“That’s true,” Chauncey said, and got to his feet, feeling the strong need of another drink.
“Would that be bourbon?” asked the Prince.
“It would. May I offer?”
“You certainly may. Say what you will about jazz, the Hollywood movie, the Broadway musical or the short story, I say America’s contribution to the arts is bourbon.”
“I agree with you,” Chauncey said, in some surprise, and reached for the bottle, only to discover it was empty. And when he looked in the lower cabinet among the extras there was no bourbon to be seen. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll have to go downstairs for more.”
“Oh, don’t bother, I’ll be perfectly happy with Scotch. As happy as one can be with that woman in the house, of course.”
“It isn’t any bother,” Chauncey assured him. “I’d rather stick to bourbon myself.” And it would be pleasant to be away from the Prince for a few minutes.
But that was not to be. “I’ll stroll along with you,” the Prince announced, and did.
The main liquor storage was in a closet on the ground floor, next to a similar closet converted to a wine cellar, the latter with its temperature and humidity maintained at a dry fifty degrees. Chauncey and Orfizzi rode down together in the elevator, and to fill the time Chauncey described the wine cellar, as it was a recent conversion. “I’d like to see it,” the Prince said.
“I’ll show it you.”
On the ground floor, they walked together down the corridor, and about halfway to the rear exit Chauncey stopped at a pair of doors on the right–hand side. “Liquor storage is on the left,” he explained, “and this is the wine cellar.” And he opened the door to look at the bleak eyes and shivering body of Dortmunder. “Ump!” Chauncey said, and quickly shut the door again, before the Prince could get around it to look inside.
“I didn’t see it,” said the Prince.
“Urn, yes,” Chauncey said. “I, urn, I’ve just had an awful thought.”
“You have?”
“I may be out of bourbon. Let’s see.” And Chauncey opened the other door, which displayed a floor–to–ceiling rank of horizontal bottle — storage spaces made of criss–crossed wooden slats, about two–thirds filled with liquor and liquor bottles. “Oh, of course,” he said. “I have plenty.” And he grabbed two bottles and put them in the startled Prince’s hands, then took a third from the stacks for himself, the while gesturing with his free hand, saying, “You see the style. The wine cellar is identical, except of course for the humidity and temperature controls. Not needed in here, naturally.”
“Naturally,” agreed the Prince. He was holding the two bottles by the neck, as though they were small dead animals and he wasn’t quite sure what he was expected to do with them.
Closing the door, Chauncey took the Prince by the elbow and led him off toward the elevator. “Now to our drink, eh?”
“But —” The Prince looked back over his shoulder at the closed wine–cellar door. “Oh,” he said doubtfully, as Chauncey continued to propel him away. “Identical. Yes, urn, right.”
Back to the elevator they went, boarded, and Chauncey pushed the button before the door closed. But then, as the door was sliding into place, he suddenly thrust the third bourbon bottle into the Prince’s arms, said, “Join you in a minute. Something I have to take care of,” and slipped out of the elevator.
“But —” The Prince’s startled face disappeared behind the closing door, and the elevator whirred upward as Chauncey tore down the hall, flung open the door, and cried, “What are you doing in there?”
“Freezing to death,” Dortmunder told him. “Can I come out?”
Chauncey looked both ways. “Yes.”
“Good.” He emerged, and as Chauncey closed the door he said, “Get me out of here.”
“I don’t under — Yes, of course.” Chauncey frowned up and down the corridor, chewing the inside of his cheek.
“We had guards,” Dortmunder said. “Not to mention elevators.”
“Things happened,” Chauncey said, distracted by his own thoughts. “Come with me.” He took Dortmunder by the arm, and as he led him down the corridor toward the back there was a faint clink from inside his leather jacket. A vision of two full bourbon bottles in the sitting–room storage cabinet came clear to Chauncey’s mind, and he offered Dortmunder a sidelong jaundiced glance, saying, “I see.”
Dortmunder seemed too disgusted by events to reply, and the two of them progressed as far as the mudroom by the back door, where Chauncey took out his key ring, slipped one key off, and handed it over, saying, “This unlocks the door to the passage. Also the one at the other end. Get it back to me later.”
Dortmunder gestured at the door beside them. “Won’t we set off the alarm when we open this?”
“I’ll say it was me, I thought I saw something in the garden. Hurry, man.”
“All right.” Dortmunder took the key.
Struck by sudden doubt, Chauncey said, “Are there any more of you still in here?”
“Only me,” Dortmunder said, as though the fact spoke volumes about his life.
“What about the painting? It’s gone, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Dortmunder said, looking surly. “That part went okay.” And he left.
Chapter 16
* * *
When Dortmunder’s head disappeared for the last time behind the elevator, Kelp withdrew his own head from the open panel in the housing and said to the others, “What do we do now?”
“What he told us,” Bulcher answered. “We get the hell out of here.”
“But what about Dortmunder?”
