The Hot Rock

by Donald E. Westlake

  The great mahogany door opened and the Major’s secretary, a slender, discreet ebony young man whose spectacles reflected the light, came in and said, “Sir, two gentlemen to see you. Mr. Kelp and another man.”

  “Show them in.”

  “Yes, sir.” The secretary backed out.

  The Major closed the dossier and put it away in a desk drawer. He then got to his feet and smiled with bland geniality at the two white men walking toward him across the great expanse of Oriental rug. “Mr. Kelp,” he said. “How good to see you again.”

  “Nice to see you too, Major Iko,” Kelp said. “This here is John Dortmunder, the fellow I told you about.”

  “Mr. Dortmunder.” The Major bowed slightly. “Won’t you both be seated?”

  They all sat down, and the Major studied this man Dortmunder. It was always fascinating to see a man in the flesh after having known him only as a dossier, words typed on sheets of paper in a manila folder, photostats of documents, newspaper clippings, photos. Here was the man that dossier had attempted to describe. How close had it come?

  In terms of facts, Major Iko knew quite a bit about John Archibald Dortmunder. He knew that Dortmunder was thirty-seven years of age, that he had been born in a small town in central Illinois, that he had grown up in an orphanage, that he had served in the United States Army in Korea during the police action there but had been on the other side of the cops-and-robbers game ever since, and that he had twice been in prison for robbery, the second term having ended with a parole just this morning. He knew that Dortmunder had been arrested several other times in robbery investigations, but that none of those other arrests had stuck. He knew that Dortmunder had never been arrested for any other crime, and that there didn’t even appear to be any rumors concerning any murders, arsons, rapes, or kidnappings that he might have performed. And he knew that Dortmunder had been married in San Diego in 1952 to a night-club entertainer named Honeybun Bazoom, from whom he had won an uncontested divorce in 1954.

  What did the man himself show? He was sitting now in the direct sunlight streaming in the park-view windows, and what he looked mostly like was a convalescent. A little gray, a little tired, face a little lined, thin body rather frail-looking. His suit was obviously new and obviously the cheapest quality made. His shoes were obviously old but had obviously cost quite a bit when new. The clothing indicated a man who had been used to living well but for whom times had recently turned bad. Dortmunder’s eyes, as they met the Major’s, were flat, watchful, unexpressive. A man who would keep his own counsel, the Major thought, and a man who would make his decisions slowly and then stand by them.

  And stand by his word? The Major thought it worth taking the chance. He said, “Welcome back to the world, Mr. Dortmunder. I imagine freedom feels sweet right now.”

  Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other.

  The Major smiled and said, “Mr. Kelp didn’t tell me.”

  “I know,” Dortmunder said. “You been checking up on me.”

  “Naturally,” the Major said. “Wouldn’t you, in my position?”

  “Maybe I ought to check up on you,” Dortmunder said.

  “Perhaps you should,” the Major said. “They’d be happy to tell you about me at the UN. Or call your own State Department, I’m sure they have a file on me over there.”

  Dortmunder shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What did you find out about me?”

  “That I can probably take a chance on you. Mr. Kelp tells me you make good plans.”

  “I try to.”

  “What happened the last time?”

  “Something went wrong,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp, rushing to his friend’s defense, said, “Major, it wasn’t his fault, it was just rotten luck. He had it figured for—”

  “I’ve read the report,” the Major told him. “Thank you.” To Dortmunder he said, “It was a good plan, and you did run into bad luck, but I’m pleased to see you don’t waste time justifying yourself.”

  “I can’t play it over again,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s talk about this emerald of yours.”

  “Let’s. Can you get it?”

  “I don’t know. How much help can you give us?”

  The Major frowned. “Help? What kind of help?”

  “We’ll probably need guns. Maybe a car or two, maybe a truck, depending on how the job works up. We might need some other stuff.”

  “Oh, yes,” the Major said. “I could supply any material you might need, certainly.”

  “Good.” Dortmunder nodded and pulled a crumpled pack of Camels from his pocket. He lit a cigarette and leaned forward to drop the match in the ashtray on the Major’s desk. “About money,” he said. “Kelp tells me it’s thirty gee a man.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars, yes.”

  “No matter how many men?”

  “Well,” the Major said, “there should be some sort of limit on it. I wouldn’t want you enlisting an army.”

  “What’s the limit?”

  “Mr. Kelp spoke of five men.”

  “All right. That’s a hundred fifty gee. What if we do it with less men?”

  “It would still be thirty thousand dollars a man.”

  Dortmunder said, “Why?”

  “I wouldn’t want to encourage you,” the Major said, “to attempt the robbery with too few men. So it will be thirty thousand per man no matter how many or how few men are involved.”

  “Up to five.”

  “If you tell me six are absolutely necessary, I will pay for six.”

  Dortmunder nodded. He said, “Plus expenses.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This is going to be a full-time job for maybe a month, maybe six weeks,” Dortmunder said. “We need money to live on.”

  “You mean you want an advance on the thirty thousand.”

  “No. I mean I want expense money over and above the thirty thousand.”

  The Major shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t the agreement. Thirty thousand dollars a man, and that’s all.”

