Watch Your Back (12 page)

“Then came digital,” he said, and shook a disgusted head. “What you got with digital, you got no highs and no lows. Everything’s perfect, and everything’s plastic. You see those Matthew Brady pictures from the Civil War? The Civil War! I’m talking a long time ago. You try to take those pictures with digital, you know what they’re gonna look like?”

“No,” Dortmunder admitted.

“Special effects in a Civil War movie,” Medrick told him. “People look at it, they say, ‘Wow, that’s great, that’s so lifelike!’ You know what is it, the difference between life and lifelike?”

“I think I do,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, there’s fewer and fewer of us. Digital finally drove me out of the business. I mean, I was gonna retire anyway, but digital made me go a few months early.”

Which was why, in recoiling from the advances of photography, Medrick had bounced back farther and farther in time, until he had settled at last on his current choice, a 1904 8x10 Rochester Optical Peerless field camera, with the mahogany body, nickel trim, and black leather bellows.

“The negative is full–size,” Medrick explained, “no enlargements, no loss of detail.”

“Sounds great,” said Dortmunder, who couldn’t have cared less.

At the end of lunch Dortmunder somehow paid the entire tab, not entirely sure how that had happened, and then they went back to Medrick’s place, where, for the next two and a half hours, Dortmunder lost at gin, at cribbage, and at Scrabble until, at five minutes past four — “Give him a chance to put on his apron,” Medrick said, playing
pluckier
across the double–double — Medrick finally phoned the O.J.

“Rollo? Medrick. It’s sunny, it’s hot, whadaya want? Listen, I got one of your back–room guys here, he says some mob people are killing the place. Yeah … uh huh … yeah … uh huh … yeah … uh huh … yeah … uh huh … yeah …”

Dortmunder was just about to stand and go out to the backyard to look at Medrick’s camera for a few hours, when Medrick abruptly said, “Good–bye, Rollo,” and hung up.

Dortmunder sat. He looked at Medrick, who turned a bleak gaze on him and said, “Rollo says, they’re moving everything out tonight.”

The cavernous trailer was empty, but the interstate was a solid road, even through the Appalachian Mountains, so the trailer did very little bouncing around. The driver, alone in the cab, a big–shouldered guy in white T–shirt and black baseball cap worn frontward, kept the cruise control at a steady eight miles an hour above the speed limit and sat there at his ease, listening to one country music radio station after another as he rolled across the state. From time to time, the setting sun gave him photographs of itself in his rearview mirror, and traffic was moderate.

By the time the semi reached the New Jersey border, darkness had long since descended, and the traffic, less than one hundred miles from New York City, was considerably heavier, but for the most part the driver could still let cruise control do all the work. A country station out of Bergen, New Jersey, announced midnight, and not long after that he took the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River into upper Manhattan, where the easy part stopped.

Big trucks weren’t allowed on the through roads in the city, so he had to steer and shift and turn and brake and angle and maneuver and in various ways work his ass off just to get off Interstate 95 and down onto Broadway at 168th Street.

From here the route was straight and simple, but not easy. The driver, who drove big trucks for a living but almost never in major cities, hated Manhattan, as all drivers of big trucks do. Every fifteen inches another traffic light, so you haven’t even finished shifting up through the gears when it’s time to hit the brakes again.

Also, no matter what the hour of day or night, there was always traffic everywhere in New York City, darting cabs and snarling delivery vans and even aggressive suburbanites in their Suburbanites. Unlike normal parts of the world, where other drivers showed a healthy respect tending toward fear when in the presence of the big trucks, New York City drivers practically dared him to start something. They’d cut him off; they’d crowd him; they’d even go so far as to blat their horns at him. The people operating small vehicles in New York, the driver thought, drove as though they all had a lawyer in the backseat.

Slowly, painfully, bit by bit, the driver lugged his trailer, which now did bounce around like a roulette ball on the pot–holed city streets, southwestward down the long esophagus of Manhattan, staying on Broadway all the way till Ninety–sixth Street — by then it was almost two in the morning, but there was still too much traffic on the city streets — where he took the left turn to go one long block over to Amsterdam Avenue. The right onto Amsterdam wasn’t so hard, and the street was a little better, being one–way.

