“Uh-huh,” said Rollo.
Stan picked up his beer and his salt, and he and Kelp walked together down the bar, past the regulars, who were now discussing whether the alien yuppies had come to earth for tofu or had they brought it with them. Along the way, Stan said, “The Williamsburg Bridge is a menace. The reason I’m late, I hadda come to Manhattan twice.”
As they went back past the end of the bar and down the hall past the two doors marked with dog silhouettes labeled POINTERS and SETTERS and past the phone booth with the string dangling from the quarter slot, Kelp said, “Twice? You forget something?”
“I forgot the Williamsburg Bridge,” Stan told him. “I came over the Manhattan Bridge—sensible, right?”
“Sure.”
“Could not get north in Manhattan,” Stan said, “not with the mess around the Williamsburg. So I went south, over the Brooklyn Bridge back to Brooklyn, took the BQE to the Midtown Tunnel, and that’s how come I’m here at all.”
“Quick thinking,” Kelp said, and opened the green door at the end of the hall.
“It’s what I do,” Stan said. “Drive.”
They went through the doorway together into a small square room with a concrete floor. Beer and liquor cases stacked to the ceiling all around hid the walls, leaving only a small open space in the middle. In that space stood a battered old round table with a stained green felt top. Half a dozen chairs were placed around this table, and the only light came from one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.
Seated at this table were Dortmunder and Tom and Tiny, who was just saying, “Turns out he was right. His head was too wide to fit through the bars. Not all the way through.”
“Hee-hee,” said Tom.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Tiny said.
Tiny and Tom considered each other. Dortmunder looked over at the doorway with the expression of a man hoping for an urgent phone call to take him away from here. “There you guys are,” he said. “You’re late.”
“Don’t ask,” Kelp told him.
“Williamsburg Bridge,” said Stan.
“Well, come on in,” Dortmunder said, “and let’s get to it. Stan Murch, you know Tiny.”
“Sure,” Stan said. “How you doin, Tiny?”
“Keepin fit.”
“And this,” Dortmunder said reluctantly, “is Tom Jimson. He’s the source of the job.”
“Hiya,” Stan said.
“The thirty-thousand-dollar driver,” Tom said, and did his chuckle noise.
Stan looked pleasantly at Dortmunder. “Am I supposed to get that?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Kelp and Stan took chairs at the table, Kelp sitting next to Dortmunder, who had in front of him two glasses—one of them sparkly clean—and a muddy bottle with a label reading AMSTERDAM LIQUOR STORE BOURBON — “OUR OWN BRAND.” Kelp took the bottle and the clean glass and poured himself a restorative.
Meantime, Stan was saying, “So you’ve got something, huh, John? And you need a driver.”
“This time,” Dortmunder said, “we’re gonna do it right.”
Stan looked alert. “This time?”
“It’s kind of an ongoing story we’ve got here,” Dortmunder told him.
Kelp put his glass down, smacked his lips, and said to Stan, “It’s trains again.”
“Let’s do it from the beginning, okay, Andy?” Dortmunder said.
“Sure,” Kelp said.
Stan sprinkled a little salt into his beer and looked around, expectant.
FORTY-ONE
Stan Murch and his Mom rode around Brooklyn all morning in Mom’s cab, with the off-duty light on. Having to drive this vehicle during her leisure hours, when she was already behind the wheel of the damn thing eight to ten hours a day, put Mom in a crusty mood. “I don’t see it,” she kept saying as they drove through the sunny spring day. “I don’t see the why so picky. A car is a car.”
“Not this time,” Stan told her. “This time it’s a gift. A gift has to be something special, Mom, you know that. Hondas and Acuras he’s got. Max has an entire used-car lot of Toyotas and Datsuns. Whenever I bring him an Isuzu or a Hyundai, he nods and he looks bored and he says, ‘Put it over there.’ ”
“He pays you, Stanley,” his Mom pointed out. “It’s a business relationship. You bring him cars in off the street, and he pays you for them. Bored and excited aren’t what it’s about.”
