The Road To Ruin Page 12

  “Don’t shout!”

  “Am I shouting?” But then, of course, he wasn’t. “All these waves here, I can’t hear a thing. Can you hear them? The waves?”

  Then Dortmunder knew who it was; the same voice that used to rasp from the intercom on West Eighty-ninth street. “Arnie? Is that you?”

  “Who else?” Arnie Albright demanded.

  “And you’re still there? The Club Med?”

  “Down in the islands,” Arnie snarled. “Everything’s sand, and everybody smiles all the time. I know you’ll say it can’t be that bad, John Dortmunder, but it is. Never get sent down to a place like this.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you got the choice, you’re sent up or you’re sent down, take up. You don’t have to take my word for it. Ignore me if you want, go your own way, whado I care?”

  Dortmunder said, “I thought the idea was, they were gonna modify your behavior.”

  “I’m modified,” Arnie assured him. “Trust me, I’m modified, but it doesn’t do any good. The G.O.s won’t eat with me.”

  “The who?”

  “The staff,” Arnie said. “The help. Everything’s democratic here, if you believe it, and the guests eat with the help. Everybody mixed up in the same tables. Only, after a few days, the G.O.s won’t eat with me any more. They pretend like they’re gonna, but then they don’t. They go sit with the smiley people instead.”

  “G.O.s,” Dortmunder said. “That’s what you’ve been saying.”

  “They got their own language here,” Arnie said. “Well, they do, anyway, they’re French. But even beyond that. So G.O. is staff, and G.M. is the rest of us, the guests.”

  “G.M.”

  “Somebody told me,” Arnie said, “it means Gentile Members, but that can’t be right, can it?”

  “I don’t know,” Dortmunder said. “I never been to a place like that.”

  “Sunlight gives me a rash,” Arnie said. “I hadda come here to find that out. But I got a little porch on my room, I can get air and shade, and this whole ocean is right here, it’s practically in the place with me, and the waves don’t sound like traffic, you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Dortmunder said.

  “You sure you can’t hear them? Listen,” Arnie said, and apparently held his phone closer to the ocean because now Dortmunder could hear a faint slow repeated shushing sound that wasn’t at all like traffic.

  “Yeah, now I do,” he said.

  A little silence, and then Arnie said, “Did you hear it?”

  “Yeah, then I did.”

  “Well, you don’t wanna talk to me,” Arnie said, “so let’s get to the subject matter.”

  Dortmunder wanted to say, no, it’s fine to talk to you, or no, it’s good to hear your voice, but there are certain lies that just will not pass a person’s lips, no matter how firm the intention, so what he did say was, “Sure, the subject matter.”

  “My cousin Archie tells me you wanna prepare a gift for when I get back there,” Arnie said, “and I should tell you what kinda gift I’d like to see.”

  Getting the idea, Dortmunder said, “That’s it exactly.”

  “I’m not interested in clocks.”

  “Okay.”

  “I am interested in music boxes.”

  “Fine.”

  “And I am interested in chess sets.”

  “I’ll make a note.”

  “And I am interested in coins, but only if they’re gold.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “But I am not interested in anything else. Well, yeah, I am.”

  “You are?”

  “I’m interested,” Arnie said, “in a ticket outa here, but I don’t think you got one of those.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, I’m not gonna take up your time,” Arnie said, “on the phone here, tell you my troubles. Whada you give a shit about my troubles? The fact is, you don’t.”

  “Uhhh,” Dortmunder said, and Arnie hung up.

  It was amazing, really, how little effect Club Med had so far had on Arnie’s personality. And it was also amazing how much of that personality could come through over the telephone.

  It was a good ten minutes before Dortmunder got his appetite back enough so he could go finish making his sandwich.

  24

  BUDDY SAID, “I hate to say this, but we aren’t getting anywhere.”

  Ace looked up, his hands full of jockstraps. “How can you say that? We’re in the guy’s house, aren’t we?”

  “Breaking and entering,” Buddy said, and shook his head. “We never broke any laws before.”

  “Stalking,” Mac suggested.

