“Oh, yeah?” Tiny put both feet back on the curb and turned to see what the guy wanted. “You yellin at me, fella?”
“That’s my car!” the guy said, sounding very upset, pointing at the Honda Civic. He was tall and slender and had thinning brown hair and a polo shirt that was a little too loose.
Tiny didn’t bother to look at the car; he’d seen it already. “Yeah?” he said.
“Well—Well—That’s my car!” The guy seemed stuck at that point, unable to follow his own thought anywhere. Or maybe he was just distracted by now having this clear view of Tiny Bulcher, who was a kind of mastodon in clothes, a sort of lowland Abominable Snowman, a creature made from the parts rejected by Dr. Frankenstein when he was sewing together his monster. When people found themselves being looked at by this gigantic bad-tempered drill press, generally speaking they did tend to forget what it was they’d been going to say.
After a sufficient silence had gone by, “Okay,” Tiny said, with a voice like two boulders being rubbed together, and he turned back to climb into the cab.
“But—” said the Honda owner. “But, wait a minute.”
Impatience exuded from Tiny like a heavy fog, probably toxic. “What now?” he asked.
“Well—” The Honda owner gestured helplessly, and looked up and down this quiet sunlit cross-street in the seventies on Manhattan’s West Side. “It’s,” he said, “it’s legal.”
“Good,” Tiny said, and turned away again.
“I mean, it’s legal where I’m parked!”
“So?” Tiny said. When his brow furrowed, it looked like a set of shelves in the basement.
“So I’m legal! Am I by a hydrant? What hydrant am I by?”
Tiny considered, then lifted a hand like a beachball with fingers and pointed at a fire hydrant way down at the other end of the block.
“What?” The Honda owner was as outraged as anybody ever gets with Tiny Bulcher. “I’m more than twelve feet from that! You want me to call the Traffic Department?”
“Sure,” Tiny said, and this time he did climb up into the truck cab, while the guy spluttered behind him. Shutting the cab door, he looked down through the open window and said, “What else?”
“I’m geting a tape measure,” the guy announced. Seeing less of Tiny had made him more aggressive.
“Go ahead,” Tiny said.
“You’ll see,” the guy said, pointing at Tiny. “And you’ll owe me an apology, too.” And he went trotting off.
“You done?” Stan Murch asked.
“Pests,” Tiny said. “I hate dealing with the public.”
Stan put the truck in gear, and they drove away from there. They turned right at the corner and went up three and over one and stopped next to a Renault Le Car. Tiny got out and picked it up by the front wheelwells and was putting it in place on the truckbed when a horn sounded. “More aggravation,” he said. The horn sounded again. “Maybe somebody’s gonna eat their horn,” Tiny grumbled, and put the Renault down any which way and went around to see a cab stopped next to the truck on the driver’s side. He went up to discuss the situation, flexing his fingers, but when he got there the cabby was Murch’s Mom, a feisty little woman in a cloth cap, this being her cab and that being what she did for a living, insisting on her independence and not wanting to be a burden on her son, Stanley, who made his living by, among other occupations, collecting things with Tiny Bulcher.
Murch’s Mom was calling out her other-side window and up to her son, saying, “I’m glad I caught you. See? I told you, it’s always a good thing to tell me where you’ll be.”
There was a passenger in the back of the cab, a stout man in a dark suit and loud tie. And loud voice: “Say, there, driver,” he said loudly, “I have an appointment.”
“Hi, Mom,” Stan was saying. “What’s up?”
“Driver, what is this delay?”
Tiny opened the rear door and showed his unsmiling countenance to the passenger. “Shut up,” he suggested.
The passenger blinked a lot. He clutched his attaché case with both hands. Tiny shut the door.
Murch’s Mom said, “John Dortmunder called, just after you left. He says he’s got something.”
“Good,” said Stan.
“For Tiny, too,” Murch’s Mom said.
