Thieves Dozen (17 page)

On the other hand, newspapers lie. So it would be up to Harmov Krandelloc, said to be an ethnic so different from anybody else that no one had yet figured out even what continent he came from, but who had recently set himself up in a warehouse off Atlantic Avenue where it crossed Flatbush as king of the next generation of really worthwhile fences, who paid great dollar

(sometimes even more than the usual ten percent of value) and never asked too many questions. It would be up to Harmov Krandelloc to determine what the thing in the ham sandwich was actually worth, and what Dortmunder could hope to realize from it.

But now, on the BMT into deepest Brooklyn, surrounded by newspaper photos of his swag, realizing that the celebrity of its former owners made this particular green-and-white object more valuable but also more
newsworthy
(a word the sensible burglar does his best to avoid), Dortmunder hunched with increasing despondency under his borrowed paper, clutched his brown bag in his left hand with increasing trepidation and wished fervently he’d waited a week before trying to unload this bauble.

More than a week. Maybe six years would have been right. Roizak Street would be Dortmunder’s stop. While keeping one eye on his
News
and one eye on his lunch, Dortmunder also kept an eye on the subway map, following the train’s creeping progress from one foreign neighborhood to another; street names without resonance or meaning, separated by the black tunnels.

Vedloukam Boulevard; the train slowed and stopped. Roizak Street was next. The doors opened and closed. The train started, roaring into the tunnel. Two minutes went by, and the train slowed. Dortmunder rose, peered out the car windows and saw only black. Where was the station?

The train braked steeply, forcing Dortmunder to sit again. Metal wheels could be heard screaming along the metal rails. With one final lurch, the train stopped.

No station. Now what? Some holdup, when all he wanted to do—

The lights went out. Pitch-black darkness. A voice called, “I smell smoke.” The voice was oddly calm.

The next 27 voices were anything but calm. Dortmunder, too, smelled smoke, and he felt people surging this way and that, bumping into him, bumping into one another, crying out. He scrunched close on his seat. He’d given up the
News,
but he held on grimly to his ham sandwich.

“ATTENTION, PLEASE.”

It was an announcement, over the public address system. Some people kept shouting. Other people shouted for the first people to stop shouting so they could hear the announcement. Nobody heard the announcement.

The car became still, but too late. The announcement was over. “What did he say?” a voice asked.

“I thought it was a she,” another voice said.

“It was definitely a he,” a third voice put in.

“I see lights coming,” said a fourth voice.

“Where? Who? What?” cried a lot of voices.

“Along the track. Flashlights.”

“Which side? What way?”

“Left.”

“Right.”

“Behind us.”

“That’s not flashlights, that’s
fire!
”

“What! What! What!”

“Not behind us, buddy, in front of us! Flashlights.”

“Where?”

“They’re gone now.”

“What time is it?”

“
Time!
Who gives a damn what time it is?”

“I do, knucklehead.”

“Who’s a knucklehead? Where are you, wise guy?”

“Hey!
I
didn’t do anything!”

Dortmunder hunkered down. If the car didn’t burn up first, there was going to be a first-class barroom brawl in here pretty soon.

Someone sat on Dortmunder. “Oof,” he said.

It was a woman. Squirming around, she yelled, “Get your hands off me!”

“Madam,” Dortmunder said, “you’re sitting on my lunch.” “Don’t you talk dirty to
me!
” the woman yelled, and gave him an elbow in the eye. But at least she got off his lap—and lunch— and went away into the heaving throng.

The car was rocking back and forth now; could it possibly tip over?

“The fire’s getting closer!”

“Here come the flashlights again!”

Even Dortmunder could see them this time, outside the window, flashlights shining blurrily through a thick fog, like the fog in a Sherlock Holmes movie. Then someone carrying a flash-light opened one of the car’s doors, and the fog came into the car, but it wasn’t fog, it was thick oily smoke. It burned Dortmunder’s eyes, made him cough and covered his skin with really bad sunblock.

People clambered up into the car. In the flashlight beams bouncing around, Dortmunder saw all the coughing, wheezing, panicky passengers and saw that the people with the flashlights were uniformed cops.

Oh, good. Cops.

