What's The Worst That Could Happen?

35

“John! Ssshhh! John! Wake up! Pssst! John! Ssshhh!”

“I’m awake, I’m awake,” Dortmunder grumbled, and opened his eyes to look at a color-deprived room with the lights on dim.

Andy was leaning over him, still jostling his shoulder. “You fell asleep, John,” he said.

“What gives you that idea?” Dortmunder sat up to put his feet over the edge of the bed, and looked around. It was a big bed with a big soft spread on it. His shoes were on the tan wall-to-wall carpet. The room looked like it should be in the Carrport house. “What time is it?”

“A quarter to five. He isn’t coming, John.”

“Sure he’s coming,” Dortmunder said. “He’s got to talk to Congress tomorrow. Today. You don’t stand up Congress.”

“He isn’t coming here at quarter to five in the morning, John. You want a cup of coffee?”

“Yes.”

“You want some breakfast?”

“Yes.”

Andy went away at last, and Dortmunder got up from the bed, creaking a lot, and went over into the bathroom, where there was a fresh toothbrush in the medicine chest, along with many other little amenities.

This was some apartment. Two large bedrooms, each with its own full bath, plus a long living room, a pretty good compact kitchen, a smallish dining room, and a half bath off the hall between living room and bedrooms. Also off the living room was one of those balconies with all the concrete teeth, providing a view of Virginia’s low hills over the river. The design throughout was like the inoffensive design at Carrport, except this was much more basic and minimal, without the antiques and little fineries that would fit so nicely into the pocket of a passing wayfarer. There was damn-all here to steal, if it came to that. Unless you felt like roaming the halls with a television set in your arms, which they didn’t at all feel like doing, you could leave this place starved for a sense of accomplishment.

The lights had been on all over the apartment, turned low, when they’d arrived, so they’d left them like that. It made it easy to move around the place, and wouldn’t startle Fairbanks when he arrived. Except the son of a bitch wasn’t arriving.

In the dining room, also dimly lit, Andy had set a nice spread at one end of the table, toast and jam and butter and orange juice and milk and coffee. “Looks good,” Dortmunder admitted, as he sat down.

“There was Cheerios,” Andy said, “but it had little bugs in it.”

“No,” Dortmunder agreed.

“I figured,” Andy said, “one thing you don’t want your food to do is walk.”

Dortmunder filled his mouth with toast and butter and jam and said, “I wonder where the hell Fairbanks is.”

Andy looked at him. “What?”

So Dortmunder chewed for quite a long while, and swallowed coffee with the toast and the other stuff, and said, “Fairbanks.”

“I wonder where the hell he is,” Andy said.

“Me, too,” Dortmunder said.

“He was supposed to be as regular, this guy,” Andy said, “as a person full of bran.”

Dortmunder said, “Things started going wrong when all of a sudden he’s off the radar screen for the weekend.”

“Maybe he knows you’re after him,” Andy said, and grinned to show he was kidding.

Nevertheless, Dortmunder took the idea seriously, but then shook his head. “No way. He can’t know there’s anybody looking for him, not yet. And even if he did, the last time we saw each other, I didn’t look like somebody was gonna go after anybody.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Andy said, and he might have been smiling in an unacceptable way, but before Dortmunder could be sure one way or the other, Andy’d covered his mouth with his coffee cup.

Dortmunder chewed some more jam and butter and toast, and thought about things. He drank coffee. “Maybe there’s something on television,” he said.

Andy looked at him. “You mean a movie? Watch a movie?”

“No. Maybe there’s something about Fairbanks.”

Andy didn’t get it. “Why would there be something about Fairbanks on television?”

“Because,” Dortmunder said, “the guy is rich and famous, and Congress is pretty well known itself, so maybe when the one goes to see the other, there’s something about it on television.”

“Huh,” Andy said. “I never would of thought of that. Could be you could be right.”

