Thieves Dozen (4 page)
“You bluh—you—”
“My presence here,” the elegant man continued, as though his ex-wife’s paralysis were an invitation to go on, “is the result of an earlier deception, at the time of our separation. I’m afraid I must admit to you now that I bribed Grindle at that time to accept on your behalf not the original but a copy of the Rodin— this copy, in fact.”
The ex-wife took a deep breath. She looked away from the bronze carnage and gazed at the elegant man. “You bloody fool,” she said, having at last recaptured her voice, and speaking now almost in a conversational tone. “You bloody self-satisfied fool, do you think you
invented
bribery?”
A slight frown wrinkled the elegant man’s features. “I beg your pardon?”
“Beg Rodin’s,” she told him. “
You
could only bribe Grindle with cash. When he told me your proposition, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t take it.”
“You—you—” Now it was the elegant man who was losing the power of speech.
“And, having taken your bribe
and
mine,” she went inexorably on, “he pronounced the false true before reversing the statues.
That,
” pointing at the shins and tree trunk, “was the original.”
“Impossible!” The elegant man had begun to blink. His tie was askew. “Grindle wouldn’t—I’ve kept the—”
“
You bloody
FOOL!” And the woman reached for a handy piece of luggage—toilet case, swamp-colored, speckled with someone else’s initials, retail $364.50—and hurled it at her ex-husband, who ducked, bellowed and reached for the late nymph’s bronze thigh with which to riposte. The woman sidestepped and the thigh rolled across the atrium, coming to a stop at Dortmunder’s feet. He looked down at it, saw the glint of something shiny on the rough inside surface and hunkered down for a closer look. At the foundry, when they’d covered the removable plaster interior with wax prior to pouring the bronze, maybe some French coin, now old and valuable, had got stuck in the wax and then transferred to the bronze. Dortmunder peered in at the thing, reaching out one hand to turn the thigh slightly to improve the light, then running his finger tips over the shiny thing, testing to see if it would come loose. But it was well and firmly fixed in place.
The rasp of the saber saw once more snarled; Dortmunder, looking up, saw that the woman had it now, and was chasing her ex-husband around the plants and flowers with it, while the plug-ugly stood frozen, pretending to be a floor lamp. Dortmunder stood, mouthed the last of his sandwich, retraced his steps to the kitchen and went out the window.
The far-off sound of sirens was just audible when he reached the pay phone at the corner and called again the O.J. Bar & Grill. When Kelp came on the phone, Dortmunder said, “The guys still there?”
“Sure. You on your way?”
“No. I got a new thing over here on the East Side. You and the guys meet me at Park and Sixty-fifth.”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Just a little breaking and entering.”
“The place is empty?”
Down the block, police cars were massing in front of Moira’s house. “Oh, yeah,” Dortmunder said, “it’s empty. I don’t think the owner’s gonna be back for years.”
“Something valuable?”
There weren’t two copies of the Rodin, no; there was one original, one copy. And the elegant man had been right about ex-husbands’ getting the sympathy vote. The hired expert had accepted bribes from both parties, but he’d made his own decision when it came to distributing the real and the fake Rodins. In Dortmunder’s mind’s eye, he saw again the shiny thing hidden within the nymph’s thigh. It was the flip-off ring from a thoroughly modern beer can. “It’s valuable OK,” he said. “But it’s kind of heavy. On the way over, steal a truck.”
D
ORTMUNDER LOOKED AT THE HORSE
. T
HE HORSE LOOKED AT
Dortmunder. “Ugly goddamn thing,” Dortmunder commented, while the horse just rolled his eyes in disbelief.
“Not that one,” the old coot said. “We’re looking for a black stallion.”
“In the dark,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Anyway, all horses look the same to me.”
“It’s not how they look,” the old coot said, “it’s how they run. And Dire Straits could run the ass off a plug like this one. Which is why he won’t be out here in the night air with these glue factories. We’ll find Dire Straits in one of them barns down there.”
