“Oh, yes! Thank you! Out of here!”
“Clear the way,” ordered the fireman, and they moved through the milling guards, while the crackle of the fire grew louder. The cottage roof had caught.
Somewhere in the darkened rooms, the crazed Klematsky was crying, “Where is he? Where’s Fairbanks? Don’t let him get away!”
I have to get away, Max thought, blundering forward out the cottage door, clutching to the fireman who was guiding him by the arm. I have to get away, I have to find a phone and find a lawyer. I need a lawyer, two lawyers, maybe ten lawyers, to protect me from that utterly mad detective.
“This way,” said the fireman’s muffled voice. “The fire’s spreading. This way.”
“Yes, yes, let’s get away from here.”
The fireman led him down the path between the cottages, and Max could see that two more of them had now caught fire. This whole part of the hotel complex would burn to the ground soon, if the fire department didn’t get to work on it, didn’t start hosing it down.
From far away, the sound of fire engine sirens screamed, coming closer.
The fireman led Max through the gate in the hedge, into the employee’s parking lot, floodlit at night. “Thank you, thank you,” Max babbled, as the sirens got closer. “You saved me—”
Wait a minute. The fire department is still on its way, it hasn’t got here yet. Who is this fireman?
Even as Max formed that question, and even as he instantly knew the answer, the false fireman spun around at him in the middle of the employee parking lot, under that garish white light. Grabbing for Max’s right hand, he bellowed, “Give me that ring!”
“You!” Max cried. “You’re the one!” And he whacked the false fireman across the head, which only hurt his left hand when it struck the smoke mask.
“Give me that ring!”
“No! You’ve ruined everything, you’ve destroyed—”
“Give me the ring!”
“Never!”
Max, inflamed by the injustice of it all, leaped on the false fireman and drove him to the blacktop. They rolled together there, the false fireman trying to get the ring, Max trying to rip that mask off so he could bite the fellow’s face, and Max wound up on top.
Straddling him. Winning, on top, as he always was, as he always would be. Because I am Max Fairbanks, and I will not be beaten, not be beaten.
You didn’t expect this, did you, Mr. Burglar? You didn’t expect me to be on top, did you, holding you down with my knees, ready now to give you what you deserve, kill you with my bare hands, rip this mask—
“YOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!”
Startled, Max looked up, and here came Brandon Camberbridge, tearing across the parking lot, running full tilt and screaming like a banshee: “You! You destroyed my hotel! My beautiful hotel!”
“I’ve got him,” Max started, to reassure the man, but it was Max that Brandon attacked, hurtling into him headlong, tackling him, the two of them flying over and over across the parking lot, away from the cause of it all, the false fireman, the burglar. The burglar! Him! Over there!
Max tried to say so, but Brandon was strangling him, pummeling him, beating his head on the blacktop. Max shrieked, and Brandon shrieked louder, and they clawed at one another, and Max felt himself blacking out.
“Excuse me.”
The calm voice stopped them both. They turned their heads, and the fireman was there, hat gone, mask dangling from the left side of his face. “This is mine,” he said, and reached down, and plucked the ring off Max’s limp finger. “Thank you,” he said, and straightened. “Carry on,” he suggested, and walked away across the parking lot, and Brandon grasped Max by the throat and screamed terrible words into his nose.
By the time many hands arrived to drag Brandon free and help Max to his feet and pound his back until he started breathing again, the burglar, of course, was long gone.
And so was the ring.
63
There were about three days a year, all of them in June, when the sun, if the sun were shining at all over the island of Manhattan, could angle down and shine into the living room of Dortmunder’s apartment on East Nineteenth Street. Thursday, June 8, two and a half weeks after the Las Vegas spectacular, it happened again, at a time when Dortmunder chanced to be present in the living room, still not quite having decided what to do with himself today. The sun shone in through the window near the sofa, bounced off the end table by Dortmunder’s right elbow, and reflected itself in the gray face of the TV set. Becoming aware of that unusual light, Dortmunder put his right hand out to catch the ray, and turned the hand back and forth, watching how warm and yellow everything looked. Then he opened the drawer in the end table and took out the ring.
Still the same ring. Shield-shaped top with those little glittery lines on it. Dortmunder held the ring in the ray of sunlight, and gave it a good long look.
Funny. He hadn’t worn that ring once since he’d got it back, just never exactly felt like it. On the plane home, it had been in his pocket, and ever since, it had been in this drawer here. Now he looked at it, and thought about it, and he was just about to put it on when the phone rang. So he put the ring on the end table in the sunlight and leaned over the other way to pick up the phone and say, “Yeah?”
“A.K.A., John.”
“Oh, A.K.A. How you doing?”
“Well, I’m fine. Remember the Anadarko family?”
“No,” Dortmunder said.
“John, would you like to remember them? That deal’s comin alive again, same as before.”
May walked by the doorway, home from work, carrying her daily bag of groceries from the Safeway, headed for the kitchen. She and Dortmunder nodded to each other, and Dortmunder said into the phone, “I don’t think so, A.K.A.”
The whole idea of rememorizing life on Red Tide Street in Carrport just didn’t appeal. Also, there was the fact that he was flush these days. After expenses, the return on the Las Vegas trip had worked out to just over seventy-two thousand dollars a person, which was a lot more than Dortmunder was used to realizing from a job. In fact, most of the time, just getting himself out of a heist with not too many rips and tears and dog bites was what he considered a good return on investment, so this was a pretty nice feeling to have, being flush. He didn’t need to remember the Anadarko family for five hundred bucks, so why do it? “Sorry, A.K.A.,” he said. “I’m in semiretirement at the moment.”
“Well, I understand what you’re saying, John,” A.K.A. said. “I’ll get somebody else. I just thought, you know, you went down that road the once.”
“That was enough for me,” Dortmunder said, and hung up, as May came in, empty-handed. “How are things?” he asked her.
She sat down, said, “Whoosh,” and said, “Ah. The feet do get tired.”
“I told you, you know,” he said, “you could quit there for a while.”
“Then what do I do with my day? There’s all these people working there, John, they’ve got lives you wouldn’t believe, they’re like soap operas, that’s what we talk about all day, I wouldn’t want to miss any chapters. So I’m okay, John. Is that the ring?”
“Yeah,” he said, picking it up, turning it again in the sunlight. “I was just looking at it.”
“You don’t wear it.”
“I don’t,” he agreed. “That’s what I was thinking about. Now, you know I’m not superstitious.”
May knew he was superstitious, deeply superstitious, but she also knew he didn’t know he was, so she said, “Uh huh.”