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.
“Point that light at the floor!”
Dortmunder pointed the light at the floor.
“Come on around me and walk out to the lobby.”
Dortmunder did that, too. What the hell, that’s where he’d been going, anyway.
The sudden western twilight had come and been and gone, leaving a faint but clear silvery greenish-gray illumination at every exterior rectangle, returning to these former windows and former doors a bit of their one-time dignity.
“Shine the light over to the left.”
Dortmunder did so and saw another doorway, leading into what had once been the hotel bar (members only). “You want me to go over there?”
“Sssh!”
Dortmunder nodded.
Something—probably not the old guy’s finger—prodded Dortmunder’s back, and the old guy’s hoarse harsh voice, nearly a whisper, said, “Where’s your partner?” He pronounced it “pardner.”
“Downstairs,” Dortmunder answered in the same near whisper. “In the basement. Looking at the, uh, plumbing.”
“Plumbing?” That seemed to bewilder the old guy but only for a second because, with another prod in Dortmunder’s back, he said, “Go on in over there.”
So Dortmunder did that, too, entering one of the most completely stripped rooms in the hotel. Tables, chairs, banquettes, barstools, bar, back bar, mirrors, cabinets, sinks, refrigerators, carpets, light fixtures, light switches, imitation Remington prints, window shades and curtains, cash register, glasses, ash trays, tap levers, duckboard floor behind the bar, both clocks, and the sawed-off baseball bat; all were gone.
Dortmunder’s flashlight picked out the peeling rotting plywood floor, the brick walls, and in the middle of the floor a black box, three feet tall and about one foot square. Pointing the light beam directly at it, Dortmunder saw it was a speaker cabinet from some old sound system, not looted because somebody at one time had kicked it in the mouth, ripping the black-and-silver front cloth and puncturing the speaker’s diaphragm. Maybe somebody who’d heard “Rock Around the Clock” once too often.
“Sit down,” said the raspy rusty voice.
“On that?”
For answer, he got another poke from the non-finger. So he went over to the speaker and turned around and sat on it, being careful to point the flashlight beam downward and not directly toward his captor. “Here I am,” he said.
“Shine the light on your face.”
He did, which made him squint. Resting the butt of the flashlight on his knee, he pointed the business end at his nose and said, “This kinda makes it tough.”
“Point it to the side a little,” the voice said out of the darkness, sounding petulant all at once. “This ain’t the third degree.”
“It isn’t?” Dortmunder pointed the light beam over his right shoulder, which was better.
“I just gotta see your face,” the old guy explained, “so I can see if you’re telling the truth.”
“I always tell the truth,” Dortmunder lied, and gave the old guy a good clear view of his face while doing so to see how things could be expected to go.
Pretty well. “You better be sure you do,” the old guy said, having just failed the test. “What do you know about…” Portentous pause, that. “… Tim Jepson?”
Ah-hah. With the lightning speed of a main-frame computer, in nano-fractions of a nanosecond, Dortmunder got the picture. “Tim Jepson” = “Tom Jimson.” Old guy with rifle = ex-partner left in elevator. Long-term revenge from a loony. A loony with a rifle. A loony with a rifle and a legitimate grievance against the guy he’d already referred to as “your pardner.” Face held unflinchingly into the light, “Never heard of him,” Dortmunder said.
“He didn’t send you two here for… anything?”
“Not us,” Dortmunder said, knowing it was the fourteen thousand dollars the old guy was hinting around about, knowing—old computer brain still clicking along at top speed—this old guy would have searched high and low for that money, but not low enough. Tom had been right about that; fourteen grand wasn’t enough to get most people to go down into that trap in the large intestine of the Cronley Hotel.