Watch Your Back (8 page)

“Well, whatever,” Judson said. “I don’t know how those things work.”

Dortmunder said, “What’s in it for you?”

Judson blinked at him. Dortmunder at least wasn’t smiling. In fact, he didn’t look optimistic at all. “Well, sir,” Judson told him, “I thought you people would want to share with me or something.”

Dortmunder nodded. “And you’d leave it up to us, the details and all that.”

“I never did anything like that,” Judson explained, “so I don’t know how it works.” Then, desperate, reaching down deep inside himself for the truth, he said, “What it is, I don’t know
anything,
and I just want to get along until I figure out what I should be doing out here, so when I realized Mr. Tiny was interested in that alarm box I just offered to help, like, on the spur of the moment kind of thing.”

Dortmunder said, “What you should be doing
out here?
What’s ‘out here’?”

“Well, out of high school.”

I shouldn’t have said that, he thought, as they all looked at one another. Then Tiny said, “Up to you two.”

“Up to Andy,” Dortmunder said. “He’s the one would have to teach him.”

Kelp laughed. “I was thinking,” he said, “I don’t think I’d like Tiny to boost
me
anywhere.” Turning his smile on Judson, he said, “Judson? You got any close friends at home? High school buddies?”

“Oh, no,” Judson assured him. “I said good–bye to all that.”

“Live with your folks?”

“Until I find a place in the city, yes, sir, but I don’t talk to my parents. Never did.”

“Ever been in trouble with the law?”

“Not real
trouble,
no, sir.”

Again Kelp laughed. “You mean, you got away with it.”

Judson couldn’t help a sheepish answering smile. “A few times, yes, sir.”

Kelp nodded at the two in back. “I’ll give him a try.”

Judson said, “Thank you, sir.”

Still with the unchanging smile, Kelp told him, “If I’m making a mistake, Tiny can always drop you from a high place.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me know,” Tiny said, and opened his door, saying, “I’ll walk it over to Riverside from here. Kid, drive these two home.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tiny left, and Kelp said, “I’m west Thirties.”

“East Nineteenth,” said Dortmunder.

“Yes, sir.”

Relieved, amazed, giddy, Judson drove up around, out of the Boat Basin, onto the West Side Highway south. Driving along toward the ship terminal and the USS
Intrepid,
he said, “And if it turns out you could use some help on that bust–out joint, I’m up for that, too.”

Well, they didn’t have to laugh
that
much.

The first thing he noticed back there — and a lucky thing he did — was that one section of the duckboards Rollo was wont to tread on had been pulled back over the rest, and the long trapdoor beneath had been left in its upraised position, leaning against the shelves under the bar. That could be a nasty fall if you didn’t watch yourself, particularly since the stairs started down from the far end of the rectangular opening.

Whether it was sloppiness or a snare for unwary burglars, Dortmunder didn’t know, but he knew he needed to move around back here, so he found the hook that held the door open, unhooked it, and eased the door back down where it belonged. He didn’t move the duckboards, though — no need to.

Standing on the closed trapdoor, he opened the first of three drawers in a row under the backbar beneath the cash register, and found it was full of officialdom: fire inspections, coil cleanings, health code violations, water meter bills. Nothing that would explain why this terrible fate had struck the O.J.

The other two drawers were equally useless from a mystery–solving point of view, though it was interesting to note that one of the drawers contained a gun, a Star Model F automatic, very dusty but also very loaded; the safety, however, was on. It lay next to some Oriental parasols.

Closing the drawers, Dortmunder looked around and saw nothing else that might be of help. What about correspondence, gaming chits, threatening notes? Why wasn’t there anything useful in here?

Well, there wasn’t. He was just about to give the whole thing up when a sudden metallic skritching noise, like a robot mouse gnawing on a copper carrot, came from the front door.

Keys! Somebody with keys, coming in.

Where to hide? Nowhere. The bar could not be more open, and both POINTERS and the back room could not be more closed cul–de–sacs.

Where? Where? Up front, several locks had to be dealt with, which Dortmunder had just recently learned, but time wasn’t the problem; space was. He had to have space in which to disappear.

The basement! The trapdoor he’d closed. Quickly he hopped onto the duckboards and bent to lift the door, while up front that other door was about to open. Should he close the trapdoor after himself? No, too awkward. Also, there was nothing he could do about the duckboards.

