by Ed McBain
After a while, the congeniality of the road and the landscape soothed Dortmunder’s put-upon feelings about legroom. He figured out a way to disport his legs that did not lead immediately to cramps, his upper body settled comfortably into the curve of the seat, and he spent his time, more fruitfully than fretting about legroom, thinking about what could go wrong.
An emergency in town while they were in possession of the generator truck, that could go wrong. The woman travel agent who was running Querk, and whose bona fides and motives were unknown, she could go wrong. (Harry Matlock’s instincts had been right, when he’d said he could recommend Querk as a follower but not as a leader. He was still a follower. The question was, who vouched for the leader?)
Other things that could go wrong. Rodrigo, for one. No, Rodrigo for four or five. Described as mostly a hustler down on his home turf, he could run foul of the law himself at just the wrong moment, and have neither the cash nor the leisure to take delivery on the print job. Or, as unknown as the travel agent, he could be planning a double-cross from the get-go. Or, he could be reasonably trustworthy himself, but unaware of untrustworthy friends waiting just out of sight. Or, he could get one of those South American illnesses that people get when they leave the five boroughs, and die.
All in all, it was a pleasant drive.
Querk’s instructions had said to exit the Taconic at Darby Corners and turn east and then north, following the signs past Darbyville, where Querk lived temporarily with his cousin, and on to Sycamore, where the Sycamore Creek Printery stood in woodland disguise beside Sycamore Creek.
They approached Sycamore from the south, while the creek approached the town from the north, so for the last few miles they were aware of the stream in the woods and fields off to their right, spritzing in the sun as it rushed and tumbled the other way.
There were farmhouses all along the route here, some of them still connected to farms, and there were fields of ripe corn and orchards of almost-ripe apples. The collapse of the local dairy farming industry due to the tender loving care of the state politicians meant several of the farms they passed were growing things that would have left the original settlers scratching their heads: llamas, goats, anemones, ostriches, Christmas trees, Icelandic horses, long-horn cattle.
The town was commercial right from the city line: lumberyard on the left, tractor dealership on the right. Far ahead was the only traffic light. As they drove toward it, private housing was mixed with shops on the left, but after the tractor man it was all forested on the right almost all the way to the intersection, where an Italian restaurant on that side signaled the return of civilization.
“That’ll be it in there,” Kelp said, taking a hand off the steering wheel to point at the dubious woodland.
“Right.”
“And all evergreens, so people don’t have to look at it in winter, either.”
“Very tasteful,” Dortmunder agreed.
It wasn’t quite eleven-thirty. The traffic light was with them, so Kelp drove through the intersection, and just a little farther, on the right, they passed Sycamore House, where they would eat lunch. It was a very old building, two stories high, the upper story extending out over and sagging down toward an open front porch. The windows were decorated with neon beer logos.
A little beyond Sycamore House a storefront window proclaimed SEVEN LEAGUES TRAVEL. This time, Kelp only pointed his nose: “And there she is.”
“Got it.”
Kelp drove to the northern end of town—cemetery on left, church on right, “Go and Sin no More” the suggestion on the announcement board out front—where he made a U-turn through the church’s empty parking lot and headed south again. “We’ll see what we see from the bridge,” he said.
Here came the traffic light, this time red. Moderate traffic poked along, locals and summer folk. Kelp turned left when he could, and now the pocket forest was on their right, and the creek up ahead. Just before the creek, where the bosk ended, a two-lane road ran off to the right, between the evergreens and creek, marked at the entrance by a large black-on-white sign:
PRIVATE
SYCAMORE CREEK PRINTERY
NO TRESPASSING
Right after that, there was what seemed to be a lake on their left, and a steep drop to a stream on their right, so the road must be the dam. Dortmunder craned around, banging his legs into car parts, trying to see something other than pine trees along the streamside back there, and just caught a glimpse of something or other where the private road turned in. “Pretty hid,” he said.
There were no intersections on the far side of the creek, and in fact no more town over here. All the development was behind them, along the west side of the creek. On this side the land climbed steeply through a more diversified woods, the road twisting back and forth, and when they finally did come to a turnoff, seven miles later, it was beyond the crest, and the turnoff was to a parking area where you could enjoy the view of the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts, farther east.
They didn’t spend a lot of time contemplating the Berkshires, but drove back to Sycamore, ignoring the traffic that piled up behind them because they insisted on going so slowly down the twisty road, trying to see signs of the printing plant inside the wall of trees. Here and there a hint, nothing more.
“So if he’s careful,” Kelp said, “with the light and the noise, it should be okay.”
“I’d like to get in there,” Dortmunder said, “just give it the double-o.”
“We’ll discuss it with him,” Kelp said.
11
It was still too early for lunch. Kelp parked the little car in the parking lot next to Sycamore House, in among several cars owned by people who didn’t know it was too early for lunch, and they got out to stretch, Dortmunder doing overly elaborate knee-bends and massaging of his thighs that Kelp chose not to notice, saying, “I think I’ll take a look at the League.”
“I’ll walk around a little,” Dortmunder said, sounding pained. “Work the kinks out.”
