Life Expectancy (10 page)

13

A
bout eight feet in width, the limestone-clad tunnel featured a low barrel-vaulted ceiling but straight walls. Underfoot, the rectangular paving stones had been laid in a herringbone pattern.

Cast off by fat yellow candles in bronze sconces, draft-stirred light shimmered lambently along the walls and, with shadows, wove an ever-changing tapestry across the curve of the ceiling.

This forbidding passageway appeared to be long, dwindling into a confusion of shadows and sinuous sylphs of light before an end could be glimpsed.

I would not have been surprised to encounter Edgar Allan Poe, but there was no sign of him, nor of Honker and the nameless maniac.

Although the cool—but not damp—air smelled surprisingly clean and free of moldy malodors, scented by nothing but raw limestone and hot candle wax, I expected bats, rats, roaches, scuttling mysteries, but at the moment we had only Crinkles.

We had proceeded hesitantly ten or fifteen feet when he said, “Stop there a minute.”

While we waited, he closed the secret door in the bookshelves from this side and then shut the ironbound oak door to the alcove. Perhaps the intention was to minimize the effect of the blast on the tunnel if the library explosion occurred prematurely, before we had reached absolute safety.

While Crinkles closed things behind us, Lorrie zippered open her purse and rummaged through it. She found the steel nail file.

To her shock, with my free left hand, I snatched it from her.

She expected me to throw it away, and when I didn’t, she said, “Gimme.”

“I pulled this Excalibur from the stone, and only I have the power to use it,” I whispered, going totally literary on her with the hope that this would charm her into acceptance.

She looked like she wanted to take a swing at me. I suspected her punch would pack one hell of a wallop.

Rejoining us, moving past us, so arrogant and so sure of our timidity that he
actually turned his back on us,
Crinkles led the way. “Come on, come on, and don’t think I haven’t got eyes in the back of my head.”

He probably did. Everyone had back-of-the-head eyes on his native planet.

“Where are we?” I asked as we followed him.

The core of him was such a tightly wound ball of psychopathic fury that he could make a direct and simple answer sound fraught with anger: “Going under Center Square Park about now.”

“I mean the tunnel. What is it?”

“What the hell do you mean
what is it?
It’s a tunnel, you shit-for-brains moron.”

Taking no offense, I asked, “When was it built, by who?”

“Back in the 1800s, before anything else. Cornelius Snow had it constructed—the greedy, grasping bastard.”

“Why?”

“So he’d be able to get around town secretly.”

“What was he, a Victorian Batman or something?”

“The tunnels connect four of his major holdings around the square—the belly-crawling capitalist pig.”

Throughout this conversation, Lorrie cast meaningful looks my way, wanting me at once to attack Crinkles with Excalibur.

As enchanted swords go, the nail file left a lot to be desired. Mostly hidden in my hand, the flat length of steel felt stiff but not as thick as a knife. The point wasn’t sharp enough to prick my thumb.

If Lorrie had been wearing spike-heeled shoes instead of white tennies, I’d have preferred to go at Crinkles with one of those.

I responded to her increasingly exasperated looks with the broad expressions of a bad mime, telling her not to be impatient, not to be rash, just to give me time to find the right opportunity for nail-file mayhem.

“So…what four major holdings do the tunnels connect?” I asked Crinkles as we moved forward through wafting candlelight and clinging shadows.

He listed them with increasing venom: “His mansion, that pile of gaudy excess. His library, which is nothing but a temple to decadent Western so-called literature. His courthouse, that nest of poisonous judges who oppressed the masses for him. And the bank, where he stole from the poor and foreclosed on widows.”

“He owned his own bank?” I asked. “How cool.”

Crinkles said, “He owned most of some things and some of just about everything—the blood-sucking, black-hearted, running dog. If a hundred men had divided his possessions, every one of them would have been too rich to be allowed to live. Wish I’d been alive back then. I’d have cut the imperialist swine’s head off and played kickball with it.”

