Good Behavior (18 page)

Nobody else in the room got really what you could call excited; nobody came over to look at this blip. After all, nothing had ever gone really wrong in this building, and all anomalies had eventually had their explanation. One of the guys across the room said, “What kind of blip?”

“Just a—” The man with the blip tapped the glass with his fingernail, but the rod remained red side up. “Just one little indicator here,” he said, and looked up at the walls full of indicators. Nothing wrong on any of them. “Something up on twenty-six,” he said, where at that moment Wilbur Howey had paused in his work to explain what he was doing to Dortmunder, thus delaying things and keeping that disturbing little indicator red.

One of the other men frowned at all the television monitors. When you have seventy-four floors to think about, you aren't necessarily going to remember every detail of which floors do and which floors do not employ the closed-circuit TV scanning option. “I don't see anything moving,” this man said.

Another man said, “You want to call the lobby, send somebody up to look?”

The first man shook his head at the red indicator. Wilbur Howey, finally having been left alone by Dortmunder, reinserted the missing screw as the man reached out and tapped the glass again with the same fingernail, and the rod flipped back to green. “There it is,” the security man said. “It's okay now.”

“Keep an eye on it,” one of the other men suggested. “If it does it again, leave a note for Maintenance on Monday.”

The first man tapped the glass. The indicator stayed green, and upstairs Tiny Bulcher kicked open the door to Asiatic Antiques. “No problem now,” the security man said. “Everything's fine.”

27

On the sixtieth floor, Howey wanted to stop
again
. “We've only got the weekend, you know,” Dortmunder told him, disgusted.

Howey looked like a man full of snappy answers, of which he would unburden himself once he caught his breath. Meantime, he sat on the top step at the sixtieth floor landing, fanning his blotchy red-and-white face with his Coors cap, glancing bright-eyed but speechless up at Dortmunder from time to time, and breathing like an obscene phone caller in a hurry. Dortmunder's watch, which was always a few minutes either fast or slow, read around ten minutes to four. It had been his plan to get up to the top of the tower, rescue Sister Mary Grace, and bring her back with him to J.C. Taylor's office by six, before anybody was up and about, but Howey was slowing things considerably. Almost four in the morning, and they still had another fourteen flights ahead of them just to reach the doors Howey was supposed to open so Dortmunder could
begin
. “Any time you're ready,” Dortmunder said. Of course, he didn't want the fella to become totally incapacitated, or dead, or anything of a
real
problem nature like that, but on the other hand there was a certain sense of urgency here that wasn't being aided by a member of the string who has to sit down and take it easy every couple minutes.

“Say,” Howey said, but that was it; he went back to breathing.

“Write me a note,” Dortmunder suggested. “Take a vow of silence.”

“By golly,” Howey said, and quit again to breathe. Then he slapped his Coors cap on his head, took a
deep
breath, grabbed the railing with both hands preparatory to pulling himself to his feet, and said, “Say … you couldn't find a … nun … in a dungeon, could ya?”

“Tower,” Dortmunder said unsympathetically. “That's all I've got.”

“Whoosh,” said Howey, and heaved his butt up off the metal stair. On his feet, he held the railing and gazed up the endless stairwell, Adam's apple bobbing in a scrawny throat that looked like a beer can somebody had squeezed with his hand. “I never was a mountain climber,” he announced. “Wimmin, that's all
I
ever wanted to climb.”

“Think how easy it'll be on the way down,” Dortmunder told him.

“Sixteen times … how many floors? Seven to seventy-four, but no thirteen, that's, uh, uhhh …”

Dortmunder said, “Can you do math and climb stairs at the same time?”

“Maybe,” Howey said, and at last started off, trudging up the steps, bony hand gripping the metal rail. Dortmunder hefted Howey's toolbag—Howey couldn't carry it himself, of course—and followed.

Fourteen flights ensued—very, very slowly. Dortmunder kept switching the toolbag from hand to hand. Occasionally, Howey would wheeze out a “Say,” or a “Whooey,” and once he stopped entirely in the middle of a flight to announce, “One thousand and fifty-six!”

