Meaning the room’s second desk. “Sure,” Stan said, and sat at desk number two and dialed his Mom’s cell phone, which she now kept in her cab, while she was working, so they could keep in constant touch.
“Hello!”
“Don’t shout, Mom.”
“I gotta shout, I’m next to a cement mixer!”
“You want me to call you back?”
“What?”
“You want me to call you back?”
“No, that’s okay,” Mom said, at a much more reasonable volume. “He turned off. How you doing out on Long Island?”
“Well, that’s what I’m—”
“Hold on, I got a fare, a fare!”
“Okay.”
Mom must have put the phone on the front seat next to her, amid the newspapers and take-out crap that always accumulated in there. He could hear a male voice, but not what it said, and then he heard his Mom’s distant voice say, “You got it,” and a few seconds later, she was back, very pleased. “JFK,” she said.
“Oh, yeah? Listen, that’s good, because things worked out different.”
“Long Island, you mean?”
“Well, it didn’t happen,” Stan said. “The rest of them all went off to discuss things with the officials, you know?”
“Uh-oh.”
“So it turns out,” Stan said, “I’ll be home for dinner after all.”
“No, you won’t,” Mom said.
“Why not?”
“John called, he’s got something. He wants a meet at the O.J., six o’clock.”
“Okay, then,” Stan said as Max came back in, trailing the memory of cigar smoke. “Where I am instead, I’m at Maximilian’s. When you’re done at Kennedy, come over here, pick me up, and we’ll go up to the O.J. together.”
“Don’t let that Maximilian cheat you, Stan.”
“What an idea,” Stan said, and hung up, and said, “Well, Max? Is that attractive?”
“But what does it attract?” Max wanted to know. “Truthfully, Stanley, how hot is that vehicle?”
“Well,” Stan said, “if it happened you wanted to fry an egg . . .”
“That’s what I thought. So that means,” Max explained, “a lotta work in the shop, changing parts, changing numbers on things, getting paperwork that doesn’t turn into dust in your hand. This is all expensive, Stanley, it’s time-consuming, the boys in the shop, it’s gonna take a lot of time away from their regular work, I’m not sure it’s even worth my while to get into it. But I know you, I like you, and I know you’re anxious to get movin outta here—”
“As a matter of fact, no,” Stan told him. “My Mom’s got a fare to Kennedy, and then she’s coming here to pick me up. So we got all the time in the world to discuss this. Isn’t that nice?”
“My lucky day,” Max said.
The phone rang, and Harriet answered: “Maximilian’s Used Cars, Miss Caroline speaking. Oh, I’m sorry, no, Mr. Maximilian is no longer with us, he retired to Minsk. Yes, I’ll pass that along. You, too.” Hanging up, she returned to her machine-gun typing. “The one with the machete,” she said.
37
When Dortmunder walked into the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at four minutes before six that evening, Rollo, the bulky, balding bartender, was painting MERY XM on the extremely dusty mirror over the back bar, using some kind of white foam from a spray can, possibly shaving cream, while the regulars, clustered at one end of the bar, were discussing the names of Santa’s reindeer. “I know it starts,” the first regular said, “‘Now, Flasher, now, Lancer, now—’”
“Now, now, wait a second,” the second regular said. “One of those is wrong.”
Dortmunder walked over to stand at the bar, somewhat to the right of the regulars and directly behind Rollo, whose tongue was stuck slightly out of the left corner of his mouth as, with deep concentration, he painted downward a left-trending diagonal next to M.
“Oh yeah?” said the first regular. “Which one?”
“I think Flasher,” said the second regular.
A third regular joined in at that point, saying, “Naw, Lancer.”
Rollo started the second leg of the next letter.
“So what are you telling me?” demanded the first regular. “They’re both wrong?”
A fourth regular, who had been communing with the spheres of the universe, or maybe with the bottles on the back bar, inhaled, apparently for the first time in several days, and said, “Rupert.”
All the regulars looked at him. Rollo started the horizontal.
“Rupert what?” demanded the second regular.
“Rupert Reindeer,” the fourth regular told him.
The third regular, in total disdain, said, “Wait a minute. You mean the one with the red nose?”
“Yeah!”
“That’s not a reindeer!” the third regular informed him.
“Oh yeah?” Transition complete, the fourth regular was at this point fully in the here and now. “Then why do they call him Rupert Reindeer?”
“He’s not one of these reindeer,” the first regular explained.
“He’s not even Rupert,” the third regular said. “He’s Rodney. Rodney, the red-nosed—”
“They won’t let him play,” the second regular said, “unless it’s foggy.”
“And you,” the third regular said, pointing a definitive finger at the fourth regular, “are foggy.”
“Hey!” the fourth regular said. “How’m I supposed to take that?”
Rollo added an extremely accomplished apostrophe just to the right of XMA, then paused to contemplate that next bare space.
“Any way you want,” the third regular said.
The fourth regular frowned, thinking that over.
Rollo shook his head, then turned slightly to glance toward Dortmunder. “How you doin,” he said.
“Fine,” Dortmunder assured him.
Rollo shook the spray can in the direction of the space next to XMA’. “It’s all curves from now on,” he said.
“You did good with the R,” Dortmunder told him.
Rollo was cheered by that. “You think so? It’s in the wrist, I believe.”
“You’re probably right,” Dortmunder said.
“I think one of them is Dopey,” the second regular said.
“Yeah,” the third regular said, “and I know which one, too.”
The first regular said, “I think the next two are Masher and Nixon.”
“Nixon!” snorted the third regular. “He wasn’t even alive yet.”
“Well, it’s Masher and somebody.”
“Donner,” said the second regular. “I know Donner goes in there somewhere.”
“No, no, no,” said the first regular. “Donner’s that place where they ate the people.”
Everybody was interested in that. “Who ate the people?” asked the fourth regular, who had decided not to make a federal case out of being called foggy, or whatever it was.
“Some other people,” the first regular explained. “They got stuck in the snow, on a bus.”
“Now wait a minute,” the third regular said. “It wasn’t a bus. I know what you’re talkin about, it was a long time ago, it was one of those wagons, Saratoga wagons.”
“It wasn’t Saratoga,” the second regular said. “Maybe you mean station wagon.”
As Rollo started the slow circuitous path of the final letter on the mirror, the first regular said, “Station wagon! If it’s too long ago for a bus, whada they doin in a station wagon?”
“I dunno, Mac,” the second regular said, “it’s your story.”
Rollo finished a somewhat recognizable S, and the first regular called over, “Hey, Rollo, you got that misspelled there!”
Rollo looked at the regular, then at his handiwork. MERY XMA’S. He didn’t seem particularly worried. “Oh yeah?” he said.
“You gotta spell merry,” the first regular told him, “with an a.”
The third regular said, “What are you, nuts? When you spell it with an a, that’s what you call it when you get married.”