What's The Worst That Could Happen?

20

When Dortmunder woke up, he had no idea where the hell he was. Some beige box with the lights on and faint voices talking. He lifted his head, and saw an unfamiliar room, with a TV on, all the lights on, himself sprawled on his back atop a king-size bed with its thick tan bedspread still on it, and May slumped asleep in a chair off to his left, one of her magazines on the floor beside her. On the TV, people covered with blood were being carried to ambulances. Wherever it was, it looked like a real mess. Then, as Dortmunder watched, the people and the ambulances faded away and some candy bars began to dance.

Dortmunder sat up, remembering. The N-Joy Broadway Hotel. Max Fairbanks. The lucky ring. The service elevator. Andy Kelp coming by, later; one in the morning.

There was a clock radio bolted to the table beside the bed; its red numbers said 12:46. Dortmunder moved, discovering several aches, and eventually made it to his feet. He sloped off to the shiny bathroom, where he found his own personal toothbrush and toothpaste, plus the hotel’s soap and towels. When he finally came back out of the bathroom, feeling a little more human and alive, May was stirring in her chair, looking for her magazine, coming awake just as fuzzily as he had. Seeing him, she said, “I fell asleep.”

“Everybody fell asleep.”

They’d checked in late in the afternoon, hung around the room for a while to unpack and think things over, then had a pretty good dinner down in the hotel’s restaurant. Then May had gone back to the room to read while Dortmunder did a preliminary walk-through of the hotel, getting to know the lay of the land, then went back to compare what he’d seen with the floor plan placed on the inside of the room door in case of fire. “You Are Here.” “Use Staircase A.” “Do Not Use Elevator.” Still, they were marked, the elevators, on the floor plan.

The layout was simple, really. The hotel was basically a thick letter U, with the base of the U on Broadway and the arms of the U on the side streets. The space in the middle was occupied, down below, by the theater and by the hotel lobby, with a glass roof at the top of that lobby on the sixteenth floor. The U started with floor seventeen and went on up that way, so all the hotel rooms could have windows.

“I don’t sleep well in chairs,” May said, getting to her feet.

“Well, you didn’t mean to,” Dortmunder said.

“Doesn’t help,” she decided, and went off to the bathroom, while Dortmunder crossed to the room’s only window and drew the heavy drapes open partway. The window wouldn’t open, so he pressed his forehead against the cool glass in order to look as straight down as possible.

They had an inside room, meaning no city vistas but also no traffic noise, and the view below, just visible with your forehead flat against the windowpane, was the glass roof of the lobby. Earlier this evening, that glass dome had been very brightly lit, but now it was dim, as though some sort of fire had been banked down there.

12:53.

Dortmunder crossed to the door to once again study the floor plan in its little frame. He leaned in close, peering, figuring it out.

The floor plan was mostly little rectangles of numbered rooms, with a central corridor. In the middle of each of the three sides was a cluster of service elements: staircase, elevators, ice machine, and unmarked rooms that would be storage for linens and cleaning supplies. Of course, Max Fairbanks’s apartment didn’t show on this simple floor plan, but Dortmunder already knew it was above the theater and below the hotel and that it faced onto Broadway. So the service cluster on the Broadway side must be the one that contained the special elevator. Dortmunder’s room was around on the south side, so when Andy got here they’d—

The door whacked Dortmunder sharply on the nose. He stepped back, eyes watering, and Andy himself came in, saying, “I hope I’m not early.”

“You’re not early,” Dortmunder said, massaging his nose.

Andy peered at him, concerned. “John? You sound like you got a cold.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Maybe the air-conditioning,” Andy suggested. “You know, these buildings, it’s all recycled air, it could be you—”

“It’s nothing!”

May came out of the bathroom, looking more awake. “Hi, Andy,” she said. “Right on time.”

“Maybe a minute early,” Dortmunder said. His nose was out of joint.

May said, “A minute early is right on time.”

“Thank you, May.”

Dortmunder, seeing no future in remaining irritated, let his nose alone and said, “We got this little floor plan here,” and showed Andy the chart on the door. He explained where they were, and where the service elevator to the apartment should be, and Andy said, “Can it be that easy?”

“Probably not,” Dortmunder said.

“Well, let’s go look at it anyway,” Andy said.

May said, “John, where’s the control?”

“The what?”

“For the TV,” she said. “The remote control. I thought I’d watch television while you’re away, but I can’t find the control.”

“Maybe it’s in the bed,” Dortmunder said.

“Maybe it’s under the bed,” Andy said.

They all looked, and didn’t find it. May said, “This is only one room and it isn’t that large a room and it doesn’t have that many things in it. So we have to be able to find the control.”

Andy said, “Are you sure you ever had a control?”

