to be called Capitalists and Immigrants, two groups of people with really no sense of humor, is not a place I'm likely to walk out of with a chess set I'm told is too heavy for one guy to carry."

"I'm sorry," she said, and she sounded as though she really was.

"I don't suppose you could get a copy of the building's plans. The architect plans with the vault and all."

"I have no idea," she said.

"It would be research."

"Yes, but—" She looked extremely doubtful. "I could look into it, I suppose. The problem is, I couldn't let anybody know what I was looking for."

"That's right."

"And I don't actually see how it could help," she said. "I mean, I don't think you could, say, dig a tunnel to the vault. So far as I know, there is no actual dirt under midtown, it's all sub-basements and water tunnels and steam pipes and sewer lines and subway tunnels."

"I believe," Dortmunder said, "there's some power lines down in there, too."

"Exactly."

"It doesn't look good," Dortmunder suggested.

"No, I have to admit."

They brooded in silence together a minute, and then she said, "If I'd known, I'd never have told Granddad."

"It isn't him, it's the ex-cop he hired."

"I'm still sorry I told him."

Which meant there was nothing more to say. With a deep breath that some might have been called a sigh, he moved his arms preparatory to standing, saying, "Well—"

"Wait a minute," she said, and produced both notepad and pen. "Give me a number where I can reach you. Give me your cell."

"I don't have a cell," he said. But I'm going to, he thought.

"Your landline, then. You do have a landline, don't you?"

"You mean a phone? I got a phone."

He gave her the number. Briskly she wrote it down, then said, "And you should have mine," and handed him a small neat white business card, which he obediently tucked into a shirt pocket. She looked at the landline number he'd given her, as though it somehow certified his existence, then nodded at him and said, "I don't promise anything, Mr. Dortmunder, but I will do my best to find something that might help."

"Good. That's good."

"I'll call you if I have anything at all."

"Yeah, good idea."

Now he did stand, and she said, "I'll show you out."

So he tried a joke, just for the hell of it: "That's okay, I left a trail of breadcrumbs on my way in."

She was still looking blank when she shook his hand good-bye at the elevators; so much for jokes.

Riding down, alone this trip, he thought his best move now was go straight over to Grand Central, take the first train out for Chicago. That's supposed to be an okay place, not that different from a city. It could even work out. Meet up with some guys there, get plugged in a little, learn all those new neighborhoods. Get settled, then send word to May, she could bring out his winter clothes. Chicago was alleged to be very cold.

Leaving the C&I International building, he figured it'd be just as quick to walk over to the station when here on the sidewalk is Eppick with a big grin, saying, "So. You got it all worked out, I bet."

9

"NOT ENTIRELY," DORTMUNDER Said.

"But you're working on it."

"Oh, sure."

"And naturally you'll have to consult with your pals, whoever it is you bring in on the job. Who do you figure you'll work with this time?"

Dortmunder looked at him. "You told that grandfather," he said, "how I learned a few things over the years."

"You're right, you're right." Eppick shrugged and grinned, not at all put out, dropping the whole subject. "So let's take a cab," he said, and crossed the sidewalk to the curb.

Helpless, Dortmunder followed. "Where we taking it?"

Eppick's arm was up now, but he didn't bother to watch oncoming traffic, instead continuing his cheerful grin at Dortmunder as he said, "Mr. Hemlow wants to see you."

"He already saw me."

"Well, now he's gonna see you again," Eppick said, as a cab pulled to a stop in their general neighborhood. Eppick opened its door, saying, "Hop in, I'll tell you about it."

So Dortmunder hopped in and slid across the seat so Eppick could follow. Eppick slammed the door and told the turbaned driver, "Two-eleven Riverside Drive."

Dortmunder said, "Not your office."

"Mr. Hemlow's place," Eppick said, as the cab headed west. "Mr. Hemlow's a distinguished man, you know."

"I don't know anything about him."

"He's retired now," Eppick said, "mostly because of this illness he's got. He used to be a chemist, invented a couple things, started a couple businesses, got very rich, sold the stuff off, gives millions away to charity."

"Pretty good," Dortmunder said.

"The point is," Eppick told him, "Mr. Hemlow isn't used to being around roughnecks. He didn't know how he was gonna take to you, so that's why the first meeting was at my place. We knew we'd have to check in with you again after you saw the granddaughter, but Mr. Hemlow decided you were okay, or okay enough, and it isn't easy for him to get around town, so this time we're going to his place."

"I guess I'm honored," Dortmunder said.

"You'll be honored," Eppick told him, "when Mr. Hemlow's got the chess set."

It was a narrow stone building, ten stories high, midblock, taller wider buildings on both sides. The windows were all very elaborate, which made sense, because they faced a tree-dotted park sloping down toward the Hudson, with the West Side Highway and its traffic a sketched-in border between grass and water and New Jersey across the way looking good at this distance.

Eppick paid and they got out of the cab and went up the two broad stone steps to where a dark green-uniformed doorman held the big brass-fitted door open for them and said, "Yes, gentlemen?"

"Mr. Hemlow. I'm Mr. Eppick."

"Yes, sir."

The lobby was small and dark and looked like a carpet salesroom in a mausoleum. Dortmunder and Eppick waited while the doorman made his call, then said, "You may go up."

"Thanks."

The elevator had an operator, in a uniform from the same army as the doorman, although Dortmunder noticed there weren't any operator type controls, just the same buttons that in other elevators the customer has to figure out how to push all by himself. But here the operator did it, and by looming over the panel in a very stiff manner he made sure nobody else got close to the buttons.

"Floor, sir?"

"Mr. Hemlow, penthouse."

"Sir."

The operator pushed P and up they went, and at the top the operator held Door Open while they exited, so he was either being very conscientious or he was hoping nobody'd notice he wasn't actually required.

Apparently Mr. Hemlow had the entire top floor, because the elevator opened onto his living room, a broad muted space with a wall of large old-fashioned windows overlooking the river but too high up to show the park or the highway. Mr. Hemlow himself waited for them in his wheelchair, and said, "Well, Johnny, from the smile on your face, things are going well."

"Oh, they are, Mr. Hemlow," Eppick assured him. "But mostly I'm smiling because I just love this room. Every time I see it."

"My late wife thanks you," Mr. Hemlow said, a little grimly. "It's all her taste. Come along and sit down." And his motorized wheelchair spun around in place and took off at a pretty good clip, which was probably why he didn't have any rugs on the nice hardwood floor.

Dortmunder and Eppick followed him over closer to the view, where Mr. Hemlow did his spin-around thing again and gestured to them to take a pair of easy chairs with an ornate antique table between them and a good view of the view. However, he then rolled himself into the middle of the view and said, "So tell me where we stand."

On the wing of the airplane, Dortmunder wanted to tell him, but instead said, "Could I ask you, did your granddaughter tell you where they're keeping this chess set?"

"She said a group of law firms was holding it while some lawsuit was being worked out. Apparently, it used to be in an extremely well-guarded place."

"So that's good," Eppick said, and grinned at Dortmunder. "Some law firm won't be so tough to break into, will it?"

"It's not in a law firm," Dortmunder said. "Not in their office."

Mr. Hemlow said, "But my granddaughter said it was."

"They got," Dortmunder told him, "whatchacallit. Custody. The outfit your granddaughter works for, this Feinberg and all of them, except Feinberg isn't with us any more, but that's okay, it's the reputation that counts. Feinberg and them, and some other law companies, they're all in these lawsuits together, so they all got custody of the chess set together. So Feinberg and three of the other companies are all in this C&I International Bank building, so where the chess set is is in the bank building vault, like three sub-basements down or something, under the building, guarded like an underground vault in a bank building."

"Sounds difficult," Mr. Hemlow commented.

Dortmunder was prepared to agree with him wholeheartedly, with details, but Eppick came in first, saying, "That won't stop John and his pals. They've come up against worse problems than that, eh, John?"

"Well…" Dortmunder said.

But Eppick wasn't listening. "It seems to me, Mr. Hemlow," he said, "the hard work's all been done here. At the start, you didn't even know where it was. Could've been anywhere in the world. Could've been broken up in different places."

"True," Mr. Hemlow said.

"Now we know where it is," Eppick went on, "and we know it's right here in New York City, in a bank vault. And we have a person with us, John here, has been inside bank vaults before. Haven't you, John?"

"Once or twice," Dortmunder admitted.

"So the only thing left to discuss," Mr. Hemlow said, "is where you'll deliver the chess set once you've laid your hands on it. You'll probably have it in a van or something like that, won't you?"

"Probably," Dortmunder said. If everybody wanted to spin out a fantasy here, he was content to go along. However; Chicago.

"I think the best place for it, at least at first," Mr. Hemlow said, "would be our compound in the Berkshires. It's been closed for a few years since Elaine died, but I can arrange to have it open and staffed by the time of your arrival."

Eppick said, "Mr. Hemlow? Some kind of country place? You sure that's secure enough?"

"It's enclosed and gated," Mr. Hemlow told him. "Not visible from the road. Elaine and I used to go to Tanglewood for the concerts in the summertime, so we built the compound up there, our rustic retreat. After Elaine passed and I became less… mobile, I stopped going. The rest of my family seems to prefer the ocean, for some reason, though why anyone would wish to be immersed in salt water all summer is beyond me. At any rate, the place is there, it has never been broken into or bothered, and it's the safest location I can think of."

"If you don't mind, Mr. Hemlow," Eppick said, "me and John here, maybe we oughta go look at it. Just to see if there's any little tweaks to be done, help out a little. Better safe than sorry."

Mr. Hemlow considered that. "When would you go?"

"First thing in the morning," Eppick told him. "I'm sure John isn't doing anything much, in the daytime."

Except fleeing to Chicago. "Naw, I'm okay," Dortmunder said.

"With your permission," Eppick said, "I'll rent a car and bill you for it later."

"Take my car," Mr. Hemlow said. "I hadn't planned to use it tomorrow. Pembroke knows how to get to the compound, and he'll have the keys."

Doubtful, Eppick said, "You're sure."

"Absolutely." From the left arm of the wheelchair, moving that medicine ball body with little grunts, Mr. Hemlow produced a phone, which he slowly buttoned, saying, "I'll leave Pembroke a message to— Oh, you're there. Very good. I'll want the car around front at" — as much as possible, the head on the medicine ball cocked to one side in a questioning way — "nine?"

"Fine," Eppick said.

"Good. Yes. It won't be me, you'll be driving Mr. Eppick and another gentleman up to the compound. You still have the keys? Excellent." He broke the connection and said, "You should be back late afternoon. Come up and tell me what you think."

"Will do."

"Thank you for coming," Mr. Hemlow said, so Eppick stood, so Dortmunder stood. Good-byes were said, they walked to the elevator while Mr. Hemlow watched from back by the view, and neither spoke until they were out on Riverside Drive, when Eppick said, "So you'll be here at nine in the morning."

"Sure," Dortmunder said.

Eppick did a more successful cocking of the head. "I get little whiffs from you, John," he said, "that you're not as keen as you might be on this job."

"That's not easy, that vault."

"But there it is," Eppick pointed out. "If you're thinking, maybe you'll just get out of town for a while until this all blows over, let me tell you, it isn't going to blow over. Mr. Hemlow's into this for sentimental reasons, but I'm in it for profit, and you'd better be, too."

"Oh, sure."

"Police departments around America," Eppick said, "are getting better and better at cooperation, what with the Internet and all. Everybody helps everybody, and nobody can disappear." Lacing his fingers together to show what he meant, in a gesture very like a stranglehold, he said, "We're all intertwined these days. See you at nine."

10

WHEN MAY GOT home from her job at the Safeway with the daily sack of groceries she felt was a perk her employers would have given her if they'd thought of it, the apartment was dark. It was not yet quite six o'clock, but in this apartment, whose windows showed mostly brick walls four to six feet away, midnight in November came around three p.m.

May switched on the hall light, went down to the kitchen, stowed the day's take, went back up the hall, turned right into the living room to see if the local news had anything she could bear to listen to, switched on the light there, and John was seated in his regular chair, in the dark, gazing moodily at the television set. Well, no; gazing moodily toward the television set.

May jumped a foot. She let out a little cry, clutched her bosom, and cried, "John!"

"Hello, May."

She stared at him. "John? What's the matter?"

"Well," he said, "I'm doomed."

For the first time in years, May wished she still smoked. Taking the other chair, she flicked ashes from that ancient cigarette onto the side table where the ashtray used to be, and said, "Was it that cop?"

"It sure was."

"And did Stan find you?"

With a hollow sardonic laugh, John said, "Oh, yeah. He found me."

"He can't help?"

"Stan doesn't help," John said. "Stan needs help, him and his golden dome. If my only problem was Stan Murch and his golden dome, I'd be sitting pretty, May. Sitting pretty."

"Well, what is the problem?"

"The thing the cop wants me to get," John said. "It's a golden chess set — more gold — and it's supposed to be too heavy for one guy to lift."

"Get somebody to help."

"It's also," he said, "in a sub-basement vault under a midtown bank building."

"Oh," she said.

"And this guy, this seventeen-months-not-a-cop," John said, "he let me know, I try to leave town, he's got these millions and millions of cop buddies on the Internet and they'll track me down. And he would, too, he's a mean son of a bitch, you can see it in his forehead."

"So what are you going to do?"

"Well," he said, "I figure I'll just sit here until they come to get me."

"You don't mean that, John," she said, though she was afraid he actually did mean it.

"I've done jail before, May," he reminded her. "It wasn't that bad. I got through it."

"You were less set in your ways, then," she said.

"You can pick up the old routines," he said. "Probly a few guys still there I knew in the old days."

"Or there again."

"Yeah, could be. Old home week."

May knew John had a very bad tendency, when things got unusually difficult, to sink with an almost sensuous pleasure into a warm bath of despair. Once you've handed the reins over to despair, to mix a metaphor just a teeny bit, your job is done. You don't have to sweat it any more, you've taken yourself out of the game. Despair is the bench, and you are warming it.

May knew it was her job, at moments like this, to pull John out of the clutches of despair and goose him into forward motion once more. After all, it isn't whether you win or lose, it's just you have to be in the goddam game.

"John," she said, being suddenly very stern, "don't be so selfish."

He blinked at her, emerging slowly up from a dream of prison as a kind of fraternal organization. "What?"

"What about me?" she demanded. "Don't you ever think about me? I can't go to jail with you, you know."

"Yeah, but—"

"What am I going to do with myself, John," she wanted to know, "if you're going to spend ten to fifteen upstate? I've made a certain commitment here, you know that, I hope."

"May, it's not me, it's that cop."

"It's you that's sitting there," she told him, "like you're waiting for a bus. And you are waiting for a bus. To jail! What's the matter with you, John?"

He tried, though feebly, to fight back. "May? You want me to try to get down into that vault? Never mind the vault, you want me to try to get into the elevator that leads down to the vault? The bank's money is down there, too, May, they will be very alert about that vault. And, even if I was crazy enough to try it, who am I gonna get to help carry? Who else would try a stunt like that?"

"Call Andy," she advised.

11

THE DOME DIDN'T look like gold at night. There were work lights around the construction site, even though no work was being done at the moment, to deter pilferage, which would usually mean boards or Sheetrock panels, not golden domes fifteen feet high, and in those work lights, as far as Andy Kelp was concerned, the dome looked mostly like a giant apricot. Not a peach, not that warmer fuzzy tone, but an apricot, except without that crease that makes apricots look as though they're wearing thong bathing suits.

Andy Kelp, a bony sharp-nosed guy in nonreflecting black, tended to blend in with the shadows at night when he moved from this place to that place. The place he was moving around in at the moment was just beyond the chain-link perimeter fence enclosing the mosque construction site, now temporarily on hold while the recently transplanted community got up to speed on the New York City culture and ethos.

And the reason Andy Kelp was moving around here at night was that, while he still thought the idea of heisting something this size and weight, particularly from people who have been known to be slightly hotheaded in the past, was a terrible notion, the one thing he didn't have was John Dortmunder's opinion. He was pretty sure John would see the scheme the same way everybody else did, but unfortunately John hadn't been at the meeting in the back room of the O.J. to put his stamp of disapproval personally on the idea, having been waylaid by some cop.

So, because of that gap in the chain of evidence, and because he wasn't doing much of anything else at the moment, he'd borrowed a car from East Thirtieth Street in Manhattan and driven out here to Brooklyn to give the golden dome the double-o. He was now coming to the conclusion that his first conclusion had been right all along, as expected, when the phone vibrated against his leg — silence can be more golden than any dome — so he pulled it out and said, "Yar."

"You busy?" The very John Dortmunder whose absence last night had brought him out here.

"Not really," Kelp said. "You?"

"We could maybe talk."

Surprised, Kelp said, "About the job?"

Sounding surprised, John said, "Yeah."

Kelp took a step back to study the dome from a slightly different angle, and it still seemed to him too big and too unwieldy and just downright too unlikely, so he said, "You mean, you want to do it?"

"Well, I got no choice."

So John felt compelled to go after all this gold; think of that. Kelp said, "To tell you the truth, I was thinking, you cut a piece off it, could be," though he hadn't thought of that till this very minute. But if John believed there might be something in this gold mountain, that could get Kelp's creative juices flowing, too. "Is that your idea," he asked, "or what?"

"Cut a piece off what?"

"The dome," Kelp said. "You'll never get the whole dome, John, I'm looking at it and—"

"The dome? You mean, Stan's Islamic dome?"

"Isn't that what you're talking about?"

"And you're out there with it? You're whacking pieces off it?"

"No, I'm just giving it the good lookover, the whadawe see when we see this idea."

"Stan there?"

"No, I just come out by myself, spur of the moment kinda thing. I don't wanna encourage Stan, get his hopes up. John, aren't you talking about the dome?"

"You think I'm a moron?"

"No, John, but you said—"

"You wanna meet? You wanna talk? Or you wanna stay out there and cut filets outa the dome?"

"I'm on my way, John. Where and when?"

"O.J., ten. It's just the two of us, so we won't need the back room."

"So it isn't a solid job yet."

"Oh, it's solid," John told him. "And I'm under it."