They separated, and Kelp walked up the block to Seven Leagues Travel, the middle shop in a brief row of storefronts, a white clapboard one-story building, with an entrance and a plate glass display window for each of the three shops. The one on the right was video rental and the one on the left was a frame shop.
Kelp pushed open the door for Seven Leagues, and a bell sounded. He entered and shut the door, and it sounded again, and a female voice called, “Just a minute! I got a bite!”
A bite? Kelp looked around an empty room, not much deeper than it was wide. Filing cabinets were along the left wall and two desks, one behind the other, faced forward on the right. Every otherwise empty vertical space was covered with travel posters, including the side of the nearest filing cabinet and the front of both desks. The forward desk was as messy as a Texas trailer camp after a tornado, but the desk behind it was so neat and empty as to be obviously unused. At the rear, a door with a travel poster on it was partly open, showing just a bit of the lake formed by the dam and the steep wooded slope beyond.
Kelp, wondering if assistance was needed here—if a person was being bitten, that was possible—walked down the length of the room past the desks, pulled the rear door open the rest of the way, and leaned out to see a narrow roofless porch and a woman on it fighting with a fishing pole. She was middle-aged, which meant impossible to tell exactly, and not too overweight, dressed in full tan slacks, a blue man’s dress shirt open at the collar and with the sleeves cut off above the elbow, huge dark sunglasses, and a narrow-brimmed cloth cap with a lot of fishing lures and things stuck in it.
“Oh!” he said. “A bite!”
“Don’t break my concentration!”
So he stood there and watched. A person, man or woman, fighting a fish can look a little odd, if the light is just so and the fishing line can’t be seen. There she was with the bent rod, and nothing else visible, so that she looked as though she were doing one of those really esoteric Oriental exercise routines, bobbing and w
eaving, hunching her shoulders, kicking left and right, spinning the reel first one way, then the other, and muttering and grumbling and swearing beneath her breath the entire time, until all at once a fish jumped out of the water and flew over the white wood porch railing to start its own energetic exercise program on the porch floor. The fish was about a foot long, and was a number of colors Kelp didn’t know the names of.
She was gasping, the woman (so was the fish), but she was grinning as well (the fish wasn’t). “Isn’t he a beauty?” she demanded, as she leaned the pole against the rear wall.
“Sure,” Kelp said. “What is it? I mean, I know it’s a fish, but what’s his name?”
“Trout,” she said. “I can tell already, I give you one more word, it’s gonna get too technical.”
“Trout is good enough,” he agreed. “They’re good to eat, aren’t they?”
“They’re wonderful to eat,” she said. “But not this one.” Going to one knee beside the flopping fish, she said, “We do catch and release around here.”
Kelp watched her stick a finger into the fish’s mouth to start working the hook out of its lower lip. He imagined a hook in his own lower lip, then was sorry he’d imagined it, and said, “Catch and release? You let it go again?”
“Sure,” she said. Standing, she scooped the fish up with both hands and, before it could shimmy away from her, tossed it well out into the lake. “See you again, fella!” she called, then said to Kelp, “Just let me wash my hands, I’ll be right with you.”
They both went back into the office and she headed for the bathroom, a separate wedge in the rear corner of the room. Opening its door, she looked back at him and waved her free hand toward her desk. “Take a seat, I’ll be right with you.”
He nodded, and she went inside, shutting the door. He walked over to the diorama of tornado damage and noticed, half-hidden under a cataract of various forms and brochures, one of those three-sided brass plaques with a name on it, this one JANET TWILLEY.
He wandered around the room, looking at the various travel posters, noting there was none to tout Guerrera, and that in fact the only South American poster showed some amazing naked bodies in Rio, and then the toilet flushed and a minute later Janet Twilley came out, shut the bathroom door, frowned at Kelp, and said, “I told you, take a seat.”
“I was admiring the posters.”
“Okay.” Coming briskly forward, she gestured at the chair beside the front desk. “So now you can take a seat.”
Bossy woman. They both sat, and she said, “So where did you want to go?”
“That’s why I was looking at the posters,” he said. He noticed she kept her sunglasses on. Then he noticed a little discoloration visible around her left eye.
She peered at him through the dark glasses. “You don’t know where you want to go?”
“Well, not exactly,” he said.
She disapproved. “That’s not the usual way,” she said.
“See,” he told her, “I have this problem with time zones.”
“Problem?”
“I change time zones, it throws me off,” he explained, “louses up my sleep, I don’t enjoy the trip.”
“Jet lag,” she said.
“Oh, good, you know about that.”
“Everybody knows about jet lag,” she said.
“They do? Well, then, you know what I mean. Me and the wife, we’d like to go somewhere that we don’t change a lot of time zones.”
“Canada,” she said.
“We been to Canada. Very nice. We were thinking of somewhere else, some other direction.”
She shook her head. “You mean Florida?”
“No, a different country, you know, different language, different people, different cuisine.”
“There’s Rio,” she said, nodding at the poster he’d been admiring.
“But that’s so far away,” he said. “I mean, really far away. Maybe somewhere not quite that far.”
