Murch put it down on the roof as gently as he'd put a beer glass on a bar. He cut the engine and in their own sudden silence they could hear the passage of the jet, sliding down the sky above them toward LaGuardia.
"Last stop," Murch said, and the jet noise faded away to the east.
Dortmunder opened the door and they all clambered out. Chefwick hurried over to the door in the small shacklike construction atop the roof while the others unloaded the helicopter. Kelp took a pair of cable shears, went over to the front left edge of the roof, lay down on his belly, reached down and out, and cut the phone wires. Murch set the portable jammer down on the roof, turned it on, put earphones on, and began twiddling with the dials. All radio broadcasting from this building promptly became unintelligible.
By now Chefwick had the door open. Dortmunder and Greenwood had stuffed their pockets with detonators and tear gas grenades, and they followed Chefwick down the stairs to the windowless metal door at the bottom. Chefwick studied this door a second, then said, "I'll have to blast this one. Go on back up."
Kelp was on the way down, carrying the cardboard carton of handcuffs and strips of white cloth. Dortmunder met him midway and said, "Back up on the roof. Chefwick has to blast."
"Right."
The three of them hurried up to the roof, where Murch had left the jammer and was sitting on the roof near the front edge, several detonator caps beside him. He looked over at them and waved. Dortmunder showed him two fingers, meaning he should wait two minutes, and Murch nodded.
Chefwick came upstairs. Dortmunder said to him, "How we doing?"
"Three," Chefwick said in a distracted sort of way. "Two. One."
Phoom, said a noise.
Grayish smoke drifted lazily up the stairwell and out the door.
Dortmunder dashed downstairs through the smoke, found the metal door lying on its back at the bottom, and hurried through the doorway into a short square hall. Straight ahead, heavy barred gates blocked the end of the hall where the stairway went down. An astonished-looking cop was sitting on a high stool there, just inside the gates, with a paper-filled lectern beside him. He was a thin and elderly white-haired cop, and his reflexes were a little slow. Also, he wasn't armed. Dortmunder knew, from both Greenwood and Murch, that none of the cops on duty up here were armed.
"Take him," Dortmunder said over his shoulder and turned the other way, where a stout cop with a ham and cheese sandwich on rye in his hand was trying to close another gate. Dortmunder pointed the machine gun conversationally and said, "Stop that."
The cop looked at Dortmunder. He stopped and put his hands up in the air. One slice of rye dangled over his knuckles like the floppy ear of a dog.
Greenwood meanwhile had convinced the elderly cop to contemplate his retirement. The cop was standing beside his lectern with his hands up while Greenwood tossed three detonator caps and two tear gas grenades through the bars and down the stairs, where they made a mess. The idea was that no one was supposed to come upstairs.
There was one more officer on duty up here. He'd been in the area between the second gate and yet a third, where there was a scarred wooden desk. He'd been sitting at this desk, reading Ramparts, and when Dortmunder and Greenwood led the other two cops in at machine-gun point, the third one looked at them in bewilderment, put down his magazine, got to his feet, raised his hands over his head, and said, "You sure you got the right place?"
"Open up," Dortmunder said, gesturing at the last gate. Through there, in the detention block, arms could be seen waving through cell bars on both sides. Nobody in there knew what was going on exactly, but they all wanted to be a part of it.
"Brother," cop number three told Dortmunder, "the hardest case we got in there is a latvian sailor hit a bartender with a fifth of Johnny Walker Red Label. Seven stitches. You sure you want one of our people?"
"Just open," Dortmunder told him.
The cop shrugged. "Anything you say," he said.
Meanwhile, on the roof, Murch had started tossing detonator caps at the street. He wanted to make noise and confusion without killing anybody, which was easy the first couple of times he dropped the caps, but which became increasingly difficult as the street filled up with cops running around trying to figure out who was attacking who and from where.
In the precinct captain's office, on the second floor, the quiet evening had erupted into bedlam. The captain had gone home for the day, of course, the prisoners upstairs had been given their evening meal, the evening patrolman shift had been sent on its way, and the lieutenant in charge had been relaxing down into that slow quiet period of the day Dortmunder had been counting on. The lieutenant had been glancing through detectives' reports, in fact, looking for the dirty parts, when people started to run into his office.
The first one hadn't actually run, he'd walked. The patrolman on the switchboard it was, and he said, "Sir, the phone's gone dead."
"Oh? We'd better call the phone company to fix it pronto," the lieutenant said. He liked the word "pronto," it made him feel like Sean Connery. He reached for the phone to call the phone company, but when he held it to his ear there wasn't any sound.
He became aware of the patrolman looking at him. "Oh," he said. "Oh, yes." He put the phone back on its hook.
He was saved, momentarily, by the patrolman from the radio room, who came running in, looking bewildered, to say, "Sir, somebody's jamming our signal!"
"What?" The lieutenant had heard the words, but he hadn't comprehended their meaning.
"We can't broadcast," the patrolman said, "and we can't receive. Somebody's set up a jammer on us, I can tell, we used to have the same thing in the South Pacific."
"Something's broken," the lieutenant said. "That's all." He was worried, but he was damned if he was going to show it. "Something's just gotten broken, that's all."
There was an explosion somewhere in the building.
The lieutenant leaped to his feet. "My God! What was that?"
"An explosion, sir," the switchboard patrolman said.
There was an explosion.
"Two explosions," the radio patrolman said. "Sir."
There was a third explosion.
A patrolman ran in, shouting, "Bombs! In the street!"
The lieutenant took a quick step to the right, and then a quick step to the left. "Revolution," he babbled. "It's a revolution. They always go for the police stations first."
Another patrolman ran in, shouting, "Tear gas in the stairwell, sir! And somebody's blown up the stairs between the fourth and fifth floors!"
"Mobilize!" screamed the lieutenant. "Call the Governor! Call the Mayor!" He snatched up the phone. "Hello, hello! Emergency!"
Another patrolman ran in, shouting, "Sir, there's a fire in the street!"
"A what? A what?"
"A bomb hit a parked car. It's burning out there."
"Bombs? Bombs?" The lieutenant looked at the phone he was still holding, then flung it away as though it had grown teeth. "Break out the riot guns!" he shouted. "Get all personnel in the building to the first floor, on the double! I want a volunteer to carry a message through the enemy lines!"
"A message, sir? To whom?"
"To the phone company, who else? I've got to call the captain!"
Upstairs in the detention block, Kelp was using the handcuffs to lock cops' wrists behind their backs and the lengths of white cloth to gag them. Chefwick, having taken the keys to the cells from the desk, was unlocking the second cell on the right. Dortmunder and Greenwood were keeping alert, machine guns at the ready, and the clamor from all the other cells had increased to near pandemonium.
Inside the cell Chefwick was opening, staring out at them all with the blank astonished delight of someone whose most outlandish wish-fulfillment fantasy has just come true, was a short, wiry, bearded, dirty old man in a black raincoat, brown trousers, and gray sneakers. His hair was long and shaggy and gray, and so was his beard.