  Dortmunder got to his feet and stubbed out the Camel in the Major’s ashtray. It smoldered. Dortmunder said, “See you around,” and, “Come on, Kelp,” and started for the door.

  The Major couldn’t believe it. He called, “Are you going?”

  Dortmunder turned at the door and looked at him. “Yeah.”

  “But why?”

  “You’re too cheap. You’d make me nervous to work for you. I’d come to you for a gun, you wouldn’t want to give me more than one bullet.” Dortmunder reached for the doorknob.

  The Major said, “Wait.”

  Dortmunder waited, hand on knob.

  The Major thought fast, adding up budgets. “I’ll give you one hundred dollars a week per man living expenses,” he said.

  “Two hundred,” Dortmunder said. “Nobody can live in New York City on one hundred a week.”

  “One-fifty,” the Major said.

  Dortmunder hesitated, and the Major could see him trying to decide whether or not to hold out for the full amount.

  Kelp, who’d just been sitting there all this time, said, “That’s a fair price, Dortmunder. What the hell, it’s only for a few weeks.”

  Dortmunder shrugged and took his hand off the knob. “All right,” he said. He came back and sat down. “What can you tell me about how this emerald’s guarded and where it’s kept?”

  A wavering thin ribbon of smoke extended up from the smoldering Camel, as though tiny Cherokees had set up a campfire in the ashtray. The line was directly between the Major and Dortmunder, making him feel crosseyed when he tried to focus on Dortmunder’s face. But he was too proud either to stub out the cigarette or move his head, so he squinted one eye half shut and went on to answer Dortmunder’s questions:

  “All I know is, the Akinzi have it very well guarded. I’ve tried to learn the details, how many guards and so on, but they are being kept secret.”

  “But it’s in the Coliseum now.
”

  “Yes. Part of the Akinzi exhibit.”

  “All right. We’ll go take a look at it. Where do we get our money?”

  The Major looked blank. “Your money?”

  “This week’s hundred fifty.”

  “Oh.” It was all happening a little too fast. “I’ll call our finance office downstairs. You can stop in there on your way out.”

  “Good.” Dortmunder got to his feet, and a second later so did Kelp. Dortmunder said, “I’ll get in touch with you if I need anything.”

  The Major was sure of that.

  5

  “Doesn’t look much like half a million bucks to me,” Dortmunder said.

  “Just so it’s thirty thousand,” Kelp said. “Each.”

  The emerald, many-faceted, deeply green, a little smaller than a golf ball, nested in a small white trivet on a cloth of red satin on a table completely enclosed in glass, all four sides and the top. The glass cube was about six feet square and seven feet high, and at a distance of about five feet out from it a red velvet rope looped from stanchions to make a larger square to keep the gawkers at a safe distance. At each corner of this larger square, just inside the rope, stood a colored guard in a dark blue uniform with a holstered gun on his hip. A small sign on a one-legged stand like a music stand said BALABOMO EMERALD in capital letters and gave the stone’s history, the dates and names and places.

  Dortmunder studied the guards. They looked bored, but not sleepy. He studied the glass, and it had the slightly olive look of glass with a lot of metal in it. Bulletproof, shatterproof, burglarproof. The edges of the glass cube were lined with strips of chromed steel and so was the line where the glass met the floor.

  They were on the second floor of the Coliseum, the ceiling about thirty feet above their heads, a balcony overlooking the floor on three sides. The Pan-African Culture and Art Exhibit was spread throughout all four display floors, with the main attractions here on the second floor. The high ceiling bounced back a general stirring of sound as people shuffled by the exhibits.

  Akinzi not being a very large or important African nation, it wasn’t out in the very middle of the floor, but the Balabomo Emerald being considered an impressive stone, it wasn’t shoved back against a wall or up onto the fourth floor either. It stood in a fairly exposed position, miles from any exit.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Dortmunder said.

  “Me too,” said Kelp.

  They left the Coliseum and went across Columbus Circle and into Central Park. They took a path that headed for the lake and Dortmunder said, “That would be tough, taking it out of there.”

  “Yeah, it would,” said Kelp.

  “I wonder maybe we should wait till it goes on the road,” Dortmunder said.

  “That won’t be for a while yet,” said Kelp. “Iko won’t like us sitting around doing nothing at a hundred fifty bucks a week per man.”

  “Forget Iko,” Dortmunder said. “If we do this thing, I’m the one in charge. I’ll handle Iko, don’t worry about it.”

  “Sure, Dortmunder,” said Kelp. “Anything you say.”

  They walked on over to the lake and sat on a bench there. It was June and Kelp watched the girls walk by. Dortmunder sat looking at the lake.

  He didn’t know about this caper, he didn’t know whether he liked it or not. He liked the idea of the guaranteed return, and he liked the idea of the small easily transported object of the heist, and he was pretty sure he could keep Iko from causing any trouble, but on the other hand he had to be careful. He’d fallen twice now, it wouldn’t be a good thing to fall again. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life eating prison food.

