“Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “this is not good.”
“I know that,” Dortmunder said.
“Nothing is happening,” Tiny said.
Dortmunder nodded. “I know that, too.”
Kelp said, “The trouble is, these clowns are in no hurry to get their reality up and running.”
“And meanwhile,” Stan said, “what are we doing on our own plan? Nothing.”
“We don’t have a plan,” the kid said. “We have a door we can’t get through, to something we don’t know what it is behind it.”
“I can feel,” Tiny said, “discouragement creeping on. We gotta sit and meet.”
Kelp said, “You mean tonight, at the OJ?”
“No,” Tiny said, “I mean now, at Dortmunder’s. Stan, use your cell, order out a pizza, extra pepperoni, I’ll whistle up the limo.” And he stomped off around the corner, to the limo he never left home without, due to his size and his disinclination to rub shoulders with the civilian world.
“Tiny’s right,” Stan said, breaking out his cell.
“Well, yes and no,” Kelp said. “Get two pizzas, one with hold the pepperoni.”
Midafternoon at the Dortmunder abode, May still at her supermarket checkout register, pizza shreds and beer cans creating their festive litter across the living room, and Tiny saying, “We don’t have all the time in the world like those reality geeks.”
“We’ve only got,” Kelp said, “until they try to check the IDs we gave them.”
“I do have this situation,” Stan said, around a mouthful of pepperoni. “On account of my Mom, they got my last name and her home phone number.”
“That’s an easy one,” Tiny said. “I already got that one scoped.”
Everybody wanted to know how, so Tiny told them. “They’re not gonna come back at us about the phony names and the phony Social Security numbers until the earliest Tuesday, so before then, we see Doug, we explain we threw Murch out.”
“Hey, wait there,” Stan said. “Threw me out?”
“Everything,” Tiny told him, “takes place in that building on Varick, everything they know about and everything they don’t know about. Where’s the driving?”
“Gee, you’re right,” Kelp said.
“Hold on a minute,” Stan said. He was about to get on his feet.
The kid said, “No, wait, Stan, you don’t get it. Monday we tell them you’re out, and anything that happens after that you aren’t part of. You set up an alibi for whenever it is we do whatever it is we’re gonna do—”
“About which,” Dortmunder said, “it wouldn’t hurt to do some thinking.”
Stan said, “But I’m not out. Not out out. Just as far as those people I’m out.”
“There’s gonna be driving, Stan,” Kelp told him, “only they don’t know about it.”
“We can say,” the kid said, “this new guy means the pot’s smaller all the way around, so we gotta unload somebody to bring the numbers up, and Stan, you’re the guy. We’ll tell him Monday.”
Tiny said, “Quicker than that. Dortmunder, you and Kelp go by his place tonight, tell him the story. Then he’s got days and days to get used to it. Murch is out, the human fly is in.”
Kelp said, “Speaking of, whadawe thinka this human fly?”
“He’s a human plant,” Tiny said.
“Yeah,” Kelp agreed. “They put him on us to watch us, but why?”
“Because,” the kid said, “they’re afraid we might start thinking about Combined Tool, as long as we’re in the building, and they wanna know if that happens.”
“Which brings me,” Dortmunder said, “back to my point. When do we start to think about Combined Tool?”
“Tonight,” Tiny decided. “When you’re done with Doug, and later on tonight, we all come to Varick Street. I’m not gonna run around on roofs, so at one o’clock I’ll be at the front door. In the limo.”
Dortmunder said, “Tiny, would there be room in that limo for an extension ladder?”
Tiny lowered a gaze on Dortmunder, thought a moment, then smiled, an unusual and not an entirely comforting sight. “That would be a first, wouldn’t it?” he said. “You’re on.”
They didn’t stay to help with the cleanup.
23
NOT HAVING the hoped-for comfort of Darlene in his life, Doug had dinner with a couple college friends, also bachelors, also beginning to get querulous about it, and got home at quarter to ten to find the lights on and John and Andy seated in his living room, reading his magazines. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t you guys have homes of your own?”
