They all trooped in, to view the unprecedented sight of Tiny in two aprons, overlapping, with a meat cleaver in one hand and a long wooden spoon in the other, with a lot of big pots and pans hissing and snarling on the stove. What he looked mostly like was some darker version of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. “Soup’s on at six,” he told them.
I wish I knew more about Oleg Zverkov. I wish I could read testimonials to him (that would be in Russian), learn what he loved about the Dortmunder novels, and what else he loved besides them, get something of the tenor of his personality, the cut of his jib.
I wish he’d been one of my regulars in the comments section, back when I was reviewing the Dortmunders, giving us the Russian take on these books (Ray Garraty being more of a Parker kind of guy.) I wish we could have swapped insights, interpretations, interests. I wish most of all that Mr. Westlake himself could have lived to see these books, to hold them in his hands (and I would have made damn sure that happened). But alas. Not to be.
Westlake novels are, most of all, about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. About individuals engaged in an open-ended process of self-discovery. And thus, they attract readers who are themselves ordinary, yet capable of the extraordinary, and who are engaged in that process themselves. Seeing the comedy and tragedy of life in equal measure, appreciating both, refusing to let one overwhelm the other.
And why, pray tell, should we not assume that such people exist everywhere, in every nation of the earth? Nations as populous as China, as expansive as Russia, as untamed as Brazil, as miniscule as Anguilla, as remote as Papua New Guinea. This blog has been visited by one hundred and fifty-four such nations as of today. The only major land masses I’m missing are Antarctica and Greenland. I’ve got readers on lots of little islands too (Westlake would have liked that.)
And you know, wherever there are people, there are bosses, seeking to control them. There are organization men, seeking to be controlled. There are rich pricks, looking to buy us on the cheap. And there are those who just don’t fit any of the available molds, who don’t belong anywhere, but would like to find some way they could, without selling themselves on the cheap.
And it’s to that last group that Westlake sings most passionately, telling them they’re not alone. That they can prevail. If only by dint of sheer persistence, self-knowledge, and pooling their diverse skills. You can make a sound in this world. You can be someone to reckon with. Oleg was one of those. That I know.
But this is an enconium. Not precisely the same thing as a eulogy. Nothing at all like an obituary. So let’s finish looking at the work to which he gave his last full measure of devotion, and which will be completed, in spite of his departure.
That’s the good news. Here’s the other kind. Title page and end papers.
(You know, I’m guessing PC is never going to be a thing in Russia.)
Hide? Where? Nowhere. The shelves were packed full and high. If this were a traditional department store, he could at least try to pretend to be a mannequin in the men’s clothing section, but these discount places were too cheap to have full entire mannequins. They had mannequins that consisted of just enough body to drape the displayed clothing on.
Pretending to be a headless and armless mannequin was just a little too far beyond Dortmunder’s histrionic capabilities. He looked around, hoping at least to see something soft to bang his head against while panicking, and noticed he was just one aisle over from the little line of specialty shops, the pharmacy and the hair salon and the video rental and the optician.
The optician.
Could this possibly be a plan that had suddenly blossomed like a cold sore in Dortmunder’s brain? Probably not, but it would have to do.
As the individual all those legislators most specifically had in mind when they enacted their three-strikes-you’re-out life-imprisonment laws, Dortmunder felt that any plan, however loosely basted together, had to be better than simple surrender. His wallet tonight contained several dubious IDs, including somebody’s credit card, so, for almost the first time in his life, he made use of a credit card in a discount store, swiping it down the line between door and jamb leading to the optician’s office, forcing the striker back far enough so he could push open the glass door in the glass wall and enter.
It wasn’t until after the door snicked shut again behind him that he realized there were no knobs or latches on its inside. This door could only be opened or closed or locked or unlocked from the outside, because the fire laws required it to be propped open anytime the place was open for business.
Trapped! he thought, but then he thought, wait a second. This just adds whadayacallit. Verisimilitude. Unless that’s the color.
The optician’s shop was broad and narrow, with the front glass wall facing the rest of Speedshop, plus white walls at sides and back, liberally decorated with mirrors and with color photographs of handsome people with bad eyesight.
(No mention of any of these beauteous four-eyed people being stereotypically coiffed Native Americans, nor would they have been in 2001, but nice foreshadowing. Also product placement. I’d have awarded extra points for Foster Grants, but that gag wouldn’t play in Petrovka, kemosabe.)
The three were more than an odd couple; they were an odd trio. Little Feather, the former showgirl, Native American Indian, was beautiful in a chiseled-granite sort of way, as though her mother were Pocahontas and her father Mount Rushmore. Irwin Gabel, the disgraced university professor, was tall and bony and mostly shoulder blades and Adam’s apple, with an aggrieved and sneering look that used to work wonders in the classroom but was less useful in the world at large.
As for Guilderpost, the mastermind looked mostly like a mastermind: portly, dignified, white hair in waves above a distinguished pale forehead. He went in for three-piece suits, and was often the only person in a given state wearing a vest. He’d given up his mustache some years ago, when it turned gray, because it made him look like a child molester, which he certainly was not; however, he did look like a man who used to have a mustache, with some indefinable nakedness between the bottom of his fleshy nose and the top of his fleshy lip. He brushed this area from time to time with the side of his forefinger, exactly as though the mustache were still there.
(I can’t quibble in the least regarding Guilderpost and Gabel. Little Feather? Ehhhhh…. women are under-represented in these illustrations. One might argue they’re under-represented in the novels, but that’s another subject.)
“Give me the flashlight,” Geerome said, and a huge white light suddenly glared all over them. Benny, wide-eyed, astounded, terrified, could still make out every crumb of dirt on the cheeks of Geerome and Herbie, the light was that bright, that intense.
And so was the voice. It came from a bullhorn, and it sounded like the voice of God, and it said, “Freeze. Stop right where you are.”
They froze; well, they were already frozen. The three Indian lads standing in a row in the grave squinted into the glare, and out of it, like a scene in a science-fiction movie, came a lot of people in dark blue uniforms. Policemen. New York City policemen.
(Ho ho ho. Merry Heistmas. The Perfect Crime, at last.)
(Villainy receives its just retribution. From other villains, but that’s nitpicking.)
Just one more. And so fittingly, it happens to be—
The thing is, I started in life as a stunt driver.”
Anne Marie, surprised, said, “Really?”
“You may have seen the one,” Chester said, “where the guy’s escaping in the car, they’re after him, the street becomes an alleyway, too narrow for the car, he angles sharp right, bumps the right wheels up on the curb, spins sharp left, the car’s up on two left wheels, he goes down the alley at a diagonal, drops onto four wheels where it widens out again, ta-ran-ta-rah.”
“Wow,” Anne Marie said.
“That was me,” Chester told her. “We gotta do it in one take or otherwise I’m gonna cream the car against some very stone buildings. I liked that life.”
(I must confess, I kind of like that there’s not a single picture of Anne Marie in any of these books. Though I’ve only seen two of J.C., and one of May. None of Gladys Murch. Maybe in some of the earlier volumes I don’t have. I think we can say women are better represented in Westlake’s fiction than they are in these books. Though rich blondes in hot cars do pretty well. Or do I mean that the other way around?)
(This image I could have done without.)
(Not this one, though.)
“The shoes, Rumsey.”
He blinked at them. There they were, neatly placed on the floor, midway down the corridor on the right. “I didn’t do that, mum.”
“Well, of course not, Rumsey.” Now she clearly didn’t know what to think. “Mr. Hall put them out there.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you know why, Rumsey?”
“Take them to the shoe repair?”
“Rumsey, I can’t believe you have been a butler for—”
“We never had nothing about shoes at the embassy, mum.”
She looked skeptical. “Who polished the ambassador’s shoes?”
In that instant, he got it. The boss puts the shoes in the corridor; the butler mouses through, later at night, to take them away to his pantry and polish them; then the butler brings them back and puts them where he found them, only now gleaming like bowling balls. So why hadn’t he known that? And who did polish the ambassador’s shoes?
“His orderly, mum,” Dortmunder said, floundering for the word. “Military orderly. All that sort of thing. Tie bow ties, polish shoes, all that. Specialist, mum.”
“Well, that’s certainly a different way to do things,” she said. “But we may never understand the eastern Europeans. Somehow, it’s all Transylvania, all the time.”
“Yes, mum.”
“Well, do them now,” she said, with a graceful gesture shoeward. “And assure Mr. Hall you’ll understand your duties much better from this point forward.”
“I will, mum,” Dortmunder said.
Buddy leaped forward, raising the sack, as Mark (green ski mask, with elks) and Ace (Lone Ranger mask) jumped to grab Hall’s arms, while Os (rubber Frankenstein head), who was supposed to grab Hall’s ankles, pointed instead at the butler and cried, “Who’s that?”
“The butler,” Mac said, apologetic even though it wasn’t his fault.
