Why Me? (18 page)

“It's ringin,” Mologna said.

“It isn't ringing,” the black woman at the microphone said.

Mologna frowned at her. “No no, I said it
is
ringin.”

She shrugged. “The folks on the street say it isn't ringing.”

“What?” Mologna said, and a voice in his ear said, “Hello?”

“Phone ain't ringing,” the black woman said. “Maybe it's busted.”

“But,” Mologna said, and the voice in his ear said, “Hello? Hello?” So he said it right back: “Hello!”

“Oh, there you are,” the voice said, sounding relieved.

Mologna said, “And who the fuck are you?”

“I'm the, uh …” He sounded rather nervous and had to stop to clear his throat. “I'm the guy, you know, the guy … with the, uh, I'm the guy with the thing.”

“The thing?” Bewildered faces were crowding around Mologna now.

“Ring. The ring.”

Zachary said, “Who in God's name are you talking to?”

Waving Zachary and everybody else away, Mologna said, “
Where
are you?”

“Well, uh … I don't think I oughta tell you that.”

The black woman was speaking with muted hysteria into her microphone. Three miles away, the pay phone in question sparkled in morning sunlight, alone, unringing, unoccupied, innocent and virginal. A cocaine salesman drifted slowly by it and repeated the phone's number aloud to his beer can. Two winos staggered to their feet and stumbled across the square toward the children's playground. The sanitationmen started their truck engine.

Mologna said, “God damn you, son of a bitch, what's goin on here?”

“It's the right number,” the black woman said.

The other black woman, who'd been talking quietly but hurriedly into another phone, now said, “The phone company says the call's going through.”

“See,” the voice in Mologna's ear said, “I just want to give it back, you see what I mean?”

“Hold on,” Mologna told the phone, cupped the mouthpiece, and glared at the second black woman. “What was that you said?”

“The phone company says the call's going through. They say you're talking to somebody at that pay phone.”

Three miles away the chess players folded up their unfinished game, while their kibitzers said things like, “Are you crazy? Man, what's the matter with you? Man, you was three fuckin moves from mate, man.” The pamphlet-distributing little old lady had crossed Hudson Street and now stood directly in front of the phone under surveillance. Two TPF men in uniform, regardless of all subterfuge, stood beefily in the restaurant doorway, hands on hips, and glared out at that subversive telephone.

The voice in Mologna's ear continued, even though everybody in the war room was talking at once. “I said hold
on
!” Mologna yelled into the phone, then yelled at everybody else, “Shut
up
! Tony, saturate that neighborhood! You, tell that phone company to get its head out of its ass and tell me what's goin on. You, tell our people on the scene to close in but stay in character. You, are you recordin this?”

The white male companion of the two black females nodded his earphoned head.

“And are we pickin up a voice from the other end?”

Another nod with earphones.

“Good,” Mologna said. “Otherwise, I'd think I was doin a Joan of Arc.” Into the phone, he said, “Let me tell you somethin, smart boy.”

“I thought maybe we could nego—”

“Just shut up and listen to me. Negotiate with you?” Cappelletti tapped Mologna's shoulder, but Mologna angrily shrugged him away. “Deal with you, you son of a bitch? I wouldn't disgrace my vocal cords doin deals with you.” Cappelletti tapped Mologna's shoulder more urgently, and this time Mologna swung his arm around to shove the other man away, meantime yelling into the phone, “I'm goin to get you, you wise-ass bastard, and let me tell you this. When I get my hands on you, you'll fall downstairs for a month!” Slamming the phone down into its cradle, ignoring the voice's feeble, “But—” Mologna spun around to glare at Cappelletti: “And what did
you
want to say, that couldn't wait?”

Cappelletti sighed: “Keep him on the line,” he said.

30

“You see,” Andy Kelp had explained to Dortmunder before the event, “with the phone company's own phone-ahead gizmo, you have to use their equipment and go through the operator every time you want to use it. But this one is from West Germany—see what it says on the bottom?—and with this one you just set these dials here to the number where you're gonna be, you plug it into the jack where your phone line goes, then plug the phone in on the other side here, and it does the phone-ahead thing without bothering the operator or anybody at all.”

