Stan Murch and Tiny Bulcher and Andy Kelp phoned from time to time, or dropped by, to see how things were going. “I can’t talk,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp over the phone at one point. “I don’t want Tom to get a busy signal when he calls.”

“I been telling you, John,” Kelp said. “You need call-waiting.”

“No, Andy.”

“And a cellular phone you can carry with you, so you can leave the house.”

“No, I don’t, Andy.”

“And a kitchen extension. I could—”

“Leave me alone, Andy,” Dortmunder said, and hung up.

Finally, late on the second day, Tom called, sounding very far away. “Where are you?” Dortmunder asked, imagining Tom in North Dudson, just off the Thruway exit.

“On the phone,” Tom answered. “It’s up to you, Al, to tell me why I’m on the phone.”

“Well, uhhhh, Tom,” Dortmunder said, and listened to hear what he would have to say next, and didn’t hear anything at all.

“Hello? Is this line dead?”

“No, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I’m here.”

“You’re gonna be all alone there in a second, Al,” Tom warned him. “I got a lot of—Goddamn it!” he suddenly shouted, apparently turning away from the phone to yell at somebody else at wherever he was. Raucous voices were heard in the background, and then Tom’s voice, still aimed away from the phone, snarling, “Because I say so, snowbird! Just sit there till I’m off the phone!” Then, louder again in Dortmunder’s ear, “Al? You still there?”

“Oh, sure,” Dortmunder said. “Tom, uh, is that your, uh, have you got your guys to help on the—”

“Well, naturally, Al,” Tom said, sounding jaunty. “And we’re all kinda anxious to get going, you know. In fact, I’m having a tiny discipline problem at the moment with this one nose jockey here. So if you could just go ahead and spit it out, you know, we could get on the road.”

“Well, the thing is, Tom,” Dortmunder said, gripping the phone hard, willing himself to keep talking whether he had anything to say or not, “the thing is, I’ve been sort of regretting how I gave up on that, uh, reservoir job. I mean, you know me, Tom, I’m not a quitter.”

“Lotta water there, Al,” Tom said, sounding almost sympathetic; for him, that is. “Too much water to get through, you were right about that. No sweat, no problem, nothing for you to feel bad about. Cost me a couple months, but that’s okay, it was kinda interesting watching you and your pals at work.”

“Well, the thing is, Tom—”

“But now, Al, now I gotta do it right. Mexico’s calling, Al.”

“Tom, I want to—”

But Tom was off again, yelling at his companion or companions. Dortmunder waited it out, licking his lips, grasping the phone, and when Tom finally finished with his discipline problem, Dortmunder said, very quickly, “Tom, you know May. She moved up there, to Dudson Center. She’s gonna stay there.”

Was that a mistake? Maybe I shouldn’t have let him know I had a personal stake in the situation. Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?

Tom, after the briefest of pauses, said, “Well, well. Putting the pressure on you, eh, is she, Al?”

“Kind of,” Dortmunder admitted. It was a mistake.

“You know, Al,” Tom said, “I got a philosophy that maybe might help you at this time.”

“You do?”

“That’s right. There’s more than one woman in this world, Al, but there’s only one you.”

A bad mistake. “Tom,” Dortmunder said, “I really want to make one more try. Just bear with me once more, don’t blow the dam—”

“On accounta May.” Tom’s voice was always icy cold, but somehow right now it sounded even colder.

“On account of,” Dortmunder told him, “my professional, uh, pride is at stake here. I don’t want to be defeated by the problem. Also, you said yourself, you’d be happier without the massive manhunt.”

“That’s true, Al,” Tom said, still with that absolute-zero voice. “But let us say, just for argument, Al, just let us say I’m gonna go ahead and get this over with. And let us say you can’t, no matter what you do, you just can’t yank that woman of yours out from in front of the dam. Now, Al, just for the sake of argument here, would you find yourself tempted to make a little anonymous phone call to the law?”

Dortmunder’s hand, slippery with sweat, trembled on the phone. “I’d hate to have to face that problem, Tom,” he said. “And I just think there’s still a way we can do the job without the, uh, fuss.”

“Uh-huh. Hold it, Al.”

Dortmunder waited, listening. Thunk of phone onto a hard surface. Voices off, raised in anger. Sudden crashing of furniture, heavy objects—bodies? — thudding and bumping. Silence, just as sudden.

“Al? You there?”

“I’m here, Tom.”

“I think I must be slowing down,” Tom said. “Okay, I see your problem, Al.”

“That’s why I want to—”

“And I see my problem.”

Dortmunder waited, breathing through his mouth. I’m his problem, he thought. In the background, at Tom’s end of the line, whining voices complained.

His own voice now like thin sharp wires, Tom said, “Maybe we ought to have a talk, Al, you and me. Maybe you ought to come here.”

I have to talk him out of it, Dortmunder thought. Somehow. Knowing exactly what Tom had in mind, he said, “Sure, Tom, that’s a good idea.”

“I’m on Thirteenth Street,” Tom said.

Well, that was appropriate. “Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

“Off Avenue C.”

“Rough neighborhood, that,” Dortmunder suggested.

“Oh, yeah?” Tom said, as though he hadn’t noticed. “Anyway, between C and D. Four-ninety-nine East Thirteenth Street.”

“Which bell do I ring?”

Tom chuckled, like ice cubes rattling. “There’s no locks around here anymore, Al,” he said. “You just come in, come up to the top floor. We’ll have a good long talk, just you and me.”

“Right, Tom,” Dortmunder said, through dry lips. “See you—koff, kah—see you soon.”

FORTY-NINE

Dortmunder plodded up black slate stairs, his left hand on the rough iron railing, right hand clutching a two-foot-long chunk of two-by-three he’d picked up from a dumpster on the street a couple blocks from here. Not for Tom, but for whomever he might meet along the way.

Which was, so far, nobody. Scurrying sounds preceded him up the stairwell, scuffling noises followed, but no one actually appeared as Dortmunder slogged steadily upward through a building that any World-War-II-in-Europe movie could have been shot in, if nobody stole the camera. Great bites had been taken out of the plaster walls, leaving dirty crumbly white wounds in the gray-green skin. At every level the corridor windows, fore and aft, were mostly broken out, some leaving jagged glass teeth, others patched with six-pack cardboard and masking tape. The white hexagonal tile floors had apparently been systematically beaten with sledge hammers over a period of many months, then smeared with body fluids and sprinkled with medical waste. That the bare light bulbs dangling from the corridor ceilings had once been enclosed in white glass globes was indicated by the amount of white ground glass mixed with the rest of the trash on the floors.

The apartment doors were dented metal, some painted brown, some gray, many without knobs or locks. From the cooking smells emerging through these sprung doorways, most of the tenants planned to have rat for lunch. Rounding the turn at the third floor, Dortmunder heard a baby wailing from some apartment nearby and nodded, muttering, “You’re right about that, kid.” Then he thumped on up.

The building was six stories high, the maximum height when it was thrown up for a building without an elevator. The stairwell, a square shaft cored from its gangrenous center, consisted of two half-flights per story; up to a landing, double back to the next floor. Dortmunder was just rounding the turn at floor five and a half when a sudden fusillade of gunfire roared out above him. “Yi!” he cried, and dropped to the filthy steps, shielding his head with the two-by-three. Wasn’t Tom even going to give him a minute to talk?