“Grab him!” Mark yelled, he already having his hands full with the belatedly struggling Hall, Mark and Buddy and Ace now tugging the sacked Hall toward the trailer.
Up to this point, the butler had just been watching events unfold, interested but not involved; as though he thought of himself as merely a bystander. But now, when Os lunged at him, shouting, “Come on, Mac!” the butler backed away, putting his hands up as he cried, “Hey, don’t call me Mac, I’m the butler, I’m not in this.”
“He’ll raise the alarm!” Mark shouted from halfway into the trailer.
Mac, having already figured that out, leaped forward to join Os in grabbing the butler by both arms and dragging him in his employer’s wake.
The butler struggled like mad: “What are you doing? I got work here! I got things to do!”
What, was he crazy?
(The final image. Which in this volume is on the same page as the table of contents, which for reasons I could not guess, is at the back of each book.)
In spite of having studied, at scattered moments of my existence, French, Spanish, Latin, and Irish (never got around to Klingon), I am a lifelong and inveterate monoglot. (Every bit as unappealing as it sounds.)
And thus, to my lasting regret, I will never be able to read Oleg’s translations. I can’t savor the unique spin he puts on Westlake’s phrasings, see how he solves all the inherent problems of making him accessible to my fellow monoglots in his homeland (though I shouldn’t assume they have just the one language simply because they don’t have mine).
Like anybody who cares about fiction, and the novel in particular, I have read quite a bit of Russian literature in translation, notably the superlative work of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I fell in love with Moliere in high school (oh grow up) thanks to the rhyming translations of Richard Wilbur, and I’d know nothing at all about Gaelic poetry, or be able to enjoy Flann O’Brien’s An Beal Bocht, without those people who straddle diverse linguistic realities, build bridges between them, so that we can see what our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world, and across the ages, have thought and felt. Skilled translators are rare and precious beings.
(And two of them know what Trump and Kim Jong Un discussed in that meeting, which is more than anyone else can say. Hmm, which one you think has an accident first? Do they even bother with accidents in North Korea? I guess we’ll find out.)
Why do I do all this? To share my love of Westlake with others who have read him. Why did Oleg do all he did? To share Westlake with fellow Russian speakers who’d read him, but (in his estimation) not clearly enough. He obviously felt something had been lost in translation, and he wanted to try and provide it.
This would be worthwhile in itself, without the quality bindings and paper, without the beautiful evocative artwork (just the image of Tiny in the kitchen alone…!!!!!!) He could have written his translations, had them printed cheaply, distributed them via the internet, and through personal connections. (I don’t know what books he translated for a living, perhaps Ray would.)
But in communicating his passion to Alexander, and (in his function as editor of these volumes) to Mr. Turbin, he made this so much more than just improving on existing translations. And in a fair world, he’d have lived long enough to see all the books come out, and a while after. But he was a Westlake reader. And what’s more, a Dortmunder reader. So what are the odds he thought this was a fair world?
It’s a world where you take your shots, as best you can, while you can, and he took his.
“Hair,” Dortmunder said. This was suddenly absolutely clear in his mind. “We find a descendant with black hair, we figure out a way to get a little buncha that hair, we give it to Little Feather, and when they come to take hair for the test, she gives them Moody hair.”
Kelp said, “John, I knew you’d do it. The Moody hair matches the Moody body, and Little Feather’s in.”
“If we can find an heir,” Dortmunder said.
Irwin laughed. “This is wonderful,” he said. “The absolute accuracy of DNA testing! First, we put in a wrong body to match our wrong heiress, then we get a wrong wrong body, and now we’re gonna get the wrong wrong hair. One switched sample is gonna get compared with another switched sample. Absolutely nothing in the test is kosher.”
Kelp said, “Irwin, that’s the kind of test we like.”
Murch said, “Whoops. You wanna plan it, and organize it, and do it, all this weekend?”
“No, I don’t want to do that,” Dortmunder said, “but that’s what we got.”
“Then,” Murch said, “I don’t know we got much.”
“Well, it could be that luck is with us,” Dortmunder told him. Then he stopped and looked around at everybody and said, “I can’t believe what I just heard me say.”
Kelp said, “I’m a little taken aback myself, John.”
This novel features both a con and a heist, and the con takes up a lot more time. The heist is merely there to shore up the con, and from conception to execution occupies eight chapters in a fifty chapter book, which I think is fairly unique for the series as a whole. I have this little suspicion that Westlake thought of the heist first, decided it wasn’t quite enough of an idea to hang a novel on, but too much for a short story, and the market for novellas was just not there anymore.
So he found a way to plug it in here, thus allowing him to tell a Dortmunder story about a con while still satisfying the need for a heist. And a damned clever way at that. I could be wrong, I often am.
Not that cons, of the short variety, are anything new to Dortmunder. In the first two novels, we see him going door to door, selling encyclopedias to housewives–he shows them some brochures, they give him a down-payment, and they never see him again, or the encyclopedias ever. He doesn’t like it, and he’s not good at it, but he feels like he has to make some kind of dishonest living, and it’s relatively low-risk. After Bank Shot, he abandoned the encyclopedia thing, and if there was no big heist to plan for the moment, stuck to simple burglary, which was never as simple as he hoped.
J.C. Taylor brought a bit of the grift back to the series, via her many mail order scams, and eventually her own fake country–but always in a strictly ancillary fashion. This would be the only novel in the series to feature a classic long con. Well, classic in the Dortmunder sense of the word, put it that way. Nothing succeeds as planned.
I don’t much like any of the covers I found for this novel (except maybe the Japanese edition I put up for Part 1), and for reasons perhaps a mental health specialist will explain to me someday, often feel obliged to find other images to go with the covers. It makes sense to me, and that’s all that really matters, right?
What you see up top is a photo of the current St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Council (my, don’t they look fierce!), and below that is The Kittatinny House, a rambling old pile that once overlooked the Delaware River, on what is now part of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Originally only accommodating 25 guests, it ended up as a super-swanky resort hotel that could sleep 250. In its final form, it burned to the ground in 1931.
I’d never heard of it before I started doing research for this review. I’d say it’s a fair bet that Westlake knew about it, and quite a few other bits and pieces of real history (some of it relating to the odd custom of House Museums and we’ll get back to that), all of which went into this Mulligan stew of alternate history he’s cooking up here. He usually knows more than his readers, and he always knows more than he’s saying. It’s annoying. Like my propensity for prologues.
Here’s the thing. I don’t really feel like doing an in-depth synopsis of this one. No percentage in it. So I’m going to revisit my old custom of titled subheadings, and see where that gets us. Hopefully somewhere under 7,000 words. We’ll see. Let’s start out with–
The Arraignment of Redcorn:
Little Feather uncrossed her arms and said, “You don’t act like you’re my lawyer, you act like you’re the other guy’s lawyer.” She pointed to the letter she’d sent. “I am Little Feather Redcorn,” she said. “My mother was Doeface Redcorn, my grandmother was Harriet Littlefoot Redcorn, my grandfather was Bearpaw Redcorn, who was lost at sea in the United States Navy in World War Two, and they were all Pottaknobbee, and I’m Pottaknobbee. I’m Pottaknobbee all the way back to my great-grandfather Joseph Redcorn, who fell off the Empire State Building.”
At that, Dawson blinked and said, “Are you trying to make fun–”
“He was working on it, when they were building it, he was up on top with a bunch of Mohawks. My mama told me the family always believed the Mohawks pushed him, so I believe it, too.”
Where we left things last time was that Little Feather had been hauled off to the local hoosegow, at the behest of Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda, who co-manage the reservation’s casino, are stealing from it on a regular basis, and thus don’t want anybody other than themselves looking at their overcooked books. They assume Little Feather’s a fake, but they’re not taking any chances. Scare her off, before this thing mushrooms. Only thing is, as we’ve already seen, Little Feather don’t scare easy.
She’s worried, sure. Nothing like this was supposed to happen, at least not this soon. But see, in her mind, she’s not really a fake. She’s a real Indian (says her mother was a full-blooded Choctee, and no that’s not a real tribe either, though it sounds like Choctaw), who has lived exactly the life she says she has, and so what if she doesn’t really belong to this specific tribe? Her ancestors got robbed by the whites just as much as any Pottaknobbees ever did, and she grew up just as poor. She’s not lying so much as badly stretching an inconvenient truth. Entirely possible she’s got some non-native ancestry as well, but you know what she’d say to that?
(Lucky horse.)
The secret to a good con is confidence, hence the name. She’s got so much confidence in herself, it doesn’t matter what name she goes by. She’s still the same person down beneath. Any name she goes by isn’t her real name, just like her forebears never called themselves Indians or Native Americans. She’s going to get her split, and she’s going to have the best house on the reservation, and as God is her witness–well, that’s a different book. Possibly different God as well, opinions differ.
So even though her public defender, Marjorie Dawson, a rather frumpy woman of around the same age as herself, acts at first as if her only job is to convince Little Feather to sign a statement admitting she lied, Little Feather’s strict adherence to that lie shakes Dawson’s own assurance, and makes her start to ask herself if this woman could be telling the truth. Believe in the lie enough, and others believe it too.
