Bad News

All three left Guilderpost’s room, and he tested the knob to be certain the door was locked. The black Econoline van with dubious California plates waited in front of them. Irwin’s Plymouth Voyager with the equally dubious South Carolina plates, in which he would follow the van, stood next over, in front of Irwin’s room.

Little Feather nodded at them and said, “See you at breakfast.”

Irwin said, “You don’t want a report tonight?”

Guilderpost believed Irwin actually had designs on Little Feather, which just shows how recklessly advanced degrees are handed out these days.

Little Feather offered Irwin her version of a smile; a faint temporary crackling in the glaze. “There isn’t any doubt, is there?”

“None,” Guilderpost answered. “We’ll place grandpa where he can be of help, use and deal with these final assistants as we have the others, and then we’ll be off, at long last, to collect our reward.”

“Goody,” Little Feather said.

4

For the life of him, Dortmunder couldn’t figure out how he’d been bamboozled into this. Standing on the southeast corner of Thirty-seventh and Lex at one in the morning, waiting to be driven out to a cemetery to dig a grave. And then undig it again. It wasn’t right. It was menial, it was undignified, and it didn’t fit his history, his pattern, his MO. “I’m overqualified for this,” he complained.

Kelp, waiting cheerfully beside him as though ditch digging were the height of his ambition, said, “John, it’s the easiest grand we’ll ever take in.”

“It’s manual labor,” Dortmunder said.

“Yes, I know,” Kelp agreed, “that’s the downside. But look at it this way. It’s also illegal.”

“It’s more manual than illegal,” Dortmunder said, and a black Econoline van came to a stop in front of him. The driver’s door was at the curbside, and out of it immediately popped a portly man in a dark gray three-piece suit, white shirt, narrow dark tie. He had completely tamed white wavy hair, like a lawn in Co

“Andy!” this fellow said, with the kind of rich voice that goes with that kind of rich hair, and stuck out a portly hand.

“Fitzroy,” agreed Kelp, and they shook, and then Kelp said, “Fitzroy, this is John. John, Fitzroy.”

“Harya.”

“How do you do,” said Fitzroy, with a gleaming but brisk smile, and when offered his hand, Dortmunder found it warm and pulpy, like a boneless chicken breast in a sock.

Kelp said, “Right on time.”

“Of course,” Fitzroy said, and to Dortmunder, he said, “I’m sorry, John, you’ll have to ride in back.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder said. At this point, what difference did it make?

Fitzroy led the way to the back of the van and opened one of the doors there. “Nothing to sit on but the floor, I’m afraid.”

Naturally. “That’s okay,” Dortmunder said, and bent forward to climb in on all fours, feeling the rough carpeting beneath his palms.

“All set?” Fitzroy asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer, instead slamming the door the instant Dortmunder’s heels had cleared the area.

Dortmunder propped his left forearm on a wooden box taking up most of the space back here, so he could scrunch around and get into a seated position, legs folded in an extremely loose version of the lotus position. Then he looked around himself in the dimness.

There were no windows back here, only up front, the windshield and the windows in the doors flanking the front seats. In this space back here were two shovels, a coil of thick rope, some other stuff, and this long box he was leaning his forearm on, which was . . .

A coffin. Very dark brown wood, scuffed-looking, with pocked brass handles and a faint redolence about it like basements, like a greenhouse in winter, like freshly turned earth, like, well, like a grave.

Dortmunder took his forearm off the box and put it on his knee. Of course; this was the coffin that would go into the grave once they took the original inhabitant out. And I, Dortmunder thought, get to ride out to the cemetery with him. Great.

The other two got into the front of the van, and Fitzroy made the left onto Lex, then the left onto Thirty-sixth, and headed for the Midtown Tu

It was May’s fault, Dortmunder decided. So long as she’d been against him taking this job, it’d been easy to say no. But when she came to the conclusion there was something mystical or something about this being exactly a thousand dollars, the exact same amount as the profit he’d had to leave behind in the Speedshop, there was no hope for him. He wasn’t a ditchdigger, he wasn’t a grave robber, and he wasn’t a guy given to manual labor, but none of that mattered. It was the thousand dollars coming around again, so he was supposed to grab it.

All right, so he’d do it and get it over with, and come back with the thousand, and never touch a shovel again for the rest of his life, so help him. In the meantime, Kelp and Fitzroy sat up front, jabbering about how useful the Internet was—sure, you could meet people like Fitzroy Guilderpost there, with shovels—while Dortmunder and the fellow beside him in the back had nothing to say to each other.

Dortmunder found, if he raised his knees and put his crossed forearms on them, and then rested his chin on his forearms, he could look out the windshield past those two happy heads and watch the city unreel. Also, in this position, he could watch their recent history in the large rearview mirrors beyond both side windows; large because there was no interior mirror, since there were no windows at the back of the van.

They were approaching the tu

They ran through the tu

So he sat up straighter, ignored the rearview mirrors, and broke into the Internet conversation—they’re doing E-mail in person up there—to say, “This box here come a long way?”

Fitzroy automatically looked at where the interior mirror would be, to see the passenger in back, then looked out at the tu

“Oh, yeah? A long way. You don’t have to, uh, refrigerate it or anything?”

“No, that’s old in there,” Fitzroy assured him. “That’s almost seventy years old. Nothing more’s going to change in there.”

“I guess not. And the one we’re switching? That’s old, too?”

“Two or three years older, in fact,” Fitzroy said. “You won’t mind, John, if I don’t tell you the entire operation.”

“Not me,” Dortmunder said. “I’m just making conversation.”

But Fitzroy was full of his caper, whatever it was, and both wanted to talk about it and didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s the linchpin, I’ll tell you that much,” he said. Then they were out of the tu

“Sure,” Dortmunder said. Polite guy, anyway.

It took Fitzroy, being portly, a while to get at his wallet, and then to hand over some bills to the attendant and wait for his change. Dortmunder leaned his chin down to his knees again to look in the outside mirrors, and the car with the one fainter headlight was moving very slowly toward another open booth. Very slowly. That driver must be trying to get to his money before he reached the booth. The car was a gray Plymouth Voyager, a passenger van, the kind of suburban vehicle mostly used for hauling Little League teams around and about, though this one had only the driver, a guy, indistinct inside there.