Chapter 18

Dortmunder took the subway to Union Square, then walked the rest of the way home. He was in the last block when a fellow came out of a doorway and said, "Pardon me. You got a match?"

"No," said Dortmunder. "I don't smoke."

"That's all right," the man said. "Neither do I." And he fell into pace with Dortmunder, walking along at his right hand. He had a very decided limp, but seemed to have no trouble keeping up.

Dortmunder stopped and looked at him. "All right," he said. The man stopped, with a quizzical smile. He was an inch or two taller than Dortmunder, slender, with a long thin nose and a bony sunken-cheeked face, and he was wearing a topcoat with the collar turned up and a hat with the brim pulled down, and he was keeping his right hand in his topcoat pocket. Some sort of black orthopedic shoe was on his right foot. He said, "All right? All right what?"

"Do whatever you're here to do," Dortmunder told him, "so I can knock you down and go home."

The man laughed as though he were amused, but he also stepped back a pace, twisting on the lame foot "I'm no holdup man, Dortmunder," he said.

"You know my name," Dortmunder mentioned.

"Well," said the man, "we have the same employer."

"I don't get it."

"Arnold Chauncey."

Then Dortmunder did get it. "You're the other guy the lawyer found for him. The killer."

The killer made a strangely modest gesture with his left hand, while the right remained in his pocket. "Not quite," he said. "Killing is sometimes part of what I do, but it isn't my real job. The way I like to think of it, my job is enforcing other people's wishes."

"Is that right."

"For instance," the killer said, "in your case, I'm being paid twenty thousand dollars, but not to kill you. I get paid whether you live or die. If you give back the picture, that's fine, you live and I collect. If you don't, if you make trouble, that's not fine, and you die and I collect." He shrugged. "It makes no difference."

Dortmunder said, "I don't want you hanging around me the next six months."

"Oh, don't worry," the killer said. "You'll never see me again. If it's thumbs down, I'll drop you from a distance." Grinning, he took his right hand out of his pocket, empty, made a pistol shape with the fingers, pointed it straight-arm at Dortmunder's face, closed one eye, grinned, sighted along his arm, and said, "Bang. I'm very good at that."

Somehow, Dortmunder believed him. He already knew that he himself was precisely the kind of reliable crook Chauncey had asked for, and he now believed that this fellow was precisely the kind of reliable killer Chauncey had asked for. "I'm happy to say," he said, "that I don't intend to do anything with that painting except hold on to it till I get paid, then give it back to Chauncey. Fancy is not my method."

"Good," said the killer, with a friendly smile. "I like getting paid for doing nothing. So long." And he started away, then immediately turned back, saying, "You shouldn't mention this to Chauncey."

"I shouldn't?"

"He doesn't want us to meet, but I thought we should have one chat." His grin flickered. "I like to see my people," he said. His eyes glittered at Dortmunder, and then once again he turned away.

Dortmunder watched him go, tall and narrow and dark, body twisting as he strode on his game leg, both hands now in his topcoat pockets, and he felt a faint chill up the middle of his back. Now he understood why Chauncey had said Dortmunder wasn't dangerous; it was because he'd had that fellow as a comparison. "Good thing I'm an honest man," he muttered to himself, and he walked on home, where he found Kelp and Murch and Chefwick and Bulcher and May all waiting for him in the living room.

"Dortmunder!"

"John!"

"You made it! I knew you would!"

They gave him cheers and pats on the back, and he gave them Chauncey's bourbon, and then they all sat down with glasses of the stuff – terrific bourbon, almost worth the trouble it caused – and Kelp said, "How'd you do it? How'd you get away?"

"Well, I went down to the bottom of the elevator shaft," Dortmunder started, "and then…" And he stopped, struck by something vaguely wrong. Looking around at the attentive faces, he saw they were more glazed than attentive. Bulcher's and Kelp's clothes were all messed up, and Kelp maybe had the beginnings of a black eye. There was a kind of subterranean tension in the room. "What's the matter?" he said.

May said, "John, tell us how you got out of the elevator shaft."

He frowned at May, he frowned at the others, he listened to the silence, and he knew. Looking at Kelp, he said, "Where is it?"

"Now, Dortmunder," Kelp said.

"Where is it?"

"Oh, dear," said Chefwick.

Murch said, "There was a fight in the theater."

"It wasn't anybody's fault," said Kelp.

Even Tiny Bulcher was looking abashed. "It was just one of those things," he said.

"WHERE IS IT?"

An electric silence. Dortmunder watched them stare at the floor, and finally it was Kelp who answered, in a tiny voice:

"We lost it."

"You lost it," Dortmunder said.

Then all of them were talking at once, explaining, justifying, telling the story from a thousand different directions, and Dortmunder just sat there, unmoving, stolid, letting it wash over him until at last they all ran down. In that next silence, Dortmunder sighed, but didn't speak, and May said, "John, can I freshen your drink?"

Dortmunder shook his head. There was no heat in him. "No, thanks, May," he said.

Kelp said, "Is there anything we can do?"

"If you don't mind," Dortmunder told him, "I'd like to be alone for a while."

"It wasn't anybody's fault," Kelp said. "It really wasn't."

"I'm not blaming you," Dortmunder said, and oddly enough it was the truth. He didn't blame anybody. Fatalism had captured another victim. "I just want to be alone for a while," he said, "and think about how I've got six months to live."

THE SECOND CHORUS

Chapter 1

Amid the merry flocks of Christmas shoppers, Dortmunder looked like some sort of rebuttal; the wet blanket's answer to Santa Claus. As he stood in the perfume department at Macy's, the word HUMBUG seemed to float in a balloon in the air over his head, and the eye he cast on the salesgirl would have to be called jaundiced. "What's that one?" he said.

The girl was holding a tiny glass phial shaped like a 1920's floor lamp without the shade; a spread-out pancake at the bottom, where the eighth of an ounce of perfume was, and then a long skinny neck with nothing in it at all, except the tube of the atomizer. "Ma Folie," said the girl. "It's French."

"Oh, yeah?"

"It means, 'My Folly.'"

"Yours, huh? Let me smell it again."

The girl had already sprayed a mite on her wrist, which she obediently re-extended in Dortmunder's direction. It felt weird to lean over and rest his nose on some unknown female's wrist – bony, gray-white skin, thin blue vein tracings – and all Dortmunder knew after he'd sniffed was the same as he'd learned last time; the stuff smelt sweet. He wouldn't have known Ma Folie from peach brandy. "How much is it?"

"Twenty-seven fifty."

"Twenty-seven dollars?"

"Foreign currency can be exchanged on the sixth floor," she told him.

Dortmunder frowned at her. "I don't have any foreign currency."

"Oh. I'm sorry, I thought… well, anyway. It costs twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents."

"I oughta knock this place over," Dortmunder muttered, and turned to look around at the store, the customers, the exits, the escalators – kinda casing the joint. But it wasn't any good, of course. They had private cops, closed-circuit TV, electric eyes, all kinds of sophisticated defenses. And the real cash would be kept in the offices, way upstairs; you'd never get out of the building, even if you managed the score.