What's So Funny?

by Donald E. Westlake

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

All it takes is a few underhanded moves by a tough ex-cop named Eppick to pull thief John Dortmunder into a game he never wanted to play. With no choice, he musters his always-game gang and they set out on a perilous treasure hunt for a long-lost gold and jewel-studded chess set once intended as a birthday gift for the last Romanov czar, which unfortunately reached Russia after that party was over. From the moment Dortmunder reaches for his first pawn, he faces insurmountable odds. The purloined past of this precious set is destined to confound any strategy he finds on the board. Success is not inevitable with John Dortmunder leading the attack, but he’s nothing if not persistent, and some gambit or other might just stumble into a winning move.

Release date: March 1, 2008

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

1

WHEN JOHN DORTMUNDER, relieved, walked out of Pointers and back to the main sales floor of the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue a little after ten that Wednesday evening in November, the silence was unbelievable, particularly in contrast with the racket that had been going on when he’d left. But now, no. Not a word, not a peep, not a word. The regulars all hunched at the bar were clutching tight to their glasses as they practiced their thousand-yard stare, while the lady irregulars mostly seemed to be thinking about their canning. Even Andy Kelp, who had been sharing a bourbon with Dortmunder down at the far end of the bar while they waited for the rest of their group to arrive, now seemed to have settled deeply into a search for a rhyme for “silver.” All in all, it looked as though a whole lot of interior monologue was going on.

It took Dortmunder about one and six-seventeenth seconds to figure out what had changed while he was away. One of the seldom used side booths, the one nearest the street door, was now occupied by a person drinking something out of a tall clear glass, revealing both ice and bubbles within, which meant club soda, which probably meant nonalcoholic. This person, male, about forty-five, who apparently still permitted his grandmother to cut his thick black hair, wore on his lumpy countenance the kind of bland inattention that did not suggest interior monologue but, rather, intense listening.

A cop, therefore, and not only that but a cop dressed in what he no doubt thought of as civilian attire, being a shapeless shiny old black suit jacket, an emerald green polo shirt and shapeless tan khakis. He also seemed to subscribe to the usual cop belief that the male body was supposed to have bulges around the middle, like a sack of potatoes, the better to hang the equipment belt on, so that your average law enforcement officer does present himself to the public as a person with a lot of Idaho inside.

As Dortmunder moved around the corner from the end of the bar and started past the clenched backs of the interior monologists, two things happened which he found disturbing. First, the lumpy features of the cop over there suddenly became even more bland, his eyes even less focused, the movement of his arm bringing club soda to his mouth even more relaxed and even.

It’s me! Dortmunder screamed inside, without letting anything—he certainly hoped—appear on the surface, it’s me he’s after, it’s me he wants, it’s me he’s got the tag sale duds on for.

And the second thing that happened, Andy Kelp, with such studied nonchalance he looked like a pickpocket on his day off, stood from his barstool, picked up his glass—and the bottle! their shared bottle!—and turned, meeting no one’s eye, to sit in the nearest of the side booths, as though to be more comfortable there. Not only that, but, once seated, he contrived to lift his feet under the table and put them on the bench seat on the other side, so that not only was he more comfortable here, he was alone.

They all know it’s me, Dortmunder acknowledged to himself. Even Rollo, the meaty bartender, his back to the room as he taped a home-lettered-on-shirt-cardboard-in-red-Crayola WE DON’T ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS sign to the backbar mirror, even Rollo, by the unusually cementish appearance of those stocky shoulders, made it clear that he too knew why Cap’n Club Soda was here, which happened to be himself, the individual who had just entered the arena.

Dortmunder’s first thought was: escape. But then his second thought was: can’t. The only exit was just beyond the cop’s black wool left elbow; unachievable, in other words. Maybe he should turn around and go back to Pointers, take a seat there, wait the guy out. No; the cop could just follow him in and start talking.

Then what about hiding out in Setters? No, that wouldn’t work either; an irregular would be sure to come in and start yelling and carrying on.

Whatever this is, Dortmunder thought, I gotta go through with it. But not without my drink.

So, with barely any break in stride at all for his own interior monologue, he headed down the bar toward that distant but worth the detour drink. And as he went, the cop signaled to him. Not with any blunt stare or finger-point or hey you, none of that. All he did was pick up his glass, smile in an appreciative way at the club soda inside it, then put the glass back down on the table and look nowhere in particular. That’s all he did, but more plainly than an invitation edged in black it said, comon over, siddown, let’s get acquainted.

