What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

  Pen down, finger hovering over the button that would end this call, she said, “Who’s that?”

  “John. You know, yesterday we talked. Hold on.” Away from the phone he said, “Gimme a minute here, do you mind? I got my party.” Speaking to Fiona again, he said, “You know, in your office yesterday.”

  “Oh, John, yes, of course,” she said, that dogged pessimistic face clear in her mind now, matching up perfectly with that weary voice. “You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Well, not on the phone, you know, not exactly. I been waiting outside here—”

  “What? Outside this building?”

  “Yeah. That’s where you are, right? I thought, you come out, we could have a talk while we walk. Hold on.” Off, he said, “I’m being polite. You be polite.” Back, he said, “I was beginning to think, maybe you went home early—”

  “Never.”

  “So you go home late.”

  “Always.”

  “How late? I mean, instead of hang around, I could come back— Hold on.” Off, he said, “You got a watch?” There was some sort of muffled complaint and then he said, “I don’t want your watch, I wanna know what time it is.”

  “It’s seven-thirty,” Fiona said.

  “See?” he said, off. “She knows what time it is, it’s seven-thirty.”

  Fiona said, “How long have you been waiting?”

  “Since five. You’d be surprised, you know, how many people come out of these buildings at five. So finally, I figured, I better check this here, so I borrowed this cell phone—” Off. “I borrowed it, you’re getting it back.”

  “I’ll come down now,” Fiona said.

  The inadvertent supplier of the cell phone was long gone when Fiona reached the street, where John Dortmunder leaned against the front of the building like a small gray rebuttal to all the work ethic within. Approaching, she said, “Mr. Dortmunder, I—”

  “John, okay?” he said. “Mr. Dortmunder makes me nervous. The only time I’m Mr. Dortmunder is when I’m being arraigned.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “You’re John, and I’m Fiona.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said. “Which way you walk?”

  “Over to Broadway and up to the subway.”

  “Okay, we’ll do it.”

  They got to the corner and had to wait for the light, during which he said, “Mainly what I want is pictures.”

  She couldn’t think of what. “Pictures?”

  “Of the thing. The thing in the vault.”

  “Oh,” she said. “The chess set.”

  For some reason, he didn’t like to hear those words spoken out in public. “Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” he said, and patted the air downward in front of himself as though wanting to tell her to pipe down without being rude about it. All at once, she was aware that other people, all around them, were standing here waiting for the light to change, and she piped down.

  WALK. They walked.

  “Well, of course we have pictures of it,” she said, more quietly, as they crossed Fifth Avenue. “The entire— Well, the entire you-know was photographed and measured when the law firms accepted custody.”

  “Measured; that’s good, too.”

  “I could e-mail it all to you,” she said.

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  They had reached the other curb, where Fiona stopped, waited for the nearby walkers to move on, and said, “I could print it out for you.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “That’s better anyway. Absolutely no record.”

  “No record, that’s good.”

  “We’ll go back to the office,” she decided, and they turned around.

  DON’T WALK.

  She said, “So you’re really going to go ahead and do this, even though you hate everything about the vault?”

  “Your grandfather and the other guy like to see forward motion,” he told her. “I’m doing what I can to keep everybody happy.”

  WALK.

  Shouldn’t he be angry about this situation? Fiona felt he should certainly be angry at her, if not her grandfather, for making this whole thing happen. And yet, he just seemed fatalistic and tired, trying not to go into that vault but sliding there inexorably, after just that one push from her. “I’m sorry, John,” she said.

  “It isn’t you,” he said. “What I’m coming to a realization about,” he said, as she withdrew from her wallet the card that would let her back into the C&I International building, “is, this is all the mistakes of my past life, coming back to haunt me. In order to pay for all those little misdemeanors and all those little lapses from all the time before I reformed, I gotta do an illegal entry into a bank vault that’s impossible to get into and even if you could get into it, which you can’t, doubly impossible to get out of, carrying a weight. Half a weight.”

  During this speech, Fiona had carded them into the building and now led the way toward the elevators, but “Hold on,” he said.

  Surprised, she turned to see him standing still in the gleaming high-ceilinged gray marble lobby. “Did you want something? The snack shop’s closed.”

  “I wanted to look at it,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  So they both looked at the lobby, Fiona trying to see it now through John Dortmunder’s eyes, seeing it for the first time, not her own eyes which hadn’t really seen the lobby as anything but another blank part of her daily commute for over a year.

  The place was very different through his eyes. On their left was the chest-high security station with the wall-mounted TV monitors behind it and the two gray-uniformed security men on duty, whom she’d barely noticed all this time because they knew and recognized her so that she never since the first week or so had had to show her Feinberg ID. But there they were nevertheless, looking in Fiona and John’s direction with casual interest because they weren’t at this moment in transit across the lobby but simply standing in one place, not a normal lobby occurrence.

  What else? The three shops on their right with pane glass windows facing the lobby, selling (1) snacks and reading matter, (2) luggage, and (3) stationery and computer software, were all closed now, though well-lit within.

