The Rabbit stopped. The other vehicle – a truck of some sort – remained where it was.
Nothing at all happened.
“This is ridiculous,” Zane said. He honked his horn: yap yap yaaaaap. The sound disappeared in the rain. The Rabbit made no response, nor did the tractor-trailer on his right, nor did the car behind him, nor did the delivery van on his left.
“Well,” he said, and opened the door. It opened about half an inch, and then it stopped.
At last Zane got the picture. Quickly switching off the Cougar’s engine, releasing his foot from the stirrup-accelerator, he slid across to the passenger door, pushed it open, and heard the thunk when it hit the side of the tractor-trailer.
Wider on this side; almost a full inch.
With the engine off, the windshield wipers had stopped, and it was through tears of rain on the glass that Zane looked out at the Rabbit, with the truck parked beyond it. No way to push through. Twisting around, he tried to look through the water-smeared rear window, but though he could make out little about the vehicle blocking him from behind, he was certain in his heart about one thing: it would have too much weight for his Cougar to move it.
Trapped. Dortmunder was up to something, that son of a bitch. He’d trapped Zane here, he was pulling something, he was doing something right now. “When I get out of here,” Zane muttered, and thumped the dashboard with a closed fist.
When he got out of here? Good God. Zane knew when he’d get out of here. When the real operators of these trucks came back to work, that’s when, and not a second before.
On Monday.
Chapter 12
At exactly midnight, Arnold Chauncey put the key into the inside lock of the passage door, turned it, opened the door, and nobody came in.
What? Holding the door ajar, blinking in the misty rain, Chauncey peered out at the street and saw no one and nothing. Where was Dortmunder? Much more important, where was the painting?
All right; no reason to panic. Anyone can be a bit late. Keeping the door partway open, turning up the skimpy collar of his suede jacket against the rain and the chill, Chauncey settled himself to wait. Dortmunder would be here. And if something went wrong with Dortmunder, then Zane would take over. Not to worry.
The passage behind Chauncey’s house was unheated, and in fact unroofed, the top only lightly covered with a trellis overgrown by vines. This offered less than no protection; the vine leaves, rather than stopping the rain, merely collected the tiny droplets into large gushes, which were dumped all at once down the back of Chauncey’s neck. Meantime, his suede jacket and silk ascot and calf-height calf-leather boots, all of which had been designed primarily for indoor stylishness, were proving themselves effete and inadequate in the harsh reality of the outside world; rather like the French aristocrats of 1789.
Fortunately, Chauncey didn’t have very long to wait, shivering in the darkness just inside the passage, peeking through the slightly open door, ducking back at the appearance of every non-Dortmunder pedestrian. After barely five minutes of this, a large dark car arrived, double-parked itself outside there, and Dortmunder’s unmistakable figure – fairly tall, very narrow, stoop-shouldered, with lowered head – hopped out and hurried tippy-toe in his direction, trying to avoid puddles and dogshit at the same time. Three others emerged scrambling from the car in Dortmunder’s wake, and followed his progression through the minefield, but Chauncey’s eye was primarily taken by the long cardboard tube in Dortmunder’s hand. Folly, home from the wars.
Dortmunder bounded through the doorway Chauncey held open for him, turned his collar down, and immediately turned it back up again, saying, “It’s raining in here.”
“There’s no roof,” Chauncey told him, and reached for the cardboard tube. “Shall I hold that?”
But Dortmunder held the tube out of reach, saying, “We’ll switch inside.”
“Of course,” said Chauncey, disappointed, and led the way to the house. At the back door, Dortmunder paused, saying, “Doesn’t this trigger the alarm?”
“I told Watson I’d use this door tonight.”
“Okay.”
The house was wonderfully warm and dry. They climbed the two flights of stairs to the sitting room where Chauncey, sounding rather more regretful than host-like, said, “I suppose you’d all like drinks.”
“You bet,” everybody said. They were standing around rubbing their hands together, working their shoulders up and down, grimacing and twitching the way people do when they leave the cold and wet for the warm and dry.
Chauncey took drink orders – they all wanted bourbon, thank you – and while he poured he said to Dortmunder, “You were late.”
“We had a little chore to take care of first.”
Chauncey handed around glasses, then raised his own in a toast: “Success to all our schemes.”
“Hear, hear. Okay. I’ll drink to that.”
They did, and Chauncey had his first real opportunity to study Dortmunder’s “string.” And what a motley collection they were, all in all, dominated by a man monster with a face like a homicidal tomato, plus a skinny sharp-nosed bright-eyed fellow who looked like a cockney pickpocket, and a mild-mannered gent who looked like a cross between a museum curator and a bookkeeper out of Dickens. So these four – with the driver outside – were the team of burglars, were they? Except for the monster, they looked perfectly ordinary. Chauncey, who had been rather nervous at the prospect of having these people all together in his house, was almost disappointed.
But mostly his thoughts were on Folly. He sipped at his drink, waiting impatiently for the others to finish their first tastes – with many aaahhhs and lip-smackings – and then he said, “Well. Shall we get to it?”
“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “You got the money?”
“Of course.”
From another cabinet near the liquor supply he brought out a small black attaché case. Opening this on a side table, Chauncey revealed stacks of bills, all fifties and hundreds, neatly filling the interior of the case. “I suppose you’ll want to count this,” he said.
Dortmunder shrugged, as though it didn’t matter, saying, “It couldn’t hurt.” He nodded to the cockney pickpocket and the museum curator, who stepped over to the money, little smiles on their faces, and started flipping through the stacks. Meanwhile, Dortmunder was removing the rolled painting from its cardboard tube. “Hold this, Tiny,” he said.
Tiny? As Chauncey stared in disbelief at the monster, who apparently did answer to that name, Dortmunder handed the fellow one corner of the painting and then backed away, unrolling it. Tiny (!) held two edges, Dortmunder held the other two, and there was Folly, revealed in all his splendor.
Not exactly, of course. There were still creases and curves in the surface, from the rolling-up, and the light struck it differently from this angle, making everything seem slightly different, slightly strange. But it was his Folly, all right, and Chauncey smiled in welcome as he stepped toward it, leaning forward to get a better look at the details. Odd how different that market basket looked in this – “Hold it right there!”
The voice, cold and loud and aggressive, came from the doorway behind Chauncey, and when he spun around he was absolutely astounded to see the room filling up with terrorists.
At least, they looked like terrorists. Three of them, all wearing ski masks and brown leather jackets and all carrying machine pistols with those skimpy-looking tubular metal stocks. They moved very professionally, one hurrying to the left, one to the right, the leader remaining in the doorway, the barrel of his pistol moving lazily from side to side, prepared to stitch a line of bullets across the entire room. From his hands he was a black man, while the other two were white.
“Good God?” Chauncey cried, and these people looked so exactly like terrorists in the weekly newsmagazines that at first he thought it was a coincidence, that he was about to be kidnapped as a capitalist oppressor and held until Outer Mongolia, say, or Lichtenstein, had released a selected list of fifty-seven political prisoners.
But then he heard a thwap behind him, and knew that either Dortmunder or Tiny had released his end of the painting, allowing it to snap back into a roll, and all at once he understood. “Oh, no,” he said, almost under his breath. “No.”
Yes. “We’ll take that,” the leader was saying, gesturing with the machine pistol past Chauncey, at Dortmunder behind him. Then the machine pistol angled toward Dortmunder’s two partners over by the attaché case, their hands full of stacks of bills, their faces showing the most complete – under other circumstances comical – surprise. “That, too,” the leader said, and the satisfaction in his voice was like molasses.
“You son of a bitch,” Dortmunder said, his voice almost a growl.