Good Behavior (20 page)

Okay. A plan. Dortmunder sat tensely in his seat and waited for the little man who wasn't there.

“Messerschmidt! Booneholler!”

It wasn't taking long at all, not nearly as long as it should. Dortmunder slumped deeper and deeper into his seat as the army armed itself, trying to think of an alternate plan just in case the first one didn't pan out. Shout “
Fire!
” in a crowded theater? Not this time; somebody would fire … a gun.

“Barbaranda! Peabody!”

Peabody? The snake-and-woman man was named
Peabody?
Dortmunder moved his knees out of the way and Peabody marched on down the aisle to get his weapon. The tattoo on his other arm involved a woman and an eagle.

“Mordred! Gollum!”

Fewer and fewer remained in their seats, more and more were lined up along the walls on both sides. They looked meaner standing up. They looked a
lot
meaner with assault rifles in their hands.

Could he pretend to have amnesia? No.

Could he rise at the same instant as somebody else and then claim
he
was Slade or Trask or whoever, and the other guy was the impostor? No; not for more than about eleven seconds.

“Zorkmeister! Fell! Omega!”

And that was it. And this was a party to which everybody had come; there were no no-shows here. There were only the now-empty wooden crates, the half dozen nervous security men, the burly man with his list up on stage, thirty armed barbarians lining each side wall, and Dortmunder. Seated. Alone. In the middle.

The burly man's frown pressed against Dortmunder like a heavy wind, even from this far away. “Say, there, fellow,” he called, holding up his piece of paper and rattling it, “how come your name isn't on this list?”

Think of something, Dortmunder ordered himself. “Uhh,” he said, and thought of nothing. “Yeah,” he said, aware of all those eyes, all those weapons. “Um,” he said.

The burly man turned his own Valmet around and pointed it in Dortmunder's direction, saying, “
This
piece of armament, fellow, has a full clip in its belly. Name, rank and serial number, boy, and don't hesitate.”

Dortmunder hesitated; he couldn't help it. But he had to say
something
. “Well, uh, my name is Smith.”

“Haw,” said some of the people on the sides, but the burly man and his Valmet didn't seem amused. Why did I say Smith? Dortmunder asked himself. It's just gonna make them madder.

“On your feet, Mr. Smith,” the burly man said. “I am about to display the Valmet's recoil action. Up!”

Dortmunder stood. He was still looking for a plan. Pretend to have a heart attack? Claim to be a policeman, and put them all under arrest? How about … how about … how about if he said he was from the company sold these people the Valmets, and the check bounced, and he was here to repossess them?

“Out in the aisle, Mr. Smith,” the burly man said, and Dortmunder obeyed, and the burly man said, “Now, boys, you'll notice the recoil of this weapon is mainly rearward, with not much barrel rise, so you can place just about as many rounds as you want in a narrow target area without pause. Any last words, Mr. Smith?”

“I can explain,” Dortmunder said—my last words are a lie! he thought despairingly—and the lights went out.

Click. Snap. Darkness, pitch-black, just like that. Dortmunder wasted a full hundredth of a second being startled before he turned and ran like a chicken thief in the general direction of the door.

Whack! The door was closed. Dortmunder knocked it open with his forehead, nose, knees, elbows, knuckles and belt buckle, and the hall lights were out, too. Behind him, a whole zoo of noises suddenly erupted, roaring and squawling and braying and barking, and over those noises came a rapid BAP-BAP-BAP-BAP, huge and echoing in the enclosed air of that room. The door shuddered, hit by a couple of rounds, and Dortmunder caromed off it, arms flailing wildly as he reeled into the blackness of the hall, where a small cold hand closed around his wrist.

“
YIIIII!!!
” Vampires, ghouls, things that go bump in the night. This was even worse than the Valmet!

A second hand groped for his mouth, to shut it, found his nose instead, and squeezed. “Ngggg,” Dortmunder said, and the first hand tugged at his wrist while the second hand released his nose, patted his cheek, and departed.

A friend? In this madhouse?

Well, somebody turned off the lights, right?

