Thieves' Dozen d-12 Page 16

  "What a rat," May said.

  "You know it," Dortmunder agreed. "So we couldn't just walk away, because we're on those tapes, and we don't know when somebody else is gonna pull the job. So if we have to go in, get the tapes, we might as well make some profit out of it. And give a little zing to Three Finger while we're at it."

  "They decided it was him pretty fast," she said.

  "His place was the only one not hit," Dortmunder pointed out to May. "So it looks like the rehabilitation didn't take after all, that he just couldn't resist temptation."

  "I suppose," she said.

  "Also," he said, "you remember that little postcard with his painting that I showed you but I wouldn't let you touch?"

  "Sure. So?"

  "Myself," Dortmunder said, "I only held it by the edges, just in case. The last thing we did last night, I dropped that postcard on the floor in front of the cash register in the leather store. With his fingerprints all over it. His calling card, he said it was."

  FUGUE FOR FELONS

  In the introduction to this volume, I recorded that bleak period of time, some years ago, when it looked as though I might lose the rights to John Dortmunder's name to marauding bands of Hollywood lawyers. Fortunately, that threat did eventually recede, but before that happy deliverance I'd settled on a substitute name for John, in case he should have to go underground for a while and come back under an alias, with fake ID. That name, found after an extensive search and taken from an exit sign on the Saw Mill River Parkway in Westchester County, just north of New York City, was John Rumsey.

  The only problem, I soon realized, is that John Rumsey is a shorter person than John Dortmunder; don't ask me why. Dortmunder's, oh, say, an even six foot. John Rumsey's five seven at best.

  From time to time, I wondered if Rumsey would be different in any other ways, not through my conscious choice, but simply because of the changed indicator. And what about the other regulars in his crew? I didn't have to know the answer to that, happily, but the question just kept poking at me.

  In assembling this volume, I realized that if I were to add just one more story, I could use the present title for the book. I'd had a story title, "Fugue for Felons," in mind for some time, and now I saw how it would play out, and also that it would be a great laboratory. Here was my chance for an experiment to solve that age-old question: What's in a name?

  A lot, as it turns out. Halfway through writing the story, I realized it wasn't an experiment that could be reversed or undone. I couldn't simply put the original names back on the name tags, because these weren't the original people. In small but crucial ways, they were their own men. John Rumsey was not John Dortmunder, and not merely because he was shorter. Similarly, Algy was not Andy Kelp, Big Hooper was not Tiny Bulcher, and Stan Little was not Stan Murch. ("March," it turns out, is an obsolete medieval term for "dwarf" which I hadn't known until I looked in the OED in conjunction with writing the story.)

  Names are important. And so, although "Fugue for Felons" is the most recent Dortmunder story, it is also not a Dortmunder story at all. In some parallel universe, where the sky is a little paler, the streets a little cleaner, the laws of probability a little chancier, where the roses don't smell quite the same, there exist John Rumsey and his friends, the closest that other cosmos can come to Dortmunder et al. And now I have visited them.

  FUGUE FOR FELONS

  John Rumsey, a short blunt man with the look of a one-time contender about him, was eating his breakfast-maple syrup garnished with French toast-when his faithful companion June looked up from her Daily News to say, "Isn't Morry Calhoun a friend of yours?"

  "I know him," Rumsey admitted; that far he was willing to go.

  "Well, they arrested him," June said.

  "He made the paper?" In Rumsey's world, there was nothing worse than reading your own name in the newspaper, particularly the Daily News, which all one's friends also read.

  "It's a little piece," June said, "but there's a picture of the car in the bank, and then his name caught my eye."

  "The car in the bank?"

  "Police," June told him, "came across Morry Calhoun last night, breaking into the Flatbush branch of Immigration Trust. A high-speed chase from Brooklyn to Queens ended when Calhoun crashed his car into the Sunnyside branch of Immigration Trust."

