Donald Westlake - Watch Your Back!

"You know perfectly well," Preston told him, beginning to become really annoyed, "the only place I'd like to go is the one place I certainly cannot go, and that is home. New York. My apartment. My clubs, my city, my theaters, my restaurants, my board of directors' meetings, my five-hundred-dollar hookers speaking French. That's where I cannot go, as you full well know. And you also know why, because that's something else I talk about often, because it preys on my mind."

"Your wives, you mean."

"To have ex-wives is the normal state of affairs," Preston explained. "It's merely the end product of lust. But ex-wives are not supposed to band together, pool their resources, set themselves to strip their former benefactor to his skivvies, and then set fire to the skivvies."

"You probably jeered at them," Alan suggested.

Preston spread his hands. "Well, of course I jeered at them. Ex-wives are meant to be jeered at. Tiny little grasping brains, greedy little pigs."

"Driving them together."

"Well, they weren't supposed to be together, they were supposed to hate each other too much. If those four women had remained solitary soreheads, as they were supposed to do, I wouldn't be on the run the way I am, hounded to the ends of the earth by the baying of the world's most rapacious divorce attorneys."

"Club Med isn't exactly the end of the earth," Alan informed him.

"It's one of them," Preston said. "It isn't your hub, your beating heart, your nerve center, in short, your New York. It isn't, Alan, New York."

"I agree," Alan said.

"Thank you." Preston brooded, then said, "If I could go home again, Alan, I would go there in a shot, as you very well know, and I would have absolutely no further use for a paid companion, and you would no doubt starve to death in a gutter somewhere. And deserve it, too. Is there anything more otiose than a paid companion?"

"Probably not," Alan said. "Of course, pleasant people get companionship for free."

"And worth every penny of it. What do you mean, pleasant people? I am pleasant. I smile at the waitstaff, I josh with the other guests."

"You taunt and tease," Alan told him. "You like to hurt people's feelings — mine, if I had any — and use big words they won't understand and just be so superior it's amazing you're not in a toga."

"Don't forget the laurel leaves," Preston said, and laughed, and said, "Do you know who I miss?"

Alan seemed mildly surprised. "You miss somebody?"

"That little Albright fellow," Preston said. "The crook, whatever he was. The fellow out of the Bowery Boy movies."

"You miss him," Alan said, the words as flat as a skipping stone.

"I do," Preston said, and smiled at the memory. "You talk about teasing people, he was the best subject I ever had in my life. Albright — there's a misnomer. And when he got to drinking!

"You got to drinking yourself," Alan told him.

"Oh, a bit, here and there," Preston acknowledged, and waved the idea away. "Just enough to keep him company, so he could tell me things I could make fun of."

"You told him a few things yourself," Alan said.

"I did?" Preston tried to remember something he might have told the little Albright fellow. "What on earth could I possibly have told Arnie Albright?"

"Oh, I don't know," Alan said. "Personal details, when you were in your cups together. He's probably forgotten it all. But you know, I almost had the feeling sometimes that he came around so often mostly because he was trying to pump you."

"Pump? Me? Don't be foolish. Arnie Albright was about as crafty as that scuba instructor you inveigled me into going to."

"If you'd gone back," Alan said, "he might have drowned you."

"One of the reasons I didn't. But Arnie Albright. To pump me. He came back, day after day—"

"Because he had nowhere else to go, like you."

"Paid companions do not interrupt," Preston said. "He came back because, in his pitiful little brain, he had dreams of someday one-upping me. It was wonderful to watch him, tongue-tied, nose turning bright red, trying to find a snappy retort."

"No, he didn't have a lot of those," Alan agreed.

"I should think not." With another laugh, Preston said, "Wherever he is right now, back up there in the city, I wonder if he thinks sometimes of me."

DORTMUNDER WAS five minutes early and Kelp five minutes late — par for the course. Dortmunder was well aware that Arnie's nasty little apartment, up on the second floor, had no street-facing windows but was wrapped like a dirty scarf around an unpleasant airshaft, but nevertheless he felt exposed out here on West 89th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue, as though Arnie might be able somehow to see through the front apartment and down to the street, where Dortmunder was not rushing to come up and see him.

But then Kelp did get there, whistling up the street with his hands in his chino pockets, wearing a light blue polo shirt with the ghostly echo of a panther on the left front, where Anne Marie had removed the manufacturer's logo. "Waiting long?" he wanted to know.

"Nah, I just got here," Dortmunder said, to give him no satisfaction. "Let's go."

He turned toward the building, but Kelp said, "Shouldn't we discuss it first?"

Dortmunder frowned at him. "Discuss what?"

"Well, what the plan is, what's our approach, like that."

"Andy," Dortmunder said, "he hasn't told us the proposition yet. We discuss after we got something to talk about. You're just trying to stall here. Comon."

Dortmunder turned toward the entrance again, and this time Kelp followed. The ground floor of Arnie's building was a storefront, at the moment selling video games, with the most astonishing posters about sex and violence in the window and with a tiny vestibule to its left. Dortmunder and Kelp crowded into the vestibule; Dortmunder pushed the button next to the dirty card that said Albright, then gave a fatalistic look at the metal grid beside it, knowing what was coming next.

Which it did. " Dortmunder ?"

"That's right," Dortmunder said to the metal grid, sorry he couldn't deny it, and the nasty buzzer sounded that would unlock the door.

Inside, a narrow hall was filled with the fragrance of old, damp newspapers, and the steep stairs led up to the second floor, where Arnie Albright himself stood and gazed down, a very strange expression on his face that he might have intended for a welcoming smile. "So," he called. "Two of you."

"I knew he didn't mean me," Kelp muttered as they went up the stairs. Dortmunder did not dignify that with a reply.

When they reached the top, Arnie turned away toward the open door of his apartment, saying, "Well, come on in, but try not to look at me, I still look like an army uniform."

Well, it was slightly worse than that, in fact. The way a tan manifested itself on Arnie Albright's city-bred skin was to look like the kind of makeup the mortician uses when there's going to be a viewing. If anybody wanted to know what Arnie Albright would look like in his coffin, this was the chance.

Otherwise he seemed unchanged, a grizzled, gnarly guy with a nose like a tree root. He was dressed in a Soho Film Festival T-shirt, bright blue cotton shorts, and Birkenstocks that looked as though they came from the same tree as his nose.

Arnie's apartment, small underfurnished rooms with big dirty windows showing the airshaft, was decorated mostly with his calendar collection, walls covered with Januarys of all times, combined with pictures of leggy girls, icy brooks, cuddly kittens, and classic cars. Here and there were the ones he called incompletes, years that had apparently started in June or September.