Chefwick said, “Andy, he’ll either get away or he won’t. But it won’t do him any good if we stand around on the roof and get caught with him.”
Kelp cast another worried glance into the elevator shaft, where there was nothing to be seen. “He’s going to blame me for this,” he said. “I know he will.”
“Come on, Kelp,” Bulcher said, and he picked up the rolled painting from the tarred roof and strode away.
So Kelp left, with many backward looks, and joined the other two on the return journey across the roofs and up the rope and back into the theater building and down the stairs to the balcony. Bulcher led all the way, and he was the one who opened the door at the foot of the stairs.
Unfortunately, it was intermission time within, and the rear of the balcony was once again full of Scotsmen. When Bulcher unexpectedly shoved open the door, he knocked one Scotsman’s full cup of whiskey all over another Scotsman’s kilt. Ignoring the damage, he made to push between them and go on about his business, but the empty–cupped Scotsman put a restraining hand on his chest and said, “Here, now. What do you think you’re at?”
“Get out of my way,” said Bulcher, who was in no mood for distractions. Behind him, Chefwick emerged from the stairs.
“By the Lord Harry you’re a rude fellow,” declared the drenched Scot, and he hauled off and punched Bulcher a good one on the ear. So Bulcher hit him back, and for good measure he then hit the other one, who staggered back into three more, spilling their drinks.
By the time Kelp got through the doorway the fight was merrily blazing away. People who had no idea what the brawl was all about were determinedly slugging people who had even less connection with it. “Well, for God’s sake,” Kelp said, standing in the doorway, gaping at a scene of surging fury and flashing knees and wildly swinging fists. Battle cries whooped and wailed above the fray, and somebody’s rock–hard hand glanced off Kelp’s forehead, causing him to stagger backward and sit down heavily on the steps.
What a view. In his dark stairway, there was a kind of muffled quality to the noise, and the belligerents staggering and swirling by the open doorway were like something in a 3–D movie. Kelp sat there a minute or two, bemused by the scene, until he suddenly realized that the white sticklike object he was from time to time seeing lifted in the air and then smashed down on one or another head was in fact the ro
lled–up painting, wielded in absentminded irritation by Tiny Bulcher.
“Not the painting!” Kelp came boiling out of the stairwell once more, plowing and bashing his way across the battlefield toward Bulcher, ignoring every buffet and deflection along the way, finally lunging upward like one of the figures in the Iwo Jima flag photo (which was posed, by the way, a later reconstruction; it’s so hard to tell fiction from fact these days), wrenching the tubed painting out of Bulcher’s great fist, screaming in his ear, “Not the painting!” and then abruptly bending double as about eleven different Scotsmen all let him have it at once in the breadbasket.
What a different perspective you get on the floor amid a sea of swirling kilts. Knees are knobbly, huge, dangerous–looking things, but over there was a pair of black stovepipes; Chefwick, in trousers. Kelp forced himself upward, climbing up handy sporrans to find that Bulcher had been swept away but indeed Chefwick was over there to the left, pressed defensively against the wall, clutching his black bag to his chest with both arms. Even in the middle of the fray, people recognized the true noncombatant when they see him, and so Chefwick remained like a rock in the ocean; it all swirled around him, but it never quite got him.
“Chefwick!” Kelp cried. Around him, a lot of Scotsmen wanted to play. “Chefwick!”
Light flashed from Chefwick’s glasses as he turned his head.
“The painting!” Kelp cried, and launched it like a javelin, and went under for the second time.
Chapter 17
* * *
Stan Murch eased the Caddy around the corner and came to a stop in front of Hunter House. As far as he was concerned, this job was a piece of cake. Nothing to do but sit here like some hired chauffeur out front of a concert hall, then when the guys came out drive calmly away. Piece of cake.
The car itself was a piece of sponge cake, with MD plates. Kelp had picked it up for Murch this afternoon. A pale blue Cadillac, it was loaded with options. Kelp preferred doctors’ cars whenever available, believing that doctors baby themselves by buying cars loaded with every power–assisting gadget and padded with every creature comfort known to the engineers of Detroit. “Driving a doctor’s car,” he sometimes said, “is like taking a nice nap in a hammock on a Sunday afternoon. In the summer.” He could wax quite lyrical on the subject.
Movement attracted Murch’s attention, and he glanced over toward the concert hall, on his right. Was something happening in there? It seemed to him, looking through the row of glass doors, that activity of some sort had begun in the lobby; a lot of running around or something. Murch squinted, trying to see more clearly, and one of those doors snapped open and a body sailed out like a glider without wings, hit the pavement, rolled, popped to its feet and ran back into the lobby.
Murch said, “What?”
By golly, there was a fight going on in there. The same body — or another one — hurtled out again, this time followed by three men struggling and reeling in one another’s arms like a rugby scrum, and then all at once the entire dispute boiled out of the theater and spread all over the sidewalk.
