Nobody's Perfect

by Donald Westlake

  And at the crest, the view was of a winding descent through hedgerows and stone walls, with three segments of macadam roadway dimly visible, and no vehicle lights at all on any of them.

  “They turned off,” Dortmunder said.

  “But there’s no place to turn off.”

  “Lights over there,” Kelp said, and when they both turned to look at him (because they had no idea where “over there” was) he was pointing off to the left. Out that way, apparently at some distance in the mountainous dark, what looked to be headlights were flickering. They disappeared, appeared again, disappeared.

  “We missed the turnoff,” Dortmunder said.

  “Damn.” Chauncey twisted sideways to look past Kelp’s ear at the downslope, easing his foot cautiously on the brake. He was a shaky driver in reverse, oversteering madly, swinging back and forth in abrupt Vs across the road, but he did make it all the way to the bottom before plowing into the front end of a silver Jensen Interceptor III with stereo t/d, AM/FM, a/c, brown int., calfskin uph., electric windows, all power, immaculate cond., private owner, which was just growling at speed around the corner of the stone barn.

  “Damn it to hell, I’ve hit him!”

  “The painting,” Dortmunder said, and pointed at the faint trail leading upward, next to the barn.

  “The painting.” Chauncey looked at Dortmunder, at the rear–view mirror, and made his decision. Into first gear, spin the wheel hard left, and accelerate.

  The initial impact had broken the Vauxhall’s left–rear tail light and slightly dented a bit of its rear metalwork, while putting out one of the Jensen’s headlights, crumpling its radiator and severely denting both its front fenders. The sudden leap forward by the Vauxhall, just as the Jensen’s driver was stepping in horror and astonishment out onto the pavement, jolted the Jensen forward, dumped its driver into the mud and gravel at the verge, and then wrenched the Jensen’s front bumper loose. Its gonglike clatter when it hit the pavement served as a kind of announcement for the Department of the Environment highway truck, a big yellow Leyland full of stones and dirt, which at that moment came around the corner of the barn and smacked the Jensen very smartly in the rear.

  In the Vauxhall, bucketing up the unpaved side road, Chauncey clung grimly to the steering wheel and Dortmunder hung desperately to everything he could find on the dashboard, while Kelp jounced backwards in the rear seat, gazing down the hill toward the road and saying, “He just got it again. Some truck hit him.”

  Neither Chauncey nor Dortmunder cared what was going on back there. A half moon and several million stars in a cloudless sky showed even more clearly than their headlights a scrub–filled up–and–down landscape virtually as wild as when Hadrian built his wall. The Picts and Celts might no longer be about (except on football weekends), but the countryside which had formed their rough bad–tempered natures was still as it had been, scarred more by nature than by man. Driving through this scrag, not once did anyone in the Vauxhall see a light, nor any other indication of the Mini, till all at once, as they crawled up over rocks and roots between two gnarled and stumpy pines, Porculey appeared in their headlights, blinking nervously and gesturing for them to turn right.

  Chauncey lifted his foot from the accelerator in surprise, and the car, barely moving anyway, promptly stalled.

  And now Chauncey’s door opened, and Leo Zane’s voice said, “Out you come. Dortmunder? Kelp? You weren’t silly enough to bring guns, were you?”

  No; they were silly enough not to bring guns. All three emerged from the Vauxhall, Chauncey looking tense but not frightened, Dortmunder grimly annoyed, Kelp disgusted. Zane said, “Walk up the hill to the right. Griswold, follow with their car. Keep the lights on us.”

  The three prisoners, followed by Zane, and then by Porculey driving their car, went up the hill, their black shadows long dark charcoal lines lengthening ahead of them. Turning right again at Zane’s direction, they found themselves in the battered moss–grown remnant of what had once apparently been a good–sized castle. A few boulderish bits of stone wall, like an early draft for Stonehenge, was all they could see at first, but then Porculey cut the Vauxhall’s lights, and in the softer illumination of moon and starlight they could make out still–standing segments of the building clustered across the way.

  Zane now used a flashlight to guide them over a gorse–grown former courtyard to a gray stone wall shielding a flight of worn steps leading down. At the bottom, a heavy door shaped like an inverted shield stood open, and they entered upon a clammy empty stone corridor, its distant end obscured by shadow. Zane’s flashlight told them to walk down this corridor and then to enter a doorway on the left, while behind them they could hear the heavy groaning of hinges as Porculey closed the stairway door.

  They were now in a large cluttered stone room. Barred windows were spaced along one wall, up near the ceiling. To the left and straight ahead the room was filled with decaying old furniture, piles of wooden boxes and cardboard cartons, stacks of newspapers, bits and pieces of armor and old weaponry, clusters of mugs and jugs and bottles, massed decaying flags, mantel clocks, candlesticks, and in every chink some further bric–a–brac. To the right, an area had been cleared, a kind of half circle before a huge deep fireplace. Here the stone floor was covered with a faded old carpet, on which stood a few massive uncomfortable–looking chairs and tables. Three candles burned on the high mantelpiece, and before the unlit fireplace stood Ian Macdough, looking worried. “So it’s true,” he said, as they all walked in.

