What's So Funny (25 page)

“The moat,” Kelp suggested.

Stan frowned at him. “The what?”

“Forget it,” Kelp said.

“You can’t do a moat in the city,” Stan told him.

“I understand that. Just forget it. Go on with the recap. Now they’re setting up all this stuff.”

“And Perly goes home,” Dortmunder said.

“Right,” Stan said. “So it’s turned over to the security guys now, and when they’ve got the office the way they like it they call their people at the bank.”

“But the people at the bank,” Judson said, “they don’t move when they get the call. They wait, and they don’t move until two o’clock.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “It’s all timed, so they can coordinate with the cops, because they get a cop escort coming down.”

“And they figure to get to the office with the armored car,” Stan said, “a little after two–thirty in the morning, drive the armored car into the building and up to the second floor and the cops go away. So now it’s just the security from the armored car and the security already in the office.” He looked around. “And there’s some sort of idea that’s where we come in.”

“That’s what we’re working on,” Dortmunder said.

“The good thing about this,” Judson said, and they all looked at him. “Well, kind of good,” he said. “We can go in ahead of time. We can go in before they set up.”

Stan said, “And then what?”

“I dunno,” Judson said. “It’s gotta help.”

Tiny said, “Dortmunder, does this Pearl guy live there?”

“No, it’s just his office.”

“Anybody there right now?”

“No, not until the chess set is gonna get there. Late tomorrow night.”

“Then what we do,” Tiny said, “we go in there
now.
We look it over, see what we can use. Dortmunder, go get your opener and meet us there.”

“I will,” Dortmunder said, rising, half–turning so he could at last see the door.

Kelp said, “John, take taxis.”

“Oh, I know,” Dortmunder said.

Fiona looked on in floods of pleasure and relief, though she’d known it was going to be a triumph from the instant she and Brian had climbed into the limousine and seen what Mrs. W had decided on for her persona this evening. It was perfect, it was inspired, it was
her.
And now the assembled guests of GRODY, in their turn, were being knocked out by it.

The GRODY party, as every year, was taking place in a rented party hall in Soho, a big barnlike space on the third floor of a recent building, accessible only by one special elevator, so that all of security could take place down in the small lobby and be over and forgotten by the time the elevator doors opened onto March Madness.

As usual, the walls of the party space had been decorated this week by GRODY staffers, so that everywhere you turned there were blown–up cartoon drawings, many of them suggestive but none actually filthy. A band consisting mostly of amplifiers scared away the demons down at the far end of the room, pumping out music one certainly hoped would not turn out to be memorable, and a few partygoers danced in a cleared space within its near vicinity, though not exactly with or to it.

Most people, as usual, stood around and shouted at one another, holding drinks in their hands, a surprising number of those drinks’ being soft, in cans. All of this activity was building toward fever pitch by ten–thirty, when the elevator door opened and Mrs. W stepped out, followed by the completely unnoticeable Fiona and Brian, whose Reverend Twisted was now reduced to nothing but a tall Munchkin.

Yes; that was it. The clunky black lace–up shoes; the black robe; the tall conical black hat; the outsize wart on nose; the green–strawed broom held aloft. It was Margaret Hamilton from
The Wizard of Oz
to the life; to the teeth. “And that goes for your little dog, too!” she cried, exiting the elevator and announcing her presence.

She was an instant hit. Awareness rippled outward through the hall, and people were drawn as by magnets in her direction. People crowded around her, people applauded her, people tried to hold conversations with her, people gave her about thirty drinks. The only sour note in the event, as it were, was the band’s attempt to play “Over the Rainbow”; fortunately, most people didn’t recognize it.

The first excitement and delight soon passed, and the party returned to approximately where it had been before Mrs. W had made her appearance, only with an extra little frisson created by this new presence in their midst. It isn’t every party that has a drop–in from the Wicked Witch of the West, perhaps the most beloved and certainly the best–known villainess in pop culture.

When the first flurry was over and the partygoers had returned to their earlier activities and conversations and the band had gone back to whatever it was they had been assaulting, Mrs. W turned to her companions, thrust her broom at Fiona, said, “Hold this,” then turned to Brian and said, “Hold me. I want to dance.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Wide–eyed, Brian was even forgetting to leer.

Off the two of them went, and Fiona had to admit that, unlikely couple or not, they did make something of a statement out there on the dance floor, the wicked witch and the wicked priest. Mrs. W danced like someone who’d learned how at parties long ago in eastern Connecticut, and Brian danced like someone who’d learned how at backyard barbeques in southern New Jersey, but somehow the blend worked.

