“You, tooand you, son, and Michael. You haven’t seen Doc, have you? He’s the only one missing now. No?”
For a moment it looked like Dean was going to hug him, but he checked himself. Instead, he tugged at his father’s sleeve.
“Dad?”
“What?”
“Krysty said ‘fuck’ down at the bottom.”
Ryan smiled. “No! Then I guess I’ll have to wash her mouth out with”
Then it all started to happen.
Chapter Eleven
At that moment Doc had arrived at the bottom of the elevator shaft and was peering with a scholarly interest at the control panel.
“What a world of choice we have here. Colors, letters and numbers. If I had my calculator with me, I could work out the odds against reaching the correct code, which odds I believe must be positively astronomical. But since I do not have it, then I needs must return to the infernal gateway and But soft!” He placed a melodramatic finger to his lips. “What sequence is writ on yonder wall?”
A touch of rheumatism in his fingers made Doc a little clumsy at punching in the key buttons. Twice he made mistakes and the display panel admonished him. The second time it warned that a third error would result in “Availability termination and security-force contact being made.”
Tongue protruding between his lips with the effort of concentration, Doc carefully followed the handwritten instructions and became the fifth person in the past ninety minutes to use the ten-symbol code.
He leaned on the sword stick, feeling peculiarly nonchalant. Waiting for the elevator took him back to the time that he and his lost wife, Emily, had stayed at the luxurious hotel on Sixth Avenuethe name escaped him. That had been one of the first times that either of them had ever come across such an ultramodern invention, and they had ridden up and down in it for half an hour, giggling like children, to the considerable irritation of the hotel’s other guests.
A dimly heard bell told him that it had arrived, and he waited for the door to open, rapping on the metal with the silver lion’s head on the top of the cane.
“Come on, my good fellow.” He noticed the Open Doors button and pressed it.
The large cage was empty and he stepped into it, looking back to make sure that no other elegantly attired ladies or gentlemen were about to join him.
But there was nobody.
“To Del Marco’s excellent dinery at the top of the tower,” he said, “where my wife and I propose to imbibe a bottle of your best Haut Brion and dine on the finest mutton with some of your famous wow-wow sauce.”
He used the ferrule of the stick to press the button that closed the door and set the elevator off on its long climb to the upper level of the redoubt.
“Going up. First floor, soft goods and everything in draperies and bed linen. Second floor. The department for the layette and the trousseau. Babies and brides. Third floor, hunting, shooting and fishing. Fourth floor, toys for all ages.” He grinned to himself, showing his amazingly perfect teeth, glittering in the dulled steel walls of the cage.
The steady upward progress continued.
“Going up for gentlemen’s outfitting and the tonsorial department. Ladies’ lingerie, going down.”
A delicate blush crept across Doc’s wrinkled cheeks, and he shuffled his feet like a little boy caught peeking through the outhouse door.
“Sorry, Emily, my dove,” he whispered. “I suffered a slip of the tongue, dearest. I promise that such bawdry will not pass my lips again.”
The ride seemed to have been going on forever, and Doc rocked back and forth on his heels, checking that it was still ascending.
“Why, here we are at our destination, Emily. I confess to being a trifle peckish.”
He pushed the button to open the door, part of his mind expecting to find himself looking at an ornate lobby with red velvet curtains and crystal chandeliers, a throng of elegant boulevardiers parading before them, with a bewigged flunkey in a frogged brocade coat and knee breeches bowing unctuously to greet Emily and himself to the restaurant.
Doc was busy pasting on a patronizing smile, ready to slip a silver dollar to the man to make sure they got a really good table near the orchestra and a long way off from the door to the kitchens.