Why Me?

"Sanitationmen," Mologna said.

"They're all police officers?"

Even Tony Cappelletti was prepared to exchange a glance with somebody at that one; he exchanged it with Freedly, who said, "If we were doing it, Mac, our people would also be in disguise."

"Well, of course they would! The description was just a little confusing, that's all." Frowning manfully at the map, Zachary said, "You appear to have the target phone well encircled."

"You bet your ass we do," Mologna told him.

"That's fourteen men," Cappelletti said, "with visual contact on the phone. Plus the TPF in that restaurant, plus two more squads out of sight some distance away—here in a parking garage on Charles Street, and over here in a moving company garage on Washington Street."

Leon said, "Ding dong."

Everybody turned to look at him. Mologna, not quite believing it, said, "Leon? Was that you?"

Leon mutely pointed at the big white clock on the wall, and when everybody turned that way they saw the time was precisely ten-thirty. "Okay," Mologna said. "Unconventional, Leon, but okay."

Leon smiled. "I can do a perfect Big Ben, quarter hours and everything."

"Later." Looking around, Mologna said, "Which phone do I use?"

"This one, Francis." Cappelletti ushered Mologna to a phone on one of the long tables. Seating himself on a folding chair—it shrieked in agony—Mologna reached for the receiver, poised his finger over the push buttons, then stopped and frowned. "What's the number?"

Everybody patted his pockets and it turned out Cappelletti had it, on a crumpled piece of paper, which he smoothed out and placed on the table. Mologna dialed, while one of the black women who'd been sitting around talking about retirement benefits spoke quietly into a microphone, saying, "He's making the call now."

Three miles away, at Abingdon Square, two winos, four sanitationmen, a bus driver, two vendors, two mechanics, a pair of chess players, and a little old lady all tensed, watching and waiting, their attention on a shiny, small telephone-on-a-stalk. Not even an enclosed booth; just a small three-sided box on one leg.

"It's ringin," Mologna said.

"It isn't ringing," the black woman at the microphone said.

Mologna frowned at her. "No no, I said it is ringin."

She shrugged. "The folks on the street say it isn't ringing."

"What?" Mologna said, and a voice in his ear said, "Hello?"

"Phone ain't ringing," the black woman said. "Maybe it's busted."

"But," Mologna said, and the voice in his ear said, "Hello? Hello?" So he said it right back: "Hello!"

"Oh, there you are," the voice said, sounding relieved.

Mologna said, "And who the fuck are you?"

"I'm the, uh…" He sounded rather nervous and had to stop to clear his throat. "I'm the guy, you know, the guy…with the, uh, I'm the guy with the thing."

"The thing?" Bewildered faces were crowding around Mologna now.

"Ring. The ring."

Zachary said, "Who in God's name are you talking to?"

Waving Zachary and everybody else away, Mologna said, " Where are you?"

"Well, uh…I don't think I oughta tell you that."

The black woman was speaking with muted hysteria into her microphone. Three miles away, the pay phone in question sparkled in morning sunlight, alone, unringing, unoccupied, i

Mologna said, "God damn you, son of a bitch, what's goin on here?"

"It's the right number," the black woman said.

The other black woman, who'd been talking quietly but hurriedly into another phone, now said, "The phone company says the call's going through."

"See," the voice in Mologna's ear said, "I just want to give it back, you see what I mean?"

"Hold on," Mologna told the phone, cupped the mouthpiece, and glared at the second black woman. "What was that you said?"

"The phone company says the call's going through. They say you're talking to somebody at that pay phone."

Three miles away the chess players folded up their unfinished game, while their kibitzers said things like, "Are you crazy? Man, what's the matter with you? Man, you was three fuckin moves from mate, man." The pamphlet-distributing little old lady had crossed Hudson Street and now stood directly in front of the phone under surveillance. Two TPF men in uniform, regardless of all subterfuge, stood beefily in the restaurant doorway, hands on hips, and glared out at that subversive telephone.

The voice in Mologna's ear continued, even though everybody in the war room was talking at once. "I said hold on!" Mologna yelled into the phone, then yelled at everybody else, "Shut up! Tony, saturate that neighborhood! You, tell that phone company to get its head out of its ass and tell me what's goin on. You, tell our people on the scene to close in but stay in character. You, are you recordin this?"

The white male companion of the two black females nodded his earphoned head.

"And are we pickin up a voice from the other end?"

Another nod with earphones.

"Good," Mologna said. "Otherwise, I'd think I was doin a Joan of Arc." Into the phone, he said, "Let me tell you somethin, smart boy."

"I thought maybe we could nego—"

"Just shut up and listen to me. Negotiate with you?" Cappelletti tapped Mologna's shoulder, but Mologna angrily shrugged him away. "Deal with you, you son of a bitch? I wouldn't disgrace my vocal cords doin deals with you." Cappelletti tapped Mologna's shoulder more urgently, and this time Mologna swung his arm around to shove the other man away, meantime yelling into the phone, "I'm goin to get you, you wise-ass bastard, and let me tell you this. When I get my hands on you, you'll fall downstairs for a month!" Slamming the phone down into its cradle, ignoring the voice's feeble, "But—" Mologna spun around to glare at Cappelletti: "And what did you want to say, that couldn't wait?"

Cappelletti sighed: "Keep him on the line," he said.

30

"You see," Andy Kelp had explained to Dortmunder before the event, "with the phone company's own phone-ahead gizmo, you have to use their equipment and go through the operator every time you want to use it. But this one is from West Germany—see what it says on the bottom? — and with this one you just set these dials here to the number where you're go

"But," Dortmunder had pointed out, "pay phones don't have jacks."

"They got a phone line coming in. And this gizmo, made in Japan, these little prongs squeeze down into the line and make contact, so you can set up a jack anywhere you want on any phone line in the city."

"It sounds awful chancy," Dortmunder had said. "Where do we make this thing phone ahead to?"

"Another pay phone."

"Fine," Dortmunder had said. "So I'm standing there at this second pay phone, and one of the bozos they've got on stakeout reads the phone-ahead number on the little Kraut gizmo you've got stuck into your little Jap gizmo stuck into the first pay phone, and then they come to phone number two and they arrest me. And probably, because they're a little a

"Well, no," Kelp had said. "Because you aren't going to be at that second pay phone either."

"I'm going crazy," Dortmunder had said. "Where the hell am I, some third pay phone? How many of these phone-ahead gizmos you got?"