What's So Funny?

33

FIONA HAD A window. She had a window just to the right of her reproduction Empire desk here on the upper floor of Livia Northwood Wheeler's duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, and she never tired of looking out her window at the sweep of Central Park down below, not even when it was snowing, which it was doing right now. Not a heavy snow like those of January and February, turning the world white and thick and hard to move around in, this was a tentative March snow, the snow of a season that knows its end is near, a mere dusting of white to freshen the mounds of old snow gathered beneath the trees and against the low stone wall that separated the park from Fifth Avenue.

Fiona's job as Livia Northwood Wheeler's personal assistant was interesting in its diversity, but it did leave time for gazing out the window at the park, imagining what the view would be when they came to spring and then to summer. When she wasn't park-gazing, though, there was enough to keep her busy in Mrs. Wheeler's affairs, which were many and varied and mostly uncoordinated.

Mrs. W (as she preferred to be called by the staff) was, for instance, on the boards of many of the city's organizations, as well as a director of a mind-boggling array of corporations. Beyond that, she was a tireless litigant, involved in many more lawsuits than merely those involving her immediate family. Solo, or as a very active member of a class, she was at the moment suing automobile manufacturers, aspirin makers, television networks, department stores, airlines, law firms that had previously represented her, and an array of ex-employees, including two former personal assistants.

While passionately involved in every one of these matters, Mrs. W was not at all coordinated or methodical and never knew exactly where she was in any ongoing concern, whom she owed, who owed her, and where and when the meeting was supposed to take place. She really needed a personal assistant.

And Fiona was perfect for the job. She was calm, she had no ax to grind, and she had a natural love for detail. Particularly for all the more reprehensible details of Mrs. W's busy life, the double-dealing and chicanery, the stories behind all the lawsuits and all the feuds and all the shifting loyalties among Mrs. W's many rich-lady friends. And, just to make Fiona's life complete, Mrs. W was writing an autobiography!

Talk about history in the raw. Mrs. W had total recall of every slight she'd ever suffered, every snub, every shortchanging, every encounter in which the other party had turned out to be even more grasping, shrewder, and more untrustworthy than she was. She dictated all these steaming memories into a tape recorder in spurts of venom, which Lucy Leebald, Mrs. W's current secretary, had to type out into neat manuscript.

Fiona's role in all this was to read the finished sections of manuscript and establish the chronology of events, since Mrs. W recalled things in no sequence at all and didn't personally care a rap when this or that event had occurred. To put her story in chronological order purely on the basis of internal evidence was, of course, impossible, but it was just exactly the kind of impossibility a history nut goes nuts for.

Fiona, still astonished by the fact three months later, was in heaven. The day she'd been fired by Mr. Tumbril at Feinberg had been a frightening one, somehow liberating but mostly perilous, with no solid future in sight. She'd had to tell Brian, of course (he'd responded with black pudding for dinner), but she told no one else, not even her grandfather, until the following week, when he called her because he'd received that set of names of Northwood heirs she'd mailed on her way out the Feinberg door. Then she'd had to confess, weeping a bit, and he was so repentant, so appalled, so positive it was all his fault, that she was forced to cheer up just so he would feel a little better.

He was also responsible for her being here, in this job. It's true Mrs. W had said, at the end of that awful experience, "Call me," but Fiona had had no intention of doing any such thing until Grandfather, hearing her story, insisted she make the call: "Always follow up, Fiona, it's a rule of the world."

So she'd followed up, to find that the invitation to call had been an act of contrition by a woman not at all used to being contrite. She hadn't thought twice about heaving the lackey Fiona Hemlow at the head of Jay Tumbril, only to discover — mirabile dictu! — the girl was innocent! And a victim! Mrs. W's victim as much as Jay Tumbril's, in fact.

So here she was, and if Mr. Tumbril knew who answered Mrs. W's office phone these days, those few times he'd left messages here, he gave no sign. Nor, of course, did she.

Tink-tink.

Not the office phone. There were three phones on Fiona's desk, each with its own ring — blip-blip for the outside line, bzzzork for the in-house line, and tink-tink for Mrs. W's private line from her desk in her own office across the hall. So: "Good morning, Mrs. W It's still snowing."

"Thank you, my dear, I have the Weather Channel for that. Come in and bring your pad."

"Yes, ma'am."

Fiona left the office she shared with Lucy Leebald, crossed the hall with its elevator at the far end and window at this end with its identical park view to her own, and into Mrs. W's office, in which the same windows somehow offered more light, more air and more park, and where Mrs. W herself sat at her more ornate desk and nodded at Fiona like the queen bee she was. "Good morning, dear."

"Good morning, Mrs. W."

"Close the door, dear, and sit on the sofa here. You have your pad; good."

The little settee next to Mrs. W's desk was far less comfortable than it looked. Fiona perched on it and looked expectant.

Mrs. W seemed more ruminative than usual this morning. Frowning a little, she watched her hands move small figurines around on her desk as she said, "As I remember, in addition to your law degree, you have a strong interest in the study of history."

"Your memoir is fascinating, Mrs. W"

"Of course it is. But it's a different history I want you to think about now."

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Do you remember a discussion we had — two discussions, I think — about the Chicago chess set?"

Oh, dear. Fiona had been afraid to even mention the chess set, but wanting to help her grandfather in his quest — even if at the moment he believed he'd given it up — she had given it a try. She'd even — when they were looking together at the photos of the pieces on Mrs. W's computer — managed to «discover» the mismatch in weight among the rooks.

But that had been some time ago. She'd given the effort up when she'd seen she was getting nowhere and might even be putting herself at risk. But now Mrs. W herself had raised the issue; for good, or for ill? Heart in her mouth but expression as innocent as ever, Fiona said, "Oh, yes, ma'am. That beautiful chess set."

"You noticed one of the pieces was the wrong weight."

"Oh, I remember that."

"Very observant of you," Mrs. W said, and nodded, agreeing with herself. "That fact kept bothering me, after our discussions, and I soon realized there was far more mystery surrounding that chess set than merely one unexpectedly lighter rook."

Looking alert, interested, Fiona said, "Oh, really?"

"Where is that chess set from?" Mrs. W demanded, glaring severely at Fiona. "Who made it? Where? In what century? It just abruptly appears, with no history, in a sealed glass case in the lobby of my father's company, Gold Castle Realty, when they moved into the Castlewood Building in 1948. Where was it before 1948? Where did my father get it, and when? And now that we know the one piece is lighter than the rest, and is a castle, now we wonder, where did my father get his company name?"

"Gold Castle, you mean."

"Exactly."

Knowing how she could answer every last one of Mrs. W's questions, but how doing so would be absolutely the worst move she could make, Fiona said, "Well, I guess he had to have it somewhere else before he put up the new building."

"But where?" Mrs. W demanded. "And how long had he had it? And who had it before him?" Mrs. W shook her head. "You see, Fiona, the more you study that chess set, the deeper the mystery becomes."

"Yes, ma'am."

"History and mystery," Mrs. W mused. "The words belong together. Fiona, I want you to ferret out the history and the mystery of the Chicago chess set."

I am being given, Fiona thought, the one job in all the world at which I have to fail. I'm the mystery, Mrs. W, she thought, I'm the mystery and the history, my family and I, and you must never know.

Mrs. W was going on, saying, "I don't mean I want you to devote your life to that, but for at least a little time every day you should work on this problem. What is that chess set, and where did it come from?"

"Yes, ma'am." With the sudden thought that there might be something useful here, after all, useful to her grandfather and to Mr. Eppick and to Mr. Dortmunder, she said, "Do you think I should go look at the chess set?"

Mrs. W didn't like that idea at all. "What, physically stare at the thing? We know what it looks like, Fiona."

"Yes, of course," Fiona said.

"If it had a label on the bottom reading 'Made In China, someone would have noticed it before this."

"Yes, ma'am."

"If it ever turns out there is a need for a physical examination, I'm sure we could arrange it. But for now, Fiona, the question you are to concern yourself with is provenance. What is that chess set's history? What is its mystery?"

"I'll look into it, Mrs. W," Fiona promised.

34

A BLUSTERY SUNDAY IN March, and Dortmunder and Kelp trudged back across the snowy warehouse roof, following their own reversed footsteps toward the distant fire escape. They were dressed in black parkas with the hoods up, black wool trousers, black leather gloves and black boots, and the wind snaked through it all anyway. The plastic backpacks they wore, also black, were just as empty as when they'd come up onto this roof, and they were going to stay that way, at least for today.

It was Kelp who'd lined up the customer for the video games said to be stacked like candy bars in the warehouse below, and it was this customer who'd told them everything they needed to know to effect entry to the place from above. Everything, that is, except the existence of the two pit bulls down there, gleaming like devils in the safety light.

At first, Kelp had suggested they might be a hologram: "It's a video game place, why not?"

"Go down and pet one," Dortmunder suggested, so that was that. While the pit bulls stared upward, yearning to be best friends but unable to climb the steel rungs mounted on the wall, Dortmunder and Kelp quietly closed the trapdoor they'd opened and turned back, empty-handed. Days like this one could be discouraging.

All at once the opening chords of Beethoven's Ninth burst across the windy air. Dortmunder dropped to the snowy roof, staring around in panic for the orchestra, and then realized Kelp was fumbling in his trouser pocket and murmuring, "Sorry, sorry."

"Sorry?"

"It's my new ringtone," Kelp explained while, without a pause, the invisible orchestra leaped back to the beginning and started all over again.

"Ringtone."

"I usually," Kelp said, finally managing to drag the cell phone out of his pocket, "keep it on vibrate."

"I don't want to know about it," Dortmunder said.

Kelp made the racket go away, put the machine to his head, and said, "Hello?"

Dortmunder turned away, brushing himself free of dirty snow and reorienting himself vis-a-vis the fire escape, when Kelp said, "Yeah, hold on, wait a minute," then extended the phone toward Dortmunder with a very strange expression on his face: "It's for you."

Dortmunder didn't believe it. "For me? Whadaya mean? People don't go around calling me on roofs!"

"He doesn't know where you are," Kelp said. "It's Eppick. Come on, it's for you."

Eppick. Dortmunder hadn't thought of that guy in three months, and had been perfectly prepared to never think of him again, but here was this phone, on this roof, with snowy wind all around, and he was supposed to talk to Johnny Eppick For Hire.

So all right. He took the phone: "Yar?"

"You don't have a cell."

"No thanks to you."

"That's pretty cute," Eppick said. "You weren't at home, you don't have an answering machine either, you might not even have indoor plumbing for all I know. I was gonna leave a message with your friend, call me, but here you are."

"I have indoor plumbing."

"Glad to hear it. Mr. Hemlow is back."

"No. I don't want him back."

"But this is good news," Eppick said. "The granddaughter has maybe come through after all. I don't know the details yet. Mr. Hemlow wants to lay it on the two of us."

Dortmunder was about to say no, he hadn't found much profit in his dealings with the firm of Hemlow & Eppick, and besides, Eppick no longer possessed those overly candid photos, but then he thought about the pit bulls to whom he'd so recently been introduced, and his other current prospects, which added up to a round nil, and he thought there might be worse roads to travel than the one that led back to Mr. Hemlow, with whom, at least, with luck, he would not be bit.

But there had to be conditions. "No more taxis."

"I understand, John," Eppick said. "I tell you what. Tell me where you are now, I'll come pick you up."

Dortmunder shook his head. Some days, you just can't win. "I'll take a cab," he said.

Dortmunder stepped into the Riverside Drive lobby as Eppick rose from the rhinoceros-horn chair and dropped somebody's New York Post on the seat. The green-uniformed doorman welcomed Dortmunder like an old stranger: "The other gentleman—"

"I remember him."

Eppick stepped forward, serious-faced, arm out as though to shake hands, about which Dortmunder was very ambivalent, but then fortunately he only wanted to grasp Dortmunder's elbow and say, "A word, John, before we go upstairs."

"Sure."

They strolled to a rear corner of the lobby among the oriental rugs on both floor and walls, and Eppick said, "As far as I'm concerned, you know, bygones are bygones."

"That's nice," Dortmunder said.

"Fortunately," Eppick said, "my insurance covered almost everything."

"That's nice."

"And it was a good learning experience, to know where I had to beef up security."

"That's nice."

Eppick peered closely into Dortmunder's face, still holding, though not tightly, Dortmunder's left elbow. "You know what I'm talking about."

"No."

"That's fine, then," Eppick said, and released his elbow to give him a friendly, if perhaps slightly hostile, whack. "Let's go up and have Mr. Hemlow give us the good news."

There was a new extraneous green-uniformed operator hovering over the controls in the elevator. Dortmunder nodded at him. "Harya."

"Sir."

"The other guy go on to pilot's school?"

"I wouldn't know, sir. I'm new here."

"You'll get the hang of it," Dortmunder assured him.

The doorman leaned his head in to tell the newbie, "The penthouse."

"Yes, sir."

So, to the penthouse they went, and there in his wheelchair was Mr. Hemlow, about whom the best you could say was that he probably didn't look any worse. Or not much worse.

"Welcome to you both," Mr. Hemlow said, nodding that head that looked as though it might roll off the medicine ball at any minute. Below, the busy leg tangoed.

"Nice to see you, Mr. Hemlow," Eppick said, and Dortmunder contented himself with a nod, deciding to let Eppick have spoken for both of them.

"Well, come along."

Apparently, everybody was friends again, because the speeding wheelchair led them back to the view and the two chairs side by side. Once they were there, Mr. Hemlow said, "May I offer you two something to drink?"

This was something new, a level of sociability heretofore unknown. Dortmunder might have tried his luck on a bourbon request, but Eppick said, "Oh, we're fine, Mr. Hemlow. So things worked out well for Fiona, did they?"

"Very well indeed." That head might be beaming, in grandfatherly pride. "It seems that Mrs. Livia Northwood Wheeler," he said, "the person Fiona improperly approached, blamed herself for Fiona's being fired, sought her out to be sure she'd be all right, and, in a word, hired her as a personal assistant."

"No kidding!" Eppick loved it.

Mr. Hemlow chuckled, or something. "At an actual increase in pay," he said. "Not much, but some."

"That's great, Mr. Hemlow."

"But that's only the beginning," Mr. Hemlow told him. "Although I'd assured Fiona, and it was the truth, that I had no further interest in the stolen chess set, she now felt she might be in a position to help us all lay our hands on it."

"That would be something," Eppick said.

"Yes, it would. Not wanting to risk her reputation even further, Fiona operated very slowly and carefully, gradually inculcating in Mrs. Wheeler's mind the idea that there just might be something not entirely on the up-and-up about that chess set."

Interested, Eppick said, "How'd she work that, Mr. Hemlow?"

"There was the difference in weight between the rooks," Mr. Hemlow said. "Also, the lack of provenance from before its appearance in Alfred Northwood's possession. Northwood had no family, no money, no discernible background, all matters of supreme significance to a woman like Mrs. Wheeler. Where had this supposedly so valuable object come from?"

Admiring, Eppick said, "Fiona got that point across, did she?"

"She was aided, I have no doubt," Mr. Hemlow said, "by Mrs. Wheeler's natural paranoia. But yes, she did become convinced there was something dubious, shall we say, about that chess set, and now she's given Fiona the task of establishing the set's bona fides."

Eppick gave a single bark of a laugh. "Those bona fides are gonna be tough to come by," he said.

"I don't doubt," Mr. Hemlow said, "that a diligent researcher could trace the set back to Sgt. Northwood's arrival in this city in 1921 on the train from Chicago. He wouldn't have announced the set's existence at that time, wouldn't have brought it out at all into public view until twenty-seven years later, when he felt secure enough, respectable enough—"

"Rich enough," Eppick suggested.

"That, too." Mr. Hemlow tremored a nod. "Solid enough, let us say, that he dared to put the set on display in the lobby of his real estate offices. Announcing without ever quite saying so that this elaborate toy of kings was the source of the Northwood fortune."

Eppick said, "What about before… when was it? 1921? When he brought the set on the train from Chicago?"

"Yes, 1921." Various parts of Mr. Hemlow, squeezed as they were into the wheelchair, tremored and tangoed and fidgeted and possibly even shrugged. "Before that date," he said, "there is no trace. We three in this room know the actual owner a little prior to that time would have been Czar Nicholas II, but even there the property rights are clouded, since apparently Nicholas never actually received the gift. Nor can we ever know the gift-giver's identity or ultimate intention."

"Good for us," Eppick said.

"Possibly." Mr. Hemlow nodded and said, "We can only assume the chess set reached Murmansk sometime in 1917, just as the First World War and the Russian Revolution were both breaking out. The set could move no further, since all the land between Murmansk and St. Petersburg was being fought over, and all trace of it, all paperwork connected to it, even the identity of the sender, all were lost in the double turmoils of war and uprising. By 1918, Nicholas and his entire family had been slaughtered by the Bolsheviks, leaving the question of ownership, if it would ever even arise, further and further in doubt. Surely the Bolsheviks could not be thought to have inherited."

"Not from their own crime," Eppick said.

"Exactly. By 1920, when the American platoon stumbled across the set in a pierside warehouse in Murmansk, who was the rightful owner? If ever there were such a thing as legitimate spoils of war, that chess set is it. So I suppose it would be permissable to say, if there are any potential claimants to ownership of the set, they are the descendants of the ten men in that platoon, including of course myself and my granddaughter."

Dortmunder said, "And the Livia Northwood Whatever. Her."

"Yes, of course," Mr. Hemlow said. "Not all of Mrs. Wheeler's worth is ill-gotten, only ninety percent of it."

Eppick barked that laugh again. "We'll leave them a couple pawns," he said.

"Amusing," Mr. Hemlow said, "but I think not."

Dortmunder said, "How's your granddaughter gonna try to find out where that thing come from if she already knows where it come from but can't tell anybody?"

"Well, you see," Mr. Hemlow said, perking up as though Dortmunder had just put his finger on a very positive and a very strategic point, "that's the beauty of it, John. Since she knows the answer, she knows what to avoid. She knows to provide Lydia Northwood Wheeler with clues and evidence that lead firmly in some opposite direction."

Dortmunder said, "Which opposite direction?"

"Whichever direction," Mr. Hemlow said, "will lead Mrs. Wheeler to demand the chess set be taken out of that vault—"

"Now you're talkin," Dortmunder said.

"— and examined by experts."

Eppick said, "Mr. Hemlow, this is great news."

"Yes, it is." Was that a smile of satisfaction down there in the blubber somewhere? "I wanted you both to know this situation is brewing," he went on, "because I will want you both available when the time comes. But let me remind you of the ground rules."

"Keep away from your granddaughter," Eppick said.

"Exactly so. She survived the previous danger, but I don't want it to happen again."

"Fine by us," Dortmunder said.

"At this point," Mr. Hemlow said, "Fiona is on her own, attempting to steer events. Whatever news may develop, she will communicate it to me, I will communicate it to you, Johnny, and you will communicate it to John."

"Absolutely, sir," Eppick said.

A beady eye from out of the folds focused on Dortmunder. "Is that clear to you as well, John?"

"I don't need to chitchat with granddaughters," Dortmunder told him. "When that thing comes up outa that vault, just tell me where it is. That's all I need."

"We're all business," Eppick assured Mr. Hemlow, "all the time. Aren't we, John?"

"You bet," Dortmunder said. He was wondering about suggesting he be put on Mr. Hemlow's payroll this time, next to Eppick, but decided not to waste his breath. He knew what the answer was.

"Well, gentlemen," Mr. Hemlow said, and down inside there he might have been smiling. "It would seem, once again, the game's afoot."

35

JACQUES PERLY WAS the only private detective Jay Tumbril knew, or was likely to know. A specialist in the recovery of stolen art, frequently the go-between with the thieves on the one side and the owner/museum/insurer on the other, Perly was a cultured and knowledgeable man, far from the grubby trappings associated with the term "private eye."

Tumbril had known Perly slightly for years, since the Feinberg firm had more than once been peripherally involved in the recovery of valuable art stolen from its clients, and now, although Fiona Hemlow could not fairly be described as either «stolen» or "art," Jacques Perly was the man Jay Tumbril thought to turn to when there were Questions to be Asked.

They met at one that Monday afternoon for lunch at the Tre Mafiosi on Park Avenue, a smooth, hushed culinary temple all in white and green and gold, with, this time of year, pink flowers. Perly had arrived first, as he was supposed to, and he rose with a smile and an outstretched hand when Tony the maître d' escorted Jay to the table. A round, stuffed Cornish game hen of a man, Jacques Perly retained a slight hint of his original Parisian accent. A onetime art student, a failed artist, he viewed the world with a benign pessimism, the mournful good humor of a rich unmarried uncle, who expects nothing and accepts everything.

"Nice to see you, Jacques," Jay said, releasing Perly's hand, as Tony seated him and Angelo distributed menus and Kwa Hong Yo brought rolls, butter, and water. "It's been a while."

"Yes, it has. You've been fine?"

"And you?"

Menus were consulted, food and wine were ordered, and then Jay leaned forward over the display plate, made a steeple of his hands over the plate, and leaned back as Kwa Hong Yo removed the plates. He then leaned forward again, made another steeple, rested chin on steeple like golf ball on tee, and said, "In complete confidence."

"Of course."

"Let's see. How do I begin?"

Perly knew better than to offer advice on that score, so after a minute Jay said, "A client of ours, a valued client of some years standing, is a very wealthy woman."

"Of course."

"She was introduced, not by me, to a young woman, a young attorney with the firm." Jay picked up a roll and watched himself turn it over and over, as though searching for a secret door. "The young woman had gone outside the normal channels to force a meeting with this client," he told the roll. "That was against the firm's rules." With a quick glance at Perly, he said, "It would be against most firms' rules."

"I can see the security implications," Perly agreed.

Jay dropped the roll onto its bread plate, a little disappointed in it. "Unfortunately," he said, "I was a bit impetuous. In fact, I fired the young woman in the client's presence."

"Who took the young woman's part," Perly suggested.

"Worse," Jay said. "She hired the young woman as her personal assistant."

"Oh, dear."

"Exactly."

Perly considered. "The softer sex," he suggested.

"Possibly," Jay said. "The more willful sex, in any event."

"Speaking of sex," Perly said, now studying his own roll, "is there any chance…?"

"What? No, no! That's not the issue at all!"

Fortunately, the soup arrived at that moment, and when they continued the conversation it was from a slightly different angle. "This young woman," Jay said. "Her manner of forcing herself on the client made me suspicious. What was her motive?"

"To be hired by the client?"

"I don't think so, not at first." Jay shook his head. "I doubt she could have guessed that turn of events in a million years."

"Then what did she have in mind?"

"That's the question," Jay said, fixing Perly with a meaningful stare. "That's the question in a nutshell."

"The question that brings us to this lunch."

"Exactly. What is the young woman's ulterior motive? What, if any, risk is there to my client?"

"Yes, of course. And how long ago did this happen?"

"I fired the young woman in December."

"Ah. In time for Christmas."

"That was not ad rem."

"No, of course not." Perly smiled, man to man. "A pleasantry," he said.

"It happened to be when I learned the facts," Jay said, feeling faintly defensive but firmly strangling the feeling in its crib. "As I say, I acted impetuously."

"And what has happened in the three months since?"

"She — the young woman — is ensconced in my client's apartment — not living there, working there, living somewhere else — and every time I phone my client only to hear that young woman's voice and have to leave a confidential message for my client with her, it gives me a twinge, a sense of foreboding."

"Yes."

"Finally," Jay explained, "it seemed to me I had to act on my instincts, if only to assure myself there was no real… problem here."

Perly nodded. Surreptitiously he looked around for the arrival of the entree while saying, "Just the level of attention and concern I'd expect from you, Jay. But you have no specific fears or doubts in connection with this young woman."

"I know nothing about her," Jay complained. "She filled out the usual applications and took the usual tests. I've brought copies of all that for you."

"Good."

"She has a decent education, comes so far as I know from a decent family, has no previous link that I can find with my client at all. But it was that client and no other that the young woman went after."

"Wherever there's an action, there is always a motive," Perly said. "What is her motive? That is what you want me to find out."

"Yes."

Perly nodded. "How will I be billing this?"

"To me, at the firm," Jay said. "I'll pass it on to the client's account."

"We are acting on her behalf, after all," Perly agreed. "Even if I don't come up with anything… reprehensible."

"Whatever you come up with," Jay told him, "if it at least answers my question about her reasons, I'll be content. And so will the client."

"Naturally."

From within his sleek dark jacket, Perly withdrew a slender black notebook that contained within a strap its own gold pen. Drawing this pen, he said, "I'll need names and addresses and some little details concerning these two ladies."

"Of course."

Seeing Jay hesitate, Perly leaned forward into his arriving main course, smiled, and said, "Confidentiality, Jay. It's considered my greatest virtue."

36

WHAT BRIAN MISSED most was the evenings alone. It had been fun, in those days, to come back to the apartment from the cable station before six, futz around with his music, browse in his cookbooks, prepare tonight's dinner in a slow and leisurely fashion, and know that, probably after ten o'clock, he'd get that call: "I'm on my way." He'd turn up the heat under the pots or in the oven, bring out tonight's wine and a couple of glasses and be ready when she walked in the front door.

Being fired from Feinberg had been bad for Fiona but ultimately it had been worse for Brian, because she was over it by now but he was never going to be. He'd never have those evenings to himself, ever again. Or the sense of freedom they had given him, in more ways than one.

As he well knew, it was the irregularity of her days that had made the regularity of his own easier to stand. What had attracted him to both cartooning and cooking in the first place was that both were art, not science. He could cook but he couldn't bake, because baking was chemistry; get one little thing wrong and you've ruined it. The same with cartooning; he couldn't do an exact face or even an exact building, but he could give you the feel of it, and that's what made it art.