“Naturally,” Tiny said. (A disbelieving voice from the back-seat of the cab said, “Tiny?” but then shut up when Tiny rolled an eye in that direction.)
“He says,” Murch’s Mom went on, “would you meet tonight at ten at the OJ.”
“Sure thing,” said Stan.
Murch’s Mom gestured at the three cars on the back of the truck. “You taking those down to your guy in Brooklyn?”
“Yeah. Going right now.”
“Well, don’t take the Battery Tunnel,” she advised him, “there’s some kind of congestion there.”
“No, I figured I’d go down Ninth to Fourteenth and over to Second Avenue,” Stan said, “take the Williamsburg Bridge, and then Rutledge and Bedford.”
“That’s good,” Murch’s Mom said. “Or you could also take the Manhattan Bridge, Flatbush and on down Fulton Street.”
“Oh, really,” grumbled the passenger. Tiny looked in at him, and the fellow busily riffled through the papers in his attaché case, looking for something very important.
“I figure I’ll just play it by ear,” Stan told his mom, “adapt to circumstances on the street.”
“That’s a good boy.”
The cab went away. Tiny tidied the Renault and got back in beside Stan, and they headed downtown. “I wonder what Dortmunder’s got,” Stan said. “Something rich, I hope.”
“Dortmunder’s an amusing fella,” Tiny said. His tree-trunk head nodded. “He makes me laugh,” he said.
Stan glanced at him. “Sure,” he said.
13
When Dortmunder walked into the OJ Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at ten that night a few of the regulars were draped against the bar discussing the weather or something. “It’s ‘Red star at night, Sailor take fright,’” one of them was saying.
“Will you listen to this crap,” a second regular said. “Will you just listen?”
“I listened,” a third regular assured him.
“Who asked you?” the second regular wanted to know.
“It’s a free country,” the third regular told him, “and I listened, and you,” he told the first regular, “are wrong.”
“Well, yes,” the second regular said. “I didn’t know you were gonna be on my side.”
“It’s ‘Red star in the morning,’” the third regular said.
“Another idiot,” said the second regular.
The first regular looked dazzled with disbelief at the wrong-headedness all around him. “How does that rhyme?” he demanded. “‘Red star in the morning, Sailor take fright’?”
“It isn’t star,” the second regular announced, slapping his palm against the bar. “It’s red sky. All this red star crap, it’s like you’re talking about the Russian army.”
“Well, I’m not talking about the Russian army,” the first regular told him. “It happened I was in the Navy. I was on P-U boats.”
This stopped all the regulars cold for a second. Then the second regular, treading cautiously, said, “Whose Navy?”
Dortmunder, down at the end of the bar, raised a hand and got the attention of Rollo the bartender, who’d been standing there with his heavy arms folded over his dirty apron, a faraway look in his eyes as the regulars’ conversation washed over him. Now, he nodded at Dortmunder and rolled smoothly down the bar to talk to him, planting his feet solidly on the duckboards, while behind him the Navy man was saying, “The Navy! How many navies are there?”
Rollo put meaty elbows on the bar in front of Dortmunder, leaned forward, and said, “Between you and me, I was in the Marines.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“We want a few good men,” Rollo assured him, then straightened up and said, “Your friends didn’t
show yet. You want the usual?”
“Yeah.”
“And the other bourbon’s gonna be with you?”
“Right.”
Rollo nodded and went back down the bar to get out a tray and two glasses and a murky bottle with a label reading Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon—“Our Own Brand.” Meantime, a discussion of the world’s navies had started up, with references to Admiral Nelson and Lord Byrd, when, in a pause in the flow of things, a fourth regular, who hadn’t spoken before this, said, “I think, I think, I’m not sure about this, but I think it’s ‘Red ring around the moon, Means rain pretty soon.’ Something like that.”
The second regular, the Russian army man, banged his beer glass on the bar and said, “It’s red sky. You got a ring around the brain, that’s what you got.”
“Easy, boys,” Rollo said. “The war’s over.”
