Nobody's Perfect

by Donald Westlake

  “I’ll do my best,” Chauncey had promised. “If in fact I can get in at all, which I very much doubt.”

  “You’ll know somebody,” Dortmunder had told him, and he’d turned out to be right. The next morning Chauncey had started making phone calls among his acquaintances in town, and damned if a young friend with a local publisher wasn’t the nephew of Parkeby–South’s head of publicity. The link had been enough to get Chauncey a sympathetic hearing from a vice–manager of the firm, who was certain something could be, as he said, “sorted out.”

  The sorting out had taken four days, but on Monday afternoon this fellow Leamery had called to say that Chauncey could most certainly view the painting, though “Mr. Macdoo does insist on being present. He’s rather a diamond in the rough, you know, our Mr. Macdoo.”

  “Mac who?”

  “Macdoo. The owner of the Veenbes.”

  “Oh, Macdow, you mean.”

  “Are you certain?” Leamery sighed, an aspish sound over the phone. “I never seem to get it right.”

  In any event, the showing was to take place the following afternoon, Tuesday. “I hope you don’t mind,” Leamery went on, “but we’d much prefer you saw it in situ, as it were. That is to say, in our value room.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Chauncey told him, and here it was Tuesday, and here was Chauncey in the value room, surrounded by the most precious items currently in Parkeby–South’s care, memorizing everything in sight, trying his damnedest to be distracted neither by his craving for the Veenbes nor by his loathing for Macdough, a smug sloppy otter of a man smirking like a shop steward. Walls, doors, locks, exterior walls, staircases … “I’ve seen enough,” he said at last, reluctantly, and turned away with one last backward glance at Folly and his followers. I shall return, he quoted General MacArthur telepathically at the oil, and left the room, pausing to watch with narrowed eyes as the guard locked the locks.

  Down the stairs they went, Chauncey ahead of both Leamery and Macdough, his eyes flicking left and right, and on the ground floor Leamery smiled his wet–toothed pale smile and said, “Would you care for tea? We’re just serving, in the office.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “Or a peg,” Macdough offered, with that offensive smile. “You look as though you could stand a bracer.”

  “I suspect, Mr. Macdow,” Chauncey permitted himself to say, “that you should save —”

  “Macduff,” said Macdough.

  “— all the bracers you have in stock. You’ll be needing them yourself soon.”

  “The name is Macduff,” Macdough repeated, “and I don’t believe I will.”

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  “Let’s talk about that window again, the one on the staircase.”

  “Again? Dortmunder, I’ve told you everything I know about that window. I’ve told you everything I know about everything. I’ve drawn you maps, I’ve drawn you sketches, I’ve gone over and over and over —”

  “Let’s talk about the window.”

  “Dortmunder, why?”

  “I want to know about it. Describe it.”

  “Very well, yet again. It was a window, on the landing half a flight below the value room. That would put it three and a half levels above the street. It was double hung, with one large pane of glass on top and six small panes in the bottom. The wood was painted a grayish–cream color, and it looked out over Sackville Street.”

  “What could you see when you looked out through it?”

  “I told you. Sackville Street.”

  “Exactly what could you see?”

  “Dortmunder, I passed that window twice, once on the way up and once coming down. I didn’t stop and stare out.”

  “What did you see on the way by?”

  “The buildings across Sackville Street.”

  “Describe them.”

  “Describe — ? Gray stone upper stories, windows, just — No! By God, now I remember. There was a streetlight!”

  “A streetlight.”

  “I saw it on the way down. It was below window level, of course. But what possible difference does that make?”

  “For one thing, it means that staircase won’t be dark. Tell me more about the window.”

  “More? There isn’t any —”

  “It didn’t have a lock.”

  “Of course it did. All windows have locks.”

  “Well, it didn’t have that — You know, that catch thing in the middle. I can remember distinctly, there was — Ah, wait!”

  “You’re remembering something else.”

  “Dortmunder, when you’re finished with me I’ll be fit for nothing but a sanitarium.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It had two locks. Sliding bolts on the inside top corners of the lower half I suppose the top half must be permanently fixed in place.”

  “Sliding bolts? They slide into the frame on both sides?”

  “So that’s two new things you remembered about the window.”

  “No more about the window. Please, Dortmunder.”

  “Fine. Let’s talk about the floor in the hall outside the value room.”

  “Dortmunder, you’re driving me crazy.”

  “Was it wood? Rug? Linoleum?”

  “The floor. God help us. Let me think …”

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  “What a country,” Kelp said. Trying to shift gears with the stick jutting out on the right side of the steering column, he signaled for a right turn instead, and said, “Damn! Crap! Bastard!” Still signaling for a right turn, he found the other stick, jutting out on the left side of the steering column, and shifted into second.

