Drowned Hopes (10 page)

“Wally,” Kelp said gently, “what we figure, roughly figuring, the treasure weighs somewhere between four hundred and six hundred pounds. That’s gotta be a pretty big magnet you’re talking about.”

“Well, sure,” Wally said. “That’s what we thought.”

“You get it the same place you got the spaceship,” Dortmunder told Kelp.

Wally swiveled around to look up at Dortmunder, his expression earnest, moist eyes straining to be understood. “It doesn’t have to be a spaceship, John,” he said. “Like, a submarine, you know, a submarine’s just like a spaceship.”

“Well, that’s true,” Dortmunder admitted.

“Or a boat,” Wally said. “Once you find the treasure, you know exactly where it is, you can lower the magnet, pull the treasure up.”

“Yeah, but, you know,” Dortmunder said, more gently than he’d intended (it wasn’t easy to be hard–edged or sardonic when gazing down into that round guileless face), “you know, uh, Wally, part of the problem here is, we don’t want anybody to see us. You put a boat, a big boat with a big magnet, out on the reservoir, they’re just gonna see you, Wally. I mean, they really are.”

“Not at night,” Wally pointed out. “You could do it at night. And,” he said more eagerly, getting into the swing of it, “it doesn’t matter about it being dark, because it’s going to be dark down at the bottom of the reservoir anyway.”

“And that’s also true,” Dortmunder agreed. He looked over Wally’s soft head at Kelp’s grimacing face. Kelp seemed to be undergoing various emotional upheavals over there. “We’ll do it at night,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp, benignly.

“Wally,” Kelp said, desperation showing around the edges, “show us solution number three, Wally. Please?”

“Okay,” Wally said, eager to be of help. Turning right back to his computer, he tickled the keyboard once more, and away went
2A) MAGNET.
In its place appeared:
3) PING–PONG BALLS

Kelp sighed audibly. “Oh, Wally,” he said.

“Well, wait a minute,” Dortmunder told him. “That’s not a bad one.”

Kelp stared at him. “It isn’t?”

“No, it isn’t. I get the idea of that one,” Dortmunder said, and explained, “That’s like one of the things in that book I brought back from the library, that
Marine Salvage
book. Of course, I only read a little of the book on the subway coming home, before Andy said let’s go see what you have on all this.”

Kelp said, “John? Ping–Pong balls are in the
book?
”

“Not exactly,” Dortmunder admitted. “But it led me to the same kind of thought. There’s sunken ships where to get them up they fill them with polyurethane foam or polystyrene granules, and it’s really just plastic bubbles of air taking the place of all the water inside the ship —”

“That’s right!” Wally said. He was so excited at the idea of actual brain–to–brain contact with another human being at this level that he positively bounced in his chair. “And what is a Ping–Pong ball?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s just a ball of air, isn’t it? Enclosed in a thin, almost weightless skin of plastic!”

“It’s a way to get a lot of air down to the ship in a hurry without a lot of trouble,” Dortmunder went on, explaining it all to Kelp. “So I was thinking, maybe you could fire them down through a length of hose.”

Kelp stared at his old friend. “John? This is
your
kind of solution?”

“Well, no, because the problem is,” Dortmunder said, and looked down at Wally’s gently perspiring face, “the problem is, Wally, this isn’t a ship. It’s a closed box, and if we open it to put the Ping–Pong balls in, we’re gonna get water in there and spoil all the, uh, treasure.”

“Well, that’s solution three–A,” Wally said, and his fingers played a riff on the keyboard, and now the screen said:
3A) PLASTIC BAG

“Oh, sure,” Dortmunder said. “That makes sense. We’re down there, somehow, probably in our spaceship, and we find this six–hundred–pound box and we dig it up, probably with our giant magnet, and then we put it in our giant plastic bag, and then we fill
that
with Ping–Pong balls, and it just floats right to the surface. Easy.”

“Well, kind of,” Wally said, his feet shuffling around among the casters of his swivel chair. “There’s still some bugs to be ironed out.”

“Some bugs,” Dortmunder echoed.

“Wally,” Kelp said desperately, “show us solution number four.”