“Holy Jesus!” said Murch, and watched a body bounce off the hood of the Caddy and back into the fray.
A face appeared at the windshield, and because of the face’s contortion and his own astonishment it took Murch a minute to realize it was Kelp, struggling to get away from a whole lot of people who wanted him to stay. Murch honked the horn, which startled Kelp’s friends, and Kelp scrambled off the hood and ducked into the Caddy.
Murch stared at him. Kelp’s clothing was ripped, his cheek was smudged, and he looked as though he might be getting a black eye. Murch said, “What in hell is going on?”
“I don’t know,” Kelp said, gasping for breath. “I just don’t know. Here comes Chefwick.”
And so he did, tiptoeing across the sidewalk, clutching his black bag to his chest, moving like a ballet dancer in a minefield, and when at last he slipped into the Caddy and shut the door behind himself all he said, wide–eyed, was, “Oh, my. Oh, my.”
Kelp asked him, “Where’s Bulcher?”
“Here he comes,” Murch said.
Here came Bulcher. He could be awesome when he was annoyed, and at the moment he was very annoyed. He had two of his opponents by the neck, one in each great ham–fist, and he was using them as battering rams to clear a path for himself through the melee, poking the two bodies out ahead of himself as he walked, battering them against raiding parties at his flanks, and generally cutting a swath. The path he’d bulldozed on his way into the hall was as nothing to the scorched–earth March To The Curb he effected on the way out. Reaching the Cadillac, he flung his assistants back into the riot while Chefwick opened a rear door for him. Then he hopped into the Caddy, slammed the door, and said, “That’s enough of that.”
“Okay, Stan,” Kelp said. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” Murch looked around, at Kelp beside him on the front seat and Chefwick and Bulcher in back, and said, “What about Dortmunder?”
“He’s not with us. Come on, Stan, they’ll take the car apart next. Drive somewhere and I’ll tell you on the way.”
The car was rocking more than somewhat, from the bodies bouncing off it, and a few of Bulcher’s recent playmates were beginning to look hungrily at him through the windows, so Murch put the Caddy in gear, pressed on the horn, eased away from the curb, and drove them away from there.
It took Kelp two right turns and a red light to explain Dortmunder’s situation, finishing, as they headed downtown, “We can only hope he’ll figure something.”
“He’s stuck in an elevator shaft, with private guards running around?”
“He’s been in tighter spots than that before,” Kelp assured him.
“Yeah,” Murch said. “And wound up in jail.”
“Don’t talk defeatist. Anyway, the guy who lives there is on our side. Maybe he can give Dortmunder a hand.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Murch said doubtfully. Then, deciding to look on the bright side, he said, “But anyway, you did get the painting, right?”
“That part was easy,” Kelp said. “Except when Bulcher thought it was a baseball bat.”
“I got carried away,” Bulcher said.
“All’s well that end’s well,” Kelp said. “Let’s see it, Roger.”
Chefwick said, “Beg pardon?”
Kelp turned a suddenly glassy smile on Chefwick. “The painting,” he said. “Let’s see it.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Sure you do. I gave it to you.”
“No, you didn’t. Bulcher had it”
“Kelp took it away from me,” Bulcher said.
“That’s right. And I threw it to Roger.”
“Well, I didn’t get it.” Chefwick was sounding prissier and prissier, as though defending himself against unjust accusations.
“Well, I threw it to you,” Kelp insisted.
“Well, I didn’t get it,” Chefwick insisted.
Kelp glared at Chefwick, and Chefwick glared at Kelp, and then gradually they stopped glaring and started frowning. They looked each other over, they frowned at Bulcher, they looked around the interior of the car, and all the time Bulcher watched them with his head cocked to one side while Murch tried to concentrate simultaneously on the Friday–night traffic and the events Inside the car.
It was Murch who finally said the awful truth aloud. “You don’t have it.”
“Something —” Kelp lifted up and looked beneath himself, but it wasn’t there either. “Something happened,” he said. “In that fight. I don’t know, all of a sudden there was this huge fight going on.”
“We don’t have it,” Bulcher said. He sounded stunned. “We lost it.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Chefwick said.
Kelp sighed. “We have to go back for it,” he said. “I hate the whole idea, but we just have to. We have to go back.”
Nobody argued. Murch took the next right, and headed uptown.
The scene in front of the thea
ter was not to be believed. The police had arrived, ambulances had arrived, even a fire engine had arrived. Platoons of Scotsmen were being herded into clumps by wary policemen, while other policemen in white helmets trotted into the hall, where the controversy was apparently continuing.
Slowly Murch drove past Hunter House along the one lane still open to traffic, and was waved on by a cop with a red–beamed long flashlight. Sadly Kelp and Chefwick and Bulcher gazed at the concert hall. Kelp sighed. “Dortmunder is going to be very upset,” he said.
Chapter 18
Nobody's Perfect Page 9