Down Amsterdam he went, able to keep his up–and–down shifting to a minimum because of the staggered lights. He was grateful for that, and for the fact that the streetlights were bright enough to show him the numbers of the cross streets. And there was his goal, lit up but not gaudy, just ahead on the right.

When he hit the brakes while engaged in city driving, the truck tended to emit a sound very like a hippopotamus farting, which it did this time, which alerted the people loitering on the sidewalk down there that he was the one they were waiting for.

He stopped, in the right lane, just uptown from them, to let them clear the way. During the daytime, there was no parking along here, but this evening, as soon as that restriction was lifted, these people had put three cars in place, to be sure he’d have the proper location available to him at the curb. Now three guys among the loiterers, with waves of the hand toward the driver, hopped into these cars and drove off, and he slid the truck neatly into the opening they’d provided. The three cars all went around the block to find someplace else to roost, and the driver switched off his engine, opened his door, and felt unair–conditioned air for the first time since Pittsburgh. Yuck.

Well, this shouldn’t take long. He climbed down to the street, hitched his belt, worked his neck muscles a little, and walked around the front of the truck to the group of guys clustered on the sidewalk — about a dozen of them, mostly muscle to carry the goods out of the bar and into the truck, but among them was supposed to be a guy in charge.

“I need somebody named Mikey,” the driver said.

“That’s me,” said a cocky bantamweight featuring so much lush, oiled, wavy black hair lifting over his ears to undulate back around his head that he looked as if he were wearing Mercury’s winged helmet. What he was in fact wearing, though it was quite hot and humid out here tonight, was a black satin unzipped warmup jacket with MIKEY in gold script over his heart and, for those who cared to walk around him and read it, EAT ME WORLD TOUR in various bright colors on the back. Under the jacket was a white T–shirt, while ironed designer jeans and huge white sneakers completed the ensemble.

The driver nodded at this Mikey, unsurprised, and gestured at his truck, saying, “It’s all yours, I’ll just open up the back and maybe go grab me a late–night snack somewheres and —”

“Say, pal,” one of the other locals said, “your truck is movin.”

“What?” Thinking in–gear, brake–on, engine–off, not–my–fault, the driver turned, and by God, the truck
was
moving. In fact, it was accelerating, hustling away from the curb and on down Amsterdam Avenue.

“Hey!” the driver yelled, but the truck ignored him and just kept moving farther and farther away.

Two or three of Mikey’s associates ran after the truck, trying to grab a door handle or a rearview mirror or
something,
but without success. One guy did manage to clutch the hasp lock on the truck’s rear doors, but the truck was already moving faster than he could run, so he simply fell down in the street and was dragged along until he decided to let go, which was soon.

Meanwhile, Mikey was yelling at the driver, “Who
is
that?” and the driver was yelling back, “Who’s
what?
I’m alone in the truck!” Then, seeing the traffic light red at the next intersection, and the truck still accelerating directly at it, he screamed, “Not through the red light!” Which the truck also ignored.

Traffic was finally light at this hour on a Sunday night, and in one of those miracles you shouldn’t go through life counting on, there were no vehicles rushing out of the cross street to cream themselves against the side of the truck at that particular instant, only a panel truck delivering tomorrow morning’s
New York Post,
and of course those trucks never travel at more than seven miles an hour — union rules — so its operator had plenty of time to stop, to honk, and to deliver, loudly, a monograph on the encroaching miscreant’s pedigree.

The three guys who’d taken their cars away were just then returning, but as Mikey screamed at them they reversed and ran off again to get the cars back, while two other guys ran to the little red Audi 900 parked behind where the driver had placed his truck, and Mikey shrieked, “After it! Get it! Get that guy! Get that truck!” — all of which was unnecessary, because that’s what they were all doing.

“For cryin out loud,” the driver said. “They’ll steal
anything
in New York.”

One of the few guys still standing around, not running hither and yon, gave the driver a New York look. “You wanna make a comment?”

