What's So Funny

by Donald Westlake

  “And if there isn’t,” Kelp said, “you make one up.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So make one up,” Tiny suggested.

  The silence that ensued was brief but telling, before Stan said, “Well, you can’t do a bomb scare.”

  “Nobody,” Tiny pointed out, “said you could.”

  “The idea with a bomb scare,” Stan went on, “is they evacuate the building, then you can do what you gotta do, but it doesn’t work that way. You try a bomb scare around this town, the building doesn’t evacuate, it fills up to the brim, with cops, firemen, insurance adjusters, short con artists, farmers’ markets, and documentary filmmakers. So forget the bomb scare.”

  “I’ll do that,” Tiny said.

  “And you can’t overpower the lobby guards,” Kelp said, “you know, with handguns and masks and sets of cuffs and all that, on account of the camera surveillance.”

  “That’s too bad,” Tiny said. “It sounds like it might’ve been fun.”

  “Well, it won’t work that way,” Kelp advised him.

  “So here’s a question,” Tiny said, and everybody except Dortmunder looked alert. “Let’s say,” Tiny said, “somebody went in there in disguise, to look like one of the people got the okay to go down to this vault. Not me, one of you guys. In a suit, shine up your shoes, like that.”

  Kelp said, “I think you gotta show ID.”

  “ID is not a complete impossible,” Tiny said. “For instance, you follow one of the bank execs home one night, out to Connecticut, you come back with the ID, family finds him next morning, healthy but tied up and gagged in a car in a commuter railroad parking lot.”

  They thought about that, then turned to Dortmunder. Kelp said, “John?”

  It was his own house, so he couldn’t even go home. He roused himself to say, “Special elevator down from the lobby, special card stick into the elevator door, don’t know what extra stuff they got downstairs, but the lobby guards know all the execs or they get fired.”

  “Also,” Judson said, just to sink that boat one more time, “it weighs almost seven hundred pounds. You’re gonna look funny carrying that in your suit.”

  Into the next silence, Stan inserted, “What if —?”

  They all, except Dortmunder, looked at him. Kelp said, “And?”

  “I was just thinking,” Stan said. “About safe–deposit boxes, you know. One of us gets a safe–deposit box, then we got a legitimate reason, go down to the vault.”

  “I think,” Kelp said carefully, “it’s a different vault, or a different part of the vault. Am I right, John?”

  “Yes,” Dortmunder said.

  Tiny said, “Dortmunder, I didn’t see this place, I don’t have it in my mind. We’ve got a lobby, we’ve got a bank, what’ve we got here? Walk me through it.”

  “It’s a big building,” Dortmunder told him. “Sixty stories high, half a block wide. The bank branch is on the corner, with its own way in and out. Lobby’s in the middle, no door, anyway no public door, between them. On the side of the lobby away from the bank wall you got shops, inside shops, no street doors. At the back of the lobby you got your elevators and the special elevator.”

  “These lobby guards?”

  “On the left, by the wall separates you from the bank.”

  Tiny nodded. “All very open,” he said. “You’re not gonna wheel that thing on a dolly across that lobby.”

  “As,” Dortmunder said, “I said.”

  “Air ducts,” Stan said.

  Tiny looked at him. “You wanna push a seven–hundred–pound chess set through a building’s air ducts? What about when they go vertical?”

  Kelp said, “Street repair crew. Set up outside, dig down, run your tunnel under the sidewalk to the —”

  “On Fifth Avenue,” Judson said.

  Kelp paused, frowned deeply, and shook his head. “Never mind.”

  Stan said, “I know where I can get hold of a helicopter.”

  Tiny said, “I don’t know what you’re gonna do with it.”

  Kelp said, “What if we did set fire to the lobby? We come in dressed like firemen —”

  Dortmunder said, “Marble doesn’t burn.”

  The silence this time was uncomfortable from the very beginning, because everybody knew at once it was the final silence, but nobody wanted to be the one to declare the session over, the cure not found. Finally, Judson cleared his throat and said, “You got a nice warm radiator here, but maybe I oughta, I don’t know, probably time to …”

  “Me, too,” Stan said, stretching as though he’d been asleep a long time.

  So then everybody moved and stood up and walked around, except Dortmunder, to whom they all said good–bye as though he were somehow both the bereaved and the dearly departed. Dortmunder nodded, but did not stand.

  Tiny, on his way out, rested a giant paw on Dortmunder’s shoulder, adding to the weight of his burdens, and said, “If you don’t like San Francisco, I got another suggestion. Biloxi.”

  Dortmunder shook his head. “Eppick —”

  “I said Biloxi,” Tiny reminded him. “Biloxi, Mississippi. Trust me, Dortmunder, they still won’t talk to a Northern cop down there.”

