“It’ll stop soon,” Kelp said hopefully. “There isn’t any slope here at all.”
“That’s the ocean,” Victor said, nodding ahead.
“Oh, no!”
The end of the street was a pier, jutting out a good thirty feet into the water. Victor caught up with the bank just before it trundled out onto the pier, but it didn’t matter; there was no way of stopping it. One fisherman in yellow rubber slicker and rain hat, sitting on a folding chair, looked up and saw the bank coming and leaped straight from his chair into the ocean; the bank, en passant, flipped his chair after him. He had been the only occupant of the pier, which now the bank had to itself.
“Make it stop!” Kelp cried as Victor slammed the Packard to a halt at the beginning of the pier. “We’ve got to make it stop!”
“No way,” Victor said. “There’s just no way.”
The two of them sat in the Packard and watched the bank roll inexorably out along the rumbling boards of the pier to the very end and quietly, undramatically, roll off the outer edge and drop like a stone into the water.
Kelp groaned.
“One thing,” Victor said. “It was beautiful to watch.”
“Victor,” Kelp said. “Do me one favor. Don’t say that to Dortmunder.”
Victor looked at him. “No?”
“He wouldn’t understand,” Kelp said.
“Oh.” Victor looked out the windshield again. “I wonder how deep it is out there,” he said.
“Why?”
“Well, maybe we could swim down to it and get the rest of the money.”
Kelp gave him a pleased smile. “You’re right,” he said. “If not today, maybe sometime when the sun’s shining.”
“And it’s warmer.”
“Right.”
“Unless,” Victor said, “someone else sees it there and reports it.”
“Say,” Kelp said, frowning out the windshield again. “There was somebody on the pier.”
“There was?”
“A fisherman, in a yellow raincoat.”
“I didn’t see him.”
“We better take a look.”
The two of them got out of the car and walked through the rain out onto the pier. Kelp looked over the edge and saw the man in the yellow raincoat climbing up the scaffolding along the side. “Let me give you a hand,” he called and knelt to reach down to him.
The fisherman looked up. His face looked astonished. He said, “You won’t believe what happened. I don’t believe it myself.”
Kelp helped him up onto the pier. “We saw it go,” he said. “A runaway trailer.”
“It just come right along,” the fisherman said, “and threw me in the ocean. Lost my chair, lost my tackle, damn near lost myself.”
“You kept your hat anyway,” Victor pointed out. “Tied under my chin,” the fisherman said. “Was there anybody in that thing?”
“No, it was empty,” Kelp said.
The fisherman looked down at himself. “My wife told me,” he said. “She said this wasn’t no day to fish. I’ll be goddamned if she wasn’t right for once.”
“Just so you didn’t get hurt,” Kelp said.
“Hurt?” The fisherman grinned. “Listen,” he said. “I come out of this with the kind of fish story you just can’t top. I wouldn’t care if I got a broken leg out of it.”
“You didn’t, did you?” Victor asked.
The fisherman stomped his booted feet on the planks of the pier; they squished. “Hell, no,” he said. “Fit as a fiddle.” He sneezed. “Except I do believe I’m coming down with pneumonia.”
“Maybe you ought to get home,” Kelp said. “Get into some dry things.”
“Bourbon,” the fisherman said. “That’s what I need.” He glanced away toward the end of the pier. “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” he said and sneezed again and went off shaking his head.
“Let’s take a look,” Kelp said. He and Victor walked out to the end of the pier and stared down into the rain-spattered water. “I don’t see it,” Kelp said.
“Here it is. See it?”
Kelp looked where Victor was pointing. “Right,” he said, catching a glimpse of the thing, like a blue-and-white whale down there in the water. Then he frowned, peering at it, and said, “Hey, it’s moving.”
“It is?”
The two of them squinted in silence for ten seconds or so, and then Victor said, “You’re right. It’s the undertow, taking it away.”
“I don’t believe it,” Kelp said.
Victor looked back toward shore. “Here comes the rest of them,” he said.
Kelp reluctantly turned and saw the other five getting out of the horse van. They came trailing out onto the pier, Dortmunder in the lead. Kelp put a sickly smile on his face and waited.
Dortmunder came up and looked into the water. “I don’t suppose you two are out here for a tan,” he said.
“No,” said Kelp.
Dortmunder nodded at the water. “It went in there, right?”
“That’s right,” Kelp said. “You can see it…” He pointed, then frowned. “No, you can’t any more.”
Victor said, “It’s moving.”
“Moving,” Dortmunder echoed.
“Coming down the hill,” Victor said, “the wind shut the doors again. I don’t suppose it’s completely airtight, but it is closed up pretty good, and it must have just enough air in it to make it buoyant enough not to be stuck in the mud or the sand on the bottom. So the undertow’s moving it.”
The others had come up by now. May said, “You mean it’s going away?”
“That’s right,” Victor said.
Kelp felt Dortmunder looking at him but wouldn’t acknowledge it. He kept staring into the water instead.
Murch’s Mom said, “Where’s it going to?”
“France,” Dortmunder said.
Herman said, “You mean it’s gone for good? After all that work?”
“Well, we got some of the money anyway,” Kelp said and looked around with the sickly smile on his face again. But Dortmunder was already walking away along the pier toward the shore. One by one, the others followed him, and the rain rained down all around.
31
“Twenty-three thousand, eight hundred twenty dollars,” Dortmunder said and sneezed.
They were all in the apartment, his and May’s. Everybody had changed clothes, with May and Murch’s Mom both in clothing belonging to May, and all five men in Dortmunder’s clothes. They were also all sneezing, and May had brewed up a lot of tea with whiskey in it.
“Twenty-three, almost twenty-four thousand,” Kelp said brightly. “It could have been worse.”
“Yes,” Dortmunder said. “It could have been Confederate money.”
Murch sneezed and said, “How much is that apiece?”
Dortmunder said, “First we pay off the financier. That’s eight thousand, leaving fifteen thousand, eight hundred twenty. Divided by seven, that’s two thousand, two hundred sixty bucks apiece.”
Murch made a face as though something smelled bad. “Two thousand dollars? That’s all?”
Herman and Murch’s Mom sneezed simultaneously.
“We’ll spend more than that in medical bills,” Dortmunder said.
Victor said, “Still, we did the job, you have to admit that. You can’t call it a failure.”
“I can if I want to,” Dortmunder said.
“Have some more tea,” said May.