Why Me?

by Donald Westlake

  “If there is a link,” Mologna acknowledged, “which I very much doubt.”

  Zachary said, “What?”

  “It’s Kelp’s foreign associations we’ll have to check into,” Freedly said, making a note.

  Zachary said, “Goddam it.”

  “Link between Dortmunder and international aspect,” Freedly explained.

  “Oh, Kelp!” Zachary said, and immediately leaped on the idea and rode madly off in all directions. “Excellent concept! ‘Kelp, Kelp’ — the name is obviously shortened. He’ll have relatives in the old country. He’s establishing the alibi while Dortmunder’s out pulling the actual job. Ruby–Oswald!”

  “They weren’t linked,” Mologna pointed out.

  “Concept,” Zachary explained. “In the theorizational stage, many linkages were postulated between those two. While they all turned out to be inappropriate in that instance, some of the same theories could very well come into play in this situation.”

  “Why not,” Mologna said. “They’ll work just as well as last time.” He looked up as the door opened: “Yes, Leon?”

  “Captain Cappelletti,” Leon announced. “With that cute little tattletale.”

  “Let’s see them,” Mologna said, and Leon ushered in Tony Cappelletti, shooing ahead of himself Benjamin Arthur Klopzik.

  Who was a changed man. Absolute terror had made him even thinner than before, but with a wiry, tensile strength that was very new. He was still scrawny but, on looking at him, one felt he might be able, like an ant, to lift and carry a crumb seven times his weight. His huge hollow eyes darted this way and that, as though expecting Mologna’s office to be full of his former comrades; they lit with horror and wild surmise when they met the curious gazes of Zachary and Freedly. “Ak!” he said, recoiling into Tony Cappelletti’s chest.

  “These are FBI men, Klopzik,” Mologna said. “Agents Zachary and Freedly. Come on in here and quit foolin around.”

  Hesitantly, Klopzik advanced far enough into the room for Cappelletti also to enter and Leon to shut the door behind them. Then Klopzik stopped and merely waited, blinking.

  “You did fine,” Mologna told him. “We picked up every word. It wasn’t your fault about that goddam CB. You may be happy to hear we towed that son of a bitch’s car away and slapped a reckless drivin charge on him, just to relieve our feelins.”

  “They’re gonna kill me.” Klopzik’s voice sounded like a zipper opening.

  “No, they won’t, Benjy,” Cappelletti said, and told Mologna, “I promised him the protection of the Department.”

  “Well, sure,” Mologna said.

  “But this time,” Cappelletti said, “we really got to do it.”

  Mologna frowned. “What are you tellin me, Tony?”

  “This time,” Cappelletti explained, “we don’t have just one mob or half a dozen ex–partners looking for a guy. Every professional crook in New York is looking for Benjy Klopzik.” (Klopzik groaned.) “If they find him, they’ll never trust the Police Department again.”

  “Ah,” Mologna said. “I see what you mean.”

  Zachary, sitting firmly like an FBI man, said, “Of course, the Bureau has considerable experiential knowledge in this sort of area: new identities, jobs, a new life in a completely different part of the country. We could —”

  “No!” cried Klopzik.

  Mologna looked at him. “You don’t want help?”

  “Not from the FBI! That program of theirs, that’s just a delay of sentence! Everybody the FBI gives a new identity, the first thing you know the guy’s been buried under the new name.”

  “Oh, now,” Zachary said, offended on the Bureau’s behalf. “I’ll admit we’ve had a few problems from time to time, but there’s no point overstating the case.”

  Mologna shook his head, seeing from Klopzik’s anguished face that the little man would not be dissuaded. “All right, Klopzik,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t wanna move out of New York,” Klopzik said, his terror receding. “What are all those other places to me? They don’t even have the subway.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Plastic surgery,” Klopzik said, so promptly that it was clear he’d been thinking about this rather intently. “And a new name, a new identity — driver’s license and all that. And a nice soft job with decent money and not much to do — maybe in the Parks Department. And I can’t go back to my old place, so I need a nice rent–controlled apartment and new furniture and a color TV … and a dishwasher!”

  “Klopzik,” Mologna said, “you want to stay in New York? Right here where they’re lookin for you?”

  “Sure, Francis,” Cappelletti said. “I think it’s an okay idea. This is the last place in the world they’ll expect to find him. Anywhere else, he’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “He is a sore thumb,” Mologna said.

  “I was kinda thinking about making a change anyway,” Klopzik confided to the room at large. “Things were kinda getting out of hand.”

  Mologna considered him. “Is that all?”

  “Yeah,” Klopzik said. “Only, I don’t wanna be a Benjy any more.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I wanna be a, a … Craig!”

  Mologna sighed. “Craig,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Klopzik actually grinned. “Craig Fitzgibbons,” he said.

  Mologna looked at Tony Cappelletti. “Take Mister Fitzgibbons outa here,” he said.

  “Come along, Benjy.”

