Nobody's Perfect

A knock at the door. Macdough turned from his views – the outer view of London and the i

It was the floor valet, with a bottle of Scotch on a silver salver. And, Macdough noted at once, two glasses. "Ah hah," he said, with an amiable smile. "You will join me after all."

The man's own smile was both sheepish and conspiratorial. "You're very kind, sir. If you'll permit me to change my mind?"

"Certainly, certainly." Macdough came forward to pour with his own hands. "Take your opportunities, that's my advice," he told the fellow. "In this life, never let your opportunities slip you by."

Chapter 2

To Dortmunder's surprise, he could get a passport. He'd paid his debts to society – at least the ones society knew about – and the privileges of citizenship were his for the asking. With the other necessary preparations, it was already July before everything was ready, but by God here he was, on a 747, leaving the United States of America, bound for London. In England.

And beside him was Kelp, who was grumpy. "I don't see why we can't ride in first class," he said, for about the fifteenth time.

"Chauncey's paying," Dortmunder answered, for maybe the seventh time. "So we do it his way."

Chauncey's way, as it happened, was that he and Leo Zane would travel beyond the maroon curtain in first class, with the free liquor and wine and champagne, and the prettier stewardesses, and the wider seats with more legroom, and the spiral staircase to a bar and lounge on an upper level, while Dortmunder and Kelp would travel in economy: the cattle car, here in back. Dortmunder had an aisle seat, so at least he could stretch his feet out when nobody was walking by, but Kelp had the middle seat, and a stout elderly Indian lady in a sari, with a red dot on her forehead, had the window seat. Kelp was sort of squeezed in there and – particularly since Dortmunder had won the struggle over whose elbow would have the armrest – Kelp was apparently pretty uncomfortable.

Well, it would only last seven hours, and when the plane landed they would be in London, and it would then be up to Dortmunder to make good on his latest brainchild. He'd be hampered in more ways than one – by not knowing the city at all, for instance, and by having to limit himself to a string consisting of one Kelp and two amateurs (Chauncey and Zane) – but there really hadn't been much choice. It was either find some way to help Chauncey or become fresh notches on Zane's gun. If that cold son of a bitch ever did anything as human as notching a gun.

The plan, as with others of Dortmunder's, combined the simple with the unusual. In this one he proposed to switch the copy and the original before the sale took place in September. Chauncey could then, in defending himself against the insurance-company lawsuit, insist the version at the auctioneers be reappraised. It would be denounced as a fake, the lawsuit would stop, and Chauncey would retire with his painting and money intact.

All Dortmunder had to do was figure out the details of that one simple act, in a foreign city, with a half-amateur crew, while a gun was held at his head.

As far as he was concerned, this plane could stay up here in the sky forever.

Chapter 3

Chauncey loved London, but not like this. In the first place, this was July. Nobody ever came to London in July, that's when the place was crammed with Americans and foreigners. In the second place, Chauncey's companions on this trip left much – in fact, everything – to be desired. In the cab from Heathrow, he and Zane occupied the rear seat, with Dortmunder and Kelp facing them on the jump seats, and while Chauncey noticed that Kelp very carefully made sure his knees were not a

Still, it was all in a good cause. Beyond Dortmunder's beetled brow, and beyond the meter ticking away just past Dortmunder's right ear, Chauncey could see the mound of their luggage piled up in the space beside the driver, and prominent among his own Hermes and Zane's American Touristers and Kelp's six canvas ditty bags and Dortmunder's anonymous brown elephant-skin two-suiter with the straps loomed the golf bag behind the lining of which lurked the Griswold Porculey imitation of Folly Leads Man to Ruin. Sometime soon – very soon, please God – the imitation would go away and the original would slip into its place in the golf bag, and Chauncey would leave this city of teeming millions and fly away to Antibes, where everybody sensible was spending the summer.

In the meantime, the only thing to do was make the best of a bad situation. Oppressed by the continuing silence in the cab, these four large bodies sweating lightly in the hot July London air, Chauncey made a desperate stab at small talk:

"This your first trip to London, Dortmunder?"

"Yeah." Dortmunder turned his head slightly to look out the window. The cab, having come in the M 4 from Heathrow, was now inching through the normal traffic jam on Cromwell Road. "Looks like Queens," Dortmunder said.

Chauncey came automatically to the city's defense. "Well, this is hardly the center of town."

"Neither is Queens."

Cromwell Road became Brompton Road before Chauncey tried again: "Have you traveled much outside the United States?"

"I went to Mexico once," Dortmunder told him. "It didn't work out."

"No?"

"No."

Kelp unexpectedly said, "You were in Canada a couple times."

"Just hiding out."

"Still."

"Just farmhouses and snow," Dortmunder insisted. "Could of been anywhere."

The cab finally reached Hans Place, a long oval around a tree-filled park, fringed by tallish orange-brick nineteenth-century houses done in the gabled ornate style termed by Sir Osbert Lancaster "Pont Street Dutch." When the cab stopped, Chauncey gratefully ejected himself onto the sidewalk and paid the fare while the others unloaded the luggage. Then Edith and Bert appeared from the house to welcome Chauncey back and to carry his baggage while the others could do as they wished with theirs.

This house had been divided long ago into four separate residences, complexly arranged. In Chauncey's maisonette, staff quarters and kitchen were on the ground floor rear, a front-windowed sitting room and rear-windowed dining room were on the first floor, and a spiral staircase from the dining room led up to two bedrooms plus bath at the rear of the second floor. Edith and Bert, a tiny shriveled couple who spoke an absolutely incomprehensible form of cockney in which R was the only identifiable consonant, were the maisonette's only full-time residents, with their own small room and bath downstairs behind the kitchen. They grew brussels sprouts in their bit of a garden in back, they did their shopping two blocks away at Harrods on Chauncey's charge account, they pretended to be valet and cook during those occasional intervals of Chauncey's presence in town, and all in all they lived the life of Reilly and knew it. "Hee bee," they said to one another, tucked into their teeny bed together at night. A maisonette in Knightsbridge! Not bad, eh, Mum? Not bad, Dad.

With much piping and chortling and recourse to the letter R, this happy couple welcomed Chauncey home. He perceived the sense, if not the substance, and told them, "Show these gentlemen to the guest room."

"Aye. Aye. R, r, r, r."

In the house they all went, and up the half flight to the sitting room, and thence up the spiral stairs, Edith and Bert struggling like trolls with Chauncey's luggage, cheerfully barking all the way. Zane went next, limping so garishly up the spiral staircase he seemed a living parody of a Hammer film, followed by Kelp, whose half dozen ditty bags gave him no end of trouble, constantly tangling and snagging with the staircase's banister rails and his own legs and – for one terrifying instant – with Zane's bad foot. The look Zane shot down at him was so cold, so lethal, that Kelp staggered backwards into Dortmunder, who'd been plodding steadily and unemotionally around the spiral like the mule circling an Arab well. Dortmunder stopped when much of Kelp landed on his head, and said, with tired patience, "Don't do that, Andy."