Callahan's Lady

by Spider Robinson

  “Oh, no!” I exclaimed. I stopped being amused by his predicament and began to get scared for him.

  “I certainly do know the son of a bitch,” Lady Sally said. “Gorilla with shoes on? Looks like he bites the heads off baby rabbits to floss his teeth? He was in my Parlor once a few years back. For about three minutes. Bugger had the manners of a hungry weasel. I gave him an invitation to the world.” Now I began to be a little afraid for Sally. Big Travis used to get all grey-faced and spitty if he saw Tony Donuts across the street. “One of half a dozen times in living memory that Priscilla required assistance in ejecting a client. He broke a longshoreman’s face and two chairs before I arrived with a scattergun. Glad to see the back of that lumbering lump of limburger, though I can’t say it was much improvement on the other side.”

  “He was too drunk to remember where he’d been the next day,” the Professor said grimly, “or you’d have seen him again. You’ve had a narrow escape, Lady. Think of this man as bad news on burnt toast.”

  “He’s not an official wise guy, a made man,” I told her. “He’s an independent. You know how the world works, Lady. If you’re Italian but not with one of the Families, you had better not compete with them. He does. That’s how tough he is.”

  She frowned. “What’s his line?”

  “Paper products,” the Professor said.

  “That’s scarcely competition,” she said. “I know the Families have taken a strong position in that line lately, but counterfeiters don’t compete with each other. The capacity of the market for counterfeit money is effectively infinite.”

  “The same is true of the goods and services in which you yourself deal, dear lady. Without wishing to be nosy, does it not require considerable effort and diplomacy to retain your own independence?”

  “Well…” I happen to know the reason that Lady Sally is permitted to remain a free agent. The heads of three Families that do not control that particular section of Brooklyn have a better time at her House than they do in any of the sorry joints they own themselves. Pressure was applied; an accommodation was reached. But Family politics are always unstable, aren’t they?

  “It’s a matter of respect, you see. Sicilians kill competitors, even when it profits them nothing, on general principles. It is, they seem to feel, merely what one does. And Signor Donuts offends further in offering a superior product. But him they pretend not to see. He is too dangerous.”

  She shook her head wonderingly. “Superior product? Hard to imagine a galoot such as you describe being a gifted engraver.”

  “He didn’t need to be. He simply found out who the best paper-cutter on the East Coast was…then killed that man and took his plates and paper. A charmingly simple and direct approach is his hallmark. He constructs Tony-Donuts-sized holes between himself and whatever he wants.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “That’s why I threw him out. It seems I was lucky to make it stick. How did he get that preposterous name?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?” I asked.

  She considered that. “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Professor?” I knew the story, but I was curious to see how he would phrase it.

  “Ahem. Briefly stated, Your Ladyship, Mr. Donnazio wished to restrict a gentleman’s freedom of movement, and the tools at hand included a mallet and two large spikes. Later, when this man’s liberty was at least theoretically restored, a policeman was heard to observe that a certain portion of the gentleman’s anatomy now resembled a pair of donuts.”

  “Good God,” Lady Sally exclaimed. “How had the fellow offended him?”

  “Signor Donnazio was engaged in raping the man’s wife at the time, and the man would not stop pestering him.”

  She shuddered and frowned ferociously. “I begin to see why he gave Priscilla trouble. Nasty piece of work. All right, let’s make this march. How and why did you manage to anger Tony Donuts, boy?”

  The Professor lit a new cigarette. “Pure rotten luck. In the course of business I developed a need for funny paper in a largish amount. The sting required the best, as the mark knows paper. He’d have spotted Families product in a twinkling. So—”

  “You perfect chump,” Lady Sally said, “are you telling me you tried to sting this Donuts monster for the bait for your other swindle?”

  He drew himself up and thrust out his tits. “I beg your pardon, Lady! Do I look that stupid?”

  Neither of us said a word or moved a muscle.

