Good Behavior (5 page)

“Don't overdo it,” Dortmunder told him.

8

There's so much unhappiness in this world. The strong prey upon the weak, injustice is rampant, evil succeeds everywhere and good is trampled in the dust.
Ai, caramba
, it makes you just want to piss!

Enriqueta Tomayo did nothing so crude or vulgar, of course, but contented herself with fiercely banging together the frying pans in the soapy water and glaring around at this antiseptic blond-and-chrome kitchen in the clouds, where she'd been working now for over a year. Back home in Guatemala the rich
ladinos
oppressed the Indians with the help of their armies, both public and private, and up here in Nueva York the rich still oppressed everybody they could get their hands on, even their own flesh and blood. By St. Barbara, this Frank Ritter man even oppresses his own daughter. He even defies God Himself!

Enriqueta whammed a frying pan into the drainboard and looked up to see the poor red-eyed little Sister herself coming into the kitchen, sighing, weary with grief. The little Sister gave Enriqueta a wan smile and crossed to the refrigerator for a glass of skim milk, while Enriqueta dried her hands on her apron and delivered herself, at top speed, of several dozen words in Spanish, the essential translation of which was, “You poor kid!”

The little Sister smiled her gratitude, and drank milk. Enriqueta walked closer to her, lowering her voice and switching to English: “Another letter from the good Sisters.”

How the poor child's eyes lit up; it was only these letters from the good Sisters that kept her spirit from breaking entirely. Enriqueta, who knew without doubt she would be fired and probably arrested and certainly beaten and undoubtedly deported if Frank Ritter and his minions ever found out about the correspondence she was smuggling between the convent and the little Sister, also knew it was the finest thing, and therefore the only real thing, she could do with what was left of her life. Her own children were grown now, dead or dispersed. The evils of Guatemala were behind her; please,
Dios
, forever. She had grown old and fat, she was here in this strange cold land working as a cook in a kitchen in the clouds for an evil monster and his poor imprisoned daughter—locked in a tower, just like in the fairy stories!—and she had a sodden husband sprawled in their nice apartment in public housing up on Columbus Avenue. What else could she do but help this poor mistreated child in the best way she could?

If only she could somehow smuggle the little Sister herself out of this tower, she'd often thought, but that was just impossible. Enriqueta was never permitted to ride the golden elevator alone, but was always “escorted” up at eleven in the morning and back down again at nine in the evening by one or more of Frank Ritter's falsely smiling guards, those hard men in civilian clothes who looked so much like the men in army clothes back in Guatemala. All she could do was smuggle the little Sister's letters out and mail them, and use her own address on Columbus Avenue for the convent's replies. But even that little bit helped; it was worth it, to see how the child's eyes lit up.

And
how
they lit up this time! With a great joyous smile on her face, the little Sister extended the letter to Enriqueta, pointing at it with her other hand:
Here, read it yourself!

Occasionally this happened, the little Sister wanting to share some message from the convent, and though it was a difficult trial Enriqueta always agreed and did her best. She
could
read, though English was more of a strain than Spanish, and it was necessary to hold the piece of paper so close to her face it almost touched her nose. Still, though it took awhile, she did at last manage to make sense of the following:

Dear Sister Mary Grace,

Wonderful news! God has seen fit to put us in the way of being helpful to a man who has
just
the skills needed to effect your rescue. He is a burglar by profession, which means he has studied the art of going in or out of difficult or locked places. (He came to us through our roof!)

Before we cast the first stone, my dear, we should remember St. Dismas, crucified with Our Lord, a common criminal who repented at the very end. “This day you shall be with Me in Paradise,” Our Lord promised him. So it was St. Dismas, the thief, who was Our Lord's chosen companion on his first momentous journey back to His Heavenly Father after his earthly travail, not one of the Apostles or Disciples, a fact we would do well to remember.

