What's So Funny (4 page)

At first his Mom didn’t get it: “He wasn’t even there.”

“That’s the point.”

He had to explain it all about seven times before she saw what he was aiming at, but at last she did see it, and it was really very simple and, straightforward. At the O.J. last night, they had been a little group of people who would come together like that from time to time for what they hoped would turn out to be profitable expeditions and employments, and there was always at least that one preliminary conversation to kick it off, to see if this new project sounded like it might work, to see if everybody wanted to come on board. Each of them in the group had his own specialty — Tiny Bulcher, for instance, specialized in lifting large and heavy objects, while he himself, Stan Murch, was the driver — and John Dortmunder’s specialty was in laying out the plan.

Now, it wasn’t often that Stan brought the original idea to the group, but this time he had one, and it was a good one, and if Dortmunder had been there he would definitely have understood the concept and started working out how to make it a reality, and all of that, and by now they’d be on their way. Instead of which, Dortmunder isn’t even at the meeting, he’s out in the bar with some cop.

But everybody else wants to know what the idea is. So Stan tells them, and they hate it. Because Dortmunder isn’t there to tell everybody how it could work, the idea gets shot down like a duck. So it’s all Dortmunder’s fault.

After his Mom took off in her cab, Stan continued to brood a while longer, and then he decided the thing to do was call John and see if he’s ready to take a meeting
now,
just the two of them, and after that they could get everybody else to come around. So he called John, but got May, who said, “Oh, you just missed him, and I’m halfway out the door myself, I got to get to work.”

“Do you know where John went?”

“He had a meeting at ten this morning —”

“With the cop?”

“Oh, did he tell you?”

“Not yet. Where’s the meeting, do you know?”

“Lower East Side, some funny address. John had never been anywhere around there before, he was going to take a bus.”

“You got the address?”

“He wrote it down a couple places, so he wouldn’t forget. I’ll look, Stan, but I don’t have much time. I don’t wanna be late. They’re short on cashiers at the Safeway as it is. Hold on.”

So he held on, and about three minutes later she came back and said, “It’s 598 East Third, and the cop is named Eppick. He says he’s retired.”

“Then why does he want to talk to John?”

“You’ll have to ask him.”

“I intend to.”

It was in a recent Audi 9000, forest green, 17K on the odometer, that Stan cruised the area of 598 East Third Street, a neighborhood not used to seeing cars of that quality abroad on its streets. Being New York, though, everybody in the district was cool about it.

May had said the meeting was scheduled for ten, and Stan got there at quarter past, so it should still be going on. In the check–cashing place? Unlikely; more probably somewhere upstairs. Motor running and flashers on, to assure the world he was not abandoning this nice car, Stan left it beside a handy fire hydrant long enough to run over and look at the names for the upstairs tenants, and found it right away: EPPICK. He hadn’t known it was spelled that way.

It was a long meeting John was having with this cop, as Stan waited in the car next to the fire hydrant, now with flashers on but engine off. Ten fifty–two read the very nice dashboard clock when at last John came out and started to walk away. Stan honked, but John just kept walking, so Stan had to start the engine, open his window, chase John around the corner, and yell, “Hey!”

Nothing. John just kept plodding forward, head down, arms and legs moving as though the machinery were a little rusty, and apparently now operating without functioning ears.

“Hey!” Stan yelled again, and honked, all of which had the same effect as before. Nil.

“
John! Goddam it!
”

Now John stopped. He looked alert. He stared up at the sky. He stared at the building he was going past. He stared back the way he’d come.

What is this? You hear a horn, you don’t look at the street? Stan pressed the heel of his palm against the horn and left it there, until at last John turned to gape, then pointed at Stan as though telling somebody, “I know that guy!”

Having captured his subject’s attention, Stan released the horn and called, “Come on over. Get in.”

So John came around and took the passenger seat and said, “What are you doing around here? This one of your routes?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” Stan said, driving forward. “Where you headed?”

“You wanted to — You mean — How did you —”

“I called and talked to May. Where you headed?”

“Oh. Well, I got a meeting up in midtown this afternoon, that’s all.”

“All of a sudden, you take a lot of meetings.”

“Not my idea,” John said.

Stan figured he’d find out sooner or later what was going on. Meanwhile, there was his own little scheme to consider. He said, “Whadaya say, I drive you up there, put this car back, we grab a bite.”

“Sure. Why not?”

Stan and John eventually found a dark bar with food on a side street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, where the plump but not soft waitress said, “How you fellas today?”

“Hungry,” Stan said. “We just walked across Manhattan.”

“I hear they got buses now,” she said, and distributed menus. “You want a drink while you read?”

They both wanted beer. She went away and they studied the menus, and John said, “Can you tell the difference between ostrich burger and bison burger?”

“Bison’s got four legs.”

“
Burger.
”

“Oh. No. Turkey burger I can tell. All those others I think they come outa the same vat, back there in the kitchen.”

“I can remember,” John said, “when ‘burger’ only meant one thing, and the only word you ever had to stick in front of it was ‘cheese’.”

“You’re showing your age, John.”

“Yeah? That’s good. Usually I show twice my age.”

The waitress having returned, Stan ordered the bison burger and John the ostrich burger, and then John said, “You wanted to talk to me.”

“Well, with all these meetings you got, you didn’t get to
our
little meeting last night.”

“No, that cop come along.”

“And he’s still along, I guess.”

“It looks like it’s gonna be a long story, I’m not sure. I know you wanna know what it’s all about.”

“Naw, John, I don’t poke and pry in somebody else’s business.”