  “Drive on the left,” Dortmunder told him.

  “I am on the left,” Kelp snarled, yanking the wheel hard to the left and thus not hitting that oncoming taxi.

  “You weren’t before.”

  “I was.”

  “You’re signaling for a right turn.”

  “Maybe I’ll turn right.”

  Kelp was in a foul mood, and his first experience driving in London wasn’t helping much. Tottering down Sloane Street toward Sloane Square in a maroon Opel, surrounded by coughing black taxis, two–story–high red buses and darting scruffy Minis the size of washing machines and the color of week–old snow, Kelp struggled to deny all his deepest driving instincts. Sitting on the right, driving on the left, shifting with his left hand — and just to compound the confusion, the foot pedals weren’t reversed.

  Not that Kelp had been his usual cheery self even before entering this Opel. Five nights sleeping on the floor in Chauncey’s apartment had already left him stiff, cranky and worn out. His initial alignment, with feet under bed and head under dresser, had quickly proved unacceptable, since both Zane and Dortmunder invariably stepped on his exposed center section if they got up in the middle of the night, and both the bastards were constantly getting up in the middle of the night. Having Zane’s gnarled foot, naked, pressing on one’s stomach in the dark, was one of life’s least pleasant experiences. The result was, Kelp was sleeping — or trying to sleep — curled up under the dresser, and it was having a very bad effect on both his posture and his personality.

  And now Dortmunder wanted to go for a drive. “Where to?” Kelp had asked him. “Around,” Dortmunder had said. “What are we looking for?” Kelp had asked him. “I’ll know it when I see it,” Dortmunder had said. He’ll know it when he sees it. Driving around all afternoon in city traffic, on the wrong side of the street, on the wrong side of the car — Kelp signaled for a left turn, swore loudly, shifted into third gear, shifted into fourth gear, and almost ran down two women in tan wool cloaks and high leather boots who stepped out right in front of the car.

  “Christ, Andy,” Dortmunder said, peeling himself off the windshield.

  “Those two — those two —” Kelp pointed at the women, more in outright astonishment than rage, while the women in their turn stood in front of the car, giving him reproving
looks and pointing to something on the sidewalk. Peering in that direction, Kelp saw a blinking orange globe light over there, atop a pole. “Well, what the hell do you suppose that is?” he said.

  “Beats me,” Dortmunder said.

  The women, having shaken their fingers at Kelp, walked on. Kelp sat blinking at the orange globe, which blinked back. “What am I supposed to do now?” he asked. “Wait for it to stay off, or to stay on?”

  Peep, said the Mini behind them, and Dortmunder said, “I think you just go now.” So Kelp signaled for a right.

  “SHIT!”

  First gear; tromp the accelerator; second gear; tromp the accelerator; third goddam gear and there was another one of those orange globes. Tromping the brake, Kelp now saw a similar orange globe directly across the way, and white lines on the street between the two, and as he was himself working out what it meant Dortmunder said, “It’s a pedestrian crossing, that’s all. Pedestrians got the right of way.”

  “I know it,” Kelp snapped, and tromped the accelerator again, and lurched into Sloane Square. “Which way now?”

  “Any way you want.”

  “I wanna go back under the dresser,” Kelp said, because Sloane Square was completely full of traffic and people. Kelp inched the Opel along, painfully aware that he didn’t know how much car he had on his left, stuck in the whirlpool flowing clockwise around the square, and was practically back where he’d started before he managed to break free, scooting down Kings Road, which turned out narrower than Sloane Street, with more traffic and more pedestrians and more shops and more buses. “And,” Kelp cried, “they don’t even have MD plates! What if there’s an emergency? How you gonna find a doctor?”

  “This car’s okay,” Dortmunder said.

  “You try driving it. You try — Oh, shit.”

  Another pedestrian crossing, this one full of young people wearing carpet remnants. Kelp realized as he was doing it that he was about to shift gears with the wrong stick again, and said, “That’s it.” Depressing the stick, signaling for a right, he just kept on bearing down until the stick said snap. “Hold this for me,” he said, handed the stick to Dortmunder, shifted into first, and drove on once the carpet sale had reached the sidewalk.

  “You’re signaling for a right again,” Dortmunder told him.

  “Tough,” said Kelp.

  They drove around for another half hour, down through Chelsea and over the Albert Bridge into Battersea, and north again over the Battersea Bridge, and up through Earl’s Court and Kensington, with Kelp becoming increasingly adjusted to this weird way of driving, and up in Notting Hill Gate Dortmunder suddenly said, “Stop here.”

  “Here?”

  “No, back there. Circle the block.”

  So Kelp tried circling the block, and promptly got lost, but after many adventures he got found again, which he didn’t realize until Dortmunder suddenly said, “Stop here.”