“Thank you, Andy,” Dortmunder said, with dignity.

After breakfast—they left the dishes in the dining room for the maid service—they went into the living room, where there was a television set you wouldn’t want to carry around the halls. It was as big as a drive-in movie, a huge screen almost up to the ceiling that made everything look slightly gray and grainy; not out of focus, exactly, but as though it were a copy of a copy of a copy.

At 5:30 in the morning, there were things being broadcast on this giant TV that maybe didn’t look as scary at normal size. Dortmunder and Kelp watched a number of programs with disbelief before they found a news channel—not CNN, some other one—that promised a morning update of “congressional activities,” which conjured images of congresspeople playing volleyball and Ping-Pong, so they settled down to watch the giant people of that station on this giant screen, who just kept on promising the congressional activities update while showing countless commercials of grown-ups eating candy bars intermixed with noncommercials of grown-ups shooting at each other. It was nearly forty minutes before the blond lady with the bionic teeth said, “And now the congressional update,” and then another nine minutes of posturing and flapdoodle from other active congresspeople before paydirt was finally struck:

Appearing before the subcommittee on entertainment tax reform this morning will be media mogul Max Fairbanks, chief executive officer of the giant entertainment and real estate conglomerate called Trans-Global Universal Industries, better known as TUI. Mr. Fairbanks’s appearance is scheduled for eleven o’clock, when he is expected to tell a sympathetic committee that only by the removal of the World War II–era entertainment luxury tax will the American film and television and multimedia industry be able to compete in the global markets of tomorrow, by producing the top-quality artistic and entertainment production which the industry, with a solid financial base, would be able to provide, were it not for this onerous tax.

“Whadaya bet,” Andy said, “this station here is one of the things he owns?”

“Pass,” Dortmunder said.

So what now? Would Fairbanks be here tonight or not? He was supposed to, but on the other hand he was supposed to have been here last night, too. Figure he’s got this 11:00 A . M . thing with these sympathetic congresspeople, where he’s asking them to let him keep more of the money. Afterward, won’t he take some of them to lunch or something? Or maybe they take him to lunch, at taxpayers’ expense, just to help out the poor guy. Then after that he’s not supposed to do anything till tomorrow, when one of his private planes would take him to Chicago.

So won’t he come here in between, change his clothes, have a nap, kick back, chill out; whatever chief executive officers do?

On the other hand, will he maybe show up here with a mob, a whole lot of people that two unarmed visitors from New York might not be able to deal with too well? That’s another possibility.

“What it comes down to is,” Dortmunder said, “I don’t wanna lose this guy again.”

“Agreed,” Andy said.

“Washington’s bad enough. I don’t wanna have to do Chicago.”

“Absolutely,” Andy said.

“So we gotta lie in wait for him, but so we get him and not the other way around.”

“Exactly,” Andy said.

Which meant, after all, they would have to do the breakfast dishes. They needed to restore the place to exactly the condition it had been in before they got here, which meant not even taking any of the few minor valuables they’d noticed along the way, because the plan now was, they’d leave here but keep an eye on the place. Sooner or later, unless Fairbanks had changed his plans radically, he would show up, and they could return, and then they’d see what was what.

Housecleaning took about twenty minutes, and at the end of it they took a cleaning rag from under the kitchen sink, carried it out to the balcony, and draped it over one of the teeth there. That way, they’d be able to tell from down below, down in that landscaped area there, which ones were Fairbanks’s windows. They also left the glass balcony door slightly open, which would screw up the air-conditioning, just enough to be noticeable. That way, when Fairbanks finally arrived here, they would be able to see from down below when the apartment lighting changed, and when the balcony door was shut. The theory behind it all was, Fairbanks would assume the open door and the cleaning rag were the results of a sloppy maid service.

