Drowned Hopes

ONE

As gray dawn crawled over the city, Dortmunder went home to find May still up, dressed in a baggy sweater and green plaid slacks. She came out of the living room into the hall when she heard him open the door, but instead of asking, as she usually did, “How’d it go?” she said, sounding nervous but relieved, “You’re back.”

He answered the usual question anyway, being tired and out of sorts and not at his most observant. “Not so good,” he said, opening the closet door. With slow and tired motions, he took tools from the many inside and outside pockets of his black jacket, placing them with muffled clanks on the closet shelf. “The jeweler’s gone, moved to Rhinebeck; there’s a pasta restaurant in there now. The antique guy’s switched to Disney collectibles. And the check-cashing place got a dog.” Taking his jacket off, he held it up and looked at the new ragged tear at the bottom in the back. “Mean goddamn dog,” he said.

“John,” May said. She sounded tense. Her left hand pretend-smoked, fiddling with an imaginary cigarette, flicking ghost ashes on the floor, something she hadn’t done since just after she’d quit.

But Dortmunder was full of his own problems. Hanging up his torn jacket, he said, “It’s almost enough to make you rethink a life of crime. I did get a little, though, after I locked the dog out and he ran away.” He began pulling crumpled money from inside his shirt, putting it on the hall table.

“John,” May said, her eyes very round and white, “there’s somebody here.”

He paused, hand over the money. “What?”

“He says—” May glanced at the doorway to the living room, apprehension and mistrust defining her features. “He says he’s an old friend of yours.”

“Who does?”

“This man.”

“Al?” The voice, hoarse and ragged but somehow self-confident, came from the living room. “Is that you, Al?”

Dortmunder looked bewildered, and then startled. “No,” he said.

A man appeared in the living room doorway. He was as gray and cold as the dawn outside, a thin gristly bony old guy of just over six feet tall, dressed in a gray windbreaker over a faded blue workshirt, and baggy gray pants and black worn shoes. He had a craggy rectangular head sitting up on top of his stony body like a log redan full of guards. His eyes were bleak, cheeks ravaged, brow furrowed, hair gray and thin and dead and hanging down over his large leathery ears. “Hello, Al,” he said, and when he spoke his lips didn’t move; but what ventriloquist would use this for an alter ego? “How you doin, Al,” the hoarse gray voice said through the unmoving lips. “Long time no see.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Dortmunder said. “They let you out.”

TWO

The gray man made a sound that might have been meant for a laugh. “A surprise, huh?” he said. “Surprised me, too.”

May said, “So you do know him.” She sounded as though she wasn’t sure whether that was good news or bad news.

“Tom and I were inside together,” Dortmunder told her, unwillingly. “We were cellmates for a while.”

The gray man, who looked too flinty and stringy and knotted to be named anything as simple and friendly as Tom, made that laugh sound again, and said, “Cellmates. Pals. Right, Al? Thrown together by the vagaries of fortune, right?”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“Why don’t we sit in the living room,” Tom suggested, his lips a thin straight line. “My coffee’s gettin cold in there.”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said.

Tom turned away, going back into the living room, walking rigid, like a man who’s been broken and then put back together a little wrong, using too much Krazy Glue. Behind his stiff back, May waggled eyebrows and shoulders and fingers at Dortmunder, asking, Who is this person, why is he in my house, what’s going on, when will it end? and Dortmunder shrugged ears and elbows and the corners of his mouth, answering, I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know if this is some kind of trouble or not, we’ll just have to wait and see. Then they followed Tom into the living room.

Tom sat on the better easy chair, the one that hadn’t sagged all the way to the floor, while Dortmunder and May took the sofa, sitting facing Tom with the look of a couple who’ve just been asked to think seriously about life insurance. Tom sat on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, lifting his cup from the coffee table, sipping with deep concentration. He looked like the background figure in a Depression movie, a guy hunkered over a small fire in a hobo encampment. Dortmunder and May watched him warily, and when he put the cup down he leaned back and sighed faintly, and said, “That’s all I drink now. Lost my taste on the inside.”

Dortmunder said, “How long were you in, Tom, all in all?”

“All in all?” Tom made that sound again. “All my life, all in all. Twenty-three years, this last time. It was supposed to be for good, you know. I’m habitual.”

“I remember that about you,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, the answer is,” Tom said, “while I been eating regular meals and getting regular exercise and a good night’s sleep all these years on the inside, the world’s managed to get worse without me. Maybe I’m not the one they should of been protecting society from all along.”

“How do you mean, Tom?”

“The reason I’m out,” Tom said. “Inflation, plus budget cuts, plus the rising inmate population. All on its own, Al, without any help from yours truly, society has raised up a generation of inmates. Sloppy ones, too, Al, fourth-rates you and me wouldn’t use to hold the door open.”

“There is a lot of that around,” Dortmunder agreed.

“These are people,” Tom went on, “that don’t know a blueprint from a candy wrapper. And to pull a job with a plan? When these bozos take a step forward with the right foot, they have no really clear idea what they figure to do with the left.”

“They’re out there, all right,” Dortmunder said, nodding. “I see them sometimes, asleep on fire escapes, with their head on a television set. They do kinda muddy the water for the rest of us.”

“They take all the fun outta prison, I can tell you that,” Tom said. “And the worst of it is, their motivation’s no damn good. Now, Al, you and me know, if a man goes into a bank with a gun in his hand and says gimme the money and a five-minute start, there’s only two good reasons for it. Either his family’s poor and sick and needs an operation and shoes and schoolbooks and meat for dinner more than once a week, or the fella wants to take a lady friend to Miami and party. One or the other. Am I right?”

“That’s the usual way,” Dortmunder agreed. “Except it’s mostly Las Vegas now.”

“Well, these clowns can’t even get that much right,” Tom said. “The fact is, what they steal for is to feed their veins, and they go right on feeding their veins inside, they buy it off guards and trusties and visitors and each other and probly even the chaplain, but if you ask them why they ignored the career counselor and took up this life of crime for which they are so shit-poor fitted, they’ll tell you it’s political. They’ll tell you they’re the victims.”

Dortmunder nodded. “I’ve heard that one,” he said. “It’s useful in the sentencing sometimes, I think. And in the parole.”

“It’s a crock, Al,” Tom insisted.

Gently, Dortmunder said, “Tom, you and I’ve told the authorities a couple fibs in our time, too.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Granted. Anyway, the result is, inflation makes it cost more to feed and house a fella in the pen in the manner to which we’ve all become accustomed, and budget cuts—Did you know, Al,” he interrupted himself, “that health-wise, long-term cons are the healthiest people in America?”

“I didn’t know that,” Dortmunder admitted.

“Well, it’s the truth,” Tom said. “It’s the regularity of the life, the lack of stress, the sameness of the food intake, the handiness of the free medical care, and the organized exercise program. Your lifers are the longest-lived people in the society. Any insurance company will tell you so.”

“Well,” Dortmunder said; “that must be some kind of consolation, I guess.”

“Yeah.” Tom made that laugh sound again. “Just knowing if you were out somewhere having fun you’d die sooner.” Tom slurped coffee without apparently opening his lips, and said, “So, anyway, with all of those things coming together, with its costing more to house me and feed me, plus you’ve got these budget cuts so they got less money to do this housing and feeding, plus you’ve got the entire male population between seventeen and twenty-six clamoring to come in to be housed and fed, the governor decided to give me a seventieth birthday present.” Grinning closed-mouthed at May, he said, “You wouldn’t think I was seventy, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” May said.

“I look younger than Al here,” Tom told her.

May frowned at Dortmunder. “John,” she said, “why does he keep calling you Al? If you do really know him, and if he really knows you, and if you really lived in the same cell together, and if your name is John—and it is John—why does he call you Al?”

Tom made a sound that might have been meant for a chuckle. “It’s a kind of an inside joke between Al and me,” he said.

Dortmunder explained, “It’s Tom’s idea of comedy. He found out my middle name’s Archibald, and I don’t much love that name—”

“You hate it,” May said.

“It’s one of the worst things about being arrested,” Dortmunder said. “When they look at me and say, ‘John Archibald Dortmunder, you are under arrest,’ I always cave in right away, and that’s why.”

May said, “And when this man found out how much you hated that name, that’s what he decided to call you from then on?”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“And his idea of a nickname for Archibald is Al?”

“Right again,” Dortmunder said.

“Inside joke,” Tom said, and made the chuckle sound again.

“That,” May said, “is his idea of humor.”

“You’re beginning to get the picture,” Dortmunder told her.

“Al,” Tom said, “are you really close with this woman? I mean, can I talk in front of her?”

“Well, Tom,” Dortmunder said, “if you plan on talking much in front of me, you’ll be talking in front of May. I mean, that’s the way it is.”

“That’s okay,” Tom said. “I got no problem with that. I just wanted to be sure you were secure in your mind.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom, you want something.”

“Of course I want something,” Tom told him. “What do you think I am? You think I do reunions? You think I make my way around the country, drop in on old cellmates, but up a lot of old jackpots? Al, do I look to you like a guy sends out Christmas cards?”

“Like I said, Tom,” Dortmunder answered patiently, “you’re here because you want something.”

“Yes,” Tom said. “I want something.”

“What?”

“Help,” Tom said simply.

“You mean money?” Dortmunder asked him, though he didn’t think that could be it. Tom Jimson was not a borrower type; he’d rather shoot you and rob the body than be reduced to begging.

“Well, it’s money in a way,” Tom said. “Let me explain, okay?”

“Go right ahead.”

“You see,” Tom said, “it’s like this. What I always did when I made a good-sized haul, I always stashed some or all of it, hid it somewhere so I’d have it if I needed it later on. I learned that when I was just a kid, from Dilly.”

May said, “Dilly?”

Dortmunder told her, “John Dillinger. Tom started out with Dillinger, and that’s what he called him.”

May said, “To his face?”

“Lady,” Tom said, “I never had a lot of trouble gettin my own way. I want to call this fella here Al, I call him Al. I wanted to call Dilly Dilly, that’s what I called him.”

“All right,” May said. The wary look in her eyes was on the increase.

“So anyway,” Tom said, “Dilly and I kind of come out together, in a way of speaking. What I mean, he got out of the pen in Indiana in ’thirty-three, and that’s when I was just gettin started myself. I was fourteen. I learned a lot from Dilly that year, before he pulled that fake death of his, and one of the things I learned was, always stash some of it away for a rainy day.”

“I remember that,” Dortmunder said. “I remember, while we were cellmates, every once in a while you had to tell some lawyer where another of those stashes was so he could go dig it up and pay himself what you owed him.”

“Lawyers,” Tom said, his voice rasping more than usual, and his lips moved slightly, just enough to give a glimpse of small, white, sharp-looking teeth. “They got their hands on a lot of my stashes over the years,” he admitted, “and they never gave me a thing for it all. But they didn’t get the big stash, and they weren’t going to. That one I held out, even from the lawyers. That one’s my retirement. There’s a place in Mexico I’m goin, way down below Acapulco on the west coast. That money’s gonna get me there, and once I’m there that money’s gonna keep me happy and healthy for a good long time. I’m gonna be an old man, Al, that’s the one ambition in life I got left.”

“Sounds good,” Dortmunder said, wondering why Tom didn’t just get on that southbound plane. Why come here? Why tell this story to Dortmunder? Where was the part he wasn’t going to like?

“What it was,” Tom was saying, “it was an armored car on the Thruway, taking money from Albany on down to New York. We had a nice clean hit, but then my partners ran into some trouble later on, and it wound up I had the whole seven hundred thousand.”

Dortmunder stared at him. “Dollars?”

“That’s what they were using back then,” Tom agreed. “Dollars. This was a year or two before I went up the last time. I was pretty flush, and what with one thing and another I didn’t have any partners to share the stuff with, so I got me a casket—”

“A box, you mean,” Dortmunder said.

“A casket, I mean,” Tom told him. “The best kind of box there is, Al, if you want to keep something safe. Airtight, watertight, steel-encased.”

“Sounds great,” Dortmunder said.

“It is,” Tom said. “And, you know, you can’t just go out and buy one of those. The company that makes them, they keep those babies under very tight control.”

Dortmunder frowned. “They do?”

“They do. See, they don’t want you to take it into your head to buy a box and stick old granny in it and shove her in a hole in the back yard. Free-lance burial, you see. The law doesn’t like that.”

“I suppose not,” Dortmunder said.

“So it happened,” Tom went on, “I happened to know this undertaker around that time. We did business together—”

Dortmunder and May exchanged a look.

“—and he slipped me a box out of his inventory. Sunnyside Casket Company’s best, and worth every penny of it. It’s a crime to waste those boxes on dead people.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

“There was a little town up there,” Tom went on, “not far from the Thruway. Called Putkin’s Corners. I went in there one night and went out behind the library to a spot where you couldn’t be seen from any windows where anybody lived, and I dug a hole four feet deep, and I shoved the casket in and covered it up, and I drove away, and nobody in the entire world—except now you two—ever knew I was ever in a town called Putkin’s Corners in my entire life.”

“And that’s what you need help with?” Dortmunder asked. “Getting that casket full of money back out of Putkin’s Corners?”

“That’s where I need help, all right,” Tom agreed.

“It doesn’t sound like it should be that much trouble,” Dortmunder assured him, thinking Tom meant that, now he was seventy years old, he wasn’t up to all the digging and lifting required.

But Tom shook his head, saying, “A little harder than you might think, Al. You see, about four years after I went up, a while before you come in to be my cellmate, the state of New York condemned all that land and houses and four villages up there, including Putkin’s Corners, and made everybody move away. And then the city of New York bought up all that land, and they threw a dam across partway down the valley, and they made themselves another reservoir for all you people down here.”

“Oh,” Dortmunder said.

“So that’s why I need help,” Tom explained. “Because as it stands right now, that stash of mine is under three feet of dirt and fifty feet of water.”

“Ah,” Dortmunder said. “Not easy.”

“Not impossible,” Tom said. “So here’s the deal I’d like to offer. You got a head on your shoulders, Al—”

“Thanks,” Dortmunder said.

“So you come into this with me,” Tom finished. “We get that box of mine out of Putkin’s Corners, you and me and whoever else it takes, and when we get it we split down the middle. Half for me, and half for you, and you share your half how you like with whoever else you bring in. Three hundred fifty thousand. I can live to be an old man on that much, especially down in Mexico. What do you say?”

“Interesting,” Dortmunder said, thinking he’d like to know more about the problems that had afflicted Tom’s partners in the original robbery, leaving him sole possessor of the seven hundred thousand dollars. But thinking also that at seventy Tom was probably not quite as dangerous as he’d been at forty-three or forty-four, when the robbery had taken place. And thinking beyond that to the amount of money itself, and the hassle he’d just gone through tonight for petty cash out of a check-cashing place with a bad-tempered dog. He didn’t know exactly how you went about digging up a casket from fifty feet down in the bottom of a reservoir, but let’s just say he had to bring in two or three other guys, say three other guys; that still left nearly a hundred thousand apiece. And there are no dogs in a reservoir.

Tom was saying, “Now, you probably want to get some sleep—”

“Yeah, I’m due,” Dortmunder admitted.

“So maybe this afternoon, early afternoon, we could drive on up and I could show you the place. It’s about two hours up from the city.”

“This afternoon?” Dortmunder echoed, thinking he’d like to sleep a little longer than that. The check-cashing place’s dog had kind of taken it out of him.

“Well, the sooner the better, you know,” Tom said.

May said, “John? Are you going to do this?”

Dortmunder knew that May had taken an aversion to Tom Jimson—most human beings did—but on the other hand there were all those advantages he’d just been thinking about, so he said, “I’ll take a look at it anyway, May, see how it seems.”

“If you think you should,” May said. The air around her words vibrated with all the other words she wasn’t saying.

“I’ll just take a look,” Dortmunder assured her, and faced Tom again to say, “Where are you staying now?”

“Well,” Tom said, “until I get my stash out of Putkin’s Corners, that sofa you’re sitting on’s about as good a place as any.”

“Ah,” Dortmunder said, while beside him May’s cheekbones turned to concrete. “In that case,” Dortmunder said, “I guess we better drive up and take a look this afternoon.”

THREE

After the Thruway exit, the road took them through North Dudson, a very small town full of cars driven with extreme slowness by people who couldn’t decide whether or not they wanted to make a left turn. Dortmunder didn’t like being behind the wheel, anyway, and these indecisive locals weren’t improving his disposition much. In his universe, the driver drives—usually Stan Murch, sometimes Andy Kelp—while the specialists ride in back, oiling their pliers and wrapping black tape around their screwdrivers. Putting a specialist behind the wheel and making him drive through little towns hundreds of miles from the real city—well, tens of miles anyway, around a hundred of miles—meant that what you wound up with was a vehicle operated by someone who was both overqualified and nervous.

But the alternative, this time, was even worse. If Tom Jimson had ever known how to drive a car, and had ever cared enough about humanity to try to drive it in a nonlethal fashion, both the skill and the caring had disappeared completely in the course of his latest twenty-three-year visit inside. So Tom had rented the car—a rental, not even something borrowed from the street, another nervous-making element—and now Dortmunder was doing the driving, regardless.

At least the weather was good, April sun agleam on the white aluminum siding sheathed around all the quaint old houses that made North Dudson so scenic a place that a city boy could get a migraine just by looking at it. Particularly when he hadn’t had enough sleep. So Dortmunder concentrated on the few familiar reminders of civilization along the way—traffic lights, McDonald’s arches, Marlboro Man billboards—and just kept driving forward, knowing that sooner or later North Dudson would have to come to an end. Beside him, Tom looked around, smiled ironically without moving his lips, and said, “Well, this place is still the same piece of shit, anyway.”

“What do I do when I get out of town?”

“You keep driving,” Tom said.

A taco joint with a neon sign in its window advertising a German beer made in Texas was the last building in North Dudson, and then the fields and forests and farms took over. The road began to wobble and to climb, and here and there horses looked up from their grazing in rock-littered fields to give them the fish eye as they passed by.

About four miles out of town, Tom broke a fairly long silence by conversationally saying, “That was the road.”

Dortmunder slammed on the brakes, sluing to a stop on the highway and giving the old fart in the pickup truck tailgating him yet another infarction. “Where?” Dortmunder demanded, staring around, seeing no intersection, his question blotted out by the squawk of the pickup’s horn howling in outraged complaint as the truck swung on by and tore away down the road. “Where?” Dortmunder repeated.

“Back there,” Tom said, and gave him a look. “You can’t take it now,” he said. “Putkin’s Corners is gone, remember? That’s the whole problem here.”

“You mean the old road,” Dortmunder said. “Not any road I’m supposed to take now.”

“You can’t take it now,” Tom said. “It’s all overgrown. See it?”

Dortmunder still couldn’t see any road, so Tom must have been right about it being overgrown. “When you said, ‘That was the road,’ ” Dortmunder told him, “I thought you meant I was supposed to turn or something.”

“When you’re supposed to turn or something,” Tom said, “I’ll tell you so.”

“I thought you did tell me so,” Dortmunder explained.

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Well, it just sounded that way,” Dortmunder said, as a station wagon went by, yapping its horn at them for being stopped in the middle of the road. “When you said, ‘That was the road,’ it sounded like you meant that was the road.”

“It was the road. Twenty-three years ago it was the road.” Tom sounded snappish. “Now what it is is a lot of trees and bushes and hills.”

“It was just confusing, what you said, is all,” Dortmunder explained, as a big truck full of logs gave them the air horn on its way by.

Tom half turned to look full at Dortmunder. “I understand what you’re saying, Al,” he said. “So don’t say it anymore. Drive on, okay? I’m seventy years old. I don’t know how much longer I got.”

So Dortmunder drove on, and a mile or so later they came to a sign that said: ENTERING VILBURGTOWN COUNTY. “This is the county,” Tom said. “When they did the reservoir, they covered almost this whole county. There’s no towns left here at all. Putkin’s Corners was the county seat. There’s the road.”

A two-lane blacktop road went off to the right. Dortmunder nodded at it and kept going straight.

Tom said, “Hey!”

“What?”

“That was the road! What’s the matter with you?”

This time, Dortmunder pulled off onto the gravel verge before he stopped. Facing Tom, he said, “Do you mean I was supposed to turn there?”

“That’s what I said!” Tom was so agitated his lips were almost moving. “I told you, ‘There’s the road’!”

“The last time you told me ‘There’s the road,’ ” Dortmunder said icily, getting fed up with all this, “you didn’t mean ‘There’s the road,’ you meant something else. A history lesson or some goddamn thing.”

Tom sighed. He frowned at the dashboard. He polished the tip of his nose with a bent knuckle. Then he nodded. “Okay, Al,” he said. “We been outta touch with each other awhile. We just got to get used to communicating with each other again.”

“Probably so,” Dortmunder agreed, ready to meet his old cellmate halfway.

“So this time,” Tom said, “what I meant was, ‘Turn here.’ In fact, I’m sorry that isn’t the way I phrased myself.”

“It would have helped,” Dortmunder admitted.

“So I tell you what you do,” Tom said. “You turn around, and we go back, and we’ll try all over again and see how it comes out. Okay?”

“Good.”

Dortmunder looked both ways, made the U-turn, and Tom said, “Turn here.”

“I already knew that, Tom,” Dortmunder said, and made the turn onto the new road.

“I just wanted to practice saying it right.”

“I’m wondering,” Dortmunder said as they drove through the forest along the new road, “if that’s some more of your famous humor.”

“Maybe so,” Tom said, looking out the windshield, watching the road unwind toward them out of the woods. “Or maybe it’s concealed rage,” he said. “One time, inside, a shrink took a whack at me, and he told me I had a lot of concealed rage, so maybe that’s some of it, coming out in disguised form.”

Dortmunder, surprised, gave him a look. “You got concealed rage?” he asked. “On top of all the rage you show, you got more?”

“According to this shrink,” Tom said, and shrugged, saying, “But what do they know? Shrinks are crazy, anyway, that’s why they take the job. Slow down a little now, we’re getting close.”

On the right, the forest was interrupted by a dirt road marked NO ADMITTANCE—VILBURGTOWN RESERVOIR AUTHORITY, with a simple metal-pipe barrier blocking the way. A little later, there was another dirt road on the same side, with the same sign and the same pipe barrier, and a little after that a fence came marching at an angle out of the woods and then ran along next to the road; an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with two strands of barbed wire angling outward at the top.

Dortmunder said, “They put barbed wire around the reservoir?”

“They did,” Tom agreed.

“Isn’t that more security than most reservoirs get?” Dortmunder waved a hand vaguely. “I thought, most reservoirs, you could go there and fish and stuff.”

“Well, yeah,” Tom said. “But back then, the time they put this one in, it was a very revolutionary moment in American history, you know. You had all these environment freaks and antiwar freaks and antigovernment freaks and like that…”

“Well, you still do.”

“But back then,” Tom said, “they were crazed. Blowing up college buildings and all this. And this reservoir became what you call your focal point of protest. You had these groups threatening that if this reservoir went in, they’d lace it with enough chemicals to blow every mind in New York City.”

“Gee, maybe they did,” Dortmunder said, thinking back to some people he knew down in the city.

“No, they didn’t,” Tom told him, “on account of this fence, and the cops on duty here, and the state law they passed to make this reservoir off limits to everybody.”

“But that was a long time ago,” Dortmunder objected. “Those chemicals are gone. The people that had them took them all themselves.”

“Al,” Tom said, “have you ever seen any government give up control, once they got it? Here’s the fence, here’s the cops, here’s the state law says everybody keep out, here’s the job to be done. So they do it. Otherwise, they wouldn’t feel right taking their paycheck every week.”

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “Complicates things for you and me, but okay.”

“Not a real complication,” Tom said, but unfortunately at that point it didn’t occur to Dortmunder to follow through and ask him what he meant by that.

Besides, here came the reservoir. The fence continued on, and through it water gleamed. A great big lake appeared, smiling placidly in the afternoon sun, winking and rippling when little playful breezes skipped over it. Pine trees and oaks and maples and birch trees surrounded the reservoir, growing right down to the water’s edge. There were no houses around it, no boats on it, no people in sight anywhere. And the road ran right along beside it. On the other side of the road, past another fence, was a big drop-off, the land falling away to a deep valley far below.

“Stop along here somewheres,” Tom said.

There was a very narrow shoulder here, and then the fence. If Dortmunder pulled right up against the fence, Tom wouldn’t be able to open his door, and anyway the car would still be partly on the road. But there hadn’t been any traffic at all along this secondary road, so Dortmunder didn’t worry about it and just stopped where they were, and Tom said, “Good,” and got out, leaving his door open.

Dortmunder left the engine running, and also climbed out onto cement roadway, but shut his door against the possibility of traffic. He walked around the car and stood beside the fence with Tom, looking out at the serene water. Tom stuck his gnarly old tree-twig finger through the fence, pointing as he said, “Putkin’s Corners was right about there. Right about out there.”

“Be tough to get to,” Dortmunder commented.

“Just a little muddy, is all,” Tom said.

Dortmunder looked around. “Where’s the dam?”

Tom gave him a disbelieving look. “The dam? Where’s the dam? This is the dam. You’re standing on the dam.”

“I am?” Dortmunder looked left and right, and saw how the road came out of the woods behind them and then swung off in a long gentle curve, with the reservoir outside the curve on the right and the valley inside the curve on the left, all the way around to another hillside full of trees way over there, where it disappeared again in among the greenery. “This is the dam,” Dortmunder said, full of wonder. “And they put the road right on top of it.”

“Sure. What’d you think?”

“I didn’t expect it to be so big,” Dortmunder admitted. Being careful to look both ways, even though there had still been no traffic out here, Dortmunder crossed the road and looked down and saw how the dam also curved gently outward from top to bottom, its creamy gray concrete like a curtain that has billowed out slightly from a breeze blowing underneath. Beyond and below the concrete wall of the dam, a neat stream meandered away farther on down the valley, past a few farms, a village, another village, and at the far end of the valley what looked like a pretty big town, much bigger even than North Dudson. “So that,” Dortmunder said, pointing back toward the reservoir, “must have looked like this before they put the dam in.”

“If I’d known,” Tom said, “I would of buried the goddamn box in Dudson Center down there.”

Dortmunder looked again at the facade of the dam, and now he noticed the windows in it, in two long rows near the top. They were regular plate-glass windows like those in office buildings. He said, “Those are windows.”

“You’re right again,” Tom said.

“But— How come? Does a dam have an inside?”

“Sure it does,” Tom said. “They got their offices down in there, and all the controls for letting the water in and out and doing the purity tests and pumping it into the pipes to go down to the city. That’s all inside there.”

“I guess I just never thought about dams,” Dortmunder said. “Where I live and all, and in my line of work, things like dams don’t come up that often.”

“I had to learn about dams,” Tom said, “once the bastards flooded my money.”

“Yeah, well, then you got a personal stake,” Dortmunder agreed.

“And I studied this dam in particular,” Tom told him. Again pointing through fence, this time at an angle down toward the creamy gray curtain of the dam, he said, “And the best place to put the dynamite is there, and over there.”

Dortmunder stared at him. “Dynamite?”

“Sure dynamite,” Tom told him. “Whadaya think I got, nuclear devices? Dynamite is the tool at hand.”

“But— Why do you want to use dynamite?”

“To move the water out of the way,” Tom said, very slowly, as though explaining things to an idiot.

“Wait a minute,” Dortmunder said. “Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute. Your idea here is, you’re gonna blow up the dam to drain all the water out, and then walk in and dig up the box of money?”

“What I figure,” Tom said, “the cops and all are gonna be pretty busy downstream, so we’ll have time to get in and out before anybody takes much of an interest.” Turning away to look across the road (and the dam) at the peaceful water in the sunshine, he said, “We’ll need some kind of all-terrain vehicle, though, I think. It’ll be pretty goddamn muddy down in there.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom, back up a bit, just back up here. You want to take all that water there, and move it over here.”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“You want to blow up this dam here, with the people inside it.”

“Well, you know,” Tom said, “if we give them the word ahead of time, they might get upset. They might want to get in our way, stop us, make problems for us or something.”

“How many people work down in there?” Dortmunder asked, pointing at the windows in the dam.

“At night? We’d have to make our move at night, of course,” Tom explained. “I figure, at night, seven or eight guys in there, maybe ten at the most.”

Dortmunder looked at the windows. He looked downstream at the farms and the villages and the town at the end of the valley, and he said, “That’s a lot of water in that reservoir, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” Tom said.

“Everybody asleep down there,” Dortmunder said, musing, imagining it, “and here comes the water. That’s your idea.”

Tom looked through the chain-link fence at the peaceful valley. His gray cold eyes gleamed in his gray cold face. “Asleep in their beds,” he said. “Asleep in somebody’s beds anyway. You know who those people are?”

Dortmunder shook his head, watching that stony profile.

Tom said, “Nobodies. Family men hustlin for an extra dollar, an extra dime, sweatin all over their shirts, gettin nowhere. Women turnin fat. Kids turnin stupid. No difference between day and night because nobody’s goin anywhere anyway. Miserable little small-town people with their miserable little small-town dreams.” The lips moved in what might have been a smile. “A flood,” he said. “Most excitin thing ever happened to them, am I right?”

“No, Tom,” Dortmunder said.

“No?” Tom asked, misunderstanding. “You think there’s a lot of excitement down there? Senior proms, bankruptcy auctions, Fourth of July parades, gang bangs, all that kind of thing? That what you think?”

“I think you can’t blow up the dam, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I think you can’t drown a whole lot of people—hundreds and hundreds of people—in their beds, or in anybody’s beds, for seven hundred thousand dollars.”

“Three hundred fifty thousand,” Tom corrected. “Half of it is yours, Al. Yours and whoever else you bring in on the caper.”

Dortmunder looked frankly at his old cellmate. “You’d really do that, Tom? You’d kill hundreds and hundreds of people for three hundred fifty thousand dollars?”

“I’d kill them at a dollar apiece,” Tom told him, “if it meant I could get outta this part of the world and get down to Mexico and move into my goddamn golden years of retirement.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom, maybe you were inside too long. You can’t do things like that, you know. You can’t go around killing hundreds and hundreds of people just like snapping your fingers.”

“It isn’t just like snapping my fingers, Al,” Tom said. “That’s the problem. If it was like snapping my fingers, I’d go do it myself and keep the whole seven hundred. If I learned anything on the inside, you know, it’s that I can’t be a loner anymore, not on something like this. Except at the very beginning, with Dilly and Baby and them, I was always a loner, you know, all my life. That’s why I talked so much when we were together in the cell. Remember how I used to talk so much?”

“I don’t have to remember,” Dortmunder told him. “I’m listening to it.” But what he did remember was how odd he used to find it, back in the good old days in the cell, that a man who did so much talking was (a) famous as a loner, and (b) managed to get all those words out without once moving his lips.

“Well, the reason,” Tom went on, “the reason I’m such a blabbermouth is that I’m mostly alone. So when I got an ear nearby, I just naturally bend it. You see, Al,” Tom explained, and gestured at the sweet valley spread out defenseless below them, “those aren’t real people down there. Not like me. Not even like you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. If I go hungry three, four days, you know, not one of those people down there is gonna get a bellyache. And when the water comes down on them some night pretty soon, I’m not gonna choke at all. I’m gonna be busy digging up my money.”

