She raised her eyes heavenward, and shook her head: Men; they’re all babies. It was as efficient as speech.
“No, honest, Sister, I did.” Old habits die hard; seeing the old habit of the nunnery, Dortmunder immediately started making excuses. “It’s all swole already,” he said, and shifted around precariously to give her a better look. “See?”
She frowned at him. Braced on the fourth step of the ladder, she raised the dangling end of her wooden-beaded sash and pointed at the crucifix on the end of it while raising her eyebrows in his direction: Are you Catholic?
“Well, uh, Sister,” he said, “I’m kind of, uh, fallen away.” He lowered his gaze, abashed, and looked at that stone floor way down there. “In a manner of speaking,” he said.
Again she shook her head, and let the crucifix drop. Coming up two rungs, she reached out and grabbed his right wrist—God, her hand was bony!—and gave it a yank. “Holy shit!” Dortmunder said, and she stared at him in wide-eyed disapproval. “I mean,” he said, “I mean, uh, what I meant—”
An eyes-closed brisk headshake: Oh, forget that. Another tug on his wrist: Let’s move it, fella.
“Well, okay,” Dortmunder said. “I hope you know what we’re doing.”
She did. She treated him like a collie bringing home a particularly stupid sheep at the end of the day, as limb by limb she transferred him off the beam and onto the ladder, where he clung a moment, half-relieved and half-terrified, covered with sweat. More vibration meant that his short-tempered benefactress was hurrying back down the ladder, so it was time to follow, which he did.
Awkwardly. His left ankle absolutely refused to support any weight at all, so Dortmunder hopped his way to the ground, holding on to the sides of the aluminum ladder with fingers so tense they left creases. Left leg stuck out and back at an awkward angle that made him look as though he were imitating some obscure wading bird from the Everglades, he went bounce-bounce-bounce all the way down on his right foot, and when he finally got to the bottom a whole lot of nuns reached over one another’s shoulders to push him backwards into a wheelchair they’d just brought in for the purpose.
Dortmunder’s fierce friend from the top of the ladder stood in front of him, gazing severely down at him, while all the other nuns hovered around, watching with a great deal of interest. This one must be the Chief Sister or Mother Superior or whatever they called it. She pointed at Dortmunder, then pointed at herself, then pointed to her mouth. Dortmunder nodded: “I get it. You’re all of you, uh, whatever. You can’t talk.”
Headshake. Hand waggled negatively back and forth. Disapproving scowl. Dortmunder said, “You can talk?”
Nods, lots of nods, all around. Dortmunder nodded back, but he didn’t get it. “You can talk, but you won’t talk. If you say so.”
The wiry little boss nun clutched her earlobe, then suddenly did a vicious right-hand punch in midair, a really solid right hook. She looked at Dortmunder, who looked back. She sighed in exasperation, shook her head, and went through it all over again: tug on right earlobe and punch the air, this punch even stronger than the first; Dortmunder believed he could feel its breeze on his face. As he sat there in the metal-armed wheelchair, frowning, wondering what in hell this old vulture was up to, she glowered at him and tugged her earlobe so hard it looked as though she’d pull it right off.
Parties. Dortmunder’s head lifted as a memory came to him. Party games, he’d seen people do—He said, “Cha-rades?”
A great heaving relieved nod flooded the room; the nuns all smiled at him. The head nun did one last earlobe tug and punched the air one more time, and then stood there with her hands on her hips, staring at him, waiting.
“Sounds,” Dortmunder said, the rules of the game vaguely floating in his head. “Sounds like. Sounds like punch? Like lunch, you mean.”
They all shook their heads.
“Not lunch? Munch, maybe.” (The lost caviar was influencing him.)
Everybody vehemently shook their heads. The boss did the charade all over again, more irritably and violently than ever, this time punching her right fist smack into her left palm with all her might. Then she stood there, shaking her left hand, and waited.
“Not punch at all,” Dortmunder decided. “Sock?” No. Well, that was just as well. “Hit? Bang? Crash? Pow? Thud?”