“Well, Andy, there isn’t one,” Wally said, swiveling slowly in Kelp’s direction.

Kelp looked aghast. “There isn’t one?”

“Not yet,” Wally amended. “But we’re working on it. We’re not finished yet.”

“That’s okay,” Dortmunder told him. “Don’t worry about it. This has been a very educational experience.”

Kelp looked warily at Dortmunder to see if he was trying to be sardonic. “Educational?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Dortmunder said. “It clears up my thinking a lot, between tricky and simple. I know which way I’m going now.” Patting Wally’s soft shoulder — it felt like patting a mozzarella cheese — Dortmunder said, “You’ve been a great help, Wally. Just like Andy said.”

They were at that moment strolling through Paragon Sporting Goods, on Broadway and 18th Street, heading for the underwater department up on the second floor. “That’s the simplest way I can think of,” Dortmunder answered, as they trotted up the wide steps. “And, after that little song and dance from your pal and his computer —”

“Wally was a great disappointment to me,” Kelp said. “I must admit it. But still, the original model he did was something terrific.”

They reached the second floor and turned right. “Wally’s a great model maker,” Dortmunder agreed. “But when it comes to
plans,
just like I was telling you from the beginning, I don’t need help from machines.”

“Sure you don’t, John,” Kelp said. “But just to
walk
in? Are you sure?”

“What could be simpler?” Dortmunder asked him. “We put on underwater stuff so we can breathe down there. We get a flashlight and a shovel and a long rope, and we go to the edge of the reservoir and we
walk in.
We walk downhill until we come to the town, and we find the library, and we dig up the box, and we tie the rope to it. Then we walk back uphill, right along the rope, and when we come out on dry land we pick up the other end of the rope and we pull. Simple.”

“I don’t know, John,” Kelp said. “Walking down fifty feet under water never struck me as exactly
simple.
”

“It’s simpler than spaceships from Zog,” Dortmunder said, and stopped. “Here we are.”

There they were. For reasons best known to management, the underwater equipment at Paragon is upstairs; top floor, off to the right of the wide staircase. When Dortmunder and Kelp walked into this section and stopped and just stood there, looking around, they did not at first glance seem as though they belonged here. At second glance, they
definitely
didn’t belong, not in this department, not in this store, probably not even on this block. One was tall, stoop–shouldered, pessimistic, walking with a shuffling nonathletic jail–yard gait, while the other was shorter, narrower, looking like the sort of bird that became extinct because it wouldn’t ever learn to fly.

The flightless bird said, “So what are we looking for?”

“Help,” said the pessimist, and turned around to see a healthy young woman approaching with many questions evident on her face.

The one she chose to begin with was, “Looking for anything in particular, gentlemen?”

“Yeah,” Dortmunder told her. “We wanna go underwater.”

She studied them with doubt. “You do?”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Why not?”

“No reason,” she said, with a too–bright smile. “Have you gentlemen ever done any diving before?”

“Diving?” Dortmunder echoed.

“You
are
talking about diving, aren’t you?” the girl asked.

“Going underwater,” Dortmunder repeated, and even made a little parting–the–waves gesture to make things clearer: putting the backs of his hands together, then sweeping them out to the sides.

“In the ocean,” the girl said dubiously.

“Well, no,” Dortmunder said. “In a kind of lake. But still, you know, under.
In
it.”

“
Freshwater
diving,” the girl said, smiling with pleasure that they were communicating after all.

“Walking,” Kelp said. Sticking his oar in, as it were.

So much for communication. Looking helplessly at Kelp, the girl said, “I beg your pardon?”

“We’re not gonna jump in it,” Kelp explained. “Not diving, walking. We’re gonna walk in it.”

“Oh,” she said, and smiled with great healthy delight, saying, “That makes no difference, not with the equipment.” Turning slightly, to include Dortmunder in her smile, she said, “I take it you gentlemen haven’t gone in for diving before.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Dortmunder told her.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Where are you taking your instruction?”

“Instruction?” Kelp said, but Dortmunder talked over him, saying, “At the lake.”

“And what equipment will you be needing?”

“Everything,” Dortmunder said.

That surprised her again. “Everything? Won’t you be able to rent anything at all from the pro?”

