34

A BLUSTERY SUNDAY IN March, and Dortmunder and Kelp trudged back across the snowy warehouse roof, following their own reversed footsteps toward the distant fire escape. They were dressed in black parkas with the hoods up, black wool trousers, black leather gloves and black boots, and the wind snaked through it all anyway. The plastic backpacks they wore, also black, were just as empty as when they'd come up onto this roof, and they were going to stay that way, at least for today.

It was Kelp who'd lined up the customer for the video games said to be stacked like candy bars in the warehouse below, and it was this customer who'd told them everything they needed to know to effect entry to the place from above. Everything, that is, except the existence of the two pit bulls down there, gleaming like devils in the safety light.

At first, Kelp had suggested they might be a hologram: "It's a video game place, why not?"

"Go down and pet one," Dortmunder suggested, so that was that. While the pit bulls stared upward, yearning to be best friends but unable to climb the steel rungs mounted on the wall, Dortmunder and Kelp quietly closed the trapdoor they'd opened and turned back, empty-handed. Days like this one could be discouraging.

All at once the opening chords of Beethoven's Ninth burst across the windy air. Dortmunder dropped to the snowy roof, staring around in panic for the orchestra, and then realized Kelp was fumbling in his trouser pocket and murmuring, "Sorry, sorry."

"Sorry?"

"It's my new ringtone," Kelp explained while, without a pause, the invisible orchestra leaped back to the beginning and started all over again.

"Ringtone."

"I usually," Kelp said, finally managing to drag the cell phone out of his pocket, "keep it on vibrate."

"I don't want to know about it," Dortmunder said.

Kelp made the racket go away, put the machine to his head, and said, "Hello?"

Dortmunder turned away, brushing himself free of dirty snow and reorienting himself vis-a-vis the fire escape, when Kelp said, "Yeah, hold on, wait a minute," then extended the phone toward Dortmunder with a very strange expression on his face: "It's for you."

Dortmunder didn't believe it. "For me? Whadaya mean? People don't go around calling me on roofs!"

"He doesn't know where you are," Kelp said. "It's Eppick. Come on, it's for you."

Eppick. Dortmunder hadn't thought of that guy in three months, and had been perfectly prepared to never think of him again, but here was this phone, on this roof, with snowy wind all around, and he was supposed to talk to Johnny Eppick For Hire.

So all right. He took the phone: "Yar?"

"You don't have a cell."

"No thanks to you."

"That's pretty cute," Eppick said. "You weren't at home, you don't have an answering machine either, you might not even have indoor plumbing for all I know. I was gonna leave a message with your friend, call me, but here you are."

"I have indoor plumbing."

"Glad to hear it. Mr. Hemlow is back."

"No. I don't want him back."

"But this is good news," Eppick said. "The granddaughter has maybe come through after all. I don't know the details yet. Mr. Hemlow wants to lay it on the two of us."

Dortmunder was about to say no, he hadn't found much profit in his dealings with the firm of Hemlow & Eppick, and besides, Eppick no longer possessed those overly candid photos, but then he thought about the pit bulls to whom he'd so recently been introduced, and his other current prospects, which added up to a round nil, and he thought there might be worse roads to travel than the one that led back to Mr. Hemlow, with whom, at least, with luck, he would not be bit.

But there had to be conditions. "No more taxis."

"I understand, John," Eppick said. "I tell you what. Tell me where you are now, I'll come pick you up."

Dortmunder shook his head. Some days, you just can't win. "I'll take a cab," he said.

Dortmunder stepped into the Riverside Drive lobby as Eppick rose from the rhinoceros-horn chair and dropped somebody's New York Post on the seat. The green-uniformed doorman welcomed Dortmunder like an old stranger: "The other gentleman—"

"I remember him."

Eppick stepped forward, serious-faced, arm out as though to shake hands, about which Dortmunder was very ambivalent, but then fortunately he only wanted to grasp Dortmunder's elbow and say, "A word, John, before we go upstairs."

"Sure."

They strolled to a rear corner of the lobby among the oriental rugs on both floor and walls, and Eppick said, "As far as I'm concerned, you know, bygones are bygones."

"That's nice," Dortmunder said.

"Fortunately," Eppick said, "my insurance covered almost everything."

"That's nice."

"And it was a good learning experience, to know where I had to beef up security."

"That's nice."

Eppick peered closely into Dortmunder's face, still holding, though not tightly, Dortmunder's left elbow. "You know what I'm talking about."

"No."

"That's fine, then," Eppick said, and released his elbow to give him a friendly, if perhaps slightly hostile, whack. "Let's go up and have Mr. Hemlow give us the good news."

There was a new extraneous green-uniformed operator hovering over the controls in the elevator. Dortmunder nodded at him. "Harya."

"Sir."

"The other guy go on to pilot's school?"

"I wouldn't know, sir. I'm new here."

"You'll get the hang of it," Dortmunder assured him.

The doorman leaned his head in to tell the newbie, "The penthouse."

"Yes, sir."

So, to the penthouse they went, and there in his wheelchair was Mr. Hemlow, about whom the best you could say was that he probably didn't look any worse. Or not much worse.

"Welcome to you both," Mr. Hemlow said, nodding that head that looked as though it might roll off the medicine ball at any minute. Below, the busy leg tangoed.

"Nice to see you, Mr. Hemlow," Eppick said, and Dortmunder contented himself with a nod, deciding to let Eppick have spoken for both of them.

"Well, come along."

Apparently, everybody was friends again, because the speeding wheelchair led them back to the view and the two chairs side by side. Once they were there, Mr. Hemlow said, "May I offer you two something to drink?"

This was something new, a level of sociability heretofore unknown. Dortmunder might have tried his luck on a bourbon request, but Eppick said, "Oh, we're fine, Mr. Hemlow. So things worked out well for Fiona, did they?"

"Very well indeed." That head might be beaming, in grandfatherly pride. "It seems that Mrs. Livia Northwood Wheeler," he said, "the person Fiona improperly approached, blamed herself for Fiona's being fired, sought her out to be sure she'd be all right, and, in a word, hired her as a personal assistant."

"No kidding!" Eppick loved it.

Mr. Hemlow chuckled, or something. "At an actual increase in pay," he said. "Not much, but some."

"That's great, Mr. Hemlow."

"But that's only the beginning," Mr. Hemlow told him. "Although I'd assured Fiona, and it was the truth, that I had no further interest in the stolen chess set, she now felt she might be in a position to help us all lay our hands on it."

"That would be something," Eppick said.

"Yes, it would. Not wanting to risk her reputation even further, Fiona operated very slowly and carefully, gradually inculcating in Mrs. Wheeler's mind the idea that there just might be something not entirely on the up-and-up about that chess set."

Interested, Eppick said, "How'd she work that, Mr. Hemlow?"

"There was the difference in weight between the rooks," Mr. Hemlow said. "Also, the lack of provenance from before its appearance in Alfred Northwood's possession. Northwood had no family, no money, no discernible background, all matters of supreme significance to a woman like Mrs. Wheeler. Where had this supposedly so valuable object come from?"