What's the Worst That Could Happen?

by Donald E. Westlake

  “At least not until we’re out of the building,” said John Weisman, walking on Max’s other side.

  John Weisman was another attorney, yet another of Max’s attorneys. It seemed to Max sometimes that he had attorneys the way Chinese restaurants have roaches. Every time you turned on the light, there were more of them. This one, John Weisman, was a specialist, Max’s bankruptcy attorney. The man devoted his life to bankruptcy cases, and charged an arm and a leg, and lived very well indeed off bankruptcy, proving either that you can get blood from a turnip, or a lot of those things claiming to be turnips were lying.

  In any event, Weisman didn’t have Walter’s solonic majesty, so that his not-till-we’re-outside crack merely sounded like a not-till-we’re-outside crack. A compact lean man in tip-top physical condition, Weisman apparently spent all his spare time in rugged pursuits, hunting, camping, hiking, mountain climbing, you name it. Max personally thought it showed great restraint on Weisman’s part not to come to court in a camouflage uniform.

  Although today it was Max who might have been better in camouflage. Judge Mainman, a fat-faced petty inquisitor, had treated him with such disdain, such contempt, as though there were something wrong with a successful man wishing to avail himself of the benefits of the law. Why would successful men buy legislators, if they weren’t to make use of the resulting laws? But try to tell that to Judge Mainman.

  “I can’t do it, you know,” Max said, as they left the court building, down all those broad shallow steps that irritatingly forced you to think about every step you took—rather appropriate for a courthouse, actually—and across the sidewalk full of scruffy people in Max Fairbanks’s way, to the waiting limousine, whose waiting chauffeur in timely fashion opened the rear door.

  The attorneys waited until everybody was inside the limo and the door shut, and then Walter said, “Can’t do what?” while Weisman said, “Sorry, Mr. Fairbanks, you have no choice.”

  Walter looked at Weisman: “Has no choice in what?”

  “Selling the house.”

  “I can’t do it,” Max said. The limousine pulled smoothly and silently away from the rotten courthouse. “It’s a personal humiliation. It’s a humiliation within my own company! In front of my own employees!”

  “Still,” Weisman said, “we do have the order.”

  The order. Judge Mainman, the puny despot, had been fuming when they’d entered his chambers, petulant that anyone would treat his magnificent decisions lightly. He didn’t believe Max’s sworn statement that he’d only gone out to Carrport to pick up some important papers, and he’d made his disbelief insultingly obvious. He was so affronted, this minor little pip-squeak of a judge, he was so affronted, he spoke at first with apparent seriousness about reopening the entire Chapter Eleven proceeding, a move that could only improve his creditors’ prospects and cost Max who knows how much more money. Millions. Actual money; millions.

  So it had been necessary to grovel before the son of a bitch, to apologize, to promise to take the bastard’s orders much more seriously from now on, and then to thank the miserable cretin for backing off from an entire junking of the agreement, backing off to a mere order to sell the Carrport house.

  Yes. Sell the house, put the proceeds from the sale into the bankruptcy fund, and let it be dribbled away into the coffers of the creditors. And every single TUI employee in middle management and above, every last one of them who had ever spent a night, a weekend, a seminar afternoon, out at the Carrport house, would understand that the boss had lost the house to a miserable bankruptcy judge.

  “There’s got to be some way out of this,” Max said. “Come on, one of you, think of something.”

  Walter said, “Max, John’s right. You have to put the property on the market. The best you can do is hope it isn’t sold between now and the time we’re finished with this adjustment.”

  “Well, no,” Weisman said. “The house has now been placed in the category of assets to be disbursed, there’s nothing we can do about that.”

  “Hmmmmm,” said Walter. Even his hmmmmms sounded wise.

  Max said, “If I put it on the market at some outlandish price? So no one will ever buy it?”

  “Then you’re in contempt of court,” Weisman said. “You have to offer the house for sale at fair market price, and I have to so represent to the court. There’s nothing else to be done.”

