Thieves Dozen (13 page)
The cops stood around and growled together while Dortmunder and the harried woman worked, their fingers sliding on the slippery shrimp. At last, though, the law left the room, and Dortmunder whispered, “Thanks.”
“I don’t know what you did—”
“Mistaken identity.”
“All I know is, you saved my sanity. Also, I still need help with these shrimp.”
“You got it.”
“There’s one thing, though, that I have to tell you,” she said as they arranged shrimp on decorative plates. “I’m married.”
“So am I,” Dortmunder said. “Kinda.”
“Me, too,” she agreed. “Kinda. But for real.”
“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “We’re just trays of shrimp that pass in the night.”
“Right.”
Returning to the party, Dortmunder saw Larry at the drinks table, a wrinkled look around his mouth as he poured a glass of white wine. Dortmunder kept out of his way as he circulated, distributing shrimp. The two suspects from the bedroom came back, looking shaken but relieved, and both beelined to the drinks table, where they made quite a dent.
A few minutes later, the apartment door thudded shut with a sound that gonged all the way down the hall and into the room with the party, where a whole lot of tense smiles suddenly loosened up.
Really? Gone? Given up? Dortmunder, suspicious by nature and cautious by necessity, carried his half-full tray of shrimp and sauce down the empty hall, glanced into the empty bedroom, opened the apartment door and looked out at five cops looking in.
Umm. Two of them were women cops. All five were just standing around the corridor with faintly eager and hungry looks, like lions in the Colosseum. Behind them, the door to the apartment across the hall was propped half-open.
OK. So they still think the odds are that their missing burglar is at the party, so they’ve set up this corridor equivalent of a radar trap. Each partygoer on the way out will be taken into the apartment across the hall—with that good citizen’s cooperation and approval, no doubt—and frisked. The women cops are for the women partygoers. And all five were looking at Dortmunder as though he were their first customer.
Uh-uh. True, he didn’t have the stash on him, but the identity papers he carried were in case of routine stops, not for anything serious. These documents were like vampires, they crumbled when exposed to light.
Dortmunder extended the tray, “Have a shrimp?”
“We’re on duty,” one of the women cops said, and the other cops looked faintly embarrassed.
“Maybe later,” Dortmunder suggested, and he closed the door on all those official eyes before they got the idea to dry-run their little gauntlet on the help.
What now? Eventually, this party, like all good things, must end. Until then, he was probably more or less safe, but as things stood, there was absolutely no way for him to get out of this apartment. Until they got their hands on the burglar, the police would not relax their vigilance for a second.
Until they got their hands on the burglar. Until they got their hands on
somebody.
Play the hand. Dortmunder slipped sideways into the bedroom, balancing the tray one-handed as he opened the dresser drawer where he’d stashed the stash. He was careful about his selection; a proper Christmas gift should be something you’d like to receive yourself, so he resisted the impulse to keep the best swag for himself, instead choosing to sacrifice two brooches and a bracelet that were definitely cream of the crop. These went into his pants pocket and back out of the bedroom he eased, on the alert.
And here came Larry and Sheila down the hall away from the party, he still assuring her that she was the one making all the decisions, while she wore the expression of someone who can’t figure out what it is that keeps biting her on the ass. They would all meet at the midpoint of the hall, with just enough room for everybody to get by.
Well, it could have been anybody, but, in fact, Dortmunder had been thinking about Larry a bit, anyway. The guy was a smart-aleck, which was good; he’d be more likely to think he could bullshit the cops the way he was doing Sheila, more likely to rub them the wrong way and attract their attention. And now this business of sidestepping past one another in the hall just made it easier.
“I don’t want to go if
you
don’t want to go,” Sheila was saying, her eyes phosphorescent with tears that hadn’t yet started to fall, and at that point in the middle of Larry’s long-suffering sigh, darned if the server didn’t almost dump his whole tray of shrimp and red sauce all over Larry’s shirt. “Hey! Watch it!”
“Oops! Here, let me—”
“That’s all right, that’s all right, no harm done, everything’s fine, if you don’t mind,” Larry said with an aggressive, splayfingered brushing down of his front, where nothing had actually spilled but where the server had been apologetically pawing and patting.