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  The lobby of the C&I International building did not look as Judson had expected from John’s description. The openness, largeness, and airiness had somehow been left out. The space must have been three stories tall, sheathed in creamy mottled marble, with a sweeping wall of glass to face the street. The place mostly reminded Judson of a cathedral, particularly on a cloudless Sunday morning like this, with the thousand rays of thin November sun reverberating every which way through the lobby, reflected from all the other glass–and–steel buildings along the avenue.

  It was like standing inside a halo. How could anybody ever bring himself to steal anything in a place like this? Never mind all the light, it was the saintliness that deterred.

  And yet it was a bank. Over there were the two guards, behind their chest–high counter, the monitor screens set into the wall up behind them.

  Would one of those screens show the vault, or at least the entrance to the vault? Why not?

  Judson moved in the direction of the monitor screens, looking at black–and–white pictures of hallways and empty elevators, until he became aware that the guards were, in their turn, looking at him. Not because they suspected him of anything, but because he was the only thing they could see that was in motion. The shops on the other side of the lobby were closed on Sundays, and so were many of the offices on the floors above.

  Belatedly deciding it would be a mistake to draw a lot of attention to himself, Judson veered from his monitor–bound route toward the register instead, deeper along that wall. They would think he was merely looking for one of the tenants here, wouldn’t they?

  Judson had no real business in the C&I building, not on Sunday nor on any other day. He had just been feeling so bad about John ever since he’d casually demolished everybody’s hopes yesterday by saying flat out that they’d never get into that bank vault, and had seen the sag of John’s face like a wedge of cheese in a microwave.

  But why should they believe him? He was the kid, what did he know? Of course, it was just that all the others were pretending there was hope, to buoy John’s spirits, and the kid had been too dumb to go along, so once he’d burst the bubble, there was nothing left for anybody else to say.

  But was he right? Was it true that the vault was impregnable? Rising from bed in his Spanish Chelsea apartment this morning, he’d known the only thing he could do was look at the place for himself, just in case — just in case, you know — there might somehow, in some little tiny way nobody else had noticed, be a way to squiggle into that vault after all.

  And back out. That was one of the most important life lessons he’d learned so far: It’s nice to be able to get into a place, but it’s essential to be able to get out again.

  Over at the big black square rectang
le of the register, with all the white letters and numbers on it defining every company with space in this building, Judson gazed upward, hoping the guards had lost interest in him (but certainly not looking over there to find out), and found himself marveling at how many different names there are in this world. All individual, most pronounceable. Think of that.

  “Help you?”

  Judson jumped like a hiccup, and turned to see one of the guards right there next to him, frowning at him, being polite in a very threatening way. “Oh, no!” he blurted. “I’m just … waiting for a friend of mine. He didn’t come down yet, that’s all.”

  “Where does he work?” the guard asked, pretending to be helpful, and then, more suddenly, more sharply, “Don’t look at the board! Where does he work?”

  Where does he work? Judson pawed desperately through his short–term memory, in search of just one of those names he’d so recently been reading and marveling on, and every last one of them was gone. His mind was a blank. “Well,” he said. “Uh …”

  “Hey, there you are! Sorry I’m late.”

  Judson turned his deer–in–the–headlights eyes and there was Andy Kelp, striding with great confidence across the sun–gleaming marble lobby, like the galactic commander in a science–fiction saga. “Oh,” Judson said, relieved and bewildered. What words were he supposed to speak? “I,” he said, “I forgot where you work. Isn’t that stupid?”

  “I wish I could,” Andy said, cheerful as ever. “Let’s not go up there, it’s too nice a day.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Andy nodded a greeting at the guard. “How ya doin’?”

  “Fine,” the guard said, but he didn’t sound it.

  Judson felt the guard’s eyes on his back all the way out to Fifth Avenue. Once safely out there among the tourists and the taxis, Andy said, “Let’s mosey southward a little.” And, as they did so, he said, “Just implanting your facial features on the staff there, eh?”

  “I wasn’t trying to.”

  “No? What were you trying to do?”

  “I felt so bad about John, I thought, why don’t I just take a look, see if maybe …”

  They stopped for a red light among the tourists, many of whom appeared to have been inflated beyond manufacturer’s specifications, and Andy said, “My thought exactly. I even went to double–o that golden dome, the least I can do is give a gander to a bank. I get there, I can see you’re in need of assistance.”

  “I was,” Judson said humbly.

  “See, kid — The light’s green.”