“No, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t care what you say, you just can’t do it. I’m not a real law-abiding citizen myself, but you go too far.”

“I just follow the logic, Al.”

“Well, I don’t,” Dortmunder told him. “I can’t do something like this. I can’t come out here and deliberately drown a whole lot of people in their beds, that’s all. I just can’t do it.”

Tom considered that, looking Dortmunder up and down, thinking it over, and finally he shrugged and said, “Okay. We’ll forget it, then.”

Dortmunder blinked. “We will?”

“Sure,” Tom said. “You’re some kind of goodhearted guy, am I right, been reading the Reader’s Digest or something all these years, maybe you joined the Christophers on the inside, something like that. The point is, I’m not too good at reading other people—”

“I guess not,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, none of you are that real, you know,” Tom explained. “It’s hard to get you into focus. So I read you wrong, I made a mistake, wasted a couple of days. Sorry about that, Al, I wasted your time, too.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder said, with the awful feeling he was missing some sort of point here.

“So we’ll drive back to the city,” Tom said. “You ready?”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “Sorry, Tom, I just can’t.”

“S’okay,” Tom said, crossing the road, Dortmunder following.

They got into the car, and Dortmunder said, “Do I U-turn?”

“Nah,” Tom said, “go on across the dam and then there’s a left, and we’ll go down through the valley and back to the Thruway like that.”

“Okay, fine.”

They drove across the rest of the dam, Dortmunder continuing to have this faintly uneasy feeling about the calm, gray, silent, ancient maniac seated beside him, and at the far end of the dam was a small stone building that was probably the entry to the offices down below. Dortmunder slowed, looking at it, and saw a big bronze seal, and a sign reading CITY OF NEW YORK—DEPT. OF WATER SUPPLY—CITY PROPERTY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “City property?” Dortmunder asked. “This is part of New York City up here?”

“Sure,” Tom said. “All the city reservoirs belong to the city.”

A New York City police car was one of three vehicles parked beside the building. Dortmunder said, “They have city cops?”

“The way I understand it,” Tom said, “it’s not duty that’s given to the sharpest and the quickest. But don’t worry about it, Al, you wanted out and you’re out. Let the next guy worry about New York City cops.”

Dortmunder gave him a look, feeling a sudden lurch in his stomach. “The next guy?”

“Naturally.” Tom shrugged. “You weren’t the only guy on the list,” he explained equably. “The first guy, but not the only. So now I’ll just have to find somebody with a little less milk in his veins, that’s all.”

Dortmunder’s foot came off the gas. “Tom, you mean you’re still gonna do it?”

Tom, mildly surprised, spread his hands. “Do I have my three hundred fifty grand? Has something changed I don’t know about?”

Dortmunder said, “Tom, you can’t drown all those people.”

“Sure I can,” Tom said. “You’re the one can’t. Remember?”

“But—” Just beyond the stone building, with the reservoir still barely visible behind them and the forest starting again on both sides of the road, Dortmunder came to a stop, pulling off onto the gravel verge and saying, “Tom, no.”

Tom scowled, without moving his lips. “Al,” he said. “I hope you aren’t going to tell me what I can do and what I can’t do.”

“It isn’t that, Tom,” Dortmunder said, although in fact it was that, and realizing it, Dortmunder also realized how hopeless this all was. “It’s just,” he said, despairing even as he heard himself say it, “it’s just you can’t do that, that’s all.”

“I can,” Tom said, colder than ever. “And I will.” That bony finger pointed at Dortmunder’s nose. “And you are not gonna queer the deal for me, Al. You are not gonna call anybody and say, ‘Don’t sleep at home tonight if you wanna stay dry.’ Believe me, Al, you are not gonna screw me around. If I think there’s the slightest chance—”

“No, no, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I wouldn’t rat on you, you know me better than that.”

“And you know me better than that.” Looking out his side window at forest, Tom said, “So what’s with the delay? How come we aren’t whippin along the highway, headin back to the city, so I can make the call on the second guy on my list?”

“Because,” Dortmunder said, and licked his lips, and looked back at the peaceful water sparkling in the sun. Peaceful killer water. “Because,” he said, “we don’t have to do it that way.”

Tom looked at him. “We?”

“I’m your guy, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “From the old days, and still today. We’ll do it, we’ll get the money. But we don’t have to drown anybody to do it, okay? We’ll do it some other way.”

“What other way?”

“I don’t know yet,” Dortmunder admitted. “But I just got here, Tom, I just came aboard this thing. Give me some time to look the situation over, think about it. Give me a couple weeks, okay?”

Tom gave him a skeptical look. “What are you gonna do?” he demanded. “Swim out with a shovel and dive and hold your breath?”

“I don’t know, Tom. Give me time to think about it. Okay?”

Tom thought it over. “A quieter way might be good,” he acknowledged. “If it could be done. Less runnin around afterward. Less chance of your massive manhunt.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

Tom looked back at the reservoir. “That’s fifty feet of water, you know.”

“I know, I know,” Dortmunder said. “Just give me a little time to consider the problem.”

Tom’s gray eyes shifted this way and that in his skull. He said, “I don’t know if I want to stay on your sofa that long.”

Oh. Dortmunder stared, agonized. The thought of May came into his mind but was firmly repressed, pushed down beneath the hundreds and hundreds of drowned people. “It’s a comfortable sofa, Tom,” he said, his throat closing on him as he said it but managing to get the words out just the same.

Tom took a deep breath. His lips actually twitched; a visible movement. Then, the lips rigid again, he said, “Okay, Al. I know you’re good at this stuff, that’s why I came to you first. You want to find another way to get down to the stash, go ahead.”

“Thank you, Tom,” Dortmunder said. Relief made his hands tremble on the wheel.

“Any time,” Tom told him.

“And in the meantime,” Dortmunder said, “no dynamite. Right?”

“For now,” Tom agreed.

FOUR

Joe the mailman came whistling down Myrtle Street in the bright sunshine, his tune blending with the songs of birds, the hiss of sprinklers, the far-off murmur of a lawn mower. “Myrtle!” shouted Edna Street, turning away from her regular spot in the upstairs front bedroom window. “Here comes the mailman!”

“I’ll get it, Mother!” Myrtle Street called, and went skipping down the well-polished mahogany staircase toward the front door. A pretty person of twenty-five—no longer really a pretty girl but somehow not quite a pretty woman either—Myrtle had lived most of her life in this old sprawling beautiful clapboard house here in Dudson Center, and was barely conscious anymore of the oddity of having the same name as her home address. At least some of the mail Joe would be bringing up onto the porch this afternoon would be addressed:

Myrtle Street

27 Myrtle Street

Dudson Center, NY 12561

A few things, such as Modern Maturity and Prevention magazine, would be addressed to Edna Street, plus a ton of stuff addressed to somebody named CAR-RT SORT, or to Current Resident.

Joe the mailman smiled roguishly as he climbed the stoop to the wide front porch of 27 Myrtle Street and saw Myrtle Street pushing open the screen door. He liked the way her legs moved inside her loose cotton dresses, the demure but lush swell of her breasts within the gray cardigan she always wore, the pale softness of her throat, the healthy animal sparkle in her eye. Joe the mailman was forty-three years old, with a family at home, but he could dream, couldn’t he? “Lovely as ever,” he greeted Myrtle as she smiled hello and reached for today’s messages from the world. “We must run away together one of these days.”

Myrtle, who had no idea of the actual depth of depravity lurking within Joe’s plain-to-lumpish exterior in his badly fitting blue-gray uniform, laughed lightly and said, “Oh, we’re both much too busy, Joe.”

“What’s he want?” screeked Edna’s voice from upstairs. “Don’t you give him anything for postage due, Myrtle! Make him take it back!”

Myrtle indulgently rolled her eyes and laughed, saying, “Mother.”

“She sure is something,” Joe agreed. He was imagining his head between those legs.

“See you tomorrow,” Myrtle said, and went back inside, the screen door slamming on Joe’s creative study of her behind.

Climbing the stairs, Myrtle went quickly through the mail. Myrtle Street, Myrtle St. She and her mother had been Myrtle and Edna Gosling when Edna had inherited the place from her mortician father and moved in with her not-yet-two-year-old baby. To be Myrtle Gosling of Myrtle Street would have been perfectly ordinary and unremarkable, but she hadn’t remained that for long. She’d been not-yet-four when Edna met Mr. Street—Mr. Earl Street, of Bangor, Maine, a salesman in stationery and school-and-library supplies—and not-yet-five when Edna married Mr. Street and decided to give her only daughter her new husband’s name. Myrtle had been not-yet-seven when Mr. Street up and ran away with Candice Oshkosh from down at the five-and-dime, never to be heard from again, but by that time Edna had firmly become Mrs. Street, and her daughter was just as firmly Myrtle Street, and that was simply the way it was.

Entering the front bedroom, Myrtle found her mother putting on one of her many black hats at the oval pier-glass mirror, staring with suspicion and mistrust at her own hands as they jammed the hat in among her steel-gray knotted curls. “Here’s the mail,” Myrtle said, unnecessarily, and Edna turned to snatch the thin sheaf of circulars and bills from her hands. It was required that Edna look at all the mail, that Myrtle not throw away the most pointless sale announcement or congressional report before her mother had seen it, looked at it, touched it, possibly even smelled it. “We have to go soon, Mother,” Myrtle said. “I don’t want to be late for work.”

“Pah!” Edna said, greedily fingering the mail. “Make them wait for you. They waited for me when I worked there. Watch him, will you?”

So Myrtle hurried to the front window to stand watch while her mother examined the mail. Out there, Joe the mailman was just crossing the street down at the corner to start his delivery to the houses across the way. A Mrs. Courtenay, a fiftyish widow, lived over there, just two doors from the corner. A woman who wore bright colors and hoop earrings, she had thus earned Edna’s utter condemnation. Edna was convinced that some day Joe the mailman would enter that house—and that widow, no doubt—rather than merely drop off the mail there, thus committing—among other things—a gross dereliction of his sworn Federal duty to deliver the mail, and Edna would at once phone the main post office downtown and have Joe the mailman dealt with. It hadn’t happened yet, but it would, it would.

Well, of course, Myrtle knew it would never happen at all. Joe wasn’t like that. True, on occasion Mrs. Courtenay would appear at her door when Joe arrived, decked in her bright colors and her hoop earrings, and she and Joe would chat a minute, but the same identical thing sometimes happened between Joe and Myrtle herself—today, for instance—which didn’t mean Joe would ever come in here and perform… anything. It was all just silly.

But it was better, in the long run, to go along with Mother’s little idiosyncrasies. “He’s on Mrs. Courtenay’s porch now,” she reported to the rattling sound of Edna tearing open an electric company bill. “He’s putting the mail in the box. He’s leaving.”

“She didn’t come out?”

“No, Mother, she didn’t come out.”

Edna, hatted and still clutching the mail, scampered over to glare out the window at Joe the mailman taking a shortcut across Mrs. Courtenay’s lawn to the next house on his route. “Probably having her period,” Edna commented, and switched her glare to Myrtle. “Are you ready or not? You don’t want to be late for work, you know.”

“No, Mother,” Myrtle agreed.

The two went downstairs together and out the back door and over the gravel to the unattached garage containing their black Ford Fairlane. This part of their day was such a foregone routine they barely even thought about it while going through the motions: Myrtle opened the right-hand garage door, while Edna opened the left. Myrtle entered the garage and climbed into the Ford and backed it out while Edna stood to the left, hands folded in front of her. Myrtle made a backing U-turn on the gravel while Edna closed both garage doors. Then Edna walked around the car, got in beside Myrtle, and they left home.

Myrtle was going to work. She was an assistant (one of three) at the North Dudson branch of the New York State Public Library. Edna was going to her Senior Citizens Center down on Main Street, where she was something of a power. At sixty-two, Edna was three years too young to even be a member of the Dudson Combined Senior Citizens Center, but there was nothing else doing all day in this dead town, so she’d got herself in by lying about her age.

Myrtle was a good, if cautious, driver; cautious mostly about her mother, who was not reticent about remarking on any flaw she might find in Myrtle’s judgment or performance skills along the way. She was quiet today, however, all the way from Myrtle Street to Spring Street to Albany Street to Elm Street to Main Street, where they had to stop and wait for the light to change before making their left turn. While they were waiting there, a car drove wanderingly by from left to right, with two men in it; they didn’t seem to know exactly where they were going.

And suddenly Edna’s bony sharp hand was clutching Myrtle’s forearm and Edna was crying, “My God!”

Myrtle immediately stared into the rearview mirror; were they about to be crashed? But Elm Street was empty behind them. So she stared at her mother, who was gaping after that car that had just gone by. The whites were visible all around the pupils of Edna’s eyes. Was she having some sort of attack? “Mother?” Myrtle asked, firmly burying that first irrepressible instant of hope. “Mother? Are you all right?”

“It couldn’t be,” Edna whispered. She was panting in her anxiety, mouth hanging open, eyes staring. Voice hoarse, she cried, “But it was! It was!”

“Was what? Mother?”

“That was your father in that car!”

Myrtle’s head spun about. She too stared after the car with the two men in it; but it was long gone. She said, astonished, “Mr. Street, Mother? Mr. Street’s come back?”

“Mr. Street?” Edna’s voice was full of rage and contempt. “That asshole? Who gives a fuck about him?”

Myrtle had never heard such language from Edna. “Mother?” she asked. “What is it?”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” Edna said, hunching forward, staring hollowly out the windshield, all at once looking plenty old enough to be a member of the Senior Citizens Center. “It couldn’t happen, but it did. The dirty bastard son of a bitch.” Bleakly, Edna gazed at the sunny world of Dudson Center. “He’s back,” she said.

FIVE

“They should never have let him out of prison,” May said.

“They shouldn’t have let him out of the cell,” Dortmunder said. “As long as I’m not in it with him.”

“You are in it with him,” May pointed out. “He’s living here.”

Dortmunder put down his fork and looked at her. “May? What could I do?”

They were in the kitchen together, having a late lunch or an early supper, hamburgers and Spaghetti-Os and beer, grabbing their privacy where they could find it. After the run back from Vilburgtown Reservoir, after they’d actually given the rental car back to its owners (yet another new experience today for Dortmunder), Tom had said, “You go on home, Al, I’ll be along. I gotta fill my pockets.” So Dortmunder had gone on home, where May had been waiting, having come back early from her cashier job at the supermarket to meet him, and where, with a hopeful expression as she’d looked over Dortmunder’s shoulder, she’d said, “Where’s your friend?”

“Out filling his pockets. He said we shouldn’t wait up, he’d let himself in.”

May had looked alarmed. “You gave him a key?”

“No, he just said he’d let himself in. May, we gotta talk. I also gotta eat, but mostly and mainly we gotta talk.”

So now they were eating and talking, sometimes simultaneously, and May wasn’t liking the situation any more than Dortmunder. But what were they to do about it? “May,” Dortmunder said, “if we leave Tom alone, he really will blow up that dam and drown everybody in the valley. And for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, he’ll find guys to help.”

“John,” May said, “wherever he is right now, your friend Tom, filling his pockets—”

“Please, May,” Dortmunder interrupted, “don’t do that. Don’t keep calling him my friend Tom. That’s unfair.”

May thought about that and nodded. “You’re right, it is. It’s not your fault who they put in your cell.”

“Thank you.”

“But, John, still, what do you think he’s doing right now? Filling his pockets; how do you suppose he does that?”

“I don’t even want to know,” Dortmunder said.

“John, you’re a craftsman, you’re skilled labor, a professional. What you do takes talent and training—”

“And luck,” Dortmunder added.

“No, it doesn’t,” she insisted. “Not a solid experienced person like you.”

“Well, that’s good,” Dortmunder said, “since I’ve been running around without it for quite a while.”

“Now, don’t get gloomy, John,” May said.

“Hard not to, around Tom,” Dortmunder told her. “And, as for what he’s doing outside right now, that’s up to him. But I was at that dam, I looked down the valley at all those houses. It’s my choice, May. I can try to figure out something else to do, some other way to get Tom his money, or I can say forget it, not my problem. And then some night we’ll sit here and watch television, and there it’ll be on the news. You know what I mean?”

“Are those the only choices?” May asked, poking delicately at her Spaghetti-Os, not meeting Dortmunder’s eye. “Are you sure there’s nothing else to do?”

“Like what?” he asked. “The way I see it, I help him or I don’t help him, that’s the choice.”

“I wouldn’t normally say this, John,” May said, “you know me better than that, but sometimes, every once in a great while, sometimes maybe it’s just necessary to let society fight its own battles.”

Dortmunder put down his fork and his hamburger and looked at her. “May? Turn him in? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s worth thinking about,” May said, mumbling, still not meeting his eye.

“But it isn’t,” Dortmunder told her. “Even if it was—even if it ever was, I mean—even then, it isn’t worth thinking about, because what are we gonna do? Call up this governor with the birthday presents, say take him back, he’s gonna drown nine hundred people? They can’t take him back.” Dortmunder picked up his fork and his hamburger again. He said, “A crime isn’t a crime until it happens.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” May said. “With a character like that walking around loose—”

Dortmunder said, “May, some famous writer said it once: The law’s an asshole. For instance, what if I was still on parole? Tom Jimson’s living here, no matter what we think. If I was still on parole, and that parole officer of mine, what was his name? Steen, that was it. If he found out a guy with Tom Jimson’s record and history was living here, they’d put me back inside. But him they can’t touch.”

“Well, that’s crazy,” May said.

“But true,” Dortmunder told her. “But let’s say I do it anyway, I’m feeling this desperation or whatever it might be, and I go and do it. And then it’s done. I’ve gone and told the law all about Tom and his stash under the reservoir. So what happens next? At the very best, what they can do is go tell him they heard he had these dynamite plans and he shouldn’t do it. And he’ll take about a second and a half to figure out who’s the blabbermouth. You want Tom Jimson mad at you?”

“Well,” May said carefully, “John, it’s you he’d be mad at, actually.”

“People who play with dynamite don’t fine tune,” Dortmunder said. He filled his mouth with hamburger and Spaghetti-Os, and then composted it all with beer and chewed awhile.

May had finished. She sat back, didn’t light a cigarette, didn’t blow smoke at the ceiling, didn’t flick ashes onto her plate, didn’t cough delicately twice, and did say, “Well, I just hope you can come up with something.”

“Me, too,” Dortmunder said, but his mouth was still full of food and drink, so it didn’t come out right. He held the fork up vertically, meaning just a second, and chewed and chewed and swallowed, and then tried again: “Me, too.”

She frowned at him. “You too what?”

“Hope I come up with something. To get the money out from under the reservoir.”

“Oh, you will,” she said. “I’m not worried about you, John.”

“Well, I wish you would be,” he said. Gazing across the room, frowning at the perfect white blankness of the refrigerator door, he said, “I think it’s time I got some help on this.”

SIX

Andy Kelp, a sharp-featured, arrow-nosed skinny kind of guy in soft-soled black shoes and dark gray wool trousers and a bulky pea coat, tiptoed through the software, quietly humming “Coke, It’s the Real Thing.” Hmmmmm, he thought, his fingers skipping among the bright packages. WordPerfect, PageMaker, Lotus, dBaseIII, Donkey Kong. Hmmmmm. From time to time a package was scooped up into his long slim fingers and stowed away in the special pocket in the back of his pea coat, and then he would move on, humming, eyes darting over the available wares. The exhibit lights left on all night in the store gave him just enough illumination to study the possibilities and make his choices. And shopping three hours after the store had closed was the sure way to avoid crowds.

Blip-blip-blip. The faint jingling sound, like Tinkerbell clearing her throat, came from the left side of Kelp’s bulky pea coat. Reaching in there, he withdrew a cellular phone, extended its antenna, and whispered into its mouthpiece, “Hello?”

A suspicious and bewildered but familiar voice said, “Who’s that?”

“John?” Kelp whispered. “Is that you?”

“What’s goin on?” demanded Dortmunder’s voice, getting belligerent. “Who is that there?”

“It’s me, John,” Kelp whispered. “It’s Andy.”

“What? Who is that?”

“It’s Andy,” Kelp whispered hoarsely, lips against the mouthpiece. “Andy Kelp.”

“Andy? Is that you?”

“Yes, John, yes.”

“Well, what are you whispering about? You got laryngitis?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Then stop whispering.”

“The fact of the matter is, John,” Kelp whispered, hunkering low over the phone, “I’m robbing a store at the moment.”

“You’re what?”

“Ssssshhhhhhh, John,” Kelp whispered. “Sssshhhhhh.”

In a more normal voice, Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I get it. I called you at home, but you aren’t home. You’ve done one of your phone gizmo things.”

“That’s right,” Kelp agreed. “I put the phone-ahead gizmo on my phone at home to transfer my calls to my cellular phone so I wouldn’t miss any calls—like this one from you, right now—while I was out, and I brought the cellular phone along with me.”

“To rob a store.”

“That’s right. And that’s what I’m doing right this minute, John, and to tell you the truth I’d like to get on with it.”

“Okay,” Dortmunder said. “If you’re busy—”

“I’m not busy forever, John,” Kelp said, forgetting to whisper. “You got something? You gonna meet with the guys at the OJ?” He was remembering to whisper again now.

“No,” Dortmunder said. “Not yet, anyway. Not until I figure the thing out.”

“There’s problems?” In his eagerness, Kelp’s whisper went up into the treble ranges, becoming very sibilant. “You want me to drop over there when I’m done, we can talk about it?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, and then he sighed, and then he said, “Yeah. Come on over. If you feel like it.”

“Sure I feel like it,” Kelp whispered, in falsetto. “You know me, John.”

“Yeah, I do,” Dortmunder said. “But come on over anyway.” And he hung up.

“Right, John,” Kelp whispered into the dead phone. Then, retracting his antenna, putting the phone away in its special pocket inside his pea coat, he looked around again at the various counters and shelves and product displays here inside Serious Business, that being the name of the store. Most of the exhibit lighting was in pastel neon, giving the place a fairytale quality of pink and light blue and pale green, washing faint color onto the gray industrial carpet and off-white shelves. In the fifteen minutes since effecting entry in here via the men’s room of the coffee shop next door, a window to the basement of this building and a brief squirm through an air-conditioning duct (pushing his pea coat ahead of himself), Kelp had pretty well browsed completely among all the treasures available here. Time to call it a night, probably.

John should have a personal computer, Kelp thought, but even as he thought it, he knew just how hard a sell John was likely to be. Tough to get him to accept anything new; like his attitude toward telephones, for instance.

But a personal computer, a good PC of your very own, that was something else. That was a tool, as useful, indeed as necessary, as a Toast-R-Oven. Wandering back over to the software displays, Kelp picked up a copy of Managing Your Money. Surely, even John would be able to see the advantage in a program like that. If he seemed at all interested, they could go out together tomorrow, or maybe even later tonight, and shop for a PC and a printer and a mouse. Maybe come back here, in fact. Kelp, so far, had enjoyed doing business with Serious Business.

SEVEN

May brought in three more beers and they popped the ring opener on the cans: Pop. Pop. Splop. “Well, hell,” said Dortmunder.

“Oh, John, that’s too bad,” May said. “Should I get a towel?”

“Naw, that’s okay, it didn’t spill much,” Dortmunder told her, and turned to Kelp to say, “Well? Whadaya think?”

“Hmmmm,” Kelp said, and swigged beer. Then he said, “If it isn’t bad manners to ask, John, what was this pal of yours in for?”

“He’s not my pal.”

“Sorry. Ex-cellmate of yours. What was he in for, do you know?”

Dortmunder drank beer, thinking back. “As I remember it,” he said, “it was murder, armed robbery, and arson.”

Kelp looked surprised: “All at once?”

“He wanted a diversion while he pulled the job,” Dortmunder said, “so he torched the firehouse.”

“A direct sort of a fella,” Kelp said, nodding.

May said, “Like with this dam.”

Kelp nodded, thinking, frowning. “You see, John,” he said, “I don’t really follow how you’re involved here. The guy says come help me blow up a dam, you say I don’t want to kill a lot of people in their beds, you say good-bye to each other.”

“He’ll find somebody else,” Dortmunder said.

“But isn’t that up to him?”

“John doesn’t see it like that,” May said, “and I agree with him.”

Dortmunder finished his beer. “I know,” he admitted. “It ought to be that way; I say no and it’s done with. But I just have this feeling, there’s got to be some way to get at that money without killing everybody in upstate New York.”

“And?”

Dortmunder frowned so massively he looked like a plowed field. “This is gonna sound egotistical,” he said.

“Go for it,” Kelp advised.

“Well, it’s just I think, if there’s any way at all to get to that money without emptying the reservoir, I’m the guy who should think of it.”

“The only one who could, you mean,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder didn’t want to go quite that far in his egotism: “The only one who’d put in the effort,” he amended.

Kelp nodded, accepting that. “And what have you come up with so far?”

“Well, nothing,” Dortmunder admitted. “But this is still the first day I’m on this thing, you know.”

“That’s true.” Kelp sloshed beer in his can. “You could tunnel, maybe,” he said.

Dortmunder looked at him. “Through water?”

“No, no,” Kelp said, shaking both the beer can and his head. “I don’t think there’s a way to do that, really. Tunnel through water. I meant you start on shore, near the water. You tunnel straight down until you’re lower than the bottom of the reservoir, and then you turn and tunnel across to this casket, or box, or whatever it is.”

“Dig a tunnel,” Dortmunder echoed, “under a reservoir. Crawl back and forth in this tunnel in the dirt under this reservoir.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” Kelp agreed. “I do get kind of a sinus headache just thinking about it.”

“Also,” Dortmunder said, “how do you aim this tunnel? Somewhere out there under that reservoir is a casket. What is it, seven feet long? Three feet wide, a couple feet high. And you gotta go right to it. You can’t go above it, you can’t go below it, you can’t miss it to the left or the right.”

May said, “You particularly can’t go above it.”

“That’s the sinus headache part,” Dortmunder told her, and to Kelp he said, “It’s too small a target, Andy, and too far away.”

“Well, you know,” Kelp said thoughtfully, “this kind of connects in with something I meant to talk to you about anyway.” Casually glancing around the living room, he said, “You don’t have a PC yet, do you?”

Dortmunder bristled. He didn’t know what this was going to turn out to be, but already he knew he didn’t like it. “What’s that?” he demanded. “Another one of your phone gizmos?”

“No, no, John,” Kelp assured him. “Nothing to do with phones. It’s a personal computer, and it just may be the solution to our problem here.”

Dortmunder stared at him with loathing. “Personal computer? Andy, what are you up to now?”

“Let me explain this, John,” Kelp said. “It’s a very simple thing, really, you’re gonna love it.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

“There must be maps,” Kelp said, “old maps from before the reservoir was put in. We use those to do a program for the computer, see, and it makes a model of the valley. Your pal shows us—”

“He’s not my pal,” Dortmunder said.

“Right,” Kelp agreed. “Your ex-cellmate shows us—”

Dortmunder said, “Why don’t you just call him Tom?”

“Well, I don’t really know the guy,” Kelp said. “Listen, can I describe this thing to you?”

“Go right ahead,” Dortmunder said.

“The maps I’m talking about,” Kelp explained, “I don’t mean your gas station road maps, I mean those ones with the lines, the whatchacallit.”

“Topographical,” May said.

“That’s it,” Kelp said. “Thanks, May.”

Dortmunder stared at her. “How come you know that?”

“Why not?” she asked him.

Kelp said, “I’m trying to explain this.”

“Right, right,” Dortmunder said. “Go right ahead.”

“So the computer,” Kelp said, “makes a model of the valley from before the water went in, with the towns and the buildings and everything, and we can turn the model any way we want—”

“What model?” Dortmunder demanded. He was getting lost here, and that made him mad. “You wanna make like a model train set? What is this?”

“The model in the computer,” Kelp told him. “You see it on your screen.”

“The television, you mean.”

“Very like television, yes,” Kelp agreed. “And it’s this detailed three-dimensional model, and you can turn it around and tilt it different ways—”

“Sounds like fun,” Dortmunder said acidly.

“And,” Kelp insisted, “you can blow up part of it bigger, to get the details and all, and then your, uh, this, uh, this fella who buried it, he shows us on the model where he buried the box, and then we input the reservoir and—”

“You what?”

“Input the reservoir,” Kelp repeated, unhelpfully, but then he added, “Our first model in the program is the valley from when the towns were there. So we can pinpoint the box. Then we tell the PC about the reservoir, and put in the dam, and fill the water in, and probably tell it how much water weighs and all that, so it can tell us what might be different down there at the bottom now.” A shadow of doubt crossed Kelp’s eager face. “There’s a lot of data we’re gonna have to get,” he said, “if we’re gonna do this right. Guy-go, you know.”

“No,” Dortmunder told him. “Guy-go I don’t know.”

“You never heard that expression?” Kelp was astonished.

“May probably did.”

“No, I don’t think so,” May said.

“Guy-go,” Kelp repeated, then spelled it. “G, I, G, O. It means ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out.’ ”

“That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

“It means,” Kelp amplified, “the computer’s only as smart as what you tell it. If you give it wrong information, it’ll give you wrong information back.”

“I’m beginning to see,” Dortmunder said. “This is a machine that doesn’t know anything until I tell it something, and if I tell it wrong it believes me.”

“That’s about it, yes,” Kelp agreed.

“So this machine of yours,” Dortmunder said, “needs me a lot more than I need it.”

“Now, there you go, being negative again,” Kelp complained.

May said, “John, let Andy finish about this. Maybe it will help.”

“I’m just sitting here,” Dortmunder said, and tried to drink from an empty beer can. “I’m sitting here listening, not making any trouble.”

“I’ll get more beer,” May decided.

As she got to her feet, Kelp said, “I’ll wait for you to come back.”

“Thank you, Andy.”

While May was out of the room, Kelp said, “Actually, if we could work this out, that’s a lot of money.”

“It is,” Dortmunder agreed.

“I’m not saying necessarily a tunnel,” Kelp said, “but whatever, probably wouldn’t take a lot of guys. Your old—This, uh, guy, he’s seventy years old, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“How strong is he?”

“Very.”

“Well, that’s fine,” Kelp said. “So he can carry his weight. Then you and me. And a driver, probably.”

“Absolutely,” Dortmunder said. “I drove up there once already. That’s enough. We’ll call Stan Murch, if it looks like we’ve got something.”

“And maybe Tiny Bulcher, for the lifting and the moving around,” Kelp suggested as May came back with three more beers. “Thanks, May.”

May said to Dortmunder, “I already opened yours, John.”

“Thanks.”

“You know,” Kelp said, popping open his beer can with casual skill, “your old— This guy, uh…”

“Tom,” Dortmunder said. “His name is Tom.”

“Well, I’ll try it,” Kelp said. “Tom. This Tom sounds a lot like Tiny. In fact, I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

Dortmunder muttered, “Better you than me.”

“Anyhoo,” Kelp said, “we were talking about the PC.”

Dortmunder looked at him. “ ‘Anyhoo’?”

“The PC,” Kelp insisted. “Come on, John.”

“Okay, okay.”

“It’s true,” Kelp said, “we have to get a lot of information to put into the computer, but that’s nothing different. You always want the best information you can get anyway, in any job. That’s the way you work.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

“And when we put it all in the computer,” Kelp told him, “then we say to it, ‘Plot us out the best route for the tunnel.’ And then we follow that route, and it takes us right to the box.”

