David Morrell - Creepers

"The government stole the gold?" JD said.

"People who turned in the coins and the bars got receipts that they could apply to their bank accounts," Vinnie said. "Since then, the only way an American can own a gold coin is by treating it as a historical collector's piece. You can look at it. You can hold it in your hand. You can buy and sell it at a rare-coin store. But you can't buy a tank of gasoline with it."

"Certainly, these days, the face value of a twenty-dollar gold coin won't buy a tank of gas," Balenger said. Keep the conversation going, he thought.

"What about the gangster?" Tod fingered the piece of pipe stuck under his belt.

"Carmine Danata was a mobster in the Roaring Twenties," Balenger said. "One of his trademarks was giving gold coins to his favorite hookers. When the Depression hit, he was sure the government was cheating everybody by confiscating the gold coins and gold bars. So he never surrendered his coins. Instead, he started hoarding them. Finally, he had so many hiding places, he couldn't keep track of them all. That's when he had the vault put into his suite in 1935."

"You're saying the gold coins are still in there?" Mack's eyes sparkled.

"Danata died in a gang shootout in Brooklyn in 1940," Balenger answered. "The suite was rented only to him. He paid for it year-round. His 'roosting place,' he called it. After his death, the hotel's owner-"

"Carlisle. We heard you talking about him. A nutjob with more money than he deserved."

"He never rented the suite to anyone else," Balenger said. "From 1940 to 1968 when the hotel closed and Carlisle lived here alone, it remained unoccupied. Carlisle had a thing about spying on people, about living his life through their lives. The professor suspected that Carlisle preserved the room the way it was when Danata was alive. The theory is that Carlisle enjoyed the idea of having a secret stash of gold coins in the vault, of looking at them when no one else could. They're supposed to be beautiful: a soaring eagle on one side, Lady Liberty carrying a torch on the other."

"The sick fuck didn't try to smuggle them out of the country and turn them into cash?" Mack asked.

"He had agoraphobia. He was afraid to leave the hotel. Another country would have been like another planet to him. Why try to turn the coins into cash you don't need when you can have the pleasure of owning more gold coins than any private citizen has looked at since 1934? Tonight, when we explored some of the rooms, we discovered Carlisle was obsessed with preserving them the way they looked when the last guests checked out. Maybe he started doing that as early as 1940 when Danata was killed."

"What's gold worth these days?"

"Over five hundred dollars an ounce."

"So we could melt the coins down and-"

"That would cost you. A double eagle, less than an ounce of gold, is worth more than seven hundred dollars on the collectors' market."

"Jesus."

"But listen to this," Balenger continued. "The 1933 double eagle was minted just before the U.S. government went off the gold standard. Before the coins could be released, they were declared illegal and had to be destroyed. Most of them. Several were stolen. Recently, one of the stolen coins was found by the government and put up for auction at Sotheby's. The winning bid was almost seven million dollars."

"Seven…?"

"Million dollars. The theory is, Danata got his hands on five of the coins."

Tod's eyes reflected the headlamps. He gestured for everybody to move. "I can't wait to see this vault."

"Help me with the professor," Balenger told Vinnie.

Vinnie glared, furious at him for lying. Nonetheless, the threat and his affection for the professor made him come over. It quickly became clear how their taped wrists limited them. By process of trial and error, they discovered that the only way they could lift the professor was by shoving their hands under his arms. Because his wrists were taped also, he couldn't help. With effort, they raised him.

Conklin moaned but managed to steady himself on his good leg.

"How bad do you feel?" Balenger asked.

"I'm still alive." The professor drew a pained breath. "Hey, under the circumstances, I'm not about to complain."

"Is it true?" Vinnie demanded. "You and this guy were going to take the gold coins?"

"I'm not perfect," Conklin said. "That's something you have to realize about your teachers. But as I listened to all of you explain about the Gold Reserve Act of 1934… Saint-Gaudens, Vinnie. You actually remember Saint-Gaudens."

"And you were going to split the money? Just the two of you?"

The elderly man looked ashamed. "Would you have agreed to be part of it? All along we've insisted on taking nothing but photographs. Now we wouldn't just have broken that rule. We'd have been committing a serious crime. Would you have risked going to prison for the rest of your life, or would you have told the authorities?"

"But you were ready to risk prison."

"At the moment, I don't have a lot to lose."

Mack and JD shoved the equipment into the knapsacks, cramming in so much that they needed only three knapsacks instead of five. The urine bottles were all they left behind.

Mack put the water pistol in his belt. "It's been a while since I had a toy." He picked up one of the knapsacks, JD the second, Tod the third. Their night-vision goggles hung around their necks.

"The way this works," Tod said, adjusting the knapsack straps with one hand while holding Balenger's pistol, "is I go up first, moving backward, aiming at you. Mack and JD come after you, but they keep a distance. That way, you can't bump against them and try to push them down the stairs. If you try anything, Mack and JD will drop flat on the stairs. Then I'll start shooting. I don't care what anybody knows about the vault- if you fuck with us, I'll shoot you first and then piss on you for making me mad."

Tod left the balcony, passed through the door at the end of the hallway, reached the fire stairs, and started climbing them backward. Headlamps wavering, Balenger and Vinnie came next, their taped hands under the professor's arms, awkwardly helping him. Rick and Cora came after that, then Mack and JD. Their footsteps were loud in the confined space.

"Now that you know I'm not a reporter," Balenger told Vinnie, easing the professor up the stairs, "I've got a question."

"What is it?"

"You were talking about the composer who wrote 'On the Banks of the Wabash' and 'My Gal Sal.' You said he was Theodore Dreiser's brother as if that was a big deal. Who the hell was Theodore Dreiser?"

"He wrote Sister Carrie."

"Sister who?" Keep talking, Balenger urged himself. Establish a bond with them.

"It's one of the first gritty American novels." Vinnie seemed to understand what Balenger was trying to do. "It's set in the slums of Chicago. The plot's about a woman who's forced to sleep around to survive."

"Sounds like real life to me," Mack said in the darkness down the stairs.

Vinnie kept the conversation going. "The theme is pessimistic determinism. No matter what we do, our bodies and our surroundings doom us."

"Yeah, definitely real life," Mack said.

It's working, Balenger thought. Moving upward, he felt the professor wince.

"The novel was published in 1900, a year before this hotel was built," Vinnie continued. "Before then, a lot of American novels were about working hard and succeeding, what William Dean Howells called 'the smiling aspects of American life.' "

"I'll wait to ask you who Howells was," Balenger said, helping the professor steady himself.

"But Dreiser grew up in terrible poverty. He saw enough suffering to decide the American dream was a fraud. To make his point, he called one of his other novels An American Tragedy. Doubleday was the company that published Sister Carrie, but when Doubleday's wife read the book, she was so shocked she insisted her husband keep all the copies in the warehouse, banning it. It wasn't until several years later when the novel was republished that it became a classic."