Timing is all. Dortmunder made his way back to the party, distributed the rest of his shrimp among the needy, and when he saw the harried woman, empty-trayed, heading for the kitchen, he followed her.
Now she was putting little sausages on the tray, each with its own yellow toothpick. Dortmunder reached into his pocket for the one prize he hadn’t given Larry: an extremely nice gold brooch shaped like a feather. “Hold it,” he said, walking over behind her, and tucked it into the raveled bun of her hair.
“What? What? What’s that?” She didn’t know what was happening but was afraid to turn her head.
“When you get home,” Dortmunder advised, “have your guy fish that out of there. Not before.”
“But what is it?”
“A feather,” he said accurately, and disrobed himself of the dish towel he’d been hiding behind. Too bad that jacket wasn’t around anymore. “Well,” he said, “up the chimney I speed.”
She laughed, a happier person than when they’d met, and picked up her refilled tray. “Say hello to the elves.”
“I will.”
They both left the kitchen, she to continue her good works and he moving briskly but without unseemly haste down the hall toward the apartment door, through which, as he neared it, came the muffled sound of voices raised in dispute, among them the high tones of the perhaps unnecessarily loyal Sheila.
“Just who do you think you are?” And that was Larry, bless him.
Eventually, of course, Larry’s innocence—at least in this context—would be established, and the manhunt would resume. But by then the wily perpetrator would be long gone. Flexing into the bedroom, the wily perpetrator found his pea-coat at the bottom of the pile again and refilled it quickly and silently with his tools and the evening’s profits. Before leaving, he paused briefly to pick up the bedside phone and dial his faithful companion, May, waiting for him at home, who answered by saying “Wrong number,” which was her form of preemptive strike against possible breathers and objectionable conversationalists.
“I’m a little bit late, May,” Dortmunder said.
“You certainly are,” May agreed. “Where are you, the precinct?” “Well, I’m at a party,” Dortmunder said, “but I’ll be leaving in a minute.” Leaving, to be specific, to continue his interrupted descent of the fire escape. “There was a complication,” he explained, “but it’s OK now.”
“Is it a nice party?”
“The food’s good,” Dortmunder said. “See you soon.”
I
T WAS HARD TO RUN
, D
ORTMUNDER WAS DISCOVERING, WITH
your pockets full of bronze Roman coins. The long skirt flapping around his ankles didn’t help, either. This hotel is either too damn big, he told himself, huffing and puffing and trying to keep his pants up under this bulky white dress, or it’s too small.
Okay, the dress isn’t really a dress, it’s an aba, but it gets in the way of running legs just as much as any dress in the world. How did Lawrence of Arabia do it, in that movie that time? Probably trick photography.
Also, the sheet on his head, called a keffiyeh, held on by this outsize cigar band circlet called an akal, is fine and dandy if you’re just walking around looking at things, but when you run it keeps sliding over your eyes, particularly when you have to go around a corner and not run straight into the wall, like now.
Dortmunder turned the corner, and here came a half dozen of his fellow conventioneers, Arabian numismatists jabbering away at each other and kicking their skirts out ahead of them as they walked. How did they
do
that?
Dortmunder braked hard to a walk, to a stroll, and fixed a brotherly smile on his face as he approached the approaching sheiks, or whatever they were. “Sawami,” he said, using the one word he’d found that seemed to work. “Sawami, sawami.”
They all smiled back, and nodded, and said some stuff, and proceeded on around the corner. With any luck, the cops would arrest one of
them.
Here’s the thing. If you happen to hear that in a big hotel in midtown Manhattan there’s going to be a sale of ancient coins, where most of the dealers and most of the customers are going to be rich Arabs, what can you possibly do but dress yourself up like a rich Arab, go to the hotel, mingle a little, and see what falls into your pockets? If the dealer with the heavy beard and the loud voice hadn’t also happened to see what was falling into Dortmunder’s pocket, everything would have been okay. As it was, he’d eluded pursuit so far, but if he were to try to leave the hotel by any of its known exits he was pretty sure he’d suddenly feel a lot of unfriendly hands clutching at his elbows.