“Sounds easy,” May said.

“Whenever things sound easy,” Dortmunder said, “it turns out there’s one part you didn’t hear.”

“Could be,” Kelp said, unruffled. “Could be, we’ll give the model to the computer and ask it about the tunnel, and it’ll say the tunnel doesn’t work, too much water around, too much mud, too far to go, whatever.”

“Be sure to put all that last part in,” Dortmunder told him, “when you’re putting in the rest of the garbage.”

“We’re not going to put garbage in,” Kelp corrected him. “We’re going to input quality data, John, believe me. In fact,” he said, suddenly even more peppy and enthusiastic, “I know just the guy to work with on this program.”

“Somebody else?” Dortmunder asked him. “One of us?”

Kelp shook his head. “Wally’s a computer freak,” he explained. “I won’t tell him what we’re trying for, I’ll just give it to him like as a computer problem.”

“Do I know this Wally?”

“No, John,” Kelp said, “you don’t travel in the same circles. Wally’s kind of offbeat. He can only communicate by keyboard.”

“And what if he communicates by keyboard with the law?”

“No, I’m telling you that’s all right,” Kelp insisted. “Wally’s a very unworldly guy. And he’ll save us weeks on this thing.”

“Weeks?” Dortmunder said, startled. “How long is this gonna take?”

“Just a few days,” Kelp promised. “With Wally aboard, just a very few days.”

“Because,” Dortmunder pointed out, “until we have this figured out, we have Tom Jimson living here.”

“That’s right,” May said.

“And if he decides to stop living here,” Dortmunder went on, “it’s because he’s gone back upstate to make a flood.”

“The Jimson flood,” said a cold voice from the doorway. They all looked up, and there was Tom, as cold and gray as ever, standing in the doorway and looking from face to face. A wrinkle in his own face might have been intended as an ironic smile. “Sounds like an old folk song,” he said, his lips not moving. “ ‘The Famous Jimson Flood.’ ”

“I think that was Jamestown,” Kelp said.

Tom considered that, and considered Kelp, too. “You may be right,” he decided, and turned to Dortmunder. “You spreading my business around, Al?”

Getting to his feet, Dortmunder said, “Tom Jimson, this is Andy Kelp. Andy and I work together.”

Tom nodded, and looked Kelp up and down. “So you’re gonna help me realize my dream of retirement,” he said.

Kelp grinned; he acted as though he liked Tom Jimson. Still comfortably sprawled on the sofa, “That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “John and May and me, we’ve been talking about different approaches, different ways to do things.”

“Dynamite’s very sure,” Tom told him.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Kelp said. “That water’s been in place there twenty years, more or less. What happens when you make a sudden tidal wave out of it? Think it might roil up the bottom, maybe mess things up down there, make it harder to find that box of yours?”

Dortmunder, standing there in the middle of the room like somebody waiting for a bus, now turned and gazed on Andy Kelp with new respect. “I never thought of that,” he said.

“I did,” Tom said. “The way I figure to blow that dam, you won’t have no tidal wave. At least, not up in the reservoir. Down below there, in East Dudson and Dudson Center and Dudson Falls, down there you might have yourself a tidal wave, but we don’t give a shit about that, now, do we?”

No one saw any reason to answer that. May, also getting to her feet, standing beside Dortmunder like an early sketch for Grant Wood’s Urban Gothic (abandoned), said, “Would you like a beer, Tom?”

“No,” Tom said. “I’m used to regular hours. Good night.”

Kelp, still with his amiable smile, said, “You off to bed?”

“Not till you get up from it,” Tom told him, and stood there looking at Kelp.

Who finally caught on: “Oh, you sleep here,” he said, whapping his palm against the sofa cushion beside him.

“Yeah, I do,” Tom agreed, and went on looking at Kelp.

May said, “Let me get you sheets and a pillowcase.”

“Don’t need them,” Tom said as Kelp slowly unwound himself and got to his feet, still smiling, casually holding his beer can.

“Well, you need something,” May insisted.

“A blanket,” he told her. “And a towel for the morning.”

“Coming up,” May said, and left the room, with alacrity.

“Well,” Dortmunder said, having trouble exiting, “see you in the morning.”

“That’s right,” Tom said.

“Nice to meet you,” Kelp said.

Tom paid no attention to that. Crossing to the sofa, he moved the coffee table off to one side, then yawned and started taking wads of bank-banded bills out of his various pockets, dropping them on the coffee table. Dortmunder and Kelp exchanged a glance.

May came back in, gave the money on the moved coffee table a look, and put an old moth-eaten tan blanket and a pretty good Holiday Inn towel on the sofa. “Here you are,” she said.

“Thanks,” Tom said. He put a.32 Smith & Wesson Terrier on the coffee table with the money, then switched off the floor lamp at one end of the sofa and turned to look at the other three.

“Good night, Tom,” Dortmunder said.

But Tom was finished being polite for today. He stood there and looked at them, and they turned and went out to the hall, May closing the door behind them.

Murmuring, not quite whispering, Dortmunder said to Kelp, “You wanna come out to the kitchen?”

“No, thanks,” Kelp whispered. “I’ll call you in the morning after I talk to Wally.”

“Good night, Andy,” May said. “Thanks for helping.”

“I didn’t do anything yet,” Kelp pointed out as he opened the closet door and took out his bulky heavy pea coat. Grinning at Dortmunder, he said, “But the old PC and me, we’ll do what we can.”

“Mm,” said Dortmunder.

As Kelp turned toward the front door, the living room door opened and Tom stuck his gray head out. “Tunnel won’t work,” he said, and withdrew his head and shut the door.

The three looked wide-eyed at one another. They moved away in a group to huddle together by the front door, as far as possible from the living room. May whispered, “How long was he listening?”

Dortmunder whispered, “We’ll never know.”

Kelp rolled his eyes at that and whispered, “Let’s hope we’ll never know. Talk to you tomorrow.”

He left, and Dortmunder started attaching all the locks to the front door. Then he stopped and looked at his hands, and looked at the locks, and whispered, “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

EIGHT

You roll aside the two giant boulders and the tree trunk. You find the entrance to a cave, covered by a furry hide curtain. You thrust this aside and see before you the lair of the Thousand-Toothed Ogre.

Wally Knurr wiped sweat from his brow. Careful, now; this could be a trap. Fat fingers tense over the keyboard, he spat out:

Describe this lair.

A forty-foot cube with a domed ceiling. The rock walls have been fused into black ice by the molten breath of the Nether Dragon. On fur-covered couches loll a half-dozen well-armed Lizard Men, members of the Sultan’s Personal Guard. Against the far wall, Princess Labia is tied to a giant wheel, slowly rotating.

Are the Lizard Men my enemies?

Not in this encounter.

Are the Lizard Men my allies?

Only if you show them the proper authorization.

Hmmm, Wally thought. I’ll have to do a personal inventory soon, I’m not sure how much junk I’ve accumulated. But first, the question is, do I enter this damn cave? Well, I’ve got to, sooner or later. I can’t go back down through the Valley of Sereness, and there’s nothing farther up this mountain. But let’s not just leap in here. Eyes burning, shoulders rigid, he typed:

Do I still have my Sword of Fire and Ice?

Yes.

I thrust it into the cave entrance, slicing up and down from top to bottom, and also from side to side.

Iron arrows shoot from concealed tubes on both sides of the entrance. Hitting nothing but the opposite wall, they fall to the ground.

Aha, Wally thought, just what I figured. Okay, Ogre, here I come.

Enter

Bzzzzzztt.

Doorbell. Drat. Is it that late? Leaving Princess Labia to twist slowly slowly in the lair, Wally ran his fingers like a trained-dog act in fast forward over the keyboard, changing the menu, bringing up the current Eastern Daylight Time—

15:30

— and his appointment book for today, which was blank except for the notation: 15:30—Andy Kelp and his friend to view the reservoir. Oh, well, that could be fun, too.

Lifting his hands from the keyboard, withdrawing his eyes from the video display, pushing his swivel chair back from the system desk, and getting to his feet, Wally felt the usual aches all through his shoulders and neck and lower back. The pains of battle, of intense concentration for hours at a time, of occasional victory and sudden crushing defeat, were familiar to him, and he bore them without complaint; in fact, with a kind of quiet pride. He could stand up to it.

At twenty-four, Wally Knurr was well on his way to becoming a character in one of his own interactive fictions. (He wrote them as well as consuming them, and so far had sold two of his creations: Mist Maidens of Morg to Astral Rainbow Productions, Mill Valley, California; and Centaur! to Futurogical Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts.) A round soft creature as milky white as vanilla yogurt, Wally was four feet six inches tall and weighed 285 pounds, very little of it muscle. His eagerly melting eyes, like blue-yolked soft-boiled eggs, blinked trustingly through thick spectacles, and the only other bit of color about him was the moist red of his far-too-generous mouth. While his brain was without doubt a wonderful contrivance, even more wonderful than the several computer systems filling this living room, its case was not top quality.

From infancy, Wally Knurr had known his physical appearance was outside the usual spectrum of facades found acceptable by the majority of people. Most of us can find some corner of the planet where our visages fit more or less compatibly with the local array of humankind, but for Wally the only faint hope was space travel; perhaps elsewhere in the solar system he would find short, fat, moist creatures like himself. In the meantime, his was a life of solitude, as though he’d been marooned on Earth rather than born here. Most people looked at him, thought, “funny-looking,” and went on about their business.

It was while doing a part-time stint as a salesman in the electronics department at Macy’s as a Christmas season extra four years ago that Wally had at last found his great love and personal salvation: the personal computer. You could play games on it. You could play math games on it. You could talk to it, and it would talk back. It was a friend you could plug in, and it would stay at home with you. You could do serious things with it and frivolous things with it. You could store and retrieve, you could compose music, commit architectural renderings, and balance your checkbook. You could desktop publish. Through the wonders of interactive fiction, you could take part in pulp stories. To Wally, the personal computer became the universe, and he was that universe’s life form. And in there, he didn’t look funny.

At the New School, where Wally had once taken a basic course in computers, he now sometimes taught a more advanced course in the same thing, and it was in that course he first met an enthusiast as open to the possibilities of this new marvel of the age as himself. The fellow’s name was Andy Kelp, and Wally was delighted they’d met. In the first place, Andy was the only person he knew who was willing to talk computer talk as long and as steadily as Wally himself. In the second place, Andy was one of those rare people who didn’t seem to notice that Wally looked funny. And in the third place, Andy was incredibly generous; just mention a new piece of software, a program, a game, a new printer, anything, and the first thing you knew here was Andy, carrying it, bringing it into Wally’s apartment, saying, “No, don’t worry about it. I get a special deal.” Wally had no idea what Andy did for a living, but it must be something really lucrative.

Five days earlier, Andy had brought him this problem of the reservoir and the ring—just like an episode in interactive fiction! — and he’d leaped to the challenge. Andy gave him before and after topographical maps of the territory, and Wally’s software already included a number of useful informational programs—weights and measures, physical properties, encyclopedia entries, things like that—and all he had to do to get whatever other software he needed was to look it up in the manufacturer’s catalogue, give Andy the name and stock number, and the next day there Andy would be, grinning as he took the fresh package out of that amazing many-pocketed pea coat of his. (Wally had been trying recently to figure out how to make an interactive fiction out of a journey through that pea coat.)

In any event, late last night Wally had finished the reservoir program and was really quite pleased with it. Andy had already told him, “Call me any time, day or night. If I’m asleep or not around, the machine’ll take it,” so Wally had phoned the instant the program was ready, expecting to leave a message on the machine. But Andy himself had answered the call, whispering because, as he said, “My cat’s asleep.”

Andy had been very pleased to hear the reservoir program was ready and had wanted to come over and see it as soon as possible. Wally himself, of course, was available at any time, so it was Andy’s own complicated schedule that had kept him away until three-thirty this afternoon. “I’ll be bringing a couple of pals of mine,” he’d said. “They’re very interested in this project. From a theoretical point of view.” So this would be him. Them.

Nice. Wally buzzed his guests in through the downstairs door, and went off to get the cheese and crackers.

NINE

Dortmunder and Tom followed Kelp up the dingy metal stairs three flights to a battered metal door, where Kelp cheerily poked another bell button. Looking at the scars and dents on the door, Tom said, “Why do people bother breakin into a place like this?”

“Maybe they forgot their keys,” Kelp suggested, and the door opened, and one of the Seven Dwarfs looked out. Well, no; a previously unknown Eighth Dwarf: Fatty.

“Come on in,” Fatty said, smiling wetly in welcome and gesturing them in with a stubby-fingered hand at the end of a stubby arm.

They went on in, and Kelp said, “Wally Knurr, these are my pals John and Tom.”

“Nice to meet you,” Fatty said. (No; Wally said. If I think of him as Fatty, Dortmunder told himself, sooner or later I’ll call him Fatty. Sure as anything. The best thing is, get rid of the risk right now.)

Wally’s living room looked like a discount dealer’s repair department, with display terminals and printers and keyboards and memory units and floppy disks all over the place, sitting on tables, on wooden chairs, on windowsills, on the floor. One little space had not as yet been invaded, this space containing a sofa, a couple of mismatched chairs, a couple of lamps, and a coffee table with a tray of cheese and crackers on it. Pointing to this latter, Wally said, “I put out some cheese and crackers here. Would you all like a Coke? Beer?”

“I want,” Tom Jimson told him, “to see this reservoir thing you did.”

Wally blinked, undergoing the normal human reaction to the presence of Tom Jimson, and Kelp moved in smoothly, saying, “We’re all excited to see this, Wally. We’ll sit around afterward, okay? I mean, to do all this in five days. Wow, Wally.”

Wally ducked his head, giggling with embarrassed pleasure. Looking at him, Dortmunder wondered just how old the little guy was. In some ways he was a grown-up, if not very far up, but in other ways be was like a grade-school kid. However old he was, though, Kelp sure knew how to handle him, because Wally immediately forgot all about his cheese and crackers and said, “Oh, sure, of course you want to see that. Come on.”

He led them across to a complete PC system on its own desk, with a worn-looking cushioned swivel chair in front. Seating himself at this, he massaged his pudgy fingers together for an instant, like a concert pianist, and then began to play the machine.

Jesus, that was something. Dortmunder had never seen anything like it, not even at a travel agency. The little man hunched over the keyboard, eyes fixed on the screen while his fingers led their own existence down below, poking, sliding, jumping, tap-dancing over the keys. And after a preliminary few displays of columns of numbers, or of masses of words that went by too fast to be read, here came a picture.

The valley. The valley as it was before the dam was built, seen from just above the highest hilltop to its south. The picture wasn’t realistic, was very cartoony, with dividing lines that were too regular and right-angled, perspective that was just a little off, and all primary colors (mostly green), but it was damn effective anyway. You looked at that TV screen and you knew you were looking at an actual valley from the air. “Hmm,” Dortmunder said.

“Now, your town,” Wally said, his sausage fingers moving on the keys, “was Putkin’s Corners. The big one.”

“County seat,” Tom said.

Dortmunder, turning his head to look at Tom’s profile, realized that even he was impressed, though, being Tom, he’d rather kill than admit it.

On the screen, the valley was in motion. Or the observer was, moving in closer and lower, the valley turning slightly as they descended, showing squared-off bits of red and yellow that were becoming the buildings of a town. The predominant green of the valley made no effort to imitate trees, but was simply a green carpet with topographical markings faintly visible on it.

I’ve seen this kind of thing on television, Dortmunder thought, as the screen showed the town growing larger and larger, the buildings all turning slowly at once as the perspective altered. As though they were in a cartoon helicopter over this cartoon landscape, circling lower, coming in on the town from above.

“That’s pretty much what it looked like, all right,” Tom said. “Only cleaner.”

Keeping eyes on the screen and fingers on the keys, Wally explained, “I input photographs from the local newspaper. I think I got just about everything we need in your part of town. You’re the one who hid the treasure, I bet.”

Tom, cold eyes flashing, said, “Treasure?”

Smiling easily, Kelp said, “You remember, Tom. The treasure hunt.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tom said.

Kelp had explained his scam before they’d come here. The idea was, an unnamed friend of Kelp’s—now revealed to Wally as Tom Jimson—had been involved in a treasure hunt with friends in upstate New York years and years ago and had buried a clue to the treasure in that spot behind the library. The treasure hunt was completed and the treasure itself found, but nobody had come up with that one clue, which was forgotten all about at the time.

Soon afterward, as the yarn went, Tom had gone away—cough, cough—and had not been back to this part of the world for many years. On his recent return, finding the reservoir now in place where Putkin’s Corners had once stood, Tom had remembered that unfound clue—a valuable diamond ring around a rolled sheet of cryptic doggerel poetry hidden in a box—and was amused (Tom Jimson! Amused!) at the idea of its still being hidden there, beneath so much water.

When Tom had told Kelp the anecdote of the buried clue, as Kelp’s cover story continued, Kelp had bet him that the new wonder of the time, the PC—our age’s genie-out-of-the-bottle—could show how the clue might be salvaged. Tom had accepted the bet, with a two-week time limit to come up with a solution. If Kelp—and Wally—solved the problem, and the diamond ring was actually salvaged from its watery grave, Tom would sell it and share the proceeds with Kelp, who would share with Wally. If Kelp—and Wally—failed, Kelp alone would have to pay Tom an unspecified but probably pretty substantial sum of money. Before accepting the bet, Kelp had talked it over with Wally, who had assured him the PC was every bit as magical and useful as Kelp believed. In fact, Wally had volunteered (as Kelp had expected he would) to do the reservoir program himself. And so here they all were.

In a cartoon helicopter hovering over a cartoon town. Wally said, “That’s County Hall, isn’t it?”

“Right,” said Tom. “With the library next to it.”

The cartoon helicopter swooped around the wooden dome of County Hall, and Dortmunder’s stomach did a little lurch, as though he were on a roller coaster. “Take it a little slower, okay?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Wally said, and the cartoon helicopter slowed, hanging in the air over the County Hall dome, looking toward the low red brick library building. “It’s behind that?”

“Right,” said Tom.

Wally’s fingers moved, and so did the cartoon helicopter, approaching the library. “I couldn’t find any photos of that area back there,” Wally explained apologetically, “so I didn’t put any details in. I have the size of the field, though, from surveyor’s plats.”

“It was just a field,” Tom said. “The idea was, they were supposed to blacktop it for a parking lot for the library, but they didn’t.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom? What if they’d changed their mind later? Water; blacktop; you’d still be under something. And they would have dug everything up first before they made a parking lot.”

“I knew somebody at the library,” Tom said, lips not moving and eyes not turning from the terminal screen, where the cartoon helicopter rounded the side of the library building and looked at a blank tan rectangle of field, with the backs of stores across the way. “She told me,” he went on, “they gave up the parking lot idea. Spent the money on books.”

“Huh,” Dortmunder said. “All of it?”

Wally, hovering his helicopter over the expanse of blank tan, said, “Do you know exactly where the clue was buried?”

“I can show you,” Tom said, “if you put in the streetlights.”

“I put in everything,” Wally told him, “that was in the photos.”

“Okay, then. There’s one spot back there where you can’t see any of the three streetlights. The one next to the library, the one in front of County Hall, and the one on the other block by the stores.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Wally said, and eased the helicopter down onto the tan field for a landing, where it swiveled upward over a span of ninety degrees and altered itself into the eyes of a person standing on the field, looking at the rear of the library. Wally’s fingers moved, and the person turned slightly to the right to look past the library toward County Hall.

“There’s the streetlight,” Tom said. “Move forward a little.”

The person did, at Wally’s direction, and the thin pole of the streetlight—a cartoon streetlight, just sketched in—disappeared behind the corner of the library.

“This is some goddamn piece of work,” Tom said, leaning closer over Wally’s head. “Let’s take a look to the left.” The angle of vision moved leftward, past the library. “Good,” Tom said. “No streetlight. Now the other way.”

The person in the field turned all the way around, buildings sliding past in distorted perspective, as in a funhouse mirror, while Dortmunder’s stomach did that lurch again. And there was the low row of stores, facing the other way, and between two of them appeared another stick-figure streetlight.

His grim voice hushed, Tom said, “Back up a little, and to the right.”

Wally did it. The stores shifted; the streetlight disappeared.

“Right there!” Tom crowed, his mouth all the way open for once. “Right goddamn there!”

TEN

“Was I right?” Kelp demanded, grinning from ear to ear as he and Dortmunder and Tom Jimson walked east on West Forty-fifth Street, away from Wally Knurr’s decrepit apartment building—loft building, really, semiconverted to human use—half a block from the river. “Was I right? Is Wally the genius we wanted?”

“He says,” Tom Jimson answered, his thin lips immobile, “the tunnel won’t work.”

“I know that, I know that,” Kelp admitted, brushing it aside, or at least trying to brush it aside. “That isn’t the—”

“Them graphics looked pretty good,” Tom Jimson added, nodding with satisfaction.

The graphics, as a matter of fact, had looked far too graphic. Wally, his fingers scampering like escaped sausages over the keys, had described to them how he’d presented the salvage operation problem to the computer, and how he’d input the tunnel option, and then he’d shown them what the computer thought of the various potential tunnel routes.

Not much. In beautiful blue and brown and green, the computer thought the routes were watery graves, every last one of them. Down would angle the tunnel, a beige tube eating its way into existence through the milk chocolate beneath and beside the baby-blanket-blue cross-section of the reservoir, inching cautiously but hungrily toward that tiny black cube of “treasure” placed just beneath the center of the blue mass like an abandoned novel under a fat man in a blue canvas chair, and sooner or later, at some horrible point in the trajectory, a crack would appear above the tunnel, a fissure, a seam, a funnel-shaped crevice, a swiftly broadening yawn, and in no time at all that ecru esophagus would fill right up with blue.

At that point, despite himself, Kelp’s throat would close. Every time. Which had made it difficult to take much part in the immediately ensuing conversation about non-tunnel alternatives, so that it was only now he could say, casually, throwing it away, “Forget the tunnel. The tunnel was never a big deal. That was just to feed the old creative juices, get us thinking about ways that will work.”

“Like,” said Tom Jimson.

“Like we’ll find it,” Kelp assured him. “We didn’t come up with anything yet, that’s perfectly true, but old Wally and his computer, they’ll—”

“Hmp,” said Dortmunder.

Whoops; another precinct heard from. They had just stopped at the curb at Eleventh Avenue to wait for the light to change, so Kelp leaned forward to look past the stone outcropping of Tom Jimson’s face at the rubble outcropping of Dortmunder’s face, and what he saw there told him his old friend John was not entirely happy. “John?” Kelp said. “What’s the problem?”

“Nothing,” Dortmunder said, and stepped out in front of a cab that, up till then, had thought it was going to beat the light. As the cabby stuck his head out his side window and began to make loud remarks, Kelp and Tom Jimson stepped off the curb after Dortmunder, Tom pausing to look at the cabby, who at once decided he’d made his point and, with dignity, retracted his head back inside his vehicle.

Meantime, Kelp, pursuing Dortmunder, said, “John? I don’t get it. What’s wrong?”

Dortmunder muttered something. Kelp hurried to overtake him and heard the last part: “—was the planner.”

“The planner?” Kelp echoed. “Yeah? What about it?”

Reaching the far corner, Dortmunder turned and said it all over again, out loud: “I was always under the impression, myself, that I was the planner.”

“Well, sure you are, John,” Kelp said, as Tom Jimson joined them and they resumed their walk east. “Sure you’re the planner. None better.” Kelp even appealed to Tom: “Isn’t that right?”

“That’s his rep,” Tom agreed.

“I’ve put together a lot of jobs in my time,” Dortmunder said.

“Of course you have, John,” Kelp said.

“Sometimes things go wrong, a little wrong,” Dortmunder said. “I freely admit that.”

“Luck, pure luck,” Kelp assured him.

“But the plan is good,” Dortmunder insisted. “I defy you, show me once when I put together a string of events that wasn’t the best when it comes to you get in, you get the goods, you get out.”

“I can’t,” Kelp admitted. “You win that one, John, I can’t come up with even one.”

“And all without a computer,” Dortmunder finished, with heavy emphasis.

“John, John,” Kelp said, while Tom looked a little confused by this turn of events, “the computer doesn’t take your place, John. The computer’s a tool, that’s all, like a pair of pliers, like a jimmy, a lockpick, a, a, a…”

“Over-and-under shotgun,” Tom suggested.

“Okay,” Kelp said, though reluctantly. “A tool,” he repeated to Dortmunder. “There’s some safes, you know? You drill a little hole next to the combination, you know the kind?”

“I know the kind,” Dortmunder agreed, though still stony-faced.

“Well, the drill,” Kelp said, “the drill doesn’t take your place, John, it’s just an aid, kind of. I mean, it’s easier than poking a hole through a half inch of steel with your finger, that’s all.”

“Back there right now,” Dortmunder said, “where we just came from, this drill of yours with the TV screen attached to it is thinking up plans.”

“For your consideration, John,” Kelp said. “For you to say yes or no. You’re the guy in charge.”

“In charge of what? A machine and a guy that isn’t even on the inside, this Wally of yours that we can’t even trust with the right story.”

“Oh, you can trust Wally,” Kelp assured him. “You can trust Wally to be very involved in the problem, and not worry his little soft head about what’s going on in the real world at all.”

“He better not,” Tom said.

“I’m the guy who does the plan,” Dortmunder insisted.

They were at Tenth Avenue already; you walk faster when you’re arguing. Stopping, waiting for the light to change, they all took a little breather, and then Tom said, “So we’re ahead, right? We got three people doin plans, so that’s even more chance to come up with the right one.”

Kelp, convinced there were quagmires ahead, but unable to keep from following the trail Tom had just indicated, said, “Three people, Tom?”

“Well, two people and a thing,” Tom amended. “Al here’s gonna think about plans—”

“You’re damn right I am,” Dortmunder said.

“And your little round fella’s machine is gonna think about plans—”

“Hmph,” said Dortmunder.

“And, of course, there’s me,” Tom said with an almost pleasant look. “But I’ve already got my plan.”

“That’s right,” Kelp said with a meaningful look at Dortmunder. “Wally and his computer aren’t the problem, John,” he said.

ELEVEN

The one called Tom was angry when I said I knew he was the one who hid the treasure. Comment.

A secret is revealed.

But why is it a secret? The treasure is hidden, but it isn’t a secret. Comment.

Tom plus treasure is the secret.

That’s right. So it matters to Tom that he has a secret. Comment.

One secret means more secrets.

Tom is a man with many secrets. Also, Andy and the one called John were both afraid of Tom, but they tried to hide that. Comment.

Tom is the warlord.

Does Andy work for Tom?

The warlord stays in his castle, surrounded by his minions.

Are Andy and John minions?

Yes.

What are the roles of minions?

Guard. Soldier. Knight. Spy.

So Andy is a knight, employed by Tom. Andy does knight errands for Tom. Andy is a knight-errand. What of John?

John is the spy.

No. The characteristic of spies is that they look trustworthy but are not. John does not look trustworthy. Comment.

Tom is the warlord. Andy is the knight. There is nothing to guard, so John is the soldier.

But what do they want?

The treasure beneath the water.

The cascade of doom, yes. But why do they want it? What is it?

More information is necessary.

They changed the description of the treasure when we needed precision for the tunnel models. First it was a small box, one foot per side, containing a ring. Then it was a large box, eight feet long, three feet wide, three feet high. The second version must be the truth, so the contents must be something other than the ring. What is eight feet by three feet by three feet?

A telephone booth.

No.

A bathtub.

No.

A Zog spaceship.

No.

A refrigerator.

No.

A voting booth.

No.

A coffin.

Yes! The coffin of doom! But what is in the coffin of doom?

A dead person.

No. It isn’t in a cemetery, it’s behind a library. Comment.

A book. The book of the history of the race/planet/encounter.

No. Too big for a book. Comment. What could be in the coffin of doom?

Valuables.

Yes. Valuables hidden before the reservoir was made. What are valuables?

Rubies. The blue rose. The defense plans. Pirate gold. The cloak of invisibility. The kingdom. Bearer bonds. The letters of transit. The princess. The Maltese falcon. The crown jewels. Money.

Yes! Stolen money?

One secret means more secrets.

Tom and Andy and John buried stolen money in the coffin of doom. Then the reservoir was made. Why didn’t they save the coffin of doom before the reservoir was filled?

The warlord was on a journey.

Andy said Tom had been away for a long time, but he didn’t say where. The journey must be for more than eighteen years because the reservoir was made eighteen years ago. What journey takes more than eighteen years?

The return to the planet Zog.

Is that all?

There is no more information on that topic.

There must be something else that takes eighteen years. Comment.

Tom is the warlord.

Comment further.

Tom is not the hero.

No. I am the hero. Comment further.

The hero is put in prison for eighteen years with the magic tablecloth. Every time he spreads the tablecloth, another meal appears on it. But Tom is not the hero. Wally is the hero. Tom is the warlord.

If Tom did not spend those eighteen years returning to the planet Zog, could he have been the prisoner, even though he’s the warlord?

An interesting variant. Possible.

Could Andy and John have been in prison with him?

The knight and the soldier can do nothing without the warlord.

So they didn’t have to be in prison. Only Tom had to be in prison. Comment.

Tom is the warlord.

Tom hid the money in the coffin of doom in the field behind the library more than eighteen years ago. Then Tom went to prison. Then the reservoir was made. Where did Tom get the money that he buried?

The warlord raids the peaceful villages.

Tom stole the money. Then he buried it. Then he went to prison. Then they made the reservoir. Then he came out of prison. Then he asked Andy and John to help him get the money back from under the reservoir. Then Andy asked me to help but didn’t tell me the truth because there are crimes in it. I have helped. I can go on helping. Should I go on helping?

The warlord is dangerous when defied.

So I should go on helping. Is there anything else I should do?

The hero is impregnable. The hero waits and is patient. The hero gains more knowledge. When the hero knows everything, he will know how to proceed.

Wally pushed back from the keyboard. Right. Time to ask the New York Times. Not rising from his wheeled swivel chair, Wally propelled himself diagonally across the room to another table beating another keyboard and terminal, this one his primary contact with the real world.

The word is access, and Wally had it. The computer age could not exist without the telephone lines that tie all the massive brilliant idiot mechanical brains together, and the telephone lines are accessible to us all. To some of us, to a gifted few Wallys among us, the accessibility of the telephone lines means access to the world and all the riches within it. Wally now had the capability to roam at will inside the computers belonging to the Defense Department, United Airlines, American Express, Internal Revenue, Citicorp, Ticketron, Toys-R-Us, Interpol, and many more, including, most significantly at this moment, the New York Times. Tapping into that fact-filled know-it-all, Wally typed out his request for information on all robberies, thefts, burglaries and other illegal removals of cash in Vilburgtown County, New York, beginning eighteen years from the present date and extending backward in time through the twentieth century. Then he sat back and watched an unreeling string of New York Times items on that subject, in reverse chronological order, crawl upward across his terminal at an easy-reading pace.

Vilburgtown County, even before the city of New York drowned it, had been a quiet, peaceful, law-abiding sort of territory. Tom Jimson’s armored car heist on the Thruway stood out against all that rustic quiet like a spaceship from Zog.

