“But I just don’t feel as though I can leave here until this is all over and settled.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to Murch’s Mom.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And if we walk away now, Tom might still decide he’d rather use that dynamite of his.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you can see, John,” May said, “why I feel I have to stay.”
Dortmunder paused with his hands in a dresser drawer. “I can see that, May,” he said. “And if you stop to think about it, you can see why I can’t stay. When you’re done up here, you’ll come home. I’ll be there.”
She looked at him, thought it over, and got to her feet. “Well,” she said, “I can see your mind is made up.”
“I’m glad you can see that, May,” Dortmunder said.
Tom was next. “Runnin out, eh, Al?”
“Yes,” Dortmunder said.
Wally followed a couple minutes later. “Gee, John,” he said, “I know you’re not the hero, you’re only the soldier, but even the soldier doesn’t leave in the middle of the game.”
“Game called,” Dortmunder told him, “on account of wet.”
Tiny and Stan and his Mom came together, like the farmhands welcoming Dorothy back from Oz. “Dortmunder,” Tiny rumbled, “I figure you’re the one got us this far.”
“I understand it’s a piece of cake from here on,” Dortmunder said, folding with great care his other pants.
Stan said, “You don’t want to drive to the city on a Wednesday, you know. Matinee day, there’s no good routes.”
“I’ll take the bus,” Dortmunder told him.
Murch’s Mom looked insulted. “I hate the bus,” she announced. “And so should you.”
Dortmunder nodded, taking the suggestion under advisement, but then said, “Will you drive me to the bus station?”
“Cabdrivers don’t get to have opinions about destinations,” Murch’s Mom snapped, which might have been a form of “yes,” and she marched out.
“Well, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “I can’t a hundred percent blame you. Put her there.”
So Dortmunder shook his hand, and Tiny and Stan left, and Dortmunder’s hand was almost recovered enough to go on packing when Doug came in to say, “I hear you’re really going.”
“I’m really going,” Dortmunder agreed.
“Well,” Doug said, “tomorrow or the next day, sometime soon, I got to go back to Long Island anyway, see to my business, pick up the stuff we need for the next try. You could ride along.”
“I’m leaving today,” Dortmunder told him.
“What the heck, wait a day.”
“Well, Doug,” Dortmunder said, “let’s say I wait a day, a couple of days, everybody having these little talks with me. Then let’s say I get into that pickup with you and we head for the city, and you just can’t resist it, you gotta tell me the plan, the details, the equipment, you gotta talk about the res— the place there, and all that. And somewhere in there, Doug,” Dortmunder said, resting his aching hand in a friendly way on Doug’s arm, “somewhere in there, I just might be forced to see if I know how to do a three-sixty.”
Dortmunder was just locking his suitcase when Andy Kelp came in. Dortmunder looked at him and said, “Don’t even start.”
“I’ve heard the word,” Kelp told him. “And I know you, John, and I know when not to waste my breath. Come on over here.”
“Come on over where?”
“The window,” Kelp told him. “It’s okay, it’s closed.”
Wondering what Kelp was up to, Dortmunder went around the bed and over to the window, and when Kelp pointed outside he looked out, past the curtain and the rain-smeared window and the rain-dotted screen and the rain-filled air over the rain-soggy lawn and the rain-flowing sidewalk to the rain-slick curb, where a top-of-the-line Buick Pompous 88 stood there, black, gleaming in the rain.
“Cruise control,” Kelp said, with quiet pride. “Everything. You gotta go back in comfort.”
Dortmunder was touched. Not enough to reconsider, but touched. “Thank you, Andy,” he said.
“The truth is,” Kelp said, leaning forward, speaking confidentially, “I think you’re right. That reservoir is out to get you.”
SIXTY-TWO
Well, at least there was a little more room at the dinner table, though no one said that out loud in case of hurting May’s feelings. But it was nice, just the same, to have that extra inch or two for the elbow when bringing a forkful of turkey loaf mouthward.
On the other hand, when it came to discussing future plans, all at once Dortmunder’s absence from the table became less positive and pleasant, though that wasn’t obvious right at first, when Doug raised the subject over coffee, saying, “Well, it’s easy from here on. We’ve touched the box. We know where it is.”
“We’ve got a rope on it,” Kelp added.
Nodding, Doug said, “And the other end of the rope is tied to our monofilament, which nobody’s going to see.”
“Especially in this weather,” Tiny said, and sneezed.
“Another good thing,” Tom added. “This last time, you birds didn’t leave a lot of evidence around to alert the law.”
Wally said, “The computer says there’s a million ways to get it now. It’s so easy.”
Stan said, “Good. So let’s do it and get it over with.”
His Mom said, “I’ll go along with that. I want to get back to where driving’s a contact sport.”
“So we’ll just do it,” Doug said, and shrugged at how easy it was.
“Be glad to get it over with,” Kelp said.
Then there was a little silence, everybody drinking coffee or looking at the wall or drawing little fingertip circles on the tablecloth, nobody quite meeting anybody else’s eye. The light in the crowded little dining room seemed to get brighter, the tablecloth whiter, the walls shinier, the silence deeper and deeper, as though they were turning into an acrylic genre painting of themselves.
Finally, it was May who broke the silence, saying, “How?”
Then everybody was alive and animated again, all looking at her, all suddenly eager to answer the question. “It’s easy, May,” Kelp said. “We just winch it in.”
“We tie the rope to the rope,” Doug explained.
“Naturally,” Tiny added, “we gotta get a new winch.”
“Oh, yeah,” Kelp said, nodding. “And a rope.”
Stan said, “Don’t we need some kind of boat?”
“Not one that sinks in the rain,” Tiny suggested.
Wally asked, “Well, when do we do it? Do you want to wait for the rain to stop?”
“Yes,” Tiny said.
“Well, I don’t know,” Doug said. “Depends on how long that is. You know, the engineers in the dam put a little boat in the water every once in a while, run around the reservoir, take samples and so on, and if they ran over our line they’d cut it. Even if they didn’t foul their propeller, even if they didn’t find it, we’d lose the line.”
Tiny said, “They won’t do one of their jaunts in this weather, count on it.”
“That’s true,” Doug agreed.
May cleared her throat and said, “It seems to me, John would point out right here that the instant the rain stops the people in the dam might go right out in their boat so they can get caught up with their schedule.”
“That’s also true,” Doug agreed.
Wally said, “Miss May, what else would John point out?”
“I don’t know,” May said. “He isn’t here.”
Everybody thought about that. Stan said, “What it is, when John’s around, you don’t mind coming up with ideas, because he’ll tell you if they’re any good or not.”