It was just after seven o’clock when they finished tidying up and leaving their signals to themselves, and they were about to depart when the phone rang. They didn’t want to open the door with a phone ringing in the apartment, just in case there was somebody going by out there whose attention might be attracted, so they stood impatiently by the front door, waiting, and the phone rang a second time, and then after a while it rang a third time, and then a male voice with no inflection, one of those imitation voices used by computers, said a phone number and then said, “You may leave your message now.”

Which the caller did. This was a human voice, male, the sound of a young staff aide, eager, trying to be smoothly efficient: “Mr. Fairbanks, this is Saunders, from Liaison. I’m supposed to come over there this morning to pick up the pack packs, but I’m told you’re in residence at the moment because of this morning’s hearing. I didn’t want to disturb you, so, uh . . .”

Dead air, while Saunders tried to figure out what to do, then did: “I’ll come over around eleven, then, when you’ll be on the Hill. So I’ll pick up the pack packs then, that’ll be early enough.” Click.

Andy said, “Pack packs?”

Dortmunder said, “Maybe it’s something to do with Federal Express.”

Andy raised a brow. “You’ll have to explain that,” he said.

“When I first got the ring,” Dortmunder told him, “it came from Federal Express, and it was in what they called a pack, only they spelled it different, like P-A-K. So maybe this is a Pak pack for Federal Express.”

“A Pak pack of what?”

“How should I know?”

“Maybe,” Andy said, “we should look for it.”

Dortmunder considered that. “We do have time,” he said.

The object they were looking for didn’t take long to find. At the back end of the living room, away from the balcony and the view, was a small office area, being a nice old-fashioned mahogany desk with an elaborate desk set on it featuring two green-globed lights. There were also a swivel chair, nicely padded, in black leather, and a square metal wastebasket, painted gold. In the bottom right drawer of this desk, which wasn’t even locked, they found a big fat manila envelope on which was handwritten in thick red ink

PAC

“Here it is,” Andy said.

Dortmunder came over to look. “And another way to spell pack,” he said. “These people must have all flunked English.”

“No, no, John,” Andy said. “Don’t you know what a Pac is?”

“How do you spell it?”

“This way,” Andy said, gesturing to the manila envelope. “It’s a legal bribe.”

“It’s a what?”

“It’s how Congress figured it out they could get bribed without anybody getting in trouble,” Andy explained. “Like, for instance, say you wanted to give a congressman a bunch of money—”

“I don’t.”

“Okay, but for instance. As a hypothetical. Say you got, oh, I don’t know, some lumber, and you want to cut it down and you’re not supposed to cut it down, but if you give this congressman some money they’ll cut you a loophole. But if you just give him the money, flat out, boom, here’s the money, chances are, he might go to jail and you could be embarrassed. So they invented these things, these Pacs, the letters stand for something . . .”

“That’s more than you can say for the congressmen.”

“Wait a minute,” Andy said. “I’m trying to remember.”

“Well, the P,” Dortmunder said, “probably means ‘political.’”

“Right! Political Action Committee, that’s what it is. You give the money to this committee, and they give it to the congressman, and then it’s legal.”

“They launder it,” Dortmunder suggested.

“Right. I think they learned it from some people in Colombia.”

“So this is the Pac pack the guy on the phone was talking about.”

“Must be.”

“Andy,” Dortmunder said, “does this mean that envelope’s full of money?”

They both looked at the envelope. They looked at each other. They looked at the envelope. Reverently, Andy took it out of the drawer and put it on top of the desk. Dortmunder closed the drawer. Andy turned the envelope over, squeezed the metal tabs together so he could lift the flap, lifted the flap, and then lifted the envelope slightly so he could look inside. “It’s full of white envelopes,” he said.

“And what are they full of?”

Andy looked at Dortmunder. His eyes were shining. “John,” he breathed, “nobody ever gave me a bribe before.”

“The envelopes, please,” Dortmunder said.

Andy shook the white envelopes out onto the desk. They were all pudgy, they were stuffed really full. They all had acronyms written on them, in the same thick red ink. There was PACAR and IMPAC and BACPAC and seven more. Ten envelopes.

