Watch Your Back!

15

WHEN DORTMUNDER WALKED into the O.J. Bar Grill at two-thirty on the morning of Friday, August 13, the place had been closed for three hours, and the only illumination inside, other than faraway streetlight glow through the time-grimed windows, was the amber tube over the space-age cash register. Closing the door as silently as he'd opened it, putting away the spatulas and doohickeys that had steered him safely through the locks and alarm system, Dortmunder made his way across the empty tavern and around behind the bar, into Rollo's realm.

The first thing he noticed back there — and a lucky thing he did — was that one section of the duckboards Rollo was wont to tread on had been pulled back over the rest, and the long trapdoor beneath had been left in its upraised position, leaning against the shelves under the bar. That could be a nasty fall if you didn't watch yourself, particularly since the stairs started down from the far end of the rectangular opening.

Whether it was sloppiness or a snare for unwary burglars, Dortmunder didn't know, but he knew he needed to move around back here, so he found the hook that held the door open, unhooked it, and eased the door back down where it belonged. He didn't move the duckboards, though — no need to.

Standing on the closed trapdoor, he opened the first of three drawers in a row under the backbar beneath the cash register, and found it was full of officialdom: fire inspections, coil cleanings, health code violations, water meter bills. Nothing that would explain why this terrible fate had struck the O.J.

The other two drawers were equally useless from a mystery-solving point of view, though it was interesting to note that one of the drawers contained a gun, a Star Model F automatic, very dusty but also very loaded; the safety, however, was on. It lay next to some Oriental parasols.

Closing the drawers, Dortmunder looked around and saw nothing else that might be of help. What about correspondence, gaming chits, threatening notes? Why wasn't there anything useful in here?

Well, there wasn't. He was just about to give the whole thing up when a sudden metallic skritching noise, like a robot mouse gnawing on a copper carrot, came from the front door.

Keys! Somebody with keys, coming in.

Where to hide? Nowhere. The bar could not be more open, and both pointers and the back room could not be more closed cul-de-sacs.

Where? Where? Up front, several locks had to be dealt with, which Dortmunder had just recently learned, but time wasn't the problem; space was. He had to have space in which to disappear.

The basement! The trapdoor he'd closed. Quickly he hopped onto the duckboards and bent to lift the door, while up front that other door was about to open. Should he close the trapdoor after himself? No, too awkward. Also, there was nothing he could do about the duckboards.

Hook the trapdoor open, skitter down the stairs, his furrowed brow sinking below bar level just as the street door opened and several guys trooped in. At least several.

"Dark in here."

"There's lightswitches behind the bar. Hold on a second."

The basement was absolutely black. With hands splayed out in front of himself, eyes uselessly staring, Dortmunder inched across the unseen floor into the unseeable black.

"Jesus Christ! Look at this!"

Dortmunder froze, fingers twitching at the end of his outstretched arms.

"What is it? Ma

"This goddamn trapdoor's open! I just about dropped myself into the cellar."

"Holy shit, close that thing."

"How? I can't see in here."

"Wait, don't move, I think I know where the lightswitch is. That Rollo's getting too damn careless."

"I think he's lost his job satisfaction."

"He can lose all he wants to, we gotta keep him on until we're done in here, because we don't want him opening his yap to some of these wholesalers. Here's the lightswitch!"

Sudden light flowed down the basement stairs, swaddled Dortmunder, and streamed on to give faint yellow-gray light to his surroundings. A rough stone wall stood directly in front of him, less than a foot from his outstretched fingers, which he now dropped to his sides. A long rectangular room extended to his right, under the main room of the bar. To his left, a doorway in a wooden wall suggested a corridor beyond. Afraid his feet could still be seen from certain angles upstairs, Dortmunder turned left and tiptoed toward that corridor.

Darkness. Almost as total as before, except that when he looked back, he could see a rectangle of thin yellow lines up above in the black, outlining the trapdoor that had just been lowered.

A sound of voices came from up there. Saying anything useful? In movies and on television, people are always just happening to be hid someplace when other people have a conversation that explains the whole thing. Could that be happening here?

Dortmunder tiptoed back to stand beneath that thin yellow rectangle overhead. What were they saying?

At first, nothing; they seemed to have stopped talking just as he got there. And then all at once there came a painful irritating screech and scrawk, which of course had to be the duckboards being slid back into position — a problem to think about a little later. But then at last, the duckboards were in their proper place, almost the entire yellow line of the rectangle had been blotted out, and people up there began again to speak, muffled but legible:

"Remember, only the Russian."

"Gotcha."

"And the gen-u-wine French."

"I got some Polish here."

"Forget that. We bring back Polish, he'll hand us our heads."

"Well, I'll take a bottle for myself."

"This cash register's empty."

"Sure, they empty it every night."

"What's with this safe here?"

"Forget that, we'll take care of that later."

"Is this French?"

"No! What'sa matter with you? What you want is Dom Perig-none."

"Dom Perig-none."

"There should be more in back."

"Remember, when a boss's daughter marries, only the best Russian vodka, only the best French champagne. Or they'll find us in the Meadowlands."

"Stoli, right?"

"Now you're talking."

The voices faded, moving into other parts of the bar, but Dortmunder could follow their progress by the dull thuds of their shoes on the floor. From here and there, from everywhere, the feet moved toward the front door and away from it again, as the soldiers up there carried the cases of Russian and French out of the place, to prepare for the celebration of the fact that one of their major scumbags was going to replicate himself.

Well, it had sort of worked. They hadn't known he was hiding here, and they had told him certain things. They weren't the things he wanted to know, but still, the principle had proved out.

A faint visual memory came back to him, from that brief moment after the upstairs lights had been switched on and before the trapdoor had been shut. The memory told him there was a lightswitch on the wall that had been facing him when he'd stood there at the foot of the stairs. That was the right place for a lightswitch, the foot of the stairs; could he find it again? Would it make so much glare they'd notice it upstairs?

Dortmunder pondered. He remembered basements from earlier in his life, remembered the lighting arrangement in the back room of this very bar, even remembered another quick visual memory of one single lightbulb in the ceiling of the rectangular room in which he now stood. All in all, it seemed to him worth the risk, to light one little lightbulb rather than curse the darkness.

He was right. When he found the switch and flipped it on, that forty-watt bulb in the middle of the ceiling created an effect very like the shadowed insubstantiality of the Kasbah at midnight, or a teenagers' party when the folks are out of town. In its fretful murk, he could see rows of kegs: beer kegs, wine kegs, even kegs handmarked in white chalk, Amsterdam Liquor Store Burben — hmm.