Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  Bewildered, Lew sat staring at Harry with a weak, one-sided smile. He didn’t understand, didn’t know how to react or what to say. The women sat unbelieving, looking from Harry to Lew. Finally Lew said, “You’re kidding, of course.”

  “No,” Harry said judiciously, hands dangling from his hooked thumbs. “No, I’m not, Lew. I really did it.”

  Her voice stunned, Shirley said, “Lew, he did. We stopped at the library just before we came here; he said he had to reserve a book. I waited in the car. He had that envelope in his hand when he went in.”

  “Right.” Harry nodded. “They were just starting to turn off the main lights when I tucked a magnificent specimen of your poster into one of the books in the reference section. So it’s there right now. Just waiting for the kids who’ll descend on that section like knowledge-devouring locusts when the doors swing open in the morning.”

  “Why? Why, for crysake!” Lew lunged forward in his chair toward Harry, eyes fierce and demanding.

  “To give you a chance to get it out, Lew. Tonight. Before those doors open tomorrow!” Harry sat forward suddenly, leaning eagerly toward Lew, their faces hardly a foot apart. “It’s tonight’s project, Lew! You and Jo go in after it! Shirley and I out front in the getaway car!”

  Shirley said, “You’ve finally done it, Harry. You’re out of your mind.”

  Her voice tight, Jo said, “Harry, you can’t do this. You’ve got to go back there! To the library! First thing tomorrow! And get that thing back the very minute it opens.”

  Harry didn’t answer or even glance at the women; just sat leaning toward Lew, grinning, waiting, watching Lew’s face.

  The things he ought to be saying were rising up in Lew’s mind: that Harry’s insane poster shown around town could kill any chance he might have in local politics, or later on in state; any chance at a partnership in the firm, perhaps any real career in law at all, he wasn’t sure; at the very least it would cripple his prospects at work, might even lose him his job. Yet he found himself unable to hold back a smile, and what he was, voice thoughtful, “You mean sneak back in there tonight. And get that thing back.”

  “Lew, no!” Jo said sharply.

  “Harry, cut it out,” said Shirley. “This isn’t what the Night People is about at all.”

  “You’re wrong”—he swung toward the women. “It’s the essence of it! Did you think it was sitting on the shore on Silva gazing over at the city? Or dancing under the stars at the shopping center? That was nice, and I liked it, but when did the real fun begin?” He leaned closer to them over the arm of his chair. “It was when the risk began. The little touch of trouble. The chance of actually getting arrested. Lew sensed it from the start; when he stepped up on the curb, and watched the cop cruise by. When he sat on the guy’s porch swing deliberately making it creak. Hell”—he threw himself back, glancing around at them all—“what do you think got us all so god-damned high last time that we didn’t come down till dawn! Stripped off our clothes. Damn near had a gang bang! It wasn’t a little booze or marijuana. What sent us up was the run-in with the cops! Which we won!” For a moment or two Harry sat glancing from one face to another, then he resumed quietly. “I don’t know what life was like in times past. Back in Lew’s Middle Ages. But these days it’s mostly a lot of shit. Well, we stumbled onto something that puts a little boost into things: The Night People. And tonight I’m leader and that’s tonight’s project. Your turn next week, Lew, and you can tell me what to do.” He grinned, “If you aren’t in jail.”

  After a moment Lew said, “What book is it in?” but Harry shook his head, still grinning. “Harry, make sense!” Lew said. “There must be two thousand books in that section! Or more!”

  “That’s why you can’t just wait till the library opens in the morning, and then walk in and get it. While you were hunting through thousands of books, one of the kids would stumble onto it first.”

  Jo leaned forward, but Lew heard the squeak of her chair, and turned to waggle a hand, and she sat back, lips compressing. Lew said, “Harry, what if I insist you go back there first thing tomorrow, and get that thing.”