Dortmunder, just changing hands with the toolbag, collided with Howey's back, lost his balance, did not fall down a flight of stairs, and said, “Now what?”

“That's how many steps!” Howey said, turning around, giving Dortmunder a triumphant look, which then faded to a frown as he said, “I think it is, anyway. Let's see …”

“Walk,” Dortmunder told him.

Howey turned and walked, one step up at a time, planting his feet solidly like a man in magnetic boots crossing a metal ceiling, and without further incident the two travelers corkscrewed on up the unchanging stairwell to the seventy-fourth floor, where Howey gasped, looked at the gate closing off the top two floors, pointed at it, gasped, shook his head in contempt, panted awhile, pointed at the gate again, and said, “Two minutes. Open it right up.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said. “And in three minutes you'll have a whole lot of new friends with guns in their hands.” He pointed at the usual security panel low beside the hall door. “We go through there.”

Howey frowned at the gate. “Why not this way? Straight up the stairs.”

Dortmunder put Howey's toolbag down by the security panel and said, “Didn't you look at the specs? From here on up, it's a different security system. You can't touch it at all.”

“Is that so, now?” Howey seemed quite pleased by this piece of news. Scratching his grizzled jaw with his knuckles, gazing at the gate with new respect, he said, “They must really like that little nun up there, you think so?”

“They want to keep her anyway,” Dortmunder said. His watch said around quarter to five. “Come on, Wilbur,” he said.

The use of the first name was apparently just the personal touch that was needed; with no further ado, Howey assumed his cross-legged seated position in front of the security panel, did the maneuver with the screws—

(“Goddamn!” said the same fellow down in security in the basement, “there goes another one!” He bunked the glass with a knuckle, and the rod flipped back from red to green. “No, it's okay,” he said. “Goddamn things.”)

—and poked briefly inside among the wiring and control sheets, whistling, “Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do,” between his teeth. “Hardly a thing up here,” he commented at one point. “No security at all.”

Dortmunder knew that to be true, from the ledger books Sister Mary Grace had smuggled out. The engineering and architectural firms on this floor used only simple-level alarms on their main entrances, the law firm used a little heat-activated and voice-activated stuff in a couple of rooms, and the Margrave Corporation didn't use any of the building's security at all. There was also, according to the plans, another staircase up to seventy-six from Margrave; that's the way Dortmunder would go, once Howey cleared the way.

It was hard to tell exactly what Margrave itself was, except it was a corporation, it had offices, and it was tied in with other of Frank Ritter's holdings. But whatever it might be, the way Dortmunder had things figured, he wasn't likely to run into anybody doing business inside there at five in the morning, and once within Margrave it shouldn't be impossible to make his way up to where the nun was being held. Generally speaking, Dortmunder thought of himself as a kind of utility infielder in the smash-and-grab line, not a specialist like Wilbur Howey but someone who could go past ordinary locks and security devices without too much trouble. So when Howey sat back on the floor, smiling with the satisfaction of a craftsman at the height of his powers—seventy-fourth floor, after all—and said, “She's all yours,” Dortmunder said, “That's fine, Wilbur. Close the panel up again so it doesn't look like anybody's come through, then go on back down. I'll take it from here.”

Howey said, “Sure you don't want me to do the office door?”

“I've seen the specs,” Dortmunder assured him, opening the fire door to the hall (nothing went wrong down in Security's basement). “That Margrave door's a breeze. It'll open all by itself when it sees me coming.” Touching his temple in a little half-salute of farewell to Howey, saying, “See you in a little while with Sister Mary Grace,” Dortmunder stepped through to the hall, letting the fire door ease itself closed behind him. Almost whistling—like Howey—he went around the corner to Margrave.

Where the office door opened itself for him and a burly man in camouflage gear, holding a Russian AK-47 assault rifle casually in his right hand, looked out at Dortmunder and said, in exasperation, “Another straggler. Come along, fellow.”

“Um,” said Dortmunder.

