Thieves Dozen Read online

  “Sure,” Dortmunder said. “What I’m calling about—”

  “Any time you need a car,” Kelp said, “you can just go pick one up.”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “About tonight—”

  “So what are you doing in a body shop?”

  The rasping sound, or something, was getting on Dortmunder’s nerves. “I’ll tell you later,” he said.

  “You’ll be along soon?”

  “No, I might be stuck here a couple hours. Maybe we should make the meet tomorrow night.”

  “No problem,” Kelp said. “And if you break loose, we can still do it tonight.”

  “You guys don’t have to hang around,” Dortmunder told him.

  “That’s OK. We’re having a nice discussion on religion and politics. See you later.”

  “Right,” said Dortmunder.

  In the atrium, they were cutting the nymph’s head off. As Dortmunder came back from his phone call, the girl’s head nodded once, then fell with a splash into the fountain. As the plug-ugly switched off the saw, the elegant man turned toward Dortmunder a face of anguish, saying, “It’s like seeing a human being cut up before your eyes. Worse. Were she flesh and blood, I could at least imagine she was Moira.”

  “That thing’s loud,” Dortmunder said.

  “Not outside,” the elegant man assured him. “Because of traffic noise, the façade was soundproofed. Also the floor; the servants won’t hear a thing.”

  The plug-ugly having wrapped the decapitated head in rope, he switched on his saw again and attacked the nymph, this time at her waistline. The head, meantime, peering raffishly through circlets of yellow rope, rose slowly roofward, hauled from above.

  Dortmunder, having pointed out to the elegant man that removal of this statue was all that mattered, that its postoperative condition was unimportant, had for his $5000 suggested they cut it into totable chunks and remove it via the roof. Since, like most cast-bronze statues, it was hollow rather than solid, the dismembering was certainly within the range of the possible.

  Dortmunder had first thought in terms of an industrial laser, which would make a fast, clean and absolutely silent cut, but the elegant man’s elegant contacts did not include access to a laser, so Dortmunder had fallen back on the notion of an acetylene torch. (Everybody in Dortmunder’s circle had an acetylene torch.) But there, too, the elegant man had turned out to be deficient, and it was only after exhaustive search of the garage that this large saber saw and several metal-cutting blades had been found. Well, it was better than a pocket-knife, though not so quiet.

  The head fell from the sky into the fountain, splashing everybody with water.

  The plug-ugly with the saw turned it off, lifted his head and spoke disparagingly to his partner on the roof, who replied in kind. The elegant man raised his own voice, in French, and when the plug-uglies ceased maligning each other, he said, “I shall bind the parts.”

  The nearer plug-ugly gave him a sullen look. “That’s brain-work, I guess,” he said, switched on the saber saw and stabbed the nymph in the belly with it. Renewed racket buried the elegant man’s response.

  It was too loud here. From Dortmunder’s memory of the model of this house, the kitchen should be through the dining room and turn right. While the elegant man fumbled with the bronze head, Dortmunder strolled away. Passing through the dining room, he pocketed an antique oval ivory cameo frame.

  Dortmunder paused in the preparation of his second pâté and swiss on rye with Dijon mustard—this kitchen contained neither peanut butter nor jelly—when the racket of saber saw was abruptly replaced by the racket of angry voices. Among them was a voice undoubtedly female. Dortmunder sighed, closed the sandwich, carried it in his left hand and went through to the atrium, where a woman surrounded by Louis Vuitton suitcases was yelling at the top of her voice at the elegant man, who was yelling just as loudly right back. The plug-ugly stood to one side, openmouthed but silent, the saber saw also silent in his hand, hovering over the statue stub, now reduced to tree trunk, knees, shins, feet, toes, base and a bit of curtain hem.

  This was clearly the ex-wife, home ahead of schedule. The elegant man seemed unable to do anything right. In the semi-darkness of the dining-room doorway, Dortmunder ate his sandwich and listened and watched.

