Why Me?

by Donald Westlake

  Freedly, the less assholish FBI man, broke his long silence to say, “Excuse me. TPF?”

  “Tactical Patrol Force,” Mologna told him. “Those are our head–beaters.”

  Freedly frowned. “Crowd control, you mean?”

  Zachary echoed, “Crowd control? Inspector, we aren’t dealing here with dissentation, some sort of anti–this, anti–that demonstration. This is a robber, in a negotiatory posture.”

  Mologna sighed, shook his head, and resigned himself to patience. “Zachary,” he said, “do you know what the West Village is?”

  “A part of Greenwich Village,” Zachary said, frowning sternly. “Of course I know where it is.”

  “Not where. What.” Holding up three fingers, Mologna said, “The West Village is three separate and distinct smalltown communities all existin in the same space at the same time. They are first the ethnic community, which is mostly Italian plus Irish, and which used to be two communities that knifed each other a lot but now they’ve got together against numbers two and three. Two is the artsy–craftsy community, everythin from folk singers and rug hookers and candle dippers to hotshot TV personalities and writers with their own column in the papers. And three is the fag community, which makes Alice in Wonderland look like a documentary. Any time we make an arrest in that area, we run the risk of offendin one or more of those communities, and if we do offend one or more of those communities the TPF comes out and breaks heads until we can retreat back to the United States. You follow me so far?”

  While Zachary merely blinked and nodded, looking forceful though bewildered, Freedly said, “The map is not the terrain.”

  Mologna nodded at him. “You’re right.”

  “Von Clausewitz said that,” Freedly added.

  “He knew his onions.” Mologna turned back to Cappelletti: “What else we got?”

  “A city bus broken down here on Eighth Avenue,” Cappelletti said. “That gives us a driver and two mechanics. Two winos here on Hudson Street, lying in a doorway. Sanitation Department truck here on Bethune, four men, goofing off. Pair of chess players here, at the benches just south of the playground. Little old lady with a lot of shopping bags handing out Jesus Saves pamphlets here at the corner of Bank and Hudson.”

  “Hold on,” Zachary said, hitching up his trousers like an FBI man. “What is all this? Sanitationmen, little old ladies. Who is this little old lady?”

  “He’s a police officer,” Tony Cappelletti said, while Mologna and Leon exchanged a glance. “He’s usually a decoy with the mugging detail. I’ve seen him, Francis,” he added to Mologna, “and he does an old lady so good you wanna ask him to make you an apple pie.”

  Zachary said, “The bus driver, the garbagemen —”

  “Sanitationmen,” Mologna said.

  “They’re all police officers?”

  Even Tony Cappelletti was prepared to exchange a glance with somebody at that one; he exchanged it with Freedly, who said, “If we were doing it, Mac, our people would also be in disguise.”

  “Well, of course they would! The description was just a little confusing, that’s all.” Frowning manfully at the map, Zachary said, “You appear to have the target phone well encircled.”

  “You bet your ass we do,” Mologna told him.

  “That’s fourteen men,” Cappelletti said, “with visual contact on the phone. Plus the TPF in that restaurant, plus two more squads out of sight some distance away — here in a parking garage on Charles Street, and over here in a moving company garage on Washington Street.”

  Leon said, “Ding dong.”

  Everybody turned to look at him. Mologna, not quite believing it, said, “Leon? Was that you?”

  Leon mutely pointed at the big white clock on the wall, and when everybody turned that way they saw the time was precisely ten–thirty. “Okay,” Mologna said. “Unconventional, Leon, but okay.”

  Leon smiled. “I can do a perfect Big Ben, quarter hours and everything.”

  “Later.” Looking around, Mologna said, “Which phone do I use?”

  “This one, Francis.” Cappelletti ushered Mologna to a phone on one of the long tables. Seating himself on a folding chair — it shrieked in agony — Mologna reached for the receiver, poised his finger over the push buttons, then stopped and frowned. “What’s the number?”

  Everybody patted his pockets and it turned out Cappelletti had it, on a crumpled piece of paper, which he smoothed out and placed on the table. Mologna dialed, while one of the black women who’d been sitting around talking about retirement benefits spoke quietly into a microphone, saying, “He’s making the call now.”

  Three miles away, at Abingdon Square, two winos, four sanitationmen, a bus driver, two vendors, two mechanics, a pair of chess players, and a little old lady all tensed, watching and waiting, their attention on a shiny, small telephone–on–a–stalk. Not even an enclosed booth; just a small three–sided box on one leg.

  “It’s ringin,” Mologna said.

  “It isn’t ringing,” the black woman at the microphone said.

  Mologna frowned at her. “No no, I said it is ringin.”

  She shrugged. “The folks on the street say it isn’t ringing.”

  “What?” Mologna said, and a voice in his ear said, “Hello?”

  “Phone ain’t ringing,” the black woman said. “Maybe it’s busted.”

  “But,” Mologna said, and the voice in his ear said, “Hello? Hello?” So he said it right back: “Hello!”

