by Ed McBain
Dortmunder said, “We’d have to go up there, ahead of time, take a look at this place.”
“Definitely,” Kelp said.
“That’s a good idea,” Querk said, “you can help me refine the details. I could drive you up there tomorrow, I’ve got my cousin’s van, I’ve been sleeping in it down in Greenwich Village.”
“Nice neighborhood,” May commented.
“Yeah, it is.”
Dortmunder said, “We oughta have our own wheels, we’ll drive up, meet you there.”
Grinning, Querk said, “Another doctor gonna be on his feet?”
“Possibly,” Kelp said. “You say this place is a hundred miles upstate? About two hours?”
“Yeah, no more. You go up the Taconic.”
Dortmunder said, “If this is a plant, with workers, there’s probably a place to eat around it.”
“Yeah, just up from the bridge, you know, where the dam is, there’s a place called Sycamore House. It’s mostly a bar, but you can get lunch.”
Dortmunder nodded. “You got a problem, up there, being seen with us?”
“No, it’s not that small a town. You’re just people I happen to know, passing through.”
“So before you leave here,” Dortmunder said, “do a little map, how we find this town, we’ll get some lunch there, come out at one o’clock, there you are.”
“Fine,” Querk said.
Kelp said, “What if there’s an emergency around there, the night we go, and we’ve got the generator truck?”
“For three hours in the middle of the night in August?” Querk shrugged. “There isn’t gonna be a blizzard. The three vehicles in the garage are in separate bays, so even if they come for the fire engine or the ambulance, which would almost never happen, middle of the summer, they still won’t see the generator truck’s gone.”
“But what if,” Kelp said.
“Then we’re screwed,” Querk said. “Me more than you guys, because there won’t be any question who put the generator truck in the printery, and there goes my quiet life not being on the run.”
Kelp said, “So you’ll take the chance.”
“The odds are so extreme,” Querk said. “I mean, unless one of you guys is a Jonah, I don’t see I’ve got anything to worry about. I’ll risk it.”
Nobody said anything.
7
First Querk split, and then Kelp, and then Dortmunder filled May in on the rest of the setup; Rodrigo, and the half of a half of a half, and the barely mentioned female travel agent.
“Well, she’s the one behind it all,” May said.
“Yeah, I got that part,” Dortmunder said. “So what was your reading on the guy?”
“Rabbity.”
“Yeah.”
“Something’s bothering you,” May said.
Dortmunder shook his head. “I don’t even know what it is. The thing is, this job seems to be doing everything you shouldn’t do, and yet somehow it doesn’t. You should never rip off the place where you work or you used to work, because you’re who they look at, but that’s what Querk’s doing, but this time it’s supposed to be okay, because, like Querk says, nobody’s supposed to know any rip-off happened. If they know there’s a hundred billion siapas gone missing, then the job’s no good.”
“I can’t imagine money like that,” May said. “But how do you get your money, that’s the question. The dollars.”
“We gotta work on that,” Dortmunder said. “So far, Querk hasn’t made any suggestions. And the other thing, I keep thinking about what Harry Matlock said, how he knew Querk was all right, not a star, when he was just a sideman in somebody else’s scheme, but he couldn’t say how Querk would be when the scheme was his own. And this is a weird scheme.”
“In parts,” May agreed.
“In all the parts. You got a factory closed because they open the dam to help out the fish downstream, you like that part?”
“Well, if that’s what they do,” May said.
“I guess.” Dortmunder frowned, massively. “It’s the country, see, I don’t know what makes sense in the country. So that’s what’s got me geechy. Querk talks about how he isn’t comfortable in the city any more, but you know, I never been comfortable in the country. Why can’t they print these siapas in the city? In Brooklyn somewhere.”
“Well,” May said, “there isn’t any fish downstream in the city.”
“Oh, yes, there is,” Dortmunder said. “I just hope I’m not one of them.”
8
As Querk walked toward Cousin Claude’s van, he thought what a pity it was he couldn’t phone now, give this progress report. But it was after five, so Seven Leagues was closed, and he couldn’t call her at home, even if she’d got home so soon. Well, he’d see her in the morning, when he drove up to Sycamore, so he’d tell her then.
And what he’d tell her was that it was all coming together. Yes, it was. The two guys he’d wound up with were sharp enough to do the job without lousing anything up, but not so sharp as to be trouble later. He had a good feeling about them.
Walking along, he kept his hands in his pockets, even though it was a very hot August afternoon, because otherwise they’d shake like buckskin fringe at the ends of his arms. Well, when this was over, when at last they’d be safe—and rich—he wouldn’t tremble at all. Hold a glass of wine, not a single wave in it.
Traveling from Dortmunder’s place on East 19th Street to where he’d parked the van in the West Village seemed to just naturally lead Querk along West 14th Street, the closest thing Manhattan has to a casbah. Open-fronted stores with huge signs, selling stuff you never knew you wanted, but cheap. Gnomish customers draped with gnomish children and lugging shopping bags half their size roamed the broad littered sidewalk and oozed in and out of the storefronts, adding more and more things to their bags.
