What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Sure. Why not?”

  There was nowhere to eat on Park Avenue. There was nowhere to eat on Fifth Avenue. On Sixth Avenue and Seventh Avenue the streets were filled with tourists standing on line to eat in places exactly like the places they’d eat in back home in Akron or Stuttgart or Osaka, except back there they didn’t have to stand on line.

  Stan and John eventually found a dark bar with food on a side street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, where the plump but not soft waitress said, “How you fellas today?”

  “Hungry,” Stan said. “We just walked across Manhattan.”

  “I hear they got buses now,” she said, and distributed menus. “You want a drink while you read?”

  They both wanted beer. She went away and they studied the menus, and John said, “Can you tell the difference between ostrich burger and bison burger?”

  “Bison’s got four legs.”

  “Burger.”

  “Oh. No. Turkey burger I can tell. All those others I think they come outa the same vat, back there in the kitchen.”

  “I can remember,” John said, “when ‘burger’ only meant one thing, and the only word you ever had to stick in front of it was ‘cheese.’”

  “You’re showing your age, John.”

  “Yeah? That’s good. Usually I show twice my age.”

  The waitress having returned, Stan ordered the bison burger and John the ostrich burger, and then John said, “You wanted to talk to me.”

  “Well, with all these meetings you got, you didn’t get to our little meeting last night.”

  “No, that cop come along.”

  “And he’s still along, I guess.”

  “It looks like it’s gonna be a long story, I’m not sure. I know you wanna know what it’s all about.”

  “Naw, John, I don’t poke and pry in somebody else’s business.”

  “Nevertheless,” John said, “to make up for it, my not getting to the meeting last night, I’ll tell you the story so far. The ex-cop is working for this rich guy that wants to what he calls ‘retrieve’ something that got stolen from his father eighty years ago.”

  “Wow. That’s a long time.”

  “It is. So this afternoon,” John said, “I’m supposed to meet the rich guy’s granddaughter, because she’s the one knows where it is. So I’m not even sure if it’s possible, or if it’s real, but you don’t just say no to a cop. Or an ex-cop either.”

  “No, I get that,” Stan said.

  “So now,” John said, “tell me yours.”

  “What I wanna do,” Stan said, and the waitress appeared, with two platters, and said, “Who had the ostrich burger?” and they couldn’t remember. So she just put the platters down, accepted an order for another couple beers, and went away, which meant they didn’t know exactly what they were eating, but that was okay.

  Around a mouthful of either ostrich or bison, John said, “You were gonna tell me what you wanna do.”

  “I wanna hand to you,” Stan said, and paused for a beer delivery, and said, “the idea I was presenting to everybody—except you—last night.”

  “Sure. I wanna hear it.”

  “It’s out in Brooklyn.”

  John looked pained. “I dunno, Stan,” he said. “That place I went to today was Brooklyn enough for me.”

  “That’s the trouble with all you guys,” Stan told him. “You’re all Manhattancentric.”

  John looked at him. “What kinda word is that?”

  “A word from the newspaper,” Stan said. “And therefore authentic.”

  “Okay.”

  “It isn’t all Manhattan, you know. There’s four other boroughs.”

  “Maybe three,” John said.

  “What? Who you throwin out?”

  “Staten Island. It’s over in New Jersey someplace. You can’t even get there on the subway. Any place you have to go to by boat is not part of New York City.”

  “Governors Island.”

  “So? That’s an island.”

  “So’s Staten.”

  Looking exasperated, John said, “You moving to Staten Island? Is that the news you wanted to bring me?”

  “No, I’m very happy in Canarsie.”

  “Just a little defensive. So tell me the idea. Did everybody else love it?”

  “Let me tell it to you, okay?”

  “Go.”

  “Because I’m in Canarsie,” Stan said, “I drive a lot, which people in Manhattan don’t do. So I see things that people in Manhattan don’t see. So out along the Belt Parkway, they’re building this mosque, you can see it from the road.”

  “Mosque.”

  “Yeah, you know, a religious place that—”

  “I know what it is, Stan.”

  “Okay. So they’re building it, I read about it in the paper—”

  “The Manhattancentric paper.”

  “Maybe the same one, I dunno. It said, they’re getting a lot of Arab oil money for this mosque, they’re building one that’s gonna be like the big one in London with the golden dome, only, this being New York City, they ran into some problems.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Cost overruns, extra permits they didn’t know about, unions they never heard of, the whole thing grinds to a halt.”

  “Of course it does,” John said. “Didn’t they know that?”

  “Well, they’re religious people,” Stan said, “and they’re immigrants, and nobody ever tells anybody how New York works, everybody just does it.”

  “I almost feel sorry for these people,” John said.

  “Well, don’t feel too sorry. They shut down now, but they’re gonna start up again next spring, with some more oil money, and now they know a little more about the system, so this is just a delay is all.”

  “I’m happy for them,” John said. “But up till now I don’t see your idea in here.”

  “The dome,” Stan said.

