“You’re saying the gold coins are still in there?” Mack’s eyes sparkled.
“Danata died in a gang shootout in Brooklyn in 1940,” Balenger answered. “The suite was rented only to him. He paid for it year-round. His ‘roosting place,’ he called it. After his death, the hotel’s owner—”
“Carlisle. We heard you talking about him. A nutjob with more money than he deserved.”
“He never rented the suite to anyone else,” Balenger said. “From 1940 to 1968 when the hotel closed and Carlisle lived here alone, it remained unoccupied. Carlisle had a thing about spying on people, about living his life through their lives. The professor suspected that Carlisle preserved the room the way it was when Danata was alive. The theory is that Carlisle enjoyed the idea of having a secret stash of gold coins in the vault, of looking at them when no one else could. They’re supposed to be beautiful: a soaring eagle on one side, Lady Liberty carrying a torch on the other.”
“The sick fuck didn’t try to smuggle them out of the country and turn them into cash?” Mack asked.
“He had agoraphobia. He was afraid to leave the hotel. Another country would have been like another planet to him. Why try to turn the coins into cash you don’t need when you can have the pleasure of owning more gold coins than any private citizen has looked at since 1934? Tonight, when we explored some of the rooms, we discovered Carlisle was obsessed with preserving them the way they looked when the last guests checked out. Maybe he started doing that as early as 1940 when Danata was killed.”
“What’s gold worth these days?”
“Over five hundred dollars an ounce.”
“So we could melt the coins down and—”
“That would cost you. A double eagle, less than an ounce of gold, is worth more than seven hundred dollars on the collectors’ market.”
“Jesus.”
“But listen to this,” Balenger continued. “The 1933 double eagle was minted just before the U.S. government went off the gold standard. Before the coins could be released, they were declared illegal and had to be destroyed. Most of them. Several were stolen. Recently, one of the stolen coins was found by the government and put up for auction at Sotheby’s. The winning bid was almost seven million dollars.”
“Seven…?”
“Million dollars. The theory is, Danata got his hands on five of the coins.”
Tod’s eyes reflected the headlamps. He gestured for everybody to move. “I can’t wait to see this vault.”
“Help me with the professor,” Balenger told Vinnie.
Vinnie glared, furious at him for lying. Nonetheless, the threat and his affection for the professor made him come over. It quickly became clear how their taped wrists limited them. By process of trial and error, they discovered that the only way they could lift the professor was by shoving their hands under his arms. Because his wrists were taped also, he couldn’t help. With effort, they raised him.
Conklin moaned but managed to steady himself on his good leg.
“How bad do you feel?” Balenger asked.
“I’m still alive.” The professor drew a pained breath. “Hey, under the circumstances, I’m not about to complain.”
“Is it true?” Vinnie demanded. “You and this guy were going to take the gold coins?”
“I’m not perfect,” Conklin said. “That’s something you have to realize about your teachers. But as I listened to all of you explain about the Gold Reserve Act of 1934…Saint-Gaudens, Vinnie. You actually remember Saint-Gaudens.”
“And you were going to split the money? Just the two of you?”
The elderly man looked ashamed. “Would you have agreed to be part of it? All along we’ve insisted on taking nothing but photographs. Now we wouldn’t just have broken that rule. We’d have been committing a serious crime. Would you have risked going to prison for the rest of your life, or would you have told the authorities?”
“But you were ready to risk prison.”
“At the moment, I don’t have a lot to lose.”
Mack and JD shoved the equipment into the knapsacks, cramming in so much that they needed only three knapsacks instead of five. The urine bottles were all they left behind.
Mack put the water pistol in his belt. “It’s been a while since I had a toy.” He picked up one of the knapsacks, JD the second, Tod the third. Their night-vision goggles hung around their necks.
