The Hot Rock Read online

  Their route to the exhibit area was roundabout, involving several corridors and two flights of stairs, but when they at last opened one of the heavy metal doors leading to the second floor exhibit area, they saw their timing had been perfect. There wasn’t a guard in sight.

  They were all out front, by the fire. Several of them were clustered around Murch, whose head was in a guard’s lap and who was obviously in shock, lying there twitching, muttering, “It wouldn’t steer… it wouldn’t steer…” and moving his arms vaguely, like a man trying to turn a steering wheel. Some of the other guards were standing around the blazing car, telling one another what a lucky guy that lucky guy was, and at least four of them were at four different telephones, calling hospitals and police stations and fire departments.

  Inside, Dortmunder and Chefwick and Greenwood made their way quickly and silently through the exhibits toward the Akinzi display. Only a few lights were on, and in the semi-dark some of the exhibits they moved among tended toward the startling. Devil masks, warriors in spear and costume, even wildly designed tapestries, all were a lot more effective now than during normal visiting hours, with all the lights lit and lots of other people around.

  When they reached the Akinzi display they went immediately to work. They’d studied this for a week now, they knew what to do and how.

  There were four locks to be undone, one in the middle of each side of the glass cube, down at the base, in the steel rim between glass and floor. Once these locks were opened the glass cube could be lifted out of the way.

  Chefwick had with him a small black bag of the sort country doctors used to favor, and this he now opened, revealing many slender metal tools of the sort most country doctors never saw in their lives. While Greenwood and Dortmunder stood on either side of him, watching the exit doors on the far walls and the railing of the third-floor balcony overlooking this area and the stairs and escalator toward the front of the building, where they could see the reflected red glow from the fire down in the lobby, while they kept careful watch on all this, Chefwick went to work on the locks.

  The first one took three minutes, but after that he knew the system and he did all the other three in less than four minutes more. But still, seven minutes was a long time. The red glow was fading, and the noise from downstairs was ebbing; soon the guards would be coming back to their duties. Dortmunder refrained from telling Chefwick to hurry, but with difficulty. Still, he knew Chefwick was doing the best he could.

  At last Chefwick whispered a shrill “Done!” Still kneeling by the last breached lock, he hurriedly put his tools back into his bag.

  Dortmunder and Greenwood got on opposite sides of the glass cube. It weighed close to two hundred pounds, and there was no way for them to get a really good grip on it. They could only press their palms against it at the edges and lift. Straining, sweating, they did so, gazing at each other’s tense face through the glass, and when they got it up two feet Chefwick slid under and grabbed the emerald.

  “Hurry up!” Greenwood said, his voice hoarse. “It’s slipping!”

  “Don’t leave me in here!” Chefwick rolled quickly out from underneath.

  “My palms are wet,” Greenwood said, even his voice straining. “Lower it. Lower it.”

  “Don’t let it go,” Dortmunder called. “For God’s sake, don’t let it go.”

  “It won’t—I can’t—it’s—”

  The glass slid out of Greenwood’s grip. With the pressure gone from the other side, Dortmunder couldn’t hold it either. The glass cube dropped eighteen inches and hit the floor.

  It didn’t break. It went bbrrrooooonnnnNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGINGINGINGmgwging.

  Shouting from downstairs.

  “Come on!” Dortmunder yelled.

  Chefwick, rattled, shoved the emerald into Greenwood’s hand. “Here. Take it.” He grabbed up his black bag.

  Guards were appearing at the head of the stairs, far away. “Hey, you!” one of them called. “You stop there, stay where you are!”

  “Scatter!” Dortmunder cried and ran to the right.

  Chefwick ran to the left.

  Greenwood ran straight ahead.

  Meanwhile, the ambulance had arrived. The police had arrived. The fire department had arrived. A uniformed policeman was trying to ask Murch questions while a white-garbed ambulance attendant was telling the policeman to leave the patient alone. Firemen were putting out the fire. Someone had taken from Murch’s pocket the wallet full of false identification he had put in there half an hour ago. Murch, still apparently dazed and only semi-conscious, was repeating, “It wouldn’t steer. I turned the wheel and it wouldn’t steer.”

