“It is.”
The cuteness that had bothered Dortmunder didn’t bother Tom because he didn’t notice it. Picking up his leather bag, he climbed out onto the gravel and shut the cab door.
Mom, giving him a sour look out the window (which he also didn’t notice), said, without joy, “See you at dinner.” And she backed out of the driveway, spraying gravel, and drove off to become a profit-making industry again.
Tom crossed to the porch, went up the stoop, and May opened the front door for him, saying, “Have a nice trip?” (She was determined to be pleasant, to behave as though Tom were a normal human being.)
“Yes,” Tom said. Then he grinned at May and said, “You got Al on the hop, all right.”
May’s face closed right up. “John doesn’t think of it that way,” she said.
“Good,” Tom told her, and looked around this little hallway. “Where do I bunk?”
“Top of the stairs, second door on your left. Your bathroom is right across the hall.”
“Okay.”
Tom went up and found a small neat sunny room with a view through two windows of the fenced-in back yard and the rears of the houses on Myrtle Street. The bed had been made (May, downstairs, regretted now having done that), with a set of fluffy pale blue towels folded atop it. The drawers in the tall old dresser were all empty, and were still nearly empty when Tom was done unpacking. Once his few clothes were put away, he placed his shaving and toilet gear atop the dresser and hung his old suit jacket in lonely splendor in the closet.
Finally, he salted the place. While certain other armaments remained in the false bottom of the leather bag, the others were distributed in his usual manner:.45 automatic duct-taped to the underside of the box spring, handy when lying in bed; spring knife rolled into a windowshade, so it would drop into his hand when he pulled the shade all the way down; tiny snub-barreled.22 duct-taped to the underside of the water closet lid in the neat old-fashioned bathroom.
There. Home sweet home.
FIFTY-TWO
When the doorbell rang, Wally reassured himself it was indeed John down at the street entrance before pushing the button to let him into the building, and then he hurried off to the kitchen to get the plate of cheese and crackers he’d had in readiness ever since thirty seconds after John’s phone calclass="underline"
“You free this afternoon?”
“Oh, sure.”
“I thought I’d come over, uh, we could talk, uh, about things.”
“Oh, sure!”
“See you in a while.”
“Oh, sure!”
What could it be? Turning off the random-scream alarm, Wally wondered again for the thousandth time what John might want to come here to discuss. It had been so long since he’d heard from John, or from Andy, or from anybody, that he’d begun to wonder if maybe they’d gone ahead and finished their adventure without him.
Was that possible? What about the princess, the warlord’s daughter? He had only met the princess once; Myrtle Jimson, Wally could see her now in his mind’s eye, clear as anything, though in his imagination she did seem to be wearing a high lacy headdress and some sort of long gown out of King Arthur’s court. But he had rescued her from no one and nothing, in fact, and there’d been no follow-through at all. His relationships with the warlord and the soldier and the rest were barely into chapter one. Could it all have ended, just like that? Could the entire caravan have moved on, leaving him alone in this oasis?
His doubts had increased with the passage of time, even though the computer had constantly reassured him:
The story cannot end until the hero is satisfied.
Which was all well and good, assuming their postulates were correct.
What if I’m wrong? What if I’m not the hero?
Then there is no story.
Wally had begun to think that perhaps the computer didn’t entirely understand the way reality works, and seismic disturbances of disbelief had just begun to shake his compact little universe, when lo and behold, John phoned! Fortunately, computers don’t say, “I told you so.”
The upstairs bell rang, and Wally hurried to open it, surprised to see John by himself out there. Looking around the landing, Wally said, “Isn’t Andy with you?”
“Well, no,” John said. He seemed ill at ease, less sure of himself than usual. “It’s just me,” he said. “Andy doesn’t know about it. I come over to, uh, talk it over with you.”
“Come in, come in,” Wally urged him. “I’ve got cheese and crackers.”
“That’s nice,” John said neutrally, nodding at the plate on the coffee table.
Wally shut the door, gestured John to the comfortable chair, and said, “Would you like a beer?”
“As a matter of fact,” John said, “yes.”
“Gee, you know, I think I would, too,” Wally told him, and hurried to the kitchen to get two cans of beer. When he returned, John was seated in the chair Wally had indicated, gloomily eating cheese and crackers. Wally gave him his beer and sat alertly on the sofa, waiting.
John squinted through his eyebrows in Wally’s direction. For some reason, be seemed to be having trouble looking straight at him. “Well,” he said, “we’re still trying to get that box up out of the reservoir.”
“The treasure,” Wally said.
“Tom really wants that money,” John said.
“Well, sure, I guess he would,” Wally agreed.
“He wants to blow up the dam,” John said.
Wally nodded, considering that. “I guess that would work,” he said. “Only, how does he plan to channel the water?”
“He doesn’t,” John said.
Wally’s wet eyes widened: “But doesn’t he know about the towns? A lot of people live down there! John, we have to tell him about—”
“He knows,” John said.
Wally looked at John’s grim face. The warlord has no pity. Wally whispered, “Would Tom really do that?”
“He’d’ve done it already,” John said, “only I talked him into letting me have one more crack at it.”
Suddenly John did look straight at Wally, and in that instant Wally understood just how difficult it had been for John to come here to ask for help. That’s why he’s here, Wally thought, with a sudden thrill. He’s here to ask for help! To ask me for help! Wally blinked, his mouth sagging open at his sense of the importance of this moment.
John said, “May moved up there. Dudson Center. See, I quit, I couldn’t do it anymore, so that’s what she did.”
Horrified, Wally said, “Tom wouldn’t blow up the dam with Miss May there!”
“Tom would blow up the dam with the Virgin Mary there,” John said.
“Then we have to get that treasure!” Wally cried, bouncing around on the sofa in his agitation. “Before he does it!”
“That’s the situation,” John agreed. “And here’s the rest of the situation. Andy and I went down in that reservoir twice, and that’s twice too much. I can’t do it again. Just take my word for it, I can’t. So it has to be something else. There’s gotta be a way to get the money up out of there without me going down in there.”
Wally nodded, trying to think but still overcome by the wonder of it. John came to me! “But what?” he asked, caught up in the story.
“I don’t know,” John told him, putting his beer can down so he could actually wring his hands. “I thought and I thought and I thought, and I just don’t come up with a thing. I shot my bolt on this one, Wally, there’s nothing left. I’m not finding anything because I can’t get myself even to think about that place. And Tom won’t wait much longer.”