Authors: Donald Westlake
“It wasn’t much good when it was open,” Tom commented. “Well, looka that,” he said. “The marquee fell off the hotel.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Used to be a big marquee stuck out over the revolving doors,” Tom explained. “Said ‘Cronley Hotel’ on both sides, had a big fancy
C
on the front.”
“That pile of rubble up there? Is that where I’m headed?”
“That’s it, all right,” Tom said, and then he shook his head and said, “I dunno, Al. I traveled with people had better dispositions than you got, I can tell you that.”
“Not on that road you didn’t,” Dortmunder told him, and came to a stop at the pile of rubble in front of a five–story brick structure polka–dotted with glassless windows. “Are you sure?”
“Tallest building in town, Al,” Tom told him. “Marquee or no marquee, this is the Cronley Hotel.”
“Tom,” Dortmunder said patiently, “are you sure your
stash
is still in there? After all this time?”
“Absolutely,” Tom said, opening his door. “And let’s go get it.”
It felt good to get out of the car, even here in Cronley. Dortmunder stood, pressed knuckles into his waist at the back, and stretched as he said, “Looks to me like this place, this whole town’s had a lotta breakage, probably looting. Forty years, Tom, a long time. You sure nobody found it by now, nothing happened to it?”
“Absolutely not.” Tom had opened the back door on his side, was prying his bag out. He paused to look over the top of the little white lemon at Dortmunder and say, “We’re gonna need our flashlights in there, Al. These people ain’t paid their electric bill in a long time.”
“Okay, okay.” Dortmunder opened his back door and yanked his own bag out. “If this isn’t some wild–goose chase.”
They opened their bags more or less companionably together on the hood while Tom explained, “Ya see, I hadda hide the money, in cash, in the hotel. I couldn’t leave the place for a few days, while I was being Myra’s sister Melissa. And I hadda figure they’d
know,
sooner or later they’d know I hid it, and they’d know it had to be in the hotel. So it had to be someplace they weren’t going to look. Not behind a picture that could be taken down, not inside a window frame that could be opened up, not down inside the tubes of a brass bed that could be moved out. It had to be somewhere nobody would look, and that wouldn’t be moved, and what I come up with is a place that’s gonna be there forever, unless they turn
this
into a reservoir, and from the look of the area, Al, I don’t find that much of a worry. Let’s see, I need my wrench and my hammer, too, and that’s it.”
As they put their bags away on the tiny backseat, Dortmunder said, “So where’s this magical place you found?”
“You’ll see it, Al, soon enough,” Tom said, and shut his door. “I don’t think we gotta lock,” he said.
Slowly and carefully they made their way over the rubble to the gaping entrance to the building. Years and years ago the entire revolving door, with its roofplate
and
its floorplate, had left Cronley lashed to the back of a pickup truck, so the entrance was now considerably less grand than when Cronley’s Chamber of Commerce had wanted the town known as “Gateway to the Great Washita–Kiowa–Jackson Super–Region.” Stepping through this portal, Dortmunder and Tom switched on their flashlights and shone them over dust, dirt, rubble, and decay. Carpets and wall sconces and the facings on brick pillars and even the entire front desk were all long gone, leaving a stripped and grubby shell.
“Lobby looks like hell,” Tom commented. “We go back this way, behind the manager’s office. We want the stairs to the basement.”
As they made their way through the debris, around slopes of plaster dust, porcupines of lumber piles with nails sticking out, tangles of wiring with frizzy ends, Tom said, “What I did, I had Myra get me a few empty wine bottles from the kitchen.
With
their corks.”
Dortmunder said, “Wine bottles? I thought this was a dry state. I thought that was the trouble.”
“You don’t understand, Al,” Tom said. “It’s hypocrisy makes the world go round. Oklahoma was a dry state, but you could drink in a private club if you were a member. So all the hotels and restaurants were private clubs.”
“Jesus,” prayed Dortmunder.
“Well, yeah,” Tom agreed. “How you became a member of the club in a restaurant was to order something to eat, and how you became a member of the club in a hotel was by checking in.”
“I don’t get it,” Dortmunder said. “Why go through all that?”
“Well, I figure they had their reason,” Tom said. “The stairs oughta be — Cripes, somebody even took all the
doors.
I hope they left the stairs.”
“I hope they left your stash.”
“They didn’t touch it, Al. Trust me on this. Now, one of these doorways should lead to the — Here it is.”
Their flashlight beams shone on rusted metal steps leading down into pitch–black total darkness. Looking down there, Dortmunder said, “No matter where I go with you, Tom, sooner or later it’s the descent into the depths.”
“This is a very solid structure, Al,” Tom assured him. “There’s no way it’s gonna collapse on us.”
Dortmunder hadn’t even been thinking of that, but
now
he was. “Thanks, Tom,” he said.
“Sure,” Tom said, and started down the stairs, carrying his wrench and hammer in one hand, flashlight in the other, Dortmunder reluctantly following, Tom saying over his shoulder, “Anyway, the wine bottles. I rolled the dough into wads and stuffed them into the bottles, and it took three bottles. Then I brought them down here under my skirt one night.”
“Under your skirt. You were still being the sister.”
“I went on being the sister, Al,” Tom said, “until Nogales, New Mexico. Let’s see now, which way?”
They’d reached the bottom of the steps and stood in a smallish open area with doorways leading off in all directions. Anonymous mounds of stuff; crumbly–looking brick walls; pockmarked concrete floor. As Tom turned in a slow circle, pointing the light here and there, trying to reorient himself after all these years, he said, “Did you ever think, Al, in a hotel room, when you flush the toilet, where all that water goes? All those toilets, all those sinks, hundreds of them all in one building, hundreds of people pissing and crapping and brushing their teeth and flushing foreign objects down the commode even when they’ve been told not to do that, you ever wonder where all that water and stuff goes next?”