  Bitter, brooding, Max twisted his new ring around and around and around on his finger. He wasn’t even conscious of that gesture any more, it had become so habitual so soon. “I’ve lost the goddam house,” he said.

  “Sorry, Mr. Fairbanks,” Weisman said, “but you have.”

  Walter said, “Max, you’ll just have to put this behind you, and look ahead.” Even Walter, though, couldn’t make that twaddle sound like anything but twaddle.

  Max said, “I can go out there one more time?”

  “So the court has ordered,” Weisman said. “After apprising the court, you’re permitted one final overnight visit, to gather and remove personal and corporate possessions and to make a last inventory.”

  Miss September. Maybe that goddam burglar will be there again; this time, I’ll shoot him. “It’s a hell of a small silver lining,” Max grumbled, “for such a great big fucking cloud.”

  23

  “D on’t look now,” May said, “but that’s Andy.”

  So of course Dortmunder did look, and it was Andy all right, across the restaurant, having dinner and a nice bottle of red wine with an attractive woman with a nice smile. The woman caught Dortmunder looking at her, so Dortmunder faced his own meal again, and said, “You’re right.”

  “I told you not to look,” May said. “Now she’s staring at us.”

  “She’ll stop after a while,” Dortmunder said, and concentrated on his lamb chop.

  May said, “Andy doesn’t want to know us at the moment, or he’d come over, or wave, or something.”

  Dortmunder shifted lamb to his cheek: “I’ve had moments, I felt the same way about him.”

  “I wonder who she is,” May said.

  Dortmunder didn’t wonder who she was, or have anything else to add on the topic, so conversation lapsed, and they both continued to eat the pretty good food.

  It was just after eight o’clock in the evening, and the restaurant in the N-Joy Broadway Hotel was thinning out, most tourists eating early because they ate early at home, or because they were going to a show afterward, or because they were exhausted and wanted to go to bed. May was having wine with dinner but Dortmunder was not, partly because he generally didn’t drink before going to work and partly because May would be going home after dinner and it would be up to Dortmunder to keep himself awake until midnight.

  They’d talked it over this evening, upstairs, before coming down to dinner. There was a possibility there would be complications tonight, since it was impossible to know ahead of time just what they would meet when the maid service elevator doors opened down below at the apartment level. If they met trouble of some kind, and if the law got involved, and if the law came to understand that the interlopers had descended from the hotel, it would probably not be a good idea for May to be asleep somewhere in that same hotel under a false name, riding on a false credit card. So after dinner she would pack up a small amount of her stuff, leaving her large suitcase for Dortmunder with any luck to fill later with items once belonging to Max Fairbanks, and she would take a taxi home, hoping to hear from Dortmunder in person in the morning rather than via the morning news.

  Dortmunder hadn’t known Andy Kelp intended to be in the hotel this early in the evening, nor that he’d be with a woman. Was she the lockman? There were some very good female lockmen, with slender and agile fingers, but in taking that one look over his shoulder Dortmunder didn’t think he’d recognized her as anybody he’d ever seen before. And if she were the lockman, wouldn’t Andy bring her over and introduce her, so maybe they could all have dinner together? So she was probably a civilian, which made it les
s than brilliant for Andy to have brought her here, but who knew why Andy did what he did?

  “Probably,” Dortmunder said, finishing his lamb chop and dabbing his mouth with his napkin, “she’s an undercover cop and he doesn’t know it.”

  May looked over that way, past Dortmunder’s shoulder. She could look, but he wasn’t supposed to. “I doubt it,” she said. “Are we going to have dessert?”

  “I always did before,” Dortmunder said.

  The waiter came over, at his signal, and it turned out there wasn’t an actual dessert menu, nor even one of those dessert carts they wheel around so you can point at what you want. Instead, what the waiter had was all the desserts memorized, and he was so proud of this accomplishment he was happy to reel them off as many times as the customer wanted. Unfortunately, he had them memorized in order, so if you said, for instance, “The third one, with the butterscotch on top. Was that chocolate or vanilla underneath?” he didn’t know. All he could do was reel off all the desserts again, and go more slowly when he got to the third one.

