calculations.”
The heavyset guy looked quickly all around, as though for an exit, and then
looked at his watch. “I’m late for an appointment,” he said.
“So am I,” said Kelp. “What I figure, what the hell, we’ve got the same
amount of damage on each car. I’ll pay for mine, you pay for yours. We put a
claim in with the insurance company, they’ll just up our rates.”
“Or drop us,” the heavyset guy said. “That happened to me once already. If it
wasn’t for a guy my brother-in-law knew, I wouldn’t have insurance right now.”
“I know how it is,” Kelp said.
“Those bastards’ll rob you deaf, dumb and blind,” the heavyset guy said, “and
then all of a sudden boom-they drop you.”
“We’re better off we don’t have anything to do with them,” Kelp said.
“Fine by me,” the heavyset guy said.
“Well, I’ll see you around,” Kelp said.
“So long,” said the heavyset guy, but even as he said it he was starting to look
puzzled, as though beginning to suspect he’d missed a station somewhere along
the way.
Dortmunder wasn’t in the car. Kelp shook his head as he put the Toronado in
drive. “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said under his breath and drove off with a
grinding of metal.
He didn’t realize he’d carried the Pinto’s front bumper away with him until
two blocks later, when he started up from a traffic light and it fell off back there
with one hell of a crash.
3
DORTMUNDER had walked three blocks along Merrick Avenue, swinging
his almost-empty attach� case, when the purple Toronado pulled to the curb
beside him again and Kelp shouted, “Hey, Dortmunder! Get in!”
Dortmunder leaned down to look through the open right-side window. “I’ll
take the train,” he said. “Thanks, anyway.” He straightened and walked on.
The Toronado shot past him, went down a line of parked cars and pulled in
by a fire hydrant. Kelp jumped out, ran around the car and met Dortmunder on
the sidewalk. “Listen,” he said.
“Things have been very quiet,” Dortmunder told him. “I want to keep it that
way.”
“Is it my fault that guy ran into me in the back?”
“Have you seen the back of that car?” Dortmunder asked him. He nodded at
the Toronado, which he was even then walking past.
Kelp fell into step beside him. “What do I care?” he said. “It’s not mine.”
“It’s a mess,” Dortmunder said.
“Listen,” Kelp said. “Don’t you want to know what I was looking for you
for?”
“No,” Dortmunder said. He kept walking.
“Where the hell you walking to, anyway?”
“That railroad station down there.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“You sure will,” Dortmunder said. He kept walking.
“Listen,” Kelp said. “You’ve been waiting for a big one, am I right?”
“Not again,” Dortmunder said.
“Will you listen? You don’t want to spend the rest of your life peddling
encyclopedias around the Eastern Seaboard, do you?”
Dortmunder said nothing. He kept walking.
“Well, do you?”
Dortmunder kept walking.
“Dortmunder,” Kelp said, “I swear and vow I have the goods. This time I
have a guaranteed winner. A score so big you can retire for maybe three years.
Maybe even four.”
“The last time you came to me with a score,” Dortmunder said, “it took five
jobs to get it, and even when I got it I didn’t have anything.” He kept walking.
“Is that my fault? Luck ran against us, that’s all. The idea of the caper was
first-rate, you got to admit that yourself. Will you for Christ’s sake stop
walking?”
Dortmunder kept walking.
Kelp ran around in front of him and trotted backward for a while. “All I’m
asking,” he said, “is that you listen to it and come look at it. You know I trust
your judgment; if you say it’s no good I won’t argue for a minute.”
“You’re gonna fall over that Pekingese,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp stopped running backward, turned around, glared back at the woman
who owned the Pekingese, and reverted to walking frontward, on Dortmunder’s
left. “I think we been friends long enough,” he said, “that I can ask you as a personal favor just to give me a listen, just to give the job a look-see.”
Dortmunder stopped on the sidewalk and gave Kelp a heavy look. “We been
friends long enough,” he said, “that I know if you come up with a job, there’s
something wrong with it.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“I never said it was.”
