Why Me? (17 page)

Kelp took a step through the hole into this space, still grasping the wallboard by the suction-cup handles, and twisted his body sidewise to get through the narrow opening in the bricks. Dortmunder watched him, dubious, but when Kelp was all the way through with no alarms or shouts or other hooraw, Dortmunder followed, slithering through into an obvious warehouse, lined with rows of rough-plank shelves and bins, all piled high with large or small cardboard cartons. Gray light hovered in the air from distant grimy windows.

Kelp, sliding the wallboard segment back into its slot, whispered, “We got to be quiet now. There's workers down at the front of the building.”

“You mean
now
? There's people in here
now
?”

“Well, sure,” Kelp said. “It's Friday, right? A working day. C'mon.”

Kelp led the way down the nearest aisle, Dortmunder tiptoeing after. Kelp moved with absolute assurance even when the echoing sound of semidistant voices was heard, and eventually Dortmunder followed him through a windowed door into a smallish room where telephones and telephone equipment were displayed on tiny walnutish shelves on orange pegboard fronting all four walls. “Here we go,” Kelp said, the compleat salesman. “Phones here, add-ons there, recording and playback equipment over there.”

“Andy,” Dortmunder said, “let's do it and get it over with.”

“Well, make your selection,” Kelp told him. “Whadaya want? Here we got a nice pink Princess, light in the dial, remember the Princess?”

“I remember the Princess,” Dortmunder agreed. “You couldn't dial it, and you couldn't hang it up.”

“Not one of our best designs,” Kelp admitted. “Now, over here we got something Swedish. I notice this particular model is avocado, but you're not limited in color, we got every color you want. Here, give this a heft.”

Dortmunder, having put down his beer can with the chicken leg balanced atop it, found himself holding the avocado something Swedish. It looked like minimalist modern sculpture, shaped somewhat like a horse's neck, curving and narrowing up from a not-quite-round base, then arcing at the top into what was apparently the part you listened to. And the little black holes down near the base were probably where you talked. Turning this object upside down, Dortmunder saw the dial on the bottom, surrounding a large red button. He pushed the button, then released it.

“Very popular,” Kelp said, “with the trendy set. One little warning, though—if you put it down to like get a pencil, light a cigarette, you break the connection.”

“Break the connection? I don't follow.”

“It's like hanging up,” Kelp explained. “That red button on the bottom hangs it up.”

“So if I'm talking on this thing,” Dortmunder said, “I can't put it down because then I'll hang up.”

“You have to put it down on its side.”

Dortmunder put the thing down on its side. It rolled off the shelf and fell on the floor.

“Then,” Kelp said, turning away from the Swedish something, “we've got this little number from England. Very lightweight, very advanced design.”

Dortmunder frowned at this new option, sitting like a praying mantis on its shelf. It was shaped more or less like a real phone, but it was smaller and colored
two
shades of avocado and made from the same kind of plastic as model Stukas and Stutzes. Also, it didn't have any rounded surfaces, just flat surfaces that met at funny angles. Dortmunder picked up the receiver and closed his hand around it and the receiver disappeared; a little bit of plastic stuck out of Dortmunder's mitt at each end, like segments of a mouse on both sides of a cat's smile. He opened his hand and looked at how close the ear-part and the mouth-part were, then held it tentatively to his cheek, then frowned at Kelp and said, “This is for people with tiny heads.”

“You get used to it,” Kelp assured him. “I've got one of those in the hall closet.”

“In case you're hanging up your coat when the phone rings.”

“Sure.”

Dortmunder poked the other part of this English number with his finger, planning to dial it, but the phone jittered away as though ticklish. He pursued it as far as the wall, where he got halfway through dialing a “6” when the phone loused him up by turning with him. “You need two hands to dial it,” he objected. “Just like the Princess.”

“It is better,” Kelp conceded, “on incoming calls.”

“From the Munchkins. Andy, all I want's a phone.”

“How about this one shaped like Mickey Mouse?”

“A phone,” Dortmunder said.

“We haven't even talked push buttons.”

“Andy,” Dortmunder said, “do you know what a phone looks like?”

