Why Me?

38

"I'm a dead man," Dortmunder said.

"Always the pessimist," Kelp said.

Around them hummed thousands—no, millions—of silent conversations, whistling and whispering through the cables; unfaithful husbands making assignations all unknowingly a millimicrometer away from their all-unknowing faithless wives; business deals being closed an eyelash distance from the unsuspecting subjects who'd be ruined by them; truth and lies flashing along cheek by jowl in parallel lanes, never meeting; love and business, play and torment, hope and the end of hope all spun together inside the cables from the teeming telephones of Manhattan. But of all those chattering voices Dortmunder and Kelp heard nothing—only the distant, arrhythmic plink of dripping water.

They were truly under the city now, burrowed down so far beneath the towers that the occasional rumble of a nearby subway seemed to come from above them. The hunted man, like the hunted animal, when he goes to ground goes under the ground.

Beneath the City of New York squats another city, mostly nasty, brutish, and short. And dark, and generally wet. The crisscrossing tunnels carry subway trains, commuter trains, long-distance trains, city water, city sewage, steam, electric lines, telephone lines, natural gas, gasoline, oil, automobiles, and pedestrians. During Prohibition a tunnel from the Bronx to northern Manhattan carried beer. The caverns beneath the city store wine, business records, weapons, Civil Defense equipment, automobiles, building supplies, dynamos, money, water, and gin. Through and around the tunnels and the caverns trickle the remnants of the ancient streams the Indians fished when Manhattan Island was still a part of nature. (As late as 1948, a bone-white living fish was captured in a run-off beneath the basement of a Third Avenue hardware store. It saw daylight for the first time in the last instant of its life.)

Down into this netherworld Kelp had led Dortmunder, jingling and jangling with his telephones and lines and gizmos, down into an endless round pipe four feet in diameter, running away to infinity in both directions, coated with phone cables but at least dry and equipped with electric lights at regular intervals. One couldn't stand upright but could sit with some degree of comfort. An adapter on one of the light sockets now serviced an electric heater, so they were warm. After a few errors—disconnecting and disconcerting several thousand callers, who naturally blamed the phone company—Kelp had rigged up a telephone of their own, so they could make contact with the city above. Dortmunder'd made the first call, to May, and Kelp had made the second, to a pizza place that made deliveries—though it had taken a while to convince them to make such a delivery to a street corner. Kelp had persevered, however, and at the agreed-on time had scurried up to ground level, returning with pizza and beer and a newspaper and word that the sky was overcast: "Looks like rain."

So they had light, they had heat, they had food and drink and reading matter, they had communication with the outside world; and still Dortmunder was gloomy. "I'm a dead man," he repeated, brooding at the piece of pizza in his hand. "And I'm already buried."

"John, John, you're safe here."

"Forever?"

"Until we think of something." Kelp used a fingertip to push pepperoni into his mouth, chewed a while, swigged some beer, and said, "One of us is bound to come up with something. You know we are. We're both clutch-hitters, John. When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

"Where?"

"We'll think of something."

"What?"

"How do I know? We'll know what it is when we think of it. I tell you what'll happen: We won't be able to stand it down here any more, and one of us will think of the solution. Necessity is the mother of invention."

"Yeah? Anybody know who the father is?"

"Errol Flynn," Kelp said, and chuckled.

Dortmunder sighed and opened the paper. "If they hadn't slowed the space program," he said, "I could of volunteered for a moon shot. Or the space station. That can't be all scientists and pilots; they're gonna need somebody to sweep up, polish the windows, empty the wastebaskets."

"A custodian," Kelp said.

"A janitor."

"Actually," Kelp said, "custodian is more accurate than janitor. They both come from the Latin, you know."

Dortmunder paused in turning the pages of the paper. He looked at Kelp without speaking.

"I'm a reader," Kelp explained, a bit defensively. "I read a piece about this."

"And now you're gonna tell it to me."

"That's right. Why, you in a hurry to go someplace?"

"Okay," Dortmunder said. "Whatever you want." He looked at the editorial page and saw, without recognizing it, the name Mologna.

"Janitor," Kelp told him, "comes from the two-faced Roman god Janus, who was in charge of doorways. So way back in the old days a janitor was a doorkeeper, and over the centuries the job kind of spread. A custodian is from the Latin custodia, meaning to take care of something you're in charge of. So custodian is better than janitor, especially in a space station. You don't wanna be doorkeeper in a space station."

"I don't wanna be a squirrel in a tunnel the rest of my life either," Dortmunder said. Mo-log-na, he thought, and scanned the editorial.

"Squirrels don't go in tunnels," Kelp objected. "Squirrels hang out in trees."

"That's another piece you read?"

"I just know it. Everybody knows it. In tunnels what you've got is rats, mice, moles, worms—"

"All right," Dortmunder said.

"I'm just explaining."

"That's it, that's all." Dortmunder put down the paper, picked up the phone, and started to dial. Kelp watched him, frowning, until Dortmunder shook his head, said, "Busy," and hung up. Then Kelp said, "What is it? Another pizza?"

"We're getting out of here," Dortmunder told him.

"We are?"

"Yeah. You were right; there was gonna come a time when one of us couldn't stand it any more, and he'd think of something."

"You thought of something?"

"I had to," Dortmunder said, and tried the number again.

"Tell me."

"Wait a minute. May?" Dortmunder whispered again, cupping the mouthpiece, hunching a bit over the phone like a man trying to light a cigarette in a high wind. "It's me again, May."

"You don't have to whisper," Kelp said.

Dortmunder shook his head for Kelp to shut up. Still whispering, he said, "You know the thing? That made all the trouble? Don't say it! Take it with you when you go out tonight."

Kelp looked very dubious. Apparently, in Dortmunder's ear May was also being dubious, because he said, "Don't worry, May, it's gonna be all right. At last, it's gonna be all right."