coming and leaped straight from his chair into the ocean; the bank, en passant,
flipped his chair after him. He had been the only occupant of the pier, which now
the bank had to itself.
“Make it stop!” Kelp cried as Victor slammed the Packard to a halt at the
beginning of the pier. “We’ve got to make it stop!”
“No way,” Victor said. “There’s just no way.”
The two of them sat in the Packard and watched the bank roll inexorably out
along the rumbling boards of the pier to the very end and quietly, undramatically,
roll off the outer edge and drop like a stone into the water.
Kelp groaned.
“One thing,” Victor said. “It was beautiful to watch.”
“Victor,” Kelp said. “Do me one favor. Don’t say that to Dortmunder.”
Victor looked at him. “No?”
“He wouldn’t understand,” Kelp said.
“Oh.” Victor looked out the windshield again. “I wonder how deep it is out
there,” he said.
“Why?”
“Well, maybe we could swim down to it and get the rest of the money.”
Kelp gave him a pleased smile. “You’re right,” he said. “If not today, maybe
sometime when the sun’s shining.”
“And it’s warmer.”
“Right.”
“Unless,” Victor said, “someone else sees it there and reports it.”
“Say,” Kelp said, frowning out the windshield again. “There was somebody
on the pier.”
“There was?”
“A fisherman, in a yellow raincoat.”
“I didn’t see him.”
“We better take a look.”
The two of them got out of the car and walked through the rain out onto the
pier. Kelp looked over the edge and saw the man in the yellow raincoat climbing
up the scaffolding along the side. “Let me give you a hand,” he called and knelt
to reach down to him.
The fisherman looked up. His face looked astonished. He said, “You won’t
believe what happened. I don’t believe it myself.”
Kelp helped him up onto the pier. “We saw it go,” he said. “A runaway
trailer.”
“It just come right along,” the fisherman said, “and threw me in the ocean.
Lost my chair, lost my tackle, damn near lost myself.”
“You kept your hat anyway,” Victor pointed out. “Tied under my chin,” the
fisherman said. “Was there anybody in that thing?”
“No, it was empty,” Kelp said.
The fisherman looked down at himself. “My wife told me,” he said. “She said
this wasn’t no day to fish. I’ll be goddamned if she wasn’t right for once.”
“Just so you didn’t get hurt,” Kelp said.
“Hurt?” The fisherman grinned. “Listen,” he said. “I come out of this with the
kind of fish story you just can’t top. I wouldn’t care if I got a broken leg out of
it.”
“You didn’t, did you?” Victor asked.
The fisherman stomped his booted feet on the planks of the pier; they
squished. “Hell, no,” he said. “Fit as a fiddle.” He sneezed. “Except I do believe
I’m coming down with pneumonia.”
“Maybe you ought to get home,” Kelp said. “Get into some dry things.”
“Bourbon,” the fisherman said. “That’s what I need.” He glanced away
toward the end of the pier. “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” he said and sneezed
again and went off shaking his head.
“Let’s take a look,” Kelp said. He and Victor walked out to the end of the
pier and stared down into the rain-spattered water. “I don’t see it,” Kelp said.
“Here it is. See it?”
Kelp looked where Victor was pointing. “Right,” he said, catching a glimpse
of the thing, like a blue-and-white whale down there in the water. Then he
frowned, peering at it, and said, “Hey, it’s moving.”
“It is?”
The two of them squinted in silence for ten seconds or so, and then Victor
said, “You’re right. It’s the undertow, taking it away.”
“I don’t believe it,” Kelp said.
Victor looked back toward shore. “Here comes the rest of them,” he said.
Kelp reluctantly turned and saw the other five getting out of the horse van.
They came trailing out onto the pier, Dortmunder in the lead. Kelp put a sickly
smile on his face and waited.
Dortmunder came up and looked into the water. “I don’t suppose you two
are out here for a tan,” he said.
“No,” said Kelp.
Dortmunder nodded at the water. “It went in there, right?”
“That’s right,” Kelp said. “You can see it…” He pointed, then frowned. “No,
you can’t any more.”
Victor said, “It’s moving.”
“Moving,” Dortmunder echoed.
