Fast Eddie thought that was self-evident. "We can sell it to him, in exchange for ... oh."

"We tell him, 'Go 'way, don't bother us no more, we make you forever young.' Okay. Next day he wake up one day older, like always. How come he gonna let us live?'

Eddie shrugged. "How come hair conditioner always looks like spoim?"

That stopped the clock for a few seconds. When it became clear that n.o.body had a theory they were prepared to share, Erin went on.

"I'm not really sure how it helps us. That's one of the things I was hoping our five resident former players could help me figure out." She turned to them hopefully.

Joe Quigley and the Professor exchanged a meaningful glance. "The basic outline is clear, I think." Joe said.

Prof nodded. "I agree, Giuseppe. The cry goes up and down the Keys: "Donuts is toast!"

Arethusa shook her head. 'I don't get it."

Maureen added, "Me either."

Joe turned to his wife. "We persuade Tony the Fountain is real. Then we offer to sell him the location-for more money than he can possibly come up with, even if he rolled up every Russian gangster in Key West."

Arethusa brightened quickest. She's very empathic, and she used to have two heads once. "I get it, love!"

"Explain it to me, Joe," Maureen asked.

"Follow Tony's elephantine thought process. Where could a guy like him possibly get a really big piece of money?"

"The Mafia." she said at once.

"Right. No place else. And when you borrow Mafia money, whose money is it?"

"Charlie Ponte in Miami."

Arethusa shook her head. "He just hands it to you. Whose money is it?"

Maureen blinked. "Oh. Well, ultimately I suppose it belongs to the Fi-Oh. I get it now."

"I don't," said several of us.

"It belongs to the Five Old Men," the Professor told us. "They whose names are not spoken, and whose location is not speculated upon. The ones who own everything."

"The Five Old Men," Maureen stressed. "They have something d.a.m.ned close to half a millennium of experience between them. These guys call Bert the Shirt sonny."

Her husband nodded. "As soon as Tony thinks of borrowing the money, he'll think of two things: who he's borrowing it from, and what a ha.s.sle it'll be to get it from the old b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Even someone as bone stupid as Tony should then think, 'Yo, if I tell them what I want it for, and offer to share, I'll get the money no sweat . . . and once I make them young, overnight I become the sixth richest man in the criminal world.

"Not enough to make it into the Fortune 500, perhaps," said Joe, "but not bad for a wop without a b.u.t.ton. And maybe even enough to buy a b.u.t.ton."

Fast Eddie was already grinning like a wolf, and so was I. "And then when the magic water turns out to be bogus-," I said.

"Donuts gets dunked," Eddie finished. Grunts of pain were heard here and there.

"Wired to an anchor," Lexington agreed.

"Is that how they're doing it now?" asked the Professor. Lex nodded. "For true, man. Them cement shoe, the body come back up when the knees go sometimes. Embarra.s.sing."

"Ah."

"Also, very few boats already got cement on them. All boats got anchor and wire."

I started to object ... then realized that if you're dumping a body at sea, and you're not a moron, you're doing it from a stolen boat. Stealing a boat gets tricky with a struggling victim under one arm and a bag of cement under the other. "Gentlemen, we digress."

The Professor nodded happily. "One of the reasons I come here, dear boy. Try this, for example: Imagine you're an ancient evil lizard, blinking in the sun."

"Huh?"

"One of the Five. It's been decades since you've felt a genuine emotion of any kind, let alone pa.s.sion. It's been decades since you even wished you could still get an erection, nearly as long since you really enjoyed having an enemy killed. You're determined to live forever, but deep down you know you're going to fail-soon, even. Then somebody promises you youth. Forever. He brings proof that convinces you. He takes your money. Raises your hopes. And then you find out he made a fool out of you. Will you be upset?"

Picturing it, I shuddered. "A tad."

"Enough to affect your judgment, perhaps?"

I felt my eyes widening and the hair on the back of my neck beginning to stand up. "Are you talking about pinning Tony's murder on them?"

He spread his hands. "Why not? It's not as if we'd be framing them. They'll be guilty."

"Could you pin it on all five?" Jim Omar asked. "Nonslip?" The Professor grimaced in thought. "Maybe not," he conceded.

