“Friend or foe?”
“Hard to say,” Leon told him. “It’s that man again, with the Byzantine Fire.”
Mologna stared. “Leon,” he said, “are you havin fun at my expense?”
“Oh, Chief Inspector!” Leon’s eyes fluttered.
Mologna shook his head. “I’m not in the mood today, Leon. Go away.”
“He insists on talking with you,” Leon said. “I quote —” he made his voice a kind of deep falsetto “— ‘for our mutual advantage.’ That’s what he said.”
Wait a minute. Was it possible to recoup after all, to make a comeback, to shove that editorial down those craven editors’ throats? Mutual advantage, huh? Reaching for the phone, Mologna said, “Which line?”
“Two.”
“Record it and trace it and track it,” Mologna ordered. His own voice deepening, he said, “I’ll keep him on the line.” Then, as Leon skipped from the room, Mologna said into line two, “Who’s this?”
“You know,” said the voice.
It was the same voice. “John Archibald Dortmunder,” Mologna said.
“I’m not Dortmunder,” Dortmunder said.
“Is that right,” Mologna said comfortably, settling into his seat for a good long chat.
“The frame won’t hold,” the voice said. “You’ll find out Dortmunder isn’t the guy, and you’ll keep looking till you find me.”
“Interestin theory.”
“I’m in trouble,” said the voice.
“That’s the understatement of the year.”
“But you’re in trouble, too.”
Mologna stiffened. “Meanin what?”
“I read the paper.”
“Every son of a bitch reads the paper,” opined Mologna.
“We could maybe help each other,” the voice said.
Mologna glowered, from deep within his soul. “What are you suggestin?”
“We both have a problem,” said the tired, weary, pessimistic and yet self–confident voice. “Maybe together we got a solution.”
Leon tiptoed in, hopped over the newspaper on the floor, and put a note on Mologna’s desk, reading, “Phone company says untraceable, no such phone.” Mologna glared at that, and said to the voice, “Hold it a second.” Pushing the hold button, he glared at Leon and said, “What the fuck is this?”
“The phone company’s bewildered,” Leon told him. “They say the call’s coming from somewhere south of 96th Street, but they can’t track it down. It’s just there, in their relays.”
“That’s too fuckin stupid to be believed,” Mologna said.
“They’re still working on it,” Leon said, not with much display of hope. “They said please keep him on the line as long as you possibly can.”
“Are you insultin me, Leon?” Mologna demanded. Without waiting for an answer, he pushed the two–line button, and heard a dial tone. The son of a bitch was gone. “Oh, Jesus,” Mologna said.
“He hung up?” Leon asked.
“I lost him again.” Mologna stared at infinity as the phone on Leon’s desk outside began ringing. Leon trotted away, and Mologna leaned forward, elbows on desk, head in hands, thinking the unthinkable: Maybe I should retire, like the fuckin paper said.
Leon was back. “It’s him again. This time he’s on one.”
Mologna moved so fast he almost ate the phone. “Dortmunder!”
“I’m not Dortmunder.”
“Where’d you go?” Mologna demanded, while Leon danced back out to contact the phone company once more.
“You put me on hold,” the voice said. “Don’t put me on hold, all right?”
“It was only a second.”
“I’ve had a lot of trouble with phones,” the voice said. (Perhaps another voice in the background made a complaining noise.) “So just don’t put me on hold. No gizmos.”
“No gizmos?” Honest rage and accumulated frustration bubbled up within Mologna. “You’re one to talk, you’ve been makin a mental case out of me with your telephones.”
“I just —”
“Never mind that, never mind that. I call you at a pay phone, right out on the street in the sunshine, you answer the phone, and there’s nobody there! Right now, right this minute, you’re talkin to me big as life, the phone company can’t trace the call! Is that honest? Is that playin the game?”
“I just don’t like to be on hold,” the voice said, sounding sullen.
Which brought Mologna back down out of his luxurious bad temper. “Don’t hang up again,” he said, squeezing the receiver hard, as though it were his caller’s wrist.
“I won’t hang up,” the voice agreed. “Just so you don’t put me on hold.”
“You’ve got a deal,” Mologna told him. “No hold. I’ll just sit here and you’ll tell me your story.”
“My story is,” said the voice, “I don’t want this ruby thing.”
“And?”
“And you do. It’ll make you the big man again around Headquarters, never mind what they say in the papers. So what I want, I want to propose a trade.”
“You’ll give me the ring? For what, immunity?”
The mirthless voice said, “You can’t give me immunity, nobody can.”
