“She’s right over there, sir.”
Mologna frowned. Was he actually expected to do somethin? “What is she?” he asked. “A burglar or a soldier?”
“A song producer, sir.”
Mologna considered this young black police officer. He was too young to know better and too black to yell at and unlikely to be pullin even a display inspector’s leg. “And just what, in the Holy Virgin’s holy name,” he wanted to know, “should I be doin with a song producer?”
“It’s about some nuns,” the young man said, blinkin rapidly. “Maybe she ought to tell you herself.”
“Nuns? Why would I—” But then his eye caught sight of a woman over by the Avalon Tower entrance, and he stopped, and for a second he just stared. Years and years ago he’d met a judo instructor who’d looked like that. By the good lord harry, but that woman could contort herself! That’s one of the ones Mrs. Mologna never did find out about. “Her?” Mologna asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And what would she be havin’ to do with nuns?”
“She wants to make a record with them, sir.”
“That’ll be a hell of a record,” Mologna decided. “That’ll get into Guinness for sure. Bring that record producer over here.”
“Yes, sir.” The young man saluted (Mologna nodded) and off he went, returnin in a moment with the woman, sayin, “Mrs. Taylor, sir.”
The woman smiled, seductive but not coarse, and said, “How do you do, Chief Inspector?”
Mologna had already struggled out of the car and onto his feet, and now he smiled his avuncular smile and put out his hand, and she placed a card in it. He’d expected a hand, not a card, but recovered and read it: Super Star Music—J.C. Taylor, President. The address was this Avalon Tower here. “Was you robbed, too?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she said. “I’m hoping there won’t be any trouble about these Sisters coming to see me.”
“They’ll be in no danger,” Mologna assured her. “The crimes here are all over for the moment.”
“Then I can bring them in?” Mrs. Taylor smiled again, radiantly, and seemed about to end the conversation.
“Wait a minute,” Mologna said. The fear of makin another mistake was still very much alive in his breast. “Maybe you better tell me the whole story.”
“I’m an independent record producer,” J.C. Taylor said, “and I’d arranged to do a demo tape today with a group of nuns from a convent down in Tribeca.”
“So you want to go down there?”
“No, they’re on their way here. It was arranged weeks ago. Their contact at the archdiocese offices is Father Angelo Caravoncello.”
Mologna bowed his head, as though he’d heard the holy name. The New York Police Department and the New York Archdiocese tend to be pretty tight. Well, in the first place, they are after all on the same side in the war between good and evil. And in the second place they both tend to assay out at a high percentage of Irish and Italian. And in the third place, they share the same turf, so they goddamn well better get along. Mologna didn’t know Father Angelo Caravoncello, but just hearin the name and the connection with the archdiocese offices was good enough for him. “I see,” he murmured.
“The idea,” she said, “is a nun’s chorus doing a pop album, like that French nun who did ‘Amazing Grace’ several years ago. Top of the charts, with a bullet.”
Mologna frowned. “Bullet?”
“Oh, that’s just trade talk,” she said. “When a record moves very fast, up through the sales charts, we say it’s with a bullet.”
“We police have trade talk like that, too,” Mologna told her. “Only when we say somethin’s with a bullet, it usually isn’t movin at all. So when do these sisters of yours get here?”
“About half an hour.”
The young black policeman piped up, sayin, “The building records show Mrs. Taylor signed in this morning, well after the robbery, and wasn’t in the building at all last night.”
“Well, of course I wasn’t,” she said, smilin again, her eyes twinklin at Mologna. “I don’t love my job that much.”
“Sure you don’t,” Mologna agreed, smilin back. He wished they’d had an actual handshake. “A pretty woman like you,” he said, “you’ll be wantin a private life of your own.”
“Oh, now, Chief Inspector,” Mrs. Taylor said, gigglin and wagglin a naughty-naughty finger at him. “You just never mind my private life.”
The woman’s flirtin with me! “Oh, I mean nothin at all by it, Mrs. Taylor,” he said, turnin red in the face, pleased all over. “Why,” he said, “I’m old enough to be your big brother.” Aware of somethin more acute, possibly even ironic, suddenly present in the young patrolman’s eyes, Mologna ended the conversation, sayin, “You run along now, and when these Sisters of yours arrive we’ll escort them right to your door.”