12

WHEN DORTMUNDER WALKED into the O.J. at ten that night Andy Kelp had not yet arrived, and the regulars, freed from last night's Eppick-inspired verbal paralysis, were discussing James Bond movies. "That was the one," the first regular said, "where the bad guy went after his basket with a laser."

"You're wrong about that," the second regular told him. "You happen to be confusing that one with that guy George Laserby, he was the Bond only that one time— What was it called?"

Dortmunder angled toward the other end of the bar, where Rollo the bartender repetitively rag-wiped one spot on the bar's surface as though he believed that's where the genie lived, while a third regular said, "In His Majesty's Secret Police."

The second regular frowned, as Dortmunder almost reached the bar: "Wasn't that Timothy Danton?"

The third regular frowned right back: "Timothy who?"

"Danton. The polite one."

"No, no," the first regular said. "This is much earlier, and, it's a laser, not a laserby, a light that slices you in half."

The third regular remained bewildered: "This is a light?"

"It's green."

"You're thinking," the second regular told him, "of Star Wars."

"Rollo," Dortmunder said.

"Forget Star Wars," the first regular said. "It was a laser, and it was green. Wasn't the bad guy Doctor No?"

"Doctor Maybe Not," said the joker. There's a joker in every crowd.

"Rollo," Dortmunder explained, and Rollo came slowly up from REM sleep, stopped his rag-wiping, focused on Dortmunder, and said, "Two nights in a row. You could become a regular."

"Maybe not," Dortmunder said, echoing the joker, though not on purpose. "But tonight, yeah. Just me and the other bourbon." Because Rollo knew his customers by their drink, which he felt was the way to inspire consumer loyalty.

"Happy to see you both," Rollo said.

"It's just the two of us, so we don't need the back room."

"Woody Allen," demanded the ever-perplexed third regular, "played James Bond?"

"I think that was him," said the second regular, showing a rare moment of regular doubt.

"Fine," said Rollo, and went away to prepare a tray containing two glasses with ice cubes and a full bottle bearing a label that read Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon — "Our Own Brand." "Drink it in good health," he said, and pushed the tray across the genie.

"Thanks."

Dortmunder turned around, carrying the tray, looked to choose just the right booth, and Kelp appeared in the bar doorway. He entered, saw Dortmunder, gazed around the room, and pointed at the booth next to him, the one where last night — just last night! — Dortmunder had met his personal ex-cop doom.

The same booth? Well, the farther from the Bondsmen the better. Dortmunder shrugged: Okay.

Once they were seated facing one another and their glasses were no longer empty, Kelp said, "This is about that cop."

"You know it. Johnny Eppick For Hire."

"How much of that is his name?"

"The front half."

"So he used to be a cop," Kelp suggested, "and now he's a private eye."

"Or whatever. He's working for a rich guy that wants this valuable heavy golden chess set that just happens to be in a sub-basement bank vault in midtown."

"Forget it," Kelp advised.

"I'd like to," Dortmunder said. "Only he's got pictures of me in a compromising position."

"Oh, yeah?" Kelp seemed very interested. "What, is he gonna show them to May?"

"Not that kind," Dortmunder said. "The kind he could show to the cops that didn't retire yet."

"Oh." Kelp nodded. "Miami could be nice, this time of year."

"I was thinking Chicago. Only, Eppick thought of it, too. He says, him and the Internet and his cop buddies would find me anywhere I went, and I believe him."

"How much time you got?"

"Before my arrest, arraignment, plea bargain, and bus ride north?" Dortmunder shrugged. "I can stall a little, I guess. But Eppick is leaning, and the guy he works for is old and sick and wouldn't be interested in any long-term plans."

"Sheesh." Kelp shook his head. "I hate to say this, but better you than me."

"Don't hate to say it," Dortmunder advised him, "because you're already kinda involved."

Kelp didn't like that. "You two've been talking about me?"

"He already knows you," Dortmunder said. "He researched me or something. Last night, when he left here, he looked down toward you and said, 'Give my hello to Andy Kelp. He knows about Arnie Albright. He knows us all."

"I don't like this," Kelp said. "I don't like your friend Eppick even thinking about me."

"Oh, is that how it is?" Dortmunder wanted to know. "Now he's my friend?"

"You know what I mean."

"I'm not sure I do."

Kelp looked around the room, as though to fix the location more securely in his mind. "You asked me to meet you here tonight," he said. "Now I get it, you asked me here because you want me to help. So when are you gonna ask me to help?"

"There is no help," Dortmunder said.

Kelp slowly sipped some of his bourbon, while gazing at Dortmunder over the glass. Then he put the glass down and continued to gaze at Dortmunder.

"Okay," Dortmunder said. "Help."

"Sure," Kelp said. "Where is this bank vault?"

"C&I International, up on Fifth Avenue."

"That's a big bank," Kelp said. He sounded faintly alarmed.

"It's a big building," Dortmunder said. "Underneath it is a sub-basement, and in the sub-basement is the chess set that's out to ruin my life."

"I could go up tomorrow," Kelp offered, "and take a look."

"Well," Dortmunder said, "I'd like you to do something else tomorrow."

Looking hopeful, Kelp said, "You already got a plan?"

"No, I already got a disaster." Dortmunder drank some of his own bourbon, more copiously than Kelp had, and said, "Let me say first, this Eppick already figures you're in. He said to me today, 'I suppose you'll work with your pal Andy Kelp. "

"Conversations about me," Kelp said, and shivered.

"I know. I feel the same way. But here's the thing. It's just as important you get to see this Eppick as it is you get to see some bank building."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Tomorrow morning," Dortmunder said, "in the rich guy's limo, we're going upstate somewhere, Eppick and me, to see if what the rich guy called his compound is secure enough for us to stash the chess set after we ha-ha lift it."

"You want me to ride upstate tomorrow," Kelp said, "in a limo with you and Eppick."

"And a chauffeur."

Kelp contemplated that, while back at the bar, "Shaken but not slurred!" piped the joker.

Kelp observed his glass, but did not drink. "And why," he wanted to know, "am I doing this?"

"Maybe we'll learn something."

"Nothing we want to know, I bet." Kelp did knock back a little more bourbon. "What time are we doing this foolish thing?"

13

BEING A WEE beastie in a huge corporate law firm in mid-town Manhattan meant that one did not have very many of one's waking hours to oneself. Again tonight it was after ten before Fiona could call her home-buddy Brian and say, "I'm on my way."

"It'll be ready when you get here."

"Should I stop and get anything?" By which she meant wine.

"No, I got everything we need." By which he meant he'd bought wine on his way home from the studio.

"See you, hon."

"See you, hon."

The interior of Feinberg et al maintained the same lighting twenty-four hours a day, since only the partners and associates had offices around the perimeter of the building, and thus windows. In the rest of the space you might as well have been in a spaceship far off in the emptiness of the universe. The only differences at ten p.m., when Fiona moved through the cubicles to the elevator bank, were that the receptionist's desk was empty, the latest Botox Beauty having left at five, and that Fiona needed her employee ID card to summon and operate the elevator. It wasn't, in fact, until she'd left the elevator and the lobby and the building itself that she found herself back on Earth, where it was nighttime, with much traffic thundering by on Fifth Avenue.

Her route home was as certain as a bowling alley gutter. Walk across Fifth Avenue and down the long block to Sixth and the long block to Seventh and the short block to Broadway. Then up two blocks to the subway, where she would descend, swipe the MetroCard until it recognized itself, and then descend some more and wait for the uptown local, riding it to Eighty-sixth Street. Another walk, one block up and half a block over, and she entered her apartment building, where she chose a different card from her bulging wallet — this was three cards for one trip — in order to gain admittance, then took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the long hall to 4-D. That same third card also let her into the apartment, where the smell of Oriental food — was that Thai? the smell of peanuts? — was the most welcoming thing in her day.

"Honey, I'm home!" she called, which they both thought of as their joke, and he came grinning out of the galley kitchen with a dishtowel tucked in around his waist and a glass of red wine in each hand. As tall as she was short, and as blond as she was raven-haired, Brian had wide bony shoulders but was otherwise as skinny as a stray cat, with a craggy handsome face that always maintained some caution down behind the good cheer.

"Home is the hunter," he greeted her, which was another part of the joke, and handed over a glass.

They kissed, they clinked glasses, they sipped the wine, which they didn't know any better than to believe was pretty good, and then he went back to the kitchen to plate their dinners while she stood leaning in the doorway to say, "How was your day?"

"Same old same old," he said, which was what he usually said, though sometimes there were tidbits of interest he would share with her, just as she would with him.

Since he worked for a cable television company, Brian actually had more frequent tidbits to offer than she did. He was an illustrator there, assembling collages and occasionally doing original artwork, all to be background for different things the cable station would air. He belonged to some sort of show business writers union, though she didn't quite see how what he did counted as writing, but it meant that, though his income was a fraction of hers, his hours were much more predictable — and shorter — than hers. She thought wistfully from time to time that it might be nice to be in a union and get home at six at night instead of ten-thirty, but she knew it was a class thing: Lawyers would never stoop to protect themselves.

Brian brought their dinners out to the table in what they called the big room, though it wasn't that big. Even so, they'd crowded into it a sofa, two easy chairs, a small dining table with two armless designer chairs, a featureless gray construct containing all the elements of their "entertainment space," two small bookcases crammed with her history books and his art books, and a small black coffee table on which they played Scrabble and cribbage.

They'd been a couple for three years now, he moving into what had been her place after he broke up with his previous girlfriend. They had no intention of marrying, no desire for children, no yen to put down roots somewhere in the suburbs. They liked each other, liked living together, didn't get on each other's nerves very much, and didn't see too much of one another because of the nature of her job. So it was all very nice and easy.

And he was a good cook! He'd had an after-school restaurant slavey job in his teens, and had taken to the concept of cookery as being somehow related to his work as an artist. He enjoyed burrowing his way into exotic cuisines, and she almost always relished the result. Not so bad.

Tonight, as her nose had told her, dinner came from the cuisine of Thailand, and was delicious, and over it she said, "My day wasn't exactly same old same old."

Interested, he looked at her over his fork. (You don't use chopsticks with Thai food.) "Oh, yeah?"

"A man I talked to," she said. "The most hangdog man I ever met in my life. You can't imagine what he looked like when he said, 'I'm going back to jail. "And she laughed at the memory, as he frowned at her, curious.

"Back to jail? You're not defending crooks now, are you? That isn't what you people do."

"No, no, this isn't anything to do with the firm. This is something about my grandfather."

"Daddy Bigbucks," Brian said.

She smiled at him, indulging him. "Yes, I know, you're only with me because of my prospects. Money is really all you care about, I know that."

He grinned back at her, but with a slight edge to it as he said, "Try going without it for a while."

"I know, I know, you come from the wrong side of the tracks."

"We were too poor to have tracks. What I've done, I've shacked-up up. Tell me about this hangdog guy."

So she told him the chess set saga, about which he had previously known nothing. He asked a few questions, brought himself up to speed, then said, "Is this guy really going to rob a bank vault?"

"Oh, of course not," she said. "It's just silly. They'll all see it's impossible, and that'll be the end of it."

"But what if he tries?"

"Oh, the poor man," she said, but she grinned as she said it. "In that case, I think he probably will go back to jail."

14

IN DORTMUNDER'S DREAM, it wasn't his old cell at all, it was much older, and smaller, and very rusty, and flooded with water knee-deep. His cellmate — a hulking guy he'd never met before, but who looked a lot like Hannibal Lecter — leered at him and said, "We like it this way."

Dortmunder opened his mouth to say he didn't at all like it this way, but out from between his lips came the sudden jangle of an alarm clock, startling him awake.

John Dortmunder was not an alarm clock kind of guy. He preferred to get out of bed when the fancy struck him, which was generally about the crack of noon. But with the necessity this morning of being way over on the Upper West Side at nine o'clock, he knew he had to make an exception. Two days in a row with morning appointments! What kind of evil cloud was he under here, all of a sudden?

Last night, May had helped him set the alarm for eight in the morning, and now at eight in the morning May's foot helped him bounce out of bed, slap the alarm clock silly until it shut up, then slope off to the bathroom.

Twenty minutes later, full of a hastily-ingested mélange of corn flakes and milk and sugar, he went out into the morning cold — it was much colder out here in the morning — and after some time found a cab to take him up to Riverside Drive, where a black limo sat in front of Mr. Hemlow's building, white exhaust putt-putting out of its tailpipe. The skinny sour guy at the wheel, with the white hair sticking out from under his chauffeur's cap, would be Pembroke, and the satisfied guy in the rear-facing backseat, encased like a sausage in his black topcoat, would be Johnny Eppick in person, who pushed open the extra-wide door, grinned into the cold air, and said, "Right on time. We're all here, climb in."

"One to go," Dortmunder told him.

Eppick didn't think he liked that. "You're bringing somebody along?"

"You already know him," Dortmunder said. "So I thought he oughta know you."

"And he would be—"

"Andy Kelp."

Now Eppick's smile returned, bigger than ever. "Good thinking. You're starting to put your mind to it, John, that's good." Slight frown. "But where is he?"

"Coming up the street," Dortmunder said, nodding down to where Kelp walked toward them up Riverside Drive.

Kelp had a jaunty walk when he was going into a situation he wasn't sure of, and it was at its jauntiest as he approached the limo, looked at that smiling head leaning out of the limo's open door, and said, "You're gonna be Johnny Eppick, I bet."

"Got it in one," Eppick said. "And you'll be Andrew Octavian Kelp."

"Oh, I only use the Octavian on holidays."

"Well, get in, get in, we might as well get going."

The interior of the limo had been adjusted for Mr. Hemlow's wheelchair, so that a bench seat behind the chauffeur's compartment faced backward, and the rest of the floor was covered with curly black carpet, with lines in it that showed where the platform would extend out through the doorway when it was time to load Mr. Hemlow aboard. The bench seat would really be comfortable only for two and Eppick was already on it, but when Dortmunder bent to enter the limo somehow Kelp was already in there, seated to Eppick's right and looking as innocent as a poisoner.

So that left the floor for Dortmunder, unless he wanted to sit up in front of the partition with the chauffeur and not be part of the conversation. He went in on all fours and then turned himself around into a seated position as Eppick closed the door. The rear wall, beneath the window, was also covered with the black carpet, and wasn't really uncomfortable at all, anyway not at first. So Dortmunder might be on the floor, but at least he was facing front.

"All right, Pembroke," Eppick said, and off they went.

Kelp, with his amiable smile, said, "John tells me you know all about us."

"Oh, I doubt that," Eppick said. "I only know that little part of your activities that's made it into the filing system. The tip of the iceberg, you might say."

"And yet," Kelp said, "I don't seem to have any files on you at all. John says you're retired from the NYPD."

"Seventeen months ago."

"Congratulations."

"Thank you."

"Where was it in the NYPD," Kelp wondered, "did they make use of your talents?"

"The last seven years," Eppick told him, not seeming to mind the interrogation at all, "I was in the Bunco Squad."

"They still call it that? 'Say, did you drop this wallet? That kinda thing?"

Eppick laughed. "Oh, there's still some street hustle," he said, "but not so much any more. You watch television half an hour, you know every scam there is."

"Not every."

"No, not every," Eppick conceded. "But these days, it's mostly phone and Internet."

"The Nigerians."

"All that money they're trying to get out of Lagos and into your bank account," Eppick agreed. "Amazing how often we find the sender in Brooklyn."

"Amazing you find the sender," Kelp told him.

"Oh, now," Eppick said. "We do have our little successes."

"That's nice," Kelp said. "But now you're out on your own. John tells me you got a card and everything."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Eppick said. "I should of given you one." And, sliding two fingers under the lapel of his topcoat, he brought out another of his cards and gave it to Kelp.

Who studied it with interest. "'For Hire, " he read. "Doesn't narrow it much."

"I didn't want the clients to feel constricted."

"You had many of those?"

"Mr. Hemlow is my first," Eppick said, "and naturally the most important."

"Naturally."

"I don't want to let him down."

"No, of course not," Kelp agreed. "Here at the beginning of your second career."

"Exactly."

"Yet John tells me," Kelp said, "this little thing you put him on the send for, he tells me it isn't gonna be easy."

"If it was gonna be easy," Eppick said, "I woulda sent a boy."

"That's true."

"I got every confidence in your friend John," Eppick said. Looking at Dortmunder, who was at that moment shifting position this way and that because after a while and a few stops at red lights the limo floor and back weren't quite as comfortable as he'd thought at first, he said, "I believe also that John has every confidence in me."

"Sure," Dortmunder said. When he crumpled himself into the corner, it was a little better.

15

JUDSON BLINT TYPED names and addresses into the computer. Here it was, nearly ten in the morning, and he still hadn't finished with Super Star Music, while stacked up beside his left elbow were the letters, the applications, and the checks — lovely checks — for Allied Commissioners' Courses and Intertherapeutic Research Service. What a long way to go.

For some reason, the mail was always heaviest on Fridays. Maybe the post office just wanted to clear everything out before the weekend. For whatever reason, Friday was always the day that made this job seem most like a job, instead of what it actually was, which was three extremely profitable felonies.

Take Super Star Music, on which he was still working at ten in the morning. Advertising in magazines likely to draw in the young and the gullible, Super Star Music promised to make you rich and famous by setting your song lyrics to music. Alternately, if it's music you got, they'll give you lyrics. Now, most amateurs do simple marching-beat doggerel, so there's lots of music out there to match; just shift the rhythms around a bit. As for lyrics, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations has some pretty good ones, or there's always what's in the next envelope right here.

Allied Commissioners' Courses, on the other hand, would teach you everything you needed to know to make a fine living as a detective; sure. And if Intertherapeutic Research Service's dirty book doesn't improve your sex life, check your pulse; maybe you died.

Judson Blint's task in this triple threat ongoing skimming of the pittances of the reality impaired was simple. Each day, he opened the envelopes, typed the return addresses into the computer and attached the labels to the right packages. Then he carried the outgoing mail on a large dolly down to the post office in the lobby of this building, brought up the next batch of suckers, and carried the checks to the inner office of J.C. Taylor, who'd originally thought up all this stuff and would give him twenty percent of the intake simply for doing the clerical work — usually between seven and eleven hundred a week.