Even in the inconstant candlelight, I could see that Lorrie’s face was red and taut with barely contained—one might almost say
hysterical
—frustration. I didn’t need a facial-language specialist to interpret her expression for me:
Go, Jimmy, go, Jimmy, go, go, go! Stab the bastard, stab the bastard! Siss-boom-bah!

I chose instead to bide my time.

She was probably wishing she had worn those spike-heeled shoes so she could take them off and tattoo my head.

A moment later we came to an intersection with another tunnel. A still gentle but stronger draft moved here. To the left and right, more sconces with additional fat yellow candles threw rippling curtains of light into a crawling darkness.

I should have realized that a cross of passageways must underlie the town square, because each of the four holdings that Crinkles had bitterly enumerated was in a different block from the others: north, south, east, and west of the park.

Nevertheless, I could not help but be impressed by the abruptly revealed complication of this subterranean structure. Looking left, right, back, forward, I thought of the stone corridors and torchlit chambers in old movies about a mummy’s tomb, and in spite of our perilous circumstances, a thrill of adventure shivered through me.

Crinkles said, “This way,” and turned left.

Before we followed him, Lorrie put her purse on the floor. She tucked it in shadows close to the wall, in the length of corridor along which we had walked from the library.

If the nameless grinning feeb saw her with the handbag, the jig would be up—if you’re willing to allow that our pathetic nail-file scheme qualified as anything so grand as a jig.

She seemed reluctant to leave the purse. No doubt she considered it an arsenal of makeshift weapons. We might be able to suffocate Crinkles with a powder puff. If she had a hairbrush, we could spank him severely.

As we trailed after our guide once more, I said, “Why all the candles?”

Crinkles grew less patient with me by the minute. “So we can see in the dark, you freaking idiot.”

“But it’s not very efficient.”

“This is all they had back in the 1870s, candles and oil lamps, you drooling imbecile.”

Once more Lorrie began signaling me, by fantastical contortions of her face and a mad-horse rolling of the eyes, that the time had come to stab him.

Crinkles had declined so drastically in my affections that, against my better judgment, I was almost ready to carve him like scrimshaw.

I said, “Yes, but we aren’t in the 1870s. You could use flashlights, battery-powered lanterns, those sparkless chemical-tube flares.”

“Don’t you think we know that, you brain-dead jackass? But then the ambience wouldn’t be authentic.”

We proceeded several steps in silence before I could no longer resist asking: “Why does the ambience need to be authentic?”

“The boss wants it that way.”

I assumed the boss must be the nameless maniac, unless there was a Mr. Big whom we had not yet encountered.

At some date long after the initial construction, the last ten feet of this corridor had been walled off. They had used a double width of concrete blocks with embedded steel rebar.

Recently half the blocks had been broken out. The rebar had been cut with an acetylene torch. To one side of the corridor lay a pile of rubble.

We followed Crinkles through the gap in this partition, into the last portion of the corridor. Another ironbound oak door stood open at the end of the passageway.

Beyond, electric light from more ceiling fixtures, added decades after the original construction, revealed a large stone-walled room with massive columns and herringbone floor. Two stone staircases with stately ornamental iron railings climbed opposite walls to doors of brushed stainless steel. But for the stainless steel, there was a feeling of an occult temple about the place.

Half the space stood empty. The other half contained rows of green filing cabinets with aisles between.

Honker and the killer of librarians stood beside the handcart with its depleted load of explosives, in murmured conversation.

Concerned that the brighter light would reveal too much, I surreptitiously slipped the nail file into my pants pocket.

Beaming at the sight of Lorrie and me, as if we were old friends arriving at a cocktail party, our smiley host came to us, indicating the encompassing architecture with a sweep of one arm. “Some place, huh? The institution’s historical records are stored on this level.”

“What institution?” I asked.

“We’re under the bank.”

Lorrie said, “I’ll be damned. You’re going to rob it, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “Isn’t that what banks are for?”

The Beagle Boys were already planting explosive charges at two of the columns.

14

P
leased with himself, the maniac pointed to a hulking piece of equipment in a corner of the room. “Do you know what that is?”