“Thank you, Chief Inspector,” Mrs. Taylor said, and now she did extend her hand, and Mologna happily shook it, and it was just as warm and soft and enjoyable as he’d anticipated.
An interestin walk the lady had, too, returnin to the buildin. Exactly like that judo instructor. Mologna sighed and gave himself over to thoughts of yesteryear, and just about half an hour later a battered old ex-school bus pulled up immediately behind his car. Still painted yellow, but with its original identification replaced by black letters readin SILENT SISTERHOOD OF ST. FILUMENA, it was driven by a large round-faced nun and contained a whole bunch more. Traditional nuns, Mologna was happy to see, still in the old black-and-white habit, several luggin satchels undoubtedly filled with their sheet music. Strugglin again out of his car, Mologna signaled a nearby patrolman and gave him orders to escort the nuns to their recordin session.
One of the nuns, a wiry little old woman with a look of holy command, came over to beam upon Mologna and show him a driver’s license and a library card both givin her name as Sister Mary Forcible. She seemed too bashful to speak. “Oh, that’s all right, Sister,” Mologna told her, pattin her bony claw. “I couldn’t doubt you for an instant. I’m an old parochial school boy myself, you know.”
Sister Mary Forcible smiled and put her ID away, and off they all went into the buildin, sweet and harmless, about to give the grace of music to a dirty and unhappy world. A lesson to us all, Mologna thought, and went back to his car and his memories of the judo instructor.
48
“Tiny,” Dortmunder said, “think about it. You don’t want to be in jail.”
“I don’t want to be in this nun suit either,” Tiny snarled, and turned to point a threatening finger at Wilbur Howey, warning him, “And one more stupid line from you about getting in the habit, and what you’ll be is black and white and red all over.”
“Say,” Wilbur answered, shying away from that finger, “can’t you take a joke?”
“No.”
Some joke. Sister Mary Forcible, having accepted Dortmunder’s contention that his efforts on Sister Mary Grace’s behalf did make it legitimate to call upon the convent for help, had gathered together fifteen of her fellow nuns and uptown they’d come, bringing a bunch of spare habits in large and extra-large, as well as a cassette of an a cappella recording of the Vienna Boys’ Choir singing Christmas favorites: “The Little Drummer Boy,” “Agnus Dei,” “Silver Bells.” This tape was now cued up in the cassette player atop the piano in the suite’s back room. The nuns were crowded everywhere in both rooms, some of them seated all unknowing on cartons of Scandinavian Marriage Secrets, every copy of which had been carefully stashed out of sight before their arrival. Sheet music that had been sent to Super Star Music by hopeful amateurs wanting the addition of lyrics had been distributed to everyone as props for the alleged recording session, and those of the nuns who could read music were studying these submissions with great dubiousness. And the Dortmunder gang was down in black and white.
Very strange. When nothing shows but your face, enclosed by the white oval of a wimple and the featureless black of a nun’s costume, you wouldn’t e
xpect much by way of individual character to show through, but it did, it did. Sister Mary Grace, for instance, back in her own chosen garb, looked completed and radiant, while Tiny, whose face mostly consisted of knuckles anyway, was barely plausible as the kind of false nun who, in the Middle Ages, poisoned and robbed unwary travelers. Stan Murch looked like a pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales, probably the one with ideas for alternate routes to Canterbury, and Wilbur Howey had the look of someone whose parents had turned her over to the nunnery fifty years ago because she was a little too dangerously peculiar for life in the outside world. Kelp was surely someone whose sister was the pretty one, while Dortmunder looked mostly like a missionary nun who was already among the cannibals and headhunters before realizing she’d lost her faith.