  “Oh, there you are,” the voice said, sounding relieved.

  Mologna said, “And who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m the, uh …” He sounded rather nervous and had to stop to clear his throat. “I’m the guy, you know, the guy … with the, uh, I’m the guy with the thing.”

  “The thing?” Bewildered faces were crowding around Mologna now.

  “Ring. The ring.”

  Zachary said, “Who in God’s name are you talking to?”

  Waving Zachary and everybody else away, Mologna said, “Where are you?”

  “Well, uh … I don’t think I oughta tell you that.”

  The black woman was speaking with muted hysteria into her microphone. Three miles away, the pay phone in question sparkled in morning sunlight, alone, unringing, unoccupied, innocent and virginal. A cocaine salesman drifted slowly by it and repeated the phone’s number aloud to his beer can. Two winos staggered to their feet and stumbled across the square toward the children’s playground. The sanitationmen started their truck engine.

  Mologna said, “God damn you, son of a bitch, what’s goin on here?”

  “It’s the right number,” the black woman said.

  The other black woman, who’d been talking quietly but hurriedly into another phone, now said, “The phone company says the call’s going through.”

  “See,” the voice in Mologna’s ear said, “I just want to give it back, you see what I mean?”

  “Hold on,” Mologna told the phone, cupped the mouthpiece, and glared at the second black woman. “What was that you said?”

  “The phone company says the call’s going through. They say you’re talking to somebody at that pay phone.”

  Three miles away the chess players folded up their unfinished game, while their kibitzers said things like, “Are you crazy? Man, what’s the matter with you? Man, you was three fuckin moves from mate, man.” The pamphlet–distributing little old lady had crossed Hudson Street and now stood directly in front of the phone under surveillance. Two TPF men in uniform, regardless of all subterfuge, stood beefily in the restaurant doorway, hands on hips, and glared out at that subversive telephone.

  The voice in Mologna’s ear continued, even though everybody in the war room was talking at once. “I said hold on!” Mologna yelled into the phone, then yelled at everybody else, “Shut up! Tony, saturate that neighborhood! You, tell that phone company to get its head out of its ass and tell me what’s goin on. You, tell our people on the scene to close in but stay in charac
ter. You, are you recordin this?”

  The white male companion of the two black females nodded his earphoned head.

  “And are we pickin up a voice from the other end?”

  Another nod with earphones.

  “Good,” Mologna said. “Otherwise, I’d think I was doin a Joan of Arc.” Into the phone, he said, “Let me tell you somethin, smart boy.”

  “I thought maybe we could nego —”

  “Just shut up and listen to me. Negotiate with you?” Cappelletti tapped Mologna’s shoulder, but Mologna angrily shrugged him away. “Deal with you, you son of a bitch? I wouldn’t disgrace my vocal cords doin deals with you.” Cappelletti tapped Mologna’s shoulder more urgently, and this time Mologna swung his arm around to shove the other man away, meantime yelling into the phone, “I’m goin to get you, you wise–ass bastard, and let me tell you this. When I get my hands on you, you’ll fall downstairs for a month!” Slamming the phone down into its cradle, ignoring the voice’s feeble, “But —” Mologna spun around to glare at Cappelletti: “And what did you want to say, that couldn’t wait?”

  Cappelletti sighed: “Keep him on the line,” he said.

  Chapter 30

  * * *

  “You see,” Andy Kelp had explained to Dortmunder before the event, “with the phone company’s own phone–ahead gizmo, you have to use their equipment and go through the operator every time you want to use it. But this one is from West Germany — see what it says on the bottom? — and with this one you just set these dials here to the number where you’re gonna be, you plug it into the jack where your phone line goes, then plug the phone in on the other side here, and it does the phone–ahead thing without bothering the operator or anybody at all.”

  “But,” Dortmunder had pointed out, “pay phones don’t have jacks.”

  “They got a phone line coming in. And this gizmo, made in Japan, these little prongs squeeze down into the line and make contact, so you can set up a jack anywhere you want on any phone line in the city.”

  “It sounds awful chancy,” Dortmunder had said. “Where do we make this thing phone ahead to?”

  “Another pay phone.”

  “Fine,” Dortmunder had said. “So I’m standing there at this second pay phone, and one of the bozos they’ve got on stakeout reads the phone–ahead number on the little Kraut gizmo you’ve got stuck into your little Jap gizmo stuck into the first pay phone, and then they come to phone number two and they arrest me. And probably, because they’re a little annoyed at all the trouble they’re going through, they have to work very hard to subdue me.”

  “Well, no,” Kelp had said. “Because you aren’t going to be at that second pay phone either.”

  “I’m going crazy,” Dortmunder had said. “Where the hell am I, some third pay phone? How many of these phone–ahead gizmos you got?”

  “No more pay phones,” Kelp had promised. “John, think about the city of New York.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s our territory, John, so let’s use it. And what’s one of the main things about this territory?”

  “No question–answer,” Dortmunder had said, squeezing his beer can so that beer slopped out onto his fingers. “Just tell your story.”

