What's The Worst That Could Happen?

33

The Watergate is a complex, not one building but six, all of them odd-shaped and dropped at random onto a triangular chunk of land next to Kennedy Center, flanked by the Potomac on the west, Virginia Avenue on the northeast, and New Hampshire Avenue (with the Saudi Arabian embassy a giant gray toolbox across the street) to the southeast. The beret-shaped building at the apex of the triangle is Watergate East, a co-op apartment building divided into two addresses: Watergate East, North and Watergate East, South, which should not be confused with Watergate South, a boomerang-shaped building, also a co-op, behind Watergate East, South. The final co-op is a riverboatlike trapezoid at the angle between Virginia Avenue and the river and, in a burst of creative nomenclature, it is called Watergate West.

We’re not done. Sorry, but we’re not done. There are also two office buildings, famous in the Nixon administration. (The Democratic National Committee is no longer headquartered there.) These are called Watergate 600 and Watergate 2600, and behind the latter is the 235-room Watergate Hotel. Lest we forget, there’s also the Watergate Mall, tucked in behind Watergate East, full of all kinds of shopping opportunities. And finally, there’s an ornamental pool in the middle of the complex (probably called the Watergate Water), surrounded by the kind of landscaping usually associated with model railroad sets; trees made of cotton balls dipped in green ink, that sort of thing.

The complex is open and closed at the same time, the mall absolutely open to pedestrians (any one of whom could be a shopper), the office buildings and hotel having normally minimal security, and the apartment houses primarily guarded by security men and women in blue blazers who sit at counters in the lobbies and buzz in the acceptable arrivers while presumably rejecting the unclean.

It was in Watergate East, North that TUI maintained a two-bedroom two-bathroom fourth-floor apartment, where Max Fairbanks was scheduled to spend Sunday and Monday nights, while appearing before a congressional committee on Monday afternoon. And it was here, in that apartment, where John Dortmunder intended to find Max Fairbanks and relieve him of a certain ring.

Sunday afternoon. Dortmunder and Kelp, invisible in their engineers’ drag, prowled the complex, making notations on their clipboards and saluting the occasional security person by touching their pens to their temples. (The first time he did this, Dortmunder touched the wrong end of his pen to his temple, but after that he got it right.)

Wandering, roving, they found the two-level garage beneath the apartment building and saw that here, too, access to the elevators was monitored by building staff, but very loosely. Then they found the truck ramp that descended beneath the building and on out to the back, giving access for deliveries to the boutiques in the mall. A person could move between the truck ramp and the upper level of the garage through a door with a laughable lock.

They went on through the mall, unseen, and out to the promenades that connected all the buildings. The hotel was down to their right, the Watergate Water dead ahead. The buildings all around them were thoroughly balconied, to take advantage of the river views, and the balcony railings were composed of rows of spaced vertical white concrete stanchions, looking from the distance like very serious teeth, so that from down here the buildings were stacks of sharks’ jawbones, one atop the other, all those teeth sticking straight up.

Kelp looked up at the balconies of Watergate East, North and said, “Hey.”

Dortmunder looked up. “What?”

“She’s gone now.”

“Who?”

“There was a woman up there, leaning over the balcony, gotta be right near where we’re going tonight, she looked like Anne Marie.”

“Couldn’t be,” Dortmunder said. “The hotel’s over there.”

“I know. She just looked like. Well . . . from this distance.”

“And you probably don’t really know her looks yet,” Dortmunder pointed out, and added, “She’s a good sport, isn’t she.”

“I sure hope so,” Kelp said. “Let’s look at that garage some more.”

A little after three, they got back to Dortmunder’s room, and May wasn’t there. “Maybe they’re both in my room,” Kelp said, and phoned, but there was no answer. So they sat down at the round table near the balcony and the view—from here, up close, the teeth looked like a highway divider—and went over the notes they’d taken, the kinds of locks they’d seen, the internal TV monitors they’d noted, the posts and routes of the security personnel. They didn’t have information, of course, about the actual apartment and the lay of the land up there, but that would come later, when they went in.

About fifteen minutes after they’d arrived, May and Anne Marie came in, grinning, and Kelp said, “Hey, there. Have a good time?”

“Pretty good,” Anne Marie said, and May dropped on the round table in front of them a bunch of Polaroid pictures.

Kelp picked up one of the pictures and looked at it. A curving hall with round nearly flush ceiling lights. Gray patterned wallpaper, shiny brown wood doors, a kind of mauve carpet with a big complex medallion on it every ten feet or so. A red-lettered exit sign some distance away around the curve. Kelp said, “What’s this?”

“The hall outside the apartment where you’re going,” May told him, and pointed. “That’s the door to it right there.”

Anne Marie touched a couple of other pictures, saying, “This is an apartment just like the one where you’re going, only it’s two floors down. But it’s the same layout.”

Dortmunder and Kelp went through the pictures. Interiors, exteriors, balcony shots, elevator shots. Kelp said, “What is all this?”

“We thought it might help,” May said.

Anne Marie said, “We weren’t doing anything else, so what the heck.”

Kelp said, “So that was you, up on the balcony.”

“Oh, did you see me?” Anne Marie smiled. “You should have waved.”

Stunned, Dortmunder said, “May? How did you do this?”

“Turns out,” May said, “there’s only certain special real estate agents are permitted to list the apartments here, because it’s all co-ops. So every Sunday afternoon, between noon and three, there’s open house.”

“It’s over now,” Anne Marie said.

“The way it works,” May explained, “you go to the desk downstairs and check in—”

“I used my real name and ID,” Anne Marie said.

“There didn’t seem to be any harm in it,” May said. “Anyway, after a couple minutes a real estate agent comes and gets you and rides up in the elevator with you and tells you what’s available, and asks what you’re interested in.”

“There’s a lot of people at this open house,” Anne Marie said. “I got the idea a bunch of them are people already living there in that building, they just want to snoop around in their neighbors’ apartments.”

“So after you’ve looked at a couple places,” May went on, “you just tell the real estate agent thank you, I can find the elevator on my own, and you leave. And it’s okay because she’s got half a dozen other people she’s showing around.”

“So then you take the stairs,” Anne Marie continued, “and go wherever you want. If we knew how to pick locks, we could have gone right into that apartment you fellas want, and took pictures all over the place.”

Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other, their mouths open. “If I’d known,” Dortmunder said, “I could have gone in there, done what they said, got into the apartment, and just wait for that son of a bitch to show up.”

“That would have been very nice,” Kelp agreed.

“It’s over now,” May said. “It’s after three.”

Anne Marie said, “But they do it every Sunday.”

“Next Sunday,” Dortmunder said, “Fairbanks isn’t gonna be here, and neither are we.” He sighed, then more or less squared his shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “No use crying over spilt blood. We can still get in, no problem.”

“When?” Kelp asked him.

“Early,” Dortmunder said. “If he isn’t there yet, we’ll wait for him. We’ll have an early dinner, the four of us, then you and me’ll go in. Nine o’clock. We’ll go in at nine.”