Drowned Hopes Part 15

TWENTY-FIVE.

Tom Jimson was a criminal! That was the first thought in Myrtle Street's head every morning when she awoke, and the last thought every night as she drifted-later and later, it seemed-into sleep, and it was somewhere in her mind all day long: at the library, at home, in the car, shopping, everywhere. Tom Jimson, her father, was a major criminal.

She'd known this fact for nearly two weeks now, and it still hadn't lost its power to astonish and appall and excite. The very next morning after that evening of pointless pursuit of her father in the car that merely circled and circled, when Myrtle had gone to work at the library, she'd started to look for Tom Jimson in every reference work she could think of, and there he was right away in, of all major-league places, the index of the New York Times!

She had been two years old, just on the brink of entering play school, when Tom Jimson had entered Sing Sing for what the newspaper account said would be the last time: "... seven life sentences to run consecutively, with no possibility of parole."

Now she understood why her mother had been so unbelieving when she'd first seen Tom Jimson ride by in an automobile in the bright light of day, why Edna had been startled into such uncharacteristic language and behavior. Tom Jimson was supposed to be in prison forever!

Had he escaped? But he wouldn't boldly show himself in his old neighborhoods, would he, if he'd escaped? And wouldn't there have been something in the newspaper if he'd escaped? But that twenty-three-year-old report of his conviction and jailing was the last time Tom Jimson-born in Oklahoma, sometime resident of California and Florida and several other states-had made the newspaper.

So what else could have happened? Maybe-this was a thrilling thought! - maybe they'd let him go! Maybe it had all been a mistake; he hadn't committed all those crimes after all, and finally the truth had come out, and her father was a free man today, exonerated.

But wouldn't that have gotten into the papers? And wouldn't he, if a wrongly convicted innocent man, have returned to his family? Did he even know he had a family? Had Edna ever told him that Myrtle existed? (Edna herself refused to talk at all about the subject anymore and would fly into a rage if Myrtle dared start to question her.) Myrtle spent nearly every waking moment of her life now going over and over these questions, considering the possibilities, thinking about her father! This morning, driving to the library, she concentrated so exclusively on the enigma of Tom Jimson that she never noticed the ancient, battered, rusty yellow Volkswagen Beetle that had been parked across the street from her house and that then followed her all the way downtown, even parking just a few slots away in the parking lot behind the library building. Nor did she feel the Beetle driver's eyes on her as she entered the building.

It was half an hour into her workday when the little fat man with the wet eyes approached her at the front desk and asked what books the library had on computers. "Oh, we have a large number," she a.s.sured him, and pointed across the room at the card catalogue, saying, "Just look in the subject heading drawers under computer, and you'll-"

"But," he interrupted, being timid and yet at the same time forceful, doing some pointing of his own toward the computer terminal on the counter to her right, "won't you have it all in there?"

Myrtle looked with a kind of remote distaste at the computer terminal, one of four in the building, put in a few years earlier as part of a statewide program. Money that could have been spent on books, as the librarians often told one another. "Oh, that," she said. "I'm sorry, the person who runs that isn't in today."

There was in fact no one who ran the computer, and hadn't been since a few months after the four were installed. At that time, a half-day orientation course had been offered up in Albany, and the only member of the staff willing to spend the time had been the most recent employee, a flighty young woman named Duane Anne, who'd just wanted the day off from regular work, and who in any case had shortly afterward enlisted in the navy.

Usually, telling someone that "the person who runs the computer" was unavailable was enough to deal with the problem, but not this time. The little round man turned his wet eyes on the machine, blinked at it, and said, "Oh, that's a very simple one, just an IBM-compatible VDT."

"VDT?" She didn't even like the sound of these things.

"Video display terminal." His large wet eyes-they did look unappetizingly like blue-yolked eggs-swiveled toward her and he said, "The main frame's up in Albany, isn't it?"

"Is it?"

"The entire state wide catalogue's available there," he said, as though that were something wonderful. "Everything in every branch!"

"Oh, really?" Myrtle could not have been less interested, but she did her best to sound polite.

But then the little man suddenly moved, saying, "May I?" as he ducked around the end of the desk to stand in front of the computer, rubbing his little fat hands together and absolutely beaming at the machine. His broad stubby nose actually twitched, as though he were a rabbit suddenly faced with an entire head of lettuce.

At a loss, knowing she'd somehow lost control of the situation but unsure what to be alarmed at, Myrtle said, "Excuse me, but I don't think-"

"Now, we turn it on here," he said, smiling, and his little hand darted out. There was a faint flat tik, and the TV screen of the computer went from its normal dead flat gray to a living virulent bottomless black. The little man's hands touched the typewriter keys, and green letters bounced horribly into existence on that black abyss.

"Oh, please!" Myrtle cried, half reaching out toward him. "I don't think you should-"

He turned toward her, smiling with pleasure, and she saw his face was really very sweet and harmless; beatific, almost. "It's all right," he told her. "Really it is. You don't have to be afraid of computers."

Which changed her att.i.tude in an instant. "Well, I'm certainly not afraid of them," she said, insulted at the implication of primitive ignorance. If she chose to have nothing to do with computers, it wasn't out of aboriginal fear. She simply saw no reason for the things, that's all.