  The screaming was merely that at first, screaming, with barely any rational words identifiable in the mix, but the ex-wife’s first impulse to make lots of noise was soon overtaken by the full realization that her statue was all cut to pieces; gradually, her shrieks faded away to gasps and then to mere panting, until at last she merely stood in stunned silence, staring at the destruction, while the elegant man also ceased to bray. Regaining his composure and his elegance, he readjusted his cuffs and, with barely a tremor in his voice, he said, “Moira, I admit you have me at a disadvantage.”

  “You—you—” But she wasn’t capable of description, not yet, not with the butchery right here in front of her.

  “An explanation is in order,” the elegant man acknowledged, “but first let me reassure you on one point: That Rodin has not been destroyed. You will still, I’m afraid, be able to turn it over to the populace.”

  “You bluh—you—”

  “My presence here,” the elegant man continued, as though his ex-wife’s paralysis were an invitation to go on, “is the result of an earlier deception, at the time of our separation. I’m afraid I must admit to you now that I bribed Grindle at that time to accept on your behalf not the original but a copy of the Rodin— this copy, in fact.”

  The ex-wife took a deep breath. She looked away from the bronze carnage and gazed at the elegant man. “You bloody fool,” she said, having at last recaptured her voice, and speaking now almost in a conversational tone. “You bloody self-satisfied fool, do you think you invented bribery?”

  A slight frown wrinkled the elegant man’s features. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Beg Rodin’s,” she told him. “You could only bribe Grindle with cash. When he told me your proposition, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t take it.”

  “You—you—” Now it was the elegant man who was losing the power of speech.

  “And, having taken your bribe and mine,” she went inexorably on, “he pronounced the false true before reversing the statues. That,” pointing at the shins and tree trunk, “was the original.”

  “Impossible!” The elegant man had begun to blink. His tie was askew. “Grindle wouldn’t—I’ve kept the—”

  “You bloody FOOL!” And the woman reached for a handy piece of luggage—toilet case, swamp-colored, speckled with someone else’s initials, retail $364.50—and hurled it at her ex-husband, who ducked, bellowed and reached for the late nymph’s bronze thigh with which to riposte. The woman sidestepped and the thigh rolled across the atrium, coming to a stop at Dortmunder’s feet. He looked down at it, saw the glint of something shiny on the rough inside surface and hunkered down for a closer look. At the foundry, when they’d covered the removable plaster interior with wax prior to pouring the bronze, maybe some French coin, now old and valuable, had got stuck in the wax and then transferred to the bronze. Dortmunder peered in at the thing, reaching out one hand to turn the thigh slightly to improve the light, then running his finger tips over the shiny thing, testing to see if it would come loose. But it was well and firmly fixed in place.

  The rasp of the saber saw once more snarled; Dortmunder, looking up, saw that the woman had it now, and was chasing her ex-husband around the plants and flowers with it, while the plug-ugly stood frozen, pretending to be a floor lamp. Dortmunder stood, mouthed the last of his sandwich, retraced his steps to the kitchen and went out the window.

  The far-off sound of sirens was just audible when he reached the pay phone at the corner and called again the O.J. Bar & Grill. When Kelp came on the phone, Dortmunder said, “The guys still there?”

  “Sure. You on your way?”

  “No. I got a new thing over here on the East Side. You and the guys
meet me at Park and Sixty-fifth.”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “Just a little breaking and entering.”

  “The place is empty?”

  Down the block, police cars were massing in front of Moira’s house. “Oh, yeah,” Dortmunder said, “it’s empty. I don’t think the owner’s gonna be back for years.”

  “Something valuable?”

  There weren’t two copies of the Rodin, no; there was one original, one copy. And the elegant man had been right about ex-husbands’ getting the sympathy vote. The hired expert had accepted bribes from both parties, but he’d made his own decision when it came to distributing the real and the fake Rodins. In Dortmunder’s mind’s eye, he saw again the shiny thing hidden within the nymph’s thigh. It was the flip-off ring from a thoroughly modern beer can. “It’s valuable OK,” he said. “But it’s kind of heavy. On the way over, steal a truck.”