  “I bought his paper fair and square and paid cash, perfectly good cash. The last of my cash. Five thousand legit for fifty thousand bogus. We parted company, just as quickly as I could politely arrange it, I assure you, and I passed from his life. Or tried to. But Tony Donuts is like a bad egg. He keeps coming back on one.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “The damned Secret Service. You will naturally understand that the Treasury Department takes a dim view of Tony’s present hobby. His plagiarized art is so good that a sizable number of agents have been devoted to tracking him down. Apparently one of them tired of living on his salary. He contacted Tony and sold him a summary of his file. For my five thousand, damn it.

  “Follow me carefully, now. The T-men have located Tony’s plates. They have tied them to him. What they do not have are any samples of currency which can be proven to have been produced since the date at which the plates can be proven to have passed into his control. Naturally, mere possession of the plates is a serious criminal offense. But they would prefer to arrest him for a more serious, and more newsworthy, felony. And Tony, though a creature of simple and direct impulses as stated above, is just prudent enough to realize that wholesale massacre of federal agents is simply not cost effective. Are you beginning to see the picture, ladies?”

  “Tony Donuts wants his fifty gees back,” I said.

  “Urgently.”

  “And you haven’t got it anymore.”

  He bowed sitting down. “Nothing germane remains outside the nutshell.”

  “Is he willing to return your five thousand?” Lady Sally asked.

  The Professor smiled. “You know, I actually asked him. Not bravery; the words just came out of my mouth before I could manage to cut out my tongue. He chortled. Have you ever heard Tony Donuts chortle?”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s precisely why I threw him out.”

  “Of course I told him his funny paper was unrecoverable. I also assured him that the nature of the game I was running made it absolutely certain that not a dollar of it would ever get into circulation. He declined to believe me, for the perfectly sensible reason that that is what I would have said whether it was true or not. Moreover, he didn’t care. He said that—” He hesitated. “He said that either I could produce his engravings, every last one of them, within two days, or…”

  “Go on, son.”

  “Or people would have to start calling him Tony Life Savers.”

  “It’s a damned lie,” I told Lady Sally. “They’d be donuts. Big donuts. I know.”

  “So do I, dear,” she assured me. “And there are a lot of marks walking around in the certain knowledge that the Professor has large ones. Nonetheless, I imagine he wouldn’t want them to become hammered brass. You’re quite certain the stuff is beyond reach, Professor?”

  “Irrevocably. Out of the country. And the sting won’t pay off for nearly a month, so I can’t simply leave town. The payoff is too tempting.”

  “Forty-eight hours is your deadline.”

  “Of which some five are already past. It might as well be forty-eight years. I wish it were. So, since there is no chance of appeasing this man, and I wish to preserve my kegs untapped, I’ve come to beg for sanctuary. All I need is somewhere to lie doggo until the day comes when his greed outweighs his caution and he runs off another batch. It can’t be long in coming. Tony has barely enough brains to keep his ears apart. At worst I’ll be gone in a month, when my mark ripens. Uh…I’d go so far as to work for my keep.”

  I stared. />
  “Not in an artistic capacity, of course. The kitchen, the Snoop Room, clean-up, anywhere out of the public eye.”

  Lady Sally looked deeply distressed. “Professor, the idea of you doing honest work is like the idea of tearing down Ebbett’s Field. No matter what the reasons, it just shouldn’t be done. I’d sooner let you run up a tab.”

  “Bless you, My Lady.”

  “—but I would much rather get you out of this soup than have you hang around while it simmers away. Freeloaders in a working House are bad for morale.”

  “I am open to all suggestions. Coming here was, I assure you, a last resort.”

  “Hmmm. What denominations are involved?” Sally asked him.

  “Tens, of course. Who in their right mind would counterfeit anything else? Strike that: we’re speaking of Tony Donuts.”

  “We’re talking about five thousand pieces of paper,” she corrected. “You could fit it into a largish briefcase.”

  “I did just that.”

  “So the question becomes, how do we fill the briefcase?”

  “I’ve told you,” he said. “It can’t be done. The funny money is out of reach, which leaves me no way to placate Signor Donuts.”