What he liked about art was that there were no rules. He liked living with no rules. The regularity of his mornings and evenings struck him as too uncomfortably close to living within the rules, so he'd been lifted by Fiona's goofy hours; they'd freed him from the temporal rules by osmosis. But he would of course never tell her that her being fired had taken that pleasure out of his life.

Besides, he was happy for her. She had a better job now, which meant not just more money and better hours but more entertaining things for her to talk about over dinner, Mrs. Wheeler being an endlessly diverting character. He wished sometimes he could figure out a way to turn her into a cartoon and sell it to the station, or maybe some other channel further up the animation food chain. He was creative in some ways, but not in that way, and he regretted it.

Now that they had these longer evenings together, another question was what to do to fill the time between getting home and actually sitting down to dinner, which couldn't possibly happen until two or three hours later. Much of the time was spent with Fiona detailing Mrs. W's latest follies while he worked on dinner, and the rest of the time they'd been filling in with games: Scrabble, backgammon, cribbage.

But the main topic of their evenings was Livia Northwood Wheeler, who was so rich the thought of it made Brian's teeth hurt. She was also apparently as ditzy and over-the-top as any cartoon character you could think of. Brian wanted to meet her. He wanted to laugh, discreetly, at her antics, and he wanted from time to time to find some of her money in his pockets. If he could arrange the meeting, he was sure he could arrange the rest. If only he could arrange the meeting.

Evening after evening, while shifting tiles or moving pegs or arranging tiles into words, he'd drop little hints that he'd like to meet the fabulous Mrs. W Why not invite her to dinner? "I'm not that bad a cook."

"You're a wonderful cook, as you very well know. 'Quixotic' is a word, isn't it? But we couldn't ask her here, Brian."

"Why not? Maybe she'd enjoy slumming."

"Mrs. W? I really doubt that."

If it were summer, or the weather were at least decent, he could suggest a picnic, in Riverside Park, or even on the roof of this building, which had some pretty good views and which some of the tenants did occasionally use for picnics and small parties, though Frisbee had been banned after a couple of unfortunate incidents.

But now, at last, this Monday in March, he had his opportunity, or he thought he did. All day at the station the preparations had been under way, and that's where he got the idea, and could hardly wait to get home, and for Fiona to get home, so he could try it on her. Maybe this time it would happen. But he should be cool about it, not just burst out with the idea, or she'd likely be turned off.

So this evening, though they were both home before six, and moving cribbage pegs inexorably onward by half past, he waited until that game was finished — she won — to even broach the subject. "Guess what's happening this weekend," he said.

She gave him a funny look. Nothing happened on the weekend in March, as all the world knew. Unless St. Patrick's Day came on any day remotely close to the weekend, being any day except Wednesday, as everyone also knew, and as at the moment was not the case. So, "Happening?" she inquired.

"It's the March Madness party at the station," he told her, with a big happy grin.

So there was to be an occurrence on the weekend in March after all, though it didn't actually occur in, or anywhere near, New York City. It was Spring Break, the annual pilgrimage of all America's undergraduate scholars to Florida to take seminars on noncommitment.

Spring Break was a big deal for Brian's station, GRODY, because it homed right in on their target audience. One time, Fiona had asked him, "Who does watch that station?" and he'd answered, "The eighteen-to-nineteen-and-a-half-year-old males, an extremely important advertising demographic," and she'd said, "That explains it," whatever that meant.

In any event, GRODY annually marked Spring Break with its March Madness party, at a rented party place down in Soho, limited to station staff and advertisers and local press and cable company minor employees and good friends and whoever else happened to hear about it. All attendees were encouraged to come costumed as one of the cartoon characters from the station, and many did. Brian's Reverend Twisted costume was kept in the back of the closet to be brought out lovingly and hilariously every year, an old if unusual friend. "Oh, I hope it still fits," he always said, which was his March Madness joke.

But now Fiona began to throw cold water on his idea even before she'd heard it, saying, with an exaggerated sigh, "Oh. I suppose we have to go."

"Have to go? Come on, Fiona, it's fun, you know it is."

"The first couple of times," she said, "it was fun, like visiting a tribe way up the Amazon that had never been marked by civilization."

"Listen—"

"But after a while, Brian," she said, "it becomes just a teeny little bit less fun."

"You never—"

"I'm not saying we won't go," she said. "I'm just saying I'm not as excited about it as I used to be. Brian, March Madness at GRODY does not hold many surprises for me any more."

He knew an opening when he heard one. "Listen," he said, very eager, as though the thought had just this second come to him. "I know how to put the zing back in the old March Madness."

The look she gave him was labeled Skepticism. "How?"

"Invite Mrs. W."

She stared at him as though he'd suddenly grown bat wings on the sides of his head. "Do what?"

"Watch her watching them," he explained, waving his arms here and there. "You know she's never seen anything like that in her life."

"Yes, I do know that," Fiona said.

"Come on, Fiona," he said. "You know I want to meet her, and there's never a place that's just right."

"And March Madness is just right?"

"It is. She'll know ahead of time it's a freak show, you'll explain the whole thing to her, a world she never even suspected existed."

"And wouldn't want to know exists."

"Fiona, invite her." Brian spread his hands above the cribbage board, a supplicant. "That's all I'm asking. Explain what it is, explain how your friend — that's me — wants to meet her, explain it's a goof and we promise to leave the instant she's had enough."

"Any of it would be more than enough, Brian."

Brian did an elaborate shrug. "If she says no," he said, "then that's that. I won't ever mention it again. But at least ask her. Will you do that much?"

"She would think," Fiona said, "I'd lost my mind."

"You'll say it was my idea, your goofy boyfriend's idea. Come on, Fiona. Ask her, will you? Please?"

Fiona sat back, frowning into the middle distance, her fingers tap-tapping on the table beside the cribbage board. Brian waited, afraid to push any more, and at last she gave a kind of resigned sigh and said, "I'll try."

Delighted, he said, "You will? Fiona, you'll really ask her?"

"I said I would," Fiona said, sounding weary.

"Thank you, Fiona," Brian said.

37

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, two days after his lunch with Jay Tumbril, Jacques Perly completed a very encouraging conference with two international art thieves and a sometime producer for the Discovery Channel, then drove back to the city from Fairfield County in bucolic Connecticut. The West Side Highway deposited him onto Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, and a few deft maneuvers later he steered the Lamborghini onto Gansevoort Street, thumbing the beeper on his visor as he did so. The battered old green garage door that obediently lifted in response was in a low squat structure that perfectly suited the neighborhood; an old stone industrial building converted to more upscale uses without losing its original rough appearance.

Perly steered into the building, beeped the door shut, and drove up the curving concrete ramp to where the conversion began. The high stone exterior walls up here were painted a creamy white, and ceiling spotlights pinpointed the potted evergreens in front of his office door. This space was large enough for two cars to park, though usually, as now, it contained only Perly's. Leaving the Lamborghini, he crossed to the faux Tudor interior wall and stepped into his reception room, where Delia looked up from her typing to say, "Hi, Chief. How'd it go?"

"Well, Delia," Perly said, with justifiable pride, "I believe we'll have an amphora on our hands in very short order. And thirty minutes of airtime."

"I knew you'd do it, Chief," she said. She'd never tell him, but she loved him madly.

"I thought I might," he admitted. "What's doing here?"

"The crew's reported on that Fiona Hemlow matter," she said. "Jerry sent his stuff over by messenger, Margo e-mailed it in, and Herkimer stopped by with it. Fritz says he'll have pix for you by the end of the day. It's all on your desk."

"Good girl. Man the barricades."

"Always, Chief."

He went into his inner office, a large room with tall windows across the back and a big domed skylight in thick glass, framed in steel. The furniture was clubby and quietly expensive, the wall decorations mostly pictures of recovered art. His desk, large and old and dark wood, had come from one of the daily New York newspapers that had gone under during the final newspaper strike of 1978. He sat at it now and drew to himself the three packets of information delivered by his crew.

Fifteen minutes later, he thumbed the intercom. "Delia, get me Jay Tumbril."

"Right, Chief."

It took another six minutes, while he skimmed the reports once more, before he got the buzz, picked up his phone, and said, "Jay."

"I'll put Mr. Tumbril right on," said a girl whose English accent was probably real.

"Fine." Perly had forgotten that Jay Tumbril was one of those people who scored points for himself in some obscure game if he made you get on the line first.

"Jacques."

"Jay."

"That was quick."

"It doesn't take long when there's nothing there."

"Nothing?"

"Well, not much. There's one little— But we'll get to that. The girl first. Fiona Hemlow."

"Yes."

"She's clean, Jay. A good student, conscientious, as obedient as a nun."

Jay, sounding faintly displeased, said, "Well, that's fine, then."

"Comes from money," Perly went on. "Her grandfather, still alive, was an inventor, a chemist, came up with some patents made him and the rest of the family rich."

"So she's not after Livia's money, is what you're saying."

"She isn't, no."

"Yes? I don't follow."

"For the last three years," Perly said, putting a finger on the name on the top sheet of Herkimer's report, "Ms. Hemlow has been shacked up with a character named Brian Clanson."

"He's the one you're dubious about."

"He is." Perly tapped Clanson's name with a fingernail, as behind him his computer dinged that an e-mail was coming in. "I ask myself," he said, "if this character put up our little nun to ingratiate herself with Mrs. Wheeler."

"So he'd be after her money."

"It's only a possibility," Perly cautioned him. "At this point, I have no reason to believe anything at all. I just look at this character, and I see someone from, to be honest, a white-trash background, a community college education, no contacts of any consequence in the city, and an extremely marginal job as some sort of illustrator for a cable channel aimed at Neanderthals. I can believe Ms. Hemlow hooked up with him because he has that redneck charm and because she's a naif who thinks well of everybody, but I can also believe Mr. Clanson hooked up with her because she has money, or at least her grandfather does."

"Mmm."

Turning in his swivel chair, Perly saw the e-mail was from Fritz, and opened it. The photographs. "Further than that," he said, "I can believe he came to the conclusion that Mrs. Wheeler was the likeliest prospect among your firm's clients for him to get his hands on."

"So you think he set the girl to go after Mrs. W."

Perly opened the photo marked BC and looked at Brian Clanson, arms folded, leaning against a tree in a park somewhere, big boned but skinny, like a stray dog, with a loose untrustworthy smile. "I'll only say this, Jay," he said, looking Clanson in the eye, "it's out of character for that girl to have imposed herself on Mrs. Wheeler all on her own. There has to have been a reason, and I can't find any other reason in the world except Brian Clanson." And he nodded at the grinning fellow, who showed no repentance.

Jay said, "So you want to look into Clanson a little deeper."

"Let's see if this is the first time," Perly said, "he's tried to work something funny with his betters."

"Go get him," Jay Tumbril said.

38

AT THE SAME TIME that Jacques Perly and Jay Tumbril were discussing the investigation into Fiona Hemlow and Livia North wood Wheeler, those two ladies, all unknowing of the scrutiny, were discussing the results of Fiona's own investigations. "There's just no record," Fiona was saying, spreading her hands in helplessness as she stood in front of Mrs. W's desk.

Mrs. W had a photo of the chess set displayed on her computer, and she now frowned at it with the same mistrustful expression that Perly, downtown, wore when gazing on the photo of Brian Clanson. "It's vexing," she said. "It's just vexatious."

"Your father, Alfred Northwood," Fiona said, consulting her memo pad, in which she had placed careful and thorough notes of the history just as though she hadn't had it memorized a long time ago, "came to New York from Chicago in 1921. We know that for certain. We know he was in the army in Europe in the First World War and became a sergeant, and went to Chicago after he left the army, though I couldn't find any records of what he was doing there. There's also no record of his having the chess set in the army or in Chicago—"

"Well, certainly not the army," Mrs. W snapped. "Nothing as valuable as that."

"No, ma'am. We know your father's friends and business associates called it the Chicago chess set because he brought it from there, but I can't find any circumstance in which he called it the Chicago chess set."

"Or anything else."

"Or anything else," agreed Fiona. "There is no record that he ever said where it came from, or how he happened to own it. I'm sorry, Mrs. W, there's just no history."

"Well, there, you see," Mrs. W said, with an irritated head-shake at the picture of the chess set. "Behind every great fortune there is a crime."

Alert, Fiona said, "There is?" because she found that a truly interesting idea.

But now Mrs. W's irritated headshake was directed at Fiona. "Balzac, dear," she said. "Père Goriot. And I fear that the crime behind my family's fortune may have more than a little to do with that chess set."

"Yes, ma'am."

Again Mrs. W frowned at the picture on the computer screen. "Will the crime be found out? Is there risk in that ugly toy? Is there anything to do other than let sleeping chessmen lie?"

"I don't know, Mrs. W."

"No, you don't. Well, thank you, Fiona. I'll think about this."

"Yes, ma'am." Fiona turned to go, then said, "Mrs. W, there is something else."

"Yes?"

"I wasn't even going to mention it, it's so silly."

"Well, either mention it or don't mention it," Mrs. W told her. "You can't dither forever."

"No, ma'am. It's my boyfriend, Brian."

Mrs. W's eyebrows lowered. "Is something wrong there?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that," Fiona assured her. "It's just — Well, you know, he works for a cable station, and they have a party every year in March, sort of the end of winter and all, and Brian said I should invite you. He's wanted to meet you, and—"

"Been telling tales about me, have you?"

Mrs. W hadn't said that as though she were angry, yet Fiona became very flustered and felt the color rise up into her cheeks. She couldn't think of a thing to say, but apparently her pink face said it all for her, because Mrs. W nodded and said, "That's all right, dear. I don't mind being an eccentric in other people's stories. I can't imagine what Jay Tumbril says about me, for instance. Tell me about this party."

"It's really very silly," Fiona said. "A lot of the people there dress up in costumes, not everybody. I won't."

"Like Halloween," Mrs. W suggested.

"Sort of."

"And when and where is this?"

"Saturday, down in Soho. It starts at eight, but Brian doesn't like to get there until ten."

"Very sensible. Let me think about it."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And," with a sudden snap to her voice, "get me Jay Tumbril on the phone."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I've made up my mind," Mrs. W said. "The time has come to bring in experts, to get to the bottom of this. Fiona, we are going to look at that chess set."

39

GRODY WAS ALWAYS in the process of expanding, without having either the money or the space to do so. The studio in Tribeca, being the entire third floor of an old industrial building where, in the late nineteenth century, aprons and overalls were manufactured, was always undergoing renovation, the carpenters and electricians with their leather toolbelts like space-age gunbelts and their macho swagger serving as the oil to the water of the staff's resident geeks.

Because the brick exterior walls of the building and the unrepealable law of gravity meant they could never actually add to their territory, the only way to accommodate more offices, more studios and more storage was to keep chopping finer and finer, until the rooms were like closets and the closets had long ago been sacrificed to the need for more space. Hallways had been squeezed to within an inch of the fire code. And one result of all this adjusting and repacking and clawing for space was that many of the resulting rooms were of unusual shapes, triangles and trapezoids. Long-ago-sacrificed doorways meant many of the routes within the GRODY confines were circuitous indeed. All of which was one reason why the company found it so hard to hire or keep anybody over the age of twenty-five.

Coming to work Thursday morning, after the astonishing news last night that Mrs. W actually would come along to Saturday's March Madness, Brian made his roundabout way toward his own office, one of the few octagons in here thus far, in which, no matter which way you faced, the workspace shrank away in front of you. Just after squeezing past two carpenters toting over their shoulders eight-foot lengths of L-shaped metal like bowling alley gutters creased down the middle, only lined along both sides with holes — what was that for? straining beer? — Brian was distracted from his route by a knocking on a window somewhere.

Oh; to the left. One of the control rooms was there, with a sealed window to the hall left over from some previous incarnation, and standing in it was Sean Kelly, Brian's shaggy boss, who mouthed things at him through the glass; some sort of question.

But the point of the control room was that it was soundproof, so Brian merely shrugged and pointed helplessly at his ear. Sean nodded, frowned, nodded, and pointed vaguely away with his right hand while doing a finger-up circular motion with his left. Come around and talk to me, in other words.

Sure. Brian nodded, paused to figure out the shortest way from this side of the glass to that side of the glass, and set off, along the way passing an electrician, seated wedged in a corner, still smoking slightly, accepting sustenance in a flask from his fellows.

Brian's route took him past his octagon, which had a doorway but no door because there was nowhere for it to open to. He nodded at it, trekked on, and eventually came to the control room containing both Sean and an expressionless technician seated at the controls, watching a tape of a hilarious animated outer-space drunk scene to be aired at eleven tonight, in competition with the world news. (They expected to win again.)

"Hey, Sean."

"Hey." Sean seemed troubled, in some vague way. "Man," he said, "you got any problems at home?" Hurriedly, he erased that from the imaginary blackboard between them. "I don't mean none of my business, man, you know, I just mean, anything gonna impact us here."

Brian could have pointed out that a permanent construction site was all impact, but he cut to the chase: " What problem, Sean? I do something wrong?"

"No, man," Sean said. "Nothing I know about. It's just, I got this call yesterday, just walking out of the office, this guy, says he's from the enforcement arm of the Better Business Bureau."

"Enforcement arm?"

"That's what he said, man." Sean grinned and scratched his head through his shaggy hair. "Can you see them comin around? 'You gotta give the twenty percent, man, it's right there in your ad. Might make a nice bit."

"Sean, he wanted to talk to you about me? Or just the place?"

"No, man, you, strictly you. Do you borrow from your coworkers—"

"Fat chance."

"Uh huh. Do I know where you cash your checks, have you ever had unexplained absences—"

"Everybody does, Sean."

That quick grin of Sean's came and went. "Sing it, sister. He wants to know, do I think you're having trouble in your home life, interfering with you here, whado I think your work prospects are—" Jesus.

"It was freaky, man." Another grin. "Don't worry, I covered for you."

Suspicion struck Brian. "You goofed on him."

"Naw, man, would I—"

"You would. Wha'd you tell him?"

"I just answered his questions, man, told him you were the number one jock in the shop."

"And? Come on, Sean."

Sean looked slightly sheepish, but still grinned. "Well, I did mention," he said, "those Venusian bordello scenes you do…"

"Lost It in Space. Yeah?"

"I said, you were so good at it, it's because you think they're real."

"Sean, what did you—"

"No, that's all, man, honest to God. Just sometimes we find you at your desk, you're in this trance state, you're getting laid on Venus. That's all I said, man."

"And did he believe you?"

Sean looked amazed at the question. "Brian? What do I know how Earth people think?"

Brian had all that day to figure out what was going on, and yet he didn't.

40

JAY TUMBRIL HAD all Thursday night to brood about Livia Northwood Wheeler and the Chicago chess set, which didn't leave much time for sleep, but he couldn't very well do that in the office either, so by eleven Friday morning he was both sleep-deprived and jittering on the edge of panic. He hated to admit there might be a circumstance in which his control of the situation was less than perfect, but there were such circumstances and this was one of them, so it was time to pull the emergency cord.

The point was, if you found yourself in a position so far outside your expertise you hadn't the faintest bloody idea what to do next, then the thing to do next was to call upon someone who does have expertise in the area, whatever that area might be. In this case, there was only one expert in the area that Jay knew, so just after eleven he picked up the intercom and said, "Felicity."

"Sir."

"Get me Jacques Perly."

"Sir."

Three minutes later, Felicity was back on the line: "Mr. Perly says he's in his car, northbound on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, speaking on his hands-free carphone, and wonders if he should ring you back later or will you rough it now."

Jay knew damn well Perly had actually said "the FDR Drive," but Felicity was so proud of her studies to become an American citizen that he merely said, "Thank you, Felicity, I'd rather talk to him now, it's a bit urgent."

"Sir."

Jay broke the connection, and spent the next twenty-five seconds rehearsing how he'd describe the situation. Then the buzz sounded, and he picked up and said, "Jacques."

"I'll put him right on."

"What?"

"Just joking," Perly said.

"I knew that was you, you didn't change your voice or anything. What do you mean, joking?"

"Your secretary said it was urgent."

"Yes, well— Yes, it is. Also, Jacques, extremely confidential."

"We know that."

"Sorry. Didn't mean to insult you. The truth is, I'm a little tense, didn't get much sleep last night…"

"You, Jay?"

"It's Livia Northwood Wheeler again!"

"What? The Hemlow girl? Or did Clanson make his move?"

"No, nothing to do with them. This is something completely different."

"Tell me."

Jay forced a deep breath, assembled his thoughts, and said, "Among the items under dispute in the law case involving Mrs. Wheeler and several of her relatives is a chess set, never I believe properly evaluated, but said to be worth in the millions."

"Worth fighting over, in other words."

"Yes. Since the suits began — I'll only say by now they sue and countersue and cross-sue one another to a degree of complexity you could only otherwise find in a map of the New York City subway system — the courts have placed this asset in the care of the law firms involved, four of whom, including us, have offices in this building, so that for the last few years the chess set, called for some reason the Chicago chess set, though I doubt it was made there, has been in the sub-cellar vaults beneath this building."

"And likely to stay there for a while, I should think."

"Except," Jay said, "now Mrs. Wheeler wants it brought up and placed somewhere that experts of various stripes may examine it."

"Dangerous."

"Infuriating," Jay corrected him. "As her attorney in this matter, it is up to me to take this request to the court. I unfortunately see no reason why the court would deny it, nor why any of the other litigants would object. I can see that every blessed soul concerned with this matter would like to take a look at that bloody chess set."

"So what's the problem?" Jacques asked.

"Where it is now," Jay told him, "in that vault beneath this building, it is safe as houses."

"But a little too inaccessible," Jacques suggested, "for perusal by experts."

"Exactly. Nor will the bank accept the concept of various people trooping through their vaults. It must come up. But whose task will it be to keep the damn thing safe while it's up and about, like the groundhog looking for its shadow?"

"Oh, I see."

"Yes, you do. It is up to this firm to find a site both accessible to the experts and agreeable to, if not the other litigants, at least to their legal representatives."

"And still be safe as houses," Perly suggested.

"If only we could." If Jay had had hair, he'd have torn it. "Not in these offices," he said. "We can't keep track of the copiers around here. And no other firm has more secure offices. It's not an official investigation, and so we can't ask the police to step in, and in fact for various potential ownership rights and inheritance liabilities, we'd rather leave officialdom out of this matter."

"When does she want to make this move?"

"Now! Yesterday!"

"Well, that's not possible. I could make a suggestion, Jay."

"Then why don't you?"

"I'm afraid it— Excuse me, there's a multiple-car collision up ahead, I'll just steer around— Oh, good, the police are on the scene, I'm being waved through— Oh, my God! Jay, you never want to see anything like that your whole life long."

"Don't describe it to me."

"I will not."

"You were going to make a suggestion."

"Oh, Lord. Give me a second, Jay."

"Of course."

That must have been horrendous, Jay thought, to rattle Jacques Perly. How much simpler life was when people couldn't tell us what they could see from their cars.

"What I was going to say, Jay—"

"Yes, Jacques."

"— That I was hesitant to make my suggestion because it could seem self-serving."

"You want to guard the piece? You're not a sentry, Jacques."

"I wanted to suggest my offices," Jacques said. "Extremely safe, extremely secure, but absolutely accessible. You've been there."

"Well, yes, but— I don't know what to say."

"You would hire private security, of course, 24/7, but the building itself is ideal for you, and I'm sure we could work out a rental acceptable to all concerned. I would have to keep my own business going at the same time, of course."

"Of course. Jacques, the more I think about this—"

"Well, think about one more thing," Jacques told him. "Ah, we're in the snowbelt now."

"Are we?"

"Ask yourself this, Jay. Why now? You said Mrs. Wheeler now wanted this, and wanted it at once. Why, Jay? After all these years, why now?"

"I haven't the vaguest idea."

"Could it be, Jay, because of her recent hire?"

"You mean—?"

"Has Fiona Hemlow put that suggestion into Mrs. Wheeler's head? And did Brian Clanson set the whole thing up? Is Brian Clanson just sitting there, waiting for that chess set to come up out of that vault?"

"Oh, my God."

"I'm already on Clanson, Jay, because of that other thing you asked me to do, though of course he has no idea he's under surveillance. We'll intensify that, study his associates. If your Chicago chess set is in my offices, and Brian Clanson makes a move to snatch it, we'll have him, Jay, in the of— our—"

"Jacques? You're breaking up."

"We'll— later." And Jacques Perly was gone.

41

THURSDAY EVENING WAS a busy time at the Safeway. The store stayed open late, and people stocked up on their groceries for the weekend. May didn't usually work the evening shift, since the one regularity John really liked in his life was dinner, but sometimes people got sick or fired or mislaid themselves somewhere, and May might be asked to fill in, like tonight. A little after seven now; she could quit at eight, pick out something nice for their evening repast in the deli department that wouldn't take a lot of preparation, and home she'd go. Easy.

The first thing she noticed about the guy was that the only thing he was carrying was a little packet of lightbulbs. He was on her checkout line, the people in front of him and behind him all with carts piled up to their chins, so that at first he just looked like a very easy example of the which-one-doesn't-belong-in-this picture quiz. She stood there, sliding items over the bar code reader, sliding them twice if she didn't hear that ping the first time, pushing the items onto the belt to roll on down to tonight's packer, an overweight kid with an overbite whom all the staff here knew only as Pudge, a name he didn't seem to mind, and she kept looking at the guy with the lightbulbs until finally she caught his eye and gestured with her head toward the last checkout line in the row, which was for people with six items or fewer, though the sign actually said six items or less. The guy grinned a thank-you and spread his hands a little; he'd rather stay here.

