44.

"Ah, the open road," Andy Kelp said, at the wheel of the Regal. (The license plates did say MD, as Dortmunder had expected, and were from New Mexico.) Interstate 93/95, between Las Vegas and Henderson, was a wide road, all right, but with all the commercial traffic highballing along it Dortmunder wouldn't exactly call it open. Still, they were making good time, and the Regal's air-conditioning was smooth as a diaper, so Dortmunder relaxed partly into all this comfort and said, "Lemme tell you what's been happening here."

Kelp glanced away from the semis and vans and potato chip trucks long enough to say, "Happening? You just got here."

"And everybody," Dortmunder told him, "makes me for a wrong guy. Like that. Like that."

The second time he tried to snap his fingers, he hurt something in a joint. "Right away," he explained.

Again Kelp gave him the double-o, then looked back at the highway in time not to run into the back of that big slat-sided truck full of live cows. Steering around the beef, which looked reproachfully at them as they went by, Kelp said, "I see what your problem is, John. You don't have a sense of what we call protective coloration."

Dortmunder frowned at him, and ma.s.saged his finger joint. "What's that?"

"You'll find out," Kelp promised him, which sounded ominous. "When we get back from seeing this fella Vogel. But let's get this part squared away first."

Shaking his head, weaving through the traffic in all this sunlight, Kelp said, "I hope he's got what we want."

"It would help," Dortmunder agreed.

Dortmunder had phoned Lester Vogel from Vegas to introduce himself and get directions, and they found the place the first try, in a low incomplete tan neighborhood of warehouses and small factories in the scrubby desert, just beyond the Henderson city line. A tall unpainted board fence ran all around a full block here, with big black letters along each side that read GENERAL MANUFACTURING, which didn't exactly tell you a h.e.l.l of a lot about what was going on inside there. However, when Dortmunder and Kelp got out of the Regal's air-conditioning and into Nevada's air, there was a smell wafting over that fence to suggest there were people somewhere nearby stirring things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.

Kelp had parked, per instructions, next to the truck entrance to General Manufacturing, a big pair of broad wood-slat doors that looked just like the rest of the fence and that were firmly closed. Now they went over to those doors, banged on them for a while, and at last a voice from inside yelled something in Spanish, so Dortmunder yelled back in English: "Dortmunder! Here to see Vogel!"

There was silence then for a long while, during which Dortmunder tried unsuccessfully to see between the wooden slats of the door, and then, just as Kelp was saying, "Maybe we oughta whack it again," one side of the entrance creaked inward just enough for a bony dark-complexioned black-haired head to lean out, study them both briefly, and say, "Hokay."

The head disappeared, but the opening stayed open, so Dortmunder and Kelp stepped on inside, to find that the interior of General Manufacturing was a lot of different places, like an entire village of busy artisans in different sheds and shacks and lean-tos and at least one old schoolbus without its wheels. Various smokes of various colors rose from various places. Vehicles of many kinds were parked haphazardly among the small structures. Workers hammered things and screwed things together and painted things and took things apart. A number of trucks, mostly with pale green Mexican license plates, were being loaded or unloaded. In an open-sided lean-to off to the right, people stirred things in vats with one hand while holding their nose with the other.

The bony head that had invited them in belonged to a scrawny body in some leftover pieces of ripped clothing; judging from his size and boniness and the condition of his teeth, he could have been any age from eleven to ninety-six.

After he'd pushed shut the door behind them and dropped a ma.s.sive wooden bar over it to keep it shut, this guy turned toward Dortmunder and Kelp, nodded vigorously, flapped a hand in the direction of the schoolbus, and said, "Orifice."

"Got it," Dortmunder said, and he and Kelp made their way through this dusty busy landscape that would surely have reminded them of Vulcan's workshop if either of them had ever paid the slightest bit of attention in school, and as they got to the orangey yellow bus its door sagged open and out bounded a grinning wiry guy in a black threepiece suit, white shirt, black tie, and black wing-tip shoes. He looked like he was going to the funeral of somebody he was glad was dead.

This guy stopped in front of Dortmunder and Kelp, legs apart, hands on hips, chin thrust forward, eyes bright and cheerful but at the same time somehow aggressive, and he said, "Which one's Dortmunder?"