TWELVE

What made it the worst for May was the things Tom chose to laugh at on TV. They were never the things other people laughed at—never the things the laugh track, for instance, laughed at—things like people getting confused about who’s supposed to go through the doorway first, things like men with strange pieces of clothing on their heads, things like parrots; never anything normal and predictable like that. No, what Tom laughed at was the soldiers getting blown up by the booby trap, or the one-legged skier vowing not to let his handicap keep him from competing on the slopes, or almost anything on the news.

But what else was May to do with herself? At the end of a long day standing at the supermarket cash register, she wanted to sit down, in her living room, with her television set. She wasn’t going to cower in the kitchen or the bedroom with a lot of old magazines just because this pathological killer happened to be infesting the apartment at the moment.

Actually, if truth be told, under other circumstances May might have found any number of things to keep her occupied in the kitchen during this Jimson siege, but John was out there right now, the kitchen table covered with maps and charts and lists and photos and lined yellow pads and pencils and pens of different colors and compasses and protractors, the floor around John’s and the table’s feet littered with crumpled sheets of yellow paper, the expression on John’s face thunderously intent. Somehow, May wasn’t sure how, it had become some kind of contest, a duel between John and the computer, like those early-nineteenth-century races between a locomotive and a horse, or John Henry trying to beat the spike-driving machine.

Was this a good idea? May was pretty sure it wasn’t.

On the television screen, a lost infant crept up onto the railroad tracks; a distant train whistle was heard. Tom’s nasal chuckle was heard. May sighed, then looked up as the living room doorway filled with the hulk of John, his face the grim picture of a man determined to outrun the hounds of hell. And the locomotive, too, if need be. “Tom,” he said, his voice hoarse, as though he hadn’t spoken in days, maybe weeks.

Tom reluctantly looked away from the infant on the tracks. “Yeah?”

“Those stashes of yours,” John said.

“The ones the lawyers got,” Tom said.

“They didn’t get them all, Tom, did they?” John asked. He asked it as though he really and truly wanted the real and true answer.

May was also reluctant to look away from the baby in peril, for quite different reasons, but she just had to turn her head and observe Tom’s face. And what was that expression? It seemed to be part dyspepsia, part migraine, part the after effects of knockout drops. Showing John this astonishing face, Tom said, “Well, they didn’t get the one under the reservoir, no, that’s why we’re all here.” And May realized this was Tom’s idea of innocence.

Which John wasn’t buying. “There’s others, Tom,” he said. “Maybe not big stashes, but stashes. The lawyers didn’t get them all.”

“They sure tried,” Tom said.

“But they failed, Tom,” John pursued.

Tom sighed. “What is it, Al?” he asked. “What’s the problem here?”

“We may need some equipment,” John told him. “You want to go fifty feet underwater, it’s probably gonna mean you’re gonna need equipment of some kind.”

Tom, his words very careful, his voice sounding as though there were some sort of constriction in his throat, said, “You want me to pay for this equipment?”

“We’ll divvy at the end,” John said, “after we get the big stash, divide the expenses equal. But in front, ahead of time, what do you want to do? Go to somebody that charges a hundred percent interest? You’re not gonna take out a bank loan on this, you know, Tom. Filling in the form would already be a problem.”

“How about a permanent bank loan?” Tom asked, lifting his eyebrows slightly to show he was being a good sport about all this.

“One job at a time, Tom,” John said. “I’ll work with you on this reservoir thing, but I don’t want to go in with you on any bank jobs.”

Tom spread his hands. “You’re above robbing banks, Al? You’ve never spent the bank’s money?”

“We got different ways of doing things, that’s all,” John told him.

“You don’t like my methods, Al?”

John sighed. “Tom,” he said, “they lack…” He looked around, looked at May, looked back at Tom. “Delicacy,” he said.

Tom made that chuckle sound. “Okay, Al. If we got equipment we gotta get, expenses, within reason, you know, I mean, I’m not rich, but maybe I could come up with a little of the necessary here and there.”

“Good,” John said. He nodded at May, as though remembering now she was someone he’d met somewhere once before, and turned away. His feet could be heard thudding back to the kitchen.

May and Tom looked back at the television screen, where now two grown men tried to sell the audience a lot of bad wine mixed with a lot of bad fruit pulp. Tom said, “What happened to the kid?”

“I don’t know,” May admitted.

“Doesn’t matter,” Tom said, sounding disgusted. “On TV, somebody always manages to grab the kid in time. Ever notice that?”

“Yes,” May said.

“That’s just the way they do it,” Tom said. Then, brightening slightly, he said, “Well, of course, there’s still real life.”

THIRTEEN

Dortmunder came back from the library with a copy of Marine Salvage by Joseph N. Gores under his coat. He took it out from his armpit as he walked past the living room doorway and Andy Kelp’s cheerful voice said, “Reading a book, huh? Anything good?”

Dortmunder stopped and looked in at Kelp seated at his ease on the sofa, holding a can of beer. Knowing May was at work at the supermarket and being in something of a bad mood anyway, Dortmunder said, “You just walked right in, huh?”

“No way,” Kelp told him. “Took me at least a minute to get through that lock of yours.”

Unwillingly looking around the room, Dortmunder said, “Where’s Tom?”

“Beats me,” Kelp said. “Somewhere in a coffin of his native earth, I suppose.”

“He doesn’t have a native earth,” Dortmunder said, and walked on to the kitchen, where his work area had overflowed the table and now also covered all but one of the chairs, plus part of the counter space next to the sink. Maps were taped to the wall and the front of the refrigerator, and the crumpled papers under the table were knee deep.

Kelp had trailed Dortmunder into the kitchen. He stood watching as Dortmunder pointedly sat at the messy table and opened Marine Salvage to the facing pictures of the Empress of Canada lying on her side in Liverpool harbor in 1953 and the Normandie lying on her side in New York harbor in 1942. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were both visible in the background of the Normandie picture. This East Nineteenth Street building where Dortmunder lived and had to put up with Andy Kelp wouldn’t be in the picture because it was too far downtown, the Normandie having fallen over at Forty-eighth Street. Dortmunder made a show of becoming very absorbed in these pictures.

But Andy Kelp was not a man to be deterred by hints. “If you aren’t busy…” he said, and gestured in a friendly fashion with the beer can.

Dortmunder looked at him. “If I’m not busy?”

“I thought we’d take a little run over to Wally’s place,” Kelp said, unruffled. “See how he’s coming along.”

“I’m coming along,” Dortmunder told him. “Don’t worry about it, I’m coming along fine.”

Kelp nodded and pointed at the messy table with his beer can, saying, “I took a look at some of that stuff while I was waiting.”

“I see that,” Dortmunder said. “Things are moved around.”

“You got some very tricky ideas in there,” Kelp said.

“Both,” Dortmunder told him. “Simple ideas and tricky ideas. Sometimes, you know, a simple idea’s a little too simple, and sometimes a tricky idea’s too tricky, so you got to concentrate on it and give it your attention and work it out.”

“Then after that, what you have to do,” Kelp suggested, “is take a break, walk away from it, come back refreshed.”

“I just went to the library,” Dortmunder pointed out. “I am refreshed.”

“You don’t look refreshed,” Kelp said. “Come on, I’ll give Wally a call, see if this is a good time to come over.”

Dortmunder frowned at that. “Give him a call? What do you mean, give him a call? Did you give me a call?”

Kelp didn’t get it. “I came over,” he said. “That’s what I do, isn’t it?”

“You come over,” Dortmunder said, gesturing at the table, “you go through the plans, you don’t give me any advance warning.”

“Oh, is that the problem?” Kelp shrugged. “Okay, fine, we won’t call, we’ll just go over.” He took a step toward the doorway, then stopped to look back and say, “You coming?”

Dortmunder couldn’t quite figure out how that had happened. He looked around at his table covered with half-thought-out plans. He had things to do here.

Kelp, in the doorway, said, “John? You coming? This was your idea, you know.”

Dortmunder sighed. Shaking his head, he got slowly to his feet and followed Kelp through the apartment. “Me and my ideas,” he said. “I just keep surprising myself.”

FOURTEEN

Kelp, leading the way up the battered stairs toward Wally Knurr’s battered door, said, “Anyway, the advantage, just dropping in like this, Wally won’t have a chance to bring out that cheese and crackers of his.”

Dortmunder didn’t answer. He was looking at the little red plastic crack-vial tops lying around on the steps, wondering what the letter T embossed on each one meant and how come crack producers felt it necessary to add a little styling detail like that fancy T to the packaging of their product. Also, as they climbed nearer and nearer to the wonder computer, Dortmunder was feeling increasingly surly, not so much because he’d been double-shuffled into coming here, but because he still couldn’t quite figure out how it had been done.

Well, it didn’t matter, did it? Because here they were. Kelp, to cut even further into Wally’s cheese-and-cracker foraging time, had let them into the building through the downstairs door without bothering to ring Wally’s apartment, so now, when they reached the top of the stairs, would be the first the computer dwarf would know of their visit. “I hope I don’t scare the little guy,” Kelp said, as he pushed the button.

“HANDS IN THE AIR!” boomed a voice, deep, resonant, authoritative, dangerously enraged. Dortmunder jumped a foot, and when he came down his hands were high in the air, clawing for the ceiling. Kelp, face ashen, seemed about to make a run for the stairs when the voice roared out again, more menacing than ever: “GET EM UP, YOU!” Kelp got em up. “FACE THE WALL!” Kelp and Dortmunder faced the wall. “ONE MOVE AN—tick— Oh, hi, Andy! Be right there.”

Hands up, facing the wall, Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other. Slowly, sheepishly, they lowered their arms. “Cute,” said Dortmunder, adjusting the shoulders and cuffs of his jacket. Kelp had the grace to look away and say nothing.

Chiks and clonks sounded on the other side of the battered door, and then it swung open and the eighth dwarf stood smiling and bobbing in there, gesturing them in, saying, “Hi, Andy! I didn’t know you were coming. You didn’t ring the bell.”

“I guess I should have,” Kelp said, walking into the apartment, Dortmunder trailing after.

Wally looked around Dortmunder’s elbow at the hallway, saying, “The warlord didn’t come?”

Dortmunder frowned at Kelp, who frowned at Wally and said, “Huh?”

But Wally was busy closing and relocking the door, and when he turned to them, his broad moist face wreathed in smiles, he said, “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

“Oh, heck, no,” Kelp assured him, brushing it away with an easy hand gesture.

“This is a bad neighborhood, you know,” Wally said confidentially, as though there might be some people around who didn’t know that.

“I’m sure it is, Wally,” Kelp said.

“There are people out there,” Wally said, pointing at the closed door, and he shook his head in disbelief, saying, “I think they live in the hall, kind of. And sometimes they want to, you know, move in here.”

Dortmunder, who wasn’t feeling any less out of sorts for having been made a fool of, said, “So what do you do when you’ve got them lined up against the wall out there? Give them cheese and crackers?”

“Oh, they don’t line up,” Wally said. “It’s animal psychology. They run away.”

Kelp said, “Animal psychology? I thought you said it was people living out there.”

“Well, kind of,” Wally agreed. “But animal psychology’s what works. See, it’s kind of like a scarecrow, or blowing whistles at blue jays, or like when you shake a rolled-up newspaper so your dog can see it. They don’t stick around to see what you mean, they just run away.”

Dortmunder said, “But don’t they catch on after a while?”

“Oh, I’ve got all different tapes,” Wally explained. “On random feed. I’ve got one that sounds like a woman with a knife having a psychotic attack, one that sounds like Israeli commandos, Puerto—”

“I’m glad we didn’t get the woman with the knife,” Kelp said. “Then I might have been a little scared. Just for a minute.”

Dortmunder said, “Still and all. Sooner or later, they got to figure it out, every time they push that bell button, somebody starts yelling at them.”

“But they don’t,” Wally said, “that’s why it’s animal psychology. All they know is, every time they come up here and push the bell button to see if anybody’s home, something happens that makes them all nervous and upset. So it’s conditioning. These people live kind of on the edge of their nerves anyway, so they don’t like things that make them more nervous, so after a while they stop coming up here. It’s what you call association.”

Unwillingly, Dortmunder got the point. “You mean,” he said, “they associate coming up here with feeling nervous and upset.”

“That’s right,” Wally said, nodding and grinning and patting his pudgy little fingers in the air.

Kelp, rubbing his hands together in anticipation, his own recent nervousness and upset completely forgotten, said, “Well, when I come up here, what I feel is great! You been working on the old reservoir problem the last two days, Wally?”

An odd evasiveness, almost shiftiness, appeared in Wally’s eyes and demeanor. “Kind of,” he said.

Dortmunder became very alert. Was there a flaw here in the computer wizard? “Andy was telling me,” he said, “you probably had all kinds of ideas to show us by now.”

“Well, we’re working on it,” Wally assured him, but still with that same indefinable sense of holding something back. “We’re working on it okay,” he said, “but it’s kind of different for us, not our… not the regular kind of stuff we do.”

Dortmunder frowned at him; somebody else was in on this now? It was becoming a goddamn cast of thousands. “We?” he echoed. “Who’s we?”

“Oh, the computer,” Wally said, beaming, pleased at the confusion. “We do everything together.”

“Oh, you do?” Dortmunder smiled amiably. “What’s the computer’s name?” he asked. “Compy? Tinkerbell? Fred?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t name it,” Wally said. “That would be childish.”

“Well,” Kelp said, “let’s see what you’ve got, Wally.”

“Oh, sure.” Wally continued to exhibit that strange reluctance; but then he beamed around at them and said, “How about cheese and crackers? I can run—”

“We just ate, Wally,” Kelp said. Moving toward one of the PC setups scattered around the room, he said, “This is the one, isn’t it?”

“Well, kind of,” Wally admitted, moving reluctantly after him.

“So let’s fire it up.”

“Yeah,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s see what the computer thinks.” He was beginning to enjoy himself.

“You see,” Wally said, squirming a little, “the computer’s used to kind of different inputs. So, you know, some of the solutions it comes up with are pretty wild.”

“You should see some of the stuff John’s come up with,” Kelp said, laughing. “Don’t worry about it, Wally, let’s just see what you’ve got.”

Kelp was so absorbed in Wally and the computer that he didn’t even notice Dortmunder glare at him, so Dortmunder had to vocalize it: “Tricky, yes. Wild, no.”

“Whatever,” Kelp said, dismissing all that, his attention focused totally on Wally as the genius butterball reluctantly settled himself at the PC. His stubby fingers stroked the keyboard, and all at once green lettering began to pour out onto the black screen of the TV from left to right. “He’s selecting the menu now,” Kelp explained to Dortmunder.

“Sure,” Dortmunder said.

More greenery on the screen. Kelp nodded and said, “He’s asking it to bring up the catalogue of solutions.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

On the screen, a new set of green words appeared:

1) LASER EVAPORATION

“Well, I don’t think,” Wally stuttered, in obvious confusion, “we don’t have to worry about that one, we can—”

“Wait a minute, Wally,” Kelp said. “Is that the first of the solutions? Laser evaporation?”

“Well, yes,” Wally said, “but it’s not a good one, we should go on.”

Kelp was apparently feeling some confusion, and potential embarrassment as well, since this was, after all, his champ at bat here. “Wally,” he said, “tell me what that means. Laser evaporation.”

Wally looked mournfully at the words on the screen. “Well, it just means what it says,” he answered. “Evaporation, Andy, you know? Evaporating water.”

Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I think I get it. This computer wants to get at the box by getting rid of the water. Same as Tom. Only the computer wants to evaporate it.”

“Well,” Wally said, hunched protectively over his keyboard, “this was just the first thought it had.”

“Take a laser,” Dortmunder went on, enjoying himself more and more, “take a very big laser and burn off all the water in the reservoir.”

“Wally,” Kelp said. “Let’s take a look at solution number two, okay?”

“Well, there were still problems,” Wally said. Turning to Dortmunder, he explained, “You see, John, the computer doesn’t actually live in the same world we do.”

Dortmunder looked at him. “It doesn’t?”

“No. It lives in the world we tell it about. It only knows what we tell it.”

“Oh, I know about that,” Dortmunder said, nodding, looking over at Kelp, saying, “That’s that word you were using the other day, right? What was that?”

“Guy-go,” Kelp said, looking wary.

“That was it,” Dortmunder agreed. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

“Well, sure,” Wally said, his defensiveness more plain than ever. “But actually, you know, sometimes garbage in isn’t garbage, depending on what you want the computer for. You tell the computer something, and sometimes it isn’t garbage, and then other times maybe it is.”

Over Wally’s head, Dortmunder gave Kelp a superior look. Kelp caught it, shook his head, and said, “Come on, Wally, let’s see solution number two.”

So Wally’s sausage fingers did their dance over the keyboard, and a new set of green words ribboned across the middle of the black screen:

2) SPACESHIP FROM ZOG

There was an uncomfortable silence. Dortmunder tried his absolute best to catch Kelp’s eye, but Kelp would have none of it. “Zog,” Dortmunder said.

Wally cleared his throat with a sound like a chipmunk gargling. Blinking at the words on the screen, he said, “You see, there’s this story—”

“Don’t explain,” Kelp said. He put a hand on Wally’s shoulder, part protectively, part warningly. “Wally, okay? Don’t explain.”

But Wally couldn’t help himself: “The computer thinks it’s real.”

“You know,” Dortmunder said, feeling that unfamiliar ache in his cheeks that probably meant he was grinning, “I’m kind of looking forward to solution number three.”

Wally did the gargling chipmunk again. “Well,” he said, “there’s kind of a solution two-A first.”

Kelp, sounding fatalistic, said, “Wally? You mean, something that goes along with the spaceship?”

“Well, yeah,” Wally agreed, nodding that round brilliant silly head. “But,” he added, with a forced hopefulness, “it could have an application maybe, kind of, with some of the other solutions.”

“Fling it at us, Wally,” Kelp said. Even his cheekbones were refusing to look at Dortmunder.

So Wally did his keyboard dance again, and SPACESHIP FROM ZOG was swept away into oblivion, replaced by:

2A) MAGNET

“Magnet,” Kelp said.

Wally swung around in his swivel chair, facing away from the computer for the first time, looking up eagerly at Kelp, saying, “But it isn’t wrong, Andy! Okay, the first idea was, the spaceship finds the treasure. Or whatever finds the treasure. But then the magnet attaches to it, and you pull it up out of the water.”

“Wally,” Kelp said gently, “what we figure, roughly figuring, the treasure weighs somewhere between four hundred and six hundred pounds. That’s gotta be a pretty big magnet you’re talking about.”

“Well, sure,” Wally said. “That’s what we thought.”

“You get it the same place you got the spaceship,” Dortmunder told Kelp.

Wally swiveled around to look up at Dortmunder, his expression earnest, moist eyes straining to be understood. “It doesn’t have to be a spaceship, John,” he said. “Like, a submarine, you know, a submarine’s just like a spaceship.”

“Well, that’s true,” Dortmunder admitted.

“Or a boat,” Wally said. “Once you find the treasure, you know exactly where it is, you can lower the magnet, pull the treasure up.”

“Yeah, but, you know,” Dortmunder said, more gently than he’d intended (it wasn’t easy to be hard-edged or sardonic when gazing down into that round guileless face), “you know, uh, Wally, part of the problem here is, we don’t want anybody to see us. You put a boat, a big boat with a big magnet, out on the reservoir, they’re just gonna see you, Wally. I mean, they really are.”

“Not at night,” Wally pointed out. “You could do it at night. And,” he said more eagerly, getting into the swing of it, “it doesn’t matter about it being dark, because it’s going to be dark down at the bottom of the reservoir anyway.”

“And that’s also true,” Dortmunder agreed. He looked over Wally’s soft head at Kelp’s grimacing face. Kelp seemed to be undergoing various emotional upheavals over there. “We’ll do it at night,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp, benignly.

“Wally,” Kelp said, desperation showing around the edges, “show us solution number three, Wally. Please?”

“Okay,” Wally said, eager to be of help. Turning right back to his computer, he tickled the keyboard once more, and away went 2A) MAGNET. In its place appeared:

3) PING-PONG BALLS

Kelp sighed audibly. “Oh, Wally,” he said.

“Well, wait a minute,” Dortmunder told him. “That’s not a bad one.”

Kelp stared at him. “It isn’t?”

“No, it isn’t. I get the idea of that one,” Dortmunder said, and explained, “That’s like one of the things in that book I brought back from the library, that Marine Salvage book. Of course, I only read a little of the book on the subway coming home, before Andy said let’s go see what you have on all this.”

Kelp said, “John? Ping-Pong balls are in the book?”

“Not exactly,” Dortmunder admitted. “But it led me to the same kind of thought. There’s sunken ships where to get them up they fill them with polyurethane foam or polystyrene granules, and it’s really just plastic bubbles of air taking the place of all the water inside the ship—”

“That’s right!” Wally said. He was so excited at the idea of actual brain-to-brain contact with another human being at this level that he positively bounced in his chair. “And what is a Ping-Pong ball?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s just a ball of air, isn’t it? Enclosed in a thin, almost weightless skin of plastic!”

“It’s a way to get a lot of air down to the ship in a hurry without a lot of trouble,” Dortmunder went on, explaining it all to Kelp. “So I was thinking, maybe you could fire them down through a length of hose.”

Kelp stared at his old friend. “John? This is your kind of solution?”

“Well, no, because the problem is,” Dortmunder said, and looked down at Wally’s gently perspiring face, “the problem is, Wally, this isn’t a ship. It’s a closed box, and if we open it to put the Ping-Pong balls in, we’re gonna get water in there and spoil all the, uh, treasure.”

“Well, that’s solution three-A,” Wally said, and his fingers played a riff on the keyboard, and now the screen said:

3A) PLASTIC BAG

“Oh, sure,” Dortmunder said. “That makes sense. We’re down there, somehow, probably in our spaceship, and we find this six-hundred-pound box and we dig it up, probably with our giant magnet, and then we put it in our giant plastic bag, and then we fill that with Ping-Pong balls, and it just floats right to the surface. Easy.”

“Well, kind of,” Wally said, his feet shuffling around among the casters of his swivel chair. “There’s still some bugs to be ironed out.”

“Some bugs,” Dortmunder echoed.

“Wally,” Kelp said desperately, “show us solution number four.”

“Well, Andy, there isn’t one,” Wally said, swiveling slowly in Kelp’s direction.

Kelp looked aghast. “There isn’t one?”

“Not yet,” Wally amended. “But we’re working on it. We’re not finished yet.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder told him. “Don’t worry about it. This has been a very educational experience.”

Kelp looked warily at Dortmunder to see if he was trying to be sardonic. “Educational?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Dortmunder said. “It clears up my thinking a lot, between tricky and simple. I know which way I’m going now.” Patting Wally’s soft shoulder—it felt like patting a mozzarella cheese—Dortmunder said, “You’ve been a great help, Wally. Just like Andy said.”

FIFTEEN

“Walk in?” Kelp demanded.

They were at that moment strolling through Paragon Sporting Goods, on Broadway and 18th Street, heading for the underwater department up on the second floor. “That’s the simplest way I can think of,” Dortmunder answered, as they trotted up the wide steps. “And, after that little song and dance from your pal and his computer—”

“Wally was a great disappointment to me,” Kelp said. “I must admit it. But still, the original model he did was something terrific.”

They reached the second floor and turned right. “Wally’s a great model maker,” Dortmunder agreed. “But when it comes to plans, just like I was telling you from the beginning, I don’t need help from machines.”

“Sure you don’t, John,” Kelp said. “But just to walk in? Are you sure?”

“What could be simpler?” Dortmunder asked him. “We put on underwater stuff so we can breathe down there. We get a flashlight and a shovel and a long rope, and we go to the edge of the reservoir and we walk in. We walk downhill until we come to the town, and we find the library, and we dig up the box, and we tie the rope to it. Then we walk back uphill, right along the rope, and when we come out on dry land we pick up the other end of the rope and we pull. Simple.”

“I don’t know, John,” Kelp said. “Walking down fifty feet under water never struck me as exactly simple.”

“It’s simpler than spaceships from Zog,” Dortmunder said, and stopped. “Here we are.”

There they were. For reasons best known to management, the underwater equipment at Paragon is upstairs; top floor, off to the right of the wide staircase. When Dortmunder and Kelp walked into this section and stopped and just stood there, looking around, they did not at first glance seem as though they belonged here. At second glance, they definitely didn’t belong, not in this department, not in this store, probably not even on this block. One was tall, stoop-shouldered, pessimistic, walking with a shuffling nonathletic jail-yard gait, while the other was shorter, narrower, looking like the sort of bird that became extinct because it wouldn’t ever learn to fly.

The flightless bird said, “So what are we looking for?”

“Help,” said the pessimist, and turned around to see a healthy young woman approaching with many questions evident on her face.

The one she chose to begin with was, “Looking for anything in particular, gentlemen?”

“Yeah,” Dortmunder told her. “We wanna go underwater.”

She studied them with doubt. “You do?”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Why not?”

“No reason,” she said, with a too-bright smile. “Have you gentlemen ever done any diving before?”

“Diving?” Dortmunder echoed.

“You are talking about diving, aren’t you?” the girl asked.

“Going underwater,” Dortmunder repeated, and even made a little parting-the-waves gesture to make things clearer: putting the backs of his hands together, then sweeping them out to the sides.

“In the ocean,” the girl said dubiously.

“Well, no,” Dortmunder said. “In a kind of lake. But still, you know, under. In it.”

“Freshwater diving,” the girl said, smiling with pleasure that they were communicating after all.

“Walking,” Kelp said. Sticking his oar in, as it were.

So much for communication. Looking helplessly at Kelp, the girl said, “I beg your pardon?”

“We’re not gonna jump in it,” Kelp explained. “Not diving, walking. We’re gonna walk in it.”

“Oh,” she said, and smiled with great healthy delight, saying, “That makes no difference, not with the equipment.” Turning slightly, to include Dortmunder in her smile, she said, “I take it you gentlemen haven’t gone in for diving before.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Dortmunder told her.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Where are you taking your instruction?”

“Instruction?” Kelp said, but Dortmunder talked over him, saying, “At the lake.”

“And what equipment will you be needing?”

“Everything,” Dortmunder said.

That surprised her again. “Everything? Won’t you be able to rent anything at all from the pro?”

“No, it don’t work that way at this particular lake,” Dortmunder said. “Anyway, right now we’re just looking to see what we’ll need, what kinda equipment and all.”

“Tanks and air and all that,” Kelp added, and pointed toward a number of scuba tanks displayed on the wall behind the glass counter full of regulators and goggles and waterproof flashlights.

The girl lost her smile for good. Frowning from Dortmunder to Kelp and back, she said, “I’m not sure what you gentlemen are up to, but it isn’t diving.”

Dortmunder gave her an offended look. “Yeah, we are,” he said. “Why would we want the stuff?”

“All right,” she said crisply, either giving him the benefit of the doubt or choosing brisk explanation as the quickest way to get rid of these noncustomers. “Clearly,” she said, “you don’t know anything about the world of diving.”

“We’re just starting out,” Dortmunder reminded her. “I told you that, remember?”

“You can’t do it without an instructor,” she said, “and it’s pretty clear you don’t have an instructor.”

Dortmunder said, “Why can’t we just read up on it in a book?”

“Because,” she told him, “there are only two ways you can dive. Either with an accredited instructor right there beside you, or with your certification that you’ve taken and passed the three-day introductory course.”

Kelp said, “You know, you’re not supposed to drive a car without a license, too, but I bet some people do.”

She gave him a severe look and shook her head. From a sunny happy healthy young woman she had segued with amazing suddenness into the world’s most disapproving Sunday School teacher. “It doesn’t work quite the same way,” she said, sounding pleased about that. Pointing at the display of tanks, she said, “I’ll sell you as many of those as you want. But they’re empty. And the only place you can get them filled is an accredited dive shop. And they won’t fill them unless you show your certification or agree to have an instructor go with you.” Her look of satisfaction was pretty galling. “Diving or walking, gentlemen,” she said, “you will not want to go very far underwater, or for very long, with empty tanks. If you’ll excuse me?” And she turned on her heel and went off to sell a $350 Dacor Seachute BCD to a deeply tanned Frenchman with offensively thick and glossy hair.

Leaving, slinking away, clumping morosely down the wide stairs toward Paragon’s street level with their tails between their legs, Dortmunder said, “Okay. We gotta getta guy.”

SIXTEEN

It was raining. Doug Berry, owner and proprietor and sole full-time employee of South Shore Dive Shop in Islip, Long Island, sat alone in his leaky shingle shed built out on its own wooden dock over the waters of the Great South Bay, and read travel brochures about the Caribbean. Steel drum calypso music chimed from the speakers tucked away on the top shelves behind the main counter, sharing space with the Henderson cold-water hoods and the mask-and-snorkel sets. The rickety side walls of the structure were decorated with posters distributed by various manufacturers in the diving field, all showing happy people boogieing along underwater with the assistance of that manufacturer’s products. From the fish net looped below the ceiling were hung shells, ship models and various pieces of diving equipment, either the real things or miniatures. In a front corner, facing the door, stood an old used store-window dummy dressed in every possible necessity and accessory the well-turned-out diver could possibly want.

Outside was more of Doug Berry’s empire. The dock, old and shaky, rotting planks nailed to rotting pilings, was three feet wider than the shed, which was built flush to the right edge of the dock, leaving the three feet on the left for an aisle back to the eighteen feet of additional dock extending out into the bay beyond the rear of the shed. Piled on this dock, under gray or green tarps, were spare air tanks and gasoline tanks and other equipment, all chained against thievery. Tied up on the left side of the dock, also under a tarp, was Doug Berry’s Boston Whaler, with its 235-horse Johnson outboard. The compressor from which air tanks were filled was also out there, under its own shiny blue plastic tarp.

On the landward side of Doug Berry’s domain was the gravel width of customer parking area, containing at the moment only Berry’s custom-packaged black (with blue and silver trim) Ford pickup, with the inevitable bumper sticker on the back: DIVERS GO DEEPER. Beyond the parking area was the potholed blacktop driveway leading out past the marine motor dealership and the wholesale fish company to Merrick Road. All of this was Doug Berry’s, and there he sat, in the middle of his realm, dreaming about the Caribbean.

Yeah, that was the place to be. No goddamn April showers down there. Just warm sun, warm air, warm sand, warm turquoise water. A fella with Doug Berry’s looks and training and skills could…

… rot on the beach.

There he went again, dammit. Doug Berry’s worst flaw, as far as he himself was concerned, was his inability to ignore reality. He’d like to be able to fantasize himself into the dive king of the Caribbean, the bronze god in flippers, slicing through the emerald waters, rescuing beautiful heiresses, discovering buried treasure, either joining pirates or foiling pirates, he’d like to sit here in this miserable shack on this rainy no-business day and dream himself two thousand miles south and twenty degrees warmer, but the reality bone in his head just wouldn’t ever give him a break.

