She had been frowning at the quiz again, and now she said, “Would you say I am very dependent, somewhat dependent, slightly dependent, or not at all dependent?” “That depends.”
Malcolm Zachary loved being an FBI man. It gave a certain meaningful tension to everything he did. When he got out of a car and slammed the door, he didn’t do it like just anybody, he did it like an FBI man: step, swing, slam, a fluid motion, flex of muscle, solid and determined, graceful in a manly sort of way. Malcolm Zachary got out of cars like an FBI man, drank coffee like an FBI man, sat quietly listening like an FBI man.
and got introduced to a lot of damn new faces. There was no way a man could remember all those names, but fortunately Chief Inspector Mologna didn’t have to; he was accompanied by Leon, his secretary, whose job it was to remember things like that and who happened to be very good at it.
“The only reason you’ll put up with me, I give good dollar. And I gotta give good dollar or I’d never see anybody. There’s people right now in this city go to Stoon even though he gives a worse dollar—they’ll take smaller cash just so they don’t have to sit and talk with Arnie.” Dortmunder said, “Stoon? Which Stoon is this?” “Even you,” Arnie said. “Now you want Stoon’s address.” Dortmunder did. “No, I don’t, Arnie,” he said.
Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna (pronounced Maloney) of the New York City Police Department and Agent Malcolm Zachary of the Federal Bureau of Investigation loved one another imperfectly. They were of course on the same side in the war between the forces of order and the forces of disorder, and they would of course cooperate fully with one another whenever that war might find them both engaged on the same field of battle, and they did of course deeply admire one another’s branch of service in this war as well as respect one another individually as long-term professionals. Apart from which, each thought the other was an asshole.
I just want to go on record with you, off the record, that the man’s an asshole.”
May came home while the sports news was being given its usual exhaustive airing, a subject in which Dortmunder’s lack of interest was so profound that he hadn’t waited until the commercial to go get another beer.
Chief Inspector F. X. Mologna
“Let me talk to Zachary,” he said. “He’s home for the day.” “Put me through to him at home.” They didn’t want to, but Mologna possessed a heavy, brooding, humorless authority that no minor clerk could stand up to for long, so fairly soon Zachary himself was on the line, sounding irritable:
No, he didn’t take it. No, he wouldn’t take it. What did the man think he was? You don’t get to be top cop in the great city of New York by takin bribes from strangers.
Everybody would be better off—even he would. And yet he couldn’t do it. There was no hope, and yet he hoped. Well, no. He didn’t so much hope as merely refuse to assist Destiny in its fell designs.
Disaster would arrive when it would arrive; it wasn’t up to John A. Dortmunder to rush it along.
Mologna gave Freedly a grudging nod and smile; Freedly was also an asshole, but less so than Zachary,
“The New York Police Department,” Mologna said, “has men who can blend into the environmentalism of New York City.” “Equipment,” Zachary said, beginning to look desperate. “We have walkie-talkies that look like ice cream cones.” “That’s why we’ll handle the case,” Mologna told him. “Our walkie-talkies look like beer cans in brown paper bags.”
“The target phone,” murmured Zachary. “—is here at the corner of Bleecker and Bank, south side, directly in front of the children’s playground. It’s a very open area, because of the playground on the south and very wide Eighth Avenue to the north.” “What’s our stakeout?” Mologna asked. “In the playground itself,” Cappelletti said, “we got two vendors, one selling hot dogs, the other selling cocaine
These old bull elephants, Ken Albemarle knew, if they survived at all, they knew all the tricks in the world, plus a few extra all their own.
The point, as Mologna well knew, was not what the Commissioner said, or what he himself said in response; the point was that in the Commissioner’s phone log and in his day book and in Mologna’s personal file there would now be a notation to the effect that the Commissioner had demonstrated leadership. The son of a bitch.
“He’s in the hospital, sick. When the cops raided the O.J. last night, Tiny was alone in the back room with all those files listing everybody’s crimes and whereabouts and whatnot for Wednesday night.” Dortmunder stared. “Did the cops get all that?” “No,” Winslow said. “That’s just it. Tiny barricaded the door. He didn’t have any matches to burn the papers, so he ate them. All of them. The last batch, the cops broke through the door, they’re beating on him with sticks, he’s chewing and swallowing and fighting them off with chairs.”