In the meantime, the only thing to do was make the best of a bad situation. Oppressed by the continuing silence in the cab, these four large bodies sweating lightly in the hot July London air, Chauncey made a desperate stab at small talk:
"This your first trip to London, Dortmunder?"
"Yeah." Dortmunder turned his head slightly to look out the window. The cab, having come in the M 4 from Heathrow, was now inching through the normal traffic jam on Cromwell Road. "Looks like Queens," Dortmunder said.
Chauncey came automatically to the city's defense. "Well, this is hardly the center of town."
"Neither is Queens."
Cromwell Road became Brompton Road before Chauncey tried again: "Have you traveled much outside the United States?"
"I went to Mexico once," Dortmunder told him. "It didn't work out."
"No?"
"No."
Kelp unexpectedly said, "You were in Canada a couple times."
"Just hiding out."
"Still."
"Just farmhouses and snow," Dortmunder insisted. "Could of been anywhere."
The cab finally reached Hans Place, a long oval around a tree-filled park, fringed by tallish orange-brick nineteenth-century houses done in the gabled ornate style termed by Sir Osbert Lancaster "Pont Street Dutch." When the cab stopped, Chauncey gratefully ejected himself onto the sidewalk and paid the fare while the others unloaded the luggage. Then Edith and Bert appeared from the house to welcome Chauncey back and to carry his baggage while the others could do as they wished with theirs.
This house had been divided long ago into four separate residences, complexly arranged. In Chauncey's maisonette, staff quarters and kitchen were on the ground floor rear, a front-windowed sitting room and rear-windowed dining room were on the first floor, and a spiral staircase from the dining room led up to two bedrooms plus bath at the rear of the second floor. Edith and Bert, a tiny shriveled couple who spoke an absolutely incomprehensible form of cockney in which R was the only identifiable consonant, were the maisonette's only full-time residents, with their own small room and bath downstairs behind the kitchen. They grew brussels sprouts in their bit of a garden in back, they did their shopping two blocks away at Harrods on Chauncey's charge account, they pretended to be valet and cook during those occasional intervals of Chauncey's presence in town, and all in all they lived the life of Reilly and knew it. "Hee bee," they said to one another, tucked into their teeny bed together at night. A maisonette in Knightsbridge! Not bad, eh, Mum? Not bad, Dad.
With much piping and chortling and recourse to the letter R, this happy couple welcomed Chauncey home. He perceived the sense, if not the substance, and told them, "Show these gentlemen to the guest room."
"Aye. Aye. R, r, r, r."
In the house they all went, and up the half flight to the sitting room, and thence up the spiral stairs, Edith and Bert struggling like trolls with Chauncey's luggage, cheerfully barking all the way. Zane went next, limping so garishly up the spiral staircase he seemed a living parody of a Hammer film, followed by Kelp, whose half dozen ditty bags gave him no end of trouble, constantly tangling and snagging with the staircase's banister rails and his own legs and – for one terrifying instant – with Zane's bad foot. The look Zane shot down at him was so cold, so lethal, that Kelp staggered backwards into Dortmunder, who'd been plodding steadily and unemotionally around the spiral like the mule circling an Arab well. Dortmunder stopped when much of Kelp landed on his head, and said, with tired patience, "Don't do that, Andy."
"I'm – I'm just–" Kelp righted himself, dropped two of his bags, stuck his rump in Dortmunder's face as he gathered them up, and climbed on.
Chauncey brought up the rear at rather a safe distance, and when he reached the top, Edith and Bert were already unpacking his bags in his room, while a dispute was starting in the guest room. Dortmunder expressed the core of the problem in a question to Chauncey: "All three of us in here?"
"This is it," Chauncey told him. "On the other hand, the sooner the job is done, the sooner you'll be able to leave and go home."
Dortmunder and Kelp and Zane looked around at the room, which had been designed with married – or at least friendly – couples in mind. One double bed, one dresser, one vanity, one chair, one writing desk, two bedside tables with lamps, one closet, one window overlooking the garden. Kelp, looking apprehensive but determined, said, "I don't care. He can shoot me if he wants, but I'm telling you right now I won't sleep with Zane."
