What's So Funny? Part 6

"I think the best place for it, at least at first," Mr. Hemlow said, "would be our compound in the Berks.h.i.+res. It's been closed for a few years since Elaine died, but I can arrange to have it open and staffed by the time of your arrival."

Eppick said, "Mr. Hemlow? Some kind of country place? You sure that's secure enough?"

"It's enclosed and gated," Mr. Hemlow told him. "Not visible from the road. Elaine and I used to go to Tanglewood for the concerts in the summertime, so we built the compound up there, our rustic retreat. After Elaine pa.s.sed and I became less... mobile, I stopped going. The rest of my family seems to prefer the ocean, for some reason, though why anyone would wish to be immersed in salt water all summer is beyond me. At any rate, the place is there, it has never been broken into or bothered, and it's the safest location I can think of."

"If you don't mind, Mr. Hemlow," Eppick said, "me and John here, maybe we oughta go look at it. Just to see if there's any little tweaks to be done, help out a little. Better safe than sorry."

Mr. Hemlow considered that. "When would you go?"

"First thing in the morning," Eppick told him. "I'm sure John isn't doing anything much, in the daytime."

Except fleeing to Chicago. "Naw, I'm okay," Dortmunder said.

"With your permission," Eppick said, "I'll rent a car and bill you for it later."

"Take my car," Mr. Hemlow said. "I hadn't planned to use it tomorrow. Pembroke knows how to get to the compound, and he'll have the keys."

Doubtful, Eppick said, "You're sure."

"Absolutely." From the left arm of the wheelchair, moving that medicine ball body with little grunts, Mr. Hemlow produced a phone, which he slowly b.u.t.toned, saying, "I'll leave Pembroke a message to- Oh, you're there. Very good. I'll want the car around front at" - as much as possible, the head on the medicine ball c.o.c.ked to one side in a questioning way - "nine?"

"Fine," Eppick said.

"Good. Yes. It won't be me, you'll be driving Mr. Eppick and another gentleman up to the compound. You still have the keys? Excellent." He broke the connection and said, "You should be back late afternoon. Come up and tell me what you think."

"Will do."

"Thank you for coming," Mr. Hemlow said, so Eppick stood, so Dortmunder stood. Good-byes were said, they walked to the elevator while Mr. Hemlow watched from back by the view, and neither spoke until they were out on Riverside Drive, when Eppick said, "So you'll be here at nine in the morning."

"Sure," Dortmunder said.

Eppick did a more successful c.o.c.king of the head. "I get little whiffs from you, John," he said, "that you're not as keen as you might be on this job."

"That's not easy, that vault."

"But there it is," Eppick pointed out. "If you're thinking, maybe you'll just get out of town for a while until this all blows over, let me tell you, it isn't going to blow over. Mr. Hemlow's into this for sentimental reasons, but I'm in it for profit, and you'd better be, too."

"Oh, sure."

"Police departments around America," Eppick said, "are getting better and better at cooperation, what with the Internet and all. Everybody helps everybody, and n.o.body can disappear." Lacing his fingers together to show what he meant, in a gesture very like a stranglehold, he said, "We're all intertwined these days. See you at nine."

10.

WHEN MAY GOT home from her job at the Safeway with the daily sack of groceries she felt was a perk her employers would have given her if they'd thought of it, the apartment was dark. It was not yet quite six o'clock, but in this apartment, whose windows showed mostly brick walls four to six feet away, midnight in November came around three p.m.

May switched on the hall light, went down to the kitchen, stowed the day's take, went back up the hall, turned right into the living room to see if the local news had anything she could bear to listen to, switched on the light there, and John was seated in his regular chair, in the dark, gazing moodily at the television set. Well, no; gazing moodily toward the television set.

May jumped a foot. She let out a little cry, clutched her bosom, and cried, "John!"

"h.e.l.lo, May."

She stared at him. "John? What's the matter?"

"Well," he said, "I'm doomed."

For the first time in years, May wished she still smoked. Taking the other chair, she flicked ashes from that ancient cigarette onto the side table where the ashtray used to be, and said, "Was it that cop?"

"It sure was."

"And did Stan find you?"

With a hollow sardonic laugh, John said, "Oh, yeah. He found me."

"He can't help?"

"Stan doesn't help," John said. "Stan needs help, him and his golden dome. If my only problem was Stan Murch and his golden dome, I'd be sitting pretty, May. Sitting pretty."

"Well, what is the problem?"

"The thing the cop wants me to get," John said. "It's a golden chess set - more gold - and it's supposed to be too heavy for one guy to lift."

"Get somebody to help."

"It's also," he said, "in a sub-bas.e.m.e.nt vault under a midtown bank building."

"Oh," she said.

"And this guy, this seventeen-months-not-a-cop," John said, "he let me know, I try to leave town, he's got these millions and millions of cop buddies on the Internet and they'll track me down. And he would, too, he's a mean son of a b.i.t.c.h, you can see it in his forehead."

"So what are you going to do?"

"Well," he said, "I figure I'll just sit here until they come to get me."

"You don't mean that, John," she said, though she was afraid he actually did mean it.

"I've done jail before, May," he reminded her. "It wasn't that bad. I got through it."

"You were less set in your ways, then," she said.

"You can pick up the old routines," he said. "Probly a few guys still there I knew in the old days."

