Drowned Hopes

THIRTY

May put on her mitts, opened the oven door, and took out the big white-with-tiny-blue-flowers Corning bowl containing her famous tuna casserole. It was perfect; already she knew it. The smell alone was enough to tell you. Little bubbles of the grand aroma within kept breaking through the crusty golden-brown surface—a surface composed of grated cheese and riced potatoes sprinkled liberally over elbow macaroni— and just filled the kitchen with promises of culinary pleasure to come. May hoped John could smell it from the living room.

It was only, in fact, the promise of her tuna casserole that had persuaded John to permit this meeting in the first place. “I don’t want to talk about it!” he’d kept raging at the beginning. “I don’t want anything more to do with it! I don’t want him living in this house anymore! And I don’t want to ever be underwater, or talk about being underwater, or even think about being underwater, for the rest of my life!”

This was a pretty negative attitude to overcome, but May’s famous tuna casserole had worked wonders before, and so she’d promised she would make it and serve it at a nice social dinner that would also happen to be a discussion of the feasibility of trying for Tom’s buried/drowned cache again. That’s all it would be, just a discussion, just to talk about the possibility, just to see if it really and truly was no more than a hollow hope that Tom Jimson could ever get hold of his seven-hundred-thousand-dollar stash without blowing up the Vilburgtown Reservoir dam, or if somebody, just maybe, if somebody might come up with something.

“They better not,” John had said, but at long last he’d agreed to this dinner. And now all May could do was present the tuna casserole and hope for the best. From here on, it was up to everybody else.

When they had six for dinner, like tonight, they moved the coffee table out of the living room into the bedroom, and the kitchen table out of the kitchen into the living room, and the four kitchen chairs into the living room, and the other armless wooden-seated chair from the bedroom into the living room, and John would sit on a telephone book on his regular living room chair, which would still have him lower than everybody else but at least high enough to see his food and enter into the conversation. The kitchen table was really quite a good size with both its leaves open, and if you put a really thick pad under the tablecloth, you wouldn’t hardly hear at all the hollow clack of Formica every time you put down your glass or your knife.

When May walked into the living room carrying the casserole like an offering in front of her, at arm’s length, in her mitted hands, they were all already seated at the table, but given the smallness of the room and the way the kitchen table filled and dominated it, there was hardly much of anything else for them to do. On the other hand, May knew full well that even if the living room were the size of a baseball field, a couple of these people present would be seated at the table anyway.

“Dinner,” she announced, put the casserole bowl on the middle of the table, and began to dispatch her troops: “John, see if anyone wants a beverage. Andy and Tiny, you two—”

“Anybody ready for a beer?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah.”

“Naturally.”

“Andy and Tiny, you two get the vegetables, they’re on the counter beside the sink. Tom, would you bring in the bread and butter, please?”

“You know,” Tom said, as he got to his feet, “I’m getting used to this living on the outside, living with other people and all. Like on the television.”

John flashed May a look as he left for the beer, which May refused to acknowledge.

Little Wally Knurr looked up, smiling his wet smile and saying, “Miss May, what can I do to help?”

“You’re the special guest,” May told him, “because it’s your first time here.”

“Oh, I want to do my part,” Wally said, sounding worried, his broad brow knitting.

“You can help with dessert,” May promised him, and Wally smiled again, happy.

Wally was a new experience for May, unlike just about anything she’d ever met before, including John’s odd friends and some of the customers at the supermarket where she worked as cashier. For one thing, his appearance; enough said. For another thing, his manner toward her, which was a sort of childish courtliness; when he’d first come in this evening and called her Mrs. Dortmunder and she’d told him she wasn’t Mrs. Dortmunder (without giving him her actual last name) and saying he should call her May, so that he didn’t know any formal name for her at all, he’d stumbled and spluttered awhile, and then had finally decided she was “Miss May,” and that was that. Then there was his size, so large horizontally and yet so small vertically; in fact, this was going to be the first meal in this apartment with two people seated on telephone books, John on the white pages and Wally on the business-to-business yellow pages to bring him up to a normal height with all the others.

Food and drink were quickly assembled, and everyone took their places. May sat nearest the door since she’d have to be going to the kitchen from time to time, and John sat facing her at the inner end of the room. Tiny sat to May’s left and Wally to her right, with Andy beyond Tiny and Tom beyond Wally. Once all were settled and served, they all tasted the famous casserole, and the usual round of sincere but hurried praise ensued. Then, the amenities out of the way, silence took hold as everyone tucked in.

Nothing had been said about Tom’s buried stash before dinner, and hardly anything was said on any subject at all during dinner, so it wasn’t until after May and Wally had brought in the coffee and two kinds of ice cream and pound cake and raspberries and whipped cream that anyone raised the topic of the day, and then it was left to May to do it. “I guess everybody knows,” she said, into the murmur of five people working their way through a number of terrific desserts, “that John doesn’t think there’s any way to get down into that reservoir and get Tom’s money except to blow up the dam.”

Wally’s big wet eyes got bigger and wetter. “Blow up the dam! But that would be terrible! People would get hurt!”

“They’d get worse than hurt,” May said gently. “And that’s why John won’t be a party to it.”

“That’s right,” John said around a mouthful of pound cake.

“I won’t do it either,” Andy announced.

Tom, who’d been putting various desserts into his mouth without opening his lips, now spoke without opening his lips: “Somebody will. Lotta money down there. Tiny?”

“Include me out,” Tiny said.

“But Tom’s right about that,” May told the table. “He’s willing to do it, and some people would be willing to help him.”

“Gee,” Wally said, apparently contemplating previously unguessed—neither by himself nor his computer—depths of human depravity.

“So the question is,” said May, “is there any other way to get in there and get that money? Any way that John could go along with.”

“If that’s the question,” John said, “I got the short answer.”

“Wait a minute, John,” Andy said, and turned to May, saying, “May, I was down there, too, and I’m sorry, but I gotta go along with John. Your basic problem down there is you can’t see anything. It isn’t like regular water.”

“They must clean the hell out of it,” John commented, “before it gets down into our sinks here.”

“What it reminds me of,” Andy said, “is a book I read once.”

John gave him a dubious look. “Are we gonna hear about Child Heist again?”

“That isn’t the only book I ever read,” Andy told him. “I’m a pretty big reader, you know. It’s a habit I picked up on the inside, when I had a lotta leisure time to myself.”

Tom said, “I spent my time on the inside thinking about money.”

“Anyway,” Andy insisted, “about this book. It was a story about the Normandie, the ship that sank at the pier in New York in—”

“I got pictures of that,” John said, “in that Marine Salvage book.”

“Well, this is a different book,” Andy told him. “It isn’t a fact book, it’s the other kind. A story.”

“The Normandie’s a fact,” John maintained. “I’ve got pictures of it.”

“Still and all,” Andy said, “this is a story about the fact of the Normandie. Okay?”

“Okay,” John said. “I just wanted to be sure we understood each other.” And he filled his mouth with more pound cake, stuffing a little mocha butterscotch cashew ice cream in around the edges.

“Well, the story,” Andy said, with a little more edge than necessary, “is about the divers who went down inside the Normandie and tried to fix it up so they could float it again. And I was thinking when I was down in that lake, what we had there was exactly the same as what this guy described in the book.”

John looked at him with flat disbelief. “Down in that lake? You were down in that lake and you were thinking about books?”

“Among other things.”

“I was concentrating on the other things,” John said.

May said, “John, let Andy tell us about this book.”

“Thanks, May,” Andy said. “The only point about the book is, it’s all about the divers going down inside the Normandie and down to the bottom of the Hudson River off Forty-fourth Street, and how they had the same kind of problem we did. It’s very exciting, very dramatic. Make a terrific movie, except of course you couldn’t see anything.”

“Maybe radio,” Tiny suggested.

“Yeah, maybe so,” Andy agreed. “Anyway, what they had, down at the bottom of the Hudson River, was just what we had. Everything’s black and dirty, the water’s full of this thick mud, and if you turn on a flashlight it’s like turning on your car headlights in a thick fog; it just bounces the light back at you.”

“That sounds terrible,” May said.

John pushed food into one cheek in order to be able to say, “I’ve been telling you it was terrible, May. Do you think I give up easy?”

“No, I don’t, John,” May assured him. “That’s why we’re talking this over now.”

“Getting our book reports,” John said.

Tiny said, “Andy? Did this book say what they did about it, how they got around it?”

“I don’t remember,” Andy said. “I just remember they were down in there, inside the Normandie and around under the Normandie, in all this black dirty water.”

“Not while I’m eating,” John said while he was eating.

May said, “Well, it seems to me, one thing we could do is look at this book and see what solution they came up with.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Tiny agreed. “Andy? You still got the book?”

“I don’t think so.”

Wally, wriggling on the yellow pages in his eagerness to be of help, said, “I could find it! I could get us all copies of it!”

May said, “Andy? What was the title?”

“Beats me,” Andy said. “It had ‘Normandie’ in it.”

“Do you know who wrote it?”

Andy shook his head. “I can’t ever remember writers’ names.”

“That’s okay,” Wally said. “I can do it.”

John said, “Not to be a wet blanket, but—”

Andy said, “Meaning, to be a wet blanket.”

John gave him a look. “But,” he repeated, “even if we find out there’s some magic way so you can see through mud, an idea in which I personally have no belief, but even if there is such a thing, some special thing so you can see bright as day through mud, I’m still not goin down in there again. And I’ll tell you why.”

“That’s okay,” Tom said. “Dynamite’s easy.”

“The why is,” John went doggedly on, “tree stumps. Even if you could see down there, that’s what you’d see. Tree stumps. And you can’t tell which is uphill, which is downhill—”

“That’s true,” Andy said. “I noticed that myself. Disorienting, that’s what they call that.”

“I call it a couple of things myself,” John told him. “And that’s why I’m not going down in there. Tree stumps, and you can’t tell up from down, and you can’t walk through that stuff. And even if you could walk through it, which you can’t, you couldn’t drag any heavy casket up through it.”

Wally said, “Maybe it would work better if you took the railroad line.”

Everybody stared at him. Embarrassed at all the sudden attention, Wally’s face grew as red as the raspberries on his spoon which didn’t make him look like a raspberry, but like a hyperactive tomato. John said to him, “Railroad? Wally, there isn’t any train to Putkin’s Corners.”

“Well, no, gee, no,” Wally said, bobbing his tomato head, spilling raspberries off his spoon. “But there’s still the line.”

Andy, looking suddenly very alert, said, “Are you sure about this, Wally?”

“Sure,” Wally told him. “That was part of the information I input when I did the model in the computer. The old DE&W used to go through—”

“DE&W?” asked May and Andy.

“Dudson, Endicott & Western,” Wally explained.

“That’s great, then,” Andy said. “If we could find the old rail bed, there wouldn’t be any tree stumps there, and it would be like a clear path all the way.”

Tiny said, “And you could walk it right down into town. Is that the story, Wally? It went to Putkin’s Corners?”

Tom said, “The railroad station was across the street from the library. Tracks went behind the station, Albany Road went in front.”

“So,” Andy said, “we could walk the rail line right down into town.”

“If,” John said, “we could see, which we can’t. And if I was ever gonna go underwater again, which I won’t. And if we could find the old rail bed, which we can’t.”

“Well, uh,” Wally said hesitantly, “that part would be easy. The tracks are still there.”

Again he got the general stare, and again his reaction was to turn bright red.

This time it was Andy who picked up the ball, saying, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s true, though,” Wally insisted.

Andy said, “Wally, they took out all the buildings they could use. They cut down all the trees. You’re telling me they left the railroad tracks? Hundreds of pounds—no, what am I saying? Thousands of pounds of reusable steel, and they left it there, under the reservoir?”

“Well, it’s kind of interesting what happened,” Wally said. “It was all ecology and conservation groups. I guess in the old days, if New York City needed more water, they’d just go up and pick a valley and move everybody out and put in the dam. But now there’s all kinds of different groups and impact statements and all that stuff, so they always have to do compromises, and this time one of the groups was one that was trying to preserve the old railroad lines anyway, because there’s people that want the railroads to come back because of all the traffic jams on the highway, and the pollution, and—”

“Close with it, Wally,” Andy suggested.

Wally looked embarrassed again. His feet, which didn’t reach the floor, started swinging back and forth. “Well, that was the compromise,” he said. “They’re trying to keep the railroad lines, not let them get torn up and housing developments put on them, so they can be used again someday.”

“Underwater?” John asked.

“Well, only that one stretch of the line was underwater,” Wally explained. “It was all mixed in with a great big negotiation, all kinds of problems and construction projects and other stuff, so part of the compromise was that these groups wouldn’t complain about the reservoir and a couple of other things, and the government wouldn’t tear up the railroad line all the way from Endicott up to the state line at Vermont. So it’s all still there.”

“Even the underwater part,” May said faintly.

“Well, that was the way it was written,” Wally told her, “in the compromise agreement, the whole line was supposed to stay. I guess they didn’t think about the reservoir part of it when they wrote the compromise. Then later on nobody felt like they could go against what it said.”

“And to think,” John said, “my old parole officer—what was his name? Steen—he wanted me to become a productive member of society.”

Tom said, “You see why I favor dynamite. Direct action startles those people.”

Everyone looked uncomfortable, but nobody answered Tom directly. After a brief awkward silence, Andy said, “Well, you know, that’s gotta make it easier. We go down in there—”

“Huh,” John said.

“—and we just stay between the tracks,” Andy went on. “And we don’t get lost.”

“No,” John said.

Andy said, “John, I hear you. If we can’t see, we don’t go. But if this Normandie book—”

“I’m gonna get it,” Wally piped up, all eagerness and bounce. “I really am.”

“And if it shows us,” Andy said, “how to solve the seeing problem, then, John, you know, just maybe we still got a chance.”

John busied himself scraping the last bit of ice cream out of his bowl with the edge of his spoon. The sound of spoon against bowl was very loud in the small living room.

May said, “John, you put in so much time and effort on this already. And you learned all that scuba-diving knowledge. It seems such a waste, not to use it.”

John looked at her. “May,” he said. “You want me to go down in there again? When I just barely got outta there the last time? When if I go down in there again, what we’re mostly talking about is what they call a watery grave? May? Do you really want me to do that again?”

“Of course not, John,” May said. “Not if the problems can’t be solved. I don’t want to lose you, John. I don’t want you to risk your life on this.”

“Well, that’s what I was risking,” John told her. “More than I knew. And that’s the end of it.”

“All I’m asking, John,” May said, “is you keep an open mind.”

“And let all that muddy water run in.”

“Just to see,” May persisted. “Just to see if it’s possible, to explore the options. And then, if it isn’t, it isn’t, and Tom goes and does it some other way.”

“Boom,” said Tom cheerfully.

“Okay,” John said to her. “And if we keep this thing going, if we keep looking around for some kind of magic three-D glasses to look through mud with, then while we’re doing all this, where’s”—he jabbed a thumb at Tom, sitting comfortably to his left—“where’s this gonna live?”

May was sure she looked as stricken as she felt. “Well,” she said, “well, umm…” And she turned to Tiny, on her left, raising her eyebrows, hoping for a volunteer.

But Tiny looked embarrassed, and fumbled with his spoon, and wouldn’t meet her eye. “Josie,” he mumbled, “she wouldn’t, uh, it wouldn’t work out so good.”

May’s pleading gaze slid onto Andy, who flashed three or four quick panicky smiles and said, “Gee, May, I’d love to, but you know, my place’s so small, I can barely fit me in there, I been planning to look for somewhere bigger for a long…”

May sighed and looked toward Wally on her right, but he was already shaking his head, saying, “Oh, I wish I could help, Miss May, I really do, but my little apartment’s so filled up with electronics and computers and all, well, John and Andy can tell you, it’s so cramped in there you can’t barely sit down anywhere, and, uh…”

Sighing, May looked across the table at John, who met her gaze with grim satisfaction, saying, “Let’s put it this way, May. I leave it up to you. You want me to forget this thing, and send everybody away? Or you want me to keep looking for underwater Seeing Eye dogs?”

May refused to look toward Tom, knowing he would be at his blandest and most careless, just sitting there, toying with his spoon. Tuna casserole curdling within her, she turned to Wally again. “How long will it take you to find that book, Wally?” she asked.

THIRTY-ONE

The book was called Normandie Triangle, and the writer was called Justin Scott, and according to the book the divers didn’t solve the problem of cruddy, black, filthy water, also known as “turbidity.” What they did was, they made a model on shore of the parts of the ship they wanted to work on, and they practiced on the model until they could do the work with their eyes closed, and then they went down into the water and did it; and it might just as well have been with their eyes closed.

So the book itself wasn’t that much help. However, Wally, with his incredible unlimited computer access to what was apparently every piece of knowledge in the world, had come up with the fact that Justin Scott lived in New York and had a telephone. Wally had the number.

“We’ll call from my place,” Kelp decided. “I got a speakerphone.”

“Of course you do,” Dortmunder said grumpily. Andy was well known to have surrounded himself with all the latest in telephone technology, and Dortmunder was too proud to admit he didn’t know what a speakerphone was.

At least Kelp wasn’t one to put out cheese and crackers, though when Dortmunder arrived at his place—which wasn’t that small, actually, a one-bedroom with a separate kitchen—Kelp had apparently anticipated some sort of party, because he looked past Dortmunder at the hall and said, “Where’s everybody?”

“Who everybody?” Dortmunder asked, walking into the living room.

“Well, Tiny,” Kelp said, standing there with the door still open. “Maybe Tom or Wally. Or could be May.”

Dortmunder stood in the middle of the living room and looked at him. “Why don’t you close your door, Andy?”

“Oh. Sure.” And he did.

