Bad News

With his free hand, Dortmunder brushed at his face. “What, I got a smutch?”

“No,” Tiny said, coming in, moving around the table to put his glass at the place to Dortmunder’s left, “it almost looked like a smile.” He was wearing his World War I infantry coat again, which he dropped on the floor behind him, then sat down. “So what’s,” he said, picking up his glass, “with the giggling all at once? It ain’t like you.”

“Well, it coulda been I was thinking,” Dortmunder said, “that at last I know what I’m doing. Or maybe it’s just I’m somewhere at last that at least I should know what I’m doing because at least it’s the right place. Or maybe it’s just that Fitzroy and Irwin aren’t go

“So who is,” Tiny asked, “besides us?”

“Kelp, and Stan Murch, and I think Murch’s Mom.”

Tiny looked around at the table and the chairs. “You’re early,” he said, “which is right, and I’m on time.”

“So am I,” Kelp said, coming in, waving a thick manila envelope. “I brought the stuff,” he said. “Copies for all of us.” He took the chair to Dortmunder’s right, putting the envelope down there, shucking his coat, seating himself, reaching for the other glass on the tray.

“Which makes Murch late,” Tiny said. Tiny was known to disapprove of people who weren’t punctual.

“I wouldn’t be,” said a voice in the hall, approaching, “if we’d come the way I wanted to come.” Stan Murch appeared, walking briskly. “But no,” he said. “Whada they say? A boy should listen to his mother? Wrong again!”

“I couldn’t know there was go

“The accident wasn’t the point,” Murch said as he put his glass and shaker down beside Kelp. “Atlantic Avenue is the point,” he said.

“Hello, all,” Murch’s Mom said, electing to come over and sit beside Tiny instead of next to her son.

“Hello,” all said.

“Every known religion,” Murch went on, shucking out of his coat, “has some big-deal event or celebration or thing in December, and every known ethnic, too, and for every known religion and every known ethnic, there’s three other blocks of stores on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn that has everything especially for them, and in December on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, every known religion and every known ethnic is shopping, and not one in a million of those people, that came here from thousands of places that you don’t even know about, ever learned how to drive.”

Tiny said gently to Murch’s Mom, “Would you wa

“Sure,” Murch’s Mom said. “It was the accident,” she confided, and went over to shut the door.

Taking his seat, Murch said, “To drive on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in December is to make a serious statement that you don’t really wa

Tiny patted the air in Murch’s direction with one big palm. “Okay, Stan, thank you,” he said. “You weren’t that late.”

“Fine,” Murch said. “I was an obedient son, that’s what you get.”

They were all seated now as though the door were the television set they were going to watch. The chairs facing away from the door got very little use, all in all.

Dortmunder said, “Okay, what we got here, we got an ongoing situation that Murch and Murch’s Mom should be brought up-to-date on, so what it comes down to, for the benefit of the recent arrivals, we got a place to go into that’s loaded with stuff, out in the boonies, and while we’re there, we gotta get some hair from a hairbrush. Or a comb.”

Murch and his Mom continued to look at Dortmunder, who considered himself finished. Murch said, “That’s it? We’re up-to-date now?”

“I don’t feel,” Murch’s Mom said, “like I’m fully aboard here, somehow. How about you, Stanley?”

Murch, who’d forgotten about the horrors of Atlantic Avenue, shook his head and said, “No, Mom, I gotta admit. Aboard? No.”

Dortmunder sighed. “We gotta go through all this DNA and the Indians and all this?”

“I think so,” Murch’s Mom said.

“I’m feeling kind of at a loss without it,” Murch said.

Kelp said, “John, let me take a whack at it.”

“It’s all yours,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp said, “John and Tiny and me got involved with some people doing an Anastasia, and we need a right DNA sample, and it’s go

“Sounds good,” Murch said.

“I’m glad you called,” his Mom said.

Dortmunder said, “That’s it? Now you’re satisfied?”

“Well, when it’s explained,” Murch’s Mom said.

Kelp said, “Okay, what I got here is the stuff from the Thurstead Web site.” Pulling a stack of papers from his envelope, he said, “All in color, and it’s free. What we got here is a whole brand-new way to case a joint.” Dealing out stapled-together pages, he said, “We can all take a look at this place.”

The top page was a very nice color photograph of an imposing and vaguely Oriental building, made of stone blocks, different sizes and different colors, so that one wall was a kind of rusty rosy red, while the other wall you could see in this picture was more of a faded pea-soup green. The photo had been taken in the summer, and muted purple-and-gold awnings angled out over all the windows. The windows themselves were different sizes and shapes, and some of them had panes of colored glass. The roof was molasses-colored shingles, and the three onion domes were different shades of dark blue. It all came together, somehow, probably because all the colors were muted and calm.

“Some snazzy place,” Murch’s Mom decided.

Murch said, “I don’t remember ever driving past this place. Where is it?”

“Jersey,” Kelp told him. “Way out by the Delaware Water Gap. In fact, if you look at what it says under the picture, it’s inside the national park there, the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.”

Murch said, “So what’ve you got there, park rangers?”

“No,” Kelp said, “they were there before the park went in, so they’re like grandfathered. Read about it. On page two is very nice.”

They all read about it, how Russell Thurbush, the famous painter, had designed and built the house high on a hilltop overlooking the Delaware River, how he’d filled it with valuable art and stuff he brought back from his worldwide travels, how it was on the National Register of Historic Places and was maintained by a nonprofit private foundation run by Thurbush’s great-granddaughter and her husband, Viveca and Frank Quinlan, who live on the property. Most of the downstairs was open to the public, with guided tours, from April until November.

“So it’s shut now,” Murch’s Mom said.

“Another reason we case it on the Web,” Kelp pointed out.

Page two, as Kelp had promised, was very nice. Among the paragraphs about the art and the history and the architectural i

The Thurstead Foundation maintains its own private security arrangements, with support available from the New Jersey State Police. Motion-activated floodlights encircle the house. In addition, security cameras are mounted in trees about the property, monitored at all times in the security office in the barn, just behind the visitor center.

“How do you like that?” Kelp said. “They tell us their security.”

Tiny said, “They don’t say what’s inside the house.”

“That’s on page three.”

Page two had been almost completely print, with only one small photo of a hookah at center left, part of Russell Thurbush’s worldwide swag, but page three was half-devoted to a photo of a room so crammed with art, paintings in big frames all over the walls, fur rugs all over the floors, whatnots and knickknacks all over every flat surface, ornate furniture and lamps like hussars, that it was a true relief for the eye to move on down to the words, in which the key sentences were: “Although the private quarters have been modernized, the areas open to the public have been left exactly as Russell Thurbush knew them. Modern heat is delivered through the original grates, and even electricity has not been added to these spaces.”