Watch Your Back

A second regular put down his foaming beerglass to say, “Clouds? Which clouds are these?”

“That they’re sitting on!” The first regular waved an arm dangerously, but did no damage. “You look at all these pictures, Jesus sitting on a cloud, that other God sitting on a cloud, Mary sitting on a cloud —”

“A little lower down,” suggested a third.

“Well, yeah, but the point is, can’t Heaven come up with
furniture?
”

As Dortmunder approached Rollo, he saw that the beefy bartender in his once–white apron was deeply absorbed in making five very complicated drinks in glasses Dortmunder had never seen before and would not have suspected the O.J. of possessing: curled, twisted, wider than deep, they looked mostly like crystal hubcaps, though smaller. But not much smaller.

Another regular, meantime, was objecting to the concept of furniture in the beyond, saying, “Whadaya want with
furniture?
Heaven isn’t Westchester, you know.”

A fifth regular weighed in, saying, “Yeah? What about all those fields of plenty?”

“Land of milk and honey,” added the third regular, as though it were an indictment.

The first regular lifted a skeptical glass and a skeptical brow to say, “Do they give out overshoes?”

What Rollo was doing with those glasses was just about everything. He had already sluiced in some crushed ice, and now he was adding some red liquid and some yellow liquid and some brown liquid and some clear liquid, all of them channeling around through the shards of ice and combining to form pools that looked like a lab test you didn’t want the results of.

The second regular was now saying, “What gets me is this fruitcake Muslim Heaven with the seventy–two virgins.”

“There
aren’t
seventy–two virgins,” the first regular objected.

“Well, no,” the second regular conceded, “not all at one time, but still, what kinda Heaven is
this?
It would be like being assigned to an all–girls’ high school.”

“Ouch,” said the third regular.

“Can you imagine,” the second regular said, “what it sounds like in the cafeteria at lunchtime?”

The fourth regular, the one with something against Westchester, said, “Would you have to learn volleyball?”

This introduction of sports stymied everybody for a minute, as Dortmunder watched Rollo slice up a banana and drop the chunks into the glasses like depth charges. Next he reached for a lime, as Dortmunder looked around and saw what must have happened. It was summertime in New York City, late July, and the sluggish tide of tourists had washed up on this unlikely shore five ladies who did each other’s silvery wavy hair, and who were seated now at one of the booths on the right. They perched very straight on just the front edge of the seat, their backs not touching the seatbacks, like freshmen in military academy, and they gazed around the unlovely precincts of the O.J. with an anthropologist’s guarded delight. Their clothing combined many of the colors Rollo was injecting into their drinks. One of them, Dortmunder saw, had a cell phone — camera and was sending pictures of the O.J. to the folks back home.

Well, being a free person and not on parole was all well and good, but there was no point in overdoing it. Hunching a shoulder against the spy–cam, Dortmunder said, “Whadaya say, Rollo?”

“With you in a minute,” Rollo said. Inside each glass now, it looked as though an elf had blown up, but Rollo was not done. To cap it all, he dropped a shiny red spheroid on top of each; could those be related to cherries somehow?

Surely that was all even these glasses could stand, but no. Turning to a little–used drawer under the backbar, Rollo came up with five Oriental pastel parasols and plopped one onto each drink, as though some poor shipwrecked son of a bitch were marooned on each of them.

And now they actually were done. Since apparently total concentration was not necessary while loading glasses onto a tray — not even glasses like these — while Rollo did that operation he said, “You already got the beer and salt back there.”

“Good.”

Tray full, Rollo reached under the bar and came up with a bottle of sluggish brown liquid behind a label reading:

“Yeah.”

“I’ll get you two glasses,” Rollo said, and while he did, Dortmunder told him, “Also the rye and water, the one that tinkles his ice cubes all the time.”

“Haven’t seen him for a while.” Rollo knew everybody not by their name but by their drink, which struck him as the professional way to go about things.

“He’s the one called this meeting,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s hope it’s good news.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Rollo said, though he didn’t. Instead, he carried the tray of weirdness toward the five tourist ladies, who filmed his approach.

Picking up the bottle and the two glasses with their own discrete burdens of ice cubes, Dortmunder made his way around the regulars, who were still gnawing the same bone, the third regular now saying, “What if you
can’t
play cards in Heaven? What if you
can’t
dance?”

