“Don’t tell me,” said the speakerphone. “It fell overboard.”
“It sure did.”
“Reason I know is, my novel The Shipkiller is always falling overboard. It’s about boats, and sailors drop it in the water accidentally. I know it’s accidental because they call me up for another copy. They can’t find it in the stores. Well, I can’t find it in the stores either, and—”
“A truly excellent novel,” Kelp silenced the writer. “My friend on Parmalee Pond admired it greatly, my friend who dropped his camera. Overboard.”
Dortmunder watched Kelp with grudging admiration; this crock of horse elbows just flowed out of the guy with no effort at all.
“And he tried to get it back,” Kelp was going on, spinning his story, “by putting on his scuba gear and walking into where he dropped it. But he ran into all this turbidity.”
“Oh, sure,” said the speakerphone. “He would. Walking in? He just roils up the bottom that way.”
“That’s what he did, all right,” Kelp agreed. “And I remembered your book, and I read it again to see how those divers of yours got around the problem.”
“They didn’t,” the speakerphone said. “Those who didn’t wash out worked entirely by feel.”
“Wash out?” Kelp echoed. “You mean, you can wash out the turbidity? With clean water, you mean?”
“No, no,” the speakerphone said. “Washed out on the test they had to take before they were hired, to find out how they’d handle themselves in total darkness underwater. Eighty percent failed the test.”
“Oh, yeah?” Kelp said while Dortmunder raised an eyebrow at him. “Why’d they fail, mostly?”
“They went insane from claustrophobia.”
“Insane?” Kelp said, and chuckled, trying to sound light and carefree. “Really?”
“Why wouldn’t they go insane?” asked the speakerphone. (A reasonable question, as far as Dortmunder was concerned.) “Consider the terror underwater in total darkness,” the writer offered. “Cold and silent, you can’t see your own air bubbles. You can’t tell up from down.” (Dortmunder nodded vigorously.) “The loudest sound is your own heart pumping. Then you start imagining things.”
At that point, Dortmunder went out for two more beers, and when he came back Kelp was saying, “But the water might help.”
“It’s a funny idea,” Justin Scott said. “Use water to clean the water. It might make things better, it might make them worse. But you’d have to be really braced before you turned that nozzle on.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Scott.”
When Kelp hung up, Dortmunder said, “So it isn’t gonna work. I’m sorry to unleash Tom Jimson on that valley, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Well, there’s this idea of using water against the water,” Kelp said.
“What idea was that? I was getting beer.”
“You take a fire hose down in there with you,” Kelp explained, “and turn it on to blast fresh water out in front of you, push the dirty water out of the way.”
“That’s a hell of a long fire hose,” Dortmunder said.
“We get lengths and put them together.”
“And where do we attach it?”
Kelp said, “There’s a hydrant at the end of the dam. Didn’t you notice it?”
“No,” Dortmunder told him. “But I did notice your writer friend said the water idea might make it worse instead of better.”
“Could make it easier to dig up Tom’s stash, though,” Kelp suggested. “Do it with high-pressure water instead of shovels.”
“But we don’t get that far,” Dortmunder said, “because we go off our heads first from claustrophobia like all those other divers. Forget it. It can’t be done.”
“Only eighty percent of the other divers,” Kelp reminded him. “Maybe we’re in the other twenty percent.”
“I know me better than that,” Dortmunder said.
HIRTY-TWO
So the agreement was Tom could stay one more night, but the next day he’d have to make other arrangements. “I want you to know, Al,” Tom said, when Dortmunder came back from his telephone conversation at Kelp’s place, “I got to give you an A for effort.”
“I think it’s an E for effort,” Dortmunder said.
“Whatever it is, Al,” Tom told him, “you got it from me. I tell ya, I kinda wish it’d worked out. A nice quiet little heist would’ve been better in a lotta ways.”
“Yeah, it would,” Dortmunder agreed.
“Well,” Tom said, with a little shrug, “you win some, you lose some.”
Everybody was depressed that evening and didn’t feel like talking. Dortmunder went to bed early and lay awake awhile, thinking about water: dirty dark water all around his own personal head, or billions of gallons of water crashing in a tidal wave into Dudson Falls and Dudson Center and East Dudson. After a while, he fell asleep, and then he dreamed about water in a whole lot of different uncomfortable ways.
And then, middle of the night, all of a sudden he woke up wide awake, staring at the ceiling. “Well, hell,” he said out loud.
“Mrm?” said May, beside him.
Dortmunder sat up in the dark bedroom, glaring at the opposite wall. “Goddamn son of a bitch bastard all to hell and shit,” he announced.
May, waking up, propped herself on an elbow to say, “John? What’s wrong?”
“I know how to do it, that’s what’s wrong,” Dortmunder told her. “Tom stays. And I go down in that goddamn reservoir again. Hell!”
THIRTY-THREE
Real life. Wally sat in the front seat of the baby-blue Lincoln Continental, the road maps on his round knees, and directed everything. Andy was at the steering wheel beside him, while John slumped on the backseat and frowned to himself like a person doing multiplication problems in his head. Directly in front of Wally was the windshield, like technology’s largest and most true-fidelity monitor screen, displaying endlessly… the real world.
A cellular telephone was mounted on the floor hump between Wally’s knees and Andy’s knees, and for some time as they drove north out of the city it intermittently rang; fifteen or twenty rings, and then silence for a while, and then another six rings, and silence, and so on. When it first happened, Wally said, “Andy? What’s that? Should I answer it?”
“In my experience,” Andy answered, “it’s usually the doctor, wanting his car back. So I tend to leave it alone.”
Wally digested that, while the phone stopped ringing, and then started again. But no Greek was ever as obsessed by the cry of the Sirens as the average American is by the ringing of a telephone; any telephone, anywhere. In this respect, at least, Wally was a true American. There was no way this phone call could be for him, since it was neither his phone nor his car, and yet his left hand twitched with the need to reach out and pick the thing up. After a while, a bit plaintively, he said, “Andy? Are you sure? Maybe it’s something important.”
“Important to who?”
“I guess so,” Wally said, still pensive.
Andy shrugged. “It’s up to you, Wally,” he said. “If you want to hear an angry doctor make a lot of empty threats, go ahead, pick it up.”
Wally kind of visualized that doctor. He was in a long white lab coat, holding the phone in one hand and a scalpel in the other, and boy, was he mad! Wally thought it over and decided he probably didn’t need to hear what the man had to say, and shortly after that the phone stopped ringing for good. Either the doctor had given up, or they’d moved out of range.