Why Me? (20 page)

“If it goes wrong,” Dortmunder pointed out, “Tiny won't like you any more either.”

Kelp waved that away with an airy sweep of his beer can: “How could it go wrong?” he asked.

33

“He annoyed me,” Mologna said to Leon. “I was gettin all this shit about telephones—he is there, he isn't there, it's goin through, it isn't goin through—and I just forgot myself.”

“This too will pass,” Leon said, his face a woodcut entitled
Sympathy
. He was feeling so bad on Mologna's account that he wasn't even dancing in place.

Mologna sat slumped at his desk, forearms sprawled among his papers. “The static I'm goin to take,” he said, shaking his heavy head. “The static I am goin to take.”

It had already started. The Commissioner—Mologna could never remember the man's name, and didn't see any real reason to make the effort—had called to chew him out in that discreet, distant, with-gloves-on manner of upper-echelon bureaucrats everywhere. The point, as Mologna well knew, was not what the Commissioner said, or what he himself said in response; the point was that in the Commissioner's phone log and in his day book and in Mologna's personal file there would now be a notation to the effect that the Commissioner had demonstrated leadership. The son of a bitch.

Well, maybe not entirely a son of a bitch at that, since the Commissioner had in the same phone call made it very clear where Mologna's true enemies were: “FBI Agents Zachary and Freedly are in my office at this very moment, discussing the situation with me,” the Commissioner had said, and the background gasp of outraged betrayal behind the Commissioner's voice had been the only bright spot in that entire fumigated conversation.

Was there anything to be done about Zachary and Freedly? Was there anything to be done to protect his own ass, now that he'd exposed it for all the world to see?

The only real solution, obviously, was to
find that goddam ruby
. And to find it
with
perpetrator; this wasn't the kind of little trouble that could be smoothed over with a nice piece of jewelry. What the public would need this time, what the Police Department and the FBI and the State Department and the United Nations and the Turkish Government would need, what Mologna himself would need, was a human sacrifice. Nothing less. “We've got to get him,” Mologna said aloud.

“Oh, I couldn't agree more,” Leon said. He and Mologna were alone in Mologna's big office in Police Plaza, partly because Mologna wanted it that way and partly because right at the moment nobody else in the great city of New York wanted to be linked with Francis Mologna in any way.

“And
we've
got to get him,” Mologna went on. “Not the fuckin FBI, or any a them foreign bozos.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“And not the goddam criminal element either. Though the bleedin Christ knows, they've got the best shot at it.”

“Unfortunate,” Leon said. “If only our man were gay, I might be able to do some undercover work myself.”

Mologna squinted at him. “Leon,” he said, “I'm never entirely sure when you're bein obscene.”

Leon pressed graceful fingertips to his narrow chest. “
Me?
”

“In any case,” Mologna said, “you heard the tape. Did that sound like a goddam faggot to you?”

“If he is,” Leon said, “he's so far back in the closet he must poop mothballs.”

“You're disgustin, Leon.” Briefly, Mologna brooded. “The criminal element,” he said. “What happens if they find him first?”

“They turn him over to us. With the Byzantine Fire, of course.”

“Maybe. Maybe.” Mologna squinted at the far wall, trying to see into the future. “Maybe the press gets onto it first? Maybe the word gets out the crooks helped us do our own job? Not good, Leon.”

“Ungood all the way.”

“That's right.” With sudden decision, Mologna said, “Leon, call Tony Cappelletti, have him reel in that stoolie of his, Whatsisname.”

“Benjamin Arthur Klopzik.”

“Like I said. I want Tony to wire him, full radio pickup. I want to know every word said in that thieves' den of theirs before they know it themselves. And I want every available TPF man in the city at the ready, no more than three blocks from that saloon. If and when those boyos find our man, I want to take him away from them
that second
.”

“Oh, very good,” Leon said. “Incisive, decisive, and oh so correct.”

“Give me the bullshit later,” Mologna told him. “First make the phone call.”