  “Then we shall simply have to stiff him.”

  “Eh? I mean, ‘Beg pardon?’”

  “We’ll give him real money.”

  “Oh.”

  The Professor got up and began to pace the studio.

  “Of course,” he said. “We’ll just give him fifty thousand dollars of real money. Brilliant. How elegant. How simple. How silly of me to miss it.” Then, big: “How the hell am I going to come up with fifty large in two days with no operating capital?”

  “Simplest thing in the world,” she said imperturbably. “Rob a bank.”

  “Rob a bank!” the Professor squeaked. “HOW?”

  “I leave that as an exercise for the student,” Sally said. “You do call yourself a player, do you not?”

  The Professor started to reply, then shut up. And slowly he began to smile…

  CHAPTER 9

  DOLLARS TO

  DONUTS

  We left him there happy as a clam. Sally told him that if he got bored or when I needed the studio, he could go downstairs and hang out in the women-only Lounge, but he assured her that he would not be bored. The Professor is never so happy as when he has a new scam brewing. He would probably have gotten around to robbing a bank sooner or later; it was the sort of technical challenge that inspired him. If you and he both live long enough, one day you are going to hand him the shirt off your back, and for the rest of your life you’ll wonder what ever possessed you.

  It worked out that all my appointments that night requested special-purpose studios (one Back Seat, two Casting Couch and a Police Interrogation), so I didn’t see the Professor again until the shift was over at three A.M. When I got to the studio door, still toweling my hair dry, I met Lady Sally, elegant in a silk wrapper and mules, accompanied by her husband and Big Mary. We all exchanged friendly hugs and passed inside.

  Lady Sally’s husband Mike is a huge redheaded shanty Irishman; he could probably walk normally with her stuffed down one trouser leg. He has a pirate’s grin and terrible taste in cigars. He works some job out on the Island that has the same hours as ours, and usually doesn’t get in until I’m in bed. I like him a lot, and wish I got to see more of him. He’s the kind of man you can hug naked from the shower with his wife watching, if you understand what that means. Big Mary is also Irish, come to think, and in fact could pass for Mike’s sister. She wore gaily colored satin pajamas. She ran over two hundred at that time, and was about as far as you can get from the stereotype of the jolly fat lady, having an acerbic wit and no tolerance for fools. Nevertheless there are reasons why she was an extremely popular artist until she retired to run the Snoop Room a few years back. I’ll hug her naked any chance I get.

  Lady Sally introduced them both to the Professor, and he greeted them formally, doffing his wig like a hat as he bowed. Out of deference to his hostess he went British again, appearing to grow a monocle. He had made a pot of tea on the hotplate. Everyone sat and I passed out cups. All three of my friends hit it off at once; neither Mike nor Mary seemed to find the Professor’s attire odd. With his permission, Lady Sally brought them into consultation on his predicament. Mary expressed sympathy, and inquired after his progress. It turned out that there was almost none, but the Prof refused to be dismayed. The harder the puzzle, the better he liked it.

  “I’ve done a great deal of basic spadework,” he said cheerfully, “chiefly eliminating unprofitable lines of approach. The classical frontal assault is of course out of the question. I have no objection to a spot of violence when necessary, but I have never planned to commit violence. Aside from its karmic tendency to boomerang on one, it smacks too much of work. The same objection applies to those silly tunneling gambits beloved by filmmakers, and additionally I have a time problem. For a time I toyed with the notion of representing myself as a vault lock repairman engaged in routine maintenance, and relying on general charm to preclude any check of my bona fides. But while I’m confident that I could sustain the role itself after a few hours’ research at the library, I am not a lock man, and would need more than forty-eight hours’ education to become one. Again, too much work. The scheme does not play to my strengths.

  “Therefore my course is clear: I must persuade someone in legitimate authority to take that money from the bank and give it to me.”

  “Christ, is that all?” Mary said. “I thought you had a problem.”

