So they treated every unimportant minor assignment, every wedding, dog show and book fair, as though it were the D-Day landing. Tonight, they operated in three two-man teams, with Fenton roving among them. Each team was responsible for one area of the house, including the upper floors, though this last part was against the stated wishes of the client, who’d said, “Concentrate on the entrances downstairs, and let the upstairs go.” But, as Fenton had told the team, “The reason they hire us is because we know the job and they don’t.”
Also, the teams traded places every half hour, to keep from becoming stale, too used to a single environment. Mulligan was alone now because his partner, Garfield, had gone to the second floor to replace Morrison and Fox, who would transfer to the first floor, releasing Dresner and Block to come down here, so Mulligan could go upstairs and rejoin Garfield.
But first the rear door, which continued as locked and unsullied as ever. Mulligan peeked through the tiny diamond-pane window at the dark back yard, saw nothing, and let it go at that.
Footsteps on the stairs; Mulligan turned and here came Dresner and Block. “Hello, boys,” Mulligan said.
Block nodded. “What say?”
Dresner said, “All quiet?”
“I believe we could have phoned in our part,” Mulligan said. “See you, boys.” And, with a certain amount of puffing he made his way up two flights of stairs to where Garfield, whose law-enforcement career had begun when he was a Military Policeman in Arizona and Paris, and who sported a Western-Marshall moustache of amazing ferocity, was practicing his quick draw before the full-length mirror in Chauncey’s bathroom. “Well, now,” Mulligan said, a bit out of sorts from the combination of Fenton’s remarks and the long climb upstairs, “it’s Wyatt Earp you’re expecting, is it?”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Garfield said, holstering his pistol and fingering his moustache, “that I’d be a natural for the movies?”
“No,” Mulligan said. “Let’s make our rounds.”
So they went up another flight of stairs. The top floor, oddly enough, was grander than any of the others, possibly because its being strictly for guests had meant the decorators hadn’t needed to worry overmuch about comfort and function. Chauncey’s own bedroom suite on the next floor down was also sumptuously furnished, of course, but it was clearly a working bedroom, whereas the rooms on the top floor, with their delicate chairs and tables, canopy beds, Persian carpets, hand-ironed cotton curtains, complementary wallpapers and upholstery and bedspreads, were like display models in a museum; one expected a plush rope across each doorway, permitting the visitor to look without touching.
Two of the suites were in current occupancy – by utter pigs. Garments, cosmetic jars, open luggage, pieces of paper and other litter formed a kind of archaeological layer over the original impersonality. Mulligan and Garfield strolled through these rooms, commenting to one another on stray artifacts–”I didn’t know women wore brassieres like that any more,” Garfield said, and Mulligan replied, “They don’t”–and also discussing their hopes for an early return to Long Island. “Two years is long enough,” Mulligan said truculently. “It’s time we got out of New York and back to the bigtime.”
“You couldn’t be more right.” Garfield said, touching his moustache. “Fenton ought to go see the Old Man for us, argue our case.”
“Absolutely,” Mulligan agreed. The two of them were returning to the central corridor then, and it was at that point Mulligan suddenly felt the unmistakable pressure of a gun barrel thrust against the middle of his back, and heard the quiet voice behind him speak the words of doom. Long Island flew away on mighty wings, and the voice said:
“Stick em up.”
Chapter 12
It seemed to Dortmunder, looking at the faces of the two private guards through the eyeholes of the ski mask covering his own face, that he’d seen them somewhere before, but that was both unlikely and irrelevant, so he dismissed it from his mind. He and Bulcher hustled the two disarmed guards into a closet in the unused guest room; locked the door, removed their ski masks, and returned to the central corridor, where an evidently nervous Kelp said, in a jittery whisper, “I thought the guards were supposed to stay downstairs.”
“So did I,” Dortmunder said. That had been quite a shock, as a matter of fact, when they’d come in from the elevator shaft to hear the sounds of conversation from one of the nearby rooms. Expecting no trouble, and not wanting to make any extra trouble for themselves in case of problems outside, none of them was carrying a gun, but fortunately a pair of socket wrenches from Chefwick’s black bag had done just as well, convincing the guards long enough for Dortmunder and Bulcher to relieve them of their own artillery and put them away.
