“I shouldn’t?”
“He doesn’t want us to meet, but I thought we should have one chat.” His grin flickered. “I like to see my people,” he said. His eyes glittered at Dortmunder, and then once again he turned away.
Dortmunder watched him go, tall and narrow and dark, body twisting as he strode on his game leg, both hands now in his topcoat pockets, and he felt a faint chill up the middle of his back. Now he understood why Chauncey had said Dortmunder wasn’t dangerous; it was because he’d had that fellow as a comparison. “Good thing I’m an honest man,” he muttered to himself, and he walked on home, where he found Kelp and Murch and Chefwick and Bulcher and May all waiting for him in the living room.
“Dortmunder!”
“John!”
“You made it! I knew you would!”
They gave him cheers and pats on the back, and he gave them Chauncey’s bourbon, and then they all sat down with glasses of the stuff – terrific bourbon, almost worth the trouble it caused – and Kelp said, “How’d you do it? How’d you get away?”
“Well, I went down to the bottom of the elevator shaft,” Dortmunder started, “and then…” And he stopped, struck by something vaguely wrong. Looking around at the attentive faces, he saw they were more glazed than attentive. Bulcher’s and Kelp’s clothes were all messed up, and Kelp maybe had the beginnings of a black eye. There was a kind of subterranean tension in the room. “What’s the matter?” he said.
May said, “John, tell us how you got out of the elevator shaft.”
He frowned at May, he frowned at the others, he listened to the silence, and he knew. Looking at Kelp, he said, “Where is it?”
“Now, Dortmunder,” Kelp said.
“Where is it?”
“Oh, dear,” said Chefwick.
Murch said, “There was a fight in the theater.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” said Kelp.
Even Tiny Bulcher was looking abashed. “It was just one of those things,” he said.
“WHERE IS IT?”
An electric silence. Dortmunder watched them stare at the floor, and finally it was Kelp who answered, in a tiny voice:
“We lost it.”
“You lost it,” Dortmunder said.
Then all of them were talking at once, explaining, justifying, telling the story from a thousand different directions, and Dortmunder just sat there, unmoving, stolid, letting it wash over him until at last they all ran down. In that next silence, Dortmunder sighed, but didn’t speak, and May said, “John, can I freshen your drink?”
Dortmunder shook his head. There was no heat in him. “No, thanks, May,” he said.
Kelp said, “Is there anything we can do?”
“If you don’t mind,” Dortmunder told him, “I’d like to be alone for a while.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault,” Kelp said. “It really wasn’t.”
“I’m not blaming you,” Dortmunder said, and oddly enough it was the truth. He didn’t blame anybody. Fatalism had captured another victim. “I just want to be alone for a while,” he said, “and think about how I’ve got six months to live.”
THE SECOND CHORUS
Chapter 1
Amid the merry flocks of Christmas shoppers, Dortmunder looked like some sort of rebuttal; the wet blanket’s answer to Santa Claus. As he stood in the perfume department at Macy’s, the word HUMBUG seemed to float in a balloon in the air over his head, and the eye he cast on the salesgirl would have to be called jaundiced. “What’s that one?” he said.
The girl was holding a tiny glass phial shaped like a 1920’s floor lamp without the shade; a spread-out pancake at the bottom, where the eighth of an ounce of perfume was, and then a long skinny neck with nothing in it at all, except the tube of the atomizer. “Ma Folie,” said the girl. “It’s French.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It means, ‘My Folly.'”
“Yours, huh? Let me smell it again.”
The girl had already sprayed a mite on her wrist, which she obediently re-extended in Dortmunder’s direction. It felt weird to lean over and rest his nose on some unknown female’s wrist – bony, gray-white skin, thin blue vein tracings – and all Dortmunder knew after he’d sniffed was the same as he’d learned last time; the stuff smelt sweet. He wouldn’t have known Ma Folie from peach brandy. “How much is it?”
“Twenty-seven fifty.”
“Twenty-seven dollars?”
“Foreign currency can be exchanged on the sixth floor,” she told him.
Dortmunder frowned at her. “I don’t have any foreign currency.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, I thought… well, anyway. It costs twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents.”
“I oughta knock this place over,” Dortmunder muttered, and turned to look around at the store, the customers, the exits, the escalators – kinda casing the joint. But it wasn’t any good, of course. They had private cops, closed-circuit TV, electric eyes, all kinds of sophisticated defenses. And the real cash would be kept in the offices, way upstairs; you’d never get out of the building, even if you managed the score.