Lorrie guessed, “A time machine?”

Having come from a family in which non sequiturs were as common in conversation as adverbs, I had adapted to the young Ms. Hicks’s style in short order.

Although the maniac was intrigued by her, he wasn’t always able to dance with her as I could, metaphorically speaking. His green eyes glazed, and his smile slightly rounded into puzzlement.

“How could it be a time machine?” he asked.

“At the fantastic pace science is progressing,” she said, “space shuttles and CAT scans, heart transplants and computerized toaster ovens, now cell phones you can carry anywhere and lipstick that won’t smear…Well, I mean, at this rate, sooner than later there’s going to be a time machine, so if there has to be one, why not here and now?”

He stared at Lorrie for a moment, then looked at the equipment in the corner as though wondering whether he had misidentified it and whether it might in fact be a time machine.

Had I made that same speech, he would have decided that I was either a headcase or a mocking smart-ass. Annoyed or offended, he would have shot me.

A beautiful woman, on the other hand, can say just about any damn thing, and men will seriously consider it.

Her guileless face, pellucid eyes, and sincere smile prevented me from determining whether the time-machine comment—or any other off-the-wall business that came out of her—was offered with total sincerity or in a spirit of fun.

Most people don’t have fun while being held hostage and being threatened with death by the likes of Crinkles. I suspected, however, that Lorrie Lynn Hicks might be capable of it.

I couldn’t wait for her to meet my family.

A lot of people don’t actually have fun even when they’re at a party having fun. That’s because they don’t have a sense of humor. Everyone claims to have a sense of humor, but some of them are lying and a significant number are fooling themselves.

This explains the success of most TV sitcoms and movie comedies. These shows can be entirely humorless, but scads of people will laugh uproariously at them because they come with a label that says
FUNNY
. The congenitally humor-challenged audience knows it’s safe to laugh, that it’s even expected.

This part of the entertainment business serves the community of the humorless in much the way that a manufacturer of prosthetic limbs serves those unfortunates who have lost arms or legs. Their work may be more important than feeding the poor.

My family has always
insisted
on fun not only during the sunny times of life but also during times of adversity, even in the face of loss and tragedy (though right now they must be sick with worry regarding my whereabouts). Maybe we inherited an acutely sensitive funny-recognition gene. Or maybe we’re just on a permanent sugar high from all the baked goods we eat.

“No,” said the nameless maniac, “it’s not a time machine. It’s the bank’s emergency generator.”

“Too bad,” Lorrie lamented. “I’d rather it had been a time machine.”

Gazing wistfully at the generator, the maniac sighed. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“So you’ve disabled the bank’s emergency generator,” I said.

My statement harried him out of his time-travel fantasy. “How did you know?”

I pointed. “The parts scattered there on the floor were a clue.”

“You’re quick,” he said with admiration.

“In my line of work, we have to be.”

He didn’t ask what job I held. As I’ve learned over the past ten years, psychopaths are routinely self-absorbed.

“The bank closed an hour ago,” he said, clearly proud of his elaborate plan and gratified to have an opportunity to share it. “The tellers’ drawers have been reconciled, and they’ve gone home. The vault will have been closed ten minutes ago. By routine, the manager and the two security guards were the last to leave.”

“Somewhere,” Lorrie guessed, “you’ve rigged a power-company transformer to blow, cutting electrical service to the town square.”

“When the power goes,” I said, “the generator won’t cut in, and the vault will be vulnerable.”

“You’re
both
very quick,” he said approvingly. “What’s the story with you two? Have you planned a heist before?”

“Not in this reincarnation,” Lorrie replied. “But that’s another story.”

He indicated the farther staircase. “That leads to the half of the bank’s upper basement where they fill coin rolls, bundle cash, verify incoming money shipments, and prepare outgoing transfers. The front door to the vault is also in that area.”

“The vault has a back door?” I asked with a note of disbelief that amused him.

He grinned, nodded, and pointed to the nearer staircase. “The door at the top goes directly into the vault.”