Then she’s brought up before another in a line of bored curmudgeonly judges we meet in the Dortmunder books, sick of the usual run of uninspired criminals they typically encounter in their daily grind. They need a little break in the routine, which Dortmunder & Co. will provide.
Judge T. Wallace Higbee had come to realize that what it was all about was stupidity. All through law school and through his years of private practice, he had believed that the subject was the law itself, but in the last twelve years, since, at the age of fifty-seven, he had been elected to the bench, he had come to realize that all the training and all the experience came down to this: It was his task in life to acknowledge and then to punish stupidity.
Joe Doakes steals a car, drives it to his girlfriend’s house, leaves the engine running while he goes inside to have a loud argument with his girlfriend, causing a neighbor to call the police, who arrived to quiet a domestic dispute but then leaves with a car thief, who eventually appears before Judge T. Wallace Higbee, who gives him two to five in Dannemora? For what? Car theft? No; stupidity.
Bobby Doakes, high on various illegal substances, decides he’s thirsty and needs a beer, but it’s four in the morning and the convenience store is closed, so he breaks in the back door, drinks several beers, falls asleep in the storeroom, is found there in the morning, and Judge Higbee gives him four to eight for stupidity.
Jane Doakes steals a neighbor’s checkbook, kites checks at a supermarket and a drugstore, doesn’t think about putting the checkbook back until two days later, by which time the neighbor has discovered the theft and reported it and is on watch, and catches Jane in the act. Two to five for stupidity.
Maybe, Judge Higbee told himself from time to time, maybe in big cities like New York and London there are criminal masterminds, geniuses of crime, and judges forced to shake their heads in admiration at the subtlety and brilliance of the felonious behaviors described to them while handing down their sentences. Maybe. But out here in the world, the only true crime, and it just keeps being committed over and over, is stupidity.
And after giving Little Feather a thorough grilling in his courtroom, Judge Higbee is grudgingly forced to acknowledge that she may be lying, but she’s not stupid (and therefore, in his private worldview, not guilty). And after a while, he begins to wonder if it’s actually Fox and Oglanda who have been stupid–done something they need to hide, and that’s why they’re so determined to get rid of this woman.
So not only does Fox’s and Oglanda’s preemptive strike fail–it backfires. Turns out there’s a memorial plaque at the reservation headquarters for Joseph Redcorn, that the Mohawks presented the tribes with (and which the tribes have always interpreted as guilty conscience because they pushed him). Even Guilderpost’s research never turned that up, but it provides some needed verisimilitude to back up the con.
Little Feather gets released on bail (she puts up her mobile home as collateral), and her co-conspirators arrange for her to stay in touch with them discreetly, knowing she’ll be watched. It’s mostly up to her now, and they just have to wait until somebody thinks to bring up DNA testing. Then they’re all set. They think. But this is a Dortmunder novel. It’s never going to be that simple. Which brings us to–
The Un-Busy Body:
“If I was them,” Dortmunder said, “and I’m in the spot they’re in, what do I do? And I’m beginning to think I know what I do.”
Tiny said, “What you did.”
Dortmundre nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking, Tiny.”
Kelp said, “They would, wouldn’t they?”
Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny all nodded, not happy. Guilderpost and Irwin both looked baffled. Guilderpost said, “What do you mean?”
Dortmunder said, “What did we do, to make sure the DNA was a match?”
“You put grampa in there,” Little Feather said.
“So if I’m on the other side,” Dortmunder said, “what do I do?”
“No!” Guilderpost cried. “They wouldn’t dare!”
“I bet they would,” Dortmunder said.
Back when I reviewed the second of the Westlake crime comedies, The Busy Body (also the second ‘Nephew’ book, since before Dortmunder turned up, they were one and the same), I made a connection. I said that 1966 novel’s star-crossed mobbed-up protagonist, Aloysius Engel, was clearly a Dortmunder prototype. I hold to that claim now, and present this book as evidence. Westlake is revisiting ideas from The Busy Body here, but is turning them on their heads. He knows what he did. And what he’s doing now is returning to the scene of the crime. Namely a graveyard.
The joke this time is that once Little Feather’s grandfather goes into that grave in Queens, he stays there. It’s a bit unclear what happens to Joseph Redcorn, who was clearly just born unlucky, and stayed that way after the Mohawks pushed him. Once both sides have fully lawyered up, and the subject of DNA testing is raised by the other side, as Guilderpost anticipated, Dortmunder correctly anticipates what Fox and Oglanda will do–dig up the deceased Pottaknobbee they’re afraid might really be Little Feather’s grampa, and replace him with somebody she’s definitely not related to. Guilderpost’s aggrieved moral indignation at this suggestion is rather priceless.
So what can they do about it? Little Feather isn’t supposed to have anybody backing her up here, so they can’t guard the grave without tipping their hand. They could dig up the body–again–and then put it back in there–again–after the tribes have planted their own ringer, but Dortmunder feels like if you do grave-robbing not once but three times, it’s starting to become your job, and that’s not a career path he’s particularly interested in.
Tiny comes up with the answer–switch the headstones. So Little Feather’s grampa, who was posing as Joseph Redcorn, is now posing as one Burwick Moody, buried very nearby, under a very similar marker. He died about three years after Joseph Redcorn, on December 5th 1933.
“That’s the day Prohibition ended,” Dortmunder said.
Tiny looked at him. “You know stuff like that?”
“I like it when they repeal laws,” Dortmunder explained.
Worth mentioning. My favorite exchange of the book may actually be one that happens before that, as they make the long drive back down from the Adirondacks to Queens, in a stolen Jeep (with MD plates, naturally, because Kelp). Seems the jeep has some kind of built-in electronic compass (GPS is not mentioned). Tiny brings it up. Tiny notices things.
As Dortmunder looked, the S E changed to S. He looked out at the road, and it was curving to the right. “So now it’s south,” he said.
“You got it,” Tiny told him. “Comin down, that’s what I been doing back here. Watchin the letters. A whole lotta S. A little N back there when Kelp got confused on the Sprain.
“The signage stunk,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder looked at Kelp’s profile, gleaming like a Halloween mask in the dashboard lights. “Signage,” he said. “Is that a word?”
“Not for those pitiful markers they had back there,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder decided to go back to conversation number one, and said to Tiny, “And the numbers are the temperature, right? Outside the car.”
“You got it again,” Tiny told him.
Forgetting about signage, Dortmunder said to Kelp, “Did you know about that?”
“Did I know about what?”
“Southwest,” Tiny said.
“The car here, Dortmunder explained to Kelp,” it tells you which way you’re going, south, east, whatever, and what the temperature is outside. It’s up there.”
Kelp looked up there.
“Back on the road!” Dortmunder yelled.
Kelp steered around the truck he’d been going to smash into and said, “That’s not bad, is it?” The temperature outside, and which way you’re going.”
“Very useful,” Dortmunder suggested.
“A car like this,” Kelp said, “you could take this across deserts, jungles, trackless wastes.”
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “How many of these things do you suppose have been across deserts and jungles and trackless wastes?”
“Oh, two or three,” Kelp said, and took the exit, and Tiny said “South.”
So they can just switch the stones back again after the wrong body is dug up and replaced with another wrong body. Here’s the problem. The reason Aloysius Engel failed to find the body he was supposed to find in that earlier comedy of errors is that he’s a natural-born schlemiel. It seems schlemiel-dom is not a uniquely causasian thing. Well, that’s only fair, right?
The Native Nephew:
Benny Whitefish and his cousin Geerome Sycamore, and his other cousin Herbie Antelope loaded the coffin into the rented van and shut the doors. Then Geerome went behind the tombstone and threw up.
Benny was pleased that Geerome had thrown up, because it meant there was at least one person around here who was a bigger goofus than himself, but of course, since Uncle Roger had put him in charge of this mission, he had to say, in a manly kind of fashion, “That’s okay, Geerome, it could of happened to anybody. Don’t think a thing about it.”
Benny Whitefish is an actual nephew, of Roger Fox–Westlake’s not being at all subtle about this, and most people still miss the joke, I bet. We first meet him because he’s assigned to keep an eye on Little Feather, and being a horny young guy, that’s a job he can get into. He immediately takes a liking to her, and she immediately spots him as her tail, and as somebody she can twist around her clever card-dealing finger without half-trying.
So before you know it, he’s on her side, and is speaking up for her at the Tribal Council, which theoretically is how the tribe is supposed to govern itself, except that since all the money comes from the casino, all the real power is with Fox and Oglanda.
The Tribal Council functioned mostly like a zoning board. Back in the good old days, the Tribal Council had waged war against tribal enemies, had overseen the distribution of meat after a hunt, maintained religious orthodoxy (a combination of ancestor and tree worship at that time), punished adultery and theft and treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors, arranged executions, oversaw the torturing of captured enemies, conducted the young men of the tribe through the rites of manhood, and arranged marriages (most of which worked out pretty well). These days, the Tribal Council gave out building permits.