“But,” Dortmunder had pointed out, “pay phones don't have jacks.”

“They got a phone line coming in. And
this
gizmo, made in Japan, these little prongs squeeze down into the line and make contact, so you can set up a jack anywhere you want on any phone line in the city.”

“It sounds awful chancy,” Dortmunder had said. “Where do we make this thing phone ahead
to
?”

“Another pay phone.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder had said. “So I'm standing there at this second pay phone, and one of the bozos they've got on stakeout reads the phone-ahead number on the little Kraut gizmo you've got stuck into your little Jap gizmo stuck into the first pay phone, and then they come to phone number two and they arrest me. And probably, because they're a little annoyed at all the trouble they're going through, they have to work very hard to subdue me.”

“Well, no,” Kelp had said. “Because you aren't going to be at that second pay phone either.”

“I'm going crazy,” Dortmunder had said. “Where the hell am I, some third pay phone? How many of these phone-ahead gizmos you got?”

“No more pay phones,” Kelp had promised. “John, think about the city of New York.”

“Why?”

“Because it's our territory, John, so let's use it. And what's one of the main things about this territory?”

“No question-answer,” Dortmunder had said, squeezing his beer can so that beer slopped out onto his fingers. “Just tell your story.”

“People
move
,” Kelp had told him. “They move all the time—uptown, downtown, across town—”

“Outa town.”

“Right. And back into town. And every time they move they get a telephone. And they always want it someplace different from the last tenant. Not the kitchen, the bedroom. Not the living room, the—”

“Okay, okay.”

“The point is, this city is overrun with unused telephone lines. You spend a lot of time in back yards and fire escapes yourself, didn't you ever notice all those phone lines?”

“No.”

“Well, they're there. So what we do, our
second
pay phone is in Brooklyn. Indoors. In a bar or a drugstore or a hotel lobby, someplace where I can get at the phone line coming in. Then I put another of these Japanese prong gizmos on that line, and I run a line of my own to an unused phone line and from there anywhere in the neighborhood: a basement, a closet, an empty apartment, whatever's handy. And that's where you take the call, on a phone we'll bring in ourselves; so as far as the phone company's concerned that phone doesn't even exist! That second pay phone will ring just once, but your phone'll ring too, and right away you answer. Nobody answers a pay phone that rings just once, so you'll have privacy.”

Dortmunder had scratched the side of his jaw, frowning deeply. “We're three phones down the line now. Why all the complication?”

“Time. They stake out that first phone. You start to talk, they go crazy. After a while they find my phone-ahead gizmo, maybe you're still on the line, still negotiating. They check with the phone company, they get the address on phone number two, now they got to rush down to Brooklyn, stake it out, approach it very carefully, go crazy all over again. And we're where we can see them, and we got time to end the call and go away before they find the new line leading to the unused line leading to us.”

“Christ on a crutch,” Dortmunder had said.

“Number A,” Kelp had pointed out, “you got no alternative. Number B, this'll work, guaranteed.”

And so it did, right on down to the question of negotiation. The phone had rung, just once, and Dortmunder had picked it up and started talking, and he was just getting over his nervousness, sitting there in the for-rent empty apartment over the delicatessen (Pay Phone Inside) on Ocean Bay Boulevard, with Kelp at the front window watching the street for cops, when all of a sudden this guy on the other end of the phone, Maloney, started a lot of yelling and screaming in Dortmunder's ear, culminating in an unnecessarily loud
click
, and then a lot of silence.

“Hello?” Dortmunder said. “Hello?”

Kelp wandered over from the window: “What's wrong?”

“He hung up on me.”

“He couldn't.” Kelp frowned, gazing into the middle distance. “Could my phone system break down somewhere?”

Dortmunder shook his head, and hung up the phone. “It could,” he said, “I know damn well it could, but it didn't. Maloney did it himself. He said he wouldn't deal with me. He said he was gonna catch me, and I was gonna fall downstairs for a month.”

“He
said
that?”

“He sounded a lot like Tiny Bulcher, only angry.”

