Drowned Hopes (7 page)

“Maybe they forgot their keys,” Kelp suggested, and the door opened, and one of the Seven Dwarfs looked out. Well, no; a previously unknown Eighth Dwarf: Fatty.

“Come on in,” Fatty said, smiling wetly in welcome and gesturing them in with a stubby–fingered hand at the end of a stubby arm.

They went on in, and Kelp said, “Wally Knurr, these are my pals John and Tom.”

“Nice to meet you,” Fatty said. (No;
Wally
said. If I think of him as Fatty, Dortmunder told himself, sooner or later I’ll
call
him Fatty. Sure as anything. The best thing is, get rid of the risk right now.)

Wally’s living room looked like a discount dealer’s repair department, with display terminals and printers and keyboards and memory units and floppy disks all over the place, sitting on tables, on wooden chairs, on windowsills, on the floor. One little space had not as yet been invaded, this space containing a sofa, a couple of mismatched chairs, a couple of lamps, and a coffee table with a tray of cheese and crackers on it. Pointing to this latter, Wally said, “I put out some cheese and crackers here. Would you all like a Coke? Beer?”

“I want,” Tom Jimson told him, “to see this reservoir thing you did.”

Wally blinked, undergoing the normal human reaction to the presence of Tom Jimson, and Kelp moved in smoothly, saying, “We’re all excited to see this, Wally. We’ll sit around afterward, okay? I mean, to do all this in
five days.
Wow, Wally.”

Wally ducked his head, giggling with embarrassed pleasure. Looking at him, Dortmunder wondered just how old the little guy was. In some ways he was a grown–up, if not very
far
up, but in other ways be was like a grade–school kid. However old he was, though, Kelp sure knew how to handle him, because Wally immediately forgot all about his cheese and crackers and said, “Oh, sure, of course you want to see that. Come on.”

He led them across to a complete PC system on its own desk, with a worn–looking cushioned swivel chair in front. Seating himself at this, he massaged his pudgy fingers together for an instant, like a concert pianist, and then began to play the machine.

Jesus, that was something. Dortmunder had never seen anything like it, not even at a travel agency. The little man hunched over the keyboard, eyes fixed on the screen while his fingers led their own existence down below, poking, sliding, jumping, tap–dancing over the keys. And after a preliminary few displays of columns of numbers, or of masses of words that went by too fast to be read, here came a picture.

The valley. The valley as it was before the dam was built, seen from just above the highest hilltop to its south. The picture wasn’t realistic, was very cartoony, with dividing lines that were too regular and right–angled, perspective that was just a little off, and all primary colors (mostly green), but it was damn effective anyway. You looked at that TV screen and you knew you were looking at an actual valley from the air. “Hmm,” Dortmunder said.

“Now, your town,” Wally said, his sausage fingers moving on the keys, “was Putkin’s Corners. The big one.”

“County seat,” Tom said.

Dortmunder, turning his head to look at Tom’s profile, realized that even he was impressed, though, being Tom, he’d rather kill than admit it.

On the screen, the valley was in motion. Or the observer was, moving in closer and lower, the valley turning slightly as they descended, showing squared–off bits of red and yellow that were becoming the buildings of a town. The predominant green of the valley made no effort to imitate trees, but was simply a green carpet with topographical markings faintly visible on it.

I’ve seen this kind of thing on television, Dortmunder thought, as the screen showed the town growing larger and larger, the buildings all turning slowly at once as the perspective altered. As though they were in a cartoon helicopter over this cartoon landscape, circling lower, coming in on the town from above.

“That’s pretty much what it looked like, all right,” Tom said. “Only cleaner.”

Keeping eyes on the screen and fingers on the keys, Wally explained, “I input photographs from the local newspaper. I think I got just about everything we need in your part of town. You’re the one who hid the treasure, I bet.”

Tom, cold eyes flashing, said, “Treasure?”

Smiling easily, Kelp said, “
You
remember, Tom. The treasure hunt.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tom said.

Kelp had explained his scam before they’d come here. The idea was, an unnamed friend of Kelp’s — now revealed to Wally as Tom Jimson — had been involved in a treasure hunt with friends in upstate New York years and years ago and had buried a clue to the treasure in that spot behind the library. The treasure hunt was completed and the treasure itself found, but nobody had come up with that one clue, which was forgotten all about at the time.

Soon afterward, as the yarn went, Tom had gone away — cough, cough — and had not been back to this part of the world for many years. On his recent return, finding the reservoir now in place where Putkin’s Corners had once stood, Tom had remembered that unfound clue — a valuable diamond ring around a rolled sheet of cryptic doggerel poetry hidden in a box — and was amused (
Tom Jimson! Amused!
) at the idea of its still being hidden there, beneath so much water.

