Why Me?

"You did fine," Mologna told him. "We picked up every word. It wasn't your fault about that goddam CB. You may be happy to hear we towed that son of a bitch's car away and slapped a reckless drivin charge on him, just to relieve our feelins."

"They're go

"No, they won't, Benjy," Cappelletti said, and told Mologna, "I promised him the protection of the Department."

"Well, sure," Mologna said.

"But this time," Cappelletti said, "we really got to do it."

Mologna frowned. "What are you tellin me, Tony?"

"This time," Cappelletti explained, "we don't have just one mob or half a dozen ex-partners looking for a guy. Every professional crook in New York is looking for Benjy Klopzik." (Klopzik groaned.) "If they find him, they'll never trust the Police Department again."

"Ah," Mologna said. "I see what you mean."

Zachary, sitting firmly like an FBI man, said, "Of course, the Bureau has considerable experiential knowledge in this sort of area: new identities, jobs, a new life in a completely different part of the country. We could—"

"No!" cried Klopzik.

Mologna looked at him. "You don't want help?"

"Not from the FBI! That program of theirs, that's just a delay of sentence! Everybody the FBI gives a new identity, the first thing you know the guy's been buried under the new name."

"Oh, now," Zachary said, offended on the Bureau's behalf. "I'll admit we've had a few problems from time to time, but there's no point overstating the case."

Mologna shook his head, seeing from Klopzik's anguished face that the little man would not be dissuaded. "All right, Klopzik," he said. "What do you want?"

"I don't wa

"What do you want?"

"Plastic surgery," Klopzik said, so promptly that it was clear he'd been thinking about this rather intently. "And a new name, a new identity—driver's license and all that. And a nice soft job with decent money and not much to do—maybe in the Parks Department. And I can't go back to my old place, so I need a nice rent-controlled apartment and new furniture and a color TV…and a dishwasher!"

"Klopzik," Mologna said, "you want to stay in New York? Right here where they're lookin for you?"

"Sure, Francis," Cappelletti said. "I think it's an okay idea. This is the last place in the world they'll expect to find him. Anywhere else, he'll stick out like a sore thumb."

"He is a sore thumb," Mologna said.

"I was kinda thinking about making a change anyway," Klopzik confided to the room at large. "Things were kinda getting out of hand."

Mologna considered him. "Is that all?"

"Yeah," Klopzik said. "Only, I don't wa

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I wa

Mologna sighed. "Craig," he said.

"Yeah." Klopzik actually gri

Mologna looked at Tony Cappelletti. "Take Mister Fitzgibbons outa here," he said.

"Come along, Benjy."

"And, and," Klopzik said, resisting Cappelletti's tugging hand, staring with wild-eyed hope at Mologna, getting it all out, the whole big, beautiful, suddenly-realizable dream, "and tell the plastic surgeon I wa

"Get it outa here," Mologna told Tony Cappelletti, "or I'll start the plastic surgery right now."

But that was all; Klopzik had shot his wad. Exhausted, satiated, happy, he allowed himself to be led away.

In the silence following upon Klopzik/Fitzgibbons' departure, Mologna looked bleakly at Zachary and Freedly and said, "That Dortmunder's got a lot to answer for."

"I'm looking forward to questioning him," Zachary said, getting the implication wrong.

"Oh, so am I," Mologna said.

Freedly said, "There isn't any doubt, is there, Chief Inspector?"

Mologna frowned at him. "Doubt? Dortmunder did it, all right. There's no doubt."

"No, I mean that we'll get him."

Mologna's heavy mouth opened in a slow smile. "At a rough estimate," he said, "I would guess there are currently four hundred thousand men, women, and children in the City of New York looking for John Archibald Dortmunder. Don't worry, Mister Freedly, we'll get him."

38

"I'm a dead man," Dortmunder said.

"Always the pessimist," Kelp said.

Around them hummed thousands—no, millions—of silent conversations, whistling and whispering through the cables; unfaithful husbands making assignations all unknowingly a millimicrometer away from their all-unknowing faithless wives; business deals being closed an eyelash distance from the unsuspecting subjects who'd be ruined by them; truth and lies flashing along cheek by jowl in parallel lanes, never meeting; love and business, play and torment, hope and the end of hope all spun together inside the cables from the teeming telephones of Manhattan. But of all those chattering voices Dortmunder and Kelp heard nothing—only the distant, arrhythmic plink of dripping water.

They were truly under the city now, burrowed down so far beneath the towers that the occasional rumble of a nearby subway seemed to come from above them. The hunted man, like the hunted animal, when he goes to ground goes under the ground.

Beneath the City of New York squats another city, mostly nasty, brutish, and short. And dark, and generally wet. The crisscrossing tu

Down into this netherworld Kelp had led Dortmunder, jingling and jangling with his telephones and lines and gizmos, down into an endless round pipe four feet in diameter, ru

So they had light, they had heat, they had food and drink and reading matter, they had communication with the outside world; and still Dortmunder was gloomy. "I'm a dead man," he repeated, brooding at the piece of pizza in his hand. "And I'm already buried."

"John, John, you're safe here."

"Forever?"

"Until we think of something." Kelp used a fingertip to push pepperoni into his mouth, chewed a while, swigged some beer, and said, "One of us is bound to come up with something. You know we are. We're both clutch-hitters, John. When the going gets tough, the tough get going."