First things first. Dortmunder reached his glass, saw there wasn’t enough liquid left in the bottom of it to put out a firefly, drained it and turned hopelessly toward the booths, carrying the empty glass. Along the way, not looking at Kelp, who likewise did not look at him, he paused beside that first table to replenish his glass from their bottle—their bottle!—then trudged on down the row of booths to stop next to Mr. Doom and mutter, “This seat taken?”

“Rest yourself,” the cop said. He had a soft deep voice, a burr with some gravel in it, as though he might sing the Lord’s lines in some church choir somewhere.

So Dortmunder slid in across from the cop, keeping his knees away from those alien knees, and put his head back to sluice down a little bourbon. When he lowered glass and head, the cop was sliding a small card across the table toward him, saying, “Let me introduce myself.” He didn’t exactly smile or grin or anything like that, but you could tell he was pleased with himself.

Dortmunder leaned forward to look down at the card without touching it. A business card, an ivory off-white, with fancy lettering in light blue, it read in the middle:

JOHNNY EPPICK

For Hire

and in the lower right corner an address and phone number:

598 E. 3rd St.

New York, NY 10009

917-555-3585

East Third Street? Over by the river? Who ever had anything to do way over there? That was a part of Manhattan so remote you practically needed a visa to go there, and if you needed a reason to go there, there weren’t any.

Also, the phone number was for a cell phone, that was the Manhattan cell phone area code. So this Johnny Eppick could say he was at 598 East Third Street, but if you called that number and he answered, he could be in Omaha, who’s to know?

But more important than the address and the phone number was that line under the name: For Hire. Dortmunder frowned at that information some little time and then, head still facing downward, he swiveled his eyes up to look toward Johnny Eppick, if that’s who he was, and say, “You’re not a cop?”

“Not for seventeen months,” Eppick told him, and now he did grin. “Did my twenty, turned in my papers, decided to freelance.”

“Huh,” Dortmunder said. So apparently, you could take the cop out of the NYPD, but you couldn’t take the NYPD out of the cop.

And now this no-longer-cop did a very cop thing: out of an inside pocket of that black suitcoat he took a photo, color, about twice the size of the business card, and slid it forward beside the card to say, “Whadaya thinka that?”

The picture was what looked like an alley somewhere, grungy and neglected like all alleys everywhere, with what looked like the rear entrances to a row of stores in an irregular line of brick buildings. A guy was moving near one of those doors, carrying a computer in both arms. The guy was all dressed in black and was hunched over the computer as though it were pretty heavy.

Dortmunder didn’t really look at the picture, just gave it a skim before he shook his head and said, with regret, “Sorry, I never saw him before.”

“You see him every morning when you shave,” Eppick said.

Dortmunder frowned. What was this, a trick? Was that himself in the picture? Trying to recognize himself in that burdened figure there, that crumpled-over dark comma against the bricks, he said, “What’s goin on here?”

“That’s the back of an H & R Block,” Eppick told him. “It’s Sunday afternoon, it isn’t tax season, they’re closed. You took four computers out of there, don’t you remember?”

Vaguely, Dortmunder did. Of course, when you’re at your job, after a while the work all blends together. Carefully, he said, “I’m pretty sure that isn’t me.”

“Listen, John,” Eppick said, then paused to pretend he was polite, saying, “You don’t mind if I call you John, do you?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“That’s good. John, the point is, if I wanted to turn some evidence on you over to some former co-workers of mine, you’d already be in a place where everything goes clang-clang, you know what I mean?”

“No,” Dortmunder said.

“It seems to me pretty clear,” Eppick said. “One hand washes the other.”

Dortmunder nodded. Pointing his jaw at the picture, he said, “Which hand is that?”

“What you want, John—”

“Well, the negative, I guess.”

Sadly Eppick shook his head. “Sorry, John,” he said. “Digital. It’s in the computer forever. One you won’t be carrying anywhere, not even to that fence friend of yours, that Arnie Albright.”

Dortmunder raised a brow in surprise. “You know too much,” he said.

Eppick frowned at him. “Was that a threat, John?”

“No!” Startled, almost embarrassed, Dortmunder stuttered, “I only meant, you know so much, I don’t know how you’d know all that much, I mean, whadaya wanna know all that much about me for, that’s all. Not you know too much. So much. You know so much, uh, Mr. Eppick.”