Huh. Ping. Ping. Then the lightbulb inside her head went off. He's a cop. He looks like a cop, heavy and self-confident, somebody that nobody would ever call Pudge, and he's doing something a normal person wouldn't do, which is wait in a long line of people buying out the store while he's only got one item. So that would make him not only a cop, but a cop with a particular interest in May, which could not be good news.

Her first thought was that John had been arrested, but her first thought always was that John had been arrested, so her second thought was to reject the first thought. If they'd arrested John, why come here? And if they were going to come here, why not just do a real cop thing and jump the line entirely to say what they had to say?

Well, she'd find out soon enough. A few thousand more pings and here he was, pushing the little packet of four hundred-watt frosted white bulbs toward her with a ten-dollar bill as he grinned and said, "You know, you really oughta get an answering machine."

He's from Andy, she thought, but she knew he wasn't. She said, "Oh, you must be the man John went to see a couple times."

"Naturally," he said.

Ping. She took the ten and made change as Pudge put the packet of lightbulbs into a plastic bag, and Johnny Eppick For Hire said, "So you be my answering machine. Pass on to John, he should call me. Tell him we got ignition."

I hope John doesn't plan to cheat this man, she thought. I'll have to remind him to be careful. "I'll tell him," she said. "Enjoy your light."

"Better than curse the darkness," he said, and grinned one last time, and carried his lightbulbs into the night.

42

BY FRIDAY MORNING, Dortmunder's irritation had cooled without disappearing. When May had come home last night and told him Eppick had actually braced her right there in the store with his message to call, Dortmunder had at first been outraged. "He talked to you? In the store? He's not supposed to have anything to do with you at all!"

May wasn't as upset as he was, but of course she'd had longer to live with it. She said, "He wasn't bad or anything, John. He just gave me the message for you and bought some lightbulbs."

"Lightbulbs? Listen, he wants to talk to me, he can call Andy, like last time."

"Well, he talked to me," she said, "and I thought it was a little weird, but there wasn't anything wrong about it."

"You know what it is?" he demanded. "I'll tell you what it is. The message isn't lightbulbs or call me or any of that. The message is, 'I can reach out to you. I not only know where you are, I know where your lady friend works, I'm on top of you any time I wanna be on top of you, that's what the message is."

"I think we already knew all that," May said. "Are you going to call him?"

"Some other time. Right now, I'm too irritated."

"Well, go in the living room, and let me get on with dinner," she said, gesturing at tonight's sack of groceries on the kitchen table.

He was hungry. "Okay."

"Have a beer as an appetizer."

"I will," he agreed, and took a can of beer with him to the living room, where he sat and frowned at the switched-off television set while he conducted several imaginary conversations with Johnny Eppick in his head, in which he was much fiercer and made much more telling points than was likely in real life, until May called him to dinner, which was a really good meat loaf, and how she'd whipped that up so fast, with all those ingredients and stuff, straight from working late hours at the Safeway, he had no idea. But it calmed him considerably, and at the end of the meal he said, "I'll call him tomorrow. Not tonight."

"Don't yell at him," she said.

He hesitated, then made the concession. "Okay."

And late this morning, after May'd headed back to the Safeway, he called Eppick's number and got his answering machine. "So this is better, is it?" he demanded. "We're in closer communication now, are we? I'm talking to a machine." And hung up.

Eppick phoned just after two that afternoon. "I'll give you a place you can walk to," he said. "Meet me at Union Square in half an hour. I'll be on a bench wherever the dealers aren't.

"The dealers won't be wherever you are."

"You think I'm that obvious?" Eppick asked him, but he sounded pleased at the idea.

"See you in half an hour," Dortmunder said, and did, walking through the park all bundled up against the raw March air, and Eppick was seated at his ease on a bench amid only civilians, and not many of them at that, because the weather was still a little below par for park bench-sitting. However, Dortmunder joined him and Eppick said, "The granddaughter has come through like a champ."

"You shouldn't talk to May," Dortmunder told him. "It upsets her."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Eppick said, though he didn't sound sorry. "She didn't look upset. Maybe we could get carrier pigeons, you and me."

They'd already veered too far from Dortmunder's practice conversations, so he said, "Tell me about the champ."

"Huh? Oh, the granddaughter." Eppick grinned, pleased at the very thought of the granddaughter. "She's our spy in the enemy camp," he said, "and she's worth her weight in chess sets."

"That's nice."

"They don't know exactly when they're gonna move the set," Eppick said, "because they're still working on the security, but as soon as they know it she knows it, and as soon as she knows it we know it. Or I know it, and you find out when the carrier pigeon gets there."

"Yeah, right."

"But what we do know now," Eppick said, "is the safe place they're gonna move it to. So this is a very nice edge," he pointed out, "because you can case it before the chess set even gets there."

"That's good."

"It's down on Gansevoort Street," Eppick told him. "It's the office of a private detective down there by the name of Jacques Perly." With an arch look, he said," You wouldn't have any trouble getting into a private detective's office, would you?

Not rising to the bait, Dortmunder said, "There's gotta be more to it than that. Some office on Gansevoort Street?"

"Well, if there's more to it," Eppick pointed out, "you've got time to find out what it is."

"I'll take a look," Dortmunder said, and glanced around at the snow-flecked park. You could see everybody's breath. "You know, it's kinda cold out here."

"It is," Eppick agreed, "but we've got privacy. But we could leave now."

"Good."

They stood, Eppick not offering to shake hands this time, and Dortmunder said, "Well, anything's gotta be better than that vault."

"Let's hope." Eppick shrugged his coat and scarf up closer to his chin. "You see your friend Kelp a lot, don't you?"

"From time to time."

"I'll leave messages with him."

"That's good," Dortmunder said. "I don't think May would like carrier pigeons."

43

AT JUST ABOUT the same time that Dortmunder and Eppick were consulting about the Chicago chess set en plein air, another meeting was coming to order on the exact same topic, but with a very different membership and in a very different setting. The setting, in fact, was the largest conference room in the offices of Feinberg et al, and still it felt crowded. It was a hush-hush top secret meeting attended only by those who absolutely had to be a party to it, and still that meant seventeen people.

Representing both Feinberg and Livia Northwood Wheeler, and therefore more or less conducting the meeting, was Jay Tumbril, accompanied by a stenographer named Stella, who would take notes of the meeting and record it as well, on cassette. Representing the other principal law firms connected with the Northwood matter were nine senior lawyers, the men in navy-blue pinstripe, the women in navy blue pinstripe plus white ruffles. Representing the NYPD, who would monitor the chess set's movements through the city streets, were two senior inspectors from Centre Street, both in uniforms heavy on the brass. Representing Securivan, the company whose armored car would actually transport the set from the sub-basement in this building to the second-floor office of Jacques Perly, were two sternly fit men with identical crew cuts and square jaws, and with brass Marine Corps insignia pins on the lapels of their pastel sport jackets. And finally, representing the intended destination of the set was Jacques Perly, who'd brought along his secretary Delia, who would also take notes and make a recording, and who was blinking a lot at the moment, not being used to life outside the office.

Once the necessary introductions had been made and business cards distributed, Jay, at the head of the conference table, stood and looked around at those assembled either at the table or in chairs along the wall, and decided to begin with a quip: "I'm happy that at last, after years of litigation, everyone connected with the matter of the Northwood estate has finally found one area of agreement. Everybody wants a look at that chess set."

Apparently no one else in the room realized that was a quip, so Jay cleared his throat into the silence and said, "We all understand there's a certain degree of peril in this move, particularly if word seeps out that it's about to happen, so I hope everyone here realizes the need for total secrecy on this matter until the move is done."

More silence, which this time Jay took for consent. "When a task is difficult and fraught with peril," he went on, "the wise man turns to the experts. I hope we're all at least that wise, and so I want to turn to the experts in our midst today, from Securivan and from the NYPD. Harry or Larry, would you share your thoughts with us?"

Harry and Larry were the Securivan men. Jay sat down and Larry remained seated as he said, "Keeping a secret that seventeen people in this room already know about, plus the judge and other people at the court, plus one or more people at the bank, plus at least one of the principals in the lawsuit means, not to offend anybody present, but it isn't a secret you're gonna keep secret for very long."

The more senior of the NYPD men present, whose name was Chief Inspector Mologna (pronounced Maloney), now said, "Speakin for myself, and speakin for the great city of New York, I can tell you right now you already got your secret blowed. This city does not raise up a criminal class that don't have its eyes open and its ears open and its hands open every blessed moment of the night and day. They're out there already and they're waitin for you. You put together a mob scene like we got in this room, of course, you're just engravin an invitation."

"Unfortunately, Chief Inspector," Jay said, "this is the minimum number possible to obtain agreement."

"Oh, I understand," the chief inspector said. "You got your protocols and you got your noses that might get out of joint, so you gotta have this social before you get down to business. But when you do get down to business, take it from me, the crooks will be right with you, every step of the way."

Larry of Securivan said, "Harry and I think the chief inspector's right, so, because there are those sharp-eared crooks out there, and, because we don't want to give them too much time to make their own plans, the sooner you make this move the better."

"That's right," the chief inspector said. "Don't shilly-shally."

Jay said, "No, we certainly don't want to do that."

"Harry and I," Larry said, "think the best time to do this is Sunday night."

"This Sunday night?" Jay asked him. "The day after tomorrow?"

"Yes, sir," Larry confirmed. "We'd want to get our armored car into position at the curb downstairs here at oh two hundred hours Monday morning."

His partner Harry spoke up: "This thing weighs, so we're told, a third of a ton. We'll have a crew of four with the armored oar, to bring the object up and place it into the vehicle."

"And we," Chief Inspector Mologna said, "are gonna have patrol cars on that block, and patrol cars up at the next intersection to divert traffic, so you are gonna have no vehicles in that area except your van and our patrols."

"This all sounds very good," Jay said.

Jacques Perly said, "When do you think you'd get to my shop?"

Larry considered that. "If we start at oh two hundred hours," he said, "say it takes fifteen minutes to bring the object up and secure it. At that time of night, fifteen or twenty minutes to drive down to your area. You should count on an arrival time of oh two-thirty to oh two-forty hours."

One of the other lawyers present said, "That means the experts could start examining the artifact Monday morning."

"Not quite," Jay said. "We don't want to tell anybody else about the move until after it's made." With a bow toward the chief inspector, he said, "Granted that secrets are difficult or impossible to keep, we'd still like to limit the advance knowledge of the move as much as we can."

Another lawyer said, "But they can start their inspections Tuesday morning, surely."

"I don't see why not."

"Some of our principals," another lawyer said, "and some of our senior partners as well, will certainly want to take this opportunity to see the thing in the flesh, as it were."

"We'll make accommodations for that as we can," Jay assured him. "But we don't want it to become a tourist destination."

That quip got its chuckle, and another lawyer said, "Oh, I think most of us are mature enough to show restraint."

Another lawyer said, "However, speed in assessing the object is also a priority, of course. I understand we're all paying Mr. Perly a per diem for the use of his space, and of course every day the object is out of the vault the risk of theft increases."

Another lawyer said, "What we're talking about here is not one object, but thirty-four. A theft doesn't have to be of the entire piece."

Jay said, "We're arranging for private guards to stay with the object 24/7 while it's at Mr. Perly's. We'll all breathe easier once the set is back in the vault downstairs."

"Amen to that," said another lawyer, and still another lawyer said, "In fact, the per diem is not that much. In this instance, it is truly better to be safe than sorry."

Which caused a general murmur of agreement, followed by Jay saying, "Does that cover it all?"

"I'd like to say one thing," said the chief inspector, and got to his feet. He also picked up his braid-rich hat from the conference table, so he apparently didn't intend to stay much longer. "At oh two hundred hours in the ayem of this comin Monday morning," he informed them all, "I am gonna be asleep in my bed in Bay Shore, Long Island. And I will not be wantin any phone calls." And he put on his hat.

On that note the meeting concluded, having worked out about as satisfactorily as the one just ending in the park downtown.

44

ANDY KELP CAME home from the department store wearing three suits and two coats. It wasn't really that cold out, but it was still better to wear them than to pay for them.

Anne Marie was at her computer on her desk in the bedroom. She looked at him and said, "Did you put on weight?"

"No," he said. "I put on wool. Let me get these clothes off."

"Okay," she said, and shut her computer down, and the phone rang.

Kelp gave it a look of dislike. "It's gotta be John," he said.

"You do your strip," she told him, "and I'll talk to John."

"Deal."

He got half his new wardrobe off when she said, "It is John, and it sounds like he really does have to talk to you."

"Then I suppose he does. Hello," he told the phone.

"We've got the place where it's gonna be."

"Where it's gonna be. But it isn't there now."

"No, but it's gonna be there soon, and you and me, we should look it over, look the place over before the thing shows up. A little easier now than later."

This was unfortunately true. Looking at Anne Marie, who had started her own striptease, Kelp said, "So where is this place?"

"Down on Gansevoort Street. An office down there."

"An office? Doesn't sound right."

"I'll give you the details, you know, in other circumstances."

"Okay, but…" Kelp looked wistfully toward Anne Marie. "Anne Marie and me, we had plans for this evening, maybe a movie… I tell you what."

"Tell me."

"There's a very trendy hotel down there on Gansevoort," Kelp said, "now that the area's gentrified. I could meet you there, in the bar there."

"Fine. When?"

"We should make it pretty late," Kelp said, and looked again at Anne Marie, who was smiling. "I'll meet you in the bar there at midnight," he said, and did, and saw Dortmunder already in position there at the bar.

Kelp had to admit, even seen from behind and across the room, slouched at the bar, John Dortmunder did not go with this setting. Any observant person in the joint would have taken one look at him in this environment and called the cops on general principles.

Fortunately, this hotel did not generally cater to observant persons. It was the kind of place that attracted rail-thin persons of several genders, all of whom sandpapered their cheekbones every evening before leaving their cave. Being unaware of the existence of any other people at all, none of this rather large and very loud mob of trendoids had noticed the creature from another species who had joined their revels. Dortmunder was in perfect concealment with this crowd.

And now there were two aliens at the bar, once Kelp climbed onto the fuschia stool beside him. The bartendress, an action figure in a skintight black dress, dropped a coaster bearing an ad for condoms on the bar in front of Kelp and said, with complete indifference, "Sir?"

Kelp looked at Dortmunder's drink, recognized it, and said, "I'll have what he's having."

"Ew." She rolled her eyes and slanked away.

Kelp observed Dortmunder's glass again, from which in fact Dortmunder was now drinking. "That's bourbon, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Two cubes?"

"Yeah." Dortmunder shrugged. "They don't like to leave bourbon all by itself around here," he explained. "They like to muffle it down a little."

Kelp looked up and down the bar and saw that the things in front of the other patrons didn't look so much like drinks as like extraterrestrials. Short extraterrestrials. "Gotcha," he said.

The bartendress might have felt sullied by having to serve a high-test drink, but she did it, and only charged fourteen dollars for the indignity, sliding a five and a one back at him from his original twenty. Kelp sipped his drink, found it to be as requested, and said, "Tell me about this office where they're gonna move the thing."

"It's some hotshot private detective named Perly," Dortmunder said. "What makes it a good place to stash the thing is what we'll find out."

"And the thing's gonna get there soon."

"That's the story."

"Probly in an armored car."

"Probly."

Kelp contemplated the situation, lubricating his brain muscles with a little more bourbon. "Tough to do an armored car on a city street," he said. "Those jobs are more for the countryside."

"Oh, you can do it," Dortmunder said, "but it takes explosives. I'd rather work more quiet than that."

"Oh, you know it." Kelp took a little more of his drink and said, "You look at this place on your way here?"

"No, I figured we oughta get the good news together."

"When do you want to do that?"

"When you finish your drink," Dortmunder said, because, it seemed, he'd finished his.

45

GANSEVOORT STREET IS part of the far West Village, an old seafaring section, an elbow of twisted streets and skewed buildings poked into the ribs of the Hudson River. The area is still called the Meatpacking District, though it's been more than half a century since the elevated coal-burning trains from the west came down the left fringe of Manhattan to the slaughterhouses here, towing many cattle cars filled with loud complaint. After the trains were no more, some cows continued to come down by truck, but their heart wasn't in it, and gradually almost an entire industry shriveled away into history.

Commerce hates a vacuum. Into the space abandoned by the doomed cows came small manufacturing and warehousing. Since the area sits next to the actual Greenwich Village, some nightlife grew as well, and when the grungy old nineteenth-century commercial buildings started being converted into pied-à-terres for movie stars, you knew all hope was gone.

Still, the Meatpacking District, even without much by way of the packing of meat, continues to present a varied countenance to the world, part residential, part trendy shops and restaurants, and part storage and light manufacturing. Into this mix Jacques Perly's address blended perfectly, as Dortmunder and Kelp discovered when they strolled down the block.

Perly had done nothing to gussy up the facade. It was a narrow stone building, less than thirty feet across, with a battered metal green garage door to the left and a gray metal unmarked door on the right. Factory-style square-paned metal windows stretched across the second floor, fronted by horizontal bands of narrow black steel that were designed not to look like prison bars, to let in a maximum of light and view, and to slice the fingers off anybody who grabbed them.

Faint light gleamed well back of those upstairs windows. The buildings to both sides were taller, with more seriously lit windows here and there. On the right was a four-story brick tenement that had undergone recent conversion to upscale living, with a very elaborate entrance doorway flanked by carriage lamps. The building on the left, three stories high and also brick, extended down to the corner, with shops on the street floor, plus a small door that would lead up to what looked like modest apartments above.

Dortmunder and Kelp stood surveying this scene a few minutes, being occasionally passed by indifferent pedestrians, they all bundled up and hustling because the wind was pretty brisk over here by the river, and then Kelp said, "You know, I read one time, if you're stuck with a decision you gotta make, there's rules."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. Depending on circumstances, you pick the most active, the earliest in time, or the one on the left."

"That's what I was thinking, too," Dortmunder said.

"That house on the right there," Kelp said, "that's shielding a very valuable family."

"I know that."

"Whereas, on the left there, the top floor apartment on the right is dark."

"Maybe they're out to that bar we were in," Dortmunder suggested.

"Maybe they'll stay a while," Kelp said, and they crossed the street to find that neither the street door nor the second door behind it offered much resistance.

This was a walk-up, so they walked up, where a narrow hall led them rightward to a door with a brass 3c on it and no light visible through the peephole.

"Could be early to bed, though," Dortmunder said.

"On a Friday night in this neighborhood? I don't think so," Kelp said. "But we'll go in quiet, not to disturb anybody."

"And not to leave any sign we were here."

"Not this time."

Kelp did the honors with the door, and they entered a semi-dark kitchen, illuminated only by distant streetlights from below this level, plus the red-ember glows of all the clocks and other LED lights on all the appliances, giving the room a faint speakeasy air.

"Joe sent me," Kelp whispered.

The kitchen led to a living room of the same size, making the kitchen fairly large and the living room pretty small. And that led to a bedroom which would also have been the same size except that a third of it had been walled off for a bathroom.

The only illumination in the bedroom to boost the streetlights' glow came from the red numerals on the alarm clock. The double bed — happily empty — was on the left, against the bathroom wall. The window to the right looked down at Gansevoort Street, and the one straight ahead beyond the bed, looked down at the roof of Perly's building, which was considerably deeper than wide and featured a large skylight in the rear half.

"I like that skylight," Kelp whispered.

"There's nobody here," Dortmunder said, in a normal voice.

Surprised, Kelp looked around and said, also in a normal voice, "You're right. And I still like that skylight."

Perly's tar-paper flat roof was about six feet below this window. Whatever light they'd seen through his windows had to be toward the front, because nothing at all showed below the skylight glass.

"I like the skylight, too," Dortmunder said, "but there's no point looking in it now."

"No, I know that."

"I wonder," Dortmunder said, "about utility access."

It is not only burglars in New York City who occasionally have trouble getting to the parts of buildings that interest them. In the older and more crowded sections of the city, like the far West Village, the small old structures pressed together in every direction can also make headaches for electric company meter readers, telephone company installers, cable company repairmen, and city inspectors of various stripes. Alleyways, basements, exterior staircases and unmarked doors all have their parts to play in making it possible for these honest working folk to complete their appointed rounds, and just behind them here tiptoe less honest folk, though in their way just as hardworking.

This window out which Dortmunder and Kelp now gazed was a normal double-hung style, with a simple lock on the inside to keep the parts closed. Dortmunder turned this to unlock it, raised the lower sash, felt the cold wind and heard it ruffle papers and cloth here and there behind him, and leaned forward to look out.

Not much snow on the flat roof below, and none on the skylight, which would be warmed from underneath. The roof of Perly's building extended to the left past the end of the building Dortmunder and Kelp were in, and it looked as though there was also space between the far end of the roof and the rear of the building on the next street.

Would anything out there provide utility access of the kind he was looking for? "I can't see," he decided. "Not good enough."

"Let me."

Dortmunder stepped aside so Kelp could take a turn leaning out the window, but then Kelp came back in and said, "I tell you what. I'll go out and see what we got. When I come back, you can help me shimmy up."

"Good."

Kelp, an agile guy, sat on the windowsill, slid his legs over and out, rolled onto his belly and slid backward out the window, holding the sill, coming to a stop with the top of his head just parallel to the bottom of the window opening. "Be right back," he whispered, and headed off" to the left.

Dortmunder considered; should he close the window? That was a pretty nippy wind. On the other hand, Kelp wouldn't be gone that long and he wouldn't want to come back to a closed window.

Lights, somewhere behind him. Doorslam.

Nobody cried out, "I'm home!" but nobody had to. Two rooms away, a tenant was shucking out of his or her coat. Two rooms away, a tenant was headed in this direction.

Dortmunder didn't go in for agile, he went in for whatever-works. He managed to go out the window simultaneously headfirst and assfirst, land on several parts that didn't want to be landed on, struggle to his feet, and go loping and limping away as behind him an outraged voice cried, "Hey!", which was followed almost instantly by a window-slam.

Dortmunder did his Quasimodo shuffle two more paces before it occurred to him what would be occurring to the householder at just this instant, which was: That window was locked. Once more he dropped to the roof, with less injury to himself this time, and scrunched against the wall to his left as that window back there yanked loudly upward and the outraged voice repeated, "Hey!"

Silence.

"Who's out there?"

Nobody nobody nobody.

"Is somebody out there?"

Absolutely not.

"I'm calling the cops!"

Fine, good, great; anything, just so you'll get away from that window.

Slam. Suppressing a groan, Dortmunder crawled up the wall until he was vertical and lurched forward, looking out ahead of himself for Kelp.

Who was not there. Was nowhere to be seen. Dortmunder risked stopping for just a second, hand braced against the wall as he scanned the roof, the skylight, the upscale building over to the right with its draped and gated windows, and there was no Kelp. None, not anywhere.

So there was a way off this roof. A way other than back past the person now explaining things to 911. Encouraged by the thought, Dortmunder hobbled on, until the wall to his left came to an end and he could look straight down into inky black.

Now what? No ladders, no staircases, no fire escapes. If there were any way to get down there into that darkness Dortmunder didn't see it. And he was looking, very hard.

The rear of Perly's building was his last hope. He gimped over there, to the low stone wall that separated the roof from empty air, and at first he didn't see anything of use in this direction, either. And then, maybe he did.

There was a larger apartment building across the way, its lighted windows giving some dim illumination to the back of Perly's building, and there, over to the right, some kind of square wrought iron thing like a basket protruded from the wall partway down. He moved over there and saw that it was a kind of tiny iron porch with no roof fronting a second story entrance, with a fire escape leading downward from it.

But how to get to it? The porch or basket or whatever it was looked very old and rickety, and was at least ten feet below where he stood.

Rungs. Metal rungs, round and rusty, were fixed to the rear wall, marching from here down to the wrought iron. They did not look like things that any sane person would want to find himself on, but this was not a sanity test, this was a question of escape.

Wishing he didn't have to watch what he was doing, Dortmunder sat on the low stone wall, then lay forward to embrace it while dangling his left foot down, feeling around for the top rung. Where the hell was it?

Finally he had to shift position so he could turn his head to the left and slither leftward across the stone wall toward the dark drop which, when he could see it, was nowhere near dark enough. In the lightspill from across the way, many items could be seen scrambled together on the concrete paving way down there: metal barrels, old soda bottle cases with soda bottles, lengths of pipe, a couple of sinks, rolls of wire, a broken stroller. Everything but a mattress; no mattresses.

But there was that damn iron rung, not exactly where he'd expected it. He wriggled backward, stabbed for the rung, and got his foot on it at last.

And now what? The first thing he had to do was turn his back on the drop and, while lying crosswise on the stone wall, put as much of his weight as he could on that foot on the rung, prepared at any instant to leap like a cat — an arthritic cat — if the thing gave way.

But it didn't. It held, and now he could ooch himself backward a little bit and put his right foot also on the rung. One deep breath, and he heard that far-off window fly up, and knew the householder was looking for him again. Could he see this far into the darkness, at the shape of a man lying on a stone wall?

Let's not give him enough time to pass that test; Dortmunder clutched the inner edge of the wall with both hands in a death grip, and slid back some more, letting the right foot slide on down past the safety of that rung, paw around, paw some more, and by God, find the next rung!

The transition from the second rung to the third was easier, but then the transition to the fourth was much worse, because that was when his hands had to leave the stone wall and, after several slow days of hanging in midair, at last grasp the top rung tightly enough to leave dents.