Dortmunder allowed himself to be drawn away from the yelling and shouting back in the theater, pulled along at a half-trot by this small but strong hand encircling his wrist. They made a turn, the sounds in the background grew fainter, and then a pale light appeared back there, showing behind them at the corridor turn. “They've got the lights on,” Dortmunder said, and in the dimness peered at his rescuer.

A girl. Early twenties. Short, slender, in blue jeans and high-necked long-sleeved full-cut black blouse. Grim-faced and fiery-eyed she was, as she glanced back toward the light, then pushed open a door on the left side of the hall. They entered an ordinary office, empty, brightly illuminated by ceiling fluorescents. Slamming the door, leaning against it, taking a deep breath, the girl looked at Dortmunder, held up her right hand with one finger pointing up, tapped two fingers of her right hand to her raised left forearm, held up one finger again, tugged her earlobe, and blew him a kiss.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Dortmunder told her. “Kiss, sounds like sis, you're Sister Mary Grace.”

She nodded and smiled, making an A-OK circle of thumb and forefinger.

“I'm, uh,” Dortmunder said, but what the hell, might as well admit it. “I'm John Dortmunder.”

She nodded again, patting the air: She too had figured things out.

Dortmunder sighed; it had to be said. “I'm here to rescue you.”

She raised an eyebrow, grinning ever so slightly, but otherwise refrained from comment.

Noise out in the hall; moving this way. “Here they come,” Dortmunder said.

Sister Mary Grace listened for a second, then nodded, and headed across the room toward the other door, gesturing for Dortmunder to follow. He followed.

30

“You notice Dortmunder takes the easy part,” Tiny Bulcher said, hefting a black plastic bag filled with about fifty pounds of jade, gold, ivory and other nice things, which he then tossed over his left shoulder. With a second black plastic bag, similarly filled, on his right shoulder, he looked like the rebuttal to Santa Claus.

“Aw, come on, Tiny,” Andy Kelp said, stripping rings from his fingers and bells from his other fingers to go into the next plastic bag to be filled. “You didn't want to go up there with the nun, you said so yourself.”

“We bust and break and carry and schlep,” Tiny said, unappeased, “and
he
drinks tea with some nun.”

Wilbur Howey, holding with both hands a six-inch-tall ivory reproduction of a piece of erotic statuary from Angkor Wat, said, “Wants to keep that little nun all to himself, does he?”

“Listen, Wilbur,” Tiny said, “you been holding that statue ten minutes now. You're supposed to
pack
it, so I can carry it downstairs.”

“Oh, sure,” Howey said. Then, as Tiny continued to gaze upon him, Howey reluctantly bent and put the statue away in the half-full plastic bag, stroking it a lingering goodbye before the black consumed it.

Stan Murch came out to the hall from Macaran Ivory Co. with an armload of netsuke, which he dumped without ceremony into the plastic bag, then looked around and said, “We knocking off now?”

“No, no,” Kelp said. “I'm right with you, Stan.”

“So's Wilbur,” Tiny said. “While
I'm
carrying all this stuff downstairs, and Dortmunder's up there playing footsie with the nun.”

“You don't play footsie with nuns, Tiny,” Kelp said.

Howey looked startled at that, but then he frowned, as though prepared to listen to a second opinion.

“Work,” Tiny advised, and turned around to plod away, the bulging black bags on his back making him look as though he were on his way to Vulcan's forge.

Stan went back into Macaran Ivory, past the sagging door that Tiny had kicked open a while back. Howey followed, bright-eyed, looking for more reproductions. Kelp paused, watched Tiny disappear through the stairwell door at the end of the hall, and then skipped lightly into Duncan Magic, next door to Macaran. He was there three minutes, deeply involved in the process of turning a long black cane into a bouquet of bright-colored plastic flowers, when Stan came in and said, “Andy, we been pals a long time.”

“Okay, okay,” Kelp said, and put the cane down on the counter. “I'm just coming now.”

“But if you come in here again,” Stan said.

“No, no,” Kelp assured him. “Not till we're done with everything else.”

“I'm just gonna have to ask Tiny for advice,” Stan finished.

“You don't have to do that, Stan, honest. Look, here I am, I'm going out to the hall. You coming?”

