Victor’s smile broadened. Nodding as though Dortmunder had just displayed
great brilliance, he said, “That’s just what they are. Anything that happens in
there after banking hours is recorded down at the police station.”
“Which is where?”
Victor pointed straight ahead. “Seven blocks down that way.”
“But time isn’t a problem,” Dortmunder said. “We’re going in against seven
guards, the precinct is seven blocks away, and time isn’t a problem.”
Kelp was grinning by now almost as widely as Victor. “That’s the beauty of
it,” he said. “That’s the stroke of genius Victor’s come up with.”
“Tell me,” Dortmunder said.
“We steal the bank,” Victor said.
Dortmunder looked at him.
Kelp said, “Isn’t that a beauty? We don’t break into the bank, we take the
bank away with us. We back up a truck, hook onto the bank, and drive it
away.”
6
WHEN May got home from Bohack’s, Dortmunder wasn’t there yet. She
stood just inside the front door and yelled, “Hey!” twice, and when there wasn’t
any answer she shrugged and slopped on through the apartment to the kitchen,
carrying the two shopping bags of groceries. Being an employee at the
supermarket, she in the first place got a cut rate on some items and in the second
place could lift other items with no static, so the shopping bags were pretty full.
As she once told her friend Betty at the store, another cashier, “I eat all this stuff
and it ought to make me fat, but I have to carry it all home, and that keeps me
thin.”
“You ought to make your husband come get it,” Betty had said.
Everybody made the same mistake about Dortmunder being May’s husband.
She’d never said he was, but on the other hand she never corrected the mistake
either. “I like to be thin,” she’d said that time and let it go at that.
Putting the two shopping bags down on the kitchen counter now, she became
aware of the fact that the corner of her mouth was warm. She was a chain
smoker and kept the current cigarette always propped in the left corner of her
mouth; when that area got warm, she knew it was time to start a new cigarette.
There was a small callus on the tip of her left thumb, caused by plucking
cigarette embers from her lips, but for some reason her fingertips never callused
at all. She flipped the half-inch butt from her mouth into the kitchen sink with one
practiced wrist movement, and while it sizzled she took the crumpled pack of
Virginia Slims from the waist pocket of her green sweater, shook one up, folded
the corner of her mouth around the end and went looking for matches. Unlike
most chain smokers, she never lit the new one from the old, because the old one
was never big enough to hold onto; this meant a continuing problem with
matches, similar to the continuing problem of water in some Arab countries.
She spent the next five minutes opening drawers. It was a small apartment-a
small living room, a small bedroom, a bathroom so small you’d scrape your
knees, a kitchen as big as the landlord’s reservation in Heaven-but it was full
of drawers, and for five minutes it was full of the swish-thap of drawers being
opened and closed.
She found a book of matches at last, in the living room, in the drawer in the
table with the television set on it. It was a pretty nice set, in color, not very
expensive. Dortmunder had gotten it from a friend who’d picked up a truckload
of them. “The funny thing about it,” Dortmunder had said when he’d brought the
thing home, “all Harry thought he was doing was stealing a truck.”
May lit the cigarette and dropped the match in the ashtray next to the TV.
She’d been concentrating on nothing but matches for five minutes, but now as
her mind cleared she became aware again of the things around her, and the
closest was the TV set, so she turned it on. There was a movie just starting. It
was in black and white and May preferred to watch things in color since it was a
color set, but the movie had Dick Powell in it, so she waited a while. Then it
turned out it was called The Tall Target, and in it Dick Powell played a New
York City policeman named John Kennedy who was trying to stop an
assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln. He was on a train, Dick Powell was,
and he kept getting telegrams, so trainmen kept coming down the corridor
shouting, “John Kennedy. John Kennedy.” This gave May a pleasant feeling of
dislocation, so she backed up until her legs hit the sofa bed and sat down.
Dortmunder came home at the most exciting part, of course, and he brought
Kelp with him. It was 1860 and Abraham Lincoln was going to his first
inauguration, and that’s where they wanted to assassinate him. Adolph Menjou
was the mastermind of the plot, but Dick Powell-John Kennedy-was too
quick for him. Still, it wasn’t certain how things would come out.
“I just don’t know about Victor,” Dortmunder said, but he was talking to
Kelp. To May he said, “How you been?”
“Since this morning? On my feet.”
“Victor’s okay,” Kelp said. “Hi, May, how’s your back?”
“About the same. It’s my legs the last few days. The groceries!”
They both looked at her as she lunged to her feet, the cigarette in the corner
of her mouth giving a puff of smoke like a model train as she exhaled. She said,
“I forgot to put the groceries away” and hurried for the kitchen, where everything in the shopping bags was wet from the frozen foods defrosting. “Turn up
the sound, will you?” she shouted and quickly put things away. In the living room
they turned up the sound, but they also talked louder. Also, the sound was
mostly sound effects, with little dialogue. Then a heavy voice that sounded as
though it had to be Abraham Lincoln said, “Did ever a President come to his
inauguration so like a thief in the night?”
The groceries were away. May walked back into the living room, saying, “Do
you suppose he really said that?”
Dortmunder and Kelp had still been talking about somebody named Victor,
and now they both turned and looked at her. Dortmunder said, “Who?”
“Him,” she said and gestured at the television set, but when they all looked at
it the screen was showing a man standing knee deep in water in a giant toilet
bowl, spraying something on the under part of the lip and talking about germs.
“Not him,” she said. “Abraham Lincoln.” She felt them both looking at her and
shrugged and said, “Forget it.” She went over and switched off the set and said
to Dortmunder, “How’d it go today?”
“So-so,” he said. “I lost my display. I’ll have to go get another.”
Kelp explained, “Some woman called the cops on him.”
May squinted through cigarette smoke. “You getting fresh?”
“Come on, May,” Dortmunder said. “You know me better than that.”
“You’re all alike as far as I can see,” she said. They’d met almost a year ago,
when she’d caught Dortmunder shoplifting at the store. It was the fact that he
hadn’t tried any line at all on her, that he hadn’t even asked for her sympathy,
that had won her sympathy. He’d just stood there, shaking his head, with
packages of boiled ham and American cheese falling out of his armpits, and she
just hadn’t had the heart to turn him in. She still tried to pretend sometimes that
he couldn’t pierce her toughness, but he could.
“Anyway,” Kelp said, “we’re none of us gonna have to work that penny-ante
stuff for a while.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dortmunder said.
“You’re just not used to Victor,” Kelp said, “that’s the only problem.”
“May I never get used to Victor,” Dortmunder said.
May dropped backward into the sofa again; she always sat down as though
she’d just had a stroke. “What’s the story?” she said.
“A bank job,” Kelp said.
“Well, yes and no,” Dortmunder said. “It’s a little more than a bank job.”
“It’s a bank job,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder looked at May as though hoping to find stability and reason
there. “The idea is,” he said, “if you can believe it, we’re supposed to steal the
whole bank.”
“It’s a trailer,” Kelp said. “You know, one of those mobile homes? The
bank’s in there till they put up the new building.
“And the idea,” Dortmunder said, “is we hook the bank onto a truck and
drive it away.”
“Where to?” May asked.
“Just away,” Dortmunder said.
“That’s one of the things we’ve got to work out,” Kelp said.
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot to work out,” May said.
“Then there’s Victor,” Dortmunder said.
“My nephew,” Kelp explained.