What's The Worst That Could Happen

by Donald Westlake

  “Well, that’s true,” Dortmunder said. “But on the other hand, who do I know in Washington? Everybody I know is from around here.”

  “Ask,” May suggested.

  “Ask who?”

  “Ask everybody. Start with Andy, he knows a lot of people.”

  “The thing about Andy,” Dortmunder said, as May unlocked them into their apartment building, “is he likes knowing people.”

  They went up the stairs in companionable silence, Dortmunder thinking about a nice glass of bourbon. Spring rains are warm, but they’re still wet.

  May unlocked them into the dark apartment. Switching on the hall light, Dortmunder said, “Andy isn’t here. Think of that.”

  “Andy isn’t here all the time.”

  “He isn’t?”

  May concentrated on relocking the door. Dortmunder said, “You want some bourbon? A beer?”

  “Tea,” she said. “I’ll make it.” Probably something she’d picked up in one of the magazines she was always reading.

  “I’ll stick to bourbon,” Dortmunder decided. “And I’ll make it.”

  They headed to the kitchen, switching on lights along the way, and Dortmunder made himself a bourbon on the rocks that just looked warm; even with the ice cubes floating around in there, you knew that drink would warm your insides.

  May was still waiting on her tea. “I’ll be in the living room,” Dortmunder said, and left the kitchen, then turned back to say, “Here he is. I told you, remember?”

  Not looking up from her tea, May called, “Hi, Andy.”

  Andy, just entering, shut the hall door and called, “Hi, May.”

  Dortmunder headed again for the living room, saying to Andy, “You might as well come along.”

  “Long as I’m here.”

  “That’s it.”

  Andy was carrying some kind of leather shoulderbag with a flap, like a scout on horseback in a western movie. Dortmunder wasn’t positive he really wanted to know what was inside that bag, but he was pretty sure he’d be finding out. In the meantime, Andy shifted this bag around on his shoulder, indicating it was fairly heavy, and said, “I’ll just get a beer first.”

  Dortmunder thought. He looked at the glass in his own hand. Rising with some difficulty to the responsibilities of host, he said, “You want a bourbon?”

  “Thanks for asking, John,” Andy said, “but I’ll just stick to beer.”

  So they went their separate ways, Dortmunder settling himself into his own chair in his living room, tasting the bourbon, and finding it every bit as satisfying as he’d hoped. Then Andy came in with his beer, sat on the sofa, put the beer and the shoulderbag on the coffee table, reached for the shoulderbag’s flap, and Dortmunder said, “Before you do that, whatever it is, lemme ask you a question.”

  “Sure,” Andy said. His hand, en route, made a left turn and picked up the beer instead.

  “Who do you know in Washington?”

  Andy drank beer. “The president,” he said. “That senator, whatsisname. An airline stewardess named Justine.”

  Dortmunder tasted bourbon; that was still good, anyway. “Who do you know,” he amended, “that isn’t a civilian?”

  Andy looked alert. “You mean, somebody in our line of work? Oh, I see, to be the local for when you do the Watergate.”

  “May says, probably there’ll be enough stuff in the guy’s place to make it worth somebody’s while.”

  “That’s true, judging from last time. Lemme think about it,” Andy decided, and leaned forward, putting down his beer. “In the meantime,” he said, reaching again for the shoulderbag, “here’s the reason I’m here.”

  “Uh huh.” Dortmunder held tight to his bourbon.

  Andy flipped back the shoulderbag’s flap, and pulled out a smallish black metal box with a telephone receiver on one side of it. “I’m gonna have to unplug your phone for a few minutes,” he said.

  Dortmunder glared at the box. “Is that an answering machine? I told you before, Andy, I don’t want —”

  “No no, John, I told you, I gave up on you with technology.” Grinning in an amiable way, Andy shrugged and spread his hands, saying, “I understand you now. The only reason you’re willing to travel in cars is because there’s no place in an apartment to keep a horse.”

  “Was that sarcasm, Andy?”

  “I don’t think so. What this is,” Andy said, “is a fax. You’ve seen them around.”

  Well, that was true. A fax was something you picked up and carried to the fence. In the straight world, they were yet another way to tell people things and have them tell you things back. Since telling people things and hearing what bad news they had to impart had never been high among Dortmunder’s priorities, he didn’t see where the fax figured into his own lifestyle. If he had a fax, who would he send a message to? What would it say? And who would send a message to him, that they couldn’t send by telephone or letter or over a beer at the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue?

  Andy carried this black box of his over to the telephone on its end table, hunkered down beside it, and briskly unhooked the phone from the wall outlet so he could hook up his fax instead, while Dortmunder said, “Why do I have this, all of a sudden? And how long am I gonna have it?”

  “The thing about a fax, John,” Andy explained, “it’s harder to bug. It isn’t impossible, the feds got a machine that can pick up a fax and it still goes on to the regular party, without anybody being the wiser, but it isn’t routine, not yet, not like a phone call. Just a minute.” Andy picked up the phone part of the fax and started tapping out a number.

