Good Behavior (17 page)

J.C. Taylor. Receptionist's desk. Avalon State Bank Tower. Burglary of an entire floor. Rescue of Sister Mary Grace. Got it.

Dortmunder had been sitting here, at J.C. Taylor's receptionist desk, waiting for midnight. He remembered closing his eyes because the light was so strong, and then there was a fuzziness, and then the smell of mayonnaise, and now here he was again, and the small digital clock on J.C. Taylor's desk said 2:11. And where the hell was everybody else? Gone off to pull the caper without him?

No. Across the way, seated on the floor, Coors cap pulled forward over his eyes, asleep with his mouth open in a revolting way, was Wilbur Howey, a copy of
Scandinavian Marriage Secrets
open facedown on his lap. And the sound from the other room that was like a Winnebago's tanks being emptied must be somebody snoring.

2:11. In fact, 2:12 already. Time to get going. Dortmunder stood up, and immediately sat down again, because his back seemed to have fused into some position he'd never known before. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, boy.” He rocked slowly back and forth, lifting first this shoulder, and then that, and when the clock reached 2:14 he tried again. This time he made it to his feet, though he did keep some fingertips in contact with the desktop just to be on the safe side. “Howey,” he said, rasping, then cleared his throat and said, “Howey,” and the little man jerked in his sleep like a dog dreaming, moving his legs so that the book fell off his lap onto the floor and closed.

“Where the hell is everybody?” Dortmunder demanded. For answer, Howey closed his mouth and made smacking sounds.

Limping a bit, Dortmunder made his way around the desk and across the office and on into the next room, which looked like the aftermath of a reform school reunion. Tiny Bulcher, the snorer, lay sprawled atop the desk, arms outflung and cheek against the green desk blotter, massive body dwarfing the swivel chair. Andy Kelp slept twisted like a vine through the metal folding chair in front of the piano, while Stan Murch had dragged the old brown leather chair over to the window and was draped unconscious on it like an abandoned set of overalls. Half-sandwiches and empty yogurt containers and soda cans were scattered everywhere.

“Couldn't
anybody
stay awake?” Dortmunder demanded of the room at large, and Andy Kelp shifted on the folding chair, his elbow brushing the piano and producing a quote from
Wozzeck
, which in turn made Tiny rumble and change position, knocking a phone book onto the floor. Stan Murch sat up straight, clutching for a non-existent steering wheel, crying, “I'm awake, I'm awake! Stay in your own lane!” Kelp then jolted up, wide-eyed and glassyeyed, attempting to stand without disentangling himself from the folding chair, which meant he toppled over into the piano—excerpt from Bartok's
Mikrokosmos
—before tumbling to the floor. All of this racket roused Tiny, who reared up like a walrus, flinging his arms wide, clearing the desk of everything that had been on it, before lunging away in astonishment, causing the swivel chair to over-balance and tip him backwards onto the floor, huge thick legs waving in air. Meantime Stan, desperately trying to make a left turn, hurtled out of the leather chair and into the side of the desk, just under where a lot of staplers and pens and desk calendars and memo pads were falling.

There then followed a brief silence, with dust motes. Dortmunder looked around. “Are you finished now?” he asked.

“Say!” shouted Howey from the other room, followed by a crash that was probably a full rack of metal shelves going over, with several thousand books.

“Hand-picked,” Dortmunder commented to himself. He looked at his own right hand with dislike. “Hand-picked,” he repeated.

25

Dortmunder hunkered down next to Howey and said, “You're sure you know this stuff.”

“I'm sure,” Howey said. It was nearly three in the morning, they were all awake now, they'd all visited the men's room, they'd all washed their faces and slicked their hair, the worst of the chaos in Taylor's office had been cleaned up, and now here they were on the landing up on twenty-six, waiting for Howey to make it possible to open the fire door.

Dortmunder said, “It isn't I doubt you or anything.”

“Good,” Howey said. He had seated himself on the floor in front of the panel concealing the alarm systems, his tools in a magic circle around him as he removed first the top left screw from the panel, and then the bottom right, dropping both into his shirt pocket. Tiny and Stan and Kelp sat on the steps watching, sometimes yawning.

