“Dortmunder,” Chauncey said, warning him. Life is better than death, said the tone of his voice. This is merely one battle, not the whole war. All of those sentiments, however expressed over the centuries, were summed up in the tone of Chauncey’s voice when he spoke Dortmunder’s name. And Dortmunder, who had been teetering forward on his toes, hands clenched, shoulders bunched, now slowly relaxed, settling onto his heels once more.
From here, everything moved with professional speed and assurance. It was Tiny who held the re-rolled painting, and at the leader’s orders he put it into its cardboard tube and turned it over to the man on the left. The attaché case was refilled, closed, and given to the man on the right. Those two backed from the room, leaving the leader in the doorway. “We’ll watch this door for ten minutes,” he said. “Check your watches. Anybody through too soon gets shot.” And he was gone.
The stairs were carpeted, so the people in the room wouldn’t hear the trio leave, or know when they left, or how many stayed behind. Chauncey just stood there, gaping at the empty doorway, and the true fact of his loss – the painting and the money – didn’t come home till Dortmunder was suddenly in front of him, glaring.
“Who’d you tell?”
“What? What?”
“Who did you tell?”
Tell? Tell someone about the insurance fraud, about the exchange of painting and money here tonight? But he hadn’t told anyone. “Dortmunder, I swear to God – Why would I, man, think about it.”
Dortmunder shook his head: “We’re pros, Chauncey, we know our job. Not one of us would say a word to anybody. You’re the amateur.”
“Dortmunder, who is there for me to tell?”
“There they go!” cried the cockney pickpocket. He and the other two were over by the front windows, looking out into the rain. “Dortmunder!”
Dortmunder hurried to the windows, Chauncey following him. Tiny was saying, “One, two, three. They didn’t leave anybody.”
“Four!” cried the cockney pickpocket. “Who’s that?” Chauncey stared out the window. He couldn’t believe what he was looking at. Over there, diagonally across the way, near the streetlight, three men in brown leather jackets had crowded around a fourth. Their faces were bare, now, but too far away to see. One carried the cardboard tube, another the attaché case. But it was the fourth man who held Chauncey’s attention, held him frozen. Tall, narrow, dressed in black…
“He can’t move fast with that limp,” Tiny was saying. “Come on, Dortmunder, we’ll trail them, we’ll get our goods back.”
“Z-z-z-z-z,” said Chauncey, but stopped himself before making that mistake. The limping man and the other three hurried away toward the corner, out of the light.
Dortmunder’s men were running from the room. Dortmunder had paused, was staring now into Chauncey’s eyes as though to read his mind. “You’re sure,” Dortmunder said; “You told nobody. You don’t know how this happened.”
How could he admit it? What would happen to him? “Nobody,” he answered, and looked Dortmunder straight in the eye.
“I’ll get back to you,” Dortmunder said, and ran from the room.
Chauncey sat down and drank half a bottle of bourbon.
Chapter 13
It was Christmas all over again, in May’s new apartment. The same crowd as at Christmastime, the same tasty aroma of tuna casserole wafting through the air, the same spirit of joy and good fellowship.
The gifts this time, though, weren’t booze and perfume, they were solid cash and a sense of solid accomplishment, and maybe even the renewed gift of life itself. The lost painting was dealt with, Chauncey was cooled out and would be sending around no more hired killers, and on that table where once had stood the miserable fake tree the attaché case now yawned wide, gleaming with crisp new greenery.
Dortmunder sat in his personal chair with his feet up on his old hassock and a glass of bourbon-on-the-rocks in his left hand, and he damn near smiled. Everything had worked out exactly, even the moving of all the furniture and goods from May’s old apartment to this new one six blocks away. And now everybody was relaxing here, less than half an hour since they’d left Chauncey’s house, and all Dortmunder could say was, it was the best worked-out goddam plan he’d ever seen in his life.
Andy Kelp came by – good old Andy – with an open bourbon bottle in one hand, an aluminum pot full of ice cubes in the other. “Top up your drink,” he said. “It’s a party.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Dortmunder topped up his drink, then found himself, actually grinning at good old Andy Kelp. “Whadaya think?” he said.