He'd been at this scam since July, when he'd first come to Manhattan out of Long Island, fresh out of high school and convinced he was the best con artist of all time, until J.C. saw through him in a New York minute but gave him this job anyway, for which he would be forever grateful. Also, it had already led a bit to even better things.

He was thinking about those better things, feeling sorry again that Stan Murch's idea at the O.J. the other night had been such a loser, because it was time to pick up a little extra coinage here and there before winter set in, when the hall door opened and, before Judson could do his spiel— "J.C. Taylor isn't in at the moment, have you an appointment, I'm terribly sorry" — Stan Murch himself walked in. He shut the door behind himself, nodded at Judson, and said, "Harya."

"Hi."

"I was in the neighborhood."

Of the seventh floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower on Fifth Avenue near St. Patrick's Cathedral? Sure. "Glad you could drop by," Judson said.

There were chairs in this small crowded room, other than the one at the desk where Judson sat, but they were all piled high with books, either detective or sex. Stan looked around, accepted reality, and leaned back against a narrow clear spot of wall beside the door. Folding his arms, he said, "That was really too bad about the other night."

"Yeah, it was."

"I just had the feeling, you know, the guys didn't quite get the concept."

"I had that feeling, too."

"You in particular," Stan said. "A bright young guy, not stuck with old-fashioned thinking."

"Well, it just seemed to me," Judson said, wanting to get out of this without acknowledging there was anything to get out of, "the other guys had a lot more expertise than me, so I oughta go along with the way they saw things."

"I got a certain expertise, too, you know," Stan said, and looked as though he were thinking about getting irritated.

"Driving expertise, Stan," Judson said. "You got the most driving expertise I ever saw in my life."

"Well, yeah," Stan said, but would not be deflected. "On the other hand," he said, and the inner door opened.

They both turned to look as J.C. herself walked in from her office, saying, "I heard voices. Hello, Stan. Keeping my staff from their work?" A striking if tough-looking brunette of around thirty, who moved in a style somewhere between a runway model's strut and a cheetah's lope, J.C., when she came into a room, particularly dressed as now in pink peasant blouse and a short black leather skirt and heeled sandals with black leather straps twining halfway up to the knee, it was impossible to look away.

Stan didn't even try. "Just exchanging a word or two, J.C.," he said. "Exercising our chins."

"Talking about the golden dome?" J.C. asked him.

Stan didn't like that. "Oh, Tiny told you," he guessed, Tiny Bulcher being J.C.'s roommate somewhere around town, a pairing that seemed to those who knew them to have been made, if not in Heaven, possibly in Marvel Comics.

"Tiny told me," she agreed. "He said it was the dumbest idea he'd heard since Lucky Finnegan decided to walk from the Bronx to Brooklyn stepping only on the third rail." To Judson she explained, "Lucky was very proud of his sense of balance."

"If no other sense," Stan said.

Judson said, "Somehow, I have the feeling he didn't make it."

"They're trying to find another nickname for him," J.C. said. "Something about barbeque."

"The golden dome," Stan said, his eye being on it, "is not as dumb an idea as some people think it is."

J.C. gave him a frank look. "Which people, Stan, don't think it's a dumb idea?"

"Me for one," he said. "My Mom, for two." J.C. pointed a scarlet-tipped finger at him. "Do not get your Mom involved."

"I'm just saying."

Judson said, "It's too bad John couldn't be there to hear the idea."

The silence that followed that remark was so extreme that both Judson and J.C. bent deeply suspicious frowns on Stan, to find him red-faced and struggling to find a deflecting comment. J.C. said, "You told him."

"We had a preliminary conversation on the subject, yes."

J.C. said, "And he hated it."

"It's true he doesn't yet see the potential," Stan said. "So all I was gonna suggest to Judson here, let's drive out, drive along the Belt, take a look at it, gleaming there beside the highway, it's like the dome of gold at the end of the rainbow."

Judson said, "I think that was a pot."

"A dome is a pot," Stan said. "Upside down."

"It is true," J.C. said, "that Judson here is a beardless youth—"

"What? I shave!"

"— but that doesn't mean he's green between the ears."

"Thank you, J.C."

J.C. considered what she was going to say next, as she hitched a hip onto the corner of the desk. "You know how it is sometimes," she said, "you see a very beautiful, very desirable woman, and man, how you'd like to get your hands on that?"

They both nodded.

"And then you find out," J.C. said, "she's unobtainable. That's all, just unobtainable. You know what I mean?"

They both nodded.

"So you feel sad a little while," she said, and they both nodded, "but then you move on, something else grabs your eye, all you've got left is a little nostalgic feeling for the never-happened," and they both nodded, and she said, "Stan, that's what that dome is. You saw it, you lusted after it, you tried to figure out how to get your hands on it, but it's just not obtainable. Try to think about something else."

The silence this time was more contemplative, and Judson deliberately gazed the other way while Stan worked his way through the seven stages of loss, or however many of those stages there are.

"Well," Stan said, at last, and Judson dared to look at him, and Stan had a recovered look on his face. "I guess for a while," he said, "I'll be taking some alternate route."

16

IT TURNED OUT Mr. Hemlow's compound wasn't upstate after all, but upstate plus, which meant, having driven straight north out of the city up through New York State for more than two hours, they suddenly veered off to the right oblique, like a basketball forward going in for a layup, and here they were in Massachusetts. And still not there.

Long before Massachusetts, Dortmunder had come to the realization that the only way he was going to survive this trip was by not sitting on the floor, which was bonier than it had seemed at first and also did a certain amount of jolting and juking, less noticeable to people up there on the comfortable upholstery. His alternative, after several failed experiments, was to lie on his back on the floor and stretch his legs out, so that his ankles were more or less between the ankles of Eppick and Kelp. In that position, left arm under his head for a pillow, he could feel foolish but also believe he would somehow live through all this.

Being on the floor like that, he didn't get to see a lot of the scenery go by, nor to participate much in the conversation proceeding above him, though he could certainly hear everything those two had to say to one another. After an early period of parry-and-feint, in which Eppick tried to interrogate Kelp while pretending he wasn't doing any such thing, and Kelp pretended to answer all those questions without ever actually conveying any solid information — much like a politician at a press conference — they settled into their anecdotage, each telling little incidents from other people's lives, never their own. "A guy I know once—" and so on. Eppick's little tales tended to finish with the miscreant in handcuffs, while Kelp's had the rascal scampering over the rooftops to safety, but they obviously both enjoyed the exercise and each other.

From time to time, in order to give his cramping left arm a rest, Dortmunder would roll over onto his right side, use his bent right arm beneath his head as a pillow, and let the twinging left arm lie straight down his side. At those times, he was in even less contact with the rest of the world, so much so that, at one point, he actually fell asleep, though he would have said that was impossible. That is, before—

"Snr—? Wha?"

"We're here, John," Eppick said, and stopped poking Dortmunder's shins with his toe.

Dortmunder sat up, incautiously, became painfully aware of many of his body parts, and braced himself against the floor, which was not vibrating.

The limo had stopped. Blinking gummy eyes, Dortmunder looked past the looming forms of Eppick and Kelp, and saw the steering wheel. Where was the chauffeur? Whatsit, Pembroke.

Oh. Out there in the woods.

They were on a dirt road now, surrounded by huge Christmas trees, and when Dortmunder twisted around — ouch — he saw out the back window that they were very close to some sort of paved road, on which, as he watched, a truck piled high with monster logs went rolling by.

Meanwhile, this dirt road had come to a metal gate in a simple three-strand wire fence extending away to left and right into the sweeping lower branches of the Christmas trees. What Pembroke was doing now was working at two padlocks holding the halves of the gate shut.

Watching Pembroke at it, Dortmunder thought, that doesn't look very high-tech to me.

Kelp said, "That doesn't look very high-tech to me."

"It doesn't have to," Eppick said, and pointed. "See those square white metal plates at every post? Those'll be the notices. This is an electrified fence."

"Oh," Kelp said.

"It won't kill you," Eppick said, "but it will make you change your mind pretty quick."

Now Pembroke was walking the two sides of the gate open, first to the right, then to the left. Beyond the opening, the dirt road angled rightward and almost immediately disappeared among those big dark tree branches.

Pembroke slid back behind the wheel, drove forward past the gate, got out, shut the parts of the gate behind him but didn't refasten the padlocks, got back into the limo and started them slowly forward onto this private land.

As they drove, Eppick twisted around frontward to say, "Pembroke, a question."

«Sir,» Pembroke said, but kept his eye on the road curving back and forth ahead of them, nothing visible now but long curving green branches of pine needles and this well-maintained dirt road.

Eppick said, "Yesterday, Mr. Hemlow called this the compound. How big is it?"

"In land, sir?"

"Well, yeah, in land."

"I believe, sir," Pembroke said, while steering massively left and massively right, using his whole upper body as though this were a toboggan on fresh snow, "the compound consists of just under thirteen hundred acres."

"And the whole thing is circled with electric fence?"

"And alarmed, sir, yes."

"Alarmed?" Eppick sounded impressed. "Where's the alarm go off?"

"Boston, sir."

Less impressed, Eppick said, "Boston? That's the other end of the state."

"It is the capital of Massachusetts, sir. Orders received from Boston, by e-mail or fax, are acted upon much more rapidly than orders received from Great Barrington."

"Oh, I get it," Eppick said. "And is that back there the only entrance?"

"Oh, no, sir. The staff entrance is around to the other side of the hill."

"Staff entrance," Eppick echoed. "Staff entrance into this… forest."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Pembroke."

"Sir."

Eppick faced the others. "Pretty good," he said.

Dortmunder had decided not to lie down any more, no matter what happened. Seated on the floor, semi-braced against the right door, with his left hand stiff-armed to the floor, he felt the limo sway to and fro as they continued their slow and steady serpentine progress through the forest, the road now tending more or less steadily uphill.

All these pine trees, and all so gigantic. It was like driving through a magic forest in a fairy tale. Dortmunder had just thought of that fanciful idea when the limo rounded yet another spreading tree, and in front of them appeared what at first looked to be several truckloads of dark brown shingles dumped in a pile in a clearing in the forest, but which, on further study, proved to be a sprawling three-story wood-shingle house with dark green window frames and a dark green shingle roof, as though it were more plant than structure and had grown in this place. A broad veranda girdled the house, both inviting and secretive.

To the right of this building was a pocket version of itself, being a garage with three green wooden doors, and this was where the dirt road became blacktop, opened to embrace all three doors, and stopped. To right and left, in among the trees, two more structures could be seen, also pretending to be abandoned piles of shingles, both of them smaller than the main house but larger than the garage.

As Pembroke angled the limo toward the garage door nearest the main house, Eppick said, "Those other buildings guesthouses?"

"On the left, sir. On the right is staff quarters."

"Who lives here now?"

"Oh, no one, sir." Pembroke stopped the limo and switched off the engine. "There has been no one on the property, sir," he said, "since the last time Mr. and Mrs. Hemlow attended a concert at Tanglewood more than three years ago. That would have been in August, sir."

17

BRADY TRIED TO find his place in the Kama Sutra even while Nessa kept on galloping beneath him at cheetah speed, putting him in a position similar to the person who has to rub his belly and pat his forehead at the same time. Got it; that page! Brady bent to his lesson, and Nessa abruptly stopped.

Brady reared back. "Already? No!"

An urgent hand reached around behind her to grasp his hip. "A car!" she cried, her words only half muffled by the pillow.

Now he too heard it, the throaty purr of some expensive automobile rolling up toward the house. Flinging the Kama Sutra away, he leaped off the bed and ran across the large master bedroom toward the front windows, as behind him Nessa scrambled into her clothes.

A long sleek black limousine rolled to a stop at the garage door behind which Brady's battered Honda Civic sat, as Brady peeked around the curtain. The car doors opened down there and four men climbed out, one at first on hands and knees until two of the others helped him up. The one from the front seat in the chauffeur's hat would be a chauffeur, and he's the one who led the others toward the house, taking a key ring from his pocket.

The door wasn't locked! Racing back across the room, grabbing his jeans from the floor but nothing else, Brady shrilly whispered, "Hide everything!" and tore out to the hall as behind him Nessa, already hiding the Kama Sutra under a pillow, wailed, "Oh, Brady!"

No time. Out Brady went, and down the broad staircase to the living room three steps at a time, naked as he usually was when around Nessa, his jeans flapping in the air behind him. Across the living room he dashed, jeans hand behind him, free hand reaching out ahead, and got to the door and snapped the lock just as he heard the first footsteps echo across the veranda.

Pausing one millisecond, his back against the door, to pull on his jeans and study the living room, at first he saw nothing out of place, but then, there it was, a beer bottle he'd left behind on the coffee table after dinner last night.

Running again, he arced past the coffee table and grabbed the bottle on the fly, as he heard the key in the front door lock and heard the doorknob turn. The door started to open, and through the doorway he went, and hurtled down the broad corridor to the kitchen, the only other room on the ground floor that would contain evidence of their intrusion.

A voice behind him, back in the living roam: "Well, this is some rustic."

Who were those people? They come here, they have a chauffeur, they have keys, but they've never seen that incredible living room before?

It was, that living room, as Brady would agree, some rustic, and so was the rest of the house. The living room, thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep, with a huge stone fireplace on one end wall, was two stories high, with a cathedral ceiling, the whole thing done in rough wood, the beams with the bark still on, the walls rough-surfaced boards, the plank floor dotted with old Navajo rugs, the furniture large, deep, comfortable, what God would buy for His own weekend place. Suspended above it all was a huge chandelier that pretended to be a whole lot of kerosene lamps with glass chimneys but was actually electrified and on a dimmer.

Brady had run to the kitchen to try to clean it up before they came back here, but now his curiosity was aroused. He stood an instant, not knowing whether to sneak back and listen or proceed with his kitchen police, when the kitchen's side door opened and Nessa appeared, dressed, having come down the back stairs.

Good. "Clean it!" he whispered, waving at the not-clean kitchen — they tended to go to bed immediately after meals, though they knew they shouldn't — and tiptoed back down the corridor, now hearing a second voice say, with a kind of weary seen-everything sound, "I guess this is what you call your compound."

A third voice, brisk, in charge, said, "Upstairs should be the best place to stash something."

What? Brady kept even closer, just out of their sight. Meanwhile, the second voice said, "No, it isn't."

There was a little pause then, that might have been uncomfortable, and the third voice said, "Pembroke, why don't you wait in the car?"

"Sir."

Nobody spoke then until the front door opened and closed, and then the take-charge third voice said, "Upstairs. Farther from the doors and windows. More hiding places."

"Too heavy," said the weary second voice, "for one guy to lift."

"Oh."

"Don't worry, Johnny," the first voice chimed in, much the most chipper of them, "we'll find a good spot somewhere down here."

"Then I suggest," the third voice said, as though trying to recapture command here, "we might just as well sit over there by the fireplace a few minutes and think about it."

"Fine idea."

"Sure."

Oh, good, Brady thought, and, scampered back to the kitchen, where Nessa was hurriedly shoving used plates, pots, silver, cups, glasses and cereal bowls into cupboards, drawers and the broom closet. "Stop!" he whispered. "Not there."

In just as harsh a whisper, Nessa said, "Brady, we've got to hide all this."

"Upstairs."

"What?"

"They're not going upstairs. They're looking for a place down here to hide something, so they'll open everything, and they're sure to see all that stuff. Carry it all up, just out of sight up the stairs, and I'll keep an eye on them, warn you when they're coming."

"How come I get the dirty job?" she demanded, but he'd already fleet-footed away again, this time peeking around the doorway to see the trio at their ease on the armchairs at the far end of the living room, looking very much like a genre painting of the day the mob broke into the Winter Palace.

Brady, a mob of one, sat on the floor by the doorway and listened while they had a little conversation out there, saying absolutely nothing else of interest, like what it was they wanted to hide and why they wanted to hide it. But that was okay. Brady had all the time in the world.

Brady Hogan and Vanessa Arkdorp were both seventeen, both born and raised in the town of Nukumbuts, NE (known to the local high school wags as Numbnuts), each aware of the other living a mere three blocks away but not making much of it until this past June when, at the town swimming beach on the Gillespie River (from a forgotten and generally unpronouncable Plains Indian name), they truly noticed one another for the very first time and immediately knew what their future was going to be: each other.

It was all very easy during summer vacation. Brady had a part-time job at the Wal-Mart, which took up little of his attention, but which he had to have because the family had fallen on hard times since Brady's father had been laid off from the grain processor four years ago. Nobody else blamed Brady's father for what was, after all, merely the fickle finger of economic fate, the roulette wheel of capitalism rolling on past your number, but Brady's father so thoroughly and obviously blamed himself that after some time everybody else began to agree with him, which meant he was never considered for any of the few jobs that did open up, and life was less than tranquil at the Hogan house these years.

Also, neither Brady nor Nessa was the scholarly type; once you knew your numbers and your alphabet, school was, face it, a drag. They were only going back for their senior year at Central Middle Combined High (twenty-seven minutes by bus, twice a day) because all of the parents they knew had an unreasoning horror of the word "dropout," as though it meant something similar to "vampire."

The principal physical result of Brady's Wal-Mart job was this very used Honda Civic, which he operated over the summer both to go to and from work and to boff Nessa on just about every bit of empty ground in the northeast part of the state. So, when the idea first occurred to them — both simultaneously, it seemed — that they might go somewhere else in the world in September other than back to dear old Central Middle Combined, the first asset they had was Brady's little red car, and the second asset was all the cash they could find in their parents' homes, which wasn't much. And other assets?

Well, principally, Brady's deftness. He'd never been in trouble, not in real trouble, though there'd been a few close calls. But back when he was ten years old he first realized he could get through just about any lock there was in Numbnuts, and did, for years, partly for fun and partly for profit (CDs, candy, beer, condoms). With his dexterity, and the Honda; and Nessa at his side, was he a world-beater or what? Guess.

Right now, nobody in their families had any idea where they were. In fact, nobody in the whole world had any idea where they were. Starting in early September, they'd just roamed at first, south and east, and then north and east, and eventually just liked the look of the Massachusetts pine forests. Still, they might have moved on had they not stumbled upon this electric fence in the woods.