Dortmunder said, “Everybody’s gonna be guided by my judgment, so they don’t need to come along. If I decide I’m crazy enough to go down in that lake again, everybody’s gonna let me do it.”

“Let us do it,” Kelp pointed out.

Dortmunder shook his head at him. “I don’t know why you’re so eager,” he said.

“I’m not exactly eager,” Kelp said. “But the thing is, I remembered about the BCD when I was down there—”

“When you weren’t thinking about books.”

“The BCD,” Kelp said. “That’s the difference right there, John. I was getting nervous, the same way you were getting, but then I remembered that good old BCD. One push on the button and up you go. When you know you can always get outta there if you need to, it makes things easier.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dortmunder said. It rankled with him that he hadn’t thought of the BCD in his moment of direst need, and it rankled double that Kelp had thought of it. “BCD or no BCD,” he said, “if I can’t walk and I can’t see, I ain’t going.”

“So let’s have a beer,” Kelp suggested, “and call this guy, and see what’s the story.”

So they did. Dialing the number, Kelp said, “I’ll switch to the speakerphone after we start talking.”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said.

A little pause, and then Kelp made a face. “It’s the answering machine.”

“You’re the last to complain,” Dortmunder told him.

Kelp ignored that. “I’ll leave my number,” he decided, and sat there waiting for the answering machine message to finish itself. Then he said, “Hi, I’m a fan, my name’s—What? Oh, hello! You’re there!”

Little pause, Kelp nodding and grinning. “Yeah, I do that sometimes, too,” he said. “Screening your calls, that’s very— Oops, hold on a second.”

He reached down, hit a switch on the side of the phone, and suddenly the room was filled with a voice saying, “—never get any work done.”

“I agree a hundred percent,” Kelp told the phone while Dortmunder stared around in shock for the source of the voice.

Which now said, “What can I do for you?”

The phone. Dortmunder got it at last; the phone had a loudspeaker in it, that’s why it was called a speakerphone. So this was the writer talking.

But now it was Kelp talking, saying, “My name’s Andy… Kelly, and I want to tell you, I just read Normandie Triangle again, so that’s I think the third time, and it’s really terrific.”

“Well, thanks,” said the speakerphone. “Thanks a lot.”

“Now, the reason I happened to read it again,” Kelp went on, “is I have a friend with a summer house upstate on Parmalee Pond. You know Parmalee Pond?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” said the speakerphone. “A friend of mine has—”

“My friend,” Kelp said hastily, “just bought his place. He’s new there. And what he did, his first time up there, he went out in his rowboat and he was gonna take a picture of his house from the lake with this very expensive Nikon camera—”

“Don’t tell me,” said the speakerphone. “It fell overboard.”

“It sure did.”

“Reason I know is, my novel The Shipkiller is always falling overboard. It’s about boats, and sailors drop it in the water accidentally. I know it’s accidental because they call me up for another copy. They can’t find it in the stores. Well, I can’t find it in the stores either, and—”

“A truly excellent novel,” Kelp silenced the writer. “My friend on Parmalee Pond admired it greatly, my friend who dropped his camera. Overboard.”

Dortmunder watched Kelp with grudging admiration; this crock of horse elbows just flowed out of the guy with no effort at all.

“And he tried to get it back,” Kelp was going on, spinning his story, “by putting on his scuba gear and walking into where he dropped it. But he ran into all this turbidity.”

“Oh, sure,” said the speakerphone. “He would. Walking in? He just roils up the bottom that way.”

“That’s what he did, all right,” Kelp agreed. “And I remembered your book, and I read it again to see how those divers of yours got around the problem.”

“They didn’t,” the speakerphone said. “Those who didn’t wash out worked entirely by feel.”

“Wash out?” Kelp echoed. “You mean, you can wash out the turbidity? With clean water, you mean?”

“No, no,” the speakerphone said. “Washed out on the test they had to take before they were hired, to find out how they’d handle themselves in total darkness underwater. Eighty percent failed the test.”

“Oh, yeah?” Kelp said while Dortmunder raised an eyebrow at him. “Why’d they fail, mostly?”

“They went insane from claustrophobia.”

“Insane?” Kelp said, and chuckled, trying to sound light and carefree. “Really?”

“Why wouldn’t they go insane?” asked the speakerphone. (A reasonable question, as far as Dortmunder was concerned.) “Consider the terror underwater in total darkness,” the writer offered. “Cold and silent, you can’t see your own air bubbles. You can’t tell up from down.” (Dortmunder nodded vigorously.) “The loudest sound is your own heart pumping. Then you start imagining things.”

At that point, Dortmunder went out for two more beers, and when he came back Kelp was saying, “But the water might help.”

“It’s a funny idea,” Justin Scott said. “Use water to clean the water. It might make things better, it might make them worse. But you’d have to be really braced before you turned that nozzle on.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Scott.”

When Kelp hung up, Dortmunder said, “So it isn’t gonna work. I’m sorry to unleash Tom Jimson on that valley, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Well, there’s this idea of using water against the water,” Kelp said.

“What idea was that? I was getting beer.”

“You take a fire hose down in there with you,” Kelp explained, “and turn it on to blast fresh water out in front of you, push the dirty water out of the way.”

“That’s a hell of a long fire hose,” Dortmunder said.

“We get lengths and put them together.”

“And where do we attach it?”

Kelp said, “There’s a hydrant at the end of the dam. Didn’t you notice it?”

“No,” Dortmunder told him. “But I did notice your writer friend said the water idea might make it worse instead of better.”

“Could make it easier to dig up Tom’s stash, though,” Kelp suggested. “Do it with high-pressure water instead of shovels.”

“But we don’t get that far,” Dortmunder said, “because we go off our heads first from claustrophobia like all those other divers. Forget it. It can’t be done.”

“Only eighty percent of the other divers,” Kelp reminded him. “Maybe we’re in the other twenty percent.”

“I know me better than that,” Dortmunder said.

HIRTY-TWO

So the agreement was Tom could stay one more night, but the next day he’d have to make other arrangements. “I want you to know, Al,” Tom said, when Dortmunder came back from his telephone conversation at Kelp’s place, “I got to give you an A for effort.”

“I think it’s an E for effort,” Dortmunder said.

“Whatever it is, Al,” Tom told him, “you got it from me. I tell ya, I kinda wish it’d worked out. A nice quiet little heist would’ve been better in a lotta ways.”

“Yeah, it would,” Dortmunder agreed.

“Well,” Tom said, with a little shrug, “you win some, you lose some.”

Everybody was depressed that evening and didn’t feel like talking. Dortmunder went to bed early and lay awake awhile, thinking about water: dirty dark water all around his own personal head, or billions of gallons of water crashing in a tidal wave into Dudson Falls and Dudson Center and East Dudson. After a while, he fell asleep, and then he dreamed about water in a whole lot of different uncomfortable ways.

And then, middle of the night, all of a sudden he woke up wide awake, staring at the ceiling. “Well, hell,” he said out loud.

“Mrm?” said May, beside him.

Dortmunder sat up in the dark bedroom, glaring at the opposite wall. “Goddamn son of a bitch bastard all to hell and shit,” he announced.

May, waking up, propped herself on an elbow to say, “John? What’s wrong?”

“I know how to do it, that’s what’s wrong,” Dortmunder told her. “Tom stays. And I go down in that goddamn reservoir again. Hell!”

THIRTY-THREE

Real life. Wally sat in the front seat of the baby-blue Lincoln Continental, the road maps on his round knees, and directed everything. Andy was at the steering wheel beside him, while John slumped on the backseat and frowned to himself like a person doing multiplication problems in his head. Directly in front of Wally was the windshield, like technology’s largest and most true-fidelity monitor screen, displaying endlessly… the real world.

A cellular telephone was mounted on the floor hump between Wally’s knees and Andy’s knees, and for some time as they drove north out of the city it intermittently rang; fifteen or twenty rings, and then silence for a while, and then another six rings, and silence, and so on. When it first happened, Wally said, “Andy? What’s that? Should I answer it?”

“In my experience,” Andy answered, “it’s usually the doctor, wanting his car back. So I tend to leave it alone.”

Wally digested that, while the phone stopped ringing, and then started again. But no Greek was ever as obsessed by the cry of the Sirens as the average American is by the ringing of a telephone; any telephone, anywhere. In this respect, at least, Wally was a true American. There was no way this phone call could be for him, since it was neither his phone nor his car, and yet his left hand twitched with the need to reach out and pick the thing up. After a while, a bit plaintively, he said, “Andy? Are you sure? Maybe it’s something important.”

“Important to who?”

“I guess so,” Wally said, still pensive.

Andy shrugged. “It’s up to you, Wally,” he said. “If you want to hear an angry doctor make a lot of empty threats, go ahead, pick it up.”

Wally kind of visualized that doctor. He was in a long white lab coat, holding the phone in one hand and a scalpel in the other, and boy, was he mad! Wally thought it over and decided he probably didn’t need to hear what the man had to say, and shortly after that the phone stopped ringing for good. Either the doctor had given up, or they’d moved out of range.

They were quite far north now. Big green signs announced North Dudson as the next exit from the Thruway. Wally, suddenly nervous, began to rattle his maps, self-conscious and shy. He had maps for the area as it was now, and maps for the area from before the reservoir was put in, and the reservoir was only one of the changes that had taken place in the intervening years. Wally felt the awful weight of his responsibility, to guide these people and this car through the modern map to one specific spot on the old map. And to do so without revealing his own extra knowledge of the terrain.

None of the others knew about that private trip of his up here; not telling them about it had been another part of the computer’s advice. In fact, the whole trip had been at the advice of the computer. After Wally had input the story of the unknown women following them around in circles, the computer had said he should definitely find out who those people were.

The hero must identify his helpers.

The hero must know his enemies.

All players in the game must be aware of one another.

So he had gotten out his little old yellow VW Beetle that he only drove four or five times a year and that he kept otherwise in a Department of Transportation garage on Twelfth Avenue rent-free (arranged through his computer access), and he’d putt-putted all the way up to North Dudson—the farthest he’d ever gone in that car—and he’d driven around and around looking for a black Ford Fairlane, knowing that even in a town like this there couldn’t be more than one such vehicle, and when he saw it at last—just got a glimpse of it, really—at the end of a driveway, in front of an old-fashioned two-door garage, being washed by an angry-looking old lady, the rest had been easy.

Wally, who was almost always tongue-tied and shy with other people—especially girls—had partly by luck and partly out of a sense of self-preservation begun his conversation with Myrtle Jimson on the one topic that would permit him to be fluent, even eloquent: computers. By the time they were through with that, some level of rapport had been established, and he was even confident and relaxed enough to ask her to join him for lunch.

All through lunch at Kitty’s Kountry Kitchen on Main Street they’d just talked. Wally told her about growing up in Florida, and she told him about growing up in North Dudson, and there was just nothing in any of what she told him to explain the car-following incident.

Was she even related to Tom Jimson? But the name couldn’t be a coincidence, it just couldn’t. In the first place, coincidence does not exist in the world of the computer. [Randomness (a.k.a. chance) has been factored into some of the more sophisticated games, but coincidence (a.k.a. meaningless correspondence other than junk mail) violates the human craving for order. Which is why puns are the pornography of mathematicians.] But knowing the computer would be just as confused as he when he reported back to it (and it was) didn’t help Wally’s mood much.

Myrtle had insisted on paying for her own lunch, and then he’d walked her back to the library, where she’d promised to keep using her computer terminal from now on, and where he’d gotten back into his yellow VW and putt-putted away to the city. And this was the first time he’d been back among the Dudsons since. “It’s our next exit, Andy,” he said, rattling his maps.

“I know that, Wally,” Andy said, amiably enough. “The State of New York spent three hundred thousand dollars to put up a sign there to tell me so.”

“Oh,” Wally said. “I wasn’t sure you saw it.”

“Thanks, anyway, Wally,” Andy said.

So Wally subsided again, as Andy steered the Lincoln Continental expertly off the Thruway and around the ramp and down the narrow road into North Dudson.

As usual, the town was full of people who’d forgotten why they were driving. In a pleasant voice, Andy made speculative remarks about such people’s ancestry, education, brain power, and sexual bent, while Wally, scandalized, his ears burning (his earlobes actually felt hot, so suffused with blood from his blushing were they), blinked obsessively at his maps, double-checking and triple-checking his projected route, and from the backseat John gave an occasional long sigh. His sighs didn’t seem to comment on Andy’s language or the quality of North Dudson’s drivers so much as on life itself.

“Pilot to navigator,” Andy said, as pleasant as ever.

Wally jumped, rattled, the maps sliding from his knees to the floor. “What? Me?”

“We’re out of that charming village,” Andy pointed out. “It’s time to give me directions, Wally.”

“Right! Right!”

“Turn right?”

“Not yet!” Wally was scrabbling about for his maps. “Stay on this road until, uh, uh…”

“Take your time,” Andy said, and John sighed.

Wally found his maps and his place. “We turn right,” he said, “at, uh, where the road says to Dudson Falls.”

“Check,” Andy said, and a few miles later made the turn, and all the subsequent turns Wally told him about, as they maneuvered their way through the spider web of back roads; these roads, already a planless catch-as-catch-can hodge-podge by the middle of the twentieth century, had only been made more complicated when the reservoir was dumped in their midst.

“It should be around here somewhere, shouldn’t it?” Andy asked as they bumped over an old railroad track.

Wally stared at him to be sure he wasn’t joking. “Andy? That was it!”

Andy frowned at the rearview mirror. “What was it?”

“We’re looking for the railroad,” Wally reminded him. “We just drove over it, Andy.”

“By God, you’re right,” Andy said, and swung the Lincoln off the road to wait for an oncoming bulk milk truck to pass. “I think what it is, Wally,” he said, “I never went looking for anything so short before.”

“I guess,” Wally said.

Andy swung around behind the milk truck, reapproached the railroad line, and again pulled off onto the verge, where a million spring weeds were in flower. They all climbed out, stretched, shook their legs as though looking for a quarter that had fallen through a hole in their pocket, and went over to look at the railroad line.

It was a singleton, one pair of rusty tracks stretching off both ways into the woods, here and there partly covered by encroaching weeds and brush. The section across the black-top road was less rusty than the rest, which had aged to a dull dark blackish red. Set back on both sides of the road were barriers across the rail line, these consisting of two broad bands of horizontal metal attached to metal stakes set in concrete footings. The barriers had once been painted white, but most of the color had rusted away. Signs reading NO ENTRY were screwed to them.

Andy beamed at the railroad line. “You know what this reminds me of?”

“Yes,” John said. “It reminds you of Tom Thumb.” He didn’t sound particularly cheerful about it.

But Andy was cheerful. “You’re right!” he said.

John looked back and forth, then said to Wally, “Which way’s the reservoir?”

Wally pointed to the right. “Two miles that way.”

“Two miles,” John repeated, and sighed.

“That isn’t so far,” Andy told him. “Two miles, just a good healthy walk.”

“Four miles,” John said. “Unless you figure to live there.”

“Well, let’s get started,” Andy said, walking around one side of the barrier.

John said, “I don’t suppose there’s any way to get that car onto the tracks.”

“Even if it was the same gauge, John,” Andy said, leaning on the barrier on its other side, “we’d have to chop down these three or four trees here to get the car in.”

John glared at him. “Gauge? What do you mean, gauge?”

Andy pointed at the tracks. “If the width between the rails is the same as the width between the tires on the car, then we can let some of the air out of the tires and put the car up on the tracks and drive on in. But it probably isn’t the same, and we can’t get the car in here anyway, so why are we talking about it? Why don’t we just walk?”

“I wore the wrong shoes,” John said, but then he shook his head and walked around the barrier, and the three of them set off along the old line toward the reservoir.

As they walked, trying to adjust their pace to the distance between the old half-rotted ties, Wally said, “Andy? What did you mean, Tom Thumb?”

“It was a locomotive,” Andy explained. “One time, John and me and some other people, we had to get into a place with an electrified fence, and there was an old track like this, and we got a locomotive from a circus—pretty locomotive, painted all different colors, called Tom Thumb—and we drove right through the fence.” To John, he said, “Things worked out that time, too.”

“Later on they did,” John admitted grudgingly. “Kind of.”

Wally wanted to know what place they had to get into that had an electrified fence and why they had to get into that place, but he didn’t exactly know how to ask, and he suspected anyway that Andy wouldn’t tell him. Andy was very cheerful and open and everything, but then later on you realized he told you as much as he wanted to tell you and then he stopped. Wally imagined the bright-painted locomotive crashing through the electrified fence. “Were there sparks?”

“You bet!” Andy said, and laughed. “The crazy people were running everywhere!”

“I guess they must have been,” Wally agreed, hoping for more.

But John interrupted, saying, “Isn’t this two miles?”

“John,” Andy said, “we can still see the barrier back there.”

“I don’t know why I wore these shoes,” John said.

Then they walked in silence for a while, Wally contemplating the fact that an accent had been wrong in that last thing Andy had said about the train and the electrified fence. He should have said, “The crazy people were running everywhere,” but what he’d said was, “The crazy people…” Why?

“Fence ahead,” Andy said.

It was a chain-link fence, eight feet high, with three strands of barbed wire at the top, and it crossed the railroad line from left to right. When they neared it, they saw the expected sign.

NO ADMITTANCEVILBURGTOWN RESERVOIR AUTHORITY

“Gosh,” Wally said. “What do we do now?”

“I’m gonna sit down,” John said, and went over to a nearby log and sat on it.

Meantime, Andy approached the fence, took a pair of wire cutters out of his inner jacket pocket, went down on one knee, and started snipping the fence from the bottom. Wally goggled: “You’re cutting the fence!”

