What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Will do.”

  “Thank you for coming,” Mr. Hemlow said, so Eppick stood, so Dortmunder stood. Good-byes were said, they walked to the elevator while Mr. Hemlow watched from back by the view, and neither spoke until they were out on Riverside Drive, when Eppick said, “So you’ll be here at nine in the morning.”

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said.

  Eppick did a more successful cocking of the head. “I get little whiffs from you, John,” he said, “that you’re not as keen as you might be on this job.”

  “That’s not easy, that vault.”

  “But there it is,” Eppick pointed out. “If you’re thinking, maybe you’ll just get out of town for a while until this all blows over, let me tell you, it isn’t going to blow over. Mr. Hemlow’s into this for sentimental reasons, but I’m in it for profit, and you’d better be, too.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Police departments around America,” Eppick said, “are getting better and better at cooperation, what with the Internet and all. Everybody helps everybody, and nobody can disappear.” Lacing his fingers together to show what he meant, in a gesture very like a stranglehold, he said, “We’re all intertwined these days. See you at nine.”

  10

  WHEN MAY GOT home from her job at the Safeway with the daily sack of groceries she felt was a perk her employers would have given her if they’d thought of it, the apartment was dark. It was not yet quite six o’clock, but in this apartment, whose windows showed mostly brick walls four to six feet away, midnight in November came around three p.m.

  May switched on the hall light, went down to the kitchen, stowed the day’s take, went back up the hall, turned right into the living room to see if the local news had anything she could bear to listen to, switched on the light there, and John was seated in his regular chair, in the dark, gazing moodily at the television set. Well, no; gazing moodily toward the television set.

  May jumped a foot. She let out a little cry, clutched her bosom, and cried, “John!”

  “Hello, May.”

  She stared at him. “John? What’s the matter?”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m doomed.”

  For the first time in years, May wished she still smoked. Taking the other chair, she flicked ashes from that ancient cigarette onto the side table where the ashtray used to be, and said, “Was it that cop?”

  “It sure was.”

  “And did Stan find you?”

  With a hollow sardonic laugh, John said, “Oh, yeah. He found me.”

  “He can’t help?”

  “Stan doesn’t help,” John said. “Stan needs help, him and his golden dome. If my only problem was Stan Murch and his golden dome, I’d be sitting pretty, May. Sitting pretty.”

  “Well, what is the problem?”

  “The thing the cop wants me to get,” John said. “It’s a golden chess set—more gold—and it’s supposed to be too heavy for one guy to lift.”

  “Get somebody to help.”

  “It’s also,” he said, “in a sub-basement vault under a midtown bank building.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “And this guy, this seventeen-months-not-a-cop,” John said, “he let me know, I try to leave town, he’s got these millions and millions of cop buddies on the Internet and they’ll track me down. And he would, too, he’s a mean son of a bitch, you can see it in his forehead.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Well,” he said, “I figure I’ll just sit here until they come to get me.”

  “You don’t mean that, John,” she said, though she was afraid he actually did mean it.

  “I’ve done jail before, May,” he reminded her. “It wasn’t that bad. I got through it.”

  “You were less set in your ways, then,” she said.

  “You can pick up the old routines,” he said. “Probly a few guys still there I knew in the old days.”

  “Or there again.”

  “Yeah, could be. Old home week.”

  May knew John had a very bad tendency, when things got unusually difficult, to sink with an almost sensuous pleasure into a warm bath of despair. Once you’ve handed the reins over to despair, to mix a metaphor just a teeny bit, your job is done. You don’t have to sweat it any more, you’ve taken yourself out of the game. Despair is the bench, and you are warming it.

  May knew it was her job, at moments like this, to pull John out of the clutches of despair and goose him into forward motion once more. After all, it isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s just you have to be in the goddam game.

  “John,” she said, being suddenly very stern, “don’t be so selfish.”

  He blinked at her, emerging slowly up from a dream of prison as a kind of fraternal organization. “What?”