"Me," Dortmunder said.

"Good," the guy said, and squinted at Kelp: "So what does that make you?"

"His friend," Kelp said.

The guy absorbed that thought, then frowned deeply at Kelp and said, "You a New Yorker?"

Kelp frowned right back at him: "'Why?"

"You are!" the guy shouted, and lit up like Times Square. "Lester Vogel," he announced, and stuck his hand out in Kelp's direction. "I used to be a New Yorker myself."

"Andy Kelp," Kelp said, but doubtfully, as he shook Vogel's hand.

Dortmunder said, "Used to be a New Yorker?"

Vogel did the handshake routine with Dortmunder as well, saying, "You lose your edge, guys. After a while. I gotta live out here now, this is access to the customers, access to the labor pool, access to the kind of air's supposed to keep these lungs from goin flat like a tire, so here I am, but I do miss it. Say, listen, Dortmunder, do me a - You mind if I call you Dortmunder?"

"No," Dortmunder said.

"Thanks," Vogel said. "Say, Dortmunder, do me a favor and say something New York to me, will ya? All I get around here is Mex, it's like livin in the subway, I hear these people jabberin away, I look around, where's my stop? East Thirtythird Street. But this is it, fellas, this is the stop. Dortmunder, say somethin New York to me."

Dortmunder lowered his eyebrows at this weirdo: "What for?"

"Oh, thanks," Vogel cried, and grinned all over himself. "You ask these people a question around here, you know what they do? They answer it! You got all this por favor comin outa your earholes. Sometimes, you know, I pick up the phone, I dial the 718 area code, I dial somebody at random, just to hear the abuse when it's a wrong number."

"So that was you, you son of a b.i.t.c.h," Kelp said, and grinned at him.

Vogel grinned back. "Kelp," he said, "we're gonna get al- Oh. Okay I call you Kelp?"

"Sure. And you're Vogel, right?"

"Waitresses around here," Vogel said, "they're all named Debby and they all wanna call me Lester. I sound like a deodorant. Well, anyway," he said, still being cheerful in manner no matter how much he complained, "A. K. A. tells me I can maybe help you boys, maybe so, and if I help you boys I'm gonna help myself, and that's what I like. So what can I do you for?"

Dortmunder pointed. "Those big tall metal canisters over there," he said. "They're green."

"You're absolutely right," Vogel said. "You're an observant guy, Dortmunder, I like that. I'm an observant guy myself, not like these laid-back putzes they got around this part of the world, and I'm observing you being an observant guy also, and I can see we're gonna get along."

"Green," Dortmunder said, "is oxygen."

"Right again!"

Vogel cried. "Green is always oxygen, and oxygen is always green, it's a safety measure, so you don't put the wrong gas the wrong place, even though they got all these different fittings. We use oxygen here in a number of things we do, we got a supplier up in Vegas, the Silver State Industrial and Medical Gas Supply Company, they give us all this different stuff we got here."

"That's right," Dortmunder said. "You use some other gases around here, too."

"If it hisses out of a big torpedoshaped canister," Vogel said, "we got it.

I take it this is the area where you got an interest."

"It is," Dortmunder said.

"Well, come along, Dortmunder, and you come along, too, Kelp," Vogel said, starting off, not seeming to care that his shiny shoes were already getting dusty out here, "let me show you fellas what we got here, and you can tell me what you want, and then you can tell me what's in it for me."

45.

Anne Marie undertipped the bellman, because she knew women are expected to undertip and she didn't want to call attention to herself. The bellman, seeing she'd lived down to his expectations, wrote her off as another cheap b.i.t.c.h, and had already forgotten her before he was well out of the room.

Once she was alone, Anne Marie went over to draw the drapes back from the room's all-window end wall, and there it was. The Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino. Well, no, not the casino, that part was somewhere down underneath her.

Twelve stories down. They had given her a room on what they called the fourteenth floor, because there are no thirteenth floors almost anywhere in America, and certainly none in Las Vegas. But they could call it fourteen all they wanted; it was the thirteenth floor, and Fate knew it.

