He had unpacked and was inspecting the food that had been put into the kitchen for them—not enough, but not bad—when Dortmunder and Kelp arrived, lugging their luggage. “We found a place for the cars,” Kelp said. “Just came from there, it’s perfect.”
“Good,” Tiny said. “And you got wheels of your own.”
“Sure.”
“You can drive me back to the gate,” Tiny told him, “and I’m in the downstairs bedroom.”
“Right.” Kelp still hefted his suitcase. “I’ll just pick a room, then take you—”
“Why not take me now,” Tiny suggested. “Get it over with.”
“Oh, yeah, okay.”
So Kelp put his suitcase down while Dortmunder went up to choose the best of the upstairs bedrooms. He and Tiny went out, and here in front of the house was parked a silver Yukon XL, one of the larger General Motors SUVs, approximately the size of a sperm whale.
“I can always count on you, Kelp,” Tiny said, as he climbed into the roomy rear seat.
“And I always count on doctors.”
Back at the gate, Mort Pessle introduced Tiny to the other guard on duty, a heavy-browed sullen-looking guy named Heck Fiedler, then said, “Come on over and meet the boss.”
The boss, in his own office in the building to one side of the entrance, was an older man, big and bulky, with a completely bald head and a stiff white beard like a clothesbrush. His name was Chuck Yancey, and his handshake was almost as good as Tiny’s. Mort Pessle went away after the introductions, and Yancey said, “You done any policin?”
“No,” Tiny said, “mostly I bust heads.”
Yancey chuckled, approving of that. “You may get an opportunity along those lines,” he said. “I’m not promising. Now, in that room through the door there you’ve got a whole rack of uniforms. Somethin oughta fit you. I know you’re a big fellow, but we’ve had a lot of big fellows here. If you don’t find anything good enough, pick out whatever’s the nearest and you’ll take it to our tailor in town.”
“Good,” Tiny said. “I like to be neat.”
“I know the feelin. One other thing.”
Tiny looked alert.
“The new man,” Yancey said, “which is you, gets the graveyard duty.”
“Graveyard? You got a graveyard here?”
“No,” Yancey said, with another chuckle, “I mean the late shift on the gate, midnight to eight in the morning. If you’re a reader, you can bring a book, or listen to the radio. We’d rather you didn’t watch TV.”
“That’s okay,” Tiny said.
“There’s nothing ever happens at night,” Yancey told him, “so it’s just you on the gate. You’ll have that the first two weeks, then we’ll switch you into the regular rotation. It’s boring there all night on your own, but you’ll get through it.”
He would be on duty all by himself at the entrance every night for two weeks, from midnight till eight in the morning. Nobody was ever around, and nothing ever happened. “I’ll make it work for me,” Tiny said, and went off to find a uniform.
36
WHEN HALL CAME DOWN his main staircase to the main floor on Thursday morning, not yet sure how he felt about the day—his digestion, the weather, his level of irritation, how much his assets had appreciated during the night in their quiet seedbeds in foreign lands—somebody he’d never seen before came striding out of a side door, said, “Murnen,” and opened the front door.
Hall gaped. The man simply stood there, in profile, like one of the royal guards at Buckminster Palace, at what his sloping body apparently took to be attention, and continued to hold the knob of the wide-open door as he glared straight across the open doorway. He wore an ill-fitting but expensive black suit, narrow black tie, white dress shirt, and black shoes like gunboats. He was some lunatic who had—
The butler! The new servants. One of four new servants, the incredible beginning of a new era, a new and much much better era.
And his name was … Rumpled, Rambo, Rasputin, er, Rumsey! “Ah, good morning, Rumsey!”
“Murnen, Mr. Hall.” Rumsey went on glaring across the doorway, and went on holding the open door.
“Very good, Rumsey,” Hall said, “but actually, I wasn’t going out.”
Rumsey took a second to digest that. Then, with a robotic nod so brisk it was a miracle he didn’t break his neck, he efficiently slammed the door. “Sur.”
“Actually,” Hall said, feeling obscurely he had an ongoing part to play in this conversation, “I was on my way to the breakfast room.”
“Sur.”
“That’s where I usually have breakfast.”
“Sur.”
“Well…” Hall would have turned away, but then he thought of something. Two somethings. “When Mrs. Hall comes down, in a few minutes,” he said, “she won’t want to go out, either.”
“She’ll be off to the breakfast room, sur.”
“Exactly so. And would you send Blanchard and Gillette to see me in my office, just to the left there, at ten?”
There was a blankness in Rumsey’s blinking. “Sur?”
“Blanchard and Gillette.”
“Blan …” The man was completely at a loss.
“For heaven’s sake, man,” Hall said, “you and Fred Blanchard have worked together for years!”
“Oh, Fred!” Rumsey cried. “Fred Blanchard. Oh, sorry, right about that.” Now, leaning unexpectedly close as for a confidence, he said, “Out of context, you see what I mean?”
“Yes, well,” Hall said, automatically taking a backward step that bumped him into the staircase he’d just left, “this is rather new for us all.”
“Blanchard and Gillette,” Rumsey said, morphing back to near-erectness. “He’ll be the driver. The other one. Ten o’clock. Will do, sur.”
•
“Well, my dear,” Alicia said, over crustless toast and coddled eggs and strawberry jam and well-creamed coffee, “what do you think of our new people?”
“They’re perfect,” Hall told her. “Of course, I’ve barely seen them so far, and I must say Rumsey the butler’s an odd duck. But then, so many servants are, really.”
“America doesn’t know how to breed servants,” Alicia said.
“That’s perfectly true.”
“The problem,” she suggested, “is that the Inquisition had ended, or at least its really active years had ended, before the founding of the United States, so on this side of the Atlantic there was never that drilled-in terror over generations to make people eager to obey orders.”
“I like your insights, Alicia,” Hall said, patting his lips with damask, “but now I must go have a word with two more of our new acquisitions.”
•
Monroe Hall’s office, in the front right corner of the main floor, with large windows that offered ego-supportive views down toward his guardhouse and leftward toward his village and outbuildings, had been designed and furnished by one of the finest teams of nostalgic re-creators in America. Did you want a keeping room? Did you want a bread oven? Did you want gaslight to supplement your electric bulbs? Did you want, along a waist-high dado cap around the room, to tastefully display your collection of iron nineteenth-century mechanical banks? Call Pioton & Fone, and watch your dreams come true. Monroe Hall had, and he couldn’t enter his office, as a result, without smiling. Didn’t it look just like Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne’s office, just before Yorktown? Yes, it did. Mm, it did.
Today, entering the office, Hall saw Blanchard and Gillette already present, which made sense, because Hall was deliberately ten minutes late. Both were studying the iron banks on the little rail around the room, Blanchard leaning close over the one of a fisherman on a boat. Place a coin on the flat plate at the end of the fishing line and the weight causes the machinery inside to move the fisherman’s arm, and the fishing line, until the coin falls into the open mouth of the creel at the stern of the boat, and thus into the bank.