Hook
the trapdoor open,
skitter
down the stairs, his furrowed brow sinking below bar level just as the street door opened and several guys trooped in. At least several.

“Dark in here.”

“There’s lightswitches behind the bar. Hold on a second.”

The basement was absolutely black. With hands splayed out in front of himself, eyes uselessly staring, Dortmunder inched across the unseen floor into the unseeable black.

“
Jesus
Christ! Look at
this!
”

Dortmunder froze, fingers twitching at the end of his outstretched arms.

“What is it? Manny? What’s the problem?”

“This goddamn trapdoor’s open! I just about dropped myself into the cellar.”

“Holy shit, close that thing.”

“How? I can’t
see
in here.”

“Wait, don’t move, I think I know where the lightswitch is. That Rollo’s getting too damn careless.”

“I think he’s lost his job satisfaction.”

“He can lose all he wants to, we gotta keep him on until we’re done in here, because we don’t want him opening his yap to some of these wholesalers.
Here’s
the lightswitch!”

Sudden light flowed down the basement stairs, swaddled Dortmunder, and streamed on to give faint yellow–gray light to his surroundings. A rough stone wall stood directly in front of him, less than a foot from his outstretched fingers, which he now dropped to his sides. A long rectangular room extended to his right, under the main room of the bar. To his left, a doorway in a wooden wall suggested a corridor beyond. Afraid his feet could still be seen from certain angles upstairs, Dortmunder turned left and tiptoed toward that corridor.

Darkness. Almost as total as before, except that when he looked back, he could see a rectangle of thin yellow lines up above in the black, outlining the trapdoor that had just been lowered.

A sound of voices came from up there. Saying anything useful? In movies and on television, people are always just happening to be hid someplace when other people have a conversation that explains the whole thing. Could that be happening here?

Dortmunder tiptoed back to stand beneath that thin yellow rectangle overhead. What were they saying?

At first, nothing; they seemed to have stopped talking just as he got there. And then all at once there came a painful irritating screech and scrawk, which of course had to be the duckboards being slid back into position — a problem to think about a little later. But then at last, the duckboards were in their proper place, almost the entire yellow line of the rectangle had been blotted out, and people up there began again to speak, muffled but legible:

“Remember, only the Russian.”

“Gotcha.”

“And the gen–u–wine French.”

“I got some Polish here.”

“Forget that. We bring back Polish, he’ll hand us our heads.”

“Well, I’ll take a bottle for myself.”

“This cash register’s empty.”

“Sure, they empty it every night.”

“What’s with this safe here?”

“Forget that, we’ll take care of that later.”

“Is this French?”

“
No!
What’sa matter with you? What you want is
Dom
Perig–none.”

“
Dom
Perig–none.”

“There should be more in back.”

“Remember, when a boss’s daughter marries, only the best Russian vodka, only the best French champagne. Or they’ll find us in the Meadowlands.”

“Stoli, right?”

“Now you’re talking.”

The voices faded, moving into other parts of the bar, but Dortmunder could follow their progress by the dull thuds of their shoes on the floor. From here and there, from everywhere, the feet moved toward the front door and away from it again, as the soldiers up there carried the cases of Russian and French out of the place, to prepare for the celebration of the fact that one of their major scumbags was going to replicate himself.

Well, it had sort of worked. They hadn’t known he was hiding here, and they had told him certain things. They weren’t the things he wanted to know, but still, the principle had proved out.

A faint visual memory came back to him, from that brief moment after the upstairs lights had been switched on and before the trapdoor had been shut. The memory told him there was a lightswitch on the wall that had been facing him when he’d stood there at the foot of the stairs. That was the right place for a lightswitch, the foot of the stairs; could he find it again? Would it make so much glare they’d notice it upstairs?

Dortmunder pondered. He remembered basements from earlier in his life, remembered the lighting arrangement in the back room of this very bar, even remembered another quick visual memory of one single lightbulb in the ceiling of the rectangular room in which he now stood. All in all, it seemed to him worth the risk, to light one little lightbulb rather than curse the darkness.