  “What about me?” she demanded. “Don’t you ever think about me? I can’t go to jail with you, you know.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “What am I going to do with myself, John,” she wanted to know, “if you’re going to spend ten to fifteen upstate? I’ve made a certain commitment here, you know that, I hope.”

  “May, it’s not me, it’s that cop.”

  “It’s you that’s sitting there,” she told him, “like you’re waiting for a bus. And you are waiting for a bus. To jail! What’s the matter with you, John?”

  He tried, though feebly, to fight back. “May? You want me to try to get down into that vault? Never mind the vault, you want me to try to get into the elevator that leads down to the vault? The bank’s money is down there, too, May, they will be very alert about that vault. And, even if I was crazy enough to try it, who am I gonna get to help carry? Who else would try a stunt like that?”

  “Call Andy,” she advised.

  11

  THE DOME DIDN’T look like gold at night. There were work lights around the construction site, even though no work was being done at the moment, to deter pilferage, which would usually mean boards or Sheetrock panels, not golden domes fifteen feet high, and in those work lights, as far as Andy Kelp was concerned, the dome looked mostly like a giant apricot. Not a peach, not that warmer fuzzy tone, but an apricot, except without that crease that makes apricots look as though they’re wearing thong bathing suits.

  Andy Kelp, a bony sharp-nosed guy in nonreflecting black, tended to blend in with the shadows at night when he moved from this place to that place. The place he was moving around in at the moment was just beyond the chain-link perimeter fence enclosing the mosque construction site, now temporarily on hold while the recently transplanted community got up to speed on the New York City culture and ethos.

  And the reason Andy Kelp was moving around here at night was that, while he still thought the idea of heisting something this size and weight, particularly from people who have been known to be slightly hotheaded in the past, was a terrible notion, the one thing he didn’t have was John Dortmunder’s opinion. He was pretty sure John would see the scheme the same way everybody else did, but unfortunately John hadn’t been at the meeting in the back room of the O.J. to put his stamp of disapproval personally on the idea, having been waylaid by some cop.

  So, because of that gap in the chain of evidence, and because he wasn’t doing much of anything else at the moment, he’d borrowed a car from East Thirtieth Street in Manhattan and driven out here to Brooklyn to give the golden dome the double-o. He was now coming to the conclusion that his first conclusion had been right all along, as expected, when the phone vibrated against his leg—silence can be more golden than any dome—so he pulled it out and said, “Yar.”

  “You busy?” The very John Dortmunder whose absence last night had brought him out here.

  “Not really,” Kelp said. “You?”

  “We could maybe talk.”

  Surprised, Kelp said, “About the job?”

  Sounding surprised, John said, “Yeah.”

  Kelp took a step back to study the dome from a slightly different angle, and it still seemed to him too big and too unwieldy
and just downright too unlikely, so he said, “You mean, you want to do it?”

  “Well, I got no choice.”

  So John felt compelled to go after all this gold; think of that. Kelp said, “To tell you the truth, I was thinking, you cut a piece off it, could be,” though he hadn’t thought of that till this very minute. But if John believed there might be something in this gold mountain, that could get Kelp’s creative juices flowing, too. “Is that your idea,” he asked, “or what?”

  “Cut a piece off what?”

  “The dome,” Kelp said. “You’ll never get the whole dome, John, I’m looking at it and—”

  “The dome? You mean, Stan’s Islamic dome?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re talking about?”

  “And you’re out there with it? You’re whacking pieces off it?”

  “No, I’m just giving it the good lookover, the whadawe see when we see this idea.”

  “Stan there?”

  “No, I just come out by myself, spur of the moment kinda thing. I don’t wanna encourage Stan, get his hopes up. John, aren’t you talking about the dome?”

  “You think I’m a moron?”

  “No, John, but you said—”

  “You wanna meet? You wanna talk? Or you wanna stay out there and cut filets outa the dome?”

