Seven Silent Men (9 page)

There was as yet no mention of the robbery on the national newscasts of CBS or NBC or ABC. Matters were too inconclusive. Nor by 7:30 did the Prairie Port Police Department know anything more about the crime than it did six hours earlier. Brink's Incorporated and bank personnel were counting the balance of the money shipment intended for Mormon State but couldn't yet say how much was stolen. The resident agents of the FBI's Prairie Port office were still unable to develop a clear-cut method by which legally to enter the case … but this didn't seem to matter when at 11
P
.
M
. Sunstrom received a phone call at home from an aide to A. R. Roland by the name of Denis Corticun.

“Get to the assistant U.S. attorney and claim jurisdiction any way you can,” he was ordered.

FOUR

“Tell me, if you would, where it was you went?”

A right pinstriped trouser leg crossed over on top of a left pinstriped trouser leg. Manicured fingers lowered and rubbed against one another as the fingers of a pickpocket might rub together prior to dipping into a passing purse. A strand of lint was lifted from the right knee and disposed of. The fingers returned to the pinstriped lap, came to rest on fingers already lying there. A throat cleared. “I am sorry to have awakened you, but it is important I know where it was you went. What happened?”

Brewmeister, in traction on a hospital bed and bandaged at the neck and shoulders, tried to move, get a better view of the man in the pinstriped suit sitting bolt upright in the chair beyond the bedstead.

“You left the scene of the robbery and went where?”

Brewmeister strained more.

“Is something amiss, Mister Brewmeister? Discomfort? Shall I summon a nurse?”

“I can't see you,” Brewmeister said.

“See me? I'm in plain sight.”

“Not your face.”

Pinstripe got up.

“Should I record that too?” asked the crisp young man with a stenographic pad. He wore a gray chalk-stripe suit and sat just within the door of the private hospital room.

“No, Mister Quinton, not that.” Pinstripe reset his chair, resat himself, bolt upright and downbed, in plain view. His right knee crossed over on top of the left knee. His manicured hands settled in his lap.

“Where did you say you're from?” Brewmeister studied what he would later describe as Pinstripe's “nondescript eastern seaboard face.”

“SOG,” Pinstripe told him. “I'm Special Duty Inspector Corticun. Denis Corticun.”

“I got that part. What department did you say?”

“Strategic Review,” answered Corticun. “It's a monitoring program, recently innovated.”

“To do what?”

“Among other things, record outstanding achievements by individual agents such as yourself.”

Brewmeister, frowning, glanced at the closed slats of a venetian blind behind Corticun. Light filtered through. “What time is it?”

“Four in the afternoon.”

“Four Sunday or Monday?”

“Monday.”

“I slept for twenty-four hours?”

“Yes.”

“What was the loot?”

“Loot?”

“The take from the bank robbery.”

“They're still attempting to establish that.”

“I'll bet it's big.” Brewmeister spoke more to himself than anyone. “A real big loot.”

Corticun snuck a fast look at Quinton, who was biting the tip of his pencil. “May we proceed with the interview?”

“Why not interview Sunstrom? I gave Strom the whole story yesterday.”

“We've talked to Mister Sunstrom. Now it's time to talk with you.”

“I'm tired. Come back later, okay?”

“Is there some reason, Mister Brewmeister, you do not wish to speak to me?”

“You go riding a goddam underground rapids and fracture a goddam leg and sprain a shoulder and tell me if you don't feel like sleeping too!”

“You rode twenty-two miles underground from what we can assess, Mister Brewmeister. A heroic and harrowing feat by anyone's measure. And I understand your displeasure at my appearing here to question you at such a moment. You are, however, a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I am here on matters of importance to that selfsame organization. Our organization. Yours and mine.”

Brewmeister stared at the ceiling.

Pinstriped legs recrossed themselves. “I am told that on your own initiative you left the scene of the robbery and went exploring the caves, is that so?”

Brewmeister nodded.

“You've had experience with caves, have you not, Mister Brewmeister?”