When Tom had told Kelp the anecdote of the buried clue, as Kelp’s cover story continued, Kelp had bet him that the new wonder of the time, the PC — our age’s genie–out–of–the–bottle — could show how the clue might be salvaged. Tom had accepted the bet, with a two–week time limit to come up with a solution. If Kelp — and Wally — solved the problem, and the diamond ring was actually salvaged from its watery grave, Tom would sell it and share the proceeds with Kelp, who would share with Wally. If Kelp — and Wally — failed, Kelp alone would have to pay Tom an unspecified but probably pretty substantial sum of money. Before accepting the bet, Kelp had talked it over with Wally, who had assured him the PC was every bit as magical and useful as Kelp believed. In fact, Wally had volunteered (as Kelp had expected he would) to do the reservoir program himself. And so here they all were.

In a cartoon helicopter hovering over a cartoon town. Wally said, “That’s County Hall, isn’t it?”

“Right,” said Tom. “With the library next to it.”

The cartoon helicopter
swooped
around the wooden dome of County Hall, and Dortmunder’s stomach did a little lurch, as though he were on a roller coaster. “Take it a little slower, okay?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Wally said, and the cartoon helicopter slowed, hanging in the air over the County Hall dome, looking toward the low red brick library building. “It’s behind that?”

“Right,” said Tom.

Wally’s fingers moved, and so did the cartoon helicopter, approaching the library. “I couldn’t find any photos of that area back there,” Wally explained apologetically, “so I didn’t put any details in. I have the size of the field, though, from surveyor’s plats.”

“It was just a field,” Tom said. “The idea was, they were supposed to blacktop it for a parking lot for the library, but they didn’t.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom? What if they’d changed their mind later? Water; blacktop; you’d still be under something. And they would have dug everything up first before they made a parking lot.”

“I knew somebody at the library,” Tom said, lips not moving and eyes not turning from the terminal screen, where the cartoon helicopter rounded the side of the library building and looked at a blank tan rectangle of field, with the backs of stores across the way. “She told me,” he went on, “they gave up the parking lot idea. Spent the money on books.”

“Huh,” Dortmunder said. “All of it?”

Wally, hovering his helicopter over the expanse of blank tan, said, “Do you know exactly where the clue was buried?”

“I can show you,” Tom said, “if you put in the streetlights.”

“I put in everything,” Wally told him, “that was in the photos.”

“Okay, then. There’s one spot back there where you can’t see any of the three streetlights. The one next to the library, the one in front of County Hall, and the one on the other block by the stores.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Wally said, and eased the helicopter down onto the tan field for a landing, where it swiveled upward over a span of ninety degrees and altered itself into the eyes of a person standing on the field, looking at the rear of the library. Wally’s fingers moved, and the person turned slightly to the right to look past the library toward County Hall.

“There’s the streetlight,” Tom said. “Move forward a little.”

The person did, at Wally’s direction, and the thin pole of the streetlight — a cartoon streetlight, just sketched in — disappeared behind the corner of the library.

“This is some goddamn piece of work,” Tom said, leaning closer over Wally’s head. “Let’s take a look to the left.” The angle of vision moved leftward, past the library. “Good,” Tom said. “No streetlight. Now the other way.”

The person in the field turned all the way around, buildings sliding past in distorted perspective, as in a funhouse mirror, while Dortmunder’s stomach did that lurch again. And there was the low row of stores, facing the other way, and between two of them appeared another stick–figure streetlight.

His grim voice hushed, Tom said, “Back up a little, and to the right.”

Wally did it. The stores shifted; the streetlight disappeared.

“Right
there!
” Tom crowed, his mouth all the way open for once. “Right goddamn
there!
”

“He says,” Tom Jimson answered, his thin lips immobile, “the tunnel won’t work.”

“I know that, I know that,” Kelp admitted, brushing it aside, or at least trying to brush it aside. “That isn’t the —”

“Them graphics looked pretty good,” Tom Jimson added, nodding with satisfaction.

The graphics, as a matter of fact, had looked far too graphic. Wally, his fingers scampering like escaped sausages over the keys, had described to them how he’d presented the salvage operation problem to the computer, and how he’d input the tunnel option, and then he’d shown them what the computer thought of the various potential tunnel routes.

Not much. In beautiful blue and brown and green, the computer thought the routes were watery graves, every last one of them. Down would angle the tunnel, a beige tube eating its way into existence through the milk chocolate beneath and beside the baby–blanket–blue cross–section of the reservoir, inching cautiously but hungrily toward that tiny black cube of “treasure” placed just beneath the center of the blue mass like an abandoned novel under a fat man in a blue canvas chair, and sooner or later, at some horrible point in the trajectory, a crack would appear above the tunnel, a fissure, a seam, a funnel–shaped crevice, a swiftly broadening yawn, and in no time at all that ecru esophagus would fill right up with blue.