What got to Querk in this spectacle, though, was the guard on duty in front of every one of those stores. Not in a uniform or anything, usually in just jeans and a T-shirt, bulky stern-looking guys positioned halfway between the storefront and curb, some of them sitting on top of a low ladder, some of them just standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, but all of them doing nothing but glaring into their store. Usually, they had their arms folded, to emphasize their muscles, and a beetle-browed angry look on their faces to emphasize their willingness to dismember shoplifters.
Walking this gauntlet, Querk was sorry his hands were in his pockets, because those guys could see that as a provocation, particularly in this August heat, but he figured, if they saw him trembling all over instead that would not be an improvement in his image.
Finally, he got off 14th Street and plodded on down to 12th, which was much more comforting to walk along, being mostly old nineteenth-century townhouses well-maintained, intermixed with more recent bigger apartment buildings that weren’t as offensive as they might be. The pedestrians here were less frightening, too, being mostly people either from the townhouses or who had things to do with the New School for Social Research, and therefore less likely to be homicidal maniacs than the people on 14th Street or up in Midtown.
When Greenwich Village becomes the West Village, the numbered grid of streets common to Manhattan acts all at once as though it’s been smoking dope, at the very least. Names start mingling with the numbers—Jane, Perry, Horatio, who are these people?—and the numbers themselves turn a little weird. You don’t, for instance, expect West 4th Street to cross West 10th Street, but it does . . . on its way to cross West 11th Street.
Cousin Claude’s van was parked a little beyond that example of street-design as funhouse mirror, on something called Greenwich Street, lined with low dark apartment buildings and low dark warehouses, some of those being converted into low dark apartment buildings. The van was still there—it always surprised him, in New York City, when something was still there after he’d left it—and Querk unlocked his way in.
This was a dirty white Ford Econoline van that Claude used mostly for fishing trips or
other excursions, so behind the bucket front seats he had installed a bunk bed and a small metal cabinet with drawers that was bolted to the side wall. Querk could plug his electric razor into the cigarette lighter, and could wash and brush teeth and do other things in restaurant bathrooms.
It was too early for dinner now, not yet six, so he settled himself behind the wheel, looked at the books and magazines lying on the passenger seat, and tried to decide what he wanted to read next. But then, all at once, he thought: Why wait? I’m done here. I don’t have to wait here all night and drive up there in the morning. It’s still daylight, I’m home before eight o’clock.
Home.
Janet.
Key in ignition. Seatbelt on. Querk drove north to West 11th Street, seeming none the worse for wear after its encounter with West 4th Street, turned left, turned right on the West Side Highway, and joined rush hour north. Didn’t even mind that it was rush hour; just to be going home.
After a while he passed the big Fairway billboard on top of the Fairway supermarket. Those two guys sure know the city, don’t they?
Well, Querk knew Sycamore.
9
In the end, Kelp decided to leave the medical profession alone this morning and rent a car for the trip upstate, which would mean fewer nervous looks in the rearview mirror for a hundred miles up and a hundred miles back. Less eyestrain, even though this decision meant he would have to go promote a credit card, which in turn meant a visit to Arnie Albright, a fence, which was the least of the things wrong with him.
Kelp truly didn’t want to have to visit with Arnie Albright, but when he dropped by at John’s apartment at eight-thirty in the morning, just in time to wish May bon voyage on her journey to Safeway, to suggest that John might be the one to go promote the credit card, John turned mulish. “I’ve done my time with Arnie Albright,” he said. “Step right up to the plate.”
Kelp sighed. He knew, when John turned mulish, there was no arguing with him. Still, “You could wait out front,” he suggested.
“He could look out the window and see me.”
“His apartment’s at the back.”
“He could sense me. You gonna use O’Malley’s?”
“Sure,” Kelp said. O’Malley’s was a single-location car rental agency that operated out of a parking garage way down on the Bowery near the Manhattan Bridge. Most of the clientele were Asians, so O’Malley mostly had compact cars, but more important, O’Malley did not have a world-wide interconnected web of computers that could pick up every little nitpick in a customer’s credit card and driver’s license, so whenever Kelp decided to go elsewhere than doctors for his wheels it was O’Malley got the business.
“I’ll meet you at O’Malley’s,” John demanded, “at nine-thirty.”
So that was that. Kelp walked a bit and took a subway a bit and walked a bit and pretty soon there he was on 89th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue, entering the tiny vestibule of Arnie’s building. He pushed the button next to Albright, waited a pretty long time, and suddenly the intercom snarled, “Who the hell is that?”
“Well, Andy Kelp,” Kelp said, wishing it weren’t so.
“What the hell do you want?”
He wants me to tell him here? Leaning confidentially closer to the intercom—he’d been leaning fastidiously away from it before this—Kelp said, “Well, I wanna come upstairs and tell you there, Arnie.”
Rather than argue any more, Arnie made the awful squawk happen that let Kelp push the door open and go inside to a narrow hall that smelled of cooking from some ethnicity that made you look around for shrunken heads. Seeing none, Kelp went up the long flight of stairs to where the unlovely Arnie stood at his open door, glaring out. A grizzled gnarly guy with a tree-root nose, he had chosen to welcome summer in a pair of stained British Army shorts, very wide, a much-too-big bilious green polo shirt, and black sandals that permitted views of toes like rotting tree stumps; not a wise decision.
