The Road To Ruin

by Donald E. Westlake

  Ace said, “You got a small one? With a lumpy bed?”

  “I like your thinking,” Os told him. “Come along, let’s choose.”

  As they started across the lengthy living room—wooden walls, massive stone fireplace, layers of huge wool rugs—Mac said, “You know, this place is about the size of our houses.”

  Surprised, Mark said, “Really? You live in a house this size?”

  “No, our houses,” Mac told him. “All three of them, put together.”

  “Ah,” Mark said.

  “Come along,” Os said, and kept switching on more lights as they moved deeper into the windowless, cavernous lodge.

  43

  OF COURSE STAN MURCH was the driver, but when it came to just driving around from place to place, that was usually Kelp. Tiny wasn’t physically suited to the task, and nobody was eager to see John behind the wheel. So, a little after five that first full day on the job, Thursday, June 16, it was Kelp who slid into the driver’s seat of his recently acquired Yukon, with Stan in the copilot’s seat and John in back; but not back the way he’d been back in the monster station wagon. This time, if he wanted, he could lean forward and rest an elbow on top of the front seat and partake in the conversation.

  Except, this time, there wasn’t any conversation. It was a short run from Hall’s big white house across the compound past mostly empty buildings, and they all spent that time with their own thoughts, reacting to a full day of more or less honest employment.

  For Kelp, the experience had been an eerie one. He’d expected to show up, have to bear with some kind of overbearing guy, and just hunker down and wait for the auto removal. Instead of which, he’d been thrown off from the very beginning by the guy’s decision not to hire him after all.

  He couldn’t have that; he needed to be here with the crew. So it meant he first had to convince Hall that he really did need a secretary, and then by God act like one, persuade Hall of his value by doing things that Hall would like.

  And that led to the second surprise; he didn’t find Monroe Hall a bad guy at all. The exact opposite, in fact. Hall was so surprised and pleased and grateful that Kelp was actually going to restore his good name—as though by now Monroe Hall had a good name to restore—that he was like a puppy getting his first bone. His admiration and gratitude were so intense it made Kelp redouble his efforts, reach out to the surrounding community, stay calm and resilient through all the rebuffs from the people he phoned—and you’d think people working for charities would be more charitable, somehow, but no—and actually work to make an opening here and there that a contrite Monroe Hall might somehow someday be able to crawl through.

  In fact, by the end of the day, Kelp found himself a little sorry he wouldn’t be able to stick around long enough to finish the job. (The finish, of course, the spectacular finish, would be the Monroe Hall Cup, added to some national pro-am golf tourney. Sure he could do it. Every golfer in the country paying his club dues from his corporate account would look at Hall and say, “What the hell, forgive and forget. Mighta been me.” And it mighta been.)

  So Kelp was silent because he didn’t have anything negative to say about Monroe Hall, and he had the feeling positive statements about the guy wouldn’t go over so well with this crowd. So what he did, he followed the old folk wisdom: If you’ve got nothing bad to say about someone, don’t say anything at all.

  The run to the green house where Chester had once lived was a short one, and when they walked in there was a smell in the house that might have meant the furniture was being refinished but was actually Tiny in the kitchen, making everybody’s dinner. They all trooped in, to view the unprecedented sight of Tiny in two aprons, overlapping, with a meat cleaver in one hand and a long wooden spoon in the other, with a lot of big pots and pans hissing and snarling on the stove. What he looked mostly like was some darker version of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. “Soups on at six,” he told them.

  Looking doubtful, John said, “We’re having soup?”

  “No,” Tiny told him. “It’s what you say. ‘Soup’s on.’ It means food. Don’t talk to me now, I don’t want no distraction. I’ll talk to you when we eat. I got good news and better news.”

  Kelp said, “I figured, if you wanted a ride from the guardshack, you’d a called me.”

  “My shift didn’t start yet,” Tiny said. “That’s parta the news. Outa my kitchen.”

  So they got out of the kitchen, and went to the living room, where Stan said, in a very quiet voice, “Suppose we could go out to eat?”

