“Good,” Kelp said. He and May went into the living room, and Kelp watched Dortmunder just leaving the room by the opposite door. “Uh,” Kelp said.
May said, “You want a beer?” She called after Dortmunder, “John, and a beer for Kelp.”
“Oh,” Kelp said. “He’s getting beer.”
Murch and his Mom were settling on the sofa. The two full ashtrays on the drum table suggested that May was probably claiming the blue armchair, and that left only the gray armchair. Dortmunder would be sitting in that.
“Have a seat,” May said.
“No, thanks,” Kelp said. “I’d rather stand. I’m sort of up and excited, you know?” –
Beer cans were being opened in the kitchen; kop, kop, kop. Murch’s Mom said, “May, I’m crazy about that lamp. Where’d you get it?”
“Fortunoff’s,” May said. “On sale, a discontinued model.”
Murch said, “I know we’re a little late, but we ran into traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I couldn’t figure it out.”
“I told you there was construction there,” his mother said. “But you don’t listen to your mother.”
“At eight o’clock at night? I figured four, five o’clock, they go home. Am I supposed to know they leave the machinery there, close the thing down to one lane all night?”
Kelp said, “To come to Manhattan you take the Brooklyn Queens Expressway?”
“Up to the Midtown Tunnel,” Murch said. “You see, coming from Canarsie-”
Dortmunder, coming in then with his hands full of beer cans, said, “Everybody can drink out of the can, right?”
They all agreed they could, and then Murch went on with his explanation to Kelp, “Coming up out of Canarsie,” he said, “you’ve got special problems, see. There’s different routes you can take that’s better at different times of day. So what we did this time, we took Pennsylvania Avenue, but then we didn’t take the Interborough. See what I mean? We took Bushwick Avenue instead, and crossed over to Broadway. Now, we could have taken the Williamsburg Bridge, but-”
“Which is exactly what we should have done,” Murch’s Mom said, and drank some beer.
“Now, that’s what I’ll do next time,” Murch admitted. “Until they get all that machinery off the BQE. But usually the best way is the BQE up to the Midtown Tunnel, and then into Manhattan.” He was leaning urgently toward Kelp, gesturing with his full beer can. “See what I mean?”
It was more of an explanation than Kelp had been looking for. “I see what you mean,” he said.
Dortmunder handed Kelp a beer and gestured at the gray armchair. “Have a seat.”
“No, thanks. I think I’d rather stand.”
“Suit yourself,” Dortmunder said, and went over to sit on the arm of May’s chair. “Go ahead,” he said.
All at once, Kelp had stage fright. All at once he’d lost all confidence in his idea and all confidence in his ability to put the idea across. “Well,” he said, and looked around at the four waiting faces, “well. You’ve all read the book.”
They all nodded.
The empty chair was like a bad omen. Kelp was standing there in front of everybody like an idiot, and right next to him was this empty chair. Turning his head slightly, trying not to see the empty chair, he said, “And I asked you all what you thought of it, and you all thought it was pretty good, right?”
Three of them nodded, but Dortmunder said, “You didn’t ask me what I thought of it.”
“Oh. That’s right. Well, uh, what did you think of it?”
“I thought it was pretty good,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp grinned with relief. His natural optimism was re turning to him now. Clapping his hands together he said, “That’s right. It is pretty good, isn’t it? And you know what else it is?”
None of them knew.
“It’s full of detail,” Kelp said. “The whole thing is worked out right from one end to the other, every detail. Isn’t that right?”
They all nodded. Dortmunder said, “But where do we come in?”
Kelp hesitated; this was the moment. The gray armchair hung like a teardrop in his peripheral vision. “We do it!” he said.
They all looked at him. Murch’s Mom said, irritably, “What was that?”
It was out now, and a sudden rush of excitement carried Kelp along on its crest. Crouching like a surfer in the curl, he leaned toward his audience and said, “Don’t you see? That goddam book’s a blueprint, a step-by-step master plan! All we do is follow it! They got away with it in the book, and we’ll get away with it right here!”
They were staring at him openmouthed. He stared back, fired with the vision of his idea. “Don’t you see? We do the caper in the book! We do the book!”
4
D 0 R T M U N D E R just sat there. The others, as they began to catch hold of Kelp’s idea, starting making exclamations, asking questions, making comments, but Dortmunder just sat there, heavily, and thought about it.
Murch said, “I get it! You mean we do everything they do in the book.”
“That’s right!”
May said, “But it’s a book about a kidnapping. It isn’t a robbery, it’s a kidnapping.”
“It works the same way,” Kelp told her. “What difference does it make, it’s still a caper, and every detail is laid right out there for us. How to pick the kid, how to get the kid, how to get the payoff-”
May said, “But, you can’t kidnap a little child! That’s mean. I’m surprised at you.”
Kelp said, “No, it isn’t. We wouldn’t hurt the kid. I mean, we wouldn’t hurt him anyway, but they make a whole big point about that in the book, how if they give the kid back unhurt the cops won’t try so hard to get them later on. Wait, I’ll find the place, I’ll read it to you.”
Kelp reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a copy of the book. Dortmunder watched him, saw him leafing through it looking for the place, and still didn’t say any. thing. He just sat there and thought about it.
Dortmunder was not a natural reader, but his times in. side prison walls had shown him the usefulness of reading when you’re waiting for a certain number of days to go by. Reading can speed the days a little, and that’s all to the good. So all in all it had been a fairly familiar experience for him, reading a book, though strange to be doing it in a place with no bars over the window. And also strange to be doing it for some other reason outside the act of reading itself. All the way through he had kept wondering what Kelp had in mind, had even distracted himself from the story here and there while trying to guess what the purpose of it all could be, and the truth had never occurred to him. A blueprint. Kelp wanted them to read the book because it was a blueprint.
Now Kelp was leafing back and forth through his copy, trying to find the part where it had said not to kill the child they were kidnapping. “I know it’s here somewhere,” he was saying.
“We all read it,” Murch’s Mom said. “Don’t start reciting it to us, like some Traffic Court judge.”
“Okay,” Kelp said, and closed the book again. Standing there, holding it, looking like some kind of paperback preacher, he said, “You all agree with me, don’t you? You see what a natural this is, what a winner this is.”
“There’s a lot of driving in it,” Murch said. “I noticed that right away.”
“Plenty for you to do,” Kelp told him eagerly.
“And they got the roads right,” Murch said. “I mean, the guy that wrote the book, he got all the roads right.”
May said, “But you’re still talking about kidnapping a child, and I still say that’s a mean, terrible thing to do.’
“Not if you do it like this book says.”
Murch’s Mom said, “I suppose you’d want May and me to take care of this brat, like the women in the book.”
Kelp said, “Well, we’re not talking about a baby or anything, you don’t have to change anybody’s diaper or anything like that. We’re talking about a kid maybe ten, twelve years old.”
“That’s very sexist,” Murch’s Mom said.
Kelp looked blank. “Hah?”
“Wanting May and me to take care of the kid. Role-assumption. It’s sexist.”
“Goddammit, Mom,” Murch said, “you’ve been off with those consciousness-raising ladies again.”
“I drive a cab,” she said. “I’m no different from a man.” Kelp said, “You want me to take care of the kid?” He seemed honestly bewildered.
Murch’s Mom snorted. “What does a man know about taking care of a child?”
“But-”
“I just wanted you to know,” she said. “It was sexist, and I wanted you to know it was sexist.”