“Spelunking.”

“Pardon me?”

“Spelunking,” Brewmeister repeated. “That's the colloquial for exploring caves. Speleology is the science of studying caves.”

“Is that ‘ie' or ‘ee'?” asked Quinton.

“One ‘e.' S-P-E-L. It comes from the Greek
spelaion. Spelaion
is cave in Greek.”

“According to agent Jessup the bank vault had cracked through the cement floor and discussion arose as to what was under the floor,” Corticun stated. “Engineers for the building said there was no danger, that there was solid rock under the cement, but you knew that might not be so. You knew there were caves down there?”

Brewmeister shook his head. “The caves I'd explored were miles downstream and around behind a cove. I explored them a long time ago. The only thing I knew about the cliffs where the bank was, was hearsay.”

“What sort of hearsay?”

“Childhood rumors about caves existing and rumrunners using them during prohibition. Things like that. Fairy tales.”

“And that's what you went looking for, childhood fairy tales?”

Brewmeister thought it over. “I'm still sort of a child, I guess. About caves.”

“From the point of the discussion as to what was under the bank vault floor, what did you do?”

“I walked out of the bank and looked upstream and thought I saw an opening in the cliff …”

“An opening how far upstream?” Corticun interjected.

“Four or five hundred yards from where I was standing. I drove over and climbed down the cliff face and had a look. It was the mouth of a passageway. I went in. The passage led me into a series of caves and tunnels and large water tubes. I followed one to the other, meandered all over hell for a while and got lucky. Or unlucky. I ended up directly under the vault.”

“How long did all of this take?”

“From the time I entered the tunnel, maybe half an hour or forty minutes.”

“Tell me about the area directly beneath the vault.”

“It was a natural cave, say twenty-five-feet high. I didn't explore all of it, but from what I could see, it ran quite a ways. My guess is it was the dome of a network of linked, smaller caves. Part of the ceiling had been cut away, excavated by the men who were trying to get to the vault.”

This time it was Corticun's arms which crossed. “Once you arrived in this dome cave under the vault, what did you do?”

“I climbed the scaffold.”

“What scaffold?”

“A steel scaffold. A portable scaffold that reached up past the lights.”

The arms uncrossed. “There were lights in the cave when you were there? Electric lights?”

“How do you think I could see the scaffold? There were about ten strings of electric lights. Hundred-watt unglazed Mazdas. Hasn't anyone been down there since? Is it still flooded?”

“It took half a day for the cave area to drain out enough,” Corticun said. “The men who went down into it after that didn't find a scaffold or lights. Or you.”

“What did you say,” Brewmeister began. “How many miles was it I traveled?”

“From the spot you were found on the island to where the cave is measures just under twenty-two miles.”

Brewmeister whistled.

“I realized this might prove difficult, if not impossible to talk about,” Corticun said, “but what can you tell me about the flooding and after?”

“It's the only part I do like talking about.” Brewmeister shifted as best he could in traction. “Like I told Strom, I was standing on the scaffold looking up into the hole in the bottom of the vault, watching the torch burn through the top of the vault. Then came a looney-toon moment when the torch man and myself were staring at one another. The next I knew I was being swept up in a tidal wave. A raging tidal wave trapped in a cave. Swirling water started spinning me around and sucking me down. By the time I realized the water was spinning out like water going down a drain I was already far below the surface and sinking deeper. I was spinning and being sucked legs first. Being sucked into something horizontal. Probably a large main. I was holding my breath and praying for I don't know what. My eyes were closed. When they weren't closed, the darkness didn't allow much to be seen. Then I got stuck. Wherever I was, whatever I was in, I was stuck. My lungs hurt to the point of bursting but some … some primal instinct told me to keep holding my breath …”

Brewmeister stared contemplatively at the ceiling as if watching the events play out on an overhead screen. “Then there was … well, I guess a water cannon describes it best. I had the sensation of being shot out of a water cannon or maybe a torpedo tube. I was being propelled forward, under water, at an incredible speed. I tried opening my eyes but couldn't from the sheer pressure of the thrust. I may have passed out at this point. Passed out or …

