Thieves Dozen Read Free Page A

his elegant fingers. “My associates”—meaning the plug-uglies—“and I will, as you would say, pull the scam.”
    “That’s not what I’d say,” Dortmunder told him.
    “No matter, no matter. What we wish from you, Mr. Dortmunder, is simply your expertise. Your professional opinion. Come along.” The elevator door opened to his elegant touch. “Care for another bourbon? Of course you do.”
    “Fortunately,” the elegant man said, “I kept the architect’s plans and models even though I lost the town house itself to Moira.”
    Dortmunder and his host and one plug-ugly (the other was off getting more bourbon and sherry) stood now in a softly glowing dining room overlooking a formal brick-and-greenery rear garden. On the antique refectory table dominating the room stood two model houses next to a roll of blueprints. The tiniest model, barely six inches tall and built solid of balsa wood with windows and other details painted on, was placed on an aerial photograph to the same scale, apparently illustrating the block in which the finished house would stand. The larger, like a child’s dollhouse, was over two feet tall, with what looked like real glass in its windows and even some furniture in the rooms within. Both models were of a large, nearly square house with a high front stoop, four stories tall, with a big square many-paned skylight in the center of the roof.
    Dortmunder looked at the big model, then at the small, then at the photograph of the street. “This is in New York?”
    “Just a few blocks from here.”
    “Huh,” said Dortmunder, thinking of his own apartment. “You see the skylight,” suggested the elegant man.
    “Yeah.”
    “It can be opened in good weather. There’s an atrium on the second level. You know what an atrium is?”
    “No.”
    “It’s a kind of garden, within the house. Here, let me show you.”
    The larger model was built in pieces, which could be disassembled. The roof came off first, showing bedrooms and baths all around a big square opening coinciding with the skylight. The top floor came off, was set aside and showed a third floor given over to a master bedroom suite and a bookcase-lined den, around the continuing square atrium hole. The details impressed even Dortmunder. “This thing must have cost as much as the real house,” he said.
    The elegant man smiled. “Not quite,” he said, lifting off the third floor. And here was the bottom of the atrium—fancy word for air shaft, Dortmunder decided—a formal garden like the one outside these real-life dining-room windows, with a fountain and stone paths. The living and dining rooms in the model were open to the atrium. “Moira’s copy,” the elegant man said, pointing at the garden, “is just about there.”
    “Tricky,” Dortmunder commented.
    “There are twelve steps down from the atrium level to the sidewalk in front. The rear garden is sunk deeper, below ground level.”
    “Very tricky.”
    “Ah, our drinks,” the elegant man said, taking his, “and not a moment too soon.” He sipped elegantly and said, “Mr. Dortmunder, the workman is worthy of his hire. I shall now outline to you our plans and our reasoning. I ask you to give us your careful attention, to advise us of any flaws in our thinking and to suggest whatever improvements come to your professional mind. In return, I will pay you—in cash, of course—one thousand dollars.”
    “And drive me uptown,” Dortmunder said. “I’m really late for my appointment.”
    “Agreed.”
    “OK, then,” Dortmunder said, and looked around for a place to sit down.
    “Oh, come along,” said the elegant man. “We might as well be comfortable.”
    Tall, narrow windows in the living room overlooked a tree-lined expensive block. Long sofas in ecru crushed velvet faced each other on the Persian carpet, amid glass-topped tables, modern lamps and antique bric-a-brac. In a Millet over the mantel, a French farmer of the last century endlessly pushed his