  Across the rear wall of the lobby were the brushed-steel doors of the elevators. To their left was the marked door to the staircase, for emergencies, and to the right of the elevator doors was another brushed-steel door that Fiona had never noticed before. Twice a day she’d passed it, and never noticed.

  With a silent glance at her, John walked toward the rear of the lobby. Fiona followed, knowing where he was headed. “I’ll get the elevator.”

  “Good.”

  They both angled closer to that door on the right, him more so than her, but neither went directly to it, because after all two security men behind them had nothing better to do than watch people moving. However, she was close enough to see—so he must see it, too—that discreet gold letters on the door said NO ADMITTANCE and that it had a card slot like all the other entry card slots in her life, but no doorknob.

  “Uh huh,” he said, and she carded for the elevator.

  Putting the card away in her wallet, she said, “You say you reformed?”

  “Right.”

  “When was that?”

  “When I met your grandfather.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, and the elevator door slid open.

  Fiona’s access to the Feinberg computer system was not total—there were distant tunnels of data, mostly involving money or foreign linkages, that required passwords beyond her station in life—but much of Feinberg’s knowledge was available to her. Being a wee beastie in these offices meant being a utility infielder, on tap to assist any of the more important associates who might need a little delving and precedent hunting done, so her access had to be broad and deep, so quite naturally included the files on the chess set known in the court papers as Chicago Chess Set, its official provenance not going farther back than Alfred X. Northwood’s long-ago train journey from that
city to New York, chess set in tow.

  “Chicago Chess Set,” she read from the screen. “Yes, here it is. How much of it do you want?”

  “All of it,” he said, looking at the cover sheet on the screen, which showed the chess set brightly lit on a black velvet background, set up and waiting, gleaming, looking exactly like something created by royal gold-lust.

  “All of it?” She reared back to look at him. “You can’t want all of it. The court hearings? There are hundreds of pages on this item of the suits, all by themselves, maybe thousands. You couldn’t read all that.”

  “No, I don’t wanna read all that,” he said. “I want all the pictures and all the measurements.”

  “All right, let’s see—” She checked the table of contents. “There’s individual photos of the pieces—”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Pages of dimensions of each piece.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Shots from different angles in different lighting.”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “In all,” she said, “sixty-four pages.”

  “I’ll borrow an envelope,” he said.

  Later that evening, over burritos with shrimp and rice—very nice—at their table in their candlelit big room, she told Brian about her latest encounter with John Dortmunder, and he laughed and said, “Is he really gonna try to go down in there and get that thing?”

  “Well, he doesn’t want to,” she said, “but it looks like my grandfather and that other man are pressing him very hard. I just keep hoping they’ll all realize it’s just impossible and give it up.”

  “Hard to give up all that gold,” Brian said. “I’d know how to get down in that vault.”

  “You would? How?”

  “Say I’m shooting a documentary,” he said. “Movie people can get in anywhere. ‘Hi, we’re doing a Discovery Channel special on bank vaults. How did you spell your name again?’ You’re right in.”

  Laughing around her burrito, she said, “Oh, Brian, I don’t think Mr. Dortmunder could convince anybody he was making a movie for the Discovery Channel.”

  “No, probably not,” Brian said. His eyes glittered just slightly in the candlelight. “Too bad.”

  21

  SATURDAY MORNING, AFTER May left for the Safeway, Dortmunder sat at the kitchen table and spread out the photos and spec sheets he’d been given by Fiona Hemlow last night. The chess set turned out to be a little smaller than he’d imagined, but also heavier: 680 pounds. Yeah, that would take more than one guy.

  According to what it said on the description sheets, the chess pieces weren’t actually gold all the way through, which would make them even heavier, but gold poured into forms around wood dowels, with three to five jewels set into each piece to make the two teams: pearls for the white gang, rubies for the red. The kings and queens were just under four inches tall, the others shorter. The gold had been shaped with extreme delicacy and care, as you would do if you were working for an absolute monarch.

  Dortmunder had been looking at the pictures and reading the specs about half an hour when the phone rang, over there on the wall next to the refrigerator. It was going to be Andy Kelp, of course, and when Dortmunder got to his feet and walked to the phone and said into it, “Harya,” it was.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Well, I got the pictures,” he said, reluctantly, looking over at the papers spread out on the table. He knew it was dumb to want to save that little trove of information for himself, but there it was.

  “The pictures? Already?”

  “And the specs, sizes, all that.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Kelp said, and was, walking into the kitchen, saying, “I didn’t want to disturb you with the bell.”

  “I appreciate that,” Dortmunder said. “How are my door locks holding up?”

  “Oh, they’re fine,” Kelp assured him. “Let’s see what we got here.”

  “One little puzzle,” Dortmunder said.

  Kelp had picked up a photo of the complete chess set, but now he looked at Dortmunder. “You mean, aside from how do we get our hands on it?”

  “One of the rooks,” Dortmunder told him, “is light.”

  “Light? How do you mean, light?”

  Using the photo Kelp was holding, Dortmunder pointed to white king’s rook and said, “That one’s about three pounds lighter than this one,” pointing to white queen’s rook, “but that one’s the same as the two on the other side.”