“What I remember next was riding an avalanche of water. My body was sticking out of what was a solid wall of water surging through the tunnels. I was traveling at the same incredible speed as before and knew I was dangerously close to the top of the tunnel. I knew that the top of the tunnel was only inches above me and that if I looked up my face would scrape off. I kept my head down. The ride, as fast as it was, was smooth for a while. Then it became rougher. I was being buffeted along now, taking sharp turns and rises and falls. Coming around one exceptionally fast turn I crashed into something and fractured my leg. Then I was carried over a series of cascades into steadily declining levels of tunnel. I was tumbling head over heels down these. I came around another turn and here the water course ran straighter and faster than in quite a while. I was almost body-surfing along. Up ahead I saw a solid wall of brick. A tunnel's end of brick. I was being driven at it like a pig on a spit …”

Brewmeister stopped speaking, watched the crisis continue on the memory screen.

After waiting several seconds, Corticun asked, “Then what?”

Brewmeister went on staring at the ceiling: His eyes half-closed. His face twisted into an anticipatory expression somewhere between pain and elation.

“Mister Brewmeister, you were being carried toward the wall and then what?”

“Ask Strom. Anyway, I got past the wall and was swept on through another couple of tunnels, got dumped out into the river and crawled onto an island and came to in this room.”

Corticun and Quinton exchanged a long look. The pinstriped knees recrossed before Corticun asked, “Mister Brewmeister, what is your assessment of the men who robbed the vault?”

“They're rich.”

“Bear with me while I propose a scenario,” said Corticun. “A group of criminals penetrates a system of tunnels and caves, a complex system, and comes up directly under the spot where a bank is being built. They bring in electricity and a large portable scaffold and God only knows what other paraphernalia. They excavate away the top of the cave until they have reached the bank floor. They cut through the floor and reach the vault itself and then cut right through that. Somehow they have arranged to neutralize the electronic alarm system on the vault and throughout the bank. What's more, somehow they have manipulated their escape by flooding the tunnels and caves they had used for the perpetration. Not only that, by flooding those areas they also erased the physical evidence of having been there in the first place.”

“Is that what they did?” Brewmeister said. “Flooded the tunnel intentionally?”

“It appears so. The perpetrators may have tested their escape and flooding plans quite a few times prior to the actual perpetration. This could explain the electrical shortages and brown-outs in the Prairie Port area over the last week and a half.”

Brewmeister's nod was appreciative. “Pretty slick.”

“Very slick,” Corticun suggested.

“The crime of the century,” added Quinton.

“It may well be.” Corticun was on his feet. “Mister Brewmeister, I would like to have your opinion on what sort of person, other than yourself, could find his way through those caves?”

“Anyone who works down there, I'd guess. Sewer or water company personnel. Maybe people from the electric company?”

“I'm referring to the caves. Who could have seen a bank being constructed and known that underneath there was a natural cave? Any local criminals?”

“It's possible some of the old rumrunners knew.”

“I thought that was a childhood rumor.”

“An oft-repeated rumor. I give it credence.”

“Are any of those old rumrunners still around?”

“One or two.”

Corticun's thumb hitched into the fob of his vest. “You've been extremely helpful, Mister Brewmeister, extremely. I hope your recovery is rapid.” He took several steps toward Quinton, who had stood up, then turned. “For the record, Mister Brewmeister, what happened at the brick wall in the tunnel?”

“Never for the record.” Brewmeister, for the first time during the interview, spoke lightly.

“Off the record then? For my own curiosity.”

“I don't think you'll want to know.”

“Why not allow me to be judge of that?”

“… I had a religious experience.”

“Religious experience?”

“… I saw the kingdom of heaven. It was on the other side of that wall.”

Had Corticun been seated, he would have crossed his legs or folded his hands or removed lint from a knee. Standing, all he could do was clear his throat.