  They crossed, amid all that padding, and Andy said, “See, if you’re gonna case a place, it’s not a good idea you give them a glossy photograph of yourself. What you do, you come in, you walk over to the elevators, you give that other door the eye, you look at your watch, you shake your head, you walk out. You don’t look at guards, you don’t stand still, you don’t hang around, but when you’re outside you’ve got the situation cold.”

  “There’s no way to get into the vault,” Judson said.

  “You said that yesterday.”

  “But now I know it.”

  “I tell you what,” Andy said. “It’s a nice day, we’re out here anyway, let’s go see did John get over it.”

  Chapter 24

  * * *

  John wasn’t watching football, and May didn’t like that at all. Here it was November, the middle of the season, every team still at least theoretically in the running, and John doesn’t even sit down to watch Sunday football. Not even the pregame show. It was worrying.

  May was in the kitchen, involved in that worrying, when the street doorbell sounded, a noise she was still getting used to, that bell having been on the blink for many years until the landlord abruptly fixed it as a run–up to a rent increase. But now, unasked for and unneeded, here it was working again, and the sound had already trained her enough so that she automatically went to the little round grid in the kitchen wall and said into it, “Hello?”

  “It’s Andy,” said a garbled voice that could have been any Martian.

  Andy? Andy doesn’t ring doorbells, he picks locks, you don’t know Andy’s going to make a visit until he’s sitting in the living room.

  What was going on here? John doesn’t watch football, Andy Kelp doesn’t pick locks, the world is coming to an end. “Come on up,” she said dubiously, and pushed the button below the grid.

  Did he plan to ring the upstairs doorbell, too? Well, we don’t have to put up with that. So May walked down the corridor from the kitchen to the apartment front door, passing along the way the open door on her right to the room where John sat brooding in the direction of the switched–off television set but not, she knew, actually seeing it.

  With the apartment door open, she could hear the asymmetric tramp of feet coming up the stairs; more than one, then. And yes, into view from the staircase came Andy and with him that nice kid Judson who’d attached himself to the group recently.

  “Harya,” Andy said, approaching. “I brought the kid.”

  “I see that. Is he the reason you rang the bell?”

  Looking a bit sheepish, Andy grinned and said, “Basically, yeah. We don’t want to give him too many bad habits all at once.”

  “Hi, Miss May,” Judson said.

  “Hi, yourself,” May said, and stepped back from the doorway. “Well, come on in. John’s in the living room, not watching football.”

  “Oh,” Andy said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  They went in to see John as though entering a sickroom. Brightly, May said, “John, look who’s here. It’s Andy and Judson.”

  He sort of looked at them. “Harya,” he said, and stopped sort of looking at them.

  “Sit down,” May said, so Andy and Judson perched uncomfortably on the sofa and she wrung her hands a little, not a normal gesture for her, and said, “Can I get anybody a beer?”

  Andy could be seen to be about to say yes, but John, in a voice of doom, said, “No, thanks, May,” so Andy closed his mouth again.

  “Well,” May said, and sat in her own chair, and everybody carefully didn’t look at John.

  Andy said, “This weather. For November, you know, this weather’s pretty good.”

  “Very sunny out there,” Judson added.

  “That’s nice,” May said, and gestured at the window. “In here, you hardly notice.”

  “Well, it’s really sunny,” Andy said.

  “Good,” May said.

  And then nobody said anything, for quite some time. Andy and Judson frowned mightily, obviously racking their brains in search of topics of conversation, but nothing. The silence in the room stretched on, and everybody in there except John became increasingly tongue–tied and desperate. John just continued to brood in the direction of the television set. Then:

  “The problem is,” John said.

  Everybody turned to him, very alert. But then he didn’t say anything else, just shook his head.

  They waited; nothing. Finally May said, “Yes, John? The problem?”

  “Well, I’m thinking about it backwards,” John said. “That’s what’s been wrong.”

  May said, “Backwards? I don’t follow.”

  “When the kid said yesterday, we can’t get into the vault —”

  “I’m sorry I said that, John,” Judson said. “I’ve been wanting to tell you that, I’m sorry.”

  “No, you were right,” John said. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along, there’s no way to get into that vault.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Fuggedabodit. See, what it is I gotta do, I gotta stop thinking about getting into the vault because I can’t get into the vault. That’s the backwards part.”

  Judson said, “It is?”

  “The mountain,” John explained, “gotta go to whatsisname. Mohammed.”

  Fearing the worst, May said, “John?”

  “You know,” John said, and gestured vaguely with both hands. �
��He won’t go to that, so that’s gotta go to him. Same with the vault. We can’t get in at the chess set, case closed, no discussion, so what we gotta do is get the chess set to come out to us.”

  “That’s brilliant, John,” Andy said. “How do we do that?”

  “Well,” John said, “that’s the part I’m working on.”

  Chapter 25