Overcome, he remained suspended there a minute or two, breathing like a walrus after a marathon, and then he progressed down, down, down, and there was the porch which was really just an openwork metal floor cantilevered from the building, with a skimpy rail at waist height.

Next to him. The rungs did not descend into the railed metal floor but beside it. So now he was supposed to let go of these beautiful rungs and vault over the goddam rail?

Apparently; the rungs stopped here. Lunge; one hand was on the rail. Lunge; one foot was over the rail but not reaching all the way down to the floor. Lunge; the other hand was on the rail and he tipped forward over it, landing headfirst onto the floor, which shrieked in complaint though it didn't entirely separate from the building.

Up. Holding on to everything he could reach, Dortmunder got to his feet, turned to the wall, and found that the doorway had been bricked up many years ago. This metal structure had not been used for a long time, and it was feeling its age. It seemed to be thinking about leaving the building, what with all this new weight to carry and all.

But here was the fire escape, extending down at a diagonal across the rear of the building, down one flight to where it stopped at another metal landing, this one with a ladder mounted up against it that could be slid down to descend from there.

Descend? The Perly building was only two stories high. So this space back here went all the way down to basement level.

I'm never gonna see the upper world again, Dortmunder thought. I'm in some kind of horror story, and this is the entrance to Hell.

Well, there was nothing for it; time to descend. Dortmunder started down the fire escape and found it the least horrible part of the experience so far. It was solid iron, securely fastened to the stone of the building, with a good railing and thick gridwork steps.

Too bad it stopped before it got anywhere. Dortmunder reached the lowermost step, which was another platform, though sturdier than the one above, and next to it was the ladder. Studying this, he saw that it operated with a counterweight; if he stood on it, his weight would make it lower. If he got off, the counterweight would lift it back up again. It was clearly an anti-burglar device, operating on the theory that burglars would approach it from below and would be unable to reach up to the bottom rung.

Okay; let's go for a ride on the ladder. Dortmunder stepped onto it, holding tight to the sides, and, after a second's trembling hesitation, it slid smoothly downward with small mouselike chirps and squeaks, descending just like an elevator except, of course, for the elevator cab and the elevator shaft.

The bottom. Dortmunder stepped off onto the cluttered concrete, and the ladder more silently rose away. Only after it departed did he stop to think he'd just now effectively cut off his own retreat. From this point on, there was no way to turn back.

All right, let's deal with what we've got, which is what, exactly? The rear of Perly's building, with more bricked-up windows and a gray metal door, stood before him. The door was rusty, its hinges were rusty, its handle was rusty, and its keyhole was rusty, but the point was, it did have a keyhole. Dortmunder bent to study this keyhole as best he could in the darkness, and it seemed to him Kelp had done a good job in getting through this door without leaving any traces.

And Kelp had to have gone through here. There was no other way. This messy rectangular concrete area back here was one story below street level, enclosed by high walls on all sides. This door was the only way out. Kelp had been ahead of him, and wasn't still in this hole in the ground, so Kelp had to have gone through this door. Could Dortmunder do it just as well, leaving no trace?

Now his competitive juices were stirring, and he forgot all those various aches and pains he'd picked up along the way since toppling out that window. In various interior pockets of his jacket, mostly in the back, were several small tools of his trade, skim-brushed with flat black enamel to keep them from reflecting light. Reaching back there, he brought out a number of these, bent over that lock, and went to work.

Very stiff, the lock was; it reminded him of himself. Except for Kelp, it looked as though nobody'd used this door in quite a while. But at least this stone-and-brick carton he was in was out of the wind, so he could work in relative comfort, without distraction.

And there. The door abruptly jolted a quarter-inch toward him, with a popping sound like a cork coming out of a bottle of wine that's turned bad. Dortmunder pulled on it and reluctantly it opened, hinges screaking in protest. As soon as the opening was wide enough, he slid through and pulled the door shut behind himself, creating pitch-blackness.

Now from those useful pockets at the back of his jacket came a tiny flashlight, shorter than a finger. He hadn't wanted it before this, when surrounded by apartment windows, but this kind of interior blackness was perfect for its use. It was sold for the alleged purpose of being attached to a keychain for people wanting to enter and start up their automobiles after dark, but it had other advantages as well, such as giving Dortmunder, when on the job, exactly the amount of light he needed to see that he was in a stone-walled corridor lined with metal storage shelves heaped with the kind of junk people are never going to use again but can't quite bring themselves to get rid of.

Ignoring all that, he stepped down the corridor, and through a doorway on the right he saw a concrete staircase going up. He went up.

The door at the top of these stairs was also gray metal and locked, which seemed excessive, but Dortmunder was on a roll now and went through it with hardly a pause and leaving not a trace of his handiwork. He brushed through the doorway, elbowed the door shut behind himself, and looked around at a place that didn't seem at all converted from its prior industrial uses.

Here was the building's plain metal front door, and over there the garage door, gray rather than green on the inside. A concrete ramp curved upward from the garage door. The space under the ramp and stretching back through the building was taken up with storerooms facing a central corridor and all fronted by barred doors like those on jail cells; unfortunate image.

Dortmunder and his small flashlight took a quick curious look at these rooms and they were full in a way the word «miscellaneous» couldn't quite cover. There was furniture, there was statuary, there were at least two motorcycles, there were office safes piled one atop another, there was what looked like a printing press, there were stacks of computers and other office equipment, and there was a painting of the George Washington Bridge with a truck on fire in the middle of it.

Very strange guy, this Jacques Perly. A private detective. Did people pay him in goods instead of money?

Dortmunder went back to the front of the building and was about to let himself out the street door when he glanced again at that ramp going up. The light source, dim but useful, came from up there.

Would Kelp have checked out the second floor? No. Something told him that Andy Kelp was long gone from this neighborhood. Probably he figured Dortmunder wouldn't be agile enough to get out that window and clear of trouble and so would be somewhere in custody right about now, meaning he'd not be a good person to stand next to for some little while. Dortmunder didn't blame him; if the situation were reversed, he himself would be halfway to Philadelphia.

But what about that ramp? As long as he was here, inside this place, shouldn't he at least take a look-see?

Yes. He walked up the ramp, which curved sharply to the right then straightened along the front wall. This concrete area, just wide enough to K-turn a car in, was flanked on the left by a cream-colored stone wall with a very nice dark wood door. High light fixtures provided the low gleam he'd seen from the street through those industrial windows now high to his right.

Was this nice wooden door locked? Yes. Did it matter? No.

Inside, he found a neat and modest receptionist's office illuminated by a grow light over a side table of small potted plants, all of them legal. He ambled through, and the next door wasn't locked, which made for a change.

This was Jacques Perly's office, very large and very elaborate, spread beneath that skylight. Aware that a private eye might have additional security here and there — even Eppick had had a couple of surprises in his office — Dortmunder tossed the room in slow and careful fashion, using his little flashlight only when he had to, very mindful of that skylight observing him from just above his head.

There were a couple of fruits from this endeavor. On a round oak table in an area away from the main desk, he found notes in a legal pad in crisp tiny handwriting that described the security arrangements to be made to accommodate the coming presence of the Chicago chess set, and those arrangements were elaborate indeed. He also found a copier, switched it on, and copied the pages of notes, putting the copies into a side pocket of his jacket and the legal pad back precisely where he'd picked it up.

There was nothing else much of interest in Perly's office; not to Dortmunder, anyway. He left it and looked at the receptionist's room. Would there be anything of use in here? Very unlikely, but as long as he was passing through he might as well check it out.

It was in the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk that he found it, tucked in the back of the drawer under various cold medicines and lipstick tubes. It was a garage door opener. It was dusty, it was clearly the second opener the company always gives you when the garage door is installed, but it had never been needed and so was long ago forgotten.

If this was the right opener. Dortmunder stepped out to the parking area at the top of the ramp, aimed the opener at the garage door down there, and thumbed it. Immediately the door started to lift, so he thumbed it again and it stopped, with a four-inch-wide gap. A third push of the thumb and back down it went, to close the gap.

Well, this was something. The garage door wasn't quiet, God knew, but it was a possible way in. Dortmunder tucked the opener into the same pocket as the security notes, closed the office door behind himself, and went home.

46

ALL DAY SATURDAY Fiona fretted over tonight's GRODY party. How had she ever let Brian talk her into inviting Mrs. W to March Madness? And what had possessed Mrs. W to say yes?

Was there any way out of this? Could she pretend to be sick? No; Brian would just escort Mrs. W to the party anyway. And if there was one thing in Fiona's fevered imaginings worse than being at GRODY's March Madness party with Mrs. W at her side, it was the thought of Mrs. W at the party without Fiona beside her, to explain it, to smooth it as much as possible, to shield the woman, if that could be done.

So what could she do to make this not happen? Could she lie to everybody? Lie to Mrs. W that the party had been canceled, lie to Brian that Mrs. W had changed her mind. No; nobody would believe her. Fiona was not at all a good liar — an unfortunate trait in a lawyer — and they'd both see through her at once.

And then, how to explain why she'd lied? Well, she couldn't, could she? She could barely explain it to herself, because it wasn't merely the mismatch of GRODY and Mrs. W, it was more than that, it was…

Brian.

There wasn't anything wrong with Brian, not really. He and Fiona made a very good couple, easygoing, supportive, not demanding. His passion for exotic cookery remained a happy surprise, though somehow not quite as exciting, a teeny bit less of a treat, now that she'd left Feinberg and started a job with normal hours. (She would never mention that to Brian, of course.)

The problem, which she could barely articulate inside her own head because it made her feel guilty, the problem was class. Brian did not come from the same world as Fiona. His people did not live where her people lived, did not school where her people schooled, did not vacation where her people vacationed, did not buy suits — if they bought suits — where her people bought suits. His was a rougher, scruffier, less settled universe of people who hadn't made it, generation after generation, with no prospect for future change. When she was with Brian, Fiona was, in the very slightest way, barely noticeable to the naked eye, slumming.

If she were honest — and she wanted to be — she'd have to admit that her own great-grandfather, Hiram Hemlow, father of her dear grandfather Horace, had come from that same class, the strivers without connections. The stolen chess set might have helped Hiram move up out of the unwashed, but that opportunity was lost.

What had finally made the difference in the Hemlow family was her grandfather Horace, who happened to be an inventive genius. With the prestige and money he made through his inventions he could cut through the nearly invisible barriers of American class, so that the generation after his, the generation of Fiona's father and her aunts and uncles, with money behind them, however fresh, could attend the right schools, move into the right neighborhoods, make the right friends.

The family had moved smoothly into the upper middle class the way it's done in America, not with family, not with history, but with money. And now, a member of barely the third generation at this level, Fiona could look at Brian Clanson and know, with shame and embarrassment but without the slightest question, that he was beneath her.

The knowledge had her tongue-tied, and the further knowledge that she must very soon display Brian to Mrs. W as her chosen escort only made things worse. Mrs. W, as Fiona had every reason to know, was about as class-conscious as anyone she'd ever met. That rambling vitriolic memoir the woman was writing reeked of it. Was Fiona, having acted against her better judgment in a moment of weakness, about to make Mrs. W despise her forever?

Through all of her fretting Brian, of course, remained oblivious, continuing blithely along with his own usual Saturday morning routine, which was to commandeer the big room while he watched the Saturday morning cartoons, an activity he claimed counted as work but which she knew he secretly enjoyed for its own sake, the more childish the better.

Confined to the bedroom with the door closed — it didn't help that much — she paced and worried and searched in vain for a route out of her dilemma, and, finally, a little before eleven, she decided to phone Mrs. W even though she had no idea what she intended to say. But she had to do something, had to start somewhere; perhaps hearing Mrs. W's voice would give her inspiration.

So she sat on the bed, reached for the phone, and it rang. Startled, she picked it up, and heard Mrs. W's voice. "Mrs. W!"

"About this question of costumes," Mrs. W said.

"Mrs. W?"

"I understand, from what you say, many of the partygoers this evening will be in costume."

Oh, she doesn't want to go! Fiona thought, and her heart leaped up: "Oh, yes, Mrs. W, all kinds of costumes!"

"That doesn't much help, Fiona, dear: 'all kinds, you see. What sort of theme does one encounter at these events?"

"Theme?" Arrested development, she thought, but didn't say. "I guess," she said, "I suppose, it's popular culture, I guess, cartoon shows and things like that. And vampires, of course."

"Of course," Mrs. W agreed. "Women, I find," she said, "don't improve in vampire costumes."

"The fangs, you mean."

"That would be part of it. I know you won't be in costume, but your friend — Brian — will he?"

"Oh, yes," Fiona said, trying to sound perky rather than resigned. "The same one every year."

"Really? And would it spoil things to tell?"

"Oh, no. It's Reverend Twisted, that's all."

"I'm sorry."

"A cartoon character," Fiona explained. "From cable, you know. A little raunchy."

"His costume is raunchy?"

"No, the cart— What it is, Mrs. W, he's a mock priest, he blesses all the bad behavior, he loves the sinner and the sin."

"I'm not sure I follow."

Beginning to feel desperate, Fiona said, "The joke is, he's the priest at the orgies, you see."

"And what does he do there?"

"Blesses everybody."

"That's all?"

"Really, yes," Fiona said, realizing she'd never before noticed just how small and toothless a joke the Reverend Twisted actually was.

Mrs. W, calm but dogged, said, "What does he wear in this persona?"

"Well, it's not that— Not that different, really. Just heavy black shoes and a shiny black suit with very wide legs and very wide double-breasted jacket with a bottle of whiskey in the pocket and a kind of white dickey and white makeup on his face and a black hat with a flat brim all the way around." I see.

"It's mostly his expression, really," Fiona tried to explain. "You know, it's a leer, he leers for hours, the next day his jaw is very sore."

"For his art," Mrs. W said, with suspect dryness.

"I suppose. He used to carry a Kama Sutra, you know, the way priests carry a Bible? But he lost it a few years ago and never got another."

"We'll just have to imagine it, then," Mrs. W said. "Thank you, my dear, you may have been of help."

"Oh, I hope so," Fiona said, and hung up, and gave herself over to despair. Mrs. W was definitely coming to the party.

47

WITH A TABLE KNIFE, Dortmunder was trying to find a little more mayo at the bottom of the jar, but mostly finding it on his knuckles, when the phone rang. Licking his fingers, he ambled over to the phone and spoke into it: "Yar."

"I'm thinking," Andy Kelp said, "of giving up my answering machine."

Surprised, Dortmunder said, "You? You live for those gizmos. Call waiting, call forwarding, call lateraling, all those things."

"Maybe not any more. Anne Marie's out today," Kelp explained. "Some old friend of hers from Kansas is showing her New York."

"Right." Dortmunder understood. It's always the out-of-towners who know the real New York. "Statue of Liberty?"

"Empire State Building," Kelp agreed. "Grand Central Station. I think they're even gonna grab a matinee at Radio City Music Hall."

"Anne Marie," Dortmunder said, "has a very good heart."

"First thing attracted me to her. Anyway, I was out myself a little, you know how it is."

"Uh huh."

"I come back just now, there's three messages from Eppick. Three, John."

"Maybe he's tensing up," Dortmunder said.

"No maybe about it. Three messages that he wants me to ask you what's going on. They're not even my messages, John."

"Does he really think," Dortmunder wanted to know, "anybody's gonna tell him what's going on on the phone? You're not the only one with those gizmos, you know."

"You tell him that, John, it's you he wants to talk to."

"Maybe later. Listen, satisfy some curiosity."

"Sure."

"How come, when you were in there last night, you didn't go in there?"

"What? In where?"

"Maybe," Dortmunder decided, "we should talk in the open air."

Open air in March should not be approached unwarily. It was in a small triangular park in the West Village called Abingdon Square — sue me — that they huddled together on a bench near the southern apex, where some of the buses only slowed down, but others across Hudson Street stopped for a while, engines growling, to compete with the traffic going past the park south on Hudson then south on Bleecker Street, north on the other part of Hudson and then north on Eighth Avenue, and east on both disconnected parts of Bank Street. There wasn't much wind here, with fairly tall buildings all around except for the children's playground in the triangle just south of this one, so that, if Abingdon Square had been an hourglass, that would be the part with the sand. Not too cold, not too much wind, plenty of ambient noise — some children are louder than buses without even trying — and so a perfect spot for a tete-à-tete.

Having called this conclave, Dortmunder went first: "You were ahead of me, last night, on that roof."

"You went out on that roof?" Kelp was surprised.

"I had to. The householder come home."

"I heard all the fuss," Kelp agreed. "I figured, it was somewhere else in the building and you took off back outa there, or it was the householder and you went through him and then back outa there. I didn't figure you for the roof."

"Neither did I," Dortmunder said. "But there I was. And you were already gone."

"That was the place to be."

"Oh, I know. So I went over and I found those rungs—"

Kelp was astonished, and said so. "John, I'm astonished."

"No choice," Dortmunder said. "Down the rungs, down the fire escape. What got me was how clean you went through that basement door."

"What basement door?"

"Into Perly's building. What other way was there?"

Kelp was now doubly astonished. "You went into Perly's building?"

"What else could I do?"

"Did you never turn around?" Kelp asked him. "Did you never see that humongous apartment house right behind you? You get thirty-seven windows to choose from over there, John."

Dortmunder frowned, thinking back. "I never even looked over there," he admitted. "And here I thought how terrific you were, you got through that basement door without leaving a mark, got through and out the building and not one single sign of you."

"That's because I wasn't there," Kelp said. "Where I was instead, I went into an apartment where there's nobody home but there's a couple nice de Koonings on the living room wall, so I went uptown to make them on consignment to Stoon, and then I went home. I never figured you to come down that same way. And wasn't that a risk, you go in there before we want to go in there? Did you leave marks, John?"

Insulted, Dortmunder said, "What kind of a question is that? Here I tell you how impressed I am how you didn't leave any marks—"

"It was easier for me."

"Granted. But then, back last night, you were like my benchmark. So what I left was what you left. Not a trace, Andy, guaranteed."

"Well, that's terrific, you found that way in," Kelp said. "Is that our route on the day?"

"We don't have to do all that," Dortmunder told him. "While I was in there anyway, I looked around, I picked up some stuff."

"Stuff they're gonna miss?"

"Come on, Andy."

"You're right," Kelp said. "I know better than that. Maybe I'm like Eppick, I'm getting a little tense. So what stuff did you come out with?"

"Their extra garage door opener."

Kelp reared back. "Their what?"

"That they don't remember they have," Dortmunder said. "Bottom drawer of the secretary's desk, way in back, under stuff, covered with dust."

"That's pretty good," Kelp admitted.

"Also some other stuff," Dortmunder said. "Perly's an organized guy, he made himself a lot of notes about the exact time the thing's coming down from the bank and all the extra security they're gonna lay on while it's there."

"He didn't."

"He did. Also, he's got a copy machine."

Kelp laughed, in pleasure and amazement. "You got their garage door opener," he said. "You got their security plans."

"Right," Dortmunder said, going for modesty.

Kelp shook his head. "And all I got was a couple de Koonings."

"Well, we took different paths," Dortmunder said, now going for magnanimity.

"We sure did." Seated on the park bench, Kelp watched a bifurcated bus make the long looping U-turn around the triangle, to go from southbound on Hudson to northbound on Eighth. "So what do you think next?" he asked.

"I think," Dortmunder said, "we make a little meet. All of us. At the O.J."

48

"OH, I HOPE it Still fits." Brian, gazing down at the Reverend Twisted costume now spread-eagled on the bed like a steamrollered Arthur Dimmesdale, was already leering a bit. How he loved to get into that part!

"Oh, it always fits you and you know it," Fiona said, trying to sound loving rather than irritated, and the phone rang, yet again. "Not again!" she cried.

Brian's leer strengthened. "She's your boss," he said.

This was the last thing Fiona had expected to result from having invited Mrs. W to March Madness. Was this the sixth or seventh call, with hours still ahead before the actual party? Mrs. W had regressed to some antediluvian teenage past, working out her anxieties on the telephone.

Mostly the calls were about costumes, or, that is, the personae inside the costumes. So far, Fiona had gently but firmly shot down Eleanor Roosevelt, the Gibson Girl, Annie Oakley, and Ella Fitzgerald. (Ella Fitzgerald?)

But the calls hadn't been entirely about the conundrum of Mrs. W's personal disguise for the evening. Should one dine ahead, or would it be a catered affair? Oh, dine ahead, definitely. Then Mrs. W would dine at home and pick up Fiona and Brian later.

Another issue. Would she be the only person of a certain age present at the party? Actually, no. Among the advertisers and other corporate types who might drop in were people of all ages, though the older ones tended to be more often male than female, and mostly interested in a new young companion to chat with.

Well, would there be anyone present whom one (Mrs. W, that is) might know? Not a chance.

Fiona answered the phone in the big room, wondering what the problem would be this time around. "Hello?"

"Do forgive the intrusion, dear—"

"Not at all, Mrs. W. Whatever I can do to help. Do you have another idea for a costume?"

"Well, yes, I do, in fact," Mrs. W said, "but this time I don't need advice. From what you have said of tonight's festivities, I have now decided on the absolutely perfect masquerade."

"Really?" Tense, worried, wondering if she could talk Mrs. W out of whatever lunge into the past she'd made this time, Fiona said, "Who, Mrs. W?"

"No, my dear, that would be telling. You will be quite impressed when you see me. Now, my car shall pick you up at ten-twenty, is that right?"

"You don't want to tell me." Dread clutched at Fiona's bosom.

"Let it be a surprise, dear."

"I'm sure it will be."

"What I was ringing up about, in fact," Mrs. W went on, "was your friend Brian."

Fiona could see Brian, in fact, in the bedroom, just pulling on the Reverend Twisted trousers, shiny black wool with so much extra material and pleating that he now looked, from the waist down, like a half-blown-up Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. "Yes, Brian," she said. "What about him?"

"I should have asked this before," Mrs. W said, and she did sound a bit uneasy when she said it. "Will your Brian object to, in effect, escorting two ladies to the event?"

Out of sequence, Brian had put on the flat-brimmed Reverend Twisted hat and was viewing himself in the closet mirror, leering so hard he looked like a Cadillac grille. "He won't mind a bit," Fiona promised Mrs. W "Trust me."

49

WHEN DORTMUNDER WALKED into the O.J. at three minutes past ten that night, Rollo appeared to be deeply involved in taking an inventory, or a census, or something, of the bottles lined up on the backbar, doubling themselves in the mirror that ran along the wall back there. Tongue between teeth and left eye scrinched up like Popeye, he pointed the business end of a pencil at each bottle, sorting like with like and subtracting for mirror image before writing down the results on a piece of stationery from Opryland Hotel. Feeling Rollo shouldn't be disturbed at such a delicate moment, Dortmunder rested a forearm on the bar and watched.

Meanwhile, down at the left end of the bar, the regulars were discussing poker, one of them now saying, "Yeah, but why a flush?"

A second regular cocked his head in response. "And your question?" he asked.

"Just that," the first one said. "Okay, I mean, a pair, trips, I get that. Even a straight, you can see the concept, your numbers are in a straight line. But why a flush?"

A third regular, who maybe hadn't caught all the nuances of the original question, explained, "That means they're all in the same suit."

The first regular lowered a gaze on him. "And?"

"They just are," the third regular said. "All the same color."

"And?"

A fourth regular, sounding a bit tentative for a regular, said, "Well, if they're red…"

"Yeah, fine," the first regular allowed. "That could be. But what about when it's black? What about when it's clubs?"

The second regular, who hadn't been heard from for a while, said, "Well, you wanna talk about that, how come they're called clubs?"

It was the third regular who said, "That's because they look like clubs,"

"No, they don't," the second regular told him. "They look like clovers. Three-leaf clovers."

The fourth regular, still tentative, said, "So what about spades?"

"They're black," the third regular said.

The fourth regular, suddenly no longer tentative, said, "We know that, dummy, but whado they look like?"

The third regular looked into space. "Dummy?" he asked, as though uncertain of his hearing.

"Well, them," the first regular said. "Them, they look like spades."

"No they don't," the fourth regular said, all tentativeness forgot. "You wanna try to dig a hole with one of those things?"

"No," the first regular told him, "I don't wanna dig a hole with one of those things, they're cards, you play games with them."

"Dummy?"

"I go back to my original question," the first regular said. "Why a flush?"

"When you lose," the second regular suggested, "your money goes down the toilet."

"What's with this dummy?" the third regular insisted.

"They don't have dummies in poker," the first regular told him. "They have dummies in bridge."

"I can see," the second regular said, "you don't play poker."

"Oh, yeah?" The first regular turned away to call, "Rollo, you got a decka cards?"

Rollo turned half away from his bottle count to say, "No, I'd rather have a license." Then, catching a glimpse of the patient Dortmunder out of the corner of his eye he turned full around and said, "There you are."

"There I am," Dortmunder agreed.

"You got an envelope under your arm."

"That's true."

Having his research materials from Perly's office to bring to the meeting, Dortmunder had commandeered from the trash a manila envelope that had once contained color photos of flat scrubland in Florida that some misguided sales agent had been certain "J. A. Dortmunder or Resident" would eagerly look upon as the site of a "dream vacation or retirement residence." Feeling a little exposed to be walking around with an envelope too big to conceal on his person, he'd written on it Medical Records, in the belief that was something nobody would want to look too closely at. "It's just some stuff," he explained to Rollo, "to show the guys."

"Well, you got some guys back there," Rollo told him. "The other bourbon's got your glass."

"Good. I didn't want to disturb you," he said, gesturing at the bottles along the backbar.

"You don't disturb me," Rollo said. "It's a place of business."

"Right."

