"By the Lord Harry you're a rude fellow," declared the drenched Scot, and he hauled off and punched Bulcher a good one on the ear. So Bulcher hit him back, and for good measure he then hit the other one, who staggered back into three more, spilling their drinks.
By the time Kelp got through the doorway the fight was merrily blazing away. People who had no idea what the brawl was all about were determinedly slugging people who had even less connection with it. "Well, for God's sake," Kelp said, standing in the doorway, gaping at a scene of surging fury and flashing knees and wildly swinging fists. Battle cries whooped and wailed above the fray, and somebody's rock-hard hand glanced off Kelp's forehead, causing him to stagger backward and sit down heavily on the steps.
What a view. In his dark stairway, there was a kind of muffled quality to the noise, and the belligerents staggering and swirling by the open doorway were like something in a 3-D movie. Kelp sat there a minute or two, bemused by the scene, until he suddenly realized that the white sticklike object he was from time to time seeing lifted in the air and then smashed down on one or another head was in fact the rolled-up painting, wielded in absentminded irritation by Tiny Bulcher.
"Not the painting!" Kelp came boiling out of the stairwell once more, plowing and bashing his way across the battlefield toward Bulcher, ignoring every buffet and deflection along the way, finally lunging upward like one of the figures in the Iwo Jima flag photo (which was posed, by the way, a later reconstruction; it's so hard to tell fiction from fact these days), wrenching the tubed painting out of Bulcher's great fist, screaming in his ear, "Not the painting!" and then abruptly bending double as about eleven different Scotsmen all let him have it at once in the breadbasket.
What a different perspective you get on the floor amid a sea of swirling kilts. Knees are knobbly, huge, dangerous-looking things, but over there was a pair of black stovepipes; Chefwick, in trousers. Kelp forced himself upward, climbing up handy sporrans to find that Bulcher had been swept away but indeed Chefwick was over there to the left, pressed defensively against the wall, clutching his black bag to his chest with both arms. Even in the middle of the fray, people recognized the true noncombatant when they see him, and so Chefwick remained like a rock in the ocean; it all swirled around him, but it never quite got him.
"Chefwick!" Kelp cried. Around him, a lot of Scotsmen wanted to play. "Chefwick!"
Light flashed from Chefwick's glasses as he turned his head.
"The painting!" Kelp cried, and launched it like a javelin, and went under for the second time.
Chapter 17
Stan Murch eased the Caddy around the corner and came to a stop in front of Hunter House. As far as he was concerned, this job was a piece of cake. Nothing to do but sit here like some hired chauffeur out front of a concert hall, then when the guys came out drive calmly away. Piece of cake.
The car itself was a piece of sponge cake, with MD plates. Kelp had picked it up for Murch this afternoon. A pale blue Cadillac, it was loaded with options. Kelp preferred doctors' cars whenever available, believing that doctors baby themselves by buying cars loaded with every power-assisting gadget and padded with every creature comfort known to the engineers of Detroit. "Driving a doctor's car," he sometimes said, "is like taking a nice nap in a hammock on a Sunday afternoon. In the summer." He could wax quite lyrical on the subject.
Movement attracted Murch's attention, and he glanced over toward the concert hall, on his right. Was something happening in there? It seemed to him, looking through the row of glass doors, that activity of some sort had begun in the lobby; a lot of running around or something. Murch squinted, trying to see more clearly, and one of those doors snapped open and a body sailed out like a glider without wings, hit the pavement, rolled, popped to its feet and ran back into the lobby.
Murch said, "What?"
By golly, there was a fight going on in there. The same body – or another one – hurtled out again, this time followed by three men struggling and reeling in one another's arms like a rugby scrum, and then all at once the entire dispute boiled out of the theater and spread all over the sidewalk.
"Holy Jesus!" said Murch, and watched a body bounce off the hood of the Caddy and back into the fray.
A face appeared at the windshield, and because of the face's contortion and his own astonishment it took Murch a minute to realize it was Kelp, struggling to get away from a whole lot of people who wanted him to stay. Murch honked the horn, which startled Kelp's friends, and Kelp scrambled off the hood and ducked into the Caddy.
Murch stared at him. Kelp's clothing was ripped, his cheek was smudged, and he looked as though he might be getting a black eye. Murch said, "What in hell is going on?"
"I don't know," Kelp said, gasping for breath. "I just don't know. Here comes Chefwick."
And so he did, tiptoeing across the sidewalk, clutching his black bag to his chest, moving like a ballet dancer in a minefield, and when at last he slipped into the Caddy and shut the door behind himself all he said, wide-eyed, was, "Oh, my. Oh, my."
Kelp asked him, "Where's Bulcher?"
"Here he comes," Murch said.
Here came Bulcher. He could be awesome when he was annoyed, and at the moment he was very annoyed. He had two of his opponents by the neck, one in each great ham-fist, and he was using them as battering rams to clear a path for himself through the melee, poking the two bodies out ahead of himself as he walked, battering them against raiding parties at his flanks, and generally cutting a swath. The path he'd bulldozed on his way into the hall was as nothing to the scorched-earth March To The Curb he effected on the way out. Reaching the Cadillac, he flung his assistants back into the riot while Chefwick opened a rear door for him. Then he hopped into the Caddy, slammed the door, and said, "That's enough of that."
"Okay, Stan," Kelp said. "Let's go."
"Go?" Murch looked around, at Kelp beside him on the front seat and Chefwick and Bulcher in back, and said, "What about Dortmunder?"
"He's not with us. Come on, Stan, they'll take the car apart next. Drive somewhere and I'll tell you on the way."
The car was rocking more than somewhat, from the bodies bouncing off it, and a few of Bulcher's recent playmates were beginning to look hungrily at him through the windows, so Murch put the Caddy in gear, pressed on the horn, eased away from the curb, and drove them away from there.
It took Kelp two right turns and a red light to explain Dortmunder's situation, finishing, as they headed downtown, "We can only hope he'll figure something."
"He's stuck in an elevator shaft, with private guards running around?"
"He's been in tighter spots than that before," Kelp assured him.
"Yeah," Murch said. "And wound up in jail."
"Don't talk defeatist. Anyway, the guy who lives there is on our side. Maybe he can give Dortmunder a hand."
"Yeah, maybe," Murch said doubtfully. Then, deciding to look on the bright side, he said, "But anyway, you did get the painting, right?"
"That part was easy," Kelp said. "Except when Bulcher thought it was a baseball bat."
"I got carried away," Bulcher said.
"All's well that end's well," Kelp said. "Let's see it, Roger."
Chefwick said, "Beg pardon?"
Kelp turned a suddenly glassy smile on Chefwick. "The painting," he said. "Let's see it."
"I don't have it."
"Sure you do. I gave it to you."
"No, you didn't. Bulcher had it"
"Kelp took it away from me," Bulcher said.