And so, from here, thirteen stories up, Anne Marie looked out and down, and there was the Battle-Lake, looking more like a Battle-Pond, flanked by its bleachers, with the cottages beyond, all laid out like a model in a war room, ready for combat. A swimming pool was also out there, and a wading pool, and miniature golf, and miniature plantings, and many tourists, most of them far from miniature. From up here, the tourists looked like rolling blobs of Playdoh in their bright vacation colors.

Also from up here, the many many security people in their tan uniforms stood out like peanuts in a bowl of M&M's. Looking down at them, watching their steady progress through the dawdling crowd, Anne Marie was convinced more than ever that the scheme was doomed.

The trip to Washington, on the other hand, had been a lark. It had seemed as though it would be a lark beforehand, and it had turned out to be a lark while it was going on, and John's friend May had been just the perfect companion for those times when Andy and John were off doing their thing. But when Andy had told her about this! When Andy had explained to her that they were all off this time to rob a casino in Las Vegas as a diversion from their attempt to get John's ring back, Anne Marie had understood, finally and completely, that these people were crazy. Bonkers. Nuts. Rob a Las Vegas casino, a place more determinedly guarded than Fort Knox, as a diversion.

I'm getting out of this, Anne Marie told herself. I am definitely leaving these March hares. But not quite yet.

The fact was, she did enjoy being with Andy, no matter how crazy he was. So, at least until everybody was in Las Vegas, and the diversion failed, and the whole crowd of them except her was carted off to jail, she would continue to pal around with Andy, and just watch the scene unfold. And at the same time she would do what was necessary to protect herself.

The reason was, she'd changed her mind about Court TV. It wasn't so much that she minded making an appearance on Court TV - that might also be fun, in a way - it was the eight-and-a-third to twenty-five years that would follow her appearance that she didn't care for. If there was one destiny open to her that was likely to be worse than marriage to Howard Carpinaw, it was a woman's prison for approximately a quarter of her life. No; not worth it.

So she'd taken steps. She had seen to it that, when the time came to cut loose from Andy Kelp and his lunatic friends, she could go ahead and cut, and be safe as houses.

First of all, she was traveling alone. Second, absolutely n.o.body on earth except Andy's friends had the slightest idea she even knew Andy Kelp. And third, before leaving New York she had written letters to two friends back in Lancaster, in both of them breaking the news that Howard had left her, and that she had stayed on in New York City a while to try to figure out what to do next with her life, and that she had now decided to come home but would spend a week in Las Vegas on the way. (Not that Las Vegas was exactly on the way from New York, New York, to Lancaster, Kansas. She was overshooting Lancaster by about eleven hundred miles. But who's counting?) So that's what would happen. She had come to Las Vegas, as announced, and she would spend a week, and then she would go home. And the fact that a major failed casino robbery diversion would have taken place in the hotel while she was in residence would be no more than a coincidence, an exciting extra on her vacation to make up for the loss of her husband. After all, hundreds of other people would have been staying in the same hotel at the same time.

She unpacked, briskly and efficiently. Life had been one hotel room after another recently - this motel-box in the sky couldn't hold a candle to that terrific room at the Watergate - and she'd become very adept at the transitions. Then, looking out the window once more at the near view of the hotel grounds and the far view of out-of-focus tan flatness and the distant view of low gray ridges at the horizon line, she wondered what she would do with herself in the quiet time until Andy reappeared.

The pool down there did look as though it might be fun. Normally, she'd be doubtful about the pool, because she felt she was about fifteen pounds overweight to be acceptable in a bathing suit, but from what she'd seen of the Gaiety's customers so far she believed her nickname around here would be Slim, so the pool it was.

She changed into her suit and packed a small purse, and was about to leave the room when the phone rang. It was - who else would it be? - Andy: "Hey, Anne Marie, I heard you were in town. It's Andy."

"Andy!" she said, being surprised on cue. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh, a little convention, the usual. I'm here with John."

"You want to come over?" she asked him. "Say h.e.l.lo?"

And look out my window, of course, while you're here.

"Maybe later," he said, surprisingly. She'd expected them to want to case the joint right away. "Maybe tomorrow morning," he said. "We gotta get John dressed, a couple other things. Midmorning, okay?"

"I'll probably be somewhere around the pool," she said, with furrowed brow.

"See you then."

Anne Marie hung up and left the room and headed for the pool, to check it out. And all the way down in the elevator she kept thinking: Get John dressed?