“Well, we’re not going over it,” Andy said, snipping away, “and I didn’t bring a shovel to dig under it, so this is pretty much what’s left.”

Wally looked at the official sign: NO ADMITTANCE. In games, sometimes, it was necessary to do shortcuts across the regular routes; so this must be the real-life equivalent. And when Wally stopped to think about it, what startled him mostly was not what Andy was doing, but his calm while doing it. Whenever Wally set out on an adventure in the computer, the excitement was what it was all about; but Andy and John did adventures as though they were jobs.

“There,” Andy said, straightening, putting the wire clippers away. “John? You wanna go first?”

John sighed, got up from the log, and came across to study the fence. Andy had snipped a vertical line up about four feet; it barely showed at all. John said, “That isn’t enough.”

“Sure it is,” Andy told him. “Wally, you pull that side in. I’ll push this side out. Plenty of room to get through.”

There was barely room enough, as it turned out. With Wally pulling and Andy pushing, it was like opening an envelope. John slithered through, complaining, and then he took over Wally’s role while Wally grunted and squeezed past, not quite ripping any of his clothing, and then Wally and John held the fence for Andy, and there they were on the other side.

But still some distance from the reservoir. They walked and walked, with John complaining from time to time and Andy pointing out pretty flowers or oddly shaped tree limbs, and at last they saw the bright glint of sunlight reflecting from water out ahead.

That was very strange. The railroad tracks ran straight into the reservoir, under the water and gone. On both sides, tangled brush and small trees made an impassable obstruction right down to the water’s edge, with no path or cleared shoreline in either direction.

Andy pointed to the left along the overgrown bank, saying, “That’s where we went in last time, way over there. So we’re farther from the dam now.”

“Don’t remind me of the last time,” John answered. Turning to Wally, he said, “You’re sure this goes all the way down in there to the town.”

“Oh, sure. And out the other side,” Wally promised him, pointing to the far shore. “But over there, it’s a lot farther from Putkin’s Corners.”

Andy, looking dubious, said, “I dunno, John, I guess we could go look at the tracks on the other side, if you think we ought to.”

“No,” John said. “What matters is what happens underwater, and we can’t know that until we…” another long sigh, accompanied by a headshake “… go down there.”

“Well,” Andy said, “the point of the trip was to see are the tracks here, and do they go into the water. They are, and they do.”

“And they go all the way across underneath,” Wally assured them.

“Well,” John said, “I look, and I look, and I just can’t find any reason not to do it. So I guess that’s it.”

Excitement leaped in Wally’s breast. They were going to try again. Maybe this time, he thought, they’d let him come along. Not to go down into the reservoir, he had no desire at all to do anything like that, but just to be one of the people up here on the bank, helping out, waiting, doing whatever the people up here did while John and Andy were down there in the cold and the dark and the wet. Trying not to sound too eager, he said, “Well, John? What do you do now?”

“Now,” John said, “I talk to Tom about more money.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Dortmunder kept squinting. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the light in here, which was ordinary enough, it was knowing about all that space out there, sensing it, just the other side of these blank walls. In here, in an airport terminal building in the unnecessarily large, flat, tan state of Oklahoma, Dortmunder stood against one of the walls with two small suitcases at his feet, hurrying travelers eddying around him as Tom, at one of the chest-high counters across the way, rented a car (again!) from a robot shaped like a short smiling girl. Dortmunder had shown his driver’s license to this automaton, since he would be driving the car when rented, but then he had retreated to this distant vantage while Tom handled the repellent commercial aspects of the transaction.

Finally finished, Tom stepped across the stream of travelers as though they weren’t there, causing several people to bump into one another but none to bump into him, and picked up his bag from beside Dortmunder’s left foot. “Okay,” he said. “We go out and wait for the bus.”

“No cars?” Dortmunder asked.

Tom lowered his eyebrows at him. “The bus to the car,” he said. “Don’t start with me, Al.”

“I don’t know about these things,” Dortmunder reminded him, picking up his own bag, and they went out of the terminal building, watched by every cop, Federal agent, and private security guard in the place, all of whom were certain in their hearts those two birds were up to something. When a lawman looked at Dortmunder and Tom Jimson, particularly together, he said to himself, “Probable Cause is their middle name.”

Outside, it was still just airport, normal airport, with horizontal concrete between the slabs of vertical concrete, but Dortmunder knew Oklahoma was just out there, just a step away, just around a concrete corner. “Sunny,” he complained.

Every car rental company had its own buses, and they were all weird-looking, with oddball color patterns and hatlike outgrowths and strangely placed fins, as though they were designed by the same people who draw spaceships in comic books. Tom rejected several of these, for no reason Dortmunder could see, and then accepted one, and they got aboard with a lot of white men in suits carrying garment bags. Among these solid citizens, Dortmunder and Tom looked like exactly what they were: ex-cons, up to no good. The driver was the only person who noticed them, and he kept an eye on them in his rearview mirror all the way out of the airport and down the wide sunstruck road to the rental company’s parking lot.

The driver had collected a stuffed envelope from each of his passengers, including Tom, and now he dropped off each renter right at the car he’d been assigned in the great lottery, giving Tom and Dortmunder a small white vehicle like a washing machine with four tiny doors. “I like Andy’s cars better,” Dortmunder said as they jammed their small bags into the no-leg-room backseat.

“I like a car the state cops aren’t looking for,” Tom told him.

They got into the front, Dortmunder at the wheel, and as he steered the little machine along, following one exit sign after another, Tom checked out the radio, to discover that his choices included thirty-seven stations playing rock music, four religious broadcasters, and one all-news station operating under the theory that “all news” meant “sports.” Tom finally settled on one of the religious programs and sat back, content.

“The bad man is among us, my friends, he is in our hearts and our minds, and our Lord and Creator sees him, my friends, sees us shelter him…”

“Hee-hee,” said Tom.

Soon enough they had left the airport and come out to nothing. Nothing. As far as the eye could see. “You wouldn’t believe how empty this all was before the white man came,” Tom said, looking around at the nothing.

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

For somebody who had lived his entire life in cities or the tumbled landscapes of hills and mountains, this nothing was extremely scary. If somebody a thousand miles over that way accidentally shot a gun, he could blow your head off. Dortmunder drove the little white washing machine down the broad white road in the scanty-to-moderate traffic, and tried to pretend something had gone wrong with his peripheral vision so that there really was something to left and right; a building, a hill, a few trees, something. He was glad, at least, to be sitting down; if he stood up he’d run a real risk of losing his balance.

“Head toward Norman,” Tom said as they approached a cloverleaf interchange with another highway. The overpasses stood out like croquet hoops on a lawn.

“I’ll be able to see it, won’t I?” Dortmunder asked.

“What, Norman? No, we’ll turn off before we get there and head west toward Chickasaw.”

“No, I meant as soon as I turn toward it,” Dortmunder explained.

Tom frowned, working that one out, while on the radio the preacher described in loving detail various activities taking place even now in Hell. “You mean,” Tom said seriously, “that it’s kinda flat around here.”

“Something like that.”

“I grew up in this territory,” Tom said. “When the dust came.”

“The Okies, you mean,” Dortmunder suggested.

“I guess I was an Okie,” Tom said. “Not like in that movie, though.”

“No.”

“Sit around the campfire, sing a song. Go into a gas station with your big old dead truck fulla mattresses, women, dying old men, whadda you do?”

“Run,” said Dortmunder.

“In the movie,” Tom said, “they bought gas. Paid for it.”

“You rent cars,” Dortmunder pointed out.

“Not the same thing,” Tom said. “I do what I gotta do to make life smooth. I rent cars because I can.”

“Wha’d you do, back in the Okie days, in that gas station?”

“Shot parts off the kid until he remembered the combination to the safe,” Tom said. “There’s your turn up there.”

THIRTY-FIVE

The way it turned out, the stash in the church had been the only one of Tom’s unofficial banks situated in the northeast. Tom did grudgingly admit there were other stashes still out of the lawyers’ hands, but they were all far away, in different parts of the country. He didn’t feel like traveling, didn’t like the idea of giving up all his last stashes, didn’t want to be helpful at all, so finally Dortmunder had suggested the two of them go together to wherever the hell it was, bringing along overnight bags for if they had to stay a little while, but planning to do it all as quickly as possible. Go there, make the withdrawal, come back.

“But an easy one, okay, Tom?” Dortmunder had said. “No more weddings, okay? Not crowds of people all around.”

“Well,” Tom had said, “how about a place with nobody around? How do you feel about a ghost town?”

So that’s where they were headed, and along the way Tom explained what had happened to Cronley, Oklahoma, to turn it from a bustling cow town and transportation hub at the turn of the century into the dry, crumbling, empty shell it was today. “It was the railroad done it, mostly,” Tom said.

“Railroads,” Dortmunder echoed, steering along an empty two-lane road in the middle of Oklahoma but thinking about the steel tracks running down into the water back up in the green mountains of upstate New York. “All of a sudden there’s railroads all over this.”

“It was the other way around in Cronley,” Tom told him. “All of a sudden, no railroads at all.”

“Well, that happened everywhere.”

“Not like this,” Tom said. “See, Cronley was a farm town to start with, on a little stream between the Canadian and Cimarron Rivers, the place where people went to buy their salt and sell their milk. Then, when the railroad come through, after the Civil War, Cronley got bigger, got to be county seat, a whole lot of warehouses got built, offices for businessmen, a big five-story hotel down by the railroad station for traveling salesmen, tallest building in town.”

“Five stories?” Dortmunder asked.

Tom ignored that, saying, “So, the drought in the thirties hit Cronley pretty hard, because all the farmers around there went away, cut down the population. But the town kept going until the fifties, when Oklahoma made its big mistake.”

“The whole state?”

“That’s it,” Tom said. “See, Oklahoma stayed dry after Prohibition. What it is, you take people, you give them a lot of trouble and misery, what they always do, every single time, Al, you can set your watch by this, what they do is, they decide God gave them all this trouble and misery because they done something wrong, so if they give themselves even more trouble and misery maybe God’ll let up on them. You see it everywhere. In the Middle Ages—a guy inside told me this—back then, the big way to keep from getting the plague was to beat yourself with whips. So Oklahoma, poor and miserable and dry as dust, decided to make itself even drier so then maybe God would leave them alone. So, no booze.”

“That was the mistake?” Dortmunder asked. “That’s what killed Cronley? No booze?”

“It set the situation up,” Tom answered. “See, what happens is, you put a law on the books, no matter how dumb it is, sooner or later somebody’s gonna come along dumb enough to enforce it. That’s what happened back in the fifties. Oklahoma cops boarded a through passenger train and arrested the bartender in the bar car for serving drinks in a dry state.”

“Wait a minute,” Dortmunder said. “On the train?”

“The through train, comin in this side of the state, goin out that side. Took the barman off, put him in jail overnight, the railroad people come around the next day and got him out.” Tom did that thing of grinning without moving his lips. “Fun night for the barman, huh? Al, you’re gonna take that county road up there.”

Up ahead, a small sign indicated a side road on the left. Since Tom had steered them off the interstate a while back, each road he’d put them on had been smaller and less populated, and now he was directing Dortmunder from an empty two-lane blacktop road onto a narrow two-lane oiled gravel road wandering off across scrub land as though it had been laid out by a thirsty snake.

At least the countryside wasn’t so flat in this middle part of the state; low, bare, brown hills now rose up around them, with taller and craggier (though just as barren) hills out ahead. This new road angled upward slightly, becoming rutted and rocky, as though rain sometimes fell here. Using both hands on the wheel to steer around the bumps and holes, Dortmunder said, “The last we heard, the bartender spent the night in jail.”

“Right,” Tom said. “So what the railroads did, the next couple years, they kept shifting routes around, and when they were done there wasn’t any trains in Oklahoma anymore.”

Surprised, but also pleased at the thought of such extensive revenge, Dortmunder said, “Is that right?”

“That’s right, all right,” Tom told him. “Even today, you take a look at the Amtrak map, the railroad lines go all around Oklahoma, but they never go in. And that’s what killed Cronley. No trains, no reason for the damn place. Now, there’s gonna be a turnoff along here somewhere, Al, but they probably don’t keep it up a hell of a lot, so we gotta watch for it.”

“Left or right?”

“Right.”

Dortmunder slowed the little white washing machine to a walk and hugged the right edge of the narrow roadway, but still they almost missed it. “Damn, Al!” Tom suddenly cried. “That was it! My fault this time, I shoulda seen it.”

Dortmunder braked to a stop and considered Tom. “Your fault this time?”

“That’s what I said,” Tom agreed, looking over his right shoulder at the ground behind them. “Come on, Al, back up, will ya?”

Dortmunder took a deep breath and held it. Then he nodded to himself, released the deep breath, shifted into reverse, and squirted the washing machine backward, gravel spraying hither and yon.

“Take it easy, Al,” Tom said calmly, looking out his window. He stuck his arm out the open window into the air and pointed, saying, “See it? See it there?”

Then Dortmunder did; crumbled blacktop, covered with dirt and weeds. “That’s it?”

“This was the back road in the old days,” Tom said. “This thing we’re on used to be paved, too.”

“Well, why don’t we take the front road?” Dortmunder asked him.

“It’s gone,” Tom said. “They ripped up part of it when they put in one a the interstates, and another part got sold off to some agribusiness. So now this is it.”

“How far from here?”

“Maybe six miles.”

“I don’t know,” Dortmunder said. “Maybe we want a Jeep for this. Or a tank, maybe.”

“We’ll be fine,” Tom assured him. “Just drive, Al.”

So Dortmunder drove, steering his little white appliance out onto a surface it had never been intended to know. Much of the roadway was crumbled away or undercut and gullied by rain, and a lot of the rest had weeds growing up right through the blacktop. The road had originally been a fairly wide two lanes, but the worst damage had worked inward from the outer edges, so now in parts it was barely as wide as the car, and never was it within the range of the civilized or the acceptable.

Which Tom didn’t seem to mind. While the vehicle made about four miles an hour—an hour and a half to Cronley, at this rate—and Dortmunder hunched over the steering wheel, forehead pressed to the windshield as he looked for axle-breaking holes out there, Tom chatted casually on, saying, “This is one of my oldest stashes, you know. Just after the war, it was. GI Joe comin home from everywhere, the streets lined with sharpers with decks a cards in their hands, just waiting. There was a fella in Cronley, stayed at the hotel there, had a girl named Myra. Lotta soldier boys got off the train there, headed back to the farm, or transfer to another train. Those days, you could take the train from Cronley down to Wichita Falls or up to Wichita or over to Amarillo, or all kinds of places. This fella—what was his name? — doesn’t matter. Him and Myra, they worked those soldiers pretty good, the fella play some poker with them up in the hotel room, Myra stand around looking sexy. So I got in good with Myra for a while, had her give me the high sign when there was a lotta money in the room, leave the door unlocked, and me and two other guys walked in and took it.” Tom nodded. Without moving his lips, he said, “Hee-hee.” Then he said, “Those other two guys, they didn’t know about me and Myra. So they run into the elevator and I shut the door on them and yanked the power and carried the cash to the room Myra’d rented for me.”

Dortmunder said, “Yanked the power? You mean you shut off the electricity in the hotel?”

“To confuse things,” Tom explained.

“With your partners in the elevator?”

“Ex-partners,” Tom corrected, and did his chuckle again, and said, “The soldiers got kinda rough on them two until the law got there.”

“Didn’t they search the hotel?” Dortmunder asked.

“Oh, sure,” Tom said. “But Myra fixed me up so I was her sister, and—”

“Sister!”

“Myra was the one with the looks,” Tom said. “But I was the one with the brains, so when the deck-a-cards guy found out Myra’d been in with the hijackers—”

“How’d he find out about that?”

“Well, how do you think, Al?” Tom asked.

“That’s how,” Dortmunder said, steering around the dangers in the road.

“So by then,” Tom said, “I was outta there. But I couldn’t take much of that cash with me, so I left it right there in the hotel, where it was safe.”

“How much?”

“We got sixteen thousand in the heist, so I took along two with me, left fourteen.”

“And now,” Dortmunder said, as the little tires of the machine plunged into the holes and clawed up the other sides, “you think this fourteen grand is gonna still be there, forty years later.”

“Absolutely,” Tom said. “I’m not comin all the way out here, Al, for the fresh air. And not to look up Myra either.”

“How old would she be now?” Dortmunder asked.

“She wouldn’t,” Tom told him. “Broads like Myra don’t live long.”

Not for the first time, Dortmunder found himself wondering just what in hell he was doing in association with Tom Jimson in any way at all. Back in prison there hadn’t been any choice in the matter—cell assignments hadn’t become negotiable until he’d been in there considerably longer—but in any case, back there he always had the comfort of knowing there was armed assistance constantly within shouting range.

What do I care about the people in that valley? Dortmunder asked himself, as the little white LEM progressed toward the dead Cronley. If I went there, walked around one of those Dudsons, people look out their windows, they see me, they’d call the cops. Saving that valley from Tom Jimson isn’t my obligation, dammit. I got into this thing because he startled me, that’s all, and it didn’t seem like it was gonna be that hard, take that long, have so many problems. So now I’m in it, and here I am in Oklahoma, like some kind of pioneer or something, driving this beer keg with wheels. Makes no sense at all.

“There it is,” Tom said, breaking a long and uncharacteristic silence.

Dortmunder slowed the vehicle almost to a dead stop so he could risk looking up and out. They’d just come over a low humpback ridge, and out ahead of them now was more greenery than Dortmunder had seen since the salad on the plane. This greenery, though, was mostly trees, short squat trees, deeply green, a thin platoon of them stretching to left and right. Since they’d spent most of the afternoon crossing this miserable imitation road, the trees’ shadows spread long pointing fingers out to the right, as though suggesting visitors would be advised to take a detour. Sticking up above this linear forest were a couple of buildings and a church steeple.