That was another thing rubbing Dortmunder the wrong way—the names that horses get saddled with. Abby’s Elbow, Nuff Said, Dreadful Summit, Dire Straits. If you were going out to the track, where the horses were almost irrelevant to the occasion, where the point was to drink beer and bet money and socialize a little and make small jokes like, “I hope I break even today; I could use the cash,” it didn’t matter much that you were betting 30 across the board on something called Giant Can and that you had to wait for a bunch of horses outdoors somewhere to run around in a big oval before you found out if you had won. But here, in the darkest wilds of New Jersey, on a ranch barely 60 miles from New York City, surrounded by all these huge, nervous creatures, pawing and snorting and rolling their eyes, out here breathing this moist, smelly air, walking in mud or worse, it just capped Dortmunder’s discontent that these dangerous furry barrels on sticks were named Picasso’s Revenge and How’m I Doin’?
From some distance away, Andy Kelp’s cautious voice rose into the rich air, saying, “There’s more down that way. I heard some go, ‘Snushfurryblurryblurryblurry.’”
“That’s a whicker,” the old coot said, as though anybody gave a damn.
“I don’t care if it’s mohair,” Kelp told him. “Let’s do this and get out of here. I’m a city boy myself.”
The edge of nervousness and impatience in Kelp’s voice was music to Dortmunder’s ears. It was Kelp who’d brought him into this caper in the first place, so if Dortmunder was going to suffer, it was nice to know that his best friend was also unhappy and discontented.
It was the eternally optimistic Kelp who had first met the old coot, named Hiram Rangle, and brought him around to the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue one night to meet Dortmunder and discuss a matter of possible mutual benefit. “I work for this fella,” Hiram Rangle had said in his raspy old-coot voice, his faded-blue eyes staring suspiciously out of his leathery brown face. “But I’m not gonna tell you his name.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Dortmunder said. He was a little annoyed in a general way, having had a series of things go wrong lately—not important, doesn’t matter—and it hadn’t been
his
idea to take this meeting. Over at the bar, the regulars were discussing the latest advances in psychotherapy— “It’s called A version, and it’s a way to make you have a different version of how you see women”; “I like the version I got”—and Dortmunder was sitting here with this old coot, a skinny little guy in deerskin jacket and flannel shirt and corduroy pants and yellow boots big enough to garage a Honda, and the coot was telling him what he
would
tell him and what he
wouldn’t
tell him. “You and my pal Andy here,” Dortmunder said, lifting his glass of bar bourbon, “can go talk to the crowd at the bar for all I care.”
“Aw, come on, John,” Kelp said. He totally wanted this thing to happen, and he leaned his sharp-featured face over the scarred corner table, as though to draw Dortmunder and the old coot together by sheer force of personality. He said, “This is a good deal for everybody. Let Hiram tell you about it.”
“He says he doesn’t want to.”
“I got to be careful, that’s all,” the old coot said, sipping defensively at his Tsing-Tao.
“Then don’t come to joints like this,” Dortmunder advised him. “
Tell
the man, Hiram,” Kelp said. “That’s what you’re here for.” Hiram took a breath and put down his glass. “What it comes down to is,” he said, “we want to steal a horse.”
They wanted to steal a horse. What it came down to was, the old coot worked for some guy who was full of schemes and scams, and one of them was a long-range plot involving this race horse, Dire Straits, on whom Dortmunder could remember having dropped some rent money some years back on a couple of those rare occasions when Dire Straits had finished out of the running. It seemed that Dire Straits, having in his racing career won many millions for many people (and having lost a few kopecks for Dortmunder), had now been put out to stud, which, as described by the old coot, sounded like a retirement plan better than most. These days, Dire Straits hung around with some other male horses on a nice green-grass farm over near Short Hills, New Jersey—“If they’re short, why do they call them hills?” Dortmunder had wanted to know, which was something else the old coot didn’t have an answer for—and from time to time, the owners of female horses paid the owners of Dire Straits great big sackfuls of money for him to go off and party. It seems there was a theory that the sons and daughters of fast horses would also be fast, and a lot of money changed hands on that theory.
Well, the schemer, Hiram Rangle’s anonymous boss, owned some fairly fast horses himself, but nothing in the Dire Straits class, so his idea was to kidnap Dire Straits and put him to work partying with his own female horses; and then, when the female horses had sons and daughters, the schemer would put down on the birth certificate some slow-moving plater as the father. Then, when the sons and daughters grew up enough to start to run, which would take only a couple of years, the odds against them would be very long, because of their alleged parentage; but because Dire Straits was their real daddy, they would run like crazy, and the schemer would bet on them and make a bundle. In a few months, of course, the odds would adjust to the horses’ actual track records; but by then, the schemer would be home free. With three or four of Dire Straits’ disguised kiddies hitting the turf every year and maybe another five or six years of active partying left in his life, it was a scheme that, as a fellow might say, had legs.
