What's the Worst That Could Happen?

by Donald E. Westlake

  Earl clearly didn’t like this. An enforcer to his toes, he had wanted to do by-the-book security here, without regard for the specifics of the situation. But he did at least recognize who was boss, so, with clear reluctance, he nodded once and said, “Yes, sir. What do you suggest?”

  “Three cars,” Max told him. “Two men each in the front and rear cars. You and I and the driver in the middle car. No one else. No cars out in front, none trailing along behind. No snipers on the roofs. No helicopters. No people on street corners with walkie-talkies. Earl, I want to arrive at the Gaiety in as normal a manner as possible, as though I didn’t have a care in the world.”

  “Sir,” Earl said. He nodded once more, permitted one small sigh to escape his thin lips, and exited to undo a whole spiderweb of security.

  Max still wasn’t exactly making an anonymous entrance. They brought him in his limo around to the rear of the hotel, through the employee parking lot, and over to the high wall of shrubs shielding the hotel grounds from any view of parked unwashed automobiles. Max emerged from the limo at last to find himself in another dairy herd of bulky men in suits, who insisted on flanking him all the way through the gate in the shrubbery and across the paths and landscaping to the cottages, and thence around the secondary cottages, and at last to cottage number one, where they left him and, alone, he went inside.

  All the drapes inside cottage one were firmly drawn, and all the lights switched on, as though he’d suddenly gone backward again into night through all those time zones. On their feet, waiting for him, were two men, one of whom he recognized, the other not. The one he recognized was his manager here, Brandon Camberbridge, a solidly reliable if unimaginative cog in the giant machine of TUI. The other, in tan uniform, bearing an expression of unassailable self-confidence, would be head of security here; the local Earl.

  As the original Earl came into the cottage behind Max, shutting the door on the dairy herd, Brandon Camberbridge stepped forward, looking worried, pleased, attentive, nervous, and weepy. Such an excess of emotion seemed unwarranted—even Max wasn’t that concerned about himself—but then all became clear when Camberbridge wailed, “Oh, Mr. Fairbanks, we so hope nothing will happen to you here at our beautiful hotel!”

  “From your lips to God’s ear,” Max said, as he realized that Camberbridge cared more for the hotel than he did about his employer. By God, he thinks it’s his hotel!

  Max smiled on the man, while deciding in that instant to have him transferred at the earliest possible moment to some other territory within the TUI empire. There was, for instance, an older downtown hotel in Boston; that might be good. It isn’t acceptable for employees to think of Max’s properties as their own, it encourages the wrong kind of loyalty. “Good to see you again, Brandon,” Max assured him, and, the man’s fate sealed, pleasantly shook his hand.

  “I want you to meet Wylie Branch,” Camberbridge said, “head of security here at the Gaiety. I sometimes think he worries about the place almost as much as I do.”

  “I don’t think I could,” Wylie Branch said, with a western drawl. “I don’t even think it would be fitting.”

  Branch and Max eyed one another, understood one another in an instant, and both of them smiled as Max shook the rangy man’s hand, saying, “So you’ll be keeping an eye out for me.”

  Branch grinned. “What I’ll mostly do, Mr. Fairbanks,” he said, “is try to keep out of your way.”

  “We’ll get along,” Max assured him, then turned aside to yawn largely in Camberbridge’s face. “Sorry,” he said, “it was a long flight.”

  “Yes, of course,” Camberbridge said. “We should leave you alone to unwind. What time should we send the chef to prepare your dinner?”

  “Nine, I think. A lady chef, I believe?”

  Camberbridge blinked. “Yes, certainly,” he said, with a brave smile.

  “Have her phone me at seven,” Max said, “to discuss the menu.”

  Camberbridge would have said something more, but Max yawned at him again, giving the man a full view of his long-ago tonsillectomy, and at last Camberbridge took the hint and, with the security men Earl and Wylie in tow, departed.

  It wasn’t for sleep that Max had wanted to be alone—he’d just, after all, awakened after a long and peaceful slumber on the plane—it was for The Book. Since he’d made the decision to use himself to snare the bothersome burgler, Max had avoided the I Ching, almost afraid to know what The Book might think of his idea. In the two and a half weeks since that impetuous moment at the now-lost house in Carrport, Max had found doubt creeping into his mind, insecurity, no matter how hard he fought against it, misgivings, a sense that somehow, in taking the damn burglar’s ring, he had not made a coup, but a mistake.

  Not that he had done wrong, or, more accurately, not that he would care if he had done wrong. Many’s the time in Max’s eventful life he had done wrong, serious wrong, and never lost an instant’s repose over it. No. What he felt somehow was that he had made an error, he had exposed himself to something unexpected, he had leaped before he had looked.

  That wasn’t like him. He was known for his impishness, for his surprising moves, but they were always grounded in his awareness of what was safe, safe for him. He didn’t, because he no longer had to, risk all.

  He hadn’t known, in truth, that when he’d boosted that burglar’s ring he was risking anything.

  In any event, the time had come. He was here now, in place, waiting for the burglar. The die was cast, it was too late to change his mind. Now he could consult The Book.

  His luggage had been brought here when his plane had first landed, while he breakfasted, so that his clothing was now neatly stored in closet and dressers, and the briefcase containing The Book awaited him on the pass-through counter between the cottage’s living room and kitchen. Opening the briefcase there, Max took out The Book and the small leather Hermès cuff-link box in which he kept the three pennies.

  These he carried to the conversation area of the living room, where he sat on the sofa, readied hotel pen and hotel pad on the coffee table, and tossed the coins six times onto a copy of the in-hotel magazine, to lessen the clatter they made.

