Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?

"The dome," Stan said.

John just looked at him, ostrich or bison visible in his open mouth. So Stan said, "The dome got delivered before they shut down, and it's gold. Not solid gold, you know, but not gold paint either. Real gold. Gold plate or something. It's sitting out there on this empty construction site, it was delivered when the walls were supposed to be up, but of course the walls weren't up, so it's sitting there, with this crane next to it."

"I think I'm getting this," John said. "It's your idea, we use the crane, we pick up this dome— How big is this dome?"

"Fifteen feet across, twelve feet high."

"Fifteen feet across, twelve feet high. You wanna pick this up and take it away."

"With the crane, like you said."

"And where you gonna stash this thing?"

"That's part of what we gotta work out," Stan said.

"Maybe you can take it to Alaska," John said, "and paint it white, and make everybody think it's an igloo."

"I don't think we could get it that far," Stan told him. "All the bridges. And forget tunnels."

John said, "And who's your customer, the American Dental Association?"

"John, it's gold . It's gotta be worth I don't know how much."

"You don't have a place to hide it," John said. "You take it down the street with this crane, you don't have any way to disguise it, camouflage it. You don't have a customer for it. So who at the O.J. last night liked the idea?"

"There were some naysayers," Stan admitted.

"How many?"

"Well, all of them. But I figured, you could see the possibilities."

"I can," John agreed. "Just this morning, that cop — who, by the way, isn't a cop any more, not for seventeen months — just this morning he was telling the rich guy about me, how I took a couple falls in the early days but learned how to have that not happen any more, and this is part of the learning. I don't go down the street with a fifteen-foot-wide, twelve-foot-tall hot golden dome out in front of me." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Stan. I can see how it was for you, you looked at this great big gold thing out there beside the Belt, you read about it in the paper, all you could think about was the gold. It's my job to think about the problems, and what this dome is is one hundred percent problem.".

"Maybe I'll go do it on my own," Stan said. He was really feeling dumped on.

"One thing," John said. "If you do it on your own, don't get your Mom involved."

His Mom was the only other gang he could think of. Stan said, "Why not?"

"Because she'd rather drive her own cab than do the state's laundry. I gotta go." Standing, John said, "If you're gonna want me to talk with you about an idea like that, you pay for lunch. See you later."

IT TURNED OUT, the C&I International Bank Building, up there on Fifth near Saks, was operating under an alias, or at least a later modification of its original name, which you could read inside in the lobby. On a marble side wall was a big black board in a gold frame with all the tenants listed in white block letters in alphabetical order, and across the top of this board it said Capitalists & Immigrants Trust. So, somewhere along the line, somebody stopped liking that name and decided C&I International would go down smoother, though mean less. Maybe the capitalists and immigrants had stopped trusting.

Feinberg, Kleinberg, Rhineberg, Steinberg, Weinberg & Klatsch was indeed, according to this board, on the twenty-seventh floor, so Dortmunder took a 16–31 elevator with a couple messengers and looked at the reception area while they transacted their businesses with the receptionist.

It was a large though low-ceilinged place with gray carpet and gray furniture in the two seating areas and black desk space in front of the receptionist and along the wall behind her. The walls, a soothing dusty green, were mostly covered with big swirling pieces of abstract art in non-startling colors, so you could feel you were hip without having to do anything about it.

The receptionist, once the messengers cleared the area and Dortmunder could step forward in their place, was just exactly too beautiful to be real, though she seemed unable or unwilling to move any part of her face. She looked at Dortmunder's hands for the package, didn't see one, and finally made eye contact, so Dortmunder could say, "Fiona Hemlow."

She reached for a pen: "And you are?"

"John Dortmunder."

She wrote that on a pad, applied herself to her phone bank, murmured briefly, then said, "She'll be out in a moment. Do have a seat."

"Thanks."

The seating area had gray glass coffee tables among the gray sofas, but nothing to read, so Dortmunder sat on a sofa and looked at the paintings and tried to decide what they looked like. He'd just about come to the conclusion that what they mostly resembled was the bowl after you've finished the ice cream when a very short young woman in black skirt, black jacket, high-necked plain white blouse and low-heeled black shoes marched in from a side aisle, looked around, gave Dortmunder a real estate agent's smile and strode over, hand out: "Mr. Dortmunder?"

Rising, he said, "That's me."

Her handshake was firm but bony. Her black hair was short, curled around her neat small ears, and her face was narrow; good-looking in an efficient sort of way. She looked to be in her mid- to late twenties, and there was no point even looking for a familial resemblance between her and the medicine ball in the wheelchair.

She said, "I'm Fiona. You met my grandfather."

"This morning, yeah. He gave me the background. Well, some of it."

"And, I," she said, being perky in somehow a subdued fashion, which was maybe how girl lawyers effervesced, "will give you the rest. Come along, I'll escort you back."

He followed her down a hall with doors on one side, all open and showing small cluttered offices, each with a neat middle-aged man or woman at a desk, intently concentrating on the phone or the computer or a bunch of pages. Then she went through an open doorway at the end of this hall into a much larger space all broken up into small pieces, like an egg carton, with chest-high walls every which way so you could see what everybody was doing. The people at the machines in these little cells were generally younger than the ones in the private offices, and Dortmunder had already come to suspect that Fiona Hemlow's work environment was in this mob scene somewhere when she said, "I arranged a small conference room for us. Much more private. No distractions."

"Good."

To get to this small conference room, she had to lead him a zigzag route through the people-boxes, and he was surprised the black composition floor wasn't covered with lines of breadcrumbs left by previous people afraid they wouldn't be able to find their way back.

A perimeter of the boxes was reached, and Fiona led the way along a wall to the left with alternating closed doors and plate-glass windows, through which he could see the conference rooms within, some occupied by two or more people in intense head-thrust-forward conversation, some empty.

Into an empty one she led the way, shut the door, and said, with a smile, "Sit anywhere. A beverage? Coke? Seltzer?"

Dortmunder understood that in the business environment it was considered a gesture of civilization to offer the guest something to drink without booze in it, and probably a hostile act to refuse it, so he said, "Seltzer, yeah, sounds good."

She went away to a tall construction on the end wall that contained everything necessary to life: refrigerator, a shelf of glasses, TV, DVD, notepads, pens, and paper napkins. She poured him a seltzer over ice and herself a Diet Pepsi over ice, brought him his drink and a paper napkin, and at last they could sit down and have their chat.