What's So Funny (7 page)

Andy Kelp, a bony sharp–nosed guy in nonreflecting black, tended to blend in with the shadows at night when he moved from this place to that place. The place he was moving around in at the moment was just beyond the chain–link perimeter fence enclosing the mosque construction site, now temporarily on hold while the recently transplanted community got up to speed on the New York City culture and ethos.

And the reason Andy Kelp was moving around here at night was that, while he still thought the idea of heisting something this size and weight, particularly from people who have been known to be slightly hotheaded in the past, was a terrible notion, the one thing he didn’t have was John Dortmunder’s opinion. He was pretty sure John would see the scheme the same way everybody else did, but unfortunately John hadn’t been at the meeting in the back room of the O.J. to put his stamp of disapproval personally on the idea, having been waylaid by some cop.

So, because of that gap in the chain of evidence, and because he wasn’t doing much of anything else at the moment, he’d borrowed a car from East Thirtieth Street in Manhattan and driven out here to Brooklyn to give the golden dome the double–o. He was now coming to the conclusion that his first conclusion had been right all along, as expected, when the phone vibrated against his leg — silence can be more golden than any dome — so he pulled it out and said, “Yar.”

“You busy?” The very John Dortmunder whose absence last night had brought him out here.

“Not really,” Kelp said. “You?”

“We could maybe talk.”

Surprised, Kelp said, “About the job?”

Sounding surprised, John said, “Yeah.”

Kelp took a step back to study the dome from a slightly different angle, and it still seemed to him too big and too unwieldy and just downright too unlikely, so he said, “You mean, you want to do it?”

“Well, I got no choice.”

So John felt compelled to go after all this gold; think of that. Kelp said, “To tell you the truth, I was thinking, you cut a piece off it, could be,” though he hadn’t thought of that till this very minute. But if John believed there might be something in this gold mountain, that could get Kelp’s creative juices flowing, too. “Is that your idea,” he asked, “or what?”

“Cut a piece off
what?
”

“The dome,” Kelp said. “You’ll never get the whole dome, John, I’m looking at it and —”

“The dome? You mean, Stan’s Islamic dome?”

“Isn’t that what you’re talking about?”

“And you’re
out
there with it? You’re whacking
pieces
off it?”

“No, I’m just giving it the good lookover, the whada we see when we see this idea.”

“Stan there?”

“No, I just come out by myself, spur of the moment kinda thing. I don’t wanna encourage Stan, get his hopes up. John,
aren’t
you talking about the dome?”

“You think I’m a moron?”

“No, John, but you said —”

“You wanna meet? You wanna talk? Or you wanna stay out there and cut filets outa the dome?”

“I’m on my way, John. Where and when?”

“O.J., ten. It’s just the two of us, so we won’t need the back room.”

“So it isn’t a solid job yet.”

“Oh, it’s solid,” John told him. “And I’m under it.”

“You’re wrong about that,” the second regular told him. “You happen to be confusing that one with that guy George Laserby, he was the Bond only that one time — What was it called?”

Dortmunder angled toward the other end of the bar, where Rollo the bartender repetitively rag–wiped one spot on the bar’s surface as though he believed that’s where the genie lived, while a third regular said, “
In His Majesty’s Secret Police.
”

The second regular frowned, as Dortmunder almost reached the bar: “Wasn’t that Timothy Danton?”

The third regular frowned right back: “Timothy who?”

“Danton. The polite one.”

“No, no,” the first regular said. “This is much earlier, and, it’s a laser, not a laserby, a light that slices you in half.”

The third regular remained bewildered: “This is a
light?
”

“It’s green.”

“You’re thinking,” the second regular told him, “of
Star Wars.
”

“Rollo,” Dortmunder said.

“Forget
Star Wars,
” the first regular said. “It was a laser, and it was green. Wasn’t the bad guy Doctor No?”

“Doctor Maybe Not,” said the joker. There’s a joker in every crowd.

“Rollo,” Dortmunder explained, and Rollo came slowly up from REM sleep, stopped his rag–wiping, focused on Dortmunder, and said, “Two nights in a row. You could become a regular.”

“Maybe not,” Dortmunder said, echoing the joker, though not on purpose. “But tonight, yeah. Just me and the other bourbon.” Because Rollo knew his customers by their drink, which he felt was the way to inspire consumer loyalty.

“Happy to see you both,” Rollo said.

“It’s just the two of us, so we don’t need the back room.”

“Woody
Allen,
” demanded the ever–perplexed third regular, “played James
Bond?
”

“I think that was him,” said the second regular, showing a rare moment of regular doubt.