Tommy Dog was chairman of the Tribal Council for this quarter, he being a Kiota and the chairmanship alternating every quarter between the tribes, to be fair to everybody and to distribute the power and the glory equally, and because nobody else wanted the job.
Yeah, I’ve had those kinds of jobs too. Tommy Dog has no encouragment for poor Benny, since he has no power to question Roger and Frank, who control the purse strings. Or the wampum pouch strings, I dunno. As Tommy looks back at Benny, he thinks to himself he resembles those paintings of the Defeated Indian, head hung dejectedly. This is not a very PC book, it should go without saying, but in a comic universe, you’re at a disadvantage if you’re not funny. If everybody is absurd, nobody is absurd, right? Even playing field. Except it’s not, really. Not when it comes to Benny.
He and his buddies get caught at the graveyard with what is supposed to be Joseph Redcorn’s coffin, but isn’t. This is a major plot complication, needless to say, so Benny’s pulling his weight, storywise. What happened was, the groundskeeper there figured out there was too much going on at night, people prowling around who aren’t supposed to be there, so he called the cops, and Benny’s the one got fingered. So where that leaves things is that now they’re going to test Burwick Moody’s DNA, not Little Feather’s grampa’s (which in a weird way, means Benny’s mission succeeded, only his uncle doesn’t know it, and neither does Benny).
And since the coffin has now been removed from what Fox and Oglanda were insisting was sacred tribal burial ground, by members of the tribe who (their lawyer argues) were merely trying to return a member of their community to his proper place, they can’t use that as an excuse for not testing the remains.
More on that later–what happens now is that Benny and his cousins spend the night at Riker’s Island, and they’d probably find the Plains Indian Sundance more relaxing. (Okay, I guess you can’t really say he didn’t earn his reward, but it’s more by way of suffering than actually doing stuff.)
Here’s the thing–Benny deserved a few more chapters. He’s not developed that much. By the end of the book, he’s shacked up with Little Feather, and that’s a grand and generous reward for any sub-protagonist. But unlike the other Westlake Nephews, Benny never gets to earn The Girl, make a grand heroic gesture. He never figures out what’s what, or who’s who; never has that insightful moment of self-realization that is the very heart of Nephewdom, and that’s basically because it’s a Dortmunder book. The Dortmunders ultimately replaced the Nephews in Westlake’s comic stylings; rendered them obsolescent. It’s not about Benny.
But think how much better the Nephew of Drowned Hopes made out, and he’s a total shit. The Nephew in Dancing Aztecs (where there is no dominating central protagonist) may be a total mama’s boy, but he’s a mama’s boy who wins. Did Benny have to be such a total nebbish? Did his subplot have to be so patronizing? Couldn’t he have counted coup just once? Points deducted from your score, Mr. Westlake. You could have given him a few more chapters.
Obviously the Native American hero of this book is a heroine. And given that Dortmunder himself was born in a town called Dead Indian, and is (I believe) the living embodiment of the Indian trickster figure Coyote, you could argue he himself is partly Indian (Dortmunder is partly everything, that’s part of his appeal). More than anything else, Benny’s another Westlake commentary on how guys under the age of 30 don’t really know themselves–Westlake remembers that form of naive listless hormone-addled identity confusion all too well.
But he’s a lot less sympathetic here. Maybe because he’s old and cranky now, has increasingly less patience with the stupidity of the young (there’s a reason Judge Higbee’s voice is so strong in this book, in spite of him being a fairly minor character). Happens to the best of us. But lest you lose patience with me, maybe we better move on from Benny Whitefish.
Truth is, Dortmunder has his own problems to worry about, and they are also problems with the book itself, that must be addressed and dealt with. This book isn’t about a heist. Aren’t all Dortmunder stories supposed to be about some kind of theft? Stealing bodies isn’t the same thing. Neither is conning people. Which leads us, quite naturally, to a question–
What Color is Dortmunder’s Parachute?:
“I mean,” Dortmunder said, “why am I in this place? I’m not a con artist. I’m not a grafter. I’m a thief. There’s nothing here to steal. We’re just riding Little Feather’s coattails–never mind, Tiny, you know what I mean–and we’re horning in on somebody else’s scam, and if they don’t manage to kill us–and you know, Tiny, that’s still Plan A they’ve got over there in their minds, and you can’t walk around with a hand grenade strapped on forever, for instance, you’re not even wearing it now–what do we get out of it?”
“What Color Is Your Parachute? is about job-hunting and career-changing, but it’s also about figuring out who you are as a person and what you want out of life.”
I always hated that book. Mainly because I associated it with having to look for a job. And that’s what Dortmunder is doing, all through this book. And he feels just the same way about it. Job-hunting sucks. Particularly when you already know what your real job is, but they ask you to do something else instead.
Case in point–Dortmunder critiques Guilderpost’s professional technique, with regards to how they stay in touch with Little Feather. This leads to a disagremeent within the makeshift gang–Tiny and Kelp say that John’s the planner, the organizer–Guilderpost is most offended, says that’s his job.
Dortmunder said, “That’s not what they mean. We do different things, Fitzroy, you and me. You figure out someplace where you can make people believe something’s true that isn’t true. Make them believe you got an old Dutch land grant screws up their title to their property. Make them believe maybe there is just one more Pottaknobbee alive in the world. That’s not what I do.”
“No, of course not,” Guilderpost said, and Irwin, sounding slight snotty, said, “I’ve been wondering about that, John. What is it that you do?”
“I figure out,” Dortmunder told him, “how to go into a place where I’m not supposed to be, and come back out again, without getting caught or having anything stick to me.”
“It’s like D day,” Kelp explained, “only like, you know, smaller.”
“We also go for quieter,” Dortmunder said.
So he can, in fact, make sound practical suggestions about how they can avoid falling under the scrutiny of the law–there’s a police tail on Little Feather as well, and much more professional than Benny’s (though Benny’s the one gets invited in for coffee). But that’s more like a consultancy gig, which hardly satisfies his need to work, and neither does switching headstones, and he’s still brooding about that later on, to May, before he heads back upstate again.
He starts off on his childhood at the orphanage of the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery, and how they had these cereal bowls with pictures of Looney Tunes characters on the bottom, and he usually got Elmer Fudd. May is confused, wonders if he’s saying he’d like her to find some of those bowls for him to eat his cereal out of.
“No,” he said, and slowly shook his head. Then he let go of the spoon–it didn’t drop; it remained angled into the gunk–and at least he looked up at May across the kitchen table and said, “What I want, I think, is, you know what I mean, some purpose in life.”
“You don’t have a purpose in life?”
“I usually got a purpose,” he said. “Usually, I kind of know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, but look at me now.”
“I know,” she agreed. “I’ve been looking at you, John. It’s this Anastasia thing, isn’t it?”
“I mean, what am I doing here?” he demanded. Slowly, the spoon eased downward. Silently, it touched the edge of the bowl. “There’s nothing for me to do,” he complained, “except sit around and wait for other people to scheme things out, and then all of a sudden Little Feather’s supposed to give me a hundred thousand large, and guess how much I believe that one.”
And then comes the bad news–the wheels have fallen off the con. Benny Whitefish’s blundered grave robbery has undone their succcessful grave robbery. They can’t pipe up and say “Hey, that’s not Little Feather’s grampa!” without revealing how they know that. And now Dortmunder’s very specific set of skills comes into play, at last–but how? What’s the job here? The grave is being closely guarded now. They can’t switch bodies again, or headstones–Burwick Moody’s grave is open now, so even if they could sneak in and switch the stones back again, it wouldn’t work.
But as you can see up top, there’s another solution. Dortmunder’s gift for lateral thinking comes into play–if you can’t change the DNA at one end, change it at the other. All they need to do is find a descendant of Burwick Moody with the same color hair as Little Feather, get some of that hair, and her own formidable skill set, honed at many a blackjack table, will allow her to present that hair as her own, and she gets her share of the casino. If the genes match, you must attach.
(Sidebar–I don’t know how advanced genetic testing was when this story takes place–or even when exactly this story takes place. Sometime in the 90’s, definitely. At what point in time would DNA testing show not only if such and such person was a close relation of yours, but whether or not the person tested was of Native American ancestry? I feel like I’ve done enough nit-picking for one review, so let’s just assume that all the court case requires, given that nobody contests the fact that it’s Joseph Redcorn in that grave, even though it isn’t, is to verify Little Feather is related to him.)
So off goes Fitzroy Guilderpost, to comb the internet for news of Burwick Moody’s present-day descendants. He comes back to the diner they’re meeting at, with good news and bad news–yes, there is a female descendant, named Viveca Quinlan. She has black hair. She lives not far away, in Pennsylvania. But the bad news is a lulu.