Fiona stood watching, feeling she knew not what, and a guy came by, looked at the broom, and said, “Do you do windows?”

“Ha ha,” she said, and went off to find the bar. She knew how she felt; forlorn.

“I never knew,” Fiona said, “she could dance.”

“Oh, sure, that’s the WASP world she comes from,” he said. “They learn all those social things, like they’re aristocrats. Remember, they call dances ‘formals.’ ”

“Everybody calls dances ‘formals.’ ”

“Not around here.”

“Well, that’s true,” she admitted.

And something else she had to admit, if only to herself, was that, while the GRODY party was the same old party it always had been, somehow this year it seemed more benign, more interesting, more fun. It was still the same completely unhomogenized crowd, the callow staff nearly invisible in the sea of outsiders, the twentysomethings dressed as X–Men or Buffy, the thirtysomethings with their more creative versions of roadkill or Messalina, the fortysomethings in their fangs and harlequin masks, the fiftysomethings in their red bow ties and shipboard gowns, the sixtysomethings dressed for some completely different party, but this year it didn’t seem fake and strained, it just seemed like people letting their hair down at the end of another damn long winter.

Fiona realized that the only thing that had really changed was her perception. It really still was the same old party, too loud and too late and far too much of a mixed bag, with no coherent reason to exist, but this year that was okay. And it was okay because of Mrs. W.

Fiona watched Mrs. W swirl by, having learned by now how to dance while holding her green broom aloft, and now paired with Brian’s shaggy boss, Sean Kelly, who this year had come either as a hobbit or Yoda; impossible to tell. In any case, he danced like a man in a gorilla suit, but nobody seemed to mind. Mrs. W beamed upon him as they swirled along, and Sean, his grinning face as red as a stoplight, yakked away nonstop.

“Brian,” Fiona said, “this is fun.”

He leered at her in surprise. “You didn’t know?”

“I have just the place,” she said, as they descended in the elevator after she’d called her driver to come pick them up. “I’ve never been there, but I’ve read about it. It’s supposed to be the most in place ever, in the West Village.”

“Oh, Mrs. W,” Fiona said. “Are you sure? It’s so late.”

“New York,” Mrs. W reminded her, “is the city that never sleeps.”

“And tomorrow,” Brian said, still with a residual leer, “is a day off.”

“Exactly so.”

“But, the … the costumes.”

“Our hats can stay in the car, Brian’s and mine,” Mrs. W said, “and so can my wart. We’ll keep our coats on.”

“Fiona,” Brian said, as he held the limo door for the ladies, “let’s do it.”

“I guess we’re going to,” she said.

“He can be pretty funny,” Brian agreed.

And now they were in the West Village, driving slowly down Gansevoort Street while the driver looked for house numbers, and when Fiona looked ahead she saw a group of men coming out of a building up there, and thought, well, we’re not the only night owls.

They’d come out of a garage, in fact, those five men, and as they stood on the pavement talking together the green garage door slid downward behind them. They were so animated, even at this hour, all talking at once, pointing this way and that, shrugging their shoulders, shaking their heads, that Fiona couldn’t look away. The limo drove slowly past them, and Fiona watched out the window, and one of them was Mr. Dortmunder.

No. Could it be? She tried to look out the back window, but it was hard to tell at this angle.

Could that really have been Mr. Dortmunder? The five men walked off in the opposite direction, all still gesticulating and talking a blue streak. They were certainly passionate about something or other.

Fiona faced front. There were so many things she didn’t understand. Mrs. W had shown an entirely different side of her personality tonight. And now, had that really been John Dortmunder?

“There it is!” Mrs. W sang out.

“Oh, good,” Fiona said, and swallowed a yawn.

“There’s nothing to do there, Jacques,” she pointed out. She was often the sensible one.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ve got to be there.”

And so it was that, an hour ahead of schedule, he and the Lamborghini were headed south on the Hutchinson River Parkway. Just to be in motion was an improvement.

Also, traffic was lighter on the Hutch inbound toward the city on Sunday night, so he made better than usual time. It was only ten minutes to nine when he turned onto Gansevoort Street and thumbed the opener clipped to his visor, and down the block his green garage door rattled upward.

The ceiling lights outside his office at the top of the ramp were kept on all the time, so by their light he drove up the steep ramp as the garage door lowered behind him, and parked in front of his door.

