When May walked into the living room carrying the casserole like an offering in front of her, at arm’s length, in her mitted hands, they were all already seated at the table, but given the smallness of the room and the way the kitchen table filled and dominated it, there was hardly much of anything else for them to do. On the other hand, May knew full well that even if the living room were the size of a baseball field, a couple of these people present would be seated at the table anyway.
“Dinner,” she announced, put the casserole bowl on the middle of the table, and began to dispatch her troops: “John, see if anyone wants a beverage. Andy and Tiny, you two—”
“Anybody ready for a beer?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah.”
“Naturally.”
“Andy and Tiny, you two get the vegetables, they’re on the counter beside the sink. Tom, would you bring in the bread and butter, please?”
“You know,” Tom said, as he got to his feet, “I’m getting used to this living on the outside, living with other people and all. Like on the television.”
John flashed May a look as he left for the beer, which May refused to acknowledge.
Little Wally Knurr looked up, smiling his wet smile and saying, “Miss May, what can I do to help?”
“You’re the special guest,” May told him, “because it’s your first time here.”
“Oh, I want to do my part,” Wally said, sounding worried, his broad brow knitting.
“You can help with dessert,” May promised him, and Wally smiled again, happy.
Wally was a new experience for May, unlike just about anything she’d ever met before, including John’s odd friends and some of the customers at the supermarket where she worked as cashier. For one thing, his appearance; enough said. For another thing, his manner toward her, which was a sort of childish courtliness; when he’d first come in this evening and called her Mrs. Dortmunder and she’d told him she wasn’t Mrs. Dortmunder (without giving him her actual last name) and saying he should call her May, so that he didn’t know any formal name for her at all, he’d stumbled and spluttered awhile, and then had finally decided she was “Miss May,” and that was that. Then there was his size, so large horizontally and yet so small vertically; in fact, this was going to be the first meal in this apartment with two people seated on telephone books, John on the white pages and Wally on the business-to-business yellow pages to bring him up to a normal height with all the others.
Food and drink were quickly assembled, and everyone took their places. May sat nearest the door since she’d have to be going to the kitchen from time to time, and John sat facing her at the inner end of the room. Tiny sat to May’s left and Wally to her right, with Andy beyond Tiny and Tom beyond Wally. Once all were settled and served, they all tasted the famous casserole, and the usual round of sincere but hurried praise ensued. Then, the amenities out of the way, silence took hold as everyone tucked in.
Nothing had been said about Tom’s buried stash before dinner, and hardly anything was said on any subject at all during dinner, so it wasn’t until after May and Wally had brought in the coffee and two kinds of ice cream and pound cake and raspberries and whipped cream that anyone raised the topic of the day, and then it was left to May to do it. “I guess everybody knows,” she said, into the murmur of five people working their way through a number of terrific desserts, “that John doesn’t think there’s any way to get down into that reservoir and get Tom’s money except to blow up the dam.”
Wally’s big wet eyes got bigger and wetter. “Blow up the dam! But that would be terrible! People would get hurt!”
“They’d get worse than hurt,” May said gently. “And that’s why John won’t be a party to it.”
“That’s right,” John said around a mouthful of pound cake.
“I won’t do it either,” Andy announced.
Tom, who’d been putting various desserts into his mouth without opening his lips, now spoke without opening his lips: “Somebody will. Lotta money down there. Tiny?”
“Include me out,” Tiny said.
“But Tom’s right about that,” May told the table. “He’s willing to do it, and some people would be willing to help him.”
“Gee,” Wally said, apparently contemplating previously unguessed—neither by himself nor his computer—depths of human depravity.
“So the question is,” said May, “is there any other way to get in there and get that money? Any way that John could go along with.”
“If that’s the question,” John said, “I got the short answer.”
“Wait a minute, John,” Andy said, and turned to May, saying, “May, I was down there, too, and I’m sorry, but I gotta go along with John. Your basic problem down there is you can’t see anything. It isn’t like regular water.”
“They must clean the hell out of it,” John commented, “before it gets down into our sinks here.”
“What it reminds me of,” Andy said, “is a book I read once.”
John gave him a dubious look. “Are we gonna hear about Child Heist again?”
“That isn’t the only book I ever read,” Andy told him. “I’m a pretty big reader, you know. It’s a habit I picked up on the inside, when I had a lotta leisure time to myself.”
Tom said, “I spent my time on the inside thinking about money.”
“Anyway,” Andy insisted, “about this book. It was a story about the Normandie, the ship that sank at the pier in New York in—”
“I got pictures of that,” John said, “in that Marine Salvage book.”
“Well, this is a different book,” Andy told him. “It isn’t a fact book, it’s the other kind. A story.”
“The Normandie’s a fact,” John maintained. “I’ve got pictures of it.”
“Still and all,” Andy said, “this is a story about the fact of the Normandie. Okay?”
“Okay,” John said. “I just wanted to be sure we understood each other.” And he filled his mouth with more pound cake, stuffing a little mocha butterscotch cashew ice cream in around the edges.
“Well, the story,” Andy said, with a little more edge than necessary, “is about the divers who went down inside the Normandie and tried to fix it up so they could float it again. And I was thinking when I was down in that lake, what we had there was exactly the same as what this guy described in the book.”
John looked at him with flat disbelief. “Down in that lake? You were down in that lake and you were thinking about books?”
“Among other things.”
“I was concentrating on the other things,” John said.
May said, “John, let Andy tell us about this book.”
“Thanks, May,” Andy said. “The only point about the book is, it’s all about the divers going down inside the Normandie and down to the bottom of the Hudson River off Forty-fourth Street, and how they had the same kind of problem we did. It’s very exciting, very dramatic. Make a terrific movie, except of course you couldn’t see anything.”
“Maybe radio,” Tiny suggested.
“Yeah, maybe so,” Andy agreed. “Anyway, what they had, down at the bottom of the Hudson River, was just what we had. Everything’s black and dirty, the water’s full of this thick mud, and if you turn on a flashlight it’s like turning on your car headlights in a thick fog; it just bounces the light back at you.”