  "Well, he's got brand loyalty anyway," Rumsey said.

  "They're holding him without bail," June went on.

  "Yeah, they do that," agreed Rumsey. "It's kind of an honor, in a way, but it's also confining. There's a picture of this car in this bank?"

  June passed the paper over her plate of dry toast and his bowl of wet syrup, and Rumsey looked at a picture of the ass end of an Infiniti sticking out of the front of a branch bank that had been mostly glass until Calhoun arrived.

  "The car was stolen," June said.

  "Sure, it would be," Rumsey said, and squinted at the photo. "Bank's closed."

  "Naturally," June said. "Until they fix the front."

  "You know," Rumsey said, "it might be a good idea, wander out there, see is there anything lying around."

  "Don't get in trouble," June advised.

  "Me? I'll just call Algy," Rumsey decided, getting to his feet, "see would he like to take a train ride."

  But there was no answer at Algy's place.

  Algy, in fact, a skinny sharp-nosed guy, was already on the subway, heading back toward Manhattan from Queens after a night of very little success at breaking and entering. He'd broken, all right, and he'd entered, but everywhere he went, the occupant had just moved out, or had a dog, or didn't have anything at all. It could be a discouragement at times.

  About the only thing Algy scored, in fact, other than half a liverwurst on rye in Saran Wrap in a refrigerator in Queens, was a Daily News some other passenger had left behind on the seat. He glanced through it, saw the picture of the car in the bank, recognized Morry Calhoun's name, got off at the next stop, and took the first train going the other way.

  Big Hooper was called Big because he was big. You could say he looked like an elephant in sweats, or an Easter Island statue no longer buried up to the neck, but what he mostly looked like was the Chicago Bears front line-not a lineman, the line.

  Big Hooper had just bent to his will the front door of a Third Avenue tavern not yet open for business, intending to give himself a morning vodka-and-Chianti before carrying away the cash register, when he realized he wasn't alone. The clinking and tinking from the back room suggested the owner was using this morning downtime to do inventory, having left his jacket and newspaper on the bar.

  Big went ahead and made his breakfast, then leafed through the paper while trying to decide whether to deal with the jangling offstage owner or come back another time, when he could have some privacy. He saw the Infiniti impaled on the bank, recognized the name Calhoun, finished his drink, and left. He took the paper.

  Stan Little was a driver. If you've got it, he'll drive it. When he wasn't working for various crews around town on their little errands, sometimes he drove for himself, picking up an example of your better-quality automotive cream puff and tooling it to Astoria in Queens, where he would have business dealings with Al Gonzo, an automotive importer-exporter, who would eventually find the merchandise a good home somewhere in the Third World. This morning, while discussing with Al the probable offshore value of a loaded Saab with less than three K on the odometer, Stan took the opportunity of Al's strategic long silences to eyeball the Daily News.

  "All right, four," Al said.

  "Well, look at that," Stan said. "Morry Calhoun."

  The reason Rumsey got off the F train early was because two transit cops went through his car and they both looked at him funny. Rumsey didn't like cops to look at him at all, much less funny, so he quick got off at the next station, even though it wasn't his but was in fact Queens Plaza, which is one of those giant bow ties in the bowels of the New York City subway system. There are 24 separate subway lines in New York, and fou
r of them converge on Queens Plaza, distributing thousands and thousands of people this way and that every second. There's the F, the 6th Avenue local that Rumsey had been on, which begins in nethermost Brooklyn, wanders northward to run under 6th Avenue in Manhattan, then heads on to outermost Queens; the R, the Broadway local, which is similar except its part of Manhattan is lower Broadway; the 8th Avenue E, which only has to deal with Manhattan and Queens; and the poor G, the Brooklyn Queens Crosstown, which never gets into Manhattan at all but just shuttles back and forth between Brooklyn and Queens, full of people wearing hats.