  HORSE LAUGH

  DORTMUNDER LOOKED AT THE HORSE. THE HORSE LOOKED AT Dortmunder. “Ugly goddamn thing,” Dortmunder commented, while the horse just rolled his eyes in disbelief.

  “Not that one,” the old coot said. “We’re looking for a black stallion.”

  “In the dark,” Dortmunder pointed out. “Anyway, all horses look the same to me.”

  “It’s not how they look,” the old coot said, “it’s how they run. And Dire Straits could run the ass off a plug like this one. Which is why he won’t be out here in the night air with these glue factories. We’ll find Dire Straits in one of them barns down there.”

  That was another thing rubbing Dortmunder the wrong way—the names that horses get saddled with. Abby’s Elbow, Nuff Said, Dreadful Summit, Dire Straits. If you were going out to the track, where the horses were almost irrelevant to the occasion, where the point was to drink beer and bet money and socialize a little and make small jokes like, “I hope I break even today; I could use the cash,” it didn’t matter much that you were betting 30 across the board on something called Giant Can and that you had to wait for a bunch of horses outdoors somewhere to run around in a big oval before you found out if you had won. But here, in the darkest wilds of New Jersey, on a ranch barely 60 miles from New York City, surrounded by all these huge, nervous creatures, pawing and snorting and rolling their eyes, out here breathing this moist, smelly air, walking in mud or worse, it just capped Dortmunder’s discontent that these dangerous furry barrels on sticks were named Picasso’s Revenge and How’m I Doin’?

  From some distance away, Andy Kelp’s cautious voice rose into the rich air, saying, “There’s more down that way. I heard some go, ‘Snushfurryblurryblurryblurry.’”

  “That’s a whicker,” the old coot said, as though anybody gave a damn.

  “I don’t care if it’s mohair,” Kelp told him. “Let’s do this and get out of here. I’m a city boy myself.”

  The edge of nervousness and impatience in Kelp’s voice was music to Dortmunder’s ears. It was Kelp who’d brought him into this caper in the first place, so if Dortmunder was going to suffer, it was nice to know that his best friend was also unhappy and discontented.

  It was the eternally optimistic Kelp who had first met the old coot, named Hiram Rangle, and brought him around to the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue one night to meet Dortmunder and discuss a matter of possible mutual benefit. “I work for this fella,” Hiram Rangle had said in his raspy old-coot voice, his faded-blue eyes staring suspiciously out of his leathery brown face. “But I’m not gonna tell you his name.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” Dortmunder said. He was a little annoyed in a general way, having had a series of things go wrong lately—not important, doesn’t matter—and it hadn’t been his idea to take this meeting. Over at the bar, the regulars were discussing the latest advances in psychotherapy— “It’s called A version, and it’s a way to make you have a different version of how you see women”; “I like the version I got”—and Dortmunder was sitting here with this old coot, a skinny little guy in deerskin jacket and flannel shirt and corduroy pants and yellow boots big enough to garage a Honda, and the coot was telling him what he would tell him and what he wouldn’t tell him. “You and my pal Andy here,” Dortmunder said, lifting his glass of bar bourbon, “can go talk to the crowd at the bar for all I care.”

  “Aw, come on, John,” Kelp said. He totally wanted this thing to happen, and he leaned his sharp-featured face over the scarred corner table, as though to draw Dortmunder and the old coot together by sheer force of personality. He said, “This is a good deal for everybody. Let Hiram tell you about it.”

  “He says he doesn’t want to.”

  “I got to be careful, that’s all,” the old coot said, sipping defensively at his Tsing-Tao.

  “Then don’t come to joints like this,” Dortmunder advised him. “Tell the man, Hiram,” Kelp said. “That’s what you’re here for.” Hiram took a breath and put down his glass. “What it comes down to is,” he said, “we want to steal a horse.”