See, Burwick Moody’s sister married an artist, Russell Thurbush, of the Delaware River School, and you know better than to try and look that up online, right? There’s a Hudson River School, and there’s something called ‘Pennsylvania Impressionism’ (one somehow imagines Renoir and Monet rolling their eyes), and obviously I did not know better than to try and look it up online.
Russell Thurbush got himself a reputation, sold a lot of paintings to very rich people, invested his money wisely, and built himself a huge mansion by the Delaware Water Gap, which is now a House Museum, and I told you we’d get back to that. Well see, Viveca Quinlan lives with her two daughters in said Museum, or rather a section of it set aside for her family’s personal use, while tourists get to go through the rest, looking at old things. It’s a bit like being the First Lady, except you don’t get to be on Oprah.
So that’s it, right? The house is full of very valuable objets d’art and antiques, and there’s alarm systems, and guards, and all of that. No possible way to get in there and nab a few follicles from her hairbrush. Good idea, John, but forget it. Hey, why are you smiling? “At last,” Dortmunder said, “A job for me.” Because that’s what color his parachute is.
So that chapter leads to seven additional chapters of heist planning and executing, and it’s a pretty good heist, that comes off amazingly smooth, thanks to a blizzard, which is pretty funny, considering that I’m finishing and posting this review on Tuesday, March 14th (finally, an excuse to focus on the job they don’t pay me for). I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, read the book. Stan Murch gets dragooned into it, and there’s some great moments with him, and with his mom, and the usual hijinks at the OJ Bar and Grill, and I could do a section on all of that, but I’m almost to 5,000 words now, so maybe not.
What I do want to talk about is what you might call a bonus identity puzzle Mr. Westlake sneaks in here, Lagniappe upon Lagniappe You remember how Dortmunder rescued that nun quite literally imprisoned in an office tower serving as a metaphorical medieval castle? Well, there’s yet another imprisoned woman in this book. Her imprisonment is purely psychological in nature, but the castle itself is quite real, if more along Victorian lines, architecturally speaking. Dortmunder rescues her without ever knowing it. But somebody knows, and that leads us to–
The Mendaciously Majestic Munificence of Murch’s Mom ( AKA, Are you there, God? It’s me, ‘Margaret.’):
“There was a rustling sound downstairs,” Viveca said.
“Didn’t hear it,” Margaret said.
Viveca leaned close and dropped her voice. “It’s mice,” she confided.
Margaret looked interested. “Oh yeah?”
“In the winter,” Viveca said, “there’s just no way to keep them out, since there’s nobody ever down there.”
“Huh.” Margaret said. “Tell me about this husband of yours.”
“Frank.”
“Be as frank as you want,” Margaret said, but then she shook her head and patted the air and said, “No, just a joke, I get it, the name is Frank. And Frank said he was leaving the house, not you.”
“Yes. And I know it’s true.”
“You want him back, you feel like shit, you–whoops, sorry, you really feel terrible all the time, and you can’t control your daughters because you don’t feel good enough about yourself, and you don’t know what’s gonna happen next. Have I got the story here?”
“Yes,” Viveca said. She felt humble in the presence of this wise older woman.
“Okay,” the wise older woman said, “I tell you what you do. Tomorrow, when you get your phone back, you call this Frank. You tell him, ‘Honey, rent a truck and come get us, all of us, we’re blowin this mausoleum.'”
“Oh dear,” Viveca said. “I don’t know, Margaret.”
“What you tell him is,” Margaret insisted, “this separation is over. Come on, Frank, rent a truck or hire a lawyer, because we’re either gettin back together or we’re gettin a divorce.”
You ever think about the people who live in house museums? Now most of them probably chose to do so–I used to work with a guy who got free rent that way for a while, he just had to be there during museum hours to let people in, and the rest of the time it was just him and Mr. Poe. Or was that a different house museum, I forget. The stories get jumbled together over time.
But imagine it’s your family’s house, or used to be–your famous ancestor’s legacy to posterity, and you’re supposed to safeguard it, but mainly that’s down to other people now, and you’re just a ghost yourself now, living in a house that isn’t really a home anymore?
That’s the situation Viveca Quinlan, last surviving adult relation of Burwick Moody and Russell Thurbush is, on the night of the blizzard, when Dortmunder & Co. arrive to do a bit of quiet thievery of the valuables downstairs, while Murch’s Mom (real name Gladys), posing as a traveler stranded in the snow, keeps everyone occupied, and obtains the needed hair sample from the bathroom, easy as pie.
And she needs to give the boys some time to browse through the gift shop, if you know what I mean, so she and Viveca and Viveca’s girls and the security guard all play Uno together, for hours, and there’s plenty of time in-between to talk, and she’s the type you just know you can confide in, and Viveca has been so lonely, as ghosts in decaying isolated Victorian piles tend to be, you’ve read the stories. This story involves a husband who decided he didn’t feel like being a ghost, and went back to New York to practice law, and there’s another woman, to which ‘Margaret’ merely says “Men.”
And obviously Murch’s Mom’s only real mission statement is to make sure nobody finds out there was ever a burglary going on there, but there’s more to her than that–we found that out in Drowned Hopes, same time we found out what her real first name was. So even while she’s hiding who she really is, she’s still showing her true colors. Anyway, just like her boy, she’s a born know-it-all, lives to hand out advice. Stan will start pontificating on the best route to take on the New York City thoroughfares at the drop of a hat. She’s giving a somewhat different type of navigational assistance here. Anybody can hit a dead-end. You just turn around and get back on the main road.
So by the time she’s ready to go, she’s saved a marriage, and possibly as many as four lives, and she never bothers to tell anybody about it, except to say she thinks maybe she did some good in there, when she gets picked up by the stolen snowplow they’re using for the heist. Stan just takes to mean they all made out like bandits, which is fine with her as well. Exeunt ‘Margaret.’
The narrator informs us that Viveca and her girls moved into her husband’s apartment two days later. When the volunteers returned in the spring, when the museum reopened, and noticed a few items missing here and there, they assumed Viveca had just taken them with her as keepsakes, or they’d been sold off by the foundation that runs the mansion, and so they said nothing about it to anybody, because it was none of their business.
(The stolen items end up with Arnie Albright, the fecklessly offensive fence, who gets his own minor subplot here, and who will take some time unloading the loot, but the gang will see a nice bit of cash. Eventually. Someday.)
The omniscient deity of this universe concludes the chapter, with great satisfaction–At last, the perfect crime. He might as well have added, I’m here, ‘Margaret.’
And that leaves us nothing but–
A not entirely satisfactory conclusion, except for Benny Whitefish (lucky horse):
The DNA test proves beyond any doubt that Viveca Quinlan is related to Burwick Moody, though that’s not what the court decision will say. Roger and Frank have a little discussion about what will happen to to them once the tribes find out they’ve been cheated of tens of millions of dollars, and the general consensus is they’d be lucky to just get lynched on a street corner–if the mob goes with the traditional punishments, things could get really unpleasant.
Before that happens, however, there’s a cross to deal with. Dortmunder knew from the start that Fitzroy and Irwin wouldn’t be willing to pony up their hundred large apiece. There may be honor among thieves, but not among grifters–Jim Thompson could tell you that (Lawrence Block is a bit more on the fence about it).
But see, a grifter has to know his or her limitations–you’re supposed to win with the tools of your trade, namely lies. Not with guns, which is what Fitzroy and Irwin try–they figure they can follow Stan back to where the gang is dividing up the loot from their heist, surprise them, take them out hard with the Glock machine pistols they’ve acquired (mainly for Tiny’s sake, one assumes), and then they just need to make sure Little Feather doesn’t develop selective amnesia, like the real fake Anastasia.
And when the dust has settled RosenGabel and Guilderpost (I’m starting to lose count of how many ways Westlake found to reference that famed Shakespearean duo who thought they were the leads, and ended up relegated to a mere Stoppard play) are not dead, but they have been disarmed, and exiled, and frightened out of their wits, and left in a very poor position to ever make any claims on Little Feather’s good fortunes. One can’t really say they learned their lesson, but they still end up in detention.
As to the other nefarious duo in this book, it comes down to one last identity puzzle. Roger knows he’s a thief, and thieves have exit strategies–his is an offshore account in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He’s going to take the money and run. Frank says he can’t do that, his family is here, his home is here. He never really processed what he’d become, so he stays, and burns the books that prove he’s a thief.
And you remember Mr. Westlake had mentioned, in several previous stories, how casinos like to pump a bit of extra oxygen in there, to keep the suckers, I mean customers, lively and active and ready to lose more money at the tables? Well, turns out Silver Chasm Indian casino does that too. By the time Frank has finished rolling around in the snow outside, to put out his burning clothes, the casino is gone. With the wind.
So a while later, Little Feather comes downstate in her mobile home, which Kelp thoughtfully helps her hook up to the city power supply, and they all meet there one last time, to hear the bad news. There’s no casino. It will take a decade or more to get the money to rebuild it. She’s accepted as the last Pottaknobbee, the tribes will take care of her, she’s found a home of sorts (and does this mean she now has to spend a third of the year chairing the Tribal Council? Those meetings are going to get a lot more interesting).