  “It looks to me,” the policeman said, “like you panicked. Something went wrong with the steering and instead of hitting the brake you tromped on the accelerator. Happens all the time.”

  “Leave the patient alone,” the ambulance attendant said.

  Finally Murch was put on a stretcher and loaded into the ambulance and driven away, the ambulance siren screaming.

  Chefwick, racing pell-mell for the nearest exit, heard the siren screaming and doubled his speed. The last thing he wanted was to spend his declining years in jail. No trains. No Maude. No fudge.

  He yanked open the door, found a staircase, raced down it, found a corridor, raced along that, and suddenly found himself face to face with an entrance and a guard.

  He tried to turn around while still running, dropped his bag, fell over it, and the guard came over to help him up. It was Kelp, saying, “What’s wrong? Something go wrong?”

  “Where’s the others?”

  “I don’t know. Should we take off?”

  Chefwick got to his feet. They both listened. There was no sound of pursuit. “We’ll wait a minute or two,” Chefwick decided.

  “We better,” Kelp said. “Dortmunder’s got the keys to the car.”

  Dortmunder, meanwhile, had run around a thatched-roof hut and joined the chase. “Stop!” he shouted, running along in the middle of a pack of guards. Up ahead he saw Greenwood duck through a door and shut it behind himself. “Stop!” shouted Dortmunder, and the guards all around him shouted, “Stop!”

  Dortmunder got to the door first. He yanked it open, held it for all the guards to run through, then shut it behind them and walked over to the nearest elevator. He rode this to the first floor, walked along a corridor, and came to the side entrance where Kelp and Chefwick were waiting. “Where’s Greenwood?” he said.

  “Not here,” said Kelp.

  Dortmunder looked around. “We better wait in the car,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Greenwood thought he was on the first floor but wasn’t. The Coliseum, in addition to its first floor, second floor, third floor, and fourth floor, has two mezzanines, the first mezzanine and the second mezzanine. The first mezzanine is between the first and second floors, but only around the outer perimeter of the building, not in the central display area. Similarly, the second mezzanine is between the second and third floors.

  Greenwood didn’t know about the mezzanines. He had been on the second floor and he had taken a staircase down one flight. Some staircases in the Coliseum skip the mezzanine and go straight from the second floor to the first floor, but some other staircases include the mezzanine among their stops, and it was one of the latter kind that Greenwood had inadvertently chosen. Therefore, he now thought he was on the first floor but he was not. He was on the first mezzanine.

  The first mezzanine consists of a corridor that goes all the way around the building. The staff has its offices here, there’s a cafeteria, the private detective agency that furnishes the guards has its offices here, various nations maintain offices, there are storage rooms and conference rooms and miscellaneous offices. It was along this corridor that Greenwood was now running, the Balaboma Emerald clutched in his hand as he searched in vain for an exit to the street.

  In his ambulance, meantime, Murch was socking his attendant on the jaw. The attendant sagged into sleep and Murch settled him
on the other stretcher. Then, as the ambulance slowed to make a turn, Murch opened the rear door and stepped out onto the pavement. The ambulance tore away, siren shrieking, and Murch hailed a passing cab. “O. J. Bar and Grill,” he said. “On Amsterdam.”

  In their other stolen car, the getaway car, Dortmunder and Kelp and Chefwick kept worriedly studying the 20 West 60th Street entrance. Dortmunder had the engine running and his foot was nervously tapping the gas pedal.

  Sirens were coming this way now, police sirens.

  “We can’t wait much longer,” Dortmunder said.

  “There he is!” cried Chefwick, as the door over there opened and a man in a guard uniform came out. But then half a dozen other men in guard uniforms came out too.

  “That’s not him,” said Dortmunder. “None of them is him.” He put the getaway car in gear and got away.

  Up on the first mezzanine, Greenwood was still loping along like a greyhound after the mechanical rabbit. He could hear the thundering of pursuit behind him, and now he could also hear the thundering of pursuit from around the corner in the corridor up ahead.

