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 massive 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 three-piece 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 Thirty-third 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 bitch,” 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 torpedo-shaped 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 bitch, 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.