The Water-Method Man

In a funny, Formica-covered room, Arnold Mulcahy and five other men were hopping mad.

'Suffering shit!' Mulcahy yelled. 'Someone must have picked it off in Frankfurt.'

'The suitcase was in New York for six hours before you got here,' one of the men told him. 'Someone could have picked it off here.'

'Trumper?' Mulcahy said. 'Did you really pack the thing, boy?'

'Yes, sir.'

They whisked him into another room, where a man who looked like a male nurse searched him all over and then left him alone. A long time later, he was brought some scrambled eggs, toast and coffee, and after another long wait Mulcahy reappeared.

'There's a limousine here for you,' he told Bogus. 'It will take you anywhere you want to go.'

'I'm sorry, sir,' Trumper said. Mulcahy just shook his head. 'Suffering shit ...' he said.

On the way to the car, Trumper said, 'I hate to ask you this, but what about Merrill Overturf?'

Mulcahy was pretending not to hear. At the limousine he opened the door for Trumper and then shoved him inside quickly. 'Take him anywhere he wants to go,' he told the driver.

Bogus rolled his window down quickly and caught Mulcahy's sleeve as he was trying to turn away from the car.

'Hey, what about Merrill Overturf?' he said.

Mulcahy sighed. He opened the briefcase he was carrying and took out a photostated copy of an official-looking document with the raised seal of the American Consulate stamped on it. 'I'm sorry,' Mulcahy said, handing the photostat to Trumper. 'Merrill Overturf is dead.' Then he smacked the roof of the car, shouted to the driver. Take him anywhere he wants to go!' and the car pulled away.

'Where to?' the driver asked Trumper, who sat in the back seat like an armrest or some other stationary part of the car itself. He was trying to read the document, which in officialese seemed to be called an Uncontested Obituary, and concerned one Overturf, Merrill, born Boston, Mass., Sept. 8, 1941. Father, Randolph W.; mother, Ellen Keefe.

Merrill had died nearly two full years before Bogus had returned to Vienna to find him. According to the document, he had bet an American girl named Polly Crenner - whom he had picked up at American Express - that he could find a tank on the bottom of the Danube. He had taken her to the Gelhafts Keller out on the Danube and Polly had stood on the dock and watched Merrill swim out in the Danube holding a flashlight over his head. When he located the tank, he was going to call to her; she had insisted that she wouldn't go in the water until he'd found it.

Miss Crenner had waited on the dock for about five minutes after she could no longer see the flashlight bobbing around; she thought that Merrill was kidding around. Then she'd run into the Gelhafts Keller and tried to get some help, but since she didn't speak any German, it took some time for her to make herself understood.

Overturf might have been drunk, Polly Crenner said later. Evidently she hadn't known he was a diabetic, and neither apparently did the consulate, for it wasn't mentioned. In any case, the cause of death was listed as drowning. The identification of Merrill's body had not been completely confirmed. That is, a body had been found three days later that was snagged on an oil barge bound for Budapest, but since it had gone through the propellers a few times, no one could be sure.

The story of the tank was never confirmed. Polly Crenner said that Merrill had started hollering about a minute before she lost sight of the flashlight that he'd found the tank, but she hadn't believed him.

'I would have believed you, Merrill,' Bogus Trumper said aloud.

'Sir?' the driver said.

'What?'

'Where to, sir?' the driver said.

They were cruising past Shea Stadium. It was a warm, balmy night and the traffic was fierce. 'This stretch is slow,' the driver informed him unnecessarily. 'It's the Mets and the Pirates.'

Trumper sat baffled over that for a long time. It was December when he'd left and he couldn't have been gone more than a week or so. They're playing baseball already? He leaned forward and looked at himself in the rear-view mirror of the limousine. He had a lovely, flowing mustache and a full beard. His back-seat window was still rolled down and the steamy New York summer air rolled over him. 'Jesus,' he whispered. He felt frightened.

'Where to, sir?' the driver repeated. He was obviously getting a little nervous about his passenger.

But Trumper was wondering if Biggie was still in Iowa - if it was summer already. Jesus Christ! He couldn't believe he'd been gone so long. He looked for a newspaper or something with a date.

What he found was the envelope with a few thousand dollars in it. Arnold Mulcahy was a more generous man than he at first appeared.

'Where to?' the driver said.

'Maine,' said Trumper. He had to see Couth; he had to clear his head.

'Maine?' the driver said. Then he got tough. 'Look, buddy,' he said, 'I ain't taking you to Maine. This car don't go out of Manhattan.'