  “I’m on my way, John. Where and when?”

  “O.J., ten. It’s just the two of us, so we won’t need the back room.”

  “So it isn’t a solid job yet.”

  “Oh, it’s solid,” John told him. “And I’m under it.”

  12

  WHEN DORTMUNDER WALKED into the O.J. at ten that night Andy Kelp had not yet arrived, and the regulars, freed from last night’s Eppick-inspired verbal paralysis, were discussing James Bond movies. “That was the one,” the first regular said, “where the bad guy went after his basket with a laser.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” the second regular told him. “You happen to be confusing that one with that guy George Laserby, he was the Bond only that one time— What was it called?”

  Dortmunder angled toward the other end of the bar, where Rollo the bartender repetitively rag-wiped one spot on the bar’s surface as though he believed that’s where the genie lived, while a third regular said, “In His Majesty’s Secret Police.”

  The second regular frowned, as Dortmunder almost reached the bar: “Wasn’t that Timothy Danton?”

  The third regular frowned right back: “Timothy who?”

  “Danton. The polite one.”

  “No, no,” the first regular said. “This is much earlier, and, it’s a laser, not a laserby, a light that slices you in half.”

  The third regular remained bewildered: “This is a light?”

  “It’s green.”

  “You’re thinking,” the second regular told him, “of Star Wars.”

  “Rollo,” Dortmunder said.

  “Forget Star Wars,” the first regular said. “It was a laser, and it was green. Wasn’t the bad guy Doctor No?”

  “Doctor Maybe Not,” said the joker. There’s a joker in every crowd.

  “Rollo,” Dortmunder explained, and Rollo came slowly up from REM sleep, stopped his rag-wiping, focused on Dortmunder, and said, “Two nights in a row. You could become a regular.”

  “Maybe not,” Dortmunder said, echoing the joker, though not on purpose. “But tonight, yeah. Just me and the other bourbon.” Because Rollo knew his customers by their drink, which he felt was the way to inspire consumer loyalty.

  “Happy to see you both,” Rollo said.

  “It’s just the two of us, so we don’t need the back room.”

  “Woody Allen,” demanded the ever-perplexed third regular, “played James Bond?”

  “I think that was him,” said the second regular, showing a rare moment of regular doubt.

  “Fine,” said Rollo, and went away to prepare a tray containing two glasses with ice cubes and a full bottle bearing a label that read Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon—“Our Own Brand.” “Drink it in good health,” he said, and pushed the tray across the genie.

  “Thanks.”

  Dortmunder turned around, carrying the tray, looked to choose just the right booth, and Kelp appeared in the bar doorway. He entered, saw Dortmunder, gazed around the room, and pointed at the booth next to him, the one where last night—just last night!—Dortmunder had met his personal ex-cop doom.

  The same booth? Well, the farther from the Bondsmen the better. Dortmunder shrugged: Okay.

  Once they were seated facing one another and their glasses were no longer empty, Kelp said, “This is about that cop.”

  “You know it. Johnny Eppick For Hire.”

  “How much of that is his name?”

  “The front half.”

  “So he used to be a cop,” Kelp suggested, “and now he’s a private eye.”

  “Or whatever. He’s working for a rich guy that wants this valuable heavy golden chess set that just happens to be in a sub-basement bank vault in midtown.”

  “Forget it,” Kelp advised.

  “I’d like to,” Dortmunder said. “Only he’s got pictures of me in a compromising position.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Kelp seemed very interested. “What, is he gonna show them to May?”

  “Not that kind,” Dortmunder said. “The kind he could show to the cops that didn’t retire yet.”

  “Oh.” Kelp nodded. “Miami could be nice, this time of year.”

  “I was thinking Chicago. Only, Eppick thought of it, too. He says, him and the Internet and his cop buddies would find me anywhere I went, and I believe him.”

  “How much time you got?”