  “And, and,” Klopzik said, resisting Cappelletti’s tugging hand, staring with wild–eyed hope at Mologna, getting it all out, the whole big, beautiful, suddenly–realizable dream, “and tell the plastic surgeon I wanna look like, like Dustin Hoffman!”

  “Get it outa here,” Mologna told Tony Cappelletti, “or I’ll start the plastic surgery right now.”

  But that was all; Klopzik had shot his wad. Exhausted, satiated, happy, he allowed himself to be led away.

  In the silence following upon Klopzik/Fitzgibbons’ departure, Mologna looked bleakly at Zachary and Freedly and said, “That Dortmunder’s got a lot to answer for.”

  “I’m looking forward to questioning him,” Zachary said, getting the implication wrong.

  “Oh, so am I,” Mologna said.

  Freedly said, “There isn’t any doubt, is there, Chief Inspector?”

  Mologna frowned at him. “Doubt? Dortmunder did it, all right. There’s no doubt.”

  “No, I mean that we’ll get him.”

  Mologna’s heavy mouth opened in a slow smile. “At a rough estimate,” he said, “I would guess there are currently four hundred thousand men, women, and children in the City of New York looking for John Archibald Dortmunder. Don’t worry, Mister Freedly, we’ll get him.”

  Chapter 38

  * * *

  “I’m a dead man,” Dortmunder said.

  “Always the pessimist,” Kelp said.

  Around them hummed thousands — no, millions — of silent conversations, whistling and whispering through the cables; unfaithful husbands making assignations all unknowingly a millimicrometer away from their all–unknowing faithless wives; business deals being closed an eyelash distance from the unsuspecting subjects who’d be ruined by them; truth and lies flashing along cheek by jowl in parallel lanes, never meeting; love and business, play and torment, hope and the end of hope all spun together inside the cables from the teeming telephones of Manhattan. But of all those chattering voices Dortmunder and Kelp heard nothing — only the distant, arrhythmic plink of dripping water.

  They were truly under the city now, burrowed down so far beneath the towers that the occasional rumble of a nearby subway seemed to come from above them. The hunted man, like the hunted animal, when he goes to ground goes under the ground.

  Beneath the City of New York squats another city, mostly nasty, brutish, and short. And dark, and generally wet. The crisscrossing tunnels carry subway trains, commuter trains, long–distance trains,
city water, city sewage, steam, electric lines, telephone lines, natural gas, gasoline, oil, automobiles, and pedestrians. During Prohibition a tunnel from the Bronx to northern Manhattan carried beer. The caverns beneath the city store wine, business records, weapons, Civil Defense equipment, automobiles, building supplies, dynamos, money, water, and gin. Through and around the tunnels and the caverns trickle the remnants of the ancient streams the Indians fished when Manhattan Island was still a part of nature. (As late as 1948, a bone–white living fish was captured in a run–off beneath the basement of a Third Avenue hardware store. It saw daylight for the first time in the last instant of its life.)

  Down into this netherworld Kelp had led Dortmunder, jingling and jangling with his telephones and lines and gizmos, down into an endless round pipe four feet in diameter, running away to infinity in both directions, coated with phone cables but at least dry and equipped with electric lights at regular intervals. One couldn’t stand upright but could sit with some degree of comfort. An adapter on one of the light sockets now serviced an electric heater, so they were warm. After a few errors — disconnecting and disconcerting several thousand callers, who naturally blamed the phone company — Kelp had rigged up a telephone of their own, so they could make contact with the city above. Dortmunder’d made the first call, to May, and Kelp had made the second, to a pizza place that made deliveries — though it had taken a while to convince them to make such a delivery to a street corner. Kelp had persevered, however, and at the agreed–on time had scurried up to ground level, returning with pizza and beer and a newspaper and word that the sky was overcast: “Looks like rain.”

  So they had light, they had heat, they had food and drink and reading matter, they had communication with the outside world; and still Dortmunder was gloomy. “I’m a dead man,” he repeated, brooding at the piece of pizza in his hand. “And I’m already buried.”

  “John, John, you’re safe here.”

  “Forever?”

  “Until we think of something.” Kelp used a fingertip to push pepperoni into his mouth, chewed a while, swigged some beer, and said, “One of us is bound to come up with something. You know we are. We’re both clutch–hitters, John. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

  “Where?”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  “What?”

  “How do I know? We’ll know what it is when we think of it. I tell you what’ll happen: We won’t be able to stand it down here any more, and one of us will think of the solution. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

  “Yeah? Anybody know who the father is?”

  “Errol Flynn,” Kelp said, and chuckled.

  Dortmunder sighed and opened the paper. “If they hadn’t slowed the space program,” he said, “I could of volunteered for a moon shot. Or the space station. That can’t be all scientists and pilots; they’re gonna need somebody to sweep up, polish the windows, empty the wastebaskets.”

  “A custodian,” Kelp said.

  “A janitor.”

  “Actually,” Kelp said, “custodian is more accurate than janitor. They both come from the Latin, you know.”

