Nobody's Perfect

"I know it," Kelp snapped, and tromped the accelerator again, and lurched into Sloane Square. "Which way now?"

"Any way you want."

"I wa

"This car's okay," Dortmunder said.

"You try driving it. You try – Oh, shit."

Another pedestrian crossing, this one full of young people wearing carpet remnants. Kelp realized as he was doing it that he was about to shift gears with the wrong stick again, and said, "That's it." Depressing the stick, signaling for a right, he just kept on bearing down until the stick said snap. "Hold this for me," he said, handed the stick to Dortmunder, shifted into first, and drove on once the carpet sale had reached the sidewalk.

"You're signaling for a right again," Dortmunder told him.

"Tough," said Kelp.

They drove around for another half hour, down through Chelsea and over the Albert Bridge into Battersea, and north again over the Battersea Bridge, and up through Earl's Court and Kensington, with Kelp becoming increasingly adjusted to this weird way of driving, and up in Notting Hill Gate Dortmunder suddenly said, "Stop here."

"Here?"

"No, back there. Circle the block."

So Kelp tried circling the block, and promptly got lost, but after many adventures he got found again, which he didn't realize until Dortmunder suddenly said, "Stop here."

This time Kelp stopped, on a dime (or perhaps on a half pence), and the lorry full of metal pipe behind him complained loudly and bitterly. Kelp didn't care; he was realizing they'd come to the same spot in Notting Hill Gate from the opposite direction. "Now, how did that happen?"

"Pull over to the curb, Andy."

Kelp pulled over to the curb, and the lorry went by, filling the air with Stepney imprecations. "Now what?"

"Now we wait," Dortmunder told him. "You might as well cut the engine."

Notting Hill Gate is the name of a street, not a gate; a commercial street, like a neighborhood in Brooklyn, with movie theaters and supermarkets and dry cleaners. Ahead on the left a storefront was boarded up, with a dumpster at the curb out front and a team of men carrying out basket-loads of rubble. Ahead on the right, a man was working on a street-light, standing in a kind of metal bucket extended way up from the back of a truck parked below; the kind of vehicle known in America as a cherrypicker. Beyond the cherrypicker, a man on a high ladder was replacing the letters on a movie marquee; at the moment it read THE CHARGE OF THE SEVEN DWARFS.

On the left, beyond the boarded-up store, a window washer was washing shop windows. The sidewalks were filled with men and women, carrying plastic bags or walking dogs or staring through freshly washed shop windows or muttering to themselves.

"You're muttering to yourself," Dortmunder said.

"No, I'm not," Kelp said.

"It's the cherrypicker," Dortmunder told him. "I already figured it out," Kelp said.

Chapter 9

When a fellow's been sleeping under a dresser for more than a week it's child's play to fall asleep inside a big roomy armoire. Kelp was dreaming of himself as an angel playing a harp on a fluffy soft cloud when the armoire door was pulled open and Dortmunder rudely awakened him by clamping one hand over his mouth for silence sake and whispering harshly in his ear, "Wake up!"

"Mmm" yelled Kelp, then remembered that he wasn't an angel after all, that he didn't in fact know how to play the harp, and that he was only in this armoire because he was a thief. He and Dortmunder had come into Parkeby-South again late this afternoon, Monday, nearly a week since Chauncey's visit, and had watched and waited and roamed until there'd been opportunities to slip u

"Food later," Dortmunder whispered, and stepped back so Kelp could clamber quietly out of the armoire. Dortmunder too was hungry, though he wouldn't have admitted it, and at the moment he was less rested than Kelp. An almost overpowering need to sneeze had kept him awake most of the time inside those carpets, and when at last he'd napped for an hour or so an actual sneeze had awakened him. His own sneeze. Fortunately it hadn't alerted any of the guards, so when Dortmunder saw by his luminous watch dial that it was nearly midnight he slipped out of his hiding place. He spent the next two hours dogging the guards' footsteps and at about one-thirty he heard one of them in the ground-floor office say, "Hm. Streetlamp's gone out." So Chauncey was on the job.

Yes, he was. The other day, Kelp and Dortmunder had followed the cherrypicker to its home, a large fenced-in lot in Hammersmith where it was surrounded by other heavy equipment, all painted the same official yellow. Earlier today, Dortmunder and Kelp had dressed in work clothes, armed themselves with a clipboard, and gone back to Hammersmith, where Dortmunder did his unhelpful workman routine while claiming to have been sent "over from the job to get one of those. They were supposed to call from the office." There'd been little difficulty from the pipe-smoking fellow in the little shack by the gate, since they'd been perfectly willing to sign false names to every document be showed them. ("Canadians, are you?" "That's right.") Retiring with the cherrypicker to a quiet cul-de-sac off Holland Road, they'd used black enamel paint to change its ID and license-plate numbers, then parked it quite openly on Pont Street, less than two blocks from Chauncey's maisonette, where Chauncey and Zane had found it waiting at one o'clock this morning. Chauncey, using the key Kelp had given him, had driven the cherrypicker to Sackville Street, where he'd opened the metal plate in the streetlight pole (Dortmunder had shown him how on a streetlight back in Hans Place), and had snipped one wire to put out the light. And now he and Zane were sitting in the cab of the truck, waiting for the signal from inside Parkeby-South.

Within, Kelp stretched and yawned and scratched his head and shook himself all over like a dog in the rain. "You done wriggling?" Dortmunder asked him. "Time we got going."

"Right," Kelp said. Then, patting himself all over, he said, "Wait a minute. Where's my gun?"

Dortmunder frisked him, but Kelp was no longer armed, until they finally found it in the armoire, where it had slipped out of his pocket. A tiny .25 calibre Beretta automatic, it looked like a toy but it was less foolish than the four-inch-barrel custom-made .22 calibre target pistol inside Dortmunder's shirt. Being in a foreign land, away from their normal sources of supply, they'd been limited in armament to whatever Chauncey could come up with, and it had been this: a woman's purse automatic and a target pistol.

"Quietly now," Dortmunder said, unlimbering his own weapon, and the two of them slipped toward the office.

Outside, a complication had developed. Chauncey had been nervous at first – he thought of himself as sophisticated, but armed robbery was rather beyond his experience – but when everything went according to Dortmunder's plan his confidence grew and he found himself quite pleased with the insouciance he was projecting.