The fact was, guys whose total assets were youth, health, good looks, and an advanced diving certificate were not in exactly short supply in the Caribbean basin. (The pestiferous phrase “dime a dozen” kept circling through Doug Berry’s irritated head, above the aborted fantasies.) And when, in addition, the fellow also already had a couple of clouds over his head—charged with (but not convicted of) receiving stolen goods, for instance—and when he’s already been ejected from the two largest and most prestigious licensing associations in the field, PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) and NAUI (National Association of Underwater Instructors), and when in fact he was now found acceptable only by DIPS (Diving Instructors Professional Society), the newest and smallest and least picky association around, his smart move—no, his only move—was to stay right here in Islip, do a moderate summertime business with college kids and Fire Islanders, do a miserable wintertime business selling equipment to people going away on vacations (there was no way to compete more directly with the big outfits, furnished with their own indoor swimming pools), supplement his livelihood with carpentry and clamming, stock his shelves as much as possible with goods that fell off the back of the delivery truck, and sit here in the rain trying to dream about the Caribbean.

Doug Berry, twenty-seven years old. He used to have a hobby; now, the hobby has him.

Movement beyond the rain-streaked front window made him look up from Aruba—tan sand, pale blue sky, aquamarine sea, no rain—to see a vaguely familiar car coming to a stop out there next to his pickup. It was a Chevy Impala, the color of a diseased lime. Its windshield wipers stopped, and then three of its four doors opened and three men wearing hats and raincoats climbed out, flinching as though water were poisonous.

Squinting through the streaky window, Doug finally recognized one of the three: the driver, a bent-nose type named Mikey Donelli. Or maybe Mikey Donnelly. Doug had never been certain if the accent was on the first syllable or the second, so he couldn’t be sure if Mikey were Irish or Italian. Not that it mattered, really; Doug and Mikey had a business-only relationship, and the business would be the same wherever Mikey’s forebears hailed from.

Mikey was, in fact, the provider of those stolen goods Doug was alleged to have received, and of a lot of other stolen goods as well. Given the realities of the South Shore Dive Shop, Mikey was just about the company’s most important supplier.

But who were the other two? Doug had never met any of Mikey’s associates and was just as glad of it. This pair walked with their hands in their raincoat pockets, chins tucked in low, hat brims pulled down over their eyes as though they were extras in a Prohibition movie. Mikey led the way from the car to the door as Doug got to his feet, closed the Caribbean brochure, and tried to put a ready-for-business expression on his face. But what was Mikey doing here? And who were the two guys with him?

Doug spent most of his life just slightly afraid. At the moment, it was up one notch above normal.

Mikey came into the shop first, followed by his friends. “Whadaya say, Dougie?” Mikey said.

“Hi, Mikey,” Doug said. No one else on Earth had ever even thought to call him Dougie. He hated it, but how can you tell somebody named Mikey—particularly a tough somebody named Mikey—that you don’t like to be called Dougie? You can’t.

All three of his visitors looked around at the shelves, the two strangers with the curiosity of people who’d never been in a dive shop in their lives before—which Doug could well believe—and Mikey with a kind of professional interest. “Gee, Dougie,” he said, “you haven’t moved much product, have you, kid?” He was probably the same age as Doug, within a year or two, but he called him Dougie and “kid.”

“It’s just the beginning of the season,” Doug explained. “Things’ll pick up.”

“You know, kid,” Mikey said, “it could be, what you could use is a nice burglary. You gotta be insured, huh?”

Oh, no. Doug was living on the edge of disaster as it was, and he knew it. False burglaries for the insurance were exactly the way to integrate a state prison, a goal Doug had never held for himself. “Not just yet, Mikey,” he said, trying to produce a cool and untroubled grin. “If I ever need anything like that, you’ll be the guy I call. You know that.”

“Sure, kid,” Mikey said and grinned, spreading his hands as though to say naturally you’ll come to me. With that round tough face and lumpy nose and curly black hair and those penetrating dark eyes, Mikey could be just as easily Italian or Irish, Irish or Italian. Doug had no idea why it mattered to him to know what Mikey was, but it did. Maybe because the question was essentially unanswerable.

Now Mikey turned to his companions, saying, “I wanna introduce you a couple guys. This is John and this is Andy. That’s Dougie. He runs this place.”

“How are you,” said Doug, nodding at them, not liking the flat emotionless way they both studied him.

“Fine,” said the one called John. “You got the certification, huh?”

That was a surprising question. “Sure,” Doug said. “I couldn’t run the dive shop unless I did.” And he gestured to the sticker in the bottom right of the front window: DIPS.

“Dips,” said the one called Andy in a thoughtful tone of voice. “I don’t think I know that one.”

Surprised that somebody like Andy would know any of diving’s professional associations, Doug said defensively, “It’s a new group, very lively, very forward-looking. The best, I think. That’s why I went with them.”

With a raucous laugh, Mikey said, “Also, Dougie, they’d take you, don’t forget.”

Doug was offended, and for the moment forgot his fear. Looking hard at Mikey, he said, “It wasn’t exactly that way, Mikey. What have you been telling these friends of yours, anyway?”

“Hey, take it easy, Dougie,” Mikey said, laughing again, but putting his hands up mock defensively. He’s afraid! Doug thought with astonishment, as Mikey went on, saying, “All I said to Andy and John, maybe you were the guy could help with a little problem they got. I’m not in it at all, okay? It’s strictly between you and them.”

Doug, pushing his unexpected advantage, said, “What’s between me and them?”

“Why don’t you guys talk it over?” Mikey said, backing toward the door, grinning at everybody. “I’m just John Alden here, right? Dougie, I can guarantee these guys, Andy and John’ll treat you straight. Guys, Dougie here is a hundred percent.” Waving generally, he said, “I gotta couple calls to make in the neighborhood. Be back in fifteen, twenty minutes, okay?”

“Sure, that’s good,” the one called John said. He nodded at Mikey, but his brooding eyes were on Doug.

“See you, guys,” Mikey said, and reached for the doorknob. But then he pointed playfully at Andy and said, “Remember, if it works out…”

Andy nodded as though this reminder was unnecessary. “Don’t worry, Mikey,” he said. “You’ve got your finder’s fee.”

“Great,” Mikey said. His grin was bigger and bigger. “I love to get friends together,” he said, and pulled open the door at last and left.

They all watched out through the window as Mikey slogged through the rain to his diseased-lime Impala and climbed in. After a few seconds, the windshield wipers started, and then the Impala backed away in a semicircle and drove out toward Merrick Road. And they were alone.

Doug looked at his unexpected visitors, wondering what this was all about. More stolen goods? He had to be very careful here, dealing with strangers; there was such a thing as entrapment.

My God, yes! Suppose the cops had the goods on Mikey for something or other—Doug had no idea what Mikey’s activities were beyond the finding of goods that had fallen off trucks, but he was sure those activities must be wide-ranging and far from legal—suppose Mikey had got himself caught, and the cops had offered him a deal if he’d turn somebody else in. Didn’t they do that all the time? They did.

Okay, in that case, who would Mikey choose to betray? Some other tough guy like himself, who’d grown up with him and knew all about him and knew where he lived? Or would he choose Doug Berry, a guy he barely knew, who wasn’t connected to anything that Mikey thought important?

These guys didn’t look like cops, But they wouldn’t, would they? Giving the pair a very critical and cautious look, Doug said, “You need some help with a diving problem?”

If he’d expected a no to that question—and he had—he was both disappointed and surprised, because the one called John turned and said, “That’s it, okay. A diving problem.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” John said. “Andy and me, we got to go underwater, and we never did that before, and it turns out it’s not so simple like we thought.”

Doug just couldn’t get this straight. “You really do want to dive?”

“Walk,” Andy said. “We wanna walk in from the shore to where it’s fifty feet deep.”

Doug looked out the side window at the rain-pocked gray waters of the Great South Bay. “Around here?”

“Somewhere else,” John said.

“Where?”

But John spread his hands and said, “We got to talk first, you know? We got to know we’re all on the same team, then we’ll talk about where.”

Andy said, “You see, Dougie, John and—”

“Doug,” Doug said.

They both frowned at him. Andy said, “I thought Mikey said you were Dougie.”

“That’s what he calls me,” Doug agreed. “Everybody else calls me Doug.”

They looked at each other and came to some sort of decision. Nodding briskly, Andy said, “Got it. Okay, Doug, here’s the story. John and me, we got to go into a body of water, like a lake—”

“Freshwater, you mean,” Doug suggested.

“Yeah,” Andy said. “Down at the bottom of this lake, there’s a box we want. A big box. So we got to get to it, tie a rope on, pull it out.”

John said, “We thought it should be kind of simple. But then we went to a store to buy the stuff, and it turns out there’s this secret society or something, nobody gets to go underwater unless they know the password.”

“We have no fatalities in the sport in the United States,” Doug told him, “and that’s why. Safety first.”

“I believe in safety first,” John said. “I don’t want to go anywhere that it isn’t safety first. So maybe this is okay after all. We can’t pull the job without a pro.”

“Not if it’s underwater,” Doug agreed.

“But,” John said, “we need a very particular special pro. Not just any pro.”

“Not the pro in just any dive shop you see around,” Andy said, expanding on the idea.

Here comes the illegality, Doug thought. Entrapment. Temptation. They’re probably both wired. Be very careful about everything you say. “Mm,” he said.

“So we asked around,” John went on, “among people we know, particular people we know…”

“And I happened to know Mikey,” Andy said. “We’ve been in trade together a couple times. And he said you were exactly the guy we were looking for.”

“So here we are,” John said.

“Mm,” Doug said.

They all looked at one another for a minute. Finally, Andy said, “Don’t you wanna know what we want?”

“I thought you were going to tell me,” Doug said, trying not to sound too eager to commit anything illegal.

Andy and John looked at each other again, and then John nodded and said, “Okay. Here’s what we want. We want the expertise and the equipment so we can go down into this res— this lake and get this box. That’s what we want.”

Doug said, “Mm.”

Again they all stood around gaping at one another, and this time Andy said, “You want to do it?”

Doug had to ask the question somehow, without suggesting he was open to criminal considerations. Tone flat, he said, “What’s illegal about it?”

They looked surprised. “Illegal?” John said. “Unless you’re gonna sell us stuff you got from Mikey, I don’t know what’s illegal about what we want here.”

“You’re the pro, that’s all,” Andy said.

Doug shook his head, bewildered, but still afraid to expose himself to risk. “Then why me?” he asked. “I mean, it’s not that I’m—that I do illegal things or anything. I’m not suggesting here that I’m open to uh, um, criminal enterprises or anything, but why did you need a special pro and all that?”

They stared at him, as bewildered as he was. John said, “Criminal enterprises?”

But then Andy laughed and clapped his hands together and said, “John, he’s afraid we’re wired!”

John looked surprised, then offended. “Wired? You mean like FBI men? Do we look like FBI men?”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Doug said. “Not that it matters, I’m not proposing any, uh…”

“Criminal enterprise,” John suggested.

Andy said, “Look, Doug, somebody’s gotta start by trusting somebody, so I’m gonna start by trusting you. You got an honest face. See, there’s a fella we know, a long time ago he went to jail, and he just got out now, and it turns out before he went inside he buried some money—”

“Criminal enterprise money,” John interpolated.

“Right,” Andy said. “Your basic ill-gotten gains is what we’re talking about here. And now he’s out and he wants these gains, and it turns out there’s a reservoir there now.”

Doug couldn’t help himself; he laughed. He said, “A reservoir? He buried the money and now it’s underwater?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Andy told him. “And to tell you the truth, Doug, there is gonna be some criminal enterprise in all this. For instance, when we go over the fence around the reservoir, that’s already breaking a law. Trespassing or something. And when we go into the reservoir, actually into the water, there’s another law laying dead on the ground.”

“And,” John said, “when we get the box with the money in it, we won’t give it back to the bank, so there we go again. Who we’ll give it to is the guy that buried it, and he’ll give us some for helping out, and we’ll give you some for helping out.”

“How much?” Doug couldn’t help from asking.

“A thousand dollars,” John said, “over your regular fees and expenses and the cost of the stuff we use.”

“Doug,” Andy said, sounding very sincere and confidential, “in all honesty and truth, Doug, I never in my life even thought about being an FBI man.”

Doug wanted to believe these two—and God knows he could use a thousand dollars—but a lot of Congressmen had once wanted to believe a couple of fellas like this were Arab sheiks. He said, “If we’re gonna start familiarizing ourselves with the equipment and all, you two will have to take your coats and, uh, shirts off, you know. Strip to the waist.”

Andy, grinning, said to John, “He still thinks we’re wired.”

“No, no,” Doug said, “it’s just to, uh, fit everything, that’s all.”

John shook his head, with a faint look of disgust, and took his coat off, and Andy followed suit. With no hesitation at all, they both stripped down, revealing physiques no one in history could have been proud of. But no microphones, no tape recorders, no wires.

Spreading his arms, pirouetting slowly, grinning at Doug, Andy said, “Okay, Doug?”

“Okay,” Doug said, and covered his confusion with a deep layer of professional manner. “Have either of you ever breathed through a mouthpiece before?”

“You could keep it warmer in here,” John said.

“A mouthpiece?” Andy asked. “I’ve talked to one or two, but I’ve never breathed through one, no.”

“Okay,” Doug said, turning to his well-stocked shelves. “We’ll start now.”

SEVENTEEN

“I wish you’d take that thing off, John,” May said. “It makes you look like something in science fiction.”

Dortmunder removed the mouthpiece from his mouth; not to accede to May’s request, but to make it possible to answer her. “I’m supposed to get used to breathing through it,” he said, and put it back in his mouth. Then he immediately forgot and breathed through his nose, as usual; underwater, he would have drowned half a dozen times by now.

Fortunately, he wasn’t underwater. He was in the living room with May, watching the seven o’clock news (which is to say, watching the headache and laxative commercials) and waiting for Tom Jimson to come back from wherever he was when he wasn’t here. He’d been waiting for Tom since he’d come back from Long Island and Doug Berry and the wonderful world of underwater late this afternoon.

May said, “John, you aren’t breathing through it.”

“Mm!” he said, startled, and grasped his nose between thumb and forefinger of his right hand, to force himself to do it right. Breathe through the mouth, doggone it. The mouth gets dry almost immediately, but that’s all right. It’s better than the lungs getting wet.

So Dortmunder went on sitting there, on the sofa, next to the silently disapproving May, breathing through his mouth and watching the news over the knuckles of the hand holding his nose. That was his position when Tom noiselessly appeared in the doorway just as the news anchorman was smiling his last. (Though what he had to smile about, considering everything he’d had to report to the world in the last half hour, was hard to figure out.) But there, all at once, was Tom Jimson in the doorway, raising an eyebrow, looking at Dortmunder and saying, “Something smell bad, Al?”

“Mm!” Dortmunder said again, and took the mouthpiece out of his mouth and sneezed. Then he said, “This is the mouthpiece for going underwater.”

“Not very far underwater,” Tom suggested, giving the mouthpiece a critical look.

“This is just one part of it,” Dortmunder explained. “In fact, Tom, I’ve gotta talk to you about that. It’s time to come up with some cash.”

Tom’s face, never exactly what you’d call mobile, stiffened up so much he now looked like a badly reproduced photo of himself. From somewhere deep within the photo came the hollow word, “Cash?”

“Come on, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “We agreed on this. You’ll dip into your other little stashes to finance this thing.”

The photo crumpled a bit. “How much cash?”

“We figure seven to eight grand.”

Animation of a sort returned to Tom’s face. That is, his eyebrows climbed up over his forehead as though trying to escape into his hair. “Dollars?” he asked. “Why so much?”

“I told you how we need a pro,” Dortmunder reminded him.

Coming farther into the room, glancing briefly at the television set on which the news had now been followed by a comedy series about a bunch of very healthy and extremely witty teens who all hung out at the same sweet shop, Tom said, “Yeah, I remember. For air. You can’t get air without a pro. But I never hearda air costing seven, eight grand before.”

Getting to her feet, May said, “Nobody’s watching TV.” She sounded faintly annoyed by the fact. Crossing to switch off the set, she said, “Anybody want a beer?”

“I think I’m gonna need one,” Tom said, and he crossed to take May’s seat as she left for the kitchen. His eyebrows still well up on his forehead, he said, “Tell me about this rich air, Al.”

“To begin with,” Dortmunder told him, “we had to find the pro. One we could deal with. So the guy that found the right guy, some fella that Andy knows, he wanted a finder’s fee. Five hundred bucks.”

“To find the pro,” Tom said.

“That’s very cheap, Tom,” Dortmunder assured him. “You got a better way to find the exact right guy we need?”

Tom shook his head, ignoring the question more than agreeing with it. He said, “So this is the exact right guy, is it?”

“Yeah, it is. And he isn’t in it for a piece, just a flat payment in front. We’re getting him for a grand, and that’s very cheap.”

“If you say so, Al,” Tom said. “Inflation, you know? I still can’t believe the prices of things. When I went inside twenty-three years ago, you know how much a steak cost?”

“Tom, I don’t even care,” Dortmunder said, and May came in with two cans of beer. Looking at them, Dortmunder said, “May? Aren’t you having any?”

“Mine’s in the kitchen,” May said. “You two talk business.” And, with a blank smile at them both, she went away to the kitchen again, which was hers once more now that Dortmunder had removed all his books and papers and pencils and pens and pictures from it, stowing the whole mountain of stuff in the bottom dresser drawer in the bedroom.

Tom swallowed beer and said, “So we’re up to fifteen hundred.”

“The rest is equipment and stuff,” Dortmunder told him. “And training.”

Tom frowned at that. “Training?”

“You don’t just go underwater, Tom,” Dortmunder explained.

“I don’t go underwater at all,” Tom said. “That’s up to you and your pal Andy, if that’s what you wanna do.”

“That’s what we want to do,” Dortmunder agreed, not letting a single doubt peek through. “And to do it right,” he went on, “we got to train and learn how it’s done. So we’ll take lessons from this guy, and that’s why I’m practicing with this mouthpiece here, learning to breathe through my mouth. So that costs. And then there’s the air and the tanks and what we wear and the underwater flashlights and all the rope we’re gonna need and lots of other stuff, and it all comes out to seven or eight grand.”

“Expensive,” Tom commented, and drank more beer.

“It’s gotta be expensive,” Dortmunder told him. “This isn’t a place you just walk into, you know.”

Tom said, “What about the little fella with the computer? Any thought outta him?”

“Wally?” Dortmunder made no effort to keep victor’s scorn out of his voice. “He had a lot of great ideas,” he said. “Spaceships. Giant magnets. Giant lasers. Even more expensive than me, Tom.” Shrugging, Dortmunder said, “No matter how we do this, it isn’t gonna be cheap.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Tom said. “Dynamite and life are cheap.”

“We agreed, Tom,” Dortmunder reminded him. “We do it my way first. And we finance from your stash.”

Tom slowly shook his head. “Those lawyers really cleaned me out, Al. I don’t have that much left.”

Dortmunder spread his hands. Tom sat there, brooding, holding his beer, wrestling with the problem. There was nothing more for Dortmunder to say to him—Tom would dope it all out for himself or not—so he put the mouthpiece back in and practiced breathing through his mouth without holding his nose. Underwater, of course, he’d have goggles on that would make a tight seal all around his eyes and nose, so he wouldn’t be able to hold his nostrils shut anyway. He had a practice pair of goggles, in fact, that Doug Berry had loaned him, but he would have felt foolish sitting next to May and wearing goggles to watch television, so they were on the dresser in the bedroom.

“There’s one,” Tom said thoughtfully, “up in the same area.”

“Mlalga,” Dortmunder said, and took the mouthpiece out and said, “Under the reservoir?”

“No no, Al, nearby. One of the towns they didn’t drown. We can go up there tomorrow and get it. Rent another car and drive up.”

“No,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t drive up there again. And no more rentals. I’ll call Andy, he’ll arrange transportation.”

EIGHTEEN

Wally said, “Well, the truth is, Andy, I’m kind of embarrassed.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Andy Kelp agreed, nodding. Seated on the brown Naugahyde sofa in Wally’s cluttered living room, he munched cheese and crackers while Wally sat facing him, frowning in agony. Andy said, “I felt kind of embarrassed, too, Wally. Talking you up to John the way I did. And then we get Zog and all this.”

Wally squirmed. His big wet eyes blinked over and over in discomfort. His little pudgy hands made vague unhappy gestures. He felt very awkward in this whole situation. He said, “Gee, Andy, I think… well, I just think maybe I ought to tell you the truth.”

Andy raised an eyebrow, gazing at him over a cheese-topped cracker. “The truth, Wally?”

Wally hesitated. He hated having to trust his own instincts, particularly when it meant disagreeing with the computer. But on the other hand, this was a computer that didn’t know the difference between Zog and Earth, which was perfectly all right in some applications but kind of a problem in others. So maybe Wally was right to override the computer’s decision this time. On the other other hand, exposing himself to these people was definitely scary. “The warlord has no pity,” the computer had reminded him, more than once.

Did Andy have pity? His eyes seemed very bright, very alert, as he looked at Wally, waiting for the truth, but he didn’t really look—Wally had to admit to himself, reluctantly—what you could call sympathetic. As Wally hesitated, Andy put the cracker and its shipment of cheese back on the plate on the coffee table and said, “What truth was that, Wally?”

So there was nothing for it but to go forward. Wally took a deep breath, swallowed once more, and said, “The treasure is seven hundred thousand dollars in cash stolen from a Securivan armored car in a daring daylight robbery on the New York State Thruway near the North Dudson exit on April twenty-sev—”

Andy, staring at him, said, “What?”

“Tom was one of the robbers,” Wally rushed on, “and he’s been in jail ever since, but not for that, because they never found the people who robbed the armored car.”

Wally, blinking more and more rapidly, sank back in his chair, exhausted. He looked at the plate of cheese and crackers and suddenly desperately wanted to eat all of them; but he was afraid to. He’d have to leave his mouth clear in case he had to talk, in case he had to, for instance, plead for his life. Reluctantly, hesitantly, he looked up away from the food at Andy’s face, and saw him grinning in admiration and astonishment. “Wally!” Andy said in unmistakable pleasure. “How’d you do that?”

Wally gulped and grinned in combined relief and delight. “It was easy,” he said.

“No, come on, Wally,” Andy said. “Don’t be modest. How’d you do it?”

So Wally explained the reasoning he’d worked out with the computer, and then demonstrated his access to the New York Times data bank, and actually brought up the original news item about the armored car robbery, which Andy read with close attention and deep interest, commenting to himself, “Not much finesse there. Just smash and grab.”

“I wanted to tell you so we’d have better communication,” Wally explained, “and better input to help solve the problem. But I was afraid. And the computer advised against.”

“The comput—?” Andy seemed startled, but then he grinned again and said, “How come?” Walking back over to the sofa, he said, “Computer doesn’t like me?”

Wally followed, and they took their seats again, Wally saying, “It wasn’t so much you, Andy. It was mostly Tom the computer was worried about.”

“Smart computer,” Andy said, and frowned, thinking it over. “Do we let Tom in on this?” he asked himself. Absentmindedly he picked up a cheese and cracker, pushed it into his mouth, and talked around it. “In some ways it’s simpler,” he said, more or less intelligibly. “We can talk up front with each other. On the other hand, I can see Tom getting a little testy.”

“That’s what the computer and I thought, too,” Wally agreed.

Andy swallowed his cheese and cracker, thinking. “I tell you what we say,” he decided.

Wally leaned forward, all ears. Well, mostly ears.

Andy reached for another cheese and cracker and pointed at himself with it. “I told you,” he said. “I decided the only way to get good input from you was to give you the whole picture. So I explained to you how Tom had been involved in this robbery years and years ago, brought in to it by bad companions and all, and how now he’s old and not wanting to be a robber anymore, and how he was let out of prison, and all he wants to do is retire, and this money’s all he’s got for his golden years, so we’re all getting together to help him get it back. Because, by now, whose money is it, anyway? So that’s what I told you. Right?”

Wally nodded. “Okay, Andy,” he said. “But, Andy?”

“Yeah?”

“Is, uh,” Wally said. He craved a cracker piled with cheese. “Is, uh,” he said, “any of that the truth?”

Andy laughed, calm and innocent and obviously easy in his mind. “Why, Wally,” he said. “Except for leaving out the part where Tom continues to be a homicidal maniac, it’s all the truth.”

NINETEEN

Myrtle Street slowly turned the crank of the old-fashioned microfilm viewer, and on its metal floor all the yesterdays of Vilburgtown County crept languidly by, recorded for posterity in the pages of the County Post. From the year before Myrtle’s birth up till the year Mother married Mr. Street, the cake sales and high school dances and Boy Scout meetings inched inexorably past, the Town Council sessions and selectman elections and volunteer fire department fund raisers leisurely unwound, the fires and floods and severe winter storms floated through (sapped of all urgency), the automobile accidents and burglaries and the one big armored car robbery out on the Thruway all popped into view and faded like sudden puffs of smoke. But through it all there wasn’t the slightest hint of the identity of Myrtle Street’s father.

In the week since Edna had blurted out that astonishing sentence—“That was your father in that car!”—Myrtle had thought of nothing else. Suddenly she burned with the desire—no, the need—to know her true origins. But Edna was no help at all. After that initial sudden outburst and that quick (equally startling) string of profanity, Edna had shut up like a safe on the subject, had refused to talk about it, had refused even to let Myrtle talk about it. Clearly she regretted that flare-up, that window into the past she’d inadvertently and briefly opened, and was waiting only for that out-of-control moment to be forgotten.

Well, it wasn’t going to be forgotten. Myrtle had the bit well and truly in her teeth now and was determined to learn everything. From knowing nothing, she wanted to know all. Her earlier complacence now astonished her. She’d always known, of course, that Gosling was her mother’s maiden name, that Street was the only other name Edna had ever possessed, and that she herself had entered the world long before Edna and Mr. Street had ever met. She had known it, but she’d never actually thought about it, wondered about it, followed through the implications. And now?

Now, she had to know. The window was open, and there was no shutting it. If Edna wouldn’t talk, there had to be another way. Myrtle had two elderly female cousins in the area, one a widow in a nursing home in Dudson Falls, the other an old maid still in her family’s farmhouse (though without the farm acreage) outside North Dudson. Myrtle had tried talking to both of them this last week but had gotten nowhere. The frustrating thing about trying to deal with doddering oldsters was that it was impossible to know for sure whether they were lying or merely feeble-minded. Both old ladies had sworn ignorance of Myrtle’s male parentage, though, so that was that.

What else was there, what other way to learn about the past? Twenty-six years ago. Who was spending time then with Edna Gosling, already thirty-six years of age and chief librarian at the Putkin’s Corners municipal library? It was really too bad the Vilburgtown Reservoir had drowned Putkin’s Corners a few years later; there might have been clues there. Well, they were unreachable now.

And the County Post seemed to contain no clues at all. No photos of the younger Edna Gosling on the arm of this gentleman or that at VFW Post clambakes or Dudson Consolidated School reunions, no “and passenger Edna Gosling” in stories of automobile accidents, no “accompanied by Miss Edna Gosling” in social-page wedding reports.

What else had Edna said about the man she claimed to be Myrtle’s father back there at her first startled instant of recognition? “It couldn’t happen, but it did,” she’d said, meaning, presumably, that she hadn’t believed the man would—no, could—ever return to this part of the world. Because she’d thought he was dead? Out of the country? Permanently hospitalized? But then she’d called the man, as Myrtle remembered it, a “dirty bastard son of a bitch.” Was that because he’d left her, pregnant and unwed, so many years ago?

If only Edna would open up!

But she wouldn’t, that’s all. But there was nothing. And now it was nearly six o’clock, time for Myrtle to leave work and go pick up Edna at the Senior Citizens Center. Having finished going through for the third time the papers covering the year before her birth, Myrtle sighed, fast-cranked the roll of microfilm back onto its reel, put it away in its box, said good evening to Janice (the employee who would steer the library through the twilight hours), went out to the employee parking area behind the library, got behind the wheel of the black Ford Fairlane, and drove across town and down Main Street to where Edna stood irritably on the curb, waiting.

The clock on the Fairlane’s dashboard assured Myrtle she wasn’t late, so Edna’s irritation was simply at its normal level of background static and nothing for Myrtle to worry about. Therefore, she had a welcoming smile on her face as she pulled to the curb before the dour old lady and pushed open the passenger door, calling, “Hello, Mother!”

“Hm,” Edna commented. She stepped forward to climb into the car, then glanced up over its top at a passing vehicle and suddenly shouted, “Goddamn!”

Now, “goddamn” was not something Edna said. It certainly wasn’t something she ever shouted, and it absolutely positively wasn’t something she would shout in the middle of the public street. Astounded, Myrtle gaped at her mother as Edna clambered into the car, slammed the door, pointed a trembling and bony finger at the windshield, and cried, “Follow that son of a bitch!”

Then she understood. Peering out, seeing a clean new tan automobile driving away from them down Main Street, Myrtle said, “My father again?”

“Follow him!”

Myrtle was, God knows, willing. Putting the Fairlane in gear, she pulled out onto Main Street just about a block behind that tan car, with only one other automobile in between. Weaving left and right to see past that intervening car, she could make out that the tan car was a new Cadillac Sedan de Ville, with MD plates. Myrtle, waiting impatiently for a chance to pass the extraneous car, said, “Is my father a doctor?”

“Hah!” Edna said. “He liked to play doctor plenty enough. Don’t you lose him, now.”

“I won’t,” Myrtle promised.

“What’s he up to?” Edna muttered, beating her bony fist against the dashboard.

The car up ahead had four people in it, two in front and two in back. Maybe I’m going to get to know my father after all these years, Myrtle thought.

“Prick son of a bitch cocksucker.”

And she was sure as heck getting to know her mother better, too.

TWENTY

“Car following us,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder, in the backseat with Wally, twisted around to look out the rear window. They’d just put yet another little town behind them, and three vehicles were visible back there, strung out along this country road flanked by forest and small clearings containing tiny aluminum-sided houses with dead automobiles in their front yards. “Which one?” Dortmunder asked. “The black Fairlane. The one right behind us.”

The Fairlane was about three car lengths back; pretty close for a tail. Frowning at it, Dortmunder tried to make out the people inside through the sky-reflecting windshield. “You sure?” he said. “Looks to me like a couple women in there.”

“Been right on our ass for miles,” Kelp said.

“They don’t act like pros,” Dortmunder said.

Wally, excitement making his eyes and mouth wetter than usual, said, “Do you think they really are, Andy? Following us?”

Tom, up front next to Kelp, said, “One way to be sure. We’ll circle once. If they’re still with us, we’ll take them out. Anybody carrying?”

“No,” Dortmunder said.

Wally, very eager, said, “Carrying what?”

“You aren’t,” Dortmunder told him. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But what is it?” Wally asked. “Carrying what, John? What aren’t I carrying?”

“A gun,” Dortmunder explained, to shut him up, and Wally’s eyes grew huge and even wetter with this new thrill.

Meanwhile, up front, Tom was saying, “There’s a left just up ahead. You’ll take it, then the next left, and it’ll swing us back to this road just this side of that town we went through. If your Fairlane’s still with us then, we’ll have to get rid of them.” Twisting around, he frowned at Dortmunder and said, “This peaceful impulse of yours, Al, you’re letting it take over your life. You don’t want to go around all the time without heat.”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Dortmunder told him.

Tom grimaced and shook his head and faced front. They made the left, onto a smaller and narrower and curvier road. “The Fairlane made the turn,” Kelp said, looking at the rearview mirror.