  “Now, listen to me; all of you. Reference books were scattered all over three or four tables tonight. Dozens and dozens of them. Left lying there for the library staff to put back on the shelves tonight. I just folded the poster in half, and stuck it into the back pages of an open book lying on one of the tables. I didn’t close the book or even look at the cover—deliberately. Because to make any sense, this has to be real, Lew; you know that. The danger has to be real, not something we can decide to call off, or something I can retrieve in the morning if you can’t find it tonight. You’re right: there’s two, three thousand books there. And I haven’t any idea—I really haven’t—which one it’s in. You have to go in and get it, Lew; you’ve got to. You have to find it. Tonight.”

  Lew sat blinking slowly, thinking about it, the women waiting, Jo’s eyes narrowed and hard. “In the dark?”

  Harry laughed, his belly trembling under the gray sweat shirt. “I don’t know: have to leave something to your ingenuity, won’t we, Lew?” And at that, the appeal, the absolute necessity of having to work out how to do this crazy thing flared up in Lew tangibly, he could feel it in his chest. Looking at Harry’s big, tough grinning face, he had to grin in response: his heartbeat was up; he wanted to do it. Harry saw it in his face, reached down for his beer can, stood up, and stretched. Pleased with himself, he winked at the two women, and walked into the living room toward the kitchen area, can tipped over his mouth, finishing the beer.

  Jo got up, came over to squat beside Lew’s chair, and put a hand on his knee. “Lew,” she said gently, reasonably, “you could get arrested. You could.”

  He had covered her hand with his, turning to smile down at her. “You’re talking to Le Chat, famed cat burglar of the Riviera.” But she wouldn’t smile, and he closed his fingers to squeeze her hand. “Jo, I won’t get caught: it’s the library, not the Federal Reserve Bank. And it shouldn’t be too hard to work out some way of doing this. To just sneak in, find that stupid poster”—Harry came strolling out onto the balcony carrying a new can of beer—“and show our juvenile friend here how easy it is.”

  “Right on.” Harry lifted his can in salute, and sat down again.

  “But there’s no point in your going, Jo; it doesn’t need two of us. I can—”

  “Oh, I’d love to go!” Shirley cried. “I’d love it! Jo, if you don’t want—”

  “Oh, I’ll go,” Jo said quickly. “If you’re really going to do it, Lew, then I want to help.” She made herself smile, and stood up. “It might be fun.”

  Lew got up to go to the kitchen; it seemed to him that what was happening called for more than beer. In the doorway he turned. “One thing, Harry; I won’t break in. No matter what. I like the library.”

  “Oh hell,” Harry said easily, “you’ll find some way to get in. They’re understaffed; I don’t think they check every last door and window each night.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Harry shrugged, lifting his beer. “You’ll get in.”

  For a while then, it was fun; everyone chattering, even Jo, presently. Lew mixed drinks, handed them around, said, “To crime!” and they drank to that. Shirley made them synchronize their watches, then Lew got a yellow legal pad from his desk, laid it on the balcony railing, and drew a large rectangle with a felt pen: just the empty rectangle, nothing else. Inside it he printed FLOOR PLAN, and held it up. “I want everyone to memorize this!”

  Harry said, “Jeez, boss, all of it?”

  “Yeh: till you know it in your sleep.”

  They began talking movie-gangster talk, but in drawing even his joke plan Lew had begun thinking about the library, picturing it: a low, handsome concrete building less than ten years old, and built on the edge of a large park of huge redwoods inside the town. One side of the park and of the library fronted on a quiet residential street.

  Lew sat down an
d, sipping his drink, visualized the building as though standing across the street from it: a low tiled roof with huge skylights; three enormous multiple-paned windows on the street side, eight or ten feet tall, rising from floor to ceiling; the entrance of double glass doors. In the daytime, light flooded the interior from these windows, doors, and skylights, and from banks of fluorescent tubes, but at night . . . Lew said, “Listen: there’s not much of a moon tonight. And there are redwoods all around the place. Damn big ones on all three park sides, and in that little strip of dirt along the front. So the street lamp out there won’t help much. It’ll be dark as hell inside! And we can’t show a light with all those windows. Even a match would show up like a bonfire.”