Naturally, as you would, as I would, they asked each other why anybody would put up an electric fence in the woods. They followed the fence to a gate — which was, in fact, the staff entrance — and from there found the big house with the little houses around it. The outbuildings were all shut down, but the big house had water and electricity and even useful food in a freezer, as though the owner hadn't realized he wouldn't be coming back, and maybe still didn't know it. They had made good use of the freezer food, and supplemented it by little late-night visits to towns fifteen and twenty miles away. They'd been here three weeks now, in a place that, from the dust all over everything when they arrived, had not been occupied for years and showed no signs of potential future occupancy as well. It was all theirs. Heaven, they called it, and they were probably right.

But now their heaven had been invaded by some very dubious people lounging around in the big living room by the big fireplace, talking about where to hide whatever it was. Which, he noticed, whatever it was, they didn't have it here with them. From what they said to one another, this trip was to find the hiding place, then another trip would be to bring the thing itself. Kind of roundabout, Brady thought, but that was their business.

Which they weren't in much hurry to get done and over with, so Brady and Nessa could go back to bed. They just talked along, and then the one that thought he was in charge, that the others called Johnny, finally said, "What I've been thinking, you want to hide something, why not the kitchen? Lots of places there."

The weary one said, "We don't know how big this is yet, so how do we know what size place we gotta put it?"

"Just big enough," Johnny said. "I mean, how big could it be?"

"The purloined letter," the chipper one said.

Both of the others seemed stymied by that. Johnny finally said, "Was that supposed to be something?"

"Short story by Edgar Allan Poe," the chipper one said. "Whatsamatta, Johnny, you never went to high school?"

"Yeah, that's all right," Johnny said. "What's this letter? We're not talking about a letter."

So what, Brady asked, are you talking about?

"We're talking about something where you hide it," the chipper one told him, "that nobody's gonna find it. In the story, it's a letter. And where the guy hid it, turns out, was right there on the dresser, where nobody's gonna see it because what they're looking for is something hidden."

"Crap," Johnny announced.

The weary one said, "You know, Johnny, maybe not. You got something, you can't find it, turns out, it's right in front of you. Happens all the time."

"Nobody's gonna look at that set," Johnny insisted, "and not notice it."

Set? What the hell is it? Brady was about to go out and ask, unable to stand it any more.

But then the chipper one said, "How about this? We get it. On the way up here, we get cans of spray paint, black enamel and red enamel. We paint 'em all over, this team red, this team black, nobody sees any gold, nobody sees any jewels, it just looks like any chess set. We can leave it right out, like on that big table over there with all that other stuff."

Gold. Jewels. Any chess set.

Tiptoeing as fast as the first night he ever sneaked into Nessa's house back in Numbnuts, Brady made his way to the second floor, where Nessa, tired and sweaty, was just finished bringing all their dirty used stuff up from the kitchen. "Baby!" he whispered, exulting. "We're in!"

"They still here?"

"Just for a little while. Then we can go back to bed and I'll tell you everything."

"Oh, no."

This being the first time Nessa had ever said no to the idea of going back to bed, Brady stumbled to a halt on his way to the front window to watch and wait for the interlopers' departure, turned back, and said, "What?"

She gestured. Dirty kitchen detritus was all over the upstairs hall floor. "The first thing we're gonna do," she said, "is clean up this stuff. We can't go on living like this, Brady, we gotta have it neater around us."

There were warning signs in that sentence, but Brady was too distracted by two different kinds of lust to notice them. "You're right, baby," he said, and proceeded to the window, and grinned back at her. "Comere and I'll tell you all about it. We're gonna clean that stuff up because we're gonna stay here for a while. And we're gonna stay here because our ship is comin in."

"What ship?" She came over to the window with deeply furrowed brow.

"Look, there they go," he said, and they watched out the window as the three men headed out for their limo, all talking at the same time.

Nessa said, "Will they be back?"

"Oh, yeah," Brady said, with a big wide grin. "They'll be back. Honey, we're waitin for them to come back."

18

SO FAR AS she knew, Fiona had only seen Livia Northwood Wheeler once in her life, more than a year ago, shortly after she'd been taken on here at Feinberg. She'd had no idea at the time, of course, that Mrs. Wheeler's father had stolen an incredibly valuable property from her own great-grandfather and his friends, but she'd noticed the woman anyway, because Mrs. Wheeler was God knows noticeable, and she'd said at the time to her cubicle buddy Imogen, "Who's that?"

"Livia Northwood Wheeler," Imogen told her. "She's richer than God. In fact, she pretty well thinks of God as a parvenu."

Fiona watched the woman out of sight, Livia headed toward the area of the associates' offices, following one of the secretaries who, like most of the secretaries here, was dressed much more elegantly than the young female lawyers. This Mrs. Livia Northwood Wheeler left in her wake an image of someone who might not actually be richer than God, but who certainly looked older than any deity you might care to mention. A very tall, unbelievably thin, ramrod-straight, hawk-nosed, gaunt-cheeked, laser-eyed creature with a helmet of snow-white hair that gleamed like radiation, she was garbed totally in black and walked with a stiff but determined gait, as though here to foreclose on your property and glad of the opportunity to do so.

That time, Fiona had watched her go with a slight shudder and the thought, "I'm glad she isn't here to see me," an opinion which seemed to be confirmed half an hour later when Mrs. Wheeler, led by the same secretary, marched through once more in the opposite direction, looking as though her session with her lawyer had neither mollified her nor increased her rage; so it must be a steady thing, like a sanctuary candle.

Now it was Friday morning, the day after her meeting with Mr. Dortmunder and the retelling of the story of the stolen chess set, and Fiona was graced with her second viewing of Mrs. Wheeler, this one identical to the first. Into view the lady marched, following a different secretary this time (secretarial turnover was much faster than lawyer turnover), and looking as though that sanctuary candle of discontent burned just as brightly in her breast as ever.

Fiona watched her go, this time armed with her knowledge of their secret and surprising link, and after the woman was out of sight it became impossible to focus her mind back on her work. There was this link, and Fiona found it fascinating. It was as though a character from a history book, a George Washington or a Henry Ford, were to suddenly walk by; wouldn't she want to share a word with the person, just to touch, however tangentially, that history? She would.

Fiona did very little to earn Feinberg's salary the next fifty minutes, but kept an eye on that route among the cubicles, knowing Mrs. Wheeler must eventually pass by once more, on her way out of the building. When at last, an eternity later, it did happen, Mrs. Wheeler again preceded by today's secretary, Fiona immediately leaped to her feet and went after them.

There was always a wait of a minute or two in the reception area before the elevator arrived; that would be her opportunity. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, to speak directly to a client with whom she had no legitimate intercourse, she knew she could even theoretically be fired for what she was about to do, but she simply couldn't help herself. She. had to meet Mrs. Wheeler's eye, she had to hear Mrs. Wheeler's voice, she had to have Mrs. Wheeler herself acknowledge Fiona Hemlow's existence.

There they were, standing in front of the elevator doors. The secretary, Fiona noticed, wasn't even trying to make conversation with this gargoyle, nor did the gargoyle seem to expect much in the way of what, in other circumstances, might be called human contact. Well, she was about to get some.

Striding forward, covering her nervousness and insecurity with a bright smile and a brisk manner, Fiona gazed steadily at Mrs. Wheeler as she crossed the reception area, and just at the instant when the woman became aware of her approach, Fiona exclaimed, with happy surprise, "Mrs. Wheeler?"

The distrust came off the lady like flies off a garbage truck. "Ye-ess?" The voice was a baritone cigarette croak, but with power in it; a carnivore's croak.

"Mrs. Wheeler," Fiona hurried on, "I'm Fiona Hemlow, just a very minor lawyer here, but I did have the opportunity to work on just one tiny corner of your case, and I so hoped some day I would get the chance to tell you how much I admire you."

Even the secretary looked startled at that one, and Mrs. Wheeler, flies rising in clouds, said, "You do?"

"The stand you have taken is so firm," Fiona assured her. "So many people would just give up, would just let themselves be trampled on, but not you."

"Not me," agreed Mrs. Wheeler, grim satisfaction almost melodious in that croak of a voice. Fewer flies were in evidence.

"If I may," Fiona said, "I would just like to shake your hand."

"My hand."

"I don't want anything else, " Fiona assured her, and tried for a girlish-chum sort of chuckle. "I could even get in trouble just by talking to you. But of all the people I've learned about since I came to work here, you're the one I absolutely the most admire. That's why — if it isn't too much — if it isn't an imposition — may I?" And she extended her small right hand, keeping that perky hopeful smile on her face and worshipful gleam in her eye.

Mrs. Wheeler did not take the hand. She didn't even look at it. She said, "If, Miss—"

"Fiona Hemlow."

"If, Miss Hemlow, Tumbril sent you after me to butter me up, please assure him it did no good."

"Oh, no, Mrs.—"

But the elevator had arrived. Without another glance at Fiona or the secretary, Mrs. Wheeler marched into the elevator as though it were the captain's bridge and she were usurping command. Silently, the door slid shut.

The secretary said, "I don't think you ought to tell Jay that."

"I don't think anybody needs to tell — Jay — anything about any of this," Fiona said, and went her way, finding herself for the first time brooding on the whole issue of family feuds that go on generation after generation, and doubting very much that her own family, in such a situation against the Northwood family, would ever be on the winning side.

19

BY SURREPTITIOUSLY RUNNING the last few feet to the limo — not an easy thing to do — Dortmunder managed to get absolute uncontested first shot at the seating. Settling with a sense of beleaguered triumph into that soft and comfortable backward-facing seat, he looked around to see Kelp sliding in next to him and was just as glad he wouldn't have to make conversation with Johnny Eppick the next two hundred miles.

Eppick himself, arriving at the limo one pace too late, smiled benignly in at the two on the bench seat, said, "Enjoy the trip," paused to shut the rear door, then got into the front seat next to Pembroke and said, "We'll go back to New York now."

"I thought we would," Pembroke said, and started the engine.

As the car rolled down the long drive, Kelp, facing that empty rear compartment of the limo, said in a conversational voice, "We'll have to stop somewhere to eat, won't we, Johnny?"

No answer. The glass partition behind Pembroke was half open, but apparently that wasn't enough. Kelp winked at Dortmunder and raised his voice slightly: "Isn't that so, Johnny?"

Still nothing, so Kelp twisted around and spoke directly into the open section of the partition: "Isn't that right, Johnny?"

Eppick's head slued around. "Isn't what right?"

"We'll have to stop for lunch somewhere."

"Sure. Pembroke probably knows a place."

"Let me think," Pembroke said.

Kelp faced front — that is, rear — and said, "So they can't hear us unless we want them to."

Up front, Pembroke and Eppick were in conversation, presumably about lunch, but the words couldn't be made out from back here. Dortmunder said, "You're right, they can't. Is there something we want to say?"

"About that idea of mine "with the chess set."

"The purloined chess set thing," Dortmunder said, and nodded. "That was pretty cute, I gotta say."

"It's more than cute for us," Kelp said.

"It is? How?"

"Once they're all painted red and black enamel," Kelp said, "who's to say that's the real piece or maybe some imitation we slid in, help keep all that gold from going to waste?"

Dortmunder frowned at Kelp's profile, but then, for security reasons of not being overheard, he faced the rear of the limo again as he said, "You're acting as though we're gonna get that thing."

"Never say die," Kelp advised.

"Die," Dortmunder said. "We're not gonna get into that vault."

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it," Kelp told him. "In the meantime, you gotta talk to that granddaughter again."

"I already asked her for building plans," Dortmunder said. "She doesn't think she can get them."

"They'd be nice, too," Kelp said, "but what I'm thinking about is pictures of the chess set."

"Pictures?"

"It's been on display. It's part of a court case. There are gonna be pictures. If we wanna bring in a couple ringers on the day, we got to know what they look like."

"They look like chess pieces in a vault under a bank," Dortmunder guessed.

"Well, you'll talk to the granddaughter," Kelp said. "Can't do any harm."

The food in New England was part hard black and part soft white. Fortunately, they carried national brands of beer in the dark-brown-laminated, green-glass-globed, black-flounce-skirted-waitress imitation Klondike/Yukon something or other where they broke their journey, so starvation was held at bay.

"I like that seat, I think I'll keep it the rest of the trip," Dortmunder announced grimly when they left the scene of their designer lunch, and nobody even argued, so he got to sit up in the balcony with Kelp the whole rest of the way.

As they neared Riverside Drive, Eppick twisted around to the space in the partition and said, "You two don't have to see Mr. Hemlow. I'll report."

Grinning, Kelp said, "Gonna tell him the enamel chess set was your idea?"

Eppick grinned right back. "What do you think?"

"I think," Kelp said, "Pembroke can drop us off downtown."

Eppick frowned a little, not sure that was part of the deal, but Pembroke, professional eyes remaining on the road, said, "Of course, sir," so that was all right.

Soon they were easing to a stop at the curb in front of Mr. Hemlow's building, and if the uniformed doorman who came trotting out and down the steps to open first the rear — "Not us, him," Kelp said — and then the front door had any attitude toward what was coming out of this particular limousine, it didn't show on his face.

Eppick, before departure, looked meaningfully back at Dortmunder and said, "You'll keep in touch. Progress, and all that."

"Oh, sure."

Pembroke's mild gaze was on them in the rearview mirror: "Sirs?"

"I'm the first stop," Kelp told him. "The West Thirties."

"Sir."

They set off, and Kelp said, "Not so bad, go home by limo."

"They'll probably raise my rent," Dortmunder said.

Kelp nodded at the floor. "Is that as comfortable down there as it looks?"

"Try it," Dortmunder suggested.

20

WHEN HER CUBICLE phone rang at seven-thirty, Fiona assumed it was a wrong number, or some other kind of mistake. Who would call her at the office, particularly after working hours? Certainly not Brian, who would always wait for her to phone him so he could put on tonight's gourmet dinner. Nor would it be any of her friends or relatives, who would never phone her at work, not even during the business day.

Ring, it went again, while she tried to think it through. A wrong number would be a distraction, but if she ignored it and let it go on into voice mail, then it would merely be a distraction postponed. In fact, having rung once — twice now — it was already a distraction, taking her away from the implications of mortmain as applied to this particular real estate bequest in this thinned-out old upstate Patroon family.

Ring. That was three; after four, it would go to voice mail.

And what if Brian had been hit by a taxi or something and it was the hospital calling, needing to know his blood type or whatever? Not that she knew his blood type, and not that the hospital wouldn't be able to work it out for themselves, but nevertheless, just before the fourth ring that would have sent the call irrevocably down that black vertical chute into the echoless dungeon of voice mail, Fiona snapped up the receiver with her left hand, hit the button with her right, and was reaching for a pen as she said, "Fiona Hemlow."

"Hey, you're still there." The voice was vaguely familiar, a little rough, not the sort of person she would know.

Pen down, finger hovering over the button that would end this call, she said, "Who's that?"

"John. You know, yesterday we talked. Hold on." Away from the phone he said, "Gimme a minute here, do you mind? I got my party." Speaking to Fiona again, he said, "You know, in your office yesterday."

"Oh, John, yes, of course," she said, that dogged pessimistic face clear in her mind now, matching up perfectly with that weary voice. "You wanted to talk to me?"

"Well, not on the phone, you know, not exactly. I been waiting outside here—"

"What? Outside this building?"

"Yeah. That's where you are, right? I thought, you come out, we could have a talk while we walk. Hold on." Off, he said, "I'm being polite. You be polite." Back, he said, "I was beginning to think, maybe you went home early—"

"Never."

"So you go home late."

"Always."

"How late? I mean, instead of hang around, I could come back— Hold on." Off, he said, "You got a watch?" There was some sort of muffled complaint and then he said, "I don't want your watch, I wanna know what time it is."

"It's seven-thirty," Fiona said.

"See?" he said, off. "She knows what time it is, it's seven-thirty."

Fiona said, "How long have you been waiting?"

"Since five. You'd be surprised, you know, how many people come out of these buildings at five. So finally, I figured, I better check this here, so I borrowed this cell phone—" Off. "I borrowed it, you're getting it back."

"I'll come down now," Fiona said.

The inadvertent supplier of the cell phone was long gone when Fiona reached the street, where John Dortmunder leaned against the front of the building like a small gray rebuttal to all the work ethic within. Approaching, she said, "Mr. Dortmunder, I—"

"John, okay?" he said. "Mr. Dortmunder makes me nervous. The only time I'm Mr. Dortmunder is when I'm being arraigned."

"All right, then," she said. "You're John, and I'm Fiona."

"It's a deal," he said. "Which way you walk?"

"Over to Broadway and up to the subway."

"Okay, we'll do it."

They got to the corner and had to wait for the light, during which he said, "Mainly what I want is pictures."

She couldn't think of what. "Pictures?"

"Of the thing. The thing in the vault."

"Oh," she said. "The chess set."

For some reason, he didn't like to hear those words spoken out in public. "Yeah, yeah, that's it," he said, and patted the air downward in front of himself as though wanting to tell her to pipe down without being rude about it. All at once, she was aware that other people, all around them, were standing here waiting for the light to change, and she piped down.

WALK. They walked.

"Well, of course we have pictures of it," she said, more quietly, as they crossed Fifth Avenue. "The entire— Well, the entire you-know was photographed and measured when the law firms accepted custody."

"Measured; that's good, too."

"I could e-mail it all to you," she said.

"No, you couldn't."

They had reached the other curb, where Fiona stopped, waited for the nearby walkers to move on, and said, "I could print it out for you."

"Oh, yeah?"

"That's better anyway. Absolutely no record."

"No record, that's good."

"We'll go back to the office," she decided, and they turned around.

DON'T WALK.

She said, "So you're really going to go ahead and do this, even though you hate everything about the vault?"

"Your grandfather and the other guy like to see forward motion," he told her. "I'm doing what I can to keep everybody happy."

WALK.

Shouldn't he be angry about this situation? Fiona felt he should certainly be angry at her, if not her grandfather, for making this whole thing happen. And yet, he just seemed fatalistic and tired, trying not to go into that vault but sliding there inexorably, after just that one push from her. "I'm sorry, John," she said.