“I hate to say it, pal,” Mologna told him, “but you’re right.” And yet, the strange thing was, he felt within himself a desire to help this poor son of a bitch. Some echo in that world–weary voice reached out to him, called out to their common humanity. Maybe it was just because he was depressed after that stinking editorial, but he knew in his heart he was closer to this fourth–rate burglar, in some cockamamie way, than to anybody else involved in the whole case. He pictured FBI Agent Zachary in an interrogation with this clown, and despite himself, his heart just reached out. “So what do you want?” he said.
“What I want,” said the voice, “is another burglar.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You’re the cops,” the voice explained. “You can make up a name, make up a guy, some guy that doesn’t exist. Frank Smith, say. Then you announce you got the burglar and his name is Frank Smith and you got the ring back and it’s all over. Then nobody’s mad at me any more.”
“Nice try, Dortmunder,” Mologna said.
“I’m not Dortmunder.”
“The problem is,” Mologna went on, “where is this Frank Smith? If we set up a make–believe guy, we’ve got nobody to show the press. If we set up a real guy, maybe the frame doesn’t stick.”
“Maybe Frank Smith commits suicide in the House of Detention,” the voice suggested. “Such things have been known to happen.”
“Too many people involved,” Mologna said. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way we could work it.” He laid out the parameters of the problem: “It would have to be a real guy, with a record, somebody known to the courts and to the underworld. But at the same time, it would have to be a guy nobody’s ever goin to find, he’ll never come back with an alibi or a — Holy Jesus!”
In sudden hope, the voice said, “Yeah? Yeah?”
“Craig Fitzgibbons,” Mologna said, an almost religious awe trembling in his voice.
“Who the hell is that?”
“A guy who will never come around to call us liars, Dortmunder.”
“I’m not Dortmunder.”
“Sure, sure. I can do your setup for you, that’s all. I sit here astonished at myself. Now, what about the quo?”
“The what?”
“The Byzantine Fire,” Mologna explained.
“Oh, that. You get it back,” the voice said, “as soon as you make the announcement.”
“What announcement?”
“Police breakthrough. Proof positive the thief with the Byzantine Fire is this fella Craig Whoever. Arrest expected any minute.”
“All right. Then what?”
“I get the ring back to you, my own way. Indirect like.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“And if you don’t?”
�
�Another police breakthrough. Proof positive it isn’t Craig Thingummy.”
“Okay,” Mologna said, nodding. Leon came in and made the world’s most expressive shrug of incredulity, representing in himself all of the thousands and thousands of employees of the New York Bell Telephone Company. Mologna nodded, waving him away, not caring any more. “I’m in a good mood today,” he told the phone. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Dortmunder.”
“Call me Craig,” said Dortmunder.
Chapter 44
* * *
Every half hour Dortmunder phoned May, who was staying home from work so she could listen to an all–news radio station (“You give us twenty–two minutes, we’ll give you the world,” they threatened). Dortmunder would have preferred to be his own listening post, but down here in the telephone company conduit, far beneath the mighty metropolis, there was no such thing as radio reception. As for TV, forget it.
“There’s trouble in Southeast Asia,” May told him at ten–thirty.
“Uh–huh,” Dortmunder said.
“There’s trouble in the Middle East,” she said at eleven o’clock.
“That figures,” he said.
“There’s trouble in the Cuban part of Miami,” she announced at eleven–thirty.
“Well, there’s trouble everywhere,” Dortmunder pointed out. “There’s even a little right here.”
“They have positively identified the thief who stole the Byzantine Fire,” she said at noon. “It was just a bulletin, interrupted the trouble in baseball.”
Dortmunder’s throat was dry. “Hold it,” he said, and swigged some beer. “Now tell me,” he said.
“Benjamin Arthur Klopzik.”
Dortmunder stared across the conduit at Kelp, as though it was his fault. (Kelp stared back, expectant, alert.) Into the phone, Dortmunder said, “Who?”
“Benjamin Arthur Klopzik,” May repeated. “They said it twice, and I wrote it down.”
“Not Craig Anybody?”
“Who?”
“Benjamin —” Then he got it. “Benjy!”
Kelp could stand no more. “Tell me, John,” he said, leaning forward. “Tell me, tell me.”
“Thanks, May,” Dortmunder said. It took him a second to realize the unfamiliar, uncomfortable feeling in his cheeks was caused by a smile. “I hate to sound really optimistic, May,” he said, “but I have this feeling. I just think maybe it might be almost possible that pretty soon I’ll be able to come up out of here.”
“I’ll take the steaks out of the freezer,” May said.
Dortmunder hung up and just sat there for a minute, nodding thoughtfully to himself. “That Mologna,” he said. “He’s pretty smart.”
“Wha’d he do? John?” Kelp was bouncing up and down in his eagerness and frustration, slopping beer out of the can onto his knees. “Tell me, John!”
“Benjy,” Dortmunder said. “The little guy the cops wired.”
“What about him?”
“He’s the guy Mologna says boosted the ring.”