“Yes. That’s how I turned it on in the first place. And, John, you were changing channels one time.”

“So it ought to be in the bed,” Dortmunder said.

“Or under the bed,” Andy said.

They all looked again and still didn’t find it, until Andy went into the bathroom and said, “Here it is,” and came out with the control in his hand. “It was next to the sink,” he said.

“I’m not even going to ask,” May said, taking it from him. “Thank you, Andy.”

“Sure.”

Dortmunder, who didn’t believe he was the one who had carried the control into the bathroom in the first place, but who saw no point in starting an argument, said, “Can we go now?”

“Sure,” Andy said, and they left.

The corridor was long, not too brightly lit, and empty. Here and there, room service trays with meal remnants waited on the floor. Dortmunder and Andy went down to the end of the corridor, turned right, and here was another identical corridor, with identical carpeting and lighting and room service trays. Midway along, an illuminated green sign on the right, up near the ceiling, said EXIT . “Down there,” Dortmunder said.

Halfway along the corridor, under the green exit sign, were the elevators, on the right, the inner side of the building, away from the street. Next to the elevators on their left was the staircase, and next to them on their right was the room containing the ice machine. Opposite the elevators was a blank wall decorated with a mirror and a small table and a chair with wooden arms. Opposite the staircase was an unmarked door.

Unmarked and locked. Andy spoke to it, gently, and soon it opened, and they stepped through into a square room filled with rough wooden shelves on which were piled stacks of linen, of toilet paper, of tissue boxes and boxes containing soap and shampoo and body lotion. To their left was an open space in front of two sets of elevator doors.

“One of these,” Dortmunder said, nodding at the elevator doors. “Ought to be, anyway.”

“Maybe the one that’s coming,” Andy said.

Dortmunder listened, and could hear the faint buzzing whirr of an elevator moving upward through its shaft. “Not to this floor, though,” he said.

“Well, maybe,” Andy said. “Let’s wait back here.”

Dortmunder followed him, and they faded back into the rows of supplies, just as the whirring stopped and they heard the elevator doors open. Andy lifted an eyebrow at Dortmunder—see?—and Dortmunder lowered an eyebrow at Andy: yeah, I see.

Looking through mountains of clean towels, they watched a guy in a black-and-white waiter outfit push an empty two-tiered gray metal cart out of the elevator. Its doors closed behind him as he opened the door to the main corridor, pushed the cart through, and disappeared.

Speaking softly, Andy said, “Gone to pick up those trays.”

“So we’ve got a few minutes.”

They left the supplies, went over to the elevators, and Andy pushed the up button. The elevator that had brought the waiter was still there, so its doors immediately opened. Andy held them open while he and Dortmunder studied the simple control panel inside. It was just black buttons with numbers on them, 31 the highest number (they were at the moment on 26) and 17 the lowest number, with two more buttons below 17, marked KITCHEN and LAUNDRY .

“So it must be the other one,” Andy said.

“Or,” Dortmunder said, contemplating the control panel, and thinking about how his luck tended to run, “we didn’t figure it right.”

“What else could it be? So we’ll hang around here till the waiter comes back through, and then we’ll bring up the other one.”

“We’ll see what happens,” Dortmunder agreed.

They released the elevator door and went back to the stacks of towels. “It probably won’t be just a button,” Dortmunder said. “I mean, if we’re right about it. It’ll probably be a key, for the security.”

“Sure. You can go to any other floor in that elevator, but you can’t go to that floor unless you’ve got the key.”

The waiter opened the door from the hall and pushed in the cart, now piled high with trays and dishes and utensils. He maneuvered the cart, which was apparently unwieldy when full, around to the elevator, thumbed open the doors, pushed the cart aboard, pushed a button inside, and disappeared.

Immediately, Andy went out and pushed the up button. There were no lights or indicators to say whether or not the other car was coming; they could only wait and see.

“Of course,” Dortmunder said, following, “they might have the other one shut off at night.”

“Why? They got a lot of stuff to do all night long. And you know? Come to think of it, maybe we should duck back in there again.”

“What for?”

“Well, just in case,” Andy said, “when the elevator gets here, and the door opens, there’s somebody aboard.”

“Right,” Dortmunder said.

So they went back to the towels and waited, and soon the other elevator did arrive, and when its doors opened, it was empty. Andy hurried to it before the doors could shut again, and he and Dortmunder studied the control panel, which was identical to the first one. “Naturally,” Dortmunder said.

“They’ve gotta clean,” Andy insisted. “Somehow, they’ve gotta clean. Rich people clean a lot, they hire whole companies to clean.”

“Let’s take a look on seventeen,” Dortmunder said.