Everybody looked startled at this news. Rollo picked up the tray with the bottle and glasses on it and brought it back to Dortmunder, saying, “And who else is coming?”
“The beer and salt.”
“Oh, yeah, the big spender,” Rollo said, nodding.
“And the vodka and red wine.”
“The monster. I remember him.”
“Most people do,” Dortmunder agreed. He picked up the tray and carried it past the regulars, who were still talking about the weather or something. “The groundhog saw his shadow,” the Navy man was saying.
“Right,” the third regular said. “Six weeks ago yesterday, so that was six weeks more winter, so yesterday he come out again, you follow me so far?”
“It’s your story.”
“So it was sunny yesterday,” the third regular said, “so he saw his shadow again, so that’s another six weeks of winter.”
There was a pause while people worked out what they thought about that. Then the fourth regular said, “I still think it’s ‘Red ring around the moon.’”
Dortmunder continued on back past the bar and past the two doors marked with dog silhouettes labeled POINTERS and SETTERS and past the phone booth with the string dangling from the quarter slot and through the green door at the back and into a small square room with a concrete floor. None of the walls could be seen, because the room was filled all the way around, floor to ceiling, with beer and liquor cases, leaving only a small bare space in the middle, containing a battered old table with a stained green felt top and half a dozen chairs. The only illumination was from one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.
Dortmunder liked being first, because whoever was first got to sit facing the door. He sat there, put the tray to his right, poured some brown stuff into one of the glasses, and was raising it when the door opened and Stan Murch came in, carrying a glass of beer in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. “The damnedest thing,” he said, closing the door behind himself, “I took the road through Prospect Park, you know, on account of the Prospect Expressway construction, and when I came out on Grand Army Plaza they were digging up Flatbush Avenue, if you’ll believe it, so I ran down Union Street to the BQE and here I am.”
“Hiya, Stan,” Dortmunder said. “How you doin?”
“Turning a dollar,” Stan said, and sat down with his beer and his salt as the door opened again and Tiny Bulcher came in, turning sideways to squeeze through the doorway. Somewhere down inside his left fist was a glass containing something that looked like, but was not, cherry soda. “Some clown out there wants to know was I in the Navy,” Tiny said, “so I decked him.” He shut the door and came over and sat facing Dortmunder; Tiny didn’t mind if his back was to the door. “Hello, Dortmunder,” he said.
“Hello, Tiny.”
Tiny looked around, heavy head moving like a wrecker’s ball. “Am I waiting for somebody?”
“Andy Kelp.”
“Am I early, or is he late?”
“Here he is now,” Dortmunder said, as Kelp came in, looking chipper but confused. Dortmunder motioned to him, saying, “Come sit down, Andy.”
“You know what there is out there,” Kelp said, shutting the door. “There’s a guy laying on the bar, had some sort of accident—”
“He asked Tiny a question,” Dortmunder said.
“He got personal with me,” Tiny said.
Kelp looked at Tiny, and his smile flickered like faraway summer lightning. “Whadaya say, Tiny?”
“I say siddown,” Tiny said, “and let’s get to it.”
“Oh, sure.” Coming around the table to sit at Dortmunder’s right and pour himself a glass of Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon, Kelp said, “Anyway, the other guys out there are trying to decide, is it a service-connected disability?”
“It’s a brain-connected disability,” Tiny said. “What have you got, Dortmunder?”
“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I have a building.”
Tiny nodded. “And a way in?”
“A way in.”
“And what is in this building?”
“A bank. Forty-one importers and wholesalers of jade and ivory and jewels and other precious items. A dealer in antique silver. Two stamp dealers.”
“And a partridge in a pear tree,” Kelp finished, grinning happily at everybody.
“Holy Toledo,” Stan Murch said.
Tiny frowned. “Dortmunder,” he said, “in my experience, you don’t tell jokes. At least, you don’t tell me jokes.”
“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.
“This isn’t a building you’re talking about,” Tiny said. “This is the big rock candy mountain.”
