“You’re talking, Captain, about an operation that will take a month.”
“No, Mr. Gelding, I’m not. By morning, we’ll have the assistance of Boy Scout troops, volunteer fire departments and other local organizations all over the Island to help in the search. We’ll use the same groups and the same techniques as when we’re looking for a lost child.”
“The bank,” Gelding said frostily, “is somewhat larger than a lost child.”
“That can only help,” Captain Deemer said. “We’ll also have assistance from the Civil Air Patrol in scanning from the skies.”
“Scanning from the skies?” The phrase seemed to take Gelding aback.
“I say we have them bottled up,” Captain Deemer said, his voice rising and his left eyelid lowering, “and I say it’s only a question of time till we tighten the net!” And he did that chicken-killing gesture again, making Lieutenant Hepplewhite in his unobserved corner wince once more.
“All right,” Gelding said grudgingly. “Under the circumstances, I must admit you seem to be doing everything possible.”
“Everything,” agreed the captain and turned his attention to Gary Wallah, the young man from the mobile home company. The strain of having to deal as allies with somebody who looked like Gary Wallah caused the captain’s head to lower into his neck again and his left eyelid to flutter like an awning in an on-shore breeze. “Tell me about this trailer,” he said, and despite his best intentions the sentence came growling out as though instead he’d said, “Up against the wall, kid.” (He didn’t use bad language in uniform.)
“It’s a mobile home,” Wallah said. “It isn’t a trailer. A trailer is a little thing with wheels that you rent from U-Haul when you want to move a refrigerator. What we’re talking about is a mobile home.”
“I don’t care if you call it a Boeing 747, boy,” said the captain, no longer even caring about the growl in his voice, “just so you describe it to me.”
Wallah didn’t say anything for a few seconds, just glanced around the room with a little smile on his face. Finally he nodded and said, “Right on. I’m here this time to cooperate, that’s what I’ll do.”
Captain Deemer closed his mouth firmly over the several things it occurred to him to say. He reminded himself that he really didn’t want to fight with everybody on his own team, and he waited in controlled impatience for this goddam draft-dodging useless hippie pot-smoking disrespectful radical son of a bitch bastard to say whatever it was he was going to say.
In a neutral tone, Wallah said, “What Roamerica leased to the bank was a modified version of our Remuda model. It’s fifty feet long and twelve feet wide and is usually made up as a two- or three-bedroom home in a variety of styles, but mostly either Colonial or Western. But in this case it was turned over to the bank with no interior partitions and without the usual kitchen appliances. The normal bathroom was put in; that is, the fixtures only, no walls or decor. The modifications done at the factory consisted mostly of installing a full burglar alarm system in the walls, floor and roof of the unit and strengthening the floor at the rear portion. This what you want, Cap?”
Instead of answering directly, Captain Deemer looked over at Lieutenant Hepplewhite to see if he was taking all this down the way he was supposed to; he was taking it down, but not the way he was supposed to. That is, instead of sitting at the desk like a normal human being he was standing beside it, bent over, pencil flying across paper. “Goddamit, Lieutenant,” the captain shouted, “sit down before you get a humpback!”
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant zipped into the chair, then looked attentively toward Wallah.
The captain said, “You got all that so far?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Go ahead, buh —”
Wallah raised an eyebrow and one side of his mustache. “Hello?”
“Nothing,” the captain said grumpily. “Go ahead.”
“Not much more to tell. It has the usual wiring in it, to be attached to regular commercial power company lines. It has baseboard electric heating. The bathroom fixtures feed out through the bottom of the unit and are adaptable to local plumbing codes. Roamerica delivered the unit to the site, connected up all power lines, water lines, sewage lines, burglar alarm lines, removed the wheels, leveled the —”
“Removed the wheels?” The captain’s left eye was completely shut now, maybe for good.
“Sure,” Wallah said. “It’s standard procedure if you’re going to —”
“Are you telling me that goddam trailer didn’t have any wheels?”
“Mobile home. And natu —”
“Trailer!” the captain yelled. “Trailer, trailer goddam trailer! And if it didn’t have any goddam wheels, how did they get it away from there?”
Nobody answered. The captain stood panting in the middle of the room, head hulked down between his shoulders, like the bull after the matador’s assistants have finished with him. His left eye was still closed, perhaps permanently, and his right eyelid was beginning to flutter.
Lieutenant Hepplewhite cleared his throat. Everybody jumped, as though a hand grenade had gone off, and they all stared at him. In a small voice he said. “Helicopter?”
They continued to look at him. Several slow seconds went by, and then the captain said, “Repeat that, Hepplewhite.”
“Helicopter, sir,” Lieutenant Hepplewhite said in the same small voice. And then, hesitant but hurrying, added, “I just thought maybe they had a helicopter and they might have come down and put ropes around it and —”
The captain glowered with his one good eye. “And take it off the Island,” he finished.
“Too heavy,” Wallah said. He opened his gray cloth plumber’s bag and took out a toy mobile home. “Here’s a scale model of the Remuda model,” he said. “Remember now, it’s fifty feet long. This one is pink and white; the stolen one is blue and white.”
“I see the color,” the captain growled. “You’re sure it’s too heavy?”
“No question.”
“I’ve got a question,” the captain said. Somehow he seemed to be holding the toy. Shifting it back and forth from hand to hand in some irritation, he said to Lieutenant Hepplewhite, “Phone the Army base. Find out if a helicopter could do the job.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And get in touch with some of the men on the scene. Have them wake neighbors, find out if anybody heard a helicopter around there tonight.”
“Definitely too heavy,” Wallah said. “And too long and awkward. They just couldn’t do it.”
“We’ll find out,” the captain said. “Here, take this damn thing.”
Wallah took back the toy. “I thought you’d be interested,” he said.
“It’s the real one I’m interested in.”
“Exactly,” said the banker, Gelding.
Lieutenant Hepplewhite was murmuring on the phone. The captain said, “Now, if they didn’t take it by helicopter, the question is how did they take it? What about these wheels you took off, where would they be now?”
“Stored in our assembly plant in Brooklyn,” Wallah said.
“You’re sure they’re still there?”
“Nope.”
The captain gave him the full voltage of his one good eye. “You’re not sure they’re still there?”
“I haven’t checked. But those aren’t the only wheels in the world; they could have gotten wheels anywhere.”
Lieutenant Hepplewhite said, “Excuse me, Mr. Wallah.”
Wallah looked at him in amused surprise — probably at being called mister.