Why Me?

"No more pay phones," Kelp had promised. "John, think about the city of New York."

"Why?"

"Because it's our territory, John, so let's use it. And what's one of the main things about this territory?"

"No question-answer," Dortmunder had said, squeezing his beer can so that beer slopped out onto his fingers. "Just tell your story."

"People move," Kelp had told him. "They move all the time—uptown, downtown, across town—"

"Outa town."

"Right. And back into town. And every time they move they get a telephone. And they always want it someplace different from the last tenant. Not the kitchen, the bedroom. Not the living room, the—"

"Okay, okay."

"The point is, this city is overrun with unused telephone lines. You spend a lot of time in back yards and fire escapes yourself, didn't you ever notice all those phone lines?"

"No."

"Well, they're there. So what we do, our second pay phone is in Brooklyn. Indoors. In a bar or a drugstore or a hotel lobby, someplace where I can get at the phone line coming in. Then I put another of these Japanese prong gizmos on that line, and I run a line of my own to an unused phone line and from there anywhere in the neighborhood: a basement, a closet, an empty apartment, whatever's handy. And that's where you take the call, on a phone we'll bring in ourselves; so as far as the phone company's concerned that phone doesn't even exist! That second pay phone will ring just once, but your phone'll ring too, and right away you answer. Nobody answers a pay phone that rings just once, so you'll have privacy."

Dortmunder had scratched the side of his jaw, frowning deeply. "We're three phones down the line now. Why all the complication?"

"Time. They stake out that first phone. You start to talk, they go crazy. After a while they find my phone-ahead gizmo, maybe you're still on the line, still negotiating. They check with the phone company, they get the address on phone number two, now they got to rush down to Brooklyn, stake it out, approach it very carefully, go crazy all over again. And we're where we can see them, and we got time to end the call and go away before they find the new line leading to the unused line leading to us."

"Christ on a crutch," Dortmunder had said.

"Number A," Kelp had pointed out, "you got no alternative. Number B, this'll work, guaranteed."

And so it did, right on down to the question of negotiation. The phone had rung, just once, and Dortmunder had picked it up and started talking, and he was just getting over his nervousness, sitting there in the for-rent empty apartment over the delicatessen (Pay Phone Inside) on Ocean Bay Boulevard, with Kelp at the front window watching the street for cops, when all of a sudden this guy on the other end of the phone, Maloney, started a lot of yelling and screaming in Dortmunder's ear, culminating in an u

"Hello?" Dortmunder said. "Hello?"

Kelp wandered over from the window: "What's wrong?"

"He hung up on me."

"He couldn't." Kelp frowned, gazing into the middle distance. "Could my phone system break down somewhere?"

Dortmunder shook his head, and hung up the phone. "It could," he said, "I know damn well it could, but it didn't. Maloney did it himself. He said he wouldn't deal with me. He said he was go

"He said that?"

"He sounded a lot like Tiny Bulcher, only angry."

Kelp nodded. "It's a challenge," he said. "The good guys against the bad guys, with a challenge and a dare and the gauntlet thrown and all like that. Like in Batman."

"In Batman," Dortmunder pointed out, "the bad guys lose."

Kelp looked at him in astonishment. " We aren't the bad guys, John," he said. "We're trying to correct a simple, honest mistake, that's all. We're rescuing the Byzantine Fire for the American people. And the Turkish people. We're the good guys."

Dortmunder contemplated that idea.

"Come on," Kelp said. "The bad guys'll show up any minute."

"Right." Dortmunder stood up from the stack of newspapers he'd been using for a chair—the apartment's only furnishing—then looked at the phone on the floor. "What about that?"

Kelp shrugged it off. "A standard desk-type black telephone? Who'd want a thing like that? Wipe off your fingerprints and leave it."

31

Ke

At the moment he was employed by the City of New York as, um, um, Police Commissioner, and right now he was being called upon to calm down two irate FBI men named Fracharly and Zeedy, who had entered his office shortly before eleven a.m. and now sat across the desk from him absolutely ruby with rage. That is, Fracharly was ruby with rage; Zeedy appeared to be snowy with shock.

"Chief Inspector Mologna," Ken Albemarle said, nodding his head judiciously and pronouncing the name right, idly tapping his fingertips on his neat and orderly desktop, "has been a fine police officer for years and years. In fact, he's been here longer than I have." (Ken Albemarle had been New York Police Commissioner for seven months.)

"Perhaps," Fracharly said through clenched teeth, "no one before this has ever noticed the Chief Inspector's incompetential quotient."

"He hung up on the man," Zeedy said, hollow-voiced, as though he still couldn't believe it.

"Just a moment," Ken Albemarle said. Tapping his intercom, he said, "Miss Friday, would you bring me Chief Inspector Francis Mologna's file?"

"Yes, sir, Commissioner," the intercom replied, in a ti

"It won't be in the file," Fracharly said. "It won't be in the fiiiiile—he just did it!"

"Quite so," Ken Albemarle said, tapping his fingertips together. "If you could give me a little of the background on this, Mister Fracharly, put me in the pic—"

"Zachary," said Fracharly.

"Beg pardon?"

"The name is Zachary, not Fracharly! And it's Agent, not Mister! I am Agent Zachary of the Federal Bureau of Investigation! Here, here—" He clawed for his hip pocket.

"No need, no need," Ken Albemarle assured him. "I've seen your identification. Sorry to get the name wrong. So you're Zachary and you're…Zeedy?"

"Freedly," said Zeedy.

"Oh, my heaven," Ken Albemarle said, chuckling at himself. "A Spoonerism. Well, no harm done, I've got it now. Zachary and Freedly. Agent Zachary and Agent Freedly."

"That's right," Agent Zachary gritted, still through clenched teeth and rubescent face.

"My favorite Spoonerism," Ken Albemarle said, smiling reminiscently, "because it's an improvement really on the original, is 'flutterby' for 'butterfly. »

"Commissioner," said Agent Freedly.

"Yes?"