Good Behavior

by Donald E. Westlake

  And then J.C. Taylor let out a held breath, and nodded, and said, “Okay. These keys”—she dropped them both in Dortmunder’s palm—“you’ll need. The bigger one’s for the men’s John, down at the end of the hall on the left. The other one’s the office door. I don’t subscribe to any part of the alarm service—I mean, what have I got to steal, right?—so you can go in and out as much as you want.”

  “Fine,” Dortmunder said.

  “I’ll be back Monday morning at eight.”

  “We’ll have the goods in this back room here.”

  “The mailers you wanted,” she said, “are on the shelves outside.”

  “Good,” Dortmunder said. “You got paid?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her smile had just a hint of mockery in it. “Mr. Bulcher was very agreeable,” she said.

  A low rumble sounded; maybe a subway train going by far below.

  J.C. Taylor looked around the room, giving it one last visual check before turning it over to the sub-tenants. “Just try not to bring the cops in here, okay?” she said.

  “That’s top of our list,” Dortmunder promised her.

  “Okay. Well, break a law,” she said, and left.

  Tiny broke the little silence that followed: “That woman,” he grumbled, low and gravelly, as he frowned at the door.

  “The office,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Forget the woman, Tiny, look at the office.”

  “I can wait,” Tiny said. “But that broad is too unrefined. When this is over, she’s goin to finishing school.”

  21

  Once upon a time there was a small and mountainous South American nation called Guerrera, run by a small and fat dictator named Pozos, a man who devoted his life to his fellow countrymen; devoted his life to robbing them, torturing them and murdering them. In the capitals of the great world outside, his domestic arrangements mattered not at all. He was welcomed in palaces and parliaments, his Guerrera belonged to alliances and organizations, he received (and pocketed) foreign aid from great powers. What a happy man Pozos was, all in all!

  But then, one dark day, he went too far. He annoyed Frank Ritter.

  Frank Ritter’s second son, Garrett, was a tall and big-shouldered man of thirty-four, already balding on top and already starting those jowls which would someday be his most salient feature. His body was kept in trim by skiing, sailing and scuba diving, but it seemed there was absolutely nothing he could do to keep his face from rushing toward lax and puffy middle age.

  For the past three years, Garrett had been in charge of Mergers & Acquisitions for Templar International, a job that had familiarized him with much of the free world’s industry, many of its top executives and most of its bases of wealth. It was time, Frank Ritter had decided, for Garrett to be introduced to the Greater Reality. Or, as Ritter had described it aphoristically in his commonplace book:

  “The real world is just beyond the visible world.”

  In his private suite in the Margrave Corporation on the seventy-fourth floor of the Avalon State Bank Tower, that Saturday afternoon, Ritter shared a drink and some of his thoughts with his son Garrett before going on to greet the freedom fighters assembling in the larger conference room. “The essential point is,” Ritter told his son, “the world has changed. The world always changes. I would say that most people in this country still retain a nineteenth-century view of the United States as an independent industrial nation with a republican form of government, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well,” Garrett said, his puffy face frowning above his trim body, “that’s what it is, isn’t it?” Like all of Frank Ritter’s children, Garrett walked warily, but had learned that one was always relatively safe to behave as though Dad knew best.

  Now, Dad shook his head and said, “Of course it isn’t. And when that’s what America was, in the nineteenth century, people didn’t know it. They thought the United States was still an agrarian democracy with a government run part-time by farmers and lawyers. Reality is always one jump ahead of the masses, Garrett.”

  “Okay,” Garrett said, and sipped at his vodka-tonic. Dad didn’t like people who drank too much. On the other hand, Dad hated people who didn’t drink at all. A narrow path, but a sure-footed Ritter child could find it.

