Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?

"I miss all the kids," Nessa said.

"No, you don't," Brady told her. " Those were the bozos. You don't miss those morons any more than I do."

"I miss something," she insisted. "But anyway, we've got to leave here. I will not be snowed in on this mountain, so we just have to go, that's all."

Being reasonable, he said, "How? We don't have any money."

"We'll steal things from here," she said. "Things we can sell to pawnshops. Things like mantel clocks and, and toaster ovens. We'll leave here while we can still get out to the main road, and drive south until we get warm, and then maybe in the spring we'll drive by home again and just look at it, just see what it looks like after we've been away."

"In the world, you mean."

She looked around the big empty dining room. "This isn't the world, Brady," she said.

In the spring, he thought, I'll come back here, the chess set will be on the table where they said, and I'll see it because I know the secret. So for now, let's just keep Nessa happy.

"Okay," he said. "We'll drive south. We'll drive to Florida. We can start tomorrow morning."

"Good." Nessa looked comfortably around at the table. "So at least," she said, "we won't have to wash these plates."

It was beside the pool at a motel in Jacksonville, Florida, that they got into conversation with the advance man for an alternative rock band on tour that would be playing in town that weekend. "Come by the room after lunch, I'll give you a couple ducats," he said, and they thanked him, and he grinned and walked off, hairy shoulders, pool water glistening in his beard and ponytail.

A little later Nessa was ready to leave the pool, but Brady was enjoying himself, mostly looking at college girls on spring break, so he said, "I'll just stick around here a little longer." If he wasn't getting as much as he used to from Nessa, at least he could look at these girls, maybe sneak off with one at some point.

But nothing happened, as he'd more or less realized it wouldn't, so an hour later he went back to the room and Nessa wasn't there. Neither was her little suitcase, nor the cash from his wallet.

Brady never saw Nessa again. Without her, he made his circuitous way back home to Numbnuts, was forgiven, got a job in Starbucks, and was a good boy the rest of his life. There came a time when he never even thought about Nessa any more, but still, every once in a while, he did wonder: Whatever happened to that chess set?

FIONA HAD A window. She had a window just to the right of her reproduction Empire desk here on the upper floor of Livia Northwood Wheeler's duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, and she never tired of looking out her window at the sweep of Central Park down below, not even when it was snowing, which it was doing right now. Not a heavy snow like those of January and February, turning the world white and thick and hard to move around in, this was a tentative March snow, the snow of a season that knows its end is near, a mere dusting of white to freshen the mounds of old snow gathered beneath the trees and against the low stone wall that separated the park from Fifth Avenue.

Fiona's job as Livia Northwood Wheeler's personal assistant was interesting in its diversity, but it did leave time for gazing out the window at the park, imagining what the view would be when they came to spring and then to summer. When she wasn't park-gazing, though, there was enough to keep her busy in Mrs. Wheeler's affairs, which were many and varied and mostly uncoordinated.

Mrs. W (as she preferred to be called by the staff) was, for instance, on the boards of many of the city's organizations, as well as a director of a mind-boggling array of corporations. Beyond that, she was a tireless litigant, involved in many more lawsuits than merely those involving her immediate family. Solo, or as a very active member of a class, she was at the moment suing automobile manufacturers, aspirin makers, television networks, department stores, airlines, law firms that had previously represented her, and an array of ex-employees, including two former personal assistants.

While passionately involved in every one of these matters, Mrs. W was not at all coordinated or methodical and never knew exactly where she was in any ongoing concern, whom she owed, who owed her, and where and when the meeting was supposed to take place. She really needed a personal assistant.

And Fiona was perfect for the job. She was calm, she had no ax to grind, and she had a natural love for detail. Particularly for all the more reprehensible details of Mrs. W's busy life, the double-dealing and chicanery, the stories behind all the lawsuits and all the feuds and all the shifting loyalties among Mrs. W's many rich-lady friends. And, just to make Fiona's life complete, Mrs. W was writing an autobiography!

Talk about history in the raw. Mrs. W had total recall of every slight she'd ever suffered, every snub, every shortchanging, every encounter in which the other party had turned out to be even more grasping, shrewder, and more untrustworthy than she was. She dictated all these steaming memories into a tape recorder in spurts of venom, which Lucy Leebald, Mrs. W's current secretary, had to type out into neat manuscript.

Fiona's role in all this was to read the finished sections of manuscript and establish the chronology of events, since Mrs. W recalled things in no sequence at all and didn't personally care a rap when this or that event had occurred. To put her story in chronological order purely on the basis of internal evidence was, of course, impossible, but it was just exactly the kind of impossibility a history nut goes nuts for.

Fiona, still astonished by the fact three months later, was in heaven. The day she'd been fired by Mr. Tumbril at Feinberg had been a frightening one, somehow liberating but mostly perilous, with no solid future in sight. She'd had to tell Brian, of course (he'd responded with black pudding for dinner), but she told no one else, not even her grandfather, until the following week, when he called her because he'd received that set of names of Northwood heirs she'd mailed on her way out the Feinberg door. Then she'd had to confess, weeping a bit, and he was so repentant, so appalled, so positive it was all his fault, that she was forced to cheer up just so he would feel a little better.

He was also responsible for her being here, in this job. It's true Mrs. W had said, at the end of that awful experience, "Call me," but Fiona had had no intention of doing any such thing until Grandfather, hearing her story, insisted she make the call: "Always follow up, Fiona, it's a rule of the world."

So she'd followed up, to find that the invitation to call had been an act of contrition by a woman not at all used to being contrite. She hadn't thought twice about heaving the lackey Fiona Hemlow at the head of Jay Tumbril, only to discover — mirabile dictu! — the girl was innocent! And a victim! Mrs. W's victim as much as Jay Tumbril's, in fact.

So here she was, and if Mr. Tumbril knew who answered Mrs. W's office phone these days, those few times he'd left messages here, he gave no sign. Nor, of course, did she.

Tink-tink.

Not the office phone. There were three phones on Fiona's desk, each with its own ring — blip-blip for the outside line, bzzzork for the in-house line, and tink-tink for Mrs. W's private line from her desk in her own office across the hall. So: "Good morning, Mrs. W It's still snowing."

"Thank you, my dear, I have the Weather Channel for that. Come in and bring your pad."

"Yes, ma'am."

Fiona left the office she shared with Lucy Leebald, crossed the hall with its elevator at the far end and window at this end with its identical park view to her own, and into Mrs. W's office, in which the same windows somehow offered more light, more air and more park, and where Mrs. W herself sat at her more ornate desk and nodded at Fiona like the queen bee she was. "Good morning, dear."