Dortmunder said, “Trees on account of a river there, huh?”

“Al, you’re a regular woodsman,” Tom said.

“And that’s your town, huh?”

“That’s my stash,” Tom said. “The tall building there, that’s the hotel.”

“Tall building,” said Dortmunder.

“You can laugh, Al,” Tom said, though Dortmunder had done no such thing. “But from Myra’s room up there on the top floor, you could see for miles.”

“See what for miles?”

Tom did his chuckle. “Well, us, for instance,” he said.

THIRTY-SIX

Guffey watched the little white car roll slowly toward town. The binoculars made it seem closer than it was, but flattened everything out. The scope on the 30–03 was better; more definition. He could just about put a round through the windshield into either one of those bobbing heads from here, at this range. If he wanted to. Not that there was any particular reason to shoot those two strangers down like dirty dogs; not yet, anyway. Not until they got close enough, not until he could see who they were.

And what if it was—Guffey’s leathery old hands trembled on the stock of the rifle—what if one of them was him?

Tim Jepson. At long long last.

“The fella that ruint my life,” Guffey whispered through dry cracked lips. He lowered the rifle and his rheumy old eyes watched unaided as the small white car rocked and bobbed slowly this way. Tim Jepson.

Except it wouldn’t be, of course. It never had been yet, no matter how long he waited, no matter how much he cultivated his patience. In twenty-six years, it had never once been Tim Jepson coming back to Cronley, coming back to pick up his fourteen thousand dollars.

But it would be! Someday! Someday it would be! But never today.

At first, in the early sixties, the occasional visitor—trespasser? invader? transient? — to the recently dead town of Cronley had been mostly just another looter hoping to find plumbing fixtures or brass doorknobs the previous looters had missed. Those had been tough, gritty, nasty city people in greasy green work clothes, driving slat-sided trucks and smoking cigars. They reminded Guffey of the toughest element back in prison, and so he kept out of their way, moving his few possessions with him, and not one of them had ever even known Cronley still possessed one last resident.

In the latter sixties, a different kind of visitor started to arrive: young dropouts in bright-colored clothing and headbands, like goofy Indians. They came in beat-up Volkswagen buses, they lit a lot of campfires, they played mopey music on portable phonographs, and they planted corn and tomatoes and marijuana. Only the marijuana came up, and soon each hopeful band decided to drop back in; Guffey would watch their buses jounce away over the ridge.

Very few of the dropouts became aware of the old hermit of Cronley, though a few of the girls did catch him peeping at them while they skinny-dipped in the river. Most of the girls got scared and mad, and told their boys, and Guffey would have to go off again and hide in the woods for a few days until they stopped looking for him; but one girl had beckoned with a crooked little finger and a crooked little grin, and my goodness! That was Guffey’s only sexual experience since before he’d gone to prison—over forty years now, it must be—but it was a humdinger. Well worth remembering. Kept a fella going when the nights got cold.

The hippies and yippies and trippies and flippies thinned out in the early seventies, and for a few years Guffey had Cronley absolutely to himself. Then, starting in the late seventies, the professors began to show up: archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, social historians. Men and women alike, they wore khaki trousers and heavy boots and lots of clothing with labels that read L. L. BEAN. (Guffey stole some of their gear to replenish his own worn-out stuff.)

Eventually, though, grant money must have veered off in some other direction. It had been almost ten years now since Guffey had seen a safari-hatted, heavy-booted professor out around these parts. More recently there’d been a little spate of carpenters and architects and interior decorators looking for wood; barn wood, staircase newels, old and interesting panels. They encouraged the further deterioration of Cronley pretty well, but that was a short-lived fad, over and done with while the town was still moderately full of good wood. Guffey guessed it must be three, maybe even four years since another human being had ventured out this way.

And now this little white car. With his natural sense of caution, as the car approached the outskirts of town Guffey gathered up his few belongings, left his room on the top floor of the Cronley Hotel, and made his way down the peeling, scabrous hall to the stairs. The elevator hadn’t worked for years, of course, and in any event Guffey would never ride that elevator again. That or any other elevator, but especially that one. That elevator was where his troubles had begun.

It was him and Eddie Hobbs and Tim Jepson when it started. Jepson was older than him and Eddie. They knew he was a hardcase, and they wanted to be hardcases just like him, and when he invited them to throw in with him on the hijacking, it had just seemed like a lark, kind of. They weren’t going to rob anybody good, after all, but were going to hit up a card shark, a fella that had been taking advantage of the returning GIs. That’s the way Jepson had presented it, and him and Eddie, nineteen and dumb and fresh off the farm, had gone right along with it.

And Jepson had betrayed them. Stuck them in an elevator without any power and took off with the loot. Him and Eddie were frantic in that elevator, in the dark, and things didn’t improve any once the lights came back and the elevator started again to move. When it reached bottom, they knew, when it reached bottom and the door slid open, all hell would break loose.

And it did. The trouble was, nobody else bought the idea that him and Eddie were stealing from a card shark. The way everybody else saw it—including the soldiers who’d been in that room with playing cards in their hands when him and Eddie and Tim busted in with guns in their hands—who him and Eddie were stealing from was soldiers.

Brave soldiers, just barely home, the war just barely over. People who would steal from soldiers didn’t get much benefit of the doubt in those days.

In the next few years, Guffey got beat up a lot. It started the instant that elevator door opened, and there were all the soldiers who’d been playing poker in that room upstairs. The cops were there by then, too, but they were in no hurry to break up a good solid thrashing, so it was quite awhile before him and Eddie were carried from the hotel to the hospital.

That was the last Guffey ever saw of Eddie, who had some sort of aunt who knew a state legislator or something, and so got his case separated from Guffey’s. Eventually, Guffey went on trial, where he drew the maximum, twenty-five to forty, because it was soldiers and because he’d been carrying a gun and because he already had a little record from some wildness in his youth (which was why he wasn’t in the army), but mostly because Tim Jepson had got away with all the money.

Guffey’s reputation had preceded him to the state pen, where first the guards beat him up and then the other prisoners beat him up and then the guards took a turn again. That slackened off after a while, but just around then some ex-soldiers began to show up in the prisoner population. Most of them felt they’d faced injustice in one way or another while they were in uniform, and Guffey was a handy way to gain redress.

Somewhere in through there, a fellow named Mitch Lynch came in, doing a heavy term for a long-con frammis against an oilman in Tulsa. Guffey didn’t recognize Lynch as the sharper him and Eddie and Tim Jepson had hijacked, but Lynch recognized Guffey as one of the assholes who’d come storming into his private suite with a gun in his hand, so Lynch set himself the task of beating the hell out of Guffey, only to discover it was already gone. The hell had been beat out of Guffey; having a go at that little fella was like punching out a mop. Lynch ran him around the track a couple times, but got no real satisfaction out of it, and gradually, in some weird way, Guffey and Lynch became friends. Acquaintances, anyway.

It was from Lynch that Guffey learned how Lynch’s girl Myra had betrayed Lynch for Tim Jepson, and then how Tim had betrayed Myra to Lynch before taking off with the dough. Or, not with the dough; that was the interesting part.

Myra had sworn to Lynch that Tim was stashing most of the sixteen thousand he’d taken in the robbery—fourteen, she was pretty sure—somewhere right in town, that he didn’t want to have to travel with a suspicious amount of cash on him, and that he figured he’d just leave the money there until he needed it someday.

Lynch had questioned Myra pretty rigorously on the subject of where Tim had hidden the fourteen thousand, and so he was damn certain in his mind that Myra didn’t know the answer, or she would have told him. “Someday I’m gettin out of here,” Lynch said, more than once. “And when I do, I’m goin back to Cronley, and I’m gonna wait. Get a job, do whatever, I don’t care. Because someday that son of a bitch is gonna show up.”

Well, so far, Lynch had been wrong on just about everything. He hadn’t gotten out of prison, not standing straight up; an exercise yard argument in 1952 had ended with a sharpened spoon handle stuck through Lynch’s ribs and into his heart. And even if he’d lived to get back to Cronley, it would have been empty by then, so there wouldn’t have been any job for him. And up till now, Tim Jepson had not come back for his fourteen thousand.

When Guffey had been released from prison, after doing eighteen years of his time, the man who’d come blinking out onto the street was a lot older than his chronological thirty-seven. He no longer had any of his own teeth. So many of his bones had been broken so often that he moved like an arthritis sufferer of eighty. And he’d pretty well lost all capacity to live as a social animal. He was a solitary, who either cowered or snarled. He couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t keep a room to live in, couldn’t get on a bus without making some kind of trouble. His parole officer hated him, and his parole officer was well known to be a living saint.

It was when Guffey found himself seriously considering what sort of crime he could commit that would guarantee his old cell back that he knew he had to take corrective action real quick, and that’s when he remembered Tim Jepson, the man who had ruined his life, and Mitch Lynch, the man who had planned to be patient and alone and await his revenge. The memory of those two men, and the thought that Cronley had no people in it, was enough. By bus, by stolen bicycle, and at last on foot, Guffey made his move.

For twenty-six years, Guffey had been Cronley’s only resident, waiting, nursing his resentments, rebuilding his shattered ego, creeping around the occasional visitor, waiting for the one visitor.

Over the years, too, Guffey had searched for that fourteen-thousand-dollar stash. He’d never found it, but he knew it was here. Tim Jepson would’ve been clever in how he hid it; that cleverness proved the money was here, somewhere in this town. And some day, Tim Jepson would come back for it.

Today?

The front marquee of the Cronley Hotel had long since fallen in. The sidewalk, where in the forties and fifties doormen had pocketed quarters from the drummers to hail them cabs to take them out to the illegal roadhouses outside town, was now a mess of ancient rubble, across which Guffey snaked and squirmed, toting his rifle and burlap bag, his knapsack (stolen from a professor) across his bony shoulders. The last rays of sunlight gleamed along the length of California Street. Down at the end there, the little white car jounced into view, turning this way, yellow sunlight glaring back from its windshield.

Not professors, these people, and not hippies. No, and not scavengers, either, in search of twentieth-century plumbing or nineteenth-century moldings.

Tim Jepson? Come for his stash at last? Guffey gripped his rifle tight and slithered away down the alley beside the hotel.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Dortmunder was annoyed, disgusted, irritated, irked, and pissed off. “And now,” he said, “I’m gonna have to drive back over that goddamn road in the dark.”

“Well, they’d have a room for us at the hotel,” Tom said. “No problem about that.”

“No? There are some problems.”

They were in the town now, on the main drag, and on both sides of the street were two- and three-story wooden or brick buildings with storefronts on the ground floor. All the glass had been broken out of all the windows years ago, and here and there structures had been partly consumed by ancient fires. The concrete of the main street and its sidewalks was all broken into great chunks, like ice floes, heaved and buckling, covered with dirt and debris, around all of which Dortmunder had to steer. A few business names painted over storefronts were still faintly visible.

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“For one thing,” Dortmunder said, “there’s nothing to eat. That diner’s closed.”

“It wasn’t much good when it was open,” Tom commented. “Well, looka that,” he said. “The marquee fell off the hotel.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Used to be a big marquee stuck out over the revolving doors,” Tom explained. “Said ‘Cronley Hotel’ on both sides, had a big fancy C on the front.”

“That pile of rubble up there? Is that where I’m headed?”

“That’s it, all right,” Tom said, and then he shook his head and said, “I dunno, Al. I traveled with people had better dispositions than you got, I can tell you that.”

“Not on that road you didn’t,” Dortmunder told him, and came to a stop at the pile of rubble in front of a five-story brick structure polka-dotted with glassless windows. “Are you sure?”

“Tallest building in town, Al,” Tom told him. “Marquee or no marquee, this is the Cronley Hotel.”

“Tom,” Dortmunder said patiently, “are you sure your stash is still in there? After all this time?”

“Absolutely,” Tom said, opening his door. “And let’s go get it.”

It felt good to get out of the car, even here in Cronley. Dortmunder stood, pressed knuckles into his waist at the back, and stretched as he said, “Looks to me like this place, this whole town’s had a lotta breakage, probably looting. Forty years, Tom, a long time. You sure nobody found it by now, nothing happened to it?”

“Absolutely not.” Tom had opened the back door on his side, was prying his bag out. He paused to look over the top of the little white lemon at Dortmunder and say, “We’re gonna need our flashlights in there, Al. These people ain’t paid their electric bill in a long time.”

“Okay, okay.” Dortmunder opened his back door and yanked his own bag out. “If this isn’t some wild-goose chase.”

They opened their bags more or less companionably together on the hood while Tom explained, “Ya see, I hadda hide the money, in cash, in the hotel. I couldn’t leave the place for a few days, while I was being Myra’s sister Melissa. And I hadda figure they’d know, sooner or later they’d know I hid it, and they’d know it had to be in the hotel. So it had to be someplace they weren’t going to look. Not behind a picture that could be taken down, not inside a window frame that could be opened up, not down inside the tubes of a brass bed that could be moved out. It had to be somewhere nobody would look, and that wouldn’t be moved, and what I come up with is a place that’s gonna be there forever, unless they turn this into a reservoir, and from the look of the area, Al, I don’t find that much of a worry. Let’s see, I need my wrench and my hammer, too, and that’s it.”

As they put their bags away on the tiny backseat, Dortmunder said, “So where’s this magical place you found?”

“You’ll see it, Al, soon enough,” Tom said, and shut his door. “I don’t think we gotta lock,” he said.

Slowly and carefully they made their way over the rubble to the gaping entrance to the building. Years and years ago the entire revolving door, with its roofplate and its floorplate, had left Cronley lashed to the back of a pickup truck, so the entrance was now considerably less grand than when Cronley’s Chamber of Commerce had wanted the town known as “Gateway to the Great Washita-Kiowa-Jackson Super-Region.” Stepping through this portal, Dortmunder and Tom switched on their flashlights and shone them over dust, dirt, rubble, and decay. Carpets and wall sconces and the facings on brick pillars and even the entire front desk were all long gone, leaving a stripped and grubby shell.

“Lobby looks like hell,” Tom commented. “We go back this way, behind the manager’s office. We want the stairs to the basement.”

As they made their way through the debris, around slopes of plaster dust, porcupines of lumber piles with nails sticking out, tangles of wiring with frizzy ends, Tom said, “What I did, I had Myra get me a few empty wine bottles from the kitchen. With their corks.”

Dortmunder said, “Wine bottles? I thought this was a dry state. I thought that was the trouble.”

“You don’t understand, Al,” Tom said. “It’s hypocrisy makes the world go round. Oklahoma was a dry state, but you could drink in a private club if you were a member. So all the hotels and restaurants were private clubs.”

“Jesus,” prayed Dortmunder.

“Well, yeah,” Tom agreed. “How you became a member of the club in a restaurant was to order something to eat, and how you became a member of the club in a hotel was by checking in.”

“I don’t get it,” Dortmunder said. “Why go through all that?”

“Well, I figure they had their reason,” Tom said. “The stairs oughta be— Cripes, somebody even took all the doors. I hope they left the stairs.”

“I hope they left your stash.”

“They didn’t touch it, Al. Trust me on this. Now, one of these doorways should lead to the— Here it is.”

Their flashlight beams shone on rusted metal steps leading down into pitch-black total darkness. Looking down there, Dortmunder said, “No matter where I go with you, Tom, sooner or later it’s the descent into the depths.”

“This is a very solid structure, Al,” Tom assured him. “There’s no way it’s gonna collapse on us.”

Dortmunder hadn’t even been thinking of that, but now he was. “Thanks, Tom,” he said.

“Sure,” Tom said, and started down the stairs, carrying his wrench and hammer in one hand, flashlight in the other, Dortmunder reluctantly following, Tom saying over his shoulder, “Anyway, the wine bottles. I rolled the dough into wads and stuffed them into the bottles, and it took three bottles. Then I brought them down here under my skirt one night.”

“Under your skirt. You were still being the sister.”

“I went on being the sister, Al,” Tom said, “until Nogales, New Mexico. Let’s see now, which way?”

They’d reached the bottom of the steps and stood in a smallish open area with doorways leading off in all directions. Anonymous mounds of stuff; crumbly-looking brick walls; pockmarked concrete floor. As Tom turned in a slow circle, pointing the light here and there, trying to reorient himself after all these years, he said, “Did you ever think, Al, in a hotel room, when you flush the toilet, where all that water goes? All those toilets, all those sinks, hundreds of them all in one building, hundreds of people pissing and crapping and brushing their teeth and flushing foreign objects down the commode even when they’ve been told not to do that, you ever wonder where all that water and stuff goes next?”

“Never,” Dortmunder said.

“We go this way,” Tom decided, and set off down a wide low-ceilinged filthy hallway, Dortmunder following. “Well, the water comes down here,” Tom said, continuing the conversation as they walked. “The pipes get bigger, and there’s traps to keep certain stuff from clogging the whole arrangement, and then there’s one big last pipe that goes out under the street to the city sewers. And just in front of that last pipe is the last trap and sump. There’s access to it so a plumber can get in there if anything really horrible happens, but mostly it’s left alone.”

“I’d leave it alone,” Dortmunder said.

“Believe it or not, Al,” Tom told him, “people looking for fourteen thousand dollars will also leave it alone. Guaranteed.”

“That’s where you put the three wine bottles?”

“I can still smell it,” Tom said, shaking his head at the memory.

They went through another doorless doorway into a larger area. Dortmunder’s flashlight picked up the scattered skeletons of a couple of small animals on the floor. The air down here smelled dry but rancid, like having your nose rubbed in rotted wood. “I think I can smell it, too,” he said.