  Harry stood leaning back against the balcony railing facing the others. “It’ll be late at night: how many people go by there then?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not around there late at night. It’s a quiet street but that doesn’t matter: one phone call to the cops about a light in the library is all it would take.”

  Shirley said, “This is great: real problems!” In Chico Marx accent she said, “So whatta we gonna do, boss?”

  Jo said, “I don’t remember any windows in the women’s washroom. We could carry books in there and turn on the light.”

  “Take forever,” Lew said. “It’s a long way from the reference section to the washrooms. And we’d be carrying them back and forth in the dark.”

  “Why take them back?” said Harry.

  “No.” Lew shook his head. “I’m not leaving the place messed up.”

  “What about a little pen flashlight?” Shirley said. “We’ve got one, if the batteries are still—”

  “Any light at all would show; those windows are big.”

  They discussed and discarded ideas, enjoying it, quietly excited. Presently Lew made more drinks. Then Jo found the answer. They worked her idea over, criticizing it, but it seemed to hold up, and Lew said, “That’s it, then; that’s how we’ll do it.”

  “Okay, what time?” said Harry. “Two-thirty?”

  “Make it two; we may need every minute.”

  “Let’s get some sleep, then.” Harry glanced at his watch. “We’ll go in my car; the getaway car, souped up to do a hundred and twenty-five in second. See you at two, Les Chats.”

  • • •

  At a quarter after two, Harry driving slowly past the library from the north, they stared out at it as though they’d never before seen it—as they had not; not like this. In the front seat the Levys were dressed as they’d been earlier, except that Harry now wore his baseball cap; Lew wore his usual, the mask front of his cap rolled up; Jo a chocolate brown pants suit. In the darkness only the widely separated street lamps and the yellow parking lights of the slowly rolling Alfa showed. Beside the car just across the sidewalk, a ragged line of redwoods rose from a narrow strip of earth: behind the trees the long street facade of the library slid past. One by one the great floor-to-ceiling windows moved by, their panes shiny black, each reflecting light from the one dim street lamp ahead, and Lew thought he could sense the silent darkness on the other side of the wall. The busy, friendly, early-evening place this had always been for him had turned sinister now, drained of warmth and welcome; beside him Jo sat nibbling her lip.

  No one spoke. A hundred yards beyond the dark building, and well past the street lamp, Harry stopped in a pool of darkness beside the redwoods of the rustic park. Across the street on the other side, the low white buildings of a grade school stretched for a short block, dark and still. Harry switched off lights and engine, and Shirley and Jo rolled down their windows a little. For a moment they heard only the small pings of the cooling engine, then became aware of the faint sough of moving air high in the redwoods. Except for the tree trunks and lower branches directly beside them across the walk, most of the park was a solid black wall; through the trees a single light bulb indicated the public toilets and a phone. Quietly Harry said, “All right,” turning sideways to look back at Lew, his arm stretching along the seat back. “I’ll keep watch every second. And if you two come a-running, I’ll start the engine, ready to haul-ass out of here. Shirley will stand on the walk with the door open. You two pile in the back, and she’ll—”

  “Yeah, we know, we know,” Lew said, suddenly irritable. He sat turned to look through the slanted rear window, studying the front and end walls of the building behind them. It looked tightly closed, locked up, and he wondered how and where they could possibly get in; he didn’t feel quite sure, in this final moment, that he wanted to leave the safety of the car.

  “You got the ground cloths?” Harry said, and Lew wished he’d shut up.

  In a small, tight voice Jo said, “Yes. Ours and yours.”

  “Right.” Harry turned front to search the motionless street as far ahead as he could see, to a sharp bend. Then he turned with difficulty, his body too big for the cramped space behind the wheel, to study the street to the rear. “All clear,” he said, and grinned at Lew; Harry was happy, Lew realized, hugely enjoying this, and he smiled, too, suddenly excited again.

  “Harry, let’s go along!” Shirley said. “Instead of just sitting here!”

  “We can’t. We just can’t; I’ve got a hunch they may need a getaway car; we have to stay here.” He grinned at Lew and Jo. “Good luck. And good hunting.”