  Buddy rejected that at once, “Whadaya mean, stalking? We’re just observing our former boss’s habit patterns, that’s all, nothing wrong with that. But this jock here—”

  Ace dumped the jockstraps back into the dresser drawer and slammed it with his hip.

  “—he isn’t a boss of ours,” Buddy went on, “he’s nothing to do with us except Monroe Hall’s a customer of his. What we’re doing here, Mac, is breaking and entering, and it’s against the law, and you know it.”

  “To tell you the truth, Buddy,” Mac said, “that part doesn’t bother me so much. What bothers me so much, we aren’t getting anywhere.”

  Ace had another bureau drawer open. “We’re learning a lot about this guy,” he insisted, holding up a neatly rolled Ace bandage.

  “What does it do for us?” Ace wanted to know. “We broke in here, into the guy’s house, three times now, and we’re using information and equipment we got from a cop cousin in New Jersey that’s an ACWFFA supporter—”

  “Great guy,” Ace announced. “Best cop I ever met.”

  “But,” Mac said, “he took a big chance with his own career, and for what? We keep searching the guy’s house; nothing. We searched his car; nothing. Not even room for three of us to hide in it, by the way.”

  “Well, maybe,” Buddy said.

  Mac kept to his own thought. “We made a copy of his address book and followed up on everybody he knows and they’re all clients or doctors or other health freaks. We found nothing to help us, and all we’re doing is spinning our wheels, and God knows what those Harvard boys are doing, but they aren’t standing around not getting anywhere like us.”

  “You notice,” Ace said, “they haven’t been in touch.”

  “And we,” Mac said, “haven’t been in touch with them. Probably for the same reason.”

  Alarmed, Buddy said, “You think they’re up to something?”

  “Of course they’re up to something,” Mac said. “So are we. Why wouldn’t they be up to something?” Looking at his watch, he said, “We gotta get outa here. And I don’t see any reason to break in here again.”

  “Jeez …” Ace said, looking around the bedroom, once again restored by them to neatness.

  “Forget it, Ace,” Mac advised him. “We just aren’t going to find any stuff in here we can use for blackmail.”

  Looking hurt, Ace said, “That’s a nasty word, Mac.”

  Riding over that, Mac said, “No child pornography, no bigamy, no double identity, not even any overdue library books. Alphonse Morriscone is a Boy Scout, and I say we leave him alone from now on. Come on.”

  As they walked toward the rear door, their usual route through Morriscone’s house, Buddy said, “I hate to invade this guy as much as you do, Mac, but what the heck else are we gonna do?”

  “There’s other things go in and outa that compound,” Mac said. “The oil truck makes deliveries.”

  Ace said, “If you think I’m gonna hold my breath in an oil truck for forty minutes, you’re crazy.”

  Mac shook his head and opened the back door. “That’s not what I’m saying. Be sure it’s locked, Buddy.”

  “Right.”

  “So what are you saying?” Ace demanded, as he followed Mac out to the small neat back porch while Buddy made sure the kitchen door was locked. From here it wa
s a simple walk across a lawn flanked by privacy fencing in rough wood verticals—if Morriscone did nude sunbathing out here, he didn’t take pictures of the fact—and through the hedge at the back to the unoccupied house on the next block with the FOR SALE sign out front. The way it was set up, they could get in and out of Alphonse Morriscone’s home unseen any time they wanted. The only problem was, there was no reason to want to.

  As they walked from Morriscone’s house around the for-sale house and down the street to where they’d parked the Taurus, Mac said, “It isn’t just oil deliveries. They get food to that house, they send their dry cleaning out.”

  Buddy said, “You’ve watched their procedures, Mac. All those delivery trucks get completely searched by those rent-a-cops at the gate. Boy Scout Morriscone is the only one who just drives in.”

  Ace said, “Well, there’s some employees. Staffers.”

  “No use to us,” Mac said.

  “And the wife does, too,” Ace said.

  They looked at him. Buddy said, “Now you wanna kidnap the wife? The three of us go into the estate hidden in one of those little dinky cars she drives?”