  John just looked at him, ostrich or bison visible in his open mouth. So Stan said, “The dome got delivered before they shut down, and it’s gold. Not solid gold, you know, but not gold paint either. Real gold. Gold plate or something. It’s sitting out there on this empty construction site, it was delivered when the walls were supposed to be up, but of course the walls weren’t up, so it’s sitting there, with this crane next to it.”

  “I think I’m getting this,” John said. “It’s your idea, we use the crane, we pick up this dome— How big is this dome?”

  “Fifteen feet across, twelve feet high.”

  “Fifteen feet across, twelve feet high. You wanna pick this up and take it away.”

  “With the crane, like you said.”

  “And where you gonna stash this thing?”

  “That’s part of what we gotta work out,” Stan said.

  “Maybe you can take it to Alaska,” John said, “and paint it white, and make everybody think it’s an igloo.”

  “I don’t think we could get it that far,” Stan told him. “All the bridges. And forget tunnels.”

  John said, “And who’s your customer, the American Dental Association?”

  “John, it’s gold. It’s gotta be worth I don’t know how much.”

  “You don’t have a place to hide it,” John said. “You take it down the street with this crane, you don’t have any way to disguise it, camouflage it. You don’t have a customer for it. So who at the O.J. last night liked the idea?”

  “There were some naysayers,” Stan admitted.

  “How many?”

  “Well, all of them. But I figured, you could see the possibilities.”

  “I can,” John agreed. “Just this morning, that cop—who, by the way, isn’t a cop any more, not for seventeen months—just this morning he was telling the rich guy about me, how I took a couple falls in the early days but learned how to have that not happen any more, and this is part of the learning. I don’t go down the street with a fifteen-foot-wide, twelve-foot-tall hot golden dome out in front of me.” He shook his head. “I’m sorr
y, Stan. I can see how it was for you, you looked at this great big gold thing out there beside the Belt, you read about it in the paper, all you could think about was the gold. It’s my job to think about the problems, and what this dome is is one hundred percent problem.”

  “Maybe I’ll go do it on my own,” Stan said. He was really feeling dumped on.

  “One thing,” John said. “If you do it on your own, don’t get your Mom involved.”

  His Mom was the only other gang he could think of. Stan said, “Why not?”

  “Because she’d rather drive her own cab than do the state’s laundry. I gotta go.” Standing, John said, “If you’re gonna want me to talk with you about an idea like that, you pay for lunch. See you later.”

  7

  IT TURNED OUT, the C&I International Bank Building, up there on Fifth near Saks, was operating under an alias, or at least a later modification of its original name, which you could read inside in the lobby. On a marble side wall was a big black board in a gold frame with all the tenants listed in white block letters in alphabetical order, and across the top of this board it said Capitalists & Immigrants Trust. So, somewhere along the line, somebody stopped liking that name and decided C&I International would go down smoother, though mean less. Maybe the capitalists and immigrants had stopped trusting.

  Feinberg, Kleinberg, Rhineberg, Steinberg, Weinberg & Klatsch was indeed, according to this board, on the twenty-seventh floor, so Dortmunder took a 16–31 elevator with a couple messengers and looked at the reception area while they transacted their businesses with the receptionist.

  It was a large though low-ceilinged place with gray carpet and gray furniture in the two seating areas and black desk space in front of the receptionist and along the wall behind her. The walls, a soothing dusty green, were mostly covered with big swirling pieces of abstract art in non-startling colors, so you could feel you were hip without having to do anything about it.

  The receptionist, once the messengers cleared the area and Dortmunder could step forward in their place, was just exactly too beautiful to be real, though she seemed unable or unwilling to move any part of her face. She looked at Dortmunder’s hands for the package, didn’t see one, and finally made eye contact, so Dortmunder could say, “Fiona Hemlow.”

  She reached for a pen: “And you are?”

  “John Dortmunder.”

  She wrote that on a pad, applied herself to her phone bank, murmured briefly, then said, “She’ll be out in a moment. Do have a seat.”

  “Thanks.”

  The seating area had gray glass coffee tables among the gray sofas, but nothing to read, so Dortmunder sat on a sofa and looked at the paintings and tried to decide what they looked like. He’d just about come to the conclusion that what they mostly resembled was the bowl after you’ve finished the ice cream when a very short young woman in black skirt, black jacket, high-necked plain white blouse and low-heeled black shoes marched in from a side aisle, looked around, gave Dortmunder a real estate agent’s smile and strode over, hand out: “Mr. Dortmunder?”

  Rising, he said, “That’s me.”

  Her handshake was firm but bony. Her black hair was short, curled around her neat small ears, and her face was narrow; good-looking in an efficient sort of way. She looked to be in her mid- to late twenties, and there was no point even looking for a familial resemblance between her and the medicine ball in the wheelchair.

  She said, “I’m Fiona. You met my grandfather.”

  “This morning, yeah. He gave me the background. Well, some of it.”

  “And, I,” she said, being perky in somehow a subdued fashion, which was maybe how girl lawyers effervesced, “will give you the rest. Come along, I’ll escort you back.”

