“Ul,” said Dortmunder.
“Where was that, exactly?” Kelp asked.
“Andy,” Dortmunder said. “Sit down, Andy.”
“Ain’t you finished your coffee? We oughta go, John.”
“Sit down a minute. I — I wanna tell you something.”
Kelp sat down, watching Dortmunder critically. “What’s wrong, John? You look all weird.”
“A virus, maybe,” Dortmunder said, and wiped his nose.
“Wha’d you wanna tell me?”
“Well …” Dortmunder licked his lips, looked at his old friend, and took his life in his hands. “The first thing,” he said, “I’m sorry I dropped your phone out the window.”
Chapter 25
* * *
The five men seated around the kitchen table drank retsina and smoked Epoika cigarettes and spoke in guttural voices. Machine pistols hung on their chairbacks, dark shades covered the windows, and a small white plastic radio played salsa music to confound any bugging apparatus that might have been placed here by their enemies, of which there were many in this troubled old world, including the six men who abruptly crashed through the service stairwell door, brandishing their own machine pistols and in four languages ordering the men at the table not to move, nor speak, nor react in any way to their sudden appearance, lest they die like the dogs they were. The men at the table, wild–eyed and frozen, clutching their glasses and their cigarettes, muttered in three languages that the new arrivals were dogs, but made no other rejoinder.
After the first few seconds, when it became apparent that the shooting of machine pistols was not to be the first item on anybody’s agenda, a cautious kind of relaxation eased all those bodies and all those faces, and everybody moved on to whatever would happen next. While two of the intruders made determined but clumsy efforts to reclose the door they’d just demolished, their leader (known as Gregor) turned to the leader of the group at the table (code name Marko) and said, “We are here to negotiate with you dogs.”
Marko grimaced, scrinching up his eyes and baring his upper teeth: “What kind of debased language is that?”
“I am speaking to you in your own miserable tongue.”
“Well, don’t. It’s painful to my ears.”
“No more than to my mouth.”
Marko shifted to the language he presumed to be native to the invaders: “I know where you’re from.”
Gregor did his own teeth–baring grimace: “What was that, the sound of Venetian blinds falling off a window?”
Speaking Arabic, another of the men at the table said, “Perhaps these are dogs from a different litter.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Marko told him. “Even we don’t understand it.”
One of the invaders repairing the door said over his shoulder, in rotten German, “There must be a language common to us all.”
This seemed reasonable, to the few who understood it, and when it had been variously translated into several other tongues, it seemed reasonable to the rest as well. So the negotiation began with a wrangle over which language the negotiation would use, culminating in Gregor finally saying, in English, “Very well. We’ll speak in English.”
Almost everybody on both sides got upset at that. “What,” cried Marko, “the language of the Imperialists? Never!” But he cried this in English.
“We all understand it,” Gregor pointed out. “No matter how much we may hate it, English is the lingua franca of this world.”
After a bit more wrangling, mostly for the purpose of saving face, English was at last agreed upon as the language they would use, with the solemn understanding by all parties that the choice of English should not be considered to represent any political, ethnological, ideological, or cultural point of view. “Now,” Gregor said, “we negotiate.”
“Negotiation,” asked Marko, “comes from the barrel of a gun?”
Gregor smiled sadly. “That thing hanging on your chair,” he said, “is it your walking stick?”
“Only a dog needs a gun for a crutch.”
“Fine,” said Gregor, switching off the radio. “Your guns and our guns cancel each other. We can talk.”
“Leave the radio on,” Marko said. “It’s our defense against bugging.”
“It doesn’t work,” Gregor told him. “We’ve been bugging you from next door, with a microphone in that toaster. Also, I hate salsa music.”
“Oh, very well,” Marko said, with bad grace. (The radio as a defense against bugging had been his idea.) To his compatriot opposite him across the table, he said, “Get up, Niklos, let this dog sit down.”
“Give my seat to a dog?” cried Niklos.
“When you negotiate with a dog,” Marko pointed out, “you permit the dog to sit.”
“Be careful, Gregor,” one of the invaders said. “Watch where you sit, that dog may leave you fleas.”
The two repairman–invaders at last wedged the door shut and came over to the table. One of them said, “Did you ever notice how you don’t get the same effect when you call somebody a dog in English?”
One of the men at the table said, “The Northern peoples are cold. They put no fire in their tongues.”
Seating himself in Niklos’ place at the table — Niklos sullenly leaned against the refrigerafor amid his enemies, arms folded — Gregor said, “We have been enemies in the past.”
“Natural enemies,” the other said.
“Agreed. And we shall be enemies again in the future.”
“God willing.”