No, no, they all semaphored, waving their arms. Go back one.
“Pow?”
Many many nods. Several of the nuns did quick charades with one another and silently laughed; talking about him.
“Sounds like pow.” Dortmunder thought it over, and saw only one way to handle the situation. He said, “Bow? Cow? Dow? Fow?” The look they gave him when he said fow made him skip gow. “How?”
Several of the nuns were pointing at the floor or stooping down. Dortmunder said, “Start at the other end of the alphabet?” and they smiled in agreement and relief, and he said, “Zow? Yow? Wow? Vow?”
That was it! Thousands of fingers pointed at him in triumph. “Vow,” Dortmunder repeated.
The head nun smiled, and spread her hands: There. That’s the story.
“I don’t get it,” Dortmunder said.
A collective sigh went up, the first sound he’d heard from this crowd. While the rest of the nuns all raised their eyebrows at one another, the boss put her finger to her lips, then cupped her hand around her ear and leaned forward to make a big dumb-show of listening.
“Sure,” Dortmunder agreed. “It’s real quiet. When you’ve got nobody talking, that’s how it gets.”
The nun shook her head, did the dumb-show again, and spread her hands: Get it, idiot?
“Oh, it’s a clue.” Dortmunder leaned forward, holding the wheelchair arms. “What is it, like, sounds like quiet? Riot. Diet. No? Oh, you mean quiet. Something like quiet. A different word like quiet. Well, I mean, when it’s real quiet, it’s like, you know, it’s quiet, you can’t hear anything, you like it when it’s quiet at night, things get very quiet, you want some other word like quiet, when it’s quiet, when there’s no horns or anything, it’s real quiet and—I’m thinking! I’m doing my best!”
Still they glowered at him, hands on hips. “Gee whiz,” Dortmunder said, “I’m new to this, you people do it all the time. And I just had a bad fall, and—All right, all right, I’m thinking.”
Hunched in the wheelchair, not speaking, he thought and thought and thought. “Well, there’s always silence,” he said, “but beyond that I can’t—Oh! It’s silence!”
Yes! They all pretended to applaud, nearly clapping their hands together. Then more and more of them switched over to a pointing thing. Point here, then point there. Point here, then point there.
Dortmunder was getting into the swing of it now, gaining confidence from his successes. “I get it,” he said. “Put the two things together. Vow. Silence. Vow. Silence.” He nodded, and then he did get it, and loudly he said, “A vow of silence! You got a—One of those religious things, a vow of silence!”
Yes! They were delighted with his accomplishment, if he’d been a Maypole they’d have danced around him. A vow of silence!
Dortmunder spread his hands. “Why didn’t you just write that, on a piece of paper?”
They all stopped their silent congratulations, and looked briefly puzzled. A few of them plucked at their skirts or sleeves to call attention to their habits, suggesting it was just habit, but the chief nun stared at Dortmunder, then reached into her garments and came out with a three-by-five notepad and a ballpoint pen. She wrote briskly, tore off the note, and handed it to Dortmunder.
Can you read?
“Oh, now,” Dortmunder said. “No need to insult me.”
4
Mother Mary Forcible and Sister Mary Serene wrote notes back and forth with the speed of long practice. Here in the tiny cluttered office of the convent, with its barred window viewing Vestry Street, they sat on opposite sides of Mother Mary Forcible’s large desk, shoving their notes at each other with increasing vehemence.
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We want Sister Mary Grace back!
God will show us the way.
He showed us last night, in the chapel!
We shall not consort with robbers and thieves.
Our Lord and Savior did!
Get thee behind me, Satan!
It went on like that, the torn-off pieces of notepad piling up on both sides of the desk, until Sister Mary Capable stuck her head in the office door and rested her cheek on her pressed-together hands, eyes closed: Our guest is still asleep.
Mother Mary Forcible looked at the old Regulator clock on the wall; nearly seven. The sun was long since up, breakfast finished, Mass attended, floors scrubbed. Shaking her head, she looked at Sister Mary Capable and snapped her fingers forcefully: Get the lazy lout up. Sister Mary Capable smiled and nodded and left.