Tom did his chuckle sound. “Been a long time since anybody’s flushed a toilet in this town, Al,” he said. “It shouldn’t be bad by now. Just up ahead there.”

Just up ahead was another brick wall. On the floor in front of it Tom’s flashlight picked out a metal plate about three feet by two, held in place with bolts at the corners. Kneeling at one of these corners, bending down to blow dust and trash away from the bolt, Tom said, “Gonna get loud in here for a while.”

And it did. Tom hooked the wrench onto the head of the bolt, then began to whale away at the metal handle of the wrench with his hammer. WANG! WANG! WANG! And in the pauses angang, angang, angang, as the sound echoed and rang and reverberated all around the enclosed space.

After about five minutes of this craziness, Tom stood up and mopped his brow and said, “Spell me awhile, Al,” so Dortmunder got to make the horrible noise himself, and it was on his watch that the bolt finally reluctantly started to turn, adding its SKRAWK-SKRAWK to all the WANGangangings.

The bolt never did get easy. The wrench had to be hit for every fraction of every turn. But at last the thick, rusty, long bolt came all the way out and fell over, clattering with the wrench still attached onto the metal plate, making another charming sound.

Tom said, “Terrific, Al. Only three to go. I’ll take a turn now.”

All in all, Dortmunder later figured, they were down in there nearly an hour before the last bolt grudgingly released its grip on the floor and fell over, and then the damn plate itself didn’t want to move, until Tom and Dortmunder had both hit it a hundred million times around its edges. And then at last, slow, heavy, rusty, difficult, it lifted up and out of the way.

Oh, boy. Forty years hadn’t done a thing to lessen that aroma. “Aaaaa!” cried Dortmunder, releasing the plate as it fell over onto its back. While Tom watched him with interest, Dortmunder staggered backward, hands to his nose. It was as though somebody’d just hit him in the face with a used shroud.

“This isn’t even it, Al,” Tom told him calmly. “The bottles are down inside that trap, fastened with wires. See the trap?”

But Dortmunder didn’t want to look down into that place. “I believe you,” he managed to gasp through a throat uninterested in breathing, not if this was what air had become. “It’s okay, I believe you.”

Pointing his flashlight into the hole beneath the metal plate, Tom said, “This is just the access to the pit with the equipment. Hmmm; a lot drier than it used to be.”

“Tom,” Dortmunder said through his hands, “I’m sorry, but I can’t hang around in here anymore.” He looked wildly around on the floor for his flashlight, staring over his protective knuckles, trying to breathe without inhaling. And there it was, the flashlight, on the floor, gleaming toward that awful place. Moving to retrieve it, Dortmunder said, “I’ll just wait for you upstairs. You don’t need me anymore, right?”

“You’re gonna miss something, Al,” Tom said. “Those wine bottles, full of cash. Over forty years down in there.”

“If that’s what I’m gonna miss,” Dortmunder said, shakily pointing the flashlight toward the doorway on the far side of the room, “then I’m just gonna have to miss it. See you upstairs.”

“Can you find your way?”

“Yes.”

With a feeling that he understood the phrase “asshole of the world” better than he ever had before, Dortmunder went out of that room and headed for an environment more compatible with man. His sense of direction, sometimes shaky, had him doubtful at one turning or another, but as long as he stayed ahead of that smell he knew he’d be all right. Though it would be nice to have that rope around his waist right now, with Tiny pulling at the other end.

Another corridor, but smelling only of the usual dry brick dust and decayed wood. Dortmunder traversed it, went through the doorway at the far end, and there was the staircase up. And amazing was its transformation: what on the way down had been rust-diseased and battered and filthy was now, in Dortmunder’s eyes, marble and gold, strewn with rose petals and glisten’d o’er with dew, leading upward to Paradise. Or at least to normal air.

At the head of the stairs, as he’d remembered, were the offices behind the main desk. These were interior rooms, without windows, and Dortmunder wanted windows, so he set off toward the lobby, rounded a corner into a hall, and his flashlight shone on a scrawny old ragamuffin of a guy holding a rifle pointed straight at him. “Sssh,” said the guy.

Dortmunder nodded. When a person pointing a rifle at you says, “Sssh,” you don’t speak out loud in response, but you do nod.

“Point that light at the floor!”

Dortmunder pointed the light at the floor.

“Come on around me and walk out to the lobby.”

Dortmunder did that, too. What the hell, that’s where he’d been going, anyway.

The sudden western twilight had come and been and gone, leaving a faint but clear silvery greenish-gray illumination at every exterior rectangle, returning to these former windows and former doors a bit of their one-time dignity.

“Shine the light over to the left.”

Dortmunder did so and saw another doorway, leading into what had once been the hotel bar (members only). “You want me to go over there?”

“Sssh!”

Dortmunder nodded.

Something—probably not the old guy’s finger—prodded Dortmunder’s back, and the old guy’s hoarse harsh voice, nearly a whisper, said, “Where’s your partner?” He pronounced it “pardner.”

“Downstairs,” Dortmunder answered in the same near whisper. “In the basement. Looking at the, uh, plumbing.”

“Plumbing?” That seemed to bewilder the old guy but only for a second because, with another prod in Dortmunder’s back, he said, “Go on in over there.”

So Dortmunder did that, too, entering one of the most completely stripped rooms in the hotel. Tables, chairs, banquettes, barstools, bar, back bar, mirrors, cabinets, sinks, refrigerators, carpets, light fixtures, light switches, imitation Remington prints, window shades and curtains, cash register, glasses, ash trays, tap levers, duckboard floor behind the bar, both clocks, and the sawed-off baseball bat; all were gone.

Dortmunder’s flashlight picked out the peeling rotting plywood floor, the brick walls, and in the middle of the floor a black box, three feet tall and about one foot square. Pointing the light beam directly at it, Dortmunder saw it was a speaker cabinet from some old sound system, not looted because somebody at one time had kicked it in the mouth, ripping the black-and-silver front cloth and puncturing the speaker’s diaphragm. Maybe somebody who’d heard “Rock Around the Clock” once too often.

“Sit down,” said the raspy rusty voice.

“On that?”

For answer, he got another poke from the non-finger. So he went over to the speaker and turned around and sat on it, being careful to point the flashlight beam downward and not directly toward his captor. “Here I am,” he said.

“Shine the light on your face.”

He did, which made him squint. Resting the butt of the flashlight on his knee, he pointed the business end at his nose and said, “This kinda makes it tough.”

“Point it to the side a little,” the voice said out of the darkness, sounding petulant all at once. “This ain’t the third degree.”

“It isn’t?” Dortmunder pointed the light beam over his right shoulder, which was better.

“I just gotta see your face,” the old guy explained, “so I can see if you’re telling the truth.”

“I always tell the truth,” Dortmunder lied, and gave the old guy a good clear view of his face while doing so to see how things could be expected to go.

Pretty well. “You better be sure you do,” the old guy said, having just failed the test. “What do you know about…” Portentous pause, that. “… Tim Jepson?”

Ah-hah. With the lightning speed of a main-frame computer, in nano-fractions of a nanosecond, Dortmunder got the picture. “Tim Jepson” = “Tom Jimson.” Old guy with rifle = ex-partner left in elevator. Long-term revenge from a loony. A loony with a rifle. A loony with a rifle and a legitimate grievance against the guy he’d already referred to as “your pardner.” Face held unflinchingly into the light, “Never heard of him,” Dortmunder said.

“He didn’t send you two here for… anything?”

“Not us,” Dortmunder said, knowing it was the fourteen thousand dollars the old guy was hinting around about, knowing—old computer brain still clicking along at top speed—this old guy would have searched high and low for that money, but not low enough. Tom had been right about that; fourteen grand wasn’t enough to get most people to go down into that trap in the large intestine of the Cronley Hotel.

Just how long was it going to take Tom to finish down there? And when he came up, what would happen then? This old guy hadn’t recognized Tom yet, but wouldn’t he sooner or later?

“If Jepson didn’t send you,” the querulous voice said out of the darkness, “what are you doing here?”

Oh, good question. “Inspection,” Dortmunder said, floundering a bit, the old computer brain beginning to hiccup. What was he doing here? “We were told there wasn’t anybody living in, uh, Cronley,” he said, filling time, being innocent, waiting for the computer to come through.

“Who told you?”

“Well, the state,” Dortmunder said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “The State, uh, Department of Recovery.”

“Department of Recovery?”

“You never heard of the D.O.R.?” Dortmunder shook his head, astonished at such unworldliness. “You gotta know about the housing shortage, right?”

“You mean…” The old guy’s voice quavered. “Here?”

He’s buying it! Dortmunder kept his face innocently blank and earnest as he said, “Well, that’s what we’re here to check out. To see if the, uh, you know, the, uh, infra, infra, infra…”

What was that word? Knowing he was losing his audience, knowing his right hand and therefore the flashlight beam was beginning to tremble, knowing his look of simple honesty was falling apart only because he couldn’t remember one single word, realizing that hotshot computer inside his head was down, Dortmunder gaped in the light, struggled—infra, infra, infrasomething—and gave it up. “Well,” he said pleasantly, “bye now,” and switched off the flashlight as he dove for the floor.

“Infrastructure!” he shouted, the goddamn word blazing across his brain too late, his voice drowned out by the roar of the rifle.

THIRTY-EIGHT

“Infrastructure!” shouted the interloper in the dark.

So Guffey’d missed him, dang it. Aiming at where he thought the voice had come from—hard to tell in this enclosed space, though, with the brang of his first shot still echoing in his ears—Guffey fired again.

“Infrastructure! Infrastructure!”

What was that, some new word for I surrender? Lowing his rifle, Guffey peered angrily into the darkness. He was getting confused, and he hated that. What was going on? Why had this state inspector—if that’s what he was—suddenly switched off his flashlight and started running around the darkness shouting out foreign words?

And if he and his partner weren’t state inspectors from the Department of Recovery, then who were they? Would Tim Jepson send other people to get his fourteen thousand dollars, or would he come himself? If Guffey knew Tim Jepson, and he thought he did by now, Tim Jepson wasn’t a man who trusted other people a whole lot. Not enough to tell some other people where he’d hidden a stash of money. And certainly not enough to send those other people out here by themselves to get it.

Could one of these two interlopers be Tim Jepson in disguise? The features of the man who had ruined his life were seared permanently into Guffey’s brain, undimmed by the more than forty years that had passed since he’d last laid eyes on that devil in human shape. Slick black hair parted in the middle and pasted flat to his skull with Vitalis. Piercing dark eyes under thin eyebrows of midnight black. A cruel hard smile showing big white teeth. A kind of loping walk, shoulders loose. A big-framed but skinny body. There was no way Tim Jepson could disguise himself that Guffey wouldn’t recognize him.

So these were just looters, weren’t they? Not officials from state government, looking to move people back into this old town. And not people connected with Tim Jepson. Simple looters, looking for plumbing fixtures at this late date! Dumb as they looked, in other words.

“Infrastructure!”

“Oh, shut up,” Guffey said, trying to think.

Surprisingly, the idiot shut up. He also stopped running back and forth and stood still. Guffey knew that because the fellow had stopped in front of a window, not realizing he was outlined against the starlight outside. And therefore he had no idea Guffey could now drop him with one shot, simple as pie.

But Guffey no longer wanted to shoot him. The way he saw it, he was already in so much trouble just having shot at this idiot that he’d probably have to hide out in the woods for a year before the state cops stopped looking for him. If he actually killed himself a couple plumbing-fixture thieves, the state cops wouldn’t give up looking until they found him.

And if they ever did find him, he knew what they’d do next. They’d put him back inside. Back inside there. The thought made Guffey’s hands tremble so hard he almost dropped the rifle. “Turn the flashlight back on, will you?” he asked, hating the quaver he couldn’t keep out of his voice.

“What, and get shot?”

“You’re standing in front of a window,” Guffey told him, forgetting his fear in his exasperation. “If I wanted to shoot you, you’d be shot by now.”

He saw the shadowy figure spin around to stare at the window, heard the shadowy figure gasp, and then the flashlight came on again, pointing at the window, illuminating the street out front and their little car parked there.

Little car. Hmmmm…

“Wait a minute,” Guffey said, and the flashlight swung around to point in his direction. Ignoring the light, Guffey said, “People who come here to steal toilets and sinks, they don’t drive little cars like that.”

“I told you,” the interloper said, “we’re from the State Department of Recovery, checking on the infrastructure so we can report—”

“Cow doody,” Guffey told him. “People from the government come around here sometimes. They’re in big Ford LTDs with air, with a big state seal on the side. Or Chrysler LeBarons. People from the government don’t drive dinky little Jap cars like that.”

“We’re, uh, outside consultants,” the interloper said.

Dealing with other human beings was so aggravating. They constantly made Guffey angry, or scared, or confused, or sad. “Goddammit,” Guffey said to this one, “you just stop lying to me right now, or I don’t care what happens, I’ll shoot you anyway.”

“Why would I lie to you?” the interloper demanded, foolishly, and pointed the flashlight up at his own face again. A dumb and completely untrustworthy smile was crookedly attached to it now, like a sign half knocked down by a hurricane.

“That’s what I wanna know,” Guffey told him, and brought the rifle butt up to his shoulder as he pointed the business end at that insulting smile. Aiming dead at that face down the length of the rifle barrel, Guffey said, “You ain’t looters, and you ain’t from the government. I know you’re nothing to do with Tim Jepson, I know I still got longer to wait till he shows up, but he will, and I’m gonna be here, and you and your partner ain’t gonna make trouble for me. By God, I will shoot you, shoot the both of you, and bury you where they’ll never find you, and drive that little car of yours into the river, and won’t nobody ever know a thing about it. So you better tell me the truth.”

There was a little silence then, while the half-attached smile fell off the interloper’s face and he blinked a lot; but his wavering hand kept the flashlight pointed toward his own face, accepting Guffey’s dominance. And there was a bad smell in the air all of a sudden. Was the fellow that scared? Good; he’d tell the truth sooner.

“Come on, you,” Guffey snapped, trying to sound as gruff as some of the really bad fellas back in prison. “Talk!”

The interloper stared over Guffey’s shoulder. “Hit him, Tom,” he said.

“You’re trying my patience,” Guffey told him.

“Hit him with the bottle.”

“That’s the oldest trick in the

THIRTY-NINE

“Wonder which one he was,” Tom said.

“That money stinks,” Dortmunder said.

“No money stinks, Al,” Tom said.

The little white car crept through the night, twin beams of light across the barren land, bouncing and bucking away from Cronley and its lone aching-headed domiciliary.

FORTY

When Andy Kelp walked into the OJ Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at six in the evening, the regulars were discussing the proposition that the new big buildings that had been stuck up over on Broadway, one block to the west, were actually spaceships designed and owned by aliens. “It’s for a zoo,” one regular was suggesting.

“No no no,” a second regular said, “that isn’t what I meant.” So he was apparently the one who’d raised the suggestion in the first place. “What I meant is for the aliens to come here.”

A third regular frowned at that. “Aliens come here? When?”

“Now,” the second regular told him. “They’re here already.”

The third regular looked around the joint and saw Kelp trying to attract the attention of Rollo the bartender, who was methodically rinsing seven hundred million glasses and was off in a world of his own. The regular frowned at Kelp, who frowned back. The regular returned to his friends. “I don’t see no aliens,” he said.

“Yuppies,” the second regular told him. “Where’d you think they came from? Earth?”

“Yuppies?” The third regular was a massive frowner. “How do you figure that?”

“I still say,” said the first regular, “it’s for a zoo.”

“You need a zoo,” the second regular told him. “Turn yourself in.” To the third regular he said, “It’s the yuppies, all right. Here they are all of a sudden all over the place, every one of them the same. Can actual adult human beings live indefinitely on ice cream and cookies? No. And did you ever see what they drink?”

“Foamy stuff,” the third regular said thoughtfully. “And green stuff. And green foamy stuff.”

“Exactly,” the second regular said. “And you notice their shoes?”

The first regular said, dangerously, “Whadaya mean, turn myself in?”

“Not in here,” Rollo said absently. He seemed to look at Kelp, who waved at him, but apparently Rollo’s eyes were not at the moment linked up with his brain; he went on with his glass-rinsing.

Meanwhile, the second regular had ignored the first regular’s interruption, and was saying, “All yuppies, male and female, they all wear those same weird shoes. You know why?”

“Fashion,” the third regular said.

“To a zoo, you mean?” demanded the first regular. “Turn myself in at a zoo? Is that what you mean?”

“Fashion?” echoed the second regular. “How can it be fashion to wear a suit and at the same time these big clunky weird canvas sneakers? How does it work out to be fashion for a woman to put on all kindsa makeup, and fix her hair, and put on a dress and earrings and stuff around her neck, and then put on those sneakers?”

“So what’s your reading on this?” the third regular asked, as the first regular, zoo partisan, stepped slowly and purposefully off his stool and removed his coat.

“Their feet are different,” the second regular explained. “On accounta they’re aliens. Human feet won’t fit into those shoes.”

The first regular took a nineteenth-century pugilistic stance and said, “Put up your dukes.”

“Not in here,” Rollo said calmly, still washing.

“Rollo?” Kelp said, wagging his fingers, but Rollo still wasn’t switched to ordinary reception.

Meantime, the other regulars were gazing upon the pugilist with surprised interest. “And what,” the second regular asked, “is this all about?”

“You say it isn’t a zoo,” the pugilist told him, “you got me to answer to. You make cracks about me and zoos, we’ll see what happens next.”

“Well, wait a minute,” the third regular said. “You got a zoo theory?”

“I have,” the pugilist told him while maintaining his fists-up, wrists-bent, elbows-cocked stance, one foot in front of the other.