  He stopped. He was caught and he knew it.

  He looked at the emerald in his hand. Roundish, many-faceted, deeply green, a trifle smaller than a golf ball.

  “Drat,” said Greenwood, and he ate the emerald.

  12

  Rollo had loaned them a portable radio, small, transistorized, Japanese, and on it they listened to the caper on WINS, the all-news station. They heard about the daring robbery, they heard about Murch having made his escape from the ambulance, they heard the history of the Balabomo Emerald, they heard about Alan Greenwood having been arrested and charged with complicity in the robbery, and they heard that the gang had managed to get away successfully with the stone. Then they heard the weather, and then they heard a woman tell them the price of lamb chops and pork chops in the city’s supermarkets, and then they turned the radio off.

  Nobody said anything for a while. The air in the back room was blue with smoke, and their faces in the glare of the lightbulb looked pale and tired. Finally Murch said, “I wasn’t brutal.” He said it sullenly. The announcer on WINS had described the attack on the ambulance attendant as brutal. “I just popped him on the jaw,” Murch said. He made a fist and swung it in a small tight arc. “Like that. That ain’t brutal.”

  Dortmunder turned to Chefwick. “You gave Greenwood the stone.”

  “Definitely,” said Chefwick.

  “You didn’t drop it on the floor someplace.”

  “I did not,” Chefwick said. He was miffed, but they were all edgy. “I distinctly remember handing it to him.”

  “Why?” said Dortmunder.

  Chefwick spread his hands. “I really don’t know. In the excitement of the moment — I don’t know why I did it. I had the bag to carry and he didn’t have anything and I got rattled, so I handed it to him.”

  “But the cops didn’t find it on him,” said Dortmunder.

  “Maybe he lost it,” said Kelp.

  “Maybe.” Dortmunder looked at Chefwick again. “You wouldn’t be holding out on us, would you?”

  Chefwick snapped to his feet, insulted. “Search me,” he said. “I insist. Search me right now. In all the years I’ve been in this line, in I don’t know how many jobs I’ve been on, no one has ever impugned my honesty. Never. I insist I be searched.”

  “All right,” Dortmunder said. “Sit down, I know you didn’t take it. I’m just a little bugged, that’s all.”

  “I insist I be searched.”

  “Search yourself,” Dortmunder said.

  The door opened and Rollo came in with a fresh glass of sherry for Chefwick and more ice for Dortmunder and Kelp, who were sharing a bottle of bourbon. “Better luck next time, boys,” Rollo said.

  Chefwick, the argument forgotten, sat down and sipped his sherry.

  “Thanks, Rollo,” Dortmunder said.

  Murch said, “I could stand another beer.”

  Rollo looked at him. “Will wonders never cease,” he said and went out again.

  Murch looked around at the others. “What was that all about?”

  Nobody answered him. Kelp said to Dortmunder, “What am I going to tell Iko?”

  “We didn’t get it,” Dortmunder said.

  “He won’t believe me.”

  “That’s kind of tough,” Dortmunder said. “You tell him whatever you want to tell him.” He finished his drink and got to his feet. “I’m going home,” he said.

  Kelp said, “Come with me to see Iko.”

  “Not on your life,” Dortmunder said.

  PHASE TWO

  1

  Dortmunder carried a loaf of white bread and a half gallon of homogenized milk over to the cashier. Because it was a Friday afternoon the supermarket was pretty full, but there weren’t many people ahead of him at the speed checkout and he got through pretty quickly. The girl put the bread and milk into a large bag and he carried it out to the sidewalk with his elbows held close to his sides, which looked a little weird but not terribly so.

  The date was the fifth of July, nine days since the fiasco at the Coliseum up in New York, and the place was Trenton, New Jersey. The sun was shining and the air was pleasantly hot without humidity, but Dortmunder wore a light basketball jacket over his white shirt, zipped almost all the way up. Perhaps that was why he looked so irritable and sour.

