'I did the research you were asking for on the phone,' Browne was saying. 'You wanted me to look for a name in the enrollment roster of the SOA… ' He turned again to Pegeen. 'That's Speleologists of America.'
Pegeen did not return the smile.
'I have that,' she said.
'Name of Swann, right? The national search was easy, that's all computerized, has been for seven years.'
'Any luck?'
'Nope. Of course that doesn't mean too much. There are a lot of amateur cavers-some of them pretty good, too-who aren't members. We only have maybe ten percent of the active cavers in the country, which is a shame because we have a good deal to offer them. The newsletter alone is worth the price of membership.'
'I didn't really expect to find him on your list,' Becker said. 'It was a long shot. People like Swann are not great joiners.'
'Well, now, let's not get ahead of ourselves,' said Browne. 'That wasn't all I did. The FBI calls me, I'm going to put myself out a little bit, right? What did he do, exactly?'
'Exactly, it's hard to say,' said Becker. 'He may not have done anything at all. He may just be a figment of my imagination.'
'Yeah, sure, which is why you go to the trouble of trying to find him in our lists. I figured, it wasn't important, you wouldn't ask. Like I said, the national is all computerized, but it doesn't go back very far.
Now regionally, we're about halfway through getting all the names into the machine. It takes time, and with these fingers I'm practically worthless myself. But they Work when I really need them.' He waggled his fingers suggestively in front of Pegeen. She had an urge to take one of the swollen knuckles and bend it backwards.
Browne returned his attention to Becker. 'So I looked in the regional records. Now those go back to before wereally even organized, just names and telephone numbers on the backs of envelopes in the beginning, people you might call if you were going to be in their area and wanted to go down. You'd call it a network these days, but you go back far enough, and hell it was just a friend giving a name of somebody a friend told him about who might know somebody else who was interested. You know what I'm saying. All of that is in that file cabinet over there.'
'A lot of work,' Becker said.
Browne shrugged. 'What else have I got to do these days? Anyway, you were right, your friend Swann isn't a joiner. He never did belong to the society.'
'Well, I knew it was a long shot…'
'I said he didn't join-that don't mean he wasn't in the file. I got his name on a paper napkin, along with the name of Herm Jennings, who suggested I call him.'
Browne pulled a pale-green paper napkin from his desk drawer. 'The check mark after his name means I called the man to see if he was interested in joining. He wasn't, or I would have put a circle around the check.
That's my system. I don't remember ever talking to him; it must have been twenty years ago or more, so I called Henn Jennings this morning.
Herm can just barely recall him as somebody who went down with him and a couple of others one time. That's how he knew he was interested in caving. But that's all he remembers; it's not like he ever really knew the man.'
'Twenty years ago? That would make him about fifteen at the time.'
'That's right-that's usually when you get started, when you're in your teens and don't know any better.'
'Did Jennings remember where they went, by any chance?'
'No, I asked him that. But you can be sure of one thing, if he went with Herm, he went someplace good, someplace tough. That's the only kind of hole Herm visits. And if Herm passed his name along, the kid could carry his own weight, fifteen or not.'
'Bingo,' said Becker.
'That's a bingo? Don't sound like much to me.'
'It shows he knows caves in this region,' Becker said.
'It shows he's been at it a long time. And that he's good.
That tells me all I need to know.'
'Well, then, good, glad I can help.'
'You've just started helping, Mr. Browne. What I really need are your maps.'
Browne turned to Pegeen. 'I've got the most thorough maps of all the known caves in my region. They're better than the government maps, better than the geologists' maps, better than anybody's.'
'I'm sure they are,' said Pegeen.
'No question. I can tell you every hole in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky that's wide enough to squeeze your shoulders through-and I been in most of them myself I drew more than half the maps personally. You didn't think there was any goddamn surveyors crawling down there, did you?'
'I would think not.'
Browne nodded emphatically.
'You got that right. Some of them ain't much bigger than a rabbit run; some of them got more room than a hotel. This whole region is honeycombed with tunnels and caves and caverns and mines-hell, it's a wonder it don't all collapse. It's the limestone substrata, you know.
Water just carves that rock like butter. You get any kind of trickle going and pretty soon-a million years or so-the water's cut its way through that limestone like a jigsaw.
You ever go caving?':'Not really,' she said.
'Not really or not at all?'
'Not at all.'
'You ever want to try, you let me know. I'll take. you down personally.'
The day I go down in a dark hole with you, old man, she thought. 'I'll remember the offer if I ever get the urge,' she said, straining for politeness.,'That's right, you get the urge, you think of me,' Browne said, winking at Becker.
The old son of a bitch thinks I'm blind as well as stupid, Pegeen thought. She watched Becker absorb Browne's attempts at male conspiracy with just the faintest hint of a smile He wasn't going along with the joke-not that it was really a joke; men always had some faint dream of success, she knew, no matter how pathetically delusional it was; they stoked themselves on fantasies of women overwhelmed by their magnetism and leaping over all bounds of decency, age, decorum, and common revulsion just to get at them-but Becker wasn't telling him to mind his manners, either.
Browne had a sheaf of charts on the side of his desk and he tapped it proudly, as if it were a codex of the classics.
'You tell me what you're looking for, and if it exists, 'I've got it here.'
Becker thought a moment. 'It should be somewhere remote, somewhere you could enter and exit unseen. It has to have a sizable chamber in it somewhere, big enough for a man to stand and move around.'
'Easy access or difficult?'
'Access to the cave?'
'That's one. Some of these entrances are halfway up a mountain. You got to climb up before you climb down.'
'Not too difficult. He's carrying, or dragging, a hundred-pound weight in addition to his gear.'
'Okay, that lets out some. How about access to the chamber, you want that easy or hard?'
'He doesn't expect to be found in there,' Becker said, 'so I guess it's got to be hard. He won't be anyplace where some random caver is going to walk in on him.'
'But he's still hauling the hundred-pound weight?'
'Oh, yeah. He'll have that with him-going in.'
'Going in?'
'He won't have to bring it back out.'
'Well, okay, I won't ask what he's dumping in there, but if I found out he's left his shit in any cave I'll kick his ass for him.' Browne turned to Pegeen. 'Sorry about that.
'What?' Pegeen asked.
'Language,' he said.