  “As I told you,” Zane said, limping to one side while Porculey closed the door.

  “Nice place you got here,” Kelp said, with his chipper smile. “Must be tough on the cleaning lady, though.”

  Dortmunder had turned an accusatory eye on Porculey, saying, “I’m disappointed in you. I knew these other two were no good, but I thought you were an honest man.”

  “It’s that ten thousand you gave me,” Porculey said, avoiding Dortmunder’s eye. “Money’s a strange thing,” he added, sounding a bit surprised at himself. “As soon as you have some, it wants you to get more. I never knew I wanted a hundred thousand dollars until I got the ten thousand.”

  Meanwhile, Macdough was still looking worried, saying to Zane, “Now we’ve got them, what do we do with them?”

  “Nothing,” Chauncey said. “There’s a public controversy over that painting Macdough, between you and me and the insurance company. What happens to your sale if I disappear before it’s straightened out?”

  Macdough rubbed a knuckle over his lips and cleared his throat. “You shouldn’t have followed us,” he said.

  “It’s my painting,” Chauncey said, “and you’re going to have to deal with me.”

  “Split the take six ways? Man, man, that doesn’t pay my hotel bill!”

  “These two were already paid,” Chauncey said, with a gesture toward Dortmunder and Kelp so casual, so dismissing, that Dortmunder understood at once the teams had regrouped, leaving himself and Kelp out in the cold.

  So, speaking just as casually, Dortmunder said, “That’s right. We just came along to help Chauncey, so now we’ll leave you people to dicker without a lot of outsiders —”

  “No, no, Dortmunder,” Zane interrupted, smiling behind his gun. “Don’t you hurry away.”

  Irritably, Chauncey said, “Why not, Zane? They don’t want anything, let them leave.”

  “With what they know?” Zane shook his head. “They could still make money, Chauncey. From your insurance company, for instance.”

  Chauncey gave Dortmunder a sudden sharp look, and Dortmunder told him, “You know better than that. All we want is our airfare, and we’re quits.”

  “I can’t think about you now, Dortmunder,” Chauncey said, shaking his head like a man pestered by gnats.

  “Mr. Chauncey,” Kelp said, “I didn’t sleep under your dresser for a week and a half to be treated like this.”

  But Chauncey wasn’t listening. He’d turned back to Macdough
, saying, “I want my painting.”

  “Buy it at the auction.”

  “I’ve already paid for it. It’s mine.”

  “I won’t give it to you,” Macdough said, “and that’s that. And I won’t give up the lion’s share of the money either.”

  Dortmunder said, “Why not pull the insurance game again?” Everybody looked at him. Macdough said, “What insurance game?”

  “You go back to Parkeby–South,” Dortmunder told him, “and say you’re worried because of the robbery, you want the same experts to come back and look at the painting. They do, they see it’s a fake, you claim the original was stolen during the robbery —”

  “Which is what happened,” Macdough pointed out, sounding bitter.

  “So you aren’t even lying. The gallery’s insurance company pays you, so you’ve got your money. You sell Chauncey the original for a few dollars and everybody’s happy.”

  There was interest in Macdough’s face, and also in Chauncey’s, but then Zane had to stick his two cents in, saying, “That’s cute, Dortmunder, but it won’t work.”

  “Sure it will.”

  “Insurance companies won’t pay twice for the same painting,” Zane said.

  Which was the flaw in Dortmunder’s argument, as Dortmunder had already known, but he could only do his best with the materials at hand. “They’ll have to pay,” he insisted. “How can the gallery’s insurance company refuse to pay Macdough for a painting everybody says is real?”

  “By stalling,” Zane said. “That’s the way insurance companies operate anyway. There’s already a lawsuit between Chauncey and his insurers in the states. The insurance company here would just tell Macdough they won’t settle his claim until the lawsuit on the other side is settled. One of those two might get some insurance money, but not both.”

  “Chauncey’s already had his,” Macdough grumbled, and from the lowering expression on his face Dortmunder knew the ploy had failed.

  “I’ll give you a hundred thousand for the painting,” Chauncey told Macdough. “I can’t afford it, but we have to break this deadlock somehow.”

  “Not enough,” Macdough said. “I signed a paper with these two for half. I’d only get fifty thousand pounds out of it.”

  Chauncey shook his head with a rueful smile. “I’m sorry, it’s worse than you think,” he said. “I meant a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “What? Sixty thousand pounds? With thirty for me?”

  “Keep all sixty,” Chauncey told him. “Tax free. It’s under the table, you don’t have to declare it and these two can’t take you to court.”

  “I wouldn’t take him to court,” Zane said dryly. “Forget it, Chauncey. Macdough and I — and Porculey, of course — intend to split four hundred thousand dollars. If we get it from you, fine. If not, we’ll get it at the auction.”

  Dortmunder said, “Not if Chauncey makes an anonymous call and tells the London police to check the copy in Parkeby–South. You don’t dare stop Chauncey, but he can stop you. Once the cops know the original was stolen, Macdough doesn’t dare show up with it. And you’re right back with only one buyer: Chauncey.”

  Chauncey smiled at Zane. “He’s right, you know.”