“Where do you get your magazines, Doug?” Andy wanted to know. “A dentist’s office?”
“I’ve been busy lately,” Doug explained. “I’m behind on my reading.” And he thought, I’m apologizing to these people! They’re in my home. I don’t want them here.
Dropping last year’s TIME on an end table, Andy said, “We don’t wanna take up a lotta your time. Particularly when it’s that old. We just wanted to drop by, tell you, there’s a little change in the personnel.”
“Change? What do you mean, change?”
John said, “A couple facts come together today and we saw we didn’t have the exactly perfect string for this job.”
“You’re changing the crew?” Doug didn’t get it. “That’s what this is about? Why do you want to change the crew?”
“Because you did,” John said.
“See,” Andy said, “Ray’s a nice addition to the group, climbing up the walls and all that, but it means we got one guy too many.”
“You don’t wanna work in a crowd,” John explained.
“So what are you saying?” Doug asked. “One of the group is leaving?”
“Stan,” Andy said.
“Stan? What, Stan? He’s the one started this thing. His mother. But he’s the first one in.”
“But he’s a driver,” Andy said. “There’s no place in this thing for a driver, it’s all on the third floor of that building on Varick.”
Doug, trying to wrap his head around this change, said, “What does Stan think about it?”
“There’s always another job,” Andy said, with a shrug. “Always another day.”
“Is he happy about it?”
“Happy doesn’t come into it,” John said. “After we saw you people today, we thought it over, and we all agreed, the string’s got to change. So Stan’s out.”
Struck by a sudden horrible thought, Doug said, “You didn’t—You didn’t kill him, did you?”
They were both clearly astonished. John said, “What are you talkin about?” and at the same time Andy said, “We’re the nonviolent crowd, remember?”
“But you’re criminals,” Doug reminded them. “Is there really any such thing as a nonviolent criminal? Except politicians, you know, white collar.”
Andy, speaking with great sincerity, said, “I can guarantee you, Doug, we stay away from violence completely unless there’s absolutely no way it can get back at us.”
“Which is never,” John added.
Doug was unconvinced. He said, “Tiny? Are you saying Tiny isn’t ever violent?”
“Look at Tiny,” John suggested. “Does he need violence?”
“We don’t want to take up your whole night here,” Andy said. “All we wanted was to come by and tell you, Ray’s in, so Stan’s out, and you can tell that payroll guy.”
“Quigg,” John said.
“Yes, I will.” Doug frowned at them. “That was worth a whole trip? You couldn’t call me tomorrow? You’re gonna see me Monday.”
“We wanted you to know when it was fresh,” John explained. “You’ve got your girl Marcy working on it, shaping it, making it entertainment, we didn’t want her to waste any time shaping Stan, because he’s out.”
“I’ll tell her,” Doug said.
“Thank you, Doug,” John said, with dignity, and they both got up and left.
Doug brooded at the closed door through which they�
�d just passed. Something’s wrong here, he told himself. Something smells funny about this. But what? And why?
24
ONE A.M. A gleaming black limousine comes to a stop on Varick Street. The building door beside it opens and two men come out and cross the sidewalk to the limo. The limo’s rear door opens and an extension ladder slides out horizontally into midair. First one of the men grasps the oncoming ladder, then the other. The two men turn and carry the ladder to the building doorway, open into darkness. The limo’s passenger says a word to the driver and climbs out to the sidewalk. He shuts the door, crosses to the building, enters into the same darkness as the other two men and the ladder, and shuts that door behind himself. The limo purrs away around the corner.
Crash.
“Turn on a light,” Tiny said. “You’re gonna bust every windshield in here.”
Kelp found the light switch and turned on the overhead fluorescents. “No, it was a side window,” he said. He was at the front end of the ladder.