“That’s okay, then,” Eppick said.

At this point there was a slight interruption as the street door beside their booth opened and two guys walked in, bringing with them a touch of the outer nippiness of the air. Dortmunder sat facing that door, while Eppick faced the bar, but if Dortmunder recognized either of these new customers he made no sign. Nor did Eppick seem to notice that fresh blood was walking past his elbow.

The first of the fresh blood was a carrot-headed guy who walked in a dogged unrelenting manner, as though looking for a chip to put on his shoulder, while the other was a younger guy who managed to look both eager and cautious at the same time, as though looking forward to dinner but unsure what that sound was he’d just heard from the kitchen.

These two didn’t become aware of Eppick until they’d already entered the place, the bar door closing behind them, and then they both faltered for just a frame or two before moving smoothly on, unhurried but covering ground, passing Andy Kelp with no recognition on either side and making their way without unseemly haste around the end of the bar and out of sight in the direction of Pointers and Setters and the phone booth and the back room.

Hoping Eppick had made nothing of this exit and entrance, and trying to ignore the army of butterflies now investigating the nooks and crannies of his stomach, Dortmunder tried to keep the conversation on track and his voice unbutterflied by saying, “I mean, that’s a real question. Knowing all this stuff about me and having this picture and all this. What’s the point in here?”

“The point, John, is this,” Eppick said. “I have a client, and he’s hired me to make a certain retrieval on his behalf.”

“A retrieval.”

“That’s exactly right. And I looked around, and I looked at old arrest records, you know, MOs of this guy and that guy, I still got my access to whatever I want over there, and it seemed to me you’re the guy I want to help me in this issue of this retrieval.”

“I’m reformed,” Dortmunder said.

“Have a relapse,” Eppick suggested. “Recidify.” Picking up the picture, he returned it to his coat pocket, then pushed the business card closer to Dortmunder, saying, “You come to my office tomorrow morning, ten a.m., you’ll meet my employer, he’ll explain the whole situation. You don’t show up, expect to hear knocking on your door.”

“Urm,” Dortmunder said.

Rising up out of the booth, Eppick nodded away, grinned in an amiable fashion, and said, “Give my hello to your friend Andy Kelp. But it’s just you I want to see in the morning.”

And he turned and walked out of the bar to the outer sidewalk, leaving behind a sopping dishrag where there once had been a man.

2

WHEN DORTMUNDER’S BREATHING had returned to normal, he twisted around on the seat to look for Kelp, who had already departed for the back room. He knew he was supposed to follow the others back there now, where, instead of the original agenda, they would expect him to answer a whole lot of questions. He didn’t think he’d enjoy that.

Facing the other way—toward the street, in fact—trying to decide what to do, he was in time to see another arrival push through the door, this one distinctive in every way. If people come in sizes, this guy was jumbo. Maybe even colossal. What he looked mostly like was the part of the rocket that gets jettisoned over the Indian Ocean, plus a black homburg. In addition to the homburg, he wore many yards of black wool topcoat over a black turtleneck sweater that made it seem as though his massive head were rising out of a hillside.

This fellow stopped just inside the closing door to lower a very large beetled brow in Dortmunder’s direction. “You were talking,” he said, “to a cop.”

“Hello, Tiny,” Dortmunder said, for that was, improbably, the monster’s name. “He isn’t a cop any more, not for seventeen months. Did his twenty, turned in his papers, decided to go freelance.”

“Cops don’t go freelance, Dortmunder,” Tiny told him. “Cops are part of the system. The system doesn’t do freelance. We are freelance.”

“Here’s his card,” Dortmunder said, and handed it over.

Tiny rested the card in his giant palm and read aloud: “‘For Hire.’ Huh. There’s rent-a-cops, but this isn’t like that, is it?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

Tiny with great gentleness handed the card back, saying, “Well, Dortmunder, you’re an interesting fellow, I’ve always said so.”

“I didn’t go to him, Tiny,” Dortmunder pointed out. “He came to me.”

“But that’s it, isn’t it,” Tiny said. “He came to you. Not Andy, not me, just you.”

“My lucky day,” Dortmunder said, failing to hide his bitterness.

“A cop that isn’t a cop,” Tiny mused, “that you could rent him like a car. And with you he wanted a nice conversation.”

“It wasn’t that nice, Tiny,” Dortmunder said.