But the little man clearly didn't view the situation that way. Shaking his head, smiling sadly at her with his ridiculously wide mouth, he said, "It's just a wonderful help, that's all. It's a tool, like that pencil."

Myrtle looked at the pencil in her hand, seeing absolutely no link between it and the machine the little man was now so fondly fondling. "I really don't think you should do that," she told him. "Authorized personnel... insurance... my responsibility..."

He smiled at her, obviously not listening to a word. "Now, let's see," he said, studying her, but not in an offensive way. "You aren't going to care about computers, so what shall we access for you?"

"Access?" The word drew a blank in Myrtle's brain.

"You have such lovely flowers around your house," the little man went on, and before Myrtle could react to that, could ask him how he knew she had such lovely flowers around her house, he was saying, "So let's see what all the libraries around the state have for you on flowers."

"But-" she started, trying to catch up. "My house?"

"Look!" he cried, indicating the TV screen, gesturing to it like an affable host welcoming a favored guest to the best party of the year. "I bet you didn't know all this was here."

So she looked at the screen. She really had no choice but to look, even though it was difficult at first to make her eyes focus on those sharp-edged green letters. But then it did all come clear, as though some kind of mist or scrim had been swept away from in front of her eyes, and she stared in absolute astonishment. Gardening, flower arranging, picture books of flowers, histories of flowers: t.i.tle after t.i.tle went by, in as much profusion as any spring meadow. "But-" she stammered, "we don't have all those books here!"

"But you can get them!" the little man told her. "See? These symbols show you which libraries in the system have which books, and this code shows you how to request through the central computer in Albany, and they'll loan you the books to your library from theirs."

"Well, that's wonderful!" Myrtle was delighted at this cornucopia out of the blue, this sudden magic box. "Wait!" she cried. "They're going too fast! I want to see- How do I order?"

"I'll show you," he said. "It's really easy."

And the next forty minutes disappeared in a haze of floral technology. With the help of the little round man-he was like the elves in the fairy stories who make the shoes-Myrtle learned to master the computer, the VDT, to ask it questions and give it commands and use it like, like, like a pencil! How astonishing! How liberating! How unexpected!

At the end of the forty minutes, when he asked her if she thought she could run it by herself now, she said, "Oh, yes, I can! Oh, thank you! I never realized!"

"People think computers are bad," the little man said, "because whenever they want to do something somebody always says, 'You can't now, the computer's down.' But if you know what you're doing, it's easy. Gee whiz, you know, pencils break their points, too, but people don't panic and say pencils aren't any good."

"That's true," she said, warming to him, wanting to agree with him.

Suddenly shy, he smiled hesitantly, half turning away from her, and said, "We've talked all this time, and we haven't even been introduced. My name's Wally Knurr."

Why she said what she did Myrtle could never afterward understand. Maybe it was that the name had been so pervasively in her mind recently. Maybe it was because at long last she wanted there to be someone in the world who didn't think of her as Myrtle Street of Myrtle Street. Maybe it was simply that this was the first time she'd introduced herself to someone new since she'd learned the true ident.i.ty of her father. Whatever the reason, what Myrtle said, putting her hand out to be shaken by his soft pudgy fingers, was, "h.e.l.lo. I'm Myrtle Jimson."

He beamed happily at her. "Would you like to have lunch with me, Miss Jimson?" he asked.

TWENTY-SIX.

The warlord's daughter!

The purpose of the Princess is to be rescued.

Wally pushed back from the computer, his swivel chair rolling on the scratched floor. His hands trembled as he looked at the machine's last response. Out of the program. Into real time, real consequence, real challenge. Real life.

Wally took a long slow deep breath. As much as was possible for him to do, he firmed his jaw. Real life. The greatest interactive fiction of them all.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

At three in the morning, the only action on two-block-long Ganesvoort Street, in the middle of the wholesale meat section of Manhattan, south of Fourteenth Street in the far West Village, is Florent, a good twenty-four-hour-a-day French bistro operating in an old polished-chrome-and-long-counter former diner. The diner's short end is toward the street, so the counter and tables run straight back under the vivid lights, with hard surfaces that bounce and echo the noise of cheerful conversation. While all around this one building the meat packers and wholesale butchers are closed and silent and dark, the bone trucks all empty and hosed down for the night, and the metal gates closed over the loading docks, the cars and limousines still wait cl.u.s.tered in front of the warm bright lights of the bistro, which seems at all times to be filled with animated talking laughing people who are just delighted to be awake now. Taxis come and go, and among them this evening was one cab containing Dortmunder and Kelp.

"You want the restaurant, right?" the cabby asked, looking at them in his mirror, because what else would they want on Ganesvoort Street at three in the morning?

"Right," Dortmunder said.

The s.p.a.ce in front of Florent was lined with stretch limos, some with their attendant drivers, some empty. The taxi stopped in the middle of the lumpy cobblestone street, and Dortmunder and Kelp paid and got out. They maneuvered between limos to the broken curb, moving toward the restaurant, as the cab jounced away to the corner. When it made its right, so did Dortmunder and Kelp, turning away from the inviting open entrance of the bistro and walking east instead, past all the dark and empty butcher businesses.