“Big deal,” the second regular said. “I can’t dance on Earth.”

Leaving the theologians, Dortmunder made his way down the hall, past the doors defined by neat dog silhouettes labeled POINTERS and SETTERS and past the phone booth that was now a helplessly gaping unofficial portal to cyberspace, and into a small square room with a concrete floor. The walls were fronted, floor to ceiling, by beer and liquor cases, leaving just room for a battered old round table with a stained green felt top and half a dozen armless wooden chairs, at one of which — the one most completely facing the door — sat a carroty–headed guy with a glass of beer in front of his right hand, a salt shaker in front of where his left hand should be, and his left hand actually holding a cell phone to his ear. “Here’s John now,” he said into it. “I’ll tell him.”

“Hello, Stan,” Dortmunder said, and sat to his left, so he, too, could have an unobstructed view of the door.

Hanging up and secreting his cell on his person, Stan said, “I think the Williamsburg is gonna be all right.”

“That’s good,” Dortmunder said. Stan Murch was a driver, and as a result he gave more than the usual consideration to the routes he chose.

“For many years,” Stan said, “the Williamsburg Bridge was where you went if you wanted to sleep in your car. Only now the construction’s done, turns out, that humongous expressway Robert Moses wanted to put across Manhattan from the Williamsburg to the Holland Tunnel, slice the island in half like the Great Wall of China, only he didn’t get it, that’s fine, turns out it didn’t have to happen anyway. Canal Street’s a great run across, the West Side Highway’s a snap coming up, I’m here so early this is my second saltshaker.” Being a driver, Stan liked to pace his alcohol intake, but he hated it when his beer went flat; hence the salt. Every once in a while, a judicious spray, the head comes right back.

“That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

“However,” Stan said, “that was Ralph on the phone, the meet is off.”

Ralph was Ralph Winslow, the rye–and–water–in–a–tinkling–glass. Dortmunder said, “He called the meeting, now he calls to say it’s off.”

“Some cops found something in his car,” Stan explained. “He couldn’t go into details.”

“No, I know.”

“In fact,” Stan said, “he’s got me on his speed–dial, so the cops think he’s still on his one permitted call to his lawyer.”

“Call Andy,” Dortmunder suggested. “He’s on his way, savehim some time.”

“Good idea. He’s on
my
speed–dial. You don’t have one of these, do you?” Stan asked, unleashing his cell.

“No,” Dortmunder said simply.

As Stan made the call to warn off the final attendee of the non–meeting, he and Dortmunder walked back down the hall and around the regulars and over to where Rollo was firmly wiping with a dirty rag the part of the bar where he’d made all those strange drinks. At the booth, the ladies were gone and those glasses were all empty except for some dirty ice. That was fast. They’d taken the parasols with them.

“Sorry, Rollo,” Dortmunder said, returning the bottle and glasses. “Change of plan.”

“You’ll be back,” Rollo said.

As Dortmunder and Stan headed for the street, the first regular was saying, “You want
my
idea of Heaven? You go there, you take a nap.”

The third regular veered half around on his barstool to get a better look at things.

“Yeah? Then what?”

“What what? It’s over. The Last Nap. Can you think of anything better?”

Into the profound silence that followed upon that, Dortmunder, on his way out the door, said, “I was counting on this. I could use something.”

“Me, too,” Stan said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

“Thank you. Maybe,” Dortmunder said, “I’ll get another phone call.”

“
Aack!
”

Dortmunder recoiled, flinging his telephone hand as far from his body as he could without surgery.

“JOHN DORTMUNDER! IS THAT YOU?”

“Don’t shout!”

“What?”

“Don’t shout!”

The phone muttered something. Cautiously Dortmunder allowed it to approach his head. The phone muttered, “This is it? I come back and the phones don’t work?”

“Arnie?” This was three weeks since the non–meeting at the O.J.

“There you are! Hello to you, John Dortmunder!”

“Yeah, hello, Arnie. So you’re back, are you?”

“Not ten minutes since I finished unlockin the door.”

“So it didn’t work, huh?” Dortmunder was not surprised.

But Arnie, not quite shouting, cried, “Whadaya mean, it didn’t work? A
course
it worked! I graduated with honors, John Dortmunder. What you see before you is a changed man.”