“Fine,” said Rollo, and went away to prepare a tray containing two glasses with ice cubes and a full bottle bearing a label that read
Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon
— ‘Our Own Brand’. “Drink it in good health,” he said, and pushed the tray across the genie.

“Thanks.”

Dortmunder turned around, carrying the tray, looked to choose just the right booth, and Kelp appeared in the bar doorway. He entered, saw Dortmunder, gazed around the room, and pointed at the booth next to him, the one where last night — just last night! — Dortmunder had met his personal ex–cop doom.

The same booth? Well, the farther from the Bondsmen the better. Dortmunder shrugged: Okay.

Once they were seated facing one another and their glasses were no longer empty, Kelp said, “This is about that cop.”

“You know it. Johnny Eppick For Hire.”

“How much of that is his name?”

“The front half.”

“So he used to be a cop,” Kelp suggested, “and now he’s a private eye.”

“Or whatever. He’s working for a rich guy that wants this valuable heavy golden chess set that just happens to be in a sub–basement bank vault in midtown.”

“Forget it,” Kelp advised.

“I’d like to,” Dortmunder said. “Only he’s got pictures of me in a compromising position.”

“Oh, yeah?” Kelp seemed very interested. “What, is he gonna show them to May?”

“Not that kind,” Dortmunder said. “The kind he could show to the cops that didn’t retire yet.”

“Oh.” Kelp nodded. “Miami could be nice, this time of year.”

“I was thinking Chicago. Only, Eppick thought of it, too. He says, him and the Internet and his cop buddies would find me anywhere I went, and I believe him.”

“How much time you got?”

“Before my arrest, arraignment, plea bargain, and bus ride north?” Dortmunder shrugged. “I can stall a little, I guess. But Eppick is leaning, and the guy he works for is old and sick and wouldn’t be interested in any long–term plans.”

“Sheesh.” Kelp shook his head. “I hate to say this, but better you than me.”

“Don’t hate to say it,” Dortmunder advised him, “because you’re already kinda involved.”

Kelp didn’t like that. “You two’ve been talking about me?”

“He already knows you,” Dortmunder said. “He researched me or something. Last night, when he left here, he looked down toward you and said, ‘Give my hello to Andy Kelp’. He knows about Arnie Albright. He knows us all.”

“I don’t like this,” Kelp said. “I don’t like your friend Eppick even
thinking
about me.”

“Oh, is that how it is?” Dortmunder wanted to know. “Now he’s my friend?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

Kelp looked around the room, as though to fix the location more securely in his mind. “You asked me to meet you here tonight,” he said. “Now I get it, you asked me here because you want me to help. So when are you gonna ask me to help?”

“There is no help,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp slowly sipped some of his bourbon, while gazing at Dortmunder over the glass. Then he put the glass down and continued to gaze at Dortmunder.

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Help.”

“Sure,” Kelp said. “Where is this bank vault?”

“C&I International, up on Fifth Avenue.”

“That’s a big bank,” Kelp said. He sounded faintly alarmed.

“It’s a big building,” Dortmunder said. “Underneath it is a sub–basement, and in the sub–basement is the chess set that’s out to ruin my life.”

“I could go up tomorrow,” Kelp offered, “and take a look.”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I’d like you to do something else tomorrow.”

Looking hopeful, Kelp said, “You already got a plan?”

“No, I already got a disaster.” Dortmunder drank some of his own bourbon, more copiously than Kelp had, and said, “Let me say first, this Eppick already figures you’re in. He said to me today, ‘I suppose you’ll work with your pal Andy Kelp’.”

“Conversations about me,” Kelp said, and shivered.

“I know. I feel the same way. But here’s the thing. It’s just as important you get to see this Eppick as it is you get to see some bank building.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Dortmunder said, “in the rich guy’s limo, we’re going upstate somewhere, Eppick and me, to see if what the rich guy called his compound is secure enough for us to stash the chess set after we ha–ha lift it.”

“You want me to ride upstate tomorrow,” Kelp said, “in a limo with you and Eppick.”

“And a chauffeur.”

Kelp contemplated that, while back at the bar, “Shaken but not slurred!” piped the joker.

Kelp observed his glass, but did not drink. “And why,” he wanted to know, “am I doing this?”

“Maybe we’ll learn something.”

“Nothing we want to know, I bet.” Kelp did knock back a little more bourbon. “What time are we doing this foolish thing?”

“It’ll be ready when you get here.”

“Should I stop and get anything?” By which she meant wine.

“No, I got everything we need.” By which he meant he’d bought wine on his way home from the studio.

“See you, hon.”

“See you, hon.”