34

The back room at the O.J. looked like one of those paintings from the Russian Revolution—the storming of the Winter Palace—or, perhaps more appropriately, from the Revolution of the French: a Jacobin trial during the Terror. The place had never been so crowded, so smoky, so hot, so full of strife and contention. Tiny Bulcher and three assistant judges sat together on one side of the round card table, facing the door, with several other tough guys ranged behind them, on their feet, leaning against the stacked liquor cartons. A few more savage-looking types lurked to both sides. A couple of chairs had been left empty near the door, facing Tiny and the rest across the green felt table. Harsh illumination from the single hanging bare bulb with its tin reflector in the middle of the room washed out all subtlety of color, reducing the scene to the work of a genre painter with a poor palette, or perhaps a German silent film about Chicago gangsters. Menace and pitiless self-interest glinted on the planes of every face, the slouch of every shoulder, the bend of every knee, the sharpness of every eye, the slant of every smoldering cigarette. Everybody smoked, everybody breathed, and—because it was hot in here—everybody sweated. Also, when there was no one being interviewed everybody talked at once, except when Tiny Bulcher wanted to make a general point, at which time he would thump the table with fist and forearm, bellow, “Shadap!” and insert a sentence into the resulting silence.

It was, in short, a scene to make even the innocent pause, had there been any innocents around to glom it. Dortmunder, of the guilty the most singularly guilty, was very lucky he had to cool his heels in the outer brightness of the bar long enough to knock back two double bourbons on the rocks before it became his and Kelp's turn to enter that back room and face all those cold eyes.

The way they were called in, a fellow they knew slightly, named Gus Brock, came to the table out front where they were waiting, and said, “Hello, Dortmunder, Kelp.”

“Hiya, Gus,” Kelp said. Dortmunder just nodded; he was going for dignity.

“You guys are a team, right?”

“Right!” said Kelp.

“You're next,” Gus Brock said. “Lemme give you the layout. This isn't the law, we're not out to screw anybody or trap anybody. What happens, you guys go in, you stand just inside the door, you'll listen to the guy ahead of you, that way you know the routine when it's your turn. Right?”

“Very fair,” Kelp said. “That's really very fair, Gus.”

Ignoring him, Gus glanced up as a very pale and nervous-looking guy came out from the back, tottered to the bar, and said hoarsely, “Rye. Leave the bottle.”

Gus nodded. “Let's go.”

So they went, and when they walked into the smoky, glary, stinking back room full of all that potential violence and destruction, Dortmunder reconsidered his life from the very beginning:
could
he have made it as a supermarket clerk? By now he'd be maybe an assistant manager, out in the suburbs maybe, with a black bow tie. The prospect had never pleased before, but with this alternative staring him in the face there was certainly something to be said for a life in a clean well-lighted place.

Everybody was talking, even arguing, except for a stout, sweating man with a bald spot, who was seated in one of the chairs facing the court, mopping his face and forearms and baldness with an already-drenched white handkerchief. Dortmunder, trying to remember how to keep his knees locked, faintly heard Kelp, under the din, ask, “Who's those guys over on the right?”

“Representatives from the Terrorists' Cooperative,” Gus Brock said.

Dortmunder leaned back against the wall, while Kelp said, “Terrorists' Cooperative?”

“There's a lot of these foreign bunches interested,” Gus Brock explained. “They're looking for the same thing as us, and they all combined together to help each other. And now they're combined with us. They're looking around among their local ethnics.”

“Boy,” said Kelp, with what struck Dortmunder as obscene enthusiasm. “What a manhunt!”

“You bet,” Gus Brock said. “The son of a bitch doesn't have a chance.”

Whomp
, went Tiny Bulcher's fist and forearm: “Shadap!”

Silence.

Tiny smiled like a shark at the fat man in the witness chair. “What's your name, guy?”

“Hah—hah—kuh, kuh, uhh, Harry,” said the fat man. “Harry Matlock.”

“Harry Matlock,” Tiny said, looking to his left, and one of the standing men poked around among a lot of folders and envelopes stuck in among the liquor cartons, finally bringing out a small used brown envelope from the phone company, which he handed to the guy to Tiny's left, who pulled several wrinkled scraps of paper out of the envelope, smoothed them on the felt, and nodded his readiness. Then Tiny said, “Tell us your story, Harry. Where were you at midnight Wednesday?”

