What's the Worst That Could Happen?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “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?”

  16

  A lthough 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 granitelike 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 have 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.

  17

  “I don’t think I like this much,” Dortmunder said.

  “Why not?” Andy asked, and pointed at the bright color photo of the main reception room, with its working marble fountain and deep maroon plush sofas. “I think it’s snazzy.”

  “I don’t mean the look of it,” Dortmunder said. “I mean the getting into it.”

  “Oh, well,” Andy said. “Sure, that.”

  Years ago, Dortmunder and his friends had discovered what a great help in their line of work the architectural magazines could be, with their glossy photos of rich people’s residences, room after room of what would or would not be worth the picking, plus blueprints of houses and gardens, plus visible in the backgrounds of many of the pictures this or that exterior door, with its hardware in plain sight.

  The Max and Lutetia Fairbanks apartment in the new N-Joy had been given this treatment, of course, several months back, in one of the high-toned interiors magazines, and Andy had found a copy at a used-magazine store this afternoon and brought it over to Dortmunder’s place, where they sat with beers side by side on the sofa, the magazine open on the coffee table in front of them, turning back and forth over the six pages of photos and copy. And Dortmunder didn’t like what he saw. “The problem is,” he said, “time.”

  “Not much lead time,” Andy said.

  “You could say that.”

  “I did say it.”

  “He’s gonna be there tonight,” Dortmunder said, “and he’s gonna be there tomorrow night, and then he’s going down to somebody’s head.”

  “Hilton Head, it’s an island down south.”

  “An island down south I’m not even gonna think about. So it’s tonight or tomorrow night, if we’re gonna get him at home in New York, and it sure as hell isn’t gonna be tonight, so that leaves tomorrow night, and that isn’t very much lead time.”

  “Like I said,” Andy pointed out.

  “And first,” Dortmunder said, “there’s the question of how do you get in. A private elevator from inside the theater lobby that doesn’t go anywhere except to that one apartment, that’s how they get in.”

  “And it has an operator,” Andy said, “a guy in a uniform inside the elevator there, that pushes the button. Suppose we could switch for the operator? Take his place?”

  “Maybe. Not much time to set that up. What if we bought tickets and went into the theater? It doesn’t say here, but don’t you figure they’ve got some window or something, they can look out and see the stage, watch the show if they feel like it?”

  “Well, the problem there is,” Andy said, “I went by the place this morning, and it’s got some musical playing there, and it’s sold out for the next seven months.”

  “Sold out?” Dortmunder frowned. “What do you mean, sold out?”

  “Like I said. It isn’t like going to the movies, John, it’s more like taking an airplane. You call up ahead of time and say this is when I wanna fly, and they sell you a ticket.”

  “For seven months later? How do you know you’re gonna feel like going to some particular show seven months from now?”

  “That’s the way they do it,” Andy said, and shrugged.

  “So switch the elevator operator,” Dortmunder said. “Except the ushers and people in the theater probably know the real guy.”

  “Probably.”

  “Lemme think,” Dortmunder said, and Andy sat back to let him think, while Dortmunder read through the article in the magazine all over again, the round sentences about volumes of space, and tensions between the modern and the traditional, and bold strokes of color, all rolling past his eyes like truck traffic on an interstate. “Says here,” he said, after a while, “the apartment is serviced by the hotel staff. That’d be maids and like that, right?”

  “Right,” Andy said.

  “Hotel maids, with those big carts they have, clean sheets, toilet paper, soap, all that stuff, and the dirty laundry they take away. Are they gonna go down to the lobby with all that and take the elevator from there up to the apartment?”

  “They’d look kind of funny,” Andy agreed, “pushing one of those hotel carts around a theater lobby.”

  “And a hotel lobby,” Dortmunder said. “And the street, because the hotel and the theater are different entrances. So that’s not the way they do it, is it?”

  “A service elevator,” Andy said.

  “Has to be. An elevator down from somewhere in the hotel. Probably one of the regular service elevators, except the elevator shaft goes down those extra floors.”

  “And it won’t have any operator,” Andy guessed. “The maids can push those buttons for themselves.”

  Dortmunder at last reached for his beer, then quickly straightened it before much spilled. “We’ve got today and tomorrow,�
�� he said. “When May comes home, we’ll pack some stuff and go check in at the hotel. I’ll have to go over to Stoon’s place and buy a credit card, something that’s good for a few days.”

  “Once you’re in,” Andy said, “you give me a call and tell me what room you’re in.”

  “And you come over late—”

  “Around one in the morning, right?”

  “And we toss the hotel.”

  “And we find the elevator.”

  “And I get my ring.”

  “And a couple other little items along the way,” Andy said. Smiling at the photos in the magazine, he said, “You know, a fella could just take a truckload of that stuff there and go downtown to Bleecker Street somewhere and set up an antique shop.”

  Dortmunder drank beer. “You do that,” he said. “And I get my ring.”

  18

  T he concept of horizontal expansion in the corporate world is that the elements, if carefully chosen, will increase one another’s business and therefore profit. It was estimated that 23 percent of the guests registered at the N-Joy Broadway Hotel took in the show at the N-Joy Broadway Theater while they were in town, and that in fact 67 percent of those had chosen that particular hotel because they’d come to New York expressly to see that specific show. Conversely, 19 percent of non-hotel-guest theatergoers chose to dine in the hotel’s main dining room before or after seeing the show, a respectable number, but one which management thought could be increased. They had a good show, a good hotel, and a good restaurant; the combination had to be a winner.

  As for that show, it was Desdemona!, the feminist musical version of the world-famous love story, slightly altered for the modern American taste (everybody lives). Hit songs from the show included “Oh, Tell, Othello, Oh, Tell,” and “Iago, My Best Friend” and the foot-stomping finale, “Here’s the Handkerchief!”