when he was in high school, had started collecting, and had gradually spread out
to all the sources of adventure in the decades before World War Two. It was
history to him, and a hobby, but not nostalgia. His own youth had been
highlighted by Howdy Doody and John Cameron Swayze, and he had as yet
discovered no twinge of nostalgia within him for either.
Maybe it was his hobby that kept him young. Whatever it was, he didn’t look
his age. At the most, he might be taken for twenty, but generally the people he
met assumed he was a teenager, and he was still routinely asked for proof of age
whenever he went into a bar. It had frequently been embarrassing, back when
he was with the Bureau, to identify himself to some pinko as an FBI man and
have the pinko fall on the floor laughing. His looks had hampered his Bureau ac-tivities in other ways, too; for instance, he couldn’t infiltrate a college campus
because he didn’t look old enough to go to college. Nor could he grow a beard,
except some straggling thing that made him look as though he was suffering from
radiation sickness. And when he let his hair grow long, the best he could look
like was the Three Musketeers’ mascot.
He sometimes thought the reason the Bureau had let him go was just as much
his appearance as the business about the handshake. Once, when he’d been
assigned to the Omaha office, he’d heard Chief Agent Flanagan say to Agent
Goodwin, “We want our men to look clean-cut, but that’s ridiculous,” and he’d
known they were talking about him.
But the Bureau hadn’t been the right place for him anyway. It wasn’t -anything
like The FBI in Peace and War, or C-Men, or the rest of the literature. They
didn’t even call themselves G-men; they called themselves Agents. Every time
he d called himself Agent, Victor had gotten the mental image of himself as an
undercover humanoid from another planet, part of the advance guard sent to
enslave mankind and turn Earth over to the Green Goks from Alpha Centauri II.
It had been a disturbing mental image and had played havoc with his
interrogation technique.
Also, consider: Victor had been with the Bureau twenty-three months, and not
once had he held in his hands a submachine gun. He hadn’t even seen one. He’d
never broken down a door. He’d never held a loud-hailer to his mouth and
bawled, “All right, Muggsy, we’ve got the house surrounded.” What he’d mostly
done was call Army deserters’ parents on the telephone and ask them if they’d
seen their son recently. And he’d also done a lot of filing-really, one hell of a
lot of filing.
No, the Bureau hadn’t been the right place for him at all. But where-other
than this garage-was the right place? He had his law degree, but he’d never
taken the bar exam and had no particular desire to become an attorney. He
made a small living these days as a dealer in old books and magazines,
completely mail order, but it wasn’t a really satisfying existence.
Well, maybe this business with his uncle Kelp would turn out to be something.
Time would tell.
“You can’t get away with that!” he said in a manly voice into the master
cassette, then overlay a high, squealing, “No, don’t!” Then he put down the
recorders, opened a drawer of the work table, and took out a small .5-caliber
Firearms International automatic. He checked the clip, and it still contained five
blanks. Switching on a recorder, he fired two quick shots and then a third, at the
same time shouting, “Take that! And that!”
“Uh,” said a voice.
Victor turned his head, startled. A section of bookcase in the left-hand wall
had opened inward, and Kelp was standing in the doorway, looking glazed.
Behind him was a wedge of sunlit back yard and the white clapboard side wall
of the neighbor’s garage. “I, uh …” said Kelp and pointed in various directions.
“Oh, hi,” Victor said cheerfully. He waved the gun in a friendly fashion and
said, “Come on in.”
Kelp pointed in the general direction of the gun. “That uh…”
“Oh, it’s blanks,” Victor said easily. He switched off the recorder, put the
automatic away in the drawer and got to his feet. “Come on in.”
Kelp came in and shut the bookcase. “You don’t want to startle me,” he said.
“Golly, I’m sorry,” Victor said concernedly.
“I startle easy,” Kelp said. “You shoot a gun, you throw a knife, any little thing
like that will set me right off.”
“I’ll sure remember that,” Victor said soberly.
“Anyway,” Kelp said, “I found the guy I was telling you about.”
“The planner?” Victor asked with quickening interest. “Dortmunder?”
“That’s the one. I wasn’t sure you wanted me to bring him in here. I know
you like this place kept private.”
“That’s good,” Victor said approvingly. “Where is he?”
“Down the drive.”
Victor hurried to the front of the room where the movie projectors and cans
of films were located. A small framed poster for the George Raft The Glass
Key was at eye level on a clear patch of wall; it was hinged at the top, and
Victor lifted it up out of the way and stood close to peer through a small
rectangular pane of dusty glass at the world outside.
What he was looking at was the weedy driveway beside his house, with its
two narrow ribbons of old cracked concrete leading down to the sidewalk and
the street. This was an older section of Long Island than either Ranch Cove
Estates or Elm Valley Heights. It was called Belle Vista; the streets were all
straight, and the houses ran mostly to two-story, one-family affairs with front
porches.
Down at the sidewalk Victor saw a man. He was walking slowly back and
forth, he was looking down, and he was taking occasional quick puffs on a stub
of cigarette he held in his cupped hand. Victor nodded, pleased at what he saw.
Dortmunder was tall and lean and tired-looking; he had the worn look of
Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra. Victor did a Bogart twitch with the left side of
his mouth, leaned back, and lowered the movie poster again. “That’s fine,” he
said amiably. “Let’s go out and meet him.”
“Sure,” Kelp said.
Victor opened the bookcase and bowed Kelp through ahead of him. On the
other side, the bookcase was an ordinary door, with a dusty window in it
covered by a chintz curtain. Victor pulled the door shut and walked with Kelp
around to the front of the garage and down the driveway toward Dortmunder.
Victor couldn’t help looking back, when he was halfway down the drive, and
admiring his handiwork. From the outside it looked like a perfectly ordinary
garage, except that it was more old-fashioned than most, with its pair of side-hinged doors padlocked in the middle. Anybody who went up to those doors
and looked through the small dusty windows would see nothing but blackness; it
was black felt against plywood six inches from the glass, but he wouldn’t know
that. He’d think it was simply dark in there. Victor had tried rigging up a blow-up photograph of a 1933 Ford in there, but he just couldn’t ever get the
perspective right, so he’d settled for darkness instead.
He faced front again, smiling, and walked with Kelp the rest of the way to
meet Dortmunder, who stopped on the sidewalk, gave them both a sour look
and flicked his cigarette butt away.
Kelp made introductions: “Dortmunder, this is Victor.”
“Hello,” Dortmunder said.
“Hello, Mr. Dortmunder,” Victor said eagerly and stuck his hand out. “I’ve
sure heard a lot about you,” he said admiringly.
Dortmunder looked at the hand, then at Victor, and finally shook hands with
him, suddenly saying, “You heard a lot about me?”
“From my uncle,” Victor said proudly.
Dortmunder gave Kelp a look that wasn’t easy to define and said, “Is that
right?”
“General things,” Kelp said. “You know, just general things.”
“This and that,” Dortmunder suggested.
“That kind of thing, yeah.”
Victor smiled at both of them. Dortmunder was just fine, in appearance and
voice and attitude and everything. Just fine. After the disappointment of the
Bureau, he hadn’t known exactly what to expect, but so far Dortmunder was
everything Victor could have hoped for.
He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Well,” he said happily, “shall
we go take a look at it?”
5
THE THREE of them sat in the front seat, with Dortmunder on the right.
Every time he turned his head slightly to the left he saw Victor, sitting in the
middle, smiling at him, as though Victor were a fisherman and Dortmunder was
the biggest fish he’d ever caught. It made Dortmunder very nervous, particularly
since this Victor used to be an FBI man, so he kept his head turned to the right