  Frank Ritter said, “Insofar as America is a major industrial nation, no, it is not. What we are today is the premier technological and service nation. Heavy industry is done in Japan and Germany and Poland. Arms manufacture is done in Brazil and Israel. But American technological preeminence has meant increasing partnerships with these foreign industries. Any partnership that survives is merely a gentlemanly form of absorption, so now we have the multinational corporation, and that’s where power lies today. Not in the UN, certainly, and not in national governments.”

  “Gee, Dad,” Garrett said. “No?”

  “No. The multinational is in the position of the bank robber in the old West; all he has to do is ride straight and hard to be safe, because the posse can’t cross the border. We have taken over the roles that nations recently held; we wage war, collect taxes through debt service, protect our areas of property and the worker/citizens within those areas, and we distribute power as we see fit.”

  Garrett, along with his brothers and sisters, had grown up believing that his father spouted two things fairly constantly; verbal nonsense and lovely money. Accept the former with obvious pleasure, and the flow of the latter was unending. “That all sounds exciting, Dad,” he said. Past his father, across this tastefully anonymous living room, the window showed a pale blue sky with stray clouds. The skiing would be good in Norway now. Oh, to be in Ostersund, now that spring is here!

  “It’s more than exciting, Garrett,” Ritter said. “It’s real. The truth is, the pendulum has swung all the way back, several hundred years, and we are today entering upon the next great era of feudalism.”

  Garrett blinked. Feudalism was something that had wafted by once or twice in college days, leaving no residue. Doubtfully, he said, “You mean, King Arthur and like that? The Round Table?”

  Ritter laughed, a sound that always had a threat in it. “I don’t mean myth,” he said. “I mean reality. Feudalism is a system based not on national citizenship but on loyalties and contracts between individuals. Power lies not in the state but in ownership of assets, and all fealty follows the line of power. Very sensible.”

  “I guess so,” Garrett said, blinking slowly.

  Ritter said, “Think of it this way. I am the baron. Templar International and Margrave Corporation and Avalon State Bank and so on are the castles I have built in different parts of my territory, for defense and expansion. The subsidiary companies we’ve bought or merged with owe their allegiance not to America but to Margrave. We reward loyalty and punish disloyalty. When necessary, we can protect our most important people from the laws of the state, just as the earlier barons could protect their most important vassal knights from the laws of the Catholic Church. The work force is tied to us by profit-sharing and pension plans. I don’t expect national governments to disappear, any more than the British or Dutch royal families have disappeared, but they will become increasingly irrelevant pageants. More and more, actors will play the parts of politicians and statesmen, while the real work goes on elsewhere.”

  “With us, you mean,” Garrett said. His puffy face lit up with excitement. He thought about buying new skis in Scandinavia.

  “And in fact,” Ritter said, “this is ultimately a benevolent advance for humanity. Of course, some eggs will get broken in the making of this omelet—”

  “Happens,” said Garrett understandingly.

  “Yes,” said Ritter, who didn’t like his train of thought interrupted. “But once the omelet is made, this will be a happier, more prosperous, far more peaceful Earth. The test-case of Japanese industry shows us that workers whose primary loyalty is to their employer rather than their citizenship or their union are more contented, more productive, less disease-ridden and longer-lived.”

  Frowning, vag
uely remembering something he’d read in a newspaper on a plane, Garrett said, “Don’t they commit suicide a lot?”

  “Not at all,” Ritter said. “Only among the youngest entrants to the work force, a natural weeding-out process. Japs like to commit suicide anyway, it’s deeply embedded in their culture.”

  “Mata Hari,” Garrett agreed, nodding.

  “Hara-kiri,” his father corrected, in some annoyance. “Mata Hari was shot by the French government as a traitor.”

  Grinning uncertainly, Garrett said, “I guess that’s a level of power we haven’t got to yet, is it?”

  “Not in America,” Ritter agreed. “Though we’re close. Consider this building we’re in. Is it in the United States? Or is it within the sphere of Avalon State Bank?”

  “Well, both,” Garrett said, brow furrowed. It was so easy to be wrong with Dad.