“Of course I'm coming,” Stan said, but in fact he was glancing back at the long black cane lying on the counter. How do you turn something like that into a bouquet of flowers?

No. Don't even ask. Stan firmly turned his back on the cane and left Duncan Magic.

31

Pickens brooded, glowering. He was mad enough to eat the bark off a Saint Bernard.

“He's got to be somewhere on this floor,” the head security wimp said. He was obviously made nervous by Pickens' silence.

“That's fine,” Pickens said, standing there next to the assembly room door with his hands on his hips. “Why don't you show him to me, then?”

“We're working on it,” the head security wimp said.

Working on it. They were all working on it; that is, the survivors were working on it. The scene in the assembly room had deteriorated badly once the lights went out. It had been a mistake to start blasting away with that Valmet. Pickens knew it full well and quite bitterly accepted the blame for the whole thing. He'd been aiming at the fellow purely as a threat—you don't kill a man who hasn't answered your questions yet—but the sudden darkness had startled him, and his finger was on that trigger anyway—no trigger guard, just as he'd pointed out to the troops—and his automatic reaction had been to squeeze.

Actually, it had almost worked out. Smith—call him Smith, that's the only name they had on the son of a bitch so far—had made a run for it out that back door, this door here, and Pickens afterward had counted seven big raggedy holes in this door, meaning he must have missed Smith by no more than inches.

But by however narrow a margin it might have been, miss Smith he had, and by firing off his weapon in that darkened room he'd set loose some of the worst instincts of the troops in his command. By the time the lights had come back on there were at least half a dozen spontaneous brawls and fistfights and wrestling matches already going on, and maybe ten handguns were out and being waved this way and that. Before Pickens had managed to restore order, the roll call was four broken jaws, three broken arms, nine hands with broken bones, and one fellow who'd been kneed so hard he might
never
straighten out again. Which reduced Pickens' forces from sixty men to forty-three, all of whom were right now out and about the seventy-fourth floor, looking for Smith.

He had to still be here, somewhere on this floor. The security wimps had checked with their comrades in the basement—which is what had brought this white-haired red-faced head security wimp hotfooting it up—and there had been no breach of security to the public stairwell since Smith had disappeared. There was no possible way he could get through Margrave's interior door to the separate stairway up to seventy-six, but on the other hand it was pretty certain by now he was no longer within these Margrave offices. Windows up here didn't open, and no elevator had come up to this level for several hours except the one bringing the head security wimp, so that meant Smith must have gone to ground in the territory of one of the other companies with space on this floor. That's where Pickens' troops were right now, doing a room-by-room search. It was only a matter of time.

“It's only a matter of time,” the head security wimp said.

“I need my time for other things,” Pickens told him. “And I need to know who that Smith is, who he's working for. Is he just a newspaper reporter? Is he FBI, or CIA, or Customs? That's our big worry, you know, Customs.”

“Customs? What the hell have
they
got to do with anything?”

“If you mount an armed insurgency against a nation with which the United States is at peace,” Pickens told him, “and if you gather and provide weapons for your forces on American territory and then transport them to the war zone
from
American territory, you are committing a Federal crime. And enforcement of that Federal crime comes under the jurisdiction of Customs. I feel you ought to know your situation here,” Pickens finished.

“Not
my
situation,” the head security wimp said, but he did look worried.

“You're part of it, my friend,” Pickens assured him. “It's just as important to you as it is to me to catch this Smith and find out who and what he is. Maybe he's working for the Guerreran government, and they already know we're on our way. If so, I'd like to know about it.”

“I suppose you would,” the head security wimp agreed.

Pickens shook his head, disgusted at himself. “If only I'd winged the son of a bitch,” he said, “so we could have ourselves some blood to follow.”

“We've got plenty of blood already,” the head security wimp said, sounding disapproving. He was still mad about Pickens having let off his weapon in the house like that, but didn't dare come right out and say so.

One of the other security wimps now approached them down the hall, his face all blotchy in red and white; angry, or scared, or maybe both. They watched him approach, and the head security wimp said, “You got news, O'Brien?”