“The way this works,” Tod said, adjusting the knapsack straps with one hand while holding Balenger’s pistol, “is I go up first, moving backward, aiming at you. Mack and JD come after you, but they keep a distance. That way, you can’t bump against them and try to push them down the stairs. If you try anything, Mack and JD will drop flat on the stairs. Then I’ll start shooting. I don’t care what anybody knows about the vault—if you fuck with us, I’ll shoot you first and then piss on you for making me mad.”
Tod left the balcony, passed through the door at the end of the hallway, reached the fire stairs, and started climbing them backward. Headlamps wavering, Balenger and Vinnie came next, their taped hands under the professor’s arms, awkwardly helping him. Rick and Cora came after that, then Mack and JD. Their footsteps were loud in the confined space.
“Now that you know I’m not a reporter,” Balenger told Vinnie, easing the professor up the stairs, “I’ve got a question.”
“What is it?”
“You were talking about the composer who wrote ‘On the Banks of the Wabash’ and ‘My Gal Sal.’ You said he was Theodore Dreiser’s brother as if that was a big deal. Who the hell was Theodore Dreiser?”
“He wrote Sister Carrie.”
“Sister who?” Keep talking, Balenger urged himself. Establish a bond with them.
“It’s one of the first gritty American novels.” Vinnie seemed to understand what Balenger was trying to do. “It’s set in the slums of Chicago. The plot’s about a woman who’s forced to sleep around to survive.”
“Sounds like real life to me,” Mack said in the darkness down the stairs.
Vinnie kept the conversation going. “The theme is pessimistic determinism. No matter what we do, our bodies and our surroundings doom us.”
“Yeah, definitely real life,” Mack said.
It’s working, Balenger thought. Moving upward, he felt the professor wince.
“The novel was published in 1900, a year before this hotel was built,” Vinnie continued. “Before then, a lot of American novels were about working hard and succeeding, what William Dean Howells called ‘the smiling aspects of American life.’”
“I’ll wait to ask you who Howells was,” Balenger said, helping the professor steady himself.
“But Dreiser grew up in terrible poverty. He saw enough suffering to decide the American dream was a fraud. To make his point, he called one of his other novels An American Tragedy. Doubleday was the company that published Sister Carrie, but when Doubleday’s wife read the book, she was so shocked she insisted her husband keep all the copies in the warehouse, banning it. It wasn’t until several years later when the novel was republished that it became a classic.”
“Guess I’ll have to read it,” Balenger said.
“Like I believe that,” Vinnie said. “The story’s powerful, but the writing’s terrible. Dreiser’s idea of polished prose was to call a bar ‘a truly swell saloon.’”
Below them, JD laughed.
Slowed by Conklin, they reached the fifth level and trudged higher. Balenger worried about the professor’s labored breathing. He debated whether to lunge up the stairs and try to grab the pistol from Tod. But Tod was too far above him. The stairs were too confining. Tod would start shooting, or maybe Mack and JD would use their knives on the rest of the group, who couldn’t run anywhere. It would be a massacre. No, he decided, this wasn’t the time.
“This Sister Carrie reminds me of the chick in that movie Sweets here mentioned.” Mack referred to Cora, Balenger knew. His rage grew. “The one ‘Moon River’ is in. What’s it called, Sweets?”
“Stop touching me.”
“What’s the movie called?”
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
“Yeah. Hell, before I saw it on TV one night, I thought it was a restaurant movie like My Dinner with Fucking Andre. But no, it’s about this screwed-up chick. What’s her name, Sweets?”
“Holly Golightly.”
“Even her name’s screwed up. Holly the Cock Tease. That should have been her name. She made guys take her to fancy restaurants. Naturally they expected to get in her pants. But after she ate a fabulous dinner, she asked them for money so she could go to the bathroom. Never been to a bathroom where I had to pay to get in, but I guess rich people put up with that stuff. Then she snuck out of the restaurant, and they never got what they paid for. She didn’t sleep with them, but as far as I’m concerned, she was still a whore.”
They reached the sixth level.
