Donald Westlake: What's So Funny?

"Yeah, they went back there."

"Maybe we oughta do likewise," Tiny said. "See what Stan has in mind. It isn't that often a driver has an idea." He gazed down at Dortmunder. "You coming?"

With a second sigh — that made two in one day — Dortmunder shook his head. "I don't think I can, Tiny. That guy kinda knocked the spirit out of me, you know what I mean?"

"Not yet."

"What I think," Dortmunder said, "I think I should go home. Just, you know, go home."

"We'll miss you," Tiny said.

"SO, JOHN," MAY said, over the breakfast table, "what are you going to do?"

After a troubled night, Dortmunder had described his meeting with Johnny Eppick For Hire to his faithful companion, May, over his usual breakfast of equal parts corn flakes, milk, and sugar, while she listened wide-eyed, ignoring her half-grapefruit and coffee black. And now she wanted to know what he was going to do.

"Well, May," he said, "I think I got no choice."

"You say he isn't a cop any more."

"He's still plugged in to the cops," Dortmunder explained. "He can still point a finger and lightning comes out."

"So you have to go there."

"I don't even know how" Dortmunder complained. "All the way east on Third Street? How do I get there, take a ferry around the island?"

"There's probably buses," May said. "Across Fourteenth Street. I could loan you my MetroCard."

"That's still a hell of a walk," Dortmunder complained. "Fourteenth, all the way down to Third."

"Well, John," she said, "it doesn't seem worth stealing a car for."

"No, I guess not."

"Especially," she said, "if you're gonna visit a cop."

"Not for seventeen months."

"Uh huh," she said.

The bus wasn't so bad, once he and the driver figured out how he should slide May's mass transit card through that little slot. It was an articulated bus, so he found a seat next to a window in the rear part, beyond the accordion. He sat there and the bus groaned away from the curb, and he looked out the window at this new world.

He'd never been so far east on Fourteenth Street. New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge.

Looking out his window, Dortmunder tried to get a handle on this particular village. He'd never been to Bulgaria — well, he'd never been asked — but it seemed to him this area was probably like a smaller city in that land, on one side or the other of the mountains. If they had mountains.

After a while, he noticed the scenery wasn't bumping past the window any more but was just sitting out there, and when he looked around to see what had gone wrong the other seats were all empty and the driver, way up there in front, was twisted around, yelling at him. Dortmunder focused and got the words:

"End of the line!"

"Oh, yeah. Right."

He waved at the guy, and got off the bus. The walk down to Third Street was just as long as he'd been afraid it would be, but then that wasn't even the end of it. Not knowing how long it would take to get to such an out-of-the-way location, he'd given it an hour, which turned out to be fifteen minutes too long, so he had to walk around the block a couple times so he wouldn't be ridiculously early.

But at least that did give him the opportunity to case the place. It was a narrow dark brick corner building, a little grungy six stories high. The ground floor was a check-cashing place, with neon signs saying so in many languages in windows backed by the kind of iron bars they use for the gorilla cages in the zoo.

Around the side on Third Street was a green metal door with a vertical row of buttons next to names on cards in narrow slots. Some of the names seemed to be people, some businesses. There were two apartments or offices per floor, labeled «L» and "R." EPPICK — that's all it said — was 3R.

Stepping back, Dortmunder looked up at the windows that should be 3R, and they were covered by Venetian blinds slanted up to see the sky, not the street. Okay; fifteen minutes. He went for a stroll.

It was still five minutes before the hour when he'd completed the circuit twice, wondering what the proper word was for a Mongolian bodega, but enough was enough, so he pressed the button next to EPPICK and almost immediately the door made that buzz they do. He pushed it open and entered a tiny vestibule with a steep flight of stairs straight ahead and a very narrow elevator on the right. So he took the elevator up, and when he got off at three there were the stairs again, flanked by two doors, these of dark wood and marked with brass figures 3L and 3R.

Another button. He pressed it, and another door gave him the raspberry. This door you had to pull, he soon figured out, but the buzz was in no hurry, it kept buzzing at him until he got the idea.

Inside, the place was larger than Dortmunder had expected, having taken it for granted a building like this would consist of a bunch of little rooms that people would call a "warren of offices." But, no. Many of the warren's interior walls had been removed, a rich burgundy carpet had been laid to connect it all, and on the carpet were separate areas defined not by walls but by furniture.

Just inside the door that Dortmunder was closing was a small well-polished wooden desk facing sideways, to see both the door and the room. Next to the desk stood Eppick, wearing his winner's smile plus, this morning, a polo shirt the same color as the carpet, gray slacks with expandable waist instead of belt, and two-tone golf shoes, though without cleats.

"Right on time, John," Eppick said, and stuck out a gnarly hand. "I'm gonna shake your hand because we're gonna be partners."

Dortmunder shrugged and stuck his own hand out. "Okay," he said, limiting the partnership.

"Lemme introduce you," Eppick said, turning away, keeping Dortmunder's hand in his own, an unpleasant experience, "to our principal."

Dortmunder was going to say he didn't know they had any principles, but then decided not to, because here was the rest of the room. To the right, along the wall under the windows with their upward-slanted Venetian blinds showing strips of pale blue late-autumn sky, was a blond oak conference table with rounded ends, flanked by eight matching blue-upholstered chairs. On the left side, where there were no windows because of the next building in the row, was a conversation area, two dark blue sofas at right angles around a square glass coffee table, and a couple of matching chairs just behind them, ready for overflow. To the rear behind the conversation area was a galley kitchen, with a simple table and six chairs in front of it, and in the final quarter, behind the conference table, stood a StairMaster and other gym equipment. Not what Dortmunder would have guessed from an ex-cop. Not from an ex-cop called Eppick, anyway.

"Around, here, John," Eppick said, and led Dortmunder around in an orbit of the front desk, aiming for the front left corner of the space, where a high-tech wheelchair that looked as though it were ready for spacewalks squatted facing the glass coffee table, opposite one of the blue sofas, with the other sofa against the wall to its left.

Someone or something hunkered in the wheelchair, inside black brogans, black pants, a Navajo-Indian-design throw rug draped over the shoulders, and a scarlet beret on top. It seemed large and soft, just barely squeezing into the available space, and it brooded straight ahead, paying no attention to Eppick as he led Dortmunder forward by the hand.

"Mr. Hemlow," Eppick said, and all at once he sounded deferential, not the self-assured cop at all any more, "Mr. Hemlow, the specialist is here."