“I don’t doubt it,” Dortmunder said.

“So let’s take a look at this floor here.”

They moved the cart as far back as possible, then got down on hands and knees and looked at the floor. It was plywood, four large sheets of plywood, screwed down and painted gray. They rapped the plywood with their knuckles, and the sound was flat, not echoing. They looked at each other, on all fours, like dogs meeting at the neighborhood fire hydrant, and then they got to their feet and Andy said, “Steel underneath.”

“I noticed that,” Dortmunder said.

“No trap door for access to the machinery or anything.”

“That’s right.”

“So the machinery’s probably up above.”

They looked upward, at the plain gray-painted roof of the elevator, and in the rear right quadrant were the clear outlines of a trap door. And in the trap door was a keyhole. “They’re beginning to annoy me,” Dortmunder said.

“Us guys don’t give up,” Andy said.

“That’s true,” Dortmunder said, “though I sometimes wonder why.”

“When the going gets tough,” Andy said, “the tough get an expert. I know when a lock is beyond my simple rustic skills. What we need is a lockman.”

“You want to bring somebody in?”

“Why not? What we pick up in that place down there we split three ways instead of two. You don’t care anyway, you just want your ring.”

“That’s also true,” Dortmunder admitted. “But a little profit would be nice.”

“I’ll see if Wally Whistler’s around,” Andy said, “or Ralph Winslow, they’re both good. I’ll show them the pictures in that magazine, they’ll pay us to come along.”

“I wouldn’t hold out for that,” Dortmunder said, and looked at the damn keyhole in the damn control panel. “Here we are, right here and all,” he said, “and the ring right down there underneath us. I can feel it.”

“We’ll get it,” Andy assured him, and looked at his watch and said, “But not tonight. Tomorrow night.” He turned to unlock the door to the corridor. “Tonight I kinda got an appointment, I wouldn’t want to be late.”

Dortmunder frowned at him. “An appointment? This time of night?”

“Well, New York, you know,” Andy said, and opened the door cautiously, and stuck his head out just a bit to see if the coast was clear, and nodded back at Dortmunder, “the city that never sleeps.”

Dortmunder followed him out to the corridor, and behind him the unmarked door snicked shut. “New York, the city with insomnia,” he said. “Is that a good idea?”

“See you tomorrow,” Andy said.

21

Most of the guests staying at the N-Joy Broadway Hotel, when they got up in the morning, went out sight-seeing, but not the Williamses. They got up and went out, like everybody else, but Mrs. Williams then became May Bellamy and went to work at the supermarket downtown, while Mr. Williams reverted to one John Dortmunder, who went home to East Nineteenth Street, where he did what he usually did at home all day long, which wasn’t much.

It had been agreed that Dortmunder and May would get together back at the hotel at six, to add another hotel meal to the credit card tab they were running up, and then wait for Andy Kelp and X Hour to arrive, which they figured to be midnight; this evening, they’d try not to fall asleep. So at about five-thirty, Dortmunder left the apartment, and when he opened the street door downstairs who was coming up the stoop but Gus Brock. “Hello,” Dortmunder said.

“Hello,” Gus said, and stopped there on the steps.

Dortmunder said, “This is not a coincidence, am I right?”

Gus scrinched up his eyes. “What isn’t a coincidence? I came over to see you.”

“That’s what I meant. I’m walking uptown.”

“Then so am I.”

They started walking together, and after they made the turn onto Third Avenue and headed uptown Gus said, “I read in Newsday where we scored pretty good out on the Island last week.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“That was us, wasn’t it? Took all that stuff from that big house in Carrport?”

“Us?” Dortmunder asked. “How do you figure ‘us’?”

“Well, you know, John,” Gus said, “you didn’t know about that place, I did. You didn’t know about the Chapter Eleven and all that, and I did.”

“Except the guy was there,” said Dortmunder. “So much for all your chapters.”

“It was our little job, John,” Gus said. “I’m just asking you to consider the situation and you’ll see it would be fair I should get a piece of this. Maybe not half, I’m not a greedy guy, but—”

Dortmunder stopped, on the sidewalk. People and traffic went by in all directions. He said, “Gus, you and I went out there to make a little visit and it didn’t happen. You went away—”

“John, don’t fault me,” Gus said. “You would’ve went away, too.”

“Absolutely,” Dortmunder said. “And I wouldn’t come to you afterward and say we did this and we did that.”

“Sure you would,” Gus said. “Can we walk, John? Where are we walking anyway?”

Dortmunder started walking again, and Gus kept pace. “Uptown,” Dortmunder said.

“Thank you. About us sharing—”

“No, Gus,” Dortmunder said. “That little visit stopped. You went away, and I was arrested.”

“Yeah, I read about that,” Gus said, and shook his head with empathetic concern. “Wow, that was a close one.”

“It wasn’t a close one,” Dortmunder said, “it was a direct hit. I was arrested.”

People going by looked at them, but kept going. Gus said, “You don’t have to shout about it, John, it isn’t like hitting the lottery or something.”

Patiently, calmly, Dortmunder said, “After I was arrested, I escaped. Nobody helped me, and especially you didn’t help me, I just—”

“Come on, John.”

“—escaped. And after I escaped I went back to that house, and that was a completely different visit, that didn’t have one thing to do with you. You were gone, and I was escaped, and it was a whole new start. So what I got was what I got and not what we got.”

They walked half a block in silence, Gus absorbing the philosophy of Dortmunder’s concept, and then he sighed and said, “John, we been friends a long time.”

“I would say,” Dortmunder said, “we’ve been associates a long time.”

“Okay, a little more precise, fine. I understand your position here, I’d be a little aggrieved at my partner, too, if the circumstances were reversed, but John I’m asking you to put yourself in my position for a minute. I’m still the guy that found the score, and I still have this like empty feeling that the score went down and I didn’t get bupkis for it.”

“You should’ve stuck around,” Dortmunder said, unsympathetically. “We could’ve escaped together.”

“John, you’re usually a reasonable kind of a guy.”

“I’m trying to break myself of that.”

“So that’s how you want to end it. Bad feelings all around.”

Again, Dortmunder stopped in the flow of pedestrian traffic to turn and frown at Gus, studying him, thinking it over. Gus faced him, being dignified, and finally Dortmunder said, “Did you hear about the ring?”

Gus looked bewildered. “Ring? What ring?”

I’m going to tell him the story, Dortmunder decided, and if he laughs that’s it, let him walk away. “It’s the reason I went back to the house,” he said.

“Which I thought, when I realized what must have happened,” Gus said, “was a very gutsy thing to do.”

“It was a very necessary thing to do,” Dortmunder told him, “given what happened.”

“Something happened?”

“After I was arrested, the cops asked the guy, did he take anything? And the guy said, he took my ring, he’s wearing my ring. And it was my ring, that May gave me, and the cops made me take it off and give it to the guy.”

Gus’s jaw dropped. “He stole your ring?”

Dortmunder watched him like a hawk. “That’s what happened.”