Collected Stories

by Donald E. Westlake

  Over breakfast (sweetened orange juice, coffee with a lot of sugar, Wheaties with a lot of sugar), that concept had appeared to make a kind of sense, even to have a certain elegance. John Dortmunder, professional thief, with his sloped shoulders, shapeless clothing, lifeless hair — colored hair, pessimistic nose and rusty–hinge gait, knew he could, if he wished, look exactly like your normal, average working man, even though, so far as he knew, he had never earned an honest dollar in his life. If called upon to transport a valuable stolen brooch from his home in Manhattan to a new but highly recommended fence in Brooklyn, therefore, it had seemed to him that the best way to do it was to place the brooch between two slabs of ham with a lot of mayonnaise, this package to be inserted within two slices of Wonder Bread, the result wrapped in paper towels and the whole carried inside an ordinary wrinkled brown paper lunch bag. It had seemed like a good idea.

  Only now he didn’t know. What was it about this brooch? Why was its recent change of possessor all over the Daily News?

  The train trundled and roared and rattled through the black tunnel beneath the city, stopping here and there at bright–lit white–tile places that could have been communal showers in state prisons but were actually where passengers embarked and detrained, and eventually one such departing passenger left his Daily News behind him on the seat. Dortmunder beat a bag lady to it, crossed one leg over the other and, ignoring the bag lady’s bloodshot glare, settled down to find out what the fuss was all about.

  300G BROOCH IN DARING HEIST

  Lone Cat Burglar Foils Cops, Top Security

  Well, that wasn’t so bad. Dortmunder couldn’t remember ever having been called daring before, nor had anyone before this ever categorized his shambling jog and wheezing exertions as that of a cat burglar.

  Anyway, on to the story:

  In town to promote his new hit film, Mark Time III: High Mark, Jer Crumbie last night had a close encounter with a rapid–response burglar who left the superstar breathless, reluctantly admiring, and out the $300,000 brooch he had just presented his fiancée, Desiree Makeup spokesmodel Felicia Tarrant.

  ‘It was like something in the movies’, Crumbie told cops. ‘This guy got through some really tight security, grabbed what he wanted and was out of there before anybody knew what happened.’

  The occasion was a private bash for the Hollywood–based superstar in his luxury suite on the 14th floor of Fifth Avenue’s posh Port Dutch Hotel, frequent host to Hollywood celebrities. A private security service screened the invited guests, both at lobby level and again outside the suite itself, and yet the burglar, described as lithe, in dark clothing, with black gloves and a black ski mask, somehow infiltrated the suite and actually managed to wrest the $300,000 trinket out of Felicia Tarrant’s hands just moments after Jer Crumbie had presented it to her to the applause of his assembled guests.

  ‘It all happened so fast’, Ms. Tarrant told police, ‘and he was so slick and professional about it, that I still can’t say exactly how it happened.’

  What Dortmunder liked about celebrity events was that they tended to snag everybody’s attention. Having seen, both on television and in the New York Post, that this movie star was going to be introducing his latest fiancée to 250 of his closest personal friends, including the press, at his suite at the Port Dutch Hotel, Dortmunder had understood at once that the thing to do during the party was to pay a visit to the Port Dutch and drop in on every suite except the one containing the happy couple.

  The Port Dutch was a midtown hotel for millionaires of all kinds — oil sheiks, arbitrageurs, rock legends, British royals — and its suites, two per floor facing Central Park across Fifth Avenue, almost always repaid a drop–in visit during the dinner hour.

  Dortmunder had decided he would work only on the floors below the 14th, where the happy couple held sway, so as not to pass their windows and perhaps attract unwelcome attention. But on floor after floor, in suite after suite, as he crept up the dark fire escape in his dark clothing, far above the honking, milling, noisy red–and–white stage set of the avenue far below, he met only disappointment. His hard–learned skills at bypassing Port Dutch locks and alarms — early lessons had sometimes included crashing, galumphing flights up and down fire escapes — had no chance to come into play.