“It’s buy or sell,” this gargoyle snarled as Kelp neared the top of the stairs, “buy or sell, that’s the only reason anybody comes to see Arnie Albright. It’s not my lovable personality is gonna bring anybody here.”
“Well, people know you’re busy,” Kelp said, and went past Arnie into the apartment.
“Busy?” Arnie snarled, and slammed the door. “Do I look busy? I look like somebody where the undertaker said, ‘Don’t do the open coffin, it would be a mistake,’ and the family went ahead anyway, and now they’re sorry. That’s what I look like.”
“Not that bad, Arnie,” Kelp assured him, looking around at the apartment as a relief from looking at Arnie, who, in truth, would look much better with the lid down.
The apartment was strange in its own way. Small underfurnished rooms with big dirty viewless windows, it was decorated mostly with samples from Arnie’s calendar collection, Januarys down the ages, girls with their skirts blowing, Boy Scouts saluting, antique cars, your ever-popular kittens in baskets with balls of wool. Among the Januarys starting on every possible day of the week, there were what Arnie called his “incompletes,” calendars hailing June or September.
Following Kelp into the living room, Arnie snarled, “I see John Dortmunder isn’t with you. Even he can’t stand to be around me any more. Wha’d you do, toss a coin, the loser comes to see Arnie?”
“He wouldn’t toss,” Kelp said. “Arnie, the last time I saw you, you were taking some medicine to make you pleasant.”
“Yeah, I was still obnoxious, but I wasn’t angry about it any more.”
“You’re not taking it?”
“You noticed,” Arnie said. “No, it made me give money away.”
Kelp said, “What?”
“I couldn’t believe it myself, I thought I had holes in my pockets, the super was coming in to lift cash—not that he could find the upstairs in this place, the useless putz—but it turned out, my new pleasant personality, learning to live with my inner scumbag, every time I’d smile at somebody, like out in the street, and they’d smile back, I’d give them money.”
“That’s terrible,” Kelp said.
“You know it is,” Arnie said. “I’d rather be frowning and obnoxious and have money than smiling and obnoxious and throwing it away. I suppose you’re sorry you didn’t get some of it.”
“That’s okay, Arnie,” Kelp said, “I already got a way to make a living. Which by the way—”
“Get it over with, I know,” Arnie said. “You want outa here, and so do I. You think I enjoy being in here with me? Okay, I know, tell me, we’ll get it over with, I won’t say a word.”
“I need a credit card,” Kelp said.
Arnie nodded. As an aid to thought, he sucked at his teeth. Kelp looked at Januarys.
Arnie said, “How long must this card live?”
“Two days.”
“That’s easy,” Arnie said. “That won’t even cost you much. Lemme try to match you with a signature. Siddown.”
Kelp sat at a table with incompletes shellacked on the top—aircraft carrier with airplanes flying, two bears and a honeypot—while Arnie went away to rummage and shuffle in some other room, soon returning with three credit cards, a ballpoint pen, and an empty tissue box.
“Hold on,” he said, and ripped the tissue box open so Kelp could write on its inside. “I’ll incinerate it later.”
Kelp looked at his choice of cards. “Howard Joostine looks pretty good.”
“Give it a whack.”
Kelp wrote Howard Joostine four times on the tissue box, then compared them with the one on the credit card. “Good enough for O’Malley,” he said.
10
Dortmunder’s only objection to the car was the legroom, but that was objection enough. “This is a sub-compact,” he complained.
“Well, no,” Kelp told him. “With the sub-compact, you gotta straddle the engine block.”
They were not the only people fleeing the city northbound on this bright hot morning in August, but it is true that most of t
he other people around them, even the Asians, were in cars with more legroom. (O’Malley’s bent toward Oriental customers was because his operation was on the fringe of Chinatown. However, he was also on the fringe of Little Italy, but did he offer bulletproof limos? No.)
In almost every state in the Union, the state capital is not in the largest city, and the reason for that is, the states were all founded by farmers, not businessmen or academics, and farmers don’t trust cities. In Maryland, for instance, the city is Baltimore and the capital is Annapolis. In California, the city is Los Angeles and the capital is Sacramento. And in New York, the capital is Albany, a hundred fifty miles up the Hudson.
When the twentieth century introduced the automobile, and then the paved road, and then the highway, the first highway in every state was built for the state legislators; it connected the capital with the largest city, and let the rest of the state go fend for itself. In New York State, that road is called the Taconic Parkway, and it’s still underutilized, nearly a century later. That’s planning.
But it also made for a pleasant drive. Let others swelter in bumper-to-bumper traffic on purpose-built roads, the Taconic was a joy, almost as empty as a road in a car commercial. The farther north of the city you drove, the fewer cars you drove among (and no trucks!), while the more beautiful became the mountain scenery through which this empty road swooped and soared. It was almost enough to make you believe there was an upside to the internal combustion engine.