“Coming down the hill,” Victor said, “the wind shut the doors again. I don’t
suppose it’s completely airtight, but it is closed up pretty good, and it must have
just enough air in it to make it buoyant enough not to be stuck in the mud or the
sand on the bottom. So the undertow’s moving it.”
The others had come up by now. May said, “You mean it’s going away?”
“That’s right,” Victor said.
Kelp felt Dortmunder looking at him but wouldn’t acknowledge it. He kept
staring into the water instead.
Murch’s Mom said, “Where’s it going to?”
“France,” Dortmunder said.
Herman said, “You mean it’s gone for good? After all that work?”
“Well, we got some of the money anyway,” Kelp said and looked around
with the sickly smile on his face again. But Dortmunder was already walking
away along the pier toward the shore. One by one, the others followed him, and
the rain rained down all around.
31
“TWENTY-THREE thousand, eight hundred twenty dollars,” Dortmunder
said and sneezed.
They were all in the apartment, his and May’s. Everybody had changed
clothes, with May and Murch’s Mom both in clothing belonging to May, and all
five men in Dortmunder’s clothes. They were also all sneezing, and May had
brewed up a lot of tea with whiskey in it.
“Twenty-three, almost twenty-four thousand,” Kelp said brightly. “It could
have been worse.”
“Yes,” Dortmunder said. “It could have been Confederate money.”
Murch sneezed and said, “How much is that apiece?”
Dortmunder said, “First we pay off the financier. That’s eight thousand,
leaving fifteen thousand, eight hundred twenty. Divided by seven, that’s two
thousand, two hundred sixty bucks apiece.”
Murch made a face as though something smelled bad. “Two thousand dollars?
That’s all?”
Herman and Murch’s Mom sneezed simultaneously.
“We’ll spend more than that in medical bills,” Dortmunder said.
Victor said, “Still, we did the job, you have to admit that. You can’t call it a
failure.”
“I can if I want to,” Dortmunder said.
“Have some more tea,” said May.
Kelp sneezed.
“Two thousand dollars,” Herman said, and blew his nose. “I spill that much.”
They were all in the living room, sitting around the money, the charred bills
and wet bills and good bills all stacked in different piles on the coffee table. The
apartment was warm and dry, but the smell of wet clothes and disaster filled the
air from the bedroom.
Murch’s Mom sighed. “I’ll have to start wearing that brace again,” she said.
“You lost it,” her son told her accusingly. “You left it in the bank.”
“So we’ll buy a new one.”
“Another expense.”
“Well,” Kelp said, “I guess we might as well divvy the loot and go on home.”
“Divvy the loot,” Dortmunder echoed and looked at the paper on the coffee
table. “You got an eye dropper?”
“It isn’t that bad,” Kelp said. “We didn’t come out of it empty-handed.”
Victor got to his feet and stretched and said, “I suppose this would be more
like a celebration if we’d gotten the rest of the money.”
Dortmunder nodded. “You could say that.”
They split up the cash and departed, everybody promising to send back the
borrowed clothes and reclaim their own. Left to themselves, Dortmunder and
May sat on the sofa and looked at the four thousand, five hundred twenty
dollars left on the coffee table. They sighed. Dortmunder said, “Well, it did give
me something to think about, I have to admit it.”
“The worst thing about a cold,” May said, “is the way it makes the cigarettes
taste.” She plucked the ember from the corner of her mouth and flipped it into
an ashtray but didn’t light a new one. “You want some more tea?”
“I still got some.” He sipped at the tea and frowned. “What’s the percentage
of tea and whiskey in this thing?”
“About half and half.”
He drank a little more. The warm steam curled around his nostrils. “You
better brew up another pot,” he said.
She nodded, starting to smile. “Right,” she said.
32
“IT’S on the Island,” Captain Deemer said. “It’s somewhere on this goddam
Island.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Hepplewhite said, but faintly.
“And I’m going to find it.”
“Yes, sir.”
The two of them were alone in the unmarked patrol car, a black Ford, radio-equipped. The captain was driving, and the lieutenant was beside him. The
captain hunched over the wheel, his eyes constantly moving as he drove back
and forth and up and down and all over Long Island.