Kelp nodded. “It's a challenge,” he said. “The good guys against the bad guys, with a challenge and a dare and the gauntlet thrown and all like that. Like in Batman.”

“In Batman,” Dortmunder pointed out, “the bad guys lose.”

Kelp looked at him in astonishment. “
We
aren't the bad guys, John,” he said. “We're trying to correct a simple, honest mistake, that's all. We're rescuing the Byzantine Fire for the American people.
And
the Turkish people. We're the
good
guys.”

Dortmunder contemplated that idea.

“Come on,” Kelp said. “The bad guys'll show up any minute.”

“Right.” Dortmunder stood up from the stack of newspapers he'd been using for a chair—the apartment's only furnishing—then looked at the phone on the floor. “What about that?”

Kelp shrugged it off. “A standard desk-type black telephone? Who'd want a thing like that? Wipe off your fingerprints and leave it.”

31

Kenneth (“Call me Ken”) Albemarle was a Commissioner, it hardly mattered of what. In his calm but successful career he had been, among other things, Commissioner of Public Sanitation in Buffalo, New York; Fire Commissioner in Houston, Texas; Commissioner of Schools in Bismarck, North Dakota; and Water Commissioner in Muscatine, Iowa. He was well qualified to be a Commissioner, with a B.A. in Municipal Administration, an M.S. in Governmental Studies and an M.A. in Public Relations, plus inherent talent and a deep-grained awareness of what the job of Commissioner actually meant. The Commissioner's purpose, he knew, was to calm people down. With his excellent employment history and fine academic background, plus his appearance—at 41 he was trim, dark-haired, and businesslike, showing the relaxed self-assurance of a high school basketball coach with a winning team—Ken Albemarle could calm down a roomful of orangutans, if necessary, and once or twice he'd proved it.

At the moment he was employed by the City of New York as, um, um,
Police
Commissioner, and right now he was being called upon to calm down two irate FBI men named Fracharly and Zeedy, who had entered his office shortly before eleven a.m. and now sat across the desk from him absolutely
ruby
with rage. That is, Fracharly was ruby with rage; Zeedy appeared to be snowy with shock.

“Chief Inspector Mologna,” Ken Albemarle said, nodding his head judiciously and pronouncing the name right, idly tapping his fingertips on his neat and orderly desktop, “has been a fine police officer for years and years. In fact, he's been here longer than I have.” (Ken Albemarle had been New York Police Commissioner for seven months.)

“Perhaps,” Fracharly said through clenched teeth, “no one before this has ever noticed the
Chief Inspector's
incompetential quotient.”

“He hung up on the man,” Zeedy said, hollow-voiced, as though he still couldn't believe it.

“Just a moment,” Ken Albemarle said. Tapping his intercom, he said, “Miss Friday, would you bring me Chief Inspector Francis Mologna's file?”

“Yes, sir, Commissioner,” the intercom replied, in a tinny voice.

“It won't be in the file,” Fracharly said. “It won't be in the
fiiiiile
—he just
did
it!”

“Quite so,” Ken Albemarle said, tapping his fingertips together. “If you could give me a little of the background on this, Mister Fracharly, put me in the pic—”

“Zachary,” said Fracharly.

“Beg pardon?”

“The name is
Zachary
, not Fracharly! And it's
Agent
, not Mister! I am Agent Zachary of the Federal Bureau of Investigation! Here, here—” He clawed for his hip pocket.

“No need, no need,” Ken Albemarle assured him. “I've seen your identification. Sorry to get the name wrong. So you're Zachary and you're … Zeedy?”

“Freedly,” said Zeedy.

“Oh, my heaven,” Ken Albemarle said, chuckling at himself. “A Spoonerism. Well, no harm done, I've got it now. Zachary and Freedly.
Agent
Zachary and
Agent
Freedly.”

“That's right,” Agent Zachary gritted, still through clenched teeth and rubescent face.

“My favorite Spoonerism,” Ken Albemarle said, smiling reminiscently, “because it's an improvement really on the original, is ‘flutterby' for ‘butterfly.'”