“Myrtle, say yes.”
“Doug…”
“Say yes.”
“Doug…”
“Say yes.”
“Ououououououououghhh…”
“Say yesssssssssss…”
“Yesssssssssss…”
He was up on his feet, holding her hand in his, drawing her up beside him. His smile was gentle and loving, his body so strong. “Yes,” he said, and turned them both toward the front door.
“There you are, Doug, goddammit!”
They spun around, and Myrtle’s heart leaped with fear. An extremely angry man, a stranger, stood at the top of the stoop, glaring at Doug.
Who knew him. “John!” he cried in absolute stunned astonishment.
“I hate your answering machine, Doug,” the angry man said. “I just want you to know that. I have a deep personal dislike for that answering machine of yours, and if I’m ever near it with a baseball bat in my hands, that’s it.”
“John, I, I, I…”
What is going on? But Myrtle couldn’t even ask the question, could only stand there, romance forgotten, her body forgotten, and stare from Doug’s ashen amazed face to the other man’s darker angrier unloving face.
“Never mind, ‘I, I, I,’ ” said this unloving face, and the man made a quick impatient sweeping gesture like a traffic cop. “Come on. We gotta talk.”
“John, I— Now? John, I can’t, I—”
“Yes, now! What’s so goddamn important that you can’t—”
“John, will ya?”
Oh! Face burning, Myrtle pulled her hand free from Doug’s, turned blindly, groped for the door, pulled it open, and flung herself into the house as behind her Doug said to the angry man, “John, I’ll never forgive you for this in my entire—”
Slam. Tottering, weaving, Myrtle staggered to the living room and dropped into the nearest chair. Through the front windows she could see them out there, both gesturing, the angry man not letting up, Doug finally assenting, shrugging, shaking his head, turning for one last lost look at the front door—Oh, Doug, how could you? How could you let us be interrupted, let that moment be broken? — before, with obvious reluctance, he followed the angry man off the stoop and across Myrtle Street and up the Fleischbacker’s driveway over there and on out of sight.
It wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when she was calmer, when she’d already had one cup of tea and was sipping a second, when she was already remembering that her involvement with Doug in the first place was because he was a mystery she was trying to solve, that the thought suddenly came to her:
I’ve seen that man somewhere before.
FIFTY-FIVE
Doug basically felt like a person with the bends. He’d never himself had the bends, having always been a careful and professional diver, but the condition had been described to him, and the description fit his current condition to a tee: nausea, anxiety, disorientation, physical pain. That was him, all right.
And to think how happy he’d been just instants before, in the arms of Myrtle Street, rounding the far turn and galloping for home at long, long last. What a wonderful distraction Myrtle had been from his search for John and Andy, from his watch on the Vilburgtown Reservoir; as an excuse to keep visiting Dudson Center she couldn’t be improved on.
In some ways, the pursuit of Myrtle Street had become as important to Doug as his pursuit of John and Andy and the seven hundred thousand dollars from the armored car robbery. And then, just as the one pursuit seemed to be coming to its warm and beautiful and successful close, the other pursuit had made a totally unexpected about-face, the pursued had become the pursuer, and at the worst possible moment in the history of the world, there was John!
Looking back on it all afterward, Doug recalled that traumatic day only in quick bytes, short periods of lucidity floating in a dark menacing swirl of queasiness and panic. And beginning with a living room full of people, men and women, all of them strangers to him except John and Andy, and all of them for some reason very angry with him.
Particularly one mean-looking old guy in a chair in a corner. While everybody else was still shouting, this guy kept saying, quietly and dispassionately, “Kill him.”
Kill him? Kill me? Doug stared around at all these cold faces, swallowing compulsively, afraid that if he threw up it would only give them more reason to kill him.
It was Andy who responded to the mean old guy first, saying, “I almost agree with you this time, Tom.”
Oh, Andy! Doug cried in his mind, but he was too frightened and sick to say anything out loud, not even to save his life. Andy, Andy, Andy, he cried inside himself, I taught you to dive!
But John was saying, “We need him, Tom,” and thank God for that. Even though John didn’t sound at all happy to have to say it; no, nor did he sound entirely convinced that what he was saying was true.
And the mean old guy—Tom—said, “What’s he doing up in this neck of the woods? Long Island boy. He followed you, John, you and Andy. He’s on to the caper. He wants the dough for himself.”
Teeth chattering, Doug found voice at last, saying, “I, I, I, I got a girlfriend, she’s M-M-Myrtle St-St-Street.”
“That’s the next block over,” said a short blunt angry woman in a flannel shirt.
“No-no-no,” Doug stammered, “that’s her, that’s her—”
“His girlfriend can put flowers on his grave,” Tom said. Then he smiled very unpleasantly at Doug and said to the others, “He’s a diver, right? Let’s take him to the reservoir, see how he dives with weights around his neck.”
“We need him to get the money,” John said.
“I don’t,” Tom said.
The other woman in the room, taller, calmer, said, “Tom, you’re letting John do it his way, remember?”
Tom shrugged. “You like this diver?” he asked John. “You want this diver in our lives?”
The other fellow present, a red-haired jaunty guy who looked as though he’d be an excellent street fighter, said, “Let’s see if he likes the deal. Make him the offer, John.”
Offer? “I accept!” Doug cried.
They all stared at him, too surprised to be mad; even Tom looked nearly human for a second. Andy, nodding, said, “That’s what I call low sales resistance.”
John, sounding almost sympathetic, said, “Listen to the offer first, Doug.”
“Okay,” Doug said. He still had to keep swallowing, and pinwheels had started to dance in his peripheral vision. But he would listen to the offer first, if that’s what he was supposed to do. Listen to the offer first.
“You know what we’re going for in the reservoir,” John said.
Panic again! “Oh! Well, uh—”
“We know you know,” John told him, sounding more irritable. “Don’t waste our time.”
“Okay,” Doug said. “Okay.”
“Okay. So here’s the story.”
Then John made the offer, something about this and that, and percentages, and diving, and Doug nodded all the way through the whole thing, and when John finally stopped talking and looked at him for a reaction, he smiled big at everybody in the room, smiling through his nausea, and he said, “Okay. Fine. I agree. It’s a deal. Where do I sign? Sounds fair to me. Hey, no problem. I’m with you. By all means. Sure! With pleasure. What’s to argue? Shake on it! You got a—”
“Oh, shut up,” said the short woman in the flannel shirt.
Then there was the drive to the city. The red-haired guy, whose name turned out to be Stan, drove Doug’s pickup, with Doug as his passenger, following Andy and John down the Thruway in a Cadillac Sedan da Fe with MD plates. (“Listen, I can drive,” Doug had said, but, “No, you can’t,” John had told him, so that was that.) Before leaving the house on Oak Street, a phone call had been made to somebody called Wally, and now they were all going to the city for this Wally to show Doug something. Sure; whatever you guys say.