“Let’s get going,” Bulcher said, the commandeered revolver toy-like in his mammoth fist, “before anything else happens.” And he tucked the pistol into his hip pocket.
“Right,” Dortmunder agreed. “The stairs are this way. Chefwick and Kelp, you hit the bedrooms. Tiny and I’ll get the painting.”
The robbery itself was quickly accomplished. Dortmunder and Bulcher removed the painting from the wall, turned it around, slit the canvas just beyond the edge of the painting all the way around, rolled it carefully into a tube shape, and fixed it with three rubber bands. Meanwhile, upstairs, Kelp and Chefwick were filling their pockets with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, watches, tiepins, a golden dollar sign money clip clutching nearly eight hundred dollars, and whatever other sparkly items attracted their magpie eyes. Bulcher and Dortmunder, with Dortmunder carrying the rolled painting, did the same for Chauncey’s bedroom, where the pickings were surprisingly slim. Back in the sitting room, Dortmunder found two full bottles of that bourbon that had so impressed him his first time here, tucked them inside his leather jacket, and then he and Bulcher rejoined the other two on the top floor. “Some nice stuff,” Kelp whispered, grinning, his nervousness forgotten now.
Dortmunder saw no reason to whisper. “Good,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chefwick used one of his handy tools to open the elevator door, and Kelp went in first, reversing the route they’d used before. The elevator shaft was concrete-lined and about six feet square, with an open grid work of metal beams inside it to support the elevator equipment. Kelp made his way via a horizontal beam on the left wall to another horizontal beam at the rear, and from there to the metal rungs set in the rear wall just opposite the doorway. Up the rungs he went, sidling past the electric motor and the chains and pulleys at the top, and out through the opened panel in the housing. Lowering a length of clothesline back through the opening, he waited while Chefwick tied his bag and the painting to the end, and then drew both up to the roof. (Dortmunder watched this part gimlet-eyed, waiting for Kelp to drop the goddam painting to the bottom of the elevator shaft – or rather to the top of the elevator, two stories below – but astonishingly enough Kelp did everything right.)
Chefwick himself went next, over to the metal rungs and up to the roof, followed by Bulcher. Dortmunder went last, pausing on the first metal beam to release the door, allowing it to slide closed, and the faint snick of the electric lock was immediately followed by a sudden whirring sound, and the small clanking of chains.
Yes? Dortmunder looked all around, and saw the elevator cables in motion. In motion? He looked down, and the top of the elevator was coming this way. The elevator was coming this way, sliding and clicking upward through its shaft.
God damn, but it was coming fast.
Chapter 13
“I wonder if you’ve heard this one, Sheikh,” Prince Elector Otto Orfizzi of Tuscan-Bavaria called across the table, his round-red-apple face thrust out among the candles.
“I should think I probably had,” Sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El responded, and turned to Laura Bathing to say, “Have you been in London recently?”
“Not for a year or so. Oops.”
The Sheikh blandly watched her sop up red wine with her most recent napkin, while the black hand and white-clad arm of their host’s serving boy reached through between them to pick up the shards of wine glass. “I was there two weeks ago,” the Sheikh said.
“Watch out, you clumsy fool!” Laura shrieked at the servant. “You’ll get glass in my meat!”
“I was buying a house in Belgravia,” the Sheikh went on, unperturbed. His softly oiled chuckle came and went. “The poor English,” he said pleasantly. “They can’t afford their own capital any more, you know. They’re all living in Woking and Hendon.”
The Prince Elector, meanwhile, was trying to tell his joke to Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville, who was ignoring him while grimly watching her husband, MuMu, thrust himself upon cosmetics heiress and frump Martha Whoopley. “What I’ve always felt about St. Louis,” MuMu was saying, “is that it’s somehow more real than most of the places I know. Do you feel that?”