So no hundred g’s apiece for the gang. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Benny Whitefish is now her official protector, and he’s brought in briefly, still not quite able to process his good fortune. And since he’s in the next room in a mobile home while she’s telling them the bad news, I’m going to assume he’s Nephew enough for Little Feather to have told him the whole unfiltered truth about who she is, and Nephew enough not to give a damn, as long as he gets to see her naked. Attaboy.
So that’s the first of the Final Five. It may well be, as Greg Tulonen thinks, the best of them as well. I’ll decide that as I work my way through the next four. I may have found any number of little flaws in it, but Westlake put so much into even his most ill-conceived efforts (which this is not), that it feels churlish to cavil and complain about that. Lagniappe isn’t about getting the very best. Lagniappe is about getting something extra.
And what we’ll be getting next time will be the last of my “Mr Westlake and (fill in name of decade here)” pieces. Because as I see it, this here is the last of his 90’s novels, whether it was written in ’99 or ’00. The next book in our queue was published in 2002, and it’s also a heist story–but not with Dortmunder. Or Parker. Or even Grofield. A new beginning, you might say. Cue Lord Tennyson. Yeah, I’ll explain that. Later. After we’ve dug ourselves out. Stan, could you loan us that snowplow? Aw c’mon, just for Lagniappe.
We picked up one excellent word–a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word–‘lagniappe.’ They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish–so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a ‘baker’s dozen.’ It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. … If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says ‘For lagniappe, sah,’ and gets you another cup without extra charge.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Irwin said, “There’s so much wickedness in the world, you know what I mean?”
“We know,” Kelp assured him.
Dortmunder said “Little Feather’s an Indian.”
“We’re coming to that, John,” Guilderpost said. “In the last thirty years or so, the American courts have been redressing many of those wrongs done so long ago. Indians are getting their sacred tribal lands back–”
Dortmunder said, “And putting casinos on them.”
Irwin said, “Yeah, sacred tribal lands and casinos just seem to go together naturally, like apple pie and ice cream.”
“The tribes have their own sovereignty,” Guilderpost said, “their own laws, and casinos are extremely lucrative.”
Little Feather laughed, a sound like shaking a bag of walnuts. “This time,” she said, “the Indians win.”
“The three tribes I’ve been telling you about, “Guilderpost said, “the Pottaknobbees, the Oshkawa and the Kiota, won their cause back in the sixties, and have been operating a thriving casino on their land up by the Canadian border for nearly thirty years now. The tribes had almost died out, but now they’re coming back, or at least two of them are. At the time of settlement, there were only three known full-blooded Pottaknobbees left in the world, and at this point, so far as anyone knows, there are none.”
“Wait a minute,” Dortmunder said. “I’m getting it.”
It seems strange to me that this is only the tenth Dortmunder novel–in around three decades. Averaging a book every three years or so isn’t so bad, I suppose, but Westlake was capable of far more rapid rates of production. The first sixteen Parker novels were produced in a mere ten year span, followed in due course by eight novels, likewise produced over about a decade’s time. Five Mitch Tobin novels in maybe six years (probably written in much less than six, allowing for publisher schedules). Four Samuel Holt novels in just three years (he wrote the first three back to back without stopping).
Dortmunder seems to have taken more time. Ideas didn’t come as quickly. The basic line-up of characters expanded, but didn’t change that much. And they were comic novels, which I suppose could be part of it–nothing harder to write than a genuinely good comedy. But that never stopped P.G. Wodehouse, and Westlake produced well over 30 comic novels between 1965 and 2008 (the exact number is a bit fuzzy, since some of his comedies were actually pretty serious, like Up Your Banners and Adios Scheherazade). Well, come to think of it, comedy wasn’t nearly as big a part of his output as some people think, was it? Maybe a third of what he wrote.
He’d always enjoyed writing the Dortmunders, found them a welcome break from his grimmer story material, and his variously successful attempts to redefine himself as a writer. Lord knows there was always a market for them, and many of his publishers would have been quite happy if he’d written nothing else.
But now, as his creative energies started to wane (along with all his other energies, because getting old really sucks), Westlake found that he needed Dortmunder more than ever. This is the first of five Dortmunder novels published over eight years. He’d never written so many in so short a time before. He wasn’t spacing them out nearly so much.
In ranking the Dortmunders up to now, I tend to put them in three separate categories, each with three books apiece. The first three are, in my estimation, the immortal timeless classics of the series, the funniest, the most original, the most illuminating–and, tellingly, the simplest in their conception, each revolving around a single well-defined idea, each with a very specific point to make. He was genuinely excited about the possibilities of this new character, and still at the peak of his ability when he wrote them. They are, in fact, great novels.
After those first three, he faltered a bit, knowing he wanted to keep writing about Dortmunder, not always sure how to do it, introducing a new character, concept, or conceit here and there, just to change things up a bit, expand the cast, keep his readers interested, keep his publishers happy–and as I said, he just enjoyed spending time with these people. I think it relaxed him. Not everything has to be a timeless immortal classic. But then he’d get ambitious again, try to do more with the set-up, see how far he could push it, and then there’d be an epic.
The great Dortmunderian epics are Good Behavior, Drowned Hopes, and What’s The Worst That Could Happen? The character in a paradoxically heroic mode, that somehow worked for him, because he never once saw himself as a hero. Just a working stiff doing his job. Some higher power is making use of him, and (somewhat inconsistently) rewards him for his services. Not perfect polished gems like the first three novels, but very pleasurable in their rambling Homeric splendor, and with some solid points of their own to make.
That leaves the three engaging but ultimately failed experiments that are Nobody’s Perfect, Why Me?, and Don’t Ask. Many interesting pieces, that somehow never quite fit together into a coherent balanced whole. As Richard Stark wrote, half-good is another way of saying half-assed. But the half that’s good is more than worth the trouble.
I don’t know quite how to categorize the last five. They form a sort of grouping of their own. Some I like better than others, but none really stick out that much for me. They aren’t classics. They aren’t epics. They aren’t experiments, failed or otherwise, because they really don’t add much of anything to the series as a whole. A new character is brought in; a nephew type who never amounts to anything much. A few more arrogant rich guys for Dortmunder to confound and deflate, variations on an established theme. The odd bit of telling social commentary, as the world continues to change in ways that Dortmunder finds irritating.
They’re all good books. And they all have Dortmunder in them, and Kelp, and May, and Murch, and Murch’s Mom, and Tiny Bulcher, and Rollo the barkeep, and (far too rarely) Josephine Carol Taylor, and you get to spend time with these people you’ve come to think of as friends. If you love the Jeeves books, do you only read the best ones? You read all of them, because that’s what fans do. Because you could never really get enough of these characters, and that makes each new book, however inconsequential in the larger scheme of things, a gift.
Lagniappe. It just came to me now. The final five Dortmunders are for Lagniappe. That grand old New Orleans custom Mark Twain wrote about in Life on the Mississippi. Let me just find the quote and post it up top. Something you don’t really need, that somehow makes life a little richer, a little fuller, because it’s an act of generosity, of kindness, of surplus beneficence. Westlake wrote these books for Lagniappe–to himself, as well as his readers. Life gave him a bit more time than he needed to get his work done, and he gave us these books in return. And this is the first–of the final five. Let’s get to it.
Bad News opens with a very Twain-like apology from Mr. Westlake to his various translators around the world, and the aggravation he’s put them through via his take on the English language. He mentions by name Laura Grimaldi, Jiro Kimura, and Jean Esch. (The first two wrote original mystery fiction as well as translations). Esch definitely translated this one; not sure about the other two. (It can be challenging, hunting for foreign editions of a novel when you don’t know the title, which will frequently not resemble the original title in any way–not that book covers always mention the translator anyway. I suspect sales-conscious publishers tend to do the translating when it comes to titles.)
This one has what must be considered one of the best opening passages of any novel in this series.
John Dortmunder was a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness. Now, like an excessively starry sky, a thousand thousand fluorescent lights in great rows in the metal roof of this huge barnlike store building came flickering and buzzing and sqlurping on, throwing a great glare over all the goods below, and over Dortmunder too, and yet he knew this vast Speedshop discount store in this vast blacktop shopping mall in deepest New Jersey, very near Mordor, did not open at ten minutes past two in the morning. That’s why he was here.
(Yeah, you see why he might harbor guilt feelings regarding his many valiant translators, don’t you? I mean, just for ‘sqlurping’ alone. I suppose they all sighed resignedly, and came up with an equivalently onomatopoeic expression, somehow.)
So leaving aside the revelation that Westlake may have read Tolkien (the first of those elaborately overwrought Peter Jackson films came out quite some months after the publication of this novel was old news), the real takeaway is Dortmunder vs. the Big Box Store (hailing back to a similar escapade for the invisible Freddie Noon in Smoke), and we’ll call this one a draw.
