Donald Westlake: The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

And now it’s happened again. This time, when life took one of those unfortunate little turns, Dortmunder made a deal with some nearby nuns — I’m just telling you what he told me — where they’d keep him out of the clutches of the law if he would go on a sort of quest for them. Once he’d figured out how to make the quest show a potential profit, he rounded up the usual accomplices.

The O. J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue on the West Side of Manhattan is where the Dortmunder gang (as in “aft agley”) makes its meets.

Since 1965, when the Chicago Tribune book critic who reviewed Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Fugitive Pigeon noted that it is so good “what can Donald E. Westlake possibly do for an encore?” his fans have suffered from the anxiety that with each succeeding novel, he must have reached his peak. The excerpt that follows from Good Behavior, Westlake’s new novel scheduled for spring 1986 publication by the Mysterious Press, indicates that he will top himself at least once more, yet, from what we have read, it is so good…

Escaping from a bungled burglary, John Dortmunder falls, literally, into a nunnery, where a vow of silence prevails. A nun helps Dortmunder, and he is obliged to return the favor. The scene that follows takes place at the O. J. Bar & Grill, where Dortmunder presents his plan to solve two problems with one scam.

When Dortmunder walked into the O. J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at ten that night a few of the regulars were draped against the bar discussing the weather or something. “It’s ‘Red star at night, Sailor take fright,’ ” one of them was saying.

“Will you listen to this crap,” a second regular said. “Will you just listen?”

“I listened,” a third regular assured him.

“Who asked you ?” the second regular wanted to know.

“It’s a free country,” the third regular told him, “and I listened, and you, ” he told the first regular, “are wrong.”

“Well, yes,” the second regular said. “I didn’t know you were gonna be on my side.”

“It’s ‘Red star in the morning,’ ” the third regular said.

“Another idiot,” said the second regular.

The first regular looked dazzled with disbelief at the wrongheadedness all around him. “How does that rhyme?” he demanded. “ ‘Red star in the morning, Sailor take fright’?”

“It isn’t star ,” the second regular announced, slapping his palm against the bar. “It’s red sky. All this red star crap, it’s like you’re talking about the Russian army.”

“Well, I’m not talking about the Russian army,” the first regular told him. “It happens I was in the navy. I was on PU boats.”

This stopped all the regulars cold for a second. Then the second regular, treading cautiously, said, “Whose navy?”

Dortmunder, down at the end of the bar, raised a hand and got the attention of Rollo the bartender, who’d been standing there with his heavy arms folded over his dirty apron, a faraway look in his eyes as the regulars’ conversation washed over him. Now, he nodded at Dortmunder and rolled smoothly down the bar to talk to him, planting his feet solidly on the duckboards, while behind him the navy man was saying, “The navy! How many navies are there?”

Rollo put meaty elbows on the bar in front of Dortmunder, leaned forward, and said, “Between you and me, I was in the marines.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We want a few good men,” Rollo assured him, then straightened up and said, “Your friends didn’t show yet. You want the usual?”

“Yeah.”

“And the other bourbon’s gonna be with you?”

“Right.”

Rollo nodded and went back down the bar to get out a tray and two glasses and a murky bottle with a label reading, “Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon. Our Own Brand.” Meantime, a discussion of the world’s navies had started up, with references to Admiral Nelson and Lord Byrd, when, in a pause in the flow of things, a fourth regular, who hadn’t spoken before this, said, “I think, I think , I’m not sure about this, but I think it’s ‘Red ring around the moon, Means rain pretty soon.’ Something like that.”

The second regular, the Russian army man, banged his beer glass on the bar and said, “It’s red sky. You got a ring around the brain , that’s what you got.”

“Easy, boys,” Rollo said. “The war’s over.”

Everybody looked startled at this news. Rollo picked up the tray with the bottle and glasses on it and brought it back to Dortmunder, saying, “And who else is coming?”

“The beer and salt.”

“Oh, yeah, the big spender,” Rollo said, nodding.

“And the vodka and red wine.”

“The monster. I remember him.”

“Most people do,” Dortmunder agreed. He picked up the tray and carried it past the regulars, who were still talking about the weather or something. “The groundhog saw his shadow,” the navy man was saying.

“Right,” the third regular said. “Six weeks ago yesterday, so that was six weeks more winter, so yesterday he come out again, you follow me so far?”

“It’s your story.”

“So it was sunny yesterday,” the third regular said, “so he saw his shadow again, so that’s another six weeks of winter.”

There was a pause while people worked out what they thought about that. Then the fourth regular said, “I still think it’s ‘Red ring around the moon.’ ”

Dortmunder continued on back past the bar and past the two doors marked with dog silhouettes labeled Pointers and Setters and past the phone booth with the string dangling from the quarter slot and through the green door at the back and into a small square room with a concrete floor. None of the walls could be seen, because the room was filled all the way around, floor to ceiling, with beer and liquor cases, leaving only a small bare space in the middle, containing a battered old table with a stained green-felt top and half a dozen chairs. The only illumination was from one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.

Dortmunder liked being first, because whoever was first got to sit facing the door. He sat there, put the tray to his right, poured some brown stuff into one of the glasses, and was raising it when the door opened and Stan Murch came in, carrying a glass of beer in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. “The damnedest thing,” he said, closing the door behind himself. “I took the road through Prospect Park, you know, on account of the Prospect Expressway construction, and when I came out on Grand Army Plaza they were digging up Flatbush Avenue , if you’ll believe it, so I ran down Union Street to the BQE and here I am.”

“Hiya, Stan,” Dortmunder said. “How you doin’?”

“Turning a dollar,” Stan said, and sat down with his beer and his salt as the door opened again and Tiny Bulcher came in, turning sideways to squeeze through the doorway. Somewhere down inside his left fist was a glass containing something that looked like, but was not, cherry soda. “Some clown out there wants to know was I in the navy,” Tiny said, “so I decked him.” He shut the door and came over and sat facing Dortmunder; Tiny didn’t mind if his back was to the door. “Hello, Dortmunder,” he said.

“Hello, Tiny.”

Tiny looked around, heavy head moving like a wrecker’s ball. “Am I waiting for somebody?”

“Andy Kelp.”

“Am I early, or is he late?”