“No, it don’t work that way at this particular lake,” Dortmunder said. “Anyway, right now we’re just looking to see what we’ll need, what kinda equipment and all.”

“Tanks and air and all that,” Kelp added, and pointed toward a number of scuba tanks displayed on the wall behind the glass counter full of regulators and goggles and waterproof flashlights.

The girl lost her smile for good. Frowning from Dortmunder to Kelp and back, she said, “I’m not sure what you gentlemen are up to, but it isn’t diving.”

Dortmunder gave her an offended look. “Yeah, we are,” he said. “Why would we want the stuff?”

“All right,” she said crisply, either giving him the benefit of the doubt or choosing brisk explanation as the quickest way to get rid of these noncustomers. “Clearly,” she said, “you don’t know anything about the world of diving.”

“We’re just starting out,” Dortmunder reminded her. “I told you that, remember?”

“You can’t do it without an instructor,” she said, “and it’s pretty clear you don’t
have
an instructor.”

Dortmunder said, “Why can’t we just read up on it in a book?”

“Because,” she told him, “there are only two ways you can dive. Either with an accredited instructor right there beside you, or with your certification that you’ve taken and passed the three–day introductory course.”

Kelp said, “You know, you’re not supposed to drive a car without a license, too, but I bet some people do.”

She gave him a severe look and shook her head. From a sunny happy healthy young woman she had segued with amazing suddenness into the world’s most disapproving Sunday School teacher. “It doesn’t work quite the same way,” she said, sounding pleased about that. Pointing at the display of tanks, she said, “I’ll sell you as many of those as you want. But they’re empty. And the only place you can get them filled is an accredited dive shop. And they won’t fill them unless you show your certification or agree to have an instructor go with you.” Her look of satisfaction was pretty galling. “Diving
or
walking, gentlemen,” she said, “you will not want to go very far underwater, or for very long, with empty tanks. If you’ll excuse me?” And she turned on her heel and went off to sell a $350 Dacor Seachute BCD to a deeply tanned Frenchman with offensively thick and glossy hair.

Leaving, slinking away, clumping morosely down the wide stairs toward Paragon’s street level with their tails between their legs, Dortmunder said, “Okay. We gotta getta guy.”

Outside was more of Doug Berry’s empire. The dock, old and shaky, rotting planks nailed to rotting pilings, was three feet wider than the shed, which was built flush to the right edge of the dock, leaving the three feet on the left for an aisle back to the eighteen feet of additional dock extending out into the bay beyond the rear of the shed. Piled on this dock, under gray or green tarps, were spare air tanks and gasoline tanks and other equipment, all chained against thievery. Tied up on the left side of the dock, also under a tarp, was Doug Berry’s Boston Whaler, with its 235–horse Johnson outboard. The compressor from which air tanks were filled was also out there, under its own shiny blue plastic tarp.

On the landward side of Doug Berry’s domain was the gravel width of customer parking area, containing at the moment only Berry’s custom–packaged black (with blue and silver trim) Ford pickup, with the inevitable bumper sticker on the back:
DIVERS GO DEEPER.
Beyond the parking area was the potholed blacktop driveway leading out past the marine motor dealership and the wholesale fish company to Merrick Road. All of this was Doug Berry’s, and there he sat, in the middle of his realm, dreaming about the Caribbean.

Yeah, that was the place to be. No goddamn April showers down there. Just warm sun, warm air, warm sand, warm turquoise water. A fella with Doug Berry’s looks and training and skills could …

… rot on the beach.

There he went again, dammit. Doug Berry’s worst flaw, as far as he himself was concerned, was his inability to ignore reality. He’d
like
to be able to fantasize himself into the dive king of the Caribbean, the bronze god in flippers, slicing through the emerald waters, rescuing beautiful heiresses, discovering buried treasure, either joining pirates or foiling pirates, he’d
like
to sit here in this miserable shack on this rainy no–business day and dream himself two thousand miles south and twenty degrees warmer, but the reality bone in his head just wouldn’t ever give him a break.