“Well, I’m not
seeing
you,” Dortmunder pointed out, “and I have to say, you don’t
sound
that different.”

“Well, it’s a makeover, that’s all,” Arnie explained, as Dortmunder’s faithful companion, May, came into the living room with a pen in her hand (she’d been doing a crossword puzzle in the kitchen) and an expression of concern on her face, wondering what all the racket was about. “It’s not like they slid a new chassis in,” Arnie went on. “I’m still the same physical plant like I was before, except my skin is all this khaki color.”

“Well, you been in the tropics,” Dortmunder said, as he showed May an elaborate combined shoulder shrug, head shake, eyebrow waggle, and torso twist, to indicate that he didn’t know so far exactly what was going on, but it didn’t seem to include any imminent threat.

“That’s it, all right,” Arnie agreed. “I don’t know
when
I’ll be able to leave the house again. But listen to me, what I’m saying, I never leave the house anyway.”

“That’s true,” Dortmunder said.

“In fact,” Arnie said, “the reason I’m calling, fresh offa the plane, I want
you
to come
here.
”

“There? Your apartment, you mean?”

“That’s where I’m gonna be, John Dortmunder, and that’s where I’m gonna put before your eyes a proposition so good you’ll fall right over.”

“What do you mean, a proposition?”

“Dortmunder, not to go into details on this public instrument here, this telephone —”

“No no, I follow that.”

“But you know,” Arnie said, “in our transactions, me and you, I always give top dollar.”

“That’s true.”

“I always
had
to give top dollar,” Arnie reminded him, “because if I gave medium dollar like that goniff Stoon, nobody would ever come to do business with me, because of my basic unpleasantness.”

“Yrm.”

“Which is in the past, John Dortmunder,” Arnie promised him. “Wait’ll you see. You come over, I’ll lay it out, you’re never gonna even
thought
about a dollar as large as this one. Come over, I’m here, until I get my pallor back I am not leaving the apartment. Come over any time, John Dortmunder. And I’ll tell you this, it’s good to be back. Good–bye to you.”

“Good–bye,” Dortmunder told the phone after Arnie hung up. Then he also hung up, and shook his head.

“I’ve been patient,” May reminded him.

“Let’s sit down,” Dortmunder said.

So they sat, and May looked alert, and Dortmunder said, “I mentioned, from time to time, a character called Arnie Albright.”

“A fence,” she said, and put her pen on the coffee table. “You sell him things sometimes. You don’t like him.”

“Nobody likes him,” Dortmunder said. “He doesn’t like himself. He told me once, he finds himself so disgusting, he shaves with his back to the mirror.”

“But you sell him things.”

“He makes up for his personality,” Dortmunder explained, “by paying a better percentage than anybody else.”

May said, “Is he really that bad?”

“Well,” Dortmunder told her, “he just came back from the intervention.”

“Intervention? He’s a drunk, too?”

“No, he’s just obnoxious, but it’s enough. Turns out, his family couldn’t stand it any more, it was either drop him out of an airplane or intervent. I don’t think any of them had a plane, so they went for the other.”

“John,” May said, “when a group of people do an intervention, they go to the drunk or the druggie or whatever he is, they tell him you have to go into rehab now, or detox, or whatever it is, or nobody wants you around here any more. If they did an intervention for obnoxiousness, where would they send him?”

“Club Med,” Dortmunder told her. “Down in the Caribbean somewhere. They figured, all the good weather, all the smiley faces, maybe it’d soak in. He called me once when he was there, he hated it. I figured, it’s not gonna work, but now he’s back and he says it
did
work, so go know.”

“Did he sound like it worked?”

Dortmunder thought back to the recent conversation. “Gee, I don’t know,” he said. “Could be. He was still loud, but maybe he didn’t grate quite so much. Still and all, he wants me to go over to his place, he’s got a proposition for me, he called me as soon as he got home, but I dunno about that.”

May said, “Did you say you’d go?”

“I don’t think I said one way or the other.”

“But he called you right away when he got home. I think you’ve got to do it.”

Dortmunder sighed, long and heartfelt. “I don’t think I can go over there by myself, May.”

“Call Andy,” she advised.

He nodded, slow and heavy. “That’s what it comes down to,” he agreed.