He trips an alarm, and the Jersey cops arrive in Keatonesque numbers. Improvising as always, he breaks into a little optician shop within the imperious emporium, the door locking behind him–he can’t hide there, because the walls are glass, but that’s not what he has in mind. He pretends to be a customer who fell asleep waiting for his prescription to be ready–he even filled out the credit card slip–gee, thanks for rescuing me officers, the missus will be worried sick.
He’s so pleased that the flatfoot rubes fell for this threadbare ruse, it doesn’t much bother him that he had to go home to the missus without all the digital cameras he’d been in the process of stealing, which would have netted him about a thousand bucks. He’s so proud of having fooled them, he forgets they still foiled him. There’s a little grifter in everyone, you see. Yes, this is foreshadowing.
The missus is May, of course, who as he tells her the stirring story of his sly scam, is secretly sighing to herself.
May didn’t like to be critical, but she just had the feeling sometimes that John didn’t really want a nest egg, or a financial cushion, or freedom from money worries, or even next month’s rent. She felt somehow that John needed that prod of urgency, that sense of desperation, that sick knowledge that he was once again dead flat, stony, beanless broke, to get him out of bed at night, to get him to go out there and bring home the bacon. And the pork chops, and the ham steak, and maybe the butcher’s van as well.
Oh, he made money sometimes, though not often. But it never got a chance to burn a hole in his pocket, because it burned through his fingers first. He’d go with a couple of his cronies out to the track, where obviously the horses were smarter than he was, because they weren’t betting on him, were they? John could still remember, as he sometimes told her, that one exciting day when he’d almost broken even; just the memory of it, years later, could bring a hint of color to his cheeks.
And then there were the friends he’d loan money to. If he had it, they could have it, and the kind of people they were, they’d take his two hundred dollars and go directly to jail.
And this is all the explanation we’re ever going to get about what happened to that great trove of treasure Dortmunder got out of Max Fairbanks last time out, folks. (Hey, it’s more of an explanation than we ever get from Parker.) May’s lament about her man’s generosity brings to mind an ancient Gaelic ode to another famous bandit chief (long predating Robin Hood). It was said of Fionn mac Cumhaill
If the brown leaves that the trees shed were gold, if the bright waves were silver, Finn would give it all away.
And bet the rest on the ponies. Oh Dortmunder has Irish in him, you can take that to the bank (then take the bank).
So he’ll never be rich, but marginally solvent he must somehow remain, and to that end, enter that most feckless of his Fianna, Andy Kelp (who never knocks, just picks locks). Andy’s got a job for them, that just happens to pay a thousand a man–May sees a providential pattern in this. She would see that.
It’s work for hire, which Dortmunder has been willing to do in the past, but always burglary for hire–this is grave-robbing for hire. Well, grave-switching. They dig up one dead guy, and put another dead guy in his place. Okay, where the hell do you find somebody willing to pay a thousand a man for illicit grave-digging? “I met him on the Internet,” Andy says. “Oh boy,” Dortmunder responds. They are never going to see eye to eye on progress, those two.
We never find out what kind of criminal Craigslist Andy has been consulting here (maybe the actual Craigslist?), but we do learn the name of his correspondent–Fitzroy Guilderpost. And he lives up to the name. Or down.
As for Guilderpost, the mastermind looked mostly like a mastermind: portly, dignified, white hair in waves above a distinguished pale forehead. He went in for three-piece suits, and was often the only person in a given state wearing a vest. He’d given up his mustache some years ago, when it turned gray, because it made him look like a child molester, which he certainly was not; however, he did look like a man who used to have a mustache, with some indefinable nakedness between the bottom of his fleshy nose and the top of his fleshy lip. He brushed this area from time to time with the side of his forefinger, exactly as if the mustache were still there.
(And this is why I have a picture of Philip Bosco up top. A mere 70 years of age when this was written, perfect for the role, but I don’t expect Westlake had him in mind. Then again Westlake did love the theater, and those who love the theater in New York speak the name Bosco with as much reverence as one possibly can speak the name of a chocolate syrup brand that is typically spelled in cartoon-like blue and red letters.)
What follows is a chapter in which we learn that Guilderpost is a con-artist par excellence, with two colorful co-conspirators–a defrocked college professor named Irwin Gabel who I have somehow head-cast against type as Sam Waterston, and a delectable if somewhat intimidating former showgirl named Little Feather, who would have been rightfully played by Cher, had this book come out a decade or two sooner, which it didn’t, and had there been a movie, which there wasn’t, and had the producers wanted to pay her asking price, which they probably wouldn’t have. But Cher is mentioned in the book, and pretty sure she was in Westlake’s mind. Maybe he caught her act while doing research on casinos.
Little Feather is Native American, or as most Native Americans say in daily parlance, an Indian (for a people who have inspired so much political correctness in recent years, they are not themselves very PC, no matter what Hollywood may think). It’s possible that like Cher, and an awful lot of other people who call themselves Indians, her ancestry is not strictly indigenous, but outside of Africa, whose ever is?
She’s an Indian, she’s not even the teensiest bit PC, and she’s getting too old to dance on a stage wearing nothing but feathers, regardless of size. Her back-up profession of dealing cards at casinos has likewise begun to pall. So she has agreed to go along with Guilderpost and Gabel’s scam, which is explained adequately well in that quote up top. And she’s also willing to go along with them killing the low-rent hoodlums they con into digging up graves for them, which is what they imagine John and Andy to be. I believe the word Guilderpost uses is “gonifs”, and I don’t think he’s Jewish at all, or else he’d know that word is not the Yiddish equivalent for pigeon.
And neither are Dortmunder and Kelp, both of whom easily spot Irwin’s tail as they ride along with Guilderpost in the van. The idea is that they dig up the grave, and switch the bodies, and then Irwin comes up from behind with a gun, and then they both get their hands and feet duct-taped together, and are thrown over the side of a handy bridge, nevermore to be seen. Dead pigeons tell no tales. But Westlake heisters are made of sterner stuff.
Before you can say turnabout is fair play, Dortmunder has deftly disarmed Guilderpost, and Kelp goes back to get Irwin–who it turns out is wired for sound–Guilderpost is not pleased to learn this. With Guilderpost, to know him is to mistrust him, so Irwin was taking out an insurance policy. And now it’s time to talk turkey.
Guilderpost, to no one’s surprise, does not have their two thousand bucks. So our duo decides to cut themselves in on his action–whatever it may be. He’s a bit evasive about that, and just to let him know what a bad idea that is–
Fitzroy called “What are you doing?” But since it was obvious what they were doing, they didn’t bother to answer him. What they were doing was, they were geting into the van, Dortmunder behind the wheel. Then they were making a K-turn on the bridge, while Fitzroy and Irwin stood staring at them. Then Dortmunder was lowering his window, so he could say, “When you want to talk to us, you know how to get in touch with Andy. On the Internet.” He closed the window, then drove back toward Long Island, saying, with deep scorn, “On the Internet.”
“There’s bad apples everywhere, John,” Kelp said.
“I’m a bad apple,” Dortmunder pointed out, “but you won’t find me on the Internet.”
But you will find grifters aplenty there, some of them Nigerian Princes, no less. Dortmunder may have enjoyed fooling those cops in New Jersey, but he’s never considered doing it for a living.
Truth to tell, there’s always been a lot more grifters than heisters in the world. The life expectancy is better, for one thing. But Westlake never wrote much about that kind of crime–in spite of the fact that he got an Oscar nod for adapting Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for the movies, and he won the Edgar Award for God Save The Mark, whose protagonist is the ultimate griftee. Many of his protagonists are certainly accomplished tricksters. It’s worth asking why he mainly left the grifter subgenre to other crime writers, including his buddy Lawrence Block.
Grifting is certainly all about identity. You pretend to be someone you’re not, take on a false identity, in order to play on weak spots in the sucker’s identity. When people say “You can’t cheat an honest man”, they’re really saying you can’t con people who know who they are.
That’s why in God Save The Mark, the hero becomes immune to the short cons he used to fall for so easily, then twigs to the long con being played on him, once he’s figured out who he is. That’s the point of the story being told–we’re only marks because of our identity confusion. But in this story, self-evidently, our heroes have all known who they are for a long time now. The confusion is going to stem from them taking on an unfamiliar role, in order to score.
And the other identity puzzle relates to the original inhabitants of North America–people whose identity is so confused, nobody can even agree on what to call them. They were nomadic hunters, fishermen, and small farmers; they all had established tribal identities, stories that told them where they came from and where they were headed to (that the stories were not entirely true is neither here nor there, since nobody’s stories ever are literally factually true; that not being the mission statement of storytellers).
