“You know, but wait a minute now,” the third regular said. “Botha these theories end at the same place. And I like the place. At the end, the new buildings and all the yuppies are both gone.”
With a surprised look, the second regular said, “That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Spaceship buildings,” agreed the ex-pugilist, “fulla yuppies, gone.”
This idea was so pleasing to everyone that conversation stopped briefly so they could all contemplate this future world—soon, Lord—when the yuppies and their warrens would all be away in some other corner of the universe.
Kelp took the opportunity of this silence to say, very loudly, “Well, Rollo, looka this! You got a customer here!”
Rollo lifted his head at that, at last, but then he looked past Kelp toward the door, saying, “Well, if it isn’t the beer and salt.”
“No, I’m the—” Kelp started, but was interrupted by a voice saying, “Hey, there, Andy, whadaya say?”
Kelp turned to see Stan Murch, a stocky open-faced guy with carrot-colored hair who’d just come in. Approaching the bar, waving amiably at Rollo, Stan said, “Don’t tell me the Williamsburg Bridge is open.”
“I wasn’t,” Kelp said.
Rollo brought a freshly rinsed glass full of beer to Stan, took a saltshaker from the back bar, and plunked it down beside the beer, saying, “The rent is paid now, all right. The beer and salt is here.”
Stan didn’t seem to mind this badinage, if that’s what it was. “A little salt in the beer,” he explained, “gives you the head right back, when it goes flat.”
“Most people,” Rollo told him, “finish their beer before it goes flat. Then they have another.”
“I’m a driver,” Stan said. “I gotta watch my intake.”
“Uh-huh,” said Rollo. At long last, he looked at Kelp and said, “The other bourbon’s in back already. I gave him your glass.”
“A nice clean glass, I bet,” Kelp said.
“Uh-huh,” said Rollo.
Stan picked up his beer and his salt, and he and Kelp walked together down the bar, past the regulars, who were now discussing whether the alien yuppies had come to earth for tofu or had they brought it with them. Along the way, Stan said, “The Williamsburg Bridge is a menace. The reason I’m late, I hadda come to Manhattan twice.”
As they went back past the end of the bar and down the hall past the two doors marked with dog silhouettes labeled POINTERS and SETTERS and past the phone booth with the string dangling from the quarter slot, Kelp said, “Twice? You forget something?”
“I forgot the Williamsburg Bridge,” Stan told him. “I came over the Manhattan Bridge—sensible, right?”
“Sure.”
“Could not get north in Manhattan,” Stan said, “not with the mess around the Williamsburg. So I went south, over the Brooklyn Bridge back to Brooklyn, took the BQE to the Midtown Tunnel, and that’s how come I’m here at all.”
“Quick thinking,” Kelp said, and opened the green door at the end of the hall.
“It’s what I do,” Stan said. “Drive.”
They went through the doorway together into a small square room with a concrete floor. Beer and liquor cases stacked to the ceiling all around hid the walls, leaving only a small open space in the middle. In that space stood a battered old round table with a stained green felt top. Half a dozen chairs were placed around this table, and the only light came from one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.
Seated at this table were Dortmunder and Tom and Tiny, who was just saying, “Turns out he was right. His head was too wide to fit through the bars. Not all the way through.”
“Hee-hee,” said Tom.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Tiny said.
Tiny and Tom considered each other. Dortmunder looked over at the doorway with the expression of a man hoping for an urgent phone call to take him away from here. “There you guys are,” he said. “You’re late.”
“Don’t ask,” Kelp told him.
“Williamsburg Bridge,” said Stan.
“Well, come on in,” Dortmunder said, “and let’s get to it. Stan Murch, you know Tiny.”
“Sure,” Stan said. “How you doin, Tiny?”
“Keepin fit.”
“And this,” Dortmunder said reluctantly, “is Tom Jimson. He’s the source of the job.”
“Hiya,” Stan said.
“The thirty-thousand-dollar driver,” Tom said, and did his chuckle noise.
Stan looked pleasantly at Dortmunder. “Am I supposed to get that?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Kelp and Stan took chairs at the table, Kelp sitting next to Dortmunder, who had in front of him two glasses—one of them sparkly clean—and a muddy bottle with a label reading AMSTERDAM LIQUOR STORE BOURBON — “OUR OWN BRAND.” Kelp took the bottle and the clean glass and poured himself a restorative.
Meantime, Stan was saying, “So you’ve got something, huh, John? And you need a driver.”
“This time,” Dortmunder said, “we’re gonna do it right.”
Stan looked alert. “This time?”
“It’s kind of an ongoing story we’ve got here,” Dortmunder told him.
Kelp put his glass down, smacked his lips, and said to Stan, “It’s trains again.”
“Let’s do it from the beginning, okay, Andy?” Dortmunder said.
“Sure,” Kelp said.
Stan sprinkled a little salt into his beer and looked around, expectant.
FORTY-ONE
Stan Murch and his Mom rode around Brooklyn all morning in Mom’s cab, with the off-duty light on. Having to drive this vehicle during her leisure hours, when she was already behind the wheel of the damn thing eight to ten hours a day, put Mom in a crusty mood. “I don’t see it,” she kept saying as they drove through the sunny spring day. “I don’t see the why so picky. A car is a car.”
“Not this time,” Stan told her. “This time it’s a gift. A gift has to be something special, Mom, you know that. Hondas and Acuras he’s got. Max has an entire used-car lot of Toyotas and Datsuns. Whenever I bring him an Isuzu or a Hyundai, he nods and he looks bored and he says, ‘Put it over there.’ ”
“He pays you, Stanley,” his Mom pointed out. “It’s a business relationship. You bring him cars in off the street, and he pays you for them. Bored and excited aren’t what it’s about.”
“But this time,” Stan told her, “I don’t want to be paid. This time I want a favor. So this time I can’t show up with a Chevy Celebrity Eurosport or a Saab. This time I gotta attract Max’s attention.”
His Mom looked all around to be sure there weren’t any cops in the vicinity and made an illegal right turn on red into Flatbush Avenue. “On the other hand,” she said.
“You don’t have to run lights, Mom,” Stan told her. “We’re not in any hurry.”
“I am,” Mom corrected him. “I’m in a hurry to get out of this car and into a tub. And you interrupted me when I was speaking.”
“Sorry.”
“What I was about to say,” Mom went on, “was on the other hand, you don’t want to give your friend Maximilian a car that’s so special and customized and different that the owner can recognize it so well that Max gets put in jail. That’s a gift he doesn’t need.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Stan said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”