  Dortmunder paused in turning the pages of the paper. He looked at Kelp without speaking.

  “I’m a reader,” Kelp explained, a bit defensively. “I read a piece about this.”

  “And now you’re gonna tell it to me.”

  “That’s right. Why, you in a hurry to go someplace?”

  “Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Whatever you want.” He looked at the editorial page and saw, without recognizing it, the name Mologna.

  “Janitor,” Kelp told him, “comes from the two–faced Roman god Janus, who was in charge of doorways. So way back in the old days a janitor was a doorkeeper, and over the centuries the job kind of spread. A custodian is from the Latin custodia, meaning to take care of something you’re in charge of. So custodian is better than janitor, especially in a space station. You don’t wanna be doorkeeper in a space station.”

  “I don’t wanna be a squirrel in a tunnel the rest of my life either,” Dortmunder said. Mo–log–na, he thought, and scanned the editorial.

  “Squirrels don’t go in tunnels,” Kelp objected. “Squirrels hang out in trees.”

  “That’s another piece you read?”

  “I just know it. Everybody knows it. In tunnels what you’ve got is rats, mice, moles, worms —”

  “All right,” Dortmunder said.

  “I’m just explaining.”

  “That’s it, that’s all.” Dortmunder put down the paper, picked up the phone, and started to dial. Kelp watched him, frowning, until Dortmunder shook his head, said, “Busy,” and hung up. Then Kelp said, “What is it? Another pizza?”

  “We’re getting out of here,” Dortmunder told him.

  “We are?”

  “Yeah. You were right; there was gonna come a time when one of us couldn’t stand it any more, and he’d think of something.”

  “You thought of something?”

  “I had to,” Dortmunder said, and tried the number again.

  “Tell me.”

  “Wait a minute. May?” Dortmunder whispered again, cupping the mouthpiece, hunching a bit over the phone like a man trying to light a cigarette in a high wind. “It’s me again, May.”

  “You don’t have to whisper,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder shook his head for Kelp to shut up. Still whispering, he said, “You know the thing? That made all the trouble? Don’t say it! Take it with you when you go out tonight.”

  Kelp looked very dubious. Apparently, in Dortmunder’s ear May was also being dubious, because he said, “Don’t worry, May, it’s gonna be all right. At last, it’s gonna be all right.”

  Chapter 39

  * * *

  March is just about the end of the winter frolic season in the northeast quadrant of the United States. In the Sleet & Heat Sports Shoppe on lower Madison Avenue, late that afternoon, the staff was busily stashing its leftover stock of toboggans, ski boots, ice skates, parkas, crutches, and flasks to make room for summer fun equipment — sunburn lotion, chlorine, shark repellent, salt tablets, poison ivy spray, bug killer, arch support sneakers, decorator–designed sweatbands, and T–shirts bearing comical messages — when a clerk named Griswold, a chunky, healthy, wind–burned twentyish sports freak, a sail–boater and a hang–glider, a mountaineer and a cross–country skier, who was only working here anyway for the employee discount and what he could boost, looked out through his bushy red eyebrows and saw two men slinking into the store: old men, maybe even forty, no wind, no legs, no staying power. Midwinter pallor on their drawn faces. Abandoning the display of Ace bandages he’d been setting up, Griswold approached these two, on his face the smile of superior compassionate pity felt toward all losers by all perfect specimens. “Help you, gentlemen?”

  They looked at him as though startled. Then the one with the sharp nose muttered to his friend, “You handle it,” and drifted back to stand by the door, hands in his pockets as he gazed out at the overcast late afternoon and the sidewalks full of people rushing to get indoors before the storm.

  Griswold gave his full alert attention to the one who would handle it, a slope–shouldered, depressed–looking fellow. Whatever sport he was involved with, Griswold thought, it hadn’t done much for him: “Yes, sir?”

  The man put his hand up to his mouth and mumbled something behind it, the meanwhile his eyes flicked this way and that, scanning the store.

  Griswold leaned closer: “Sir?”

  This time the mumble made words, barely audible: “Ski masks.”

  “Ski masks? Ah, skiing! You and your friend there indulge?”

  “Yeah,” the man said.

  “Well, that’s fine. Come right over this way.” Leading the way deeper into the store, past splints and shoulder pads and groin cups, Griswold said, “You must have seen our ad in the paper.”

  “We just happened by,” the man said, still talking into his hand, as th
ough he had a tiny microphone in there.

  “Is that so? Then this is your lucky day, if I may say so.”

  The man looked at him. “Yeah?”

  “We’re in the middle of our end–of–season ski sale.” Griswold beamed happily at his customer. “Fantastic savings, right on down the line.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  The other customer was still back by the door, looking out, and thus was out of earshot, so Griswold concentrated on the bird in hand. “That’s right, sir,” he said. “Now, here, for instance, are these magnificent Head skis. Now, you know how much these little beauties would normally set you back.”