"Krrawk murrkagl mornt?" The small, nervous voice that gurgled back out of the grille might possibly have been human.
"Hello? I have a safe-deposit box here, I think?"
After a few moments, the door buzzed. He popped it open, found himself in a dark stair-lobby, and walked up the steps. The door on the first floor landing was open. A plump young woman with pale, straight hair stood there, waiting nervously. "Did you say you have safe-deposit?" She had a bit of an accent, perhaps Eastern European.
"Yes. It was part of my mother's estate, given to her by her uncle, a man named Dowd." He handed her the letter and the passbook. "You can see for yourself. He had a regular savings account here, too." He held up the key. "The box number is 612."
"Oh." She said it as though he had just informed her nuclear war would begin at any moment. "Oh, no."
"What?"
She shook her head. "Mr. Root, he is not here." But she turned and led him through the door.
If it was a bank lobby, it was the strangest, smallest one he'd ever seen. The whole room was about the size of a Victorian parlor, and similarly decorated. Pictures of stern-looking men in antique black suits hung on the wall, surrounded by dusty baroque frames; in such a cramped room they seemed almost to be leaning in on top of visitors. Four clocks showing different times were displayed in a row on the wall, but instead of the usual London, Tokyo, and other financial centers, the plaques beneath the old-fashioned faces read Glastonbury, Carcassone, Alexandria, and Persepolis. Was it a musty old joke of some kind? He'd heard of most of them, but he wasn't sure why anyone would care what time it was in any of those places. There were a few other pieces of office equipment, but none of them appeared to be a great deal more recent than the Age of Steam, except for some kind of huge teletype machine with a table all to itself near the back of the room, which looked like it might have been state of the art during the Second World War.
"Do you still have the safe-deposit boxes?"
She nodded eagerly. "Oh yes. In back rooms." She gestured at the rear wall and the door there, flanked by portraits of two frowning patriarchs.
"And when will this Mr. Rude be back?"
"No, Root — like tree, yes? But I don't know." Her pleasure at being able to confirm the existence of the boxes had dissolved, plunging her into anxiety once more. "He comes in not very much. Maybe Friday? Maybe Monday?"
Theo looked around again. A stuffed crow stood in a glass case just behind the room's front door. "And you're just here by yourself the rest of the time?"
Now her slightly bovine features took on a look of alarm. "Not alone. There are other people in other offices — next door, there is Pan-Pacific Novelties."
"I don't mean any harm, I just… it seems weird. I mean, this is a bank, right? I've never seen a bank that looked like this."
She shrugged. "Most of customers very old, I think. They don't come here. Used to be very busy, this place, but years are gone. Now most of banking done by telephone, by fax." She pointed first at the rotary-dial phone, then at the massive piece of machinery Theo had noticed earlier. "Mostly I just answer questions."
"Questions? Like… ?"
She flushed, and was suddenly a much prettier girl. "Like, is fax machine on?"
He felt guilty for giving her the third degree. It wasn't her fault she was working for a company that was probably a front for some bizarre offshore money-laundering scheme. "Sorry. Let me just get into the box and I'll let you get back to your work."
"Get into box?"
"Yes. You said they're in the back, right? The safety-deposit boxes?"
"But Mr. Root not here."
"I don't need a loan or anything. There's a box in there that originally belonged to my mother's uncle. It's mine now. I've got the letter where he gave it to her, and I've got a photocopy of her letter making me executor of her estate, and I've got the key to the box. That's how these things work." He started toward the door at the back of the cramped room. "Back here, right?"
She flapped her hands a little and looked at the heavy old dial phone as if considering calling her absent boss to come save her from this madman who actually wanted to use the Traveler's Bank as a bank.
Or maybe she's thinking about stunning me with that ten-pound bakelite receiver if I get any farther out of line.
If the front room was dark and old-fashioned, Theo thought that the back room made it look like a pop-art painting by comparison. The only light came from a nest of wires which had once underpinned a spherical paper shade, the naked bulb now exposed in their midst like a glowing sun at the center of a medieval orrery. There were shelves and shelves of long, narrow boxes, but most of them seemed to be the bank's records, cartons stuffed with three-by-five cards lettered by hand.
"Mr. Root, he wants to get someone to put all this in computer," the girl said apologetically.
Theo tried hard not to laugh at the thought of some poor bastard having to do the data entry for what looked like a perfectly preserved nineteenth-century fiscal institution. If this was not the back room for Scrooge and Marley, it was a damn good imitation. "Just show me the safe-deposit boxes, please."
The metal boxes had several shelves of their own near the back, with a strip of carpet and a very old swivel chair set up for the convenience of whatever Bob Cratchit had to work with them. Theo found 612, sat down with it in his lap, and wiggled the key back and forth several times without success. The problem was an old lock, not the wrong key: after a few more tries the key scraped past whatever grit had impeded it and the lock opened. Theo would not have been surprised to see a cloud of dust billow up out of the box, as though he had unsealed Tutankhamen's tomb.
Instead of gold or jewels — not that he'd been counting on either — he found only a leather-bound notebook.
He said good-bye to the flustered young woman and walked down the stairs, the fairy-tale reader in him half-expecting to discover that his dozen minutes inside had really been a dozen hours, that he would find the moon high in the sky and the nighttime neighborhood deserted, but outside the front door it was still prosaic afternoon. He stepped out of tiny Duende Street and headed back toward his motorcycle, the sun glaring flatly and the wind curling up the steep road, carrying the scent of the bay to him as it tugged at his hair and clothes.
He went to a Denny's to get an early dinner, and while he waited for his turkey sandwich he sugared his coffee and opened the notebook.
Eamonn Dowd's cramped script was easier to read now, either because Theo was becoming used to it or because the piece of writing he had labeled an attempt at fiction had been produced in less hurried circumstances than the letter he had sent to his niece. From the opening lines it read more like autobiography than a novel, but that was well within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition that seemed to have been more comfortable for Dowd than something closer to his own era. Theo wondered when his great-uncle had been born, working back from Grandmother Dowd's death in the early 1980s. If he was one of her older brothers, especially by as much as fifteen years — not impossible in such a large family — he could have been born in the late 1890s, which would make his literary influences fairly reasonable.
The 1890s. By the time he read Hemingway for the first time, he would already have been at least as old as me.
It also meant that the "journey from which there would be no returning" he was referring to in 1971 probably meant his own natural death.