“Oh. Sure.” And he did.
Dortmunder said, “Everybody’s gonna be guided by my judgment, so they don’t need to come along. If I decide I’m crazy enough to go down in that lake again, everybody’s gonna let me do it.”
“Let us do it,” Kelp pointed out.
Dortmunder shook his head at him. “I don’t know why you’re so eager,” he said.
“I’m not exactly eager,” Kelp said. “But the thing is, I remembered about the BCD when I was down there—”
“When you weren’t thinking about books.”
“The BCD,” Kelp said. “That’s the difference right there, John. I was getting nervous, the same way you were getting, but then I remembered that good old BCD. One push on the button and up you go. When you know you can always get outta there if you need to, it makes things easier.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dortmunder said. It rankled with him that he hadn’t thought of the BCD in his moment of direst need, and it rankled double that Kelp had thought of it. “BCD or no BCD,” he said, “if I can’t walk and I can’t see, I ain’t going.”
“So let’s have a beer,” Kelp suggested, “and call this guy, and see what’s the story.”
So they did. Dialing the number, Kelp said, “I’ll switch to the speakerphone after we start talking.”
“Sure,” Dortmunder said.
A little pause, and then Kelp made a face. “It’s the answering machine.”
“You’re the last to complain,” Dortmunder told him.
Kelp ignored that. “I’ll leave my number,” he decided, and sat there waiting for the answering machine message to finish itself. Then he said, “Hi, I’m a fan, my name’s—What? Oh, hello! You’re there!”
Little pause, Kelp nodding and grinning. “Yeah, I do that sometimes, too,” he said. “Screening your calls, that’s very— Oops, hold on a second.”
He reached down, hit a switch on the side of the phone, and suddenly the room was filled with a voice saying, “—never get any work done.”
“I agree a hundred percent,” Kelp told the phone while Dortmunder stared around in shock for the source of the voice.
Which now said, “What can I do for you?”
The phone. Dortmunder got it at last; the phone had a loudspeaker in it, that’s why it was called a speakerphone. So this was the writer talking.
But now it was Kelp talking, saying, “My name’s Andy… Kelly, and I want to tell you, I just read Normandie Triangle again, so that’s I think the third time, and it’s really terrific.”
“Well, thanks,” said the speakerphone. “Thanks a lot.”
“Now, the reason I happened to read it again,” Kelp went on, “is I have a friend with a summer house upstate on Parmalee Pond. You know Parmalee Pond?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” said the speakerphone. “A friend of mine has—”
“My friend,” Kelp said hastily, “just bought his place. He’s new there. And what he did, his first time up there, he went out in his rowboat and he was gonna take a picture of his house from the lake with this very expensive Nikon camera—”
“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.