"Then I say don't do it."

I got my voice back. "Forget that-don't even think about it!" I climbed out of the water and stood at poolside to lend my words more weight. "I'm sorry, Willard, but I'm invoking my authority as den mother, here. I have very few house rules, but this is one of them: We are not taking on the Mafia."

"I have to say that sounds reasonable to me, Prof," said Long-Drink.

"f.u.c.kin'-A," said Fast Eddie. "Ya take out a shot dat big, de shrapnel spreads. A lotta innocent bystanders fall. I don't want dat on my conscience."

The Professor sighed and conceded the point. "You're right, of course. The sheer elegance of it carried me away for a moment there. All right, we settle for driving off the mammoth, and leave the brontosaurs alone, and yes, I know they're not called brontosaurs anymore. Would someone please bring me a large beaker of booze? Sparing the lives of gangsters is thirsty work." A flagon of firewater was delivered to him, bucket-brigade style, and he drank deep.

"Okay," said Erin, "we're making great progress. I like the general outline of the scam. But I want to know the specifics. What exactly am I supposed to tell the mammoth when he comes grazing in tomorrow and it's time to Tell the Tale? What is the Tale I'll be Telling him?"

"Yes, Willard," said Maureen. "Where is this silly Fountain of Youth supposed to be, and how do we sell it to Tony?"

"All right," the Professor said, licking his lips. "Let's discuss that."

And for the next hour or so, we did.

6.

WHEN SHE WAS SEVENTEEN.

When I was seventeen I drank some very good beer...

-H.J. Simpson.

The next afternoon found Tony Donuts driving down Duval Street in a topless Jeep, glaring into each T-shirt shop he pa.s.sed.

n.o.body has ever driven Duval Street at more than thirty miles an hour, and the only one ever to reach that speed was a drunk attempting a getaway. Generally traffic on Duval moves slower than some of the pedestrians, largely because of them. So for one thing, Tony's glares into storefronts were more than just split-second deals. They usually lasted long enough to const.i.tute at least some real reconnaissance, without much risk of his rear-ending some elderly tourist couple from Wisconsin.

For another thing, he had plenty of time to notice the attractive blonde in a yellow shorts-and-top combo, coming his way on the south side of the street-even enough to recognize her and recall where he'd seen her before, though it took him a while. By the time he worked out why it had taken him so long to place her, however, he was already past her.

He jammed on the brakes, put the Jeep in reverse, and stepped on the gas. He just had time to see her wave at him and step into an alley between a bar and a head shop before he was rear-ended by an elderly tourist couple from Wisconsin. He considered ignoring this and turning hard left into the alley, but saw that the alley was too narrow to accommodate his vehicle. He sighed, shut off the Jeep, and got out. The already shaken tourist couple turned to stone. A line of cars was forming behind theirs, but not one honked. Tony tossed the geezer the keys to the Jeep and pointed to it with his thumb. "Meet me here this time tamorra," he said. "Have that fixed."

"Yessir," said the geezer. The keys had bounced off his face and landed somewhere near his feet. He made no attempt to retrieve them, moved no voluntary muscle until Tony turned away to enter the alley.

Nearly at once the man monster found that the alley was barely wide enough to accommodate him, and no cleaner than anything else along Duval Street. He cursed under his breath and plunged ahead anyway. In six steps his double-breasted suit needed dry-cleaning. He thought of giving up and going back ... but behind him he heard the geezer from Wisconsin trying to start up the Jeep and yelling at his geezette to follow him back to the motel, and Tony just didn't feel like dealing with all that c.r.a.p. So he pressed on, and in six more steps his suit needed reweaving.

The next time his pa.s.sage was impeded by an air conditioner sticking a few inches out into the alley, he drove it entirely into the building with a single blow from the heel of his fist and kept going. Behind him, a drunk biker stuck his head and a knife out the hole, looked at Tony's back, changed his mind, and withdrew without speaking. "Act of G.o.d, man," Tony heard the biker say to someone inside.

