Nothing. Too far away, or too many walls and doors in between.

What if he were to open the door, just a tiny tiny little bit, maybe while down low on the floor, and stick the opener out at ground level and try it from there?

Anything was better than to stay in here. Dortmunder let go of the shower stall, fumbled around, found the doorknob, and used it for support while he went down on his knees and very slowly, carefully, silently opened the door. He was just about to stick the opener out when he realized he could see Perly's desk out there, and Perly wasn't sitting at it.

So where was he? Was he standing or sitting somewhere that he'd have a fine clear view of an arm sticking out of the bathroom, holding a garage door opener?

The door opened inward. Dortmunder scooted over a bit on his knees until he could open it farther, a little farther, and there was Perly, walking away toward an open shelf-filled closet, his arms full of large binders and his back toward Dortmunder.

Out. Shucking off the bath towel, out he went, on his knees, pulling the door almost closed behind himself. Without a sound, over to the desk he went, down out of Perly's sight, and crouched low to look under the desk.

Over there, beyond the desk and across the polished wood floor, Perly's feet had turned around from that closet and were crossing the room. The feet stopped, then reversed and headed for the closet again, so that his back would be toward both Dortmunder and the doorway out of here.

Dortmunder's run was not graceful, but it got there. Out of Perly's office he galumphed, and paused at the closed outer office door to put the opener away. Then he eased open that door, slid through, admired the Lamborghini parked there for about a fifth of a second, and headed down the ramp.

How to get out of the building. He could just say the hell with it and open the noisy garage door and make a run for it. Or he could hope to get through that other door without attracting Perly's notice upstairs. Or he might go down to the basement and out the back way and see if he could find Kelp's apartment with all the art treasures. Get at least something to show for the night's work.

At the foot of the ramp, he decided the hell with it, let's just get gone, and was reaching in his pocket for the opener when, from his left, Kelp's voice did a loud whisper: "John!"

He turned. All four of his partners in alleged crime were over there, by the stairs that led down to the basement. Kelp gestured to him to come over, so he did and said, "I thought you people were long gone."

"I was," Tiny said. "Perly see you up there?"

"No," Dortmunder said. "But I left a towel on the floor, he might notice that."

Stan said, "Your pants are wet."

"I know," Dortmunder told him. "I'm well aware of that."

Judson said, "So does this mean it's a go again?"

Dortmunder looked around. Perly was upstairs and hadn't been spooked. Nothing else had changed. "Well, how do you like that," he said. "We go back to Plan A."

54

OPERATION CHESS GAMBIT went off, at least in its earlier parts, without a hitch. The operation, code-named personally by Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna of the NYPD before he'd taken himself off to his home, his wife and his comfortable and capacious bed in Bay Shore, Long Island, began at eleven o'clock, when, just exactly on time, two uniformed and armed operatives of the Continental Detective Agency, plus two of the agency's technical people, rang the street bell at Jacques Perly's office and, having identified themselves through the intercom, were granted admittance. Their unmarked small van drove up the curving ramp, parked next to the Lamborghini, and for the next fifty minutes Perly and the two operatives contented themselves with awkward conversation while the tech people laid out their special gadgets, including sensors on the windows and on the trapdoor to the roof.

When they were finished, the tech people turned their van around with some difficulty, due to the Lamborghini taking up so much of the available space, and at last, after a lot of backing and filling, they drove down the ramp and away. Perly spent another ten minutes giving the operatives last-minute instructions about what was on-limits and what was off-limits in this office — he'd noticed that one of them had already managed to drop a bath towel on the floor — and then he turned the Lamborghini around with not much trouble at all, because he didn't have a second vehicle to contend with and was in any event used to the space, and also drove away, headed for Westchester.

Once Perly was gone, one of the operatives phoned a fellow operative standing by up at the C&I International bank building, to tell him everything was ready for the cargo to be transferred, and then both found themselves comfortable places to sit and curl up with their books. Being a Continental operative could be slow work if you weren't a reader.

Meantime, up in the Bronx, the armored car drove out of the Securivan secure garage facility a few minutes early, at 12:25, and made terrific time coming down to midtown Manhattan, arriving at the C&I International building at 1:10, nearly an hour ahead of schedule. The driver chatted for a while with the four Continental operatives there, all uniformed and armed, who would be doing the heavy lifting, and then somebody said, "Listen, why wait till two o'clock? We're here now, the guys are ready downtown, let's call the cops and tell them we're starting now."

Everybody thought that was a good idea. Get the job done early, get home before sunup. So the NYPD was called, and by the time the Continental operatives, assisted by the guy from the bank, had the chess set mounted on its dolly and brought up out of the vault and across the lobby floor to the entrance there were four patrol cars in position out front.

Sometimes a task has a lot of screwups and irritations in it, but every once in a while you've got a job to do and everything works just fine, not a single problem, and that's how this chess set move went, at least for a while. There was no trouble moving the set, no trouble installing it in the armored car with the four operatives on the bench in there to guard it, and no trouble driving down the mostly deserted streets, accompanied now by only one patrol car.

They arrived at Jacques Perly's building at 1:27 exactly. One of the Continentals in with the chess set radioed the guards upstairs to open the garage door, which they did by pushing the button they'd been shown on the secretary's desk, and down in the basement the five poker players jumped up and said, "What's that? It's the garage door! It isn't even one-thirty!"

They had planned to relieve the guards of their duties and their uniforms at two o'clock, which would have given them a solid half-hour before the chess set would arrive. Fuming, Stan said, "Doesn't anybody keep to a goddam schedule?"

"Only us," Dortmunder said. "Come on, let's see what this is."

The five hurried up the stairs just in time to watch the armored car nose into the building and groan tentatively up the ramp, while outside the patrol car went about its business, its nursing detail done. The five stared, all hope gone. This was disaster. They absolutely had to get their hands on that goddam chess set before it got into that impossible circle of security inside Perly's office, that was the whole point here.

Over there on the ramp the armored car, angled upward like a turtle crawling over a log, stopped. It moved backward a little, then stopped. It moved forward a little, and very loud scraping sounds were heard. It stopped, moved backward, hitched itself around like a fat man adjusting his shorts, moved forward, and reproduced the scrape sound effect.

"It's too big," Judson said. He sounded stunned.