  This time Kelp stopped, on a dime (or perhaps on a half pence), and the lorry full of metal pipe behind him complained loudly and bitterly. Kelp didn’t care; he was realizing they’d come to the same spot in Notting Hill Gate from the opposite direction. “Now, how did that happen?”

  “Pull over to the curb, Andy.”

  Kelp pulled over to the curb, and the lorry went by, filling the air with Stepney imprecations. “Now what?”

  “Now we wait,” Dortmunder told him. “You might as well cut the engine.”

  Notting Hill Gate is the name of a street, not a gate; a commercial street, like a neighborhood in Brooklyn, with movie theaters and supermarkets and dry cleaners. Ahead on the left a storefront was boarded up, with a dumpster at the curb out front and a team of men carrying out basket–loads of rubble. Ahead on the right, a man was working on a street–light, standing in a kind of metal bucket extended way up from the back of a truck parked below; the kind of vehicle known in America as a cherrypicker. Beyond the cherrypicker, a man on a high ladder was replacing the letters on a movie marquee; at the moment it read THE CHARGE OF THE SEVEN DWARFS.

  On the left, beyond the boarded–up store, a window washer was washing shop windows. The sidewalks were filled with men and women, carrying plastic bags or walking dogs or staring through freshly washed shop windows or muttering to themselves.

  “You’re muttering to yourself,” Dortmunder said.

  “No, I’m not,” Kelp said.

  “It’s the cherrypicker,” Dortmunder told him. “I already figured it out,” Kelp said.

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  When a fellow’s been sleeping under a dresser for more than a week it’s child’s play to fall asleep inside a big roomy armoire. Kelp was dreaming of himself as an angel playing a harp on a fluffy soft cloud when the armoire door was pulled open and Dortmunder rudely awakened him by clamping one hand over his mouth for silence sake and whispering harshly in his ear, “Wake up!”

  “Mmm” yelled Kelp, then remembered that he wasn’t an angel after all, that he didn’t in fact know how to play the harp, and that he was only in this armoire because he was a thief. He and Dortmunder had come into Parkeby–South again late this afternoon, Monday, nearly a week since Chauncey’s visit, and had watched and waited and roamed until there’d been opportunities to slip unnoticed into hiding places; Dortmunder into a sheaf of carpets draped over a railing around a stairwell, and Kelp into this armoire. It was slightly after four P.M. when they’d hidden themselves away, and it was slightly before two A.M. now, so Kelp had been asleep for about nine hours. “I’m hungry,” he whispered, when Dortmunder released his mouth.

  “Food later,” Dortmunder whispered, and stepped back so Kelp could clamber quietly out of the armoire. Dortmunder too was hungry, though he wouldn’t have admitted it, and at the moment he was less rested than Kelp. An almost overpowering need to sneeze had kept him awake most of the time inside those carpets, and when at last he’d napped for an hour or so an actual sneeze had awakened him. His own sneeze. Fortunately it hadn’t alerted any of the guards, so when Dortmunder saw by his luminous watch dial that it was nearly midnight he slipped out of his hiding place. He spent the next two hours dogging the guards’ footsteps and at about one–thirty he heard one of them in the ground–floor office say, “Hm. Streetlamp’s gone out.” So Chauncey was on the job.

  Yes, he was. The other day, Kelp and Dortmunder had followed the cherrypicker to its home, a large fenced–in lot in Hammersmith where it was surrounded by other heavy equipment, all painted the same official yellow. Earlier today, Dortmunder and Kelp had dressed in work clothes, armed themselves with a clipboard, and gone back to Hammersmith, where Dortmunder did his unhelpful workman routine while claiming to have been sent “over from the job to get one of those. They were supposed to call from the office.” There’d been little difficulty from the pipe–smoking fellow in the little shack by the gate, since they’d been perfectly willing to sign false names to every document be showed them. (“Canadians, are you?” “That’s right.”) Retiring with the cherrypicker to a quiet cul–de–sac off Holland Road, they’d used black enamel paint to change its ID and license–plate numbers, then parked it quite openly on Pont Street, less than two blocks from Chauncey’s maisonette, where Chauncey and Zane had found it waiting at one o’clock this morning. Chauncey, using the key Kelp had given him, had driven the cherrypicker to Sackville Street, where he’d opened the metal plate in the streetlight pole (Dortmunder had shown him how on a streetlight back in Hans Place), and had snipped one wire to put out the light. And now he and Zane were sitting in the cab of the truck, waiting for the signal from inside Parkeby–South.

  Within, Kelp stretched and yawned and scratched his head and shook himself all over like a dog in the rain. “You done wriggling?” Dortmunder asked him. “Time we got going.”

  “Right,” Kelp said. Then, patting himself all over, he said, “Wait a minute. Where’s my gun?”