At the end of the alley was another alley running parallel to Duval Street, wider than the first but not by much. Not wide enough for most delivery trucks, for example, which is another of the reasons why traffic runs so slow on Duval, and a hint as to how long ago downtown Key West was laid out. Tony reached this mews just in time to catch a good look at the blonde before she entered the back door of some shop or other. But when he reached the door, it was locked.

He was already sweating in his suit. He was always sweating in his suit; he just didn't know any gangster costume with short pants or a tank top. He considered giving up the chase. It was, after all, just a broad.

But he'd had two pretty good looks at her now, and he was pretty sure. Having lived in a few states with different statutory ages of consent, Tony had become almost as good as a barkeeper at judging ages, especially female ages ... and he was just about positive what he was following now was the sa.s.sy broad whose b.o.o.b he'd honked the day before-only today she was a good three or four years younger. It was the b.o.o.b that nailed it down for him, actually. Broads could make themselves look younger, and G.o.d knew they could make their b.o.o.bs look bigger, even be bigger . . . but in Tony's experience they did not make b.o.o.bs smaller.

It's her kid sister, he told himself. Her kid sister, that's all it is. Sisters look a lot alike sometimes. But he kept remembering her waving good-bye as she'd entered the alley. Something had been written on the palm of her hand, in Magic Marker. Too far away to see clearly, but it could have been his signature... .

And if it was her, she was not only an interesting mystery, but a mystery who had promised that today she was going to show him something better than money or s.e.x.

So Tony mopped at his soaking forehead with a handkerchief so expensive it was almost useless, sighed again, punched the door once, and then walked over it.

He found himself in an everything shoppe, one of those dimly lit, mildewy-smelling, overstuffed junkyards in which the only thing you can't find is the way out. It looked like where all the yard sales live during the week. He tried to spot the broad, but the place stunned the eye somehow. A coot (the stage right after geezer, when you aren't even trying to fake it anymore) stood nearby, gaping at Tony where a door should be; Tony grabbed him by the shoulder and said, "Blonde come in just now? Yellow playsuit?"

The coot nodded so rapidly the vertebrae of his neck sounded like castanets and dust flew out of his beard.

Tony lifted him clear off the floor with the one hand, straight-arm, with no apparent effort. "Where?"

The coot gestured with the arm that still functioned, toward the front of the shop, toward Duval Street and its crowds.

"Out?"

More frantic nodding.

Tony brought the coot so close their eyes were inches apart. "Where to?" But when the coot p.i.s.sed himself Tony knew he didn't know, so he just let him drop and stepped over him.

The front of the store was deserted, which figured. As he looked around to see if she was hiding somewhere, a photo-copy machine he hadn't noticed suddenly wheezed noisily into life a foot away, surprising him. Tony didn't like surprises, so he punched the machine to teach it a lesson, and the piece of paper it had just extruded as its dying act went fluttering to the floor. He would have ignored anything white with print on it . . . but this sheet was dark. It stirred his memory, catapulted him back to carefree days of youth spent doc.u.menting the crack of his own and others' b.u.t.tocks in the school library. It was a photocopy of an open human hand, in such high contrast that the skin didn't look as poorly mummified as usual, and it was quite easy to make out Tony's own signature across the palm.

He still couldn't see the way out of the dump, so he made one of his own. Soon he was outside in sunshine again, surrounded by rubble, broken gla.s.s, and an expanding ring of tourists, fugitives, weirdos, and college students on break. The majority of them were either stoned or drunk, and nearly all of them had come there for the specific purpose of exhibiting bad judgment-but n.o.body jostled Tony or criticized him for blocking traffic or even raised an eyebrow. n.o.body ever did. He looked east, failed to spot the blonde in the crowd, looked west just as she blew past him on a bicycle, barely missing him. As she went by she lifted her hand, displaying his autograph again, and when he raised his own hands to deflect a possible slap, she darted under his guard ... and pinched his left nipple.

He gaped after her. He was a man not often astonished. There were other bicyclists too nearby to escape; he could have had his pick of bikes. It was just too frigging hot for a bike race in a business suit. Instead he found himself staring, mesmerized, at the teenage b.u.t.tocks and thighs that were pedaling her away from him.