Dortmunder said, “It's just there's a lot more security on this floor than down on seven.”

“I know,” Howey said. He loosened the bottom left screw but not all the way.

Dortmunder said, “I mean, this is a pretty critical moment right here.”

“Sure is,” Howey said. Tugging the top left corner of the panel away from the wall, he inserted the orange plastic handle of a screwdriver in the space and slid it down as close to the bottom of the panel as possible, forcing the top left corner to bend farther away from the wall.

Dortmunder said, “This'd be a hell of a time to have something go wrong.”

Howey took a deep breath and turned away from his work. “Say, listen, pal,” he said. “Don't I hear your mother calling?”

“Huh?” Dortmunder actually listened for a second, before giving Howey a very squinty look. “Meaning what?” he demanded.

Howey gestured a thumb over his shoulder at the rest of the crew, saying, “You know, you ought to be over there with the peanut gallery.”

Dortmunder pointed at the orange-handled screwdriver stuck partway behind the panel. “Just as an example,” he said, “just to make me more easy in my mind, what's
that
for?”

“Well, then, I'll tell you,” Howey said, taking a screw out of his shirt pocket. Reaching past the top left corner of the panel, he slipped the screw back into its hole. Tightening it with another screwdriver, he said, “You see, what the story is here, the way this system is set up, according to those diagrams you got, if anybody takes both of these top screws out after six
P.M.
, that automatically all by itself sets off an alarm down in Security. You see what I mean?”

“Oh,” Dortmunder said. “So they'll know if somebody's tampering.”

“Say, by golly, you do catch on right away,” Howey said. “So what I'm doing here …” He now finished removing the bottom left screw, loosened the top right screw just barely one turn, and pivoted the whole panel around on that screw till it cleared the space behind it. Then he tightened the top right screw again, and the panel stayed where it was, out of the way. “
That's
what I'm doing,” he said.

“That's pretty good,” Dortmunder said, admiring it.

Howey grinned and nodded, then said, “Now, listen, I know you're the boss of this outfit and all that, but while I'm down here, you know what I mean? Amscray.”

From over on the stairs, Tiny said, “Dortmunder, come over here. I can't see through you what he's doing.”

Well, this actually was a very different and more reliable-seeming Howey than they'd been dealing with before. He'd left that marriage secrets book behind without even a murmur, he'd climbed the eighteen flights of stairs without a fuss, and he was getting down to work here with apparent competence and no fooling around. Deciding it would be safe enough at this point to delegate responsibility, Dortmunder said, “Okay, then, you're on your own,” and went over to sit with the others and watch Howey go to work.

This clearly was a more complicated setup than the one down on seven. Inside the panel, rows of printed circuits on thick board—soldered roadmaps on one side, color-coded spaghetti of wires on the other—were packed in together in vertical lines like a robot's library. Howey's fingers and narrow-nosed tools prowled carefully among it all, touching a wire here, a connection there, a plastic-enclosed chip somewhere else. Poking delicately into the innards, he altered some links, severed others, and made new connections with the help of wire of his own plus a blue-gray sticky stuff that looked like chewing gum or Playdoh. From time to time, he used a line tester, and it always lit up.

It took awhile, even without Dortmunder's help. After ten minutes or so, Howey began to make clucking sounds of annoyance and grunts of frustration every time the line tester was used and again came up positive. “Say, you're a cutey, ain'tcha?” he was heard to mutter at one point. But finally he pushed himself back from the panel, turned to the others, and said, “Another Wilbur Howey special, gents. It's all yours.”

Everybody else stood up and stretched, while Dortmunder said, “You're positive.”

Still seated on the floor amid his tools, Howey gave Dortmunder an exasperated look, saying, “Say, do stars fall on Alabama? Go ahead and open it.”

“Sure,” Tiny said, and went over to the fire door, but Dortmunder noticed that Howey kept alertly staring into the alarm system while Tiny pulled it open, and it wasn't till the door was ajar that Howey gave a great big smile of satisfaction—and relief—and busied himself putting his tools away.

