Drowned Hopes

“Well, none of you are that real, you know,” Tom explained. “It’s hard to get you into focus. So I read you wrong, I made a mistake, wasted a couple of days. Sorry about that, Al, I wasted your time, too.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder said, with the awful feeling he was missing some sort of point here.

“So we’ll drive back to the city,” Tom said. “You ready?”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said. “Sorry, Tom, I just can’t.”

“S’okay,” Tom said, crossing the road, Dortmunder following.

They got into the car, and Dortmunder said, “Do I U-turn?”

“Nah,” Tom said, “go on across the dam and then there’s a left, and we’ll go down through the valley and back to the Thruway like that.”

“Okay, fine.”

They drove across the rest of the dam, Dortmunder continuing to have this faintly uneasy feeling about the calm, gray, silent, ancient maniac seated beside him, and at the far end of the dam was a small stone building that was probably the entry to the offices down below. Dortmunder slowed, looking at it, and saw a big bronze seal, and a sign reading CITY OF NEW YORK—DEPT. OF WATER SUPPLY—CITY PROPERTY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “City property?” Dortmunder asked. “This is part of New York City up here?”

“Sure,” Tom said. “All the city reservoirs belong to the city.”

A New York City police car was one of three vehicles parked beside the building. Dortmunder said, “They have city cops?”

“The way I understand it,” Tom said, “it’s not duty that’s given to the sharpest and the quickest. But don’t worry about it, Al, you wanted out and you’re out. Let the next guy worry about New York City cops.”

Dortmunder gave him a look, feeling a sudden lurch in his stomach. “The next guy?”

“Naturally.” Tom shrugged. “You weren’t the only guy on the list,” he explained equably. “The first guy, but not the only. So now I’ll just have to find somebody with a little less milk in his veins, that’s all.”

Dortmunder’s foot came off the gas. “Tom, you mean you’re still go

Tom, mildly surprised, spread his hands. “Do I have my three hundred fifty grand? Has something changed I don’t know about?”

Dortmunder said, “Tom, you can’t drown all those people.”

“Sure I can,” Tom said. “You’re the one can’t. Remember?”

“But—” Just beyond the stone building, with the reservoir still barely visible behind them and the forest starting again on both sides of the road, Dortmunder came to a stop, pulling off onto the gravel verge and saying, “Tom, no.”

Tom scowled, without moving his lips. “Al,” he said. “I hope you aren’t going to tell me what I can do and what I can’t do.”

“It isn’t that, Tom,” Dortmunder said, although in fact it was that, and realizing it, Dortmunder also realized how hopeless this all was. “It’s just,” he said, despairing even as he heard himself say it, “it’s just you can’t do that, that’s all.”

“I can,” Tom said, colder than ever. “And I will.” That bony finger pointed at Dortmunder’s nose. “And you are not go

“No, no, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “I wouldn’t rat on you, you know me better than that.”

“And you know me better than that.” Looking out his side window at forest, Tom said, “So what’s with the delay? How come we aren’t whippin along the highway, headin back to the city, so I can make the call on the second guy on my list?”

“Because,” Dortmunder said, and licked his lips, and looked back at the peaceful water sparkling in the sun. Peaceful killer water. “Because,” he said, “we don’t have to do it that way.”

Tom looked at him. “We?”

“I’m your guy, Tom,” Dortmunder said. “From the old days, and still today. We’ll do it, we’ll get the money. But we don’t have to drown anybody to do it, okay? We’ll do it some other way.”

“What other way?”

“I don’t know yet,” Dortmunder admitted. “But I just got here, Tom, I just came aboard this thing. Give me some time to look the situation over, think about it. Give me a couple weeks, okay?”

Tom gave him a skeptical look. “What are you go

“I don’t know, Tom. Give me time to think about it. Okay?”

Tom thought it over. “A quieter way might be good,” he acknowledged. “If it could be done. Less ru

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

Tom looked back at the reservoir. “That’s fifty feet of water, you know.”

“I know, I know,” Dortmunder said. “Just give me a little time to consider the problem.”

Tom’s gray eyes shifted this way and that in his skull. He said, “I don’t know if I want to stay on your sofa that long.”

Oh. Dortmunder stared, agonized. The thought of May came into his mind but was firmly repressed, pushed down beneath the hundreds and hundreds of drowned people. “It’s a comfortable sofa, Tom,” he said, his throat closing on him as he said it but managing to get the words out just the same.

Tom took a deep breath. His lips actually twitched; a visible movement. Then, the lips rigid again, he said, “Okay, Al. I know you’re good at this stuff, that’s why I came to you first. You want to find another way to get down to the stash, go ahead.”

“Thank you, Tom,” Dortmunder said. Relief made his hands tremble on the wheel.

“Any time,” Tom told him.

“And in the meantime,” Dortmunder said, “no dynamite. Right?”

“For now,” Tom agreed.

FOUR

Joe the mailman came whistling down Myrtle Street in the bright sunshine, his tune blending with the songs of birds, the hiss of sprinklers, the far-off murmur of a lawn mower. “Myrtle!” shouted Edna Street, turning away from her regular spot in the upstairs front bedroom window. “Here comes the mailman!”

“I’ll get it, Mother!” Myrtle Street called, and went skipping down the well-polished mahogany staircase toward the front door. A pretty person of twenty-five—no longer really a pretty girl but somehow not quite a pretty woman either—Myrtle had lived most of her life in this old sprawling beautiful clapboard house here in Dudson Center, and was barely conscious anymore of the oddity of having the same name as her home address. At least some of the mail Joe would be bringing up onto the porch this afternoon would be addressed:

Myrtle Street

27 Myrtle Street

Dudson Center, NY 12561

A few things, such as Modern Maturity and Prevention magazine, would be addressed to Edna Street, plus a ton of stuff addressed to somebody named CAR-RT SORT, or to Current Resident.

Joe the mailman smiled roguishly as he climbed the stoop to the wide front porch of 27 Myrtle Street and saw Myrtle Street pushing open the screen door. He liked the way her legs moved inside her loose cotton dresses, the demure but lush swell of her breasts within the gray cardigan she always wore, the pale softness of her throat, the healthy animal sparkle in her eye. Joe the mailman was forty-three years old, with a family at home, but he could dream, couldn’t he? “Lovely as ever,” he greeted Myrtle as she smiled hello and reached for today’s messages from the world. “We must run away together one of these days.”

Myrtle, who had no idea of the actual depth of depravity lurking within Joe’s plain-to-lumpish exterior in his badly fitting blue-gray uniform, laughed lightly and said, “Oh, we’re both much too busy, Joe.”

“What’s he want?” screeked Edna’s voice from upstairs. “Don’t you give him anything for postage due, Myrtle! Make him take it back!”

Myrtle indulgently rolled her eyes and laughed, saying, “Mother.”

“She sure is something,” Joe agreed. He was imagining his head between those legs.