The girls were not quite identical. Glancing around, Dortmunder saw maybe four different girls among the paintings, and it was with a sudden shock that he realized one of them was Cleo Marlahy. So that's what she looks like with her clothes off, he thought, blinking at a picture in which, against a background of an apple orchard white with spring flowers, an unsmiling girl was rather leggily climbing over a rail fence.
"Ah hah!"
Porculey had found something. Back he came, lugging a large book, and showed the page to Dortmunder. "That it?"
"Yes," said Dortmunder, looking at the small color illustration taking up half the page. The jester pranced, the people followed, the darkness yawned. Below the illustration were the title, the painter's name and dates, and the words Private Collection.
"Here," Porculey said, dumped the book in Dortmunder's lap, and padded off again.
Kelp, leaning over from his chair, said, "That's it, all right."
Dortmunder looked at him. "You never even saw the thing."
"Well, you described it."
Porculey came back with two more books, both also containing reproductions of the painting. He added these to Dortmunder's lap and returned to the sofa. Cleo, meanwhile, had gone off to rescue the pilsner glass, and now brought it back and handed it to Porculey. "Thank you, my dear," he said, and she patted his cheek and sat down again beside him.
Dortmunder's lap was full of books, all open to illustrations of folly leading man to ruin. He said, "So anyway you know what it looks like."
"There are also larger reproductions available," Porculey said. "Prints. Photographs of the original."
Kelp said, eagerly, "So you can do it?"
"Not a chance," Porculey said.
Even Dortmunder was surprised at that. Not that he'd ever believed, really believed, there was anything in Kelp's idea, but the suddenness with which it had been shot down left Dortmunder for just a second without a reaction.
But not Kelp. Sounding almost outraged, he said, "Not a chance? Why not? You've got the copies, the reproductions, you're the guy can do endless perfect twenty dollar bills!"
"Not from photographs," Porculey said. "Look at those three illustrations. There isn't one color reproduced the same in all three. Which is the original color, or is the original something entirely different? And even if we could be absolutely sure we had every one of Veenbes' dozens of colors right, what about the brush-strokes? How is the paint laid on the surface, how does it reflect light, where is it thick, where thin? The man who owns that painting must have looked at it from time to time, he must know what his painting looks like. I might be able to do something that would fool a buyer, maybe even a gallery operator or a museum curator, but the owner of the painting? I'm afraid not."
Cleo, her smile sympathetic, said, 'Porky really does know about art. If he says it can't be done, it can't be done."
"So that's that," Dortmunder said.
Kelp was frowning so hard he looked like a crumpled piece of paper. "But that can't be that," he insisted. "There has to be a way."
"Sorry," Porculey said.
Dortmunder slugged down the rest of his coffee. "Maybe I will have some wine after all, he said."
Chapter 4
'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house floated the aroma of May's tuna casserole. The apartment was filling up with guests, and Dortmunder, a cup of bourbon-spiked eggnog in his hand, sat in his personal chair in the living room – partly because he felt like sitting there, but mostly because if he stood up somebody else would be sure to cop his seat – and contemplated the Christmas tree. He wasn't sure about that tree. He'd been dubious about it from the beginning, and he was still dubious about it.
He'd been dubious, in fact, from before he'd actually seen the thing. Two days ago, when May had walked in with a cardboard carton the right size and shape to hold maybe four rolled-up window shades, and had said, "I bought us a Christmas tree at the hardware store," Dortmunder had been dubious at once. "At the hardware store?" he'd said. "And it's in that box?"
"Yes and yes. Help me set it up."
So then she'd opened the box and taken out a lot of fuzzy silver sticks. "That's no tree," Dortmunder's said. "That's a lot of imitation corncobs."
"We have to put it together," she'd told him, but when they did all they wound up with was a tapering fuzzy silver thing that didn't look at all like a Christmas tree. "There, now," May said. "What does that look like?"
"A man from Mars."
"Wait till we put the ornaments on."
Well, now it had the ornaments on, and a lot of gift-wrapped presents underneath, but it still didn't look like a Christmas tree. In the first place – and this is just the first place, mind, this isn't the whole objection – in the first place, Christmas trees are green.
Still, whatever the thing was it did give off a kind of cheerful glitter, and it made May happy, so what the hell. Dortmunder kept his doubts to himself and his feet up on his old battered hassock, and he grinned and nodded at his guests. A funny thing to have, guests. Not people in to talk about setting up a score, or splitting the take afterward, or anything else in the way of business. Just people to come over and eat your food and drink your liquor and then go home again. Strange sort of idea, when you thought about it. It had been May's idea, like the Christmas tree, intended to cheer Dortmunder up.
One thing about throwing a party; you offer people free food and free drink, they're very likely to show. Astonishing number of familiar faces here, some of them people Dortmunder hadn't seen in years. Like Alan Greenwood over there, a fellow he'd worked with a bunch of times until all of a sudden it turned out Greenwood had been leading a double life; all the time Dortmunder had thought of him simply as a good utility-infielder-type heist man, Greenwood had had this secret life as an actor. Boom, he got discovered, he got his own television series, he didn't need to run around on fire escapes any more. And here he was, in his blue denim leisure suit and his string tie and his lace-frilled shirt, with this incredible gaunt blond beauty named Doreen on his arm. "Nice to see ya, Greenwood."
"What's happening, baby," Greenwood said, and shook hands with his left.
Then there was Wally Whistler, one of the best lock men in the business, just out of prison, having got sent up for absentmindedly unlocking a lock while he was at the zoo with his kids; it had taken hours to get the lion back in his cage. And Fred Lartz, a onetime driver who had given up driving after an experience he had one time when he got drunk at a cousin's wedding out on Long Island, took a wrong turn off the Van Wyck Expressway, wound up on Taxiway Seventeen out at Kennedy Airport, and got run down by Eastern Airlines flight two-oh-eight, just in from Miami. Fred's wife Thelma – the lady out in the kitchen with May, with the funny hat – did all the driving for the family these days.
Also present, and scoffing down the eggnog pretty good, was Herman X, a black man whose other life as a radical political activist in no way interfered with his primary career as a lock-man. The lady he'd brought with him, and introduced as Foxy, was another stunner, tall and skinny and stylish and gleaming black. Foxy and Alan Greenwood's Doreen tended to stalk in slow circles around one another, remote and wary.
The crew from the painting fiasco were present, in force. Roger Chefwick had showed up with his round, pleasant, motherly wife, Maude. Tiny Bulcher was there with a small, sweet-faced, rather plain girl named Eileen, who looked terrified; Dortmunder kept expecting her to slip somebody a note reading, "Rescue me from this man." Stan Murch was there with his Morn, who had come direct from work and so was still in her taxi-driving duds: checked slacks, leather jacket, soft cap. And Andy Kelp was there, of course, with his nephew Victor.