What's The Worst That Could Happen?

29

Dortmunder was under the bathroom sink when the phone rang. He was down there, with hammer and screwdrivers and pliers and grout, because of the responsibility of having money all of a sudden. Before this, the space behind the top drawer in the bedroom dresser had always been enough for whatever stash he had to tuck away, but not now.

It was rolling in, all at once, just rolling in. First the twenty-eight grand for the stuff he took out of the house in Carrport, then the thirteen fifty for the Lexus that also came from the same house, and now twenty-four and a half large was his share of the proceeds from the last visit to the N-Joy Broadway Hotel night before last, where it turned out Mrs. Fairbanks’s taste was both exquisite and expensive. Even after spending a little on himself and May, Dortmunder still had over fifty thousand dollars American in his kick. A lot to take care of.

So that’s why he was under the sink, constructing a new bank down there, when the phone rang. It’s Andy, he thought, struggling backward out from under the sink. Ouch! Dammit! That hurt. I know it’s Andy.

Only it wasn’t. “Hey, John,” said a hearty voice to Dortmunder’s surly hello. “Ralph here.”

Ralph. Dortmunder knew a couple of Ralphs; which one was this? “Oh, yeah,” he said. “How you doing?”

“Just fine,” said Ralph, and faintly in the background ice cubes could be heard, clinking against a glass.

Oh. So this was Ralph Winslow, another lockman, the one Andy would have gone to if Wally Whistler had been unavailable. Unless working on a particularly complex safe, Ralph Winslow at all times had a glass of rye and water in his hand, ice cubes clinking.

Was this another visit somewhere? If so, he’d have to turn it down. Max Fairbanks was a full-time occupation. “What’s up?” Dortmunder asked.

“Well, I’m just calling,” Ralph said, “to tell you I’m with you one hundred percent.”

This sentence didn’t seem to have any content. Dortmunder said, “Thanks, Ralph.”

“I heard about the business with the ring,” Ralph explained.

Dortmunder’s eyebrows came together at the middle of his nose. “Oh, you did, did you?”

“And I want you to know,” Ralph said, “it coulda happened to any one of us.”

“That’s right,” Dortmunder said, full of belligerence.

“And whoever it might have happened to,” Ralph went on, “it was a shitty thing the guy did.”

“Right again,” Dortmunder said, softening a bit.

“And I wish ya the best with gettin it back.”

“Thanks, Ralph,” Dortmunder said. “I appreciate that.”

“Any time, if there’s anything I can do,” Ralph said, “help out a little, just let me know.”

“I’ll do that.”

“He can’t treat us that way, you know what I mean?”

Us. Dortmunder almost felt like saluting. “I know what you mean,” he said, “and thanks, Ralph.”

“That’s all,” Ralph said. “I gotta go. See you around.”

“Sure,” Dortmunder said, and went back under the sink, feeling a little better about life, not even much minding the little nicks and bloodlettings that were a part of his carpentry, and five minutes later the phone rang.

“Now, that one’s Andy,” Dortmunder muttered, backing out from under the sink. “Ouch. Why doesn’t he just come over, he’s got so much to say? Come over and help.”

But this one wasn’t Andy either: “John? Fred Lartz here.”

“Oh, yeah, Fred. How you doing?”

Fred Lartz was a driver, or at least he used to be a driver, and the unspoken agreement among his friends was that he still was a driver, though the truth was he’d lost his nerve ever since that unfortunate afternoon, coming back from a cousin’s wedding on Long Island, when he happened to take a wrong turn on the Van Wyck Expressway—there had been alcohol at this wedding—and wound up on taxiway 17 at Kennedy Airport, with an Eastern Airlines flight, just in from Miami, coming fast the other way. After he got out of the hospital he was never quite the same, but he was still Fred Lartz the driver, the guaranteed best getaway specialist in the business. Only these days it was his wife, Thelma, who did the actual driving, while Fred sat beside her to give advice. The two of them still only got one split, so nobody minded. (And though nobody would ever say so, Thelma was better than Fred had ever been.)

Now, Fred said, “I’m doing fine, John. I just wanted to tell you, Thelma and me, we heard about your trouble, and we just want to say, it was a rotten thing to happen, and you don’t want to let it get you down.”

“Oh,” said Dortmunder. “You mean the, uh, the, uh, the ring, uh . . .”

“That’s it,” Fred said. “Thelma and me, we feel for you, John, and if there’s anything either of us can do, any way we can help out, you just give us a call.”

“Well, thanks, Fred.”

“Will you do that?”

“Count on it,” Dortmunder said, and they said their good-byes, and five minutes later the phone rang.

“I think I’m getting too much sympathy,” Dortmunder told his hammer, put it down, backed out from under the sink—ouch—and this time it was Jim O’Hara, a general purpose workman like Gus Brock or Andy Kelp, and he too had heard about the stolen ring and wished to offer his condolences and expressions of solidarity. Dortmunder thanked him, and hung up, and decided not to try going under the sink for a while. Instead, he got himself a beer and sat in the living room by the phone, and waited.

Somebody had been doing a lot of gossip; Gus, maybe, or Wally Whistler. Or both. Or everybody by now.

In the next half hour, he heard from five more guys, all associates in the job, all expressing their best wishes in his troubles. It was like being in the hospital, only without the flowers. He was gracious, within his limitations, and had two more beers, and decided not to work on the bank under the sink at all today. Until tomorrow, the money could stay where it was, in a brown paper supermarket bag, closed with masking tape and shoved up against the wall behind the sofa where Dortmunder sat.

Again, the phone rang. Dortmunder answered, in his new gracious voice, saying, “Hi.”

“Hello, John, it’s Wally.”

Wally? Wally Whistler? Why would Wally Whistler call to offer sympathy, when they’d already been through all this together at the N-Joy? “Hello, there, Wally,” Dortmunder said.

“I just wanted to tell you,” Wally said, sounding as though he had a cold or something, “your friend isn’t at Hilton Head any more.”

Wally. In Dortmunder’s mind, Wally now morphed from Wally Whistler, the lockman, to Wally Knurr, the computer genius who was tracking Max Fairbanks for him. Catching the sense of what this Wally had just said, Dortmunder lunged upward, wide-eyed. “What? Where is he?”

“Don’t know,” this Wally said. “A fax just went out to his people that he’s unavailable from now, Saturday, until Monday morning.”

“And where’s he gonna be Monday morning?”

“Oh, that doesn’t change,” Wally said. “He still has to appear before that committee, so from Monday morning his schedule’s the same. It’s just over the weekend.”

“Thanks, Wally,” Dortmunder said, and hung up, and sat brooding at his empty beer can. This didn’t change anything, since he’d never for a second had it in mind to attack an island off the South Carolina coast—piracy was not part of his job description—but it was still confusing, and maybe worrisome.

Unavailable? Max Fairbanks unavailable? To his own people, Max Fairbanks was never unavailable. So what’s going on? What’s happened?

And where is Max Fairbanks?