“Not me,” said the driver, and a large black SUV, a Chrysler Town & Country LX, raced past, headed down Amsterdam Avenue. The driver had time to notice that the Chrysler had doctor’s license plates, that it was being driven much faster than most doctor–operated vehicles, and that the traffic light was still red at that intersection down there, although
just
as the Chrysler arrived and the
New York Post
delivery truck finally cleared out of the way, the light snapped green and the Chrysler tore on through, only then hitting its brakes.

So did the truck, by now almost to the next corner. All those red brake lights flashed on down there, and now the red Audi leaped away from the curb in pursuit.

But the truck was stopping, and so was the Chrysler, right next to it. Whoever was driving the truck now jumped out of it to get into the front passenger seat in the Chrysler, while the Chrysler’s right–side rear door slid back to open and a truly huge man–monster climbed out, carrying an axe.

“Holy Toledo!” the driver cried, as the huge man swung the axe twice at the nearest tires on the left rear of the truck, making two sharp reports very much like gunfire. He then turned to heave the axe at the fast–approaching Audi.

To avoid getting an axe through the windshield, the Audi veered into the rear of the truck as the man–monster climbed back into the Chrysler, which immediately hustled around the corner and out of sight, so that when the three cars that had earlier gone away came screaming back around the block, there was nothing to be seen but a disabled truck and, tucked under its tail, an Audi, starting to smoke though not yet to burn, while the two guys who had been in the Audi now kept trying to run away from it but spent most of their time falling down.

The driver and Mikey and some others walked the block and a half to the truck and the Audi, but as they neared the mess, the Audi did start to burn. Stopping, the driver said, “You know, when a car catches fire, what usually kinda happens next is the gas tank blows.”

“He’s right, Mikey,” said one of the others.

So they all turned around and walked the other way, toward the closed but not empty O.J. Bar & Grill. As they walked, the driver said, “You know what this means, I hope.”

Now it was Mikey who gave him the New York look. “Tell me, pal,” he said.

“This means,” the driver assured him, “a whole shitpot of overtime.”

At seven–fifteen in the morning, Dortmunder wasn’t ready for trick questions like that. “Into what?” he said.

“Another seat.” Medrick seemed as bright–eyed and alert at this awful hour as he had while board–gaming Dortmunder into the ground all afternoon yesterday. “I was awake all night thinking about it,” he explained, “and now I know what to do. So I need a seat with a phone, and I need you in the seat next to me. So now you got an aisle —”

“I like an aisle,” Dortmunder said. He remembered that much, even at an hour like this.

“Well, you got one, and I got the middle, and that’s where the phone is.”

“Who’s got the window?”

“Who knows? Who cares? For two hours and ten minutes, we can put up with it.”

“If you say so.”

They were on the line at that moment for security inspection, strung along with a whole lot of sleepy, grumpy, badly dressed, overweight people who were traveling even though, from the look of them, nobody would be very happy to see them at the other end. “The plane’s gonna be full,” Dortmunder said.

“They’re all full,” Medrick assured him. “Everybody wants to be somewhere he’s not, and as soon as he gets there he wants to go home.”

“Even when I’m home,” Dortmunder told him, “I want to go home.”

“When we get through security,” Medrick suggested, “we’ll have a cup of coffee.”

“Probably,” Dortmunder said, “I’ll be able to find my mouth by then.”

The uniformed fat woman at security immediately regretted demanding that Dortmunder remove his shoes; he could tell she did, but she was too professional — or maybe just too stunned — to let it show. With that little triumph over the Security League of the Air behind him, he joined Medrick at a too–small table in an overcrowded franchise, for a cup of rotten coffee, and Medrick said, “I blame smoke signals.”

“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said.

“For where we are now, I mean.”

“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said. At this hour, he was prepared just to let the whole shebang slide on over him.

But Medrick had a point and intended to pursue it. “It’s communications technologies that did us in,” he said. “Now you got your Internet, before that your television, your radio, your newspapers, your telephone, your signal flags, your telegrams, your letters in the mailbox, but it all goes back to smoke signals, the whole problem starts right there.”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said.