They drove along quietly then, the four of them in the purring Cadillac. Kelp had, as Dortmunder had known he would, come up with excellent transportation. And an extra passenger, too, since Kelp on his own had decided it would be a good idea to tell Wally the actual story here (which Tom hadn’t liked one bit, but it was already done, so there you are) and bring the little butterball along so he could have a look at the actual terrain, to help him and his computer think about the problem better. So here they all were, the Unlikely Quartet, driving around the countryside.

Around and around. A few miles farther along this secondary road, just after a steep downgrade and a one-lane stonewalled bridge, they came to the second left, as Tom pointed out. Kelp took it, and looked in the mirror. “Still with us,” he said.

“Heat would solve this problem,” Tom commented.

“Heat brings heat,” Dortmunder told the back of his head. Tom didn’t bother to answer.

“I’ll go around again,” Kelp suggested, “and when we get to that one-lane bridge from before, I can squeeze them.”

“A Caddy can beat a Fairlane,” Tom pointed out. “Why not just floor this sucker?”

“I don’t break speed limit laws in a borrowed car,” Kelp told him.

Tom snorted but made no comments about the superior qualities of rented cars.

Dortmunder looked back, and the Fairlane was still on their tail, far too close for anybody who knew anything about surveillance. Unless somebody wanted them to know they were being followed. But why? And who were those two women? He said, “Tom, why would anybody follow you?”

“Me?” Tom said, looking over his shoulder. “Whadaya mean, me? How come it isn’t one of you guys? Maybe they’re computer salesmen, want to talk to Wally.”

“The rest of us aren’t known around here,” Dortmunder said.

“Neither am I,” Tom said. “Not after twenty-six years.”

“I don’t like it,” Dortmunder said. “Right here in the neighborhood where we’re supposed to do the main job, and we’ve got new players in the game.”

“Here’s the turn,” Kelp said, and took it. Then he looked in the rearview mirror and said, “They kept going!”

Dortmunder looked back, and now there was no one behind them at all. “I don’t get it,” he said.

Wally, tentative about making suggestions among this crowd, said, “Maybe they were lost.”

“No,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, wait a second,” Kelp said. “That’s not entirely crazy, John.”

“No?” Dortmunder studied Kelp’s right ear. “How much crazy is it?” he asked.

“People get lost,” Kelp said, “particularly in the country. Particularly in places like this, where everything’s got the same name.”

“Dudson,” commented Tom.

“That’s the name, all right,” Kelp agreed. “How many Dudsons are there, anyway?”

“Let’s see,” Tom said, taking the question seriously. “North, East, Center, and Falls. Four.”

“That’s a lot of Dudsons,” Kelp said.

“There used to be three more,” Tom told him. “Dudson Park, Dudson City, and Dudson. They’re all under the reservoir.”

“Good,” Kelp said. “Anyway, John, how about that? You go out for a nice ride in the country, all of a sudden everywhere you look another Dudson, you’re lost, you don’t know how to get back, you’re driving in circles.”

“We were the one driving in circles,” Dortmunder said.

“I’m coming to that,” Kelp promised. “So there you are, driving in circles, and you decide you’ll pick another car and follow it until it gets somewhere. Only they picked us. So when we start going in circles, too, they figure we’re also lost on account of all the Dudsons, so off they go.”

“Sounds good to me,” Tom said.

Timidly, Wally said, “It does make sense, John.”

“I never seen that to matter much,” Dortmunder commented. “But, okay, maybe you’re all right. Nobody around here knows any of us, those two women didn’t act like they knew how to tail anybody, and now they’re gone.”

“So there you are,” Kelp said.

“There I am,” Dortmunder agreed, frowning.

Tom said, “So now can we go pick up my stash?”

“Yes,” Kelp said.

“Just the same,” Dortmunder said, mostly to himself, “something tells me we got that Ford in our future.”

TWENTY-ONE

“Mother,” Myrtle said, keeping her attention straight out the windshield as they drove together through the twilight back toward Dudson Center, “you just have to tell me the truth.”

“I don’t see that at all,” Edna said. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

“My eyes are on the road. Mother, please! I have the right to know about my own father.”

“The right!” Even for Edna, that word was flung out with startling fury. “Did I have the right to know him? I thought I did, but I was wrong. He knew me, God knows, and here you are.”

“You’ve never said a word about him.” Myrtle found herself awed by it, by Edna’s years of silence, by her own blithe acceptance of the status quo, never questioning, never wondering. “Can he be that bad?” she asked, believing the answer would simply have to be no.

But the answer was, “He’s worse. Take my word for it.”

“But how can I?” Myrtle pleaded. “How can I take your word, when you don’t give me any words? Mother, I’ve always tried to be a good daughter, I’ve always—”

“You have,” Edna said, suddenly quieter, less agitated. Myrtle risked a quick sidelong glance, and Edna was now brooding at the dashboard, as though the words mene mene tekel upharsin had suddenly appeared there. Myrtle was surprised and touched to see this softening of her mother’s features. Imperfectly seen though her face might be in the light of dusk, some harsh level of reserve or defense was abruptly gone.

And abruptly back: “Watch the road!”

Myrtle’s eyes snapped forward. The two-lane blacktop road was now bringing them past the Mexican restaurant at the edge of Dudson Center; they were less than fifteen minutes from home.

Myrtle hadn’t at all wanted to give up the pursuit. It was true the people in the backseat of the Cadillac kept turning around to look at her, it was true the Cadillac was driving in circles around the countryside, it was true these things suggested they’d realized they were being followed and therefore had no intention of going on to their original destination until she stopped following them, but what did any of that matter? She didn’t care where they were going, she cared only about who they were. Or not even all of them, only the one: her father. To her way of thinking, if she followed them long enough, if she made her presence both obvious and inevitable, sooner or later wouldn’t they have to either arrive somewhere, or at least stop somewhere, so that she could get out of her car and go look at them, see them, talk to them? Talk to him?

But Edna had said no. “They’re on to us,” she snarled out of the side of her mouth, displaying another previously unknown side to her personality. “Forget it, Myrtle. We’ll go home.”

“But we’re so close! If we lose them—”

“We won’t lose that son of a bitch,” Edna had said grimly. “If he’s back—and he’s back, all right, damn his eyes—one of these black days he’ll come around, you see if he doesn’t. It’s only a matter of time. Myrtle, if they take that goddamn left again up there, you don’t follow them! You go straight ahead!”

And the Cadillac had taken the g——left, and obedient Myrtle, the good daughter, had gone straight ahead. And now they were almost home, the adventure almost finished, long before it had ever really begun. Myrtle had no faith in her mother’s conviction that her father would “come around” one of these days, black or otherwise; after all these years, why should he?

And he’d been so close!

Once Mother gets out of this car, Myrtle thought, I’ve lost the truth forever. “Please,” she said, so faintly she wasn’t sure Edna would be able to hear her at all.

The answer was a sigh; another surprising example of softness. In a voice so gentle as to be almost unrecognizable, Edna said, “Don’t ask me these things, Myrtle.”

Her own voice as soft as her mother’s, Myrtle said, “But it hurts not to know.”

“It never used to,” Edna said with a return of her normal tartness.

“Well, it does now,” Myrtle said. “Knowing you just won’t talk about it.”

“For Christ’s sake, Myrtle,” Edna cried, “don’t you think it hurts me? Don’t you think that’s why I don’t want to talk about the goddamn man?”

“You must have loved him very much,” Myrtle said, gently and consolingly, the way they do such scenes in the movies. She’d never imagined the day would come when she’d play such a scene herself.

“God knows,” Edna answered bitterly. “I suppose, at the time, I must have thought I…” But then she shook her head, eyes flashing. Sharply she said, “And what did I get out of it?”

“Well, me,” Myrtle reminded her, and tried a little smile, saying, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“At the time?” Edna’s answering smile was twisted and lived only on one side of her face. “It wasn’t so wonderful, either, back then. Not in North Dudson.”

“I can’t even imagine it.”

Edna cocked an eye at her as Myrtle stopped for a red light on Main Street. Ahead, the windows of the library gleamed yellow in the gloaming. “No, I don’t suppose you can imagine it,” Edna said. “Did I do that to you? Well, I guess I did.”

“Do what to me?”

“The light’s green,” Edna said.

Myrtle, feeling an impatience and an irritation that were rare in her, looked out at the green light and tromped down on the accelerator. The Ford bucked across the intersection, not quite stalling, but then Myrtle settled down to her normal way of driving.

Musingly, not even having noticed Myrtle’s jack rabbit start—which is what she would have called it, with withering disapproval, under normal circumstances—Edna said, “I brought you up to be careful, cautious, obedient, mild…”

Laughing, but awkward and self-conscious, Myrtle said, “You make me sound like a Girl Scout.”

“You are a Girl Scout,” her mother told her, without pleasure. “I wasn’t brought up that way,” she went on. “I was brought up to be independent, make up my own mind, take my own chances. And what did it get me? Tom Jimson. That’s why I went the other way with you.”

Excited, Myrtle said, “Tom Jimson? Is that his name?”

“I’m not even sure of that much,” Edna said. “It’s one of the names he told me. The one he told me most often, so maybe it’s his.”

“What was he like?” Myrtle asked.

“Satan,” Edna said.

“Oh, Mother,” Myrtle said, and smiled in condescension. She knew this story. Edna had been madly in love with… Tom Jimson… and he’d abandoned her, pregnant and unwed, and the hurt was still there. Now Edna thought he was Satan. Then she’d loved him. So how bad, really, could he be?

Myrtle made the turn onto Elm Street, and then the turn onto Albany Street. Ahead lay Spring Street, and beyond that Myrtle Street. “Myrtle Jimson,” she said softly, testing the sound of it.

“Hah!” Edna snorted. “That was never in it, believe me!”

“I wonder where they were going,” Myrtle said.

“Well, not to church,” Edna told her. “I can tell you that much.”

TWENTY-TWO

The church was beautiful in the waning light of day. A small white clapboard structure with a graceful steeple, it nestled into its rustic setting like a diamond in a fold of green felt. The hillside behind it was a rich tumble of evergreens mixed with stands of beech and birch and oak, falling away to well-manicured lawn that swept like a thick-piled carpet around the tidy white building with its oval-topped stained-glass windows well spaced along both side walls.

The road outside, Church Lane, curving up into these foothills from State Highway 112, came nowhere but here, to the Elizabeth Grace Dudson Memorial Reformed Congregational Unitarian Church of Putkin Township. (Five different churches, and five separate congregations, had been combined down to this one, absorbing the remnants of churches flooded by the reservoir or emptied by shrinking attendance.) Since Church Lane ended here, the road simply ballooned at its terminus into a large parking area, from which the asphalt path ran straight up the slight incline to the church front door. The white of the church, the rich indigos and maroons and golds and olives of the stained-glass windows, the varied greens of the surrounding lawn and hillside, the bottomless black of the asphalt, were never more beautiful than now, in the fading light at the end of another perfect day.

And even more beautiful than the church and its setting was the bride, blushing pink in her swaths of organdy white, climbing from the family station wagon with her parents and baby sister. They were the first arrivals, half an hour before the scheduled ceremony, father looking uncomfortable and thick-fingered in his awkwardly fitting dark suit and badly knotted red tie, baby sister an excited bonbon in puffy peach, mother beribboned and bowed in lavender, dabbing at her tear-filled eyes with a lavender hankie and saying, “I told you not to go all the way, you little tramp. Just get him off with your hand, for heaven’s sake! Oh, I so wanted a June wedding!”

“Mother!” the bride replied, elaborately ill-tempered. “I’ll be showing by then.”

“Let’s get this thing over with,” said father, and led the way heavy-footed up the path and into the church.

Snickering cousins of the bride came next, some to be ushers and flower girls, some just to hang out, and two burly fellows in blocky wool jackets who’d volunteered to be parking lot attendants, to see to it that all of the cars of all of the guests would fit in this space at the end of Church Lane.

Relatives of the bride continued to predominate for the first ten minutes or so; giggling awkward large-jointed people wearing their “best” clothes, saved for weddings, funerals, Easter, and appearances in court. Soon this group began to be supplemented by members of the groom’s family: skinnier, shorter, snake-hipped people with can-opener noses and no asses, dressed in Naugahyde jackets and polyester shirts and vinyl trousers and plastic shoes, as though they weren’t human beings at all but were actually a chain dental service’s waiting room. Intermixed with these, in warm-up jackets and pressed designer jeans, were the groom’s pals, acne-flaring youths full of sidelong looks and nervous laughter, knowing this was more than likely a foretaste of their own doom: “There but for the grace of the Akron Rubber Company go I.” The bride’s girlfriends arrived in a too-crowded-car cluster and hovered together like magnetized iron filings, all demonstrating the latest soap opera fashion trends and each of them a sealed bubble of self-consciousness and self-absorption. The groom, a jerky marionette in a rented tux, a wide-eyed pale-faced boy with spiky hair and protuberant ears, appeared with his grim suspicious parents and entered the church with all the false macho assurance of Jimmy Cagney on his way to the electric chair. The church door shut behind him with a hollower boom than it had given anyone else.

As the hour of the service approached, the last few cars, each with its couple snarlingly blaming each other for causing them to be late, came tearing up Church Lane and was slotted into one of the remaining spaces by the volunteer attendants. And then it was TIME. The attendants grinned at each other, pleased with their accomplishment, and were about to turn and enter the church themselves when headlights alerted them to one last car load of wedding guests. “They are gonna be late!” one attendant told the other, and both stepped out to the road to wave frantically at the oncoming car to get a move on.

Instead of which, at first it slowed down, as though the driver were suddenly uncertain of his welcome. “Come on, come on!” shouted an attendant, and ran forward, still waving. The car was a new Caddy—a lot better than most of the cars here—and the driver had the narrow nose and bewildered expression that suggested to the attendants (cousins of the bride) that these people represented the groom’s side.

“Park over there!” the attendant yelled, pointing at one of the few remaining slots.

The driver had lowered his window, the better to display his confusion. He said, “The church…?”

“That’s right! That’s right! There’s the church right there, it’s the only thing on this road! Come on, will ya, you’re late!”

Someone in the car said something to the driver, who nodded and said, “I guess we might as well.”

So then at last the Caddy was driven to its slot, all four of its doors opened, and a bunch of extremely unlikely wedding guests emerged. The attendants, waiting for them, exchanged a knowing glance that silently said, Groom’s side, no question. Along with the sharp-nosed driver were a short fat round troll, a gloomy slope-shouldered guy, and a mean-looking old geezer. Shepherded by the attendants, these four made their way up the walk and into the now-full church, where the ceremony hadn’t yet begun after all, having been delayed by both a sudden loss of courage on the groom’s part (being treated now from an uncle’s flask) and a screaming cat fight between the bride and her mother.

A tuxedoed usher approached the latecomers, while the attendants went off to the seats saved for them by other cousins. Leaning toward the new arrivals, the usher murmured, “Bride or groom?”

They stared at him. The sharp-nosed one said, “Huh?”

The usher was used by now to the wedding guests being under-rehearsed. Patiently, gesturing to the pews on both sides of the central aisle, he said, “Are you with the bride’s party or the groom’s?”

“Oh,” said the sharp-nosed one.

“Bride,” said the mean-looking old man, but at the same instant, “Groom,” said the pessimistic-looking guy.

This under-rehearsed was ridiculous. “Surely,” the usher began, “you know whi—”

“We’re with the groom,” the pessimist explained. “They’re with the bride.”

“Oh,” the usher said, and looked around for empty seats on both sides of the aisle. “Here’s two for the bridal party,” he said, “and two over—”

He broke off, astonished, because the group seemed to be arguing fiercely and almost silently among themselves as to which of them was to be with which. Noticing him noticing them, they cut that business short and sorted themselves out with no further trouble, except for sharp looks back and forth. The usher seated the pessimist and the little round man among the bride’s family and friends, then placed the mean-looking old man and the sharp-nosed fellow in among the partisans of the groom.

As he did so, the uncle with the flask (tucked away out of sight) emerged from a side door down by the altar and made his somewhat unsteady way (he’d been medicating himself as well, since the cap was off anyway) to his seat on the aisle down near the front on the groom’s side. He was still settling himself and grinning his report on the groom’s condition to his neighbors when the mother of the bride, rather red of face and grim of expression, but with shoulders triumphantly squared, came from the rear of the church, escorted by an usher, and marched down the center aisle to sit in the front row.

A moment of extremely suspenseful silence ensued, during which the minister’s wife, out of sight in the vestry, placed the needle on the turning record, and a scratchy but full-throated version of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” poured forth from the speakers mounted high in the four corners of the nave.

As the music swelled and the minister came out of the vestry to stand by the chancel rail, the mean-looking old guy with the bridal party gave a disgusted look across the aisle at the pessimist among the groom’s people. The pessimist gave him the disgusted look right back, then shook his head and sat back to watch the wedding.

The music stopped. The speakers in the corners of the nave said, “Tick… tick… ti—” And stopped.

The minister stepped forward, crossing the front of the church behind the chancel rail, smiling bland encouragement at the parents and immediate family in the front row. He was a round-faced round-shouldered slender amiable man with a round sparsely haired head and round highly reflecting spectacles, and he wore thick-soled black shoes like a cop and a long-sleeved black dress with a white dickey at the neck. The black dress showed off his round potbelly as he crossed to the pulpit and climbed the circular staircase.

On the bride’s side of the aisle, the mean-looking old guy leaned forward and looked significantly across the aisle at the pessimist, who didn’t seem to want to have his eye caught. But the old guy kept nodding, and widening his eyes, and waving his eyebrows, until finally everybody else in the immediate area was in on it, so then at last the pessimist turned and nodded—“I know, I know”—which didn’t keep the old guy from pointing very significantly with his eyebrows and ears and elbows and nose and temples toward the general area of the pulpit and the climbing minister. The pessimist sighed and folded his arms and faced determinedly forward. The little dumpling beside him kept looking back and forth between the pessimist and the old guy, open-mouthed and eager. Next to the old guy, the sharp-nosed fellow ignored the whole thing, concentrating instead on the cleavage in the dress of the friend of the bride on his other side.

Meantime, the minister had attained the pulpit, from where he beamed out amiably upon his congregation. After pausing to adjust the microphone on its gooseneck stalk in front of him, at last he said, “Well, we all want to thank Felix Mendelssohn for sharing that wonderful music with us. And now, if you’ll all rise.”

Shckr—shckr—shckroop.

“Very good, very good.” The minister’s face and smile were at the pulpit, but his voice came from the four upper corners of the nave. “And now,” he said, “we will all turn to our neighbor, and we will greet our neighbor with a handshake and a hug.”

Embarrassed laughter and throat-clearing filled the church, but everyone (except the mean-looking old guy) obeyed. The sharp-nosed fellow very enthusiastically embraced the friend of the bride next to him, while the pessimist and the dumpling hugged each other in a much more gingerly fashion.

“Very good, very good,” the minister’s voice boomed down at them from the four corners of the nave. “Resume your seats, resume your seats.”

Schlff—schlff—fflrp.

“Very good.” The minister’s eyeglasses reflected the interior of the church, creating gothic wonders where none in fact existed. Beaming around at the congregation, giving them back this much more interesting reflection of themselves, he said, “We have come here this evening, in the sight of God and man, mindful of the laws of God and the laws of the State of New York, to join in holy wedlock Tiffany and Bob.”

He paused. He beamed his sweet smile into the farthest corner of his domain. He said, “You know, the blessed state of matrimony…….”

His voice went on, for some extended time, but the words did not enter one brain in that church. A great glazed comatosity o’ercame the congregation, a state of slow enchantment like that in the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like the residents of Brigadoon, the people in the church drifted in a long and dreamless sleep, freed of struggle and expectation.

“……. with Bob. Bob?”

A slow sigh escaped the slumbering assembly, a faint and lingering breath. Shoulders moved, hands twitched in laps, bottoms shifted on the wooden pews. Eyes began to focus, and there was Bob, as if by magic, a bowed beanpole inaptly in a black tux at the head of the central aisle, standing with his look-alike best man—slightly heavier, grinning in nervous relief, left hand clutching jacket pocket (no doubt to feel the ring still safe within)—the two of them in profile to the crowd, Bob blinking like the terrorists’ kidnap victim he was, the beaming minister descending the pulpit and striding toward the lectern set up just within the chancel rail. The speakers in the corners, said, “Tick… tick… tick…” and a slow, heavy-beated, orchestral version of “Here Comes the Bride” battered the people below.

Now it all began to move. Tiffany, on her father’s arm, and her attendants made their uncertain way down the aisle, trying but failing to keep pace with the music, stumbling and tripping prettily along, concentrating so totally on their feet that they forgot to be self-conscious. Bob watched them as though they were an approaching truck.

Bride and groom met in front of the lectern and turned to face the minister, who beamed over their heads at the people and announced, “Bob and Tiffany have written their own wedding service,” and everybody went back to sleep.

When they awoke, the deed was done. “You may kiss the bride,” the minister said, and some smart-aleck pal of the groom said, “That’s about the only thing he hasn’t done to her,” perhaps a little more loudly than he’d intended.

Bride and groom made their hasty grinning way up the aisle as the congregation stood and stretched and talked and cheered them on, and from the speakers high above came the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The mean-looking old guy turned to the sharp-nosed fellow and said, “If I had a gun, I’d shoot somebody.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” the sharp-nosed fellow answered in agreement.

“How about with these two?” the mean-looking old guy said as the happy couple hurried past.

Across the aisle, the round troll dabbed his moist eyes and said, “Gee, that was nice. Better even than Princess Labia’s wedding.” The pessimist sighed.

Most weddings take place in daylight, but there’d been a certain urgency in the planning of this one, and all the potential daytime slots here at Elizabeth Grace Dudson Memorial Reformed Congregational Unitarian Church of Putkin Township had already been taken. The mother of the bride had been determined that her daughter would have a church wedding, and women who successfully name their infant daughters Tiffany do tend to get their own way, so an evening wedding it was. Exterior lights had been turned on at the end of the ceremony, so that when the wedding party emerged, laughing and shouting and throwing superfluous rice (it was unnecessary to wish fecundity upon Tiffany and Bob), the scene looked more like a movie than real life. Many of the revelers, becoming aware of this, started to perform wedding guests rather than be wedding guests, which merely increased the general air of unreality.

Inside, the church was nearly empty. The minister chatted up front with a small group of ladies, a few other relatives and friends drifted slowly doorward, and the four latecomers sat stolid in their pews, as though waiting for the second show. A departing aunt said to them, “Aren’t you coming to the party?”

“Sure,” said the pessimist.

She continued on. “Come along, now,” said another exiting in-law.

“Be there in a minute,” the sharp-nosed fellow assured her.

“It’s over, you know,” kidded a grandmother with a grandmotherly twinkle.

Twinkling right back, the butterball said, “We’re looking at the pretty windows.”

The minister, passing with the last of the ladies, smiled upon the quartet and said, “We’ll be closing up now.”

The mean-looking old guy nodded. “We wanna pray a little more,” he said.

The minister seemed taken aback at that idea, but rallied. “We must all pray,” he agreed, “for long life and joy for Tiffany and Bob.”

“You bet,” said the mean-looking old guy.

The pessimist slowly turned his head—his neck made faint cracking sounds—to watch the minister and the final few of his flock amble on to the door and out. “Jeez,” he said. Which was a prayer.

TWENTY-THREE

“Jeez,” said Dortmunder.

Across the aisle, Kelp said, “Okay, Tom? Okay? Can we get it now?”

Sullen, Tom said, “It wasn’t my idea to come to a wedding.”

“It was your idea,” Kelp reminded him, “to stash your stash in a church.”

“Where’s a better place?” Tom wanted to know.

Dortmunder rose, all of his joints creaking and cracking and aching. “Are you two,” he wanted to know, “just gonna sit there and converse?”

So everybody else stood up at last, their knees and hips and elbows making sounds like gunshots, and Tom said, “Won’t take but two minutes now that the goddamn crowd is gone.”

He stepped out to the aisle, turned toward the front of the church, and a voice back at the door said, “Gentlemen, I really must ask you to leave now. Silent prayer in one’s home or automobile is just as efficacious—”

It was the minister again, coming down the aisle at them. Tom gave him a disgusted look and said, “Enough is enough. Hold that turkey.”

“Right,” said Kelp.

As Tom walked down the aisle and Wally gaped at everything in fascinated interest—the true spectator—Dortmunder and Kelp approached the minister, who became too belatedly alarmed, backing away, his voice rising toward treble as he said, “What are—? You can’t— This is a place of worship!”

“Sssshhh,” Kelp advised, soothingly, putting his hand on the minister’s arm. When the minister tried to pull away, Kelp’s hand tightened its grip, and Dortmunder took hold of the sky pilot’s other arm, saying, “Take it easy, pal.”

“Little man,” Kelp said, “you’ve had a busy day. Just gentle down, now.”

The minister stared through his round spectacles at the front of his church, saying, “What’s that man doing?”

“Won’t take a minute,” Dortmunder explained.

Up front, Tom had approached the pulpit, which was an octagonal wooden basket or crow’s nest built on several sturdy legs. The underpart of the pulpit was faced by latticed panels inset between the legs, the whole thing stained and polished to the shade generally known as “a burnished hue.” Tom bent to stick his fingers through the diamond-shaped holes in the latticework panel around on the side, half hidden by the circular stairs. He poked and tugged on this, but the last time that panel had been moved was thirty-one years earlier, and Tom had been the one to move it. In the interim, heat and cold and moisture and dryness and time itself had done their work, and the panel was now well and truly stuck. Tom yanked and pushed and prodded, and nothing at all happened.

At the other end of the church, the minister continued to stare at these suddenly hostile wedding guests, trying to remember his emergency-techniques training. He knew any number of ways to calm a person in a traumatic or panic-inducing situation, but they all worked on the assumption that he was an outside observer—a skilled and concerned and compassionate observer, it is true, but outside. None of the techniques seemed to have much relevance when he was the one in a panic. “Um,” he said.

“Hush,” Kelp told him.

But he couldn’t hush. “Violence is no way to solve problems,” he told them.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dortmunder said. “It’s never let me down.”

From the front of the church, underlining the point, came a crash, as Tom, exasperated beyond endurance, stood up, stepped back, and kicked the pulpit in the lattice, which smashed to kindling. The minister jumped like Bambi’s mother in Dortmunder and Kelp’s hands. They held him in place, quivering, while Wally, excitement making him seem taller but on the other hand wider, waddled hurriedly to the front of the church to see what was going on.

Up there, Tom was on his knees again, pulling out from inside the pulpit an old black cracked-leather doctor’s bag with a rusted-out clasp. “There’s the son of a bitch,” he said, with satisfaction.

“Gee!” Wally said. “The treasure in the pulpit!”

Tom gave him a look. “That’s right,” he said, and carried the bag down the aisle toward the others, Wally bouncing along like a living beachball in his wake.

“Is that it?” Dortmunder asked. “Can we go now?”

“This is it,” Tom acknowledged, “and we can go in a minute. Hold on here.” He put the doctor’s bag on a handy pew and fiddled for a while with the clasp. “Fucking thing’s rusted shut,” he said.

Shocked, the minister blurted, “Language!”

Everybody looked at him, even Wally. Tom said, “How come that’s talking?”

“I really don’t know,” Kelp said, studying the minister with unfriendly interest. “But I don’t think it’s gonna happen again.”

Taking a good-size clasp knife from his pocket and opening it, Tom said, “I hear from him again, I take his tongue out.”

“Drastic,” Kelp suggested calmly, “but probably effective.”

“Very.”

The minister stared round-eyed at the knife as Tom used it to slice through the old dry leather around the clasp, freeing the bag, opening it, and then putting the knife away. The minister sighed audibly when the knife disappeared, and his eyes rolled briefly in his head.

Tom reached into the bag, pulled out a wad of bills, peeled off a few, dropped the wad back into the bag, and turned to slap the bills into the minister’s enfeebled hand. Since the minister couldn’t seem to do it for himself, Tom closed his fingers around the money for him, saying, “Here’s half a grand to fix up the pulpit. Keep your nose clean.” To the others he said, “Now we can go.”

Dortmunder and Kelp released the minister, who staggered backward against a pew. Ignoring him, the others headed for the door, Dortmunder saying to Tom, “You’re a generous guy. I never knew that.”

“That’s me, okay,” Tom said. “Ever surprising.”

As they reached the door, the minister, beginning to recover from his fright, called after them, “Don’t you want a receipt? For your taxes?” But they didn’t answer.

TWENTY-FOUR

All was quiet in East Amity, a tiny bedroom community on the south shore of Long Island. Well after midnight, and the commuters were all tucked between their sheets, dreaming of traffic jams, while out on the village streets there was no traffic at all. The village police car drove by, all alone, down Bay Boulevard, idling along, Officer Pohlax yawning at the wheel, barely aware of the boutiques and tire stores he was here to protect. Ahead on the left bulked Southern Suffolk Combined High School (yay!), from which Officer Pohlax himself had graduated just a very few years earlier.

How old it made him feel now, still in his twenties, to look at the old school and remember that feeling of infinite possibility back then, the absolute conviction that a determined fellow, if he kept himself in shape and didn’t drink too much, could eventually sleep with every girl in the world. Various girls he had and had not slept with during those halcyon days drifted through his mind, every one with the same identical smile, and he and his police car drifted on past the high school, wafted by the gusts of imperfect memory.

Doug Berry, at the wheel of his black pickup with the blue-and-silver styling package, watched that goddamn slow-moving police car inch by and tapped impatient fingers against the steering wheel. He was parked on a dark side street across from the high school, engine running but lights off, waiting for the coast to be clear. He knew that would be old Billy Pohlax at the wheel—they’d gone to high school together, that very high school across the street, way back when—and he knew Billy wouldn’t pass by here again for at least an hour. Which should be plenty of time, if his students showed up when they were supposed to.

Three blocks away, brake lights gleamed like rubies on the village police car, which then made a right off Bay Boulevard, heading down to the docks and marinas along the waterfront. Doug slipped the pickup into gear, left the lights off, and scooted across Bay and onto the driveway leading up to the big parking lot wrapped halfway around the school, on its left side and rear. Doug drove around to the back, the equipment in the bed of his vehicle thumping and clanking from time to time, and pulled in close up against the rear door to which he had bought the key, just the other day, from another old classmate, now an assistant building custodian (janitor) at this same school.

Doug opened his pickup’s door, the interior light went on, and he slammed the door again, scared out of his wits. The light! He’d forgotten about the light! If somebody saw him…

Was there a way to turn off that damn light? Trying to study the dashboard in the dark, he succeeded only in briefly switching on the dashboard lights. Finally, he decided the only thing to do was chance it, and move as fast as he could. Pop open the door (light on!), scramble out, close the door rapidly without slamming it (light off), sag in relief against the side of the pickup.

Okay, okay. No problem. Not a single light showed in any of the houses on Margiotta Street, out behind the high school. No one had seen him. There was nothing to worry about.

Reassuring himself like mad, Doug went over to the door, tried the key, and was relieved, faintly surprised, and also faintly disappointed, when it worked and the door swung open. Standing in the open doorway, he was about to check the time on his waterproof, shockproof, glow-in-the-dark watch/compass/calendar when motion made him look up to see a long black car—a Mercedes, he realized—traveling without lights and just coming to a stop next to his pickup. In the extreme dimness, he could just make out the MD plate on the Mercedes, which was a real surprise. Those guys weren’t doctors. Standards haven’t slipped that much.