  “I could hide under her skirt,” Ace offered with a big grin around at everybody, which fell away when he saw they didn’t think that was funny.

  Morosely, Mac said, “Maybe we oughta try to find the Harvards.”

  •

  “Look at those capering apes,” Os said, binoculars to his eyes.

  “You probably mean Ace,” Mark said, since he didn’t have binoculars to his eyes. “He’s the worst of them.”

  “God,” Os said. “Not only proles, but useless.”

  “I think it’s our friend Morriscone who’s useless.” Mark suggested. “We could find nothing in his background that we could use against the man, and by now, after three B and Es, it’s becoming quite clear our friends in the labor movement haven’t found anything in his foreground, either.”

  “Time is going by,” Os said.

  Across the way, the trio were getting into their Taurus. Watching them through the naked eye, Mark said, “We have to use those people. Somehow use them. Use them somehow.”

  “Good,” Os said.

  25

  GIVEN HER UPBRINGING in Kansas and D.C., Anne Marie’s automatic response to any gathering of individuals was to turn it into a social occasion—why miss an opportunity to work a room? But Andy absolutely refused to go along with the idea in re the upcoming three P.M. meeting in their apartment in which Jim Green would give Andy and the others their new identities. “It isn’t a party, Anne Marie,” he explained, not unkindly. “It’s more of a huddle-type thing, you know, informational.”

  “I’m not saying a party,” she insisted, although she knew she was. “Just a few hors d’oeuvres, maybe a glass of white wine. You can’t drink beer and bourbon forever.”

  Looking startled, he said, “I can’t?”

  “I should think Jim would feel insulted,” Anne Marie said, “when he’s doing us this big favor, and he comes all the way down from Connecticut, and we don’t even offer him a pâté.”

  “We’re not going to an opening, Anne Marie,” Andy said, “and none of us is gonna want pâté on his new identity papers. Green is gonna bring the stuff down, hand it out, explain what he’s gotta explain, and that’s it. Everybody goes away.”

  She shook her head. “You want people to come into our home,” she said, “and sit around and talk, and then just go away again, and nobody eats anything, and nobody chats about anything, and nobody drinks anything but beer.”

  “Now you got it,” Andy said.

  •

  But she stuck around anyway, just in case a social aspect should happen to arise, in which case her hostessing abilities would be needed after all. And Stan Murch was the first to arrive. She greeted him at the door: “Hi, Stan.”

  “So now it’s Brooklyn,” Stan said, coming in. “I always figured, Canarsie’s a convenient place to live, you got a lotta ways to get to Manhattan, you got Flatlands to Flatbush to the Manhattan Bridge, only Flatbush can get a little slow, so sometimes I do Rockaway Parkway to Eastern Parkway, and not Rockaway Avenue, that takes you to Bushwick, you don’t wanna go to Bushwick.”

  “No, I don’t,” Anne Marie agreed. “Would you like something to drink?”

  But Stan wasn’t done. “So that’s what I did today,” he said, “only you got a mess at Grand Army Plaza, they’re tearing everything up in front of the library there, you can’t get through, so I eased around to Washington Avenue, up past the BQE to hang the left on Flushing, and again you can’t get through. Why? A demonstration against the Naval Reserve Center, that’s two blocks down to the right, the cops won’t let the demonstrators any closer than Washington. I’m backing outa there, some guy pulls up on me and honks. I gotta get outa the car, explain to this bozo that all those yelling people and cops and picket signs he could see if he had working eyes and not just a working horn means you can’t go that way. So he finally moves over to let me back up, then he jumps in where I was, cackling like an idiot, he put one over on me, he’s probably still there.”

  “A glass of wine?”

  “So I come under the BQE on Park,” Stan told her, “and Tillary, and did the Brooklyn Bridge instead, and after that Manhattan was a snap.”

  “Stan,” Anne Marie said, “you got here first.”

  “So it could of been worse.”

  “A beer?” she asked him.

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I still got some driving to do today,” and the doorbell rang.

  This time, it was Tiny, and he had with him a small but lovely bouquet of pink roses. “Here,” he said, and handed them over.