Then in comes Mr. Wasichu to foul everything up, and after much unpleasantness (some would say genocide, though obviously it was just intermittently attempted genocide, a somewhat lesser offense), now they’re running gaming establishments. Well, most of them aren’t, but that’s the new meme. The surviving aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas are called two different names in the U.S., deriving from various misunderstandings relating bizarrely to two Italian navigators. In Canada, they’re called “First Nations,” which is really just as bad, since the English word ‘nation’ doesn’t remotely describe what they were before the Wasichus got here.
Their group identities got lost in translation. They had to start reinventing themselves–like the rest of us. Welcome to America, people who were here thousands of years before it existed as such. And Westlake is fascinated by the way Indian reservations are distinct sovereign nations within his own nation, part of it, theoretically with all the same rights, yet somehow their own thing, avoiding any proper national definition, neither fish nor fowl. It’s Anguilla all over again. Under A Yankee Heaven.
It’s a lot for one little book about comedic criminals to get across, and Westlake doesn’t manage an authoritative statement on either theme, but it does somehow enrich the narrative. Which I seem to be straying from, sorry.
So Dortmunder and Kelp have the van, and thus they have the body of whoever was originally in that grave they dug up, and so basically there’s no way the grifting trio can pull their scam without coming to terms with them–or getting rid of them, which they know would be Fitzroy and Irwin’s preferential option (Little Feather is less bloody-minded), so they bring in Tiny Bulcher to make that option less palatable.
What happens is, Anne Marie Carpinaw, now happily cohabitant with Kelp, wants to have Thanksgiving dinner, like they were a regular couple, which they’re not, but whatever. Kelp will do whatever she wants, because regular sex is a good thing. So they have John and May and Tiny and J.C. over, and this is the only time we get to see her in this book, so enjoy it. I did. She gets to offer a brief professional opinion on the impending scam, and is seen no more.
And right during dinner, Kelp gets a call from Fitzroy Guilderpost–it took about five weeks, but he managed to get Kelp’s phone number, which means he knows where Kelp lives, which means there’s some pressure on both sides to meet now. Kelp tells a story about a friend of his who agreed to be home at a certain time to take a call from this guy he had a little disagreement with, and then his house blew up at that exact time. So they’re just going to meet in at Parking Area Six at Jones Beach. The next morning. Not much time to plan a cross. Also a really terrible place to sneak up on anybody when it’s not beach season.
And also they’ve got Tiny Bulcher. Who is terrifying enough all by his lonesome. At the meet, conducted at Little Feather’s mobile home, parked at Jones Beach, he somehow accessorizes to even more blood-chilling effect. See, he’s duct-taped a hand grenade to one of his massive hands. And now he’s offering the extracted pin to Guilderpost.
Guilderpost gaped at the hand grenade. All three of them gaped at the hand grenade. Not taking the pin, Guilderpost said, “What are you doing?”
“Well, I’m goin inside there,” Tiny said, “look around, see the situation.”
“But why–Why that thing?”
“Well, if I was to faint or anything in there,” Tiny said, “I wouldn’t be holding this safety lever anymore, would I?”
Irwin said, “Is that–Is that an actual–is that live?”
“At the moment,” Tiny said.
Guilderpost, flabbergasted, said, “But why would you do such a thing?”
Dortmunder answered, saying, “Fitzroy, we’ve got like a few reasons not to trust you a hundred percent. So Tiny sees to it, if something happens to somebody, something happens to everybody.”
Little Feather takes the pin, and makes a joke about never having been pinned on the first date, making it clear who’s wearing the balls in this outfit. Irwin insists on accompanying Tiny into the motor home, because yeah, they booby-trapped it. Well, there’s no harm in trying, right?
So now that it’s been established that a trio of grifters, even of one of them is clearly a direct descendant of Sacagawea (because she’s one with the sack, get it?), is nowhere near sufficient to finish off the Dortmunder Gang, they get down to brass tacks about what’s happening here. Little Feather is going to pose as the last surviving member of the Pottaknobbee tribe, and as such, due a third of the take from an Indian casino operating upstate. Like the woman who once claimed to be the crown princess of all the Russias, she has been carefully coached to know everything she’s supposed to know about the person she’s supposed to be. Unlike the late Anna Anderson, there are now scientific means of proving she’s a liar, as Anderson was posthumously proven to be in the 1990’s, shortly before this book was written.
Guilderpost has allowed for all that. Little Feather’s real grandfather’s body is the one Dortmunder and Kelp put in the grave of the man whose great-granddaughter she will claim to be, one Joseph Redcorn, and DNA testing will confirm she is related to him. A former construction worker, who was up there with the famed Mohawk high steel men one day (already fading into the past as Westlake wrote this), on the skeleton of what would become the Empire State Building, when he lost his balance and fell. (All surviving members of the Three Tribes have always believed the Mohawks pushed him, which if true would be less of an Indian thing than a clubbish construction worker union thing, I’m guessing.)
And here’s a third identity puzzle. This woman every reader of Bad News will go on thinking of as Little Feather Redcorn, even while knowing her real name is Shirley Ann Farraff (at least that’s the name she’s gone by in the white world, her stepfather’s name, and Guilderpost has come up with a fix for that as well), has to spend the rest of her life pretending to be someone she’s not, member of a tribe she didn’t even know existed until these two hucksters approached her–because she looked the part of an Indian princess and dealing cards at a casino generally means you’ve got a good poker face. And she’s perfectly fine with all that, as long as it means she’s set for life. And the book clearly wants us to root for her, if not necessarily her partners in grift. We’ll have to talk more about that later.
So the agreement is made–Dortmunder & Co. don’t get a share of the profits the original conspirators hope to get, but once the plan has succeeded, they will get 100k apiece for their services (and their silence afterwards). And now they’re all heading north. To the very heart of Westlake Country, but he never claimed it was his country alone.
You hardly even know you’re leaving the United States. On your way to Dannemora in upstate New York, near the Canadian border, famous as the home of Clinton State Prison, you turn left at the big billboard covered by a not very good painting of a few Indians in a canoe on some body of water, either a river or a lake, surrounded by pine tree-covered mountains. It’s either sunrise or sunset, or possibly the mountains are on fire. Printed across this picture, in great thick letters speckled white and tan and black, apparently in an effort to make it seem as though the letters are made of hides of some kind, is the announcement:
WORLD-FAMOUS
SILVER CHASM CASINO
Native American Owned & Operated With Pride
5 Mi.
This billboard is brightly illuminated at night, which makes it seem rather worse than by day. At its top and bottom, arrows have been added, also lit up at night, which point leftward at a well-maintained two-lane concrete rod that curves away into the primeval forest.
You are deep in the Adirondacks here, in the state-operated Adirondack Forest Preserve, but once you make that left turn, you have departed the United States of America and entered the Silver Chasm Indian Reservation, home of the Oshkawa and the Kiota, and until recently, also home of the Pottaknobbee. This is a sovereign state, answerable to no one but itself
There are at this time eleven very real Indian Reservations in New York State, including the Shinnecock reservation on Long Island (this one time, bird-watching at Montauk Point at dawn, we came across a man who looked like an Indian at prayer, and it would have been rude to ask if he was a real-live Shinnecock and who he was praying to, so we just quietly left the place to him, since it did belong to him, after all, or he to it.)
The St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in Franklin County, most of which is in the huge Adirondack State Park (three times the size of Yellowstone), is the most likely real-life model for Silver Chasm, but knowing Westlake, I would tend to think he made use of composites here. That final image you see up top is the Yellow Brick Road Casino, in Chittenango, not far from Syracuse, and right next to Land of Oz and Ends Antiques shop, just in case you have any money left after leaving the casino.
The casino at the Franklin county reservation (which it should be remembered is inside of yet not part of Franklin county) has a more authentic sounding name, and much more luxurious-sounding facilities than what Westlake describes here. Though since it was founded in 1999, it was probably a lot less grand at the time of writing. Anyway, he couldn’t very well use the Mohawks here, could he now? Fictional tribes don’t sue.
Anyway, it’s in this chapter that we meet Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda, managers of the casino, and though they are legitimate members of the two remaining tribes, it’s by DNA only. They are, we realize quickly, members of a vast and powerful tribe that exists throughout the civilized world; one of whose members is now operating out of the White House, though his reservations are in Manhattan and Mar-a-Lago. (And our reservations are a bit late to mention, wouldn’t you say?)
They get the letter from Little Feather, carefully composed by Guilderpost, laying claim to her ancestral heritage. And of course they think she’s a fake, but the real problem is they know their books are fake–they’ve been stealing from their own people, skimming off the top for decades now (this fictional Adirondacks casino has been around for thirty years). And if this woman’s claim is accepted, she’ll have every right to look at those books. So they make some calls, and next thing you know, Little Feather’s in jail. Short novel, huh?
Well, in point of fact, that only takes us to the end of Chapter 13. In a 50 chapter book. As Custer once said at the Little Bighorn, “Oy fucking vey.” Well, I bet he would have, had he known the phrase. But now that the foundation is laid, the remaining edifice should rise quickly to its full height in Part 2. And then I bet the Mohawks push me off.
The Westlake Review 