“I didn’t see it,” said the Prince.
“Urn, yes,” Chauncey said. “I, urn, I’ve just had an awful thought.”
“You have?”
“I may be out of bourbon. Let’s see.” And Chauncey opened the other door, which displayed a floor-to-ceiling rank of horizontal bottle – storage spaces made of criss-crossed wooden slats, about two-thirds filled with liquor and liquor bottles. “Oh, of course,” he said. “I have plenty.” And he grabbed two bottles and put them in the startled Prince’s hands, then took a third from the stacks for himself, the while gesturing with his free hand, saying, “You see the style. The wine cellar is identical, except of course for the humidity and temperature controls. Not needed in here, naturally.”
“Naturally,” agreed the Prince. He was holding the two bottles by the neck, as though they were small dead animals and he wasn’t quite sure what he was expected to do with them.
Closing the door, Chauncey took the Prince by the elbow and led him off toward the elevator. “Now to our drink, eh?”
“But–” The Prince looked back over his shoulder at the closed wine-cellar door. “Oh,” he said doubtfully, as Chauncey continued to propel him away. “Identical. Yes, urn, right.”
Back to the elevator they went, boarded, and Chauncey pushed the button before the door closed. But then, as the door was sliding into place, he suddenly thrust the third bourbon bottle into the Prince’s arms, said, “Join you in a minute. Something I have to take care of,” and slipped out of the elevator.
“But–” The Prince’s startled face disappeared behind the closing door, and the elevator whirred upward as Chauncey tore down the hall, flung open the door, and cried, “What are you doing in there?”
“Freezing to death,” Dortmunder told him. “Can I come out?”
Chauncey looked both ways. “Yes.”
“Good.” He emerged, and as Chauncey closed the door he said, “Get me out of here.”
“I don’t under– Yes, of course.” Chauncey frowned up and down the corridor, chewing the inside of his cheek.
“We had guards,” Dortmunder said. “Not to mention elevators.”
“Things happened,” Chauncey said, distracted by his own thoughts. “Come with me.” He took Dortmunder by the arm, and as he led him down the corridor toward the back there was a faint clink from inside his leather jacket. A vision of two full bourbon bottles in the sitting-room storage cabinet came clear to Chauncey’s mind, and he offered Dortmunder a sidelong jaundiced glance, saying, “I see.”
Dortmunder seemed too disgusted by events to reply, and the two of them progressed as far as the mudroom by the back door, where Chauncey took out his key ring, slipped one key off, and handed it over, saying, “This unlocks the door to the passage. Also the one at the other end. Get it back to me later.”
Dortmunder gestured at the door beside them. “Won’t we set off the alarm when we open this?”
“I’ll say it was me, I thought I saw something in the garden. Hurry, man.”
“All right.” Dortmunder took the key.
Struck by sudden doubt, Chauncey said, “Are there any more of you still in here?”
“Only me,” Dortmunder said, as though the fact spoke volumes about his life.
“What about the painting? It’s gone, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Dortmunder said, looking surly. “That part went okay.” And he left.
Chapter 16
When Dortmunder’s head disappeared for the last time behind the elevator, Kelp withdrew his own head from the open panel in the housing and said to the others, “What do we do now?”
“What he told us,” Bulcher answered. “We get the hell out of here.”
“But what about Dortmunder?”
Chefwick said, “Andy, he’ll either get away or he won’t. But it won’t do him any good if we stand around on the roof and get caught with him.”
Kelp cast another worried glance into the elevator shaft, where there was nothing to be seen. “He’s going to blame me for this,” he said. “I know he will.”
“Come on, Kelp,” Bulcher said, and he picked up the rolled painting from the tarred roof and strode away.
So Kelp left, with many backward looks, and joined the other two on the return journey across the roofs and up the rope and back into the theater building and down the stairs to the balcony. Bulcher led all the way, and he was the one who opened the door at the foot of the stairs.