Meantime, Sister Mary Serene had clearly decided on a new tactic. Scrabbling through the scumble of used notes, she smoothed out one of her very first and pushed it across at Mother Mary Forcible:
We want Sister Mary Grace back!
Mother Mary Forcible wrote: Of course we do. Prayer and contemplation will lead us to the way.
Instead of writing further, however, Sister Mary Serene merely pushed the first note over again: We want Sister Mary Grace back!
I never denied that!
We want Sister Mary Grace back!
Please don’t be boring, Sister Mary Serene.
We want Sister Mary Grace back!
Do you wish to encourage crime?
We want Sister Mary Grace back!
You’re as bad as I am!
Sister Mary Serene looked so cherubic and round-cheeked when she smiled. Nodding, she pointed yet again at that same unrelenting message. Mother Mary Forcible sat back, bony fingertips absentmindedly patting the surface of her desk, and brooded.
It was true the entire convent, every member of the Silent Sisterhood of St. Filumena, had been praying night and day for guidance and aid with this Sister Mary Grace problem, and it was equally true the convent had never before in its history had a burglar in the chapel rafters; but could the one actually have much to do with the other? Sister Mary Serene, having been the first to discover the fellow and therefore having an understandable feeling of proprietorship toward him, quite naturally argued that here at last was God’s instrument, but Mother Mary Forcible remained a skeptic. While certainly many of God’s messengers and instrumentalities over the ages had been unlikely sorts, it was even more certain that most crooks were merely crooks, without much of good or God about them.
On the other hand, the customs of a lifetime are hard to resist. Through almost her entire adult life, Mother Mary Forcible had kept her back firmly turned toward the outer world, had limited her temporal existence to this building, this group of women and this rule of silence, which the sisters were permitted to break only for two hours every Thursday. Her attention and desires had been exclusively directed Upward, relying upon the efficacy of prayer and the mercy of the Creator to answer every need. But with a problem as worldly as that posed by Sister Mary Grace, was it possible that a solution equally worldly was the answer?
Movement in the doorway distracted Mother Mary Forcible from her thoughts and, speak of the devil, here was the miscreant himself, left foot swathed in white bandages, Sister Mary Chaste’s cane in his left hand and a mug of Sister Mary Lucid’s coffee in his right. His hangdog expression was as it had been, and being unshaven had not at all increased the aspect of reliability in his countenance. “I’m supposed to come to the office,” he muttered, exactly like some Peck’s bad boy caught smoking in the lavatory.
If Mother Mary Forcible had wanted to teach grammar school, there were plenty of orders she could have joined. With an exasperated look at Sister Mary Serene, who was beaming at the fellow as proudly as though she’d invented him, she gestured briskly for him to sit in the chair to the left of the desk, which he did, putting one dirty-nailed hand on the desktop as he made a kind of Humphrey Bogart twitch around the mouth and said, “I can explain, uh, about last night.”
Mother Mary Forcible was already dashing off her first note, and pushing it across to him: You’re a burglar.
He looked pained. “Oh, now,” he said, but the second note was already well under way. He smiled back tentatively at Sister Mary Serene, then read note number two:
We didn’t turn you in to the police at the other end of the block last night. We could have.
“Oh,” he said. “Police at the other end of the block, uh huh. You figure I, uh …”
Mother Mary Forcible looked at him.
“Well,” he said, and shrugged, and sighed, and thought it over. “Uh, thanks,” he said.
Mother Mary Forcible had the next note all ready; she slid it across the desk.
Possibly you can help us in return.
He frowned, studied the note, turned it over to read the blank back, shook his head. Then he stared around the office, looking for something, saying, “What, you got a safe you can’t open or something?”
Too bad this wasn’t Thursday; it took an awfully long time to explain the situation.