  Having got off the F, there was nothing for Rumsey to do but wait for another F, or some other letter, and so continue his journey in peace, but lo and behold, here were two more transit cops, and now they were looking at him funny. Maybe, he thought, he'd take the escalator upstairs to where the surface part of the bow tie was a lot of bus routes starting with "Q," but as he turned away, with millions of people rushing all around him in this great echoing iron cavern, this paean to 19th-century engineering at its sternest, a voice cut through the din and the roar to say, "You. Yeah, you. Wait there."

  Now the cops were talking to him; this was very bad. Feeling guilty, even though he hadn't committed any crimes yet today, Rumsey turned about, hunched his shoulders in that automatic way that tells police officers everywhere that you are guilty, and said, "Me?"

  It is impossible for two human beings to completely surround one human being, and yet these two cops did it. They were big bulky guys with big dark bulky uniforms festooned with serious extras like a gun in a holster and a ticket book and handcuffs (Rumsey didn't like to look at handcuffs) and a little black radio fastened up high on the black belt that angled down across their chests. Their very presence said authority, it said you're in for it now, Jack; it saidfuggedaboudit.

  "See s' ID," one of the cops said.

  "Oh, sure," Rumsey said, because, no matter what, you never

  disagree when authority is this close into your personal space. He remembered he'd packed somebody's ID when he'd left the house, so he went to his hip pocket for his wallet, while the cops watched him very carefully, and as he handed over somebody's credit card and the same somebody's library card from the branch in Canarsie, he said, "Uh, what's the problem, officers?"

  The cop who took the ID said, "How about your driver's license?"

  "They took my license," Rumsey explained. "Just temporary, you know."

  The other cop chuckled. "You were a bad boy, huh?"

  That was cop humor. Rumsey acknowledged it with a sheepish grin, saying, "I guess so. But what's wrong here?"

  The cop with the ID said, "We're looking for a guy, Mr. Jefferson."

  So he was Mr. Jefferson today. Trying to feel Jeffersonian, Rumsey said, "Well, why pick me? There's a lotta guys here." Millions, in fact-on escalators, in subway trains, on platforms . . .

  "The description we got," the humorous cop said, "looks like you."

  "A lotta guys look like me," Rumsey said.

  "Not really," the cop said, and all at once their two radios squawked, making Rumsey flinch like a rabbit hearing a condor.

  Police radios are the aural equivalent of doctor's handwriting. All of a sudden, the little black metal box goes squawk-squawk-squawk, and the cops understand it! Like these two-they understood it when their little metal boxes went squawk-squawk-squawk, and this information they'd just received made them relax and even grin at each other. One of them pushed the button on his metal box and told his shoulder, "Ten-four," while the other one handed Rumsey Mr. Jefferson's ID and told him, "Thanks for your cooperation."

  Rumsey said, "Huh? Listen, you don't mind, would you tell me? Wha'd they just say there?"

  The cops looked surprised. One said, "You didn't hear? They got the guy."

  "The one we were looking for," the other one addended. "Oh," Rumsey said. "Was he me?" "Move along," said the cop.

  Algy came up out of the subway and started walking along the boulevard in the cool October sunshine. Three blocks from the bank he was headed for was another bank, on another corner, this one open for business. As a matter of fact, as Algy walked by its front door, a big-boned guy in a black topcoat, carrying a full grocery store plastic bag, hurtled out of that bank and crashed straight into Algy; this is because the guy wasn't looking where he was going, but leftward, off at traffic along the boulevard.

  Neither Algy nor his new dance partner went down, though it looked iffy for a second, and they had to grab at each other's coats. "Easy, big guy," Algy advised, while the guy, increasingly frantic, pulled himself free, waving that plastic bag around over his head, shouting, "Out of the way!"

  Algy might have said a cautionary word or two about panic and its discontents, but at that instant a black sedan pulled in by the fire hydrant between them and the curb. The driver, another dark-coated big guy, leaned way over to shove open the passenger door and yell, "Ralph! In!"

