DORTMUNDER LOOKED AT THE HORSE. THE HORSE LOOKED AT Dortmunder. "Ugly goddamn thing," Dortmunder commented, while the horse just rolled his eyes in disbelief.

"Not that one," the old coot said. "We're looking for a black stallion."

"In the dark," Dortmunder pointed out. "Anyway, all horses look the same to me."

"It's not how they look," the old coot said, "it's how they run. And Dire Straits could run the ass off a plug like this one. Which is why he won't be out here in the night air with these glue factories. We'll find Dire Straits in one of them barns down there."

That was another thing rubbing Dortmunder the wrong way-the names that horses get saddled with. Abby's Elbow, Nuff Said, Dreadful Summit, Dire Straits. If you were going out to the track, where the horses were almost irrelevant to the occasion, where the point was to drink beer and bet money and socialize a little and make small jokes like, "I hope I break even today; I could use the cash," it didn't matter much that you were betting 30 across the board on something called Giant Can and that you had to wait for a bunch of horses outdoors somewhere to run around in a big oval before you found out if you had won. But here, in the darkest wilds of New Jersey, on a ranch barely 60 miles from New York City, surrounded by all these huge, nervous creatures, pawing and snorting and rolling their eyes, out here breathing this moist, smelly air, walking in mud or worse, it just capped Dortmunder's discontent that these dangerous furry barrels on sticks were named Picasso's Revenge and How'm I Doin?

From some distance away, Andy Kelp's cautious voice rose into the rich air, saying, "There's more down that way. I heard some go, 'Snushfurryblurryblurryblurry.'"

"That's a whicker," the old coot said, as though anybody gave a damn.

"I don't care if it's mohair," Kelp told him. "Let's do this and get out of here. I'm a city boy myself."

The edge of nervousness and impatience in Kelp's voice was music to Dortmunder's ears. It was Kelp who'd brought him into this caper in the first place, so if Dortmunder was going to suffer, it was nice to know that his best friend was also unhappy and discontented.

It was the eternally optimistic Kelp who had first met the old coot, named Hiram Rangle, and brought him around to the OJ. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue one night to meet Dortmunder and discuss a matter of possible mutual benefit. "I work for this fella," Hiram Rangle had said in his raspy old-coot voice, his faded-blue eyes staring suspiciously out of his leathery brown face. "But I'm not gonna tell you his name."

"You don't have to tell me anything," Dortmunder said. He was a little annoyed in a general way, having had a series of things go wrong lately-not important, doesn't matter-and it hadn't been his idea to take this meeting. Over at the bar, the regulars were discussing the latest advances in psychotherapy- "It's called A version, and it's a way to make you have a different version of how you see women"; "I like the version I got"-and Dortmunder was sitting here with this old coot, a skinny little guy in deerskin jacket and flannel shirt and corduroy pants and yellow boots big enough to garage a Honda,

and the coot was telling him what he would tell him and what he wouldn't tell him. "You and my pal Andy here," Dortmunder said, lifting his glass of bar bourbon, "can go talk to the crowd at the bar for all I care."

"Aw, come on, John," Kelp said. He totally wanted this thing to happen, and he leaned his sharp-featured face over the scarred corner table, as though to draw Dortmunder and the old coot together by sheer force of personality. He said, "This is a good deal for everybody. Let Hiram tell you about it."

"He says he doesn't want to."

"I got to be careful, that's all," the old coot said, sipping defensively at his Tsing-Tao.

"Then don't come to joints like this," Dortmunder advised him.

"Tell the man, Hiram," Kelp said. "That's what you're here for."

Hiram took a breath and put down his glass. "What it comes down to is," he said, "we want to steal a horse."

They wanted to steal a horse. What it came down to was, the old coot worked for some guy who was full of schemes and scams, and one of them was a long-range plot involving this race horse, Dire Straits, on whom Dortmunder could remember having dropped some rent money some years back on a couple of those rare occasions when Dire Straits had finished out of the running. It seemed that Dire Straits, having in his racing career won many millions for many people (and having lost a few kopecks for Dortmunder), had now been put out to stud, which, as described by the old coot, sounded like a retirement plan better than most. These days, Dire Straits hung around with some other male horses on a nice green-grass farm over near Short Hills, New Jersey-"If they're short, why do they call them hills?" Dortmunder had wanted to know, which was something else the old coot didn't have an answer for-and from time to time, the owners of female horses paid the owners of Dire Straits great big sackfuls of money for him to go off and party. It seems there was a theory that the sons and daughters of fast horses would also be fast, and a lot of money changed hands on that theory.

Well, the schemer, Hiram Rangle's anonymous boss, owned some fairly fast horses himself, but nothing in the Dire Straits class, so his idea was to kidnap Dire Straits and put him to work partying with his own female horses; and then, when the female horses had sons and daughters, the schemer would put down on the birth certificate some slow-moving plater as the father. Then, when the sons and daughters grew up enough to start to run, which would take only a couple of years, the odds against them would be very long, because of their alleged parentage; but because Dire Straits was their real daddy, they would run like crazy, and the schemer would bet on them and make a bundle. In a few months, of course, the odds would adjust to the horses' actual track records; but by then, the schemer would be home free. With three or four of Dire Straits' disguised kiddies hitting the turf every year and maybe another five or six years of active partying left in his life, it was a scheme that, as a fellow might say, had legs.

Kelp put it slightly differently: "It's like The Prince and the Pauper, where you don't know it, but your real daddy's the king."

"I think we're talking about horses here," Dortmunder told him.

Kelp shook his head. "You never see the romantic side," he said.

"I'll leave that to Dire Straits," Dortmunder said.

Anyway, it turned out that the one fly in the ointment in the schemer's scheme was the fact that, even with all his hustling and finagling, he'd never in his career done any actual, straightforward, out-and-out theft. He had his scheme, he had his own ranch with his own female horses on it, he had a nice cash cushion to use in making his bets three years down the line, but the one thing he didn't have, and didn't know how to get, was Dire Straits. So one way or another, his hireling, Rangle, had got in touch with Andy Kelp, who had said his friend John Dortmunder was exactly the man to plan and execute a robbery of this delicate and unusual a nature, and that was why this meeting was taking place in the O.J., where over at the bar the regulars were now arguing about whether penis envy was confined to men or if women could have it, too: "How can they? What's the basis of the comparison?"

"I can tell you this much," Hiram Rangle said. "My boss'll pay twenty thousand dollars for Dire Straits. Not to me; I've already got my salary. To the people who help me."

"Ten thousand apiece, John," Kelp pointed out.