“Mexico has many—”
“Oh, Mexico,” he said. “Isn’t that full of Americans? We’d like maybe somewhere a little off the beaten path.”
Over the next ten minutes, she suggested Argentina, Belize, Peru, Ecuador, all of the Caribbean, even Colombia, but not once did she mention the name Guerrera. Finally, he said, “Well, I better discuss this with the missus. Thank you for the suggestions.”
“It would be better,” she told him, a little severely, “if you made your mind up before you saw a travel agent.”
“Yeah, but I’m closing with it now,” he assured her. “You got a card?”
“Certainly,” she said, and dumped half the crap from her desk onto the floor before she found it.
12
The less said about lunch, the better. After it, Dortmunder and Kelp came out to find Querk perched on the porch rail out front. Dortmunder burped and said, “Well, look who’s here.”
“Fancy meeting you two,” Querk said.
Kelp said, “We should all shake hands now, surprised to see each other.”
So they did a round of handshakes, and then Dortmunder said, “I feel like I gotta see the plant.”
“I could show you a little,” Querk said. “Not inside the buildings, though, around the machines, the management gets all geechy about insurance.”
“Just for the idea,” Dortmunder said.
So they walked to the corner, crossed with the light, and turned left, first past the Italian restaurant (not open for lunch, unfortunately), and then the abrupt stand of pines. Looking into those dense branches, Dortmunder could occasionally make out a blank grayness back in there that would be the sound-baffle wall.
At the no-trespassing sign, they turned right and trespassed, walking down the two-lane blacktop entrance drive with the creek down to their left, natural woods on the hillside across the way, and the “forest” on their right.
A big truck came slowly toward them from the plant entrance, wheezing and moving as though it had rheumatism. The black guy driving—moustache, cigar stub, dark blue Yankees cap—waved at Querk, who waved back, then said, “He delivers paper. That’s what I’ll be doing this afternoon, move that stuff around.” With a look at his watch, he said, “I should of started three minutes ago.”
“Stay late,” Dortmunder suggested.
At the entrance, the shallowness of the tree-screen became apparent. The trees were barely more than two deep, in complicated diagonal patterns, not quite random, and behind them loomed the neutral gray wall, probably ten feet high.
Passing through the entrance, Dortmunder saw tall gray metal gates opened to both sides, and said, “They close those when the plant is shut?”
“And lock them,” Querk said. “Which is my specialty, remember. I could deal with them before we get the truck, leave them shut but unlocked.”
And the closed gates, Dortmunder realized, would also help keep light in here from being seen anywhere outside.
They walked through the entrance, and inside was a series of low cream-colored corrugated metal buildings, or maybe all one building, in sections that stretched to left and right and were surrounded by blacktop right up to the sound-baffle wall, which on the inside looked mostly like an infinitude of egg cartons. The only tall item was a gray metal water tower in the middle of the complex, built on a roof. The roofs were low A shapes, so snow wouldn’t pile too thick in the winter.
Directly in front of them was a wide loading bay, the overhead doors all open showing a deep, dark, high-ceilinged interior. One truck, smaller than the paper deliverer, was backed up to the loading bay and cartons were being unloaded by three workmen while the driver leaned against his truck and watched. Beyond, huge rolls of paper, like paper towels in Brobdingnag, were strewn around the concrete floor.
“My work for this afternoon,” Querk said, nodding at the paper rolls.
“That driver’s doing okay,” Dortmunder said.
Querk grinned. “What did Jesus Christ say to the Teamsters? ‘Do nothing till I get ba
ck.’”
Dortmunder said, “Where’s the presses?”
“All over,” Querk said, gesturing generally at the complex of buildings. “The one we’ll use is down to the right. We’ll be able to park down there, snake the wires in through the window.”
Kelp said, “Alarm systems?”
“I’ve got keys to everything,” Querk said. “I studied this place, I could parade elephants through here, nobody the wiser.” Here on his own turf he seemed more sure of himself, less, as May had said, rabbity.
Kelp said, “Well, to me it looks doable.”
Querk raised an eyebrow at Dortmunder. “And to you?”
“Could be,” Dortmunder said.
“I like your enthusiasm,” Querk said. “Shall we figure to do it one night next week?”
“I got a question,” Dortmunder said, “about payout.”
Querk looked alert, ready to help. “Yeah?”
“When do we get it?”
“I don’t follow,” Querk said.
Dortmunder pointed at the building in front of them. “When we leave there,” he said, “what we got is siapas. Money we get from Rodrigo.”
“Sure,” Querk said.
“How? When?”
“Well, first the siapas gotta go to Guerrera,” Querk said, “and then Rodrigo has stuff he’s gonna do, and then the dollars come up here.”
“What if they don’t?” Dortmunder said.
“Listen,” Querk said, “I trust Rodrigo, he’ll come through.”
“I dunno about this,” Dortmunder said.
Querk looked at his watch again. He was antsy to get to work. “Lemme get a message to him,” he said, “work out a guarantee. What if I come back to the city this Saturday? We’ll meet. Maybe your place again?”
“Three in the afternoon,” Dortmunder said, because he didn’t want to have to give everybody lunch.