"We're ready again," Kelp said and pulled a tattered list from his pocket. "This is the stuff we need."
"No helicopters this time, I hope."
"No, it's too far from New York. But we thought about it."
"I'm sure you did," the Major said dryly and took the list.
Kelp said, "Mind if I sink a couple?"
"Go ahead," the Major said and opened the sheet of paper.
Kelp picked up the cue, dropped the three, and the Major screamed, "A locomotive?"
Kelp nodded and put the cue down again. Turning to face the Major, he said, "Dortmunder thought there might be some question about that."
"Question!" The Major looked as though he'd been poleaxed.
"We don't actually need a big diesel locomotive," Kelp said. "What we need is something that runs on standard gauge tracks under its own power. But it's got to be bigger than a handcar."
"Bigger than a handcar," the Major said. He backed up till his legs hit a chair, on which he sat. The list hung forgotten in his hand.
"Chefwick is our railroad expert," Kelp said. "So if you want to talk things over with him, he'll let you know exactly what we need."
"Of course," the Major said.
"He could come over tomorrow afternoon," Kelp suggested.
"Of course," the Major said.
"If you could have your own people ready by then. For him to talk to."
"Of course," the Major said.
Kelp frowned at him. "You okay, Major?"
"Of course," the Major said.
Kelp went over and waved his hand in front of the Major's eyes. They didn't change, they kept staring at some point in the middle of the room. Kelp said, "Maybe I oughta give you a call later on. When you're feeling better."
"Of course," the Major said.
"It really isn't that big a locomotive we want," Kelp said. "Just a kind of a medium-size locomotive."
"Of course," the Major said.
"Well." Kelp looked around a little helplessly. "I'll call you later on," he said. "About when Chefwick should come over."
"Of course," the Major said.
Kelp backed to the doorway and hesitated there for a second, feeling the need to say something to buck the Major's spirits up a little. "Your pool is getting a lot better, Major," he said at last.
"Of course," the Major said.
5
Major Iko stood beside the truck, forehead furrowed with worry. "I've got to give this locomotive back," he said. "Don't lose it, don't hurt it. I have to give it back, it's only borrowed."
"You'll get it back," Dortmunder assured him. He checked his watch and said, "We've got to get going."
"Be careful with the locomotive," the Major pleaded. "That's all I ask."
Chefwick said, "You have my personal word of honor, Major, that no harm will come to this locomotive. I think you know my feeling about locomotives."
The Major nodded, somewhat reassured, but still worried. A muscle in his cheek was jumping.
'Time to go," Dortmunder said. "See you later, Major."
Murch would drive, of course, and Dortmunder sat in the cab beside him, while the other three got in back with the locomotive. The Major stood watching them, and Murch waved to him and drove the truck down the dirt road from the deserted farmhouse and out to the highway, where he turned north, away from New York and toward New Mycenae.
It was a very anonymous truck, with an ordinary red cab and a trailer completely swathed in olive drab tarpaulins, and no one they passed gave them a second look. But underneath the tarps lurked a very gaudy truck indeed, its sides combining brightly painted pictures of railroading scenes with foot-high red letters running the length of the trailer and reading, FUN ISLAND AMUSEMENT PARK - TOM THUMB. And underneath, in slightly smaller black lettering, The Famous Locomotive.
What strings the Major had pulled, what stories he'd told, what bribes he'd paid, what pressures he'd applied in order to get this locomotive, Dortmunder neither knew nor cared. He'd gotten it, that was all, within two weeks of the order having been placed, and now Dortmunder was going to go wipe that laugh from Attorney Prosker's face. Oh, yes, he would.
This was the second Sunday in October, sunny but cool, with little traffic on the secondary roads they were traveling, and they made good time to New Mycenae. Murch drove them through town and out the road toward the Clair de Lune Sanitarium. They rode on by, and Dortmunder glanced at it as they went past. Peaceful. Same two guards chatting at the main gate. Everything the same.
They traveled another three miles down the same road, and then Murch turned right. Half a mile later he pulled off to the side of the road and stopped, pulling on the handbrake but leaving the engine running. This was a woodsy, hilly area, without houses or other buildings. A hundred yards ahead stood a set of white crossbars, warning of a railroad crossing.
Dortmunder looked at his watch. "Due in four minutes," he said.
In the last two weeks, he and the others had been all over this territory, till they knew it now as well as they knew their own homes. They knew which roads were well traveled and which were generally empty. They knew where a lot of the dirt side roads went, they knew what the local police cars looked like and where they tended to spend their Sunday afternoons, they knew four or five good places in the neighborhood to hide out with a truck, and they knew the railroad schedule.
Better than the railroad did, evidently, because the train Dortmunder was waiting for was almost five minutes late. But at last they did hear it hooting in the distance, and then slowly it appeared and began to trundle by, the same passenger train Dortmunder and the others had ridden up here in two weeks ago.
"There's your window," Murch said and pointed at a holed window gliding by.
"I didn't think they'd fix it," Dortmunder said.
It takes a train quite a while to get itself entirely past a given point, particularly at seventeen miles an hour, but eventually the final car did go by and the road was once again clear. Murch looked at Dortmunder and said, "How long?"
"Give it a couple minutes."
They knew the next scheduled occupant of that track would be a southbound freight at nine-thirty tonight. During the week there were many trains going back and forth, both passenger and freight, but on Sundays most trains stayed home.
After a minute or two of silence, Dortmunder dropped his Camel butt on the truck floor and stepped on it. "We can go now," he said.
"Right." Murch put the truck in gear and eased forward to the tracks. He jockeyed back and forth till he was crosswise on the road, blocking it, and then Dortmunder got out and went around back to open the rear doors. Greenwood and Kelp at once began to push forward a long complicated boardlike object, a wide metal ramp with a set of railroad tracks on it. The far end clanged on the rails below, and Greenwood came down to help Dortmunder push and shove it till the ramp's tracks lined up with the railroad company's tracks. Then Greenwood waved to Kelp on the tailgate, who turned around and waved into the interior, and a few seconds later a locomotive came out.
And what a locomotive. This was Tom Thumb, the famous locomotive, or at any rate a replica of the famous Tom Thumb, the original of which, built for the Baltimore amp; Ohio back in 1830, was the first regularly working American-built steam locomotive. It looked just like all the old, old locomotives in Walt Disney movies and so did the replica, which was an exact copy of the original. Well, maybe not exactly exact, since there were one or two small differences, such as that the original Tom Thumb ran on steam from a coal-fired furnace while the replica ran on gasoline in an engine from a 1962 Ford. But it looked legit, that was the important thing, and who was going to carp about the thin putt-putt of smoke that snuck out the tailgate instead of the thick belch-belch of smoke that was supposed to issue from the funnel-mouth smokestack?