Free Why Me? by Donald E. Westlake Page B

one another. This theft is enough of an international incident as it is; Washington would be very displeased if New York were turned into another Beirut, with shooting in the streets.”
    â€œNew York would be displeased, too,” Freedly said.
    â€œNo doubt,” agreed Cabot.
    Acidly, Zachary said, “Mo-log-na could give another press conference.”
    Unexpectedly, Cabot chuckled. The other two, seeing nothing amusing anywhere in the visible landscape, looked at him with annoyed surprise. “I’m sorry,” Cabot said. “I was just thinking, what if Inspector Mologna were right? What if some passing burglar, uninterested in Cyprus or Turkey or NATO or the Russian Orthodox Church or any of it, just happened to pick up the Byzantine Fire in the course of his normal operations? And now the world is filling up with police forces, intelligence agencies, guerrilla bands, assassination teams, religious fanatics, all pointed at that poor bastard’s head.” With another chuckle, Cabot said, “I wouldn’t want to be him.”
    â€œI wish Mo-log-na was him,” Zachary said.
    16
    Dortmunder had deliberately taken a subway in the wrong direction from Times Square to get away from a pair of uniformed cops who had been gazing at him with steadily increasing interest, so it was a quarter after ten, fifteen minutes late, before he walked into the O. J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue, where three of the regulars were discussing Cyprus—probably because it was in the news in connection with the Byzantine Fire. “All you gotta do is look onna map,” one of the regulars was saying. “Cyprus is right there by Turkey. Greece is way to hell and gone.”
    â€œOh, yeah?” said the second regular. “You happen to be a Turk, by any chance?”
    â€œI happen,” the first regular said, with a dangerous glint in his eye, “to be Polish and Norwegian. You got any objections?”
    â€œWell, I happen,” said the second regular, “to be one hunnerd percent Greek, and I’m here to tell you you happen to be fulla shit. Both the Polish part and the Norwegian part. Both parts, fulla shit.”
    â€œWait a minute, fellas,” said the third regular. “Let’s not cast a lotta national aspersions.”
    â€œI’m not casting anything,” said the second regular. “This Norwegian Polack’s telling me where Greece is.”
    â€œWhat is this?” demanded the first regular. “You have to be Greek before you know where Greece is?”
    â€œThere’s something in what he says,” said the third regular, who apparently saw himself as the voice of reason in a world of extremes.
    â€œThere’s horseshit in what he says,” said the second regular.
    Dortmunder approached the bar some distance from the nationalists, where Rollo the bartender, tall, meaty, balding, blue-jawed, wearing a dirty white shirt and a dirty white apron, stood looking up at the color TV set, on which at that moment several very clean people were pretending to look worried in a very clean hospital room. “Whadaya say,” said Dortmunder.
    Rollo looked down from the screen. “Now they’re rerunning the made-for-TV movies,” he said, “and claiming they’re movies. It’s Whatsisname’s law.”
    â€œIt’s what?”
    â€œYou know,” Rollo said. “That law. Where the bad shit drives out the good.”
    â€œThe good shit?” It occurred to Dortmunder that Rollo was beginning to sound like one of his own customers. Maybe he’d been in this job too long.
    â€œJust a minute,” Rollo said, and walked away to where the nationalists were beginning to threaten incursions into one another’s territory. “You boys wanna fight,” Rollo said, “you go home and fight with your wives. You wanna drink beer, you come here.”
    The pro-Turk Norwegian Pole said,