“Nevertheless,” John said, “to make up for it, my not getting to the meeting last night, I’ll tell you the story so far. The ex–cop is working for this rich guy that wants to what he calls ‘retrieve’ something that got stolen from his father eighty years ago.”

“Wow. That’s a long time.”

“It is. So this afternoon,” John said, “I’m supposed to meet the rich guy’s granddaughter, because she’s the one knows where it is. So I’m not even sure if it’s possible, or if it’s real, but you don’t just say no to a cop. Or an ex–cop either.”

“No, I get that,” Stan said.

“So now,” John said, “tell me yours.”

“What I wanna do,” Stan said, and the waitress appeared, with two platters, and said, “Who had the ostrich burger?” and they couldn’t remember. So she just put the platters down, accepted an order for another couple beers, and went away, which meant they didn’t know exactly what they were eating, but that was okay.

Around a mouthful of either ostrich or bison, John said, “You were gonna tell me what you wanna do.”

“I wanna hand to you,” Stan said, and paused for a beer delivery, and said, “the idea I was presenting to everybody — except you — last night.”

“Sure. I wanna hear it.”

“It’s out in Brooklyn.”

John looked pained. “I dunno, Stan,” he said. “That place I went to today was Brooklyn enough for me.”

“That’s the trouble with all you guys,” Stan told him. “You’re all Manhattancentric.”

John looked at him. “What kinda word is that?”

“A word from the newspaper,” Stan said. “And therefore authentic.”

“Okay.”

“It isn’t all Manhattan, you know. There’s four other boroughs.”

“Maybe three,” John said.

“What? Who you throwin’ out?”

“Staten Island. It’s over in New Jersey someplace. You can’t even get there on the subway. Any place you have to go to by
boat
is not part of New York City.”

“Governors Island.”

“So? That’s an island.”

“So’s Staten.”

Looking exasperated, John said, “You moving to Staten Island? Is that the news you wanted to bring me?”

“No, I’m very happy in Canarsie.”

“Just a little defensive. So tell me the idea. Did everybody else love it?”

“Let me tell it to you, okay?”

“Go.”

“Because I’m in Canarsie,” Stan said, “I drive a lot, which people in Manhattan don’t do. So I see things that people in Manhattan don’t see. So out along the Belt Parkway, they’re building this mosque, you can see it from the road.”

“Mosque.”

“Yeah, you know, a religious place that —”

“I know what it is, Stan.”

“Okay. So they’re building it, I read about it in the paper —”

“The Manhattancentric paper.”

“Maybe the same one, I dunno. It said, they’re getting a lot of Arab oil money for this mosque, they’re building one that’s gonna be like the big one in London with the golden dome, only, this being New York City, they ran into some problems.”

“Naturally.”

“Cost overruns, extra permits they didn’t know about, unions they never heard of, the whole thing grinds to a halt.”

“Of course it does,” John said. “Didn’t they know that?”

“Well, they’re religious people,” Stan said, “and they’re immigrants, and nobody ever
tells
anybody how New York works, everybody just does it.”

“I almost feel sorry for these people,” John said.

“Well, don’t feel
too
sorry. They shut down now, but they’re gonna start up again next spring, with some more oil money, and now they know a little more about the system, so this is just a delay is all.”

“I’m happy for them,” John said. “But up till now I don’t see your idea in here.”

“The dome,” Stan said.

John just looked at him, ostrich or bison visible in his open mouth. So Stan said, “The dome got delivered before they shut down, and it’s gold. Not solid gold, you know, but not gold paint either. Real gold. Gold plate or something. It’s sitting out there on this empty construction site, it was delivered when the walls were supposed to be up, but of course the walls
weren’t
up, so it’s sitting there, with this crane next to it.”

“I think I’m getting this,” John said. “It’s your idea, we use the crane, we pick up this dome — How big is this dome?”

“Fifteen feet across, twelve feet high.”

“Fifteen feet across, twelve feet high. You wanna pick this up and take it away.”

“With the crane, like you said.”

“And where you gonna stash this thing?”

“That’s part of what we gotta work out,” Stan said.

“Maybe you can take it to Alaska,” John said, “and paint it white, and make everybody think it’s an igloo.”

“I don’t think we could get it that far,” Stan told him. “All the bridges. And forget tunnels.”

John said, “And who’s your customer, the American Dental Association?”

“John, it’s
gold.
It’s gotta be worth I don’t know how much.”

“You don’t have a place to hide it,” John said. “You take it down the street with this crane, you don’t have any way to disguise it, camouflage it. You don’t have a customer for it. So who at the O.J. last night liked the idea?”

“There were some naysayers,” Stan admitted.

“How many?”

“Well, all of them. But I figured,
you
could see the possibilities.”

“I can,” John agreed. “Just this morning, that cop — who, by the way, isn’t a cop any more, not for seventeen months — just this morning he was telling the rich guy about me, how I took a couple falls in the early days but learned how to have that not happen any more, and
this
is part of the learning. I don’t go down the street with a fifteen–foot–wide, twelve–foot–tall hot golden dome out in front of me.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Stan. I can see how it was for you, you looked at this great big gold thing out there beside the Belt, you read about it in the paper, all you could think about was the gold. It’s
my
job to think about the problems, and what this dome is is one hundred percent problem.”

“Maybe I’ll go do it on my own,” Stan said. He was really feeling dumped on.

“One thing,” John said. “If you do it on your own, don’t get your Mom involved.”

His Mom was the only other gang he could think of. Stan said, “Why not?”

“Because she’d rather drive her own cab than do the state’s laundry. I gotta go.” Standing, John said, “If you’re gonna want me to talk with you about an idea like that, you pay for lunch. See you later.”