It was only after she'd turned north a few blocks down and disappeared from view that he realized he could have jacked a moped just as easily as a one-speed clunker bike, and maybe caught her. Tony had not been in Key West long enough yet to think of mopeds as serious transportation.

Screw it, he decided. Key West was a speed b.u.mp; she wasn't going anywhere. Put her on the to-do list and get back to work. He began looking around for the donor of his next car. This time something with air-conditioning.

The hooker he rented that night earned every penny.

As for us, there really wasn't much worth reporting for us to do, that day. Tony came by at his usual time for his daily bite, refraining from robbing my customers individually now that we had established a business relationship. Instead he tried to pump me about the mysterious blonde broad. Bolstered by the company and telepathic support of my friends, I found the courage to look him in his fearsome eye and convince him I knew nothing about her, had never seen her before yesterday, couldn't tell him where she was. (It helped that technically I wasn't, quite, lying. I'd never met either the twenty-one or the seventeen-year-old Erin, had never seen either before yesterday . . . and didn't have a clue where either was now. Only when they were.) Tony believed me and left, and that was that day as far as our con was concerned.

Nevertheless, it was the most memorable day of the entire affair for me-all because of what started out that night seeming to be the sort of absolutely generic, standard issue, garden-variety philosophical conversation for which bars are notorious.

It was late, getting on toward closing time. Few remained, Eddie had packed it in for the night, and people were keeping their voices down in consideration of those who might be asleep in the five cottages. I had left my post behind the bar, and gone around back of it-behind behind the bar, if you follow me-to empty the used-grounds hopper of The Machine into a trash can. The area back there behind the big wall of booze bottles is relatively secluded, and not heavily used due to the nature of trash cans in Florida sunshine; if the breeze fails, the smell can be something you could raise houseplants in. But we aren't becalmed much at The Place, and some folks like privacy, so I keep a few tables back there. I came upon Doc Webster sitting alone at one now. That was odd; the Doc may not be the most gregarious man I know, but he's definitely in the top three. We've had a firm no-prying policy in force for decades, but it's pretty much always been blatant hypocrisy.

Rather than simply stepping over there and asking him why he was by himself, however, I began singing a new song parody I was working up, softly, as if to myself. The tune was Sir Paul's t.i.tle song for the James Bond film Live and Let Die.

When we were young, with our heads in an open book We used to read Niven/Pournelle (you know you did, you know you did, you know you did) And in this ever-changing world, Pournelle and Niven hope the fans will still buy .. .

I paused and waited hopefully. And was pleased when, as I'd hoped, the Doc was unable to prevent himself from singing, "The Mote in G.o.d's Eye-" He was willing to accept company.

"Let me guess," I said, strolling over to his table. "You're sitting by yourself because some Cuban-Irish guy persuaded you to try a taco scone."

He was off his game. It took him a whole second to identify the straightline, see the punchline I planned, and improve on it. "The famous 'scone with the wind,' yes, it was Tarable."

I took a seat downwind of him and fired up a doobie. Slimmer than a soda straw, but it was Texada Timewarp from British Columbia; two or three hits would be plenty. And again the Doc surprised me. I'd sat downwind out of courtesy, because I knew he wasn't a head, but he reached out and took the joint out of my fingers, and shortened it an inch with a single toke. Which he held so long, the exhalation was barely visible, long enough for me to have two more tokes of my own. Our eyes met, and we beamed at each other like twin Buddhas, one chubby and one skinny, while the night began to sparkle in our peripheral vision.

I offered him a second hit, but he waved it away, so I set the joint down in an ashtray. After a few minutes of shared silent stone, he suddenly asked, "Do you, think we'll ever see Mike again, Jake?" That toke had hoa.r.s.ened his voice a little.

The question took me by surprise. "Why, sure. I guess. One of these days."

"It's been ten years now."

He was right. The question had been bothering me, too. I didn't often let it rise up to conscious level. "I guess he figured we were ready to solo. You know?"

"Well, I wish he'd asked first."

"Doc, are you p.i.s.sed off about something? At Mike Callahan?"

"At myself. At all of us idiots. For years we had him around all the time. We didn't really know for sure that he was literally superhuman until right near the end, there, but it was pretty much always clear that he knew stuff n.o.body else knew. Am I right?"