Dortmunder, at the other end, said, “We’ll do the indoor stuff first.”
Kelp looked across the massed vehicles to the elevator platform way over on the other side. “I think,” he said, “we got to carry it over our heads.”
“Save a lotta glass that way,” Tiny commented.
Holding his end of the ladder up in the air over his head, Kelp started the dodging and weaving necessary to thread the needle in here. Dortmunder followed, his end of the ladder also up in the air, and Tiny followed as caboose. They would use the ladder to get to the second floor because they didn’t know what would be alarmed when the building was supposed to be empty, and the elevator seemed like a prime candidate for security.
As they neared the elevator, Stan and the kid came up out of a horseless hansom cab, both yawning a little. (Stan was out of the public part of events, but not out of the inner circle parts.) The kid said, “That’s really comfortable, that thing.”
“Not much scenery, though,” Stan said, and nodded at the ladder. “Good. Now we find out if the damn place is worth the trouble.”
“It better be,” Kelp said. “I’m not doing this for wages.”
At the elevator at last, Kelp put his end of the ladder down while Dortmunder walked the other end up toward the vertical. The other three came in at that point to lay hands on the ladder, to help and hinder, and when it was upright they pushed up the extension, elongating the ladder into the upper darkness.
“Ouch!”
Kelp looked over at Dortmunder. “You okay?”
“Not until you lower it a little so I can get my thumb out.”
“Sorry.”
They completed the extension without further incident, and Tiny said, “We don’t have to do a mob scene up there, everybody in everybody’s way. Dortmunder, you and Kelp go on up, see what it looks like.”
“Right.”
So Kelp went up the ladder, Dortmunder following, and on the next level they came to the empty space fronting Combined Tool. Six feet back from the hole for the elevator an off-white wall stretched across from the right-side outer wall, with the one brown door in the middle of it they’d seen before. Just to the left of the elevator area, a second wall came forward, perpendicular from the first one, running beside the elevator hole to the front of the building.
So this empty rectangle of space with the door in it was all at this level they could see. Of course this door too was equipped with palm-print recognition. They stood back—not too far back—and considered the situation.
“Wires,” decided Kelp.
“You’re right.”
They both had flashlights out now, shining them on the walls and ceiling. Kelp said, “Electricity. Phone. Cable. Security. A cluster of wires.”
Dortmunder pointed his light at the stone side wall of the elevator space. “They gotta do surface-mount. You can’t bury wires in a stone wall. See, like that.” And his light shone on a gray metal duct, an inch square, coming down from above. “That’s where they put in those cameras, to screw us outta the storage space.”
“Well, let’s see.” Kelp turned the other way, looking at the side wall where it came close to the front of the building. “There we go.”
His light showed another gray duct, a little larger, coming out of that side wall, very low and almost to the front. The duct emerged, made a left turn to go downward, then another left and headed off toward the door they’d come in.
Kelp called, “Tiny! You see that duct? I’m shining the light on it.”
“I got it.”
“Find where it goes, I’ll be right down.”
Dortmunder said, “And what am I doing?”
“Same as last time. Comere.”
They went over to the impregnable door, and Kelp withdrew from one of the rear pockets of his jacket the stethoscope and earphone gizmo. As Dortmunder watched, he bent to the door, listening here, listening there, then saying, “Hah.”
“You got it.”
“We know the thing has to be alarmed,” Kelp said, “and here it is. Only this time I want it to stop.”
“Okay.”
“Give me a couple minutes to get set,” Kelp said, “then you listen, and you tell me when it switches off.” He tapped a fingertip on the appropriate spot on the door. “Right there.”
“Done.”
Kelp went away down the ladder, and Dortmunder experimentally listened to the door’s faint hum for a minute, then, tiring of that, walked around in this blank, supremely uninteresting area until Kelp, from far away at the ground floor rear, yelled, “John!”
“Yar!”
“Start listening!”
“You got it.”