  But eventually Dortmunder got them all memorized in his own mind as well, and then he could choose, the pecan swirl vanilla cake with the raspberry sauce, and May could have the rocky road ice cream, and they could both have coffee, and the waiter went away, and Dortmunder wondered how long it would be before he could clear his head of all those desserts. It was worse than the Anadarko family of Carrport, Long Island.

  He wondered if the Anadarkos were related to Max Fairbanks. Probably not.

  “Don’t look now,” May said, “but they’re leaving.”

  So naturally Dortmunder looked, and when he turned around of course the woman was facing in this direction anyway, standing beside the table, and she noticed his movement, and she looked him straight in the eye for the second time in one meal. Dortmunder blinked like a fish and faced front, and May said, “I told you don’t look.”

  “If you don’t want me to look,” he pointed out, “don’t tell me what they’re doing.”

  May looked past his shoulder again. “They’re walking away now,” she said. “He has his arm around her waist.”

  “I don’t even care,” Dortmunder said.

  It took his entire dessert to get him back in a good mood.

  24

  D inner at the Lumleys’. Lutetia enjoyed the Lumleys because, although they’d been rich for more than one generation, they still liked to talk about money. Harry Lumley was in commercial real estate in various cities around the globe—at the moment, briskly withdrawing himself from Hong Kong and Singapore—while Maura Lumley was in cosmetics, specializing in strangely colored lip and nail treatments for high school girls. “There are millions in those little idiots,” Maura liked to say. “All you have to do is draw it out of them.”

  They were ten tonight at the Lumleys’, in their Fifth Avenue penthouse duplex overlooking Central Park just north of the Metropolitan Museum. The other three couples were also rich, of course, the gentlemen being captains of industry, or at least captains of stock shares, and their wives being extremely attractive in that lacquered way required of women who have married recent money. The conversation ranged over politics and taxes and dining experiences around the globe. It was all very pleasant, very ordinary, very reassuring, and it wasn’t until the sorbet that Lutetia noticed Max wasn’t saying anything.

  Now what? Managing Max was a full-time job, and not always an easy one. Lutetia didn’t mind the work, she knew she was good at it, but there were times when she wished he had come with an owner’s manual. Usually at an evening like this, Max would be very much an element of the party, full of gossip, full of jokes about politicians, full of ethnic humor and racial humor and class humor and economic humor, but tonight he was merely being attentive, smiling at other people’s humor, eating distractedly, adding nothing to the occasion, looking at his watch from time to time.

  He’s a million miles away, Lutetia thought, but in which direction?

  From that point, through the rest of the meal and on to the brandy or port on the terrace afterward, Central Park a great black sleeping beast stretched out below them, Lutetia did her best to involve Max, stimulate him, make him enter into the spirit of the occasion. She even went so far as to remind him of two or three of his favorite stories, asking him to regale the group with them; something she never did. And the worst of it was, he readily agreed, only to produce an amiable but mechanical recital, without his usual clever dialects and mischievous facial expressions, so that his efforts—or hers, through him—produced only mild laughter, merely polite.

  He wasn’t sullen, he didn’t appear to be angry, his manner wasn’t what you could call worried, there was nothing hostile about him. He just wasn’t Max, that’s all. Lutetia began to be afraid.

  It wasn’t until they were in the limo, going through dark Central Park on their slightly roundabout way home, that the penny, or the shoe, or whatever it was, dropped. Lutetia had resolved not to raise the subject, not to pose any questions, not to do a thing except watch Max with extreme care, ready to jump at the slightest unexpected sound, so he was the one who at last broached the topic: “The judge,” he said.

  She looked at him, alert, wary. “Yes?”

  “He apparently has . . . I’ve apparently given him power over me beyond . . . It’s certainly not what I thought this legal square dance was all about.”

  “He displeased you.”

