55
It was such a temptation to make off with the sleeping guard’s handgun, but Herman resisted the impulse. He was here on reconnaissance only, and would be coming back later, so pilfering pistols would not be a good idea.
Herman Jones, formerly Herman Makanene Stulu’mbnick, formerly Herman X, finished stage one of his reconnaissance, thanked Max Fairbanks for his patience, and was ushered out of the cottage by the same brother who’d admitted him. Two more guards, one a brother and one not, escorted him from the cottage to the main path, where he thanked them for their courtesy, assured them they’d see him later, and moved jauntily away, toward the main building of the hotel.
For Herman Jones, subterfuge at this level was child’s play, was barely deception at all. Back in the old days when he’d been actively an activist, when he’d been X and most of his jobs had been selfless heists to raise money for the Movement, so that he barely had time left to steal enough to keep his own body and soul together, he’d constructed an entirely false cover life to live within, full of nice middle-class friends of all races who believed he was something important and well-paid in “communications,” a word that, when he used it, sometimes seemed to suggest book publishing, sometimes the movies or television, and sometimes possibly government work.
Later, when he’d been in politics in central Africa, vice president of Talabwo, a nation where your Swiss bank account was almost as important as your Mercedes-Benz and where the only even half-educated person within five hundred miles who was not trying to overthrow the president was the president, and where if the president went down the vice president could expect to share with him the same shallow unmarked grave, Herman had learned a level of guile and misdirection that Americans, had they been able to observe it, could only have envied.
So now that he was home, no longer devoted to turning over the proceeds of all his better heists to the Movement (mainly because the Movement seemed to have evaporated while he was away), and no longer having to deal with politicians and army men (most of them certifiably insane) day and night, Herman was ready to turn his hard-earned expertise to for-profit crime.
Which was why he was here. He’d only worked with John Dortmunder twice before, but he’d enjoyed both jobs. The first time, he’d been brought into the scheme by Andy Kelp, whom he’d met in the course of various non-Movement enterprises, and the scheme was an interesting one, in which they’d stolen an entire bank, which had given him plenty of leisure time to work on the vault. The job hadn’t wound up to be an absolutely perfect success, but the group had been nicely professional and the experience basically a good one. The second time he’d been included into a Dortmunder job, it had been a scam, a little favor like this current one, but with less potential return.
Pilots say that any landing you walk away from is a good landing, and Herman’s variant on that was, any crime you walk away from unhandcuffed is a good crime. With that criterion, all of Herman’s experiences with John Dortmunder had been good ones.
So now he was back in the States, and he wanted people in the profession to know he was here, he was available, and that’s why he’d phoned Andy Kelp. Then, when Andy’d told him what was going down here, and why, he could see it was a caper he had to be part of. However large or small the profit on this one, it would get him noticed in the right places. “Herman is back,” people would say to each other after tonight. “As good as ever.”
No no no. They would say, “Herman is back. Better than ever.”
The night outside the cottages was dark, and very lightly populated. The children among the hotel guests were presumably all tucked into their beds at this point, watching television, while their parents and the other adult customers of the Gaiety roamed the casino or sat around in groups in the coffee shop, telling each other how much fun they were having. Outside, the dry desert air was cooler at night, almost pleasant, but the only human beings to be seen, here and there on the paths and walkways, were hotel employees and extra security personnel. And, of course, a number of robbers.
Striding away from cottage one in the shadowed darkness, exuding the confidence of a supervisory employee on official business, clipboard prominent, Herman made his way to cottage three, diagonally to the right rear of cottage one, and at the moment—as at most moments since the high rollers left—unoccupied. (Cottages five, six, and seven, even farther back from the Battle-Lake, currently housed the imported extra guards.)
So many hotels and other such places no longer have actual keys for their many doors. They have electronic locks instead, that respond only to a specific magnetic impulse. All the old skills of the lockman, with picks and slugs and routers and skeleton keys, have gone by the board. But technology is there to be mastered, and mastered it shall be. The card Herman now inserted into the slot of the front door of cottage three had not been supplied by a hotel check-in clerk, but had come from the criminal workshops of New York City. This card was an alien, a wily seducer, a cuckoo in another bird’s nest, and the instant Herman slid it into the slot that little green light went on, and the door fell open before him.
Cottage three was a bit smaller than cottage one, and had the faint chemical smell of a place with wall-to-wall carpet after it’s been shut up for a while. Herman moved briskly through the place, turning on lights, making notes on his clipboard, doing small adjustments here and there. At the end, he left the small light on in the kitchen, the one under the upper cabinet that merely illuminated a bit of the white Formica counter beside the sink.
At the door, because he wasn’t going to give his magic card away, Herman paused to take a roll of duct tape from inside his tuxedo jacket, tear off a length, and attach it to the edge of the door over the striker to keep it from locking. Spies, political agents, and other amateurs put such tape on a door horizontally, so that it shows on both front and back, and can be noticed by a passing security person. Herman ran the tape vertically, which did the job just as well while remaining invisible when the door was shut.
Having made cottage three ready, Herman marched off and this time made his way around the Battle-Lake along the path illuminated by low-wattage knee-high flower-shaped fixtures. Beyond the lake, he approached a guard standing next to the walkway with his hands clasped behind him, observing the late-night stillness with the satisfied look of a man who likes peace and quiet for their own sake. This guard, however, was not actually a guard at all, but was another associate of John Dortmunder’s, named Ralph Demrovsky; he too wore a uniform copped earlier this evening from Finest Fancy Linen Service.
When Herman approached, Ralph smiled and held his right hand out. Herman took no notice of him, but somehow, as he strode by, the clipboard left his hand and wound up in Ralph’s. And then, as Herman moved on through tree shadows between lighted areas toward the main building, his right hand brushed across the front of his tux jacket, and when next he moved into the light the nametag was gone from there, and he was now merely a handsome black man in a tux, surely a guest of the hotel, though better dressed than most these days. Still, there are always some well-dressed hotel guests in Las Vegas, even in these latter times, people who maintain the standards and joie de vivre of the good old days of mob bosses and Arab sheiks.
Herman entered the hotel not as though he owned it, but as though he were thinking of buying it. He strode past the open coffee shop and the closed boutiques and around the check-in desk, where things were very quiet at the moment, with only one clerk on duty. To get to the elevators, he had to skirt the edge of the slot machine area, and surreptitiously he sniffed a little, to see if he could tell anything about the air, but of course he couldn’t. And from the look of the few people he could see in among the slot machines, it hadn’t started to take effect as yet.