Chauncey and Kelp both leaned over the painting. Chauncey said, “Look? Look at what?”
It was Kelp who answered. “By golly, that’s Cleo,” he said.
“Cleo? Cleo?”
“Cleo Marlahy,” Dortmunder told him. “Porculey’s girl friend.”
Kelp said, “I told you I saw him, that day outside Parkeby-South.”
“Porculey?” Chauncey was struggling to catch up. “Porculey did a second fake? But why? How – How did it get here?” He stared at Dortmunder, but Dortmunder was looking at something on the far side of the table. Chauncey looked in the same direction, and saw the fourth plate of kippers, untouched, cold. Outside, the sun slid behind a cloud. Rain began to fall. “Zane,” said Chauncey.
Chapter 11
Leo Zane said, “So we have the picture.”
“I don’t believe you,” Ian Macdough said.
“Don’t be silly,” Zane told him. “Of course you believe us.” Success was within Zane’s grasp, and the sense of it was making him expansive, bright eyed, almost warm. He had conceived a complex and daring plan, and he’d succeeded under the very noses of Chauncey and his hired thieves. What would Dortmunder and company think now of their cleverness?
The idea had come to Zane in a sudden flash, back in New York, while Dortmunder had been explaining his own painting-switch scheme to Chauncey. The money, the opportunity, everything was right. Porculey had readily agreed to furnish a second fake Veenbes for a quarter of the return, the switch had been made, and now they were here in the Savoy, Zane doing the talking while Porculey ate toast from Macdough’s unfinished breakfast. They had come to give the Scotsman their terms.
“Half,” Macdough said bitterly. “You think I’ll give you half.”
Half. Two hundred thousand dollars, more or less; enough to start life all over again. This last year had convinced him; no more cold wet northern winters. He would live somewhere warm and dry, become healthy, even happy, make friends, perhaps get a dog, a television set. Life would become possible. Two hundred thousand dollars could buy a lot of warmth.
Macdough, this orange-haired red-faced bluff of a man, was wasting everybody’s time and his own breath with bad temper. “You’re either a pair of filthy liars,” he was saying, “or you’re despicable thieves.”
“Half,” Zane said calmly. “If you want the painting back.”
“If you even have it. Show it to me, then.”
“Oh, no,” Zane said. “Not before you sign the agreement.”
“How do I know you have it at all?”
“There’s an easy way to check,” Zane told him, “and you know it yourself. Go to Parkeby-South, look at the painting there, see if it’s the right one.”
Macdough hesitated, and Zane could see his dark little mind working. The man believed them, all right, and was trying to find some way out. But there was none. Zane had it all sewed up. “Well?” he said.
“All right,” Macdough decided. “I’ll go to Parkeby-South, and I’ll look at my painting, and then I’ll more than likely have you two arrested for confidence tricksters.”
“We’ll all go together,” Zane said, getting to his feet.
“You’ll wait outside,” Macdough told him.
“Of course. Come along, Porculey.”
“One minute. One minute.” Porculey put the last of Macdough’s uneaten bacon between the last two slices of Macdough’s toast, and the three friends left the suite and took a taxi to Parkeby-South, where Macdough ran grim-faced inside while Zane and Porculey waited in the cab.
Porculey, showing nervousness now that Macdough was out of sight, said, “What if he calls the police?”
“He won’t,” Zane said. “Not unless he’s an even bigger fool than I think. If he calls the police he loses everything, and he knows it.”
Macdough was less than five minutes inside, and when he emerged he actually hurled himself like a javelin across the sidewalk and into the cab, where he faced the other two with a glower of helpless rage and said, “All right, you bastards. All right.”
“Back to the Savoy, driver,” Zane called, and as the cab moved away from the curb he took from his pocket the two-page contract, prepared and typed by himself, and extended it to Macdough, saying, “You’ll probably want to read this before you sign it.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Macdough said, and with their concentration on the contract, none of them in the cab noticed the pale blue Vauxhall that started up from the curb half a block behind them and edged forward in their wake.