5
Andy Kelp let himself into the apartment with a credit card, looked into the living room at Dortmunder and May, and said, “It’s just me. Don’t get up.” Then he went on to the kitchen and got a beer. A wiry, bright-eyed, sharp-nosed man, he looked around the kitchen with the quick interested manner of a bird landing on a berry bush. An assortment of gourmet crackers were arranged on a plate on the kitchen table. Kelp took one with sesame seeds, washed it down with beer, and went back to the living room, where May was lighting a fresh cigarette from the tiny ember of the previous butt and Dortmunder was sitting with his bandaged foot on the coffee table. “How you doing?” he said.
“Terrific,” Dortmunder told him, but it sounded like irony.
May dropped the sputtering ember in the ashtray and talked through fresh smoke: “I wish you’d ring the doorbell like everybody else, Andy,” she said. “What if we’d been in a tender moment?”
“Huh,” Kelp said. “That didn’t even occur to me.”
“Thanks a lot,” Dortmunder said. He didn’t seem to be in the best of moods.
Kelp explained to May, “On the phone, John said he hurt his foot, and I didn’t know if you were home, so I figured I’d save him walking to the door.” To Dortmunder, he said, “What did happen to your foot?”
“He fell off a roof,” May said.
“Jumped off,” Dortmunder corrected.
“Sorry I couldn’t come along last night,” Kelp told him. “Did O’Hara work out?”
“Up to a point.”
“What point?”
“The point where he was arrested.”
“Whoops,” Kelp said. “And he just got out of the slammer, too.”
“Maybe he can get his old room back.”
Kelp drank beer and pondered briefly on the accidents of fate that had led to his place being taken last night by Jim O’Hara. There but for the grace of God, and all that. He said, “Where were you while O’Hara was being arrested?”
“Jumping off the roof.”
“Falling off,” May corrected.
Dortmunder ignored that. “I spent the night in a convent,” he said.
Kelp didn’t quite get the joke, but he smiled anyway. “Okay,” he said.
“The nuns bandaged his foot,” May said, “and loaned him a cane.”
“They got this vow of silence,” Dortmunder explained, “so there’s no phone, so I couldn’t call May and tell her not to worry.”
“So naturally, I worried,” May said.
Kelp said, “Wait a minute. You spent the night in a convent?”
“I already told you that,” Dortmunder said.
“Yeah, but—You mean, you did? You spent the night in a convent?”
“It was the convent roof he sprained his ankle on,” May said, “when he fell off the other roof.”
“Jumped off.”
>
“So— I mean—” Kelp, stymied for words, gestured with the beer can, but that didn’t fully express his thoughts either. “What I mean is,” he said, “what did you tell them? I mean, there you are on their roof.”
“Well, they doped it out,” Dortmunder said. “The other end of the block was all police cars, and there was a burglar alarm going off down there, and all like that. So they kind of put two and two together.”
“These nuns.”
“The nuns, right.”
“Well—” Kelp was still having trouble phrasing himself. “What did they say?”
“Nothing. I told you, they have this vow of silence. They wrote a lot of notes, though.”
“Notes,” Kelp said, nodding, catching up. “Fine. What did the notes say?”
For some reason, Dortmunder looked uncomfortable. Also for some reason, possibly the same reason, May looked kind of steely and determined and grim around the jaw. Dortmunder said, “They offered me a deal.”
Kelp squinted at his old partner. “A deal?” he asked. “Nuns? What do you mean, a deal?”
“They wanted his help,” May explained. “They have a problem, and they were praying for help, and here comes John, falling onto their roof—”
“Jumping.”
“—and they decided he was sent by God.”
Kelp stopped squinting. Instead, he looked very round-eyed at his old partner, saying, “You? Sent by God?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Dortmunder said, sounding sulky. “They dreamed it up themselves.”
“Explain it to Andy,” May suggested. “Maybe he’ll have some good ideas.”
“I already have a good idea,” Dortmunder said, but then he shrugged and said, “All right. This is the story. It’s this bunch of cloistered nuns way downtown with this vow of silence, and last year they got this new nun joined up, the first new one they had in five, six years.”
Good Behavior Page 2