Leaving Rollo and that conversation, Dortmunder walked down to the end of the bar and past the regulars, as the fourth one was saying, "You know what's a very good card game? Frisk."

"Frisk?"

Suddenly tentative again, the fourth regular said, "Isn't that it? Frisk? Like bridge."

Rounding the end of the bar, Dortmunder walked down the hall, past the doors labeled POINTERS and SETTERS with black dog silhouettes, and past the former phone booth, now an unoccupied sentry box containing nothing but notes to and from the lovelorn plus a few frayed wire ends, and into a small square room with a concrete floor. Beer and liquor cases were stacked against all the walls, floor to ceiling, leaving just space enough for a beat-up old round wooden table with a once-green felt top, this surrounded by half a dozen armless wooden chairs. The only light source was a single bare bulb under a round tin reflector hanging from a long black wire over the center of the table.

This was where they would meet, and it turned out, this time Dortmunder was the last to arrive, and as usual, the prize awarded to the last arrival was that he got to sit at the table with his back to the door. Andy Kelp had apparently been the first to show up, since he now sat in the place of utmost security on the opposite side of the table, facing the door. In front of him on the felt stood the bottle of alleged bourbon, plus two short fat glasses, one half full and one containing only ice cubes.

To Kelp's left sat Stan Murch, and to Stan's left Judson Blint, the kid. In front of each of them was a glass of draft beer and between them the saltshaker they shared, it being a tenet of Stan's creed that a little salt sprinkled into a glass of beer would restore a faltering head, a belief the kid had lately signed onto.

Across from those two, more or less taking up that opposite quadrant, was Tiny Bulcher, his fist closed around a glass that looked as though it might have cherry soda in it but which actually contained a mixture of vodka and less expensive Chianti, a drink Tiny claimed was not only robust but also good for the digestion. His digestion, anyway.

It was Tiny who'd been speaking when Dortmunder entered the room: "If that's his attitude, fine, I put him back in the meat locker."

People tended to look for a distraction when Tiny was telling his stories, so the room significantly brightened when everybody saw Dortmunder walk in. "There you are!" Kelp sang out.

"You got my glass," Dortmunder said, shut the door, and sat with his back to it, putting the envelope on the table in front of him.

"Coming up," Kelp said, and poured into the emptier glass at his disposal, then paused with the bottle hovering. "Good?"

"That's fine," Dortmunder agreed.

As the glass relayed from Kelp to Stan to the kid to Dortmunder, Kelp said, "We just been waiting for you to get here with the stuff."

"You tell them what I got?"

"No," Kelp said. "I thought you'd like that pleasure yourself."

"Thank you, Andy," Dortmunder said, took a sip of his drink, and nodded at the others. "I got it all here," he said, and patted the envelope.

Judson said, "Medical records?"

"That's just the cover story," Dortmunder told him. "Inside, it's a different story."

Kelp said, "He had an interesting night, John did."

"Andy and I," Dortmunder said, "we thought we'd check out the place where the chess set's gonna be when it's outa that damn vault, and the place is a private eye's office down in the West Village."

Judson said, "An office?"

"Well, he's got the whole building."

Stan said, "That's some private eye."

Dortmunder shrugged. "It's only a two-story building. Anyway, what with one thing and another, I'm on this roof I gotta get off, and down into this space behind all these buildings, and I thought the only way out was through this Perly's building."

Judson said, "Perly?"

"That's the guy's name. Jacques Perly."

"Very pretty," Tiny said, not as a compliment.

"Anyway," Dortmunder said, "Andy was out ahead of me, turned out he went a different way, through an apartment building I didn't notice."

Stan said, "An apartment building you didn't notice? How do you not notice an apartment building?"

Kelp, to offer some assistance, said, "It was nighttime, Stan, and it was very dark and confusing down in there."

"If you say so," Stan said.

Ignoring that, Dortmunder said, "So I went through Perly's building, without, I might say, leaving one single trace that I went through there. And while I was there, I figured, let's see what it looks like here. So I tossed it, and I found some stuff."

Stan said, "What stuff?"

"Well, their other garage door opener," Dortmunder told him. "I didn't bring that with me, I got it at home."

Stan said, "This is a place with a garage? In Manhattan?"

Kelp said, "You see them sometimes, Stan, with the sign. No Parking, Active Driveway."

"It's an old industrial building," Dortmunder explained. "Converted for Perly."

Abruptly, Judson laughed. "You got their garage door opener! You could go there any time, bing-bing, you're in."

"It's loud," Dortmunder cautioned him. "You go in that way, you're not exactly sneaking up on anybody."

"Still," Judson said." It's nice."

Kelp said, "John, tell them what else you got."

"Well, Perly is a very organized guy," Dortmunder said, taking from Medical Records the sheets of paper covered with copies of Perly's neat small handwriting. "He put down the time the chess set's getting there, who's moving it, the security people they're gonna have then and later, the extra security stuff they're gonna lay on like motion sensors—"

"I hate motion sensors," Tiny said.

"We all do, Tiny," Dortmunder agreed. "Anyway, I made copies, so we can know what he knows."

Tiny said, "How many copies?"

"Just one, Tiny. I didn't wanna hang out there too long."

"Well, I don't wanna hang out here too long," Tiny said. "Kid, read it."

So for the next five minutes Judson read Perly's careful notes, while the others listened in a silence that moved steadily toward awe. When he finished, the silence went on for another few seconds, until Kelp said, "They really don't want us in there."

"Not up to them," Tiny said.

"Well, let's do a little recap here," Stan said. "I think I got it, but tell me if I'm right. This guy Perly gets to his office at ten tomorrow night." He looked at Judson. "Right?"

"That's what it says," Judson agreed.

Stan nodded. "He's got stuff to do, get ready for his house-guests. And they're gonna show up at eleven. Am I still right?"

"Absolutely," Judson told him. "These are the security guys and the tech guys with the equipment."

"And with them," Stan said, "they got Tiny's motion sensors."

"I don't like motion sensors," Tiny said.

"We know, Tiny," Stan told him. He looked around. "They also got — what? New phones."

"A cell phone," Kelp said. "And a special landline phone doesn't use Perly's connections."

"They've also got," Dortmunder said, "a metal cabinet with thirty-two lockable drawers for the chess pieces."

"And the complete security thing at the office door like at the airport with the doorway you go through," Stan said. He looked around. "Am I leaving anything out?"

"The moat," Kelp suggested.

Stan frowned at him. "The what?"

"Forget it," Kelp said.

"You can't do a moat in the city," Stan told him.

"I understand that. Just forget it. Go on with the recap. Now they're setting up all this stuff."

"And Perly goes home," Dortmunder said.

"Right," Stan said. "So it's turned over to the security guys now, and when they've got the office the way they like it they call their people at the bank."

"But the people at the bank," Judson said, "they don't move when they get the call. They wait, and they don't move until two o'clock."

"That's right," Dortmunder said. "It's all timed, so they can coordinate with the cops, because they get a cop escort coming down."

"And they figure to get to the office with the armored car," Stan said, "a little after two-thirty in the morning, drive the armored car into the building and up to the second floor and the cops go away. So now it's just the security from the armored car and the security already in the office." He looked around. "And there's some sort of idea that's where we come in."

"That's what we're working on," Dortmunder said.

"The good thing about this," Judson said, and they all looked at him. "Well, kind of good," he said. "We can go in ahead of time. We can go in before they set up."

Stan said, "And then what?"

"I dunno," Judson said. "It's gotta help."

Tiny said, "Dortmunder, does this Pearl guy live there?"

"No, it's just his office."

"Anybody there right now?"

"No, not until the chess set is gonna get there. Late tomorrow night."

"Then what we do," Tiny said, "we go in there now. We look it over, see what we can use. Dortmunder, go get your opener and meet us there."

"I will," Dortmunder said, rising, half-turning so he could at last see the door.

Kelp said, "John, take taxis."

"Oh, I know," Dortmunder said.

50

FROM THE MINUTE she walked in the joint, Mrs. W was the belle of the ball, the queen of the hop, the star of the show. She was the top.

Fiona looked on in floods of pleasure and relief, though she'd known it was going to be a triumph from the instant she and Brian had climbed into the limousine and seen what Mrs. W had decided on for her persona this evening. It was perfect, it was inspired, it was her. And now the assembled guests of GRODY, in their turn, were being knocked out by it.

The GRODY party, as every year, was taking place in a rented party hall in Soho, a big barnlike space on the third floor of a recent building, accessible only by one special elevator, so that all of security could take place down in the small lobby and be over and forgotten by the time the elevator doors opened onto March Madness.

As usual, the walls of the party space had been decorated this week by GRODY staffers, so that everywhere you turned there were blown-up cartoon drawings, many of them suggestive but none actually filthy. A band consisting mostly of amplifiers scared away the demons down at the far end of the room, pumping out music one certainly hoped would not turn out to be memorable, and a few partygoers danced in a cleared space within its near vicinity, though not exactly with or to it.

Most people, as usual, stood around and shouted at one another, holding drinks in their hands, a surprising number of those drinks' being soft, in cans. All of this activity was building toward fever pitch by ten-thirty, when the elevator door opened and Mrs. W stepped out, followed by the completely unnoticeable Fiona and Brian, whose Reverend Twisted was now reduced to nothing but a tall Munchkin.

Yes; that was it. The clunky black lace-up shoes; the black robe; the tall conical black hat; the outsize wart on nose; the green-strawed broom held aloft. It was Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz to the life; to the teeth. "And that goes for your little dog, too!" she cried, exiting the elevator and announcing her presence.

She was an instant hit. Awareness rippled outward through the hall, and people were drawn as by magnets in her direction. People crowded around her, people applauded her, people tried to hold conversations with her, people gave her about thirty drinks. The only sour note in the event, as it were, was the band's attempt to play "Over the Rainbow"; fortunately, most people didn't recognize it.

The first excitement and delight soon passed, and the party returned to approximately where it had been before Mrs. W had made her appearance, only with an extra little frisson created by this new presence in their midst. It isn't every party that has a drop-in from the Wicked Witch of the West, perhaps the most beloved and certainly the best-known villainess in pop culture.

When the first flurry was over and the partygoers had returned to their earlier activities and conversations and the band had gone back to whatever it was they had been assaulting, Mrs. W turned to her companions, thrust her broom at Fiona, said, "Hold this," then turned to Brian and said, "Hold me. I want to dance."

"Yes, ma'am." Wide-eyed, Brian was even forgetting to leer.

Off the two of them went, and Fiona had to admit that, unlikely couple or not, they did make something of a statement out there on the dance floor, the wicked witch and the wicked priest. Mrs. W danced like someone who'd learned how at parties long ago in eastern Connecticut, and Brian danced like someone who'd learned how at backyard barbeques in southern New Jersey, but somehow the blend worked.

Fiona stood watching, feeling she knew not what, and a guy came by, looked at the broom, and said, "Do you do windows?"

"Ha ha," she said, and went off to find the bar. She knew how she felt; forlorn.

Brian did dance with Fiona a little later, to a somewhat slower number, during which he said, "Mrs. W is really something, isn't she?" He had his leer back by now, which gave the statement a strange coloration.

"I never knew," Fiona said, "she could dance."

"Oh, sure, that's the WASP world she comes from," he said. "They learn all those social things, like they're aristocrats. Remember, they call dances 'formals. »

"Everybody calls dances 'formals. »

"Not around here."

"Well, that's true," she admitted.

And something else she had to admit, if only to herself, was that, while the GRODY party was the same old party it always had been, somehow this year it seemed more benign, more interesting, more fun. It was still the same completely unhomogenized crowd, the callow staff nearly invisible in the sea of outsiders, the twentysomethings dressed as X-Men or Buffy, the thirtysomethings with their more creative versions of roadkill or Messalina, the fortysomethings in their fangs and harlequin masks, the fiftysomethings in their red bow ties and shipboard gowns, the sixtysomethings dressed for some completely different party, but this year it didn't seem fake and strained, it just seemed like people letting their hair down at the end of another damn long winter.

Fiona realized that the only thing that had really changed was her perception. It really still was the same old party, too loud and too late and far too much of a mixed bag, with no coherent reason to exist, but this year that was okay. And it was okay because of Mrs. W.

Fiona watched Mrs. W swirl by, having learned by now how to dance while holding her green broom aloft, and now paired with Brian's shaggy boss, Sean Kelly, who this year had come either as a hobbit or Yoda; impossible to tell. In any case, he danced like a man in a gorilla suit, but nobody seemed to mind. Mrs. W beamed upon him as they swirled along, and Sean, his grinning face as red as a stoplight, yakked away nonstop.

"Brian," Fiona said, "this is fun."

He leered at her in surprise. "You didn't know?"

Mrs. W didn't want to go home. The party was winding down, the bar closed, the band endlessly packing up like NASA after a moonshot, one a.m. just a memory, and so few people left in the place you could hear each other at a normal tone of voice. But Mrs. W didn't want to go home.

"I have just the place," she said, as they descended in the elevator after she'd called her driver to come pick them up. "I've never been there, but I've read about it. It's supposed to be the most in place ever, in the West Village."

"Oh, Mrs. W," Fiona said. "Are you sure? It's so late."

"New York," Mrs. W reminded her, "is the city that never sleeps."

"And tomorrow," Brian said, still with a residual leer, "is a day off."

"Exactly so."

"But, the… the costumes."

"Our hats can stay in the car, Brian's and mine," Mrs. W said, "and so can my wart. We'll keep our coats on."

"Fiona," Brian said, as he held the limo door for the ladies, "let's do it."

"I guess we're going to," she said.

The ride up and over from Soho to the West Village didn't take long, and Mrs. W, more girlish than Fiona had ever seen her, chatted away the whole time. She had apparently been particularly taken by Sean Kelly. "A remarkable comic mind," she pronounced.

"He can be pretty funny," Brian agreed.

And now they were in the West Village, driving slowly down Gansevoort Street while the driver looked for house numbers, and when Fiona looked ahead she saw a group of men coming out of a building up there, and thought, well, we're not the only night owls.

They'd come out of a garage, in fact, those five men, and as they stood on the pavement talking together the green garage door slid downward behind them. They were so animated, even at this hour, all talking at once, pointing this way and that, shrugging their shoulders, shaking their heads, that Fiona couldn't look away. The limo drove slowly past them, and Fiona watched out the window, and one of them was Mr. Dortmunder.

No. Could it be? She tried to look out the back window, but it was hard to tell at this angle.

Could that really have been Mr. Dortmunder? The five men walked off in the opposite direction, all still gesticulating and talking a blue streak. They were certainly passionate about something or other.

Fiona faced front. There were so many things she didn't understand. Mrs. W had shown an entirely different side of her personality tonight. And now, had that really been John Dortmunder?

"There it is!" Mrs. W sang out.

"Oh, good," Fiona said, and swallowed a yawn.

51

IN THE CAREFUL chronology Perly had written for himself, he would return to his office on Sunday night at ten, to lock away many of his files and personal possessions and wait for the people from Continental Detective Agency to arrive with their equipment at eleven. But the tensions of the week had built up so much that by Sunday he couldn't stand it any more. Sunday evening was traditionally the one night of the week he could set aside for a quiet dinner at home in Westchester with his wife, but tonight he was just too much on edge. He wolfed his dinner, without his usual wine, and shortly before eight he said, "I'm sorry, Marcia, I'm too keyed up to just sit here. I've got to get down to the office."

"There's nothing to do there, Jacques," she pointed out. She was often the sensible one.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "I've got to be there."

And so it was that, an hour ahead of schedule, he and the Lamborghini were headed south on the Hutchinson River Parkway. Just to be in motion was an improvement.

Also, traffic was lighter on the Hutch inbound toward the city on Sunday night, so he made better than usual time. It was only ten minutes to nine when he turned onto Gansevoort Street and thumbed the opener clipped to his visor, and down the block his green garage door rattled upward.

The ceiling lights outside his office at the top of the ramp were kept on all the time, so by their light he drove up the steep ramp as the garage door lowered behind him, and parked in front of his door.

Unlocking that door, he stepped inside, switched on the lights there, and shrugged out of his coat. Fortunately, he didn't hang the coat up in the closet, because at the moment there was a very large and irritable person standing in there, muttering to himself about people who show up an hour early. He draped his coat instead over the chair at Delia's desk, and it's also fortunate he didn't happen to look under that desk, or he would surely have noticed a lithe young guy curled around the wastebasket under there.

The door between Delia's office and his own was normally kept unlocked, so he just opened it and entered and left it open as he switched on more lights in there. He then went over to sit at his own desk, under which there weren't any people. However, lying on his left side behind the sofa, squeezed between sofa and wall in a place Perly had never intentionally gazed upon, was a carrot-topped guy who looked almost as put out as the big fellow in the other room's closet.

Once at his desk, Perly switched on one more light, the gooseneck lamp there, which gave him concentrated illumination at the desk area but somehow made the rest of the room seem a little darker, though of course not as dark as the night outside his two large well-draped windows facing the rear of the apartment building on the next block. He often closed those maroon drapes at night, and briefly considered doing so again tonight, but then decided the security people would want to know what was out there, so he left the drapes open, which was just as well, because that way he didn't notice the sharp-nosed, keen-eyed guy standing behind the right-side drape of the right-hand window, farthest from his desk. That person had originally taken up a position facing the drape, but at the last instant had turned around, so that now he faced the window, in which he could examine at his leisure the reflection of most of the room, but in which his own dark presence against the dark drape could not be seen from any distance at all.

There had been a third person, another returnee from last night's reconnaissance mission, who had been in this room when the racket of the garage door lifting had alerted everybody to Perly's untimely arrival. This person had been near a closed interior door he'd already established as leading to a bathroom, so he'd popped open the door, popped into the bathroom, popped the door shut, popped it open again while he found the light switch and popped the light on, then popped the door shut again.

It was only when he heard Perly enter the office out there that it occurred to him that (a) Perly might want to utilize this bathroom at some point in the evening, and (b) there was nowhere to hide in the bathroom.

Well, was there? He looked around at a small simple utilitarian bathroom with white-painted walls and white tile floor, white toilet and small "white sink and a white-tiled shower the size of the former phone booth back in the O.J.

Could he make use of the shower? Perly wasn't going to take a shower here tonight, was he? The shower had a plastic curtain across the opening, but the curtain was a translucent gray; shapes could be seen through it.

He had to do something. He had to get this light turned off, soon, and he had to find some way to disappear. How?

Above the toilet were two shelves, with white hand towels and bath towels. Hurriedly, he grabbed a bath towel, switched off the light, and felt his way into the shower, where he lowered himself until he was seated, knees up to his chin, on the white shower pan in the rear corner away from the drain. As best he could, he covered himself with the bath towel and scrunched up to become as small as possible. White tile, white pan, white towel; with any luck, no foreign shapes would call attention to themselves through the curtain. Sighing, reflecting on how nobody could be trusted, not even people with handwriting as neat as Perly's, he settled down to see what happened next.

Meanwhile, in his office, Perly was opening desk drawers, deciding what he wanted to remove from here and store in the safe in the corner until his visitors should move back out. Absorbed, he didn't hear the small click of the closet door opening in the other room, nor the faint rustle of the lithe young guy unwrapping himself from the wastebasket under Delia's desk, nor even the tiny tick of the outer office door opening, but he did hear the quick snip of that door as it closed, and looked up from his desk, frowning.

Had security got here this early? Impossible. He rose, crossed to the doorway between the offices, and looked out at unchanged normality.

It must have been his imagination. Shaking his head, he crossed back to his desk, unaware that the fellow from behind the drape had sped silently across the room to stand behind the door while Perly frowned at his empty outer office, then looped silently around the door and through the doorway as Perly walked back to his desk.

Perly sat; the outer office door tocked shut.

Perly reared back and stared at the doorway. Wasn't that definitely the sound of the door? Was he hearing things?

Something's funny, he thought, and stood again, and this time walked both across his office and across Delia's office to open that outer door, lean out, and see nothing out there but his own Lamborghini.

He frowned at the ramp, listening hard, but heard and saw nothing, while the carrot-topped fellow who'd been on the floor behind the sofa squeezed out of there and scampered across both offices to tuck himself into the recently vacated closet.

Perly frowned, still in his doorway, facing his ramp. Nothing. Nobody there. Could temperature changes at night do it?

This time, on returning to his office, Perly resolved to pay no more attention to tiny anonymous noises. They meant nothing. Everything was fine. Nothing could go wrong.

52

"THE WHOLE THING'S going to hell from the get-go," Tiny said. He didn't sound happy.

"It's goddam Perly's own schedule," Stan complained. "Can't he read his own writing?"

The four had retreated down the ramp to take up a position over by the stairs to the basement. But this wasn't the way things were supposed to be. Relying on Perly's schedule, they'd fitted their own schedule into it like a burglar's hand in a stolen glove. They would get here a little before nine, and they'd have a leisurely time to study the offices for unknown problems — or opportunities, you never knew — and then come down here and continue on down to the basement about a quarter to ten.

Then Perly was supposed to show up, not now. Then he would show up, at ten, dammit, and do his packing and his filing until eleven, when Continental Detective Agency people would show up with the security stuff. A little five-handed poker would be played in the basement while Perly and the security guys set things up, and then left, and the office would be in the charge of the two uniformed Continentals, who would call their people at the bank.

Shortly before two in the morning, according to the plan, the game would be ended, and they'd come up from the basement and go on up the ramp to persuade the Continentals to cooperate — Tiny was particularly good at that part. The uniforms would be borrowed from their previous wearers, and whichever of the group they fit best would become the new security detail. When the set showed up, they would accept delivery, then go get the borrowed van they'd stashed around the corner.

Simple. Plain. Nice. No trickery, no complications. But now?

"I think the whole job's in the tank," Tiny said. "And if it is, where we all go is home."

Kelp said, "John's still up there, you know."

Tiny looked around. "Dortmunder? Where is he?"

"He went into the bathroom," Kelp said.

"At a time like this?"

"He went to hide in the bathroom."

"You can't hide in bathrooms," Judson said.

Tiny said, "The kid's right."

Kelp, looking for a ray of hope, said, "Does this bathroom have a window?"

Stan, who'd studied all the territory up there as carefully as if he were going to drive around in it, said, "No. One of those exhaust fan things."

"Jump-the-gun Perly," Tiny said, "is gonna take a leak, and guess what. We don't wanna be here when that happens."

Stan said, "What if we just went up and take him prisoner now? There's five of us."

Kelp shook his head. "Perly has to front the operation until the chess set's here."

Tiny said, "So it's time to say good night."

Kelp didn't want to leave with John still stuck up there. "No, wait, Tiny," he said. "Nothing bad's happened yet. We can still hope."

Tiny doubted it. "Hope? Hope what? Hope Perly's blind? Hope he doesn't take leaks? Forget it, Kelp, Dortmunder's history. Where's that door zapper?"

"The garage door opener?" Kelp pointed upward. "John's got it."

"Perfect," Tiny said, then looked around and pointed. "That looks like a door."

"Tiny," Kelp said, "why not wait a little while, see what happens."

"We don't want to be here," Tiny said, "when Perly makes the phone call. You know the precinct in this neighborhood already has this address on their minds tonight. When Perly calls the precinct, it's already too late to leave here."

"I tell you what," Kelp said. "I'll just go back up there, take a look, see what's going on."

"Couldn't hurt," Stan said. "What the hell, we're here,"

"And if there's a problem," Kelp said, "we can always go out the way John came in last night, the back door out of the basement. Could be some other rich apartments across the way, so it isn't a total loss."

Tiny considered, then shrugged. "Five minutes," he said. "Then I'm outa here, and I won't mind making noise."

"Thanks, Tiny," Kelp said, and turned toward the ramp.

"If you two wind up upstate," Tiny said after him, "I don't visit."

Not feeling that needed an answer, Kelp went on up the ramp. The office door had an automatic lock on it, but he'd already automatically unlocked it once tonight, so he just breezed through it, being very quiet, then tiptoed across the outer office to peek around the corner of the doorway.

There was Perly, seated at his desk, taking folders out of a side drawer. He sorted the folders into two stacks, then reached for more. And just beyond him was the bathroom door.

A distraction might help John, but a distraction would also ruin the heist. Kelp held his position and watched, and Perly stood, picked up one of the stacks of folders, and carried it over to an open safe along the same wall as the bathroom. He stooped to put the folders into the safe, turned around, and went back to the desk.

Twice more Kelp watched Perly sort folders and carry some to the safe. Then he put the rest of the folders back in the drawer, locked the drawer, and stood up to go over to some bookshelves full of tall binders, all neatly marked on their spines with tape. He stood looking at the binders, then turned to look at the bathroom door instead.

Uh oh. Did John make a noise in there?

Perly crossed to the bathroom door and opened it. He switched on the light, stepped in, and closed the door.

Kelp didn't know what to do. Stay here and see if he could help John? Or get fast down the ramp to warn the others?

The toilet flushed.

Kelp frowned at the bathroom door. Water ran in a sink in there. Perly came out, switched off the light, and went back to the bookcase, where he started to sort through the binders as Kelp raced down the ramp and over to the others. In a shrill half-whisper, he said, "Perly went in there!"

"We're gone," Tiny said.

"No, listen," Kelp said. "He went in there, he took a leak, he came out, calm as ever. He never saw John!"

"Impossible," Tiny said.

"But that's what happened, Tiny, I saw it."

Judson said, "Are you sure he's in there?"

"I watched him go in," Kelp said. "And he didn't come back out, or where is he?"

"If he come out," Stan said, "even if Perly didn't see him, we would."

"Tiny," Kelp said, "we can stick around, because somehow John made himself invisible in there."

"Then I will stick around," Tiny said. "I'll want him to tell me how he did it."