“And it’s all ours,” Dortmunder said.
“How? You won the lottery?”
Dortmunder shook his head. “I got somebody on the inside,” he said. “I got the specs on every bit of security in the building. I got two great big looseleaf books this thick, all about the building. I got more information than I can use.”
Stan said, “How secure is this information? How sure are you of the inside guy?”
“One hundred percent,” Dortmunder said. “This person does not tell lies.”
“What is it, a disgruntled employee?”
“Not exactly.”
Tiny said, “I would need to talk to this person myself.”
“I definitely plan to arrange that,” Dortmunder told him.
Stan said, “So what’s the idea? We back up a truck, go in, empty everything we can, drive away?”
“No,” Dortmunder said. “In the first place, somebody on the street is gonna notice something like that.”
“There’s always nosy Parkers,” Tiny agreed. “One time, a guy annoyed me and annoyed me, so I made his nose go the other way.”
“In this building,” Dortmunder said, “there are also seventeen mail-order places, different kinds of catalogue outfits and like that. I’m checking, I’m looking around, I’m being very careful, and what I want to find is one of these mail-order people we can make a deal with.”
Kelp said to Stan and Tiny, “I love this part. This is why John Dortmunder is a genius.”
“You’re interrupting the genius,” Tiny pointed out.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“The deal is,” Dortmunder said, “we’d go into the building on a Saturday night and we wouldn’t leave till Monday morning. We’d take everything we could get and carry it all to the mail-order place and put it all in packages and mail it out of the building Monday morning with their regular routine.”
Tiny thoughtfully nodded his head. “So we don’t carry the stuff out,” he said. “We go in clean, we come out clean.”
“That’s right.”
“I just love it,” Kelp said.
Tiny leveled a gaze at Kelp. “Enthusiasm makes me restless,” he said.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“We’ll have to pick and choose,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Even if we had a week, we wouldn’t be able to take everything. And if we took everything, it’d be too much to mail.”
Stan said, “You know,
John, all my life I wanted to be along on a caper where there was so much stuff you couldn’t take it all. Just wallow in it, like Aladdin’s Cave. And this is what you’re talking about.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” Dortmunder agreed. “But I’m gonna need help in the setup.”
“Ask me,” Stan said. “I’ll help. I want to see this thing happen.”
“Two things,” Dortmunder told him. “First, the mail-order outfit. It ought to be somebody that’s a little bent already, but not so bent the FBI’s got a wiretap.”
“I can ask around,” Stan said. “Discreetly. I know some people here and there.”
“I’ll also ask,” Tiny said. “Some people know me here and there.”
“Good,” Dortmunder said. “The other thing is, a lockman. We need somebody really good, to follow the schematics I got and shut down all the alarms without kicking them on instead.”
Tiny said, “What about that little model train nut guy from the pitcha switch? Roger Whatever.”
“Chefwick,” Dortmunder said.
“He retired,” Kelp said.
Tiny looked at him. “In our line of work,” he said, “how do you retire?”
“You stop doing what you were doing, and you do something else.”
“So Chefwick stopped being a lockman.”
“Right,” Kelp said. “He went out to California with his wife, and they’re running this Chinese railroad out there.”
“A Chinese railroad,” Tiny said, “in California.”
“Sure,” Kelp said. “It used to run in China somewhere, but this guy bought it, the locomotive and the Chinese cars and even a little railroad station with the roof, you know, like hats that come out?”
“Like hats that come out,” Tiny said.
“Like a pagoda,” Kelp said. “Anyway, this guy put down track and made an amusement park and Chefwick’s running the train for him. So now he’s got his own lifesize model train set, so he isn’t being a lockman anymore, so he’s retired. Okay?”
Tiny thought about it. “Okay,” he said, reluctantly.
Stan said, “What about Wally Whistler? I know he’s absentminded and all, but—”
Tiny said, “He’s the guy let the lion out at the zoo, isn’t he?”
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