  Dortmunder said, “Is that a local call?”

  “No, it isn’t.” Andy listened, then said, “Hi, it’s Andy. Go ahead,” and hung up.

  “Don’t mind me,” Dortmunder said. His bourbon glass was almost empty, except for ice.

  Hunkering beside the fax, Andy swiveled around to Dortmunder and said, “Wally called me. He’s got news, but none of us wants him to tell me on the phone. So he’s —”

  The phone rang. Dortmunder said, “Get that, will you? You’re right there.”

  “No, no, this is Wally,” Andy said, and the phone rang a second time, and May appeared in the doorway with a mug of tea. She looked around at everything and saw the black box and said “What’s that?” just as the box suddenly made a loud, high–pitched, horrible noise, like a lot of baby pigeons being tortured to death all at once. May’s eyes widened and the tea sloshed in her mug and she said, “What’s that?”

  The pigeons died. The box chuckled to itself. Dortmunder said, “It’s a fax. Apparently, this is the only way Wally likes to talk now.”

  “Here it comes,” Andy said.

  Dortmunder and May watched in appalled fascination as the box began slowly to stick its tongue out at them; a wide white tongue, a sheet of shiny curly paper that exuded from the front of the thing, with words on the paper.

  Andy smiled in paternal pleasure at the box. “It’s like a pasta machine, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes,” Dortmunder said. It was easier to say yes.

  The white paper, curling back on itself like a papyrus roll, kept oozing from the box. Then it stopped, and the box made a bell bing sound, and Andy reached down to tear the paper loose. Straightening, he went back to the sofa, sat down, took some beer, unrolled the fax — he looked exactly like the herald announcing the arrival in the kingdom of the Duke of Carpathia — and said, “Dear John and Andy and Miss May.” Smiling, he said, “What a polite guy, Wally.”

  “He’s a very nice person,” May said, and sat in her own chair. But, Dortmunder noticed, she didn’t sit back and relax, but stayed on the edge of the chair, holding the mug of tea with both hands.

  Andy looked back at his proclamation, or whatever it was. “I just picked up an internal memorandum of Trans–Global Universal Industries, which is Max Fairbanks’s personal holding company, and his plans have changed. Instead of going to Nairobi, he’s coming to New York —”


  “Good news,” Dortmunder said, with some surprise, as another person might say, Look! A unicorn!

  “He’s going to be arriving tomorrow night —”

  “Wednesday,” May said.

  “Right — because he has an appointment with his Chapter Eleven judge on Thursday. Then he’ll leave for Hilton Head on Friday and go back to the schedule the way it was before.”

  “He’s going to be here,” Dortmunder said, tinkling the ice in his empty glass. “Staying here. Two nights. Where?”

  “We’re coming to that now,” Andy said, and read, “In New York, Fairbanks stays with his wife Lutetia at the N–Joy Theater on Broadway. I hope this is a help. Sincerely, Wallace Knurr.”

  Dortmunder said, “The what?”

  “N–Joy Theater on Broadway.”

  “He stays at a theater?”

  “It isn’t Washington, at least, John,” May pointed out. “It’s New York. And you know New York.”

  “Sure, I do,” Dortmunder said. “The guy lives in a theater. Everybody in New York lives in a theater, am I right?”

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  Although the two pillars upon which TUI had always stood were real estate (slums, then office buildings, then hotels) and communications (newspapers, then magazines, then cable television), the corporation had also from the beginning spread horizontally, like crabgrass, into allied businesses. In the last few years, the real estate and communications sides of the firm had grown more and more useful to one another, combining their specialties to create theme parks, buy a movie studio, and carve tourist centers from the decayed docksides and crumbled downtowns of older cities. And now, most recently and most triumphantly, they had come together to construct, house, and operate a Broadway theater.

  The center of Manhattan Island is the absolute zero point of the triangulation of entertainment and real estate in the capitalist world. Here, millions of tourists a year from all around the planet are catered to in and around buildings constructed on land worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a foot.

  Max Fairbanks had long wanted an obvious presence in New York City, mostly because there were already a few other prominent billionaires with obvious presences in New York City, and one doesn’t become a billionaire in the first place without some certain degree of competitiveness in one’s nature. The profit motive was there as well, of course — the N–Joy complex was expected to do for New York City what Disney World had done for Orlando; put it on the map — but merely a strong second after self–aggrandizement, which was why the name of the theater: the N–Joy Broadway, for Max’s symbol, Tui, one of the characteristics of which, in The Book, was the Joyous.

  The N–Joy Broadway was a legitimate stage theater, suited most particularly for revivals of beloved musicals, but it was much much more than that. Girdling the theater was the Little Old New York Arcade, shops and boutiques recreating an earlier and cleaner version of the scary city outside; no longer would the tourists have to brave the dangers of the actual Fifty–Seventh Street, farther uptown.