Kelp put it slightly differently: “It’s like
The Prince and the Pauper,
where you don’t know it, but your real daddy’s the king.”
“I think we’re talking about horses here,” Dortmunder told him.
Kelp shook his head. “You never see the romantic side,” he said. “I’ll leave that to Dire Straits,” Dortmunder said.
Anyway, it turned out that the one fly in the ointment in the schemer’s scheme was the fact that, even with all his hustling and finagling, he’d never in his career done any actual, straightforward, out-and-out theft. He had his scheme, he had his own ranch with his own female horses on it, he had a nice cash cushion to use in making his bets three years down the line, but the one thing he didn’t have, and didn’t know how to get, was Dire Straits. So one way or another, his hireling, Rangle, had got in touch with Andy Kelp, who had said his friend John Dortmunder was exactly the man to plan and execute a robbery of this delicate and unusual a nature, and that was why this meeting was taking place in the O.J., where over at the bar the regulars were now arguing about whether penis envy was confined to men or if women could have it, too: “How can they? What’s the basis of the comparison?”
“I can tell you this much,” Hiram Rangle said. “My boss’ll pay twenty thousand dollars for Dire Straits. Not to me; I’ve already got my salary. To the people who help me.”
“Ten thousand apiece, John,” Kelp pointed out.
“I know how to divide by two, Andy.” Dortmunder also knew how to divide by zero, which was how he’d profited from his other operations recently—just a little run of hard luck, nothing worth talking about—which was why he’d finally nodded and said, “I’ll look at this horse of yours,” and why he was now here in the sultry New Jersey night, ankle-deep in some sort of warm, dark pulpiness, listening to Andy Kelp imitate horse whickers and deciding it was time they found the right animal and got the hell out of there.
Because the problem was that Dire Straits was, in a manner of speaking, in prison. A prison
farm,
actually, with fields and open sky, but a prison nevertheless, with tall fences and locked gates and a fairly complicated route in and out. And breaking into a prison for horses was not much easier than breaking into a prison for people, particularly when the horses involved were also valuable.
V-A-L-U-A-B-L-E. When Kelp first showed Dortmunder the item from the
Daily News
sports pages about how Dire Straits was insured for more than $1,000,000, Dortmunder had said, “A million dollars? Then what do we need with ten grand? Why don’t we deal with the insurance company?”
“John, I thought of that,” Kelp had said, “but the question is, Where would we keep it while we negotiated? I’ve only got the studio apartment, you know.”
“Well, May wouldn’t let me keep it at our place, I know that much.” Dortmunder sighed and nodded. “OK. We’ll settle for the ten.”
That was last week. This week, on Tuesday, Kelp and Dortmunder and the old coot had driven out through the Holland Tunnel and across New Jersey into the Short Hills area in a Ford Fairlane the old coot had rented, and when they got to the place, this is what they saw. On a wandering country road through rolling countryside covered with the lush greenery of August was a modest Colonial-style sign reading YERBA BUENA RANCH, mounted on a post next to a blacktop road climbing up a low hill toward a white farmhouse visible some distance in through the trees. Kelp, at the wheel, turned in there just to see what would happen, and what happened was that, about halfway to the house—white-rail fences to both sides of the blacktop, more white-rail fences visible in the fields beyond the house—a nice young fellow in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of a horse on it came walking out and smiled pleasantly as Kelp braked to a stop, and then said, “Help you, folks? This is a private road.”
“We’re looking for Hopatcong,” Kelp said, just because the name HOPATCONG on a highway sign had struck him funny. So then, of course, he had to listen to about 18 minutes of instructions on how to get to Hopatcong before they could back up and leave there and drive on up the public road and take the right turn up a very steep hill to a place from which they could look down and see Yerba Buena Ranch spread out below, like a pool table with fences. The ranch was pretty extensive, with irregularly shaped fields all enclosed by those white wooden rails and connected by narrow roads of dirt or blacktop. Here and there were small clusters of trees, like buttons in upholstery, plus about ten brown or white barns and sheds scattered around out behind the main farmhouse. They saw about 30 horses hanging out and watched a little cream-colored pickup truck drive back and forth, and then Dortmunder said, “Doesn’t look easy.”
