Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  A telephone booth.

  No.

  A bathtub.

  No.

  A Zog spaceship.

  No.

  A refrigerator.

  No.

  A voting booth.

  No.

  A coffin.

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

  A dead person.

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

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

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

  Valuables.

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

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

  Yes! Stolen money?

  One secret means more secrets.

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

  The warlord was on a journey.

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

  The return to the planet Zog.

  Is that all?

  There is no more information on that topic.

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

  Tom is the warlord.

  Comment further.

  Tom is not the hero.

  No. I am the hero. Comment further.

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

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

  An interesting variant. Possible.

  Could Andy and John have been in prison with him?

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

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

  Tom is the warlord.

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

  The warlord raids the peaceful villages.

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

  The warlord is dangerous when defied.

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

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

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

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

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

  TWELVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Those stashes of yours,” John said.

  “The ones the lawyers got,” Tom said.

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

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

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

  “They sure tried,” Tom said.

  “But they failed, Tom,” John pursued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You don’t like my methods, Al?”

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t know,” May admitted.

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

  “Yes,” May said.

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

  THIRTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  FOURTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’m sure it is, Wally,” Kelp said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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