“Well, let it fly,” the third regular invited him. “Everybody gets to say their theory.”

“Naturally,” the second regular said. He’d been gazing at those upraised fists with interest but no particular concern.

The pugilist lowered his fists minimally. “Naturally?”

“Rollo,” said Kelp.

“You got an idea that’s better than yuppies,” the second regular told the pugilist, “let’s have it.”

The ex-pugilist lowered his arms. “It is yuppies,” he said. “Only it’s different.”

The other regulars gave him all their attention.

“Okay,” the zoo man said, looking a little self-conscious at being given the respectful hearing he’d been demanding, “the thing is this: you’re right about those new buildings being spaceships.”

“Thank you,” the second regular said with dignity.

“But they’re like roach motels,” the ex-pugilist said. “They attract yuppies. Little tiny rooms, loft beds, no moldings; it’s what they like. See, the aliens, they got these zoos all over the universe, all kindsa creatures, but they never had human beings before, because there weren’t any human beings that could live under zoo conditions. But yuppies do it naturally!”

“Rollo!” insisted Kelp.

“So, what,” asked the third regular, “is your reading of the situation?”

“Once all the buildings are completely rented out,” the ex-pugilist told them, “they take off, like ant farms, they deliver yuppies all over the universe to all the different zoos.”

“I don’t buy it,” the second regular said. “I still buy mine. The yuppies are the aliens. You can tell by their feet.”

“You know, but wait a minute now,” the third regular said. “Botha these theories end at the same place. And I like the place. At the end, the new buildings and all the yuppies are both gone.”

With a surprised look, the second regular said, “That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Spaceship buildings,” agreed the ex-pugilist, “fulla yuppies, gone.”

This idea was so pleasing to everyone that conversation stopped briefly so they could all contemplate this future world—soon, Lord—when the yuppies and their warrens would all be away in some other corner of the universe.

Kelp took the opportunity of this silence to say, very loudly, “Well, Rollo, looka this! You got a customer here!”

Rollo lifted his head at that, at last, but then he looked past Kelp toward the door, saying, “Well, if it isn’t the beer and salt.”

“No, I’m the—” Kelp started, but was interrupted by a voice saying, “Hey, there, Andy, whadaya say?”

Kelp turned to see Stan Murch, a stocky open-faced guy with carrot-colored hair who’d just come in. Approaching the bar, waving amiably at Rollo, Stan said, “Don’t tell me the Williamsburg Bridge is open.”

“I wasn’t,” Kelp said.

Rollo brought a freshly rinsed glass full of beer to Stan, took a saltshaker from the back bar, and plunked it down beside the beer, saying, “The rent is paid now, all right. The beer and salt is here.”

Stan didn’t seem to mind this badinage, if that’s what it was. “A little salt in the beer,” he explained, “gives you the head right back, when it goes flat.”

“Most people,” Rollo told him, “finish their beer before it goes flat. Then they have another.”

“I’m a driver,” Stan said. “I gotta watch my intake.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rollo. At long last, he looked at Kelp and said, “The other bourbon’s in back already. I gave him your glass.”

“A nice clean glass, I bet,” Kelp said.

“Uh-huh,” said Rollo.

Stan picked up his beer and his salt, and he and Kelp walked together down the bar, past the regulars, who were now discussing whether the alien yuppies had come to earth for tofu or had they brought it with them. Along the way, Stan said, “The Williamsburg Bridge is a menace. The reason I’m late, I hadda come to Manhattan twice.”

As they went back past the end of the bar and down the hall past the two doors marked with dog silhouettes labeled POINTERS and SETTERS and past the phone booth with the string dangling from the quarter slot, Kelp said, “Twice? You forget something?”

“I forgot the Williamsburg Bridge,” Stan told him. “I came over the Manhattan Bridge—sensible, right?”

“Sure.”

“Could not get north in Manhattan,” Stan said, “not with the mess around the Williamsburg. So I went south, over the Brooklyn Bridge back to Brooklyn, took the BQE to the Midtown Tunnel, and that’s how come I’m here at all.”

“Quick thinking,” Kelp said, and opened the green door at the end of the hall.

“It’s what I do,” Stan said. “Drive.”

They went through the doorway together into a small square room with a concrete floor. Beer and liquor cases stacked to the ceiling all around hid the walls, leaving only a small open space in the middle. In that space stood a battered old round table with a stained green felt top. Half a dozen chairs were placed around this table, and the only light came from one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.

Seated at this table were Dortmunder and Tom and Tiny, who was just saying, “Turns out he was right. His head was too wide to fit through the bars. Not all the way through.”

“Hee-hee,” said Tom.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Tiny said.

Tiny and Tom considered each other. Dortmunder looked over at the doorway with the expression of a man hoping for an urgent phone call to take him away from here. “There you guys are,” he said. “You’re late.”

“Don’t ask,” Kelp told him.

“Williamsburg Bridge,” said Stan.

“Well, come on in,” Dortmunder said, “and let’s get to it. Stan Murch, you know Tiny.”

“Sure,” Stan said. “How you doin, Tiny?”

“Keepin fit.”

“And this,” Dortmunder said reluctantly, “is Tom Jimson. He’s the source of the job.”

“Hiya,” Stan said.

“The thirty-thousand-dollar driver,” Tom said, and did his chuckle noise.

Stan looked pleasantly at Dortmunder. “Am I supposed to get that?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Kelp and Stan took chairs at the table, Kelp sitting next to Dortmunder, who had in front of him two glasses—one of them sparkly clean—and a muddy bottle with a label reading AMSTERDAM LIQUOR STORE BOURBON — “OUR OWN BRAND.” Kelp took the bottle and the clean glass and poured himself a restorative.

Meantime, Stan was saying, “So you’ve got something, huh, John? And you need a driver.”

“This time,” Dortmunder said, “we’re gonna do it right.”

Stan looked alert. “This time?”

“It’s kind of an ongoing story we’ve got here,” Dortmunder told him.

Kelp put his glass down, smacked his lips, and said to Stan, “It’s trains again.”

“Let’s do it from the beginning, okay, Andy?” Dortmunder said.

“Sure,” Kelp said.

Stan sprinkled a little salt into his beer and looked around, expectant.

FORTY-ONE

Stan Murch and his Mom rode around Brooklyn all morning in Mom’s cab, with the off-duty light on. Having to drive this vehicle during her leisure hours, when she was already behind the wheel of the damn thing eight to ten hours a day, put Mom in a crusty mood. “I don’t see it,” she kept saying as they drove through the sunny spring day. “I don’t see the why so picky. A car is a car.”

“Not this time,” Stan told her. “This time it’s a gift. A gift has to be something special, Mom, you know that. Hondas and Acuras he’s got. Max has an entire used-car lot of Toyotas and Datsuns. Whenever I bring him an Isuzu or a Hyundai, he nods and he looks bored and he says, ‘Put it over there.’ ”

“He pays you, Stanley,” his Mom pointed out. “It’s a business relationship. You bring him cars in off the street, and he pays you for them. Bored and excited aren’t what it’s about.”

“But this time,” Stan told her, “I don’t want to be paid. This time I want a favor. So this time I can’t show up with a Chevy Celebrity Eurosport or a Saab. This time I gotta attract Max’s attention.”

His Mom looked all around to be sure there weren’t any cops in the vicinity and made an illegal right turn on red into Flatbush Avenue. “On the other hand,” she said.

“You don’t have to run lights, Mom,” Stan told her. “We’re not in any hurry.”

“I am,” Mom corrected him. “I’m in a hurry to get out of this car and into a tub. And you interrupted me when I was speaking.”

“Sorry.”

“What I was about to say,” Mom went on, “was on the other hand, you don’t want to give your friend Maximilian a car that’s so special and customized and different that the owner can recognize it so well that Max gets put in jail. That’s a gift he doesn’t need.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Stan said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Then look at it,” Mom said, applying the brakes and pointing.

They had just passed through Grand Army Plaza and were running along Prospect Park West, with the park on their left and the fine old stone apartment buildings on their right. Some well-to-do people live in this neighborhood, and one of them—or, more likely, a visitor to one of them—had left his dove-gray Aston Martin parked at the curb in the sunlight.

“Well, well,” Stan said as his Mom brought the cab to a stop beside this gift. “Right you are, Mom.”

“Make sure, Stanley.”

So Stan got out of the cab, and the first thing he saw was that the Aston Martin was parked next to a fire hydrant. And the second thing he saw was the red, white, and blue diplomat license plate; diplomatic immunity, as the frustrated cops well know, extends also to fire hydrants.

Stan grinned at the plate and turned back to the cab to lean in the passenger window and say, “It’s okay, Mom, it’s a diplomat. The cops won’t even write this one down.”

“See you at Maximilian’s,” Mom said, and took off as Stan brought out his bunch of keys from his pocket and turned back to the Aston Martin.

The fifth key did the trick, and the same key worked in the ignition. Stan swung the Aston Martin out away from the fire hydrant, made his U-turn, went back up through Grand Army Plaza, and headed east northeast across Brooklyn and Queens to Maximilian’s Used Cars, near the Nassau County line. When he got there, he took the side street beside the gaudily flagged car lot and turned in at the anonymous driveway behind it. He stopped in an area of tall scraggly weeds, flanked by the white clapboard backs of garages. Climbing out of the Aston Martin, patting it affectionately on the hood, he stepped through an unlocked gate in a chain-link fence and followed a path through more weeds and shrubbery to the rear of Maximilian’s office, a small pink stucco structure with a shabbily California look. Going through the rear door into a gray-paneled office, Stan nodded to a skinny severe hatchet-faced woman typing at one of the two nondescript desks and said, “Hi, Harriet. Where’s Max?”

The woman went on typing, as though her hands were separate creatures with an independent existence of their own, while her head turned and she smiled and said, “Hi, Stan. Your Mom’s waiting out front. And Max is out there selling.”

“Not to my Mom,” Stan said.

Harriet laughed. “He wouldn’t even try,” she said, and went back to observing her hands type.

Stan opened the connecting door to the outer office, stepped through, and looked out the window at the lot, filled with Colts and Golfs. Beyond them, Mom’s yellow cab sat at the curb in the sunlight. To the right was Max, over where the poorest, cheapest, most hopeless cars were kept, the cars with!!!ULTRASPECIAL!!! and!!!CREAMPUFF!!! and STEAL THIS CAR!!! written on their windshields in whitewash. Max was a big old man with heavy jowls and thin white hair who looked as though he’d been put out there in the sunlight by mistake; a windowless room with damp industrial carpet on the floor seemed more appropriate. But there he stood, glaring in the sunshine, hands on hips, dressed in his usual dark vest, hanging open over a white shirt smudged from leaning against used cars, plus shapeless shaggy black trousers and shoes like loaves of black bread.

Max was, as Harriet had said, selling, or trying to sell, something out of his tin collection to two customers. Leaning on the windowsill, Stan observed these customers, who looked as out of place in the healthy brightness of day as Max. They were short and young, barely twenty, with thick black hair and bushy drooping mustaches and swarthy black-eyed faces. They were dressed in bulky dark sweaters and corduroy pants and rope shoes, and while one talked with Max the other kept looking out at the street. Then they’d switch, and the second would listen to Max’s line of crap for a while.

Stan watched them dismiss a Honda hatchback without a pause, then as quickly refuse a Renault Le Car and an American Motors Hornet. They paused briefly over a Subaru station wagon, but then one of them pointed at the rear window and the other one nodded, agreeing this wasn’t their car. Max, misunderstanding, showed them a couple times how well the tailgate worked, but they weren’t interested, so at last Max shrugged and they moved on to a puke-green Chevy Impala, which sparkled both customers right up; they almost danced at the sight of it.

Which wasn’t rational. The Impala was at least eighteen years old, probably the most ancient vehicle on the lot. The side panels were half rusted out, deep rust pits circled the headlights, and the antenna was a wire coat hanger. It was also one of the biggest cars still in existence, a mastodon, a huge heavy gas guzzler, one third hood, one third trunk, and one third passenger space.

But the two young mustachios loved it. They stopped looking out at the street so both could examine this beauty at the same time. While one went around to the front, poking and prodding at the bumper to be sure it was solid, the other had Max open the trunk so he could bring a tape measure out of his pocket and confirm the vastness of the interior.

When Max started the engine and let them take turns behind the wheel—they cared about the steering, that’s all, doing little runs forward and back in the lot, whipping the wheel left and right—Stan decided it was time to interfere. Obviously, Max was prepared to sell these clowns a car, which it would be better if he didn’t do.

First, Stan went back over to the connecting door, opened it, leaned his head in, and said, “Harriet, would you call the precinct and ask them to run a car by here? Not to stop, just drift by.”

“Right,” Harriet said, without asking questions, and reached for the phone.

Stan shut the door, recrossed the room, went out into the sunlight, and gave his Mom a little stick-tight wave as he walked over toward Max and his customers, who were out of the Impala now, standing on the blacktop, nodding impatiently as Max went through the rest of his spiel, the double talk about guarantees and stuff he always rushed through once the sale was secure. Approaching him, Stan said, “Max, I want to—”

“In a minute,” Max said, glowering in surprise at Stan, who after all should know the etiquette of never interrupting a sale.

But Stan went blithely on, as though he’d never heard of etiquette. “The precinct just called,” he said.

Max glowered even more at that news, while the customers gave each other a quick startled look. Max said, “The law? Now what do they want from my life’s blood?”

“I dunno,” Stan said. “Something about being on the lookout for terrorists or some damn thing.”

“Terrorists?” Max demanded. “In a car lot?”

The customers were getting less swarthy. Ignoring them, being open and innocent, Stan said, “I think it’s something about car bombs. You know?”

“No, I don’t know,” Max said, trying to turn away.

But Stan wouldn’t let him get back to his spiel. “I mean those suicide car bomb things,” he said, “where one of them just drives into a place and blows everything up. Usually, you know, they use some old clunker, a big car, something with a lot of power under the hood, something tough that can crash a barricade, good steering to go around the obstacles, lots of room in the trunk for the dynamite.” As though just noticing the Impala, Stan gave it a careless wave and said, “This kinda car, like.”

Max didn’t say a word. The customers again looked at each other, and then turned to watch a police car prowl slowly past, both cops gazing toward the lot. The customers spoke to each other in a language.

Max licked his lips. He said, “Stan, you’ll be so good, you’ll wait in my office.” Turning, he said, “Gentlemen, excuse the inter—”

But the gentlemen were leaving, walking away between the rows of hopeless wrecks in the Ultraspecial department of Maximilian’s Used Cars, moving unhurriedly but steadily until Max raised his voice, calling, “Gentlemen, don’t you want this car?” Then they walked faster, not looking back.

Stan said, “They were gonna pay cash, right?”

“You’re goddamn right they were,” Max said. “Until you come along.”

“Max,” Stan said, “don’t you still get it? Don’t you know what those guys were?”

“Customers,” Max said. Then, before Stan could speak, Max raised a grimy-knuckled and nail-bitten hand, showed Stan its callused palm, and said, “But even if you’re right, so what? If you’re right, you know what I got? The perfect customer. Not only do they give me cash, so there’s no problem with the paper, the credit line, discounting with the bank, having to eat the damn car when they repossess, none of that, but these are customers who will never bring the car back to argue the way they always do. The transmission, the brakes, all this stuff they bitch about. These customers weren’t like that. Even saying you’re right, Stan, and I don’t say you’re right, these customers were the best kind of customers you could get. They’re like the army. They buy the product, they blow it up, everybody’s happy.”

“Except you,” Stan said.

Max glowered at him. “The sun is baking your brains,” he decided. “Come into the office, explain me this favor you did.”

“Be right there,” Stan told him, and walked over to Mom’s cab, where Mom looked up at him out her open window and said, “This is taking long.”

“There was a little complication,” Stan told her. “I’ll tell you on the way home.”

“You’re done? He said yes?”

“A few minutes,” Stan promised, and went back over to the office, where Max was seated behind his desk, chewing an imaginary cigar, the only kind the doctor would let him have.

“Good,” Max said, looking at him as though he’d believed Stan might run away rather than face him. “The expressman with the downside. Deliver.”

“The FBI,” Stan said.

Max shifted the imaginary cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “The FBI? Whadda they gotta do with me?”

“Your customers,” Stan explained, “your perfect customers out there, they go away with that heap, and a week or two from now some embassy blows up, maybe some airline office, maybe even a police station, the UN Building.”

“Good,” Max said. “The car is out of my inventory and out of my inventory.”

“But there’s enough of it left,” Stan said, “for identification, registration, history of the car. The FBI likes to say it checks out every lead, and that car’s a lead, and it leads here.”

“So what?” Max demanded, taking the imaginary cigar from his mouth and waving it in his hand. “This happens to be a time I’m innocent! I don’t know those people! I sold them a car! That’s what I do!”

“Max, Max,” Stan said, “don’t use the word innocent, okay? I look out the window here, I see half a dozen cars I sold you, and I know where I got them. You want police attention, Max? For any reason at all?”

Max didn’t answer. He gazed at Stan wide-eyed. The imaginary cigar had gone out.

Stan said, “The FBI comes in here looking for evidence on crime number one, checking you out, going through the records, studying the paper. But there isn’t any evidence on crime number one, because you’re innocent, you aren’t involved. So do they go away? Do they just ignore all the evidence they pick up on crimes number two through twenty-eight? Or do they turn over this big thick report to the local cops?”

“You’re right,” Max said. He sounded stunned. Shaking his head, dropping the imaginary cigar in an imaginary ashtray, he said, “I’m not used to innocence, it clouded my judgment. You saved me, Stan,” he went on, his agitation pushing him up onto his feet. “I owe you on that. I owe you a big one.”

Stan looked interested. “You do?”