“Where’s six-ten?” Tod asked.
Their headlamps showed doors with tarnished numbers.
“Six twenty-two’s on the right.” JD aimed his light toward the tree growing into the floor.
“Then six-ten’s the other way.” Tod motioned with his pistol for the group to proceed toward the darkness on the left.
“And that stupid ending,” Mack said. “The hero’s supposed to be a smart writer. He knows the twat gets paid to take messages to a gangster in prison. He knows she’s gonna marry a South American millionaire to get her hands on the money. But the dumb hero still falls in love with her. In the end, they’re in this alley in the rain, looking for a cat she threw away, and they find the cat, and they’re kissing, and the music gets all weepy, and I’m thinking, You stupid fuck, run! Get away from that whore as fast as you can! She’ll break your heart and dump you the first time a guy with cash comes along!”
“Apart from that, how did you like the movie?” JD laughed.
“Damn it,” Vinnie suddenly shouted at Balenger, “I’d have gone along with you!” He was so furious, he couldn’t restrain himself. “All the professor needed to do was ask me, and I’ve have gone along! You think I don’t need the money? I make a shit salary in a school where the students beat teachers for giving them homework. I don’t have rich parents like Rick has. Hell, my father’s dying from emphysema. He doesn’t have health insurance. All I do is pay for his damned medical bills! If you’d asked me, I’d have gone!”
“Now there’s a guy who knows cash is king,” Mack said. “If you’ve got dough, you not only pay your old man’s doctor bills. You get Holly the Cock Tease.”
“I’m sure I care,” Tod said. “Here’s six-ten.”
A sign indicated DO NOT DISTURB.
Tod twisted the doorknob and pushed. “Locked.”
“I’m not surprised.” Balenger worked to keep the conversation alive.
“Tell me about it.”
“Cora and Rick couldn’t find a key for it or for a handful of other rooms. The missing keys must belong to the few doors that are locked.”
“Well, in case you wonder why you and your friends are still alive, one reason is you’re going to do the heavy lifting while we take it easy.”
“But that’s not the only reason,” Mack said, looking at Cora.
“Plus, the old man’s gonna help us get into the vault,” JD said. “Put him down on the floor.”
Balenger and Vinnie obeyed, making the professor as comfortable as possible. Balenger felt relieved to be able to stand on his own. He wished his hands were free to massage his arms.
“Now get that door open.” Tod switched on a flashlight.
“How?”
Tod aimed the pistol. His flashlight made Balenger squint. “I really hate it when you disagree with me.”
“Rick. Vinnie. Give me a hand.”
Rick’s nose, caked with dried blood, was twice its normal size. He and Vinnie joined Balenger in front of the door.
Although his wrists were taped together, Vinnie managed to twist the knob and test the door. No result. “I’ll keep the knob turned while you try to force the door open.”
Mack laughed. “Sounds even. They work while you stand there.”
Balenger and Rick pounded their shoulders against the door. The wall shook. They stepped back and charged, crashing. The door didn’t budge.
“Feels like it has a metal core.” Balenger’s shoulder pulsed.
“I don’t care if it’s kryptonite. Get it open.”
“My turn to keep the knob turned,” Rick said, shoving Vinnie out of the way.
Vinnie joined Balenger. They stepped back and charged, hitting the door with their full weight.
“We could ram it all day,” Balenger said. “It isn’t going to budge.”
“Well, you’d better think of how to open it,” Tod said, “because I’m getting impatient, and when I’m impatient—”
“The crowbar.”
“Ah. The crowbar.”
“It’s the only way. Or maybe the hammer.”
“The hammer,” Mack said. “Maybe you’d like some knives to cut through the wall. Or the gun to shoot the lock.”
“I don’t think that would do any good.”
“Glad to hear that,” JD said. “For a second there, it sounded like you wanted us to give you weapons.”
“Just a crowbar if you want to get this door open.”