This detail seemed to belong entirely in the maniac’s distorted view of reality and not at all in the real world that I inhabited.

Pleased by my amazement, he said, “Cornelius Snow was the sole stockholder in the bank when he built it. He arranged things for his convenience.”

“Are we talking skullduggery here?” Lorrie wondered, and seemed to be delighted that there might be some.

“Not at all,” he assured her. “From every indication, Cornelius Snow was an honest, civic-minded man.”

“He was an insatiable greedy drooling pig,” Crinkles angrily disagreed as he worked on another explosive charge.

“He didn’t need to misappropriate any depositor’s funds because eighty percent of the deposits were his to begin with.”

Crinkles had no interest in these facts of accounting, only in emotion: “I would have roasted him on a spit and fed him to dogs.”

“In the 1870s,” the maniac said, “there wasn’t anything remotely like the complex web of regulation and oversight by which banks operate these days.”

“Except dogs would have the good sense not to eat the venomous bastard,” Crinkles added in a voice bitter enough to curdle milk.

“Shortly past the turn of the century, that simpler world began to fade away.”

“Even inbred, starving sewer rats wouldn’t have eaten the avaricious creep if you’d basted him in bacon grease,” Crinkles elaborated.

“After Cornelius died, when the bulk of his estate was left to a charitable trust, the section of tunnel leading to the bank’s subterranean entrance was walled shut.”

I recalled the breach in the wall that we had passed through en route. The Beagle Boys had been busy.

“The steel door at the head of those stairs to the vault isn’t actually operable,” the nameless maniac continued. “The old oak door was replaced with steel in the 1930s, then welded shut. And on the other side is a reinforced concrete-block wall. But we can get through all of that in maybe two hours, once we’ve dealt with the alarm.”

“I’m surprised this room right here isn’t alarmed,” Lorrie said. “Though I suppose if that was really a time machine, it would be.”

“Nobody saw the need. To all appearances, it’s not a major bank, not worth knocking over. Besides, after 1902, when they sealed off the underground approach, there
wasn’t
a back entrance anymore. And in respect of the bank’s security, the charitable trust that owns the Snow Mansion agreed not to disclose Cornelius’s tunnels. A few people in the historical society have seen them, but only after signing a nondisclosure agreement with teeth.”

Earlier he had mentioned torturing a member of the historical society, who was no doubt now as dead as the librarian. No matter how tightly a lawyer constructs a nondisclosure clause, there are ways around it.

I won’t say that I was thunderstruck by these revelations, but I was certainly flabbergasted, however fine a point that might be. Although born and raised in Snow Village, and although I loved my picturesque hometown and was steeped in its history, I’d never heard so much as a rumor about secret passageways under the town square.

When I expressed my amazement to the maniac, the warm twinkle in his eyes crystalized into a colder glitter that I recognized from the eyes of Killer the Gila monster and Earl the milk snake.

“You can’t deeply, fully
know
a town,” he said, “if you love it. Loving it, you’re charmed by surfaces. To deeply, fully know a town, you’ve got to hate it,
loathe
it, loathe it with an unquenchable fiery passion. You’ve got to be consumed by a need to learn all its rotten shameful secrets and use them against it, find its hidden cancers and feed them until they metastasize into apocalyptic tumors. You’ve got to
live
for the day when its every stone and stick will be wiped forever from the face of the earth.”

I assumed that once upon a time something bad had happened to him in our little tourist mecca. Something more traumatic than being given a lesser hotel room when he had reserved a suite or being unable to buy a ski-lift pass on a busy winter weekend.

“But when you come right down to it,” Lorrie said (somewhat riskily, it seemed to me), “this whole escapade isn’t about hate or about justice, like you said earlier. It’s about bank robbery. It’s just about money.”

The maniac’s face turned so livid that from hairline to chin and from ear to ear it looked like one big bruise. His smile went flatline.

“I don’t care about money,” he said so tightly that the words seemed to escape him without parting his fiercely compressed lips.

“You’re not breaking into a produce market to steal a lot of carrots and snow peas,” Lorrie said. “You’re robbing a bank.”