  So what didn’t he like? Well, for one thing, they were going after an item valued at half a million dollars, and it only stood to reason an item valued at half a million dollars was going to get some pretty heavy guarding. It wasn’t going to be easy to get that rock away from the Akinzi. The four guards, the bulletproof glass, that was probably only the beginning of the defenses.

  For another thing, if they did manage to get away with the stone, they could count on very heavy police activity. The cops would be likely to spend considerably more time and energy tracking down the people who stole a half-million-dollar emerald than going after somebody who copped a portable television set. There would also be insurance dicks all over the place, and sometimes they were worse than the cops.

  And finally, how did he know Iko could be trusted? There was something just a little too smooth about that bird.

  He said, “What do you think of Iko?”

  Kelp, surprised, looked away from the girl in the green stockings and said, “He’s okay, I guess. Why?”

  “You think he’ll pay up?”

  Kelp laughed. “Sure he’ll pay up,” he said. “He wants the emerald, he has to pay up.”

  “What if he doesn’t? We wouldn’t find any buyer anywhere else.”

  “Insurance company,” Kelp said promptly. “They’d pay a hundred fifty gee for a half-million-dollar rock any day.”

  Dortmunder nodded. “Maybe,” he said, “that would be the better system anyway.”

  Kelp didn’t get it. “What would?” he said.

  “We let Iko finance the job,” Dortmunder said. “But when we get the emerald we sell it to the insurance company instead.”

  “I don’t like that,” Kelp said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he knows who we are,” Kelp said, “and if this emerald is this big symbolic thing for the people in his country, they could get awful upset if we cop it for ourselves, and I don’t want some whole African country out to get me, money or no money.”

  “Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Okay. We’ll see how it plays.”

  “A whole country out to get me,” Kelp said and shivered. “I wouldn’t like that.”

  “All right.”

  “Blow guns and poison arrows,” Kelp said and shivered again.

  “I think they’re more modern now,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp looked at him. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? Tommy guns and airplanes.”

  “All right,” Dortmunder said. “All right.” To change the subject, he said, “Who do you think we should bring in with us?”

  “The rest of the team?” Kelp shrugged. “I dunno. What kind of guys do we need?”

  “It’s hard to say.” Dortmunder frowned at the lake, ignoring a girl going by in a tiger-stripe leotard. “No specialists,” he said, “except maybe a lockman. But nobody for safes, nothing like that.”

  “We want five or six?”

  “Five,” Dortmunder said. He announced one of the rules he lived by: “If you can’t do a job with five men, you can’t do it at all.”

  “Okay,” said Kelp. “So we’ll want a driver, and a lockman, and a utility outfielder.”

  “Right,” said Dortmunder. “For the lockman, there was that little guy in Des Moines. You know the one I mean?”

  “Something like Wise? Wiseman? Welsh?”

  “Whistler!” said Dortmunder.

  “That’s it!” said Kelp and shook his head. “He’s in stir. They got him for letting a lion loose.”

  Dortmunder turned his head away from the lake and looked at Kelp. “They did what?”

  Kelp shrugged. “Don’t blame me,” he said. “That’s just what I heard. He took his kids to the zoo, he got bored, he started to play around with the locks kind of absentminded, like you or me might doodle, and the first thing you know he let a lion loose.”

  “That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

  “Don’t blame me,” Kelp said. Then he said, “What about Chefwick? You know him?”

  “The railroad nut. He’s crazy out of his head.”

  “But he’s a great lockman,” Kelp said. “And he’s available.”

  “Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Give him a call.”

  “I will.” Kelp watched two girls in various shades of green and gold go by. “Now we need a driver,” he said.


  “How about Lartz? Remember him?”

  “Forget him,” Kelp said. “He’s in the hospital.”

  “Since when?”

  “A couple weeks ago. He ran into a plane.”

  Dortmunder gave him a long slow look. “He did what?”

  “It ain’t my fault,” Kelp said. “The way I heard it, he was at the wedding of some cousin of his out on the Island, he was coming back into town, he took the Van Wyck Expressway the wrong way by mistake, the first thing he knew he was out to Kennedy Airport. He was a little drunk, I guess, and—”

  “Yeah,” Dortmunder said.

  “Yeah. And he got confused by the signs, and he wound up on taxiway seventeen and he ran into this Eastern Airlines plane that just come up from Miami.”

  “Taxiway seventeen,” Dortmunder said.

  “That’s what I heard,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder pulled out his Camels and stuck one thoughtfully in his face. He offered the pack to Kelp, but Kelp shook his head and said, “I gave them up. Those cancer commercials got to me.”

  Dortmunder paused with the cigarettes held out in mid-air. He said, “Cancer commercials.”

  “Sure. On television.”

  “I haven’t seen any television in four years,” Dortmunder said.

  “You missed something,” Kelp said.

  “Apparently I did,” Dortmunder said. “Cancer commercials.”

  “That’s right. Scare the life out of you. Wait till you see one.”

  “Yeah,” Dortmunder said. He put the pack away and lit the cigarette in his face. “About a driver,” he said. “Did you hear about anything odd happening to Stan Murch lately?”

  “Stan? No. What happened?”

  Dortmunder looked at him again. “I was asking you.”

  Kelp shrugged in bewilderment. “Last I heard he was fine,” he said.