"Yeah, I would of." Bulcher took a long slow taste of his fresh drink, while Kelp continued to smile at him, and Dortmunder brooded at him, and Murch and Chefwick went on doing their hypnotized-sparrow number. Putting the glass down at last, Bulcher said to Dortmunder, "What do we need him for?"

"I already been at work," Kelp said, bright and eager, and ignoring Dortmunder's shut-up frown.

Bulcher observed him. "Oh, yeah? Doing what?"

"I checked out the theater. Hunter House, it's called. How we get in, how we get out."

Dortmunder, who was wishing Kelp would get laryngitis, explained, "We get to the roof through a theater nearby."

"Uh huh. And we're paying this guy twenty grand to go find out how we get in a theater." Bulcher leaned forward, resting one monstrous forearm on the table. He said, "I'll tell you the secret for ten grand. You buy a ticket."

"I bought tickets," Kelp assured him. "We're gonna see the Queen's Own Caledonian Orchestra."

Dortmunder sighed, shook his head a bit in irritation, and paused to pour some Our Own Brand bourbon into one of the glasses on the tray. He sipped, watched moodily as Kelp poured his own drink, and then said, "Tiny, I make the plan. That's my job. Your job is to carry heavy things and to knock people down that get in the way."

Bulcher jabbed a thumb the size of an ear of corn in Kelp's direction. "We're talking about his job."

"We need him," Dortmunder said. Under the table, he crossed his ankles.

"How come we didn't need him the first time we got together?"

"I was out of town," Kelp said brightly. "Dortmunder didn't know where to find me."

Bulcher gave him a look of disgust. (So did Dortmunder.)

"Bull," he said, and turned back to Dortmunder, saying "You didn't mention him at all."

"I didn't know yet I needed him," Dortmunder said. "Listen, Tiny, I've been to the place now. We have to get in through the top of an elevator shaft, we got a fifteen- or twenty-foot brick wall to go down and then back up, and we don't have all night to do it. We need a fifth man. I'm the planner, and I say we need him."

Bulcher turned his full attention on Kelp again, as though trying to visualize a circumstance in which he would find himself needing this person. His eyes still on Kelp, he spoke to Dortmunder, saying, "So that's it, huh?"

"That's it," Dortmunder told him.

"Well, then." A ghastly smile turned Tiny's face into a cross between a bad bayonet wound and a six-month-old Halloween pumpkin. "Welcome aboard, pal," he said. "I'm sure you're gonna be very helpful."

Dortmunder released held breath, his shoulders sagging in relief. So that was over. "Now," he said, "about tomorrow night. Stan Murch will drive us to this Hunter House a little before eight-thirty…"

Chapter 9

The hall was full of Scotsmen. Hundreds of them gamboled in the aisles and thronged the lobby, with more arriving every minute. Some were in kilts, some were singing, some were marching arm in arm, most were clutching mugs, flasks, bottles, cups, glasses, jars, demijohns, goblets and jugs, and all were calling out to one another in strange and barbarous tongues. Around many necks and trailing down many backs were long scarves in the colors of favorite soccer or rugby teams. Tam o' Shanters with bright wool balls on top were jauntily cocked over many a flashing eye. Hunter House bulged with Highland bonhomie.

"Well, now what the hell?" said Dortmunder.

Tiny Bulcher said, "That guy's wearing a dress."

"It's a kilt," Roger Chefwick told him. A level crossing of English manufacture in one part of Chefwick's model-train lay-out featured a man in a kilt who would glide out and wave a red flag every time a train went by. Chefwick was very familiar with kilts. "These are all Scotsmen," he explained.

"I don't know," Dortmunder said. "I don't know about this."

"I've got the tickets," Kelp said, in a hurry to get them all upstairs and on about their business. "Follow me."

Except it wasn't quite that easy. Kelp tried to lead, but everywhere he turned there were another six Scotsmen in his path. Also, the two fifty-foot rolls of vinyl clothesline he had tucked inside his coat didn't increase his maneuverability. For all his efforts they remained becalmed, four innocent bystanders abroad on a roiling sea of Scotsmen.

And now some of them were fighting. Over there by the head of the second aisle, two or three lads were rounding and punching and clutching at one another, while another half dozen tried to either stop them or join in, hard to tell which. "What are they fighting about?" Kelp cried.

A passing Scot paused to answer: "Well, you know," he said, "if it's neither football nor politics, it's more than likely religion." And away he waded, to join the discussion.

Dortmunder, sounding ominously bad-tempered, said, "Kelp, give me those tickets."

What was be going to do, ask for his money back? Apprehensive, Kelp gave him the tickets, but Dortmunder immediately turned and handed them to Tiny Bulcher, saying "You lead the way."

"Right," Bulcher said. Clutching the tickets in one enormous fist, he waded forward, moving his shoulders and elbows, tamping startled Scotsmen left and right, the other three in his wake.

When they reached the balcony, it was so full they couldn't possibly open the door leading to the roof stairs without being noticed. "We'll sit down and wait," Dortmunder decided, and Bulcher ushered them through the throng to their seats. "You'd make a wonderful locomotive," Chefwick told him as they sat down.

Chapter 10

In Wednesday's New York Post – in the section that in the unenlightened past was known as the Woman's Page, but which today operates under a discreet anonymity, offering Fashion, Social Notes, and Recipes to an audience presumably no more than fifty-two per cent female – the following item appeared:

What a dinner party, what a ghastly affair. Arnold Chauncey sat at the head of the table, behind his false-face host's smile, and observed his guests with all the affability of Dortmunder observing the Scotsmen. Mavis and Otto Orfizzi, to begin with, hated one another so uncordially, so spitefully, and with such unremitting verbal venom, that no one could be said to be truly safe in their presence, while MuMu and Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville were both too absorbed in themselves to be much help under the best of circumstances. As for the dinner guests, they approached the unbearable, except for Major General (Ret.) and Mrs. Homer Biggott, both of whom seemed merely to be dead. Sheikh Rama, on the other hand, was very much alive, cheerfully and suavely insulting everyone his glittering oily eye lit upon, making jokes about the West's incipient decline and the Arab world's upcoming dominance, name-dropping shamelessly and endlessly, and generally behaving like the well-educated (Cambridge) snotty little nouveau riche he was.

But the worst of all was Laura Bathing. "I don't mind a bit, sweetheart," she'd said upon arrival, when Chauncey had apologized for her inadvertent omission from the item in the Post, and in the last two hours she had made perfectly clear just how little she'd minded by breaking three glasses, two plates, an ashtray and a table lamp, all in small clumsy accidents, smearing whiskey, wine and gravy in her wake, and screaming almost without respite at Chauncey's staff, until be had very nearly been driven to point out that these days servants were much harder to find than dinner guests. It wasn't much help that both Lance Sheath and MuMu deCharraiveuneuirauville were quite obviously courting – no, probably stalking was the better word – cosmetics heiress Martha Whoopley, a stocky stodgy fortyish styleless frump with the face of a TV dinner and the personality of a humidifier and the ownership of eleven million dollars in her own right. MuMu was obviously interested in marrying up, but Chauncey had planned Lance for Laura Bathing, unaware that Lance was currently in search of backing for a film. Laura, placed at table between the insulting sheikh and the back of Lance Sheath (whose front was determinedly toward Martha Whoopley, on his other side), was not taking her situation calmly. In fact, Laura more and more seemed determined to strip Chauncey's house of all its breakables before the meal was finished.