“I’m destroying the bank to break the town.”

“Money, money, money,” she persisted.

“This is about
vengeance
. Well-deserved, long-overdue vengeance. And that’s close enough to justice for me.”

“Not for me, it isn’t,” Crinkles interjected, leaving his work with the explosives to contribute to the conversation more directly. “This
is
about money because wealth isn’t just wealth but also the root and stalk and flower of power, and power liberates the powerful while it oppresses the powerless, so to crush what crushes, those who are oppressed must oppress the oppressors.”

I made no attempt to rerun that sentence through my memory banks. I was afraid that by trying to untangle it, my brain would crash. This was Karl Marx filtered through the lens of Abbott and Costello.

Aware from our expressions that his point had been too blunt to penetrate, Crinkles stated his philosophy more succinctly: “Some of that filthy stinking pig’s money belongs to me and to lots of other people he exploited to get it.”

“Gee whiz, take a rest from stupid for a moment,” Lorrie told Crinkles. “Cornelius Snow never exploited you. He died long before you were born.”

She was on a roll now, insulting everyone who had the power and the motivation to kill us.

I shook my cuffed hand, thereby shaking hers, to remind her that any spray of bullets she invited was likely to leave me dead, as well.

Crinkles’s mass of wiry hair seemed to stiffen until he less resembled Art Garfunkel than he did the bride of Frankenstein.

“What we’re doing here is making a
political
statement,” he insisted.

Thus far phlegmatic compared to his companions, Honker joined them, so exacerbated by all this talk of vengeance and politics that his caterpillar eyebrows twitched as if jolts of an electric current enlivened them.

“Cash,” he said. “That’s all it’s about for me. Cold cash. I’m here to take the money and run. If there wasn’t a bank, I wouldn’t have signed up for this, the rest of it doesn’t matter to me, and if you guys don’t shut up
and get the job done
—then I’m out of here, and you’re on your own.”

Honker must have had skills essential to the heist, because his threat quieted his partners.

Their fury, however, did not abate. They looked like thwarted attack dogs, held back on choke chains, faces dark with unspent rage, eyes hot with violent passion that would not cool until they had been allowed to bite.

I wished that I had some cookies to give them, maybe German
lebkuchen
or nice crisp Scotch shortbread. Or chocolate pecan tarts. The poet William Congreve wrote, “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast,” but I suspect good muffins are more effective.

As if aware that his associates’ submission to a threat did not constitute teamwork, Honker threw a bone to each man’s mania, beginning with Crinkles: “There’s a clock running and we’ve got a lot to do. That’s all I’m saying. And if we just do the job, your political statement will be made, loud and clear.”

Crinkles bit his lower lip in a manner reminiscent of our young president. Reluctantly he nodded agreement.

To the green-eyed maniac, Honker said, “You planned this caper ’cause you want justice for your mother’s death. So let’s do the job and
get
that justice.”

The librarian-killer’s eyes grew misty, as they had done when his heartstrings had been strummed by my revelation that my mother used to iron my socks.

“I found the issues of the newspaper that carried the story,” he told Honker.

“They must have been hard to read,” Honker sympathized.

“I felt like my heart was being ripped out. I could hardly…force myself through them.” His voice thickened with emotion. “But then I got so angry.”

“Understandable,” Honker commiserated. “Each of us only gets one mother.”

“It wasn’t just her being murdered. It was the lies, Honker. Almost everything in the newspaper was a
lie.
”

Glancing at his wristwatch, Honker shrugged and said, “Well, what do you expect from newspapers?”

“Capitalist lapdogs is all they are,” Crinkles observed.

“They said my mother died in childbirth and Dad shot the doctor in a mad rage, as if
that
makes any sense.”

The nameless maniac could have been my age. To the day? To the hour? Almost to the minute? If he’d gotten his good looks and green eyes from his mother…

Astonished, without thinking, I said, “Punchinello?”

When Honker furrowed his forehead, his push-broom eyebrows swept shadows of suspicion over his eyes.