Thieves Dozen Read Free Page B

barrowload of hay through a narrow barn door. The elegant man might have lost his atriummed town house to the scheming Moira, but he was still doing OK. No welfare housing necessary.
    With a fresh drink to hand, Dortmunder sat on a sofa and listened. “We’ve made three plans,” the elegant man said, as Dortmunder wondered who this “we” was he kept talking about; surely not the plug-uglies, giants with the brains of two-by-fours, sitting around now on chair arms like a rock star’s bodyguards. “Our first plan, perhaps still feasible, involves that skylight and a helicopter. I have access to a heli—”
    “Loud,” Dortmunder said.
    The elegant man paused, as though surprised, then smiled. “That’s right,” he said.
    Dortmunder gave him a flat look. “Was that a test? You wanna see if I’ll just say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, give me my grand and take me uptown,’ is that it?”
    “To some extent,” agreed the elegant man placidly. “Of course, apart from the noise—a dead giveaway to the entire neighborhood, naturally, the house would swarm with police before we’d so much as attached the grapple—still, apart from that noise problem, a helicopter
is
quite an attractive solution. At night, from above—”
    “Illegal,” interrupted Dortmunder.
    “Eh?”
    “You can’t fly a helicopter over Manhattan after dark. There’s a law. Never break a law you don’t intend to break: people get grabbed for a traffic violation, and what they’re really doing is robbing a bank. That kind of thing. It happens all the time.”
    “I see.” The elegant man looked thoughtful. Smoothing back his silver locks, he said, “Every trade is more complicated than it appears, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah,” said Dortmunder. “What’s plan number two?”
    “Ah, yes.” The elegant man regained his pleased look. “This involves the front door.”
    “How many people in this house?”
    “None.” Then the elegant man made a dismissing finger wave, saying, “The staff, of course. But they’re all downstairs. It’s soundproofed down there and servants sleep like the dead, anyway.”
    “If you say so. Where’s this Moira?”
    “She
should
be in England, mired on the M four,” the elegant man said, looking extremely irritated, “but the delay I’d arranged for her to undergo didn’t quite take place. As a result, she is probably at this very moment boarding her flight to New York. She’ll be here sometime early tomorrow morning.” Shrugging away his annoyance, he said, “Nevertheless, we still have all of tonight. Plan number two, as I started to say, has us forcing entry through the front door. Three strong men”—with a graceful hand gesture to include both himself and the silent plug-uglies—“with some difficulty, can jog the statue onto a low wheeled dolly. Out front, we shall have a truck equipped with a winch, whose long cable will reach as far as the atrium. The winch can pull the statue on the dolly through the house and down a metal ramp from the head of the stairs to the interior of the truck.”
    “That sounds OK,” said Dortmunder. “What’s the problem?” “The guard,” the elegant man explained, “outside the embassy next door.”
    “Oh,” said Dortmunder. “And if you get rid of the guard. . . .”
    “We create an international incident. A side effect even more severe than the breaking of helicopter-at-night laws.”
    Dortmunder shook his head. “Tell me about plan number three.”
    “We effect entry through the rear, from the house on the next block. We set various incendiary devices and we burn the place down.”
    Dortmunder frowned. “Metal doesn’t burn,” he objected.
    “A flaw we’d noticed ourselves,” the elegant man admitted. Dortmunder drank bourbon and gave his host a look of disgust. “You don’t have any plan at all,” he said.
    “We have no
good
plans,” the elegant man said. “Would you have a suggestion of your own?”
    “For a thousand