19

A WEDNESDAY NIGHT, just one week since the organizational meeting at the OJ, and Dortmunder and Kelp were walking, not for the first time in their lives, on a roof. It was the roof of the GR Development building, sixty feet above Varick Street, and out around them the night was well advanced, it now being not quite four in the morning.

It was a cloudy night, not cold, and not particularly dark. The city generates its own illumination, and on cloudy nights that glow is reflected down onto the streets and parks and rooftops, for a soft Impressionist cityscape.

Dortmunder and Kelp, dressed in dark grays to blend into the prevailing color scheme, walked the roof above Varick Street and looked around to see what they could see. The building they stood on was flanked by two much larger, taller, heftier structures extending both ways to the corner. To the north was the stone pile containing the Chase bank at basement level and street level and one level up. From the look of the many sentry lights visible in the upper windows, most of the tenants above Chase had also thought long and hard about the issue of security.

To the south, the other building’s ground floor housed a restaurant supply wholesaler, whose strategy in the realm of security lighting was one illuminated wall clock at the rear of the showroom, in the pink glow of which were tumbled all the fast-food counters, bartops, banquettes, ovens, walk-in freezers, and wooden cases of dinnerware recently collected from enterprises that had unfortunately stumbled into nonexistence and whose gear was now awaiting the next hopeful entrepreneur with a certified check in his pocket. The floors above this bric-a-brac were uniformly dark except for the red neon EXIT sign the fire code requires at every level.

That had been Dortmunder and Kelp’s route in. A low-security door on the side street, leading to the woks and barstools, had given them easy access to the building and then its stairwell and eventually the sixth-floor office of an olive oil importer through whose window they had stepped to get here on the roof.

There were several protuberances on this roof, and all were of interest, but the most interesting of all was the three-foot-by-five-foot cinder-block box, seven feet tall, in the left rear corner. This would be the terminus of the iron staircase that zigzagged up the interior. Inside that gray metal door would be the top of that staircase, and down that staircase would be GR Development, and then Scenery Stars, and then Knickerbocker Storage, and then, last but far from least, Combined Tool.

While Dortmunder held a shrouded flashlight to marginally increase the illumination, Kelp studied the staircase door, bending over it, squinting at it, not quite touching it. “It’s got an alarm on it,” he decided.

“We knew that,” Dortmunder said.

“It looks like it’s connected to a phone line,” Kelp said. “So it won’t make a lotta noise right around here.”

“That’s good.”

“It’ll do something somewhere, though. Lemme see what we can do here.”

While Kelp continued to study the problem before him, Dortmunder braced his wrist against the doorjamb to keep his light beam steady while he studied the world around them. Although he saw many lit windows in the wall above the Chase bank, it didn’t appear to him that any of those rooms were currently occupied. The windows in the wall down the other way were dark, and the buildings across Varick Street were too far away to matter, so it seemed to Dortmunder they were unobserved at this moment and would be likely to go on being unobserved anytime they happened to come up here at three-thirty in the morning. It was a reassuring thought.

While he was thinking, Kelp was taking from one of his many pockets a short length of wire bounded at each end by an alligator clip. The first clip he attached quickly to a bolt head jutting from the door just above the lock and handle. Then he thought a while before attaching the other to a screw head on the door frame. Nodding in agreement with himself, he took another wire from another pocket, this one with an earphone at one end and what looked like a stethoscope at the other. Earphone into his ear, he listened at a wire on the door, then said, “Listen to this.”

Dortmunder took the thingy and listened at the same wire. “It’s a little hum.”

“That’s right. If it stops humming when I cut this here, we go.”

“Gotcha.”

Dortmunder listened intently. Kelp watched intently, clipper in hand, and snipped a wire.

“Still humming.”

“We like that,” Kelp said.

Now Kelp worked with more confidence. The alarm wires led to a metal plate on the door that extended beyond the edge of the door to its metal frame. If the door were opened, the plate would lose contact with the frame and sound the alarm, somewhere, to somebody.

As Dortmunder stepped back to give him room, Kelp loosened the plate and turned it so its contact was only with the metal door. The ends of the wire he’d snipped he bent back and stuck to the door with bits of nonreflecting electrical tape. He studied what he’d done, then nodded and said, “Listen some more.”

“Right. Still humming.”

“If it stops, we’re outa here.”

“You bet.”

Kelp turned his attention to the lock on the door. Needle-nose pliers and a thin metal plate came from more of Kelp’s pockets. The faint humming in Dortmunder’s ear was really very soothing, and then the door eased open, outward. Kelp cocked an eye at Dortmunder, who, ear to earphone and stethoscope to wire, had moved with the door.

Dortmunder nodded. “Humming.”

“We’re done.”

Kelp pocketed his equipment and then, by Dortmunder’s muffled flashlight, they went down the iron stairs, closing the roof door behind themselves. At the bottom of that flight, GR Development, they started confidently forward and then abruptly stopped.

“It’s different,” Kelp said.

“It’s all walls or something,” Dortmunder said, shining the light around.

“We need more light,” Kelp decided.

Guided by the stone side building wall, they worked their way around the newly obstructed space until they came across light switches, which turned on glaring overhead fluorescents, and in that light they could see these several pieces of walls, all eight or ten feet high, rough wood or canvas, propped up with angled two-by-fours nailed into the floor.

“It’s like a set,” Kelp said.

“From the wrong side,” Dortmunder said. “Is there a way in?”

There was. Around the rough unfinished wall they came to an opening, and now they could see that what had been built was a broad but shallow three-walled room without a ceiling. A dark wood bar, a little beat-up, stretched along the back wall, on which were mounted beer posters and mirrors that had been smeared with something that looked like soap, so they wouldn’t reflect. A jumble of bottles filled the back bar, plus a cash register at the right end. Barstools in a row looked as though they’d come directly from the wholesale restaurant supply place next door, and so did the two tables and eight chairs in the grouping in front of the bar. At the right end of the bar stood two pinball machines, and at the left end a doorway into darkness.

Kelp, in wonder, said, “It’s the OJ.”

“Well, it isn’t the OJ,” Dortmunder said.

“No, I know it isn’t,” Kelp said, “but that’s what they’re going for.”

“Pinball machines?”

“I know what Doug would say,” Kelp told him. “Visual interest.”

“You can’t talk next to a pinball machine.”

“They won’t have pinball machines in the back room,” Kelp said.

“Let’s take a look at it.”

But the space at the left end of the bar didn’t lead to anything but a canvas wall painted a flat black. Standing in front of it, they looked at one another and Kelp said, “It’s gonna be some of these other walls.”