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“Nothing,” Monroe said. “It was a bluff, of course. I simply told him I could see he wasn’t on top of the business the way he should be, so I’d buy it from him and install someone really topnotch to run it for me.”

“But that’s insulting,” Alicia pointed out. “And Henry is our friend. Or was.”

“Insulting was the point, dear,” Monroe said. “And don’t worry about losing Henry Cooper. As I’d thought, my offer goaded him into finding fresh people for us right away.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, of course.”

“They’ll be coming by for their interviews tomorrow, and I really find it hard to believe I’ll reject a one of them.”

“I certainly hope not.” Alicia looked at the food still on her plate. “With a chauffeur,” she said, “Mrs. Parsons could do some farmstand shopping. The season’s just beginning, Monroe.”

“Life is getting better,” he said, with his big smile. Then his smile turned into a laugh, as he said, “Oh, I have to tell you, the most comic thing.”

“Comic?”

“You know,” he said, “I must constantly make out tax returns, reports to the bankruptcy court, all of these things.”

“The accountants do, you mean.”

“Yes, of course, when I say ‘I’ I don’t mean literally ‘I.’ But the thing is, my instructions have always been, overload them. Give them every detail, no matter how irrelevant. If I buy a newspaper, put it down. Put everything down.”

“But, Monroe, why?”

“Two reasons,” he said. “They want reports, I’ll give them reports, I’ll give them so many reports they’ll choke on them, they’ll go blind trying to keep up with all my reports, I’ll bore them into an early grave with the volume of my reports. And the second thing, connected to that, if it ever does become necessary, and you know I hope it never does—”

“Oh, dear.”

“Yes, I know. But if it ever does become necessary to tuck a little something naughty in there, I can reasonably hope, with all the mass of detail over such a long period of time, no one will notice.”

“I hope it never has to happen,” Alicia said. “We’ve had all the trouble we need, my dear.”

“Oh, exactly so,” he said. “But here’s the comical thing, I found this out yesterday. The trouble that descended this time was not on me but on that personal trainer fellow of mine, Flip.”

“Flip?” She didn’t understand. “How can he be in trouble?”

“Because I reported to the IRS that I’d paid him so much and so much,” Monroe said, “as I report everything. But I paid him in cash, and he never reported it.” Monroe’s laugh was hearty indeed. “One of the little people,” he said, “he’s not supposed to get away without paying taxes. We’re supposed to get away with that sort of thing. He’s supposed to pay his little mite, to take up our slack.”

With a little moue of distaste, Alicia said, “Monroe, don’t joke like that.”

He looked briefly sober, but the laugh was still back there. “Oh. Yes. In any event, he got caught. He wanted to complain about it, I could see it in his eyes, but he didn’t have the guts for it.”

Alicia said, “Did you ever tell him you were going to report those payments?”

“It never occurred to me,” Monroe said. He shrugged, drank wine, patted his lips, said, “It will be a good lesson to him.”

30

DORTMUNDER WAS NEVER HAPPY outside the five boroughs. There was always something wrong with the rest of the world, some way it had figured out to make him uncomfortable. For instance, at the moment, in the uncharted middle of Pennsylvania, he had to sleep on the kitchen floor.

Chester and his jolly wife, Grace, lived in a very small house in a very small town. Because Tiny and Stan, in their new persons from Jim Green, didn’t know each other or anybody else in this area, they could stay at nice motels along the Susquehanna River while waiting to be employed by Monroe Hall, but Kelp had given the employment agency Chester as his kinsman and local contact, and Kelp and Dortmunder had to already know each other because they’d both allegedly worked at the same embassy down in Washington, D.C., so they both had to stay with Kelp’s “relative” at least the one night, and even before the coin toss Dortmunder had known which of them was going to get the living room sofa. So it was on some folded blankets on the kitchen floor that Dortmunder was expected to get his night’s rest, and fat chance.

The problems were many. The floor, to begin with, but beyond that the very fact of kitchen. Even a small kitchen in a small house in a small town, like this one, is as full of gleaming machinery as that inside the villain’s mountain in a James Bond movie. The stove, the microwave, and the clock radio all had sharply bright numbers to tell you the time, in two shades of green and one shade of red, and of course they were all a minute apart except for a few seconds every now and then when two of them pretended to agree. So they were irritating, and they were also bright.

Then there was the refrigerator. At least it didn’t have any shiny numbers glaring off it, but that was about the only good thing you could say about it. Occasionally it was silent, but that in a way was the worst, because that meant the victim had to wait, never knowing when the motor would suddenly thrug-ug-ug-ug… And then also the icemaker, from time to time, with a muffled crash like somebody disposing of a skeleton in a Hefty bag, would spit out another strip of ice cubes onto the previously existing cubes below.

A very busy place, all in all, this kitchen, at the bottom of which, like at the bottom of a well, Dortmunder lay in discomfort and tried to grab a little sleep before morning, when he was supposed to be bright and rested enough to go play butler, an impersonation he’d never tried before.

Well, he’d gone into training for it, with May’s help. May was a movie fan, which meant she went to movies and remembered them, and which also meant she had recently added a time-flashing machine to their own lives, a DVD player, in the living room. Which was all right, because Dortmunder never slept in the living room anyway, except in front of the six o’clock news.

Once this butler task had arisen, May said, “I told you that would come in handy,” and rented disks of Ruggles of Red Gap and My Man Godfrey and The Remains of the Day. He watched them all, parts of them more then once, and gradually felt he’d got the idea. He wouldn’t be able to work the accent, but other than that he thought he could handle the assignment. A lot of it, he’d decided, was in the clothes.

Which could have been another problem, but in the end it turned out okay. When you do your shopping after midnight, what you bring home has got to be ready-to-wear, because you can’t very well ask for alterations. Dortmunder’s new black suit, picked up with Kelp’s guidance and assistance, bagged a little bit here and there, but was, generally speaking, fine.

But now, lying all night in this very active kitchen, looking at the brightly lit if equivocal numbers, listening to the symphony of the refrigerator, thinking about butlers, all while he was supposed to be asleep, he did make a pretty long night of it. On the other hand, when Grace Fallon walked in at seven that morning to start twice her usual number of breakfasts, Dortmunder actually was asleep. Her arrival startled him awake, and for just a minute he couldn’t figure out what he was doing lying on a kitchen floor or who was that woman in the blue jeans and pink sweater and gray hair walking around, reaching for the coffeemaker.