Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

The princess, stolen by gypsies/crows/Merlin/the childless peasant woman, will have a birthmark in an intimate location.

Not in Real Life. Or, even if she does, it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t any inheritance.

A princess has her father’s realm. A warlord has a cache of valuables.

Oh, the money in the reservoir. I think Tom intends to take that with him. The point is, the princess is in peril!

Naturally.

I arranged to have her placed under my protection.

Naturally.

And now I wait, and I’m patient, and I see what transpires, isn’t that right?

Naturally.

When Dortmunder opened one eye, everything was wrong. Opening the second eye didn’t improve the situation. He was still in the same condition, lying on the floor in the living room, facing a television set on which Raquel Welch wore a lab coat and discussed microbiology. Raquel Welch. Microbiology. Micro biology.

Feet. Feet entered the living room, dressed in scuffed old brown boots and raggedy-cuffed faded blue jeans. Seeing the feet, Dortmunder realized it had been the opening of the apartment door that awakened him, and then he remembered it all: 1) Guffey. 2) Tom/Tim Jimson/Jepson. 3) Handcuffs. 4) Pizza, which Guffey had gone out for.

“Got it,” Guffey announced from way up there above the feet.

“Great.” Dortmunder used his left hand to push himself to a seated position, since his right wrist was through a loop of the handcuffs, whose other loop was closed around a segment of the radiator. Dortmunder felt dizzy, woozy, and now he recalled that the reason Guffey had gone out for pizza in the first place was because they both had begun to feel they’d put somewhat too much beer into empty stomachs.

Companionably, Guffey opened the pizza box on the floor, within easy reach of Dortmunder’s left hand, and then said, “I got us some more beer, too.”

“Good.”

Guffey also sat on the floor, democratically, and they both rested their backs against the sofa while they ate pizza and drank beer and watched Raquel Welch run around inside somebody’s bloodstream. She was in a jumpsuit now, more sensibly, but she was still talking about microbiology.

After a while, Guffey said wistfully, “You know, John, this is about the nicest party I’ve been to in, oh, forty, uh, lemme think, forty-four years.”

“Well, it’s not a real party, Guffey,” Dortmunder pointed out. “It’s just the two of us.”

“For me,” Guffey told him, “two’s a crowd.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

They sat in easy silence together awhile longer, and then, during a National Guard commercial—it was really very late at night, damn near morning already—Guffey said doubtfully, “Maybe it’s Matt.”

“You think so?”

“I dunno. Try me on it.”

Filling his voice with enthusiasm and good cheer—or at least giving it the old dropout try—Dortmunder said, “Hey, Matt, whadaya say? How ya doing, Matt? Hey, look, fellas, it’s Matt Guffey!”

Guffey listened to all that, listened to the echoes, thought it over, then shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said.

“It’ll come to you,” Dortmunder assured him.

“Yeah, sure it will.”

That had been a kind of embarrassing moment, much earlier this evening, when Dortmunder, in a psychologically clever ploy to get Guffey to relax his vigil and lower his guard, had said, “Listen, if we’re gonna be stuck together a couple days, let’s at least be friendly. My name’s John.” And it had turned out that Guffey couldn’t remember his first name.

Well, you couldn’t blame the guy, really. For the last couple of decades, nobody had talked directly to Guffey at all, and during the prison years prior to that people all called one another by their last names to demonstrate how manly they really were despite whatever sexual practices incarceration might have reduced them to, so it had probably been some time in the waning days of the Second World War that anybody had last addressed Guffey by his first name.

Guffey had been embarrassed, of course, at this lapse in his memory, and Dortmunder had volunteered to help him find the missing name, so now Guffey spent a part of his time—that part not learning about microbiology—thinking about potential names, and whenever he came across one that seemed a possibility Dortmunder would try it out on him. So far, no success.

A while later, the microbiology movie came to an end and Guffey managed to get to his feet on the second try and go over to switch around the channels till he found Raquel Welch again, this time not discussing anything at all because she was a cavewoman.

The lack of discussion didn’t seem to harm the impact of the picture.

“Sam. Try Sam.”

“Hey, Sam! Sam Guffey! Come over here, Sam!”

“Nope. Makes me sound like a dog.”

After another little period of time, Dortmunder came out of a half snooze to realize he had to make room for more beer. (The pizza was all gone, but a couple beers were left.) “Guffey,” he said.

Guffey looked away from the prehistoric landscapes. “Nurm?”

“Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “I gotta go the bathroom.”

“Gee, so do I,” said Guffey.

“Yeah, but I’m, uh, I got this, this thing here. The whatchamacallit.”

“Oh, that thing,” Guffey said, and frowned.

In previous similar circumstances, Guffey had sat across the room and tossed the key to Dortmunder, who’d unlocked the cuffs and tossed the key back before Guffey permitted him to go away to the bathroom. Then it had been Dortmunder’s responsibility, under Guffey’s watchful gaze and steady rifle, to lock himself to the cuffs again on his return.

But this time, Guffey made no move to get up and cross the room to where the rifle leaned against an armchair. “Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “It’s kind of urgent.”

Guffey frowned at Dortmunder, doubling every wrinkle on his wrinkled face. He said, “You won’t try to run away, will you?”

“Run? I can barely walk.”

“Here, take the goddamn thing,” Guffey said, and yanked the handcuff key from his pocket and slapped it into Dortmunder’s palm.

“Thanks, Guffey,” Dortmunder said, the gravity of the occasion causing him to pay insufficient attention to what Guffey had just done. So he simply unlocked the cuffs, climbed the sofa and the wall to his feet, and lurched a circuitous route to the doorway and the hail and the bathroom.

While he was in there, Guffey’s voice sounded from the other side of the door: “Try Jack.”

“Hey, Jack!” Dortmunder yelled, trying to keep his aim true on a sneakily shifting bowl. “I’m fulla beer, Jack! Hey, Jack Guffey, you fulla beer?”

No answer. Dortmunder finished, flushed, washed, opened the door, and Guffey was standing there, nodding slowly, his eyes at half mast. “No,” he said, “and yes.”

Dortmunder went back to the living room and sat on the floor in front of the sofa but didn’t put the cuffs back on. He gazed at the Neanderthals—what casting! — and then at the rifle leaning against the armchair beside the television set, and thought things over. He could move, if he wanted to, no question about that. He just didn’t want to, that’s all.

After a while, Guffey came back into the room, bouncing off the doorposts. He gazed blearily at Dortmunder. Sounding maybe worried, maybe dangerous, certainly drunk, he said, “You didn’t put the cuffs on.”

“No, I didn’t,” Dortmunder told him. “And I didn’t grab the rifle either. What the hell, Guffey. Any enemy of Tom’s is a friend of mine. Come over here and watch the movie.”