Still, it was all in a good cause. Beyond Dortmunder’s beetled brow, and beyond the meter ticking away just past Dortmunder’s right ear, Chauncey could see the mound of their luggage piled up in the space beside the driver, and prominent among his own Hermes and Zane’s American Touristers and Kelp’s six canvas ditty bags and Dortmunder’s anonymous brown elephant-skin two-suiter with the straps loomed the golf bag behind the lining of which lurked the Griswold Porculey imitation of Folly Leads Man to Ruin. Sometime soon – very soon, please God – the imitation would go away and the original would slip into its place in the golf bag, and Chauncey would leave this city of teeming millions and fly away to Antibes, where everybody sensible was spending the summer.
In the meantime, the only thing to do was make the best of a bad situation. Oppressed by the continuing silence in the cab, these four large bodies sweating lightly in the hot July London air, Chauncey made a desperate stab at small talk:
“This your first trip to London, Dortmunder?”
“Yeah.” Dortmunder turned his head slightly to look out the window. The cab, having come in the M 4 from Heathrow, was now inching through the normal traffic jam on Cromwell Road. “Looks like Queens,” Dortmunder said.
Chauncey came automatically to the city’s defense. “Well, this is hardly the center of town.”
“Neither is Queens.”
Cromwell Road became Brompton Road before Chauncey tried again: “Have you traveled much outside the United States?”
“I went to Mexico once,” Dortmunder told him. “It didn’t work out.”
“No?”
“No.”
Kelp unexpectedly said, “You were in Canada a couple times.”
“Just hiding out.”
“Still.”
“Just farmhouses and snow,” Dortmunder insisted. “Could of been anywhere.”
The cab finally reached Hans Place, a long oval around a tree-filled park, fringed by tallish orange-brick nineteenth-century houses done in the gabled ornate style termed by Sir Osbert Lancaster “Pont Street Dutch.” When the cab stopped, Chauncey gratefully ejected himself onto the sidewalk and paid the fare while the others unloaded the luggage. Then Edith and Bert appeared from the house to welcome Chauncey back and to carry his baggage while the others could do as they wished with theirs.
This house had been divided long ago into four separate residences, complexly arranged. In Chauncey’s maisonette, staff quarters and kitchen were on the ground floor rear, a front-windowed sitting room and rear-windowed dining room were on the first floor, and a spiral staircase from the dining room led up to two bedrooms plus bath at the rear of the second floor. Edith and Bert, a tiny shriveled couple who spoke an absolutely incomprehensible form of cockney in which R was the only identifiable consonant, were the maisonette’s only full-time residents, with their own small room and bath downstairs behind the kitchen. They grew brussels sprouts in their bit of a garden in back, they did their shopping two blocks away at Harrods on Chauncey’s charge account, they pretended to be valet and cook during those occasional intervals of Chauncey’s presence in town, and all in all they lived the life of Reilly and knew it. “Hee bee,” they said to one another, tucked into their teeny bed together at night. A maisonette in Knightsbridge! Not bad, eh, Mum? Not bad, Dad.
With much piping and chortling and recourse to the letter R, this happy couple welcomed Chauncey home. He perceived the sense, if not the substance, and told them, “Show these gentlemen to the guest room.”
“Aye. Aye. R, r, r, r.”
In the house they all went, and up the half flight to the sitting room, and thence up the spiral stairs, Edith and Bert struggling like trolls with Chauncey’s luggage, cheerfully barking all the way. Zane went next, limping so garishly up the spiral staircase he seemed a living parody of a Hammer film, followed by Kelp, whose half dozen ditty bags gave him no end of trouble, constantly tangling and snagging with the staircase’s banister rails and his own legs and – for one terrifying instant – with Zane’s bad foot. The look Zane shot down at him was so cold, so lethal, that Kelp staggered backwards into Dortmunder, who’d been plodding steadily and unemotionally around the spiral like the mule circling an Arab well. Dortmunder stopped when much of Kelp landed on his head, and said, with tired patience, “Don’t do that, Andy.”
“I’m – I’m just–” Kelp righted himself, dropped two of his bags, stuck his rump in Dortmunder’s face as he gathered them up, and climbed on.