“Sir?”
But Dortmunder didn’t answer. He remained frozen in position, having just that second noticed a face he knew on the Down escalator, descending steadily from the ceiling; a bright cheerful Christmassy face, gazing birdlike this way and that as he glided down that long diagonal. Dortmunder was so taken aback that it didn’t occur to him to avert his own face until too late; Kelp had seen him, Kelp had flashed a huge smile, Kelp was up on tiptoe on the escalator waving one hand high over his head.
“Sir?”
“Christ,” Dortmunder muttered. He gave the girl a bilious look and she backed away, uncertain whether to be frightened or offended. “All right,” Dortmunder said. “The hell with it, all right.”
“Sir?”
“I’ll take the goddam thing.”
Kelp was struggling his way through the multitudes, the bewildered husbands, the snotty-nosed children, the self-absorbed secretaries, the massed family groups, the smirking pairs of teenage girls, the short stout women carrying nine shopping bags, the tall slender women wearing fun furs over their shoulders and yellow-lensed sunglasses on top of their heads, all the flux and flow of gift-time in the metropolis, and Dortmunder, now that it was too late, lifted one shoulder to shield his face while he slipped the girl three crumpled saw-bucks.
“Dortmunder!”
“Yeah,” Dortmunder said.
“What a coincidence!” Kelp was carrying a full Korvette’s shopping bag; working some dodge, no doubt. “I just called your place about an hour ago, May said she didn’t know where you were.”
“Christmas shopping,” Dortmunder said, as another man might say, “Cleaning the cesspool.”
Kelp glanced at the girl, currently putting a fresh perfume bottle in a complicated little cardboard box, and he leaned closer to Dortmunder to say, quietly, “Whadaya wanna buy that stuff for? We hit one of them shopping centers out on the Island, we make a profit on it.”
“For a Christmas present?” Dortmunder shook his head. “A Christmas present is different,” he said. “A Christmas present is something you buy.”
“Yeah?” Kelp received that as though it were a brand-new idea, but one possibly worth further thought.
“Besides,” Dortmunder said, “I still got some of that Chauncey money.” The five of them had split nearly seven thousand dollars after fencing all the jewelry and other goods from the fiasco.
Kelp was surprised. “You do? That was over a month ago!”
“Well, I’m not a big spender.”
The girl came back with Dortmunder’s purchase in a bag, and his change. “That’s twenty-nine seventy,” she said, and dropped a quarter and a nickel into Dortmunder’s palm.
“You told me twenty-seven fifty.”
“Plus tax.”
“Well, shit,” Dortmunder said, put his change in his pocket, picked up his parcel, and turned away.
“And Merry Christmas to you,” the girl told his back.
“Listen,” Kelp said, as they moved away from the counter, “I got to talk to you, that’s why I was looking for you. It’s too crowded in here, you want a lift home?”
Dortmunder gave him a wary look. “No new capers,” he said.
“Nothing new,” Kelp said, with funny emphasis. “I promise.”
“Okay, then.”
They went out to Herald Square. It was nearly six, quite dark, not quite freezing, and slowly, slightly, sloppily snowing. Jammed traffic and roly-poly bundled people were everywhere. “Colder’n hell,” Dortmunder said.
“It isn’t the cold, it’s the humidity,” Kelp told him. “The air’s so damp, it gets right into your bones. If it’d get down below freezing, dry the air out, we wouldn’t feel so cold.”
Dortmunder looked at him. “Everything’s gotta be the opposite with you,” he said.
“I’m just saying.”
“Don’t. Where’s your car?”
“I don’t know yet,” Kelp said. “Wait right here, I’ll be back.” And he sloshed away, carrying his Korvette’s shopping bag into the swirling crowds and the gathering snow.
It was after Kelp was out of sight that what he’d said ricocheted in Dortmunder’s mind. Aloud, he muttered, “He doesn’t know yet?” Escape suggested itself, but when he thought about his alternatives – the subway in the Christmas rush, trying to find a cab in Herald Square at six o’clock on a shopping day in December, walking twenty-five blocks home in the snow and the cold – he realized he might just as well stay where he was. So he leaned his back against the wall of Macy’s, near the entrance doors, put his hands in his overcoat pockets – his right hand closing around the box of perfume – and settled down to wait. Snow gathered on his shoulders and his black knit cap, snow melted on his forehead and caused little icy rivulets to run down his nose and cataract onto his coat buttons, and icy slush transmitted previews of the grave through his wet shoes to his feet.