“But at this moment, our requirements intersect.”
“Meaning?”
“We want the same thing.”
“The Byzantine Fire!”
“No. We want,” Gregor corrected, “to find the Byzantine Fire.”
“It’s all the same.”
“No, it’s not. When we know where it is, we can contest properly for its possession. At that time, our desires shall again be in opposition, and we shall again be enemies.”
“From your lips to God’s ear.”
“But so long as the Byzantine Fire is lost, we find ourselves, however uneasily, on the same side.”
There was general bristling at such an idea, until Marko raised his arms in a commanding gesture, as though calming a multitude from a balcony. “There is sense in what you say,” he admitted.
“Of course there is.”
“We are all aliens in this godless land, however many contacts we may have among the émigrés.”
“Émigrés,” spat Gregor. “Petty merchants, buying aboveground swimming pools on the installment plan.”
“Exactly. You can force a man to fetch and carry and obey orders if you threaten him with the death of his grandmother in the old country, but you can’t get him to think, to volunteer, to show you the inner workings of this debased and sensualist society.”
“Our experience precisely.”
“Strangers in a strange land would do well to combine their forces,” Marko mused.
“Which is just what I’m here to recommend. Now, we have made an initial exploratory contact with the police.” (Gregor wore black corduroy trousers.) “And you have made initial exploratory contact with the New York underworld.”
Marko (it was his uncle who knew the landlord at the O.J.) looked surprised at that, and not at all pleased. “How do you know such a thing?”
“Your toaster told us. The point is, we can complement one another’s scanty intelligence, and we can be prepared to act decisively when the Byzantine Fire is found, and —”
“Also the thief,” Marko said.
“We have no interest in the thief.”
“We do. For religious reasons.”
Gregor shrugged. “Then we’ll turn him over to you. The main point is that, combining together, the chances of our finding the Byzantine Fire are much improved. Once it’s found, of course, we can discuss the next step. Are you agreed?”
Marko frowned around at his men. They looked tense and bony–
cheeked and grim, but not violently opposed to the suggestion. He nodded. “Agreed,” he said, and extended his hand.
“May the souls of my ancestors understand and forgive this expediency,” said Gregor, and grasped his enemy’s hand.
The phone rang.
The men all stared at one another. The leaders wrenched their hands apart. Gregor hissed, “Who knows you’re here?”
“No one. What about you?”
“No one.”
Getting to his feet, Marko said, “I’ll deal with it.” He crossed to the wall phone, unhooked the receiver, and said, “Allo?” The others watched him, saw his expression darken like the sky before a summer storm, saw it then redden (sailors take warning), saw it then look merely confused. “One moment,” he told the phone, and turned to the others. “It’s the Bulgarians,” he said. “They’ve been bugging us from the basement, they heard everything, they say it makes perfect sense. They want to come up and join us.”
Chapter 26
* * *
“Gee muh knee” Kelp said, gazing at the Byzantine Fire.
“Don’t put it on,” Dortmunder advised him. “I had a hell of a time getting it off.”
“Jeez,” Kelp said. He just sat there in the living room, on Dortmunder’s sofa, staring at the ruby and the sapphires and the gold all glittering away in his palm. “Holy shit,” he said.
May, hovering like a den mother, said, “Would you like a beer, Andy?”
Dortmunder told her, “It’s too early in the day for him.”
“The hell it is,” said Kelp.
“Better make it two, then,” Dortmunder said.
“Three,” said May, and went off to get the beers, trailing cigarette smoke.
Dortmunder went and sat down in his favorite easy chair, facing the sofa. He watched Kelp watching the Byzantine Fire until May came back, when Kelp’s attention was finally distracted by a can of beer. Then Dortmunder said, “So that’s it.”
Kelp looked at him over the beer can. “Jeez, John,” he said. “How’d it happen?”
So Dortmunder told him how it had happened; the breaking in, the guys arriving, the guys leaving, the finding of the stone. “Who knew what it was?” Dortmunder finished.
“Who knew what it was?” Kelp echoed, incredulous. “The Byzantine Fire? Everybody knows what it is!”
“They do now,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Wednesday night, it had just been robbed, it wasn’t all over the papers yet, nobody knew any Byzantine Fire.”
“Sure they did. It was too in the papers, the American people were giving it to Turkey, that’s how come it came in from Chicago.”
Dortmunder gave Kelp his steadiest look. “Andy,” he said, “that’s something else you know now, it’s part of the robbery story. Tell me the truth: before the heist, did you know all about this American people gift business?”
Looking a bit uncomfortable, Kelp said, “Well, in a general sort of way.”