But whatever they looked like, and however they felt about it, this was their only chance and every one of them knew it. They’d all shaved in the men’s room down the hall, and fortunately none of them were wearing high heels. And now all they had to do was wait for the sweep to go by. In the meantime, J.C. had trained Dortmunder in the use of the cassette player and had explained to the nuns, both real and make-believe, how to look like a chorus. The three small microphones which were all she had here had been placed prominently around the front room. And Andy Kelp stood in the open hall doorway, looking away to the right toward the elevators, waiting for the red down-pointing arrow to light, announcing that the sweep had finally reached the seventh floor.
For over an hour they’d been ready to give their performance. How long could it take a squad of cops to search an empty building, even one seventy-six stories high? Dortmunder didn’t want his people overtrained and careless when the moment finally came.
He hadn’t mentioned robbery in his phone conversation with the convent, feeling it was better to let sleeping moral issues lie. After all, he wasn’t asking the nuns to participate in any burglaries or to help move or stash the loot. He had gone at their request to rescue their stolen Sister, he had done so with the help of these other people here, and now the Silent Sisterhood was merely being asked to rescue the rescuers. Simple. Clean. Virtually honest.
“Here they come!” Kelp hissed this announcement, looking excitedly back at the room, and there was a great rustling of skirts as everybody reacted. “Any second,” Kelp said, still looking out and down the hallway, “any second now.”
“Then close the goddamn door!” Dortmunder told him. “The door, I mean. Close the door.”
So Kelp closed the door, on the outside of which was taped a hand-written notice: QUIET—DO NOT ENTER OR KNOCK—RECORDING SESSION IN PROGRESS. Lifting his skirts with both hands, Kelp scurried across the room to his place. Dortmunder, in the back room, hit the play button on the cassette player, and the clear sweet tones of the boys’ choir filled both rooms with Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” The nuns and pseudo-nuns held their sheet music up near their faces—very near their faces, in some instances—and, as J.C. had rehearsed them, they lip-synced along with the tape. And the police, as Dortmunder had anticipated, ignored the sign on the door and the sound of singing from within and pounded on the glass for entry.
As Dortmunder peeked around the edge of the inner room doorway, keeping one hand on the cassette player while he watched, J.C. crossed the room, put an angry expression on her face, opened the door just far enough for the law to see all those singing nuns behind her, and whispered the prepared line: “Sssshhh! Can’t you read?”
Dortmunder counted four cops. They looked tired, sweaty, dusty. They had started on the seventy-sixth floor and this was the seventh, and they hadn’t found a goddamn thing. By now, they surely didn’t really expect to find anything, but they and the other squads in the sweep had to go through the motions anyway, and had to go through them thoroughly, just in case. Dortmunder could see it all in their faces, even from back here, and could see the one cop wearily nod and say something quietly to J.C, no doubt apologizing, no doubt explaining he was only doing his job, no doubt insisting he had no choice but to interrupt the recording session for just a minute or two.
The boys’ choir was coming near the end of the pre-arranged line. Dortmunder’s fingertip, touching the stop button, had started to sweat. How could a fingertip sweat? What if he missed when the instant came, and his finger slid off, and everybody out there stopped mouthing words while the goddamn boys’ choir went right on singing? If it weren’t for that goddamn vow of silence, they wouldn’t all have to go through this rigmarole, they could just—
“Then we might as well stop,” J.C. said loudly, sounding very irritated. She turned and made a down-chopping arm movement, and Dortmunder closed his eyes and pushed. Everything stopped. He opened his eyes, and the nuns were all shuffling around, looking at one another, rattling their sheet music, avoiding direct eye contact with the cops. Dortmunder slipped through the doorway and joined them as the cops walked in, their leader saying, “Yes, ma’am, we heard all about you people from Chief Inspector Mologna.”
Mologna! Dortmunder almost jumped out of his habit at the name. He’d had a run-in with Chief Inspector Mologna himself awhile ago and had barely got out of it with a whole skin. He, John Dortmunder, was in a way kind of sorta almost responsible for some public trouble that had come to Chief Inspector Mologna around that time. As though Mologna were right there in the room with him now—awful thought—Dortmunder could hear the man’s voice, threatening him that time on the telephone: “When I get my hands on you, you’ll fall downstairs for a month.”
Ugh.