What to do, what to do? Getting out of this OPEC drag wouldn’t help much, since his pursuers had no doubt already figured out he was a goof in sheik’s clothing. In fact, wearing it helped him blend in with the hotel’s regular guests, so long as he didn’t have to engage in conversation more complicated than, “Sawami sawami. Sawami? Ho, ho, sawami!”
And at least he wasn’t up in Santa Claus rig. Every year around this time, with shiny toys in the store windows and wet snow inside your shoes, wherever there might happen to be any kind of a robbery in a public setting, the cops
immediately
would nick the nearest Saint Nick, because it is well known that Santa Claus is every second-rate second story guy’s idea of a really terrific disguise.
Not Dortmunder. Better a sheet among sheiks than a red suit, a white pillow and handcuffs. Leave your camel at home.
NO ADMISSION. That was what the door said, and that was perfect. That was exactly what you would look for when you’re on the run, a door that says
No Admission,
or
Authorized Personnel Only,
or
Keep Out:
any of those synonyms for ‘quick-exit.’ This particular door was at a turn in the corridor, tucked away mostly out of sight in the corner of the L. Dortmunder looked down both lengths of empty hallways, tried the knob, found it locked, and stepped back to consider just what kind of lock he was expected to go through here.
Oh, that kind. No problem. Hiking up his skirt, reaching into a coin-laden pants pocket, he brought out a little leather bag of narrow metal implements he’d once told an arresting officer was his manicure set. That cop had looked at Dortmunder’s finger-nails and laughed.
Dortmunder manicured
No Admission,
pushed the door open, listened, heard no alarm, saw only darkness within, and stepped through, shutting the door behind him. Feeling around for a lightswitch, his fingers bumped into some sort of shelf, then found the switch, flipped it up, and a linen closet sprang into existence: sheets, towels, tissue boxes, soap, quart-size white plastic coffee pitchers, tiny vials of shampoo. Well, hell,
this
was no way out.
Dortmunder turned and reached for the doorknob and felt a breeze. Yes? He turned back, inspecting the small but deep crowded room with all his eyes, and there at the rear was a window, an ordinary double hung window, and its bottom half was just slightly open.
What floor am I on? Dortmunder had gone out windows before in his career that had turned out to be maybe a little too high up in the air for comfort and he’d lived to regret it, but at least he’d lived. But where was he now?
The window was behind shelves piled with towels. Dortmunder moved towels out of the way, leaned his head in between two shelves, pushed the window farther open and looked out into December darkness. A kind of jumbled darkness lay in an indefinite number of stories below, maybe three, maybe five. To the right were the backs of tall buildings facing 57th Street and to the left were the backs of shorter buildings facing 56th Street.
Didn’t people make rope ladders out of sheets? They did; Dortmunder followed their example, first tying the end of a sheet around the handle of a coffee pitcher and lowering that out the window, then tying sheets together and paying them out until he heard the far-away
clunk
of the pitcher against something hard.
Far
away.
Don’t look down, Dortmunder reminded himself, as he tied the top sheet to a shelf bracket and stripped at last out of his Middle East finery and switched off the linen closet light, but then he had to figure out how to get this body from this position, standing in the dark linen closet, to hanging on sheets outside the window. How do you get from here to there? To slide between the shelves and out the window head first seemed utter folly; you’d wind up pointing the wrong way, and you wouldn’t last long. But to get up on the shelf and through that narrow opening feet first was obviously impossible.
Well, the impossible takes a little longer, particularly in the dark.
Many
parts of himself he hit against the wooden edges of the shelves. Many times he seemed certain to fall backward off a shelf and beat his head against the floor. Many times he had all of himself in position except one arm, on the wrong shelf, or maybe one knee, that had found a way to get into the small of his back. Then there came a moment when all of him was outside the window except his left leg, which wanted to stay. Ultimately, he was reduced to holding onto the sheet with his teeth and right knee while pulling that extra leg out with both hands, then in a panic grabbing the sheet with every molecule in his body just as he started to fall.