53

IT WAS NICE the bath towel thing had worked, but other than that, this whole situation sucked. Dortmunder stood in the pitch-black bathroom, hand on the edge of the shower stall so he wouldn't get lost, considered his current position, and decided he didn't like it. He was still stuck in here with a guy outside to whom he would be unable to offer any conceivable explanation as to why this person he'd never seen before was suddenly walking out of his bathroom.

"It must be a space-warp kinda thing. I was just coming out of a bar in Cleveland." No.

Another problem with this place was that Perly himself wanted to make use of it, an experience Dortmunder had found not entirely pleasant. But the capper, and the reason he was standing out here in the dark with the bath towel over his shoulders, turns out, the showerhead had a leak. A slow insidious leak that you don't even notice until all at once the seat of your pants is soaking wet, and you wouldn't mind the opportunity to make use of this bathroom yourself. Which was also impossible.

What could he do to get out of here? What about the garage door opener? Would it work at this distance? If he hit the button, would the noise of the door lifting distract Perly and make him run from the room and otherwise behave in a way that would allow Dortmunder to get out of here?

It was worth a try. He took the opener from his pocket, aimed it at the door, and pressed the button.

Nothing. Too far away, or too many walls and doors in between.

What if he were to open the door, just a tiny tiny little bit, maybe while down low on the floor, and stick the opener out at ground level and try it from there?

Anything was better than to stay in here. Dortmunder let go of the shower stall, fumbled around, found the doorknob, and used it for support while he went down on his knees and very slowly, carefully, silently opened the door. He was just about to stick the opener out when he realized he could see Perly's desk out there, and Perly wasn't sitting at it.

So where was he? Was he standing or sitting somewhere that he'd have a fine clear view of an arm sticking out of the bathroom, holding a garage door opener?

The door opened inward. Dortmunder scooted over a bit on his knees until he could open it farther, a little farther, and there was Perly, walking away toward an open shelf-filled closet, his arms full of large binders and his back toward Dortmunder.

Out. Shucking off the bath towel, out he went, on his knees, pulling the door almost closed behind himself. Without a sound, over to the desk he went, down out of Perly's sight, and crouched low to look under the desk.

Over there, beyond the desk and across the polished wood floor, Perly's feet had turned around from that closet and were crossing the room. The feet stopped, then reversed and headed for the closet again, so that his back would be toward both Dortmunder and the doorway out of here.

Dortmunder's run was not graceful, but it got there. Out of Perly's office he galumphed, and paused at the closed outer office door to put the opener away. Then he eased open that door, slid through, admired the Lamborghini parked there for about a fifth of a second, and headed down the ramp.

How to get out of the building. He could just say the hell with it and open the noisy garage door and make a run for it. Or he could hope to get through that other door without attracting Perly's notice upstairs. Or he might go down to the basement and out the back way and see if he could find Kelp's apartment with all the art treasures. Get at least something to show for the night's work.

At the foot of the ramp, he decided the hell with it, let's just get gone, and was reaching in his pocket for the opener when, from his left, Kelp's voice did a loud whisper: "John!"

He turned. All four of his partners in alleged crime were over there, by the stairs that led down to the basement. Kelp gestured to him to come over, so he did and said, "I thought you people were long gone."

"I was," Tiny said. "Perly see you up there?"

"No," Dortmunder said. "But I left a towel on the floor, he might notice that."

Stan said, "Your pants are wet."

"I know," Dortmunder told him. "I'm well aware of that."

Judson said, "So does this mean it's a go again?"

Dortmunder looked around. Perly was upstairs and hadn't been spooked. Nothing else had changed. "Well, how do you like that," he said. "We go back to Plan A."

54

OPERATION CHESS GAMBIT went off, at least in its earlier parts, without a hitch. The operation, code-named personally by Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna of the NYPD before he'd taken himself off to his home, his wife and his comfortable and capacious bed in Bay Shore, Long Island, began at eleven o'clock, when, just exactly on time, two uniformed and armed operatives of the Continental Detective Agency, plus two of the agency's technical people, rang the street bell at Jacques Perly's office and, having identified themselves through the intercom, were granted admittance. Their unmarked small van drove up the curving ramp, parked next to the Lamborghini, and for the next fifty minutes Perly and the two operatives contented themselves with awkward conversation while the tech people laid out their special gadgets, including sensors on the windows and on the trapdoor to the roof.

When they were finished, the tech people turned their van around with some difficulty, due to the Lamborghini taking up so much of the available space, and at last, after a lot of backing and filling, they drove down the ramp and away. Perly spent another ten minutes giving the operatives last-minute instructions about what was on-limits and what was off-limits in this office — he'd noticed that one of them had already managed to drop a bath towel on the floor — and then he turned the Lamborghini around with not much trouble at all, because he didn't have a second vehicle to contend with and was in any event used to the space, and also drove away, headed for Westchester.

Once Perly was gone, one of the operatives phoned a fellow operative standing by up at the C&I International bank building, to tell him everything was ready for the cargo to be transferred, and then both found themselves comfortable places to sit and curl up with their books. Being a Continental operative could be slow work if you weren't a reader.

Meantime, up in the Bronx, the armored car drove out of the Securivan secure garage facility a few minutes early, at 12:25, and made terrific time coming down to midtown Manhattan, arriving at the C&I International building at 1:10, nearly an hour ahead of schedule. The driver chatted for a while with the four Continental operatives there, all uniformed and armed, who would be doing the heavy lifting, and then somebody said, "Listen, why wait till two o'clock? We're here now, the guys are ready downtown, let's call the cops and tell them we're starting now."

Everybody thought that was a good idea. Get the job done early, get home before sunup. So the NYPD was called, and by the time the Continental operatives, assisted by the guy from the bank, had the chess set mounted on its dolly and brought up out of the vault and across the lobby floor to the entrance there were four patrol cars in position out front.

Sometimes a task has a lot of screwups and irritations in it, but every once in a while you've got a job to do and everything works just fine, not a single problem, and that's how this chess set move went, at least for a while. There was no trouble moving the set, no trouble installing it in the armored car with the four operatives on the bench in there to guard it, and no trouble driving down the mostly deserted streets, accompanied now by only one patrol car.

They arrived at Jacques Perly's building at 1:27 exactly. One of the Continentals in with the chess set radioed the guards upstairs to open the garage door, which they did by pushing the button they'd been shown on the secretary's desk, and down in the basement the five poker players jumped up and said, "What's that? It's the garage door! It isn't even one-thirty!"

They had planned to relieve the guards of their duties and their uniforms at two o'clock, which would have given them a solid half-hour before the chess set would arrive. Fuming, Stan said, "Doesn't anybody keep to a goddam schedule?"

"Only us," Dortmunder said. "Come on, let's see what this is."

The five hurried up the stairs just in time to watch the armored car nose into the building and groan tentatively up the ramp, while outside the patrol car went about its business, its nursing detail done. The five stared, all hope gone. This was disaster. They absolutely had to get their hands on that goddam chess set before it got into that impossible circle of security inside Perly's office, that was the whole point here.

Over there on the ramp the armored car, angled upward like a turtle crawling over a log, stopped. It moved backward a little, then stopped. It moved forward a little, and very loud scraping sounds were heard. It stopped, moved backward, hitched itself around like a fat man adjusting his shorts, moved forward, and reproduced the scrape sound effect.

"It's too big," Judson said. He sounded stunned.

"These people," Stan said, "can't do anything right."

"Enough is enough," Dortmunder said, stepping forward from the stairwell. "Stan, get the van. Take the kid with you. Tiny, Andy, come on."

Everybody did as they were told, Stan and Judson exiting through the nearby door, Kelp and Tiny following Dortmunder, Kelp saying, "John? What's our plan?"

"We're getting what we came for," Dortmunder said, and yelled at the armored car as it did that scrape thing again, "Hey! Cut it out! Whadaya wanna do, knock down the wall?"

The armored car was completely inside the building now, on the ramp, in a position where it scraped the wall just as much when it went backward as when it went forward. The driver, over on the far side in his closed cab, looked out his right window at Dortmunder and shrugged his arms up in the air: "Whadaya want from me?"

Dortmunder went to the rear door of the armored car and banged on the bulletproof window. Cautiously, the door opened an inch, and the Continental in there, his hand on his holstered sidearm, said, "Who are you?"

"We work for Perly," Dortmunder told him. "We're the outside security, keep an eye on the place while you people are here, and brother, you need us. I got a van here," he went on, as Stan and Judson arrived with it. Turning to Kelp, he said, "Tell him to back it in. As close to the armored car as he can."

Kelp, looking awed, went away to instruct Stan, while Dortmunder said to the Continental, "You're gonna wreck this place. We'll get the chess set out and into the van, then get your truck outa here, then take the set up the ramp with the van. Also, we gotta take pictures of the damage."

"That's Securivan," the Continental told him. "That's not us."

From up above, one of the two Continentals already in position called down, "You need help down there?"

"Stay there," Dortmunder yelled up to him. "You don't wanna compromise the security you got there." Then he had to move briskly out of the way as Stan backed the van into the building and over to the rear of the armored car.

"I guess that's all we can do," the Continental said, and turned to tell his friends in the armored car what was going on. They all climbed out and, with all nine of them lending a hand, it took no time at all to transfer the chess set and its dolly into the van.

Once it was in and the van door shut, Stan drove the van out to the curb with Judson on the seat beside him, Kelp and Tiny sort of vagued themselves out of the scene and down the block, and Dortmunder said to the four Continentals, "You guys want to get in position where you can guide this driver. He's all messed up in here. You two go round front, you get on this side, you get on that side, I'll stand here by the door, be sure there's nobody coming."

Everybody got into position, and Dortmunder stepped back and thumbed the opener in his pocket, then galloped over to shove into the van next to Judson, which then left. The Continentals ran to the closing door, but didn't get there in time. If one of them had been a little spryer he might have been able to roll out under the closing door, but none of them were that spry.

Eventually they got the door open again, with a lot of shouting and recrimination, but the van was nowhere to be seen. Also, nobody had noticed its license number.

55

THE LONGEST DAY of Jacques Perly's life started, appropriately enough, before dawn, with a phone call from the NYPD that woke him from a sound sleep at, according to the green LED readout of his bedside clock, 1:57 a.m., approximately fifty minutes since he'd shut his eyes.

"Jacques? Whuzza?"

"God knows," Jacques muttered, rolling over, lifting onto an elbow, tucking the phone between shoulder and jaw as he switched on the low bedside light and reached for pen and paper, just in case, while saying, "Perly."

"Jacques Perly?"

"That's me."

"This is Detective Krankforth, Midtown South. There has been a robbery at your office, sir."

Jacques was not really yet awake. He said, "A — a burglary?"

"No, sir," Detective Krankforth told him. "There were individuals present on the premises, that upgrades it to a robbery."

"Indi— Oh, my God, the chess set!"

"There are officers at the location," Detective Krankforth told him, "who would like to converse with you as soon as possible."

"I'll be there in an hour," Perly promised, and dropped the phone into its cradle as he scrambled out of bed.

"Jacques? Whuzza?"

"Hell," he told her. "Go back to sleep."

More hell than he'd guessed. He couldn't park in his own building, couldn't even drive down that block. After being impatiently waved off by a traffic cop who didn't want to hear anything he might want to say, he found an all-night garage two blocks away and walked back, shivering in the cold. Three-fifteen in the morning now, nearly the coldest time of the night.

Two television remote trucks were parked outside the yellow crime tape that closed off the block. Whatever had happened here had caused some commotion because people leaned out windows into the cold up and down the block, and other people stood in clumps outside the yellow tape, staring at nothing much.

Perly identified himself to a cop at the tape, who radioed to someone, then nodded and let him in, saying, "See Captain Kransit in the command module."

The command module, in civilian life, was a mobile home, though sporting NYPD blue and white. A uniformed patrolman ushered Perly up the steps and in, where a disgruntled plainclothesman in brown suit and no tie, raw-boned, fortyish, craggy-faced, looking exactly like a disgruntled high school science teacher, said, "Mr. Perly? Have a seat."

The front half of the command module contained tables and benches bolted to the floor, with a closed door in a black wall partway back. Perly and Kransit sat facing one another, elbows on table, and Perly said, "The chess set was stolen?"

"We're still trying to work out exactly what happened," Kransit told him. "Somebody's coming down from C&I bank, should have been here by now. You got a valuable chess set delivered to you tonight, is that it?"

"Yes. After I left. The Continental Detective Agency provided uniformed guards, and Securivan made the transfer. NYPD provided escort coming down."

Captain Kransit didn't take notes, but did consult a yellow legal pad open on the table at his right elbow. "You were not here when this chess set arrived?"

"No, that wasn't necessary. The arrangement is, I'm renting my office to these people while the set is out of its vault for study and evaluation, so once the security people were in place I could go home. That was about twelve-fifteen" — glance at watch — "three hours ago. Can you tell me what happened?"

The microphone/speaker dangling from Kransit's lapel squawked like a chicken, and Kransit told it, "Send him in," then got to his feet. "The bank man's here. Let's go take a look at what we've got."

The command module had been warm, which Perly noticed when he stepped back out to the cobbled street. The man approaching them was black, well over six feet tall, and done up in thick black wool overcoat, plaid scarf and black homburg. He looked like a Negro Theater Ensemble production of The Third Man. "Woolley," he announced.

Introductions were made, hands were shaken, and they turned toward Perly's building, where the garage door stood uplifted. "The crime scene is still intact," Kransit said, as they walked. "The vehicle is still inside."

"Well, yes, it would," Perly started, then stopped and started. "It's on the ramp!" And there it was, tilted up, a big, dark, bulky mass of metal, crawling with forensic team members like ants on a rotted eggplant.

Captain Kransit seemed slightly embarrassed on the armored car's behalf. "Yes, sir," he said. "Seems it got stuck in there."

Three or four men in dark blue overalls had been standing near the entrance. Now one of them came over to say, "Captain, we ready to pull this mother out of here?"

"Not just yet," the captain told him. "When forensics is finished."

"It's gonna take some doing," the overalled guy said, not without satisfaction. "Those guys really stepped on their dick in there."

"I'll let you know when," the captain promised, and Perly said, "Captain, what did happen? And where are the guards?"

"They were all shaken up by the event," the captain told him. "They've been taken down to Centre Street for a little rest and then a debriefing, but I can tell you both, now that you're here, Mr. Woolley, what occurred here tonight. This armored car arrived at about one-thirty—"

"Well, that's wrong," Perly said. "It was supposed to appear at two-thirty."

"We'll find out about that," the captain promised him. "But in fact, it did get here at one-thirty, when, too late, they discovered the vehicle was too bulky to make that tight turn up the ramp. Trying to correct, back and fill, you know, they wedged themselves in tighter."

The overalled guy still stood nearby, and now he said, "We might have to take some of that stone wall out."

Perly said, "What? Now you're going to tear my building down?"

"Well, that's a very valuable piece of machinery in there," the overalled guy said.

Perly gave him a dangerous look. "More valuable, do you think," he said, "than my building?"

Becoming belatedly cautious, the overalled guy said, "I guess we'll leave that to the insurance companies. I'm out of it." And he walked away to join his pals, dignity intact.

Woolley said, "Captain, so far, we have this vehicle wedged onto this ramp. I take it something happened next."

"Five men appeared, in civilian clothes," the captain told him. "I don't have every detail, but this is based on the preliminary investigations up here, before the witnesses were taken downtown. Five men approached the armored car from over there, said they worked for Mr. Perly."

Woolley said, "They came from inside the building?"

"That's right. They were already in place before the armored car arrived. The guards in the car assumed they came from the ground floor offices."

"I don't have ground floor offices," Perly said. "That's all storage."

"The men in the armored car didn't know that," the captain told him. "These men said they were your outside supplemental security, and they had a van with them, and they assisted in transferring the chess set from the armored car to the van, which would be small enough to make the curve up the ramp. Then — the men on the scene have expressed great embarrassment and chagrin over this — the van drove away."

Woolley looked very sad. "I'm afraid, Mr. Perly," he said, "you haven't been very lucky in this affair. No sooner do you take over the responsibility for the chess set than it disappears."

Perly rounded on him. "Responsibility? I never had responsibility for that goddam chess set."

"Sir, I am a Christian."

Perly was beside himself. "I don't care if you're a Girl Scout, my responsibility does not begin until that chess set enters my office. My office." Perly pointed a rage-trembling finger. "That ramp is not my office. Not verifying the size vehicle needed was not my responsibility, and what happens to the chess set before it actually enters my office is also not my responsibility. It was still property entrusted to the bank that underwent an armed robbery, not property entrusted to me."

"Er, Mr. Perly," Captain Kransit said, "it wasn't actually an armed robbery. None of the thieves showed any weapons. They merely showed up, took the chess set, and went away."

"Which somehow doesn't make things much better," Perly told him. "But the point remains, the bank continues to maintain sole custody of that chess set, as it has for lo these many years, and as it will continue to do until the chess set crosses the threshold into my office."

Woolley shrugged; no skin off his nose. "We'll let the lawyers sort that out," he said.

Envisioning a future full of C&I International bank lawyers, not to mention all the lawyers attached to all those Northwood heirs, Perly turned to glare at that stupid Tonka toy stuck in his beautiful building. It's Clanson, he told himself. Brian Clanson, he set this up somehow. I'm not going to mention his name, not tonight, but I'm going to get the goods on that white-trash son of a bitch if it's the last thing I do.

"All done, Captain," said the head of the forensics team, as at last they all trooped out to the sidewalk, carrying their cases of equipment and samples and supplies.

"Thank you," the captain said, and turned to the blue-overalled crowd. "It's all yours, boys."

"Thanks, Captain!" The boys headed for the armored car. They were all smiling, ear to ear.

Perly closed his eyes.

56

WHEN FIONA GOT to the office Monday morning, Lucy Leebald, who was already there, typing more of Mrs. W's memoir — Fiona was, in fact, a bit late this morning — said, "Mrs. W says come see her."

"Thanks."

Though she'd had trouble getting out of bed this morning, despite Brian calling to her from the kitchen every three minutes, Fiona did in fact feel better today than yesterday. Saturday night's March Madness party, followed by the pub crawl instigated by Mrs. W, had just about finished her off. She knew she'd drowsed a bit in the limo after the final bar, and Brian had had to hold her arm to steer her from curb to elevator and from elevator to apartment, where she'd slept heavily but not restoratively until almost midday, so that yesterday had become a completely lost and wasted day, but by this morning her recuperation was very nearly complete, so it was with a clear eye and a firm step that she crossed the hall to Mrs. W's office.

Where Mrs. W looked as chipper as the first robin of spring. Fiona had never guessed the woman had such stamina. Closing the door behind her, she said, "Good morning, Mrs. W."

"Good morning, my dear," Mrs. W said, and then, a bit archly, "Where have you been keeping young Brian?"

"Oh, I'm glad you liked him, Mrs. W"

"He's a charming young man. Sit down, dear."

Fiona perched on the uncomfortable settee, notepad in lap, and Mrs: W said, "Apparently, he's quite a talented young man, as well. Some of the decorative work on the walls was his, I understand."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Somehow," Mrs. W said delicately, "that television station— What is it called?"

"GRODY."

"Exactly so. It somehow doesn't seem quite the right place over the long haul," Mrs. W suggested, "for a person of maturity and talent. Wouldn't you say?"

"Brian does enjoy it there," Fiona said, which was as close as she could honestly come to defending his occupation.

"Oh, I'm certain he must. His co-workers are such a jolly lot. Especially that Sean. I quite enjoyed myself with them all."

"Well, your costume was wonderful," Fiona said. "Everyone was just in love with it."

Mrs. W came as close as she could to a simper. "I must admit," she said, "I was pleased at the effect it had. Do you suppose Brian would like to go back to university?"

Surprised, Fiona said, "He has his degree, Mrs. W In broadcast communications."

"Oh, really?" Mrs. W seemed quite interested. "One obtains a degree in broadcast communications, does one?"

As Fiona looked for a response to that, the phone on Mrs. W's desk tinkled, and she picked it up: "Yes, Lucy? Thank you, dear, I'll speak to him." Smiling at Fiona and holding up one finger to indicate that this wouldn't take long, she pressed the button on the phone and said, "Yes, good morning, Jay. How are you this morning? Really? Why's that? What? My God! Jay, how could that— That's horrible, Jay. For all of us, yes. What do the police say? Have they no idea— Yes, of course, of course. Well, obviously. Two o'clock. I will be there, Jay."

Mrs. W hung up and turned toward Fiona a thunderstruck face. At this moment, she looked less like the wicked witch of the west and more like Munch's Scream. "Unbelievable," she said.

Fiona, bursting with curiosity, said, "What is it, Mrs. W? What's happened?"

"The Chicago chess set has been stolen. '

"Oh, my God," Fiona said, and inside she was saying, Oh, my God. They did it.

57

BECAUSE OF ITS proximity to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge over to Queens, the easternmost part of East Sixtieth Street is pretty well lined with parking garages, for those members of the bridge and tunnel crowd who prefer to keep their Manhattan driving experience to a minimum; say, seventeen feet. The garages are large, and full, and given to heavy turnover of both customer and employee, so any one of them would make a good place to stash, for just one overnight, an anonymous little van full of chess pieces, if you didn't mind paying the exorbitant fee, just this once.

Dortmunder had not accompanied the van last night — that had been Stan and Judson's duty — but he knew what to look for to find the right garage, and that was Tiny. Yes, there he stood, midblock, looking from a distance like a grand piano about to be hoisted through an upper-floor window.

Approaching, yawning — that had been a late night last night, and this meet was scheduled for 10 a.m. — Dortmunder eventually saw Judson beyond Tiny, and at that moment the kid saw him back and grinned and waved, which caused Tiny to turn around and acknowledge Dortmunder's approach, but did not cause him to grin and wave. He did, however, say, "Kelp's not here yet."

"He's probably waiting for the doctor to get out of the car," Dortmunder said, and to Judson he said, "Stan in there?"

"He should be right out."

"And you got the directions."

Patting his shirt pocket, Judson said, "Andy wrote it all out for me, gave it to me when we met last night."

Tiny said, "What about Kelp calling Eppick to call the guy, make sure the house is open?"

Dortmunder said, "He was gonna do that this morning, before he went for wheels."

"It's a hell of a distance to go," Tiny suggested, "to stash one box."

"Well, its not a stash, Tiny—"

Judson said, "Here comes Andy."

"— it's more of a delivery. The guy that it's his house, he's the customer."

"And we do home deliveries," Tiny commented. "That's real good of us."

Now out of the bowels of the garage came last night's small black van, Stan at the wheel, as simultaneously there came to a halt nearby a bright red Cadillac Colossus with MD plates, an SUV large enough for the rear seat to accommodate a basketball team; or Tiny.

"See you up there," Dortmunder told Judson, waved to Stan at the wheel of the van, and turned to climb into the front passenger seat of the Colossus, as Tiny occupied the rear seat in much the way the Wehrmacht once occupied France.

The van moved off first, Kelp following it down the block to the corner, where the light, for once, was green. The van went straight through the intersection, keeping to the left lane for the bridge approach.

Following, Kelp said, "What's he doing? He's going to Queens."

"Maybe he knows something," Dortmunder said.

"Maybe I do, too," Kelp said, keeping to the right, headed for the northbound entrance to FDR Drive. "We're not going east to Queens, we're going north to New England."

Dortmunder twisted around, to look back past the bulk of Tiny, but the van was already out of sight. "I wonder why he did that," he said.

"We'll ask him up at the compound," Kelp said. "We'll have to wait for them a while, though."

58

NESSA REACHED BEHIND her to clamp Chick's thrusting hip. "A car!" she cried, her words half muffled by the pillow.

The metronome that was Chick abruptly clenched. "A what?"

"A car! See what it is."

Chick wasted seconds staring around the bedroom, as though expecting to see some car drive through here, but then at last he did hop out of her and out of bed and over to stare out the window. "It is a car!" he confirmed. "Two cars!"

Could this be the bozos with the chess set after all? Nessa didn't believe it for a second. "Time to get dressed," she said, feeling grim.

There'd been a few men in Nessa's life since, last November, four months ago, she'd switched from the dreamer Brady to the completely unreliable Hughie the roadie, and if she were the contemplative sort, she would be contemplating right now the fact that her men had not been getting better along the way. Chick, for instance, did not have Brady's deftness with locks, nor Hughie's cleverness and constant cash flow, nor much of anything else to recommend him except a large strong tireless body and an amiable willingness to let Nessa lead him by the nose or some other part, but he was an easy companion in her slow drifting progress toward somewhere or other, so what the hell.

Nessa had not so much hardened in the last four months as jelled toward the person she would eventually be. Leaving Numbnuts with Brady had not been a serious life decision, but just a fun goofy thing to do, on a par with cutting school or piling into a car with a bunch of other kids some summer night to go skinny-dipping out to Lake Gillespie. Leaving Brady for Hughie the roadie had been almost as impulsive and unthinking, but calculation had begun to enter her head: the indolent and unfocused Brady was proving to be useless in her life, but Hughie appeared to be a man with uses. And when he too in very different ways disappointed, there turned out to be somebody else. By now she had become serious enough to understand that she was not yet actually serious, but would be. There was still time to grow up. At the moment, but not forever, she was with Chick, who was gaping out the window, at a loss.

So she pulled on her jeans, crossed to the window next to Chick, said, "Put something on," and looked out and down at two simple sedans parked in front of the garage and, did they but know it, parked also in front of Chick's dented gray PT Cruiser, which was at the moment stashed inside that garage. Another complication, maybe.