“But this time,” Stan told her, “I don’t want to be paid. This time I want a favor. So this time I can’t show up with a Chevy Celebrity Eurosport or a Saab. This time I gotta attract Max’s attention.”
His Mom looked all around to be sure there weren’t any cops in the vicinity and made an illegal right turn on red into Flatbush Avenue. “On the other hand,” she said.
“You don’t have to run lights, Mom,” Stan told her. “We’re not in any hurry.”
“I am,” Mom corrected him. “I’m in a hurry to get out of this car and into a tub. And you interrupted me when I was speaking.”
“Sorry.”
“What I was about to say,” Mom went on, “was on the other hand, you don’t want to give your friend Maximilian a car that’s so special and customized and different that the owner can recognize it so well that Max gets put in jail. That’s a gift he doesn’t need.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Stan said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Then look at it,” Mom said, applying the brakes and pointing.
They had just passed through Grand Army Plaza and were running along Prospect Park West, with the park on their left and the fine old stone apartment buildings on their right. Some well-to-do people live in this neighborhood, and one of them—or, more likely, a visitor to one of them—had left his dove-gray Aston Martin parked at the curb in the sunlight.
“Well, well,” Stan said as his Mom brought the cab to a stop beside this gift. “Right you are, Mom.”
“Make sure, Stanley.”
So Stan got out of the cab, and the first thing he saw was that the Aston Martin was parked next to a fire hydrant. And the second thing he saw was the red, white, and blue diplomat license plate; diplomatic immunity, as the frustrated cops well know, extends also to fire hydrants.
Stan grinned at the plate and turned back to the cab to lean in the passenger window and say, “It’s okay, Mom, it’s a diplomat. The cops won’t even write this one down.”
“See you at Maximilian’s,” Mom said, and took off as Stan brought out his bunch of keys from his pocket and turned back to the Aston Martin.
The fifth key did the trick, and the same key worked in the ignition. Stan swung the Aston Martin out away from the fire hydrant, made his U-turn, went back up through Grand Army Plaza, and headed east northeast across Brooklyn and Queens to Maximilian’s Used Cars, near the Nassau County line. When he got there, he took the side street beside the gaudily flagged car lot and turned in at the anonymous driveway behind it. He stopped in an area of tall scraggly weeds, flanked by the white clapboard backs of garages. Climbing out of the Aston Martin, patting it affectionately on the hood, he stepped through an unlocked gate in a chain-link fence and followed a path through more weeds and shrubbery to the rear of Maximilian’s office, a small pink stucco structure with a shabbily California look. Going through the rear door into a gray-paneled office, Stan nodded to a skinny severe hatchet-faced woman typing at one of the two nondescript desks and said, “Hi, Harriet. Where’s Max?”
The woman went on typing, as though her hands were separate creatures with an independent existence of their own, while her head turned and she smiled and said, “Hi, Stan. Your Mom’s waiting out front. And Max is out there selling.”
“Not to my Mom,” Stan said.
Harriet laughed. “He wouldn’t even try,” she said, and went back to observing her hands type.
Stan opened the connecting door to the outer office, stepped through, and looked out the window at the lot, filled with Colts and Golfs. Beyond them, Mom’s yellow cab sat at the curb in the sunlight. To the right was Max, over where the poorest, cheapest, most hopeless cars were kept, the cars with!!!ULTRASPECIAL!!! and!!!CREAMPUFF!!! and STEAL THIS CAR!!! written on their windshields in whitewash. Max was a big old man with heavy jowls and thin white hair who looked as though he’d been put out there in the sunlight by mistake; a windowless room with damp industrial carpet on the floor seemed more appropriate. But there he stood, glaring in the sunshine, hands on hips, dressed in his usual dark vest, hanging open over a white shirt smudged from leaning against used cars, plus shapeless shaggy black trousers and shoes like loaves of black bread.