  Some of the suites clearly contained no paying tenants. Some contained occupants who obviously meant to occupy the suite all evening. (A number of these occupants’ stay–at–home activities might have been of educational interest to Dortmunder, had he been less determined to make a profit from the evening.)

  A third category of suites was occupied by pretenders. These were people who had gone out for an evening on the town, leaving behind luggage, clothing, shopping bags, all visible from the fire escape windows, providing clues that their owners were second–honeymooners from Akron, Ohio who would repay an enterprising burglar’s attentions with little more than Donald Duck sweatshirts from 42nd Street.

  Twelve floors without a hit. The not–quite–honeymoon suite was just ahead. Dortmunder was not interested in engaging the attention of beefy men in brown private security guard uniforms, but he was also feeling a bit frustrated. Twelve floors, and not a soul no bracelets, no anklets, no necklaces; no Rolexes, ThinkPads, smuggled currency; no fur, no silk, no plastic (as in credit cards).

  OK. He would pass the party, silent and invisible. He would segue from 12 up past 14 without a pause, and then he would see what 15 and above had to offer. The hotel had 23 floors; all hope was not gone.

  Up he went. Tiptoe, tiptoe; silent, silent. Over his right shoulder, had he cared to look, spread the dark glitter of Central Park. Straight down, 140 feet beneath his black–sneakered feet, snaked the slow–moving southbound traffic of Fifth Avenue, and just up ahead lurked suites 1501–2–3–4–5.

  The window was open.

  Oh, now what? Faint party sounds wafted out like laughing gas. Dortmunder hesitated but knew he had to push on.

  Inch by inch he went up the open–design metal steps, cool in the cool April evening. The open window, when he reached it, revealed an illuminated room with a bland pale ceiling but apparently no occupants; the party noises came from farther away.

  Dortmunder had reached the fire escape landing. On all fours, he started past the dangerous window when he heard suddenly approaching voices:

  “You’re just trying to humiliate me.” Female, young, twangy, whining.

  “All I’m trying is to teach you English.” Male, gruff, cocky, impatient.

  Female: “It’s a pin. Anybody knows it’s a pin!”

  Male: “It is, as I said, a brooch.”

  Female: “A brooch is one of them things you get at the hotel in Paris. For breakfast.”

  Male: “That, Felicia, sweetheart — and I love your tits — I promise you, is a brioche.”

  Female: “Brooch!”

  Male: “Brioche!”

  Most of this argument was taking place just the other side of the open window. Dortmunder, thinking it unwise to move, remained hunkered, half–turned so his head was just below the sill while his body was compressed into a shape like a pickup’s spring right after 12 pieces of Sheetrock have been loaded aboard.

  “You can’t humiliate me!”

  An arm appeared within that window space above Dortmunder’s head. The arm was slender, bare, graceful. It was doing an overarm throw, not very well; if truth be told, it was throwing like a girl.

  This arm was attempting to throw the object out through the open window, and in a way it accomplished its purpose. The flung object first hit the bottom of the open window, but then it deflected down and out and wound up outside the window.

  In Dortmunder’s lap. Jewelry, glittering. What looked like emeralds on the ends, what looked like diamonds along the middle.

  Any second now somebody was going to look out that window to see where this bauble had gone. Dortmunder closed his left hand around it and moved. It was an automatic reaction, and since he’d already b
een moving upward he kept on moving upward, rounding the turn of the landing, heaving up the next flight of the fire escape, breathing like a city bus, while behind him the shouting began:

  Male: “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!”

  Female: “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!”

  Up and over the hotel roof and into the apartment building next door and down the freight elevator and out onto the side street, a route long known to Dortmunder. When he at last ambled around the corner onto Fifth, merely another late–shift worker going home, the police cars were just arriving in front of the hotel.

  Newspapers tell lies, Dortmunder thought. He read on, to find a description of the thing in his ham sandwich. The things that looked like emeralds were emeralds, and the things that looked like diamonds were diamonds, that was why the fuss. Altogether, the trinket the bride — perhaps–to–be had flung ricocheting out the window last night was valued, in the newspapers, at least, at $300,000.