“Sure. But take a look at this one in its own briefcase, built right in. Carry it anywhere, plug it in. Here's one with a blackboard on it, you can take messages, write them down with chalk.”

While Kelp continued to point this way and that, calling Dortmunder's attention to things of no interest, Dortmunder picked up his chicken leg and beer, chewed and drank, and scanned the orange wall, searching, searching … until finally, on the lowest shelf way over to the right, he saw a phone. A real phone. Black, with a dial. Shaped like a phone. “That,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp paused in his contemplation of a seven-eighths-size modern facsimile of an old wall-type crank phone. Looking at Dortmunder, he said, “What?”

“That.” Dortmunder pointed the chicken leg at the real phone.

“That? John, whadaya want with
that
?”

“I'll talk on it.”

“John,” Kelp said, “even bookmakers wouldn't use a phone like that.”

“That's the one I want,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp considered him, then sighed. “You sure can get stubborn sometimes,” he said. “But, if that's what you want …”

“It is.”

Gazing sadly at all those rejected wonders, Kelp shrugged and said, “Okay, then, that's what you'll get. The customer is always right.”

29

“It's a pay phone,” Tony Cappelletti said, “in the Village, on Abingdon Square.”

“My men,” Malcolm Zachary said firmly, like an FBI man, “can have that booth staked out in five minutes.”

Mologna glowered heavily across his desk. Cooperation between law enforcement agencies had made it necessary to bring the FBI in on this phone call from the alleged thief, but it wasn't necessary to put up with a lot of disguised feds saturating the area in laundry trucks and unmarked black sedans with D.C. plates. “So far,” Mologna said, “this is a crank call to the Police Department of the City of New York. We're not goin to make a federal case out of it.”

“But,” Zachary said, “we have infiltratory specialists, men carefully trained to blend into any environmentalism.”

“The New York Police Department,” Mologna said, “has men who can blend into the environmentalism of New York City.”

“Equipment,” Zachary said, beginning to look desperate. “We have walkie-talkies that look like ice cream cones.”

“That's why
we'll
handle the case,” Mologna told him. “Our walkie-talkies look like beer cans in brown paper bags.” Having finished off Zachary, Mologna turned back to Tony Cappelletti: “Our people in position?”

“All ready,” Cappelletti promised. “We've set up our war room across the hall.”

Mologna crouched over his massive belly like a man catching a beach ball, then all at once heaved himself to his feet. “Let's go,” he said, and marched out, trailed by the dour Cappelletti, the sparkling-eyed Leon, the disgruntled Zachary, and the watchful-but-silent Freedly.

In a bare room across the hall, some long folding tables and rickety folding chairs had been set up on the scuffed linoleum floor, a few phone lines and radio equipment had been brought in (their cables flopped around underfoot), a couple of city and subway maps had been taped to the wall, and two overweight black women and an overweight white man in grungy civilian clothing sat around smoking cigarettes and discussing retirement benefits. As a war room, it would have made James Bond laugh.

The newcomers clustered around a city map on one wall, and Tony Cappelletti described the current situation: “Abingdon Square is here in the West Village, at the meeting of Bleecker, Hudson, Bank, and Bethune streets and Eighth Avenue. Hudson and Bank are the only through streets, so we've got a total of seven entrances or exits to the square. The phone we're after—”

“The target phone,” murmured Zachary.

“—is here at the corner of Bleecker and Bank, south side, directly in front of the children's playground. It's a very open area, because of the playground on the south and very wide Eighth Avenue to the north.”

“What's our stakeout?” Mologna asked.

“In the playground itself,” Cappelletti said, “we got two vendors, one selling hot dogs, the other selling cocaine. In a restaurant on Bleecker across the street from the phone we got a TPF squad, fully equipped, and—”

Freedly, the less assholish FBI man, broke his long silence to say, “Excuse me. TPF?”

“Tactical Patrol Force,” Mologna told him. “Those are our head-beaters.”

Freedly frowned. “Crowd control, you mean?”