The fact was, guys whose total assets were youth, health, good looks, and an advanced diving certificate were not in exactly short supply in the Caribbean basin. (The pestiferous phrase “dime a dozen” kept circling through Doug Berry’s irritated head, above the aborted fantasies.) And when, in addition, the fellow also already had a couple of clouds over his head — charged with (but not convicted of) receiving stolen goods, for instance — and when he’s already been ejected from the two largest and most prestigious licensing associations in the field, PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) and NAUI (National Association of Underwater Instructors), and when in fact he was now found acceptable only by DIPS (Diving Instructors Professional Society), the newest and smallest and least picky association around, his smart move — no, his only move — was to stay right here in Islip, do a moderate summertime business with college kids and Fire Islanders, do a miserable wintertime business selling equipment to people going away on vacations (there was no way to compete more directly with the big outfits, furnished with their own indoor swimming pools), supplement his livelihood with carpentry and clamming, stock his shelves as much as possible with goods that fell off the back of the delivery truck, and sit here in the rain trying to dream about the Caribbean.

Doug Berry, twenty–seven years old. He used to have a hobby; now, the hobby has him.

Movement beyond the rain–streaked front window made him look up from Aruba — tan sand, pale blue sky, aquamarine sea,
no rain
— to see a vaguely familiar car coming to a stop out there next to his pickup. It was a Chevy Impala, the color of a diseased lime. Its windshield wipers stopped, and then three of its four doors opened and three men wearing hats and raincoats climbed out, flinching as though water were poisonous.

Squinting through the streaky window, Doug finally recognized one of the three: the driver, a bent–nose type named Mikey Donelli. Or maybe Mikey Donnelly. Doug had never been certain if the accent was on the first syllable or the second, so he couldn’t be sure if Mikey were Irish or Italian. Not that it mattered, really; Doug and Mikey had a business–only relationship, and the business would be the same wherever Mikey’s forebears hailed from.

Mikey was, in fact, the provider of those stolen goods Doug was alleged to have received, and of a lot of other stolen goods as well. Given the realities of the South Shore Dive Shop, Mikey was just about the company’s most important supplier.

But who were the other two? Doug had never met any of Mikey’s associates and was just as glad of it. This pair walked with their hands in their raincoat pockets, chins tucked in low, hat brims pulled down over their eyes as though they were extras in a Prohibition movie. Mikey led the way from the car to the door as Doug got to his feet, closed the Caribbean brochure, and tried to put a ready–for–business expression on his face. But what was Mikey
doing
here? And who were the two guys with him?

Doug spent most of his life just slightly afraid. At the moment, it was up one notch above normal.

Mikey came into the shop first, followed by his friends. “Whadaya say, Dougie?” Mikey said.

“Hi, Mikey,” Doug said. No one else on Earth had ever even
thought
to call him Dougie. He hated it, but how can you tell somebody named Mikey — particularly a
tough
somebody named Mikey — that you don’t like to be called Dougie? You can’t.

All three of his visitors looked around at the shelves, the two strangers with the curiosity of people who’d never been in a dive shop in their lives before — which Doug could well believe — and Mikey with a kind of professional interest. “Gee, Dougie,” he said, “you haven’t moved much product, have you, kid?” He was probably the same age as Doug, within a year or two, but he called him Dougie and “kid.”

“It’s just the beginning of the season,” Doug explained. “Things’ll pick up.”

“You know, kid,” Mikey said, “it could be, what you could use is a nice burglary. You gotta be insured, huh?”

Oh,
no. Doug was living on the edge of disaster as it was, and he knew it. False burglaries for the insurance were
exactly
the way to integrate a state prison, a goal Doug had never held for himself. “Not just yet, Mikey,” he said, trying to produce a cool and untroubled grin. “If I ever need anything like that, you’ll be the guy I call. You know that.”

“Sure, kid,” Mikey said and grinned, spreading his hands as though to say
naturally you’ll come to me.
With that round tough face and lumpy nose and curly black hair and those penetrating dark eyes, Mikey could be just as easily Italian or Irish, Irish or Italian. Doug had no idea why it mattered to him to know what Mikey was, but it did. Maybe because the question was essentially unanswerable.

Now Mikey turned to his companions, saying, “I wanna introduce you a couple guys. This is John and this is Andy. That’s Dougie. He runs this place.”

