“I found you living in the park,” Diesel said.
“I like the park. Lots of fresh air. And people come around in a van and hand out baloney sandwiches twice a day. I like baloney sandwiches. When I was a kid, I always ate baloney sandwiches. I’d take one to school with me every day. My son never eats baloney. He says the stuff in baloney will kill you. I say when? I’ve got cataracts, high blood pressure, enlarged prostate, skin cancer, hemorrhoids, an artificial hip, false teeth, and gas. Every day I take eleven different pills and a stool softener. And now I’m supposed to worry about baloney.”
“I thought you were going to save mankind this afternoon,” I said to Diesel.
“That’s still the plan,” Diesel said. “We’ll have to take Morty with us.”
I had a new batch of rejected meat pies in a bag on my workstation. “Have you had lunch? Do you want a pie?” I asked him.
“I’m good,” Diesel said. “I had a baloney sandwich in the park.”
“I’ll be done in a few minutes,” I told him.
“What about me?” Glo asked. “You need me, right? You can’t save the world without me. Can you wait until three o’clock? That’s when I’m done.”
“I don’t know what we’re doing, but I think we should wait for her,” Morty said. “She’s a cutie. She makes me want to bend a spoon. Did I ever tell you about the time I bent three spoons at once? I was at this dinner party and . . .”
Clara groaned. “Don’t wait until three o’clock. Leave now. All of you. If he stays here any longer, I’ll go into a coma.”
An hour later, we were standing in front of Old North Church.
“I’ll go in first,” Diesel said. “Give me five minutes to look around, and then all three of you can come in. When you see me go downstairs, make sure no one follows me.”
“Oh boy,” Morty said. “We’re pulling off a caper, aren’t we? Now, this is more like it. Don’t you worry. No one’s gonna get past me and go down those stairs. You can count on me.”
“Keep your eye on him,” Diesel said to me. “He’s sneaky.”
“You bet I am,” Morty said. “I’m a slippery old bugger. You turn your back on me, and—whoosh—I’m gone. Unless I’m with two hot chicks, like you girls, then I might hang around. I’m as old as dirt, but I still got it. One day last month, I almost had a boner.”
“The golden years,” Diesel said. “I’d like to hear more, but I have to rob a grave. Give me a head start and then come in and cover me.”
I watched him walk to the church and go through the red door. I timed five minutes and turned to Glo. “Morty and I will stand close to the stairs that lead down to the crypt. You position yourself more toward the middle of the church. If we see someone who looks official, we talk to them, ask questions, so they don’t go near the stairs.”
“Gotcha,” Glo said. “Let’s do it.”
A family of tourists stood in the center aisle, staring up at the pipe organ in the balcony. Someone who appeared to be a docent was talking to them and gesturing toward the organ. The docent was a pleasant-looking woman in her fifties. She was wearing sensible shoes, a brown skirt, and a tan sweater set. She had a name tag pinned to her cardigan sweater, but I couldn’t see it from this distance.
Morty and I moved toward the stairs, so we screened Diesel while he stepped over the rope that prohibited entry. In seconds, Diesel was out of sight and Morty and I were standing guard.
“What’s he after down there?” Morty asked. “It’s gotta be something real valuable. Like jewels or a bag of money or a treasure map.”
“He’s looking for a bell.”
“Does it have jewels on it?”
“No, but we’re hoping it has a secret message.”
“I like the sound of that. This is like Indiana Jones, where he goes into a tomb and he’s looking for a clue to something. I don’t remember all the details, but there’s spiders and a big boulder that could have crushed him, but it didn’t. It might not have happened in that order, but it was pretty darn exciting. I’ve seen all the Indiana Jones movies. And I’ve seen all the James Bond movies, too. That Bond was a cool cucumber. He knew what to do with the ladies.”
A man and a woman came into the church and joined the family listening to the docent. Morty and I pretended to be reading a plaque on the wall. Glo was still hanging in the middle. A couple minutes passed, and two women walked in and went to the docent.
Glo meandered over to me and studied the plaque Morty and I had been pretending to read. “We might have a problem,” Glo said. “I’ve been eavesdropping. There’s a crypt tour scheduled. They’re waiting for one more person to arrive.”