"I believe there's a fold-up cot in the closet," Chauncey said. "I'm sure you'll sort something out."
"I can't sleep on a cot," Zane said. "Not with this foot."
"And I can't sleep with you," Kelp told him. "Not with that foot."
"Take it easy, you," Zane said, pointing a bony finger at Kelp's nose.
"Let's all take it easy," Dortmunder suggested. "We'll draw straws or something."
Zane and Kelp were both objecting to that plan when Chauncey left the room, closing the door behind him, and entered his own civilized quarters, where Bert and Edith had not only finished his unpacking but had laid out a change of clothing on the bed and were starting a hot tub. "Lovely," Chauncey said, and then told them, "Now, those men with me, they're very eccentric Americans, just pay them no mind at all. They'll be here for a few days, on business, and then they'll be gone. Just ignore them while they're here, and if they behave at all strangely, pretend you don't notice."
"Oh, r," said Edith.
"Aye," promised Bert.
Chapter 4
Leaning against a Chippendale chifferobe, Dortmunder watched two Japanese gentlemen bid against one another for a small porcelain bowl with a bluebird painted inside it. That is, he assumed it was the two Japanese gentlemen who were doing the bidding, since their slight head-nods were the only activity in the crowded room apart from the steady chanting of the impeccably dark-suited young auctioneer: "Seven twenty-five. Seven-fifty. Seven-fifty on my right. Seven seventy-five. Eight hundred. Eight twenty-five. Eight twenty-five on my left. Eight twenty-five? Eight-fifty. Eight seventy-five."
They'd started at two hundred, and Dortmunder had by now become bored, but he was determined to stay here in this spot long enough to find out just how much a rich Japanese would spend on a peanut bowl with a bird in it.
Here was one of the auction rooms at Parkeby-South, a large auctioneer-appraisal firm in Sackville Street, not far north of Piccadilly. Occupying a bewildering cluster of rooms and staircases in two adjacent buildings, the firm was one of the oldest and most famous in its line of work, with connections to similar companies in New York, Paris and Zurich. Under this roof – or these roofs – were miles of rare books, acres of valuable carpet, a veritable Louvre of paintings and statuary, a bull's dream of china and glass, and enough armoires, commodes, tallboys, chiffoniers, secretaries, wardrobes, rolltop desks and cellarets to fill every harem in the world. The place looked like San Simeon, with Hearst just back from Europe.
There were three kinds of rooms at Parkeby-South. There were half a dozen auction rooms filled with people seated on rows of wooden folding chairs as they bid incredible amounts for marble thises and crystal thats; there were display rooms crammed with everything from a life-size bronze statue of General Pershing's horse to a life-size blown-glass bumblebee; and finally there were rooms behind closed doors featuring the discreet notice: PRIVATE. Modest unarmed gray-haired guards in dark blue uniforms made no ostentatious display of themselves, but to Dortmunder's practiced eye they were everywhere, and when Dortmunder experimentally pushed open a PRIVATE door to see what would happen, one of these guards immediately materialized from the molding and said, with a helpful smile, "Yes, sir?"
"Looking for the men's room."
"That's up on the first floor, sir. You can't miss it."
They were already on the first floor. Dortmunder thanked him, collected Kelp from his mesmerized pose in front of a glass cabinet full of gold rings, and went on upstairs, where he was now wa
tching a pair of Orientals struggle with one another for a jelly-bean bowl.
He was also brooding. There must be over a million dollars worth of goods in this building. Guards were all over the joint like flu in January, and so far as Dortmunder could see there were no burglar alarms on the windows. Which could only mean live guards in the place all night long.
"Eleven hundred," said the auctioneer. They were going by fifties now. "Eleven-fifty. That's eleven-fifty on my left. Eleven-fifty? No? Eleven-fifty on my left." Clack went the hockey puck in his left hand onto the top of his wooden rostrum. "Sold for eleven-fifty. Item number one fifty-seven, a pair of vases."