“Come on, come on,” the burly man said, making shooing motions with the rifle as though it were a broom, sweeping Dortmunder in. “We're late as it is,” he said.

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “Uh huh.” He walked into Margrave.

28

The trouble with these ruthless-killer types, Virgil Pickens thought as he led the final straggler down the halls of Margrave to the assembly room, is they're not so good on discipline. Here's this fellow wandering around the public corridors when he's supposed to be learning the tools of his trade.

The error, made by The People Upstairs, was that all the political orientation lectures had been done first, and for people like this crowd the politics and the social situations are utterly without interest. All they want to know is, what does our side look like, what does the other side look like, and what do I kill them with? We're to that part now, Virgil Pickens thought, but the boys are already turned off.

Well, it was his job to turn them back on. Walking into the assembly room, a brightly lit small theater with seating for about a hundred in rows of red plush movie-house seats (but no tilt to the floor) all facing a small stage with a movie screen mounted on the rear wall, Pickens saw that less than half the troops were in conversation, in small clusters in the aisles, and those conversations stopped the instant he appeared, the talkers turning hooded, watchful, unfriendly eyes in Pickens' direction, he representing The People Upstairs. The rest of the boys meanwhile sat around singly or in pairs, silent, brooding at the blank movie screen, smoking from cigarettes held cupped in their palms, scratching their old tattoos, and looking mutinous. They were all just recently up and had their breakfasts, and were still sleepy and feeling mean. These, as Pickens well knew, were not folks to bore; these were folks to react to boredom by making a little excitement in the area.

“Grab a pew,” Pickens told the straggler—a deceptively mild-looking fellow—and headed for the stage, saying loudly, “Find your seats, gents, we're gonna talk about death and destruction.”

A low general growl answered him, probably composed of equal parts appreciation and irritation. Pickens went up the four steps to the stage and over to the card table standing in front of the movie screen. Something lumpy on the table was covered with a red-white-and-blue flag composed of various triangles and stars. Standing behind the table, facing the crowd, Pickens held the AK-47 aloft, gripping it just forward of the magazine—if the screen behind him had been red, he'd have looked
exactly
like a Bolshevik poster of the early twenties—and said, “Some of you know this weapon, do you?”

“Shit, yes,” said a lot of voices, while a few others said, “AK,” some said, “Rooshen,” and one voice called out, “Where's it from?”

“This one,” Pickens told the questioner, smiling, because the idea here was to arouse everybody's interest, “this one's from Czechoslovakia. It's a good one.”

“That's nice,” said the questioner.

It was nice. The odd thing about it, even though the AK-47 was a Russian design—with some help from captured German designers and engineers after the Second World War, the Russians having been very impressed by the Wehrmacht's Maschinenpistole MP44—the examples of it made in the Eastern European factories of the Warsaw Bloc tended to be a lot better than the ones actually made in Russia. Waggling this Czech-made rifle, Pickens grinned at his troops and said, “You've taken more than one of these away from little brown people here and there, haven't you, boys?”

A low chuckle went around the room; they were warming up. The AK-47, particularly the model like this one with the metal folding butt so it can be reduced to a concealable twenty-four inches long, has been in the last thirty years the absolute favorite weapon of guerrillas, terrorists, freedom fighters, mercenaries and other bloodthirsty types all over the world, with only the Israeli Uzi even approaching it in popularity. Pickens smiled warmly at his boys, smiled warmly at the weapon in his hand, and said, “So here it is. And now”—with pause for dramatic effect—“you can forget the goddamn thing!” And he flung it side-arm, straight away from himself and off the stage to his right, where it crashed into the wall and fell on the floor behind the side curtain.

That
woke them up. Simple minds, simple pleasures; Pickens knew how to deal with rough boys like this, it was his living. Still smiling, he picked up the flag from the table by two of its corners, and displayed it, saying, “By the way, this is the Guerrera flag. When we get down there, if you see anybody wearing this or waving it or standing next to it, cut him down. That's our meat.”

The boys purred, looking at the flag. One of them called out, “What's our side look like?”