  Algy stepped back, gesturing for Ralph to go catch his ride, but all at once Ralph had a gun in his hand and a glower on his face and a cluster of Algy's coat sleeve in his fist, as he snarled in Algy's face, "Get in."

  Algy couldn't believe it. "Get in?"

  The driver couldn't believe it, either. "Ralph? What the hell you doin'?"

  Over the approaching but still far-off screams of many sirens, under the surveillance of a pair of bank guards, goggle-eyed be-

  hind the bank's glass revolving door, Ralph yelled at his partner, "He's a hostage!"

  The driver also didn't believe that. With one scornful look at Algy, he said, "He's no hostage, Ralph. He looks like one of us."

  "I do, you know," Algy said.

  The driver squinted toward his rearview mirror, filling up with nearing patrol cars. "A hostage is a fourteen-year-old girl, Ralph," he explained. "Get in the car."

  At last Ralph released Algy's sleeve and jumped into the black sedan, which lunged away into traffic, through the inevitable red light, and on around the corner, with all at once three gumdrops in hot pursuit, and more coming.

  One cop car slid to a wheel-locked stop by Algy and the fire hydrant as the two bank guards came running out, both of them pointing at Algy and shouting, "That's one of them!"

  "Hey," Algy said.

  The two cops got out on both sides of their car to hike up their tool belts and give Algy the fish-eye. "What's your story?" the nearest one wanted to know. His partner was a woman, built low for stability.

  "I'm walking by," Algy started.

  "They were talking to him," a guard argued.

  The woman cop, being the smarter of the pair, pointed at Algy and said to the guards, "Was he in the bank?"

  "Well, no," both guards said.

  The first cop went back to the first question. "So what is your story?"

  "I'm walking by," Algy started again, "and the guy come out and run into me, and his car showed up, and he wanted me for a hostage, but the driver said no, a hostage is a fourteen-year-old girl, so they went off to find one."

  Wide-eyed, the woman cop said, "They're on their way to kidnap a fourteen-year-old girl?"

  Algy shrugged. "I dunno. That's what they said."

  The woman cop hopped back into her patrol car to report this development, while her partner abruptly became surrounded by victims from inside the bank, both customers and guards. Over their bobbing heads, the cop called to Algy, "Stick around. You can identify them."

  "Sure thing," Algy said, with his most honest smile. Holding the smile, he walked casually backward to the corner and around it, the way, as a kid, he used to sneak into movie houses by looking as though he was coming out. Once away from the sight lines of all that drama, he legged it on out of there.

  Big Hooper did not take subways. The cars cramped him, and let's not even talk about the turnstiles. If he had to travel any distance (within the five boroughs, of course-where else is there?), he'd promote the cash he needed one way and another, then phone for a stretch limo, preferably b
lack. The white ones were just a little flashy. He'd take the limo to somewhere near his destination, pay in cash, and if he needed a lift back, he'd call a different service.

  Today he'd decided to give the limo driver an address just a few blocks beyond the Sunnyside branch of Immigration Trust, so he could eyeball the place before de-limoing, just in case it might seem like a good idea not to drop in after all.

  So they were tooling along eastbound across Queens, maybe a mile, two miles, from their destination, with Big watching a soap opera on the TV in the back of today's (white, what the hell) limo, when it gradually occurred to him that they weren't moving, and they hadn't been moving for quite some little while.

  When he looked up from the girl in the hospital bed trying to remember who she was, he saw a lot of stopped cars and the backs of a lot of gawking people. He could tell they were gawking because they kept going up on the balls of their feet, trying to see over the top of one another.

  Big offed the TV and said, " 'S it?"

  "Some kinda cop thing," the driver said, looking at Big in his interior mirror. He was apparently from some remote, probably mountainous part of Asia that hadn't started outbreeding until very recently. "They got the street closed," he went on.

  "Well, take another way," Big told him.