“Okay.”

“If you got the choice, you’re sent up or you’re sent down, take up. You don’t have to take my word for it. Ignore me if you want, go your own way, whado I care?”

Dortmunder said, “I thought the idea was, they were gonna modify your behavior.”

“I’m modified,” Arnie assured him. “Trust me, I’m modified, but it doesn’t do any good. The G.O.s won’t eat with me.”

“The who?”

“The staff,” Arnie said. “The help. Everything’s democratic here, if you believe it, and the guests eat with the help. Everybody mixed up in the same tables. Only, after a few days, the G.O.s won’t eat with me any more. They pretend like they’re gonna, but then they don’t. They go sit with the smiley people instead.”

“G.O.s,” Dortmunder said. “That’s what you’ve been saying.”

“They got their own language here,” Arnie said. “Well, they do, anyway, they’re French. But even beyond that. So G.O. is staff, and G.M. is the rest of us, the guests.”

“G.M.”

“Somebody told me,” Arnie said, “it means Gentile Members, but that can’t be right, can it?”

“I don’t know,” Dortmunder said. “I never been to a place like that.”

“Sunlight gives me a rash,” Arnie said. “I hadda come here to find that out. But I got a little porch on my room, I can get air and shade, and this whole ocean is right here, it’s practically in the place with me, and the waves don’t sound like traffic, you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Dortmunder said.

“You sure you can’t hear them? Listen,” Arnie said, and apparently held his phone closer to the ocean because now Dortmunder could hear a faint slow repeated shushing sound that wasn’t at all like traffic.

“Yeah, now I do,” he said.

A little silence, and then Arnie said, “Did you hear it?”

“Yeah, then I did.”

“Well, you don’t wanna talk to me,” Arnie said, “so let’s get to the subject matter.”

Dortmunder wanted to say, no, it’s fine to talk to you, or no, it’s good to hear your voice, but there are certain lies that just will not pass a person’s lips, no matter how firm the intention, so what he did say was, “Sure, the subject matter.”

“My cousin Archie tells me you wanna prepare a gift for when I get back there,” Arnie said, “and I should tell you what kinda gift I’d like to see.”

Getting the idea, Dortmunder said, “That’s it exactly.”

“I’m not interested in clocks.”

“Okay.”

“I am interested in music boxes.”

“Fine.”

“And I am interested in chess sets.”

“I’ll make a note.”

“And I am interested in coins, but only if they’re gold.”

“Good thinking.”

“But I am not interested in anything else. Well, yeah, I am.”

“You are?”

“I’m interested,” Arnie said, “in a ticket outa here, but I don’t think you got one of those.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, I’m not gonna take up your time,” Arnie said, “on the phone here, tell you my troubles. Whada you give a shit about my troubles? The fact is, you don’t.”

“Uhhh,” Dortmunder said, and Arnie hung up.

It was amazing, really, how little effect Club Med had so far had on Arnie’s personality. And it was also amazing how much of that personality could come through over the telephone.

It was a good ten minutes before Dortmunder got his appetite back enough so he could go finish making his sandwich.

24

BUDDY SAID, “I hate to say this, but we aren’t getting anywhere.”

Ace looked up, his hands full of jockstraps. “How can you say that? We’re in the guy’s house, aren’t we?”

“Breaking and entering,” Buddy said, and shook his head. “We never broke any laws before.”

“Stalking,” Mac suggested.

Buddy rejected that at once, “Whadaya mean, stalking? We’re just observing our former boss’s habit patterns, that’s all, nothing wrong with that. But this jock here—”

Ace dumped the jockstraps back into the dresser drawer and slammed it with his hip.

“—he isn’t a boss of ours,” Buddy went on, “he’s nothing to do with us except Monroe Hall’s a customer of his. What we’re doing here, Mac, is breaking and entering, and it’s against the law, and you know it.”

“To tell you the truth, Buddy,” Mac said, “that part doesn’t bother me so much. What bothers me so much, we aren’t getting anywhere.”

Ace had another bureau drawer open. “We’re learning a lot about this guy,” he insisted, holding up a neatly rolled Ace bandage.

“What does it do for us?” Ace wanted to know. “We broke in here, into the guy’s house, three times now, and we’re using information and equipment we got from a cop cousin in New Jersey that’s an ACWFFA supporter—”

“Great guy,” Ace announced. “Best cop I ever met.”

“But,” Mac said, “he took a big chance with his own career, and for what? We keep searching the guy’s house; nothing. We searched his car; nothing. Not even room for three of us to hide in it, by the way.”

“Well, maybe,” Buddy said.

Mac kept to his own thought. “We made a copy of his address book and followed up on everybody he knows and they’re all clients or doctors or other health freaks. We found nothing to help us, and all we’re doing is spinning our wheels, and God knows what those Harvard boys are doing, but they aren’t standing around not getting anywhere like us.”

“You notice,” Ace said, “they haven’t been in touch.”

“And we,” Mac said, “haven’t been in touch with them. Probably for the same reason.”

Alarmed, Buddy said, “You think they’re up to something?”

“Of course they’re up to something,” Mac said. “So are we. Why wouldn’t they be up to something?” Looking at his watch, he said, “We gotta get outa here. And I don’t see any reason to break in here again.”

“Jeez …” Ace said, looking around the bedroom, once again restored by them to neatness.

“Forget it, Ace,” Mac advised him. “We just aren’t going to find any stuff in here we can use for blackmail.”

Looking hurt, Ace said, “That’s a nasty word, Mac.”

Riding over that, Mac said, “No child pornography, no bigamy, no double identity, not even any overdue library books. Alphonse Morriscone is a Boy Scout, and I say we leave him alone from now on. Come on.”

As they walked toward the rear door, their usual route through Morriscone’s house, Buddy said, “I hate to invade this guy as much as you do, Mac, but what the heck else are we gonna do?”

“There’s other things go in and outa that compound,” Mac said. “The oil truck makes deliveries.”

Ace said, “If you think I’m gonna hold my breath in an oil truck for forty minutes, you’re crazy.”

Mac shook his head and opened the back door. “That’s not what I’m saying. Be sure it’s locked, Buddy.”

“Right.”

“So what are you saying?” Ace demanded, as he followed Mac out to the small neat back porch while Buddy made sure the kitchen door was locked. From here it was a simple walk across a lawn flanked by privacy fencing in rough wood verticals—if Morriscone did nude sunbathing out here, he didn’t take pictures of the fact—and through the hedge at the back to the unoccupied house on the next block with the FOR SALE sign out front. The way it was set up, they could get in and out of Alphonse Morriscone’s home unseen any time they wanted. The only problem was, there was no reason to want to.

As they walked from Morriscone’s house around the for-sale house and down the street to where they’d parked the Taurus, Mac said, “It isn’t just oil deliveries. They get food to that house, they send their dry cleaning out.”

Buddy said, “You’ve watched their procedures, Mac. All those delivery trucks get completely searched by those rent-a-cops at the gate. Boy Scout Morriscone is the only one who just drives in.”

Ace said, “Well, there’s some employees. Staffers.”

“No use to us,” Mac said.