The Hot Rock (14 page)

Without moving, the Major lifted his eyes and looked at Kelp. “You’re wrong,” he said. “I have been practicing.”

Kelp shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said.

The Major sighted some more, then hit the cue ball, which hit the twelve, ricocheted off the three, and dropped the eight. “
Banimi ha junt!
” the Major said and threw the cue down onto the table. “Well?” he barked at Kelp. “It’s been two weeks since Dortmunder agreed to do the job. Money keeps going out, but no emerald ever comes in.”

“We’re ready again,” Kelp said and pulled a tattered list from his pocket. “This is the stuff we need.”

“No helicopters this time, I hope.”

“No, it’s too far from New York. But we thought about it.”

“I’m sure you did,” the Major said dryly and took the list.

Kelp said, “Mind if I sink a couple?”

“Go ahead,” the Major said and opened the sheet of paper.

Kelp picked up the cue, dropped the three, and the Major screamed, “A
locomotive?
”

Kelp nodded and put the cue down again. Turning to face the Major, he said, “Dortmunder thought there might be some question about that.”

“
Question!
” The Major looked as though he’d been pole axed.

“We don’t actually need a big diesel locomotive,” Kelp said. “What we need is something that runs on standard gauge tracks under its own power. But it’s got to be bigger than a handcar.”

“Bigger than a handcar,” the Major said. He backed up till his legs hit a chair, on which he sat. The list hung forgotten in his hand.

“Chefwick is our railroad expert,” Kelp said. “So if you want to talk things over with him, he’ll let you know exactly what we need.”

“Of course,” the Major said.

“He could come over tomorrow afternoon,” Kelp suggested.

“Of course,” the Major said.

“If you could have your own people ready by then. For him to talk to.”

“Of course,” the Major said.

Kelp frowned at him. “You okay, Major?”

“Of course,” the Major said.

Kelp went over and waved his hand in front of the Major’s eyes. They didn’t change, they kept staring at some point in the middle of the room. Kelp said, “Maybe I oughta give you a call later on. When you’re feeling better.”

“Of course,” the Major said.

“It really isn’t that big a locomotive we want,” Kelp said. “Just a kind of a medium–size locomotive.”

“Of course,” the Major said.

“Well.” Kelp looked around a little helplessly. “I’ll call you later on,” he said. “About when Chefwick should come over.”

“Of course,” the Major said.

Kelp backed to the doorway and hesitated there for a second, feeling the need to say something to buck the Major’s spirits up a little. “Your pool is getting a lot better, Major,” he said at last.

“Of course,” the Major said.

“You’ll get it back,” Dortmunder assured him. He checked his watch and said, “We’ve got to get going.”

“Be careful with the locomotive,” the Major pleaded. “That’s all I ask.”

Chefwick said, “You have my personal word of honor, Major, that no harm will come to this locomotive. I think you know my feeling about locomotives.”

The Major nodded, somewhat reassured, but still worried. A muscle in his cheek was jumping.

“Time to go,” Dortmunder said. “See you later, Major.”

Murch would drive, of course, and Dortmunder sat in the cab beside him, while the other three got in back with the locomotive. The Major stood watching them, and Murch waved to him and drove the truck down the dirt road from the deserted farmhouse and out to the highway, where he turned north, away from New York and toward New Mycenae.

It was a very anonymous truck, with an ordinary red cab and a trailer completely swathed in olive drab tarpaulins, and no one they passed gave them a second look. But underneath the tarps lurked a very gaudy truck indeed, its sides combining brightly painted pictures of railroading scenes with foot–high red letters running the length of the trailer and reading, FUN ISLAND AMUSEMENT PARK — TOM THUMB. And underneath, in slightly smaller black lettering, the famous locomotive.

What strings the Major had pulled, what stories he’d told, what bribes he’d paid, what pressures he’d applied in order to get this locomotive, Dortmunder neither knew nor cared. He’d gotten it, that was all, within two weeks of the order having been placed, and now Dortmunder was going to go wipe that laugh from Attorney Prosker’s face. Oh, yes, he would.

This was the second Sunday in October, sunny but cool, with little traffic on the secondary roads they were traveling, and they made good time to New Mycenae. Murch drove them through town and out the road toward the
Clair de Lune Sanitarium.
They rode on by, and Dortmunder glanced at it as they went past. Peaceful. Same two guards chatting at the main gate. Everything the same.

They traveled another three miles down the same road, and then Murch turned right. Half a mile later he pulled off to the side of the road and stopped, pulling on the hand brake but leaving the engine running. This was a woodsy, hilly area, without houses or other buildings. A hundred yards ahead stood a set of white crossbars, warning of a railroad crossing.