Kelp said, "Which one, do you know?"

Dortmunder shook his head. "All she said was, this block."

"I see it," Kelp said, looking forward. "Do you?"

"No," Dortmunder said, frowning, squinting at the empty nighttime view, not liking it that Kelp had gotten the answer first, if in fact he had. "What do you think you see?"

"I think I see," Kelp answered, "a truck over there on the other side, down a ways, with a guy sitting at the wheel."

Then Dortmunder saw it, too. "That's it, all right," he agreed.

As they started across the street, Kelp said, "Maybe after we talk to Tiny we can go back to that place, grab something to eat. Looked nice in there."

Dortmunder said, "Eat? Whadaya wanna eat at this hour for?"

"Ask the people in the restaurant," Kelp suggested. "They're eating."

"Maybe they got a different body clock."

"And maybe I got a different body clock," Kelp said. "Don't take things for granted, John."

Dortmunder shook his head but was spared answering because they'd reached the truck, an anonymous high-sided aluminum box with a battered cab, on the door of which some previous company name had been sloppily obliterated with black spray paint. The driver was a twitchy skinny owlish man who hadn't shaved for seventy-nine hours, which was not for him a record. He sat nervously, hunched over the wheel of his truck, its engine growling low, like something asleep deep in a cave. He stared straight forward, as though it was the law in this state to keep your eye on the road even when your vehicle was stationary.

Dortmunder approached the driver's open window and said, "Whadaya say?"

Nothing. No answer. No response. The driver watched nothing move in front of his unmoving truck.

So Dortmunder decided to cut straight to the essence of the situation. "We wanna talk to Tiny," he said.

The driver blinked, very slowly. His left hand trembled on the steering wheel, while his right hand moved out of sight.

"Wait a second," Dortmunder said. "We're friends of-"

The truck lunged forward, suddenly in gear. Dortmunder automatically flinched back as the dirty aluminum side of the truck swept past his nose, about a quarter of an inch away.

Kelp, behind Dortmunder a pace, cried out helpfully, "Hey! Dummy! Whadaya-!" But the truck was gone, rattling away down Ganesvoort Street, reeling past Florent, tumbling to the corner, swaying around to the right, and out of sight. "Well, now, what the h.e.l.l was that for?" Kelp demanded.

"I think he was a little nervous," Dortmunder said, and a voice behind them growled, "Where's my truck?"

They turned and found themselves facing a bullet head on an ICBM body lumpily stuffed into a black shirt and a brown suit. It was as though King Kong were making a break for it, hoping to smuggle himself back to his island disguised as a human being. And, just to make the picture complete, this marvel carried over his shoulder half a cow; half a naked cow, without its fur or head.

"Tiny!" Dortmunder said inaccurately. "We're looking for you!"

"I'm looking for my truck," said Tiny, for that was indeed the name by which he was known. Tiny Bulcher, the blast furnace that walks like a man.

Dortmunder, a bit abashed, said, "Your driver, uh, Tiny, he's a very nervous guy."

Tiny frowned, which made his forehead like a children's book drawing of the ocean. "You spooked him?"

Kelp said, "Tiny, he was spooked long before we got here. Years before. He never said a word to us."

"That's true," Dortmunder said.

Kelp went on, "We just told him we're your friends, we're looking for you, and zip, he's gone."

Dortmunder said, "Tiny, I'm sorry if we made trouble."

"You're right to be," Tiny told him. "You called my place, huh? Talked to Josie?"

"That's right."

"And she just told you I was down here, huh?"

"Sure."

Tiny looked discontented with this idea. "Somebody calls that girl on the phone, says, 'Where's Tiny,' and she says, 'Oh, Tiny's downtown committing a felony right now.' "

"She knows me, Tiny," Dortmunder pointed out. "You and me met J. C. Taylor together, remember?"

Kelp added, "We been through the wars together, Tiny, us and J.C. Rescued the nun and everything."

Tiny ignored Kelp, saying to Dortmunder, "Josie knows you, does she?" He was the only one in the known universe to call J. C. Taylor "Josie." "On the phone, she knows you. Could be a cop calls, says, 'h.e.l.lo, J.C., this is John Dortmunder, your pal Tiny committing any felonies at this particular moment?' 'Oh, sure,' says Josie."

"Come on, Tiny," Dortmunder said, "J.C. recognized my voice. I didn't say my name at all, she did. And I said I wanted to get in touch with you right away, so that's when she told me you were down there. So she did the right thing, okay?"

Tiny brooded about that. He shifted the half a cow from his right shoulder to the left. "Okay," he decided. "I trust Josie's judgment. But what about the truck?"

Kelp said, "The guy ran off, Tiny. What are we supposed to do, come down here with tranquilizer darts? The guy was very spooked, that's all. We show up and that's it, he's gone."

"Well, here's the situation," Tiny said. "The situation is, I agreed I'd come down here for a guy, with the guy's truck and the guy's driver, and I'd make my way in this place and pick up six sides a beef, on accounta I can do that quick and easy."