Meantime, the leader of this squad of cops was still talking to J.C, saying, “We do got to take a quick look through here, just in case there’s somebody hiding in the place and you don’t even know about it.”
“In here?” J.C. said scornfully, waving a hand to indicate the small, cramped, crowded quarters.
“We’ll be very quick, ma’am,” the cop promised.
This was the tough part, standing here amid the nuns, hoping their presence would keep the cops from believing they had to search inside every box and carton and drawer for loot from the burglaries. Tiny and Stan had both argued that they should leave before the sweep reached this floor, do a quick make-believe recording session and then slide out of the building with the legitimate nuns, but that would leave the loot still in these offices, and if this space were empty the cops would have no reason to hurry and be sloppy and take things for granted.
Still, this was the tough part, and Dortmunder was glad the cops were buying the whole nun-chorus story. They said they’d be quick in their search, and as it turned out they were. While the other three stood just inside the door, looking around, one of them, eyes modestly down, tugging respectfully at the bill of his uniform cap, worked his way through the nuns to the door to the inner room, looked around in there, re-emerged, and told his friends, “Nobody. You couldn’t hide a peanut in here.”
“Okay, fine,” the leader said, and gave J.C. a kind of half salute, touching his cap. “I’m sorry about the interruption, ma’am,” he said. “Hope you get a number-one hit here.”
“Thank you,” J.C. said, though coldly.
The cops filed back out again, but then the leader stopped and looked back at the nuns—Dortmunder shrunk down inside himself, so that the only thing left in the outer world was his nose—and then at J.C. He said, “One thing.”
The tension in the room could have provided electric power for Cleveland for a week. J.C. said, “Yes?”
“You gonna do a video?”
“Well, uhh …” J.C. dithered, then shrugged and said, “We’re, uh, thinking about it.”
“That’s what you gotta do these days,” the cop told her. “If you want to reach the kids, you know? You gotta do a video.”
“Good idea,” J.C. said.
“Good luck,” the cop said, and went out, and closed the door.
The sigh that went up from all the assembled nuns was almost audible; on the very edge of a vow-breaker. But framed within the
ir wimples, all those faces were flushed and sparkling and having fun; this was a lot different from the usual Sunday down at the convent.
Dortmunder hurried back to the inner room and pushed play and the boys’ choir took up again where they’d been so rudely interrupted. And Tiny said, “Video. I’d like a video of that clown, falling out an airplane.”
Sister Mary Forcible was near Tiny. She tapped his forearm, and when he looked down at her she smiled at him and shook her finger disapprovingly, then quickly took a pen out of her habit and scrawled a couple of words on the back of her sheet music. She showed this note to Tiny.
He studied it, then spoke slowly: “Christian cha-rit-y.” He nodded, leaning over the nun like a landslide about to happen. “I tell you what, Sister,” he rumbled, “he should fall out an airplane over water, okay? Warm, soft water, so he could land in it.” They smiled at each other and Tiny turned away, heading for the inner room. Passing Dortmunder, he muttered, “Shark-infested water.”
49
Displayin himself in the main front entrance to the Avalon State Bank Tower while TV lights enhanced the wanin rays of the late afternoon sun and TV cameras recorded every immortal moment, Chief Inspector Francis X. Mologna listened to the depressin news from his boys in blue. The sweep had swept through, right on down the buildin from top to bottom, and had produced nothin.
Well, not entirely nothin. An illegal horse parlor had been exposed on thirty-seven and a Virgin Islands pro-independence terrorist group’s bomb factory had been turned up on nine and two prison escapees from Massachusetts, the professional arsonist Matlock twins, had been found livin in a chiropodist’s office on fifty-two, but none of the valuables stolen from the importers on twenty-six had been located. Also, a surprisin amount of sexual hanky-panky between people married to people other than the people they were hanky-pankyin with had been discovered, but no more mercenary soldiers had appeared, nor had any burglars. The men who had done the sweep had made their reports to their immediate commanders, and these three commanders, bein two lieutenants and a captain, were now passin the reports on to the chief inspector, leanin too close to be sure they got into the TV pictures.
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