Good Behavior Read Free

the far side, then shimmy down the pillar (somehow), and thus make good his getaway, but this goddam rough-hewn timber was a little too rough-hewn; every time he touched it he got three more splinters. Trying to protect his hands and his ankle and everything else, he’d struggled along to just about the middle of the timber before he’d lost his grip and almost fallen. That’s when his coat fell open, and tools began to drop. And now here he was, stuck, above a sea of nuns.
    Silent nuns. Even in his present difficulty, Dortmunder noticed that strangeness. The first little group of nuns, having spotted him up here, had run off to get more nuns, all of them seeming very excited, pointing at him, gesturing at one another, waving at him to remain calm, running back and forth, but never saying a word, not to one another and not to him. Robes whiffed down there, soft-soled shoes went pid-pid , beads and crucifixes klacked , but not a word did they speak.
    Deaf mutes? Unable to use the telephone? Hope hesitantly lifted its battered head in Dortmunder’s breast.
    And here came yet more nuns, with a ladder. Apparently, having a man in the rafters was quite an exciting event to this crowd, so they all wanted to participate, which meant there were so many nuns helping to carry the ladder that it probably assayed out to about one nun per rung. This labor-intensive method caused a lot of delay in transferring the ladder from the horizontal to the vertical—thirty or forty of the nuns didn’t want to let go—which made for a great flurry of hand-waving and head-shaking and finger-pointing before at last it was raised and opened to its tall aluminum A, and pushed over to where its top could poke Dortmunder’s dangling knee.
    â€œOkay,” Dortmunder called. “Okay, thanks, I got it.” Hundreds of nuns held the feet of the ladder and gazed up at him. “I got it now,” he called to them.
    Oh, yeah? Here he was on a rafter, and there next to him was the ladder, and the physical impossibility of transferring himself from the former rafter to the latter ladder gradually made itself manifest. There was absolutely no way to let go of anything over here, and equally no way to attach himself to anything over there. Dortmunder dithered, unmoving, and time went by.
    Vibration in the ladder. Dortmunder looked down, and here came a nun, lickety-split, zipping up to his level. She was small and scrawny, ageless inside that habit, her sharp-nosed ferretlike face peering out of the oval opening of the wimple like somebody looking out of the porthole of a passing ship.
    And not much liking what she saw, either. With one brief unsympathetic look at Dortmunder, she pointed briskly at his left leg and then at the first step of the ladder below the top. Nothing goody-goody about this one; she’d fit right in back at the orphanage. Feeling almost at home, Dortmunder said, “I’m sorry, Sister, I can’t do that. I think I broke my ankle, or sprained it, or something. Or something.”
    She raised her eyes heavenward, and shook her head: Men; they’re all babies . It was as efficient as speech.
    â€œNo, honest, Sister, I did.” Old habits die hard; seeing the old habit of the nunnery, Dortmunder immediately started making excuses. “It’s all swole already,” he said, and shifted around precariously to give her a better look. “See?”
    She frowned at him. Braced on the fourth step of the ladder, she raised the dangling end of her wooden-beaded sash and pointed at the crucifix on the end of it while raising her eyebrows in his direction: Are you Catholic?
    â€œWell, uh, Sister,” he said, “I’m kind of, uh, fallen away.” He lowered his gaze, abashed, and looked at that stone floor way down there. “In a manner of speaking,” he said.
    Again she shook her head, and let the crucifix drop. Coming up two rungs, she reached out and grabbed his