"It isn't you," he said. "What I'm coming to a realization about," he said, as she withdrew from her wallet the card that would let her back into the C&I International building, "is, this is all the mistakes of my past life, coming back to haunt me. In order to pay for all those little misdemeanors and all those little lapses from all the time before I reformed, I gotta do an illegal entry into a bank vault that's impossible to get into and even if you could get into it, which you can't, doubly impossible to get out of, carrying a weight. Half a weight."

During this speech, Fiona had carded them into the building and now led the way toward the elevators, but "Hold on," he said.

Surprised, she turned to see him standing still in the gleaming high-ceilinged gray marble lobby. "Did you want something? The snack shop's closed."

"I wanted to look at it," he said.

"Oh."

So they both looked at the lobby, Fiona trying to see it now through John Dortmunder's eyes, seeing it for the first time, not her own eyes which hadn't really seen the lobby as anything but another blank part of her daily commute for over a year.

The place was very different through his eyes. On their left was the chest-high security station with the wall-mounted TV monitors behind it and the two gray-uniformed security men on duty, whom she'd barely noticed all this time because they knew and recognized her so that she never since the first week or so had had to show her Feinberg ID. But there they were nevertheless, looking in Fiona and John's direction with casual interest because they weren't at this moment in transit across the lobby but simply standing in one place, not a normal lobby occurrence.

What else? The three shops on their right with pane glass windows facing the lobby, selling (1) snacks and reading matter, (2) luggage, and (3) stationery and computer software, were all closed now, though well-lit within.

Across the rear wall of the lobby were the brushed-steel doors of the elevators. To their left was the marked door to the staircase, for emergencies, and to the right of the elevator doors was another brushed-steel door that Fiona had never noticed before. Twice a day she'd passed it, and never noticed.

With a silent glance at her, John walked toward the rear of the lobby. Fiona followed, knowing where he was headed. "I'll get the elevator."

"Good."

They both angled closer to that door on the right, him more so than her, but neither went directly to it, because after all two security men behind them had nothing better to do than watch people moving. However, she was close enough to see — so he must see it, too — that discreet gold letters on the door said NO ADMITTANCE and that it had a card slot like all the other entry card slots in her life, but no doorknob.

"Uh huh," he said, and she carded for the elevator.

Putting the card away in her wallet, she said, "You say you reformed?"

"Right."

"When was that?"

"When I met your grandfather."

"That's what I thought," she said, and the elevator door slid open.

Fiona's access to the Feinberg computer system was not total — there were distant tunnels of data, mostly involving money or foreign linkages, that required passwords beyond her station in life — but much of Feinberg's knowledge was available to her. Being a wee beastie in these offices meant being a utility infielder, on tap to assist any of the more important associates who might need a little delving and precedent hunting done, so her access had to be broad and deep, so quite naturally included the files on the chess set known in the court papers as Chicago Chess Set, its official provenance not going farther back than Alfred X. Northwood's long-ago train journey from that city to New York, chess set in tow.

"Chicago Chess Set," she read from the screen. "Yes, here it is. How much of it do you want?"

"All of it," he said, looking at the cover sheet on the screen, which showed the chess set brightly lit on a black velvet background, set up and waiting, gleaming, looking exactly like something created by royal gold-lust.

"All of it?" She reared back to look at him. "You can't want all of it. The court hearings? There are hundreds of pages on this item of the suits, all by themselves, maybe thousands. You couldn't read all that."

"No, I don't wanna read all that," he said. "I want all the pictures and all the measurements."

"All right, let's see—" She checked the table of contents. "There's individual photos of the pieces—"

"Sounds good."

"Pages of dimensions of each piece."

"Not bad."

"Shots from different angles in different lighting."

"Lay it on me."

"In all," she said, "sixty-four pages."

"I'll borrow an envelope," he said.

Later that evening, over burritos with shrimp and rice — very nice — at their table in their candlelit big room, she told Brian about her latest encounter with John Dortmunder, and he laughed and said, "Is he really gonna try to go down in there and get that thing?"

"Well, he doesn't want to," she said, "but it looks like my grandfather and that other man are pressing him very hard. I just keep hoping they'll all realize it's just impossible and give it up."

"Hard to give up all that gold," Brian said. "I'd know how to get down in that vault."

"You would? How?"

"Say I'm shooting a documentary," he said. "Movie people can get in anywhere. 'Hi, we're doing a Discovery Channel special on bank vaults. How did you spell your name again? You're right in."

Laughing around her burrito, she said, "Oh, Brian, I don't think Mr. Dortmunder could convince anybody he was making a movie for the Discovery Channel."

"No, probably not," Brian said. His eyes glittered just slightly in the candlelight. "Too bad."

21

SATURDAY MORNING, AFTER May left for the Safeway, Dortmunder sat at the kitchen table and spread out the photos and spec sheets he'd been given by Fiona Hemlow last night. The chess set turned out to be a little smaller than he'd imagined, but also heavier: 680 pounds. Yeah, that would take more than one guy.

According to what it said on the description sheets, the chess pieces weren't actually gold all the way through, which would make them even heavier, but gold poured into forms around wood dowels, with three to five jewels set into each piece to make the two teams: pearls for the white gang, rubies for the red. The kings and queens were just under four inches tall, the others shorter. The gold had been shaped with extreme delicacy and care, as you would do if you were working for an absolute monarch.

Dortmunder had been looking at the pictures and reading the specs about half an hour when the phone rang, over there on the wall next to the refrigerator. It was going to be Andy Kelp, of course, and when Dortmunder got to his feet and walked to the phone and said into it, "Harya," it was.

"What's happening?"

"Well, I got the pictures," he said, reluctantly, looking over at the papers spread out on the table. He knew it was dumb to want to save that little trove of information for himself, but there it was.

"The pictures? Already?"

"And the specs, sizes, all that."

"I'll be right there," Kelp said, and was, walking into the kitchen, saying, "I didn't want to disturb you with the bell."

"I appreciate that," Dortmunder said. "How are my door locks holding up?"

"Oh, they're fine," Kelp assured him. "Let's see what we got here."

"One little puzzle," Dortmunder said.

Kelp had picked up a photo of the complete chess set, but now he looked at Dortmunder. "You mean, aside from how do we get our hands on it?"

"One of the rooks," Dortmunder told him, "is light."

"Light? How do you mean, light?"

Using the photo Kelp was holding, Dortmunder pointed to white king's rook and said, "That one's about three pounds lighter than this one," pointing to white queen's rook, "but that one's the same as the two on the other side."

While Dortmunder riffled through more photos, Kelp stared at the picture of the entire set. "You mean all of these others weigh the same?"

"Almost. There's little tiny differences because there's different jewels in each one. Here, here's the separate pictures of those two. The one on the right there is the light one."

"King's rook," Kelp read the caption at the bottom of the picture and looked at the squat golden castle decorated with four sparkly pearls. "I thought rook meant to cheat somebody."

"Outa three pounds, I know. But one of these pages here uses the word 'rook' and then that thing, that para thing…" He finger-drew in the air the icon of a lying-down smile face.

"I know what you mean," Kelp said.

"Good, (or castle) it says. So that's a word for it."

Kelp bent over the individual pictures of the two white rooks, then leaned back and shook his head. "Maybe," he said, "we'll be able to tell more when we've got 'em in our hands. Heft them."

Dortmunder frowned at him. "Got 'em in our hands? Don't you remember, they're still in that vault. This is just so Eppick and Hemlow think something's happening, but Andy, nothing is happening."

"I don't know why you're so negative," Kelp told him. "Look at these pictures. Every day, we get closer."

"Yeah, and I know to what," Dortmunder said, and the phone rang. "That's probably Eppick now," he said, getting to his feet. "Wanting to know is it time to send the arresting officers."

"Give the man credit for a little patience," Kelp suggested.

Dortmunder barked into the phone and Stan Murch's voice said, "The kid and I just finished breakfast, in a place over by his place."

"That's nice," Dortmunder said, and told Kelp, "Stan and Judson just had breakfast together."

"Why's he telling you that?"

"We didn't get there yet," Dortmunder said, and into the phone he said, "Why are you telling me that? This isn't something else about that dome, is it?"

"No, no," Stan said. "I gave that up."

"Good."

"Kind of like a lost love."

"Oh, yeah?"

"I'm traveling strictly Flatbush Avenue these days."

"Well, it's still Brooklyn."

"But no dome. Listen, the kid and me," Stan said, "were wondering, since the dome thing's no good, did you maybe have something going on with that cop."

"Mostly," Dortmunder said, "he's got something going on with me."

"If we could help—"

"I'm beyond help."

Kelp said, "Tell them come over. The more brains the merrier."

"Andy says you should come over to my place, bring your brains."

"We'll be right there," Stan said, and they were, but they used the traditional entry method of ringing the street doorbell, and it so happened they did so just as the phone rang again.

"You get the phone," Kelp suggested, standing, "and I'll get the door."

"Good." Dortmunder crossed to the phone and said, "Harya," into it as Kelp pressed the release button on the wall and walked away down the hall to wait for the arrivals to climb the two flights.

A voice that could only belong to Tiny Bulcher said, "Dortmunder, I worry about you."

"Good," Dortmunder said. "I wouldn't want to worry about me all alone."

"You having trouble with that cop?"

"Yes. Listen, Andy's here and now Stan and Judson are just showing up."

"You're having a meeting without me?"

"It didn't start out to be a meeting. People just keep showing up, like a wake. You wanna come over?"

"I'll be right there," Tiny said, and was.

There were four chairs around the kitchen table, and Judson could sit on the radiator, so once Tiny had been added to the mix they were all more or less comfortable. Since Dortmunder had just finished describing the current situation to Stan and Judson, Kelp did the honors with Tiny, including a description of Eppick's apparently broad and entirely unnecessary background data bank on everybody in the room.

"There are people," Tiny commented, "who, when they retire, they oughta retire."

"Tiny," Dortmunder said, "the way it looks, I'm the only one he's really putting the pressure on. When I don't get that chess set, I'm the one he's gonna blame, nobody else."

"San Francisco isn't a bad place to hang out sometimes," Tiny observed.

"I was thinking Chicago," Dortmunder told him, "and Andy suggested Miami, but Eppick knows all about that. He tells me, with all the millions of cops all connected now, he'll find me wherever I go."

Tiny nodded, thinking it over. "It's true," he said. "It's harder to disappear than it used to be in the old days. In the old days, you just burn your fingerprints off with acid and there you are."

"Ow," Judson said. "Wouldn't that hurt?"

"Not for twenty-five years," Tiny told him. "Anyway, you can't burn DNA off. Not and live through it."

Kelp said, "You know, we got another little conundrum here. I know it isn't as important as the main problem—"

"The vault," Dortmunder said.

"That's the problem I was thinking of," Kelp agreed. "Anyway," he told the others, "you see these pictures of these two rooks."

"Those are castles," Stan said.

"Yes, but," Kelp said, "rook is a name for them in chess. Anyway, everything weighs the way it's supposed to, except this one rook here is three pounds lighter than the other rooks."

They all leaned over the pictures, including Judson, who got up from the radiator and came over to stand beside the table, gazing down. Stan said, "They look alike."

"But you see the weight," Kelp said. "They wrote it down right there."

Stan nodded. "Maybe it's a typo."

"This stuff is all pretty careful," Kelp said.

Dortmunder said, "I don't find this as gripping as the main problem."

"No, of course not," Kelp said. "It's just a mystery, that's all."

"No, it isn't," Judson said. "That part's easy."

They all watched him go back to sit on the radiator again. Kelp said, "You know why this one's different."

"Sure." Judson shrugged. "You just got to put yourself in that sergeant's place, Northwood. There he is in Chicago with this thing, very valuable but it weighs almost seven hundred pounds. He's as broke as the other guys, but he's gotta get out of there fast before the platoon gets back. So he has a guy, maybe a jeweler, somebody, make up a fake, looks just like the real thing. That way, he can sell the pearls, sell the gold, get on that train, show up in New York in style and start his wheeling and dealing."

Everybody thought that was brilliant. Tiny said, "Kid, you're an asset."

"Thank you, Tiny."

Judson beamed all over. Since he also looked as though any second he might start to blush, everybody else went back to looking at the pictures and talking to one another, Kelp saying, "So when we do our own little switcheroo, we want to make sure we don't do this guy."

Dortmunder said, "What do you mean, our own switcheroo? We got a vault between us and them, remember?"

Stan said, "I gotta say, from my perspective, it does seem worth the effort."

"Effort isn't the question," Dortmunder said. "The vault is the question."

"So let's ask the kid," Tiny said. "Kid, you solved the mystery of the rook; very good. Here's question number two: How do we get into the vault?"

Judson looked surprised. "We can't," he said.

22

DORTMUNDER JUST SAT there and let the conversation wash over him, like a hurricane over a levee. To have his own conviction of the impregnability of the C&I International vault confirmed by Judson Blint — out of the mouths of babes, as it were — merely put the rat poison on the cake. It was all over, in the immortal words of Charles Willeford, except the paperwork.

The others around the table didn't want to believe it. "There's always a way to do anything," Stan insisted.

"And if there isn't," Kelp said, "you make one up."

"Exactly."

"So make one up," Tiny suggested.

The silence that ensued was brief but telling, before Stan said, "Well, you can't do a bomb scare."

"Nobody," Tiny pointed out, "said you could."

"The idea with a bomb scare," Stan went on, "is they evacuate the building, then you can do what you gotta do, but it doesn't work that way. You try a bomb scare around this town, the building doesn't evacuate, it fills up to the brim, with cops, firemen, insurance adjusters, short con artists, farmers' markets, and documentary filmmakers. So forget the bomb scare."

"I'll do that," Tiny said.

"And you can't overpower the lobby guards," Kelp said, "you know, with handguns and masks and sets of cuffs and all that, on account of the camera surveillance."

"That's too bad," Tiny said. "It sounds like it might've been fun."

"Well, it won't work that way," Kelp advised him.

"So here's a question," Tiny said, and everybody except Dortmunder looked alert. "Let's say," Tiny said, "somebody went in there in disguise, to look like one of the people got the okay to go down to this vault. Not me, one of you guys. In a suit, shine up your shoes, like that."

Kelp said, "I think you gotta show ID."

"ID is not a complete impossible," Tiny said. "For instance, you follow one of the bank execs home one night, out to Connecticut, you come back with the ID, family finds him next morning, healthy but tied up and gagged in a car in a commuter railroad parking lot."

They thought about that, then turned to Dortmunder. Kelp said, "John?"

It was his own house, so he couldn't even go home. He roused himself to say, "Special elevator down from the lobby, special card stick into the elevator door, don't know what extra stuff they got downstairs, but the lobby guards know all the execs or they get fired."

"Also," Judson said, just to sink that boat one more time, "it weighs almost seven hundred pounds. You're gonna look funny carrying that in your suit."

Into the next silence, Stan inserted, "What if—?"

They all, except Dortmunder, looked at him. Kelp said, "And?"

"I was just thinking," Stan said. "About safe-deposit boxes, you know. One of us gets a safe-deposit box, then we got a legitimate reason, go down to the vault."

"I think," Kelp said carefully, "it's a different vault, or a different part of the vault. Am I right, John?"

"Yes," Dortmunder said.

Tiny said, "Dortmunder, I didn't see this place, I don't have it in my mind. We've got a lobby, we've got a bank, what've we got here? Walk me through it."

"It's a big building," Dortmunder told him. "Sixty stories high, half a block wide. The bank branch is on the corner, with its own way in and out. Lobby's in the middle, no door, anyway no public door, between them. On the side of the lobby away from the bank wall you got shops, inside shops, no street doors. At the back of the lobby you got your elevators and the special elevator."

"These lobby guards?"

"On the left, by the wall separates you from the bank."

Tiny nodded. "All very open," he said. "You're not gonna wheel that thing on a dolly across that lobby."

"As," Dortmunder said, "I said."

"Air ducts," Stan said.

Tiny looked at him. "You wanna push a seven-hundred-pound chess set through a building's air ducts? What about when they go vertical?"

Kelp said, "Street repair crew. Set up outside, dig down, run your tunnel under the sidewalk to the—"

"On Fifth Avenue," Judson said.

Kelp paused, frowned deeply, and shook his head. "Never mind."

Stan said, "I know where I can get hold of a helicopter."

Tiny said, "I don't know what you're gonna do with it."

Kelp said, "What if we did set fire to the lobby? We come in dressed like firemen—"

Dortmunder said, "Marble doesn't burn."

The silence this time was uncomfortable from the very beginning, because everybody knew at once it was the final silence, but nobody wanted to be the one to declare the session over, the cure not found. Finally, Judson cleared his throat and said, "You got a nice warm radiator here, but maybe I oughta, I don't know, probably time to…"

"Me, too," Stan said, stretching as though he'd been asleep a long time.

So then everybody moved and stood up and walked around, except Dortmunder, to whom they all said good-bye as though he were somehow both the bereaved and the dearly departed. Dortmunder nodded, but did not stand.

Tiny, on his way out, rested a giant paw on Dortmunder's shoulder, adding to the weight of his burdens, and said, "If you don't like San Francisco, I got another suggestion. Biloxi."

Dortmunder shook his head. "Eppick—"

"I said Biloxi," Tiny reminded him. "Biloxi, Mississippi. Trust me, Dortmunder, they still won't talk to a Northern cop down there."

23

THE LOBBY OF the C&I International building did not look as Judson had expected from John's description. The openness, largeness, and airiness had somehow been left out. The space must have been three stories tall, sheathed in creamy mottled marble, with a sweeping wall of glass to face the street. The place mostly reminded Judson of a cathedral, particularly on a cloudless Sunday morning like this, with the thousand rays of thin November sun reverberating every which way through the lobby, reflected from all the other glass-and-steel buildings along the avenue.

It was like standing inside a halo. How could anybody ever bring himself to steal anything in a place like this? Never mind all the light, it was the saintliness that deterred.

And yet it was a bank. Over there were the two guards, behind their chest-high counter, the monitor screens set into the wall up behind them.

Would one of those screens show the vault, or at least the entrance to the vault? Why not?

