What's The Worst That Could Happen?

44

“Ah, the open road,” Andy Kelp said, at the wheel of the Regal. (The license plates did say MD, as Dortmunder had expected, and were from New Mexico.)

Interstate 93/95, between Las Vegas and Henderson, was a wide road, all right, but with all the commercial traffic highballing along it Dortmunder wouldn’t exactly call it open. Still, they were making good time, and the Regal’s air-conditioning was smooth as a diaper, so Dortmunder relaxed partly into all this comfort and said, “Lemme tell you what’s been happening here.”

Kelp glanced away from the semis and vans and potato chip trucks long enough to say, “Happening? You just got here.”

“And everybody,” Dortmunder told him, “makes me for a wrong guy. Like that. Like that.” The second time he tried to snap his fingers, he hurt something in a joint. “Right away,” he explained.

Again Kelp gave him the double-o, then looked back at the highway in time not to run into the back of that big slat-sided truck full of live cows. Steering around the beef, which looked reproachfully at them as they went by, Kelp said, “I see what your problem is, John. You don’t have a sense of what we call protective coloration.”

Dortmunder frowned at him, and massaged his finger joint. “What’s that?”

“You’ll find out,” Kelp promised him, which sounded ominous. “When we get back from seeing this fella Vogel. But let’s get this part squared away first.” Shaking his head, weaving through the traffic in all this sunlight, Kelp said, “I hope he’s got what we want.”

“It would help,” Dortmunder agreed.

Dortmunder had phoned Lester Vogel from Vegas to introduce himself and get directions, and they found the place the first try, in a low incomplete tan neighborhood of warehouses and small factories in the scrubby desert, just beyond the Henderson city line. A tall unpainted board fence ran all around a full block here, with big black letters along each side that read GENERAL MANUFACTURING , which didn’t exactly tell you a hell of a lot about what was going on inside there. However, when Dortmunder and Kelp got out of the Regal’s air-conditioning and into Nevada’s air, there was a smell wafting over that fence to suggest there were people somewhere nearby stirring things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.

Kelp had parked, per instructions, next to the truck entrance to General Manufacturing, a big pair of broad wood-slat doors that looked just like the rest of the fence and that were firmly closed. Now they went over to those doors, banged on them for a while, and at last a voice from inside yelled something in Spanish, so Dortmunder yelled back in English: “Dortmunder! Here to see Vogel!”

There was silence then for a long while, during which Dortmunder tried unsuccessfully to see between the wooden slats of the door, and then, just as Kelp was saying, “Maybe we oughta whack it again,” one side of the entrance creaked inward just enough for a bony dark-complexioned black-haired head to lean out, study them both briefly, and say, “Hokay.”

The head disappeared, but the opening stayed open, so Dortmunder and Kelp stepped on inside, to find that the interior of General Manufacturing was a lot of different places, like an entire village of busy artisans in different sheds and shacks and lean-tos and at least one old schoolbus without its wheels. Various smokes of various colors rose from various places. Vehicles of many kinds were parked haphazardly among the small structures. Workers hammered things and screwed things together and painted things and took things apart. A number of trucks, mostly with pale green Mexican license plates, were being loaded or unloaded. In an open-sided lean-to off to the right, people stirred things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.

The bony head that had invited them in belonged to a scrawny body in some leftover pieces of ripped clothing; judging from his size and boniness and the condition of his teeth, he could have been any age from eleven to ninety-six. After he’d pushed shut the door behind them and dropped a massive wooden bar over it to keep it shut, this guy turned toward Dortmunder and Kelp, nodded vigorously, flapped a hand in the direction of the schoolbus, and said, “Orifice.”

“Got it,” Dortmunder said, and he and Kelp made their way through this dusty busy landscape that would surely have reminded them of Vulcan’s workshop if either of them had ever paid the slightest bit of attention in school, and as they got to the orangey yellow bus its door sagged open and out bounded a grinning wiry guy in a black three-piece suit, white shirt, black tie, and black wing-tip shoes. He looked like he was going to the funeral of somebody he was glad was dead.

This guy stopped in front of Dortmunder and Kelp, legs apart, hands on hips, chin thrust forward, eyes bright and cheerful but at the same time somehow aggressive, and he said, “Which one’s Dortmunder?”

“Me,” Dortmunder said.

“Good,” the guy said, and squinted at Kelp: “So what does that make you?”

“His friend,” Kelp said.

The guy absorbed that thought, then frowned deeply at Kelp and said, “You a New Yorker?”

Kelp frowned right back at him: “Why?”

“You are!” the guy shouted, and lit up like Times Square. “Lester Vogel,” he announced, and stuck his hand out in Kelp’s direction. “I used to be a New Yorker myself.”

“Andy Kelp,” Kelp said, but doubtfully, as he shook Vogel’s hand.

Dortmunder said, “Used to be a New Yorker?”

Vogel did the handshake routine with Dortmunder as well, saying, “You lose your edge, guys. After a while. I gotta live out here now, this is access to the customers, access to the labor pool, access to the kind of air’s supposed to keep these lungs from goin flat like a tire, so here I am, but I do miss it. Say, listen, Dortmunder, do me a—You mind if I call you Dortmunder?”

“No,” Dortmunder said.

“Thanks,” Vogel said. “Say, Dortmunder, do me a favor and say something New York to me, will ya? All I get around here is Mex, it’s like livin in the subway, I hear these people jabberin away, I look around, where’s my stop? East Thirty-third Street. But this is it, fellas, this is the stop. Dortmunder, say somethin New York to me.”

Dortmunder lowered his eyebrows at this weirdo: “What for?”

“Oh, thanks,” Vogel cried, and grinned all over himself. “You ask these people a question around here, you know what they do? They answer it! You got all this por favor comin outa your earholes. Sometimes, you know, I pick up the phone, I dial the 718 area code, I dial somebody at random, just to hear the abuse when it’s a wrong number.”

“So that was you, you son of a bitch,” Kelp said, and grinned at him.

Vogel grinned back. “Kelp,” he said, “we’re gonna get al—Oh. Okay I call you Kelp?”

“Sure. And you’re Vogel, right?”

“Waitresses around here,” Vogel said, “they’re all named Debby and they all wanna call me Lester. I sound like a deodorant. Well, anyway,” he said, still being cheerful in manner no matter how much he complained, “A.K.A. tells me I can maybe help you boys, maybe so, and if I help you boys I’m gonna help myself, and that’s what I like. So what can I do you for?”

Dortmunder pointed. “Those big tall metal canisters over there,” he said. “They’re green.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Vogel said. “You’re an observant guy, Dortmunder, I like that. I’m an observant guy myself, not like these laid-back putzes they got around this part of the world, and I’m observing you being an observant guy also, and I can see we’re gonna get along.”

“Green,” Dortmunder said, “is oxygen.”

“Right again!” Vogel cried. “Green is always oxygen, and oxygen is always green, it’s a safety measure, so you don’t put the wrong gas the wrong place, even though they got all these different fittings. We use oxygen here in a number of things we do, we got a supplier up in Vegas, the Silver State Industrial and Medical Gas Supply Company, they give us all this different stuff we got here.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “You use some other gases around here, too.”

“If it hisses out of a big torpedo-shaped canister,” Vogel said, “we got it. I take it this is the area where you got an interest.”

“It is,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, come along, Dortmunder, and you come along, too, Kelp,” Vogel said, starting off, not seeming to care that his shiny shoes were already getting dusty out here, “let me show you fellas what we got here, and you can tell me what you want, and then you can tell me what’s in it for me.”