  “He’s not in this conversation,” Zane said, angrily.

  “I’m the one took the painting away,” Dortmunder told Macdough. “I could put it back.”

  “I can put it back!” Zane yelled, glaring at Dortmunder. To the others he said, “We won’t talk in front of these people any more. They’re out of it.”

  Chauncey said, “You can’t let them go, and nobody wants you shooting them.”

  Kelp said, “I’d just like to mention, today’s my birthday.”

  “There are rooms here with doors that lock,” Zane said mildly. “We’ll put them away till the discussion’s over.”

  Dortmunder said to Macdough, “I could be useful to you.” But it wasn’t enough; not against Zane’s gun. Macdough glanced away, biting the insides of his cheeks, and Zane gestured with the gun barrel, saying, “Come on, you two.”

  There wasn’t any choice. Dortmunder and Kelp went, out the door and farther down the hall to a closed door with a thick wooden bar across it. “Take off the bar and lean it against the wall,” Zane ordered, standing back too far for Dortmunder to swing it at him. Then he had them enter the room, which they saw in the flashlight’s beam to be filled with the same massed clutter as the room they’d just left.

  “There’s no light in here,” Kelp said, crossing the threshold. “There’s nothing interesting to see,” Zane assured him. “Step back from the door.” When Dortmunder stood facing him, just barely inside the room, Zane smiled at him and said, “Relax. You know they won’t let me shoot you.”

  “They’ll let you leave us here. Is that a better way to die?”

  Zane shrugged. “Where there’s life, I understand,” he said, “there’s hope.” And he shut and barred the door.

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  “He’s crazy, you know,” Chauncey told Macdough, the instant Zane had led his prisoners out the door. “He wants all the money, and he’ll kill every one of us before he’s done.”

  “He’s my partner,” Macdough said. “You’re just trying to split us up.”

  “He’s a killer. That’s what attracted me to him in the first place.”

  Porculey, stepping toward the two men, said, “Mr. Chauncey, I agree with you, and I want you to know I am heartily sorry I ever got involved with the man.”

  “I can handle myself with Zane,” Macdough insisted, rather too forcefully. “And with you.” Both he and Chauncey ignored Porculey, as though he hadn’t spoken, as though he weren’t there.

  “You’re out of your depth,” Chauncey said. “I will queer your pitch, Macdough, and even Zane knows he doesn’t dare stop me.”

  “We’ll find another buyer. We’ll get just as much on the black market. Some Arab sheikh.”

  Porculey, seeing he’d get cold comfort from both these two, and also seeing how absorbed they were in their argument, sidled as unobtrusively as a stout terrified man can sidle toward the door, picking up the still–wrapped painting on the way by. Quietly, without fuss, he departed the room.

  Meanwhile, Chauncey pointed out Macdough’s lack of expertise in selling paintings on the black market, and Macdough stated he had nothing but time and could probably sell the painting and collect on Parkeby–South’s insurance, and Chauncey said, “And the minute you get your hands on the money, you’re a dead man.”

  Which was when Zane entered, saying “Talking against me, Chauncey?”

  “Telling him the truth.”

  “Macdough knows better than that,” Zane said, though from the way Macdough looked at Zane maybe he didn’t know better than that. Still, Zane went blithely on, saying, “Porculey and I have no —” Then he stopped, frowned, looked left and right. “Where is my little friend?”

  “Porculey?”

  “The painting!” Macdough pointed at the table on which it had lain.

  “He — he wouldn’t dare!”

  The three men turned toward the door, about to race in pursuit, Zane already waving his pistol over his head, when Porculey himself came backing in and turned to give their astonished faces a sheepish smile. The tubular package was held at port arms across his chest.

  “You!” Macdough shrieked, and led the charge, closely followed by Chauncey and Zane. Porculey, his smile panicky, yelped and ran away into the piles of junk, the other three pursuing, Zane actually firing a shot in the air, a vast blast of explosion which deafened them all in that confined stone room, so that nobody, not even Zane himself, heard his own voice shout, “Stop!”

  Porculey wouldn’t have stopped anyway. He was climbing an upended mohair sofa, scrambling over pillows and library tables and candelabra up toward the ceiling, with half a dozen hands clutching at his ankles. They were dragging him back, dragging him down, and Porculey was shrieking a babble of absurd explanatio
n, when all at once a voice from behind them all said:

  “Ullo ullo ullo, what’s this, then?”

  They looked back, all of them draped on the stored goods like a quartet of mountain climbers who’ve just heard a rumble, and coming through the doorway was a tall–helmeted young police constable in uniform, pushing his bicycle.

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  The fact was, the driver of that Jensen Interceptor III was locally a Very Important Person. Sir Francis Monvich, his name was, he was fifty–six and very rich, and when his eighty–three–year–old father died he would become the 14th Viscount Glengorn, which in that neighborhood was pretty good. When Sir Francis Monvich’s Jensen was hit both front and rear, and when the hooligan who hit it in front promptly ran away into the surrounding countryside, the local constabulary could be expected to take a very serious view of the situation. They would consider their position. They would proceed at once to find some individuals who would assist the police in their enquiries.