Chauncey brought up the rear at rather a safe distance, and when he reached the top, Edith and Bert were already unpacking his bags in his room, while a dispute was starting in the guest room. Dortmunder expressed the core of the problem in a question to Chauncey: “All three of us in here?”
“This is it,” Chauncey told him. “On the other hand, the sooner the job is done, the sooner you’ll be able to leave and go home.”
Dortmunder and Kelp and Zane looked around at the room, which had been designed with married – or at least friendly – couples in mind. One double bed, one dresser, one vanity, one chair, one writing desk, two bedside tables with lamps, one closet, one window overlooking the garden. Kelp, looking apprehensive but determined, said, “I don’t care. He can shoot me if he wants, but I’m telling you right now I won’t sleep with Zane.”
“I believe there’s a fold-up cot in the closet,” Chauncey said. “I’m sure you’ll sort something out.”
“I can’t sleep on a cot,” Zane said. “Not with this foot.”
“And I can’t sleep with you,” Kelp told him. “Not with that foot.”
“Take it easy, you,” Zane said, pointing a bony finger at Kelp’s nose.
“Let’s all take it easy,” Dortmunder suggested. “We’ll draw straws or something.”
Zane and Kelp were both objecting to that plan when Chauncey left the room, closing the door behind him, and entered his own civilized quarters, where Bert and Edith had not only finished his unpacking but had laid out a change of clothing on the bed and were starting a hot tub. “Lovely,” Chauncey said, and then told them, “Now, those men with me, they’re very eccentric Americans, just pay them no mind at all. They’ll be here for a few days, on business, and then they’ll be gone. Just ignore them while they’re here, and if they behave at all strangely, pretend you don’t notice.”
“Oh, r,” said Edith.
“Aye,” promised Bert.
Chapter 4
Leaning against a Chippendale chifferobe, Dortmunder watched two Japanese gentlemen bid against one another for a small porcelain bowl with a bluebird painted inside it. That is, he assumed it was the two Japanese gentlemen who were doing the bidding, since their slight head-nods were the only activity in the crowded room apart from the steady chanting of the impeccably dark-suited young auctioneer: “Seven twenty-five. Seven-fifty. Seven-fifty on my right. Seven seventy-five. Eight hundred. Eight twenty-five. Eight twenty-five on my left. Eight twenty-five? Eight-fifty. Eight seventy-five.”
They’d started at two hundred, and Dortmunder had by now become bored, but he was determined to stay here in this spot long enough to find out just how much a rich Japanese would spend on a peanut bowl with a bird in it.
Here was one of the auction rooms at Parkeby-South, a large auctioneer-appraisal firm in Sackville Street, not far north of Piccadilly. Occupying a bewildering cluster of rooms and staircases in two adjacent buildings, the firm was one of the oldest and most famous in its line of work, with connections to similar companies in New York, Paris and Zurich. Under this roof – or these roofs – were miles of rare books, acres of valuable carpet, a veritable Louvre of paintings and statuary, a bull’s dream of china and glass, and enough armoires, commodes, tallboys, chiffoniers, secretaries, wardrobes, rolltop desks and cellarets to fill every harem in the world. The place looked like San Simeon, with Hearst just back from Europe.
There were three kinds of rooms at Parkeby-South. There were half a dozen auction rooms filled with people seated on rows of wooden folding chairs as they bid incredible amounts for marble thises and crystal thats; there were display rooms crammed with everything from a life-size bronze statue of General Pershing’s horse to a life-size blown-glass bumblebee; and finally there were rooms behind closed doors featuring the discreet notice: PRIVATE. Modest unarmed gray-haired guards in dark blue uniforms made no ostentatious display of themselves, but to Dortmunder’s practiced eye they were everywhere, and when Dortmunder experimentally pushed open a PRIVATE door to see what would happen, one of these guards immediately materialized from the molding and said, with a helpful smile, “Yes, sir?”
“Looking for the men’s room.”
“That’s up on the first floor, sir. You can’t miss it.”
They were already on the first floor. Dortmunder thanked him, collected Kelp from his mesmerized pose in front of a glass cabinet full of gold rings, and went on upstairs, where he was now watching a pair of Orientals struggle with one another for a jelly-bean bowl.