The interior of Feinberg et al maintained the same lighting twenty–four hours a day, since only the partners and associates had offices around the perimeter of the building, and thus windows. In the rest of the space you might as well have been in a spaceship far off in the emptiness of the universe. The only differences at ten p.m., when Fiona moved through the cubicles to the elevator bank, were that the receptionist’s desk was empty, the latest Botox Beauty having left at five, and that Fiona needed her employee ID card to summon and operate the elevator. It wasn’t, in fact, until she’d left the elevator and the lobby and the building itself that she found herself back on Earth, where it was nighttime, with much traffic thundering by on Fifth Avenue.

Her route home was as certain as a bowling alley gutter. Walk across Fifth Avenue and down the long block to Sixth and the long block to Seventh and the short block to Broadway. Then up two blocks to the subway, where she would descend, swipe the MetroCard until it recognized itself, and then descend some more and wait for the uptown local, riding it to Eighty–Sixth Street. Another walk, one block up and half a block over, and she entered her apartment building, where she chose a different card from her bulging wallet — this was three cards for one trip — in order to gain admittance, then took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the long hall to 4–D. That same third card also let her into the apartment, where the smell of Oriental food — was that Thai? the smell of peanuts? — was the most welcoming thing in her day.

“Honey, I’m home!” she called, which they both thought of as their joke, and he came grinning out of the galley kitchen with a dishtowel tucked in around his waist and a glass of red wine in each hand. As tall as she was short, and as blond as she was raven–haired, Brian had wide bony shoulders but was otherwise as skinny as a stray cat, with a craggy handsome face that always maintained some caution down behind the good cheer.

“Home is the hunter,” he greeted her, which was another part of the joke, and handed over a glass.

They kissed, they clinked glasses, they sipped the wine, which they didn’t know any better than to believe was pretty good, and then he went back to the kitchen to plate their dinners while she stood leaning in the doorway to say, “How was your day?”

“Same old same old,” he said, which was what he usually said, though sometimes there were tidbits of interest he would share with her, just as she would with him.

Since he worked for a cable television company, Brian actually had more frequent tidbits to offer than she did. He was an illustrator there, assembling collages and occasionally doing original artwork, all to be background for different things the cable station would air. He belonged to some sort of show business writers union, though she didn’t quite see how what he did counted as writing, but it meant that, though his income was a fraction of hers, his hours were much more predictable — and shorter — than hers. She thought wistfully from time to time that it might be nice to be in a union and get home at six at night instead of ten–thirty, but she knew it was a class thing: Lawyers would never stoop to protect themselves.

Brian brought their dinners out to the table in what they called the big room, though it wasn’t that big. Even so, they’d crowded into it a sofa, two easy chairs, a small dining table with two armless designer chairs, a featureless gray construct containing all the elements of their “entertainment space,” two small bookcases crammed with her history books and his art books, and a small black coffee table on which they played Scrabble and cribbage.

They’d been a couple for three years now, he moving into what had been her place after he broke up with his previous girlfriend. They had no intention of marrying, no desire for children, no yen to put down roots somewhere in the suburbs. They liked each other, liked living together, didn’t get on each other’s nerves very much, and didn’t see too much of one another because of the nature of her job. So it was all very nice and easy.

And he was a good cook! He’d had an after–school restaurant slavey job in his teens, and had taken to the concept of cookery as being somehow related to his work as an artist. He enjoyed burrowing his way into exotic cuisines, and she almost always relished the result. Not so bad.

Tonight, as her nose had told her, dinner came from the cuisine of Thailand, and was delicious, and over it she said, “My day wasn’t exactly same old same old.”

Interested, he looked at her over his fork. (You don’t use chopsticks with Thai food.) “Oh, yeah?”

“A man I talked to,” she said. “The most hangdog man I ever met in my life. You can’t imagine what he looked like when he said, ‘I’m going back to jail’.” And she laughed at the memory, as he frowned at her, curious.

“Back to jail? You’re not defending crooks now, are you? That isn’t what you people do.”

“No, no, this isn’t anything to do with the firm. This is something about my grandfather.”

“Daddy Bigbucks,” Brian said.

She smiled at him, indulging him. “Yes, I know, you’re only with me because of my prospects. Money is really all you care about, I know that.”

He grinned back at her, but with a slight edge to it as he said, “Try going without it for a while.”

“I know, I know, you come from the wrong side of the tracks.”

“We were too poor to have tracks. What I’ve done, I’ve shacked–up up. Tell me about this hangdog guy.”

So she told him the chess set saga, about which he had previously known nothing. He asked a few questions, brought himself up to speed, then said, “Is this guy really going to rob a bank vault?”

“Oh, of course not,” she said. “It’s just silly. They’ll all see it’s impossible, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“But what if he tries?”

“Oh, the poor man,” she said, but she grinned as she said it. “In that case, I think he probably will go back to jail.”