"Oh, you won't be able to use that," Chauncey said. "You'd have to go right up through the house, all full of people."
"Tell me about it anyway."
"I'm sorry," Chauncey said, moving closer, away from the trapdoor illumination, "but I don't understand. Tell you what about it?"
"What's it for?"
"Originally?" Chauncey shrugged. "I really don't know, but I suspect it began merely as a space between walls. I understand my house was a speakeasy at one point during Prohibition, and that's when the new doors were added."
"What do you use it for?"
"Nothing really," Chauncey said. "A few years ago, when there were some rock musicians hanging about, a certain amount of dope came in that way, but normally I have no use for the thing. Tonight was different, naturally. I don't think I should be seen with suspicious characters just before my house is robbed."
"Okay," Dortmunder said.
Chauncey said, "Now let me ask a question. What prompted the interest?"
"I wanted to know if you were a comic-book hero," Dortmunder told him.
Chauncey seemed surprised, then amused. "Ah, I see. No romantics need apply, is that it?"
"That's it."
Chauncey reached out to tap a finger against Dortmunder's upper arm, which Dortmunder hated. "Let me assure you, Mr. Dortmunder," he said, "I am no romantic."
"Good," said Dortmunder.
Chapter 8
One of the regulars was flat on his back atop the bar at the O.J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue when Dortmunder and Kelp walked in on Thursday evening. He was holding a damp filthy bar rag to his face, and three other regulars were discussing with Rollo the best way to treat a nosebleed. "You put an ice cube down the back of his neck," one said.
"You do and I'll flumfle your numble," the sufferer said, his threat lost in the folds of the bar rag.
"Give him a tourniquet," another regular suggested.
The first regular frowned. "Where?"
While the regulars surveyed the body of their stricken comrade for a place to put an anti-nosebleed tourniquet, Rollo came down the bar, nodded at Dortmunder and Kelp over his impaired customer's steel-toed work boots, and said, "How you doing?"
"Better than him," Dortmunder said.
"He'll be okay." Rollo dismissed the Death-of-Montcalm scene with a shrug. "Your vodka-and-red-wine is here, your sherry is here, your beer-and-salt is here."
"We're the last," Dortmunder said.
Rollo nodded hello to Kelp. "Nice to see you again."
"Nice to be back," Kelp told him.
Rollo went off to make their drinks, and Dortmunder and Kelp watched the first-aid team. One of the regulars was now trying to stuff paper bar coasters into the bleeder's nose, while another one was trying to get the poor bastard to count backwards from one hundred. "That's for hiccups," said the third.
"No no," said the second, "you drink out of the wrong side of the glass for hiccups."
"No, that's for when you faint."
"No no no, when you faint you put your head between your knees."
"Wrong. If somebody faints, you slap their face."
"You do and you'll stumbun with me," said the patient, who now had bar rag and paper coasters in his mouth.
"You're crazy," the second regular told the third. "You slap somebody's face if they've got hysterics."
"No," said the third regular, "if somebody's got hysterics, you have to keep them warm. Or is it cold?"
"Neither. That's for shock. You keep them warm for shock. Or cold."
"No, I've got it," the third regular said. "You keep them warm for hysterics, and you keep them cold if they've got a burn."
"Don't you know anything?" asked the second regular. "For a burn you put butter on it."
"Now I know!" the third regular cried. "Butter's for a nosebleed!"
Everybody stopped what they were doing to stare at him, even the bleeder. The first regular, his hands full of paper coasters, said, "Butter's for a nosebleed?"
"You stuff butter up the nose! Rollo, give us some butter!"
"You won't dumrumbin my nose!"
"Butter," said the second regular in disgust. "It's ice he needs. Rollo!"
Rollo, ignoring the cries for butter and ice, carried a tray past the invalid's feet and slid it across the bar toward Dortmunder. It contained a bottle of Amsterdam Liquor Store bourbon, two empty glasses with ice, and a glass containing, no doubt, vodka-and-red-wine. "See you later," he said.
"Right." Dortmunder reached for the tray, but Kelp got to it first, picking it up with such eagerness to be of help that the bourbon bottle rocked back and forth, and would have gone over if Dortmunder hadn't steadied it.
"Thanks," Kelp said.
"Yeah," Dortmunder said, and led the way toward the back room.
But not directly. They had to stop for a second so Kelp could throw in his own contribution with the medics. "What you do for a nosebleed," he told them, "is you take two silver coins and put them on both sides of his nose."
The regulars all stopped squabbling among themselves to frown at this outsider. One of them, with great dignity, pointed out, "There haven't been any silver coins in circulation in this country since 1965."
"Oh," said Kelp. "Well, that is a problem."
"Sixty-six," said another regular.
Dortmunder, several paces ahead, looked back at Kelp to say, "Are you coming?"
"Right." Kelp hurried in Dortmunder's wake.
As they went past POINTERS and SETTERS, Dortmunder said, "Now, remember what I told you. Tiny Bulcher won't be happy about you because you're costing him five grand, so just be quiet and let me do the talking."
"Definitely," Kelp said.
Dortmunder glanced at him, but said nothing more, and then went through the green door and into the back room, where Stan Murch and Roger Chefwick and Tiny Bulcher were all seated at the green-felt-topped table, with Tiny Bulcher saying, "…so I went to his hospital room and broke his other arm."
Chefwick and Murch, who had been gazing at Bulcher like sparrows at a snake, looked up with quick panicky smiles when Dortmunder and Kelp came in. "Well, there you are!" Chefwick cried, with a kind of mad glitter in his eyes, and Murch actually spread his arms in false camaraderie, announcing, "Hail, hail, the gang's all here!"
"That's right," Dortmunder said.
Talking more rapidly than usual, his words running together in his haste, Murch said, "I did a new route entirely, that's why I'm so early, I was coming from Queens, I took the Grand Central almost to the Triborough–"
Meanwhile, Kelp was putting the tray on the table and placing Bulcher's fresh drink in front of him, cheerily saying "There you go. You're Tiny Bulcher, aren't you?"
"Yeah," Bulcher said. "And who are you?"
"–then I got off, and turned left under the El, and, uh…" And Murch ran down, becoming aware of the new tension in the room as Kelp, still cheery, answered Bulcher's question.
"I'm Andy Kelp. We met once seven or eight years ago, a little jewelry-store job up in New Hampshire."
Bulcher gave Kelp his flat look. "Did I like you?"
"Sure," Kelp said, taking the chair to Bulcher's left. "You called me pal."
"I did, huh?" Bulcher turned to Dortmunder. "What's my pal doing here?"
"He's in," Dortmunder said.
"Oh, yeah?" Bulcher looked around at Murch and Chefwick, then back at Dortmunder. "Then who's out?"
"Nobody. It's a five-man string now."
"It is, huh?" Bulcher nodded, glancing down at his fresh vodka-and-red-wine as though there might be some sort of explanation engraved on the glass. Looking at Dortmunder again, he said, "Where does his cut come from?"
Same as everybody else's. We'll get twenty thousand a man."
"Uh huh." Bulcher sat back – the chair squealed in fear – and brooded at Kelp, whose cheery expression was beginning to wilt. "So," said Bulcher, "you're my five thousand dollar pal, are you?"