Kelp stopped, paused, grinned, cocked his head to one side, and said, “I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re a goddam genius. I think you been operating under a cloud too long, and it was about time your true genius shone through, and it did. That’s what I think.”
Dortmunder nodded. “Me, too,” he said simply.
Kelp went away, to top up other drinks around the room, and Dortmunder settled down to sip and smile and consider the harvest, at long last, of his own genius. The original notion had been Andy’s, but the plan had been all Dortmunder.
And how well it had worked! Dortmunder always planned well, nobody could argue that, but things never worked out the way they were supposed to. This time, though, the pieces had clicked into place one after the other like a stunt drill team.
It was at the Christmas party that Kelp had suggested to the other guests they could do an old buddy a favor and at the same time pick up some pocket money for themselves, and once they’d understood the situation they’d all agreed. Wally Whistler, the lock man whose absentmindedness in releasing a zoo lion from its cage had resulted in an only-recently-completed involuntary vacation upstate, had followed Roger Chefwick’s route in bypassing Chauncey’s alarm system and coming down through the elevator shaft while Dortmunder, purposely late, had kept Chauncey out of his house. Fred Lartz, the former driver who had quit driving after he’d got run down by Eastern Airlines flight two-oh-eight, and Herman X, the radical black lock man, had completed the terrorist trio, and their timing, manner and efficiency just couldn’t have been bettered. (Dortmunder raised his glass thrice: to Herman X, dancing once more with his sleek girl friend Foxy to an Isaac Hayes record; to Fred Lartz, comparing routes in a corner with Stan Murch; and to Wally Whistler, absentmindedly fumbling with the catch on the spring-leaf table. Whistler and Lartz raised their glasses in return. Herman X winked and raised his right fist.)
A strange string, that; two lock men and a non-driving driver. The driving for that bunch, in fact, had been done by Fred Lartz’s wife, Thelma, the lady in the crazy hat out in the kitchen helping May. Thelma did all Fred’s driving for him now that he’d quit, but this was her first time driving professionally, and she’d been cool and reliable all the way. (Dortmunder raised his glass to Thelma, who couldn’t see him because she was in the kitchen. Three or four other people saw him, though, and grinned and raised their glasses back, so that was all right.)
But the coup de grace had been the little play put on for Chauncey’s benefit on the street outside. And for that, who better than an actor? Alan Greenwood, the former heist man and now television star, had been delighted at the idea of playing the limping killer, Leo Zane. “It’s the kind of role an actor can get his teeth into,” he’d said, and he’d made a special trip back from the Coast just to appear in Dortmunder’s private production. And what a job he’d done! For just a second, seeing him out there under that streetlight, Dortmunder had actually believed he was Zane, somehow free of the trap and ready to blow the gaffe on all of them. Wonderful performance! (Dortmunder raised his glass to Greenwood, also dancing. At first, he’d thought Greenwood was here with Doreen again, the girl from Christmas, but this time Greenwood had introduced her as Susan, so maybe she was somebody different. Anyway, they were dancing, and over Susan’s shoulder Greenwood gave the English thumbs-up salute and smiled with several hundred teeth.)
So now they had it all. Porculey’s copy of Folly Leads Man to Ruin looked terrific thumb tacked over the sofa, and the attaché case full of money looked just as terrific on the table across the room. One hundred thousand dollars, every last dollar of it present and accounted for. The money had to be spread a bit thinner than if the original robbery had worked out, but so what? The point was, they’d done the job at last and they had the money. Ten thousand would go to Porculey for the fake, and the man had earned every penny of it. One thousand each would go to Wally Whistler and Fred Lartz and Herman X as a token payment of appreciation, and one thousand to Alan Greenwood to cover his expenses in coming to town just for this gig. It had been agreed by everybody concerned that May should get a thousand, both to help fix up the new apartment and also as a kind of testimonial to her world-renowned tuna casserole. And that left eighty-five thousand dollars. Split five ways (Kelp would give his nephew Victor a little something as a finder’s fee out of his own piece), it left Dortmunder and Kelp and Murch and Chefwick and Bulcher a solid reasonable seventeen thousand dollars each. What was wrong with that? Nothing. (Dortmunder raised his glass to the attaché case. It didn’t offer any visible response, but it didn’t have to. Its presence was enough.)