Dortmunder was about to start walking again when Kelp quickly said,
“Anyway, it isn’t my caper. You know about my nephew Victor?”
”No.”
“The ex-FBI man? I never told you about him?”
Dortmunder looked at him. “You have a nephew who’s an FBI man?”
“Ex-FBI man. He quit.”
“He quit,” Dortmunder echoed.
“Or maybe they fired him,” Kelp said. “It was some argument about a secret
handshake.”
“Kelp, I’m gonna miss my train.”
“I’m not making this up,” Kelp said. “Don’t blame me, for Christ’s sake.
Victor kept sending in these memos how the FBI ought to have a secret
handshake, so the agents could tell each other at parties and like that, and they
never went for it. So either he quit or they fired him, something like that.”
“This is the guy that came up with the caper?”
“Look, he was in the FBI, he passed the tests and everything, he isn’t a nut.
He’s got a college education and everything.”
“But he wanted them to have a secret handshake.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Kelp said reasonably. “Hey, listen, will you come meet
him, listen to him? You’ll like Victor. He’s a nice guy. And I tell you the score is
guaranteed beautiful.”
“May’s waiting for me to come home,” Dortmunder said. He could feel
himself weakening.
“I’ll give you the dime,” Kelp said. “Come on, whadaya say?”
“I’m making a mistake,” Dortmunder said, “that’s what I say.” He turned
around and started walking back. After a second, Kelp caught up with him
again, smiling cheerfully, and they walked back together.
The Toronado had a ticket on it.
4
“EVERYBODY FREEZE,” Victor snarled. “This is a stickup.”
He pushed the stop button on the cassette recorder, rewound, and played it
back. “Everybody freeze,” the cassette snarled. “This is a stickup.”
Victor smiled, put the recorder down on his work table, and picked up both
other recorders. All three were small, about the size of a tourist’s camera. Into
one of them Victor said, in a high-pitched voice, “You can’t do this!” Then he
played that from one recorder into the other, at the same time giving a falsetto
“Eeek!” The scream and the high-pitched remark were then played back from
recorder number three to recorder number two, while in a deep voice Victor
said, “Look out, boys, they’ve got guns!” Gradually, working back and forth
between the recorders, he built up an agitated crowd response to the stickup
announcement, and when he was satisfied with it he recorded it onto the first
Cassette.
The room Victor was in had started life as a garage but had veered. It was
now a cross between a den and a radio repair shop, plus some Batcave.
Victor’s work table, littered with recording equipment, old magazines and odds
and ends, was against the rear wall, which was completely papered with covers
from old pulp magazines, pasted on and then shellacked. At the top of the wall
was a rolled-up motion-picture screen, which could be pulled down and hooked
to a gizmo at the back of the work table.
The wall to Victor’s left was lined with bookcases, filled with pulp magazines,
paperback books, Big Little Books, comic books, and elderly hardcover boys’
books-Dave Dawson, Bomba, the Boy Allies. The wall to his right was also
lined with shelves, these containing stereo components and records, mostly old
sixteen-inch transcription records of radio shows like “The Lone Ranger” and
“Terry and the Pirates.” On a small shelf at the bottom were a line of new
cassettes, identified in neat lettering in red ink with such titles as The Scarlet
Avenger Meets Lynxman and “Rat” Duffy’s Mob Breaks Out.
The last wall, where the garage doors had once been, was now given over to
motion pictures. There were two projectors, an eight-millimeter and a sixteen-,
and shelf after shelf of canned film. Stray bits of unused wall around the room
sported posters for old movie serials-Flash Gordon Conquers the
Universe-and box tops from old cereals-Kellogg’s Pep, Quaker Puffed
Rice, Post Toasties.
There were no doors or windows visible anywhere in the room, and most of
the central floor space was taken up by fifteen old movie seats, in three rows of
five, all facing the rear wall, the rolled-up screen, the littered work table, and
Victor.
Being just thirty years of age, Victor hadn’t yet been born when most of the
material in the room had first appeared. He’d discovered the pulps by accident