While a pair of gray-smocked employees held up the pair of vases – also porcelain, they featured one-footed flamingoes on their sides – Kelp whispered in disbelief, "They paid eleven hundred fifty dollars for that little bowl?"
"Pounds," Dortmunder whispered back. "English money."
"Eleven hundred fifty pounds? How much is that in cash?"
"More," said Dortmunder, who didn't know.
"Two grand?"
"Something like that. Let's get out of here."
"Two grand for a little bowl," Kelp said, following Dortmunder out to the hall. Behind them, the auctioneer had started the bidding on the vases at six hundred. Pounds, not dollars.
Out on the street, Dortmunder turned toward Piccadilly, but Kelp lagged behind, looking wistfully back. "Come on," Dortmunder said, but Kelp still dawdled, looking over his shoulder. Dortmunder frowned at him: "What's the matter?"
"I'd like to live there," Kelp said. He turned to grin wistfully at Dortmunder, but his expression changed almost immediately into a puzzled stare. He seemed to be looking now at something across the street.
Dortmunder, facing the same way, saw nothing. "What now?" he said. "You wanna live in that silver store?"
"I thought – No, it couldn't have been."
"You thought what?"
"Just for a second–" Kelp shrugged and shook his head. "There was a guy looked like Porculey," he said. "Fat like him. He went in one of those doors over there. You know the way people look like other people. Especially out of town."
"People look like other people out of town?"
"Couldn't have been him, though," Kelp said, and at last he moved briskly forward, leaving Dortmunder staring after him. Looking back, Kelp said, "Well? You coming?"
Chapter 5
"I'm discouraged," Dortmunder said.
Chauncey looked up from his brussels sprouts. "I'm sorry to hear you say that."
The four of them were at dinner in Chauncey's apartment, the meal prepared by Edith and served with many whispered r's by Bert. This was their first repast together since their arrival yesterday, the jet lag caused by the five-hour time difference having thrown them all off for a while. Chauncey had kept himself awake yesterday with Dexedrine and asleep last night with seconal and by this morning had become completely adjusted to British time. The others seemed to have fared less well, with Zane the most obvious sufferer. The man's bleached face was even more pallid and gaunt than usual, and his limp had progressed to a level of grotesquerie not seen in these parts since the days of the Black Death.
As for Dortmunder and Kelp, jet lag and a strange environment seemed merely to confirm both in their pre-existing personalities. Dortmunder was more dour, Kelp giddier, though Kelp this morning had briefly been in an extremely foul mood, apparently brought on by the ultimate arrangement of sleeping accommodations in the guest room. Zane, through a combination of medical necessity and native harshness, had occupied the double bed, alone, with Dortmunder taking the cot; leaving Kelp to sleep on an assemblage of pillows and comforters on the floor. The opened-out cot, however, having already taken up most of the available extra space, Kelp had been forced to recline with his head under the dresser and his feet under the bed, which had resulted in his doing himself some sort of injury when he'd awakened, startled, from a bad dream in the middle of the night.
Kelp's essential good humor had soon returned, however, and he'd seemed basically cheerful when he and Dortmunder left early this afternoon to look over the situation at Parkeby-South. Chauncey himself had gone out not long after, having tea with friends in Albert Hall Mansions, and had seen none of his guests until dinnertime, when his question to Dortmunder about the result of his visit to Parkeby-South had produced the word discouraged.
A word on which Dortmunder was willing to expand: "The place is full of rich stuff," he said. "And full of guards. And it looks to me like there's guards in there at night, when they're closed. I didn't see any alarm systems, but there could be."
"You mean you can't get in?"
"I can get in," Dortmunder said. "I can get in and out anywhere. That's not the problem."
"Then what is the problem?"
"The idea," Dortmunder reminded him, "is to switch these paintings without anybody knowing it. Now, you turn off a burglar alarm and you're home free, you can come and go and nobody the wiser. But you can't walk in and out of a place full of live guards without somebody seeing you."
"Ah," said Chauncey.
Zane, pausing with a fork load of lamb chop and mint jelly halfway to his mouth, said, "Create a distraction."