A total of four people, all bundled up because in Massachusetts it was still definitely winter in late March, had climbed out of the two cars and, as Nessa watched and behind her Chick finally put his clothes on, the four began to pull other things out of the cars to carry with them off to the guesthouse, away to the right. Mops, brooms, squeegees, buckets holding cans and boxes of cleaning supplies.

Servants, these were, two men and two women, come to clean the guesthouse. We're about to have guests.

Won't they come to this house, too? A good thing they started their work over there. Nessa and Chick wouldn't be able to leave this vicinity while their car was bottled up in that garage, but at least they'd have time to erase their presence from this house before any of the cleaners arrived.

There wouldn't be much evidence of their presence to eliminate, in fact, since Nessa and Chick had only slipped past the locked rear gate and into the compound last night. Driving northward, she had told him about the big empty house in the Massachusetts woods, and how Brady had found the way to circumvent the lock, which she could now do as well. She told him about the people who'd showed up at the place to choose somewhere to hide a valuable chess set they planned to bring up, but then how they never did return, with or without anything of value.

"I still think they're bozos," she'd said last night, "but what else've we got to do? We'll stop by there, see if they actually ever did show up with that chess set, sleep in a nice bed, defrost some of the food there, and take off tomorrow."

"Then let's go to Ohio," Chick had said, for no real reason, and she'd said, "Sure. Why not?"

Why not? One place was as good as another, until it would be time to get serious. In the meantime, that chess set might have come in handy, but of course it hadn't been here. If there was one thing Nessa had learned so far in her travels it was this: Bozos are bozos.

59

AS BRIAN SAW it, the problem was how to make Mother Mean, the new consort for the Reverend Twisted, recognizably enough the Wicked Witch of the West for the viewer to get it but not so recognizable that all the property rights lawyers of the world would rise up en masse to smite him, and so he was hard at work in his octagonal office at GRODY late this Monday morning, forgetting all about lunch, deeply engrossed in his petty piracy, when someone knocked on the frame of his doorless doorway.

Now what? Looking around with that sudden spasm of guilt known to all pilferers, he saw standing there in his doorway what looked very much like a plainclothes detective, fortyish, a bulky body in a rumpled suit and tie. But he couldn't be, could he? A detective?

"Help you?"

"Brian Clanson?"

"Guilty," Brian said, with a leftover leer.

The man drew a narrow billfold from his inside jacket pocket, flipped it open, and showed Brian an overly designed police badge; too busy. "Detective Penvolk," he said. "I'd like you to come with me, if you would."

More startled than frightened, at least at first, Brian said, "But I'm working here, I…"

"It won't take long," Detective Penvolk assured him. "You can just answer a few questions for us."

"What questions?"

"Mr. Clanson," the detective said, with a sudden bit of steel in his voice, "we prefer our interviews in settings other than this."

"Well, that made sense. In truth, Brian would have preferred his entire work experience in a setting other than this. However, it didn't seem as though he were going to be given many options at the moment, so Brian obediently rose, saying, "Will this take long?"

"Oh, I don't think so," the detective said. He turned to look both ways along the corridor, then said, "You probably know the shortest way out of here."

"Probably," Brian agreed. "Unless they did some carpentry last night." Nodding to the right, he said, "It should be that way."

The corridors were too narrow to walk two abreast, though people meeting could squeeze past one another. The occasional pregnancy among the staffers was usually blamed on the corridors. Brian therefore led the way, the detective followed him, and Brian said over his shoulder, "Could you tell me what this is all about?"

"Oh, let it wait till we get there," the detective advised.

Brian's boss, Sean Kelly, had his office on the right along here, an elongated rectangle that looked as though it wanted to grow up to be a bowling alley. Sean was at his Star Trek replica control panel in there when Brian walked by, and he was deep in conversation with Detective Penvolk's older gloomier brother. Sean rolled his eyes as Brian walked by, though Brian had no idea what he meant by that.

Had something bad happened during March Madness? There hadn't been any overdoses, had there? That was so old century. Still, something was going on, if one detective wants to talk to Brian and another detective wants to talk to Sean.

As they continued down the angling corridor, Brian dropped unconsciously into a prison shuffle, and said over his shoulder, "The reason I asked, I mean, what this is all about, you know, this kind of thing could make you nervous. I mean, not knowing. What it's all about."

"Oh, don't let it worry you," the detective advised. "If you're innocent, you've got nothing to be afraid of."

Irrepressible at all the wrong times, "Innocent?" Brian asked. "Moi?"

Detective Penvolk chuckled. Faintly.

60

WHEN KELP STEERED the Colossus up to the closed gate to Mr. Hemlow's compound in Massachusetts around one-thirty that afternoon, the van was already there, parked in front of the gate. Stan and Judson, with all the time in the world, strolled back and forth on the recently snow-cleared drive, working out the kinks after all those hours in the car.

Looking grim, Kelp said, "I'm not gonna ask him," as he pulled in behind the van.

"I will," Tiny said.

"He'll only tell you," Kelp warned him.

"Then I'll know something," Tiny said.

They all climbed out of the Colossus and said hellos back and forth, and then Tiny said, "Kelp wants to know how you went to Queens and got here first."

"I don't care one way or the other," Kelp said.

"If you're headed north," Stan told them all, "that's the best way out of midtown. You take the bridge and Northern Boulevard, then the BQE to Grand Central to the Triboro Bridge—"

"And there you are back in Manhattan," Kelp said.

"They call it Triboro because it goes to three boroughs," Stan said. "You take it north to the Bronx, to the Major Deegan, which happens to be the Thruway, which is the widest fastest road in any of the boroughs. Meanwhile, when you do it your way, you're in traffic jams on the FDR, traffic jams on the Harlem River Drive and traffic jams on the West Side Highway, and you're not even outa Manhattan yet. Also, I suppose you had to fill the tank on that thing six, seven times to get here."

"It is a little thirsty, this beast," Kelp admitted, and spread his hands, forgiving everybody. "But we're all here now, so what difference does it make?"

Judson, admiration in his voice, said, "Stan is one heck of a driver."

"We know," Kelp said.

"Andy," Dortmunder said, before any tension could develop, "you're supposed to buzz them now, aren't you?"

"Right."

Kelp went off to the intercom mounted on the post beside the gate, and Dortmunder said to Stan, "There's a flat clear spot we found the last time in there. That's where we'll switch."

Stan, not sounding thrilled, said, "And I get to drive the monster."

"It's not so bad," Dortmunder told him. "It's kinda like driving a waterbed."

As Kelp got off the intercom, the two halves of the gate swung silently outward. "They say they got lunch ready for us," he said.

"That's a good thing," Tiny said.

They climbed back into the vehicles and drove through, the van moving over to let the Colossus go first. Behind them as they went, the gate closed itself.

Soon Kelp stopped once more, at a spot where, on the left side of the driveway, there was a small clearing. There might have been a little house there at one time, or just a turnaround for cars, or possibly extra parking for parties. Whatever the original idea, the space now was just a small clearing without the usual towering pines, the land at this time of year showing hardy weeds growing up through old snow.

Once again, they all piled out of the cars, but this time Stan and Judson took green plastic tarpaulins from the back of the van and spread them on the weedy patch while the other three dragged the box containing the chess set out far enough to get at the interior box containing the chess pieces. This part of the set was heavy enough all by itself for Tiny, who carried it over to the green tarps, to say, "Huh," before putting it down.

While he was doing that, Dortmunder and Kelp were pulling several cans of spray enamel out of the van and placing them on the periphery of the tarps.

"We'll see you up there," Stan said, when everything was ready.

"Shouldn't take us long," Kelp said. "Save us some lunch."

"Tell Tiny," Stan suggested.

"Don't be too long," Tiny suggested.

Judson gestured at the tarps. "The people up at the house," he said. "What are they supposed to think about all this?"

"They're servants," Tiny told him. "They're supposed to think, what a nice job I got."

"Oh. Okay."

As Stan and Judson got into the front of the Colossus, Tiny resumed his usual occupation of the backseat. Dortmunder and Kelp started rattling spray paint cans, listening to the little balls bounce around inside, and the Colossus disappeared around the next curve into the pines.

Kelp said, "Hold on, I need the red queen."

"Right."

Now they bent to the chess pieces and distributed them into two sections on the tarps, all standing in place, the red-gem pieces over here, the white-gem pieces over there. Kelp took the Earring Man's red queen from his pocket, put the original into his pocket in its place, and now the two of them went to work. Dortmunder sprayed his bunch black, Kelp went for the red. Fortunately, there was very little breeze, so they managed not to spray one another but still could circle the clusters of chessmen and get a pretty good shot at them from all sides.

As they sprayed, Dortmunder said, "We're only switching the one piece. We're leaving a lot of value up here."

"The way I figure," Kelp said, bending to get to the deeper crevices, "the four hundred bucks we paid for the queen was like seed money. We break up the queen and sell the parts and Anne Marie goes back to Earring Man for a few more second-team members, after the chess set heist is yesterday's news. We know the set's gonna stay up here. We just come back from time to time, do another little switcheroo. Money in the bank."

"Kings and queens in the bank," Dortmunder said. "Even better."

The job didn't take long. The box that had held the pieces went back into the van, along with a couple unused cans of paint, and then they got into the van, Kelp driving, to go the rest of the way to the compound.

As they started off, Dortmunder looked back at the two clusters of martial figures spread on the green tarps like a pair of abandoned armies, as though feudalism had just abruptly shut down in this part of the world. He said, "They'll be okay there, right?"

"Sure, why not," Kelp said. "Stay out in the air, dry overnight, tomorrow we'll set them up in that big living room. In the meantime, what could happen?"

61

WHEN FIONA GOT back from lunch at her favorite bistro down on Seventy-second, it was not quite one-thirty, and Mrs. W was waiting, perhaps patiently, in the office Fiona shared with Lucy Leebald. "You heard me on the phone," she said, "that there is to be a meeting this afternoon about this dreadful event."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I want you with me."

Surprised, Fiona said, "You do?"

"I will want a reliable witness," Mrs. W said. "I may want a lawyer, of which you are still one, and with some familiarity with the case involved. And I may need moral support."

"You, Mrs. W?"

"We'll see," said Mrs. W, pulling on her gray suede gloves. "Come along. We'll be back anon, Lucy."

"Yes, ma'am."

The meeting was in a large conference room at Feinberg, her old stamping grounds. It felt very strange to walk through this tasteful gray territory as someone else entirely, no longer a wee beastie, but… well. No longer their wee beastie, but Mrs. W's wee beastie, a far better job description indeed.

The sleekly dressed secretary who led them through the Feinberg maze was a new one, but that was often the case. They turned at last into a short corridor and there, obviously waiting for them, was Jay Tumbril, as hateful-looking as ever. He gave Fiona a quick dismissive sneer and said to Mrs. W, "You brought her. Good."

"You said you would explain why when we got here," Mrs. W said.

"All in good time," Tumbril said, and gestured to the nearby open door. Inside there, Fiona could see, was the conference room, full of people, none of them looking happy.

But that wasn't the point. She said, "Mrs. W? He asked you to bring me?"

"All in good time, as I say," Tumbril answered, and pointed at one of the two low sofas along the corridor. "Wait there, young woman," he said. "Do not try to leave the building."

"Why would I leave the—"

But he had already turned away, ushering Mrs. W in. Without another glance in her direction, he also entered the conference room and shut the door.

This was a dead space in the Feinberg domain, a short corridor with a large conference room on each side, for meetings that wouldn't fit into the smaller rooms such as the one where Fiona had first talked with Mr. Dortmunder. There was no other furniture here than the sofas, each accompanied by a low end table on which reading matter was carelessly stacked, most of it three-year-old New York magazines.

Having nothing else to do — leave the building, indeed! — Fiona sat down and tried to find a New York too old for her to remember the articles inside.

The meeting went on and on. Fiona read New York magazines. She read TIME way out of time. She read Golf Digest. She even read Yachting.

Inside the conference room, the meeting was occasionally stormy. From time to time she could hear voices raised, male and female, though never what they were saying.

Every once in a while, she sensed movement and would look up to see one of her former co-workers staring at her from the end of the corridor. They always fled away like Eloi when she caught their eye, too afraid to be seen with her to allow them to satisfy their curiosity as to why she was here. And to think she used to like some of those people.

The meeting, which had begun at two, didn't end until nearly four, and then seemed to trickle away more than finish. The door opened and people began to come out, but they were all still talking, arguing, gesturing at one another. They paused in the corridor or back in the conference room or the doorway between, to make another point. None of them had grown any happier since the meeting had started. The exodus was like the end of a church service, but hostile.

And then, among the departing parishioners, here came Mrs. W and Jay Tumbril. Fiona stood, the two approached her, and Mrs. W said, "Well, Jay? Now will you tell us what it's all about?"

"Ms. Hemlow will, I believe," Tumbril said, and gestured at the closed door to the other conference room. "We'll have some privacy in here."

So the three went in, Tumbril shut the door, and he turned to say, "We might as well sit."

It was a very long conference table. Tumbril sat at its head, with Mrs. W on his left hand and Fiona on his right. Mrs. W said, "Jay, I don't handle suspense particularly well. Say what you have to say."

"Let's give Ms. Hemlow the opportunity." Tumbril turned his spotlight glare on her. "Would you like to tell us about it?"

Bewildered, Fiona said, "About what? I don't know what you mean."

"No?" Another smirk from the senior partner. Sitting back in his chair — they were actually quite comfortable chairs — he said, "Perhaps I should tell you, your coconspirator has already been arrested."

"My what?"

"He's probably already implicating you," Tumbril went on, "putting all the blame on your shoulders to try to make things easier for himself. That's what his sort generally does."

"Jay," Mrs. W said, "you are perplexing the both of us. If you have something to say, man, say it."

"Your sweet little assistant here, Livia," Tumbril told her, "is part of the gang that stole the Chicago chess set."

Fiona felt her face go beet-red, and her heart pounded as though it would explode. How could they have found out? She might have blurted something irretrievably incriminating if Mrs. W hadn't distracted Tumbril from her flaming face by saying, "Jay! Have you lost your mind? This girl couldn't lift that thing!"

"She was what I believe the police call the inside man," Tumbril said, "or in this case the inside woman. She's the one passed on to the gang the details of where the set would be kept while out of the vault. That was all they needed."

These few seconds when Tumbril was distracted by having to explain things to Mrs. W were all Fiona needed to get control of herself. She could feel the blood recede from her cheeks as sanity returned to her brain. Whatever had gone wrong, what she had to do now was just keep denying everything, she knew that much. Deny deny deny. But she couldn't help wondering, who had the police caught? Mr. Dortmunder? Somehow, she hoped not.

Mrs. W was saying, "I don't believe that for a second, Jay, and if you weren't blinded by prejudice you wouldn't believe it, either. And how is it you never mentioned this magnificent break in the case during the meeting we all just underwent together?"

"The police don't want it made public," Tumbril told her, "until it's wrapped up. Preferably with a confession. From the fellow they've already got, or possibly from this young lady here."

Now Mrs. W was openly scoffing. "Look at the girl," she said. "She would no more gallivant with a gang than you would play basketball."

"Bas— Livia, try not to wander. I told you at the beginning she was up to something. Didn't I? When she flung herself on you in these very offices."

"Flung her—"

"Mr. Tumbril," Fiona said, and, when she had the man's gimlet-eyed attention, "who did they arrest?"

"Ah, yes." The smirk raised itself a notch, and Tumbril leaned forward, the better to observe her reaction. "His name is… Brian Clanson. Do you recog—"

"Brian!" This was so astonishing, so absurd, she almost laughed out loud. "Brian? You think—" Then she did laugh, at the thought of Brian organizing a robbery like this. Or organizing anything, for that matter.

But then the laugh cut off in her throat and she too leaned forward. "They arrested him?"

"That's what usually happens to thieves. Wouldn't you like to make your plea bargain with the district attorney before he does?"

Brian knows, she thought. I told him about Mr. Dortmunder and the chess set months ago, when I thought it couldn't ever happen. He's certain to remember.

Will he tell the police, to protect himself? But how would that protect him? If he said he didn't do it, but he'd known it was probably going to happen and he hadn't reported it, how would that do anything to save him?

The only thing Brian could possibly do was keep silent and wait for them to realize they'd made a mistake. The only question was, would he understand that was the only thing he could possibly do?

Was there any way she could get to him, talk to him? Would they let him have visitors? But didn't they secretly record jailhouse conversations? Wasn't that in the papers all the time, that they weren't supposed to tape private conversations but they did anyway, and then people got convicted of things?

But even if she could see Brian, what could she say to him? And what would Brian say to the police?

Brandishing a self-confidence she didn't at all feel, Fiona said, "Brian didn't have anything to do with stealing that chess set. It is just a stupid mistake, and they'll have to let him go."

"Is that so?" Now Tumbril leaned back, hands folded on his paunch. "And are you claiming the chess set is not the reason you approached Mrs. Wheeler?"

Fiona hesitated, and in the hesitation knew that the hesitation itself had given the answer, and so changed her own response even as it was forming. In fact, she was a good lawyer. "No," she said. "I won't deny it. It was because of the chess set."

"Fiona!"

"Tell us more," Tumbril offered, with his little smirk.

"I'll have to tell you the whole story."

"I have all the time in the world," he assured her.

"All right, then," she said. "In 1920—"

And she went on to tell them the entire history of the chess set and the platoon members' failed efforts to find either it or their missing Sgt. Northwood. She told them of hearing the story from her grandfather, and ended with her coming to work here at Feinberg, where she had learned about the lawsuits with all the Northwoods attached, and with that very same chess set attached.

"And I told my grandfather," she finished, "that at last we knew what had happened to the chess set, so he could at least be content at the end of his life knowing the answer to that awful mystery." Turning to Mrs. W, she said, "And I did want to meet you because of that. Your father stole everything from my great-grandfather, and stole his hope from him, or all of our lives would have been very different."

"Dear God," Mrs. W said, in the faintest voice she'd ever used in her life.

"Tell me about your grandfather," Tumbril suggested, smirking as though he thought he was being sly.

"He's an eighty-year-old millionaire in a wheelchair," she told him, "with a fortune from patents of his inventions in chemistry."

Tumbril blinked, slowly. For the first time, he seemed to have nothing to say.

"And to think," Mrs. W said, "you wanted to accuse this child of theft. How long, Jay, do you suppose it would be before that story of hers went public? Our fortune, our lives, based on a despicable crime? My father stole from his own soldiers!"

"I remember you said, Mrs. W," Fiona said, "every fortune starts with a great crime."

"Balzac, dear," Mrs. W said. "Always give credit where due."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I do not want to see," Mrs. W told Tumbril, "my name, my family or my face on the cover of New York."

"No," Tumbril said. "No, that's true."

"So now, you horse's ass," Mrs. W said, "for once in your life do something sensible. Get on the phone. Get that poor boy out of quod."

62

JOHNNY EPPICK AND Mr. Hemlow, having started north in Mr. Hemlow's limousine after lunch, didn't reach the compound until half past four. The trip up, with Mr. Hemlow's wheelchair buckled to the floor so that Mr. Hemlow faced forward toward Eppick on the rear-facing seat behind Pembroke, was not devoid of accomplishment. By the time they arrived, they'd come to a number of satisfactory conclusions.

Mr. Hemlow began, once they were north of the city, by saying, "Johnny, I must tell you, you chose well."

"I'm pleased with John," Eppick agreed. "And his companions, too."

"There are five of them now?"

"That does seem to be what it took." Eppick grinned in an admiring way. "I talked with a couple friends still on the Job, and I must say what they did was as smooth as Mister Softee ice cream. They went up against half a dozen armed professional security men, and pulled the job without a shot being fired, with no violence of any kind, without even a threat. Sir, it was a heist even your granddaughter would approve."

"Oh, she'll approve the result, I have no doubt of that." Mr. Hemlow brooded out the window a bit, Eppick watching that profile that itself looked a bit like a Mister Softee ice cream. Then he turned back to Eppick to say, "They will expect to be paid."

"Yes, sir, they will."

"If I intended to sell the set," Mr. Hemlow mused, "it would be a simple matter of giving each a percentage. And you, too, of course."

"Thank you, sir."

"But that would require destroying the set, extracting the individual jewels and melting the gold down into ingots, which would be a far worse crime, in my opinion."

"Absolutely, sir," Eppick said piously.

"So," Mr. Hemlow went on, "since converting the set to cash is out of the question, let us consider what we should offer these fellows as recompense for their good work."

"It will all be coming out of your own pocket, Mr. Hemlow."

"I realize that. On the other hand, my pockets are deep enough to allow me such an indulgence. And when the day is done, I and my descendents will still have the set, with all its value intact."

"That's true, sir."

Mr. Hemlow brooded at the Hutchinson River Parkway a while, and then said, "The question is, what would constitute a proper payment? How much should I offer? What amount would fellows like that think was fair, and what would they think was insulting?"

"That's a very good question, sir," Eppick said. "Give me a minute to think about it."

"Of course."

Now it was Eppick who brooded a while at the Hutch, occasionally nodding or shaking his head as the argument progressed within. Finally he turned back to Mr. Hemlow to say, "If it were me, sir, I would begin by offering them ten thousand dollars apiece. They would not be satisfied with that number."

"I shouldn't think so," Mr. Hemlow said.

"So you would allow them to negotiate with you," Eppick explained, "to argue you up to fifteen or twenty thousand. I'm believing a payout of a hundred thousand dollars would be all right with you."

"Of course. Let me think about this."

"Certainly, sir."

Mr. Hemlow took his turn studying what by now had become Route 684, and did some of his own head-shaking, just visible mixed in there with his normal head-shaking. Then he looked again at Eppick and said, "I think that's too low. I think ten thousand dollars is not a strong enough bargaining first step, but would be seen as an insult. They know as well as we do they did more than ten thousand dollars' worth of work last night."

"That's true."

"I might offer them twenty, however."

"You'll still have the argument, though, sir," Eppick pointed out. "And then you'll wind up at twenty-five or thirty."

"Well, thirty thousand dollars doesn't seem out of the way, considering the job that was done."

"So that would make it a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar payout for you."

"One hundred eighty thousand," Mr. Hemlow said.

"Sir?"

"You would be getting the same amount, Johnny," Mr. Hemlow said. "In addition to the normal fees I'm paying you."

Astounded, Eppick said, "I would?"

"None of this would have been possible without you, Johnny. You knew how to assemble the team, and you knew how to keep them in good order. You kept them honest."

"In a way," Eppick said.

"Yes, in a way."

Eppick laughed. "Mr. Hemlow," he said, "if I'm getting the same size piece as everybody else, I've been negotiating on the wrong side here."

"It was better that way, Johnny, better for you to think your advice was disinterested. I take it you would be content with thirty thousand dollars."

"Absolutely, sir."

"And the others?"

"I don't see any problem there, sir," Eppick said. "I truly don't."

"Fine."

When they gazed out at the Taconic State Parkway now, both were smiling.

Pembroke buzzed them in at the gate, and they drove the winding road up through the massive pines. Pale late-afternoon light was steadily darkening, the snow around the trees looking gray and tired and old. They drove part of the way up to the house and then Mr. Hemlow barked, "Pembroke! Stop."

Pembroke stopped, and Eppick turned to see what Mr. Hemlow was staring at. Out there, in a small clearing beside the road, on green tarpaulins, were two armies of chessmen, one the brightest crimson, the other deepest black.

"Beautiful," Mr. Hemlow breathed. "No one would guess what lies beneath that paint. On, Pembroke."

Pembroke drove on.

63

MRS. W SAID, "What's taking so long?"

Fiona, seated on the next settee, had wanted to ask the same question, but was still somewhat intimidated by Jay Tumbril, particularly here in his own office, and so had kept silent.

"In my experience," Tumbril answered, "arrest is sudden, but release takes a little longer."

"It's nearly six o'clock," Mrs. W pointed out. "They've had nearly two hours to let poor Brian go."

Tumbril started, "Yes, but—" and was interrupted by his phone. "Maybe this is Michael now," he said, reaching for it.

While Fiona, Mrs. W, and Tumbril waited here in Tumbril's office, another Feinberg beastie, not so wee, named Michael, a cadaverous seven-footer in a black suit that made him look like an exclamation point, had been sent to retrieve Brian from the police, after Tumbril had phoned to explain the situation to the assistant district attorney who'd been assigned the case. Now, into the phone, Tumbril said, "Yes, Felicity? Good, put him on. Michael, what's the delay there? What? Jacques is absolutely certain of this? Put Roanoke on." That being the name of the assistant DA. Tumbril raised baffled eyebrows at Mrs. W, then said into the phone, "Mr. Roanoke? Jay Tumbril here. Are you certain Jacques Perly's certain? Well, if you don't mind, we'd like to be on our way there as well. Mrs. Livia Northwood Wheeler, with her assistant, and I shall come along personally. We'll get downtown just as rapidly as we can."

Breaking the connection, Tumbril pressed another button on the phone and said, "Felicity, call us a car. Soonest."

Mrs W, increasingly irritated and impatient, said, "Jay? What is this? What's going on? Where's Brian?"

"Jacques Perly," Tumbril said, "the private investigator whose office—"

"Yes, we know who he is. What about him?"

Tumbril spread his hands. "He says he has proof positive Clanson was part of the gang."

Fiona said, "That's ridiculous."

"Jacques is on his way to the DA's office with photographs."

Sounding like Queen Elizabeth the First in a testy mood, Mrs. W said, "I will wish to see these photographs."

"We all will," Tumbril assured her. "That's why I ordered the car."

