answerer, and there was no way to answer this phone.
Also, the money was getting to him. He was glad to give his expertise to the
Movement, help the Movement cover its expenses in the time-honored fashion
of the IRA, but at times he could feel his palm itching to hold onto some of the
cash he got for them this way. As he’d told his guests a little earlier tonight, he
had expensive tastes.
It wouldn’t be so bad if he had some private scores going, but it had been
almost a year since he’d been involved in a non-political robbery, and the money
from that last caper was just about gone. He needed something soon, or he’d be
eating that black bread without the caviar.
They were heading up Central Park West when Phil said, “Do I hear a
phone? I keep thinking I hear a phone.”
Van said, “Jack stole their phone.”
Herman could see Phil frowning as he drove. “He stole their phone? Why?
Just to be mean?”
“I need an extension for my bedroom,” Jack said. “Lemme see if I can get it
to be quiet.” He took it out of the bag and held it in his lap, and it didn’t tinkle as
much after that.
Jack having moved the phone had dislodged some of the crumpled paper, and
Herman could see green down in there. A hundred dollars, he thought, for
expenses. But there was no point in it; a hundred dollars wouldn’t come near his
expenses.
They let him off across the street from his building. They headed on uptown,
and Herman sprinted across the street and inside. He went around to the service
elevator, rode it up to his floor, and pushed the 1 button to send it back down
again when he got off. He entered his kitchen and Mrs. Olaffson said,
“Everything’s all right.”
“Good.”
“They’re getting drunk.”
“Very good. You can serve any time.”
“Yes, sir.”
He walked through the apartment to the living room and noted the shifts that
had taken place in his absence. Several of them, but primarily involving George
and Linda Lachine.
George and Susan were sitting together now, George with a rather fatuous
smile on his face while Susan talked to him, and Linda was standing over on the
opposite side of the room, trying to look as though she were admiring the W. C.
Fields print.
Rastus and Diane were still together, Rastus now with his hand on Diane’s leg.
The tinkling telephone and the reminder of his money worries had put Herman in
a bad mood and left him feeling unable to cope with the complexities that Rastus
would have to offer. So it was heterosexual time; why not?
First he had to make some general comments to the general group, who
greeted his return with comments about how long he’d been away. “You know
those people,” he said with a dismissing wave of the hand. “They can’t do
anything on their own, not a thing.”
“Problems?” Foster asked. He had come with Diane but seemed uninterested
in leaving with her.
“Nothing they can’t handle by themselves,” he said and gave everybody a
brisk grin as he rounded the coffee table and headed for Linda.
But he didn’t get there. Mrs. Olaffson appeared again, in a rerun, complete
with the same dialogue: “Telephone, sir.”
Herman looked at her, for just a second too bewildered to speak. He
couldn’t say, “My call from the Coast?” because that was all over now. He very
nearly said, “We’ve done that bit,” but stopped himself in time. Finally, out of
desperation, he said, “Who is it?”
“He just said it was a friend, sir.”
“Listen,” Rastus drawled in that Southern-cracker voice he liked to use when
irritated, “ain’t we never gonna eat?”
“All right,” Herman said. To Rastus, to Mrs. Olaffson, to everybody. “I’ll
make this one fast,” he promised grimly,
strode from the room, went down the hall, and bashed his nose painfully when
he turned the knob on the study door without stopping and the door turned out
still to be locked. “God damn!” he said, his eyes tearing and his nose smarting.
Holding his nose-he reminded himself of that usher-he trotted around through
the kitchen and into the study that way. Dropping into the director’s chair, he
picked up the receiver and said, “Yes!”
“Hello, Herman?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Who’s this?”
“Kelp.”
Herman’s spirits suddenly lifted. “Well, hello,” he said.
“Been a long time.”
“You sound like you got a cold.”
“No, I just hit my nose.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” Herman said. “What’s happening?”
“Depends,” Kelp said. “You available?”
“Never better.”
“This is still a maybe.”
“Which is better than a nothing,” Herman said.
“That’s true,” Kelp said with some surprise, as though he’d never thought that
out before. “You know the 0. J. Bar?”
“Sure.”
“Tomorrow night, eight-thirty.”
Herman frowned. There was a screening he’d been invited to … No. As
he’d told his guests, he had expensive tastes, and as he’d told Kelp, a maybe
was better than a nothing. “I’ll be there,” he said.
“See you.”
Herman hung up and reached for a Kleenex. Smiling, he wiped the tears from
his eyes, then carefully unlocked the study door and went out to the hall, where
Mrs. Olaffson greeted him with “Dinner is ready, sir.”
“And so am I,” he said.
10
VICTOR stood smiling in the elevator. This building, on Park Avenue in the
seventies, had been built at the turn of the century, but the elevator dated from
1926 and looked it. Victor had seen identical elevators in old movies-the dark
wood, the waist-high brass rail, the smoke-tinted mirror, the corner light fixtures
like brass skyscrapers upside down. Victor felt embraced by the era of the
pulps and gazed around with a happy smile as he and his uncle rode up to the
seventeenth floor.
Kelp said, “What the hell you grinning at?”
“I’m sorry,” Victor said contritely. “I just liked the looks of the elevator.”
“This is a medical doctor we’re going to,” Kelp said. “Not a psychiatrist.”
“All right,” Victor said soberly.
“And remember to let me do the talking.”
Earnestly, Victor said, “Oh, I will.”
He was finding this whole operation fascinating. Dortmunder had been
perfect, Murch and his Mom had been perfect, the back room of the 0. J. Bar
and Grill had been perfect, and the steps being taken to put the job together
were perfect. Even Dortmunder’s obvious reluctance to let Victor participate
was perfect; it was only right that the old pro wouldn’t want to work with the
rank amateur. But Victor knew that by the finish he would have had opportunity
to demonstrate his value. The thought made him smile again, until he felt Kelp’s
eyes on him, when he immediately wiped the smile away.
“It’s unusual that I’d even bring you along,” Kelp said as the elevator door
opened and they stepped out together into the seventeenth-floor foyer. The
doctor’s door, with a discreet name plate, was to the left. Kelp said, “He might
not even want to talk in front of you.”
“Oh, I hope not,” Victor said, laughing boyishly.
“If he does,” Kelp said, “you go right back to the waiting room. Don’t argue
with him.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Victor said sincerely.
Kelp grunted and went in, Victor following.
The nurse was behind a partition on the right. Victor stayed in the background
while Kelp talked to her, saying, “We have an appointment. Charles Willis and
Walter McLain.”
“Yes, sir. If you’ll just take a seat …” She pushed a buzzer that let them
through the interior door.
The waiting room looked like the scale model of a Holiday Inn lobby. A stout
lady looked up from her copy of Weight Watchers and gave them the glance of
anonymous hostility with which people always look at one another in doctors’
Waiting rooms. Kelp and Victor pawed through the magazines on the central
table, and Kelp sat down with a fairly recent Newsweek. Victor searched and
searched, found nothing at all interesting, and finally settled for a copy of
Gourmet. He sat down with it near Kelp, browsed along, and after a while
noticed that the word “redolent” appeared on every page. He staved of
boredom by watching for its reappearances.
But mostly he thought about the robbery and what he and Kelp were doing
here. It had never occurred to him that big-scale robbers had to be financed,
just like anybody else, but of course they did. The preparation of a robbery
involved all sorts of expenses, and somebody had to foot the bill. Victor had
eagerly asked Kelp a thousand questions about that facet of the operation and
had learned that sometimes a member of the robbery team did the financing, in
return for a larger share of the profit, but that more often the financing was done
by outsiders, who put up the money for a guarantee of 100 percent profit, two