  And apparently he was wrong again. Smiling coldly, Ritter said, “Where does government influence show, Garrett? To begin with, we got a tax abatement in return for setting aside a garden downstairs as a public space, which is so public we get to lock it every night at eight. In this building we have technicians of various kinds who are foreign nationals and who technically can’t work in the United States without government permission; the infamous green card. But their employer of record is some foreign subsidiary of ours, therefore no green card needed. But what about, let us say, invasion?”

  Garrett, who’d been nodding along like a good son, was brought up short. “Invasion? You mean the Russians?”

  “Certainly not. The Russians are the greatest false threat to this country since the Yellow Peril. I’m talking about physical attack on any part of this building. Let’s say someone was foolish enough to try to rob our bank or one of our tenants, would the police or the FBI be the first line of defense? Absolutely not. A small part of our army is in this building, Garrett, with equipment as up-to-date as any garrison force on Earth. Our sentries would repel attack, and our insurance subsidiary would make good any unlikely loss that might be suffered in this building.”

  “So we’re the government here,” Garrett said.

  “Exactly. The great task for you children in the next generation will be the new distribution of power, deciding which of the new barons will become the new kings.”

  “King Garrett the First,” Garrett said, smiling. He saw himself swooping down a Norwegian glacial slope in an ermine robe and gold crown.

  Another thin smile from Dad, who said, “The old terms won’t come back, Garrett, only the old reality. If you’ll always bear in mind that we are now on the threshold of the new feudalism, that today’s CEO is every bit as powerful as yesterday’s duke or marquis, you’ll never be at a loss when business problems arise.”

  “I really appreciate all this, Dad,” Garrett said, sounding hearty and sincere, looking puffy and false.

  A shadow of doubt crossed Ritter’s face, quickly obliterated. “That’s why,” he said, “family is so important. With the obsolescence of national patriotism, ultimate loyalty to the barons must reside in family connections, blood and marriage.” He sighed. “Which is one of the many truths I can’t seem to get across to your sister Elaine.”

  Garrett perked up a little. He actually liked Elaine, even though he thought she was sort of wimpy and silly. “How is the kid?” he asked. “Get over all that religion business?”

  “We’re working on it,” Ritter said darkly. A flick of cuff, and he looked at his watch. “Our freedom fighters will be assembling. Time for the pep-talk.”

  “Freedom fighters,” Garrett echoed, and couldn’t prevent a slight expression of repugnance to curl his lip. Coming through the Margrave offices to this meeting he had seen them lolling about in the various rooms, telling one another hair-raising anecdotes, nearly sixty hard-bitten mercenaries, merciless veterans of uncounted wars in Africa and Asia and Central America, assembled by Frank Ritter to spearhead the “liberation” movement that would repay that upstart South American dictator Pozos for becoming an annoyance. Garrett considered himself manly, God knows, but he was also civilized, and these “freedom fighters” were nothing but timber wolves in human shape. You could smell the testosterone. He said, “I just don’t understand why you’re assembling that bunch of thugs here.”

  “Security,” his father told him. “In any of the more usual staging areas, Florida or Texas or wherever, there’d be too much possibility of information leakage. Most of these men are known to the Federal law-enforcement agencies. If they assemble somewhere, it becomes known. But anybody can assemble in New York City without being noticed, that’s what this town is for. So they come here, and they’ll spend the weekend in these offices and the dormitory, they’ll study our maps and models of the terrain, and they’ll organize their plan of attack. On Monday, two of our buses will take them out to our airfield on Long Island, where our plane will fly them south to Guerrera, refueling along the way at our resort island in the Caribbean.”

  This part was fun for Garrett, like playing Dungeons & Dragons back in college. “And when they get there?” he said.