  “If he were crossing the road ahead of us,” Max said, gesturing at the winding blacktop road in the dim-lit leafy park, “I’d have Chalmers run him down.”

  Chalmers was the driver. Mildly, Lutetia said, “Do you think Chalmers would do it?”

  “If I told him to, he’d damn well better.”

  “What did the judge do, my dear?”

  There were really quite a few lights in the park. Max’s face was now plain, now in shadow. It seemed to Lutetia his expression was pained. “He humiliated me,” he said.

  Oh, dear. Lutetia well knew there was little short of death you could do to Max Fairbanks worse than that. She herself might argue with him, defy him, even sneer at him, but she would make damn sure she was out of the country first, if she ever decided it had become necessary to humiliate him; by divorce, for instance, or a public affair with a poor person. Sympathizing, grateful to Max for having shared his pain with her, she took his hand in both of hers and said, “You give these little people power, Max, they don’t always use it well.”

  In the next passing streetlight, she could see his grateful smile, and smiled back. She said, “Tell me what he did.”

  “First he threatened to open the entire Chapter Eleven again, which would cost us millions. Literally, millions. Walter and that other fellow, Weisman, groveled at the bastard’s feet while I sat quietly in the background—”

  “Good.”

  “And at last he agreed to a compromise. And even that I didn’t understand until afterward, when the lawyers explained it to me.”

  They were out of the park now, driving down the well-lit Seventh Avenue, and Lutetia could see Max plain. What he had been covering back at the Lumleys’, hiding with a veneer of polite good humor, was a haggard vulnerability, an uncharacteristic self-doubt. Still holding his hand in both of hers, she said, “What was it? What did he do?”

  “He took away the Carrport house.”

  This was so unexpected she very nearly laughed, but realized in time that Max would not put up with being laughed at over this matter. Swallowing her amusement, she said, “What do you mean, took it away?”

  “It has to be sold, and the proceeds added to the Chapter Eleven pot.”

  Lutetia studied him, not understanding. “I don’t see—That’s annoying, of course, but why does it hit you so hard ?”

  They were stopped at a traffic light. He shook his head, angry with himself, and looked out at busy midtown, just before midnight. “I suppose I’ve made a fetish of that house,” he said. “I enjoyed—You were never there.”
r />   “You never wanted me there.”

  “You never wanted to be there.”

  That was true. The Carrport house was a part of Max’s corporate business, and nothing to do with her. It was used for corporate matters of various kinds, which would bore her, and also, she suspected, for hanky-panky, about which she didn’t want to know. “I wasn’t interested in a suburban house on Long Island,” she acknowledged. “But why was it so important to you?”

  “I was the host out there,” he said. “The master, the thane. I enjoyed that, bringing management out, being, I don’t know, lord of the manor or some such thing. That was the only place where I was physically the commander of my armies, all gathered around me. Feudalism, I suppose. It may sound foolish . . .”

  “As a matter of fact,” she told him, “it sounds quite real. Not something you would have normally told me.”

  “That’s true enough.” Max shook his head. “Not something I’d even told myself before. I never understood how important Carrport was to me.”

  “So this judge,” Lutetia said, “he didn’t merely take away a corporate asset, he stole a part of your pleasure in who you are.”

  “Irreplaceable,” he said.

  “Oh, no, my dear,” she assured him. “You’ll get over it, and you’ll find some other symbol. It was only a symbol, really, not actually you. Some other house, a plane, a ship—Have you thought about a ship?”

  He frowned at her, as though she might be making fun of him. “A ship? What are you talking about, Lutetia?”

  “A number of men,” she said carefully, “financial giants, somewhat like you, have found comfort in commanding a yacht. You could dock it here in New York, travel all sorts of places in it, have your management meetings aboard it, do all the things you used to do in Carrport.”

  He looked at her with growing suspicion. “You don’t like ships. You don’t like being on the water.”

  “I was never interested in Carrport either, remember? This would be your place. Even better than Carrport, I should think. Master of your own ship, on the high seas.”