The cops yelled for everybody to shut up, and after a while everybody shut up, and one of the cops said, “We’re gonna walk you through the train to the front car. We got steps off the train there, and then we’re gonna walk to the station. It’s only a couple blocks, and the thing to remember is, stay away from the third rail.”

A voice called, “Which is the third rail?”

“All of them,” the cop told him. “Just stay away from rails. OK, let’s go before the fire gets here. Not
that
way, whaddya looking for, a barbecue?
That
way.”

They all trooped through the dark smoky train, coughing and stumbling, bumping into one another, snarling, using their elbows, giving New Yorkers’ reputations no boost whatsoever, and eventually they reached the front car, where more cops—
more
cops—were helping everybody down a temporary metal staircase to the ground. Of course it would be metal, with all these third rails around; it couldn’t be wood.

A cop took hold of Dortmunder’s elbow, which made Dortmunder instinctively put his wrists together for the cuffs, but the cop just wanted to help him down the stairs and didn’t notice the inappropriate gesture. “Stay off the third rail,” the cop said, releasing his elbow.

“Good thought,” Dortmunder said, and trudged on after the other passengers, down the long smoky dark tunnel, lit by bare bulbs spaced along the side walls.

The smoke lessened as they went on, and then the platform at Roizak Street appeared, and yet another cop put his hand on Dortmunder’s elbow, to help him up the concrete steps to the platform. This time Dortmunder reacted like an innocent person, or as close to one as he could get.

A lot of people were hanging around on the platform; apparently, they wanted another subway ride. Dortmunder walked through them, and just before he got to the turnstile to get out of here yet another cop pointed at the bag in his hand said, “What’s that?”

Dortmunder looked at the bag. It was much more wrinkled than before and was blotchily gray and black from the sooty smoke. “My lunch,” he said.

“You don’t want to eat that,” the cop told him, and pointed at a nearby trash can. “Throw it away, why don’t ya?”

“It’ll be OK,” Dortmunder told him. “It’s smoked ham.” And he got out of there before the cop could ask for a taste.

Out on the sidewalk at last, Dortmunder took deep breaths of Brooklyn air that had never smelled quite so sweet before, then headed off toward Harmov Krandelloc, following the directions he’d been given: two blocks this way, one block that way, turn right at the corner, and there’s the 11 paddy wagons and the million cops and the cop cars with all their flashing lights and the long line of handcuffed guys being marched into the wagons.

Dortmunder stopped. No cop happened to be looking in this direction. He turned smoothly around, not even disturbing the air, and walked casually around the corner, then crossed the street to the bodega and said to the guy guarding the fruit and vegetable display outside, “What’s happening over there?”

“Let me get you a paper towel,” the guy said, and he went away and came back with two paper towels, one wet and one dry.

Dortmunder thanked him and wiped his face with the wet paper towel, and it came away black. Then he wiped his face with the dry paper towel and it came away gray. He gave the paper towels back and said, “What’s happening over there?”

“One of those sting operations,” the guy said, “like you see in the movies. You know, the cops set up a fake fence operation, get videotape of all these guys bringing in their stuff, invite them all to a party, then they arrest everybody.”

“When did they show up?”

“About ten minutes ago.”

I’d have been here, Dortmunder thought, if it wasn’t for the subway fire. “Thinka that,” he said.

The guy pointed at his bag: “Whatcha got there?”

“My lunch. It’s OK, it’s smoked ham.”

“That bag, man, you don’t want that bag. Here, gimme, let me—”

He reached for the bag, and Dortmunder pulled back. Why all this interest in a simple lunch bag? What ever happened to the anonymous-workman-with-lunch-bag theory? “It’s fine,” Dortmunder said.

“No, man, it’s greasy,” the bodega guy told him. “It’s gonna soak through, spoil the sandwich. Believe me, I know this shit. Here, lemme give you a new bag.”

A paddy wagon tore past, behind Dortmunder’s clenched shoulder blades, siren screaming. So did a second one. Meantime, the bodega guy reached under his fruit display and came out with a fresh new sandwich-size brown paper bag. “There’s plastic people,” he explained, “and there’s paper people, and I can see you’re a paper man.”

“Right,” Dortmunder said.

“So here you go,” the guy said, and held the bag wide open for Dortmunder to transfer his lunch.