“Benjy Klopzik?” Kelp was astonished. “That little jerk couldn’t steal a paper bag in a supermarket.”
“Nevertheless,” Dortmunder said. “Everybody’s after him now, right? Because of being wired.”
“They want him almost as bad as they want you,” Kelp agreed.
“So the cops announce he’s the guy lifted the ruby ring. He won’t come back and say no, it wasn’t me. So that’s the end of it.”
“But where is he?”
“Who cares?” Dortmunder said. “The Middle East, maybe. The Cuban part of Miami, maybe. Maybe the cops killed him and buried him under Headquarters. Wherever he is, Mologna’s pretty damn sure nobody’s gonna find him. And that’s good enough for me.” Reaching for the phone, grinning from ear to ear, Dortmunder said, “That’s plenty good enough for me.”
Chapter 45
* * *
Life is unfair, as Tony Costello well knew. He was on the very brink of losing his job as police–beat reporter on the six o’clock news, and it was all because nobody knew he was Irish. It was bad enough that “Costello,” though Irish, sounded Italian; but then his mother had had to go and compound the problem by naming him Anthony. Sure there were lots of micks named Anthony, but you go ahead and combine “Anthony” with “Costello” and you might just as well forget the wearin’ o’ the green altogether.
Plus, Tony Costello’s additional misfortune was that he was a black Irishman, with thick black hair all over his head, and a lumpy prominent nose, and a short and chunky body. Oh, he was doomed right enough, that he was.
If only it were possible to bring it out into the open, to talk about it, go up to some of these dumb micks — Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna, for instance, there was a tub of dolphin shit for you — and say to these fellas, “God damn it to hell and back, I’m Irish!” But he couldn’t do that — the prejudice, the old boys’ club, the whole Irish Mafia that runs the Police Department and always has would have to be acknowledged that way, which of course was out of the question — and as a result all the best scoops, the inside dope, the advance words–to–the–wise all went to that son of a bitch Scotsman, that Jack Mackenzie, because the dumb micks all thought he was Irish.
“Looks like spring today!” said a pretty girl in the elevator at noon on Saturday, but Tony Costello didn’t give a shit. His days as police–beat reporter were numbered, the numbers were getting smaller, and there was nothing he could do about it. A month, six weeks, two months at the outside, and he’d be shipped bag and baggage to Duluth or some damn place, some network affiliate where the police beat was automobile accidents and Veterans’ Day parades. Maybe it looked like spring today, maybe last night’s drenching rain had been winter’s valedictory, maybe this morning’s soft breezes and watery sun heralded the new season of hope, but if there was no hope in Tony Costello’s heart — and there was none — what could it matter to him? So he snubbed the pretty girl in the elevator, who spent the rest of the day looking rather bewildered, and he stamped down the corridor past all the other busy–busy network employees into his own cubicle, where he asked Dolores, the secretary he shared (for as long as he was still here) with five other reporters, “Any messages?”
“Sorry, Tony.”
“Sure,” Costello said. “Sure not. No messages. Who would call Tony Costello?”
“Buck up, Tony,” Dolores said. She was slender, but motherly. “It’s a beautiful day. Look out the window.”
“I may jump out the window,” Costello said, and his phone rang.
“Well, well,” Dolores said.
“Wrong number,” Costello suggested.
But Dolores answered it anyway: “Mister Costello’s line.” Costello watched her listen, nod, raise her eyebrows; then she said, “If this is some sort of prank, Mister Costello’s far too busy —”
“Huh,” said Costello.
Dolores was listening again. She seemed interested, then intrigued, then amused: “I think maybe you ought to talk to Mister Costello himself,” she said, and pressed the hold button.
“It’s Judge Crater,” Costello suggested. “He was captured by Martians, he’s spent all these years in a flying saucer.”
“Close,” Dolores said. “It’s the man who burgled Skoukakis Credit Jewelers.”
“Skoukakis …” The name rang a bell, then exploded: “Holy shit, that’s where the Byzantine Fire was grabbed!”
“Exactly.”
“He says — he says he’s, uh, uh, Whatsisname?” (Not being on the inside track with the boys at Headquarters, Costello mostly got his police news from the radio and had heard Mologna’s announcement in the car on the way downtown. Oh, it was an uphill fight for Tony Costello every inch of the way.)
“Benjamin Arthur Klopzik,” Dolores reminded him. “And what he says is, he robbed the place. To prove his point, he described the store.”
“Accurately?”
“How would I know? I’ve never been there. Anyway, he wa
nts to talk to you about the Byzantine Fire.”
“Maybe to set up a return.” A rare smile lightly touched Costello’s features, making him look a bit less like an Irish bog (or an Italian swamp). “Through me,” he said, in wonderment. “Is that possible? Through me!”
Why Me? Page 21