  They wanted to steal a horse. What it came down to was, the old coot worked for some guy who was full of schemes and scams, and one of them was a long-range plot involving this race horse, Dire Straits, on whom Dortmunder could remember having dropped some rent money some years back on a couple of those rare occasions when Dire Straits had finished out of the running. It seemed that Dire Straits, having in his racing career won many millions for many people (and having lost a few kopecks for Dortmunder), had now been put out to stud, which, as described by the old coot, sounded like a retirement plan better than most. These days, Dire Straits hung around with some other male horses on a nice green-grass farm over near Short Hills, New Jersey—“If they’re short, why do they call them hills?” Dortmunder had wanted to know, which was something else the old coot didn’t have an answer for—and from time to time, the owners of female horses paid the owners of Dire Straits great big sackfuls of money for him to go off and party. It seems there was a theory that the sons and daughters of fast horses would also be fast, and a lot of money changed hands on that theory.

  Well, the schemer, Hiram Rangle’s anonymous boss, owned some fairly fast horses himself, but nothing in the Dire Straits class, so his idea was to kidnap Dire Straits and put him to work partying with his own female horses; and then, when the female horses had sons and daughters, the schemer would put down on the birth certificate some slow-moving plater as the father. Then, when the sons and daughters grew up enough to start to run, which would take only a couple of years, the odds against them would be very long, because of their alleged parentage; but because Dire Straits was their real daddy, they would run like crazy, and the schemer would bet on them and make a bundle. In a few months, of course, the odds would adjust to the horses’ actual track records; but by then, the schemer would be home free. With three or four of Dire Straits’ disguised kiddies hitting the turf every year and maybe another five or six years of active partying left in his life, it was a scheme that, as a fellow might say, had legs.

  Kelp put it slightly differently: “It’s like The Prince and the Pauper, where you don’t know it, but your real daddy’s the king.”

  “I think we’re talking about horses here,” Dortmunder told him.

  Kelp shook his head. “You never see the romantic side,” he said. “I’ll leave that to Dire Straits,” Dortmunder said.

  Anyway, it turned out that the one fly in the ointment in the schemer’s scheme was the fact that, even with all his hustling and finagling, he’d never in his career done any actual, straightforward, out-and-out theft. He had his scheme, he had his own ranch with his own female horses on it, he had a nice cash cushion to use in making his bets three years down the line, but the one thing he didn’t have, and didn’t know how to get, was Dire Straits. So one way or another, his hireling, Rangle, had got in touch with Andy Kelp, who had said his friend John Dortmunder was exactly the man to plan and execute a robbery of this delicate and unusual a nature, and that was why this meeting was taking place
in the O.J., where over at the bar the regulars were now arguing about whether penis envy was confined to men or if women could have it, too: “How can they? What’s the basis of the comparison?”

  “I can tell you this much,” Hiram Rangle said. “My boss’ll pay twenty thousand dollars for Dire Straits. Not to me; I’ve already got my salary. To the people who help me.”

  “Ten thousand apiece, John,” Kelp pointed out.

  “I know how to divide by two, Andy.” Dortmunder also knew how to divide by zero, which was how he’d profited from his other operations recently—just a little run of hard luck, nothing worth talking about—which was why he’d finally nodded and said, “I’ll look at this horse of yours,” and why he was now here in the sultry New Jersey night, ankle-deep in some sort of warm, dark pulpiness, listening to Andy Kelp imitate horse whickers and deciding it was time they found the right animal and got the hell out of there.

  Because the problem was that Dire Straits was, in a manner of speaking, in prison. A prison farm, actually, with fields and open sky, but a prison nevertheless, with tall fences and locked gates and a fairly complicated route in and out. And breaking into a prison for horses was not much easier than breaking into a prison for people, particularly when the horses involved were also valuable.

  V-A-L-U-A-B-L-E. When Kelp first showed Dortmunder the item from the Daily News sports pages about how Dire Straits was insured for more than $1,000,000, Dortmunder had said, “A million dollars? Then what do we need with ten grand? Why don’t we deal with the insurance company?”

  “John, I thought of that,” Kelp had said, “but the question is, Where would we keep it while we negotiated? I’ve only got the studio apartment, you know.”

  “Well, May wouldn’t let me keep it at our place, I know that much.” Dortmunder sighed and nodded. “OK. We’ll settle for the ten.”