“I been in the limo outside,” Tiny said, that being his preferred method of transportation, given his immensity, “I spotted you in there, I figured, maybe Dortmunder and this cop want to be alone, then I see Stan and the kid go in, no introductions, no high fives, and now the cop comes out, and turns out, what he wanted with you, he wanted to give you his new card, he’s opened shop, cop for lease.”

“Not a cop, Tiny,” Dortmunder said. “Not for seventeen months.”

“I think that transition takes a little longer,” Tiny suggested. “Maybe three generations.”

“You could be right.”

“Again,” Tiny agreed. “You wanna talk about it, Dortmunder?”

“Not until I think about it a while,” Dortmunder told him. “And I don’t really want to think about it, not yet.”

“So some other time,” Tiny said.

“Oh, I know,” Dortmunder said, and sighed. “I know, there will be some other time.”

Tiny looked around the bar. “Looks like everybody else is around back.”

“Yeah, they went back there.”

“Maybe we oughta do likewise,” Tiny said. “See what Stan has in mind. It isn’t that often a driver has an idea.” He gazed down at Dortmunder. “You coming?”

With a second sigh—that made two in one day—Dortmunder shook his head. “I don’t think I can, Tiny. That guy kinda knocked the spirit out of me, you know what I mean?”

“Not yet.”

“What I think,” Dortmunder said, “I think I should go home. Just, you know, go home.”

“We’ll miss you,” Tiny said.

3

SO, JOHN,” MAY said, over the breakfast table, “what are you going to do?”

After a troubled night, Dortmunder had described his meeting with Johnny Eppick For Hire to his faithful companion, May, over his usual breakfast of equal parts corn flakes, milk, and sugar, while she listened wide-eyed, ignoring her half-grapefruit and coffee black. And now she wanted to know what he was going to do.

“Well, May,” he said, “I think I got no choice.”

“You say he isn’t a cop any more.”

“He’s still plugged in to the cops,” Dortmunder explained. “He can still point a finger and lightning comes out.”

“So you have to go there.”

“I don’t even know how,” Dortmunder complained. “All the way east on Third Street? How do I get there, take a ferry around the island?”

“There’s probably buses,” May said. “Across Fourteenth Street. I could loan you my MetroCard.”

“That’s still a hell of a walk,” Dortmunder complained. “Fourteenth, all the way down to Third.”

“Well, John,” she said, “it doesn’t seem worth stealing a car for.”

“No, I guess not.”

“Especially,” she said, “if you’re gonna visit a cop.”

“Not for seventeen months.”

“Uh huh,” she said.

The bus wasn’t so bad, once he and the driver figured out how he should slide May’s mass transit card through that little slot. It was an articulated bus, so he found a seat next to a window in the rear part, beyond the accordion. He sat there and the bus groaned away from the curb, and he looked out the window at this new world.

He’d never been so far east on Fourteenth Street. New York doesn’t exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge.

Looking out his window, Dortmunder tried to get a handle on this particular village. He’d never been to Bulgaria—well, he’d never been asked—but it seemed to him this area was probably like a smaller city in that land, on one side or the other of the mountains. If they had mountains.

After a while, he noticed the scenery wasn’t bumping past the window any more but was just sitting out there, and when he looked around to see what had gone wrong the other seats were all empty and the driver, way up there in front, was twisted around, yelling at him. Dortmunder focused and got the words:

“End of the line!”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

He waved at the guy, and got off the bus. The walk down to Third Street was just as long as he’d been afraid it would be, but then that wasn’t even the end of it. Not knowing how long it would take to get to such an out-of-the-way location, he’d given it an hour, which turned out to be fifteen minutes too long, so he had to walk around the block a couple times so he wouldn’t be ridiculously early.

But at least that did give him the opportunity to case the place. It was a narrow dark brick corner building, a little grungy, six stories high. The ground floor was a check-cashing place, with neon signs saying so in many languages in windows backed by the kind of iron bars they use for the gorilla cages in the zoo.

Around the side on Third Street was a green metal door with a vertical row of buttons next to names on cards in narrow slots. Some of the names seemed to be people, some businesses. There were two apartments or offices per floor, labeled “L” and “R.” EPPICK—that’s all it said—was 3R.

Stepping back, Dortmunder looked up at the windows that should be 3R, and they were covered by venetian blinds slanted up to see the sky, not the street. Okay; fifteen minutes. He went for a stroll.