"Very good!" Chauncey said, and beamed hopefully at Dortmunder. "What about that?"
Dortmunder looked dubious. "What distraction?"
Zane answered again: "Rob the place. Go in with guns, steal a few things, and while you're there switch the paintings."
"Lovely," Chauncey said.
Dortmunder didn't seem to think so. He said, "Another fake robbery? If we're stealing stuff, why don't we steal the painting? The cops'll want to know about that."
"Mm," said Chauncey.
But Zane wouldn't give up that easily. He said, "Did you actually see the picture while you were there? Is it on display?"
"No. I guess they keep the most valuable stuff locked up somewhere until it's sold."
Shrugging, Zane said, "So you didn't see it, that's why you didn't steal it."
Chauncey, tired of shifting between hope and despair, merely raised an eyebrow at Dortmunder this time, waiting for his negative response.
Which didn't come. Frowning, Dortmunder poked brussels sprouts here and there on his plate, saying at last, "I don't know. It sounds complicated. Just the two of us, we don't know how many guards they got in there, we've got to fake a robbery in one part of the place and at the same time find the painting locked up in some other part and get through that lock without anybody knowing, and switch the paintings without anybody seeing, and get away before the cops show up. It doesn't sound good."
Chauncey said, "What sounds better?"
Dortmunder slowly shook his head, having nothing to say. He was brooding, thinking, quite apparently getting nowhere.
It was Zane who broke the silence again, saying casually to Chauncey. "I was looking at that back yard of yours. High walls, nobody can see in, nice soft dirt. Plenty of room back there for a couple graves."
Dortmunder went on brooding as though he hadn't heard, but Kelp babbled, "Don't you worry about a thing, Mr. Chauncey! Dortmunder'll figure it out. He's figured out tougher problems than this one. Haven't you, Dortmunder?"
Dortmunder didn't answer. He continued to brood, pushing and poking at the brussels sprouts on his plate. His fork hit one too hard, and it dropped off the edge and rolled forward to bunk against his wineglass, leaving a thin trail of melted butter in its wake on the damask cloth. Dortmunder didn't seem to notice that either, but went on staring with hooded eyes at his food a moment longer, while the other three watched. Then he sighed, and lifted his head. Pointing both his eyes and fork at Chauncey, he said, "I got a job for you."
"Oh, yes?"
"Yes," said Dortmunder.
Chapter 6
Folly Leads Man to Ruin. It was the Veenbes, all right, the original, last seen on the sitting-room wall in New York. Chauncey could have reached out and touched it, but he restrained
himself, merely gazing upon it with disguised hunger, plus a wince of pity for the dreadful garish frame in which the poor thing now found itself. "I don't believe it," he said, casually, with a dismissing shrug. "Frankly, I just don't believe it's legitimate."
"Well, you can believe it," that scoundrel Macdough told him, with a self-satisfied smirk. "That's the genuine article, you can take it from me."
I intend to, Chauncey thought, with no little satisfaction, but all he said aloud was, "I'll be insisting on my own expert valuation, of course."
Leamery, the attentive young twit representing Parkeby-South, simpered diplomatically at them both, saying, "Of course, of course. Under the circumstances, naturally, that's the only thing to do. Everyone agrees."
"Troop your experts through," Macdough challenged, with his whisky-soaked burr. "Troop em up and down and sideways, it's all one to me."
It was at Dortmunder's request that Chauncey was here, in this next-to-the-top-floor value room at Parkeby-South, putting up with Leamery's smarm and Macdough's gloat, gazing helplessly at his own property while feigning disinterest. "You can get in to see the painting," Dortmunder had told him. "You've got a legitimate reason, this picture could cost you four hundred grand to an insurance company. So you'll go in, and you'll look at everything, and when you come back here you'll make me a map. I'll want to know where the painting is, what kind of doors and windows, where's the nearest outside wall, what brand is the lock on the door, what else is in the room, do they have closed-circuit TV, security cameras, everything. Is it a regular room or a safe, or a safe inside a room, or a barred cage, or what is it? And how many locks to go through. Everything."
Nobody's Perfect (dortmunder) Page 17