  “People move,” Kelp had told him. “They move all the time — uptown, downtown, across town —”

  “Outa town.”

  “Right. And back into town. And every time they move they get a telephone. And they always want it someplace different from the last tenant. Not the kitchen, the bedroom. Not the living room, the —”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “The point is, this city is overrun with unused telephone lines. You spend a lot of time in back yards and fire escapes yourself, didn’t you ever notice all those phone lines?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they’re there. So what we do, our second pay phone is in Brooklyn. Indoors. In a bar or a drugstore or a hotel lobby, someplace where I can get at the phone line coming in. Then I put another of these Japanese prong gizmos on that line, and I run a line of my own to an unused phone line and from there anywhere in the neighborhood: a basement, a closet, an empty apartment, whatever’s handy. And that’s where you take the call, on a phone we’ll bring in ourselves; so as far as the phone company’s concerned that phone doesn’t even exist! That second pay phone will ring just once, but your phone’ll ring too, and right away you answer. Nobody answers a pay phone that rings just once, so you’ll have privacy.”

  Dortmunder had scratched the side of his jaw, frowning deeply. “We’re three phones down the line now. Why all the complication?”

  “Time. They stake out that first phone. You start to talk, they go crazy. After a while they find my phone–ahead gizmo, maybe you’re still on the line, still negotiating. They check with the phone company, they get the address on phone number two, now they got to rush down to Brooklyn, stake it out, approach it very carefully, go crazy all over again. And we’re where we can see them, and we got time to end the call and go away before they find the new line leading to the unused line leading to us.”

  “Christ on a crutch,” Dortmunder had said.

  “Number A,” Kelp had pointed out, “you got no alternative. Number B, this’ll work, guaranteed.”

  And so it did, right on down to the question of negotiation. The phone had rung, just once, and Dortmunder had picked it up and started talking, and he was just getting over his nervousness, sitting there in the for–rent empty apartment over the delicatessen (Pay Phone Inside) on Ocean Bay Boulevard, with Kelp at the front window watching the street for cops, when all of a sudden this guy on the other end of the phone, Maloney, started a lot of yelling and screaming in Dortmunder’s ear, culminating in an unnecessarily loud click, and then a lot of silence.

  “Hello?” Dortmunder said. “Hello?”

  Kelp wandered over from the window: “What’s wrong?”

  “He hung up on me.”

  “He couldn’t.” Kelp frowned, gazing into the middle distance. “Could my phone system break down somewhere?”

  Dortmunder shook his head, and hung up the phone. “It could,” he said, “I know damn well it could, but it didn’t. Maloney did it himself. He said he wouldn’t deal with me. He said he was gonna catch me, and I was gonna fall downstairs for a month.”

  “He said that?”

  “He sounded a lot like Tiny Bulcher, only angry.”

  Kelp nodded. “It’s a challenge,” he said. “The good guys against the bad guys, with a challenge and a dare and the gauntlet thrown and all like that. Like in Batman.”

  “In Batman,” Dortmunder pointed out, “the bad guys lose.”

  Kelp looked at him in astonishment. “We aren’t the bad guys, John,” he said. “We’re trying to correct a simple, honest mistake, that’s all. We’re rescuing the Byzantine Fire for the American people. And the Turkish people. We’re the good guys.”

  Dortmunder contemplated that idea.

  “Come on,” Kelp said. “The bad guys’ll show up any minute.”

  “Right.” Dortmunder stood up from the stack of newspapers he’d been using for a chair — the apartment’s only furnishing — then looked at the phone on the floor. “What about that?”

  Kelp shrugged it off. “A standard desk–type black telephone? Who’d want a thing like that? Wipe off your fingerprints and leave it.”

  Chapter 31

  * * *

  Kenneth (“Call me Ken”) Albemarle was a Commissioner, it hardly mattered of what. In his calm but successful career he had been, among other things, Commissioner of Public Sanitation in Buffalo, New York; Fire Commissioner in Houston, Texas; Commissioner of Schools in Bismarck, North Dakota; and Water Commissioner in Muscatine, Iowa. He was well qualified to be a Commissioner, with a B.A. in Municipal Administration, an M.S. in Governmental Studies and an M.A. in Public Relations, plus inherent talent and a deep–grained awareness of what the job of Commissioner actually meant. The Commissioner’s purpose
, he knew, was to calm people down. With his excellent employment history and fine academic background, plus his appearance — at 41 he was trim, dark–haired, and businesslike, showing the relaxed self–assurance of a high school basketball coach with a winning team — Ken Albemarle could calm down a roomful of orangutans, if necessary, and once or twice he’d proved it.

  At the moment he was employed by the City of New York as, um, um, Police Commissioner, and right now he was being called upon to calm down two irate FBI men named Fracharly and Zeedy, who had entered his office shortly before eleven a.m. and now sat across the desk from him absolutely ruby with rage. That is, Fracharly was ruby with rage; Zeedy appeared to be snowy with shock.