  On the other hand, newspapers lie. So it would be up to Harmov Krandelloc, said to be an ethnic so different from anybody else that no one had yet figured out even what continent he came from, but who had recently set himself up in a warehouse off Atlantic Avenue where it crossed Flatbush as king of the next generation of really worthwhile fences, who paid great dollar (sometimes even more than the usual ten percent of value) and never asked too many questions. It would be up to Harmov Krandelloc to determine what the thing in the ham sandwich was actually worth, and what Dortmunder could hope to realize from it.

  But now, on the BMT into deepest Brooklyn, surrounded by newspaper photos of his swag, realizing that the celebrity of its former owners made this particular green–and–white object more valuable but also more newsworthy (a word the sensible burglar does his best to avoid), Dortmunder hunched with increasing despondency under his borrowed paper, clutched his brown bag in his left hand with increasing trepidation and wished fervently he’d waited a week before trying to unload this bauble.

  More than a week. Maybe six years would have been right.

  Roizak Street would be Dortmunder’s stop. While keeping one eye on his News and one eye on his lunch, Dortmunder also kept an eye on the subway map, following the train’s creeping progress from one foreign neighborhood to another; street names without resonance or meaning, separated by the black tunnels.

  Vedloukam Boulevard; the train slowed and stopped. Roizak Street was next. The doors opened and closed. The train started, roaring into the tunnel. Two minutes went by, and the train slowed. Dortmunder rose, peered out the car windows and saw only black. Where was the station?

  The train braked steeply, forcing Dortmunder to sit again. Metal wheels could be heard screaming along the metal rails. With one final lurch, the train stopped.

  No station. Now what? Some holdup, when all he wanted to do —

  The lights went out. Pitch–black darkness. A voice called, “I smell smoke.” The voice was oddly calm.

  The next 27 voices were anything but calm. Dortmunder, too, smelled smoke, and he felt people surging this way and that, bumping into him, bumping into one another, crying out. He scrunched close on his seat. He’d given up the News, but he held on grimly to his ham sandwich.

  “ATTENTION PLEASE.”

  It was an announcement, over the public address system.

  Some people kept shouting. Other people shouted for the first people to stop shouting so they could hear the announcement. Nobody heard the announcement.

  The car became still, but too late. The announcement was over. “What did he say?” a voice asked.

  “I thought it was a she,” another voice said.

  “It was definitely a he,” a third voice put in.

  “I see lights coming,” said a fourth voice.

  “Where? Who? What?” cried a lot of voices.

  “Along the track. Flashlights.”

  “Which side? What way?”

  “Left.”

  “Right.”

  “Behind us.”

  “That’s not flashlights, that’s fire!”

  “What! What! What!”

  “Not behind us, buddy, in front of us! Flashlights.”

  “Where?”

  “They’re gone now.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Time! Who gives a damn what time it is?”

  “I do, knucklehead.”

  “Who’s a knucklehead? Where are you, wise guy?”

  “Hey! I didn’t do anything!”

  Dortmunder hunkered down. If the car didn’t burn up first, there was going to be a first–class barroom brawl in here pretty soon.

  Someone sat on Dortmunder. “Oof,” he said.

  It was a woman. Squirming around, she yelled, “Get your hands off me!”

  “Madam,” Dortmunder said, “you’re sitting on my lunch.”

  “Don’t you talk dirty to me!” the woman yelled, and gave him an elbow in the eye. But at least she got off his lap — and lunch — and went away into the heaving throng.

  The car was rocking back and forth now; could it possibly tip over?

  “The fire’s getting closer!”

  “Here come the flashlights again!”

  Even Dortmunder could see them this time, outside the window, flashlights shining blurrily through a thick fog, like the fog in a Sherlock Holmes movie. Then someone carrying a flashlight opened one of the car’s doors, and the fog came into the car, but it wasn’t fog, it was thick oily smoke. It burned Dortmunder’s eyes, made him cough and covered his skin with really bad sunblock.