Judson moved in the direction of the monitor screens, looking at black-and-white pictures of hallways and empty elevators, until he became aware that the guards were, in their turn, looking at him. Not because they suspected him of anything, but because he was the only thing they could see that was in motion. The shops on the other side of the lobby were closed on Sundays, and so were many of the offices on the floors above.

Belatedly deciding it would be a mistake to draw a lot of attention to himself, Judson veered from his monitor-bound route toward the register instead, deeper along that wall. They would think he was merely looking for one of the tenants here, wouldn't they?

Judson had no real business in the C&I building, not on Sunday nor on any other day. He had just been feeling so bad about John ever since he'd casually demolished everybody's hopes yesterday by saying flat out that they'd never get into that bank vault, and had seen the sag of John's face like a wedge of cheese in a microwave.

But why should they believe him? He was the kid, what did he know? Of course, it was just that all the others were pretending there was hope, to buoy John's spirits, and the kid had been too dumb to go along, so once he'd burst the bubble, there was nothing left for anybody else to say.

But was he right? Was it true that the vault was impregnable? Rising from bed in his Spanish Chelsea apartment this morning, he'd known the only thing he could do was look at the place for himself, just in case — just in case, you know — there might somehow, in some little tiny way nobody else had noticed, be a way to squiggle into that vault after all.

And back out. That was one of the most important life lessons he'd learned so far: It's nice to be able to get into a place, but it's essential to be able to get out again.

Over at the big black square rectangle of the register, with all the white letters and numbers on it defining every company with space in this building, Judson gazed upward, hoping the guards had lost interest in him (but certainly not looking over there to find out), and found himself marveling at how many different names there are in this world. All individual, most pronounceable. Think of that.

"Help you?"

Judson jumped like a hiccup, and turned to see one of the guards right there next to him, frowning at him, being polite in a very threatening way. "Oh, no!" he blurted. "I'm just… waiting for a friend of mine. He didn't come down yet, that's all."

"Where does he work?" the guard asked, pretending to be helpful, and then, more suddenly, more sharply, "Don't look at the board! Where does he work?"

Where does he work? Judson pawed desperately through his short-term memory, in search of just one of those names he'd so recently been reading and marveling on, and every last one of them was gone. His mind was a blank. "Well," he said. "Uh…"

"Hey, there you are! Sorry I'm late."

Judson turned his deer-in-the-headlights eyes and there was Andy Kelp, striding with great confidence across the sun-gleaming marble lobby, like the galactic commander in a science-fiction saga. "Oh," Judson said, relieved and bewildered. What words were he supposed to speak? "I," he said, "I forgot where you work. Isn't that stupid?"

"I wish I could," Andy said, cheerful as ever. "Let's not go up there, it's too nice a day."

"Oh. Okay."

Andy nodded a greeting at the guard. "How ya doin?"

"Fine," the guard said, but he didn't sound it.

Judson felt the guard's eyes on his back all the way out to Fifth Avenue. Once safely out there among the tourists and the taxis, Andy said, "Let's mosey southward a little." And, as they did so, he said, "Just implanting your facial features on the staff there, eh?"

"I wasn't trying to."

"No? What were you trying to do?"

"I felt so bad about John, I thought, why don't I just take a look, see if maybe…"

They stopped for a red light among the tourists, many of whom appeared to have been inflated beyond manufacturer's specifications, and Andy said, "My thought exactly. I even went to double-o that golden dome, the least I can do is give a gander to a bank. I get there, I can see you're in need of assistance."

"I was," Judson said humbly.

"See, kid — The light's green."

They crossed, amid all that padding, and Andy said, "See, if you're gonna case a place, it's not a good idea you give them a glossy photograph of yourself. What you do, you come in, you walk over to the elevators, you give that other door the eye, you look at your watch, you shake your head, you walk out. You don't look at guards, you don't stand still, you don't hang around, but when you're outside you've got the situation cold."

"There's no way to get into the vault," Judson said.

"You said that yesterday."

"But now I know it."

"I tell you what," Andy said. "It's a nice day, we're out here anyway, let's go see did John get over it."

24

JOHN WASN'T WATCHING football, and May didn't like that at all. Here it was November, the middle of the season, every team still at least theoretically in the running, and John doesn't even sit down to watch Sunday football. Not even the pregame show. It was worrying.

May was in the kitchen, involved in that worrying, when the street doorbell sounded, a noise she was still getting used to, that bell having been on the blink for many years until the landlord abruptly fixed it as a run-up to a rent increase. But now, unasked for and unneeded, here it was working again, and the sound had already trained her enough so that she automatically went to the little round grid in the kitchen wall and said into it, "Hello?"

"It's Andy," said a garbled voice that could have been any Martian.

Andy? Andy doesn't ring doorbells, he picks locks, you don't know Andy's going to make a visit until he's sitting in the living room.

What was going on here? John doesn't watch football, Andy Kelp doesn't pick locks, the world is coming to an end. "Come on up," she said dubiously, and pushed the button below the grid.

Did he plan to ring the upstairs doorbell, too? Well, we don't have to put up with that. So May walked down the corridor from the kitchen to the apartment front door, passing along the way the open door on her right to the room where John sat brooding in the direction of the switched-off television set but not, she knew, actually seeing it.

With the apartment door open, she could hear the asymmetric tramp of feet coming up the stairs; more than one, then. And yes, into view from the staircase came Andy and with him that nice kid Judson who'd attached himself to the group recently.

"Harya," Andy said, approaching. "I brought the kid."

"I see that. Is he the reason you rang the bell?"

Looking a bit sheepish, Andy grinned and said, "Basically, yeah. We don't want to give him too many bad habits all at once."

"Hi, Miss May," Judson said.

"Hi, yourself," May said, and stepped back from the doorway. "Well, come on in. John's in the living room, not watching football."

"Oh," Andy said. "That doesn't sound good."

"That's what I think."

They went in to see John as though entering a sickroom. Brightly, May said, "John, look who's here. It's Andy and Judson."

He sort of looked at them. "Harya," he said, and stopped sort of looking at them.

"Sit down," May said, so Andy and Judson perched uncomfortably on the sofa and she wrung her hands a little, not a normal gesture for her, and said, "Can I get anybody a beer?"

Andy could be seen to be about to say yes, but John, in a voice of doom, said, "No, thanks, May," so Andy closed his mouth again.

"Well," May said, and sat in her own chair, and everybody carefully didn't look at John.

Andy said, "This weather. For November, you know, this weather's pretty good."

"Very sunny out there," Judson added.

"That's nice," May said, and gestured at the window. "In here, you hardly notice."

"Well, it's really sunny," Andy said.

"Good," May said.

And then nobody said anything, for quite some time. Andy and Judson frowned mightily, obviously racking their brains in search of topics of conversation, but nothing. The silence in the room stretched on, and everybody in there except John became increasingly tongue-tied and desperate. John just continued to brood in the direction of the television set. Then:

"The problem is," John said.

Everybody turned to him, very alert. But then he didn't say anything else, just shook his head.

They waited; nothing. Finally May said, "Yes, John? The problem?"

"Well, I'm thinking about it backwards," John said. "That's what's been wrong."

May said, "Backwards? I don't follow."

"When the kid said yesterday, we can't get into the vault—"

"I'm sorry I said that, John," Judson said. "I've been wanting to tell you that, I'm sorry."

"No, you were right," John said. "That's what I've been saying all along, there's no way to get into that vault."

"I'm sorry."

"Fuggedabodit. See, what it is I gotta do, I gotta stop thinking about getting into the vault because I can't get into the vault. That's the backwards part."

Judson said, "It is?"

"The mountain," John explained, "gotta go to whatsisname. Mohammed."

Fearing the worst, May said, "John?"

"You know," John said, and gestured vaguely with both hands. "He won't go to that, so that's gotta go to him. Same with the vault. We can't get in at the chess set, case closed, no discussion, so what we gotta do is get the chess set to come out to us."

"That's brilliant, John," Andy said. "How do we do that?"

"Well," John said, "that's the part I'm working on."

25

THOUGH FIONA AND Brian ended their workdays at radically different hours, they began them together, up no later than eight, soon out of the apartment, a stop at Starbucks for coffee and a sweet roll as breakfast on the subway, then the ride downtown together until Fiona got off the train in midtown, Brian continuing on toward his cable company employer's studios down in Tribeca.

This Monday morning was the same, with the usual hurried peck on the lips as Fiona left the train, paused to throw her empty coffee cup into the same trash barrel as always, and walked up the flights of concrete stairs to the street, then down Broadway and over to Fifth, where a poor beggar huddled against the chill air near the entrance to C&I.

Fiona reached into her coat pocket in search of a dollar — she always gave such unfortunates a dollar, not caring how they might spend it — when she realized it wasn't a beggar at all, it was Mr. Dortmunder. Terribly embarrassed, feeling her face flush crimson, hoping he hadn't seen her reach into her pocket or at least hadn't interpreted it for what it was, she forced a large smile onto her face, stopped in front of him and, too brightly, said, "Mr. Dortmunder! Hello again."

"I figured," he said, "we should maybe talk out here, not all the time up in Feinberg. You got a few minutes, we could walk around the block?"

She checked her watch, and she was in fact running a little early today, so she said, "Of course." To make it up to him for mistaking him for a beggar, she said, "I'd be happy to."

"Nice," he said. "So we'll walk."

So they walked, amid the morning scurry of office workers. The Monday crowds on Fifth Avenue were very different from Sunday's; those tourists were still in their hotel rooms, discussing the comparative excitements of a sightseeing bus around Manhattan or a ride on the Staten Island ferry, while the people on the sidewalks this morning were much faster, much leaner, and much more tightly focused on where they were going and why. It was hard for Fiona and Mr. Dortmunder to move among them at the slower pace required for conversation, but they tried, taking the occasional shoulder block along the way.

"What it is," Mr. Dortmunder said, "we got a real problem getting at that thing down in that place, like I told you last time."

"I'm sorry this whole thing got started," she said.

"Well, so am I, but here we are." He shrugged. "The thing is," he said, "your grandfather and the guy working for him, they're pretty set on getting that thing. Or, I mean, me getting that thing."

She felt so guilty about this, much worse than mistaking him for a beggar. "Would it help," she said, "if I talked to my grandfather?"

"Defeatist isn't gonna get far with him."

That sounded like her grandfather, all right. Sighing, she said, "I suppose not."

"But there maybe could be another way," he said.

Surprised, ready to be pleased, she said, "Oh, really?"

"Only," he said, "it's gonna mean I'm gonna have to ask you to help out."

She stopped, absorbed a couple rabbit punches from the hurrying throng, and said, "Oh, no, Mr. Dortmunder!"

They'd reached the corner now, and he said, "Come on around here, before they knock you out."

The side street was easier. Walking along it, she said, "You have to understand, Mr. Dortmunder, I'm an attorney. I'm an officer of the court. I can't be involved in crime."

"That's funny," he said. "I've heard of one or two lawyers involved in crime."

"Criminal lawyers, yes."

"That's not what I mean."

A luggage store with an inset entrance wasn't yet open for business. Pulling him into the space, surrounded by luggage behind windows, she said, "Let me explain." Sure.

"Feinberg," she said, "is a respectable serious law firm. If they knew I was even this much involved in— Mr. Dortmunder, let's be honest here."

"Uh," he said.

"What we're talking about," she said, "is robbery. Burglary. It's a felony, Mr. Dortmunder."

"That's what it is, all right."

"You simply can't ask me to be involved in a felony," she said. "I mean, I'm trying to be good at what I do."

"I'm not asking," he said, "for you to slip this thing out under your coat or anything. Let me tell you the situation, okay?"

"I'll have to tell my grandfather," she said, "that neither you nor he nor anyone else can expect any help from me of any kind. Not on this matter."

"That's nice," he said. "I'd like to tell him the same thing myself. Will you listen to what I got to say?"

Fiona could be mulish when pushed. Feeling pushed, face closed, she said, "Go right ahead."

"Those specs and pictures you gave me of the thing—"

"Already I'm in so deep!"

"Miss Hemlow," he said, "you don't know deep. Here's the thing about those specs. One of the rooks is the wrong weight."

This snagged her attention. "It's what?"

"It weighs three pounds less than the other ones," he said. "We figure, Northwood had a fake made up, sold the real one off for railroad fare."

"My goodness."

"Yeah, I know. Anyway, your company has one of these family members, right?"

"Yes, of course."

"If we could get the news to that one," he said, "that there's a problem with one of the pieces, then maybe there's problems with more than one, maybe somebody in the family was up to some hanky-panky, and maybe he wants to—"

"She."

"Okay. Maybe she wants to get the whole chess set investigated by some experts. You know," he said, and his eyes actually gleamed. "Bring it up out of that vault, bring it to the expert's lab or wherever it is, have the thing there for a while."

"Oh, my God," she said.

"I can't do it," he pointed out. "You can see that I can't go talk to this person, how do I know any of this stuff? You could talk to her."

"Oh, my God," she said, more faintly.

He cocked his head and studied her. "Will you do it? I gotta tell you, it's the only way your grandfather's gonna get the thing."

"I have to," she stammered, "I have to think." And she fled the storefront, leaving him there, looking more than ever like a beggar.

26

WHEN DORTMUNDER GOT back to the apartment May was already off to her job, but she'd left a note on a Post-it stuck to the six-pack in the refrigerator, where he'd be sure to see it. "Call Epic on his cell," it read, and gave the number.

"I'd like to call Eppick in his cell," he muttered, but transferred the note to the wall beside the phone and dialed.

"Eppick!"

"It's, uh, John. You wanted me to—"

"That's right." Eppick sounded in a hurry. "Grab a cab, come—"

Dortmunder waited. "Yeah?"

"— In the lobby."

"What?"

"I'll be there before—"

"Where?"

Silence. Not a hovering silence, or a pregnant silence, more of a bat cave silence; they're all asleep in there. Then a dial tone, so he hung up.

Try again? Why? Dortmunder turned back toward the refrigerator, remembering the six-pack that had been used so effectively as a means of communication, and the phone rang.

Well, there were some things you simply had to go through. He went back and picked up the phone: "Yeah?"

"I'm in this cab, the recep — buildings bounce — soon as you — read me?"

"No."

A little silence, then, " — These cell phones!" It sounded like an expletive might have been deleted.

"I understand," Dortmunder said, "they're the wave of the future."

"Then the future's looking bleak. I want you to—" Dial tone.

"Good-bye," Dortmunder told the dial tone, achieved a can of beer from the six-pack and went to the living room to get the Daily News May had been reading earlier this morning. He brought it back to the kitchen table, because he knew damn well Eppick was not a guy to give up, and sat there for a while turning newspaper pages. Since he didn't look at the paper more than a couple times a week, usually when he found one on a subway seat, he could never figure out what all those comic strips were all about. Were those supposed to be punch lines over there on the right?

In the sports section, the standings were about as expected. It occurred to him that sports might be more interesting if the football players wore basketball uniforms and the basketball players wore football uniforms, and the phone rang.

Okay; he went over and answered: "Here."

''That's better. John, you gotta grab a cab and come right up to Mr. Hemlow's place."

"The reception's a lot better now."

"I made the cab stop at a pay phone. Come up right away, John, Mr. Hemlow isn't happy."

"Why should Hemlow be happy?"

"No, he isn't happy about you. I'll be in the lobby."

Eppick was in a rhinoceros-horn chair in the lobby, and got up from it when Dortmunder was let in by the doorman, who looked as though he wasn't entirely certain this was the right thing to do.

"All right," Eppick said, still impatient. "Let's go."

In the elevator, Dortmunder said, "I seem to be laying out a whole lotta cab money."

"That's because," Eppick said, "you're an independent contractor."

"Oh," Dortmunder said, and the elevator opened, and a fuming medicine ball awaited them in his wheelchair.

"Gentlemen," Mr. Hemlow spat. Dortmunder hadn't known you could spit a word like "gentlemen," but Mr. Hemlow made it sound easy. "Sit down," he ordered, and the wheelchair spun away toward the view.

Once everybody was in position, Dortmunder and Eppick side by side in the antique chairs, Mr. Hemlow facing them in the middle of the view, Mr. Hemlow, over the tempo-setting twitch of his right knee, lowered a glower at Dortmunder and said, "I understand you spoke to my granddaughter this morning."

"Yeah, I did," Dortmunder said. "Not in the place, on the sidewalk out front."

Eppick glared at Dortmunder's right eye and ear. "You accosted her? On the street?"

"I didn't accost her. It was a little conversation."

Mr. Hemlow, the lid barely on his rage, said, "You asked her to take part in a criminal act."

"I don't see that," Dortmunder said. "Where's the crime? I didn't even ask her to jaywalk."

Eppick said, "Sir, could you back it up a little here? I don't really know what's going on. What did he ask her to do?"

"I just—"

"I'm not asking you" Eppick spat. Now everybody was spitting. "I'm asking Mr. Hemlow."

"As I understand it," Mr. Hemlow said, "your associate here has decided it's too much trouble to make his way into that bank vault and retrieve the chess set, so he wants—"

Appalled, Eppick cried, "Your granddaughter to go down there?"

"No, not quite that bad. He wants Fiona to approach Livia Northwood Wheeler and—"

"I'm sorry, sir," Eppick said. "Who?"

"She is the Sgt. Northwood descendant," Mr. Hemlow explained, "who is represented by Fiona's firm in the family lawsuits."

"Oh," Eppick said. "Thank you, sir."

"Fiona's firm represents Livia Northwood Wheeler," Mr. Hemlow went on, those little red eyes glowering at Dortmunder. "Fiona doesn't represent her, does not have any legitimate reason to speak to the woman, even if she were willing to do what you asked of her."

Eppick said, "Sir, what did… John here, ask?"

"Perhaps John himself should tell you," Mr. Hemlow said.

Eppick turned a judgmental gaze on Dortmunder, who shrugged and said, "Sure. We can't get down in there, so I figured, maybe we could get the thing to come out instead. The specs and stuff the granddaughter gave me, which by the way I think was more legally iffy than what I asked her today, those specs showed one piece was too light, and we figure the sergeant switched it for a phony—"

"To give himself a stake," Eppick said, nodding, agreeing with himself. "Very smart."

"Nah, anybody could figure that."

"I meant him."