Dortmunder looked at his watch. “Due in four minutes,” he said.

In the last two weeks, he and the others had been all over this territory, till they knew it now as well as they knew their own homes. They knew which roads were well traveled and which were generally empty. They knew where a lot of the dirt side roads went, they knew what the local police cars looked like and where they tended to spend their Sunday afternoons, they knew four or five good places in the neighborhood to hide out with a truck, and they knew the railroad schedule.

Better than the railroad did, evidently, because the train Dortmunder was waiting for was almost five minutes late. But at last they did hear it hooting in the distance, and then slowly it appeared and began to trundle by, the same passenger train Dortmunder and the others had ridden up here in two weeks ago.

“There’s your window,” Murch said and pointed at a holed window gliding by.

“I didn’t think they’d fix it,” Dortmunder said.

It takes a train quite a while to get itself entirely past a given point, particularly at seventeen miles an hour, but eventually the final car did go by and the road was once again clear. Murch looked at Dortmunder and said, “How long?”

“Give it a couple minutes.”

They knew the next scheduled occupant of that track would be a southbound freight at nine–thirty tonight. During the week there were many trains going back and forth, both passenger and freight, but on Sundays most trains stayed home.

After a minute or two of silence, Dortmunder dropped his Camel butt on the truck floor and stepped on it. “We can go now,” he said.

“Right.” Murch put the truck in gear and eased forward to the tracks. He jockeyed back and forth till he was cross wise on the road, blocking it, and then Dortmunder got out and went around back to open the rear doors. Greenwood and Kelp at once began to push forward a long complicated board–like object, a wide metal ramp with a set of railroad tracks on it. The far end clanged on the rails below, and Greenwood came down to help Dortmunder push and shove it till the ramp’s tracks lined up with the railroad company’s tracks. Then Greenwood waved to Kelp on the tailgate, who turned around and waved into the interior, and a few seconds later a locomotive came out.

And what a locomotive. This was Tom Thumb, the famous locomotive, or at any rate a replica of the famous Tom Thumb, the original of which, built for the Baltimore & Ohio back in 1830, was the first regularly working American–built steam locomotive. It looked just like all the old, old locomotives in Walt Disney movies and so did the replica, which was an exact copy of the original. Well, maybe not exactly exact, since there were one or two small differences, such as that the original Tom Thumb ran on steam from a coal–fired furnace while the replica ran on gasoline in an engine from a 1962 Ford. But it looked legit, that was the important thing, and who was going to carp about the thin putt–putt of smoke that snuck out the tailgate instead of the thick belch–belch of smoke that was supposed to issue from the funnel–mouth smokestack?

Apparently this replica didn’t spend all its time in the amusement park mentioned on its mother truck, but at least occasionally traveled around to be displayed at fairs and supermarket openings and other gala events. The specially equipped truck was itself an indication of that, as was the fact that the wheels were suited to the standard gauge of today’s tracks.

The locomotive came complete with its own tender, a boxlike wooden affair like a dinette on wheels. On the original, the tender was usually full of coal, but in the replica it was empty except for a green–handled push broom leaning against one corner.

Chefwick was at the controls as Tom Thumb came slowly down the ramp and effected the tricky transition from one set of rails to another, and he was in seventh heaven, smiling and beaming around in sheer delight. In his mind he hadn’t been given a full–size locomotive, he himself had been miniaturized. He was running a model train in person. He beamed out at Dortmunder and said, “Toot toot.”

“Sure thing,” Dortmunder said. “Up a little more.”

Chefwick eased Tom Thumb forward a few more feet.

“That’s good right there,” Dortmunder said and went back to help Greenwood and Kelp slide the ramp back up into the truck. They shut the truck doors and hollered to Murch, who hollered back and drove the truck around in a wide loop that left it once more off the road. So far, there’d been no other traffic at all.

Chefwick and Greenwood and Kelp were already in their wet–suits, the black rubber gleaming and glistening in the sun. They weren’t wearing the gloves or face masks or headpieces yet, but otherwise they were completely encased in rubber. So much for electrified fences.

Dortmunder and Greenwood and Kelp all climbed aboard the tender, and Dortmunder called forward to Chefwick, “Go ahead.”

“Right,” said Chefwick. “Toot toot,” he called, and Tom Thumb began to perk along the track.

The other wet–suit was waiting for Dortmunder in the tender, on the arms case. He put it on and said, “Remember. When we go through keep your hands over your faces.”

“Right,” said Kelp.