  He walked a block from the supermarket, still carrying the bag with his elbows pressed to his sides, and then he stopped and put the bag on the hood of a handy parked car. He reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket and pulled out a can of tuna fish and dropped it into the bag. He reached into the left-hand pocket and pulled out two packets of beef bouillon cubes and dropped them into the bag. He reached into his left-side trouser pocket and pulled out a tube of toothpaste and dropped that into the bag. Then he zipped open his jacket and reached into his left armpit and took out a package of sliced American cheese and dropped that into the bag. And finally he reached into his right armpit and took out a package of sliced baloney and dropped that into the bag. The bag was now much more full than before, and he picked it up and carried it the rest of the way home.

  Home was a fleabag residence hotel downtown. He paid an extra two dollars a week for a room with a sink and a hotplate, but he made up for it a dozen times over in the money saved by eating at home.

  Home. Dortmunder walked into his room and gave it a dirty look and put his groceries away.

  The place was neat, anyway. Dortmunder had learned about neatness during his first stretch and had never gotten out of the habit. It was easier to live in a neat place, and having things orderly and clean made even a gray crapper stall like this bearable.

  For a time, for a time.

  Dortmunder put water on for instant coffee and then sat down to read the paper he’d glommed from the head this morning. Nothing in it, nothing interesting. Greenwood hadn’t made the papers for almost a week now, and nothing else in the world caught Dortmunder’s attention.

  He was looking for a score. The three hundred bucks he’d received from Major Iko was long since gone and he’d really been scrimping ever since. He’d reported in to the parole office here as soon as he’d hit town — no point making unnecessary trouble for himself — and they’d gotten him some sort of cockamamie job at a municipal golf course. He worked there one afternoon, trimming the edges of a green, the color reminding him of the stinking Balabomo Emerald, and wound up with a sweet sunburn on the back of his neck. That was enough of that. Since then he’d been making do on slim pickings.

  Like last night. Out walking around, looking for whatever might come his way, he’d hit on one of those twenty-four-hour laundromat places, and the attendant, a chubby old woman in a gray faded flower-print dress, was sitting in a blue plastic chair sound asleep. In he’d gone and quietly tapped the machines one by one and walked out with twenty-three dollars and seventy-five cents in quarters in his pockets, damn near weight enoug
h to pull his pants off. If he’d had to run away from a cop right then it would have been no contest.

  He was sipping his instant coffee and reading the funnies when the knock came at the door. He started, looking instinctively at the window, trying to remember if there was a fire escape out there or not, and then he remembered he wasn’t wanted for anything right now and he shook his head in irritation at himself and got up and walked over and opened the door, and it was Kelp.

  “You’re a tough man to find,” Kelp said.

  “Not tough enough,” Dortmunder said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder and said, “Come in.” Kelp walked in and Dortmunder shut the door after him and said, “What now? Another hot caper?”

  “Not exactly,” Kelp said. He looked around the room. “Livin’ high,” he commented.

  “I always throw it around like this,” Dortmunder said. “Nothing but the best for me. What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “Not exactly another caper,” Kelp explained.

  “What do you mean, not exactly another caper?”

  “The same one,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder looked at him. “The emerald again?”

  “Greenwood stashed it,” Kelp said.

  “The hell,” Dortmunder said.

  “I’m only telling you what Iko told me,” Kelp said. “Greenwood told his lawyer he stashed the stone, and sent the lawyer to tell Iko. Iko told me and I’m telling you.”

  “Why?” Dortmunder asked him.

  “We still got a chance for our thirty gee,” Kelp said. “And the hundred fifty a week again while we get set up.”

  “Set up for what?”

  “To spring Greenwood,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder made a face. “Somebody around here is hearing bells,” he said. He went over and picked up his coffee and drank.

  Kelp said, “Greenwood’s for it and he knows it. His lawyer says the same thing, he doesn’t stand a chance to beat the rap. And they’ll give him the book because they’re sore about the stone being gone. So either he turns the stone over to them to lighten the sentence or he turns it over to us for springing him. So all we have to do is bust him out and the stone is ours. Thirty gee, just like that.”