In any event, it is our hope, and our constant prayer to the Almighty, that this association with us and rescue of your own self may be the beginning of the path of reclamation for this latter-day Dismas, whose name is John. Even now he is studying the best way to reach you and bring you out of your imprisonment. If you happen to have any advice or suggestions you might want us to pass along to John, concerning the physical details of your incarceration, I am sure he would be most pleased.

Praying for your early release, long life to the Pope, forgiveness of the souls in Purgatory and the conversion of Godless Russia, I remain, as ever,

Mother Mary Forcible
Silent Sisterhood of St. Filumena

Enriqueta's immediate instinctive doubt of men named John—or men named anything else, for that matter—she kept carefully to herself. This letter had made the little Sister, at least for this moment, happy; what did it matter if at some later time John turned out to be false or incompetent? Enriqueta enclosed her skepticism in her heart, where it could do no harm. “Say!” she said, returning the little Sister's letter and her elated smile, “that sounds pretty hokay!”

9

When May got home from the library, Dortmunder was in the living room, sitting on the sofa, poking at a lot of Polaroid prints on the coffee table with the end of his cane. He didn't look cheerful. “How's it going?” she asked.

“Could be worse,” he said.

Well, that was encouraging. “How?” she asked.

“I could have gone down that fire escape with O'Hara.”

“No, I meant saving the girl.”

“So did I.”

“Well.” May dropped her purse and a shopping bag of Xerox copies onto a chair. “You want coffee?”

“No, thanks. When Andy gets here, I'll have a beer.”

“Well,
I
need coffee,” she said. “That library, there's weirder people there than in the subway.” Shaking her head, she went on out to the kitchen.

Today was the fifth day of Dortmunder's research into the girl-rescuing operation, and May's day off from the Bohack, so she'd spent it up at the Mid-Manhattan Public Library, in the periodical rooms, reading about Frank Ritter and Templar International and Margrave Corporation and Avalon State Bank, and dropping dimes into the Xerox machine. Fortunately, Andy Kelp had one time showed her the quiet way to get dimes back out of such machines, so the day wasn't as expensive as it might have been. But it was exhausting, much more so than her normal day standing at the cash register.

Back in the living room, May sat in the most comfortable chair, put her feet up on a puffy hassock, sipped her coffee, and watched Dortmunder poke at the pictures with his cane. “You don't look happy,” she told him.

“Good,” he said. “If I
looked
happy, it'd be a bad sign. That guy Chepkoff phoned this afternoon.”

“Which guy was that?”

“The one sent me for the caviar. He paid three hundred on account, you know.”

“On account?”

“On account we wouldn't do the job otherwise. So now he called, he wants his three hundred back. I told him, ‘We all take risks in this. You it cost three hundred, me it cost a sprained ankle, O'Hara it's probably gonna cost about eight years.' He argued with me, so I hung up on him. The guy's crazy.”

May said, “John, do you want to hear about Frank Ritter?” Without waiting for an answer, she went on, “I just spent all day at the library, with a lot of people in overcoats and asleep and scratching their arms and looking at pictures of naked statues. I was learning all about Frank Ritter. Do you want to
hear
about Frank Ritter?”

Dortmunder looked at her in some surprise. “I'm sorry, May,” he said. “You're right, yeah. I want to hear about Frank Ritter.”

May didn't like to be short-tempered. Taking a deep breath, she said, “All right.”

Dortmunder said, “You aren't smoking.”

“I gave it up.”

“You
what?
”

“I was thinking about it from time to time,” she said. “Remember how, whenever there was a letter in the
New York Times
from somebody with the Tobacco Institute, I always used to clip it out and keep it for a while?”

“Scotch-tape them on the mirror sometimes,” Dortmunder agreed. “Freedom of choice and all that.”

“Sure. Then did you notice, a while back, how I stopped clipping those letters out?”

“No, I didn't,” Dortmunder said. “But it's tough to notice somebody not doing something.”

“That's true. Anyway, it occurred to me,
I
don't write letters to the
New York Times
and
you
don't write letters to the
New York Times
.”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, “we're not in business with the public, like the tobacco people.”