Mr. Hemlow said, "John here took this information to Fiona and asked her to pass it on to Mrs. Wheeler with a recommendation that she have the entire chess set appraised."

"Which," Dortmunder said, "would bring it up outa that vault."

"Were Fiona to address a client of the firm," Mr. Hemlow said, "without being asked specifically to do so by a partner or an associate, she would be let go at once."

"Fired, you mean," Dortmunder said.

" 'Let go' conveys the same information," Mr. Hemlow said.

Eppick said, "Sir, let me have a word with John, if I may."

"Certainly."

Eppick nodded his thanks, then turned to Dortmunder. "I see what you were trying to do," he said, "and it wasn't bad. I understand that vault is maybe a little tougher than some places you've seen in the past."

"All places I've seen in the past."

"Okay. And the idea to get the thing out of the vault to somewhere maybe a little easier to get at, that's good, too."

"Thank you," Dortmunder said, with dignity.

"The problem is, though," Eppick said, "you can't use the granddaughter, not for anything. She started the ball rolling, but now she's out of it. We gotta protect her, we gotta protect her job, we gotta protect her reputation."

"Uh huh."

"She is not," Mr. Hemlow said, "an asset."

Dortmunder frowned, not getting that, but decided to let it slide.

Eppick apparently understood it, though, because he nodded in approval and said, "Exactly." To Dortmunder he said, "But the idea's a good one. We just gotta find some other way to make some other member of the family want experts to take a look at the chess set."

"Then," Dortmunder said, "Mr. Hemlow, I gotta ask you this. There's one last thing I'd want from your granddaughter, and I think it's okay, but you tell me."

Dubious, head rolling down over the medicine ball more than ever, Mr. Hemlow glowered up through his eyebrows and said, "What would that be?"

"She said, she told me one time, there's seventeen family people in this, everybody suing everybody, all with their own lawyers. Could she get me a list of the seventeen, and which lawyer each one's got?"

Mr. Hemlow thought a minute, but the head was nodding while he did it, not in time with the metronome knee. Then he said, "She could do that."

"Thank you."

"I will arrange for her to compile such a list and give it to me. I will convey it to Johnny here, and he can pass it on to you."

"Great."

"But then," Mr. Hemlow said, "that is the end of it. You will never have contact with my granddaughter ever again."

"Oh, sure," Dortmunder said.

Riding down in the elevator, Dortmunder said," Whadaya mean, independent contractor?"

"It's one of the job definitions," Eppick told him, "you know, that the government has. Like, if you work for wages, you're a salaried employee, so you can be in a union, but if you're an independent contractor you can't be in a union."

"I'm not in a union," Dortmunder said, and the elevator door opened at the lobby.

Leaving the building, Eppick said, "We're both going downtown. Come on down to the corner, we'll grab a cab. I'll even pay."

Dortmunder said, "But you don't want to give the doorman a dollar to get a cab right here."

"Neither do you," Eppick told him.

So they walked down to the corner and eventually found a cab without help, and as they rode downtown together Dortmunder said, "Tell me more about this independent contractor. Whadaya mean, it's a government definition?"

"It shows where you fit in the workforce," Eppick said. "There's certain things you gotta match up with, and then you're an independent contractor."

"Like what?"

"You don't get a fixed salary every week."

"Okay."

"You don't work in the same office or factory or whatever every day."

"Okay."

"You carry your own tools on the job."

"I do that," Dortmunder said.

"You work without direct supervision."

"You know it."

"There's no withholding tax on what you make."

"Never happened yet."

"The employer or whoever doesn't give you a pension or health care."

"This is my profile to the life," Dortmunder said.

"Then there you are," Eppick said. "And now, go to work on those family members. I think you're onto something there."

"Soon as I get the list," Dortmunder promised.

When May got home that evening, Dortmunder helped by carrying one of the grocery sacks. In the kitchen, he said, "I found out something today."

"Oh?"

Dortmunder smiled. "I am an independent contractor."

She looked at him and put the cereal away. "Oh," she said.

27

LATER THAT SAME day, Kelp was in his own apartment in the West Thirties, chatting with Anne Marie Carpinaw, the friend he'd made one time on a trip to Washington, DC, and had brought home to protect her from that place. Deciding to raise a certain issue, "You're a woman," Kelp pointed out.

"I believe," Anne Marie said, "that was the first thing you noticed about me."

"It was." Kelp nodded, agreeing with them both. "And as a woman," he said, "I just have this feeling you might maybe have some certain expertise."

"About what?"

"Well, in this case, jewelry."

"Yes, please," she said. "It's never in bad taste, and never out of style."

"Not like that," he said. "A different kind of expertise."

The look she gave him had something caustic in it. "I could show my expertise at sulking, if you like."

"Come on, Anne Marie," Kelp said. "I just wanna pick your brain."

"Well, that's all right, then," she said. "I was wondering when you'd get around to my brain."

"I didn't have that much need for it up till now." She laughed, but pointed a finger at him. "You're on the lip of the volcano there, pal."

"Then let me ask my question," he said. "It's most likely you don't know the answer, but I definitely don't know the answer, and I gotta start somewhere."

"Go ahead."

They were in their living room, which earlier he had salted with a manila envelope on the coffee table. This he now picked up, and withdrew from it two photos of the red queen from the chess set, plus the sheet giving the queen's dimensions and weight. "What I wanna do," he said, handing her these documents, "is make a fake one of these. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent perfect, because we're gonna paint it with red enamel."

"This is the thing," she said, studying the photos, "that John is working on."

"Well, we both are," Kelp said, "if we get past a couple little problems. And one of them is how to make a copy of that thing there, same size, same shape, pretty much the same weight."

"Well, that's easy," she said. "Particularly if the jewels don't have to match."

"No, they're gonna be painted over. Whadaya mean, it's easy?"

"You came to the right person," she said. "What I will do is turn this over to the Earring Man."

"The who?"

"Women lose earrings," she pointed out. "You know that."

"You find 'em in cabs," Kelp agreed, "you find 'em next to telephones, you find 'em on the floor the morning after the party."

"Exactly," she said. "So there you are, you had a pair of earrings you loved, now you've only got one earring, and one earring isn't going to do anything for anybody except some pathetic guy trying to be hip."

"I've seen those guys, too," Kelp said. "They look like they're off the leash."

"So if you're a woman," Anne Marie went on, "with one earring of a pair you loved, you go to this jeweler that everybody calls Earring Man because he will make you an exact match."

"That's pretty good," Kelp said. "I never knew that."

"I think there's probably an Earring Man, or maybe more than one, in every urban center in the world where women don't have to wear headscarves. The one I know is in DC. I wore earrings a lot more when I was a congressman's daughter than when I'm some heister's moll."

Surprised, Kelp said, "Is that who you are?"

Looking at the photos again, she said, "How much of a hurry are you in for this?"

"Well, since John says 'we're never gonna get our hands on the real one, I'd say you could take your time."

She nodded, thinking it over. "I still have some unindicted friends down in DC," she said. "I'll make a couple calls and probably fly down tomorrow. He'll most likely want a couple weeks."

"He'll know," Kelp said, "there's a certain amount of secrecy involved here."

"Oh, sure," she said. "Earring Man would never betray a confidence." Grinning at the memory, she said, "The great story about him is the time a woman came in, very sad, with the one earring, and she lost the other in a cab, just like you said. He went to work on it, and a couple days later another woman came in with the other earring and claimed she lost the missing one in a cab. He never called either of them on it, never found out which one was lying, didn't care."

Kelp said, "Anne Marie, in that case, how come you know about it?"

She couldn't believe the question. "Andy," she said, "people gossip all the time. That isn't the same as tattling."

Sometimes you know when the explanation you've got is the only explanation you're going to get. "Fine," Kelp said. "Whadaya wanna do about dinner?"

28

IT TOOK FIONA two full days, until late afternoon on Wednesday, burrowing into other people's files and records, to compile the list of all the litigating Northwood heirs requested by her grandfather. During this time, her own work suffered, of course, so when she finally had the list printed out and safely inside a manila envelope inside her shoulder bag under her desk, she turned immediately to the concerns and hungers and unfulfilled dreams of another enraged family — oil — but had only been at it for twenty minutes when her desk phone rang.

Oh, what now? She didn't have time for this, she'd be here till midnight, and what would happen to Brian's dinner, would he prepare some exotic cuisine and then just sit there and watch it congeal, hour after hour? Why would people phone her at a time like this?

No choice; she had to answer. "Hemlow," she said into the phone, and a clipped British female voice said, "Mr. Tumbril wishes to see you in his office. Now."

Click. Stunned, Fiona put down her phone. Why would a partner in the firm want her in his office? And why, of all the partners, Mr. Tumbril? In New York, a city known for fierce litigators the way New Orleans is known for overweight chefs and Los Angeles for fanciful accountants, the name Jay Tumbril was in itself very often enough to make mad dogs settle and homicidal maniacs run screaming from the room.

Well, she'd soon find out what it was about. She made her circuitous way across the Feinberg domain to Mr. Tumbril's corner — of course — office, outside which Mr. Tumbril's British secretary, as lean of head and body as a whippet, accepted her proffered identity, spoke briefly into her phone, and said, "Go in."

Fiona went in, closing the door behind her. She had never been inside Mr. Tumbril's office before, but the office itself wasn't primarily what she immediately saw and reacted to; it was Livia Northwood Wheeler, seated at attention on a pale green sofa along the windowless side wall and gazing at Fiona with an extremely complex expression on her face, appearing to combine apprehension, expectation, doubt, defiance, arrogance, and possibly a few additional herbs for flavor.

"Ms. Hemlow."

Her master's voice. Reluctantly, Fiona turned away from that bouillabaisse of an expression to the much clearer and sterner expression on the face of Jay Tumbril. A tall, large-boned man in his fifties, with a small ferret-like face, he was not quite so fearsome when seated behind his large neat desk, flanked by large clean windows showing views of the jumble of Manhattan, as when he was on his feet, pacing and stalking in front of a jury, but he was still quite fearsome enough. In a smaller voice than any she'd known she possessed, Fiona said, "Yes, sir."

"The last time Mrs. Wheeler visited these offices," Tumbril said, "you approached her as she waited for the elevator. You said I had sent you."

Shocked, Fiona cried, "Oh, no, sir!" Turning in horror toward Mrs. Wheeler, she said, "I didn't say that. I didn't say that at all."

Mrs. Wheeler was no longer looking at her, but at Tumbril instead, and her expression now was a simple combination of surprise and offense. "Jay," she said, "you're misrepresenting me. It was my conclusion you'd sent her after me. She denied it at the time."

Tumbril didn't like that. "Why would I send her after you?"

"There was a certain amount of rancor in this room at the time of my last visit," she said, apparently unafraid of Tumbril, no matter how much he glared at her. "I thought perhaps you were trying to make peace."

"Why would I do that?" Said with more impatience than curiosity, as though he didn't expect there could be an answer.

Nor was there one. "My mistake," Mrs. Wheeler said.

Accepting victory as his due, Tumbril turned his scowl back on Fiona. "Since I didn't send you to speak to Mrs. Wheeler," he said, "who did?"

"No one, sir."

"It was your own idea."

"Yes, sir."

"Miss Hemlow," Tumbril said, "do you know the firm's policy with regard to young assistants such as yourself making direct contact with clients?"

"Yes, sir," Fiona said, in a voice so small she could barely hear it herself.

"And what is that policy, Miss Hemlow?"

It was one thing to study cross-examination technique in law school, but quite another to undergo it. Fiona said, "Sir, we're not supposed to deal directly with a client unless a partner or associate requests it."

"Jay," Mrs. Wheeler said. "I didn't mean to get this girl in trouble."

"She got herself in trouble, Livia." Tumbril made a little sweeping-away motion toward Fiona, as though she were dust, and said, "She had no excuse to speak to you. She never even had work assigned to her to do on your affairs. Why would she speak to you?"

"Well," Mrs. Wheeler said, "she said she admired me."

"Admired you? For what?"

"For the stance I was taking in my suit."

Tumbril sat well back in his large leather chair to gaze with thorough disapproval at Fiona. "You went into the files?"

"Yes, sir."

"Of a case toward which you had absolutely no responsibilities?"

"Yes, sir."

"You searched through matters that were none of your concern," Tumbril summed up, "and then you went to the principal in the matter to toady up to her."

"No, sir, I just—"

"Yes, sir! Well, young lady, if you thought you might be advancing yourself with this behind-the-scenes rubbish, you've done quite the reverse. You will go and clear out your desk and wait for security to escort you from the building."

"Jay!"

"I know what I'm doing, Livia. Miss Hemlow, the firm

will mail you your final compensation. You will understand

we will not be able to give you a reference."

"Yes, sir."

"Good-bye, Miss Hemlow."

Stricken, not yet able to think about what was happening to her, Fiona turned toward the door.

"Young lady," Mrs. Wheeler said, and when Fiona turned her heavy head the older woman had leaned forward to hold out a card. "Phone me," she said.

Hardly knowing she was doing it, Fiona took the card. She couldn't think of a thing to say.

Tumbril could. "You're making a mistake, Livia."

"Not the first one I've made in this office," she told him.

Tumbril threw one last scowl at Fiona. "You may go."

She went.

The envelope! If security found that envelope, with all that information on all the Northwood heirs, she'd be worse than fired, she'd be charged with felonies, her reputation would be destroyed forever.

Trying not to look in a desperate hurry, Fiona walked faster than she'd ever walked before through the maze of cubicles to her desk. She pulled the envelope from her shoulder bag, slapped a mailing label on it, wrote her grandfather's name and address on the label, and carried it away, to drop it in an absent person's out basket on her way to the ladies'.

Once in there, she realized she actually did need a stall for a moment, which was just as well because, when she stepped out, security was standing there, frowning at her, a heavyset severe woman in a uniform of brown. She said, "Fiona Hemlow?"

"Yes."

"You're supposed to be at your desk."

"When you're fired," Fiona told her, "it makes you need to go to the ladies' room. I'll just wash my hands."

The security woman followed her back to her cubicle, where her neighbor Imogen widened her eyes but knew enough not to say anything. Fiona took her few personal possessions from her desk, permitted the security woman to search her bag, and then they headed off for the elevators.

Fiona looked at it all, so familiar, so much of her life. All those hunched backs, those computers, telephones, stacks of documents, all of these creatures pulling steadfastly at the oars of this galley while their betters sat out of sight, next to windows.

Fiona smiled. Suddenly a weight had lifted, and she hadn't even known she was carrying it. "You know," she told the security woman, "I'm a very lucky person."

29

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, ANNE Marie took a shuttle back up to LaGuardia from DC. Kelp cabbed out there from the city a little ahead of time, so he'd have leisure to find just the right wheels with which to deliver Anne Marie back to their love nest. His first priority, as always, was a car with MD plates, he being firmly of the conviction that doctors have a greater than average experience of the highs and lows of human life, and will therefore whenever possible gravitate toward the high; as in their choice of personal vehicle, for instance.

This trip, however, was more than ordinarily special, as being the return of Anne Marie after three days of travel to and from DC and dealing with the Earring Man while there, all on Kelp's behalf. So, when he began his ramble through long-term parking, keeping an eye out for MD plates and no dust (early in the long term), his other criterion was that he wanted a woman doctor's car. In the old days he would have looked for a modest sedan with lower-than-average mileage but more than the usual dents, but times had changed and the old signifiers no longer signified.

Well, something had to signify. Kelp strolled for a while among the wheels on offer, and then he saw a white Lexus RX 400h, the low-fuel-consumption hybrid, and yes, MD plates; unusual on a white car. This doctor drives a hybrid, so this doctor cares about the planet. And the bumper sticker: The Earth — Our Home — Keep It Tidy. Uh huh. And when he looked through the driver's window, there was the clincher: two bottles of Poland Spring water in the cup holders.

An electronically inclined acquaintance of Kelp's named Wally Knurr had recently sold him, at very little above cost, a carefully restructured universal remote. Originally meant to find its way through the various individual electronic signals of every known TV, VCR, and DVD, the machine now provided the same service for your most recent automobile models, thus bypassing all the physical violence of yesteryear. It took Kelp barely a dozen clicks with the remote to make the Lexus give him the bleep of welcome. He checked inside, to be sure the parking fee ticket was in its place behind the sun visor, saw that it was, locked the Lexus again and went off to find Anne Marie.

Who seemed to be the only one in her group to come down the long ramp from the gates without a briefcase. What she lugged instead was a bulky black leather shoulder bag bouncing on her right hip, which made her look like a particularly fetching stew out of uniform, and from the tail ends of a few conversations he observed as the herd headed this way some of her fellow passengers had dreamed of being in a position to get her even further out of uniform, but forget all that now: her boyfriend's back.

They kissed, to the disgust of the briefcase-toters, and made their way out to long-term, where Anne Marie gazed with pleasure upon the Lexus and said, "For me?"

"I picked it out special."

"You're very thoughtful," Anne Maria told him, as he remoted them into the car.

Once he had the seat adjusted back from somewhere up against the firewall, the Lexus was fine. Kelp happily paid the three-day parking charge and out they went to Grand Central Parkway, westbound toward the city.

As they drove, he said, "I guess it all went okay, then."

"You owe me four hundred bucks."

"Extra beyond the airfare, you mean. How'd I do that?"

"Mr. Earring Man wanted an advance," she said. "He smelled a felony, and would risk his reputation for no less."

"I can understand that," Kelp said. "You did right to pay him."

"You know, Andy," she said, "I'm not the gang's banker."

"Oh, I know that," Kelp assured her. "Me and John, over the weekend, we'll do a little this and that."

"Good."

"But otherwise, he says no problem, huh?"

"He didn't want to admit how easy it was going to be," she said, "but I could tell."

The 125th Street Bridge was near. "I missed you," he said.

"Good. I missed you, too."

"We'll have a nice dinner out."

She considered that. "We'll have a nice late dinner out," she decided.

30

AS FAR AS Dortmunder was concerned, his was a for-profit operation, so he wasn't in love with the idea that, not only was this particular heist impossible, but now they were in the red on the thing to the tune of four hundred bucks. He understood that Anne Marie had done what Anne Marie had to do, but even so.