He was right. When he found the switch and flipped it on, that forty–watt bulb in the middle of the ceiling created an effect very like the shadowed insubstantiality of the Kasbah at midnight, or a teenagers’ party when the folks are out of town. In its fretful murk, he could see rows of kegs: beer kegs, wine kegs, even kegs handmarked in white chalk,
Amsterdam Liquor Store Burben
— hmm.

The place was also cluttered with broken barstools and tables, open tall metal lockers in which hung the remnants of waiters’ uniforms from some era of O.J. history before Dortmunder’s time, and many cartons of empty bottles, some of them bearing the logos of long–extinct bottlers.

And halfway down one side wall, close to that overhead light source, which was a blessing, there stood a battered old gray metal desk, with an equally battered gray metal swivel chair in front of it. The kneehole was on the left of the desk, while on the right were two tall file drawers.

Okay, that’s more like it. Dortmunder settled himself into the squeaking chair with his left elbow on the desktop, opened the upper squeaking drawer, and let his fingers do the walking among the folder tags in there, stopping when he came to “SLA.”

SLA. The State Liquor Authority, the god of the taverner, whose rules are the closest thing in their world to Holy Writ, because they have the ultimate power of life and death: they can shut you down.

The SLA folder was more than an inch thick. When Dortmunder opened it on the desk and bent low to read it in the uncertain light, he saw that the papers were roughly in chronological order from front (old) to back (new), and that the earliest documents were forty–seven years old. That was when Jerome Hulve and Otto Medrick, d/b/a Jerrick Associates, applied for and eventually received a liquor license for the O.J. Bar & Grill at this address. (Why the reverse of initials? Maybe the J.O. Bar & Grill didn’t sound as melodic to them.)

Thirty–one years ago, Otto Medrick, now d/b/a O.J. Partners, bought out the half–interest from the bar now in the possession of the estate of Jerome Hulve and had to go through a whole lot of paperwork all over again, as though he were a brand–new guy. And six months ago, Otto Medrick, whose address was now given as 131 — 58 Elfin Dr., Coral Acres, FL, sold O.J. Partners to Raphael Medrick of 161 — 63 63rd Point, Queens, NY, for no cash down and a percentage of profit over the next twenty years.

Raphael Medrick, when taking the reins, also had to present the SLA with a bushel of paperwork, even more than Otto thirty–one years before, and some of the extra paper was interesting. Letters attesting to Raphael Medrick’s rehabilitation had been proffered by his attorney, by a judge from Queens County Court, and by Raphael’s former probation officer. All wrote that Raphael’s previous (brief) life of crime had been nonviolent, totally repudiated by Raphael himself, and caused by association with bad companions from whom Raphael was now forsworn. A letter from Otto Medrick further assured the SLA that Otto had complete confidence in his nephew Raphael, or he would certainly not turn over to Raphael his every asset in this world.

When Dortmunder at last lifted his head from this family saga, nearly an hour had gone by since he’d first switched on the basement light, and he realized it had been quite a while since he’d heard movement from the troops upstairs. Aware of a new stiffness in his back caused by the need to bend so close over the papers in this uncertain light, he creakily straightened himself, cocked an ear, and listened.

Nothing. When he looked over toward the stairs, he could see no lines of yellow light in the ceiling.

He stood, did a couple deep knee bends, regretted them, and walked over to look more closely up the stairs at the unbroken ceiling. No light. He stepped to the wall, switched off the basement light, and still no illumination from upstairs. So he flipped the light back on and started up the stairs to see if it would be possible to get out of here.

All by itself the trapdoor was pretty heavy, being made of wood thick enough to walk on. When you put lengths of duckboard on top of it, what would that do?

Nothing good. Dortmunder went up the stairs, bending forward, until his back was against the bottom of the trapdoor and his knees were bent. He was on the side away from the hinges. He braced himself, pressed upward with legs and back, and nothing happened except that little bolts of pain shot here and there through his body.

Not good. Not at all good. In order to get on with his life, which he very much wanted to do, he had to get out of this basement. Come on, it can’t be
that
heavy.

Going back down the stairs, he rooted among the broken bits of furniture till he found a cracked–off wooden barstool leg, tapered like a simplified bowling pin. Grasping this, he went back up the stairs, leaned up to the farthest corner he could reach, and
insisted
that it lift, just
insisted
and
insisted,
and then it did lift, and immediately he slid the leg into the new narrow space. A beginning.