Zane smiled as he watched Macdough read the contract. In simple clear-cut language, it said Macdough was to pay Zane and Porculey “for their assistance in preparing the said painting for sale,” one-half his net return “before taxes” from the painting’s disposition.
“…or paid to the survivor–” Macdough read aloud, and gave them a bitter look. “Trust each other, do you?”
“Certainly,” said Zane, ignoring the startled sidelong look he got from Porculey.
Macdough went on reading, then shook his head and said, “All right. You’re a pair of unnatural ghouls, but you have me over a barrel.”
“My pen,” Zane suggested, extending it, and watched smiling as Macdough scrawled his name at the bottom of the second page.
“Now, give me back my painting,” Macdough said, handing over the contract and the pen.
“Of course. But if you have a safe place to hide it, I think you should keep it out of Parkeby-South’s hands until just before the sale.”
Macdough looked startled, and worried. “Chauncey might try to get it back?”
“Of course he will, and so will the men with him.”
“The bastards.”
“Do you have a safe place,” Zane asked him, “or should we hold it for you?”
“You bastards!” Macdough snorted. “I’ll hold my own property for my own self, if you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit,” Zane said, unruffled. “But if you don’t mind, Mr. Porculey and I will stay with you while you hide it.”
“It’s a long way from here,” Macdough said doubtfully, “and my car isn’t the world’s biggest.”
“We won’t mind at all,” Zane said. “Will we, Mr. Porculey?” Porculey, who looked like a man rampant with second thoughts, vaguely shook his head, saying, “Not at all, no. Don’t mind at all.”
“So we’ll all go for a drive together,” Zane said. Putting one cold hand on Macdough’s knee and the other cold hand on Porculey’s knee, he smiled at both unhappy men in turn. “One for all,” he said. “And all, of course, for one.”
Chapter 12
It’s difficult to wait unobtrusively in a car on the Strand in the middle of London’s horrible traffic jam, but that’s what Chauncey was doing, clinging grimly to his bit of curb despite the honking of taxis, the yelling of lorry drivers or the dirty looks of pedestrians. Dortmunder had crossed the street and disappeared into the Savoy, following Zane and Porculey and Macdough, leaving Chauncey and Kelp to wait here in this clogged artery for whatever would happen next.
It was Dortmunder who’d figured it out that Zane would have to go to Macdough, as his only logical customer for the painting, and that Macdough would be bound to check the authenticity of the painting currently held by Parkeby-South. Which was why they’d rented this Vauxhall and taken up a position across the street from the auction gallery. (“By God,” Dortmunder had said, with something like awe in his voice, “I’m returning to the scene of the crime.”) But even Dortmunder hadn’t been able to explain why that despicable trio in the taxi had led them back to the Savoy rather than on to wherever the painting was stashed. Which was why Dortmunder was in there now, trying to find out what was going on without being seen.
Kelp, who had been quietly thinking his own thoughts in the back seat, now leaned forward and said, “You know? I’m getting so I kind of like this town.”
“Glad to hear it,” Chauncey said. His eye was on the lane leading to the Savoy’s entrance.
“It’s a lot like New York,” Kelp said, “only goofier. You know what I mean?”
“Here comes Dortmunder.”
Here came Dortmunder. He trotted across the street, slid in next to Chauncey, and said, “He’s checking out, and he ordered his car. A white Mini, license W-A-X three six one A. You owe me five pounds, for bribes.”
“Where are they going?” It made no sense to Chauncey that Macdough should suddenly check out of his hotel.
Apparently, it didn’t make sense to Dortmunder either. “I suppose they’ll go pick up the painting,” he said. “After that, I don’t know. We’ll just stick with them.”
“Mini coming,” Kelp said.
Out of Savoy Court came an absolutely jam packed white Mini. Macdough was driving, hunched over the steering wheel like a bear riding a tricycle, with Zane a stiff rigor-mortis figure in the passenger seat beside him and Porculey expanding like bread dough all over the back. The Mini’s springs were nowhere near able to deal with such a load; burr-rong, it bottomed out, as Macdough turned into the viscosity of traffic on the Strand.