“I think,” Dortmunder said, “we have to open one.”

So Andy did. There was a very nice leather-handled letter opener included in the desk set; Andy took it and slit open IMPAC and out came the green paper, and they were fifty hundred-dollar bills, crisp and new.

“Five thousand dollars,” Andy said.

Dortmunder prodded another of the envelopes, like a cook checking the bread dough. “Five grand in each? Try another one.”

PACAR : Five thousand dollars.

Andy said, “John, what we have here is fifty thousand dollars. In cash.”

“God damn it,” Dortmunder said. “What a shame.”

Andy frowned at him. “A shame? What’s a shame?”

“I just stopped to think about it,” Dortmunder said. “Saunders is gonna come pick this stuff up at eleven o’clock. We’ve gotta leave it here.”

“John, this is fifty big ones!”

“If Saunders comes here and it’s gone,” Dortmunder pointed out, “Saunders calls the cops. Or at the very least he calls Fairbanks. And we can forget it when it comes to getting in here when Fairbanks comes home.”

“John,” Andy said, “are we going to let fifty thousand dollars get away from us because of one ring?”

“Yes,” Dortmunder said.

“No,” Andy said.

Dortmunder said, “Andy, don’t give me trouble on—”

“Just a minute here,” Andy said. “Let me think.”

“Sure. Think.”

“We already opened these two envelopes, you know.”

“There’s more envelopes, and right there’s the red pen they use. We can put it all back together same as it was.”

“That would be a shame and a pity and a total waste,” Andy protested. “Go away, John, amuse yourself while I think.”

“I don’t want to screw up getting the ring.”

“I know, John, I never seen such a one-track mind in my life. Lemme think, willya?”

“I’m just saying,” Dortmunder said, and at last walked away to the other end of the living room, by the slightly open door to the balcony. He stood there and looked out at the cleaning rag draped on a tooth, and beyond it at the early morning view. In the view at the moment were a number of people running, in the green landscape just this side of the river. These were running people who weren’t in any hurry to get anywhere and who in fact weren’t going anywhere in particular, and the kind of running they were doing was called jogging. So far as Dortmunder was concerned, that was the biggest misuse of time and energy anybody ever thought of. Think of all the better ways you could spend your time; sitting, to begin with.

“Okay, John.”

Dortmunder looked over at Andy, who was now seated at the desk with something else on the desktop in front of him. “Okay?” he said. “What’s okay?”

“Come take a look.”

So Dortmunder went over, and Andy had taken a sheet of TUI letterhead stationery out of the desk, and using the same red pen he’d written,

Dortmunder said, “Take this note with you?”

“Well, he can’t leave it here.”

“Isn’t he gonna wonder why he’s supposed to take it with him?”

“Wonder?” Andy seemed bewildered by the idea. He said, “Why would a guy like Saunders wonder? He’s a young white-collar employee, he’s not paid to wonder, he’s paid to fetch. Now, if I told him, burn this note, that’s going too far. But I say, ‘Take this note with you,’ that just means, carry a piece of paper. John, that’s what Saunders does.”

Dortmunder studied the note. He frowned at the big manila envelope, now again containing its ten fat smaller envelopes. He said, “It might work.”

“Of course it’ll work, John,” Andy said. “What’s the worst that can happen? We hang around outside until after the cops come and go. Besides, we gotta take the chance, you know that. We cannot leave this money here.”

Dortmunder thought about it, and at last he shrugged and said, “You’re right. Every once in a while, you gotta take a chance.”

“Now you’re talking,” Andy said, and when he stood up the manila envelope was under his arm.

The women were both in May’s room, so that’s where Dortmunder and Andy went. When they walked in, May and Anne Marie were up and dressed, watching the Today show on television. The faces they turned toward Dortmunder and Andy were both expectant and relieved. But then May looked at Dortmunder’s hand and said, “You didn’t get it.”