Unlocking that door, he stepped inside, switched on the lights there, and shrugged out of his coat. Fortunately, he didn’t hang the coat up in the closet, because at the moment there was a very large and irritable person standing in there, muttering to himself about people who show up an hour early. He draped his coat instead over the chair at Delia’s desk, and it’s also fortunate he didn’t happen to look under that desk, or he would surely have noticed a lithe young guy curled around the wastebasket under there.

The door between Delia’s office and his own was normally kept unlocked, so he just opened it and entered and left it open as he switched on more lights in there. He then went over to sit at his own desk, under which there weren’t any people. However, lying on his left side behind the sofa, squeezed between sofa and wall in a place Perly had never intentionally gazed upon, was a carrot–topped guy who looked almost as put out as the big fellow in the other room’s closet.

Once at his desk, Perly switched on one more light, the gooseneck lamp there, which gave him concentrated illumination at the desk area but somehow made the rest of the room seem a little darker, though of course not as dark as the night outside his two large well–draped windows facing the rear of the apartment building on the next block. He often closed those maroon drapes at night, and briefly considered doing so again tonight, but then decided the security people would want to know what was out there, so he left the drapes open, which was just as well, because that way he didn’t notice the sharp–nosed, keen–eyed guy standing behind the right–side drape of the right–hand window, farthest from his desk. That person had originally taken up a position facing the drape, but at the last instant had turned around, so that now he faced the window, in which he could examine at his leisure the reflection of most of the room, but in which his own dark presence against the dark drape could not be seen from any distance at all.

There had been a third person, another returnee from last night’s reconnaissance mission, who had been in this room when the racket of the garage door lifting had alerted everybody to Perly’s untimely arrival. This person had been near a closed interior door he’d already established as leading to a bathroom, so he’d popped open the door, popped into the bathroom, popped the door shut, popped it open again while he found the light switch and popped the light on, then popped the door shut again.

It was only when he heard Perly enter the office out there that it occurred to him that (a) Perly might want to utilize this bathroom at some point in the evening, and (b) there was nowhere to hide in the bathroom.

Well, was there? He looked around at a small simple utilitarian bathroom with white–painted walls and white tile floor, white toilet and small white sink and a white–tiled shower the size of the former phone booth back in the O.J.

Could he make use of the shower? Perly wasn’t going to take a
shower
here tonight, was he? The shower had a plastic curtain across the opening, but the curtain was a translucent gray; shapes could be seen through it.

He had to do something. He had to get this light turned off, soon, and he had to find some way to disappear. How?

Above the toilet were two shelves, with white hand towels and bath towels. Hurriedly, he grabbed a bath towel, switched off the light, and felt his way into the shower, where he lowered himself until he was seated, knees up to his chin, on the white shower pan in the rear corner away from the drain. As best he could, he covered himself with the bath towel and scrunched up to become as small as possible. White tile, white pan, white towel; with any luck, no foreign shapes would call attention to themselves through the curtain. Sighing, reflecting on how nobody could be trusted, not even people with handwriting as neat as Perly’s, he settled down to see what happened next.

Meanwhile, in his office, Perly was opening desk drawers, deciding what he wanted to remove from here and store in the safe in the corner until his visitors should move back out. Absorbed, he didn’t hear the small click of the closet door opening in the other room, nor the faint rustle of the lithe young guy unwrapping himself from the wastebasket under Delia’s desk, nor even the tiny tick of the outer office door opening, but he did hear the quick snip of that door as it closed, and looked up from his desk, frowning.

Had security got here this early? Impossible. He rose, crossed to the doorway between the offices, and looked out at unchanged normality.

It must have been his imagination. Shaking his head, he crossed back to his desk, unaware that the fellow from behind the drape had sped silently across the room to stand behind the door while Perly frowned at his empty outer office, then looped silently around the door and through the doorway as Perly walked back to his desk.

Perly sat; the outer office door locked shut.

Perly reared back and stared at the doorway. Wasn’t that definitely the sound of the door? Was he hearing things?

Something’s funny, he thought, and stood again, and this time walked both across his office and across Delia’s office to open that outer door, lean out, and see nothing out there but his own Lamborghini.

He frowned at the ramp, listening hard, but heard and saw nothing, while the carrot–topped fellow who’d been on the floor behind the sofa squeezed out of there and scampered across both offices to tuck himself into the recently vacated closet.

Perly frowned, still in his doorway, facing his ramp. Nothing. Nobody there. Could temperature changes at night do it?

This time, on returning to his office, Perly resolved to pay no more attention to tiny anonymous noises. They meant nothing. Everything was fine. Nothing could go wrong.