Life Expectancy

belong entirely in the maniac's distorted view of reality and not at all in the real world that I inhabited.
        Pleased by my amazement, he said, "Cornelius Snow was the sole stockholder in the bank when he built it. He arranged things for his convenience."
        "Are we talking skullduggery here?" Lorrie wondered, and seemed to be delighted that there might be some.
        "Not at all," he assured her. "From every indication, Cornelius Snow was an honest, civic-minded man."
        "He was an insatiable greedy drooling pig," Crinkles angrily disagreed as he worked on another explosive charge.
        "He didn't need to misappropriate any depositor's funds because eighty percent of the deposits were his to begin with."
        Crinkles had no interest in these facts of accounting, only in emotion:
        "I would have roasted him on a spit and fed him to dogs."
        "In the 1870s," the maniac said, "there wasn't anything remotely like the complex web of regulation and oversight by which banks operate these days."
        "Except dogs would have the good sense not to eat the venomous bastard," Crinkles added in a voice bitter enough to curdle milk.
        "Shortly past the turn of the century, that simpler world began to fade away,"
        "Even inbred, starving sewer rats wouldn't have eaten the avaricious creep if you'd basted him in bacon grease," Crinkles elaborated.
        "After Cornelius died, when the bulk of his estate was left to a charitable trust, the section of tunnel leading to the bank's subterranean entrance was walled shut."
        I recalled the breach in the wall that we had passed through en route.
        The Beagle Boys had been busy.
        "The steel door at the head of those stairs to the vault isn't actually operable," the nameless maniac continued. "The old oak door was replaced with steel in the 1930s, then welded shut. And on the other side is a reinforced concrete-block wall. But we can get through all of that in maybe two hours, once we've dealt with the alarm."
        "I'm surprised this room right here isn't alarmed," Lorrie said.
        "Though I suppose if that was really a time machine, it would be."
        "Nobody saw the need. To all appearances, it's not a major bank, not worth knocking over. Besides, after 1902, when they sealed off the underground approach, there wasn't a back entrance anymore. And in respect of the bank's security, the charitable trust that owns the Snow Mansion agreed not to disclose Cornelius's tunnels. A few people in the historical society have seen them, but only after signing a nondisclosure agreement with teeth."
        Earlier he had mentioned torturing a member of the historical society, who was no doubt now as dead as the librarian. No matter how tightly a lawyer constructs a nondisclosure clause, there are ways around it.
        I won't say that I was thunderstruck by these revelations, but I was certainly flabbergasted, however fine a point that might be. Although born and raised in Snow Village, and although I loved my picturesque hometown and was steeped in its history, I'd never heard so much as a rumor about secret passageways under the town square.
        When I expressed my amazement to the maniac, the warm twinkle in his eyes crystalized into a colder glitter that I recognized from the eyes of Killer the Gila monster and Earl the milk snake.
        "You can't deeply, fully know a town," he said, "if you love it. Loving it, you're charmed by surfaces. To deeply, fully know a town, you've got to hate it, loathe it, loathe it with an unquenchable fiery passion. You've got to be consumed by a need to learn all its rotten shameful secrets and use them against it, find its hidden cancers and feed them until they metastasize into apocalyptic tumors. You've got to live for the day when its every stone and stick will be wiped forever from the face of the earth."
        I assumed that once upon a time something bad had happened to him in our little tourist mecca. Something more traumatic than being given a lesser hotel room when he had reserved a suite or being unable to buy a ski-lift pass on a busy winter weekend.
        "But when you come right down to it," Lorrie said (somewhat riskily, it seemed to me), "this whole escapade isn't about hate or about justice, like you said earlier. It's about bank robbery. It's just about money."
        The maniac's face turned so livid that from hairline to chin