Medrick shook his head. “But,” he said, “I just don’t think society’s ready to go back that far.”

“Probably not,” Dortmunder said, and yawned. Maybe he could drink the coffee.

“But that’s what it would take,” Medrick insisted, “to return some shred of honesty to this world.”

Dortmunder put down his coffee mug. “Is that what we’re trying for?” he asked.

“Right just this minute it is,” Medrick told him. “You see, with smoke signals, that was the very first time in the whole history of the human race that you could tell somebody something that he couldn’t see you when you told him. You get what I mean?”

“No,” Dortmunder said.

“Before smoke signals,” Medrick said, “I wanna tell you something, I gotta come over to where you are, and stand in front of you, and
tell
you. Like I’m doing now. And you get to look at my face, listen to how I talk, read my body language, decide for yourself, is this guy trying to pull a fast one. You get it?”

“Eye contact.”

“Exactly,” Medrick said. “Sure, people still lied to each other back then and got away with it, but it wasn’t so easy. Once smoke signals came in, you can’t see the guy telling you the story, he could be laughing behind his hand, you don’t know it.”

“I guess that’s true,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Every step up along the way,” Medrick said, “every other kind of way to communicate, it’s always behind the other guy’s back. For thousands of years, we’ve been building ourselves a liar’s paradise. That’s why the video phones weren’t the big hit they were supposed to be, nobody wants to go back to the eyeball.”

“I guess not.”

“So that means they’ll
never
get rid of the rest of it,” Medrick concluded. “All the way back to smoke signals.”

“I don’t think they use those so much any more,” Dortmunder said.

“If they did,” Medrick said darkly, “they’d lie.”

“Seating rows six forty–three to six fifty–two,” said the announcement, so they boarded the damn plane.

Their third seatmate, next to the window over beyond Medrick, turned out to be okay, a very neat little old lady who put her own robin’s egg blue Samsonite bag in the overhead rack, tucked her worn old black leather shoulderbag under the seat in front of her, kicked off her shoes, and opened a paperback novel by Barbara Pym, which she then proceeded to read with such intensity you’d think there was going to be a test on it when the plane reached Newark.

All Dortmunder wanted was the experience over with. He strapped himself in as though this were the electric chair and he’d just received word the governor was on the golf course, closed his eyes to pretend he was unconscious, experienced the rinse cycle of the plane taking off, listened to the announcements even though he knew in his heart he would never willingly associate himself with a flotation device, and at last the stew, who’d warned them ahead of time about futzing around with electronics during takeoff and landing, said, “Electronic equipment may now be used,” and Medrick said, “Good.”

Dortmunder opened his eyes. The phone was a neat gray plastic hotdog inset in the back of the middle seat ahead. Medrick yanked it out, did some credit card stuff, then did some dialing stuff, and then said, “Frank? Otto. It’s nine–seventeen in the morning — what, you don’t have any clocks on Long Island? I’m calling you about your son. Well, Frank, I’m in an airplane and I’m headed for Newark, which is not what I had planned for today, but while you been looking around for a clock the last four months your boy Raphael has been robbing me blind. Of course he wouldn’t do that, and in fact — Frank, I know he’s a good boy, and the reason I know he’s a good boy, same as you know he’s a good boy, is, he’s too stupid to be anything else. Now, listen to me, Frank, I’m not blaming you, and I’m not blaming Maureen, you and me got the same genes inside us, so if there’s moon–child genes floating around inside Raphael, which you damn well know there is, they’re just as likely to come from our side of the family as hers.”

