Thieves Dozen (2 page)
That story, set in Arnie Albright’s charming apartment, was written in the fall of 1993, twelve years after John and I had first entered the lists of the ten-yard dash. In that time, we’d combined for seven short stories and one workout, and until then I’d had no particular goal in mind beyond each event, assuming every time that this story was the last, that John and I had longer fish to fry. But now it occurred to me that if we combined on just two or three additional mini-sagas, we’d have enough for a collection. So all I had to do was think of two or three more stories.
I don’t know how it is with anybody else, but I can never think about what I’m supposed to think about. Dortmunder short stories had come along and come along, never anticipated and never particularly needed, but as soon as I decided I
should
do another Dortmunder short story, I couldn’t think of one. Here I was, most of the way across the stream, with only two flat stones to touch to reach the other bank, and not a flat stone could I find anywhere inside my head (which is usually full of them).
It wasn’t until more than four years later, when I’d given up on the idea of a Dortmunder collection or any more Dortmunder short stories for any reason at all, a time when I was supposed to be thinking about something else entirely, when here it came, and it couldn’t have been more simple. John would leave home on a little errand, that’s all. “Now What?” the story was called, and it was back to Dortmunder working solo, and all he was trying to do was get from point A to point B. Well, he got back to
Playboy
; he could settle for that.
And we found the same home with the final story in this assemblage, “Art and Craft,” in which, I admit, John did poach on territory not normally his own. Maybe it’s that he’s been associated in bookstores and libraries with detective stories and their sleuths all these years—though, in his case, mostly in rebuttal— that led him at last to make, in “Art and Craft,” the kind of observation of tiny detail that’s usually the province of cerebral plainclothesmen and grandmas with cats. Still, his use of the technique remains peculiarly his own.
And I guess Dortmunder remains peculiarly mine, at whatever length. Originally, he was just passing through. He wasn’t expected to have legs, and yet here he is, still domitable but bowed, apprentice, it would appear, of both the extended romp and the quick hit, the perhaps-not-exactly-surgical strike.
Through these years of John Dortmunder’s brief encounters, there has remained one constant, and her name is Alice Turner. She was the fiction editor at
Playboy
, where seven of the stories herein first appeared, and through all these travails she continued to look upon John and me with bemused disbelief followed by stoical acceptance. (Acceptance is an important quality in a magazine editor.) Her suggestions have been not onerous and always to the point, and have definitely improved the product. She’s also a terrific person who, in her off-hours, wrote a history of Hell, so what’s not to like?
Speaking of which, some years ago, as a result of a contractual contretemps with a motion picture studio (the closest thing to evil incarnate left in this secular age), it looked for a while as though I might either have to stop writing about John entirely—a horrible thought—or change his name, which the harpies were claiming for themselves. A pseudonym for John seemed a possibility, since he’d been known to sail under colors other than his own once or twice already, but when I went to
choose
that new name, nothing worked. John Dortmunder was John Dortmunder, damn it, and nobody else.
After brooding for a month, I finally settled on the name Rumsey, which I had found on an exit sign on the Saw Mill River Parkway, north of New York City. Rumsey seemed to me closest in feeling, in philosophy, in weltanschauung (not to mention weltschmerz) to Dortmunder.
I typed out the name a few times: John Rumsey. John Rumsey.
John Rumsey. Hmmm.
Fortunately, the evil empire’s shadow receded from my peaceful village, so Dortmunder could go on being Dortmunder after all, and once that happened, I could admit to myself that even Rumsey wasn’t a completely satisfying substitute. The problem is, John Rumsey is short. John Dortmunder is of average height, but John Rumsey is short. If the guys were to get together in the back room of the O.J. Bar & Grill to scope and scheme some new outrage, John Rumsey would be the shortest guy in the joint. Don’t ask me how I know; I know.
Hey. Maybe this is really Rumsey, here in this collection. You think?
A
RT THEFT, OF COURSE,” SAID THE ELEGANT MAN, “HAS BEEN
overdone. By now it’s thoroughly boring.”
Dortmunder didn’t say anything. His business was theft, of art or whatever else had value, and he’d never supposed it was meant to be exciting. Nor, while tiptoeing around darkened halls in guarded buildings with his pockets full of stolen goods, had he ever found boredom much of a problem.