  Lew nodded. Shirley got out, and they slid past the front seat to the sidewalk, each carrying a folded ground cloth. On the walk, Shirley in the car again, Lew eased the door shut, and stood with Jo looking around them. Nothing stirred. Except for the school and the library this was a street of small, old Mill Valley houses, some built in the early years of the century. No light showed in any of them as far as he could see in both directions. Behind the library Mount Tamalpais filled the lower half of the sky, black on deep blue.

  Lew touched Jo’s arm, and they turned to walk back along the sidewalk toward the library. They had no plan for entering except to try doors and windows, hoping to find one unlocked. A few steps short of the library, Lew touched Jo’s arm again, and they stopped on the walk, looking up at the dark bulk of the night-time building. “You really want to go in there?” he said gently. “You don’t have to. There’s no need at all.”

  “I don’t know what I want.” Still staring at the looming building, so close now, she said, “It gives me the creeps to think of feeling my way around in there. But to just go back and sit in the car waiting would be too drab to bear. What I really want, I suppose, is to have it over with. Do you want to? Really?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Now that we’ve started. Now that we’re out here and really going in if we can. But I want to bring it off, not mess up, so let me think.”

  The front doors of the library, twenty yards ahead near the center of the long street facade, were a pair of heavy glass sheets opening out onto a wide, brick-paved veranda a few steps above sidewalk level. These doors especially were sure to be locked, Lew felt certain. In any case, he did not want to walk onto that open veranda and try them in full view of every darkened window across the street.

  The library was built on a slope: only one story high on the street side, it was two at the rear. Along much of the rear face ran a wide wooden balcony overlooking the woods and the small stream that curled through the park, a fine, secluded place to sit and read on a sunny day. This balcony hung a story above the ground; underneath it ran a row of windows and doors opening into the basement which was divided into rooms for storage, exhibitions, board meetings. They could hope one of these doors or windows had been forgotten.

  They stood directly beside the dirt path leading down the slope along the building’s end wall, and Lew took Jo’s hand, and turned onto it. Feeling their way with their feet through the almost complete darkness, they moved down the slope beside the end wall, and turned under the balcony. Here the darkness was absolute, and Lew reached to the back of his belt where he’d shoved a powerful four-cell flashlight he’d bought for a camping trip. They had to see
; the building stood between them and the street, and he pulled the flash out, cupped his hand around the head to confine the beam, and pushed the stud. Aiming the hard white light, he found the first window, and in the light reflected from it gestured to Jo; she reached to the metal frame and pushed. It was locked, and they moved on to the first door. Jo gripped the knob, turning, but it barely moved.

  The next window, next door, and the following window were locked. Lew found the knob after that, a dull weather-mottled bronze in the blob of light, tried it, and it turned, the door opening toward him, and Lew said, “I’ll be damned.”

  “Lucky,” Jo murmured, but her voice didn’t sound as though she felt lucky.

  They stepped inside, Lew pulled the door shut, pressing the stud that locked it, and they stood warily listening. Then he swept his beam across the room: it was the boardroom, a long, narrow table surrounded by a dozen neatly pushed-in chairs; at the room’s other end stood the door to the inside corridor. He said, “This wasn’t luck. Harry unlocked the goddamn door.”

  “How do you know?” She was whispering now.

  “I know, that’s all. They didn’t forget to lock it: tonight at the library Harry just came down the stairs, into this room, and turned the knob, that’s all you have to do to unlock the stud. When they closed, no one checked down here: why should they? They keep these doors locked all the time, you know they do.” For a moment longer they stood hesitating, then Lew said, “Come on,” and walked across to the inner door. He switched off the flash, slowly and soundlessly opened the door, and they stood, leaning forward in the opening, breaths held, listening. Nothing; no sound. Lew touched Jo’s arm, and she stepped past him, out into the dead-black corridor. Behind her he eased the door closed, pulled down his face mask, and pressed the head of the flashlight to the underside of his chin. “Jo,” he whispered, and as she turned he pushed the stud. The light flared up onto the Africanlike mask, weirdly illuminating it, and she punched at him, hitting his shoulder hard.