  He followed her down a hall with doors on one side, all open and showing small cluttered offices, each with a neat middle-aged man or woman at a desk, intently concentrating on the phone or the computer or a bunch of pages. Then she went through an open doorway at the end of this hall into a much larger space all broken up into small pieces, like an egg carton, with chest-high walls every which way so you could see what everybody was doing. The people at the machines in these little cells were generally younger than the ones in the private offices, and Dortmunder had already come to suspect that Fiona Hemlow’s work environment was in this mob scene somewhere when she said, “I arranged a small conference room for us. Much more private. No distractions.”

  “Good.”

  To get to this small conference room, she had to lead him a zigzag route through the people-boxes, and he was surprised the black composition floor wasn’t covered with lines of breadcrumbs left by previous people afraid they wouldn’t be able to find their way back.

  A perimeter of the boxes was reached, and Fiona led the way along a wall to the left with alternating closed doors and plate-glass windows, through which he could see the conference rooms within, some occupied by two or more people in intense head-thrust-forward conversation, some empty.

  Into an empty one she led the way, shut the door, and said, with a smile, “Sit anywhere. A beverage? Coke? Seltzer?”

  Dortmunder understood that in the business environment it was considered a gesture of civilization to offer the guest something to drink without booze in it, and probably a hostile act to refuse it, so he said, “Seltzer, yeah, sounds good.”

  She went away to a tall construction on the end wall that contained everything necessary to life: refrigerator, a shelf of glasses, TV, DVD, notepads, pens, and paper napkins. She poured him a seltzer over ice and herself a Diet Pepsi over ice, brought him his drink and a paper napkin, and at last they could sit down and have their chat.

  “So you found this thing,” Dortmunder began. “This chess set.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Mr. Dortmunder, this is too good a story to just jump in and tell the end.”

  Dortmunder hated stories that were that good, but okay, once again no choice in the matter, so he said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “When I was growing up,” she said, “there was every once in a while some family talk about a chess set that seemed to make everybody unhappy, but I couldn’t figure out why. It was gone, or lost, or something, but I didn’t know why it was such a big deal.”

  She drank Diet Pepsi and give him a warning finger-shake. “I don’t mean the family was full of nothing but talk about this mysterious chess set, it wasn’t. It was just a thing that came up every once in a while.”

  “Okay.”

  “So last summer it came up again,” she said, “when I was visiting my father at the Cape, and I asked him, please tell me what it’s all about, and he said he didn’t really know. If he ever knew, he’d forgotten. He said I should ask my grandfather, so when I got back to the city I did. He didn’t want to talk about it, turned out he was very bitter on that subject, but I finally convinced him I really wanted to know what this chess set meant in the family, and he told me.”

  “And that made you find it,” Dortmunder said, “when nobody else could.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve always been fascinated by history, and this was history with my own family in it, the First World War and invading Russia and all the rest of it. So I took down the names of everybody in that platoon that brought the chess set to America, and the other names, like the radio company they wanted to start, Chess King Broadcasting, and everything else I thought might be useful, and I Googled it all.”

  Dortmunder had heard of this; some other nosey parker way to mind everybody else’s business. He preferred a world in which people stuck to their own knitting, but that world was long gone. He said, “You found some of these people on Google.”

  “And I looked for brand names with chess words,” she said, “because why wouldn’t Alfred Northwood use that kind of name, too? A lot of the stuff I found was all dead ends, but I’m used to research, so I kept going, and then I found Gold Castle Realty, founded right here in New York in 1921, and then it turned out they were the builders of the Cas
tlewood Building in 1948. So I looked into Gold Castle’s owners and board of directors, and there’s Northwoods all over it.”

  “The sons,” Dortmunder said.

  “And daughters. But mostly now grandsons and granddaughters. It had to be the same Northwood, came here from Chicago when he stole the chess set, used it to raise the money to start in real estate, and became hugely successful. They are very big in New York property, Mr. Dortmunder. Not as famous as some others, because they don’t want to be, but very big.”

  “That’s nice,” Dortmunder said. “So they’ve got this chess set, I guess.”

  “Well, here’s where it gets even better,” she said, and she so liked this part she couldn’t stop grinning. “The original Alfred X. Northwood,” she said, “married into a wealthy New York family—”

  “Things kinda went his way.”

  “His entire life. He died rich and respectable, loved and admired by the world. You should see the obit in the Times. Anyway, he died in 1955, aged seventy, and left six children, and they grew up and made more children, and now there are seventeen claimants to Gold Castle Realty.”

  “Claimants,” Dortmunder said.

  “The heirs are all suing each other,” she said. “It’s very vicious, they all hate each other, but every court they go into they get gag orders, so there’s nothing public about this information at all.”

  “But you got it,” Dortmunder said, wishing she’d quit having fun and just tell him where the damn chess set was.

  “In my researches,” she said, “I came across inklings of some of the lawsuits, and then it turned out this firm represents Livia Northwood Wheeler, Alfred’s youngest daughter, who’s suing everybody in the family, no partners on her side at all.” Leaning closer to him over the conference table, she said, “Isn’t that delicious? I’m looking for the Northwoods, and everything you could possibly want to know about their business for the last eighty years is in files in these offices. Oh, I’ve done a lot of after-hours work, Mr. Dortmunder, I can assure you.”