The fat man swabbed his neck and said, “Muh-me and three other guys—”

The door opened, whacking Dortmunder on the shoulder blades. He leaned out of the way, looking back, and saw Benjy Klopzik scooting in. “Sorry,” Benjy whispered.

Tiny Bulcher yelled past the fat man, “Benjy! Where you been?”

“Hi, Tiny,” the little man said, shutting the door behind himself. “I hadda feed my dog.”

“Whadayou doin with a dog? Stand in that corner, I'll take you for a walk later.” Switching his glare to the fat man, he said, “So? Whadja stop for?”

Benjy inserted himself delicately under the elbows of the Terrorists' Cooperative. The fat man swabbed himself all over and said, “I was in Huntington, Long Island. Me and three other guys. We were taking out an antique store.”

“Antiques? Old furniture?”

“Valuable stuff,” the fat man said. “We had a purchaser and everything, a dealer downtown on Broadway.” Shaking his damp head, he said, “It all fell through, on accounta the blitz. We couldn't make delivery Thursday, then the cops found the truck.”

“This is Long Island,” the man to the left of Tiny said. “Kennedy fucking Airport's on Long Island.”

“We were way to hell and gone,” the fat man said desperately, bouncing wetly around on his chair. “Honest. Huntington, Long Island, it's way out on the island, it's way up on the North Shore.”

Tiny said, “Who were these other three guys?”

“Ralph Demrovsky, Willy Car—”

“One at a time!”

“Oh,” the fat man said. “Sorry.”

Tiny had looked around at one of the standing men to his right. “We got Demrovsky?”

“I'm looking.”

Now Dortmunder saw that in fact a rough-and-ready sort of filing system had been created back there, with folders and envelopes stuck in among the floor-to-ceiling liquor cartons. Apparently, each guy standing back there had a separate part of the alphabet to deal with. Education, Dortmunder thought, is a wonderful thing.

“Here it is.”

The file this time was in a small folded restaurant menu. This was handed to the man seated at Tiny's right, who opened it, leafed through the few ratty papers in it, and said, “Yeah, we talked to him already. Gave the same story.”

Tiny looked at the fat man. “What time'd you get to this antique store?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

The man with the fat man's file made a note. Tiny lifted an eyebrow at the man with Demrovsky's file, who nodded agreement. Then Tiny looked back at the fat man: “What time'd you leave?”

“Three o'clock.”

“Demrovsky,” said the other guy, “says two-thirty.”

“It was around there,” the fat man said, sounding panicky. “Who's looking at their watch? It was around two-thirty, three o'clock.”

Dortmunder closed his eyes. The questioning went on, bringing out the other two names, comparing everybody's story with everybody else. The fat man was innocent, at least of stealing the Byzantine Fire, and soon everybody in the room knew it, so the last part of the questioning was merely to double-check the alibis of other people.
I'm next
, Dortmunder thought, and the thought was barely complete when the fat man was dismissed, patting and swabbing himself and hurrying from the room, leaving his seat for Dortmunder, who tottered to it, grateful at least to be seated, not entirely sure he was grateful to have Kelp seated beside him. The door behind him opened and closed, but Dortmunder didn't look back to see who was now on deck.

“So,” Tiny Bulcher said. “You two guys were together Wednesday night.”

“That's right,” Kelp said, speaking right up. “We were working on my phones.”

“Tell us about it,” Tiny offered, and Kelp did, reeling off the story they'd cooked up together, rattling right along, putting in all the details, while Dortmunder sat beside him, silent and dignified and scared shitless.

Early on in the questioning, already existing files (Kelp's in a Valentine's Day card, Dortmunder's in a thin cardboard packet that had originally contained bunion pads) were brought out, checked, annotated. Dortmunder moodily watched the guy with his file, wondering what was already written down on those odds and ends of paper, what facts, clues, hints, suggestions, information was waiting in there to trip him up. Something, something.

Tiny and the guy with Kelp's folder asked a few questions, in a not particularly threatening manner, and it became clear that one or two of Kelp's phone pals of Wednesday night had already mentioned his calls. But then, after the deceptive calm, Tiny's ball-bearing eyes rolled infinitesimally in their sockets, and there he was looking at Dortmunder and saying, “So you were with him, right?”