Chapter 12

It seemed to Dortmunder, looking at the faces of the two private guards through the eyeholes of the ski mask covering his own face, that he'd seen them somewhere before, but that was both unlikely and irrelevant, so he dismissed it from his mind. He and Bulcher hustled the two disarmed guards into a closet in the unused guest room; locked the door, removed their ski masks, and returned to the central corridor, where an evidently nervous Kelp said, in a jittery whisper, "I thought the guards were supposed to stay downstairs."

"So did I," Dortmunder said. That had been quite a shock, as a matter of fact, when they'd come in from the elevator shaft to hear the sounds of conversation from one of the nearby rooms. Expecting no trouble, and not wanting to make any extra trouble for themselves in case of problems outside, none of them was carrying a gun, but fortunately a pair of socket wrenches from Chefwick's black bag had done just as well, convincing the guards long enough for Dortmunder and Bulcher to relieve them of their own artillery and put them away.

"Let's get going," Bulcher said, the commandeered revolver toy-like in his mammoth fist, "before anything else happens." And he tucked the pistol into his hip pocket.

"Right," Dortmunder agreed. "The stairs are this way. Chefwick and Kelp, you hit the bedrooms. Tiny and I'll get the painting."

The robbery itself was quickly accomplished. Dortmunder and Bulcher removed the painting from the wall, turned it around, slit the canvas just beyond the edge of the painting all the way around, rolled it carefully into a tube shape, and fixed it with three rubber bands. Meanwhile, upstairs, Kelp and Chefwick were filling their pockets with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, watches, tiepins, a golden dollar sign money clip clutching nearly eight hundred dollars, and whatever other sparkly items attracted their magpie eyes. Bulcher and Dortmunder, with Dortmunder carrying the rolled painting, did the same for Chauncey's bedroom, where the pickings were surprisingly slim. Back in the sitting room, Dortmunder found two full bottles of that bourbon that had so impressed him his first time here, tucked them inside his leather jacket, and then he and Bulcher rejoined the other two on the top floor. "Some nice stuff," Kelp whispered, grinning, his nervousness forgotten now.

Dortmunder saw no reason to whisper. "Good," he said. "Let's get out of here."

Chefwick used one of his handy tools to open the elevator door, and Kelp went in first, reversing the route they'd used before. The elevator shaft was concrete-lined and about six feet square, with an open grid work of metal beams inside it to support the elevator equipment. Kelp made his way via a horizontal beam on the left wall to another horizontal beam at the rear, and from there to the metal rungs set in the rear wall just opposite the doorway. Up the rungs he went, sidling past the electric motor and the chains and pulleys at the top, and out through the opened panel in the housing. Lowering a length of clothesline back through the opening, he waited while Chefwick tied his bag and the painting to the end, and then drew both up to the roof. (Dortmunder watched this part gimlet-eyed, waiting for Kelp to drop the goddam painting to the bottom of the elevator shaft – or rather to the top of the elevator, two stories below – but astonishingly enough Kelp did everything right.)

Chefwick himself went next, over to the metal rungs and up to the roof, followed by Bulcher. Dortmunder went last, pausing on the first metal beam to release the door, allowing it to slide closed, and the faint snick of the electric lock was immediately followed by a sudden whirring sound, and the small clanking of chains.

Yes? Dortmunder looked all around, and saw the elevator cables in motion. In motion? He looked down, and the top of the elevator was coming this way. The elevator was coming this way, sliding and clicking upward through its shaft.

God damn, but it was coming fast.

Chapter 13

"I wonder if you've heard this one, Sheikh," Prince Elector Otto Orfizzi of Tuscan-Bavaria called across the table, his round-red-apple face thrust out among the candles.

"I should think I probably had," Sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El responded, and turned to Laura Bathing to say, "Have you been in London recently?"

"Not for a year or so. Oops."

The Sheikh blandly watched her sop up red wine with her most recent napkin, while the black hand and white-clad arm of their host's serving boy reached through between them to pick up the shards of wine glass. "I was there two weeks ago," the Sheikh said.

"Watch out, you clumsy fool!" Laura shrieked at the servant. "You'll get glass in my meat!"

"I was buying a house in Belgravia," the Sheikh went on, unperturbed. His softly oiled chuckle came and went. "The poor English," he said pleasantly. "They can't afford their own capital any more, you know. They're all living in Woking and Hendon."

The Prince Elector, meanwhile, was trying to tell his joke to Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville, who was ignoring him while grimly watching her husband, MuMu, thrust himself upon cosmetics heiress and frump Martha Whoopley. "What I've always felt about St. Louis," MuMu was saying, "is that it's somehow more real than most of the places I know. Do you feel that?"

Martha Whoopley used her tongue to clear brussels sprouts into her cheek pouches, then said, "More real? How d'ya mean?"

"After all the flitter of New York, Deauville, Paris, Rome–" MuMu gestured gracefully, candlelight sparkling on his rings and bracelets, a fraction of his collection. "All of this," he summed up. "Isn't it somehow more, more, oh I don't know, more real to get back to St. Louis?"

"I don't think it's more real," Martha said. She shoved a lot of French bread into her mouth and went on talking. "I grew up there. I always thought it stunk."

"But you still live there."

"I keep a house out by the plant. You've got to keep your eye on those manager people."

Film star and environmental activist Lance Sheath, a rugged escarpment at Martha's right, leaned toward her with his virile confidentiality, saying in the deep voice that had thrilled billions, "You oughta spend some time in Los Angeles. Get to know the future."

"We have a packaging facility in Los Angeles," Martha told him. "Out in Encino. I don't like it much out there. All that white stucco hurts my eyes."

Prince Otto was finishing his joke to whoever would listen. It concerned a Jewish woman checking in at the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, asking for bellboys to get the luggage from the car, and then requesting a wheelchair for her husband. "'Of course,'" said the desk clerk," concluded the Prince. "'I'm terribly sorry, can't your husband walk?' 'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank God he doesn't have to.'"

While the Prince laughed heartily at his own joke, Chauncey's mind delivered him, intact, a variant beginning, "A sheikh's wife enters the Dorchester Hotel in London–" and ending, "'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank Allah he doesn't have to.'" Should he wait ten minutes or so, and then straight faced tell that variant? No; revenge enough was already under way.

Meanwhile, Mavis Orfizzi was clutching her own bony breast in assumed horror at her husband's gaucherie. "I can't stand it any more," she cried, for the benefit of the table at large, and surged to her feet, knocking over her chair, and so upstaging Laura Bathing that one gave off screeching at Thomas Jefferson, the serving boy, and gaped in astonishment. "Otto," Mavis announced over the other guests' heads, "you are as clumsy and oafish at table as you are in bed."

"In bed?" demanded the Prince Elector, stung out of his raconteur's role, "I'm afraid to touch you in bed for fear of cutting myself," he declared.