Donald Westlake: The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

“Here he is now,” Dortmunder said, as Kelp came in, looking chipper but confused. Dortmunder motioned to him, saying, “Come sit down, Andy.”

“You know what there is out there,” Kelp said, shutting the door. “There’s a guy laying on the bar, had some sort of accident—”

“He asked Tiny a question,” Dortmunder said.

“He got personal with me,” Tiny said.

Kelp looked at Tiny, and his smile flickered like faraway summer lightning. “Whaddaya say, Tiny?”

“I say siddown,” Tiny said, “and let’s get to it.”“Oh, sure.” Coming around the table to sit at Dortmunder’s right and pour himself a glass of Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon, Kelp said, “Anyway, the other guys out there are trying to decide, is it a service-connected disability?”

“It’s a brain-connected disability,” Tiny said. “What have you got, Dortmunder?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I have a building.”

Tiny nodded. “And a way in?”

“A way in.”

“And what is in this building?”

“A bank. Forty-one importers and wholesalers of jade and ivory and jewels and other precious items. A dealer in antique silver. Two stamp dealers.”

“ ‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ ” Kelp finished, grinning happily at everybody.

“Holy Toledo,” Stan Murch said.

Tiny frowned. “Dortmunder,” he said, “in my experience you don’t tell jokes. At least, you don’t tell me jokes.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“This isn’t a building you’re talking about,” Tiny said. “This is the big rock candy mountain.”

“And it’s all ours,” Dortmunder said.

“How? You won the lottery?”

Dortmunder shook his head. “I got somebody on the inside,” he said. “I got the specs on every bit of security in the building. I got two great big looseleaf books this thick, all about the building. I got more information than I can use.”

Stan said, “How secure is this information? How sure are you of the inside guy?”

“One hundred percent,” Dortmunder said. “This person does not tell lies.”

“What is it, a disgruntled employee?”

“Not exactly.”

Tiny said, “I would need to talk to this person myself.”

“I definitely plan to arrange that,” Dortmunder told him.

Stan said, “So what’s the idea? We back up a truck, go in, empty everything we can, drive away?”

“No,” Dortmunder said. “In the first place, somebody on the street is gonna notice something like that.”

“There’s always nosy Parkers,” Tiny agreed. “One time, a guy annoyed me and annoyed me, so I made his nose go the other way.”

“In this building,” Dortmunder said, “there are also seventeen mail order places, different kinds of catalogue outfits and like that. I’m checking, I’m looking around, I’m being very careful, and what I want to find is one of these mail order people we can make a deal with.”

Kelp said to Stan and Tiny, “I love this part. This is why John Dortmunder is a genius.”

“You’re interrupting the genius,” Tiny pointed out.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“The deal is,” Dortmunder said, “we’d go into the building on a Saturday night and we wouldn’t leave till Monday morning. We’d take everything we could get and carry it all to the mail order place and put it all in packages and mail it out of the building Monday morning with their regular routine.”

Tiny thoughtfully nodded his head. “So we don’t carry the stuff out,” he said. “We go in clean, we come out clean.”

“That’s right.”

“I just love it,” Kelp said.

Tiny leveled a gaze at Kelp. “Enthusiasm makes me restless,” he said.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“We’ll have to pick and choose,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Even if we had a week, we wouldn’t be able to take everything. And if we took everything, it’d be too much to mail.”

Stan said, “You know, John, all my life I wanted to be along on a caper where there was so much stuff you couldn’t take it all. Just wallow in it, like Aladdin’s Cave. And this is what you’re talking about.”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Dortmunder agreed. “But I’m gonna need help in the setup.”

“Ask me,” Stan said. “I’ll help. I want to see this thing happen.”

“Two things,” Dortmunder told him. “First, the mail order outfit. It ought to be somebody that’s a little bent already, but not so bent the FBI’s got a wiretap.”

“I can ask around,” Stan said. “Discreetly. I know some people here and there.”

”I’ll also ask,” Tiny said. “Some people know me here and there.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said. “The other thing is, a lockman. We need somebody really good, to follow the schematics I got and shut down all the alarms without kicking them on instead.”

Tiny said, “What about that little model-train nut guy from the pitcha switch? Roger Whatever.”

“Chefwick,” Dortmunder said.

“He retired,” Kelp said.

Tiny looked at him. “In our line of work,” he said, “how do you retire?”

“You stop doing what you were doing, and you do something else.”

“So Chefwick stopped being a lockman.”

“Right,” Kelp said. “He went out to California with his wife, and they’re running this Chinese railroad out there.”

“A Chinese railroad,” Tiny said, “in California.”

“Sure,” Kelp said. “It used to run in China somewhere, but this guy bought it, the locomotive and the Chinese cars and even a little railroad station with the roof, you know, like hats that come out?”

”Like hats that come out,” Tiny said.

Like a pagoda,” Kelp said. “Anyway, this guy put down track and made an amusement park and Chefwick’s running the train for him. So now he’s got his own life-size model-train set, so he isn’t being a lockman anymore, so he’s retired. Okay?”

Tiny thought about it. “Okay,” he said, reluctantly.

Stan said, “What about Wally Whistler? I know he’s absentminded and all, but—”

Tiny said, “He’s the guy let the lion out at the zoo, isn’t he?”

“Just fiddling with the lock on the cage,” Stan said. “Absentminded, that’s all.”

“No good,” Kelp said. “Wally’s in Brazil, without any extradition.”

“Without what?” Dortmunder asked.

“In Brazil?” Tiny asked.

“He was helping some people at Customs down in Brooklyn,” Kelp told them. “You know, people that didn’t want to tie up the government with a lot of red tape and forms and stuff, so they were just going to get their imports at night and leave it at that, you know the kind of thing.”

“You said ‘Brazil,’ ” Tiny reminded him.

“Yeah, well, Wally, what Wally’s problem is, he’s just too good at his line of business.” Kelp shook his head. “You show Wally a lock, he just has to caress the thing, and poke at it, and see how it works, and the first thing he knew he went through a door, and then a couple more doors, and like that, and when he tried to go back the ship had sailed.”

“The ship,” Dortmunder said. It didn’t seem to him there’d been a ship in the story up till then.

“That he was on,” Kelp said, “that he didn’t know it. They were just leaving, and one of those doors he went through was into the ship from the warehouse, and it turned out they had some reasons of their own to leave in the middle of the night, so they didn’t want to go back to let him off, so he rode along and now he’s in Brazil without extradition.”

“That was the word,” Dortmunder said. “Explain that.”

“Well, most places in the world,” Kelp explained, “you find yourself broke and you don’t speak the language and all, you go confess to a crime in, like, Duluth or St. Louis or somewhere, and then the governments get together and do a lot of legal paper on you and they extradite you and the government pays your air fare and you get to St. Louis or Duluth or wherever it was, and you say, ‘Oops, my mistake, I didn’t do that after all,’ and you’re home. Only with Brazil, we got no treaty, they won’t extradite, so Wally’s stuck. And he says Brazil is so poor, most places don’t have locks, so he’s going crazy. So he’s trying to get to Uruguay.”