  People clambered up into the car. In the flashlight beams bouncing around, Dortmunder saw all the coughing, wheezing, panicky passengers and saw that the people with the flashlights were uniformed cops.

  Oh, good. Cops.

  The cops yelled for everybody to shut up, and after a while everybody shut up, and one of the cops said, “We’re gonna walk you through the train to the front car. We got steps off the train there, and then we’re gonna walk to the station. It’s only a couple blocks, and the thing to remember is, stay away from the third rail.”

  A voice called, “Which is the third rail?”

  “All of them,” the cop told him. “Just stay away from rails. OK, let’s go before the fire gets here. Not that way, whaddya looking for, a barbecue? That way.”

  They all trooped through the dark smoky train, coughing and stumbling, bumping into one another, snarling, using their elbows, giving New Yorkers’ reputations no boost whatsoever, and eventually they reached the front car, where more cops — more cops — were helping everybody down a temporary metal staircase to the ground. Of course it would be metal, with all these third rails around; it couldn’t be wood.

  A cop took hold of Dortmunder’s elbow, which made Dortmunder instinctively put his wrists together for the cuffs, but the cop just wanted to help him down the stairs and didn’t notice the inappropriate gesture. “Stay off the third rail,” the cop said, releasing his elbow.

  “Good thought,” Dortmunder said, and trudged on after the other passengers, down the long smoky dark tunnel, lit by bare bulbs spaced along the side walls.

  The smoke lessened as they went on, and then the platform at Roizak Street appeared, and yet another cop put his hand on Dortmunder’s elbow, to help him up the concrete steps to the platform. This time Dortmunder reacted like an innocent person, or as close to one as he could get.

  A lot of people were hanging around on the platform; apparently, they wanted another subway ride. Dortmunder walked through them, and just before he got to the turnstile to get out of here yet another cop pointed at the bag in his hand said, “What’s that?”

  Dortmunder looked at the bag. It was much more wrinkled than before and was blotchily gray and black from the sooty smoke. “My lunch,” he said.

  “You don’t want to eat that,” the cop told him, and pointed at a nearby trash can. “Throw it away, why don’t ya?”

  “It’ll be OK,” Dortmunder told him. “It’s smoked ham.”
And he got out of there before the cop could ask for a taste.

  Out on the sidewalk at last, Dortmunder took deep breaths of Brooklyn air that had never smelled quite so sweet before, then headed off toward Harmov Krandelloc, following the directions he’d been given: two blocks this way, one block that way, turn right at the corner, and there’s the 11 paddy wagons and the million cops and the cop cars with all their flashing lights and the long line of handcuffed guys being marched into the wagons.

  Dortmunder stopped. No cop happened to be looking in this direction. He turned smoothly around, not even disturbing the air, and walked casually around the corner, then crossed the street to the bodega and said to the guy guarding the fruit and vegetable display outside, “What’s happening over there?”

  “Let me get you a paper towel,” the guy said, and he went away and came back with two paper towels, one wet and one dry.

  Dortmunder thanked him and wiped his face with the wet paper towel, and it came away black. Then he wiped his face with the dry paper towel and it came away gray. He gave the paper towels back and said, “What’s happening over there?”

  “One of those sting operations,” the guy said, “like you see in the movies. You know, the cops set up a fake fence operation, get videotape of all these guys bringing in their stuff, invite them all to a party, then they arrest everybody.”

  “When did they show up?”

  “About ten minutes ago.”

  I’d have been here, Dortmunder thought, if it wasn’t for the subway fire. “Thinka that,” he said.

  The guy pointed at his bag: “Whatcha got there?”

  “My lunch. It’s OK, it’s smoked ham.”

  “That bag, man, you don’t want that bag. Here, gimme, let me —”

  He reached for the bag, and Dortmunder pulled back. Why all this interest in a simple lunch bag? What ever happened to the anonymous–workman–with–lunch–bag theory? “It’s fine,” Dortmunder said.

  “No, man, it’s greasy,” the bodega guy told him. “It’s gonna soak through, spoil the sandwich. Believe me, I know this shit. here, lemme give you a new bag.”