First Tiny, then Kelp, then Stan, then Dortmunder, and finally Howey with his full tool kit came through the fire door, Howey letting it close gently behind them. Just on their right were the display windows of Asiatic Antique Jewelry. The lights in there were off, but the corridor lights still burned, and in their illumination the colored jewels gleamed, each clutched in a tiny fist of silver or gold. “I call that beautiful,” Tiny said.

They walked to Asiatic Antique's entrance and Howey said, “You want me to open this one?”

“
I'll
take care of that,” Tiny said, approaching the door. “Anticipation,” he said, biting down on the word as though it were an apple. “It's always been tough for me to wait. When I was very young, all the time, two-three weeks before Christmas, I'd go downtown and shoplift some toys.” Lifting his right foot, he kicked the door open.

26

When things first started to go wrong at the nuclear plant in Pennsylvania called Three Mile Island in March of 1979, various dials and gauges reported the fact, but nobody would believe them. Sometimes dials and gauges break down, and then people go through a lot of trouble and difficulty, and at the end it turns out it was just another dial or gauge breaking down. When you come along with your clipboard every day, and the dials and gauges always stay in the same range, then that's what you're used to, and what you expect to see. So when the Three Mile Island dials and gauges began to say that something was wrong, people tapped the glass fronts of the dials and gauges with their fingernails and waited to see what happened, and decided that once again the only thing that was wrong was the dials and gauges. After all, nothing seriously wrong had ever happened before.

When things started to go wrong at the chemical plant in Bhopal, India, in January of 1985, various dials and gauges reported the fact, but nobody would believe them. Sometimes dials and gauges break down, and then people go through a lot of trouble and difficulty, and at the end it turns out it was just another dial or gauge breaking down. When you come along with your clipboard every day, and the dials and gauges always stay in the same range, then that's what you're used to, and what you expect to see. So when the Bhopal chemical plant dials and gauges began to say that something was wrong, people tapped the glass fronts of the dials and gauges with their fingernails and waited to see what happened, and decided that once again the only thing that was wrong was the dials and gauges. After all, nothing seriously wrong had ever happened before.

The Avalon State Bank Tower, in addition to stretching seventy-six stories into the sky, also extended four stories down into the ground, nestling itself into a sliced-out pocket in the bedrock of Manhattan Island. The bottom two floors were all machinery and metal ladders, like the bowels of a great ocean-going passenger liner—which in many ways is what a skyscraper is, massive and self-contained and compartmented, except that the skyscraper is always moored in the same place, and of course it's standing on end, and come to think of it skyscrapers don't float, and maybe they aren't anything like each other at all. Forget the whole thing.

The third story up from bedrock was storage, including fire-proof and earthquake-proof and presumably nuclear-destruction-proof warehousing of files and documents and negotiable paper and certain embarrassing videotapes. Also on that floor were fire-fighting and mob-fighting equipment and three entire rooms of extra desks. And the level just below the street was Security.

Security, in addition to locker and shower rooms, gym, dormitory, several offices and three detention cells, also included a large General Operations Room in which there was a background hum all the time and the walls were lined with closed-circuit TV monitors and banks of red lights (none of them glowing) and all sorts of dials and gauges. Half a dozen men were on duty in GenOps through the night, dressed in the livery of Frank Ritter's service, being light blue uniforms with “Global Security Service” curled around a globe on their shoulder patches. These men sat at long tables covered with more dials and gauges, with telephones and intercoms and radios ready to hand, and at 3:04 on this Sunday morning in spring one of these men frowned down at an indicator on the table in front of him, and said, “Huh?”

It had been quiet for some time in GenOps, so now most of the other men in the room glanced over at the first man, and one of them said, “What's up?”

“I got me a blip,” said the first one. He frowned more and more deeply at that indicator, a small square window with a small circular rod within, painted red on one side and green on the other. Always until now, except for two brief periods when the system had been undergoing intensive tests, the green side of that rod had faced up. But now, since twenty-seven flights up a man named Wilbur Howey had just slightly misread a schematic and didn't realize that the removal of
either
top screw from the wallplate over the security feed would trigger a reaction down in Security, that circular rod had just flipped over, like a tiny slot machine, and now showed red.