Both front doors of the Mercedes opened, without the interior light going on. (How did they do that?) Andy was the driver, John the passenger. They shut the car doors quietly and approached, Andy saying, “Right on time.”

“I’ve got the door open,” Doug announced, unnecessarily, since he was standing in it. Then he gestured at the pickup, saying, “All the gear’s here. It weighs a ton.”

It did, too. Wearing half the stuff and carrying the rest, the three staggered into the school building, Doug closing the door behind them and then leading the way with his pencil flash along the wide empty dark corridor—that well-remembered smell of school! — to the stairs, and then down the long flight and along the next corridor—not quite so wide down here—to the double swinging doors leading to the boys’ locker room, and through it to the entrance to the pool. An interior room in the basement, the pool area had no windows, and so there was no reason not to turn on lights, which Doug did: all of them, revealing great expanses of beige tile and heavily chlorinated water. Footsteps and voices echoed wetly in here, so you always had the feeling there was somebody else around, just behind you or on the other side of the pool.

The two students looked at that great ocean in the bottom of the school building, and Andy said, “Where’s the shallow end?”

“It’s the deep end we want,” Doug told him. “Right here. Let’s get our gear on.”

“At the real place,” Andy said, “we’re just gonna walk in.”

“Look, guys,” Doug said. “That was your decision, that I’m not going to the real place with you. So I arranged for us to use this pool. And believe me, wherever it is you’re gonna walk into, when you get fifty feet deep it’s gonna be a lot farther down than the deep end of this pool.”

They both took a moment to look into the pool, contemplating that truth. Then John sighed and shook his head and said, “Okay, we’ve come this far. Let’s do it.”

“Fine,” Doug said. “We’ll get out of our street clothes, into our swimsuits and our wetsuits and all our gear, and get to it.”

Two less athletic or more reluctant students Doug had never had. They didn’t like their wet suits, they didn’t like the way the tank straps felt on their shoulders, they didn’t like the weight belts around their waists (he’d given them each fourteen pounds), they didn’t like their masks, they hated their BCDs. Finally, Doug said, “Look guys, the idea was, you wanted to do this, remember? I’m not forcing you into it.”

John held up his BCD, a thing that looked like a larger and more elaborate life vest, and said, “What is this thing, anyway?”

“A BCD,” Doug told him.

Which didn’t seem to help much. “That’s the alphabet,” Andy pointed out. “A, B, C, D.”

“No, no,” Doug said. “Not A BCD, a BCD. Buoyancy Control Device. Simply, the amount of air you put in the BCD determines at what level you hover when you’re underwater.”

“When I’m underwater,” John said, “I generally hover at the bottom.”

“Not with the BCD,” Doug assured him. “Let me demonstrate.”

“Go right ahead,” John said.

So Doug went into the pool, wearing all the gear and with the BCD inflated enough to keep him at the surface. Head out of the water, he said, “I’m going to raise my arm and press the button on the top of the control to release some of the air from the BCD. This pool is only eight feet deep, so I can’t descend very far, but I’ll hover in the water, above the bottom, and then I’ll add air to the BCD from my tank, and I’ll rise again. Now, watch.”

They looked at each other. Doug said, “Watch me.”

“We’re watching,” John said.

So Doug did exactly as he’d announced he would do, keeping his knees bent upward so his feet wouldn’t touch the bottom when he floated downward. He hovered near the bottom for a while, then lay out flat and stroked across the pool, the BCD maintaining his depth at about five feet. Stroking back, he added air and rose to the surface. Looking at those two skeptical faces, he said, “See how easy?”

“Sure,” said John.

“So let’s do it,” Doug said. “Jump on in.”

No. They would not “jump on in”; no matter how he assured them they wouldn’t sink, they insisted on going down to the shallow end and coming down the steps there. And even then, they were barely knee deep when both stopped. Looking as startled as a man whose face is encumbered with mask and mouthpiece can possibly look, Andy cried, “This suit doesn’t work!”

“Sure it does,” Doug told him. I’m earning my thousand dollars, he told himself. “Come on in, fellas.”

“It’s wet inside the suit!”

John said, more quietly and fatalistically, “Inside mine, too.”

“It’s supposed to do that,” Doug explained, holding to the side of the pool at the deep end. “The wet suit is Neoprene rubber. It lets a layer of water in. Your body warms the water, the suit holds it in, and you stay warm.”

“But wet!” Andy complained.

Doug shook his head, losing heart. “I don’t know, guys,” he said. “Maybe you just aren’t cut out for this.”

“No,” John said, “it’s okay. Just so we know the score. If that’s the way it’s supposed to work, okay, then. Come on, Andy,” he said, and plowed on into the water with the expression of a man tasting his aunt’s favorite eggplant recipe.

Once he actually got his students in the water, Doug’s problems really began. These two guys simply did not want to breathe underwater. They’d descend, mouthpiece clamped in teeth, eyes wide behind the goggles, and they’d hold their breath. Eventually, asphyxiating, they’d surface and take in great huge gulps of air.

“Oh, come on, fellas,” Doug kept saying. “That’s air in that tank on your back. Use some of it.” But they wouldn’t.

Eventually, Doug saw that drastic measures were the only measures with these guys. Climbing out of the pool, but still wearing all his equipment in case of trouble, he convinced and cajoled them toward the deeper end. Their BCDs were full, of course, so they couldn’t sink, and they kept holding to the edge, but at least they were in water that was theoretically over their heads.

Now to turn theory into practice. Gently but firmly disengaging their clutching fingers from the pool’s rim, Doug shoved each of them away toward the middle. As buoyant as Macy’s parade floats, they drifted in the middle of the pool, blinking at him through their glass masks.

“Fine,” Doug told them, standing at the edge of the pool. “Mouthpiece in mouth. Are you breathing through your mouthpieces?”

They nodded. Above the water, they were happy to use scuba air.

“Fine,” Doug said. “Now we’ll test another part of the equipment. Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen. Each of you, lift your left arm. You know the silver button on that control there? Fine. Press it.”

Trustingly, they pressed it. Astounded, they sank.

Doug looked down through the water at their shifting swaying images. They were standing on the bottom of the pool, staring at each other in horror and shock. At this point, they would either panic and have to be rescued, in which case everybody could go home because the whole idea was impossible, or they would learn to breathe. Doug watched, and waited.

Bubbles. First from John, then from Andy. Bubbles; they were breathing.

Doug smiled, conscious of that rare swell of pride and accomplishment that teachers attain all too seldom, and a voice behind him screamed, “AAAKKK! Spaceman! Don’t move! Don’t move!”

Doug about jumped into the pool. He did jump, but in a circle, landing to face Billy Pohlax, Officer William Pohlax, the beat cop who wasn’t supposed to be around this area for at least another half hour, but who was in this school, in the doorway to this very room, not twenty feet from the pool, shakily pointing a gun in Doug’s general direction. Billy was so obviously terrified, so out of control, that his gun could surely go off at any second.

Doug cried, “Billy! Billy, it’s me, Doug!”

“Don’t move, don’t move!” Fear, fortunately, was keeping Billy way back in the doorway, where he couldn’t see the people inside the pool.

Doug froze. “I just want to show you my face, Billy. Remember me? Doug Berry?”

“Doug?” Billy’s trembling perceptibly eased.

Doug risked lifting his hands to his head, removing the mask and mouthpiece, showing his white face to Billy’s white face.

And Billy sagged with relief, saying, “Jeez, Doug, I thought you were a man from Mars or something. They had that movie Cat People on the box the other night, d’jever see that?”

“No,” Doug said.

Looking around, Billy said, “Anybody else here?” He took a step forward into the room.

“Uhhh, no,” Doug said, and moved casually but quickly to join Billy at the doorway. “What I’m doing here, Billy,” he explained, “Jack Holsem let me have a key, you remember Jack?” Subtly, he moved in a half circle, turning Billy away from the pool.

“Sure,” Billy said. “Dumbest kid in school. Works here now.”

A three-quarter turn away from the pool was the best Doug could make Billy do. “Still in school,” he said, and tried a casual grin, just to see if he could do it. “Anyway, I don’t have any place to try out new equipment, test it, you know. This time of year, the bay’s too cold.”

“Yeah, I guess it would be,” Billy agreed.

“Listen, Billy,” Doug said, being very confidential, pressing hard on their old friendship, “I’m not supposed to be here, you know. Jack wasn’t supposed to let me have the key. But I’m not stealing anything or anything, not doing—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Billy said, looking down, watching himself with awkward intensity shove his gun back into its holster.

“I don’t want to get Jack in trouble,” Doug said, and over Billy’s shoulder he saw John and Andy’s heads emerge, way down at the shallow end of the pool. They were walking out! But then they turned and saw him talking to the cop, the quite obvious cop, and without even pausing they reversed direction and plodded stolidly back underwater again.

Oh, very good! Very smart! Doug, turning his relief into good fellowship, said, “Billy? You can forget about this, can’t you? For Jack’s sake?”

“Sure,” Billy said. “You I don’t have to worry about. But what about that stolen car out there?”

“Stolen car,” Doug echoed, while his stomach joined John and Andy at the bottom of the pool.

“Mercedes,” Billy explained. “MD plates. Reported stolen in the city about an hour ago. I came back behind the school”—and he grinned sheepishly—“to tell you the truth, Doug, I was gonna coop a little.”

Doug didn’t know the word. “Coop?”

“Take a little nap,” Billy translated. “Back behind the school here’s the perfect place. Anyway, I recognized your pickup, you know, because of the bumper sticker, and right next to it’s this stolen Merc.” Consciously becoming more formal, more official, Billy said, “You want to tell me about that, Doug?”

“A stolen Mercedes?” Doug’s mind skittered with a million unhelpful thoughts.

“MD plates,” Billy amplified. “What about it?”

“I don’t know,” Doug said, floundering. “What about it?”

“You don’t know anything about this car?”

“Well, no,” Doug said, as innocent as anything. “It wasn’t there when I parked the pickup. I’ve been down here maybe half an hour. They must’ve left it there after I came down.”

“Abandoned it,” Billy decided, nodding in agreement. “Okay, Doug. I better go report it. You ready to get out of here?”

“Aw, gee, Billy,” Doug said. “I’ve still got another, I don’t know, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to do down here, testing, uh, equipment. Can’t I, uh—”

“Well, the thing is,” Billy said, “our department wrecker’s gonna come here for the Merc. If they see your pickup, you know, the least I’ll have to do is give you a ticket. There’s no parking behind the school after ten P.M. except on game nights.”

“Well, uh…” He couldn’t leave John and Andy in the bottom of the pool for the rest of their lives! “Give me, uh, Billy, give me just five minutes, okay?”

“Well, a couple minutes,” Billy agreed reluctantly. “But I can’t be away from my post, away from the radio—”

“You go back to the radio,” Doug told him. “I’ll just finish up down here. I’ll be right out.”

“Now, don’t take too long,” Billy said.

“No no no, I promise.”

Billy looked out toward the pool, as though he’d walk over there and look in after all. “Spooky down here at night. Just like Cat People. You gotta see that flick, Doug. The original, not the dumb remake.”

“I will, I will. Don’t forget your radio.”

“Right.” Billy pointed a stern finger at Doug, becoming official again as he said, “Five minutes.”

“Thanks, Billy.”

Then, at last, Billy left, and the instant he was gone, Doug ran to the pool and jumped into the water, descending to where John and Andy stood around as though waiting to be picked up by the next submarine. With pointings and other frantic gestures, he showed them yet again how to add air to the BCD to increase their buoyancy, and up all three rose together. As soon as their heads broke the surface, all three started loudly to talk, but Doug’s urgency was greater and he shouted them both down, screaming, “We don’t have time!”

“That was a cop!” Andy yelled.

“Looking for the people who stole the Mercedes!”

Andy and John became very silent. Floating in the pool, they exchanged a glance, and then John said to Doug, “You didn’t happen to mention us down there in the pool.”

“Don’t worry, I said I was alone. But I’ve got to leave now, and take the pickup away before Billy calls the department wrecker to come get the Mercedes.”

John said, “Billy?”

“The cop,” Doug told him. “I went to high school with him. This high school.”

“Those early contacts,” Andy suggested, “are so all-important.”

“Yeah,” Doug said. “Anyway, I gotta leave, but you can’t. So what I’ll do is, I’ll wait till they come for the Mercedes and everybody’s gone, and then I’ll come back and pick you guys up and all this equipment.”

John said, “How long?”

“How do I know?” Doug asked him. “An hour, maybe.”

John said, “And what are we supposed to do down here for an hour?”

Doug looked around the pool, then back at his students. “Well,” he said, “you could practice. Tell the truth, guys, you need it.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Tom Jimson was a criminal! That was the first thought in Myrtle Street’s head every morning when she awoke, and the last thought every night as she drifted—later and later, it seemed—into sleep, and it was somewhere in her mind all day long: at the library, at home, in the car, shopping, everywhere. Tom Jimson, her father, was a major criminal.

She’d known this fact for nearly two weeks now, and it still hadn’t lost its power to astonish and appall and excite. The very next morning after that evening of pointless pursuit of her father in the car that merely circled and circled, when Myrtle had gone to work at the library, she’d started to look for Tom Jimson in every reference work she could think of, and there he was right away in, of all major-league places, the index of the New York Times!

She had been two years old, just on the brink of entering play school, when Tom Jimson had entered Sing Sing for what the newspaper account said would be the last time: “… seven life sentences to run consecutively, with no possibility of parole.”

Now she understood why her mother had been so unbelieving when she’d first seen Tom Jimson ride by in an automobile in the bright light of day, why Edna had been startled into such uncharacteristic language and behavior. Tom Jimson was supposed to be in prison forever!

Had he escaped? But he wouldn’t boldly show himself in his old neighborhoods, would he, if he’d escaped? And wouldn’t there have been something in the newspaper if he’d escaped? But that twenty-three-year-old report of his conviction and jailing was the last time Tom Jimson—born in Oklahoma, sometime resident of California and Florida and several other states—had made the newspaper.

So what else could have happened? Maybe—this was a thrilling thought! — maybe they’d let him go! Maybe it had all been a mistake; he hadn’t committed all those crimes after all, and finally the truth had come out, and her father was a free man today, exonerated.

But wouldn’t that have gotten into the papers? And wouldn’t he, if a wrongly convicted innocent man, have returned to his family? Did he even know he had a family? Had Edna ever told him that Myrtle existed? (Edna herself refused to talk at all about the subject anymore and would fly into a rage if Myrtle dared start to question her.)

Myrtle spent nearly every waking moment of her life now going over and over these questions, considering the possibilities, thinking about her father! This morning, driving to the library, she concentrated so exclusively on the enigma of Tom Jimson that she never noticed the ancient, battered, rusty yellow Volkswagen Beetle that had been parked across the street from her house and that then followed her all the way downtown, even parking just a few slots away in the parking lot behind the library building. Nor did she feel the Beetle driver’s eyes on her as she entered the building.

It was half an hour into her workday when the little fat man with the wet eyes approached her at the front desk and asked what books the library had on computers. “Oh, we have a large number,” she assured him, and pointed across the room at the card catalogue, saying, “Just look in the subject heading drawers under computer, and you’ll—”

“But,” he interrupted, being timid and yet at the same time forceful, doing some pointing of his own toward the computer terminal on the counter to her right, “won’t you have it all in there?”

Myrtle looked with a kind of remote distaste at the computer terminal, one of four in the building, put in a few years earlier as part of a statewide program. Money that could have been spent on books, as the librarians often told one another. “Oh, that,” she said. “I’m sorry, the person who runs that isn’t in today.”

There was in fact no one who ran the computer, and hadn’t been since a few months after the four were installed. At that time, a half-day orientation course had been offered up in Albany, and the only member of the staff willing to spend the time had been the most recent employee, a flighty young woman named Duane Anne, who’d just wanted the day off from regular work, and who in any case had shortly afterward enlisted in the navy.

Usually, telling someone that “the person who runs the computer” was unavailable was enough to deal with the problem, but not this time. The little round man turned his wet eyes on the machine, blinked at it, and said, “Oh, that’s a very simple one, just an IBM-compatible VDT.”

“VDT?” She didn’t even like the sound of these things.

“Video display terminal.” His large wet eyes—they did look unappetizingly like blue-yolked eggs—swiveled toward her and he said, “The main frame’s up in Albany, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“The entire state wide catalogue’s available there,” he said, as though that were something wonderful. “Everything in every branch!”

“Oh, really?” Myrtle could not have been less interested, but she did her best to sound polite.

But then the little man suddenly moved, saying, “May I?” as he ducked around the end of the desk to stand in front of the computer, rubbing his little fat hands together and absolutely beaming at the machine. His broad stubby nose actually twitched, as though he were a rabbit suddenly faced with an entire head of lettuce.

At a loss, knowing she’d somehow lost control of the situation but unsure what to be alarmed at, Myrtle said, “Excuse me, but I don’t think—”

“Now, we turn it on here,” he said, smiling, and his little hand darted out. There was a faint flat tik, and the TV screen of the computer went from its normal dead flat gray to a living virulent bottomless black. The little man’s hands touched the typewriter keys, and green letters bounced horribly into existence on that black abyss.

“Oh, please!” Myrtle cried, half reaching out toward him. “I don’t think you should—”

He turned toward her, smiling with pleasure, and she saw his face was really very sweet and harmless; beatific, almost. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Really it is. You don’t have to be afraid of computers.”

Which changed her attitude in an instant. “Well, I’m certainly not afraid of them,” she said, insulted at the implication of primitive ignorance. If she chose to have nothing to do with computers, it wasn’t out of aboriginal fear. She simply saw no reason for the things, that’s all.

But the little man clearly didn’t view the situation that way. Shaking his head, smiling sadly at her with his ridiculously wide mouth, he said, “It’s just a wonderful help, that’s all. It’s a tool, like that pencil.”

Myrtle looked at the pencil in her hand, seeing absolutely no link between it and the machine the little man was now so fondly fondling. “I really don’t think you should do that,” she told him. “Authorized personnel… insurance… my responsibility…”

He smiled at her, obviously not listening to a word. “Now, let’s see,” he said, studying her, but not in an offensive way. “You aren’t going to care about computers, so what shall we access for you?”

“Access?” The word drew a blank in Myrtle’s brain.

“You have such lovely flowers around your house,” the little man went on, and before Myrtle could react to that, could ask him how he knew she had such lovely flowers around her house, he was saying, “So let’s see what all the libraries around the state have for you on flowers.”

“But—” she started, trying to catch up. “My house?”

“Look!” he cried, indicating the TV screen, gesturing to it like an affable host welcoming a favored guest to the best party of the year. “I bet you didn’t know all this was here.”

So she looked at the screen. She really had no choice but to look, even though it was difficult at first to make her eyes focus on those sharp-edged green letters. But then it did all come clear, as though some kind of mist or scrim had been swept away from in front of her eyes, and she stared in absolute astonishment. Gardening, flower arranging, picture books of flowers, histories of flowers: title after title went by, in as much profusion as any spring meadow. “But—” she stammered, “we don’t have all those books here!”

“But you can get them!” the little man told her. “See? These symbols show you which libraries in the system have which books, and this code shows you how to request through the central computer in Albany, and they’ll loan you the books to your library from theirs.”

“Well, that’s wonderful!” Myrtle was delighted at this cornucopia out of the blue, this sudden magic box. “Wait!” she cried. “They’re going too fast! I want to see— How do I order?”

“I’ll show you,” he said. “It’s really easy.”

And the next forty minutes disappeared in a haze of floral technology. With the help of the little round man—he was like the elves in the fairy stories who make the shoes—Myrtle learned to master the computer, the VDT, to ask it questions and give it commands and use it like, like, like a pencil! How astonishing! How liberating! How unexpected!

At the end of the forty minutes, when he asked her if she thought she could run it by herself now, she said, “Oh, yes, I can! Oh, thank you! I never realized!”

“People think computers are bad,” the little man said, “because whenever they want to do something somebody always says, ‘You can’t now, the computer’s down.’ But if you know what you’re doing, it’s easy. Gee whiz, you know, pencils break their points, too, but people don’t panic and say pencils aren’t any good.”

“That’s true,” she said, warming to him, wanting to agree with him.

Suddenly shy, he smiled hesitantly, half turning away from her, and said, “We’ve talked all this time, and we haven’t even been introduced. My name’s Wally Knurr.”

Why she said what she did Myrtle could never afterward understand. Maybe it was that the name had been so pervasively in her mind recently. Maybe it was because at long last she wanted there to be someone in the world who didn’t think of her as Myrtle Street of Myrtle Street. Maybe it was simply that this was the first time she’d introduced herself to someone new since she’d learned the true identity of her father. Whatever the reason, what Myrtle said, putting her hand out to be shaken by his soft pudgy fingers, was, “Hello. I’m Myrtle Jimson.”

He beamed happily at her. “Would you like to have lunch with me, Miss Jimson?” he asked.

TWENTY-SIX

The warlord’s daughter!

The purpose of the Princess is to be rescued.

Wally pushed back from the computer, his swivel chair rolling on the scratched floor. His hands trembled as he looked at the machine’s last response. Out of the program. Into real time, real consequence, real challenge. Real life.

Wally took a long slow deep breath. As much as was possible for him to do, he firmed his jaw. Real life. The greatest interactive fiction of them all.

TWENTY-SEVEN

At three in the morning, the only action on two-block-long Ganesvoort Street, in the middle of the wholesale meat section of Manhattan, south of Fourteenth Street in the far West Village, is Florent, a good twenty-four-hour-a-day French bistro operating in an old polished-chrome-and-long-counter former diner. The diner’s short end is toward the street, so the counter and tables run straight back under the vivid lights, with hard surfaces that bounce and echo the noise of cheerful conversation. While all around this one building the meat packers and wholesale butchers are closed and silent and dark, the bone trucks all empty and hosed down for the night, and the metal gates closed over the loading docks, the cars and limousines still wait clustered in front of the warm bright lights of the bistro, which seems at all times to be filled with animated talking laughing people who are just delighted to be awake now. Taxis come and go, and among them this evening was one cab containing Dortmunder and Kelp.

“You want the restaurant, right?” the cabby asked, looking at them in his mirror, because what else would they want on Ganesvoort Street at three in the morning?

“Right,” Dortmunder said.

The space in front of Florent was lined with stretch limos, some with their attendant drivers, some empty. The taxi stopped in the middle of the lumpy cobblestone street, and Dortmunder and Kelp paid and got out. They maneuvered between limos to the broken curb, moving toward the restaurant, as the cab jounced away to the corner. When it made its right, so did Dortmunder and Kelp, turning away from the inviting open entrance of the bistro and walking east instead, past all the dark and empty butcher businesses.

Kelp said, “Which one, do you know?”

Dortmunder shook his head. “All she said was, this block.”

“I see it,” Kelp said, looking forward. “Do you?”

“No,” Dortmunder said, frowning, squinting at the empty nighttime view, not liking it that Kelp had gotten the answer first, if in fact he had. “What do you think you see?”

“I think I see,” Kelp answered, “a truck over there on the other side, down a ways, with a guy sitting at the wheel.”

Then Dortmunder saw it, too. “That’s it, all right,” he agreed.

As they started across the street, Kelp said, “Maybe after we talk to Tiny we can go back to that place, grab something to eat. Looked nice in there.”

Dortmunder said, “Eat? Whadaya wanna eat at this hour for?”

“Ask the people in the restaurant,” Kelp suggested. “They’re eating.”

“Maybe they got a different body clock.”

“And maybe I got a different body clock,” Kelp said. “Don’t take things for granted, John.”

Dortmunder shook his head but was spared answering because they’d reached the truck, an anonymous high-sided aluminum box with a battered cab, on the door of which some previous company name had been sloppily obliterated with black spray paint. The driver was a twitchy skinny owlish man who hadn’t shaved for seventy-nine hours, which was not for him a record. He sat nervously, hunched over the wheel of his truck, its engine growling low, like something asleep deep in a cave. He stared straight forward, as though it was the law in this state to keep your eye on the road even when your vehicle was stationary.

Dortmunder approached the driver’s open window and said, “Whadaya say?”

Nothing. No answer. No response. The driver watched nothing move in front of his unmoving truck.

So Dortmunder decided to cut straight to the essence of the situation. “We wanna talk to Tiny,” he said.

The driver blinked, very slowly. His left hand trembled on the steering wheel, while his right hand moved out of sight.

“Wait a second,” Dortmunder said. “We’re friends of—”

The truck lunged forward, suddenly in gear. Dortmunder automatically flinched back as the dirty aluminum side of the truck swept past his nose, about a quarter of an inch away.

Kelp, behind Dortmunder a pace, cried out helpfully, “Hey! Dummy! Whadaya—!” But the truck was gone, rattling away down Ganesvoort Street, reeling past Florent, tumbling to the corner, swaying around to the right, and out of sight. “Well, now, what the hell was that for?” Kelp demanded.

“I think he was a little nervous,” Dortmunder said, and a voice behind them growled, “Where’s my truck?”

They turned and found themselves facing a bullet head on an ICBM body lumpily stuffed into a black shirt and a brown suit. It was as though King Kong were making a break for it, hoping to smuggle himself back to his island disguised as a human being. And, just to make the picture complete, this marvel carried over his shoulder half a cow; half a naked cow, without its fur or head.

“Tiny!” Dortmunder said inaccurately. “We’re looking for you!”

“I’m looking for my truck,” said Tiny, for that was indeed the name by which he was known. Tiny Bulcher, the blast furnace that walks like a man.

Dortmunder, a bit abashed, said, “Your driver, uh, Tiny, he’s a very nervous guy.”

Tiny frowned, which made his forehead like a children’s book drawing of the ocean. “You spooked him?”

Kelp said, “Tiny, he was spooked long before we got here. Years before. He never said a word to us.”

“That’s true,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp went on, “We just told him we’re your friends, we’re looking for you, and zip, he’s gone.”

Dortmunder said, “Tiny, I’m sorry if we made trouble.”

“You’re right to be,” Tiny told him. “You called my place, huh? Talked to Josie?”

“That’s right.”

“And she just told you I was down here, huh?”

“Sure.”

Tiny looked discontented with this idea. “Somebody calls that girl on the phone, says, ‘Where’s Tiny,’ and she says, ‘Oh, Tiny’s downtown committing a felony right now.’ ”

“She knows me, Tiny,” Dortmunder pointed out. “You and me met J. C. Taylor together, remember?”

Kelp added, “We been through the wars together, Tiny, us and J.C. Rescued the nun and everything.”

Tiny ignored Kelp, saying to Dortmunder, “Josie knows you, does she?” He was the only one in the known universe to call J. C. Taylor “Josie.” “On the phone, she knows you. Could be a cop calls, says, ‘Hello, J.C., this is John Dortmunder, your pal Tiny committing any felonies at this particular moment?’ ‘Oh, sure,’ says Josie.”

“Come on, Tiny,” Dortmunder said, “J.C. recognized my voice. I didn’t say my name at all, she did. And I said I wanted to get in touch with you right away, so that’s when she told me you were down there. So she did the right thing, okay?”

Tiny brooded about that. He shifted the half a cow from his right shoulder to the left. “Okay,” he decided. “I trust Josie’s judgment. But what about the truck?”

Kelp said, “The guy ran off, Tiny. What are we supposed to do, come down here with tranquilizer darts? The guy was very spooked, that’s all. We show up and that’s it, he’s gone.”

“Well, here’s the situation,” Tiny said. “The situation is, I agreed I’d come down here for a guy, with the guy’s truck and the guy’s driver, and I’d make my way in this place and pick up six sides a beef, on accounta I can do that quick and easy.”

“You sure can, Tiny,” Kelp said admiringly.

“And the further idea is,” Tiny said, glowering at the interruption, “I throw a seventh side in the truck and that one goes home with me. A side a beef for a half hour’s work.”

“Pretty good,” Dortmunder admitted.

“So the guy’s truck and the guy’s driver run off,” Tiny went on, “so that’s it for his six sides a beef. But”—and he whacked his open palm against the half a cow on his shoulder: spack! — “I got mine.”

“Well, that’s good,” Dortmunder said. “You wanna get yours, Tiny.”

“I always get mine,” Tiny told him. “That’s just the way it is. But now what do I do about taking this side home? Sooner or later, I make my way into some more populated parts a town, I’m gonna attract attention.”

“Gee, Tiny,” Kelp said, “I see what you mean. That’s a real problem.”

“And I think of it,” Tiny said, “as your problem.”

Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other. Kelp shrugged and spread his hands and turned to Tiny to say, “I could argue the point, Tiny, but let’s just say I feel like helping you out. Everybody wait right here.”

He took a step away but stopped when Tiny said, “Andy.” He turned back and looked alert, and Tiny said, “None of your doctors’ cars, Andy.”

“But doctors have the best cars around, Tiny,” Kelp explained. “They understand the transitoriness of life, doctors, and they’ve got the money to make things smooth and even along the way. I always put my faith in doctors.”

“Not this time,” Tiny said, and whacked his cow again. “Me and Elsie here don’t want no cute Porsches and Jaguars. We don’t like that crowded feeling.”

Kelp sighed, admitting defeat. Then he looked up and down the street, thinking, his eye drawn to the light spilling from Florent. His own eyes lit up, and he grinned at Tiny. “Okay, Tiny,” he said. “What would you and Elsie say to a stretch limo?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

On the drive north, Kelp at the wheel of the silver Cadillac stretch limo with the New Jersey vanity plate—KOKAYIN—Dortmunder and Tiny on the deeply cushioned rear seats, the half a cow draped in front of them like the mob’s latest victim on top of the bar-and-TV console and the rear-facing plush seats, Dortmunder explained the job: “You remember Tom Jimson.”

Tiny thought about that. “From inside?”

“That’s the one,” Dortmunder agreed. “That’s where we both knew him. He was my cellmate awhile.”

“Nasty poisonous old son of a bitch,” Tiny suggested.

“You’ve got the right guy,” Dortmunder told him.

“A snake with legs.”

“Perfect.”

“Charming as a weasel and gracious as a ferret.”

“That’s Tom, okay.”

“He’d eat his own young even if he wasn’t hungry.”

“Well, he’s always hungry,” Dortmunder said.

“That’s true.” Tiny shook his head. “Tom Jimson. He was the worst thing about stir.”

Looking in the mirror, Kelp said, “Tiny, I never heard you talk like that before. Like there was a guy out there somewhere that worried you.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tiny frowned massively at this suggestion that another human being might give him pause. “You’re lucky you don’t know the guy,” he said.

“But I do,” Kelp corrected him. “John introduced me. And I’m with you a hundred percent.”

“Introduced you?” Tiny was baffled. “How’d he do that?”

Quietly, Dortmunder said, “They let him go.”

Tiny switched his frown to Dortmunder. “Let him go where?”

“Out.”

“They wouldn’t. Even the law isn’t that stupid.”

“They did, Tiny,” Dortmunder told him. “On accounta the overcrowding. For a seventieth birthday present.”

Tiny stared at his cow as though to say do you believe this? He said, “Tom Jimson? He’s out right now? Walking around the streets?”