Bending to his work, Dortmunder listened through the gizmo to the humming of the door. It was a very soothing kind of hum, really, especially when you positioned yourself so your back could be comfortable. It was a non-threatening hum, an encouraging hum, faint but unending, assuring you that everything was going to be all right, all your troubles were over, you’d just sail along now on the calm sea of this hum, no nasty sur—
“JOHN! WHAT THE HELL’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?”
The scream, about an inch from his non-gizmo ear, was so loud and unexpected he drove his head into the door to get away from it, and the door bounced his head back into the scream with a new ache in it. Staring upward, he saw what appeared to be Kelp’s evil twin, face twisted into a Kabuki mask of rage. “What? What?”
“Can’t you hear anything?”
“The hum.” Dortmunder straightened, pulled the earphone out of his unassaulted ear, assembled the tatters of his dignity about himself, and said, “You wanted me to listen to the hum, I listened to the hum.”
Now Kelp frowned at the door. “It never stopped.”
“Never. It was gonna stop, I’d tell you.”
“I shouted up from downstairs,” Kelp said. He was growing a bit calmer.
“I,” Dortmunder said, self-respect now totally intact, “was listening to the hum.”
Again Kelp frowned at the door. His rage with Dortmunder seemed to be forgotten. “I did everything,” he said. “I shut down everything, I bypassed everything.”
“Hum,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp stood frowning, thinking. From downstairs voices were raised, full of questions for Kelp, but he continued to frown at the door.
“They’re calling you,” Dortmunder said. “Pretty soon they’ll come up and yell in your face.”
Slowly, Kelp was roused from his studies, and called down, “I’ll be right there!” Then, to Dortmunder, he said, “I didn’t yell in your face, I yelled in your ear.”
“Very similar.”
Kelp nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Accepted,” Dortmunder said.
“I was upset,” Kelp explained.
“I am remaining calm,” Dortmunder said. “You wanted to go down the ladder?”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do here,” Kelp said. “We are not gonna ge
t through that door.”
“Not tonight, anyway,” Dortmunder said, and Kelp didn’t say anything.
So they went down the ladder, Kelp first, to find the others at their ease in the hansom cab. Tiny pretty thoroughly occupied the rear-facing front seat, with Stan and the kid opposite. The seats were well-cushioned, to accommodate the needs and expectations of tourists.
Kelp clambered up to the driver’s perch, above and behind the others, not quite so padded, but not bad. Dortmunder stood there, and then the kid said to him, “Grab something and sit.”
“Sure.”
Dortmunder looked around. A motorcycle with a sidecar stood alertly nearby. He rolled it over next to the hansom cab, settled himself into the surprisingly comfortable sidecar, and said, “It looks as though Kelp doesn’t know how to get past that door.” He might be remaining calm, but that didn’t mean he’d forgiven or forgotten.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Kelp said, too absorbed with the problem to take offense. “The only thing I can figure, they’ve gone wireless. And why wouldn’t they? They’ve got TV and the Internet and all that, so why not go wireless?”
The kid said, “Andy? What do we do about it?”
“Nothing,” Kelp said. “If it’s wireless, we’re screwed.”
“Well, that isn’t the only possibility,” Dortmunder said. “We haven’t tried out back yet.”
“I don’t know,” Kelp said. “It’s lookin tight.”
“If this thing isn’t gonna happen,” Tiny said, “it’s time for us to start packing tents.”
“It’s going to happen,” the kid said, suddenly energized. Clambering over the other passengers, he climbed out of the hansom cab and said, “Bring the ladder out back, I’ll climb up it and see what the windows do.”
“They won’t open,” Tiny told him.
But the kid refused to be daunted. “Come on,” he insisted. “Let’s go see what’s what.”
“If we’re gonna keep on with this,” Tiny said, rising from the hansom’s front seat, causing a smallish tremor that rattled Stan around on the backseat like a lone die in a padded cup, “I’ll carry your ladder, kid.”
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