  “It shouldn’t be too difficult, friend Mary,” the Professor agreed. “Consider that I will have had few if any predecessors. The worst moments in my profession come when one finds oneself the second person to have tried a particular sting on a mark. Your Ladyship, is the House buttoned up for the night?”

  “The lodge is tyled,” she assured him.

  “Ah, so. May I ask you all to forgive me, then? This girdle is killing me.” All four of us urged him to get comfortable, and he stripped gratefully down to panties and stockings. Mike offered to undress himself; Prof thanked him but assured him that it was unnecessary. “How do you ladies manage to endure these diabolical devices?” he asked us, poking maliciously at his bra and girdle and adding his wig to the pile.

  “The same way you men put up with neckties,” Mary said.

  “I don’t,” said Mike with some smugness.

  “Well, I don’t put up with bras,” she said. “Except for professional purposes. But they’re the flip side of the same thing. A visible symbol to your society of your willingness to endure some small discomfort to please your neighbors. Our culture chooses to bind your neck, bind my belly and breasts; Chinese women bind their feet; some African men scar their faces.”

  “I just like the way they make my tits stick out,” Lady Sally said. “What I’ve always found silly about men’s underwear are those ridiculous openings on the front of jockey shorts.”

  Mike nodded vigorous agreement. “No man alive knows what the hell those things are for,” he said. “It is not physically possible to piss with your unit in the shape of a letter Z.”

  “And the hole isn’t big enough to get more than a couple of fingers in,” I agreed. “Ladies and gentlemen, haven’t we wandered a bit? Professor, have you any idea whom, of a bank’s personnel, you want to target?”

  “Elementary, my dear Nothing’s-on,” he said, scratching his bra mark. “The manager. Simple economy of effort. Only a bank manager could redirect that much mazuma without the need to involve others. Even a bank president would have to go through the manager for such a sum.”

  “There are two bank managers presently on my client roster,” Lady Sally said, “but damn it, they’re both sweethearts. I should hate to see them gaffed. In fact, I don’t believe you could work up the necessary dislike, Professor.”

  “Huh!” Mary said. “Uh, Boss?”

  “Yes, dear?”

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nbsp; “I need a temporary suspension of Rule Three.”

  Rule One at Lady Sally’s House is, “Give full value at every performance.” Rule Two is, “The customer need not always come first. Enjoy yourself; it’s contagious.” Rule Three reads: “Thou shalt not gossip about the clients—to each other or to other clients.” (And Rule Four is, “Thou shalt not recognize clients outside the House unless they acknowledge you first.”) Of course Rule Three is impossible for an artist to obey. The stories we have are just too juicy not to share. In practice the rule has been modified to mean that you can tell stories about a client if you’re careful to phrase it so that nobody can tell which specific client you’re discussing.

  Any of Lady Sally’s Rules can be suspended in an emergency. But she gets to define “emergency.”

  “Is this client a current account?” she asked Mary.

  “Hell, no. He took three strikes in three at-bats.”

  The third time one of the artists complains to her about a particular customer, Lady Sally gives that client a permanent invitation to the world. The complaint need not be more specific or concrete than, “What a creep.” (She sometimes stretches a point for U.N. diplomats, saying that anyone who carries that much weight on their shoulders deserves the benefit of the doubt; as long as there’s one artist in House willing to accept their business, and they don’t actively annoy the other customers, diplomats can keep coming around.)

  “In that case, speak on by all means. We have accepted that the general good presently requires a pigeon.”

  “Thanks, Boss. We had a bank manager in here about three months ago. I don’t know what his real name was, but his House name was ‘Jim Brady.’”

  “Winthrop Willoughby, Chemical Corn Exchange,” Lady Sally said at once. “You’re right, dear, I’d forgotten.”

  “Why, I filed the second complaint on that greaseball,” I exclaimed. “What a creep. I don’t mind if a customer needs me to say crude things about his wife…but he wanted me to say creepy things. I don’t think he’d ever been in a House before; I had to lead him by the hand, so to speak. I didn’t know he was a bank manager.”