"I should think I probably had," Sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El responded, and turned to Laura Bathing to say, "Have you been in London recently?"
"Not for a year or so. Oops."
The Sheikh blandly watched her sop up red wine with her most recent napkin, while the black hand and white-clad arm of their host's serving boy reached through between them to pick up the shards of wine glass. "I was there two weeks ago," the Sheikh said.
"Watch out, you clumsy fool!" Laura shrieked at the servant. "You'll get glass in my meat!"
"I was buying a house in Belgravia," the Sheikh went on, unperturbed. His softly oiled chuckle came and went. "The poor English," he said pleasantly. "They can't afford their own capital any more, you know. They're all living in Woking and Hendon."
The Prince Elector, meanwhile, was trying to tell his joke to Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville, who was ignoring him while grimly watching her husband, MuMu, thrust himself upon cosmetics heiress and frump Martha Whoopley. "What I've always felt about St. Louis," MuMu was saying, "is that it's somehow more real than most of the places I know. Do you feel that?"
Martha Whoopley used her tongue to clear brussels sprouts into her cheek pouches, then said, "More real? How d'ya mean?"
"After all the flitter of New York, Deauville, Paris, Rome–" MuMu gestured gracefully, candlelight sparkling on his rings and bracelets, a fraction of his collection. "All of this," he summed up. "Isn't it somehow more, more, oh I don't know, more real to get back to St. Louis?"
"I don't think it's more real," Martha said. She shoved a lot of French bread into her mouth and went on talking. "I grew up there. I always thought it stunk."
"But you still live there."
"I keep a house out by the plant. You've got to keep your eye on those manager people."
Film star and environmental activist Lance Sheath, a rugged escarpment at Martha's right, leaned toward her with his virile confidentiality, saying in the deep voice that had thrilled billions, "You oughta spend some time in Los Angeles. Get to know the future."
"We have a packaging facility in Los Angeles," Martha told him. "Out in Encino. I don't like it much out there. All that white stucco hurts my eyes."
Prince Otto was finishing his joke to whoever would listen. It concerned a Jewish woman checking in at the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, asking for bellboys to get the luggage from the car, and then requesting a wheelchair for her husband. "'Of course,'" said the desk clerk," concluded the Prince. "'I'm terribly sorry, can't your husband walk?' 'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank God he doesn't have to.'"
While the Prince laughed heartily at his own joke, Chauncey's mind delivered him, intact, a variant beginning, "A sheikh's wife enters the Dorchester Hotel in London–" and ending, "'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank Allah he doesn't have to.'" Should he wait ten minutes or so, and then straight faced tell that variant? No; revenge enough was already under way.
Meanwhile, Mavis Orfizzi was clutching her own bony breast in assumed horror at her husband's gaucherie. "I can't stand it any more," she cried, for the benefit of the table at large, and surged to her feet, knocking over her chair, and so upstaging Laura Bathing that one gave off screeching at Thomas Jefferson, the serving boy, and gaped in astonishment. "Otto," Mavis announced over the other guests' heads, "you are as clumsy and oafish at table as you are in bed."
"In bed?" demanded the Prince Elector, stung out of his raconteur's role, "I'm afraid to touch you in bed for fear of cutting myself," he declared.
"I can't stand it!" Mavis cried out, but then, apparently realizing she'd become reduced to repeating herself, she clutched her brow with both hands, screamed, "No more!" and fled the room.
Her intent didn't occur to Chauncey until, in the astounded hush at the table following her exit, all at once be heard from afar the busy whirr of machinery. Elevator machinery. "No!" he cried, half rising from his seat, arm stretching out toward the doorway through which the damned posturing woman had made her melodramatic exit. But it was too late. Too late. Arm dropping to his side, Chauncey sagged back into his chair, and from the distance the sound of whirring stopped.
Chapter 14
"I've been shafted," Dortmunder said.
Well, he had. He'd moved as fast as he could to the metal ladder rungs at the rear of the elevator shaft, but there just hadn't been time to get up and out of the way. The elevator remorselessly rose, like an engine of destruction in an old Saturday-afternoon serial, and before he could climb a single rung the thing had overtaken him, pinning him to the wall.
It was those damn bourbon bottles that trapped him. The top of the elevator had a lip around the edge, an overhang which had brushed its way up the back of his legs, shoved his rump aside, grazed his shoulder blades, and bunked him gently on the back of the head before halting just above him. There was a bit more room below the lip, but when he tried to climb the rungs to freedom he discovered that the bottles under his jacket gave him just that much extra thickness, front to back, and he couldn't clear the goddam lip. Nor did he have enough room to use his hands to open the jacket and remove the bottles. He could sidle up the rungs, bit by bit, until his head and shoulders were above the top of the elevator, but at that point he was stuck.
From above, the harsh whisper of Kelp floated down: "Come on! Dortmunder, come on!"
He looked up, but couldn't get his head back far enough to see the top of the shaft. Speaking to the concrete wall, he half whispered back, "I can't."
And then, from somewhere not too far away, a woman screamed.
"Terrific," Dortmunder muttered. Louder, he called up to Kelp, "You people go on! Stash the painting!"
"But what about you?"
"Go on!" And, to end the argument, Dortmunder crab-crawled his way down the ladder rungs again, putting his head out of Kelp's sight.
By now the woman had stopped screaming, but all at once more voices sounded, male and female. Turning his head as far as possible, Dortmunder could just see an air vent, and through it the interior of the elevator, the open elevator door, and a bit of hallway. And as he looked, and listened to the raised male and female voices, one of those goddam private guards – the fat one – suddenly ran by the open elevator door.
There was only one thing to do, and Dortmunder did it. Down he went, sidling past the back wall of the elevator, down as rapidly as he could into almost impenetrable darkness, lower and lower into the elevator shaft. Because who knew when it would occur to somebody to use the goddam elevator again.
Whirrrrrrrrr.
Yike. Zip zip zip zip went Dortmunder, descending and descending, but nowhere near as fast as the elevator, whose cables shushed and binkled near his right elbow, and whose dirty black metal bottom dropped toward him like an anal retentive's worst nightmare. He could sense it above his head, dropping and dropping, inexorable, closing down and down.
Whirrrrr-clump.
It stopped. Dortmunder's head, withdrawn like a turtle's into his neck, remained a good clear quarter-inch below the bottom of the elevator as he listened to the doors chunk open and heard the resonance of feet pounding outward; one or more of the private guards, gone to report. Meaning this was not the ground floor, but the main floor above it. Good thing they hadn't gone all the way down.
"All right, all right," Dortmunder whispered to himself, "let's not panic," and immediately the question came into his mind, Why not?
Well. He struggled for an answer, and finally found one:
"Don't want to fall."
Very good. Not panicking, Dortmunder made his way down the rest of the ladder to the bottom of the shaft, which was in such utter blackness that he knew he'd arrived only when he started to reach his left foot down for the next rung, and slammed his toes into something solid at least three inches before he'd expected anything. "Ow!" he said aloud, and the well-like walls gave the word back to him.