  “No,” Kelp said. “Nobody refuses Tiny’s hospitality.”

  “I think I’ll take some Pepto-Bismol ahead of time,” John decided.

  •

  And then it was good. It wasn’t your ordinary stuff, but it was good. Real tastes, but not too sweet, not too sour. There was lamb, in chunks; there was bacon, not too crisp; there were home-fried potatoes, with some kind of tasty oil on them; there was swiss chard, boiled up and spread with some kind of sauce that tasted sort of like chutney; there were biscuits, so light and fluffy you had to put butter on them to keep them from floating away. And there was not just beer, but stout, to tie it all together.

  There was no talk at the table for quite some time. It was Kelp who first came up for air, saying, “Tiny, this is great. What is this? This is great.”

  “It’s Tsergovian,” Tiny told him. “It’s from the old country. It’s how my people used to eat in the old days, when they had food.”

  John said, through a full mouth, “Then I’m surprised they ever left.”

  “Well, there were a lotta days,” Tiny said, “when they didn’t have food. So that’s why they come here, before my time. The food wasn’t as good over here, but it was around every day.”

  Stan said, “I wouldn’t mind this food every day.”

  “Which brings up the question,” John said, through another mouthful of food, “when do we do what we come here for.”

  “Which is the good news and the better news,” Tiny said, “I told you I got. I didn’t want to disturb you from your eating.”

  “Well, I’m done now,” Kelp said. “Whoo.”

  “Save a little room,” Tiny advised him, “I got pumpkin pecan pie for dessert.”

  Everybody moaned, and Kelp said, “Tiny. Tell me that isn’t the good news.”

  “No,” Tiny said. “But we gotta eat this pie.”

  “Maybe for breakfast,” Stan suggested.

  Tiny considered that and, to everyone’s relief, nodded. “That could work,” he said. “Okay, the news and the news. The good news is, the new hire in security gets the shit detail.”

  They looked at him. Kelp said, “That’s the good news?”

  “The shit detail,” Tiny said, “is guard duty at the main gate, midnight till eight in the morning. All by myself until six A.M., when a couple day guys show up.”

  “Wait a minute,” John said. “You’re gonna be alone on the gate all night?”

  “Midnight to six.”

  Stan said, “Then we’re outa here,” and Kelp felt a little pang. He’d thought he’d have a few days anyway to get Hall shaped up for his comeback.

  But Tiny said, “Not right away. Tonight, clear sky, big moon, all the stars. Tomorrow night, heavy cloud cover. No rain, but also no moonlight, no starlight.”

  John said, “So tomorrow night. Good. But first we gotta find the cars.”

  “That’s my better news,” Tiny said. “While I was down there today, picking out my uniform—a very nice brown, a little tight in the shoulders, but for two nights I can live with it—I come across a map they got there of the compound. On that map is marked where every one of Hall’s cars is stashed. And on a big board in the office there are the keys to every one of those buildings, each one with a tag on it, says which building it is.” He looked around at them. “You sure nobody wants a little pie?”

  44

  PUMPKIN PECAN PIE FOR breakfast is only good at first. When Dortm
under followed Kelp and Murch out of the house Friday morning to start their second day on the job, he noticed he wasn’t the only one burping.

  Riding back to the main house, Dortmunder reflected on how surprised he’d been by Monroe Hall. He’d expected a real bastard, but the guy had been easygoing, even kind of shy. Dortmunder couldn’t see why everybody hated him so much. He didn’t voice this opinion, though, because he knew it wouldn’t be understood by the rest of the crew, and so, like them, he remained silent.

  At the house, Hall himself greeted them just inside the front door. “Ah, Fred,” he said to Kelp, with a big smile, “go on in the office, I’ll be right with you.”

  “Check,” Kelp said, and went off.

  Dortmunder planned to go off, too, to his position in the butler’s pantry, a cross between a smallish windowless office and largish closet off the kitchen where the bells to summon him were mounted on the side wall, but as he took a step, Hall gave him an icy look and said, “Wait right there, Rumsey.”