Max spread his hands. “Name it. I know you come here to sell me a vehicle, but that—”

“Well, kinda, yeah,” Stan said, shifting gears, moving straight into plan B. “A beauty, actually, better than—”

“But that can wait,” Max said firmly. “I can see you got something in mind. What is it?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, Max,” Stan said, “I was gonna ask your advice.”

“Ask.”

“You see, I need a car, and—”

“You need a car?”

“This is a special car,” Stan explained, “with special kinds of modifications on it. I was thinking, the guys in your body shop—”

“Can do anything,” Max finished. “So long as you don’t need a vehicle more than, say, two, three weeks, my boys can give you whatever you want.”

“This is short-term,” Stan promised.

“Everything I do here is short-term,” Max said. “That’s what the customers refuse to accept. Whadda they want for fifteen ninety-five? Would they buy a TV set as old as these cars?”

“A good point,” Stan said. “Maybe you should put it in the advertising.”

“There are fine points of business, Stanley,” Max told him, “you’ll never understand. Tell me about this car you need. Fix up the engine? High speed?”

“Well, no,” Stan said. “The fact is, one thing we need is the engine taken out.”

Max looked at him. “Is this humor?” he asked. “Harriet keeps telling me about this stuff, humor; is that what this is?”

“Absolutely not,” Stan told him, and took the specifications out of his pocket. “Now, the most important thing is, the dimension side-to-side between the tires has got to be four feet, eight and a half inches, from the middle of the tread to the middle of the tread. The front tires got to be that wide apart, and the back tires.”

“Sure,” Max said.

“Then,” Stan said, “no engine. And either a convertible, or we cut the top off the car.”

“Cut the top off the car,” Max said.

“Well, here’s the list,” Stan said, and gave it to him. “You want to see the creampuff I brought?”

“In a minute.” Max studied the list, nodding slowly. “My boys are gonna laugh and laugh,” he said.

“But can they do it?”

“They can do anything,” Max repeated. “When do you need it?”

“In a hurry,” Stan said.

“How did I know?” Max put the list in his pocket. “So let’s see this creampuff you brought me.”

“And in appreciation for what you and your boys are doing,” Stan said as they went through Harriet’s office and out the back to go look at the Aston Martin, “I’m gonna let you call your own price on this one. Max, I’m almost giving it away!”

FORTY-TWO

“What time is it?” Judy murmured in his ear.

Doug Berry reared up on his elbows, rested his wrist on Judy’s nose, and looked at his waterproof, shockproof, glow-in-the-dark watch/compass/calendar. “Five to three,” he said.

“Oh!” she cried, suddenly moving beneath him on the life jackets spread on the bottom of his Boston Whaler much more enthusiastically than at any point before this. “Damn! The lesson’s over! Let’s go!”

“Judy Judy Judy,” Doug said, holding on to her bare shoulders. “I didn’t know I was finished.”

“It doesn’t matter when you’re finished,” she told him. “I pay for the lessons. And I have a waxing appointment this afternoon. Off, big boy.”

“Wait a second!” Doug stared around; all he needed was half a minute, less, he was sure of it. “Your hair’s stuck!” he announced, leaning his weight back down on her, lowering his face beside hers as though to help. “Stuck in this buckle here, be careful, you’ll h-h-h-hurt yourself, I’ll just get it-it-it-it loose, and you’re all-l-l-l-l-l-l, oh, buhbuhbuhbuh, AH!”

When the shivering stopped, he raised himself onto his elbows again, grinned down into her skeptical eyes, and said, “There. It’s loose now.”

He rolled off her, and they both sat up in the sunlight, Doug looking off toward the distant shore of Long Island, out across the Great South Bay, as Judy said caustically, “Are you satisfied now?”

“If you are, Judy,” he told her, grinning, not giving a shit anymore. “You’re paying for the lessons.”

She was. Judy was the wife of an ophthalmologist in Syosset, and this was the third year she’d come to Doug for diving lessons. All kinds of diving lessons. Each May first she’d appear, regular as clockwork, and would help pay his rent and divert his hours three days a week until the fifteenth of July, when she and her husband would go off for their month on St. Croix.

She was a good-looking woman in her late thirties, Judy, whose hard body was severely kept in trim with aerobics, jogging, Nautilus machines, and pitiless diets. The ruthlessness showed in her face, though, in the sharpness of her nose and the coldness of her dark eyes and the thinness of her lips, so it was unlikely anyone other than the ophthalmologist—who had no choice—would have willingly hung out with her over an extended period without something more than her companionship to be gotten out of it. Who salted her restless tail the rest of the year Doug had no idea, but his annual two-and-a-half months of the pleasure of her company was just about all he’d be able to stand.

May was still a little early for most water traffic on the bay, especially in midweek, except for the ubiquitous clammers and the occasional ferries over to Fire Island. It was easy at this time of year to find an anchorage in the shallow water of the bay away from other boaters, dive a bit, screw a bit, and thus while away the two hours of each lesson. Doug would have been happy to give her extra time today for free, since he had nothing else at all on his plate this afternoon, but, as usual, Judy’s self-maintenance program came first. Leg waxing. Right.

Doug started the motor and steered the small boat toward Islip, soon making out his own shack and dock straight ahead. Judy wasn’t much given to small talk, particularly over the roar of a 235 horse Johnson outboard, so they rode in silence—not particularly companionable—all the way to shore, and were almost there when Doug spotted, beyond the shack, a silver Jaguar V12 in his parking area, next to Judy’s black Porsche.

A customer! And a rich one, at that, judging from the car. So Judy’s wax job was a blessing in disguise, after all, and Doug was feeling almost kindly toward the bitch as he tied up at his dock and offered his hand to help her ashore. “See you Wednesday,” he said, smiling his professional smile.

“Mm,” she said, already thinking of other things. Off she marched while Doug finished tying up and removed the spent tanks from the boat.

She was already gone, in a cloud of dust, when Doug walked around to the front of the shack and looked at the two customers he’d least expected ever to see again. And particularly driving a car like that Jag.

Oh; MD plates.

“There you are,” said Andy.

John pointed accusingly at the door. “Your note says back by three.”

“And here I am,” Doug said as he unlocked his shop door. Leading the way inside, he said, “You two decided not to make the dive?”

“Oh, we made it,” John said, sounding disgusted, while Andy shut the door.

Doug was astonished. “You did?” He’d taken it for granted these two, no matter how much expert professional training he’d given them, would never survive a real dive in the actual world under uncontrolled conditions. But they’d done it, by golly, and they’d lived through it.

And now what? Hoping they weren’t here to try to sell the equipment back, Doug said, “Everything worked out real good, huh?”

“Not entirely,” Andy said, with a grin and a shrug. “Unexpected little problems.”

“Turbidity,” John said, as though it were the filthiest word he knew. And maybe it was.

“Oh, turbidity,” Doug said, nodding, seeing the problem now, saying, “I’m a saltwater man, deep-water man, so I don’t run into that too much. But in a reservoir, sure, I suppose you would. Screwed things up, huh?”

“You sum up good,” John told him.

“If you came to me for advice,” Doug said, “I’m sorry, but I’m the wrong guy. Like I say, turbidi—”

“We already got advice,” Andy told him. “From a famous writer that’s an expert on these things. You know the big ship called the Normandie?”

“That’s not the point,” John interrupted. “The point is, we think we know how to do it right this time—”

“Go in from above,” Doug suggested. “I know that much. Take a boat out—”

“Can’t,” John said. “But we still got an idea. What we don’t got is air.”

“Ah,” Doug said. “I get it.”

“We figure,” Andy said, “you could fill our tanks just like you did last time.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Doug said, wondering how much extra he could charge.

Andy told him, “We’ll pay double, for two tanks.”

“You know,” Doug said slowly, thinking vaguely there might be something extra in this for him somewhere, “what you probably need is a pro along, somebody to deal with the problems right there, when they happen.”

“No, we don’t,” John said.

“Thanks a lot, Doug,” Andy said, grinning at him and shaking his head. “I appreciate the thought behind the offer. But we think we got it pretty well doped out this time.”

“We hope,” John said.

“We’re pretty confident,” Andy reminded his partner, and turned back to Doug to say, “So all we need is air.”

“Then that’s what you’ll get,” Doug said, but as he led the way out of the shop and around to the compressor under its shiny blue tarp on the dock behind the shack, he kept thinking, There’s got to be something in this for me. Something. For me.

FORTY-THREE

The thing is, the railroad doesn’t have handcars anymore. Those terrific old handcars with the seesaw type of double handle so one guy would push down while the other guy facing him pulled up, and then vice versa, and the handcar would go zipping along the track, that old kind of handcar that guys like Buster Keaton used to travel on, they don’t have them anymore. All the good things are gone: wood Monopoly houses, Red Ryder, handcars.

Which is why the big sixteen-wheeler that Stan Murch airbraked to a coughing stop at the railway crossing on the old road west of Vilburgtown Reservoir at one A.M. on that cloudless but moonless night did not contain a handcar. What it contained instead, in addition to diving gear and a winch and other equipment, was a weird hybrid vehicle that had mostly been, before the surgical procedures began, a 1976 American Motors Hornet. A green Hornet, in fact; so not everything is gone.

Still a two-door small car with a minimal backseat and small separate trunk (not a hatchback), this Hornet was now without engine, transmission, radiator, radio, hood, hubcaps, bumpers, head- and taillights, spare tire, windshield wipers, dashboard and roof. It still contained its steering mechanism (not power steering), brakes (ditto), seats, windshield, windows and 1981 New York State inspection sticker. It also had new axles front and back, and new wheels, the very old tires of which had been reduced to half pressure, which made it slump lower than normally to the ground, as though its transfiguration had reduced it to gloom.

Also looking reduced to gloom was Dortmunder, who had ridden along in the truck cab with Stan, allegedly to give him directions, since this was Stan’s first trip up here to the north country, but actually just to rest and be by himself and brood about the fact that he was going underwater again; Stan, in any case, followed the beige Cadillac driven by Kelp and containing Tom and Tiny.

“Ppphhhrr-AHG!” said the airbrakes, and, “We’re here,” said Stan.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Dortmunder said.

“Which side do I want?”

Dortmunder looked around. Everything was different at night. “The left,” he decided.

“Good,” Stan said, “that’ll be easier. I’ll just back it up short of that guard rail, right?”

“That’s it,” Dortmunder said, and sighed, and climbed down out of the cab. This was one time when planning the job was a lot better than actually going out and doing it. A lot better. What haven’t I thought of? Dortmunder asked himself. Sssshhhhh, he answered.

Kelp had pulled into the side of the road beyond the crossing, and now he and the other two walked back to join Dortmunder, Kelp saying, “Nice and smooth, huh?”

“If traffic came along right now, it could really screw us up,” Dortmunder said hopefully.

“Nah,” Kelp told him. “Don’t worry, John. There’s no traffic along here this late.”

“That’s good,” Dortmunder said hopelessly.

“This hour of night, all these people around here are in bed,” Kelp said.

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said, thinking about his own bed.

Stan, backing and filling, had turned the big semi now, putting it crossways on the empty road, its rear bumper two feet from the rusty white metal lower crosspiece of the barrier. Leaning out his window, Stan called, “Let’s hurry it up, guys. Somebody comes along here, he could broadside me.”

“Nobody will come along,” Dortmunder said bitterly.

“The bars up here even close at midnight,” Kelp explained.

Everybody but Stan went to the back of the semi, where Tiny opened the big rear doors, and then he and Kelp climbed up inside while Dortmunder and Tom went around to the other side of the barrier, Tom shining his flashlight here and there, Dortmunder waiting for the planks to come out.

This part was going to be kind of tricky, and yet simple. The upper crosspiece of the barrier was about ten inches higher than a standard loading dock, and so the same height above the floor of the semi. They had a vehicle to pull out of the truck and over that barrier, and so a normal ramp wouldn’t do the job. They’d had to invent.

Tiny and Kelp pushed out the first plank, a long and heavy two-by-six. When it thunked into the barrier, Dortmunder called, “Hold it,” and he and Tom lifted it up to the top of the barrier and helped slide it on out. It was very heavy.

“Here comes the tricky part,” Kelp called from inside the truck.

“Right, right,” Dortmunder said. “Just let it come down.”

“It isn’t let,” came Tiny’s voice from inside the truck. “It’s coming down.”

And it did. Overbalanced, the plank abruptly seesawed on the fulcrum of the metal barrier and, as Dortmunder and Tom scampered out of its way, the end of the thing crashed down to the ground in the general vicinity of the railway tracks. The other end of it, still just within the truck opening and angled up to about the height of Kelp’s head in there, was now shown to be hinged to another two-by-six plank slanted down into the dark interior.

“You guys ready?” Kelp called.

“Sure, sure, just a minute,” Dortmunder told him, and said to Tom, “Shine the light around, will ya? Where’s the end of the board?”

“Here it is,” Tom said, standing over it, pointing the light down.

Dortmunder joined him, and the two of them moved the end of the heavy plank farther along the trackbed, lifting it, swinging it, dropping it, repeating the cycle until Dortmunder noticed he was doing most of the work, since he was using two hands and Tom only one. “Use both hands, Tom,” he said.

“I gotta hold the flashlight.”

“Hold it in your mouth.”

“No way, Al.”

Tiny called from the truck, “What’s the holdup?”

“Give me the flashlight,” Dortmunder said.

Reluctantly, Tom handed it over, and Dortmunder stuck the other end of it in his mouth, clamping it with his teeth, aiming it by moving his head. “Rurr,” he explained. “Gar rurr gar-gar.”

“Whatever you say, Al,” Tom said.

It went a little easier with four hands at the task, and finally Kelp called, “That’s it!” and they lifted the plank one last time, putting it on one of the rails, before going back to the barrier.

The hinge holding the two planks together now straddled the barrier, the second shorter plank angling back and down into the truck. Kelp and Tiny were already pushing out the plank for the other side, and this one seemed to go easier, now that they’d all had some practice.

Next came the car. Kelp was heard puffing and grunting (no sounds from Tiny), and then the eyeless noseless face of the green Hornet came into view, its half-flat tires waddling up the slope of the planks, Kelp and Tiny pushing from behind.

Up and over the hinged plank the abused little vehicle went, tires squlging along, its human servitors patting and prodding it along its way like circus roustabouts unlading a baby elephant. When the front tires hit the rails, the soft treads sagged around the shape of the metal, making a loose grip, keeping the tires firmly in place as the rest of the car continued on down the planks. When all four wheels were on the rails, momentum pushed the Hornet another dozen feet, before it drooped to a stop.

The planks wouldn’t be needed again. They were pushed sideways and dumped onto the ground behind the barrier, parallel to the road. Then the rest of the gear was unloaded from the semi and stowed into the roofless Hornet: diving suits, tanks, trash bags of Ping-Pong balls, winch, rope, shovels, poles (for pushing), wire cutters, and all the rest.

When that was done, Kelp and Stan got back into the vehicles that had brought them here and drove away to abandon the truck, which was too big to hide and in any event was no longer needed. Then Kelp would drive Stan back, and they’d stash the Cadillac in a nearby dirt road they’d noted earlier.

Meantime, Dortmunder and Tiny and Tom started pushing the Hornet along the track. They’d thought they might need somebody at the wheel, but the softness of the tires made that unnecessary; the car rolled right along, the overhanging bulge of tires keeping them from veering off the rail. On the other hand, the soft tires also increased friction and made the car harder to push; the best they could do was a slow walking pace.

If the work hadn’t been so hard, it would have been a pretty trip, strolling along the cleared railway roadbed through the forest, with the starry sky far above the trees in the pollution-free deep-black up-country sky. Their flashlights beamed this way and that through the tree trunks and shrubbery, making aisles of light in the dark forest, the green of spring’s young leaves standing out like wet paint. Now, at nearly two in the morning, the forest was silent and peaceful, the only sounds the scuffling of their feet on the gravel and their occasional grunted remarks: “Son of a bitch bastard,” and the like.

By the time Kelp and Stan caught up, the trio with the car had reached the chain-link fence marking the boundary of reservoir property, in which Tiny was in the process of wire-cutting a huge opening. “No problem,” Kelp announced.

“Please don’t say that,” Dortmunder told him.

“It’s your plan, John,” Kelp pointed out. “What could go wrong?”

Dortmunder groaned.

Bob shone the flashlight beam on the padlock securing the bar across the dirt road leading to the reservoir. As usual, it had not been tampered with. Of course it hadn’t. The event had happened once, that’s all, and would never happen again. Making Bob come down here every night and doublecheck every padlock on every entry road around the reservoir was just a sneaky punishment for his failure to understand what was actually going on the night it happened.

The night it happened. Not a sea monster, after all, but some weird form of breaking and entering. Who would break and enter a reservoir, and for what possible reason? It didn’t make any sense, but that’s what somebody did, all right; the clipped-through padlocks found next morning, and the tracks of some large heavy vehicle leading right down to the bank of the reservoir, proved that much.

Unfortunately, these mysterious midnight prowlers had chosen to strike at a particular moment when Bob himself was overwrought, what with his just having returned from his honeymoon and starting back to work and all, and so he’d had this excessively emotional response when he’d looked out at the lake and seen what it turned out must have been a person swimming, but which, to his overwrought and excessively emotional eyes had, uh, seemed to be, um…

… a sea serpent.

Bob and the counselor had worked all this out pretty extensively the last month. In fact, Bob was beginning to believe that his terrible experiences of that moonlit night in April were a blessing in disguise, since they’d led him to Manfred, the counselor who was having an absolutely significant effect on Bob’s life.

