Thieves Dozen (8 page)

“Well, I suppose,” Dortmunder said doubtfully.

“What’s wrong
now
?” the robber demanded. “You’re too god-damn
picky,
Diddums; you’re just the messenger here. You think you know my job better than I do?”

I know I do, Dortmunder thought, but it didn’t seem a judicious thing to say aloud, so instead, he explained, “I just want things to go smooth, that’s all. I just don’t want bloodshed. And I was thinking, the New York City police, you know, well, they’ve got helicopters.”

“Damn,” the robber said. He crouched low to the littered floor, behind the broken doorframe, and brooded about his situation. Then he looked up at Dortmunder and said, “OK, Diddums, you’re so smart. What
should
we do?”

Dortmunder blinked. “You want
me
to figure out your getaway?”

“Put yourself in our position,” the robber suggested. “Think about it.”

Dortmunder nodded. Hands in the air, he gazed at the blocked intersection and put himself in the robbers’ position. “Hoo, boy,” he said. “You’re in a real mess.”

“We
know
that, Diddums.”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I tell you what maybe you could do. You make them give you one of those buses they’ve got down there blocking the street. They give you one of those buses right now, then you know they haven’t had time to put anything cute in it, like time-release tear-gas grenades or anyth—”

“Oh, my God,” the robber said. His black ski mask seemed to have paled slightly.

“Then you take
all
the hostages,” Dortmunder told him. “Everybody goes in the bus, and one of you people drives, and you go somewhere real crowded, like Times Square, say, and then you stop and make all the hostages get out and run.”

“Yeah?” the robber said. “What good does that do us?” “Well,” Dortmunder said, “you drop the ski masks and the leather jackets and the guns, and
you
run, too. Twenty, thirty people all running away from the bus in different directions, in the middle of Times Square in rush hour, everybody losing themselves in the crowd. It might work.”

“Jeez, it might,” the robber said. “OK, go ahead and— What?” “What?” Dortmunder echoed. He strained to look leftward, past the vertical column of his left arm. The boss robber was in excited conversation with one of his pals; not the red-eyed maniac, a different one. The boss robber shook his head and said, “Damn!” Then he looked up at Dortmunder. “Come back in here, Diddums,” he said.

Dortmunder said, “But don’t you want me to—” “Come back in here!”

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “Uh, I better tell them over there that I’m gonna move.”

“Make it fast,” the robber told him. “Don’t mess with me, Diddums. I’m in a bad mood right now.”

“OK.” Turning his head the other way, hating it that his back was toward this bad-mooded robber for even a second, Dortmunder called, “They want me to go back into the bank now. Just for a minute.” Hands still up, he edged sideways across the sidewalk and through the gaping doorway, where the robbers laid hands on him and flung him back deeper into the bank.

He nearly lost his balance but saved himself against the sideways-lying pot of the tipped-over Ficus. When he turned around, all five of the robbers were lined up looking at him, their expressions intent, focused, almost hungry, like a row of cats looking in a fish-store window. “Uh,” Dortmunder said.

“He’s it now,” one of the robbers said.

Another robber said, “But
they
don’t know it.”

A third robber said, “They will soon.”

“They’ll know it when nobody gets on the bus,” the boss robber said, and shook his head at Dortmunder. “Sorry, Diddums. Your idea doesn’t work anymore.”

Dortmunder had to keep reminding himself that he wasn’t actually
part
of this string. “How come?” he asked.

Disgusted, one of the other robbers said, “The rest of the hostages got away, that’s how come.”

Wide-eyed, Dortmunder spoke without thinking: “The tunnel!”

All of a sudden, it got very quiet in the bank. The robbers were now looking at him like cats looking at a fish with no window in the way. “The tunnel?” repeated the boss robber slowly. “You
know
about the tunnel?”

“Well, kind of,” Dortmunder admitted. “I mean, the guys digging it, they got there just before you came and took me away.”

“And you never mentioned it.”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, very uncomfortable, “I didn’t feel like I should.”

The red-eyed maniac lunged forward, waving that submachine gun again, yelling, “
You’re
the guy with the tunnel! It’s your tunnel!” And he pointed the shaking barrel of the Uzi at Dortmunder’s nose.

“Easy, easy!” the boss robber yelled. “This is our only hostage; don’t use him up!”