The elegant man sighed. “What do people of your sort drink?” he asked.
“Bourbon,” Dortmunder said. “Water. Coca-Cola. Orange juice. Beer.”
“Bourbon,” the elegant man told one of the two plug-uglies who’d brought Dortmunder here. “And sherry for me.”
“Coffee,” Dortmunder went on. “Sometimes Gallo Burgundy. Vodka. Seven-Up. Milk.”
“How do you prefer your bourbon?” the elegant man asked. “With ice and water. People of my sort also drink Hi-C, Scotch, lemonade, Nyquil—”
“Do you drink Perrier?”
“No,” said Dortmunder.
“Ah,” said the elegant man, closing the subject with his preconceptions intact. “Now,” he said, “I suppose you’re wondering why we all gathered you here.”
“I got an appointment uptown,” Dortmunder answered. He was feeling mulish. When a simple walk to the subway turns into an incident with two plug-uglies, a gun in the back, a shoving into a limousine outfitted with liveried chauffeur beyond the closed glass partition, a run up the stocking of Manhattan to the East Sixties, a swallowing up into a town house
with
a garage
with
an electronically operated door, and an interview at gunpoint with a tall, slender, painfully well-dressed, 60ish, white-haired, white-mustached elegant man in a beautifully appointed and very masculine den imported intact from Bloomingdale’s, a person has a right to feel mulish. “I’m already late for my appointment,” Dortmunder pointed out.
“I’ll try to be brief,” the elegant man promised. “My father— who, by the way, was once Secretary of the Treasury of this great land, under Teddy Roosevelt—always impressed upon me the wisdom of obtaining expert advice before undertaking any project, of whatever size or scope. I have always followed that injunction.”
“Uh-huh,” said Dortmunder.
“The exigencies of life having made it necessary for me,” the elegant man continued, “to engage for once in the practice of grand larceny, in the form of burglary, I immediately sought out a professional in the field to advise me. You.”
“I reformed,” Dortmunder said. “I made some mistakes in my youth, but I paid my debt to society and now I’m reformed.”
“Of course,” said the elegant man. “Ah, here are our drinks. Come along, I have something to show you.”
It was a dark and lumpy statue, about four feet tall, of a moody teenaged girl dressed in curtains and sitting on a tree trunk. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” the elegant man said, gazing fondly at the thing.
Beauty was outside Dortmunder’s visual spectrum. “Yeah,” he said, and looked around this subterranean room, which had been fitted out like a cross between a den and a museum. Bookcases alternated with paintings on the walls, and antique furniture shared the polished wood floor with statuary, some on pedestals, some, like this bronze of a young girl, on low platforms. Dortmunder and the elegant man and the armed plug-uglies had come down here by elevator: apparently, the only route in and out. There were no windows and the air had the flat blanketlike quality of tight temperature and humidity control.
“It’s a Rodin,” the elegant man was saying. “One of my wiser acquisitions, in my youth.” His mouth forming a practiced
moue,
he said, “One of my
less
wise acquisitions, more recently, was a flesh-and-blood young woman who did me the disservice of becoming my wife.”
“I really got an appointment uptown,” Dortmunder said. “More recently still,” the elegant man persisted, “we came to a particularly bitter and unpleasant parting of the ways, Moira and I. As a part of the resulting settlement, the little bitch got this nymph here. But she
didn’t
get it.”
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.
“I have friends in the art world,” the elegant man went on, “and all men have sympathizers where grasping ex-wives are concerned. Several years earlier, I’d had a mold made of this piece, and from it an exact copy had been cast in the same grade of bronze. A virtually identical copy; not quite museum quality, of course, but aesthetically just as pleasing as the original.”
“Sure,” said Dortmunder.
“It was that copy I gave to Moira; having, of course, first bribed the expert she’d brought in to appraise the objects she was looting from me. The other pieces I gave her with scarcely a murmur, but my nymph? Never!”
“Ah,” said Dortmunder.
“All was well,” the elegant man said. “I kept my nymph, the one and only true original from Rodin’s plaster form, with the touch of the sculptor’s hand full upon it. Moira had the copy, pleased with the thought of its being the original, cheered by the memory of having done me in the eye. A happy ending for everyone, you might have said.”