“Probably,” Dortmunder said. “He usually comes home pretty late.”

“Home? Where’s he living?”

“Well,” Dortmunder said reluctantly, “with me at the moment.”

Tiny was appalled. “Dortmunder! What does May say?”

“Nothing good.”

“The thing is, Tiny,” Kelp said from the front seat, “John’s agreed Tom can stay until after the job.”

Tiny slowly shook his massive head. “This is a Tom Jimson job? Forget it. Stop the car, Andy, me and Elsie’ll walk.”

“It isn’t like that, Tiny,” Dortmunder said.

But Tiny was still being extremely negative. “Where Tom Jimson passes by,” he said, “nothing ever grows again.”

Kelp said, “Tiny, let John tell you the story, okay? It isn’t the way you think. None of us would sign on a Tom Jimson job.”

Tiny thought that over. “Okay,” he said, “I tell you what I’ll do. I won’t just automatic say no.”

“Thank you, Tiny,” Dortmunder said.

“I’ll listen,” Tiny said. “You’ll tell me the story. Then I’ll say no.”

Dortmunder and Kelp exchanged a glance in the rearview mirror. But there was nothing to do but plow forward, so Dortmunder said, “What this is, it’s a buried stash.” And he went on to explain the background, the reservoir, the circumstances and the split, which should be around a hundred twenty thousand dollars for each of the three in this car.

“Tom Jimson,” Tiny interjected at that juncture, “has a way of not having any partners left to split with.”

“We know that about him,” Dortmunder pointed out. “We’ll watch him.”

“Birds watch snakes,” Tiny said. “But okay, go ahead, tell me the rest of it.”

So Dortmunder told him the rest of it, and Tiny didn’t interrupt again until the part about going underwater, when he reared around in astonishment and said, “Dortmunder? You’re gonna go diving?”

“Not diving,” Kelp insisted from up front. “We’re not gonna dive. We’re gonna walk in.”

“Into a reservoir,” Tiny said.

Kelp shrugged that away. “We been taking lessons,” he said. “From a very professional guy.”

“Tiny,” Dortmunder said, getting the narrative back on track, “the idea is, we’ll go down in there, we’ll walk in from the shore, and we’ll pull a rope along with us. And there’ll be a winch at the other end of the rope.”

“And you,” Kelp explained, “at the other end of the winch.”

Tiny grunted. Dortmunder said, “When we get to the right place, we dig up the casket, we tie the rope around one of the handles, we give it a tug so you know we’re ready, and then you winch it out. And we walk along with it to keep it from snagging on stuff.”

Tiny shook his head. “There’s gotta be about ninety things wrong with that idea,” he said, “but let’s just stay with one: Tom Jimson.”

“He’s seventy years old, Tiny,” Dortmunder said.

“He could be seven hundred years old,” Tiny said, “and he’d still be God’s biggest design failure. He’d steal the teeth out of your mouth to bite you with.”

Kelp said, “I gotta admit it, Tiny, you really do know Tom.”

“Tiny,” Dortmunder said, “I’ll be honest with you.”

“Don’t strain yourself, John,” Tiny said.

“With me and Andy down there at the bottom of the reservoir,” Dortmunder told him, “and Tom Jimson up on the shore with the winch and the rope, I’d feel a lot more comfortable in my mind if you were up there with him. And not just to turn the winch.”

“I think you should have the National Guard up there before you could feel really comfortable in your mind,” Tiny told him, “but I agree. You don’t want to go down in there without insurance.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said. “Will you do it, Tiny?”

“You can buy a lotta sides of beef with a hundred twenty thousand, Tiny,” Kelp chipped in.

Tiny brooded, looking at his cow. The thing looked deader and nakeder than ever. “Every time I tie up with you, Dortmunder,” he said, “something turns weird. The last time, you had me dressed like a nun.”

“We had to get through the cops, Tiny. And that one did work out, didn’t it? We wound up with most of the loot that time, didn’t we? And you wound up with J.C.”

“And think of it this way,” Kelp said, sounding chipper and positive and gung ho, like a high school basketball coach. “It’s an adventure, kinda, and getting outta the city into the healthy country—”

“Healthy,” Tiny echoed.

“—and it’s like a real basic enterprise,” Kelp finished. “Man against the elements!”

Tiny cocked an eyebrow at the back of Kelp’s head. “Tom Jimson’s an element?”

“I was thinking of water,” Kelp explained.

Dortmunder said, “Tiny? I could really use your help on this.”

Tiny shook his head. “Something just tells me,” he said, “if I sign on to this cockamamie thing, I’m gonna wind up looking like Elsie here.”

Dortmunder waited, saying nothing more. It was up to Tiny now, and he shouldn’t be pushed. Even Kelp kept quiet, though he looked in the mirror a lot more than he looked out the windshield.

And finally Tiny sighed. “What the hell,” he said. “If I had any sense, I wouldn’t know you two in the first place.”

TWENTY-NINE

Midnight. The Dodge Motor Home with the MD plates eased off the county road onto the gravel verge and cut its lights. A moon just rising over the Showangunks gave vague amber illumination, turning into copper the metal-pipe barrier across the dirt side road, glowing softly and almost confidentially on the sign beside that road: NO ADMITTANCE — VILBURGTOWN RESERVOIR AUTHORITY.

The living room door of the motor home opened and Tiny Bulcher stepped down, carrying a large gimbaled metal cutter. He crossed to the barrier, snipped the padlocked chain holding it shut, lifted the horizontal bar out of its groove, and pivoted it out of the way. Then he waved the metal cutter at the motor home, which drove slowly through the opening onto the dirt road, rocking dangerously as it came. Once it was by and had come to a stop, its brake lights turning the scene briefly dramatic, Tiny put the barrier pipe back in place and reboarded the motor home.

Inside, Kelp sat at the large bus-type wheel, while Dortmunder and Tom Jimson sat silent, facing each other in the dark living room area. Putting the metal cutter back with a clank on the other tools, Tiny sat in the swivel chair to Kelp’s right, looked out the windshield, and said, “Can you see anything?”

“From time to time,” Kelp told him. “The moon helps a little.”

Dortmunder, hearing this conversation, got up from the convertible sofa and moved forward as the motor home rocked like a boat in a heavy sea, inching along the rutted dirt road. Peering over Tiny’s shoulder at the darkness out front, Dortmunder said, “Andy? You can’t see a goddamn thing out there.”

“I’m doing fine,” Kelp insisted. “If everybody’ll stop distracting me. And you don’t want me to use lights in here.”

“Nothing against you, Andy,” Tiny said, “but why aren’t we using a driver on this job? Where’s Stan Murch?”

“We don’t need a driver,” Dortmunder explained, “because we don’t expect to make any getaways. And the more men on the job, the smaller the split for each of us.”

A cackle sounded from the back. Tiny and Dortmunder exchanged a glance.

Kelp rolled his window down, letting in a lot of cool damp spring air. “There,” he said. “That’s better.”

Tiny frowned at him. “What’s better about it?”

“I can hear when we rub against the bushes,” Kelp explained. “Keeps us on the road.”

Tiny swiveled slowly around to face Dortmunder. “Thirty thousand is what Stan Murch would cost me,” he said. “Right?”

“About that,” Dortmunder agreed.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Tiny said, and swiveled front.

The motor home rocked and swayed through the second-growth forest, Kelp listening to bushes, Tiny and Dortmunder squinting hard as they stared through the windshield, Tom sitting back in the dark by himself, thinking his own thoughts.

Dortmunder said, “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” Kelp asked.

“Just stop,” Tiny told him.

“If you say so,” Kelp agreed nonchalantly, and stopped with the nose of the motor home half an inch from another metal-pipe barrier.

Tiny said, “Okay? Do you see it now?”

Kelp peered out the windshield, gazing too high and too far away. “See what?”

“He can only hear it,” Dortmunder suggested.

Tiny shook his head in disgust and got up out of the swivel chair to look for the metal cutter. Kelp leaned his head out the open window beside him, looked around, and at last saw the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence sketched into the face of the forest, picking up scattered muted highlights from the moon, extending away into nothingness to left and right. “Well, look at that,” he said.

“We already did,” Dortmunder told him.

Tiny got out and dispatched this barrier the same way as the first, and the motor home steered slowly, majestically, with all the dignity of a great passenger liner, through the opening in the fence and onto Vilburgtown Reservoir property. Then it stopped and Tiny climbed aboard again, saying, “I could see a bit of it out there. Ahead of us.”

“A bit of what?” Kelp asked him.

“The reservoir.”

“Don’t drive into it,” Dortmunder suggested.

“He won’t,” Tiny said. “He’ll hear the splash.”

Ahead, through the trees, as Kelp continued to ease them slowly-forward, tiny winks of gold and saffron showed where moonlight reflected from the restless water of the reservoir. About fifteen feet from the water’s edge they came to a dirt clearing, and Kelp stopped. “There you are,” he said. “Through doubt and scorn, I made my way.”

Tiny said, “You couldn’t of done it without the bushes.”

They all emerged from the motor home and went down to the water’s edge to look out across the quietly rippling surface. It looked deep. It didn’t look man-made at all. In the orangey light of the swollen moon just above the mountain-tops, the Vilburgtown Reservoir looked ancient, bottomless, black, menacing. Things must live down in there; long silent things with large eyes and sharp teeth and long bony white arms. “Hmmm,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, uh,” Kelp said. “We’re here. I guess we should get on with it.”

“No time like the present,” Tom said.

“Right,” Dortmunder said.

Dragging their feet a little, Dortmunder and Kelp led the way back to the motor home and off-loaded all their gear: wet suits, air tanks, underwater flashlights, the whole schmear. As they started to strip off their street clothes in the chilly night air, Tiny frowned away to the left, saying, “Dam’s down there somewhere, isn’t it?”

Tom, pointing, said, “You can make out the curve of it right there. See?”

Tiny said, “Nobody inside there can look down this way?”

“Naw.” Tom waved both bony hands, dismissing that problem. “The windows all face down the valley. Don’t worry, Tiny, we’re all alone here.”

Nearby, Dortmunder and Kelp, changing into their wet suits, heard that remark and looked at each other. But they didn’t say a word.

“Hey, it’s the husband!”

“Welcome back, honeymooner! Hey, you got some bags under your eyes!”

“You gotta take time out to sleep, boy! It’ll still be there when you wake up! Is he thinner?”

“Thinner? He’s wasted away to nothin! He’s got no lead in his pencil!”

“He barely got a pencil anymore!”

“Siddown, Bobby, siddown, you got to start building up your strength!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bob said, nodding at his tormentors, keeping his bitter thoughts to himself. He’d known all along that when he finally came back to work here at the dam he’d be sure to take some ribbing, and the thing to do was just play along and wait for these jerks to get bored with themselves.

But it wasn’t easy, under the circumstances, to keep his mouth shut. The fact is, he’d screwed Tiffany a hell of a lot more before the wedding than during the so-called honeymoon. The first couple days of married life, Tiffany’d been in a really shitty mood, just mad at everything, at the airplane ride, the hotel, the whole island of Aruba. Bob had been pretty patient and reasonable, all things considered, and at last on the third day she’d relaxed and her disposition improved, and they’d had several kind of nice hours together before the onset of morning sickness, a thing Tiffany was apparently going to be experiencing all day long for the next five months. (The worst so far, the absolute worst for everybody concerned, everybody in the vicinity, had been the plane ride back.)

So all this hooting and hollering was pretty well aimed at the wrong guy. But there was no point saying so, or saying anything at all to these clowns, come to that. His three coworkers on the night shift at Vilburgtown Dam were not famous for empathy or thoughtfulness. (Well, to be honest, neither was Bob.) So while they made increasingly crude remarks, in their desperate pseudo-friendly determination to get a rise out of him, Bob went glumly to his work station and settled back into the routine of things. There were forms to be filled out, computer input to be caught up on, safety checks and maintenance checks that hadn’t been dealt with while he was gone, consumption reports for the New York City water people, pension and insurance and overtime and union and tax documents on the four-man detachment of New York Police Department cops assigned to the dam, electric and phone bills…

And they just wouldn’t let up; they just had to keep making their brilliant remarks, even though he was trying to get some work done. These three bozos, janitor clerks like himself, handmaidens of the dam, with no Civil Service seniority, had drawn this utterly boring and unchanging night shift as their introduction to the world of grown-up work, would be here for years until youths even more callow than themselves were hired by the city and stuffed into this dam like worms into a hydroponic tank, so that Bob and his pals could at last move up to a life of daytime inactivity, to spend their days watching cloud formations and guarding the reservoir against fishermen, boaters, skinny dippers, malfunctions, and madmen carrying enough LSD to drive the entire Eastern Seaboard mad.

Day duty: when sometimes the phone did ring, when sometimes a passing motorist wanted to stop and chat about engineering marvels, when sometimes something happened. But until that happy day, the four of them were stuck together in here in utter tedium, and so any event at all, including (perhaps especially including) a coworker’s return from his honeymoon, was something to be savored, to be dwelt on, to be consumed slowly and completely, to be driven right flat into the fucking ground.

“I’ll be back,” Bob finally announced, knowing he could stand no more of it for a while. Getting to his feet, he turned away from his data sheets and computer terminal and best friends, and muttered, “I need some air.”

“What you need is oysters!”

“By now, what he needs is a splint! A little short splint about, what, Bobby, about four inches long?”

“That Tiffany’s a lucky girl, you know. Bobby can do his dirty deed on her with that little wiener, and she won’t know a thing about it, can go right on sleeping.”

Jesus. Bob went out the door and up the concrete steps and out onto the catwalk on the reservoir side of the dam, just below the lip of the roadway. Beautiful out here; since Aruba, Bob had become something of a student of beauty, and he could tell that this scene, this northern spring scene here, with its outlined pine trees and big orange moon and scraggle-toothed mountains and the peaceful water, was beauty.

And he was all alone with it. Down there to his left, where the roadway atop the dam met the land on the far side, was the only structure in sight, a low square one-room building made of local stone, which housed the office of the police detachment, and which was empty right now. There were no cops on duty at night, though they were on call in their homes nearby in case of trouble, and the state police were also close by and available in case of real trouble.

But if you ignored that little stone building and turned your back on the dam to look straight out across the water, it was almost the way it would have been back in Indian times, before the Europeans ever came up the Hudson River and started their settlements. Squinting, you could almost imagine silent Indians out there in their canoes, skimming across the water. Of course, this particular body of water hadn’t actually been here back in Indian times, that imaginary canoe of Bob’s would have been fifty or sixty feet up in the air among the treetops back then, but the idea of it was right.

And he alone here, the only observer. That faint splash from some distance off to the right, for instance. If he wanted to pretend that was an Indian paddle, what was wrong with that? Even if he really knew it was just some fish.

While Kelp splashed his fingers in the water to see how cold it was—and winced—Dortmunder fitted his goggles on and inhaled through his nose, the way Doug Berry had showed him, to create the seal that would make the goggles water-tight. Then he put the mouthpiece in his mouth and started breathing the air out of the tank, and once again he got that claustrophobic feeling. When his head was enclosed in face mask and mouthpiece, for some reason it always reminded him of prison.

“You ready?” Kelp asked, which of course meant he himself wasn’t ready, because if he could talk his mouthpiece wasn’t in. For answer, Dortmunder went plodding toward the water.

Because they weren’t diving in but walking in, and because they didn’t intend to do any swimming while they were in there, just walking, they didn’t wear the normal flippers, but had chosen low zippered boots instead. This made their entry into the water a bit more dignified than the usual flapping flipper-wearer. A bit more dignified, but not much.

Or, that is, it would have been dignified if the water hadn’t been so cold, causing first Dortmunder and then Kelp to jump right back out the instant they stepped in. Then, looking wide-eyed at each other through the masks, clutching their flashlights, each with his small folding shovel hooked to his weight belt, and with the end of the long white rope lashed loosely around Dortmunder’s middle, they both tried again.

Cold. Wading in was the worst possible way to do this. Each inch of the body was given its own opportunity to start freezing, separately, serially. When Dortmunder was about thigh deep, he knew he could stand no more of this death-by-a-thousand-freezes, so he simply sat down in the water, which flooded the wet suit right up to his neck. My heart’s gonna stop! he thought, but then the wet suit began to do its job, warming the water next to his skin the way it had done every time in the swimming pool out on Long Island, and his shivering lessened, and the severe ache in his teeth abated, and the hair reattached itself to his scalp.

Next to him, Kelp, seeing what he’d done, had echoed it, and was no doubt going through the same tortures. I am extremely uncomfortable, Dortmunder told himself, but I’m gonna live. There was a kind of gloomy satisfaction in the thought.

Well, it was time to move on. With some difficulty, Dortmunder got his feet under himself once more, but he didn’t stand up all the way. He remained crouched to keep his body underwater, and looked back at the shore, where Tiny and Tom were visible against the lighter mass of the motor home—Tiny leaning on the winch on its tripod, Tom just standing there to one side, like the evil spirit of the lake.

Tiny can handle him, Dortmunder told himself. Tiny can take care of himself. Sure he can. Tiny’s a big guy, he’s alert, he’ll keep control of the situation. Telling himself this stuff, Dortmunder turned away and started duck-walking deeper into the lake.

The ground underfoot underwater was very muddy and very kind of squidgy. As Dortmunder moved deeper, the bottom began to tug at his boots, trying to pull them off, so he had to move more and more carefully, drawing his heel out of the muck every time, while invisible fingers down there clutched at the back of his boot.

Then cold water touched his bare chin, beneath the mouthpiece. I’m gonna go underwater! Now! I’m gonna go underwater now! He turned and stared wildly shoreward one last time, but he was too far out over the water now and could no longer make out anything clearly. Tiny and Tom and the motor home were all in the darkness under the trees.

Everything’s fine. I’m gonna go underwater now. And he did.

Flashlight. How the hell do you turn on the flashlight? There’s gotta be a button, there’s—

A faint glow off to his right: Kelp’s flashlight. So it’s possible, no reason to panic, just look down in the darkness and try to figure out where the flashlight button is. Concentrating on the problem at hand, he forgot to breathe through his mouth, tried to breathe through his nose, and his nostrils pinched shut as the edges of the mask pressed painfully against his cheeks and forehead.

I’m strangling! Terrified, he gulped air through his mouth, discovered he was breathing, found the flashlight button, clicked the damn thing, and he still couldn’t see much of anything.

This was very dirty water. A lot dirtier than the stuff that comes out of faucets down in New York City. This water was brown. It had millions of tiny hairy dirt atoms floating in it, bouncing the flashlight glow back in a sepia halo.

He couldn’t even see the bottom. He angled the flashlight straight down, and he could just make out his own knees, but no deeper. His boot-clad feet were lost in the brown murk. Behind him, the thick white rope angled upward, buoyant enough to hover just a few inches below the surface, its braided white line disappearing no more than two feet away.

The original idea was, if they just kept moving forward, they’d come to the old road that used to go from Dudson Park to Putkin’s Corners; downhill to the right would be the direction they wanted. According to Wally Knurr’s computer, the old blacktop should still be there, though it might be partly covered with drifting mud. Of course, if they couldn’t see the bottom at all, that was gonna make it a little tougher to find the road. Except that blacktop, even underwater blacktop, wouldn’t try to pull his boot off at every step, so that would be a clue.

So the thing to do was stick together and move forward. Stick together. Dortmunder looked around, and couldn’t see Kelp’s flashlight anymore. Was it because of the glow of his own light? Finding the damn button again—why do they make it so hard to find the button? — he switched off his light, then turned in a slow circle, staring through the goggles at nothing at all. Pitch-black darkness. No light. Darkness. Blackness. Cold wet blackness, pressing in, pressing down, pressing against his chest and his forehead and the flimsy glass between his eyes and—

Button!

The hazy tan glow came back, re-creating the narrow round tube of dim light in which he stood, this murky closet surrounded by all that black.

Where was Kelp? Jeez, he could get lost down here. I hope he doesn’t panic, Dortmunder told himself, afraid that Kelp might not have his own nerves of steel, and knowing for certain that Kelp didn’t have the long white braid of rope that, no matter what else might happen, still linked Dortmunder’s waist to the winch and Tiny and the shore and the whole upper world of air and light.

Move forward, that was the thing to do. Move forward. Keep the flashlight on as a guide to Kelp, keep tight hold of the rope, that absolute lifeline, and move forward, feeling one’s way, waiting for that goddamn road.

Why am I doing this?

His foot hit something, hard. The something was hard, and his foot hit it hard. Damn! Now what?

Dortmunder bent low, sticking the flashlight down into the murk, and saw a tree stump there, right in front of him. Most of its bark had rotted away, the interior was rusty-looking and crumbly, and some of its roots had been exposed by the shifting mud. Roots as bent and dark as witches’ fingers, they were all around his feet.

Dortmunder moved to his right, and bumped into something else. It was another stump, about a foot high, a little thicker than the first one. He remained bent over to swing the flashlight in an arc, and more and more of them appeared out of the darkness; a squat army of tree stumps, some thick, some thin, all frayed and crumbling, standing at grubby attention in uneven rows, none more than a foot high. He moved the flashlight in a wider arc, half turning, and they were behind him, too, thousands of them, crowded together, roots overlapping as though they lolled at their ease here, just waiting for him, waiting all these years, biding their time, in no hurry, knowing some black night Dortmunder would descend among them and…

All right, all right. They aren’t alive, okay? They’re tree stumps, that’s all. Get hold of yourself, goddammit.

Then he remembered one of the items factored into Wally Knurr’s computer model of the valley when it was flooded. Most of the trees had been cut down before the water was put in. Yes, and most of the buildings had been towed away, except for totally useless ones or some overly large stone or brick ones like a couple of churches and firehouses and the library Tom had buried his goddamn stash behind. And those had been stripped of doors and windows and floors and anything else that might be of use.

He hadn’t thought before about what all that meant. He hadn’t stopped to think how difficult it was going to be to walk downhill through a forest of short tree stumps. On the other hand, even if he’d thought about tree stumps, he still wouldn’t have known about the murky darkness, the complete inability to see anything more than a few feet in front of a flashlight. And he hadn’t known just how difficult this mud was going to be to move around in.

Bent over, the rope and the weight belt digging into his waist, Dortmunder tried to find a path through the tree stumps. Shuffling forward, bumping into roots and stones—now there’s rocks in here, too—having to turn this way and that to make any progress at all, he soon realized he’d lost all idea which way was forward.

Well, forward is downhill, right? But which way was downhill? With just this narrow tiny area of light for reference, with all the crud floating around in the water, it was impossible to tell which was uphill, which was downhill, which was crosshill.

Which way is forward? More importantly, which way is back? He aimed the flashlight at the floating rope trailing him, but it weaved and drifted with tiny currents, forming half loops, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

Still gazing upward, trying to peer farther back along the line of rope, Dortmunder moved, bumped into something else, lost his balance briefly, compensated fast, and stepped out of his right boot.

Oh, hell! His bare foot was down now in cold wet slimy mud, sinking into it. He tugged upward, and felt a thick root pressed across the top of his instep. Clutching at him!

Bending quickly down, swinging the flashlight around fast to see what was going on with his foot, Dortmunder inadvertently slammed the light into yet another stump. It bounced from his hand. It went out.

Darkness. Blackness. Don’t panic. The flashlight’s down there somewhere, in the dark. The boot’s down there somewhere, in the dark. The foot’s down there somewhere, in the dark, caught by roots. Don’t panic!

How long have I been down here? I’ve only got an hour of air! Have I been down here an hour? Does this air taste funny?

Don’t panic? Don’t panic? Why the hell not?

Leaning on the rail of the catwalk, gazing out over the still silent beauty of the reservoir in the increasingly pale bright light of the rising moon, Bob found himself reflecting on the changes that had come so recently into his life, and for the first time he wished he actually had a friend. Not the so-called friends he’d had all his life, in grade school and high school, not those gape-jawed assholes so like the three clowns down in the dam, but a friend, a real friend, someone he could talk to about his innermost thoughts.

For instance. He couldn’t possibly talk to the jerks in the dam about waking up with a woman; they didn’t have the maturity for the subject. And the fact is, although Bob had what he considered plenty of experience in going to bed with women, the whole phenomenon of then waking up with one, waking up in the morning with another person right there, a woman, an entire life-size woman, first thing in the morning, an entire experience to deal with the second you open your eyes, was something he’d thought insufficiently about before it started to happen.

And what was it like? That was the weird thing; it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It sure wasn’t sexy. It was like having some kind of big animal in the room with you, a deer or a sheep, maybe a goat, sometimes more like a horse. There it was, coughing and blowing its nose and scratching itself, moving around the room, opening and closing drawers, looking as pale and bloodless as a vampire victim without its makeup on. It was like—

Sea monster! Bob stared, thrilled and terrified, as the thing broke the surface way out there across the reservoir, a huge saurian head with long laid-back ears, its reptile eye reflecting white from the moon. It was scaly, almost metallic; a definite sea monster, no question.

The thing moved toward shore. Bob panted, staring at it, almost fainting. Here! Here in the Vilburgtown Reservoir! Like Loch Ness! Like, like, like Stephen King! Right here in front of his eyes!

Near shore, the sea monster—lake monster? reservoir monster? — dove again and disappeared, a widening circular ripple left in its wake. Bob stared and stared, but it never came back. And here, he thought, his awe tinged with bitterness, here’s something else I’ll never be able to tell anybody. Not even Tiffany.

Maybe especially not Tiffany.

Hmmm.

Kelp surfaced again, closer to shore, and saw Tiny and Tom watching him from up the bank with the interest of uninvolved spectators. Boy, he thought. Get to know who your friends are.

What a bad few minutes that had been, back down there in the lake. He’d lost contact with John, he was stuck in mud down in among all those tree stumps, and he’d lost every bit of his sense of direction. He didn’t even have the rope linking him to shore; John had that. If he hadn’t remembered the BCD, he might of got really worried down there.

As it happened, though, just as he was considering he might start to get really nervous, he remembered that the B in BCD stood for “buoyancy,” and he even remembered how to operate the son of a gun; you press the button on the side of the control box. Not the one on top.

And what a glorious feeling that was, to rise up and up, out of the muck and mire, up through the crud-filled water, floating upward like a bird, like a balloon, like Superman, then bursting through the skin of water into the air above, to find the moon higher, brighter, whiter, the great water-filled dark bowl of the valley holding him in its comforting dark-green cupped hands, and himself floating safe and serene in the middle of it all, master of his fate!

Over there was the shore. And over there on the shore was the light blur of the Dodge motor home. Kelp was not really a smooth swimmer, not one of your Olympic types, knifing gracefully through the water. What he tended to do was dangle his arms and legs down in the water, agitate them in busy random motion, and gradually move forward. Now, he tried heading for shore via this usual method, but the BCD had him so buoyant that he just bobbed up and down in the water like an abandoned beer can.

Finally, he let some air out of the BCD, enough to drift down just a bit below the surface, and then his usual method regained its usual level of inefficiency. He progressed that way awhile, until one dangling foot hit ground, and after that he walked the rest of the way, emerging from the reservoir like the latest salesman on the staff, the one who’d been given the worst route.

Ridding himself of mouthpiece and goggles, Kelp waded ashore as Tiny came down to meet him, saying, “What’s the story?”

“It’s no good,” Kelp told him. He moved toward the motor home, meaning to rid himself of all this gear. “Can’t see anything. And there’s tree stumps all over the place. You just can’t move down there.”

Tom joined them on their move toward the motor home, looking concerned, saying, “You can’t get to my money?”

“I don’t see how,” Kelp told him. “John and me, we—” He stopped and stared around the clearing. “Where is John?”

Tiny said, “Where’s John? He was with you!”

“Gee,” Kelp said, “I figured he’d get back before me. He had the rope, he had…”

Kelp’s voice faded away to silence. He turned and looked at the silent dark water. Deep as hell out there; he knew that now. Tiny and Tom also looked out over the reservoir, listening, watching, waiting…

“Jeez,” said Tiny.

The winch and its tripod fell over.

They spun around, startled by the noise, to see the winch and tripod sliding toward the water, zipping down the bank in a long shallow ground-hugging dive, determined to go for a moonlight swim.

“He’s pullin the rope!” Tiny cried.

“Stop it!” Kelp yelled, and Tiny ran forward and jumped, to slam both big feet down on the snaking white rope, pinning it to the ground just in front of the suicidal winch, while Kelp flung away his goggles and flashlight and ran to the water’s edge, where he gazed at the taut rope angling straight into the water.

Tiny picked up the slack part of the rope, the part between his imprisoning feet and the winch, and wrapped it around one wrist. “Should I pull it in?”

“Sure!” Kelp told him, excited and relieved. “That’s gotta be John at the other end!”

So Tiny began, hand over hand, to haul in the rope. “Heavy,” he commented, but kept pulling.

Tom approached the taut line of rope and looked along its length to where it disappeared in the dark water. He said, “Do you suppose he got it?”

“Jeepers,” Kelp said. “Do you think so? He just kept going! We lost each other, but he just kept at it, moved right on down in there, and found the box, and now he’s—” But then doubt crossed Kelp’s brow and he shook his head. “I was down there,” he said. “No way.”

“Whatever it is,” Tiny said, “it’s heavy.”

They stood there on the bank, water lapping just beyond their feet, Kelp and Tom tensely waiting while Tiny drew in rope, hand over hand, straining, putting his back into it. Then, all at once, Tiny fell over backward, landing with a major thump, his big legs flipping up into the air to catch a lot of suddenly loose-flying rope, and an instant later Dortmunder, who had let go the rope when he’d finally seen the surface of the water above him, came charging up onto dry land, flinging his remaining equipment left and right.

(If Bob had really wanted to see a sea serpent, he should have stuck around for this one. Unfortunately, though, the apotheosis of having sighted the first sea serpent had led him to realize that in fact he hated his bride, loathed his friends and coworkers, and despised his job, so Bob had left work and driven to the nearest town with an all-night newsstand to buy a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Happiness, he now knew, would be found as a mercenary soldier on some different continent.)

Having been dragged headfirst through tree stumps and roots and mud for what had seemed like miles, Dortmunder was not at the moment at his most presentable. He’d lost both his boots by this stage, plus the weight belt, plus the collapsible shovel, and several times had come damn close to losing his grip on both the rope and his mind. The wet suit had half unzipped itself and was full of mud. So were the goggles.

This creature, looking in fact less like a sea serpent and more like one of the clay people of Mayan mythology and Flash Gordon serials, stomped up out of the reservoir and slogged straight to Tom, who actually looked kind of startled at this abrupt approach, saying, “Al? You okay?”

“I got one word to say to you, Tom,” Dortmunder announced, pointing a muddy finger at Tom. “And that word is dynamite!”

Tom blinked. “Al?”

“Blow it up!” Dortmunder ranted wildly, waving in the general direction of the reservoir. “Do it any way you want! I’m through!”

Tiny, sitting up from his supine position, said, “Dortmunder? You’re giving up?”

Dortmunder swiveled around to glare at him. In a clear and praiseworthy effort to keep himself more or less calm and under control, he pointed again at the reservoir with his mud-dripping finger and said, “I am not going in there again, Tiny. That’s it.”

Kelp approached his old friend, worry creasing his features. He said, “John? This isn’t you. You don’t admit defeat.”

“Defeat,” Dortmunder told him, and squished away to the motor home.