  “There’s an anti-government underground already in place,” Ritter said. “Pro-American, oddly enough, but all involved with land reform and that nonsense. With proper financing, they could probably take over on their own, but they’re dirt poor. We negotiated with Mr. Avilez, the rebels’ man in New York pleading their case at the UN, and we’ve arranged a trade of mineral rights for financing, but instead of financing we’ll send our own army. The rebels will cooperate until Pozos is overthrown, and then you’ll fly down and help them decide who runs the next government.”

  “So it’s not another Bay of Pigs,” Garrett said.

  “Absolutely not,” Ritter said. “We have the people, and we’ll go on having the people until we have the people.” He smiled, and looked around this pleasant room, symbol of his empire, and then frowned, staring at a half-closed door across the way.

  “Dad? What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.” Ritter got to his feet and strode across the room to shove that door open and look in at a small book-lined research library, with refectory table and four heavy wooden chairs in the middle of the room. The door in the opposite wall was closed. Ritter shook his head and turned away.

  Garrett had followed him, and now said, “What’s up?”

  “Strangest thing,” Ritter said. “For just a second, I thought I saw Elaine standing in this doorway.”

  Garrett looked past his father at the library. “Elaine? Down here?”

  “Ridiculous, I know.”

  “You think—Do you think she could have heard what we were talking about? The invasion? Would she tell anybody?”

  Ritter’s mouth formed a mirthless grin. “She doesn’t talk, remember? Besides, it was just a trick of the light, she’s locked away upstairs. Come along, let’s explain to our freedom fighters what they’re fighting for.”

  22

  “I think it’s bad luck to whistle in an elevator,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp said, “John, you think everything’s bad luck.” But he stopped whistling.

  It was still Saturday afternoon, and so still possible to use the elevators without calling attention to oneself, and J.C. Taylor’s office had already become confining. Wilbur Howey had gone into several minutes of frozen dazzled silence when he’d first come across the Scandinavian marriage secrets book, but ever since, he’d been going through it with the avidity of a teenager with a book on hotrod customizing, popping and snapping in all directions and piping, “Say!” at intervals like a mantel clock. Meantime, Tiny insisted on reading aloud great long sections of the how-to-be-a-detective book with an attempted sarcastic delivery but stumbling along slowly and mispronouncing all the long words, while Stan over at the window produced running commentary on Saturday afternoon’s traffic on Fifth Avenue and the nearby cross-streets, so when Kelp had pointed out that he hadn’t yet seen the places they intended to burgle tonight Dortmunder had imme
diately said, “I’ll show you.”

  “That’s okay, John,” Kelp had said. “It’s the twenty-sixth floor, right? I can find it.”

  “I’ll show you,” Dortmunder had said.

  To go from the seventh floor to the twenty-sixth floor, because of the wonders of modern technology, it was necessary to take two elevators. They were alone in the first elevator, going down to the lobby, during which ride Kelp, his musical side awakened by the piano in the Taylor office, had started whistling something that might have been “Malaguena” if it had all been in the same key. In the vaulted lobby, with a couple of security guards in pale blue uniforms and black gunbelts chatting casually together over by the closed newsstand, they walked around and took a 22–35 elevator, sharing it with an extremely scruffy four-man rock group arguing about the harmonics. “No,” one of them kept saying, “it’s duh-buh-buh, duh-buh-buh.” Another one was saying, “That’s not even in four-four,” when the elevator stopped at twenty-six. “You want duh-buh, duh-buh,” Kelp told them, as he and Dortmunder got off. The doors slid shut on the rock group’s astounded and revolted faces.

  Dortmunder said, “Andy, I don’t think they were looking for your help.”

  “Well, they needed it,” Kelp said. “This is it, huh?”

  This was it. An office directory faced them from the wall opposite the bank of elevators. They stepped over and studied it:

  ASIATIC ANTIQUE JEWELRY, INC.

  2605

  DEARBORN JADE IMPORTERS

  2601

  DUNCAN MAGIC

  2608

  KOBOL & KOBOL