All he could hope was that no brooch made any sudden leap for freedom along the way. He opened the original bag, which in truth was a real mess by now, about to fall apart and very greasy and dirty, and he took the paper towel–wrapped sandwich out of it and put it in the fresh, crisp, sharp new paper bag, and the bodega guy gave it a quick twirl of the top to seal it and handed it over, saying, “You want a nice mango with that? Papaya? Tangelo?”

“No, thanks,” Dortmunder said. “I would, but I break out.” “So many people tell me that,” the bodega guy said, and shook his head at the intractability of fate. “Well,” he said, cheering up, “have a nice day.”

A paddy wagon went by, screaming. “I’ll try to,” Dortmunder promised, and walked away.

No more subways. One burning subway a day was all he felt up to, even if it did keep him from being gathered up in that sting operation and sent away to spend the rest of his life behind bars in some facility upstate where the food is almost as bad as your fellowman.

Dortmunder walked three blocks before he saw a cab; hang the expense, he hailed it: “You go to Manhattan?”

“Always been my dream,” said the cabbie, who was maybe some sort of Arab, but not the kind with the turban. Or were they not Arabs? Anyway, this guy wasn’t one of them.

“West 78th Street,” Dortmunder said, and settled back to enjoy a smoke-free, fire-free, cop-free existence.

“Only thing,” the Arab said, if he was an Arab. “No eating in the cab.”

“I’m not eating,” Dortmunder said.

“I’m only saying,” the driver said, “on account of the sandwich.”

“I won’t eat it,” Dortmunder promised him.

“Thank you.”

They started, driving farther and farther from the neighborhood with all the paddy wagons, which was good, and Dortmunder said, “Cabbies eat in the cabs all the time.”

“Not in the backseat,” the driver said.

“Well, no.”

“All’s the space we can mess up is up here,” the driver pointed out. “You eat back there, you spill a pickle, mustard, jelly, maybe a chocolate chip cookie, what happens my next customer’s a lady in a nice mink coat?”

“I won’t eat the sandwich,” Dortmunder said, and there was no more conversation.

Dortmunder spent the time trying to figure out what the guy was, if he wasn’t Arab. Russian, maybe, or Israeli, or possibly Pakistani. The name by the guy’s picture on the dash was Mouli Mabik, and who knew what that was supposed to be? You couldn’t even tell which was the first name.

Their route took them over the Brooklyn Bridge, which at the Manhattan end drops right next to City Hall and all the court buildings it would be better not to have to go into. The cab came down the curving ramp onto the city street and stopped at the traffic light among all the official buildings, and all at once there was a pair of plainclothes detectives right
there,
on the left, next to the cab, waving their shields in one hand and their guns in the other, both of them yelling, “You! Pull over! Right now!”

Oh,
damn
it, Dortmunder thought in sudden panic and terror, they
got
me!

The cab was jolting forward. It was not pulling over to the side, it was not obeying the plainclothesmen, it was not delivering Dortmunder into their clutches. The driver, hunched very low over his steering wheel, glared straight ahead out of his windshield and accelerated like a jet plane. Dortmunder stared; he’s helping me escape!

Zoom,
they angled to the right around two delivery trucks and a parked hearse, climbed the sidewalk, tore down it as the pedestrians leaped every which way to get clear, skirted a fire hydrant, caromed off a sightseeing bus, tore on down the street, made a screaming two-wheeled left into a street that happened to be oneway coming in this direction, and damn near managed to get between the oncoming garbage truck and the parked armored car. Close, but no cigar.

Dortmunder bounced into the bulletproof clear plastic shield that takes up most of the legroom in the backseat of a New York City cab, then stayed there, hands, nose, lips and eyebrows pasted to the plastic as he looked through at this cabbie from Planet X, who, when finished ricocheting off his steering wheel, reached under his seat and came up with a shiny silver-and-black Glock machine pistol!

Yikes! There might not be much legroom back here, but Dortmunder found he could fit into it very well. He hit the deck, or the floor, shoulders and knees all meeting at his chin, and found himself wondering if that damn plastic actually was bulletproof after all.

Then he heard cracking and crashing sounds, like glass breaking, but when he stuck a quaking hand out, palm up, just beyond his quaking forehead, there were no bulletproof plastic pieces raining down. So what was being broken?