It was still five minutes before the hour when he’d completed the circuit twice, wondering what the proper word was for a Mongolian bodega, but enough was enough, so he pressed the button next to EPPICK and almost immediately the door made that buzz they do. He pushed it open and entered a tiny vestibule with a steep flight of stairs straight ahead and a very narrow elevator on the right. So he took the elevator up, and when he got off at three there were the stairs again, flanked by two doors, these of dark wood and marked with brass figures 3L and 3R.

Another button. He pressed it, and another door gave him the raspberry. This door you had to pull, he soon figured out, but the buzz was in no hurry, it kept buzzing at him until he got the idea.

Inside, the place was larger than Dortmunder had expected, having taken it for granted a building like this would consist of a bunch of little rooms that people would call a “warren of offices.” But, no. Many of the warren’s interior walls had been removed, a rich burgundy carpet had been laid to connect it all, and on the carpet were separate areas defined not by walls but by furniture.

Just inside the door that Dortmunder was closing was a small well-polished wooden desk facing sideways, to see both the door and the room. Next to the desk stood Eppick, wearing his winner’s smile plus, this morning, a polo shirt the same color as the carpet, gray slacks with expandable waist instead of belt, and two-tone golf shoes, though without cleats.

“Right on time, John,” Eppick said, and stuck out a gnarly hand. “I’m gonna shake your hand because we’re gonna be partners.”

Dortmunder shrugged and stuck his own hand out. “Okay,” he said, limiting the partnership.

“Lemme introduce you,” Eppick said, turning away, keeping Dortmunder’s hand in his own, an unpleasant experience, “to our principal.”

Dortmunder was going to say he didn’t know they had any principles, but then decided not to, because here was the rest of the room. To the right, along the wall under the windows with their upward-slanted venetian blinds showing strips of pale blue late-autumn sky, was a blond oak conference table with rounded ends, flanked by eight matching blue-upholstered chairs. On the left side, where there were no windows because of the next building in the row, was a conversation area, two dark blue sofas at right angles around a square glass coffee table, and a couple of matching chairs just behind them, ready for overflow. To the rear behind the conversation area was a galley kitchen, with a simple table and six chairs in front of it, and in the final quarter, behind the conference table, stood a StairMaster and other gym equipment. Not what Dortmunder would have guessed from an ex-cop. Not from an ex-cop called Eppick, anyway.

“Around here, John,” Eppick said, and led Dortmunder around in an orbit of the front desk, aiming for the front left corner of the space, where a high-tech wheelchair that looked as though it were ready for spacewalks squatted facing the glass coffee table, opposite one of the blue sofas, with the other sofa against the wall to its left.

Someone or something hunkered in the wheelchair, inside black brogans, black pants, a Navajo-Indian-design throw rug draped over the shoulders, and a scarlet beret on top. It seemed large and soft, just barely squeezing into the available space, and it brooded straight ahead, paying no attention to Eppick as he led Dortmunder forward by the hand.

“Mr. Hemlow,” Eppick said, and all at once he sounded deferential, not the self-assured cop at all any more, “Mr. Hemlow, the specialist is here.”

“Tell him to sit down. There.”

The voice sounded as though it were coming from a bicycle tire with a slow leak, and at first Dortmunder thought Mr. Hemlow had pointed at the sofa to his left with a chicken foot, but no, that was his hand.

Speaking of hands, Eppick finally released Dortmunder’s and gestured for him to get to that sofa by walking around behind Mr. Hemlow in his wheelchair, which Dortmunder did, while Eppick went away to take up a lot of the other sofa, crossing one leg over the other as though he wanted to show how relaxed he was, but not succeeding.

Dortmunder sat to Mr. Hemlow’s left, leaned forward, rested his forearms on his thighs, looked eye-to-eye with Mr. Hemlow, and said, “Harya doin?”

“I’ve been better,” grated the bicycle tire.

Dortmunder was sure of that. Seen up close, Mr. Hemlow was seven or eight different kinds of mess. He had a little clear plastic hose draped over his ears and inserted into his nostrils to give him oxygen. His face and neck and apparently everything but those chicken-foot hands were bloated and stuffed looking, as though he’d been filled up by a bicycle pump trying to solve the tire leak. His eyes were small and mean-looking, their pupils a very wet blue, so that, under the red beret, he looked like a more than usually homicidal hawk. What could be seen of his skin was a raw-looking red, as though he were originally a very pale person who’d been left. . .