  Oops. That was exactly the tone of a tier guard in a state pen; once heard, not easily forgotten. What was wrong now?

  Hall was willing to let him wait for the answer, turning instead to Murch, switching on the big friendly act again, saying, “Gillette, Mrs. Parsons wants to visit some farm markets this morning.”

  “Will do,” Murch said, which was probably not what a real Gillette would have said, but Hall’s concentration was actually still on Dortmunder, i.e., Rumsey.

  As Murch headed for the kitchen and Mrs. Parsons, Hall lowered a look of utter contempt in Dortmunder’s direction, and said, “Do you call yourself a butler?”

  At the moment, there was only one answer to that: “Yes, sur.”

  “They must have quite a lax view of butlers in eastern Europe,” Hall suggested.

  “I don’t know, sur.”

  “All those years of the workers of the world running things, and we see how well that panned out. And you’re still one of them, are you, Rumsey?”

  Dortmunder had no idea what they were talking about. “Oi’m Amurrican, sur,” he pointed out.

  “Perhaps a little too American,” Hall said. “I suggest you take a look at the upstairs corridor, Rumsey, and try to see, do try to see, in what tiny way you have been remiss.”

  “Yes, sur,” Dortmunder told Hall’s back, as the man marched off to convene with Kelp, who was a good boy.

  Upstairs corridor. Dortmunder had already noticed that you never call a corridor a hall in a house owned by somebody named Hall. But what was the upstairs corridor—or hall, dammit—to do with Dortmunder? He hadn’t yet even been up there, so what could he have done wrong?

  Well, it was time to go see how he’d managed to get himself in the doghouse in a location he’d never even visited. Feeling ill used, he climbed the broad stairs, and here was an upstairs hall, very wide, with closed doors. Dortmunder started down it, looking for clues, and a cuckoo spoke eight times, seven minutes late.

  The corridor was almost empty. Here an antique three-legged table with an elaborately shaded lamp on it; there a pair of black oxford shoes less gunboaty than his own, placed neatly side by side next to a closed door; here a big painting on the wall of mountains and clouds and sunset. Or sunrise.

  Dortmunder walked down one side of the corridor and back up the other. No dog crap on the floor, no spilled glasses, no overflowing ashtrays. What’s going on here? He stood finally near the stairs, gazing at the corridor, scratching his head, until one of those doors opened and Mrs. Hall came out, looking fresh and beautiful and, when she spied Dortmunder, bewildered.

  “Yes, Rumsey?”

  “Mr. Hall sent me up here, mum.”

  “What for?”

  “I dunno. He got mad about somethin and said I was supposed to come up here.”

  “Hmm.” She too looked up and down the corridor, but when she turned back to him her expression was oh-please. “Oh, Rumsey,” she said. “Do you call yourself a butler?”

  Which was what the husband had asked, and which Dortmunder didn’t like to hear at all. Everybody was threatening to blow his cover. He was beginning to think there was something about buttling he’d missed in those training films. “I do my best, mum,” he said.

  “The shoes, Rumsey.”

  He blinked at them. There they were, neatly placed on the floor, midway down the corridor on the right. “I didn’t do that, mum.”

  “Well, of course not, Rumsey.” Now she clearly didn’t know what to think. “Mr. Hall put them out there.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t you know why, Rumsey?”

  “Take them to the shoe repair?”

  “Rumsey, I can’t believe you have been a butler for—”

  “We never had nothing about shoes at the embassy, mum.”

  She looked skeptical. “Who polished the ambassador’s shoes?”

  In that instant, he got it. The boss puts the shoes in the corridor; the butler mouses through, later at night, to take them away to his pantry and polish them; then the butler brings them back and puts them where he found them, only now gleaming like bowling balls.

  So why hadn’t he known that? And who did polish the ambassador’s shoes? “His orderly, mum,” Dortmunder said, floundering for the word. “Military orderly. All that sort of thing. Tie bow ties, polish shoes, all that. Specialist, mum.”

