The sheets held. His hands, elbows, knees, thighs, feet, teeth, nostrils and ears held. Down he went, the cold city breeze fanning his brow, his descent accompanied by the music of ancient coins clinking in his pocket and tiny threads ripping in the sheets.
The jumbled darkness down below was full of
stuff,
some of it to be climbed over, some to be avoided, none of it friendly. Dortmunder blundered around down there for a while, aware of that white arrow on the side of the hotel in the evening dark, pointing its long finger directly at him, and then he saw, up a metal flight of stairs, a metal grillwork door closed over an open doorway, with warm light from within.
Maybe? Maybe. Dortmunder tiptoed up the stairs, peered through the grill, and saw a long high room completely encased by books. A library of some kind, well lit and totally empty, with a tall Christmas tree halfway along the left side.
Dortmunder manicured the metal door, stepped through, and paused again. At this end of the room were a large desk and chair, at the far end a long marble-topped table, and in between various furniture; sofa, chairs, round table. The Christmas tree gave off much bright light and a faint aroma of the north woods. But mostly the room was books, floor to the ceiling, glowing amber in the warmth of large faceted overhead light globes.
At the far end was a dark wooden door, ajar. Dortmunder made for this, and was halfway there when a short gray-haired guy came in, carrying two decks of cards and a bottle of beer. “Oh, hi,” the guy said. “I didn’t see you come in. You’re early.”
“I am?”
“Not
very
early,” the guy conceded. Putting the cards on the round table and the beer on a side table, he said, “I have this right, don’t I? You’re the fella Don sent, to take his place, because he’s stuck at some Christmas party.”
“Right,” Dortmunder said.
“Pity he couldn’t make it,” the guy said. “He always leaves us a few bucks.” He stuck his hand out. “I’m Otto, I didn’t quite get your . . .”
“John,” Dortmunder said, fulfilling his truth quota for the day. “Uh, Diddums.”
“Diddums?”
“It’s Welsh.”
“Oh.”
Two more guys came into the room, shucking out of topcoats, and Otto said, “Here’s Larry and Justin.” He told them, “This is John Diddums, he’s the guy Don sent.”
“Diddums?” Justin said.
“It’s Welsh,” Otto explained.
“Oh.”
Larry grinned at Dortmunder and said, “I hope you’re as bad a player as Don.”
“Ha ha,” Dortmunder said.
Okay; it looks like there’s nothing to do but play poker with these people, and hope the real substitute for Don doesn’t show up. Anyway, it’s probably safer in here, for the moment. So Dortmunder stood around, being friendly, accepting Otto’s offer of a beer, and pretty soon Laurel and Hardy came in, Laurel being a skinny guy called Al and Hardy being a nonskinny guy called Henry, and then they sat down to play.
They used chips, a dollar per, and each of them bought twenty bucks worth to begin. Dortmunder, reaching in his heavy pockets, pulled out with some wadded greenbacks a couple of bronze coins, which bounced on the floor and were picked up by Henry before Dortmunder could get to them. Henry glanced at the coins and said, as he put them on the table and pushed them toward Dortmunder, “We don’t take those.”
Everybody had a quick look at the coins before Dortmunder could scoop them up and slip them back into his pocket. “I’ve been traveling,” he explained.
“I guess you have,” Henry said, and the game began. Dealer’s choice, stud or draw, no high-low, no wild cards.
As Dortmunder well knew, the way to handle a game of chance is to remove the element of chance. A card palmed here, a little dealing of seconds there, an ace crimped for future reference, and pretty soon Dortmunder was doing very well indeed. He wasn’t winning every hand, nothing that blatant, but by the time the first hour was done and the cops began to yell at the metal grillwork door Dortmunder was about two hundred forty bucks ahead.
This was Otto’s place. “Now what?” he said, when all the shouting started out back, and got to his feet, and walked back there to discuss the situation through the locked grill.
Looking as though he didn’t believe it, or at least didn’t want to believe it, Al said, “They’re raiding our poker game?”
“I don’t think so,” said Henry.
Otto unlocked the door, damn his eyes, and the room filled up with a bunch of overheated uniformed cops, several of them with new scars and scrapes from running around in that jumbled darkness out there. “They say,” Otto told the table generally, “there was a burglary at the hotel, and they think the guy came this way.”