  “Before my arrest, arraignment, plea bargain, and bus ride north?” Dortmunder shrugged. “I can stall a little, I guess. But Eppick is leaning, and the guy he works for is old and sick and wouldn’t be interested in any long-term plans.”

  “Sheesh.” Kelp shook his head. “I hate to say this, but better you than me.”

  “Don’t hate to say it,” Dortmunder advised him, “because you’re already kinda involved.”

  Kelp didn’t like that. “You two’ve been talking about me?”

  “He already knows you,” Dortmunder said. “He researched me or something. Last night, when he left here, he looked down toward you and said, ‘Give my hello to Andy Kelp.’ He knows about Arnie Albright. He knows us all.”

  “I don’t like this,” Kelp said. “I don’t like your friend Eppick even thinking about me.”

  “Oh, is that how it is?” Dortmunder wanted to know. “Now he’s my friend?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  Kelp looked around the room, as though to fix the location more securely in his mind. “You asked me to meet you here tonight,” he said. “Now I get it, you asked me here because you want me to help. So when are you gonna ask me to help?”

  “There is no help,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp slowly sipped some of his bourbon, while gazing at Dortmunder over the glass. Then he put the glass down and continued to gaze at Dortmunder.

  “Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Help.”

  “Sure,” Kelp said. “Where is this bank vault?”

  “C&I International, up on Fifth Avenue.”

  “That’s a big bank,” Kelp said. He sounded faintly alarmed.

  “It’s a big building,” Dortmunder said. “Underneath it is a sub-basement, and in the sub-basement is the chess set that’s out to ruin my life.”

  “I could go up tomorrow,” Kelp offered, “and take a look.”

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, “I’d like you to do something else tomorrow.”

  Looking hopeful, Kelp said, “You already got a plan?”

  “No, I already got a disaster.” Dortmunder drank some of his own bourbon, more copiously than Kelp had, and said, “Let me say first, this Eppick already figures you’re in. He said to me today, ‘I suppose you’ll work with your pal Andy Kelp.�
�”

  “Conversations about me,” Kelp said, and shivered.

  “I know. I feel the same way. But here’s the thing. It’s just as important you get to see this Eppick as it is you get to see some bank building.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Dortmunder said, “in the rich guy’s limo, we’re going upstate somewhere, Eppick and me, to see if what the rich guy called his compound is secure enough for us to stash the chess set after we ha-ha lift it.”

  “You want me to ride upstate tomorrow,” Kelp said, “in a limo with you and Eppick.”

  “And a chauffeur.”

  Kelp contemplated that, while back at the bar, “Shaken but not slurred!” piped the joker.

  Kelp observed his glass, but did not drink. “And why,” he wanted to know, “am I doing this?”

  “Maybe we’ll learn something.”

  “Nothing we want to know, I bet.” Kelp did knock back a little more bourbon. “What time are we doing this foolish thing?”

  13

  BEING A WEE beastie in a huge corporate law firm in midtown Manhattan meant that one did not have very many of one’s waking hours to oneself. Again tonight it was after ten before Fiona could call her home-buddy Brian and say, “I’m on my way.”

  “It’ll be ready when you get here.”

  “Should I stop and get anything?” By which she meant wine.

  “No, I got everything we need.” By which he meant he’d bought wine on his way home from the studio.

  “See you, hon.”

  “See you, hon.”

  The interior of Feinberg et al maintained the same lighting twenty-four hours a day, since only the partners and associates had offices around the perimeter of the building, and thus windows. In the rest of the space you might as well have been in a spaceship far off in the emptiness of the universe. The only differences at ten p.m., when Fiona moved through the cubicles to the elevator bank, were that the receptionist’s desk was empty, the latest Botox Beauty having left at five, and that Fiona needed her employee ID card to summon and operate the elevator. It wasn’t, in fact, until she’d left the elevator and the lobby and the building itself that she found herself back on Earth, where it was nighttime, with much traffic thundering by on Fifth Avenue.