Medrick listened for a minute, nodding impatiently, while a whole lot of nothing went by outside the window, past the Barbara Pym fan, and the stews started serving the beverage from the other end of the plane. Then Medrick said, “I wouldn’t be giving you tsouris, Frank, but the fact is, the O.J. is gonna go into bankruptcy in like fifteen minutes unless we do something about it, and
I
happen to be in this airplane, and
you
happen to be on the ground, so what you can do — All right, I’ll tell you what’s going on. Raphael hooked up with some Jersey kid that’s mobbed up or something, and he turned over running the joint to that kid, and now the kid —”

More pause. More impatient nodding. Then Medrick said, “I don’t doubt that, Frank, Casper the Friendly Ghost is probably a better businessman than Raphael, but there’s businessmen and businessmen, and what
this
businessman is doing, he’s bleeding the joint white. If you’ll listen to me, Frank, I’ll tell you how he’s doing it. He’s using up the corporation’s credit, he’s buying stuff, not paying for it, he’s gonna strip it all out, sell it to somebody else, walk away. Wait.”

Medrick shook his head. Turning to Dortmunder, he said, “Like what is he buying?”

“Well, I happened to notice, four cash registers.”

Medrick blinked. “Four cash registers?”

“They’re all in the back room.”

Into the phone, Medrick said, “Four cash registers, Frank, all in the back room.”

“Maybe thirty barstools.”

“Maybe thirty barstools.”

“Already,” Dortmunder said, “they took out a lot of French champagne and Russian vodka for a wedding.”

Medrick, phone pressed to the side of his head, turned that head to give Dortmunder an outraged look: “A wedding? Now I’m paying for a wedding?”

“Looks like.”

Into the phone, Medrick said, “Thank you, Frank, I’m glad you asked me. So I’ll tell you what I want from you. Remember the phony doctor they made Raphael go to when he was on probation? Leadass, that’s right, the psychiaquack, Oh, Led
vass,
I beg your pardon, Ledvass the distinguished nut doctor. Call him, Frank, call him now, you’ll get an answering service, tell them it’s an emergency, when Leadass calls back you — I know, Frank — you tell him the diagnosis, and the diagnosis is delusions of grandeur, it’s making him buy things he’s got no use for, and for his own protection you want Leadass should commit Raphael
today,
so when I get off this plane —”

“Hurray,” Dortmunder said.

“— I can go to all the vendors been unloading this stuff on the O.J., whado
they
care, I can say, take it all back, you been selling to a fellow mentally deficient, here’s the commitment papers. You’ve got keys to the place, Frank, after you talk to Leadass go there — Frank, you want me to be your dependent? If the O.J. goes down, Frank, I’ve got nothing but what the government gives me, I got no choice, I’m moving in with you and Maureen.”

Dortmunder noticed that several people in nearby seats were openly staring by now, and it seemed to him at least one of them had brought out an audio recording thing, though with the usual airplane background garble it was unlikely he’d wind up with anything he could bring into court. Anyway, the Barbara Pym lady was still deep in her book, and if Medrick didn’t care how the whole world knew his business, what skin was it off Dortmunder’s nose?

Now Medrick was saying, “So you’re going to the O.J., you’ll look at all this stuff piled up in there, you’ll find the paperwork, receipts, vouchers, invoices, whatever, with all of that you and Leadass can get Raphael committed, and I mean
today,
I want him inside from now until we get this whole mess straightened out. Frank, it’s okay, don’t apologize, I understand, we’re all busy, like you say. Well, not me, in Florida we’re not what you could call
busy,
but I know you are, and Maureen is, and everybody on Long Island is, and I’m glad you’re taking this seriously, Frank, because it is serious, and — No, no, Frank, forget that, don’t worry about it, just save me the O.J., and that’s where I’m going just as soon as I get off this plane —”

“Hurray.”

“— and I’m bringing with me this back–room crook that —”

“Hey.”

“— told me about it, he’s the one rescued the O.J., if in fact we’re getting it in time, we owe him a debt of gratitude, I’ll see you at the O.J. before one.”

With a certain savage satisfaction, Medrick slammed the phone back into its cave. Ignoring the cry of pain from the seat in front, he said, “Oh–kay.”

“Beverage?” asked the stew.

“Yes,” said Dortmunder.

“I will have a frosty beer,” Medrick said.

“Me, too,” said Dortmunder.

“A Bloody Mary for me,” said the Barbara Pym lady. Smiling sweetly at Dortmunder and Medrick, she said, “It’s called a bust–out joint, and I hope you pin those cocksuckers good.”