“He scored some rare coins,” one cop, a big guy with sergeant’s stripes and Perry on his nameplate, said. “Anybody come through here tonight?”
“Just us,” Larry said. Nobody looked at Dortmunder. “Maybe,” one of the cops said, “you should all show ID.” Everybody but Dortmunder reached for wallets, as Otto said, “Officer, we’ve known each other for years. I own this building and the bookshop out front, and these are writers and an editor and an agent, and this is our regular poker game.”
“You all know each other, huh?”
“For years,” Otto said, and grabbed a handy book, and showed the cop the picture on the back. “See, that’s Larry,” he said, and pointed at the guy himself, who sat up straight and beamed a big smile, as though his picture was being taken.
“Oh, yeah?” The cop looked from the book to Larry and back to the book. “I read some of your stuff,” he said. “I’m Officer Nekola.”
Larry beamed even more broadly. “Is that right?” “You ever read William J. Caunitz?” the cop asked.
Larry’s smile wilted slightly. “He’s a friend of mine,” he said. “Of ours,” Justin said.
“Now there’s a real writer,” Nekola said. “He used to be a cop himself, you know.”
“We know,” Larry said.
While the literary discussion went on, Dortmunder naturally found himself wondering: Why are they covering for me here? I came in the back way, I showed those coins, they don’t know me for years, so why don’t they all point fingers and shout, “Here’s your man, take him away!” What’s up? Isn’t this carrying the Christmas spirit a little too far?
The symposium had finished. One of the cops had gotten Justin to autograph a paperback book. The cops were all leaving, some through the front toward the bookstore, the rest returning to the jumbled darkness out back. Otto called after them, “In case anything comes up, how do we get in touch with you people?”
“Don’t worry,” Sgt. Perry said. “We’ll be around for hours yet.” And then Dortmunder got it. If these people were to blow the whistle, the cops would immediately take him away, meaning he would no longer be in the game.
And he had their money.
You don’t do that. You don’t let a new guy leave a poker game after one measly hour, not if he has your money, not for
any
excuse. And particularly under these current circumstances. Knowing what they now knew about Dortmunder, his new friends here would be replaying certain recent hands in their minds and seeing them in a rather different light.
Which meant he knew, unfortunately, what was expected of him now. If this is the quid, that must be the quo.
Otto resumed his seat, looking a bit grim, and said, “Whose deal?”
“Mine,” Justin said. “Draw, guts to open.”
Dortmunder picked up his cards, and they were the three, five and seven of spades, the queen of hearts and the ace of clubs. He opened for the two dollar limit, was raised, and raised back. Everybody was in the hand.
Since it didn’t matter what he did, Dortmunder threw away the queen and the ace. Justin dealt him two replacements and he looked at them, and they were the four and six of spades.
Has anybody ever done that before? Dortmunder had just drawn twice to an inside straight in the same hand, and made it. And made a straight flush as well. Lucky, huh? If only he could tell somebody about it.
“Your bet, John,” Justin said.
“I busted,” Dortmunder said. “Merry Christmas.” He tossed in the hand.
It was going to be a long night. Two hundred and forty dollars long.
D
ORTMUNDER HAVING COME INTO POSSESSION OF SOME CERTAIN
coins of a particular value, and the merchant named Stoon having recently returned to the slammer upstate, he decided it was time to go see Arnie Albright. Nothing else to be done. Therefore, shrugging his shoulders and pocketing his Ziploc bag of coins, Dortmunder took the West Side IRT up to 86th, then walked on up to 89th between Broadway and West End, where Arnie’s apartment moldered upstairs over a bookstore.
Dortmunder entered the vestibule. He thought about ringing the doorbell there, but then he thought about not ringing it, and liked that thought better, so he went through the interior door with a shrug of a credit card. Climbing the stairs, he stopped at Arnie’s door—it was a particularly offensive shade of dirty gray-yellow-green—and rapped the metal with his knuckles.
Nothing.
Was Arnie out? Impossible. Arnie was never out. It was practically against a city ordinance for Arnie Albright to go out of his apartment and mingle with ordinary people on the ordinary street. So Dortmunder rapped again, with the knuckle of the middle finger of his right hand, and when that still produced nothing he kicked the door instead, twice: KHORK, KHORK.
“WHAT?” demanded a voice from just the other side of the door.