But what a mess he’d made of things along the way, starting with his inability to find Soldier of Fortune magazine later that night when he’d driven away from the dam and home and Tiffany forever. Without Soldier of Fortune, his plans to become a hard-bitten mercenary soldier on some different and more interesting continent had been stymied, and so he’d bought a couple sixpacks instead and parked all night alone up on Ten Eyck Hill, overlooking the reservoir, waiting for the sea serpent to return.

It had not, of course, and at some point in his vigil Bob had finally passed out from exhaustion and beer (and, as he and Manfred now understood, overwroughtness and excessive emotion), and when he’d returned, bleary and messy, to his normal life the next day, he’d learned that nobody wanted him anymore. Tiffany, furious, had moved back with her parents. Down at the dam, they were talking about dereliction of duty. It wasn’t until Bob had agreed to accept counseling that his boss had decided not to fire him.

Once Tiffany had learned he was so serious about solving his problems that he’d started counseling, she’d come back as well—which had its pluses and minuses, to tell the truth—and over the course of the last month Bob felt that he and Manfred had made great strides together. Bob felt himself really coming together these days, both intellectually and emotionally. Right now, he was feeling very good about himself, very comfortable in his space.

It was going to take a little longer, though, for the crowd at work to settle down and forget the past and accept the new Bob. In the meantime, the other guys mostly didn’t talk to him—which was okay, too, considering the kind of talk they talked when they did talk—and he had this ridiculous extra duty every night, checking all the padlocks and all the roads to be sure those mysterious unknown swimmers had not returned.

But who were they? What made them do it? Cutting through padlocks, destroying official property like that, was serious business. Nobody would do such a thing just so they could go skinny-dipping with their girlfriend. Not when there were so many actual lakes and ponds all around this whole area. And not at all in April; way too cold. Some sort of Polar Bear Club branch of the ancient Druids was the only possibility Bob had come up with so far, which just didn’t sound all that probable, not even to him.

Well, again tonight, this padlock on the barrier next to the state highway was unharmed. Nevertheless, he was required to unlock it, open the bar, get into his car, drive to the property-line fence and the second padlocked barrier, check that lock, open it, and drive on to the reservoir, to the spot where it had happened.

Criminals do not return to the scene of their crime. Manfred said that was just superstition. But on the other hand, Manfred also said he should go along with everybody else for now, with all their myths and rituals, until the general community feeling was that he had atoned for his abandonment of them and their values. So that’s what he’d do.

Once he had the barrier unlocked and open, Bob sighed and got back into his car, shifted into drive, and headed down the dirt road, among the trees, in the dark, toward the water.

The water looked darker tonight, with no moon. Darker, and colder, and even more unfriendly. Changing into his wetsuit, boots, gloves, airtank, weight belt, and BCD, Dortmunder muttered, “Last chance to get outta this.”

“What?” Kelp asked chirpily, nearby.

“Nothing,” Dortmunder said grumpily.

Because, of course, it wasn’t the last chance to change his mind, he’d missed that moment a long time ago. He was here now, with Kelp and Tiny and Tom and Stan Murch and this vivisected Hornet and this winch and all this rope, and there was no choice. Into the drink. “I could use one,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing!”

“All set over here,” Stan said, standing beside the car.

All set. Tiny had broken off a couple of pine tree branches to chock the wheels of the Hornet, though it didn’t give much impression of any lively desire to race down the gradual slope into the water. One end of the long rope from the winch was tied to a frame piece where the bumper used to be attached; not because they had any hope of winching the entire car back up to the surface, but only because that was the simplest and safest way to be sure they had the rope with them. The two big trash bags of Ping-Pong balls were in the trunk, which was closed only with a simple hook arrangement to make it easy to open underwater in the dark. The underwater flashlights waited on the front seat, the shovels and a four-foot-long fireplace poker in back. A second long coil of rope also lay on the backseat, one end extended forward between the front seats and tied firmly to the steering column. The two long poles, to push them along as necessary, were placed behind the front seats, sticking up and back over the rear seat.

The idea was, the Hornet would roll on down the track underwater, downhill almost all the way into Putkin’s Corners. Now and again, if they came to a stop, they’d stand up in the car like gondoliers and pole themselves along. Since only the points of the poles would ever touch bottom, they could minimize turbidity.

Once they reached Putkin’s Corners, they’d have to get out of the car and walk, which would roil up the bottom some, but that couldn’t be helped. They would use the second rope then to keep in contact with each other and with the car as they made their way around the library—directly across the street from the railroad station, that’s a help—and into Tom’s goddamn field. The four-foot-long poker would be poked into the soft bottom in the area where Tom had buried his casket, and when they hit it they’d dig it up and drag it—this would be a tough part, full of hard work and turbidity—back to the Hornet. There, they’d attach the long rope to a casket handle, then open the car’s trunk—carefully! don’t want the trash bags of Ping-Pong balls to escape and float up to the surface—tie the bags of Ping-Pong balls to the casket on both sides to lighten it, then give the prearranged three-tug signal to Tiny and walk back up the track with the casket as Tiny cranked the winch.

Not exactly a piece of cake, but not absolutely impossible either. And this time, if anything went wrong, Dortmunder would definitely remember his BCD and rise up out of there. Count on it.

“I’m ready,” Kelp said. “You coming, John?”

“Naturally,” Dortmunder said, and plodded over to get into the Hornet, sitting behind the wheel, the underwater flashlight in his lap, Kelp on the seat beside him, grinning around his mouthpiece. At what?

Dortmunder put his own mouthpiece in and nodded to Tiny, who pulled away the tree branch chocks, and nothing happened. Dortmunder made pushing gestures, and Tiny said, “I know, I know,” and went around to the back of the car.

While Tom stayed with the winch, Tiny and Stan pushed on the car, which rolled sluggishly, and then less sluggishly, down the incline toward the reservoir. “Mmmmmm!” said Kelp, in delight, as the Hornet’s front end plowed into the black water.

The front wheels hit with a little splash. Dortmunder expected the water’s drag to stop the damn car again, but it didn’t, at least not right away. Rolling slowly, but rolling, the Hornet moved easily down into the reservoir, water bubbling up into the passenger compartment around their feet through the holes where the accelerator and clutch pedal used to be, then pouring in through the larger space where the dashboard once spread, as the hoodless front went beneath the surface. The windshield and side windows caused a little wake to boil past them as they rolled on, water bubbling on the outside of the glass. There was no rear window anymore, it having gone with the top, so all at once the interior was full, water halfway up their chests, a few seconds of freezing icy numbness, as Dortmunder had expected, and then it was okay.

Breathe through the mouth.

Breathe through the mouth.

Breathe through the mouth.

Breathe through the mouth.

Kelp pulled his mouthpiece out long enough to cry, “It’s working!” and then popped it back in as the water closed over their heads. Water tumbled around their face masks. Trapped bubbles of air in the car’s doors and trunk and frame began to work their way clear for the straight run up through the black water to the eddying, then quieting, surface.

Second padlock untampered with. Nobody at the clearing down by the reservoir at the end of the road. Naturally not.

Bob switched off his headlights, got out of his car, and stood leaning his skinny butt against a front fender, arms folded, gazing out over the water. Nobody could say for sure how long it would take him to do this pointless inspection every night, since nobody had ever had to go through this nonsense before him, so there was no reason why he shouldn’t take a little time out for himself along the way.

Darker tonight, without the moon, but lots of high tiny white pinpoints of stars in clusters and lines and patterns all across the black sky, looking as though they really ought to mean something. If only the thousands of white dots were numbered, you could connect them, and then you’d know it all. The secret of the universe. But nobody even knows which dot is number one.

Maybe the sun? Our own star? Maybe we can’t see the pattern because we’re in the pattern. Have to talk to Manfred about that.

Ever since he’d started the counseling, Bob had learned there were depths and complexities within himself that his schooling and his family—and certainly his retarded boyhood friends—had never evoked. Ways of seeing things. Ways of relating himself to the world and the universe and time itself.

What did it all matter, really, in the vastness of space, the fullness of time? Maybe Tiffany wasn’t exactly the ideal person to spend the rest of one’s life with, but what the heck, maybe he wasn’t anybody’s lifelong ideal either.

Look up at all those pinpricks of light up there, all those stars, billions and billions, so many with planets around them, so many of the planets beating some form of life. Not human beings, of course, and not the kinds of aliens and monsters and ETs you saw in science fiction, either. Maybe life based on methane instead of oxygen; maybe life closer to our plants than our animals, but intelligent; maybe life in the form of radio waves. And all going on for billions of years, from the unimaginable beginning of the universe to its unthinkable end. What were Bob and Tiffany in all that? Not very important, huh?

So take it easy, that was the answer, don’t get so excited about things. Don’t get so excited about sex—that’s what got you where you are today—or your future or your job or sea serpents or the simple-ass stupid asinine meatheaded dumbness of one’s pals and coworkers. Accept the life you’ve got. One little life in the great heaving ocean of space and time, the hugeness of the universe.

Think about all those lives up there in space, unguessable lives, millions and millions of miles away. Each life its own, each life unique, unrepeatable, soon ended, a brief shining of the light.

“And this is mine,” Bob whispered, accepting it, accepting all of it: himself, Tiffany, Manfred, his shit-for-brains buddies, his small destiny in this unimportant spot on this minor planet circling this mediocre sun in this lower-middle-class suburb of the universe. “I accept,” Bob whispered to the universe.

Bubbles. Little air bubbles breaking the surface of the water, out a ways and off to the right. Hard to see, in this thin starlight barely brushing the black surface of the reservoir. Just a few little bubbles, rippling the water. Bob smiled, calm, accepting it. Some fish down there, moving around.

Dortmunder moved around as the Hornet came to a stop. Their progress had been very slow from the time they’d been completely submerged, just drifting down along the railroad track, but that hadn’t been at all bad. Actually, the gradualness of their descent helped control the turbidity, so whenever Dortmunder aimed his flashlight back up the track there was very little extra roiling of the water.

Which didn’t mean the damn stuff was clean. Far from it. Their flashlight beams still glowed dimly on murky brown water full of drifting hairy tendrils and clumps of stuff that Dortmunder could only hope were not what they looked like. But visibility was a lot better than last time; by which is meant, some visibility existed. It was possible for a light beam to cut at least partially through the sludge and drifting guck and pervasive brownness of the water to show the slimy gravel and rusty track over which they were passing, the furry tree stumps on both sides.

At one point, Kelp had poked Dortmunder’s arm to direct his attention to a low stone wall they were traveling by on their right, with more stone walls going away at right angles into the murk at both ends. A building foundation. That was spooky; people used to live there. Way down here, in the dark.

The Hornet had still been moving at that time, the old stone foundation gradually receding away behind them. But now it was stopped, with no town at all in sight within the short uncertain range of their lights. As with the last time they’d been down in here, spatial disorientation had taken place, so it was impossible to tell if they were still on a hillside or had reached flat ground. So who knew how much farther it was to Putkin’s Corners?

Oh, well. Time to go to work. Dortmunder got to his feet, putting one foot on the soggy seat as he turned, holding the flashlight with his left hand as he picked up the pole from the back with his right. Beside him, Kelp, moving more easily without this useless steering wheel in his way, was doing the same thing.

Kelp elaborately mimed, with his entire body, a counting cadence: One, two, three; ready, set, go. On the first two, they positioned their poles, more or less even with the rear tires, pressing down into the gravel roadbed. On three, they pushed, and the Hornet moved forward, but only as long as they kept pushing.

One, two, three; forward.

One, two, three; forward.

One, two, three; forward.

One, two, three; up.

One— Up?

Dortmunder and Kelp stared at each other in wild surprise, goggle-eyed inside their goggles. Shakily, Dortmunder aimed the flashlight over the Hornet’s side, down at the ground, which was farther away.

Jesus Christ! Now what?

Only the front tires still touched the tracks. As the rear of the Hornet swayed gently back and forth, still lifting slowly, tilting them forward, Dortmunder and Kelp turned this way and that, bewildered, losing the poles, bumping into each other. The Hornet, off balance, tilted ever more forward and now leftward as well, the right front tire lifting off the rail as delicately as a mastodon’s foot.

The Ping-Pong balls! They’d misunderstood the buoying capacity of two large trash bags full of Ping-Pong balls, that’s what had happened. Trapped in the trunk of the Hornet, now that they’d reached the increased pressure of this depth, they were lifting the rear of the car.

And if Dortmunder and Kelp tried to keep poling them deeper, closer to Putkin’s Corners, despite the Ping-Pong balls? No way. But what could they do instead? Gotta think. Gotta think! Gotta have a minute to think!

Dortmunder made frantic pushing gestures at Kelp: Sit down! Sit down, you’re rocking the car! Kelp, not sure what Dortmunder wanted of him, moved this way and that, stumbled forward, blundered into Dortmunder, and grabbed the steering wheel beside Dortmunder’s elbow to regain his balance.

Now all the weight was on the Hornet’s left side, and suddenly the car flipped right over, catching the two of them within itself like a clam rake snagging a couple of clams. Both their flashlights went tumbling away into the murk.

BCD! That’s all Dortmunder could think when he found himself in the dark again, underwater and lost again, enclosed inside the Hornet. Scrabbling all over himself, he found the right button, managed to lift his left arm up into the area around the steering column, jammed the button down hard, and the BCD filled right up with air, just as it was supposed to, increasing his buoyancy wondrously, pressing him ever more firmly against the Hornet’s upside-down front seat, increasing the Hornet’s buoyancy as well, moving the whole mass slowly and ponderously upward, through the black water.

So many stars. If you looked very closely, you could see them reflected in the calm black surface of the reservoir, as though this small man-made bowl of water on the planet Earth contained within itself the entire universe.

Gee! Bob thought, I’m coming up with so many insights! I’ll have to write all of this down on paper when I get back to my desk in-the dam so I’ll be able to talk about it all with Manfred, next time we—

Something broke the still surface. Out a ways, off to the right, near where the bubbles had been. Something… something hard to make out.

Bob stood up straighter, taking a step away from his car, squinting toward that unknown object emerging out of the reservoir. Not a sea serpent, he told himself jokingly; he knew all about that sort of thing now, knew the deep wellsprings of self-discontent that had led him to that particular error. This would simply be some sort of fish, that’s all, surfacing briefly; probably the same one that had caused the bubbles a little while ago.

But, no. Not a fish. Still not a sea serpent, but not a fish either. Starlight glinted mutedly on metal. A machine of some sort. Round constructions on top, a wider metal surface below, angling away, downward into the water. Hard to see details in the dark, but certainly metal, certainly a machine.

A submarine? In the reservoir? Ridiculous. It couldn’t possibly—

And then, with a sudden leap of the heart, Bob knew. A spaceship! A flying saucer! A spaceship from the stars, from the stars! Visiting Earth secretly, by night, hiding here in the reservoir, taking its measurements or doing whatever it was doing, now rising up out of the water, going back, back to the stars. To the stars!

Bob ran forward, arms upraised in supplication. “Take me with you!” he screamed, and tripped over a root, and crashed flat onto the ground at the edge of the water, knocking himself cold.

“Now, if you want to get to South Jersey in the afternoon,” Stan said, “the Verrazano and the Outerbridge Crossing are still your best bet. It’s just it’s a little tricky getting across Staten Island. What you do, when you—”

“I had to bury a soldier on Staten Island once,” Tiny reminisced, leaning on the winch.

Tom, hunkered down on his heels beside the tracks like a refugee taking five, said, “Because he was dead, I suppose.”

“Not when we started,” Tiny said. “See, what we—”

Stan, looking out at the reservoir, said, “What’s that?”

They all looked. Tom slowly rose, with a great creaking and cracking of joints, and said, “Tires.”

“The Hornet,” Tiny said. “Upside-down.”

“Floating,” said Stan.

Tiny said, “I don’t think it’s supposed to do that.”

Stan said, “Where do you figure John and Andy are?”

“In the reservoir,” Tom said.

Tiny said, “I think I oughta winch it in.”

Stan said, “Did you hear somebody shout?”

They all listened. Absolute silence. The rear wheels and axle and a bit of the trunk and rear fenders of the Hornet bobbed in the gloom.

Tiny said, “I still think I oughta winch it in.”

“I’ll help,” Stan volunteered.

Tiny turned the winch handle rapidly at first, taking up a lot of slack, while the car sat out there like a newly discovered island; then the rope tautened, the winching got harder, and the Hornet wallowed reluctantly shoreward.

The car was still several yards offshore, but in water only perhaps five feet deep, when a sudden thrashing and spouting took place on its left side, and Dortmunder and Kelp appeared, apparently fighting each other to the death, struggling, clawing, swinging great haymaker lefts and rights. But, no; what they were really trying to do was untangle from each other, separate all the hoses and equipment and feet.

Kelp at last went flying ass over teakettle, and Dortmunder turned in a great swooping circle, found the shore, and came wading balefully forward, flinging things in his wake: face mask, mouthpiece, tank, BCD. Emerging from the water too wild-eyed for anybody to dare speak to, he unzipped the wetsuit, sat on a rail to remove the boots and peel off the legs of the wetsuit, stood in nothing but his underpants to heave the boots and wetsuit into the reservoir (just missing Kelp, who was still struggling and floundering and falling and scrambling shoreward), and turned to march away, between the tracks.

“Oo! Oo! Oo!”

He stopped, growling in his throat, grinding his teeth, and turned about to march back to the reservoir. “Oo! Oo! Oo!” Wading into the cold water, he felt around in it for the boots, found them, carried them back to shore—“Oo! Oo!”—sat down again on the rail, pulled the boots on, stood in nothing but his underpants and boots, and this time did go marching away down the railroad line.

Mildly, Tom said, “If I’d blown it up to start with, we would’ve all saved ourselves a lot of time and trouble. Well, live and learn.” And he followed Dortmunder away toward the highway.