Why Me?

30

"You see," Andy Kelp had explained to Dortmunder before the event, "with the phone company's own phone-ahead gizmo, you have to use their equipment and go through the operator every time you want to use it. But this one is from West Germany—see what it says on the bottom? — and with this one you just set these dials here to the number where you're gonna be, you plug it into the jack where your phone line goes, then plug the phone in on the other side here, and it does the phone-ahead thing without bothering the operator or anybody at all."

"But," Dortmunder had pointed out, "pay phones don't have jacks."

"They got a phone line coming in. And this gizmo, made in Japan, these little prongs squeeze down into the line and make contact, so you can set up a jack anywhere you want on any phone line in the city."

"It sounds awful chancy," Dortmunder had said. "Where do we make this thing phone ahead to?"

"Another pay phone."

"Fine," Dortmunder had said. "So I'm standing there at this second pay phone, and one of the bozos they've got on stakeout reads the phone-ahead number on the little Kraut gizmo you've got stuck into your little Jap gizmo stuck into the first pay phone, and then they come to phone number two and they arrest me. And probably, because they're a little annoyed at all the trouble they're going through, they have to work very hard to subdue me."

"Well, no," Kelp had said. "Because you aren't going to be at that second pay phone either."

"I'm going crazy," Dortmunder had said. "Where the hell am I, some third pay phone? How many of these phone-ahead gizmos you got?"

"No more pay phones," Kelp had promised. "John, think about the city of New York."

"Why?"

"Because it's our territory, John, so let's use it. And what's one of the main things about this territory?"

"No question-answer," Dortmunder had said, squeezing his beer can so that beer slopped out onto his fingers. "Just tell your story."

"People move," Kelp had told him. "They move all the time—uptown, downtown, across town—"

"Outa town."

"Right. And back into town. And every time they move they get a telephone. And they always want it someplace different from the last tenant. Not the kitchen, the bedroom. Not the living room, the—"

"Okay, okay."

"The point is, this city is overrun with unused telephone lines. You spend a lot of time in back yards and fire escapes yourself, didn't you ever notice all those phone lines?"

"No."

"Well, they're there. So what we do, our second pay phone is in Brooklyn. Indoors. In a bar or a drugstore or a hotel lobby, someplace where I can get at the phone line coming in. Then I put another of these Japanese prong gizmos on that line, and I run a line of my own to an unused phone line and from there anywhere in the neighborhood: a basement, a closet, an empty apartment, whatever's handy. And that's where you take the call, on a phone we'll bring in ourselves; so as far as the phone company's concerned that phone doesn't even exist! That second pay phone will ring just once, but your phone'll ring too, and right away you answer. Nobody answers a pay phone that rings just once, so you'll have privacy."

Dortmunder had scratched the side of his jaw, frowning deeply. "We're three phones down the line now. Why all the complication?"

"Time. They stake out that first phone. You start to talk, they go crazy. After a while they find my phone-ahead gizmo, maybe you're still on the line, still negotiating. They check with the phone company, they get the address on phone number two, now they got to rush down to Brooklyn, stake it out, approach it very carefully, go crazy all over again. And we're where we can see them, and we got time to end the call and go away before they find the new line leading to the unused line leading to us."

"Christ on a crutch," Dortmunder had said.

"Number A," Kelp had pointed out, "you got no alternative. Number B, this'll work, guaranteed."

And so it did, right on down to the question of negotiation. The phone had rung, just once, and Dortmunder had picked it up and started talking, and he was just getting over his nervousness, sitting there in the for-rent empty apartment over the delicatessen (Pay Phone Inside) on Ocean Bay Boulevard, with Kelp at the front window watching the street for cops, when all of a sudden this guy on the other end of the phone, Maloney, started a lot of yelling and screaming in Dortmunder's ear, culminating in an unnecessarily loud click, and then a lot of silence.

"Hello?" Dortmunder said. "Hello?"

Kelp wandered over from the window: "What's wrong?"

"He hung up on me."

"He couldn't." Kelp frowned, gazing into the middle distance. "Could my phone system break down somewhere?"

Dortmunder shook his head, and hung up the phone. "It could," he said, "I know damn well it could, but it didn't. Maloney did it himself. He said he wouldn't deal with me. He said he was gonna catch me, and I was gonna fall downstairs for a month."

"He said that?"

"He sounded a lot like Tiny Bulcher, only angry."

Kelp nodded. "It's a challenge," he said. "The good guys against the bad guys, with a challenge and a dare and the gauntlet thrown and all like that. Like in Batman."

"In Batman," Dortmunder pointed out, "the bad guys lose."

Kelp looked at him in astonishment. " We aren't the bad guys, John," he said. "We're trying to correct a simple, honest mistake, that's all. We're rescuing the Byzantine Fire for the American people. And the Turkish people. We're the good guys."

Dortmunder contemplated that idea.

"Come on," Kelp said. "The bad guys'll show up any minute."

"Right." Dortmunder stood up from the stack of newspapers he'd been using for a chair—the apartment's only furnishing—then looked at the phone on the floor. "What about that?"

Kelp shrugged it off. "A standard desk-type black telephone? Who'd want a thing like that? Wipe off your fingerprints and leave it."