The red-eyed maniac reluctantly lowered the Uzi, but he turned to the others and announced, “
Nobody’s
gonna forget when I shot up the switchboard. Nobody’s
ever
gonna forget that. He wasn’t
here
!”

All of the robbers thought that over. Meantime, Dortmunder was thinking about his own position. He might be a hostage, but he wasn’t your normal hostage, because he was also a guy who had just dug a tunnel to a bank vault, and there were maybe 30 eyeball witnesses who could identify him. So it wasn’t enough to get away from these bank robbers; he was also going to have to get away from the police. Several thousand police.

So did that mean he was locked to these second-rate smash-and-grabbers? Was his own future really dependent on
their
getting out of this hole? Bad news, if true. Left to their own devices, these people couldn’t escape from a merry-go-round.

Dortmunder sighed. “OK,” he said. “The first thing we have to do is—”

“We?” the boss robber said. “Since when are you in this?” “Since you dragged me in,” Dortmunder told him. “And the first thing we have to do is—”

The red-eyed maniac lunged at him again with the Uzi, shouting, “Don’t you tell us what to do! We know what to do!”

“I’m your only hostage,” Dortmunder reminded him. “Don’t use me up. Also, now that I’ve seen you people in action, I’m your only hope of getting out of here. So this time, listen to me. The first thing we have to do is close and lock the vault door.”

One of the robbers gave a scornful laugh. “The hostages are
gone,
” he said. “Didn’t you hear that part? Lock the vault door after the hostages are gone. Isn’t that some kind of old saying?” And he laughed and laughed.

Dortmunder looked at him. “It’s a two-way tunnel,” he said quietly.

The robbers stared at him. Then they all turned and ran toward the back of the bank. They
all
did.

They’re too excitable for this line of work, Dortmunder thought as he walked briskly toward the front of the bank.
Clang
went the vault door, far behind him, and Dortmunder stepped through the broken doorway and out again to the sidewalk, remembering to stick his arms straight up in the air as he did.

“Hi!” he yelled, sticking his face well out, displaying it for all the sharpshooters to get a really
good
look at. “Hi, it’s me again! Diddums! Welsh!”

“Diddums!” screamed an enraged voice from deep within the bank. “Come back here!”

Oh, no. Ignoring that, moving steadily but without panic, arms up, face forward, eyes wide, Dortmunder angled leftward across the sidewalk, shouting, “I’m coming out again! And I’m
escaping
!” And he dropped his arms, tucked his elbows in and ran hell for leather toward those blocking buses.

Gunfire encouraged him: a sudden burst behind him of
ddrrritt, ddrrritt,
and then
kopp-kopp-kopp,
and then a whole symphony of
fooms
and
thug-thugs
and
padapows.
Dortmunder’s toes, turning into high-tension steel springs, kept him bounding through the air like the Wright brothers’ first airplane, swooping and plunging down the middle of the street, that wall of buses getting closer and closer.

“Here! In here!” Uniformed cops appeared on both sidewalks, waving to him, offering sanctuary in the forms of open doorways and police vehicles to crouch behind, but Dortmunder was
escaping.
From everything.

The buses. He launched himself through the air, hit the black-top hard and rolled under the nearest bus. Roll, roll, roll, hitting his head and elbows and knees and ears and nose and various other parts of his body against any number of hard, dirty objects, and then he was past the bus and on his feet, staggering, staring at a lot of goggle-eyed medics hanging around beside their ambulances, who just stood there and gawked back.

Dortmunder turned left.
Medics
weren’t going to chase him; their franchise didn’t include healthy bodies running down the street. The cops couldn’t chase him until they’d moved their buses out of the way. Dortmunder took off like the last of the dodoes, flapping his arms, wishing he knew how to fly.

The out-of-business shoe store, the other terminus of the tunnel, passed on his left. The getaway car they’d parked in front of it was long gone, of course. Dortmunder kept thudding on, on, on.

Three blocks later, a gypsy cab committed a crime by picking him up even though he hadn’t phoned the dispatcher first; in the city of New York, only licensed medallion taxis are permitted to pick up customers who hail them on the street. Dortmunder, panting like a Saint Bernard on the lumpy back seat, decided not to turn the guy in.