“The ketchup people don't all the time write to the
New York Times
,” May pointed out. “The beer people don't, the pantyhose people don't. All the people that write to the
New York Times
is South African spokesmen and the Tobacco Institute.”

“And people from out of town that lost their wallet in a taxi,” Dortmunder reminded her, “and the cabby brought it back to them at the hotel, and they never knew New Yorkers were such nice people.”

“Well,
those
letters,” May said. “What bothers me about
those
letters is, most cabbies aren't New Yorkers, they're from Pakistan. But the Tobacco Institute letters, what bothers me about those is, why talk so much unless you've got something to hide?”

“That makes sense,” Dortmunder said.

“So I kept thinking, maybe I'd give it up for a while,” May said, “but I could never seem to get a start on it. But I was in the library now, six hours steady in there, and there's No Smoking, and I was so distracted by Frank Ritter and the Xerox machines and the people sticking matches in their ears and reading the encyclopedia cover to cover that I hardly noticed. I came out onto Fifth Avenue and reached for a cigarette, and then I said, ‘Wait a minute. I got
six hours
on it.' So I gave it up.”

“Well, that's pretty good,” Dortmunder said. “Probably a smart idea, too. And I guess that's why you snapped at me before.”

“I didn't
snap
at you!”

“Oh, right,” Dortmunder said. “Tell me about Frank Ritter.”

May took another deep breath. “Well, he's rich,” she said, “but you probably figured that.”

“I did, yes.”

“His grandfather was rich, and his father got richer, and now Frank Ritter's got richer than that. What he owns—” She gestured at the shopping bag of Xeroxes. “—I've got a lot of stuff in there about what he owns, and it's mostly banks. But a lot of other stuff, too. Like, somebody starts a new oilfield somewhere, and then Frank Ritter becomes a partner in that company, and then one of his banks loans them the money to get started, and then they hire his construction company to do the drilling and everything, and they hire his laboratory to do the tests, and they hire his security company for the guards and all, and they lease some planes from his plane-leasing company—”

“I'm beginning to get the picture,” Dortmunder said.

“Then there's a couple of South American countries,” May went on, “a couple of the little ones.”

“What about them?”

“Well, I'm not sure exactly how it works,” May said, “but I think Frank Ritter owns them.”

“Owns
countries?
You can't own countries.”

May shook her head and reached for a cigarette, but there wasn't one there, so she pretended she was just scratching. “What happened was,” she said, “one of his banks loaned these countries a lot of money. Then the countries went bankrupt and couldn't pay the money back, so some people from the bank and the engineering company and the security company all went down there—”

“In a plane from the plane-leasing company, I suppose,” Dortmunder said.

“I guess. Anyway, they all went down there to help the countries reorganize their priorities, and they're all still down there, so I guess Frank Ritter owns those countries.”

Dortmunder shook his head. “Now I'm up against a guy owns countries.”

“Somebody put him up to be Secretary of the Treasury down in Washington a few years ago,” May said, “but the Congress turned him down. One Congressman, they quoted him in
Newsweek
, he said, ‘Conflict-of-interest is Frank Ritter's middle name.'”

Dortmunder sighed. “This is some fella,” he said. “He's rich, he's powerful, he owns countries, he has his own army and air force. If this guy wants to ground his daughter, I guess he figures he might as well just go ahead and do it.”

“She's the youngest of seven children,” May told him. “Elaine Gwen Ritter is her real name. She's got three brothers and three sisters, and they all work for the father. The oldest brother runs the Avalon State Bank here in the city, and one of the sisters with her husband runs the magazine company, and like that.”

“He's got a magazine company, too?”

“He's got all
kinds
of companies, John,” May told him. “I guess the daughter Elaine was supposed to grow up and marry a guy who'd fit in with everybody else, and then go to work for her father. Frank Ritter owns so many things, spread out so much, he likes to have relatives running the different parts. So I guess from his point of view, here's a daughter that isn't pulling her weight.”