“He never showed up,” Dortmunder said.

Andy said, “But we got a plan.” Dropping the manila envelope on the bed, he said, “We also made out a little. There’s fifty big in there.”

Anne Marie said, “Does that mean what I think it means?”

“It was Pac money,” Andy told her.

Anne Marie apparently knew what that meant, because she went off into peals of laughter. “At last,” she said, when she could say anything again, “the trickle-down theory begins to work.”

May said, “John? Tell us everything.”

So Dortmunder did, with interpolations from Andy and questions from Anne Marie, and when he was finished he said, “So we stay over one more night, and tonight I finally meet up with Max Fairbanks and get my ring back. But just to be on the safe side, I think I ought to call Wally.”

Andy said, “Who, Wally Knurr?” To Anne Marie he explained. “He’s our computer guy, with the access to everything.” To Dortmunder, he said, “How come?”

“Fairbanks was supposed to be in that apartment last night and he wasn’t,” Dortmunder said. “I guess he’ll do his talking to Congress this morning, but what else is he doing I’m not sure any more I know. And he did that news blackout over the weekend. So what’s he up to? What’s going on? I feel like I could use an update from Wally.” He looked over at the bedside clock and said, “Is seven minutes after eight too early to call him?”

“They’re early risers up there in Dudson Center,” Andy assured him.

So Dortmunder made the call, and first he had to have a pleasant civilian conversation with Myrtle Street, Wally’s lady friend, which he did reasonably well, and then Wally came on and said, “John! I’ve been trying to call you!” He sounded out of breath, or even more out of breath than usual.

“Hell,” Dortmunder decided. “I knew it. What’s gone wrong, Wally?”

“I don’t know,” Wally said, “but something sure has. Fairbanks has sent the word out that there will be no information given out as to his whereabouts from now on. If people want to reach him, they should make contact through his corporate headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, a place he’s never been to, not even when they laid the cornerstone for the new building.”

“Well, goddamit,” Dortmunder said. “Why’s he doing all that?”

“I don’t know, John,” Wally said. “I’m sorry. I do know he still plans to have his two business meetings in Chicago, but I can’t find out where he’ll be staying or when he’ll get there or when he’ll leave. Then he’ll definitely be somewhere in Australia on the days he’s supposed to be there—”

“Which doesn’t help a lot.”

“Oh, I know, John. And the next time he’s willing to have his whereabouts known is next Monday, a week from now, when he gets to Las Vegas.”

“Vegas doesn’t change?”

“I guess because everything was all set there already, so it’s too late to keep it secret. But after Las Vegas, there isn’t a word on what he’s gonna do or where he’s gonna be. Not a word.”

“But Vegas is still what it was.”

“So far, anyway,” Wally said. “He’ll be at the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino two nights next week, Monday and Tuesday, after he gets back from Australia.”

“Unless he changes his mind again.”

“I’m sorry, John,” Wally said. “I know I said I could track him for you. But this is very unusual for Max Fairbanks. Maybe the IRS is after him or something.”

“Somebody’s after him, don’t worry about that,” Dortmunder said. “Thanks, Wally. If there’s any change—”

“Oh, I’ll let you know, you or Andy, right away. Or probably Andy, he’s got an answering machine.”

“Right.”

“Tell him, there’s about four messages from me on his machine.”

“About this conversation we’re just having right here.”

“Oh, sure.”

“I’ll tell him,” Dortmunder said, and immediately forgot. “So long, Wally.”

When he hung up, everybody wanted to know what the other, more interesting, half of the conversation had been, so Dortmunder repeated Wally’s bad news, and Andy said, “So we don’t get the ring. I’m sorry, John. Not this trip.”

“Damn it to hell,” Dortmunder said. He was really angry. “We come all this way, and what do we get? A lousy fifty thousand dollars!”