"No," Dortmunder admitted.
"Special effects in a Civil War movie," Medrick told him. "People look at it, they say, 'Wow, that's great, that's so lifelike! You know what is it, the difference between life and lifelike?"
"I think I do," Dortmunder said.
"Well, there's fewer and fewer of us. Digital finally drove me out of the business. I mean, I was gonna retire anyway, but digital made me go a few months early."
Which was why, in recoiling from the advances of photography, Medrick had bounced back farther and farther in time, until he had settled at last on his current choice, a 1904 8x10 Rochester Optical Peerless field camera, with the mahogany body, nickel trim, and black leather bellows.
"The negative is full-size," Medrick explained, "no enlargements, no loss of detail."
"Sounds great," said Dortmunder, who couldn't have cared less.
At the end of lunch Dortmunder somehow paid the entire tab, not entirely sure how that had happened, and then they went back to Medrick's place, where, for the next two and a half hours, Dortmunder lost at gin, at cribbage, and at Scrabble until, at five minutes past four — "Give him a chance to put on his apron," Medrick said, playing pluckier across the double-double — Medrick finally phoned the O.J.
"Rollo? Medrick. It's sunny, it's hot, whadaya want? Listen, I got one of your back-room guys here, he says some mob people are killing the place. Yeah… uh huh… yeah… uh huh………yeah… uh huh… yeah… uh huh… yeah…"
Dortmunder was just about to stand and go out to the backyard to look at Medrick's camera for a few hours, when Medrick abruptly said, "Good-bye, Rollo," and hung up.
Dortmunder sat. He looked at Medrick, who turned a bleak gaze on him and said, "Rollo says, they're moving everything out tonight."
22
IT BEING AUGUST, when the big semi left Pittsburgh to get first up onto Interstate 79 north and then 80 east across Pennsylvania, it was still daylight, though already evening.
The cavernous trailer was empty, but the interstate was a solid road, even through the Appalachian Mountains, so the trailer did very little bouncing around. The driver, alone in the cab, a big-shouldered guy in white T-shirt and black baseball cap worn frontward, kept the cruise control at a steady eight miles an hour above the speed limit and sat there at his ease, listening to one country music radio station after another as he rolled across the state. From time to time, the setting sun gave him photographs of itself in his rearview mirror, and traffic was moderate.
By the time the semi reached the New Jersey border, darkness had long since descended, and the traffic, less than one hundred miles from New York City, was considerably heavier, but for the most part the driver could still let cruise control do all the work. A country station out of Bergen, New Jersey, announced midnight, and not long after that he took the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River into upper Manhattan, where the easy part stopped.
Big trucks weren't allowed on the through roads in the city, so he had to steer and shift and turn and brake and angle and maneuver and in various ways work his ass off just to get off Interstate 95 and down onto Broadway at 168th Street.
From here the route was straight and simple, but not easy. The driver, who drove big trucks for a living but almost never in major cities, hated Manhattan, as all drivers of big trucks do. Every fifteen inches another traffic light, so you haven't even finished shifting up through the gears when it's time to hit the brakes again.
Also, no matter what the hour of day or night, there was always traffic everywhere in New York City, darting cabs and snarling delivery vans and even aggressive suburbanites in their Suburbanites. Unlike normal parts of the world, where other drivers showed a healthy respect tending toward fear when in the presence of the big trucks, New York City drivers practically dared him to start something. They'd cut him off; they'd crowd him; they'd even go so far as to blat their horns at him. The people operating small vehicles in New York, the driver thought, drove as though they all had a lawyer in the backseat.
Slowly, painfully, bit by bit, the driver lugged his trailer, which now did bounce around like a roulette ball on the pot-holed city streets, southwestward down the long esophagus of Manhattan, staying on Broadway all the way till Ninety-sixth Street — by then it was almost two in the morning, but there was still too much traffic on the city streets — where he took the left turn to go one long block over to Amsterdam Avenue. The right onto Amsterdam wasn't so hard, and the street was a little better, being one-way.
Down Amsterdam he went, able to keep his up-and-down shifting to a minimum because of the staggered lights. He was grateful for that, and for the fact that the streetlights were bright enough to show him the numbers of the cross streets. And there was his goal, lit up but not gaudy, just ahead on the right.
When he hit the brakes while engaged in city driving, the truck tended to emit a sound very like a hippopotamus farting, which it did this time, which alerted the people loitering on the sidewalk down there that he was the one they were waiting for.
He stopped, in the right lane, just uptown from them, to let them clear the way. During the daytime, there was no parking along here, but this evening, as soon as that restriction was lifted, these people had put three cars in place, to be sure he'd have the proper location available to him at the curb. Now three guys among the loiterers, with waves of the hand toward the driver, hopped into these cars and drove off, and he slid the truck neatly into the opening they'd provided. The three cars all went around the block to find someplace else to roost, and the driver switched off his engine, opened his door, and felt unair-conditioned air for the first time since Pittsburgh. Yuck.
Well, this shouldn't take long. He climbed down to the street, hitched his belt, worked his neck muscles a little, and walked around the front of the truck to the group of guys clustered on the sidewalk — about a dozen of them, mostly muscle to carry the goods out of the bar and into the truck, but among them was supposed to be a guy in charge.
"I need somebody named Mikey," the driver said.
"That's me," said a cocky bantamweight featuring so much lush, oiled, wavy black hair lifting over his ears to undulate back around his head that he looked as if he were wearing Mercury's winged helmet. What he was in fact wearing, though it was quite hot and humid out here tonight, was a black satin unzipped warmup jacket with MIKEY in gold script over his heart and, for those who cared to walk around him and read it, EAT ME WORLD TOUR in various bright colors on the back. Under the jacket was a white T-shirt, while ironed designer jeans and huge white sneakers completed the ensemble.
The driver nodded at this Mikey, unsurprised, and gestured at his truck, saying, "It's all yours, I'll just open up the back and maybe go grab me a late-night snack somewheres and—"
"Say, pal," one of the other locals said, "your truck is movin."
"What?" Thinking in-gear, brake-on, engine-off, not-my-fault, the driver turned, and by God, the truck was moving. In fact, it was accelerating, hustling away from the curb and on down Amsterdam Avenue.
"Hey!" the driver yelled, but the truck ignored him and just kept moving farther and farther away.
Two or three of Mikey's associates ran after the truck, trying to grab a door handle or a rearview mirror or something, but without success. One guy did manage to clutch the hasp lock on the truck's rear doors, but the truck was already moving faster than he could run, so he simply fell down in the street and was dragged along until he decided to let go, which was soon.