“Uh-huh,” said Dortmunder.
“But not an ending at all, unfortunately.” The elegant man shook his head. “It has come to my attention,
very
belatedly, that tax problems have forced Moira to make a gift of the Rodin nymph to the Museum of Modern Art. Perhaps I ought to explain that even I cannot with any certainty bribe an appraiser from the Museum of Modern Art.”
“He’ll tell,” Dortmunder said.
“He will, in the argot of the underworld,” the elegant man said, “spill the beans.”
“That isn’t the argot of the underworld,” Dortmunder told him.
“No matter. The point is, my one recourse, it seems to me, is to enter Moira’s town house and make off with the copy.”
“Makes sense,” Dortmunder agreed.
The elegant man pointed at his nymph. “Pick that up,” he said. Dortmunder frowned, looking for the butcher’s thumb.
“Go ahead,” the elegant man insisted. “It won’t bite.” Dortmunder handed his bourbon and water to one of the plug-uglies; then hesitant, unfamiliar with the process of lifting teenaged girls dressed in curtains—whether of bronze or anything else—he grasped this one by the chin and one elbow and lifted . . . and it didn’t move. “Uh,” said Dortmunder, visions of hernias blooming in his head.
“You see the problem,” the elegant man said, while the muscles in Dortmunder’s arms and shoulders and back and groin all quivered from the unexpected shock. “My nymph weighs five hundred twenty-six pounds. As does Moira’s copy, give or take a few ounces.”
“Heavy,” agreed Dortmunder. He took back his drink and drank.
“The museum’s expert arrives tomorrow afternoon,” the elegant man said touching his white mustache. “If I am to avoid discomfort—possibly even public disgrace—I must remove Moira’s copy from her possession tonight.”
Dortmunder said, “And you want me to do it?”
“No, no, not at all.” The elegant man waved his elegant fingers. “My associates”—meaning the plug-uglies—“and I will, as you would say, pull the scam.”
“That’s not what I’d say,” Dortmunder told him.
“No matter, no matter. What we wish from you, Mr. Dortmunder, is simply your expertise. Your professional opinion. Come along.” The elevator door opened to his elegant touch. “Care for another bourbon? Of course you do.”
“Fortunately,” the elegant man said, “I kept the architect’s plans and models even though I lost the town house itself to Moira.”
Dortmunder and his host and one plug-ugly (the other was off getting more bourbon and sherry) stood now in a softly glowing dining room overlooking a formal brick-and-greenery rear garden. On the antique refectory table dominating the room stood two model houses next to a roll of blueprints. The tiniest model, barely six inches tall and built solid of balsa wood with windows and other details painted on, was placed on an aerial photograph to the same scale, apparently illustrating the block in which the finished house would stand. The larger, like a child’s dollhouse, was over two feet tall, with what looked like real glass in its windows and even some furniture in the rooms within. Both models were of a large, nearly square house with a high front stoop, four stories tall, with a big square many-paned skylight in the center of the roof.
Dortmunder looked at the big model, then at the small, then at the photograph of the street. “This is in New York?”
“Just a few blocks from here.”
“Huh,” said Dortmunder, thinking of his own apartment. “You see the skylight,” suggested the elegant man.
“Yeah.”
“It can be opened in good weather. There’s an atrium on the second level. You know what an atrium is?”
“No.”
“It’s a kind of garden, within the house. Here, let me show you.”
The larger model was built in pieces, which could be disassembled. The roof came off first, showing bedrooms and baths all around a big square opening coinciding with the skylight. The top floor came off, was set aside and showed a third floor given over to a master bedroom suite and a bookcase-lined den, around the continuing square atrium hole. The details impressed even Dortmunder. “This thing must have cost as much as the real house,” he said.
The elegant man smiled. “Not quite,” he said, lifting off the third floor. And here was the bottom of the atrium—fancy word for air shaft, Dortmunder decided—a formal garden like the one outside these real-life dining-room windows, with a fountain and stone paths. The living and dining rooms in the model were open to the atrium. “Moira’s copy,” the elegant man said, pointing at the garden, “is just about there.”