Tom Thumb traveled faster than seventeen miles an hour, and they reached the
Clair de Lune Sanitarium
in no time, where Chefwick pulled to a stop just before the turnoff where the old tracks angled away toward the sanitarium grounds. Greenwood jumped down, went over to the switch beside the tracks and turned it to the spur position, and then climbed back aboard.

It had taken two nights of oiling and straining and heaving to get the old switch to work again. It’s too expensive for railroads to remove all their old unused equipment, and it doesn’t hurt anything to leave it all lying there, which is why there are so many abandoned stretches of track to be seen around the United States. But there’s nothing wrong with most of it except rust, which had been the only problem here. The switch now turned like a dream.

They all put on their headpieces and gloves and face masks, and Chefwick accelerated over the bumpy orange track toward the sanitarium fencing. Tom Thumb, tender and all, was still lighter than the Ford from which his engine had come, and he accelerated like a go–cart, hitting sixty before he hit the fence.

Snap! Sparks, sputters, smoke. Live wires whipping back and forth. Tom Thumb’s wheels shrieking and squealing along the twisty old rails, then shrieking even louder when Chefwick applied the brakes. They’d breached the fence like a sprinter breasting the tape, and now they screamed and scraped to a stop surrounded by chrysanthemums and gardenias.

In his office on the opposite side of the building, Chief Administrator Doctor Panchard L. Whiskum sat at his desk rereading the piece he’d just written for the
American Journal of Applied Pan–Psychotherapy,
entitled
Instances of Induced Hallucination among Staff Members of Mental Hospitals,
when a white–jacketed male nurse ran in shouting, “Doctor! There’s a locomotive in the garden!”

Doctor Whiskum looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He said, “Sit down, Foster. Let’s talk about it.”

In the garden, Dortmunder and Greenwood and Kelp had emerged from the tender in wet–suits and skin divers’ masks, carrying tommy guns. All over the lawn, white garbed patients and blue–garbed guards and white–garbed attendants were running back and forth, up and down, around in circles, shouting at each other, grabbing each other, bumping into each other. Bedlam was in bedlam.

Dortmunder pointed his tommy gun in the air and let go with a burst, and the silence after that was like the silence in a cafeteria just after somebody has dropped a thousand metal trays on a tile floor. Silent. Very silent.

The lawn was full of eyes, all of them round. Dortmunder looked among them and finally found Prosker’s. He pointed the tommy gun at Prosker and called, “Prosker! Get over here!”

Prosker tried to make believe he was somebody else, named Doe or Roe. He kept on standing there, pretending Dortmunder wasn’t looking at him.

Dortmunder called, “Do I shoot your ankles off and have somebody carry you? Get over here.”

A lady doctor in the foreground, wearing black hornrims and white lab coat, suddenly cried, “You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Do you realize what you’re doing to the reality concepts we’re trying to instill in these people? How do you expect them to differentiate between illusion and reality when you do something like this —”

“Be quiet,” Dortmunder told her and called to Prosker, “I’m losing my patience.”

But Prosker continued to stand there, feigning innocence, until all at once a guard near him took a quick step and shoved him, shouting, “Will you get over there? Who knows if his aim is any good? You want to kill innocent people?”

A chorus of
yeahs
followed that remark, and the tableau of people — Living Chessboard is what it mostly looked like — turned itself into a sort of bucket brigade, pushing Prosker on from hand to hand all across the lawn to the locomotive.

When he got there, Prosker suddenly became voluble. “I’m not a well man!” he cried. “I’ve had illnesses, troubles, my memory’s gone! I wouldn’t be here, why I would I be here if I wasn’t a sick man. I tell you, my memory’s gone, I don’t know anything about anything.”

“Just step up there,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll remind you.”

Very reluctantly, with much pushing from behind and pulling from in front, Prosker got up into the tender. Kelp and Greenwood held him while Dortmunder told the crowd to stay where it was while they made their escape. “Also,” he said, “send somebody to put that switch back after we’re gone. We don’t want to de–rail any trains, do we?”

A hundred heads shook no.

“Right,” Dortmunder said. He told Chefwick, “Back her up.”

“A–okay,” Chefwick said, and under his breath he said, “Toot toot.” He didn’t want to say it aloud with a lot of crazy people within earshot, they might get the wrong idea.

The locomotive backed slowly out of the flowerbeds. Dortmunder and Kelp and Greenwood surrounded Prosker, grabbing him by the elbows and lifting him a few inches into the air. He hung there, pressed in by wet–suits on all sides, his slippered feet waggling inches above the floor, and said, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?”