  “Well, that’s certainly a different way to do things,” she said. “But we may never understand the eastern Europeans. Somehow, it’s all Transylvania, all the time.”

  “Yes, mum.”

  “Well, do them now,” she said, with a graceful gesture shoeward. “And assure Mr. Hall you’ll understand your duties much better from this point forward.”

  “I will, mum,” Dortmunder said.

  •

  You’d think that would be the end of it, but no. When he carried the damn shoes—not that dirty, anyway—down the stairs to the first floor, there was Hall hanging around down there, obviously waiting for him, to give him a nasty spiteful smirk when he saw the shoes hanging from Dortmunder’s fingers. “Well, we are full of the old initiative, aren’t we?”

  “Sorry, sur,” Dortmunder said, while in his mind’s eye he held one shoe in each hand and slapped their soles smartly up against both sides of the son of a bitch’s head. “Done differently in the embassy, sur,” he explained. “Be better from now.”

  “How encouraging,” Hall mocked, and then, as Dortmunder turned away toward his pantry (come to think of it, he had noticed shoe-polishing equipment in there), called after him, “Former boss assassinated, eh? For wearing filthy shoes, do you suppose?”

  “No, sur,” Dortmunder muttered—the best he could do.

  Raising his voice even further, Hall ordered, “Bring them to me in my office when they’re clean.”

  Well, he knew what that meant: white-glove inspection. “Sur,” he said, and plodded on.

  •

  In the event, he only had to go back twice to buff the shoes some more, even though he could see his reflection in them the first time he’d whacked them around. But three trips was all it took. While Kelp sat smug and amused in his little corner of the office, Hall gave each shoe a long and critical once-over, and at last grudgingly said, “I suppose they’ll do. And do you know what to do with them next, Rumsey?”

  “Put em outside your door, sur. Where I got um.”

  “Very good,” Hall told him. “We may make a third-rate butler of you yet.”

  “Thank you, sur.”

  Dortmunder turned away, the gleaming shoes in his hand, but Hall said, cold as ice, “I’m not finished.”

  Oh. So Dortmunder turned back, lifted his head and his eyebrows, and said, “Sur?”

  “A riding instructor is coming with horses this afternoon at two,” Hall said. “The gate will ring you in your pantry. You will go to the door to await his arrival. When he reaches the house, you will instruct him to wait outside, then come in here and inform me of his presence.
”

  “Yes, sur.”

  “That’s all. Dismissed.”

  Dortmunder thudded up the stairs to return the shoes to where he’d found them. Horse, with trainer. Now, in his mind’s eye, he saw Hall, atop a horse, turn to listen to an instruction from the trainer, oblivious of that oncoming tree branch. Very thick tree branch.

  45

  MAC DIDN’T KNOW WHICH part of the enterprise frightened him the most—all of it, probably. All he knew is, it was the most scared he’d ever been in his life. More scared than the first time he’d had sex with the girl who would soon become his wife; hell, more scared than the first time he’d had sex with anybody. More scared than when they put him in charge of the K-type showerhead assembly line. More scared than the first time he’d gotten off a ski lift at the top of a mountain and looked down.

  Well, that time, he’d ridden the ski lift back down the mountain again, and had been firmly apres-ski ever since. But he didn’t have that choice this time. There was only one way off this particular mountain.

  And it was worse than the mountain, because the mountain was just one thing. With the mountain, you’ve got this steep bank of white with trees and boulders on it, and the job is to get from the top to the bottom without ricocheting too much. Simple, straightforward. But this horse thing was all details, and every detail was scarier than every other detail.

  Take the mustache. It was a thick mustache, like a push broom, and it felt very insecure glued to his upper lip. Also, it tickled his nose. But the worst, the most scary part, was how horribly Os had smirked in amusement while gluing the thing onto him.

  You took one look at Os, you knew he was a mean practical joker. But this was too important to him, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t arrange for Mac’s mustache to fall off his face at just the wrong instant for a gag, would he? Would he?