“Never,” Dortmunder said.
“We go this way,” Tom decided, and set off down a wide low–ceilinged filthy hallway, Dortmunder following. “Well, the water comes down here,” Tom said, continuing the conversation as they walked. “The pipes get bigger, and there’s traps to keep certain stuff from clogging the whole arrangement, and then there’s one big last pipe that goes out under the street to the city sewers. And just in front of that last pipe is the last trap and sump. There’s access to it so a plumber can get in there if anything really horrible happens, but mostly it’s left alone.”
“
I’d
leave it alone,” Dortmunder said.
“Believe it or not, Al,” Tom told him, “people looking for fourteen thousand dollars will
also
leave it alone. Guaranteed.”
“That’s where you put the three wine bottles?”
“I can still smell it,” Tom said, shaking his head at the memory.
They went through another doorless doorway into a larger area. Dortmunder’s flashlight picked up the scattered skeletons of a couple of small animals on the floor. The air down here smelled dry but rancid, like having your nose rubbed in rotted wood. “I think I can smell it, too,” he said.
Tom did his chuckle sound. “Been a long time since anybody’s flushed a toilet in this town, Al,” he said. “It shouldn’t be bad by now. Just up ahead there.”
Just up ahead was another brick wall. On the floor in front of it Tom’s flashlight picked out a metal plate about three feet by two, held in place with bolts at the corners. Kneeling at one of these corners, bending down to blow dust and trash away from the bolt, Tom said, “Gonna get loud in here for a while.”
And it did. Tom hooked the wrench onto the head of the bolt, then began to whale away at the metal handle of the wrench with his hammer. WANG! WANG! WANG! And in the pauses
angang, angang, angang,
as the sound echoed and rang and reverberated all around the enclosed space.
After about five minutes of this craziness, Tom stood up and mopped his brow and said, “Spell me awhile, Al,” so Dortmunder got to make the horrible noise himself, and it was on his watch that the bolt finally reluctantly started to turn, adding its SKRAWK–SKRAWK to all the
WANGangangings.
The bolt never did get easy. The wrench had to be hit for every fraction of every turn. But at last the thick, rusty,
long
bolt came all the way out and fell over, clattering with the wrench still attached onto the metal plate, making another charming sound.
Tom said, “Terrific, Al. Only three to go. I’ll take a turn now.”
All in all, Dortmunder later figured, they were down in there nearly an hour before the last bolt grudgingly released its grip on the floor and fell over, and then the damn plate itself didn’t want to move, until Tom and Dortmunder had both hit it a hundred million times around its edges. And then at last, slow, heavy, rusty, difficult, it lifted up and out of the way.
Oh, boy. Forty years hadn’t done a thing to lessen
that
aroma. “Aaaaa!” cried Dortmunder, releasing the plate as it fell over onto its back. While Tom watched him with interest, Dortmunder staggered backward, hands to his nose. It was as though somebody’d just hit him in the face with a used shroud.
“This isn’t even it, Al,” Tom told him calmly. “The bottles are down inside that trap, fastened with wires. See the trap?”
But Dortmunder didn’t want to look down into that place. “I believe you,” he managed to gasp through a throat uninterested in breathing, not if
this
was what air had become. “It’s okay, I believe you.”
Pointing his flashlight into the hole beneath the metal plate, Tom said, “This is just the access to the pit with the equipment. Hmmm; a lot drier than it used to be.”
“Tom,” Dortmunder said through his hands, “I’m sorry, but I can’t hang around in here anymore.” He looked wildly around on the floor for his flashlight, staring over his protective knuckles, trying to breathe without inhaling. And there it was, the flashlight, on the floor, gleaming toward that awful place. Moving to retrieve it, Dortmunder said, “I’ll just wait for you upstairs. You don’t need me anymore, right?”
“You’re gonna miss something, Al,” Tom said. “Those wine bottles, full of cash. Over forty years down in there.”
“If that’s what I’m gonna miss,” Dortmunder said, shakily pointing the flashlight toward the doorway on the far side of the room, “then I’m just gonna have to miss it. See you upstairs.”
“Can you find your way?”
“Yes.”
With a feeling that he understood the phrase “asshole of the world” better than he ever had before, Dortmunder went out of that room and headed for an environment more compatible with man. His sense of direction, sometimes shaky, had him doubtful at one turning or another, but as long as he stayed ahead of that smell he knew he’d be all right. Though it would be nice to have that rope around his waist right now, with Tiny pulling at the other end.
Another corridor, but smelling only of the usual dry brick dust and decayed wood. Dortmunder traversed it, went through the doorway at the far end, and
there
was the staircase up. And amazing was its transformation: what on the way down had been rust–diseased and battered and filthy was now, in Dortmunder’s eyes, marble and gold, strewn with rose petals and glisten’d o’er with dew, leading upward to Paradise. Or at least to normal air.
At the head of the stairs, as he’d remembered, were the offices behind the main desk. These were interior rooms, without windows, and Dortmunder wanted windows, so he set off toward the lobby, rounded a corner into a hall, and his flashlight shone on a scrawny old ragamuffin of a guy holding a rifle pointed straight at him. “Sssh,” said the guy.
Dortmunder nodded. When a person pointing a rifle at you says, “Sssh,” you don’t speak out loud in response, but you do nod.