  Above the theater — a state–of–the–art extravaganza replete with spinning platforms, hydraulically lifted and lowered stages, computerized files, built–in smoke machines and Dolby sound under every seat — rose a forty–nine–story granite–like tower, containing a few floors of offices — show business, architecture, a few of Max Fairbanks’s enterprises — and then the N–Joy Broadway Hotel, whose four–story–high lobby began on the sixteenth floor. On an average day, eighty–two percent of the twelve hundred rooms above the N–Joy Broadway Hotel lobby were occupied, but the residents of these of course were all transients, rarely remaining as long as a week. Like the Paris Opera, the N–Joy Broadway contained only one permanent resident, and her name was Lutetia.

  Lutetia Fairbanks her name was, most recently, and now Lutetia Fairbanks forever. A tall and handsome woman, with striking abundant black hair, she moved with a peculiarly deliberate walk, a heavy but sensual thrusting forward and bearing down, as though she were always seeking ants to step on. The regal, if slightly Transylvanian, aspect this gave her was enhanced by her predilection for swirling gowns and turbanned headgear.

  Lutetia’s home, for the last sixteen months and on into the foreseeable future, was a twelve–room apartment carved into the brow of the N–Joy, above the marquee and below the hotel lobby. Her parlor windows, of soundproof glass, looked out at the world’s most famous urban vista through the giant white neon O of the building’s emblazoned name. Her frequent guests — she was quickly gaining local prominence as one of the city’s premier hostesses — were whisked up to her aerie in a manned private elevator just off the theater entrance. Hotel staff serviced the apartment. The same climate control equipment that micromanaged the ambiance of both theater and hotel lobby purified and tempered the atmosphere in the apartment. The furnishings were antiques, the servants well trained in other nations, the living easy. So long as Max didn’t fuck up, everything would keep on coming up roses.

  It seemed to Lutetia that Max was, or had been, fucking up. He had that look in his eye, that childish glint of guilty pleasure, risking it all to throw just one spitball at teacher.

  They had met here in the ballroom late on Wednesday afternoon, where Lutetia was overseeing the preparations for this Friday’s dinner, at which the guests of honor were to be Jerry Gaunt, the latest superstar reporter from CNN, and the Emir of Hak–kak, an oil well near Yemen. Max had sought her out here, she having far more important things to do than chase after some errant husband.

  That depending, of course, on just how errant he was being. “What have you been up to?” she demanded, once they’d repaired to the farther end of the ballroom, away from the busily place–setting servants.

  “Nothing, my darling,” Max said, blinking those oh–so–innocent eyes of his. “Nothing, my pet.”

  “You’re in trouble with the bankruptcy, that’s why you’re back in New York.”

  “And to see you, my sweet.”

  “Bull,” she told him. “What were you doing in Carrport? Who were you there with?”

  “Nobody, precious. I needed, I merely needed, to get away from it all, out where no phones would ring, no messengers would descend, no problems would have to be dealt with.”

  “That last part didn’t work so well, did it?”

  Max spread his hands, with his oh–so–sheepish smile. “How was I to know some dimwit crook would choose that night to attack the place?”

  “If he’d only known you were there,” Lutetia pointed out, “he would surely have left you alone, if only out of professional courtesy.”

  “You are hard, Lutetia, very hard.”

  “Max,” Lutetia said, stalking around him with that boots–of–doom stride, “two things you are not permitted to bring into my house and my life. Scandal, and disease.”

  “Pet, I wouldn’t —”

  “Scandal is worse, but disease is bad enough. I will not be humiliated, and I will not be put at risk of a disgusting death. I won’t have it, Max. We both know what my lawyers could do, if they wished.”

  “But why would they wish? Love petal, why would you wish?”

  “I’m busy here, Max,” she informed him. “I will not have my schedule destroyed by some overgrown boy playing hooky.”

  “You’ll hardly know I’m here, my sweet.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Will we dine together, love?”

  “Not tonight,” she said, to punish him. She knew he’d had a woman out there on the Island, she could feel it in her antennae; on the other hand, she didn’t really and truly want to know the miserable details, not for sure and certain, because then she would have to do something drastic, if only to satisfy her pride, as powerful and overweening as his. “I’m dining out tonight,” she announced. “With friends.” Then, relenting a bit, she said, “Tomorrow night we could have dinner, if you have any appetite after your meeting with the judge.”

  “I know I’ll ha
ve an appetite then,” he said, and smiled his oh–so–roguish smile at her, adding, “Will I see you later tonight, my lotus blossom?”

  She was about to refuse, just on general principles, but the gleam in his eye snagged her. He was, as she well knew, as rascally in bed as out, which was sometimes wearing but sometimes fun. “We’ll see,” she said, with half a smile, and permitted him to bite her earlobe before he scampered off and she returned to the servants, to inform them that they would be wanting the coral–colored napkins on the tables, as any fool could tell from the centerpieces, not the peach.

  Chapter 17