What's The Worst That Could Happen? d-9

by Donald E. Westlake

  “To go one’s way with sincerity”: this brings clear-sighted deeds.

  And what do the editors have to say about this, when success is equated with misfortune? Max read, and pondered, and began to see what they meant, and he didn’t like it at all.

  What The Book was saying to him was that he had succeeded in getting somebody to follow him that he didn’t want following him; the line is in the wrong place. There’s danger in being followed this way, all kinds of trouble, and the way to avoid it is to see clearly. To see the follower clearly.

  Who? Detective Klematsky sprang to mind. Should Max try to exert pressure at the NYPD, have Klematsky replaced by somebody less insane? Or would that just make more trouble than before? And what if the follower isn’t Klematsky after all, but is, for instance, the bankruptcy judge, Mainman?

  How could he see the follower clearly if he didn’t know which follower it was? Max had known he felt beleaguered, and now he knew why. He was being trailed somehow, followed by somebody, and he could feel it, sense it. But who?

  This isn’t enough information, Max decided, and tossed the coins again. You could approach The Book two or three times in a row this way, before the information would reduce to gibberish. And this time he got—wait a minute, Tui again, his own trigram, but now at the bottom of the hexagram. And once more the other trigram was Chên, the Arousing, Thunder, this time on the top. The previous hexagram had come back to him, inverted, with again only one moving line, this time the nine in the second position.

  The number of the hexagram was 54, and its name was the Marrying Maiden, and Max felt a chill go up his back, and thought about turning down the air-conditioning.

  The Marrying Maiden. He’d never been led to that hexagram before, but in his reading of The Book he’d come across it several times, and he’d noticed how unpleasant it was, and he’d always been glad when 54 had not come up.

  But now it had. Hexagram 54, what are you?

  The Judgment

  THE MARRYING MAIDEN.

  Undertakings bring misfortune.

  Nothing that would further.

  Good God. It was some undertaking of his, something he had done, that had brought about this mess. What was it? What had he done? The Carrport visit? Was it that damn judge after all?

  With fingers that now trembled a bit, Max turned the page to read the image of this hexagram:

  The Image

  Thunder over the lake:

  The image of THE MARRYING MAIDEN.

  Thus the superior man

  Understands the transitory

  In the light of the eternity of the end.

  The eternity of the end! Wait, wait, wait a minute here. Why bring death into this? Yes, of course, Max had always laughed at death, had always said, and always believed, because of course it was true, that his own life was an afterthought, a joke, a cosmic error, that he was supposed to have been snuffed out long ago, lifeless in the first dew of his youth, but that didn’t mean, that doesn’t mean, that doesn’t mean he wants to die. What is this, all of a sudden?

  What exactly is he being warned about here? Is there actually an assassin following him? Has some enemy—there are enemies, oh, God, there are enemies—hired a killer to stalk him? But we’re all businessmen here, aren’t we, all rational people? Our weapons of choice are attorneys and accountants, not assassins. Still, could it be that someone was driven too close to the edge, has someone’s sanity snapped, is there a murderer coming?

  That window ahead of him, with its black view of the black ocean, how exposed it is. How exposed he is, here in this double halo of light from the lamps flanking this sofa, like two shotgun barrels firing at once.

  What an image! Max ducked his head, blinked at the page of The Book, tried to concentrate, tried to read the editors’ comments, tried to find the loophole.

  So hard to concentrate, so hard to read. And what namby-pamby is this from the editors? It might as well be out of Ann Landers. No, worse, Joyce Brothers. They say, these Hallmark-level editors, they say this terrifying image of the superior man understanding the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end, they say it simply means friends should avoid misunderstandings that will make their relationships turn sour.

  Oh, please. How can they say such a thing? Max read and read, time going by, the pages turning this way and that, and finally he calmed enough to realize that the hexagram of the Marrying Maiden was at its literate level simply about the ways in which a girl adapts herself to her bridegroom’s household, the difficulties and delicacies of being low woman on the totem pole in a traditional Chinese family.

  Still, even though that was the literal meaning of what he’d just read, the whole point of the I Ching was to adapt the concrete imagery of its hexagrams to the specifics of one’s own life. Max Fairbanks was no blushing bride, cowed by her new mother-in-law. So what could this mean? Somehow, he had entered into a relationship the way a bride enters into a relationship with her new husband’s family, fraught with peril. Once she accepts the ring—

  No. It can’t be.

  Max stared at The Book, stared at the pennies, stared at the window, which had become opaque with a rise in humidity outside, a passing mist, so that what he saw was his own startled self, squat on the sofa.

  The burglary at the N-Joy.

  He returned to the Carrport house.

  He knows where I am. Well, of course he does, everybody knows where I am, the newspapers know where I am. And he’s following me, because he wants this ring.

  He can’t have it. Max looked at the ring, glinting and winking on his finger. It felt so good there, so warm, so right. This is my trigram!

  The Watergate apartment. He expects me to be there, next.

  I could still be wrong, he thought, trying to soothe himself. It could still be something else, anything else. There’s still more to the answer, there’s the one moving line that I haven’t consulted yet, the nine in the second place. That could change everything.

  Max turned the page. He bent his head over The Book. He read the two sentences, then read them again, then looked up at himself in the window.

  It’s about him. The Book has done it again, and I can’t argue. First it described me, as I am at this moment. Then it described the situation that was coming closer to me. Then it pointed to the person who had caused that situation. And now it says what that person is doing:

  Nine in the second place means:

  A one-eyed man who is able to see.

  The perseverance of a solitary man furthers.

  He’s coming to get me.

  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 ro
om 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?”