  “Why, thank you, Tiny,” she said. “That’s very thoughtful.”

  “Some girl on the street,” he told her, “threw them at her boyfriend just before the cops showed up. I figured they shouldn’t go to waste.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you.”

  “Any time.”

  Tiny finished coming in, but before Anne Marie could shut the door Jim Green was there, smiling, saying, “Hello, Anne Marie, how are you today?”

  “Just fine,” she said, and would have closed the door but John was suddenly there. “Oh,” she said. “Did you two come together?”

  John looked confused. Frowning toward Jim, he said, “I don’t think so.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Jim said, and at last Anne Marie could complete the closing of the door.

  And here came Andy from deeper in the apartment, saying, “Hey, we’re all here. Anybody want a beer?”

  “Not me,” Stan said.

  “Maybe later,” John said.

  “What we want,” Tiny said, looking at Jim, “is to see who we are.”

  “Coming up,” Jim said. He was carrying a hardsided black attaché case, which he now put on the coffee table. He snapped open the catches, lifted the top, and inside Anne Marie saw several thick small manila envelopes, each with a name written on it in black ink. Taking these out of the case, Jim distributed them, saying, “This is yours,” four times.

  All four of the guys were immediately absorbed in the contents of their envelopes. Andy sat in his regular chair, Tiny took all of the sofa, Stan sat in the other armchair, and John perched on the radiator. As they started their study, Jim came over to say, “Well, Anne Marie, you having more fun now than you used to?”

  “A different kind of fun,” she said.

  “Listen,” he said, “if you ever need to disappear, let me know. For you I’ll do a special job, not like these.”

  “They seem happy with these,” Anne Marie said, and Jim grinned and turned to look at them.

  They were happy with the contents of their envelopes, like children opening their presents under the tree, Christmas morning, every surprise a joyful one. “A passport,” Andy said, in awe.

  “Gotta have one of those,” Jim told him.

  “John Howard Rumsey,” John said.

  Andy said, “Yeah
? Who’s that?”

  “Me,” John told him.

  “That ain’t bad,” Andy allowed. Reading his passport, he said, “I’m Fredric Eustace Blanchard. So I guess I’m Fred.”

  “I’m still John,” John said. “Easy to remember.”

  His voice even lower than usual, Tiny rumbled, “Judson Otto Swope.” Nodding around at the others, he said, “I like that name. I didn’t want a name I wasn’t gonna like.”

  Stan said, “Says here, I’m Warren Peter Gillette. I don’t suppose I have to remember the Peter.” He looked up to his left, as though out a car window: “Hi, Officer, I’m Warren Gillette.”

  “Yeah, here’s my driver’s license,” Andy said, and grinned at Jim. “You take a better picture than Motor Vehicles.”

  “Of course,” Jim said.

  “I’m in securities,” Tiny said. “What am I, a stockbroker?”

  “You’re in security,” Jim corrected him, though mildly. “You worked for Securitech, an outfit that dealt with industrial espionage, helping companies keep their trade secrets.”

  “How come I’m not there any more?”

  “The company folded when both owners went to jail for insider trading.”

  John said, “I’m a butler?” He sounded as though he wasn’t sure what he thought about that.

  Jim said, “You people need work histories that’ll make your mark want to hire you, am I right?”

  “I’m a chauffeur!” Stan said. He sounded very pleased.

  “That’s right,” Jim said. Pointing at Andy, he said, “And you’re a private secretary. In fact, you and John worked for the same man, Hildorg Chk, ambassador to the United States from Vostkojek, at their official residence in Georgetown.”

  “We had dealings with that country once,” Tiny rumbled.

  John said, “What if they check with this ambassador?”

  Smiling, Jim shook his head. “Sadly,” he said, “he was assassinated on a visit home over the holidays. That’s why you and Andy are both looking for work.”

  “I drove for a movie star,” Stan said, “with a place on Central Park West. How come I’m not there any more?”

  “His career tanked,” Jim said. “He gave up New York, just kept his place in Pacific Palisades, drives himself these days, and is looking for interesting second-lead roles.”