"Or there again."

"Yeah, could be. Old home week."

May knew John had a very bad tendency, when things got unusually difficult, to sink with an almost sensuous pleasure into a warm bath of despair. Once you've handed the reins over to despair, to mix a metaphor just a teeny bit, your job is done. You don't have to sweat it any more, you've taken yourself out of the game. Despair is the bench, and you are warming it.

May knew it was her job, at moments like this, to pull John out of the clutches of despair and goose him into forward motion once more. After all, it isn't whether you win or lose, it's just you have to be in the G.o.ddam game.

"John," she said, being suddenly very stern, "don't be so selfish."

He blinked at her, emerging slowly up from a dream of prison as a kind of fraternal organization. "What?"

"What about me?" she demanded. "Don't you ever think about me? I can't go to jail with you, you know."

"Yeah, but-"

"What am I going to do with myself, John," she wanted to know, "if you're going to spend ten to fifteen upstate? I've made a certain commitment here, you know that, I hope."

"May, it's not me, it's that cop."

"It's you that's sitting there," she told him, "like you're waiting for a bus. And you are waiting for a bus. To jail! What's the matter with you, John?"

He tried, though feebly, to fight back. "May? You want me to try to get down into that vault? Never mind the vault, you want me to try to get into the elevator that leads down to the vault? The bank's money is down there, too, May, they will be very alert about that vault. And, even if I was crazy enough to try it, who am I gonna get to help carry? Who else would try a stunt like that?"

"Call Andy," she advised.

11.

THE DOME DIDN'T look like gold at night. There were work lights around the construction site, even though no work was being done at the moment, to deter pilferage, which would usually mean boards or Sheetrock panels, not golden domes fifteen feet high, and in those work lights, as far as Andy Kelp was concerned, the dome looked mostly like a giant apricot. Not a peach, not that warmer fuzzy tone, but an apricot, except without that crease that makes apricots look as though they're wearing thong bathing suits.

Andy Kelp, a bony sharp-nosed guy in nonreflecting black, tended to blend in with the shadows at night when he moved from this place to that place. The place he was moving around in at the moment was just beyond the chain-link perimeter fence enclosing the mosque construction site, now temporarily on hold while the recently transplanted community got up to speed on the New York City culture and ethos.

And the reason Andy Kelp was moving around here at night was that, while he still thought the idea of heisting something this size and weight, particularly from people who have been known to be slightly hotheaded in the past, was a terrible notion, the one thing he didn't have was John Dortmunder's opinion. He was pretty sure John would see the scheme the same way everybody else did, but unfortunately John hadn't been at the meeting in the back room of the O.J. to put his stamp of disapproval personally on the idea, having been waylaid by some cop.

So, because of that gap in the chain of evidence, and because he wasn't doing much of anything else at the moment, he'd borrowed a car from East Thirtieth Street in Manhattan and driven out here to Brooklyn to give the golden dome the double-o. He was now coming to the conclusion that his first conclusion had been right all along, as expected, when the phone vibrated against his leg - silence can be more golden than any dome - so he pulled it out and said, "Yar."

"You busy?" The very John Dortmunder whose absence last night had brought him out here.

"Not really," Kelp said. "You?"

"We could maybe talk."

Surprised, Kelp said, "About the job?"

Sounding surprised, John said, "Yeah."

Kelp took a step back to study the dome from a slightly different angle, and it still seemed to him too big and too unwieldy and just downright too unlikely, so he said, "You mean, you want to do it?"

"Well, I got no choice."

So John felt compelled to go after all this gold; think of that. Kelp said, "To tell you the truth, I was thinking, you cut a piece off it, could be," though he hadn't thought of that till this very minute. But if John believed there might be something in this gold mountain, that could get Kelp's creative juices flowing, too. "Is that your idea," he asked, "or what?"

"Cut a piece off what?"

"The dome," Kelp said. "You'll never get the whole dome, John, I'm looking at it and-"

"The dome? You mean, Stan's Islamic dome?"

"Isn't that what you're talking about?"

"And you're out there with it? You're whacking pieces off it?"

"No, I'm just giving it the good lookover, the whadawe see when we see this idea."

"Stan there?"

"No, I just come out by myself, spur of the moment kinda thing. I don't wanna encourage Stan, get his hopes up. John, aren't you talking about the dome?"

"You think I'm a moron?"

"No, John, but you said-"

"You wanna meet? You wanna talk? Or you wanna stay out there and cut filets outa the dome?"

"I'm on my way, John. Where and when?"

"O.J., ten. It's just the two of us, so we won't need the back room."

"So it isn't a solid job yet."

"Oh, it's solid," John told him. "And I'm under it."

12.

WHEN DORTMUNDER WALKED into the O.J. at ten that night Andy Kelp had not yet arrived, and the regulars, freed from last night's Eppick-inspired verbal paralysis, were discussing James Bond movies. "That was the one," the first regular said, "where the bad guy went after his basket with a laser."

"You're wrong about that," the second regular told him. "You happen to be confusing that one with that guy George Laserby, he was the Bond only that one time- What was it called?"

Dortmunder angled toward the other end of the bar, where Rollo the bartender repet.i.tively rag-wiped one spot on the bar's surface as though he believed that's where the genie lived, while a third regular said, "In His Majesty's Secret Police."