Dortmunder leaned close. “It’s me,” he said, not too loudly. “John Dortmunder.”
“DORTMUNDER?”
“Who you tryin’ to tell, the people in Argentina?”
Many lock noises later, the door opened and Arnie Albright stood there, the same as ever, unfortunately. “Dortmunder,” Arnie cried, already exasperated. “Whyn’tchoo ring the doorbell, like a person?”
“Because then you yell at me on the intercom,” Dortmunder explained, “and you want me to yell back, and tell my business to everybody on the street.”
“I gotta protect myself,” Arnie said. “I got things of value here.” He gestured vaguely behind himself, as though he couldn’t quite remember which things of value they were, or where exactly he’d put them.
Dortmunder said, “You gonna let me in?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” Arnie, a grizzled, gnarly guy with a tree-root nose, a skinny, deeply lined person who could have been any age from four hundred to a thousand, stepped back and gestured Dortmunder inside, saying, “So Stoon’s been sent up again, huh?”
Surprised, because this was very new news, Dortmunder said, “When’d you hear that?”
Arnie shut the door. “I didn’t. But when I see you coming to Arnie, I know Stoon’s outta business.”
“Oh, naw,” Dortmunder said.
“Don’t tell me, Dortmunder,” Arnie said, leading the way across the living room, if that’s the word. “If Stoon was out and about, up and around, coming and going, it’s him you’d go see in a minute, even though I pay better dollar.”
“Naw, Arnie,” Dortmunder said, following, wishing he didn’t have to spend so much time lying when he was with Arnie.
The Albright apartment had small rooms with big windows, all of them looking out past a black metal fire escape at a panoramic view of the brick rear wall of a parking garage maybe four feet away. For interior decoration, Arnie had hung a lot of his calendar collection around on the walls, all of these Januaries starting on all different days of the week, with numbers in black or red or, very occasionally, dark blue. Also, to break the monotony, there were the calendars that started in March or August, the ones Arnie called incompletes. (Being a serious collector, he was full of serious collector jargon.) The top halves of all these calendars were pictures, mostly photographs (fall foliage, kittens in baskets, the Eiffel Tower), except that the pictures of the girls bent way over to pump gas into a roadster were drawings. Excellent drawings in very bright colors, really artistic. Also, the religious pictures, mainly the Sermon on the Mount (perspective!), were drawings, but generally not as artistically interesting as the girls.
Arnie led the way through the decades to the table over by the parking garage view, saying, “So what have you got for me today? Huh? Not a piano, I bet, huh? Not a piano? Huh?”
It was amazing how quickly Arnie could become tiresome. “Some coins, Arnie,” Dortmunder said.
“Damn, you see?” Arnie said. “It didn’t work.”
“It didn’t?”
“Just the other day,” Arnie said, his voice full of accusation, “I read this self-improvement thing, see, in some goddam magazine in the garbage, ‘Lighten Up, Asshole,’ something like that, it said, ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you, piss and moan and you piss and moan alone.’”
“I heard that,” Dortmunder allowed. “Something like that.” “Well, it’s bullshit,” Arnie said. “I just tried a joke there—” “You did?” Dortmunder looked polite. “I’m sorry I missed it.” “It’s my personality that’s wrong,” Arnie said. “It’s just who I am, that’s all. Somebody else could tell that joke, you’d be on the floor, you’d need CPR, the Heimlich Maneuver. But not me. I’m a pain in the ass, Dortmunder, and don’t argue with me about that.”
“I never argue with you, Arnie,” Dortmunder said.
“I get on people’s nerves,” Arnie insisted. He waggled a bony finger in Dortmunder’s face. “I make them sorry they ever met me,” he snarled. “It don’t matter what I do, I even put on perfume, would you believe it?”
“Well,” Dortmunder said cautiously, “you
do
smell kinda different at that, Arnie.”
“Different, yeah,” Arnie growled. “Not better, just different. I put on these
male scents,
you know what I mean? Ripped ’em outta some other magazine, outta the trash can up at the corner, rubbed ’em all over myself, now people get close to me, they hail a
cab
to get away.”
Dortmunder sniffed, not a lot. “It’s not that bad, Arnie,” he said, though it was.
“At least you lie to me,” Arnie said. “Most people, I’m so detestable, they can’t
wait
to tell me what a turd I am. Well, siddown by the window there, that’ll help a little.”