  While Dortmunder riffled through more photos, Kelp stared at the picture of the entire set. “You mean all of these others weigh the same?”

  “Almost. There’s little tiny differences because there’s different jewels in each one. Here, here’s the separate pictures of those two. The one on the right there is the light one.”

  “King’s rook,” Kelp read the caption at the bottom of the picture and looked at the squat golden castle decorated with four sparkly pearls. “I thought rook meant to cheat somebody.”

  “Outa three pounds, I know. But one of these pages here uses the word ‘rook’ and then that thing, that para thing . . .” He finger-drew in the air the icon of a lying-down smile face.

  “I know what you mean,” Kelp said.

  “Good. (or castle) it says. So that’s a word for it.”

  Kelp bent over the individual pictures of the two white rooks, then leaned back and shook his head. “Maybe,” he said, “we’ll be able to tell more when we’ve got ’em in our hands. Heft them.”

  Dortmunder frowned at him. “Got ’em in our hands? Don’t you remember, they’re still in that vault. This is just so Eppick and Hemlow think something’s happening, but Andy, nothing is happening.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so negative,” Kelp told him. “Look at these pictures. Every day, we get closer.”

  “Yeah, and I know to what,” Dortmunder said, and the phone rang. “That’s probably Eppick now,” he said, getting to his feet. “Wanting to know is it time to send the arresting officers.”

  “Give the man credit for a little patience,” Kelp suggested.

  Dortmunder barked into the phone and Stan Murch’s voice said, “The kid and I just finished breakfast, in a place over by his place.”

  “That’s nice,” Dortmunder said, and told Kelp, “Stan and Judson just had breakfast together.”

  “Why’s he telling you that?”

  “We didn’t get there yet,” Dortmunder said, and into the phone he said, “Why are you telling me that? This isn’t something else about that dome, is it?”

  “No, no,” Stan said. “I gave that up.”

  “Good.”

  “Kind of like a lost love.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I’m traveling strictly Flatbush Avenue these days.”

  “Well, it’s still Brooklyn.”

  “But no dome. Listen, the kid and me,” Stan said, “were wondering, since the dome thing’s no good, did you maybe have something going on with that cop.”

  “Mostly,” Dortmunder said, “he’s got something going on with me.”

  “If we could help—”

  “I’m beyond help.”

  Kelp said, “Tell them come over. The more brains the merrier.”

  “Andy says you should come over to my place, bring your brains.”

  “We’ll be right there,” Stan said, and they were, but they used the traditional entry method of ringing the street doorbell, and it so happened they did so just as the phone rang again.

  “You get the phone,” Kelp suggested, standing, “and I’ll get the door.”

  “Good.” Dortmunder crossed to the phone and said, “Harya,” into it as Kelp pressed the release button on the wall and walked away down the hall to wait for the arrivals to climb the two flights.

  A voice that could only belong to Tiny Bulcher said, “Dortmunder, I worry about you.”

  “Good,” Dortmunder said. “I wouldn’t want to worry about me all alone.”

  �
�You having trouble with that cop?”

  “Yes. Listen, Andy’s here and now Stan and Judson are just showing up.”

  “You’re having a meeting without me?”

  “It didn’t start out to be a meeting. People just keep showing up, like a wake. You wanna come over?”

  “I’ll be right there,” Tiny said, and was.

  There were four chairs around the kitchen table, and Judson could sit on the radiator, so once Tiny had been added to the mix they were all more or less comfortable. Since Dortmunder had just finished describing the current situation to Stan and Judson, Kelp did the honors with Tiny, including a description of Eppick’s apparently broad and entirely unnecessary background data bank on everybody in the room.

  “There are people,” Tiny commented, “who, when they retire, they oughta retire.”

  “Tiny,” Dortmunder said, “the way it looks, I’m the only one he’s really putting the pressure on. When I don’t get that chess set, I’m the one he’s gonna blame, nobody else.”

  “San Francisco isn’t a bad place to hang out sometimes,” Tiny observed.

  “I was thinking Chicago,” Dortmunder told him, “and Andy suggested Miami, but Eppick knows all about that. He tells me, with all the millions of cops all connected now, he’ll find me wherever I go.”

  Tiny nodded, thinking it over. “It’s true,” he said. “It’s harder to disappear than it used to be in the old days. In the old days, you just burn your fingerprints off with acid and there you are.”

  “Ow,” Judson said. “Wouldn’t that hurt?”

  “Not for twenty-five years,” Tiny told him. “Anyway, you can’t burn DNA off. Not and live through it.”

  Kelp said, “You know, we got another little conundrum here. I know it isn’t as important as the main problem—”

  “The vault,” Dortmunder said.

  “That’s the problem I was thinking of,” Kelp agreed. “Anyway,” he told the others, “you see these pictures of these two rooks.”

  “Those are castles,” Stan said.

  “Yes, but,” Kelp said, “rook is a name for them in chess. Anyway, everything weighs the way it’s supposed to, except this one rook here is three pounds lighter than the other rooks.”