Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

The valley. The valley as it was before the dam was built, seen from just above the highest hilltop to its south. The picture wasn’t realistic, was very cartoony, with dividing lines that were too regular and right-angled, perspective that was just a little off, and all primary colors (mostly green), but it was damn effective anyway. You looked at that TV screen and you knew you were looking at an actual valley from the air. “Hmm,” Dortmunder said.

“Now, your town,” Wally said, his sausage fingers moving on the keys, “was Putkin’s Corners. The big one.”

“County seat,” Tom said.

Dortmunder, turning his head to look at Tom’s profile, realized that even he was impressed, though, being Tom, he’d rather kill than admit it.

On the screen, the valley was in motion. Or the observer was, moving in closer and lower, the valley turning slightly as they descended, showing squared-off bits of red and yellow that were becoming the buildings of a town. The predominant green of the valley made no effort to imitate trees, but was simply a green carpet with topographical markings faintly visible on it.

I’ve seen this kind of thing on television, Dortmunder thought, as the screen showed the town growing larger and larger, the buildings all turning slowly at once as the perspective altered. As though they were in a cartoon helicopter over this cartoon landscape, circling lower, coming in on the town from above.

“That’s pretty much what it looked like, all right,” Tom said. “Only cleaner.”

Keeping eyes on the screen and fingers on the keys, Wally explained, “I input photographs from the local newspaper. I think I got just about everything we need in your part of town. You’re the one who hid the treasure, I bet.”

Tom, cold eyes flashing, said, “Treasure?”

Smiling easily, Kelp said, “ You remember, Tom. The treasure hunt.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tom said.

Kelp had explained his scam before they’d come here. The idea was, an unnamed friend of Kelp’s—now revealed to Wally as Tom Jimson—had been involved in a treasure hunt with friends in upstate New York years and years ago and had buried a clue to the treasure in that spot behind the library. The treasure hunt was completed and the treasure itself found, but nobody had come up with that one clue, which was forgotten all about at the time.

Soon afterward, as the yarn went, Tom had gone away—cough, cough—and had not been back to this part of the world for many years. On his recent return, finding the reservoir now in place where Putkin’s Corners had once stood, Tom had remembered that unfound clue—a valuable diamond ring around a rolled sheet of cryptic doggerel poetry hidden in a box—and was amused ( Tom Jimson! Amused !) at the idea of its still being hidden there, beneath so much water.

When Tom had told Kelp the anecdote of the buried clue, as Kelp’s cover story continued, Kelp had bet him that the new wonder of the time, the PC—our age’s genie-out-of-the-bottle—could show how the clue might be salvaged. Tom had accepted the bet, with a two-week time limit to come up with a solution. If Kelp—and Wally—solved the problem, and the diamond ring was actually salvaged from its watery grave, Tom would sell it and share the proceeds with Kelp, who would share with Wally. If Kelp—and Wally—failed, Kelp alone would have to pay Tom an unspecified but probably pretty substantial sum of money. Before accepting the bet, Kelp had talked it over with Wally, who had assured him the PC was every bit as magical and useful as Kelp believed. In fact, Wally had volunteered (as Kelp had expected he would) to do the reservoir program himself. And so here they all were.

In a cartoon helicopter hovering over a cartoon town. Wally said, “That’s County Hall, isn’t it?”

“Right,” said Tom. “With the library next to it.”

The cartoon helicopter swooped around the wooden dome of County Hall, and Dortmunder’s stomach did a little lurch, as though he were on a roller coaster. “Take it a little slower, okay?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Wally said, and the cartoon helicopter slowed, hanging in the air over the County Hall dome, looking toward the low red brick library building. “It’s behind that?”

“Right,” said Tom.

Wally’s fingers moved, and so did the cartoon helicopter, approaching the library. “I couldn’t find any photos of that area back there,” Wally explained apologetically, “so I didn’t put any details in. I have the size of the field, though, from surveyor’s plats.”

“It was just a field,” Tom said. “The idea was, they were supposed to blacktop it for a parking lot for the library, but they didn’t.”

Dortmunder said, “Tom? What if they’d changed their mind later? Water; blacktop; you’d still be under something. And they would have dug everything up first before they made a parking lot.”

“I knew somebody at the library,” Tom said, lips not moving and eyes not turning from the terminal screen, where the cartoon helicopter rounded the side of the library building and looked at a blank tan rectangle of field, with the backs of stores across the way. “She told me,” he went on, “they gave up the parking lot idea. Spent the money on books.”

“Huh,” Dortmunder said. “All of it?”

Wally, hovering his helicopter over the expanse of blank tan, said, “Do you know exactly where the clue was buried?”

“I can show you,” Tom said, “if you put in the streetlights.”

“I put in everything,” Wally told him, “that was in the photos.”

“Okay, then. There’s one spot back there where you can’t see any of the three streetlights. The one next to the library, the one in front of County Hall, and the one on the other block by the stores.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Wally said, and eased the helicopter down onto the tan field for a landing, where it swiveled upward over a span of ninety degrees and altered itself into the eyes of a person standing on the field, looking at the rear of the library. Wally’s fingers moved, and the person turned slightly to the right to look past the library toward County Hall.

“There’s the streetlight,” Tom said. “Move forward a little.”

The person did, at Wally’s direction, and the thin pole of the streetlight—a cartoon streetlight, just sketched in—disappeared behind the corner of the library.

“This is some goddamn piece of work,” Tom said, leaning closer over Wally’s head. “Let’s take a look to the left.” The angle of vision moved leftward, past the library. “Good,” Tom said. “No streetlight. Now the other way.”

The person in the field turned all the way around, buildings sliding past in distorted perspective, as in a funhouse mirror, while Dortmunder’s stomach did that lurch again. And there was the low row of stores, facing the other way, and between two of them appeared another stick-figure streetlight.

His grim voice hushed, Tom said, “Back up a little, and to the right.”

Wally did it. The stores shifted; the streetlight disappeared.

“Right there !” Tom crowed, his mouth all the way open for once. “Right goddamn there !”

“Was I right?” Kelp demanded, grinning from ear to ear as he and Dortmunder and Tom Jimson walked east on West Forty-fifth Street, away from Wally Knurr’s decrepit apartment building—loft building, really, semiconverted to human use—half a block from the river. “Was I right? Is Wally the genius we wanted?”

“He says,” Tom Jimson answered, his thin lips immobile, “the tunnel won’t work.”

“I know that, I know that,” Kelp admitted, brushing it aside, or at least trying to brush it aside. “That isn’t the—”