His faithful companion May came out of the living room when Dortmunder opened the front door of his apartment and stepped into his hall. “
There
you are!” she said. “Thank goodness. It’s all over the radio
and
the television.”

“I may never leave the house again,” Dortmunder told her. “If Andy Kelp ever calls, says he’s got this great job, easy, piece of cake, I’ll just tell him I’ve retired.”

“Andy’s here,” May said. “In the living room. You want a beer?”

“Yes,” Dortmunder said simply.

May went away to the kitchen and Dortmunder limped into the living room, where Kelp was seated on the sofa holding a can of beer and looking happy. On the coffee table in front of him was a mountain of money.

Dortmunder stared. “What’s
that
?”

Kelp grinned and shook his head. “It’s been too long since we scored, John,” he said. “You don’t even recognize the stuff anymore. This is money.”

“But— From the vault? How?”

“After you were taken away by those other guys—they were caught, by the way,” Kelp interrupted himself, “without loss of life—anyway, I told everybody in the vault there, the way to keep the money safe from the robbers was we’d all carry it out with us. So we did. And then I decided what we should do is put it all in the trunk of my unmarked police car in front of the shoe store, so I could drive it to the precinct for safekeeping while they all went home to rest from their ordeal.”

Dortmunder looked at his friend. He said, “You got the hostages to carry the money from the vault.”

“And put it in our car,” Kelp said. “Yeah, that’s what I did.” May came in and handed Dortmunder a beer. He drank deep, and Kelp said, “They’re looking for you, of course. Under that other name.”

May said, “That’s the one thing I don’t understand. Diddums?”

“It’s Welsh,” Dortmunder told her. Then he smiled upon the mountain of money on the coffee table. “It’s not a bad name,” he decided. “I may keep it.”

A M
IDSUMMER
D
AYDREAM

I
T HAVING BECOME ADVISABLE TO LEAVE
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY FOR AN
indefinite period, Dortmunder and Kelp found themselves in the countryside, in a barn, watching a lot of fairies dance. “I don’t know about this,” Dortmunder muttered.

“It’s perfect cover,” Kelp whispered. “Who’d look for us
here
?” “
I
wouldn’t, that’s for sure.”

The fairies all skipped off stage and some other people came on and went off, and then the audience stood up. “That’s it?” Dortmunder asked. “We can go now?”

“First half,” Kelp told him.

First half. Near the end of the first half, one of the players in bib overalls had gone out and come back in with a donkey’s head on, which about summed up Dortmunder’s attitude toward the whole thing. Oh, well; when in Rome, do as the Romans, and when in West Urbino, New York, go to the Saturday-afternoon summer theater. Why not? But he wouldn’t come back Sunday.

Outside, the audience stood around in the sunshine and talked about everything except
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The women discussed other women’s clothing and the men brought one another up to date on sports and the prices of automobiles, all except Kelp’s cousin, a stout man named Jesse Bohker, who smelled of fertilizer because that’s what he sold for a living, and who talked about the size of the audience because he was the chief investor in this barn converted to an extremely barnlike summer theater, with splintery bleachers and nonunion actors up from New York. “Good gate,” Bohker said, nodding at the crowd in satisfaction, showbiz jargon as comfortable as a hay stalk in his mouth. “Shakespeare brings ’em in every time. They don’t want anybody to think they don’t have culture.”

“Isn’t that great,” Kelp said, working on his enthusiasm because his cousin Bohker was putting them up until New York became a little less fraught. “Only eighty miles from the city, and you’ve got live theater.”

“Cable kills us at night,” cousin Bohker said, sharing more of his entertainment-world expertise, “but in the daytime, we do fine.”

They rang a cowbell to announce the second half, and the audience obediently shuffled back in, as though they had bells round their own necks. All except Dortmunder, who said, “I don’t think I can do it.”

“Come
on
, John,” Kelp said, not wanting to be rude to the cousin. “Don’t you wanna know how it comes out?”

“I know how it comes out,” Dortmunder said. “The guy with the donkey head turns into Pinocchio.”

“That’s OK, Andy,” cousin Bohker said. He was a magnanimous host. “Some people just don’t go for it,” he went on, with the fat chuckle that served him so well in fertilizer sales. “Tell the truth, football season, I wouldn’t go for it myself.”