Perly had arrived ahead of them, an outraged capon, too agitated to sit. He bounced around the small messy office of Assistant DA Noah Roanoke, and began squawking before Mrs. W and Fiona and Tumbril had even finished crossing the threshold: "You were going to let him go? You were going to release him? After what he did to my building? And your chess set!"

"Just a minute, Jacques," Tumbril said, and approached the balding neat metal-bespectacled man behind the room's standard-issue gray metal desk. "Mr. Roanoke?"

Roanoke rose, hand extended. He was as calm as Perly was excited. "Mr. Tumbril," he suggested, as they shook hands.

Tumbril gestured. "Ms. Livia Northwood Wheeler. Her assistant, Fiona Hemlow."

"Please sit," Roanoke offered, and took his own advice.

But nobody else did, because Perly, having vibrated through the introduction ritual, now said, "I cannot believe this! And you didn't even consult me!"

"If you have evidence, Jacques," Tumbril told him, "I assure you we all want to see it."

"Didn't even consult."

"We're here now, Jacques."

"I've turned the photos over to Noah," Perly said, with a quick brushing-away gesture toward Roanoke.

Who said, "Please, ladies. Those chairs aren't terribly comfortable, but they're better than standing."

Along the wall to the left of the entrance were three gray metal armless chairs with green cushioned seats, the sort of chairs you'd associate with Department of Motor Vehicles waiting rooms rather than doctors' waiting rooms. Since Mrs. W now took the one farthest left, Fiona took the one farthest right, as Roanoke handed a manila folder to Jay, who opened it and said, "Jacques, I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me what I'm looking at here."

"As you know, Jay," Perly said, "we've had our suspicions about young Clanson for some time now, so much so that I began an investigation of the fellow."

Mrs. W almost but didn't quite pop back up onto her feet. "You did what? To Brian? On whose authority?"

"Jay's," Perly told her. "As your attorney."

"Without telling me. And who was supposed to pay for this?"

"Mrs. Wheeler," Perly said, "I am sure you will find the result well worth the expense."

"Oh, are you."

"Jacques," Tumbril said, "I'd still like some help here."

"All right," Perly said. "Here's the sequence. On Saturday night, an agent of mine kept tabs on this fellow Clanson, and late that night — just twenty-four hours before the robbery! — photographed him casing my building!"

Tumbril nodded at the folder open in his hands. "Oh, is this him in the backseat?"

"And that is my building, just beyond him. What my man did," Perly said, "when he saw what neighborhood Clanson was headed toward, was to take a faster route, and be in position when the car went by."

"Then this next picture," Tumbril said, "is him and some others getting out of the car. We're farther away here, hard to make it out."

"My man did what he could with a telephoto lens. But I can tell you that's a low-life bar farther down my street. Meeting the rest of the gang there, no doubt."

Mrs. W said, "Jay, let me see those pictures."

As Jay handed her the folder, Fiona slid one chair to the left, so she could look at the photos, too, and Perly said, "Unfortunately, my man couldn't get clear pictures of the others in the car, but he said one was a tough-looking older woman, some sort of harridan, a real Ma Barker type, probably the brains of the gang."

Fiona looked at the photos. In awe, she raised her eyes to look at the stony profile of Mrs. W as that lady said to Perly, with icy calm, "A tough-looking older woman? A harridan? A Ma Barker type?"

"When we get our hands on her," Perly said, "and we will, I can guarantee you she'll have a record as long as your arm."

Now Mrs. W did stand, though not precipitately or with apparent excitement. She stood as a thoughtful judge might stand when about to pronounce a death sentence. "The vehicle Brian is riding in, Mr. Perly," she said, "is mine. I am the harridan seated next to him."

Perly blinked at her. "What?"

"The third member of our nefarious gang in my limousine, Mr. Perly," Mrs. W went on, "is Fiona here, my assistant. We had come from a party given by Brian's television station, and we were on our way to a lounge considered at the moment to be the most desirable social venue in the entire city."

Perry's mouth had sagged open during Mrs. W's speech, but nothing had come out of it, so now it closed again. He continued to stare at Mrs. W as though all cerebral function behind those eyes had come to a halt.

Tumbril, clearing his throat, said, "Livia, I don't think Jacques is usually in that neighborhood at night."

"He doesn't seem to be all there by day, either," Mrs. W said, turning her icy gaze on Tumbril. "And if you intend to pay him for this harassment of an innocent boy, Jay, it shall come from your pocket, because you are no longer my lawyer."

"Livia, you don't want to—"

"Mr. Roanoke," Mrs. W said, turning toward that interested observer, her manner still steely but less aggressive, "we would like Brian returned to us now."

"Yes, ma'am," Noah Roanoke said.

64

BEFORE DINNER, Mr. Hemlow read to them, in the big rustic cathedral-ceilinged living room at the compound, with a staff-laid fire crackling red and orange in the deep stone fireplace, part of a paragraph from Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue on the subject of chess: "Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound."

Closing the book, nodding his red-bereted head this way and that, Mr. Hemlow said, "What Poe calls draughts is what we know as the game of checkers."

Kelp said, "I like checkers."

Eppick said, "That's easy. Everybody likes checkers. Shall I put the book back on the shelf, Mr. Hemlow?"

"Thank you."

"My Mom used to read to me," Stan said. "When I was a kid. Mostly biographies of race car drivers."

"It's good when a family shares an interest," Mr. Hemlow said.

No hostess in her right mind would have put together a guest list for dinner like this and hope to make it work, but somehow it wasn't being too bad. Since nobody wanted to do the seven-hour round trip from and to New York in one day, it had been agreed that Mr. Hemlow would open the compound and he himself would spend the night in his ground floor bedroom in the main house with one or two staff members for assistance, while the other six would sleep in the simple but comfortable guesthouse, then head back to the city in the morning. Mr. Hemlow's staff, all local part-timers but loyal over the long term to a generous boss, would make dinner and breakfast, and now, as the group waited for dinner, they were chatting together, not too easily, in the main living room.

Eppick, having returned from putting Poe back in his place, said, "Mr. Hemlow, while we're waiting for dinner here, maybe this is the time to talk a little about recompense."

Nodding, Kelp said, "That sounds good."

"Yes, indeed," Mr. Hemlow said. "Something to whet the appetite, as it were. As you gentlemen know, I do not intend to sell the set but to keep it, right over there." And he gestured to where Kelp had earlier opened out the empty chessboard onto a large side table. "Nor," he added, "is there an accurate figure as to the set's value."

"That's one of the things," Eppick said, "they were gonna be working on in the private eye's office."

Tiny tapped a knuckle on his oak chair arm. "The millions, we know that much," he said. "That's close enough for us."

"Yes, of course." Mr. Hemlow was meeting most of the gang, and especially Tiny, for the first time, and seemed less taken aback than most people when initially rounding a corner to find Tiny Bulcher in their path. It may have been simply that life had already given him so many sharp lefts and rights that he couldn't actually be jolted any more. In any case, he merely gave Tiny's comment a benign response and went on to say, "I think we will all agree that, in this particular instance, the value to be considered is not the worth of the chess set but the worth of the skill and ingenuity and determination demonstrated by yourselves."

Stan said, "A fence would give us ten percent."

"The issue of a fence," Mr. Hemlow said, "does not arise, as this was a commissioned work."

"Unlike most jobs you people pull," Eppick added, "you aren't grabbing something to turn around and sell it. This time, you've been hired to do a little something in your area of expertise. You're like employees here."

Dortmunder said, "So this is the one time I'm not an independent contractor, is that it?"

"In a way," Eppick said. "But of course, without the retirement. Or the health program."

Stan said, "Or the softball team."

"That, too."

Mr. Hemlow said, "The number I was thinking of, to express my appreciation for a job well done, was twenty thousand dollars a man."

Tiny did that tock on the chair arm again. "No, you weren't," he said.

Mr. Hemlow gazed upon Tiny from under his red beret. "I wasn't?"

"A hundred G," Tiny said, "isn't ten per cent of millions."

Eppick said, "It's ten per cent of one million."

"Let's not forget those other millions," Tiny told him.

Mr. Hemlow seemed to chuckle down inside there, unless he was merely having a stroke. Then he said, "I can see why you were chosen to negotiate for the group."

"He chose himself, if you want to know," Dortmunder said.

"Nevertheless," Mr. Hemlow said, "let me see what your friend has to say." To Tiny he said, "How much do you think is fair?"

"Not fair," Tiny said. "Right. Fifty G a man."

Even Mr. Hemlow was startled by that one. "A quarter million dollars?"

"Now we're getting there," Tiny said.

"I couldn't possibly," Mr. Hemlow said, "make an outlay that lavish."

"We can still give the thing back," Tiny said. "Let you try with a more economical bunch. Or just melt it down and sell it off ourselves."

Judson said, "That might be kinda fun, Tiny."

Mr. Hemlow said, "I could go to twenty-five."

"The funny thing about the acoustics in this place," Tiny said, "with the high ceiling and all, sometimes you can't hear a thing."

Dortmunder said, "Mr. Hemlow, I really think you gotta come up a little bit here, just so the guys have a sense of self-esteem outa this."

Mr. Hemlow shuddered all over, even more than usual, while his left leg tapped out a series of SOSes. Then he said, employing the number everybody in the room had known they would end on, "I will give you my absolute top offer, and that is thirty thousand dollars per man. For my own self-esteem, I can do no more."

A little silence. Everybody looked at Tiny, who looked around at everybody else and finally said, "You wanna let it go cheap?"

Kelp said, "We're not gonna give it back, Tiny, that's not realistic."

Stan said, "And taking it apart, carrying it around to people like Stoon and Arnie, that's too much like work."

Dortmunder said, "You got a deal, Mr. Hemlow."

"Good."

"Dinner," the maid said.

65

MRS. W INSISTED on hosting a celebratory dinner, so after Fiona and Brian went back home to the apartment so Brian could shower and change and shake like a leaf and down some medicinal vodka and generally try to get over the horrible experience of having been, for however brief a moment, in the toils of the law, they went back across town in Mrs. W's waiting limo to meet the lady herself at Endi Rhuni, a hot new Thai-Bangladeshi fusion restaurant on East Sixty-third Street, where the vulture wings, when a shipment had come in, were the spécialité de la maison.

Mrs. W was already there, resplendent, as the saying goes, behind a large snowy white round table at a banquette built for six. They joined her, Fiona sliding in to Mrs. W's left, Brian to her right, and Brian began by ordering a little more vodka, just to be certain he was keeping the dosage up to the proper level.

The first business of the occasion was to order a meal. Vulture wings happened to be in residence, so Mrs. W and Brian both ordered some, while Fiona, feeling less adventurous, had the llama steak with yams. Then Mrs. W called for a New Zealand pinot noir she felt good about, the waiter left, and she said, "Brian. Are you quite recovered?"

"Dickens," he said. His voice still shook a bit, but not as much as when he'd first been released to them. "It's Dickens, that's what it is. I never knew what people meant when they said that, when they said Dickensian, you know, that place is Dickensian, or look down there, that's Dickensian. But now I do. Boy, believe me, now I do. That was Dickensian."

"It sounds terrible, you poor boy," Mrs. W said.

"I even thought," he said, with a meaningful look at Fiona, "if I knew anything I'd tell, just to get out of there. But then I thought, if I tell, I'm part of it, and I'll never get out. So I didn't tell. Not that I knew anything I could tell."

"Of course not," Fiona said.

He shook his head. "The place was so awful, I mean just the place. I mean cold, and hard, and dirty. But the people. Mrs. W, you don't even want to know there are people like that."

"No, I'm sure I don't."

"You don't want those people out of there," Brian told her. "You want me out of there—"

"Of course."

"But not those people. You don't want those people out of there. Ever. Lock 'em up and throw away the key, there's something else I never really understood. You know, I thought, for a while there I thought I was gonna have to spend the night there."

"Oh, Brian," Mrs. W said, and squeezed his near forearm in sympathy.

"I thought, how can I do this," Brian went on. "I thought, this is going to destroy me, even if I get out of here someday someday someday, it's going to destroy my talent, how can I ever try to draw something funny ever again or—"

"Oh, Brian," Fiona said, "you'll get over it."

"— put on the Reverend Twisted, knowing those people are there. I mean, I'm a different person now, I can't, I can't be like I was—"

"The new Brian may be even better than the old," Mrs. W assured him, and said, "Oh, your glass is empty," and raised a commanding hand to have his vodka refreshed.

By then the food and wine had started to arrive, so they set to, and the conversation skirted around other topics without ever leaving Brian's life-changing experiences entirely unobserved, and by the end of the meal the tremor in his voice was almost completely gone. They finished with shared desserts — peanut parfait, lychee flan, bees' nest soup — and were happily passing them around when all at once the theme music from Mighty Mouse rollicked beneath the table.

"Oh, I forgot!" Brian cried, scrabbling around inside his clothing. "I always turn it off when— I'm just so flustered, I don't know—" He popped the cell phone open and looked in it. "It's the station," he said. "Maybe they want me to take tomorrow off to recover. I better answer it."

The women agreed, and Brian spoke into the phone: "Here I am, out of custody." He grinned. "Hi, Sean, I'm here with Mrs. W and Fiona, we're making the bad memories go away over weird desserts." He nodded at the phone, switched his grin to the women, and said, "Sean says hello."

"And so do we," said Mrs. W.

"What? Sure I can talk." Brian looked alert, then confused, then terribly hurt. "But why? I was innocent! Sean, they let me go."

Fiona, startled for him, said, "Brian?"

"But, Sean, it wasn't my fault. You've gotta go? You lay this on me, and then you've gotta go? Sean? Sean?" Staring helplessly at the women, he said, "He went."

"But what was it, dear boy?" Mrs. W wanted to know.

Turning his cell phone off, closing it, moodily returning it to its recess on his person, he said, "They fired me."

"What?"

"I knew it," Fiona said.

Mrs. W reared around to glare at her with a disbelieving, almost angry look. "You knew it? How could you have known it?"

"Just from how Brian looked."

Leaving that side-issue, Mrs. W turned back to say, "Brian, what on earth did they fire you for?"

"Cops all over the station, asking questions. Turns out, that private eye'd been doing stuff there, maybe phone taps, nobody knows."

"But what has that to do with you?"

"I was what it was all about." Brian gave a hopeless shrug. "At GRODY, they don't wanna be around anything heavy."

"But it wasn't your fault."

"I'd just be a bad reminder."

Fiona said, "Can't your union do anything?"

"They'll try to find me another job."

"Well, this is intolerable," Mrs. W said, and whipped out her own cell phone. "We're not going to take this lying down, Brian. Never take anything lying down.".

"No, ma'am."

With the deftness of a master knitter, Mrs. W navigated her cell phone, marching through its address book to the person she wanted, then making the call. Fiona watched and said, "Who are you calling, Mrs. W?"

"Jay. We're not going to put up with this, my dear."

"But, you fired Jay today."

"Oh, nonsense," she said. "I fire him all the time, that doesn't— Jay? Livia. Well, we are also just finishing dinner. Half an hour? Perfect. Call me at home." Slapping the phone shut, she said, "We've finished our desserts. Fiona, dear, we'll have to go on ahead, so I'm afraid I must ask you to put this meal on your credit card and take a taxi home. I'll reimburse you, of course, tomorrow."

"But—"

"Come along, Brian," Mrs. W said, hurrying him ahead of her around the banquette and onto his feet.

Fiona said, "Should I come on to your place, Mrs. W?"

"I do not intend to spend all night on this, my dear," Mrs. W told her. "You go on home, and Brian will be along after he's explained the situation to Jay." She started off, then turned back to say, "Dear. Don't overtip."

The reason Fiona overslept is because Brian, having lived a normal regular life far longer than she had, was always the first one out of bed. This morning, without Brian, she slept until nearly nine o'clock, then woke from confused bad dreams with a sudden start.

Without Brian? No, his side of the bed wasn't rumpled. He hadn't…

He hadn't come home last night.

First things first. When she came out of the bathroom, she immediately phoned Mrs. W, and recognized Lucy's voice. "Hi, it's Fiona, can I talk to Mrs. W?"

"Oh, you just missed them."

"Just missed? Them?"

"They're on their way to Newark, they're flying to Palm Beach. For about a week, Mrs. W says."

"But who—"

"She says I should find out what she owes you for last night and she'll send you a check."

"But who—"

"She says," Lucy went on, "you had a terrible time of it, and you should take the rest of this week off, and everybody can start all over again next week."

"But who—"

"On salary, she said," Lucy explained.

"Lucy! Who did Mrs. W go to Palm Beach with?"

Sounding surprised, Lucy said, "You didn't know? You had to know. She's taking your friend Brian down there to find him a much better job than he had at that cable station. Do you know how much you spent last night?"

"I'll have to, uh, I'll have to figure that out and call you back."

"Fine," Lucy said. "Mrs. W says she'll check in with me when they get to Palm Beach."

"They."

"Enjoy your vacation," Lucy said, and hung up.

So, a little later, did Fiona, though she continued to sit on the sofa in the big room, naked, alone, without breakfast, just looking around at what had suddenly become a very different space.

It must be in their genes, she thought. Her father stole my great-grandfather's future. And now she's stolen my boyfriend.

66

MR. HEMLOW'S STAFF specialized in the kind of breakfast that didn't merely stick to your ribs but weighed them down so much it was a real effort to keep your chin above the level of the table. As a result, it was nearly ten on Tuesday morning before anybody in the compound began to show any vital signs at all, and that was Tiny, whose storage capacity, of course, was larger than everyone else's, so his recovery time tended to be more rapid as well. At last he stood, roamed around the big living room, paused to gaze at the chessboard waiting for its armies, strolled over to the front door and stepped out onto the porch. He left the door open, since the crisp mountain air, while cold, was also a tonic for that logy feeling. A minute later he came back to the doorway to say, "Who moved the Caddy?"

Several mumbles answered him, and then Kelp said, "Nobody, it's over there by the garages."

Standing in the doorway, Tiny looked that way. "The van is over there by the garages. A couple little staff cars are over there by the garages. The Caddy isn't there."

"Impossible," Kelp said. "That's where I left it."

"The Caddy," Tiny told him, "is not something you don't notice."

"I don't get this," Kelp said. Struggling to his feet, he followed Tiny back out into the cold.

Dortmunder roused himself. "I don't like that," he said.

Stan, chin slipping below table level, said, "What don't you like?"

"None of us moved it," Dortmunder said. "That's what I don't like."

Pushing himself two-handed up from the table, he weaved toward the open door. Behind him, Mr. Hemlow said to the hovering servant girl, "Was the upstairs seen to here?"

"No, sir," she said. "Everybody was at the guesthouse and you stayed down here."

"Have somebody look around up there."

"Yes, sir, I'll go."

Dortmunder went out onto the porch. Tiny and Kelp stood where lately the Colossus had stood. They seemed to be discussing the garage, and now Kelp lifted that door, and a car was in there.

Dortmunder went down off the porch and walked over to the garage, and it was a beat-up gray PT Cruiser with New Jersey plates that had been scuffed up with mud to make them hard to read.

Kelp was just closing the driver's door when Dortmunder arrived. "The key's in it," he said, "but nothing personal."

"They were staying here," Dortmunder said, as Judson walked over to join them from the house. "Empty house in the woods, they were smart enough to get in without setting off the alarm."

Tiny said, "Who?"

"We'll never know," Dortmunder said. "The Caddy was in their way, to get at their car. I figure, first they just wanted to move the Caddy over, then they said, what the hell, our car's stolen anyway, let's take the nice one."

Judson said, "How's the chess set?"

Kelp, horror-struck, looked away downhill. "The chess set!"

"Gone," Dortmunder told him.

"I gotta go— I gotta—"

Kelp, with Judson right behind him, climbed into the van. Dortmunder and Tiny turned and made their silent way back to the house, where Dortmunder found a nice old rocking chair not too close to the fire and sat there and waited for events to unfold.

They didn't take long. Kelp and Judson came back with the news that the green tarps were still there. The servant girl came downstairs with a slender pair of cherry-red panties. "They were under a pillow," she said. "What made me look, the bed wasn't made the way we make it."

"How could this have happened?" Mr. Hemlow wanted to know. He'd developed an extra two or three rumba routines this morning.

The answer arrived soon, in the person of Eppick, who came back from inspecting the rear entrance to the compound. "It's been rigged so you can bypass it, if you know how. It doesn't show itself to the eye, but if you know how you can get in. And out."

Mr. Hemlow said, "Johnny, you came up here with John to make sure the place was still secure."

"That was four months ago, Mr. Hemlow. I didn't do any sweep this time. We're all staying here."

Kelp said, "Mr. Hemlow, this is a blow to everybody, but at least you know one thing for sure. The chess set isn't ever going back to the Northwoods."

"Nor is it going," Mr. Hemlow said, "in any fashion at all, to its rightful inheritors."

Tiny, not sympathetic, said, "They can't miss what they didn't have."

"I keep reminding myself," Mr. Hemlow said, "just yesterday, I saw all those pieces, out there, beside the driveway. The lost chess set. I saw it, if only just the once, with these eyes."

"Hold the thought," Tiny suggested. "And before the rest of us get on the road here, let's work out how you're gonna get us our money."

Astonished, Mr. Hemlow said, "Are you serious? The set is gone."

"We delivered it," Tiny said. "We found it and we got it and we delivered it. If this place of yours is a sieve, that's no skin off our nose."

Mr. Hemlow said, "I am not without resources."

"That's right, so you can—"

"No, I mean, resources of self-defense." Mr. Hemlow glowered around at all the faces glowering right back at him. "I am not going to pay one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a chess set I do not have."

Eppick said, "Mr. Hemlow, be fair. They worked hard. They delivered it to your door. And this isn't their fault. You gotta give them something."

Mr. Hemlow brooded. Never before in the history of the world has a wheelchair-bound sick man surrounded by hostile professional criminals looked less troubled by his situation. The loss of the chess set troubled him. About the attitudes and potential threats of the half-dozen men gathered around him he couldn't have cared less.

But he did finally say, "They deserve something, that's true.

Smiling, Stan said, "I knew you were a decent guy, Mr. Hemlow."

"I do not have the chess set, nor will I ever, but it is true the work was done, and as you point out the Northwoods will never have the set again either. I will pay ten thousand dollars per man."

Stan, no longer smiling, said, "That's a third!"

"Take it or leave it," Mr. Hemlow said. "You'll have a third of the original price. I'll have the chessboard. Fifty thousand dollars is a mighty steep price for a chessboard, gentlemen."

A long slow sigh circled the room. "We'll take it," Dortmunder said.

67

THE DOCTOR, WHEN Trooper Hemblatt reached him by phone at his hospital down in New York City, was pretty steamed, and the trooper didn't see as how he could blame the man. "They just came right into the hospital parking lot and waltzed out with my car."

"Yes, sir."

"I had less than seven K on that car."

"Just over seven K now, sir. But at least they didn't bang it up."

"I'll want my garage to do a complete diagnostic on it, as soon as I get it towed down here."

"That's up to you, sir."

"But you got the thieves, did you?"

"We do have two individuals in custody, yes, sir, but we're still sorting that out."

"What do you mean, sorting out?"

"Well, there's little question about the man who was operating the vehicle when it was stopped. Chester Wilcox doesn't deny he took it, sir."

"He was driving it! How could he deny it?"

"Exactly, sir. The one oddity is, he claims he didn't pick it up in New York City, but down in Massachusetts, in some estate down there."

"Massachusetts! I don't even know anybody in Massachusetts. He took it from the hospital parking lot, right here on Third Avenue, yesterday morning. You say he was with a woman?"

"She claims to be a hitchhiker who boarded the vehicle this morning near New Lebanon, just this side of the New Hampshire state line."

"Is she telling the truth?"

"That's hard to say, sir. Wilcox claims she was with him at the estate, that she was the one, not him, who knew how to find the place, and that it was in fact her idea to take your vehicle, but he doesn't seem to know much about her, other than her first name. He may be telling the truth, but I doubt we'll develop sufficient cause to hold her."

"Just so he's put away, and I get my car back. What is he up to, Trooper, claiming he stole my car in some other state and saying some hitchhiker put him up to it? Is he hoping for an insanity defense?"

"I think what Wilcox mostly has is a stupidity defense, sir," Trooper Hemblatt said. "But let me go over the rest of it, if I may."

"There's more?"

"We want to be sure there's nothing missing from the vehicle, sir. Your garage door opener and cell phone and medicated cushion are all there, and the chess pieces are still in the trunk."

"The what?"

"Chess pieces, sir, a full chess set, but without the board. They're pretty heavy, they could be made of cement." This rural part of northern New Hampshire was too remote to know or care about some stolen chess set way down in New York City.

"I don't have a chess set." The doctor, on the other hand, was too self-centered to pay much attention to the news.

"It's in the vehicle, sir, in the trunk. Red pieces and black pieces."

"I don't even play chess."

"Well, sir, the pieces are there."

"I don't want them. They're not mine, I don't want them."

"I don't think we're gonna get a straight answer from Wilcox, sir. If he says the pieces came from the estate it won't help because he claims he doesn't know where the estate is, and the woman claims never to have been there."

"Trooper, I really don't want that chess set."

Trooper Hemblatt considered. "I tell you what," he said. "If you don't want the set, do you mind if we give it away? There's an old age home in town here, run by the Little Sisters of Eternal Misery. They could probably make a board out of a piece of plywood or something, put some pleasure in the old folks' lives."

"That's very thoughtful of you, Trooper," the doctor said. "You do that."

"I will, sir."

"I'll let you know when I've arranged for the tow."

"Yes, sir. Sorry for all this trouble, sir."

"Oh, well," said the doctor. "All's well that ends well."