Zachary echoed, “Crowd control? Inspector, we aren't dealing here with dissentation, some sort of anti-this, antithat demonstration. This is a robber, in a negotiatory posture.”

Mologna sighed, shook his head, and resigned himself to patience. “Zachary,” he said, “do you know what the West Village is?”

“A part of Greenwich Village,” Zachary said, frowning sternly. “Of course I know where it is.”

“Not where.
What
.” Holding up three fingers, Mologna said, “The West Village is three separate and distinct smalltown communities all existin in the same space at the same time. They are first the ethnic community, which is mostly Italian plus Irish, and which used to be two communities that knifed each other a lot but now they've got together against numbers two and three. Two is the artsy-craftsy community, everythin from folk singers and rug hookers and candle dippers to hotshot TV personalities and writers with their own column in the papers. And three is the fag community, which makes
Alice in Wonderland
look like a documentary. Any time we make an arrest in that area, we run the risk of offendin one or more of those communities, and if we
do
offend one or more of those communities the TPF comes out and breaks heads until we can retreat back to the United States. You follow me so far?”

While Zachary merely blinked and nodded, looking forceful though bewildered, Freedly said, “The map is not the terrain.”

Mologna nodded at him. “You're right.”

“Von Clausewitz said that,” Freedly added.

“He knew his onions.” Mologna turned back to Cappelletti: “What else we got?”

“A city bus broken down here on Eighth Avenue,” Cappelletti said. “That gives us a driver and two mechanics. Two winos here on Hudson Street, lying in a doorway. Sanitation Department truck here on Bethune, four men, goofing off. Pair of chess players here, at the benches just south of the playground. Little old lady with a lot of shopping bags handing out Jesus Saves pamphlets here at the corner of Bank and Hudson.”

“Hold on,” Zachary said, hitching up his trousers like an FBI man. “What is all this? Sanitationmen, little old ladies. Who is this little old lady?”

“He's a police officer,” Tony Cappelletti said, while Mologna and Leon exchanged a glance. “He's usually a decoy with the mugging detail. I've seen him, Francis,” he added to Mologna, “and he does an old lady so good you wanna ask him to make you an apple pie.”

Zachary said, “The bus driver, the garbagemen—”

“Sanitationmen,” Mologna said.

“They're all police officers?”

Even Tony Cappelletti was prepared to exchange a glance with somebody at that one; he exchanged it with Freedly, who said, “If
we
were doing it, Mac, our people would also be in disguise.”

“Well, of course they would! The description was just a little confusing, that's all.” Frowning manfully at the map, Zachary said, “You appear to have the target phone well encircled.”

“You bet your ass we do,” Mologna told him.

“That's fourteen men,” Cappelletti said, “with visual contact on the phone. Plus the TPF in that restaurant, plus two more squads out of sight some distance away—here in a parking garage on Charles Street, and over here in a moving company garage on Washington Street.”

Leon said, “Ding dong.”

Everybody turned to look at him. Mologna, not quite believing it, said, “Leon? Was that you?”

Leon mutely pointed at the big white clock on the wall, and when everybody turned that way they saw the time was precisely ten-thirty. “Okay,” Mologna said. “Unconventional, Leon, but okay.”

Leon smiled. “I can do a perfect Big Ben, quarter hours and everything.”

“Later.” Looking around, Mologna said, “Which phone do I use?”

“This one, Francis.” Cappelletti ushered Mologna to a phone on one of the long tables. Seating himself on a folding chair—it shrieked in agony—Mologna reached for the receiver, poised his finger over the push buttons, then stopped and frowned. “What's the number?”

Everybody patted his pockets and it turned out Cappelletti had it, on a crumpled piece of paper, which he smoothed out and placed on the table. Mologna dialed, while one of the black women who'd been sitting around talking about retirement benefits spoke quietly into a microphone, saying, “He's making the call now.”

Three miles away, at Abingdon Square, two winos, four sanitationmen, a bus driver, two vendors, two mechanics, a pair of chess players, and a little old lady all tensed, watching and waiting, their attention on a shiny, small telephone-on-astalk. Not even an enclosed booth; just a small three-sided box on one leg.