He was also brooding. There must be over a million dollars worth of goods in this building. Guards were all over the joint like flu in January, and so far as Dortmunder could see there were no burglar alarms on the windows. Which could only mean live guards in the place all night long.
“Eleven hundred,” said the auctioneer. They were going by fifties now. “Eleven-fifty. That’s eleven-fifty on my left. Eleven-fifty? No? Eleven-fifty on my left.” Clack went the hockey puck in his left hand onto the top of his wooden rostrum. “Sold for eleven-fifty. Item number one fifty-seven, a pair of vases.”
While a pair of gray-smocked employees held up the pair of vases – also porcelain, they featured one-footed flamingoes on their sides – Kelp whispered in disbelief, “They paid eleven hundred fifty dollars for that little bowl?”
“Pounds,” Dortmunder whispered back. “English money.”
“Eleven hundred fifty pounds? How much is that in cash?”
“More,” said Dortmunder, who didn’t know.
“Two grand?”
“Something like that. Let’s get out of here.”
“Two grand for a little bowl,” Kelp said, following Dortmunder out to the hall. Behind them, the auctioneer had started the bidding on the vases at six hundred. Pounds, not dollars.
Out on the street, Dortmunder turned toward Piccadilly, but Kelp lagged behind, looking wistfully back. “Come on,” Dortmunder said, but Kelp still dawdled, looking over his shoulder. Dortmunder frowned at him: “What’s the matter?”
“I’d like to live there,” Kelp said. He turned to grin wistfully at Dortmunder, but his expression changed almost immediately into a puzzled stare. He seemed to be looking now at something across the street.
Dortmunder, facing the same way, saw nothing. “What now?” he said. “You wanna live in that silver store?”
“I thought – No, it couldn’t have been.”
“You thought what?”
“Just for a second–” Kelp shrugged and shook his head. “There was a guy looked like Porculey,” he said. “Fat like him. He went in one of those doors over there. You know the way people look like other people. Especially out of town.”
“People look like other people out of town?”
“Couldn’t have been him, though,” Kelp said, and at last he moved briskly forward, leaving Dortmunder staring after him. Looking back, Kelp said, “Well? You coming?”
Chapter 5
“I’m discouraged,” Dortmunder said.
Chauncey looked up from his brussels sprouts. “I’m sorry to hear you say that.”
The four of them were at dinner in Chauncey’s apartment, the meal prepared by Edith and served with many whispered r’s by Bert. This was their first repast together since their arrival yesterday, the jet lag caused by the five-hour time difference having thrown them all off for a while. Chauncey had kept himself awake yesterday with Dexedrine and asleep last night with seconal and by this morning had become completely adjusted to British time. The others seemed to have fared less well, with Zane the most obvious sufferer. The man’s bleached face was even more pallid and gaunt than usual, and his limp had progressed to a level of grotesquerie not seen in these parts since the days of the Black Death.
As for Dortmunder and Kelp, jet lag and a strange environment seemed merely to confirm both in their pre-existing personalities. Dortmunder was more dour, Kelp giddier, though Kelp this morning had briefly been in an extremely foul mood, apparently brought on by the ultimate arrangement of sleeping accommodations in the guest room. Zane, through a combination of medical necessity and native harshness, had occupied the double bed, alone, with Dortmunder taking the cot; leaving Kelp to sleep on an assemblage of pillows and comforters on the floor. The opened-out cot, however, having already taken up most of the available extra space, Kelp had been forced to recline with his head under the dresser and his feet under the bed, which had resulted in his doing himself some sort of injury when he’d awakened, startled, from a bad dream in the middle of the night.
Kelp’s essential good humor had soon returned, however, and he’d seemed basically cheerful when he and Dortmunder left early this afternoon to look over the situation at Parkeby-South. Chauncey himself had gone out not long after, having tea with friends in Albert Hall Mansions, and had seen none of his guests until dinnertime, when his question to Dortmunder about the result of his visit to Parkeby-South had produced the word discouraged.