“Oh, we want to get the door open. Definitely. Who’s got the crowbar?”
“Me,” Mack said. His shaved head cast a reflection from Balenger’s headlamp.
“Get it out.”
“You bet.”
Mack pulled the crowbar from his knapsack. “Now you guys wouldn’t be thinking of trying to use this against us, would you?”
“We just want to do what you say.”
“’Cause if you do try to use this crowbar against us, you know what’ll happen, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t think you do,” JD said. “I think I should demonstrate.”
JD approached the group. Suddenly, he used one hand to grab Rick behind the neck and shoved his other hand under Rick’s belt at his spine.
“Hey, what are you—”
But JD was already running, pushing Rick toward the balustrade.
“No!” Balenger shouted.
This time, when JD reached the edge, he didn’t shove Rick the other way to safety. Instead, he increased speed, abruptly stopped, and hurtled Rick over the balustrade.
“Noooooo!”
Plummeting, Rick disappeared into the darkness. His wail faded.
Silence.
A muted crash echoed from far below. The echo died.
Balenger’s heart seemed to stop. He felt suspended in the space between pulses. He couldn’t move.
The stillness was broken by JD, who peered down toward the lobby six levels below. “What do you know? I can see a little pinpoint of light glowing down there. His headlamp survived the crash.”
“What’s the old joke?” Tod said. “The fall isn’t what kills you. It’s landing.”
“Well, Sweets, I guess it’ll be me making music with you now,” Mack said.
Cora slid to the floor. Her lips moved in a murmur. “No.”
Balenger could barely hear her. In the beam from his headlamp, he noted how frantic her eyes were.
“No,” she whispered.
Her eyes bulged. The tendons in her neck stood out like ropes. Her shriek filled the sixth level, stronger than the wind that whistled through the gaps in the skylight a level above.
“NO.”
“All right, all right, okay, we get the idea!” Tod aimed his flashlight straight into her eyes. “You miss him! Get used to it and shut up, or you’ll go over the railing next!”
“Not until I’m done with her,” Mack said.
“NO!”
“Somebody shut her up,” Tod warned. “I’m not kidding. If she doesn’t stop—”
Balenger went over to where she slumped on the floor. “Cora.”
She kept screaming.
“Cora.” He put his taped hands on her left shoulder. “Stop.”
“NO!”
“Cora.” Balenger nudged her. “Stop right now.”
Tears streamed down her face. As she wailed, snot dripped from her nose. Saliva leaked from her open mouth.
“Cora.” Balenger managed to grasp her arm. He shook her, shook harder. Her body was like a rag doll’s. Her head flopped forward and back. He slapped her, and abruptly, she became silent.
Her cheek was red. She looked stunned. Her eyes remained wide, but she hardly blinked, just sank back against a wall and whimpered.
“You didn’t need to hit her so hard,” Vinnie said bitterly.
“It shut her up, didn’t it?” Tod said. “I swear, she was going over the railing.”
The professor lay on the floor, horrified.
Mack tapped the crowbar across one of his hands. “So now you know what’ll happen if you try to use this against us. Get that door open.”
He set the crowbar on the floor and backed away.
Balenger tried to control his emotions. His hands trembled when he picked up the crowbar and wedged it into the doorframe. He braced himself and tugged. Wood splintered.
“No,” the professor moaned. “We don’t destroy the past.”
“Just steal from it. Right, Pops?” JD asked.
“Vinnie, give me some help,” Balenger said.
In shock, Vinnie joined him. He put his hands next to Balenger’s, who felt them tremble just as his did. The two of them yanked. Crack. Splinter.
Crack. The wood broke almost as loudly as a gunshot. Balenger’s ears rang as the door flew open. Darkness beckoned.
“Put down the crowbar and step away from it,” Tod warned.
Balenger did what he was told. He watched Mack retrieve the crowbar and return it to his knapsack.
“Now let’s find the vault,” Tod said.
Creepers Page 12