Over the weekend, to pay this debt, Dortmunder and Kelp made a couple little after-hours visits to some Madison Avenue luxury purveyors so upscale and rarefied the little sign in the door said, English spoken, which further necessitated a West Side visit to a fellow named Arnie Albright, known to the authorities as a receiver of stolen goods but to his customers as the guy you went to when you were carrying something you didn't want to carry any more.

Negotiations with Arnie were usually brutish, nasty, and short, the short because Arnie well knew he had competitors who, while perhaps a little more off the beaten path and certainly noted for bargaining an extremely hard dollar, were also well ahead of Arnie in the acceptable human being category. Arnie knew his customers could only stand to look at him for so long, particularly when, such as now, his recurring wet red rash had returned, to spread over his lumpy face so that he looked as though he'd fallen asleep in a bowl of salsa. When you finally did get the cash, you wanted to go home and wash it.

As for Johnny Eppick and his employer, Mr. Hemlow, Dortmunder assumed the granddaughter was having a little trouble collecting the information he'd requested on all the other heirs, which was also okay, because, once he did get that information, he hadn't the slightest idea what he was going to do with it. So, let sleeping Eppicks lie.

Which he did, until late the following Monday morning, shortly after May had gone off to the Safeway. That's when the phone decided to ring, so Dortmunder put down the Daily News — there didn't seem to be anybody he knew in it today — got to his feet, walked to the kitchen, grabbed the receiver, and said, "Yar."

"Mr. Hemlow wants to see us. His place."

Fatalistic, Dortmunder said, "I'm springing for another cab, am I?"

"I don't think you have time to walk," Eppick said, and hung up.

Poker-faced, the doorman said, "The other gentleman is already here."

"Yeah, I see him," Dortmunder said. He was in a bad mood because of having to spend so much of Arnie Albright's money just to get here.

Eppick's manner was not bad-tempered, actually, just guarded. Rising from the rhinoceros-horn chair, he said, "He didn't sound happy."

"Like usual, you mean."

"Maybe worse."

As they rode up in the elevator with its extraneous operator, Eppick said, "We'll just see how it goes."

"That sounds like a plan," Dortmunder agreed.

It was not going to go well. Mr. Hemlow in his wheelchair waited in his usual position on the polished floor of his penthouse, but when they emerged from the elevator he did not spin around, did not zoom over to the view, did not invite them to take a seat. Instead, he stayed where he was, with them on their feet in front of him, and after the elevator had gone away he said, "I wanted to tell you both in person. I don't blame either of you for what happened."

Eppick, sounding alarmed, said, "Something happened?"

"Last Wednesday," Mr. Hemlow said, "my granddaughter was fired. Embarrassed, she didn't tell me, but this morning, in the mail, arrived the list of heirs you asked for."

"You mean John asked for," Eppick said, dodging a bullet.

"Yes, of course."

Mr. Hemlow seemed shrunken this morning, as though some of the stuffing had leaked out of the medicine ball. His eyes and brow were more troubled than hawklike today, and even the red beret perched atop him like a maraschino cherry didn't do much to improve the bad vibe he exuded.

"I phoned her when I received the envelope," he said, "and she explained she'd been fired, had been escorted from the offices by an armed guard, and had just barely time to mail me the envelope before the guard searched her belongings."

"Searched her belongings!" Eppick sounded equal parts astounded and outraged.

Mr. Hemlow's tempo-setting knee kept double time to the slow sad shake of his head. "That is the corporate form of the farewell interview these days, it appears," he said. "Particularly if the employee has been caught breaking the rules, as Fiona had, and on my account. That's what I blame myself for, and no one else."

Dortmunder, who had kind of liked Fiona Hemlow, said, "What kinda rule did she break?"

"She sought out Livia Northwood Wheeler. She had no right to speak to Mrs. Wheeler, no justification for approaching her. A person in Fiona's position — in Fiona's former position — is not to speak until spoken to."

"That's terrible, Mr. Hemlow," Eppick said. He sounded sincerely upset by the news.

"It's my own selfishness caused this to happen," Mr. Hemlow said. "My egotism. Who cares about ancient grudges, ancient history? Who can correct a one-hundred-year-old wrong? Nobody. The guilty aren't there any more. The people who are there, whatever else they may have done, have never done me an injury. And now all I've done is harm my own granddaughter."

"We'll make up for that, Mr. Hemlow," Eppick said, all at once eager. "When we get that—"

"No."

Dortmunder had seen this coming, but apparently Eppick had not. He blinked, and rocked back half a step toward the elevator door. "No? Mr. Hemlow, you don't—"

"I do." For a sagging sack of guts, Mr. Hemlow sounded pretty damn firm. "The chess set can stay where it is," he said. "It's done enough harm in this world, let it rot in that vault."

You bet, Dortmunder thought.

But Eppick was not a man to give up without a fight. "Sir, we've been working on—"

"I know you have, Johnny," Mr. Hemlow said, "and I appreciate it, but the job is over. Send my accountant your final bill, you'll be paid at once."

"Well…" Eppick said. "If you're sure."

"I am, Johnny. So thank you, and good-bye."

"Good-bye, sir."

Eppick turned to push the elevator button, but Dortmunder said, "Hey. What about me?"

"Mr. Dortmunder," Mr. Hemlow said, "you have not been in my employ. Johnny has."

"Don't look at me, John," Eppick said, though that's exactly what Dortmunder was doing.

"Why not?"

"Because, John," Eppick said, as though explaining to a bonehead, "you didn't do anything."

Dortmunder couldn't believe it. "I didn't do anything? I drove all around New England, sitting on the floor. I wracked my brains, trying to figure out the way to get my hands on that chess thing. I done more taxi time than an escort service. I been working my brain on this."

"That's between you gentlemen," Mr. Hemlow said. "Good morning." And now he did spin the wheelchair around and sped off, this time through a doorway into a side hall.

Pushing the elevator button at last, Eppick said, "Well, John, I just think you have to count this one up to profit and loss."

Dortmunder didn't say anything. The elevator arrived, they rode down together, and he still didn't say anything. No expression at all appeared on his face.

Out on the sidewalk, Eppick said, "You don't want to make trouble, John. I've still got those pictures."

"I know it," Dortmunder said.

"The least I can do," Eppick said, "I'll spring for a cab for us, downtown."

"No, thanks," Dortmunder said. He needed to be alone, to think. About revenge. "I'll walk," he said.

31

LIKE MANY MEMBERS of the NYPD, past and present, Johnny Eppick had not lived within the actual five boroughs of New York City for many years; not, in fact, since his second year on the force, when he'd married and left his parents' home in Queens to set up his own new family — two boys and one girl, eventually, now all starting families of their own, none following him into the Job — farther out on Long Island.

Unlike some of his fellows, Eppick had never maintained a little apartment in the city, containing one or a string of surrogate wives, he being of the sort who was content with one family and one home, just so it was completely separate from the Job. The place on East Third Street was new, since his retirement, since he and Rosalie had come to the realization that, while they still loved one another and had no desire for change, it was also true that neither of them could stand his being around the house all the time. He was retired from the Job. Tough; go there anyway. Thus Johnny Eppick For Hire.

He wasn't the first ex-cop to go into private detectiving. The city pension was good, but there isn't a pension anywhere that couldn't use a little supplement, though that wasn't the primary reason so many ex-cops wound up with security companies or armored car outfits or banks. The primary reason was boredom; after the tensions and horrors and pleasures of the Job, it was tough to sit around all day with the remote in one hand and a beer can in the other. Leave that life to the young slobs who hadn't come out of their cocoons yet.

In the earliest days of his retirement years, Eppick had thought about hiring on somewhere, but a life on wages after so many years on the Job had just seemed too much of a comedown. It was time to be his own boss for a while, see how that would play out. So he got his private investigator's license, not hard for an ex-cop, and set up the office down on East Third because it was inexpensive and he didn't feel he was going to have to impress anybody. All he needed was files and a phone. Besides, private eyes were expected to office in grungy neighborhoods.

Once he had his tag and his address, Eppick had caused there to be made letterhead stationery and a business card. He'd spread the word through the cops and the lawyers and the other people he'd met over the years through the Job, and the first fish in the net was Mr. Horace Hemlow.

And what a fish. A keeper, Eppick had thought, rich and honest and dedicated to his obsession. Putting every other potential client on hold, changing his answering machine message to deflect other possible business, he'd devoted himself to Mr. Hemlow, even researching that scuzzy band of crooks to handle the actual dirty work without any possibility of double-cross.

And look what he got for it. Time and expenses. He might as well deliver newspapers, for that kind of money; that would also keep him out of the house.

Okay. After the chess set debacle, Eppick changed his answering machine message once more, made another round of soliciting phone calls, and started to receive smaller but at least not irritating offers of work. Here a jealous wife, there a health freak searching, for genome reasons, for his natural father. It kept him on the move.

On a blustery Monday two weeks after the farewell in Mr. Hemlow's apartment, the first Monday in December, Eppick drove to the city, left his Prius in its monthly parking spot in a garage a block from his office, walked the block, took the elevator to his office, entered, and saw in an instant he'd been robbed. Burgled. Cleaned out solid.

Just about everything was gone. Phone, fax, printer, computer, TV, DVD, toaster oven, even the less heavy half of his exercise equipment.

The whole thing had been done with an economy and a professionalism that, even through his outrage, he had to recognize and admire. There was barely a mark on the locks. His three alarm systems, including the one that should have phoned the precinct, had been dismantled or bypassed with casual, almost disdainful, assurance. Everything was gone, and not a footprint was left to mark its passing.

Eppick of course immediately phoned the precinct — on his cell phone, the office phone and answering machine being gone — though he hadn't the slightest expectation anybody would ever track down those crooks. But he needed the report for his insurance, and this haul would certainly lead to a very hefty insurance company check.

And many headaches between now and then, while he replaced everything that had gone away, integrated the new systems, estimated just how much his personal and professional privacy had been violated, and worked out what additional security measures he would have to take to keep the bastards from coming back for a second dip.

The cops who came to make the report were unknown to him, he never having worked in this precinct. They were sympathetic and professional and just a little scornful, exactly as he would be if the roles were reversed. He hated the interview, and ground his teeth in rage once his responders had departed.

Now, the next thing to do was hide this disaster from his two current clients. It would never do for a professional private detective to himself become a crime victim; all credibility would be lost forever. Therefore, after a quick trip farther downtown to an area of electronics stores, he came back with a new telephone — answering machine, which he set up on his ravaged desk and into which, using a much more grating voice than normal, he placed this message:

"Hi. Johnny Eppick here. I came down with something over the weekend I hope isn't flu, so I'm not in the shop today. Leave a message and I hope I'll be here and healthy first thing tomorrow."

The rest of the replacement equipment he'd buy out on the Island, to avoid New York City's sales tax, so he might as well get to it. There was no point hanging around the ransacked office all day.

It was while driving out the LIE, just east of the city line, that the penny finally dropped and one word came into his mind, as though in neon: Dortmunder.

Of course. In the first shock, he hadn't been thinking straight, hadn't connected the dots, but what else could this be? Dortmunder. He had to get even for not scoring anything out of the chess set caper. And, whining all the time about something as minor league as taxi fares, that gave you the measure of the man.

The son of a bitch had waited exactly two weeks, Monday to Monday, just long enough so Eppick wouldn't be able to prove it but he'd have to know it.

And there was more to it than that. All of the other things that were taken were just smoke screen, just icing on the cake. The only theft that really mattered was the computer. That little box where the incriminating pictures of John Dortmunder were stored.

Yes, and when he got back to the office tomorrow and looked in his files — a thing that hadn't occurred to him until just this minute — the copies of those pictures that he'd printed out would also be gone.

I no longer have a handle on John Dortmunder's back, Eppick thought. Dortmunder had needed that handle off of there. Why? Because he's up to something. What is he up to?

Eppick frowned mightily as he drove east toward home.

32

"THEY'RE NEVER COMING back!"

"Nessa," Brady said, over their lunch of nuked frozen fish fingers, nuked frozen french fries, and canned beer, "of course they're coming back. They came all the way up here just to be sure everything was all right."

"Then when they left here," Nessa said, leaning belligerently over her fish fingers in this large elaborate dining room constructed for more diners but less volume, "they must have made sure everything was wrong, because they aren't coming back!"

"Come on, Nessa, you don't have to holler, I'm right here in front of you."

"Yet somehow you don't hear me," she said. "Those bozos are not coming back."

Surprised, almost offended on their behalf, he said, "What do you mean, bozos? Those were very serious people."

"Hah."

"They were up here to discuss hiding a very valuable chess set," Brady reminded her. "And here was where they meant to hide it. They even pointed out the table in the living room."

"Where they were going to hide it."

"Yes."

"Right out on a table in the living room."

"I told you, Nessa, it was the something letter. You remember Edgar Allan Poe."

"We read The Raven," she said, being sulky. "It was very boring."

"Well, he did something else," Brady said, "that said, if you want to hide something, put it right out in plain sight where nobody expects to see it."

"Put it right out in plain sight," Nessa said, "where I won't expect to see it, and guess what happens next."

"Well, Edgar Allan Poe is what they were doing," Brady said, "and they're definitely coming back."

"Brady," she said, around a mouthful of fish fingers, as she waved a melodramatic arm toward the far windows, "it's snowing."

"I know that."

"Again."

"I know that."

"We're in the mountains in New England in December. Brady, on the TV they're talking about accumulations. You know what accumulations are?"

"Listen, Nessa—"

"You wanna wait here till spring? Here?"

The fact was, Brady wouldn't mind if he had to wait here forever. He had this huge house all to himself, he had no responsibilities, he had this really cute girl to go to bed with all the time — though not so much lately, unfortunately — and he had the prospect of this amazingly valuable chess set at the end of the rainbow. So what was the problem?

Well, he'd better not put it that way, because, the truth is, the problem was Nessa. She had some kind of cabin fever or something. She got bored too easily, that's what it came down to. He screwed her as much as he could, or these days as much as she'd put up with, but still she got bored.

He just had to keep his calm, that's all. This was just a phase Nessa was going through, and soon she'd be fine again. Maybe in the spring, when the flowers started to grow, though he sensed it wouldn't be a really smart move to phrase it quite that way.

"Honey," he said, "I heard those guys talk, and I know they meant it, and I know they're coming back, and I know they're serious."

"They're bozos," she said, and filled her mouth with french fries.

He paused, a fish finger in midair. "Why do you keep saying that?"

"They pranced through here," she reminded him, "the four of them, looking all over for just the right place to hide their precious chess set, and they never even saw us."

"Well, neither do those maintenance guys. We're too smart for them, that's all. Just last week the maintenance guys came through and we've been here for months now and they still don't know we're here."

These were two guys who drove up the first Friday of every month to check the house, flush the toilets, check the smoke alarms, that kind of thing. They were easy to evade, and so Brady and Nessa evaded them.

The very point she now made. "We know they're coming," she said. "They're not searching the place, they're just doing their rounds. Those other bozos suddenly showed up when we didn't know they were coming, they went all through the house with us underfoot—"

"They never went upstairs."

"They went all over downstairs, Brady, and they never even got a glimpse of us, and you say they're serious?"

"They'll be back," he insisted.

"Not this winter," she insisted right back. "And I don't want to still be here next spring."

"Where do you want to be?"

She looked at him. It was a disquieting look, and it went on quite a long while, during which she consumed most of the rest of the greasy food on her plate. He instinctively felt he shouldn't speak during this examination, shouldn't do anything but let her work out her own thought processes inside her own head. He had no idea why she was so discontented with their paradise — she hadn't been at first — but if he just kept very quiet and very attentive, maybe this whole thing would blow over and they'd get back to the way things used to be. Having fun. Not worrying about anything. Not nagging people all the time.

She licked grease from her fingers. They never could remember napkins, so she rubbed her fingers down the leg of her jeans. She said, "I want to go home."

"What?"

"Not right away," she said.

"Wha, wha, we, you, I—"

"But I want to see something first, be somewhere, have things going on around me."

"We, we—"

"I think," she said, "I'd like to go south first, maybe down to Florida. Then we can circle back and head for home."

"Nebraska? Nessa? Numbnuts, Nebraska?"

"I miss all the kids," Nessa said.

"No, you don't," Brady told her. "Those were the bozos. You don't miss those morons any more than I do."

"I miss something," she insisted. "But anyway, we've got to leave here. I will not be snowed in on this mountain, so we just have to go, that's all."

Being reasonable, he said, "How? We don't have any money."

"We'll steal things from here," she said. "Things we can sell to pawnshops. Things like mantel clocks and, and toaster ovens. We'll leave here while we can still get out to the main road, and drive south until we get warm, and then maybe in the spring we'll drive by home again and just look at it, just see what it looks like after we've been away."

"In the world, you mean."

She looked around the big empty dining room. "This isn't the world, Brady," she said.

In the spring, he thought, I'll come back here, the chess set will be on the table where they said, and I'll see it because I know the secret. So for now, let's just keep Nessa happy.

"Okay," he said. "We'll drive south. We'll drive to Florida. We can start tomorrow morning."

"Good." Nessa looked comfortably around at the table. "So at least," she said, "we won't have to wash these plates."

It was beside the pool at a motel in Jacksonville, Florida, that they got into conversation with the advance man for an alternative rock band on tour that would be playing in town that weekend. "Come by the room after lunch, I'll give you a couple ducats," he said, and they thanked him, and he grinned and walked off, hairy shoulders, pool water glistening in his beard and ponytail.

A little later Nessa was ready to leave the pool, but Brady was enjoying himself, mostly looking at college girls on spring break, so he said, "I'll just stick around here a little longer." If he wasn't getting as much as he used to from Nessa, at least he could look at these girls, maybe sneak off with one at some point.

But nothing happened, as he'd more or less realized it wouldn't, so an hour later he went back to the room and Nessa wasn't there. Neither was her little suitcase, nor the cash from his wallet.

Brady never saw Nessa again. Without her, he made his circuitous way back home to Numbnuts, was forgiven, got a job in Starbucks, and was a good boy the rest of his life. There came a time when he never even thought about Nessa any more, but still, every once in a while, he did wonder: Whatever happened to that chess set?