At that point, despite himself, Kelp’s throat would close. Every time. Which had made it difficult to take much part in the immediately ensuing conversation about non–tunnel alternatives, so that it was only now he could say, casually, throwing it away, “Forget the tunnel. The tunnel was never a big deal. That was just to feed the old creative juices, get us thinking about ways that
will
work.”

“Like,” said Tom Jimson.

“Like we’ll find it,” Kelp assured him. “We didn’t come up with anything
yet,
that’s perfectly true, but old Wally and his computer, they’ll —”

“Hmp,” said Dortmunder.

Whoops; another precinct heard from. They had just stopped at the curb at Eleventh Avenue to wait for the light to change, so Kelp leaned forward to look past the stone outcropping of Tom Jimson’s face at the rubble outcropping of Dortmunder’s face, and what he saw there told him his old friend John was not entirely happy. “John?” Kelp said. “What’s the problem?”

“Nothing,” Dortmunder said, and stepped out in front of a cab that, up till then, had thought it was going to beat the light. As the cabby stuck his head out his side window and began to make loud remarks, Kelp and Tom Jimson stepped off the curb after Dortmunder, Tom pausing to look at the cabby, who at once decided he’d made his point and, with dignity, retracted his head back inside his vehicle.

Meantime, Kelp, pursuing Dortmunder, said, “John? I don’t get it. What’s wrong?”

Dortmunder muttered something. Kelp hurried to overtake him and heard the last part: “ — was the planner.”

“The planner?” Kelp echoed. “Yeah? What about it?”

Reaching the far corner, Dortmunder turned and said it all over again, out loud: “I was always under the impression, myself, that
I
was the planner.”

“Well, sure you are, John,” Kelp said, as Tom Jimson joined them and they resumed their walk east. “Sure you’re the planner. None better.” Kelp even appealed to Tom: “Isn’t that right?”

“That’s his rep,” Tom agreed.

“I’ve put together a lot of jobs in my time,” Dortmunder said.

“Of course you have, John,” Kelp said.

“Sometimes things go wrong, a little wrong,” Dortmunder said. “I freely admit that.”

“Luck, pure luck,” Kelp assured him.

“But the
plan
is good,” Dortmunder insisted. “I defy you, show me once when I put together a string of events that wasn’t the
best
when it comes to you get in, you get the goods, you get out.”

“I can’t,” Kelp admitted. “You win that one, John, I can’t come up with even one.”

“And all without a computer,” Dortmunder finished, with heavy emphasis.

“John, John,” Kelp said, while Tom looked a little confused by this turn of events, “the computer doesn’t take your
place,
John. The computer’s a
tool,
that’s all, like a pair of pliers, like a jimmy, a lockpick, a, a, a …”

“Over–and–under shotgun,” Tom suggested.

“Okay,” Kelp said, though reluctantly. “A tool,” he repeated to Dortmunder. “There’s some safes, you know? You drill a little hole next to the combination, you know the kind?”

“I know the kind,” Dortmunder agreed, though still stony–faced.

“Well, the drill,” Kelp said, “the drill doesn’t take your
place,
John, it’s just an aid, kind of. I mean, it’s easier than poking a hole through a half inch of steel with your finger, that’s all.”

“Back there right now,” Dortmunder said, “where we just came from, this drill of yours with the TV screen attached to it is thinking up
plans.
”

“For your consideration, John,” Kelp said. “For you to say yes or no.
You’re
the guy in charge.”

“In charge of what? A machine and a guy that isn’t even on the inside, this Wally of yours that we can’t even trust with the right story.”

“Oh, you can trust Wally,” Kelp assured him. “You can trust Wally to be very involved in the
problem,
and not worry his little soft head about what’s going on in the real world at all.”

“He better not,” Tom said.

“I’m the guy who does the plan,” Dortmunder insisted.

They were at Tenth Avenue already; you walk faster when you’re arguing. Stopping, waiting for the light to change, they all took a little breather, and then Tom said, “So we’re ahead, right? We got three people doin plans, so that’s even more chance to come up with the right one.”

Kelp, convinced there were quagmires ahead, but unable to keep from following the trail Tom had just indicated, said, “Three people, Tom?”

“Well, two people and a thing,” Tom amended. “Al here’s gonna think about plans —”

“You’re damn right I am,” Dortmunder said.

“And your little round fella’s machine is gonna think about plans —”

“Hmph,” said Dortmunder.

“And, of course, there’s me,” Tom said with an almost pleasant look. “But I’ve already got
my
plan.”

“That’s right,” Kelp said with a meaningful look at Dortmunder. “Wally and his computer aren’t the problem, John,” he said.