Why Me?

"Terrific."

"I got—You know how I just dialed your number?"

"With your nose?"

"Heh, heh. That's pretty good. Listen, lemme tell you. I got these cards. I got this card with holes punched in it for your telephone number, and I put the card in a slot in this phone here, and the card dials the number."

"More efficient," Dortmunder said.

"You got it. I got phones now all—You know where I'm calling you from?"

"The closet?"

"The bathroom."

Dortmunder closed his eyes. "Let's talk about something else," he said.

"You know, I was home here when you called yesterday." Kelp sounded a bit aggrieved.

"Not according to the machine."

"I kept trying to tell you it was me."

"You said you were the machine."

"No, afterward. Did you do the thing?"

"Yeah."

"Who with?"

"Single-o."

Kelp chuckled, and said, "You didn't do the big jewel thing out to Ke

Skoukakis Credit Jewelers was near Ke

"In the—John, are you—" Guk-ick, guk-ick, guk-ick. "Oop! Hold on."

"No," said Dortmunder, and hung up, and went back to the kitchen and turned the heat on under the kettle. He rinsed his breakfast dishes, and the water was just boiling when the phone rang. He went ahead and made coffee, added lots of milk and sugar, stirred, put the spoon in the sink, walked back to the living room, and picked up the phone on the fourteenth ring. "Yeah."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I was making coffee."

"You need an extension in the kitchen."

"No, I don't. Who was your other call?"

"A wrong number."

"Good thing you didn't miss it."

"Well, anyway. Where were you last night?"

"Where you said. Out by Ke

"Come on, John," Kelp said. "Don't milk the joke."

"Milk what joke?"

Sounding exasperated, Kelp said, "You did not steal some twenty-million-dollar ruby from Ke

"That's right," Dortmunder said. "Who said I did?"

"You did. I make a joke about the big heist at Ke

"I was out near Ke

"Not near Ke

"Oh. It was a misunderstanding."

"So what you hit was a—"

"Andy."

"What?"

"You maybe aren't the only one who puts little extras on their phones."

"There's something you want?"

"You ever hear of wiretap?"

"Who do you want tapped?"

"Nobody. But let's just pretend, just for fun, let's just make believe the police or somebody have tapped your phone or my phone or whatever."

"For what?"

"Oh, to find out if either one of us happened to commit a crime recently."

"Oh. I see what you mean."

"Also," Dortmunder said, "there is no such thing as a twenty-million-dollar ruby."

"Valuable," Kelp said. "Priceless. It's in the papers and on television and everything."

"I wasn't thinking that big last night," Dortmunder said, and the phone went guk-ick, guk-ick, guk-ick. "That's it," Dortmunder said. "Good-bye."

"John! Just hold on a second!"

Dortmunder hung up and carried his coffee back to the kitchen and sat at the table and studied the watch some more. 6:10:42:08.

The phone rang.

Dortmunder turned the watch around and around in his hands. He sipped coffee.

The phone went on ringing.

Dortmunder hit the watch against the tabletop, then pressed the button on its side: 6:10:42:09. "Ah-hah," Dortmunder said. He looked at the clock on the kitchen wall—eleven-fifteen, more or less—and waited while the sweep second hand went halfway round the face. (The phone still rang.) Then he pressed the button on the side of the watch. 6:10:42:09.

"Mm," said Dortmunder. He hit the watch against the tabletop, pressed the button. 6:10:42:10. Hit; press. 6:10:42:11.

Fine. If you started at ten minutes after six, and if you hit this watch against the tabletop six thousand times a minute, it'd keep perfect time. Leaving the watch on the table, Dortmunder went to the living room, walked past the ringing phone, put on his other jacket—the one with no tools in it-put the plastic bag with last night's proceeds in his pocket, and left the apartment.

8

You don't get to be top cop in the great city of New York by squattin back on your heels and spittin between your knees; no, sir. You get to be top cop in the great city of New York by standin up four-square with your fists at the ready and smash in the face of every pest and nuisance as gets in your way, bedad. And by then you're makin enough money—with your salary and what dibs of undeclared cash happen to fall from time to time into your open palm—so you no longer have to live in that smelly awful city of New York at all any more, but can have a lovely big house in Bay Shore, out in Suffolk County on Long Island, a nice water-frontage house lookin out at Great South Bay. And you can have your own power boat (called Lucille, after your wife, to keep her quiet), and three ungrateful children, and a summer cottage over on the beach at Fire Island, and a beer belly, and the satisfaction of knowin you've done about the best any man could do with the hand you were dealt.

Nine-thirty a.m. Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna (pronounced Maloney), having driven into the city three hours earlier than his usual habit, and having been rigorously briefed for the last thirty minutes, followed his beer belly into the big conference room at Headquarters (One Police Plaza, downtown behind City Hall, a lovely building, all tall and dark brick, built like a giant pinup), and got introduced to a lot of damn new faces. There was no way a man could remember all those names, but fortunately Chief Inspector Mologna didn't have to; he was accompanied by Leon, his secretary, whose job it was to remember things like that and who happened to be very good at it.

But what a lot of people had crowded into this conference room for this conference. Most of them men, most of them white, but here and there women, here and there black. In addition to Chief Inspector Mologna and Leon and two detectives from New York's finest, there were also representatives from the Housing Police, the Transit Police, the DA's office, the State CID, the FBI, the CIA, the United States Mission to the United Nations, United States Customs, the Chicago Natural History Museum, Turkish Intelligence, and the Turkish Mission to the United Nations. The first fifteen or twenty minutes of the meeting was just spent with people introducing themselves to one another. "Pronounced Maloney," Mologna kept saying, and relied on Leon to remember who everybody was.

An FBI man named—Mologna raised an eyebrow at Leon, seated to his left at the long oval conference table, who wrote Zachary on his yellow pad—Zachary got the ball rolling by standing up and telling them what they all already knew: some son of a bitch had stolen the Byzantine Fire, and some other son of a bitch had stolen it from the first son of a bitch. Zachary had a graphic display—charts and blown-up photographs one after another on an easel—and a pointer, and a kind of stiff mechanical way of pointing at things with the pointer, as though he weren't quite a human being but was a model put together by the Walt Disney people. A Walt Disney FBI man. "We know," this fellow (squint at legal pad) Zachary said, "that the first group was Greek Cypriot. Several individuals are already in custody, and the rest should be rounded up soonest. So far, no hard information is available on the second group, though several theories have been advanced."

You just bet they have, Mologna thought. He caught Leon's eye and they shared a millisecond twinkle. It was amazing how their minds meshed like that. Here was Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna (pronounced Maloney), 53 years of age, a God-fearing white male Long Island Irishman, and be damned if the person in all of life whose thought processes most closely matched his own wasn't some damn 28-year-old smart-aleck faggot nigger called Sergeant Leon Windrift. (Had Leon been only homosexual, he would have been bounced out of New York's finest long ago. Had he been only black, he'd be a patrolman forever. Being a faggot and a nigger, he could neither be fired nor kept in some damn precinct, which is why he'd risen so rapidly through the ranks to a sergeantcy and a job at Headquarters, where Mologna had first noticed him and stolen him for himself.)