“How are you,” said Doug, nodding at them, not liking the flat emotionless way they both studied him.

“Fine,” said the one called John. “You got the certification, huh?”

That was a surprising question. “Sure,” Doug said. “I couldn’t run the dive shop unless I did.” And he gestured to the sticker in the bottom right of the front window: DIPS.

“Dips,” said the one called Andy in a thoughtful tone of voice. “I don’t think I know that one.”

Surprised that somebody like Andy would know
any
of diving’s professional associations, Doug said defensively, “It’s a new group, very lively, very forward–looking. The best, I think. That’s why I went with them.”

With a raucous laugh, Mikey said, “Also, Dougie, they’d
take
you, don’t forget.”

Doug was offended, and for the moment forgot his fear. Looking hard at Mikey, he said, “It wasn’t exactly that way, Mikey. What have you been telling these friends of yours, anyway?”

“Hey, take it easy, Dougie,” Mikey said, laughing again, but putting his hands up mock defensively.
He’s
afraid! Doug thought with astonishment, as Mikey went on, saying, “All I said to Andy and John, maybe you were the guy could help with a little problem they got. I’m not in it at all, okay? It’s strictly between you and them.”

Doug, pushing his unexpected advantage, said, “
What’s
between me and them?”

“Why don’t you guys talk it over?” Mikey said, backing toward the door, grinning at everybody. “I’m just John Alden here, right? Dougie, I can guarantee these guys, Andy and John’ll treat you straight. Guys, Dougie here is a hundred percent.” Waving generally, he said, “I gotta couple calls to make in the neighborhood. Be back in fifteen, twenty minutes, okay?”

“Sure, that’s good,” the one called John said. He nodded at Mikey, but his brooding eyes were on Doug.

“See you, guys,” Mikey said, and reached for the doorknob. But then he pointed playfully at Andy and said, “Remember, if it works out …”

Andy nodded as though this reminder was unnecessary. “Don’t worry, Mikey,” he said. “You’ve got your finder’s fee.”

“Great,” Mikey said. His grin was bigger and bigger. “I love to get friends together,” he said, and pulled open the door at last and left.

They all watched out through the window as Mikey slogged through the rain to his diseased–lime Impala and climbed in. After a few seconds, the windshield wipers started, and then the Impala backed away in a semicircle and drove out toward Merrick Road. And they were alone.

Doug looked at his unexpected visitors, wondering what this was all about. More stolen goods? He had to be very careful here, dealing with strangers; there was such a thing as entrapment.

My God, yes! Suppose the cops had the goods on Mikey for something or other — Doug had no idea what Mikey’s activities were beyond the finding of goods that had fallen off trucks, but he was sure those activities must be wide–ranging and far from legal — suppose Mikey had got himself caught, and the cops had offered him a deal if he’d turn somebody else in. Didn’t they do that all the time? They did.

Okay, in that case, who would Mikey choose to betray? Some other tough guy like himself, who’d grown up with him and knew all about him and knew where he lived? Or would he choose Doug Berry, a guy he barely knew, who wasn’t connected to anything that Mikey thought important?

These guys didn’t
look
like cops, But they wouldn’t, would they? Giving the pair a very critical and cautious look, Doug said, “You need some help with a diving problem?”

If he’d expected a
no
to that question — and he had — he was both disappointed and surprised, because the one called John turned and said, “That’s it, okay. A diving problem.”

“You
do?
”

“Yeah,” John said. “Andy and me, we got to go underwater, and we never did that before, and it turns out it’s not so simple like we thought.”

Doug just couldn’t get this straight. “You really do want to dive?”

“Walk,” Andy said. “We wanna walk in from the shore to where it’s fifty feet deep.”

Doug looked out the side window at the rain–pocked gray waters of the Great South Bay. “Around here?”

“Somewhere else,” John said.

“Where?”

But John spread his hands and said, “We got to talk first, you know? We got to know we’re all on the same team, then we’ll talk about where.”

Andy said, “You see, Dougie, John and —”

“Doug,” Doug said.

They both frowned at him. Andy said, “I thought Mikey said you were Dougie.”