The corridor on seventeen had almost the same colors of walls and doors and carpet as the corridor on twenty-six, but not exactly, so that your first idea was that something had gone wrong with your eyes. On that floor, Dortmunder and Andy checked out all three service clusters, north, west, and south (west being the one that should be above the Fairbanks apartment), and found nothing they hadn’t already seen on twenty-six. Sighing, Andy looked at his watch and said, “And it was gonna be so simple.”

“It is simple,” Dortmunder said. “We can’t get in.”

“There’s gotta be a way. Do they keep a maid chained up in there? How does she get new soap? How does she get rid of the old sheets?”

They were standing in the public corridor again, near the public elevators in the middle section. The Fairbanks apartment should be directly beneath their feet. Dortmunder looked up and down the corridor and said, “We need another door. A door without a number on it.”

“Sure,” Andy said.

They moved southward down the corridor, and by the time they’d got to the turn they’d found three unmarked locked doors, unlocked them all, and found first a room full of maids’ carts and vacuum cleaners, then a room full of television sets and lamps, and then a bathroom, probably for staff. So they turned and went the other way, and north of the elevators they found a locked and unmarked door that opened to a great tangle of pipes; heat or plumbing or both. And the next door they opened was an elevator, with a maid’s cart in it.

“Well, look at that,” Andy said.

“Somebody coming,” Dortmunder said, having heard the public elevator stop, down the hall. Moving as one, like a very small flock of birds wheeling in the air, they stepped into this new hidden elevator and let the door snick shut behind them.

Now it was dark. They both patted walls until Andy found the light switch, and then it was okay again.

This was an elevator like the service elevators, simple and rectangular and painted industrial gray. Its control panel was even simpler: two buttons, neither of them marked. And just to remove any last vestige of doubt, the maid’s cart contained boxes of stationery marked, in fussy lettering, MF or LF .

There was a keyhole in the control panel, just above the buttons. Andy stooped to study it, then straightened again and said, “No.”

Dortmunder looked at him. “No?”

“This is not your ordinary lock,” Andy said.

“No,” Dortmunder agreed. “It wouldn’t be.”

“Your ordinary lock I shrug at,” Andy explained. “But not this. And I suspect,” he went on, “that it probably has an alarm in there behind it, to go off in some security office somewhere if anybody sticks a bobby pin or anything in that keyhole.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Dortmunder said.

“In fact,” Andy said, “it would be my opinion that it would be safer to go through the floor and shinny down the cable or climb down the rungs, if there’s rungs, than to fool around with this lock here. If we turn the screws there and there and there and there to take the face off the control panel, just to see what’s what and how come, that could send a signal to security.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Dortmunder said.

“So let’s take a look at this floor here.”

They moved the cart as far back as possible, then got down on hands and knees and looked at the floor. It was plywood, four large sheets of plywood, screwed down and painted gray. They rapped the plywood with their knuckles, and the sound was flat, not echoing. They looked at each other, on all fours, like dogs meeting at the neighborhood fire hydrant, and then they got to their feet and Andy said, “Steel underneath.”

“I noticed that,” Dortmunder said.

“No trap door for access to the machinery or anything.”

“That’s right.”

“So the machinery’s probably up above.”

They looked upward, at the plain gray-painted roof of the elevator, and in the rear right quadrant were the clear outlines of a trap door. And in the trap door was a keyhole. “They’re beginning to annoy me,” Dortmunder said.

“Us guys don’t give up,” Andy said.

“That’s true,” Dortmunder said, “though I sometimes wonder why.”

“When the going gets tough,” Andy said, “the tough get an expert. I know when a lock is beyond my simple rustic skills. What we need is a lockman.”

“You want to bring somebody in?”

“Why not? What we pick up in that place down there we split three ways instead of two. You don’t care anyway, you just want your ring.”

“That’s also true,” Dortmunder admitted. “But a little profit would be nice.”

“I’ll see if Wally Whistler’s around,” Andy said, “or Ralph Winslow, they’re both good. I’ll show them the pictures in that magazine, they’ll pay us to come along.”

“I wouldn’t hold out for that,” Dortmunder said, and looked at the damn keyhole in the damn control panel. “Here we are, right here and all,” he said, “and the ring right down there underneath us. I can feel it.”

“We’ll get it,” Andy assured him, and looked at his watch and said, “But not tonight. Tomorrow night.” He turned to unlock the door to the corridor. “Tonight I kinda got an appointment, I wouldn’t want to be late.”

Dortmunder frowned at him. “An appointment? This time of night?”

“Well, New York, you know,” Andy said, and opened the door cautiously, and stuck his head out just a bit to see if the coast was clear, and nodded back at Dortmunder, “the city that never sleeps.”

Dortmunder followed him out to the corridor, and behind him the unmarked door snicked shut. “New York, the city with insomnia,” he said. “Is that a good idea?”

“See you tomorrow,” Andy said.