Unfortunately, it was intermission time within, and the rear of the balcony was once again full of Scotsmen. When Bulcher unexpectedly shoved open the door, he knocked one Scotsman’s full cup of whiskey all over another Scotsman’s kilt. Ignoring the damage, he made to push between them and go on about his business, but the empty-cupped Scotsman put a restraining hand on his chest and said, “Here, now. What do you think you’re at?”
“Get out of my way,” said Bulcher, who was in no mood for distractions. Behind him, Chefwick emerged from the stairs.
“By the Lord Harry you’re a rude fellow,” declared the drenched Scot, and he hauled off and punched Bulcher a good one on the ear. So Bulcher hit him back, and for good measure he then hit the other one, who staggered back into three more, spilling their drinks.
By the time Kelp got through the doorway the fight was merrily blazing away. People who had no idea what the brawl was all about were determinedly slugging people who had even less connection with it. “Well, for God’s sake,” Kelp said, standing in the doorway, gaping at a scene of surging fury and flashing knees and wildly swinging fists. Battle cries whooped and wailed above the fray, and somebody’s rock-hard hand glanced off Kelp’s forehead, causing him to stagger backward and sit down heavily on the steps.
What a view. In his dark stairway, there was a kind of muffled quality to the noise, and the belligerents staggering and swirling by the open doorway were like something in a 3-D movie. Kelp sat there a minute or two, bemused by the scene, until he suddenly realized that the white sticklike object he was from time to time seeing lifted in the air and then smashed down on one or another head was in fact the rolled-up painting, wielded in absentminded irritation by Tiny Bulcher.
“Not the painting!” Kelp came boiling out of the stairwell once more, plowing and bashing his way across the battlefield toward Bulcher, ignoring every buffet and deflection along the way, finally lunging upward like one of the figures in the Iwo Jima flag photo (which was posed, by the way, a later reconstruction; it’s so hard to tell fiction from fact these days), wrenching the tubed painting out of Bulcher’s great fist, screaming in his ear, “Not the painting!” and then abruptly bending double as about eleven different Scotsmen all let him have it at once in the breadbasket.
What a different perspective you get on the floor amid a sea of swirling kilts. Knees are knobbly, huge, dangerous-looking things, but over there was a pair of black stovepipes; Chefwick, in trousers. Kelp forced himself upward, climbing up handy sporrans to find that Bulcher had been swept away but indeed Chefwick was over there to the left, pressed defensively against the wall, clutching his black bag to his chest with both arms. Even in the middle of the fray, people recognized the true noncombatant when they see him, and so Chefwick remained like a rock in the ocean; it all swirled around him, but it never quite got him.
“Chefwick!” Kelp cried. Around him, a lot of Scotsmen wanted to play. “Chefwick!”
Light flashed from Chefwick’s glasses as he turned his head.
“The painting!” Kelp cried, and launched it like a javelin, and went under for the second time.
Chapter 17
Stan Murch eased the Caddy around the corner and came to a stop in front of Hunter House. As far as he was concerned, this job was a piece of cake. Nothing to do but sit here like some hired chauffeur out front of a concert hall, then when the guys came out drive calmly away. Piece of cake.
The car itself was a piece of sponge cake, with MD plates. Kelp had picked it up for Murch this afternoon. A pale blue Cadillac, it was loaded with options. Kelp preferred doctors’ cars whenever available, believing that doctors baby themselves by buying cars loaded with every power-assisting gadget and padded with every creature comfort known to the engineers of Detroit. “Driving a doctor’s car,” he sometimes said, “is like taking a nice nap in a hammock on a Sunday afternoon. In the summer.” He could wax quite lyrical on the subject.
Movement attracted Murch’s attention, and he glanced over toward the concert hall, on his right. Was something happening in there? It seemed to him, looking through the row of glass doors, that activity of some sort had begun in the lobby; a lot of running around or something. Murch squinted, trying to see more clearly, and one of those doors snapped open and a body sailed out like a glider without wings, hit the pavement, rolled, popped to its feet and ran back into the lobby.