46.

"I don't know about this," Dortmunder said. "I don't know about those knees, to begin with."

"You brought those knees in with you, John," Kelp reminded him. "Look at the clothes."

It was very hard to look at the clothes, with those knees glowering back at him from the discount-store mirror like sullen twin hobos pulled in on a b.u.m rap. On the other hand, with these clothes, it was very hard to look at the clothes anyway.

This was the end result of Dortmunder's having told Kelp, in the car on the way to Henderson, how everybody in this town seemed to gaze upon him with immediate suspicion. If he'd known that admission was going to lead to this he'd have kept the problem to himself, just resigned himself to being a suspicious character, which is in fact what he was.

But, no. Despite the absolute success of the meeting with Lester Vogel - that scheme was going to work out perfectly, he almost believed it himself - here he was, humiliated, in this discount mall on the fringes of the city, in front of a mirror, his knees frowning at him in reproof, wearing these clothes.

The pants, to begin with, weren't pants, they were shorts. Shorts. Who over the age of six wears shorts? What person, that is, of Dortmunder's dignity, over the age of six wears shorts? Big baggy tan shorts with pleats. Shorts with pleats, so that he looked like he was wearing brown paper bags from the supermarket above his knees, with his own sensible black socks below the knees, but the socks and their accompanying feet were then stuck into sandals. Sandals? Dark brown sandals? Big clumpy sandals, with his own black socks, plus those knees, plus those shorts? Is this a way to dress? And let's not forget the shirt. Not that it was likely anybody ever could forget this shirt, which looked as though it had been manufactured at midnight during a power outage. No two pieces of the shirt were the same color. The left short sleeve was plum, the right was lime. The back was dark blue. The left front panel was chartreuse, the right was cerise, and the pocket directly over his heart was white. And the whole shirt was huge, baggy and draping and falling around his body, and worn outside the despicable shorts.

Dortmunder lifted his gaze from his reproachful knees, and contemplated, without love, the clothing Andy Kelp had forced him into. He said, "Who wears this stuff?"

"Americans," Kelp told him.

"Don't they have mirrors in America?"

"They think it looks spiffy," Kelp explained. "They think it shows they're on vacation and they're devil-may-care."

"The devil may care for this c.r.a.p," Dortmunder said, "but I hate it."

"Wear it," Kelp advised him, "and n.o.body will look at you twice."

"And I'll know why," Dortmunder said. Then he frowned at Kelp, next to him in the mirror, moderate and sensible in gray chinos and blue polo shirt and black loafers, and he said, "How come you don't dress like this, you got so much protective coloration."

"It's not my image," Kelp told him.

Dortmunder's brow lowered. "This is my image? I look like an awning!"

"See, John," Kelp said, being kindly, which only made things worse, "what my image is, I'm a technician on vacation, maybe a clerk somewhere, maybe behind the counter at the electric supply place, so what I do when I've got time off, I wear the same pants I wear to work, only I don't wear the white shirt with the pens in the pocket protector, I wear the shirt that lets me pretend I know how to play golf. You see?"

"It's your story," Dortmunder said.

"That's right," Kelp agreed. "And your story, John, you're a working man on vacation. You're a guy, every day on the job you wear paint-stained blue jeans and big heavy steel-toe workboots probably yellow, you know those boots? - and T-shirts with sayings on them, cartoons on them, and plaster dust like icing all over everything. So when you go on vacation, you don't wear nothing you wear at work, you don't want to think about work " "Not the way you describe it."

"That's right. So you go down to the mall, and here we are at the mall, and you walk around with the wife and you're supposed to pick up a wardrobe for your week's vacation, and you don't know a thing about what clothes look like except the c.r.a.p you wear every day, and the wife picks up this shirt out of the reduced bin and says, This looks nice,' and so you wear it. And when we leave here, John, I want you to look around and see just how many guys are wearing exactly that shirt, or at least a shirt just like it."

Dortmunder said, "And is that who I want people to think I am?"

"Well, John," Kelp said, "it seems to me, it's either that, or it's you're a guy that, when people look at you, they think nine and one and one. You know what I mean?"

"And this," Dortmunder said, as he and his knees glared at one another, "is something else Max Fairbanks owes me."