A word on which Dortmunder was willing to expand: “The place is full of rich stuff,” he said. “And full of guards. And it looks to me like there’s guards in there at night, when they’re closed. I didn’t see any alarm systems, but there could be.”
“You mean you can’t get in?”
“I can get in,” Dortmunder said. “I can get in and out anywhere. That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“The idea,” Dortmunder reminded him, “is to switch these paintings without anybody knowing it. Now, you turn off a burglar alarm and you’re home free, you can come and go and nobody the wiser. But you can’t walk in and out of a place full of live guards without somebody seeing you.”
“Ah,” said Chauncey.
Zane, pausing with a fork load of lamb chop and mint jelly halfway to his mouth, said, “Create a distraction.”
“Very good!” Chauncey said, and beamed hopefully at Dortmunder. “What about that?”
Dortmunder looked dubious. “What distraction?”
Zane answered again: “Rob the place. Go in with guns, steal a few things, and while you’re there switch the paintings.”
“Lovely,” Chauncey said.
Dortmunder didn’t seem to think so. He said, “Another fake robbery? If we’re stealing stuff, why don’t we steal the painting? The cops’ll want to know about that.”
“Mm,” said Chauncey.
But Zane wouldn’t give up that easily. He said, “Did you actually see the picture while you were there? Is it on display?”
“No. I guess they keep the most valuable stuff locked up somewhere until it’s sold.”
Shrugging, Zane said, “So you didn’t see it, that’s why you didn’t steal it.”
Chauncey, tired of shifting between hope and despair, merely raised an eyebrow at Dortmunder this time, waiting for his negative response.
Which didn’t come. Frowning, Dortmunder poked brussels sprouts here and there on his plate, saying at last, “I don’t know. It sounds complicated. Just the two of us, we don’t know how many guards they got in there, we’ve got to fake a robbery in one part of the place and at the same time find the painting locked up in some other part and get through that lock without anybody knowing, and switch the paintings without anybody seeing, and get away before the cops show up. It doesn’t sound good.”
Chauncey said, “What sounds better?”
Dortmunder slowly shook his head, having nothing to say. He was brooding, thinking, quite apparently getting nowhere.
It was Zane who broke the silence again, saying casually to Chauncey. “I was looking at that back yard of yours. High walls, nobody can see in, nice soft dirt. Plenty of room back there for a couple graves.”
Dortmunder went on brooding as though he hadn’t heard, but Kelp babbled, “Don’t you worry about a thing, Mr. Chauncey! Dortmunder’ll figure it out. He’s figured out tougher problems than this one. Haven’t you, Dortmunder?”
Dortmunder didn’t answer. He continued to brood, pushing and poking at the brussels sprouts on his plate. His fork hit one too hard, and it dropped off the edge and rolled forward to bunk against his wineglass, leaving a thin trail of melted butter in its wake on the damask cloth. Dortmunder didn’t seem to notice that either, but went on staring with hooded eyes at his food a moment longer, while the other three watched. Then he sighed, and lifted his head. Pointing both his eyes and fork at Chauncey, he said, “I got a job for you.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Yes,” said Dortmunder.
Chapter 6
Folly Leads Man to Ruin. It was the Veenbes, all right, the original, last seen on the sitting-room wall in New York. Chauncey could have reached out and touched it, but he restrained himself, merely gazing upon it with disguised hunger, plus a wince of pity for the dreadful garish frame in which the poor thing now found itself. “I don’t believe it,” he said, casually, with a dismissing shrug. “Frankly, I just don’t believe it’s legitimate.”
“Well, you can believe it,” that scoundrel Macdough told him, with a self-satisfied smirk. “That’s the genuine article, you can take it from me.”
I intend to, Chauncey thought, with no little satisfaction, but all he said aloud was, “I’ll be insisting on my own expert valuation, of course.”
Leamery, the attentive young twit representing Parkeby-South, simpered diplomatically at them both, saying, “Of course, of course. Under the circumstances, naturally, that’s the only thing to do. Everyone agrees.”
“Troop your experts through,” Macdough challenged, with his whisky-soaked burr. “Troop em up and down and sideways, it’s all one to me.”