Creepers

32

"Help me with the professor," Balenger told Vinnie.

Vinnie glared, furious at him for lying. Nonetheless, the threat and his affection for the professor made him come over. It quickly became clear how their taped wrists limited them. By process of trial and error, they discovered that the only way they could lift the professor was by shoving their hands under his arms. Because his wrists were taped also, he couldn't help. With effort, they raised him.

Conklin moaned but managed to steady himself on his good leg.

"How bad do you feel?" Balenger asked.

"I'm still alive." The professor drew a pained breath. "Hey, under the circumstances, I'm not about to complain."

"Is it true?" Vinnie demanded. "You and this guy were going to take the gold coins?"

"I'm not perfect," Conklin said. "That's something you have to realize about your teachers. But as I listened to all of you explain about the Gold Reserve Act of 1934… Saint-Gaudens, Vinnie. You actually remember Saint-Gaudens."

"And you were going to split the money? Just the two of you?"

The elderly man looked ashamed. "Would you have agreed to be part of it? All along we've insisted on taking nothing but photographs. Now we wouldn't just have broken that rule. We'd have been committing a serious crime. Would you have risked going to prison for the rest of your life, or would you have told the authorities?"

"But you were ready to risk prison."

"At the moment, I don't have a lot to lose."

Mack and JD shoved the equipment into the knapsacks, cramming in so much that they needed only three knapsacks instead of five. The urine bottles were all they left behind.

Mack put the water pistol in his belt. "It's been a while since I had a toy." He picked up one of the knapsacks, JD the second, Tod the third. Their night-vision goggles hung around their necks.

"The way this works," Tod said, adjusting the knapsack straps with one hand while holding Balenger's pistol, "is I go up first, moving backward, aiming at you. Mack and JD come after you, but they keep a distance. That way, you can't bump against them and try to push them down the stairs. If you try anything, Mack and JD will drop flat on the stairs. Then I'll start shooting. I don't care what anybody knows about the vault- if you fuck with us, I'll shoot you first and then piss on you for making me mad."

Tod left the balcony, passed through the door at the end of the hallway, reached the fire stairs, and started climbing them backward. Headlamps wavering, Balenger and Vinnie came next, their taped hands under the professor's arms, awkwardly helping him. Rick and Cora came after that, then Mack and JD. Their footsteps were loud in the confined space.

"Now that you know I'm not a reporter," Balenger told Vinnie, easing the professor up the stairs, "I've got a question."

"What is it?"

"You were talking about the composer who wrote 'On the Banks of the Wabash' and 'My Gal Sal.' You said he was Theodore Dreiser's brother as if that was a big deal. Who the hell was Theodore Dreiser?"

"He wrote Sister Carrie."

"Sister who?" Keep talking, Balenger urged himself. Establish a bond with them.

"It's one of the first gritty American novels." Vinnie seemed to understand what Balenger was trying to do. "It's set in the slums of Chicago. The plot's about a woman who's forced to sleep around to survive."

"Sounds like real life to me," Mack said in the darkness down the stairs.

Vinnie kept the conversation going. "The theme is pessimistic determinism. No matter what we do, our bodies and our surroundings doom us."

"Yeah, definitely real life," Mack said.

It's working, Balenger thought. Moving upward, he felt the professor wince.

"The novel was published in 1900, a year before this hotel was built," Vinnie continued. "Before then, a lot of American novels were about working hard and succeeding, what William Dean Howells called 'the smiling aspects of American life.' "

"I'll wait to ask you who Howells was," Balenger said, helping the professor steady himself.

"But Dreiser grew up in terrible poverty. He saw enough suffering to decide the American dream was a fraud. To make his point, he called one of his other novels An American Tragedy. Doubleday was the company that published Sister Carrie, but when Doubleday's wife read the book, she was so shocked she insisted her husband keep all the copies in the warehouse, banning it. It wasn't until several years later when the novel was republished that it became a classic."

"Guess I'll have to read it," Balenger said.

"Like I believe that," Vinnie said. "The story's powerful, but the writing's terrible. Dreiser's idea of polished prose was to call a bar 'a truly swell saloon.' "

Below them, JD laughed.

Slowed by Conklin, they reached the fifth level and trudged higher. Balenger worried about the professor's labored breathing. He debated whether to lunge up the stairs and try to grab the pistol from Tod. But Tod was too far above him. The stairs were too confining. Tod would start shooting, or maybe Mack and JD would use their knives on the rest of the group, who couldn't run anywhere. It would be a massacre. No, he decided, this wasn't the time.

"This Sister Carrie reminds me of the chick in that movie Sweets here mentioned." Mack referred to Cora, Balenger knew. His rage grew. "The one 'Moon River' is in. What's it called, Sweets?"

"Stop touching me."

"What's the movie called?"

"Breakfast at Tiffany's."

"Yeah. Hell, before I saw it on TV one night, I thought it was a restaurant movie like My Dinner with Fucking Andre. But no, it's about this screwed-up chick. What's her name, Sweets?"

"Holly Golightly."

"Even her name's screwed up. Holly the Cock Tease. That should have been her name. She made guys take her to fancy restaurants. Naturally they expected to get in her pants. But after she ate a fabulous dinner, she asked them for money so she could go to the bathroom. Never been to a bathroom where I had to pay to get in, but I guess rich people put up with that stuff. Then she snuck out of the restaurant, and they never got what they paid for. She didn't sleep with them, but as far as I'm concerned, she was still a whore."

They reached the sixth level.

"Where's six-ten?" Tod asked.

Their headlamps showed doors with tarnished numbers.

"Six twenty-two's on the right." JD aimed his light toward the tree growing into the floor.

"Then six-ten's the other way." Tod motioned with his pistol for the group to proceed toward the darkness on the left.

"And that stupid ending," Mack said. "The hero's supposed to be a smart writer. He knows the twat gets paid to take messages to a gangster in prison. He knows she's gonna marry a South American millionaire to get her hands on the money. But the dumb hero still falls in love with her. In the end, they're in this alley in the rain, looking for a cat she threw away, and they find the cat, and they're kissing, and the music gets all weepy, and I'm thinking, You stupid fuck, run! Get away from that whore as fast as you can! She'll break your heart and dump you the first time a guy with cash comes along!"

"Apart from that, how did you like the movie?" JD laughed.

"Damn it," Vinnie suddenly shouted at Balenger, "I'd have gone along with you!" He was so furious, he couldn't restrain himself. "All the professor needed to do was ask me, and I've have gone along! You think I don't need the money? I make a shit salary in a school where the students beat teachers for giving them homework. I don't have rich parents like Rick has. Hell, my father's dying from emphysema. He doesn't have health insurance. All I do is pay for his damned medical bills! If you'd asked me, I'd have gone!"

"Now there's a guy who knows cash is king," Mack said. "If you've got dough, you not only pay your old man's doctor bills. You get Holly the Cock Tease."

"I'm sure I care," Tod said. "Here's six-ten."