“It could of happened to you,” Dortmunder told him. “Don’t kid yourself. You could of been the one noticed the vacation sign, broke in, opened the safe, saw that big red rock and figured, what the hell, take it along, maybe it’s worth something. It could of happened to you.”
“It didn’t, John,” Kelp said. “That’s all I can say, and I’m happy I can say it. It didn’t happen to me.”
“It happened to me,” Dortmunder said, and was grimly aware that all three people in the room — including, God help him, himself — were thinking about the Dortmunder jinx.
Kelp shook his head. “Wow,” he said. “Whadaya gonna do now, John?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t realize I even had the goddam thing till last night, I haven’t had much time to think about it.”
“I hate to say this to any man,” Kelp said, “but I think you oughta give it back.”
Dortmunder nodded. “I been thinking the same way. But it raises a question.”
“Yeah?”
“How? How do I give it back? Do I mail it?”
“Don’t be silly, you know you can’t trust the mails.”
“Also,” Dortmunder said, “I don’t feature just leaving it someplace, like one of your abandoned babies in church, because then some kid comes along or some wise guy, and he grabs it, and the heat stays on, and I’m still in trouble.”
“You know what, John?” Kelp sat up straighter on the sofa. “A sudden thought just hit me.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“You better not go to the O.J., after all. I don’t think you could safely chit–chat with Tiny Bulcher. I mean, face it, you don’t have an alibi.”
Dortmunder said nothing. He just looked at Kelp. It was May, seated in her own chair to one side, who said quietly, “John knows that, Andy.”
“Oh, yeah? Yeah, I see what you mean.” Kelp grinned and shook his head at himself, saying, “This is still new news to me, you know? I’m still catching up.”
“The thing right now,” Dortmunder said, “is how do I give that goddam ruby back.”
“I think you gotta call them,” Kelp said.
“Who, Turkey? Or the American people.”
“The law. Call that cop on the television, Maloney.” (Having only heard the name and never having seen it, that’s the way Kelp thought it was spelled.)
“Call the cops,” mused Dortmunder. “And then I say, ‘Hello, I got it. You want it back?’ ”
“That’s right,” Kelp said. He was getting excited. “Then you maybe even dicker a little. John, you could maybe even turn a profit on this thing!”
“I don’t want to turn a profit,” Dortmunder told him. “I just want out from under that stone.”
“Well, keep an open mind,” Kelp suggested. “See how the conversation goes.”
“I’ll tell you how the conversation goes,” Dortmunder said. “We dicker back and forth, we keep an open mind, and meantime they’re tracing the call, and all of a sudden I’m surrounded by blue uniforms.”
“Not necessarily,” Kelp said, looking very thoughtful.
May said, “Andy? Do you have an idea?”
“Could be,” Kelp said. “Coouuuuld very well be.”
Chapter 27
* * *
When the little man sidled into the office, ushered by Tony Cappelletti, Mologna gazed sternly across his desk and said, “Benjamin Arthur Klopzik?”
“Gee!” the little man said, with a sudden huge beaming smile. “Is that me?”
Mologna frowned and tried again: “You are Benjamin Arthur Klopzik?”
“I am?”
“Siddown,” Tony Cappelletti told the little man, giving him a shove toward the chair in front of Mologna’s desk. “This is Klopzik, all right. You trying to pull something, Benjy?”
“Oh, no, sir, Captain,” Benjamin Arthur Klopzik said, and turned an appealing little smile in the direction of Mologna. “Good morning, Chief Inspector.”
“Go to hell,” Mologna told him.
“Yes, sir.” Klopzik placed his dirty–nailed hands between his bony knees and sat very alertly, like a dog who can do tricks.
“So,” Mologna said, “a lot of you social misfits, penny–ante heisters, cheapjack four–flushers, and miserable hopeless losers figure you’ll help the Police Department of the City of New York find the Byzantine Fire, is that it?”
“Yes, sir, Chief Inspector.”
“Not to mention the FBI.”
Klopzik looked confused. “Chief Inspector?”
“Not that I want to mention the FBI,” Mologna went on, and looked past Klopzik to toss a wintry smile at the still–standing Tony Cappelletti, who gave nothing back at all; it was like telling a joke to a horse. Mologna wished Leon wouldn’t spend so much time in the outer office, doing his crochet. Was there an excuse to buzz for Leon? Frowning severely at Klopzik, Mologna said, “So you’ll make a statement, is that right? And sign it?”
But Klopzik looked terrified: “Statement? Sign?” Twisting around in his chair, he stared mutely at
Cappelletti, as though at his trainer.
Who shook his heavy hairy head. “We don’t want to blow Benjy in the underworld, Francis.”
Why Me? Page 13