  The lines in a hexagram are built from the bottom up, and this time Max threw 8, 7, 8, 9, 7, and 8. And there was his personal trigram again, Tui, at the top. With what below?

  He consulted The Book, and the trigram below was K’un, the Abysmal, or Water, and the name of the hexagram was Oppression (Exhaustion), and Max’s heart sank as he looked at that name. So The Book really didn’t approve.

  Well, he might as well get on with it, read what The Book had to say. He did understand, somewhere below the level of belief, that much of the interchange between the I Ching and himself was dependent on his own interpretation of often ambiguous statements, so what could he find for The Book to say about his current situation?

  K’UN—OPPRESSION (EXHAUSTION)

  The Judgment

  Oppression. Success. Perseverance.

  The great man brings about good fortune.

  No blame.

  When one has something to say,

  It is not believed.

  Well, that’s not so bad. Is it? Success and perseverance and the great man bringing about good fortune; it certainly sounds as though The Book approves his current scheme. It even says there’s no blame for Max’s little peccadillo that got him into this situation.

  On the other hand, what’s this business about having something to say, and not being believed? What could he want to say to anybody in this matter? And who is it who refuses to believe?

  And why should Max give a damn if anybody believes him or not?

  Well, let’s move on to the Image, and see if it gets any clearer.

  The Image

  There is no water in the lake:

  The image of EXHAUSTION.

  Thus the superior man stakes his life On following his will.

  Yes, of course! Nothing ambiguous there. Max had always staked his life on
following his will. And on that special night, not quite three weeks ago, in Carrport, on Long Island, it had been Max’s will to possess this ring. Yes! The Book approves.

  Is there more? In the second half of the I Ching there are further comments and explanations; Max turned to that part and read:

  Miscellaneous Notes

  OPPRESSION means an encounter.

  So. This time at last we will meet, the burglar and I. And . . .

  Appended Judgments

  OPPRESSION is the test of character.

  OPPRESSION leads to perplexity and thereby to success. Through OPPRESSION one learns to lessen one’s rancor.

  And even that made sense. Rancor was certainly an accurate word—if an odd one—to describe Max’s feelings toward the burglar who had stripped the Carrport house and reduced Lutetia’s New York home to bare bones and made off with fifty thousand dollars from the Watergate apartment, and it was certainly true that once Max had the son of a bitch in his grasp, that once the burglar was well and truly on his way to prison for the rest of his unnatural life, his rancor would lessen. His rancor would disappear, is what it would do. His rancor would be replaced by sunshine and glee. The last sound that damn burglar would hear, as he was hustled off the Gaiety’s property into durance permanent, would be the boom of Max’s laughter, vengeful and free.

  And what else did The Book have to say? Again, as in every time when he’d thrown the coins on this particular question, there was only the one changing line, this time the nine in the fourth position, which read,

  He comes very quietly, oppressed in a golden carriage.

  Humiliation, but the end is reached.

  Well, wait now. Who comes very quietly in a golden carriage? The plane that had brought Max here, he supposed that could probably be thought of as a golden carriage. But had he been oppressed?

  Well, yes, actually he had been, in that he was still oppressed by the thought of the burglar out there, prowling after him. So that’s what it must mean.

  It couldn’t very well be the burglar in a golden carriage, could it? What would a burglar be doing in a golden carriage?

  Again Max went to the further commentaries in the back part of The Book, where he read,

  “He comes very quietly”: his will is directed downward. Though the place is not appropriate, he nevertheless has companions.

  I have companions. I have Earl Radburn and Wylie Branch and all those bulky security men. I have the hotel staff. I have thousands and thousands of employees at my beck and call. The place is not appropriate because a person in my position shouldn’t have to stoop to deal personally with such a gnat as this, that’s all it means.

  And that’s why there’s humiliation in it, the humiliation of my having to deal with this gnat myself. But the end is reached. That’s the point.

  Come on, Mr. Burglar. My companions and I are waiting for you, in our golden carriage. The end is about to be reached. And who do you have, to accompany you?

  52

  A t Nellis Air Force Base, just a few miles northeast of Las Vegas, at some time in the evening hours of Monday, the twenty-second of May, somebody broke into a seldom-used storage building and removed a dozen cartons, all alike. The objects inside these cartons had never been used, and it was unlikely anyone in the Air Force would ever use them, so nobody noticed the theft right away, and in fact it would probably never have been noticed at all if it were not for the inventory the Air Force was required to take on this base every year at the end of September. By then, of course, the stolen objects had long since been used and discarded.

  There were other thefts during the evening hours of that Monday night in May in the general Las Vegas area, all of which were discovered and reported to the authorities long before the end of September, but not soon enough to alter events. The Finest Fancy Linen Service, for example, of North Las Vegas, which provides cloth products for several of the Strip hotels, ranging from room-service napkins to croupiers’ pocketless trousers, was burglarized for eight freshly cleaned tan uniforms with shoulder patches and other markings to identify them as used by the security personnel at the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino. Also, a large hydraulic-compacting garbage truck was liberated from Southern Nevada Disposal Service, a private trash contractor with several Strip hotels as its customers. In addition, five new cars, fresh from the factory, were boosted from a Honda dealer in the city, and equipped with license plates lifted from cars in McCarran Airport’s long-term parking lot.

  One of these recently acquired Hondas was later that evening driven by Fred Lartz (Thelma at the wheel) with Stan Murch and Tiny Bulcher as passengers, both of them wearing dark blue coveralls, down to Henderson, where the Lartzes let them out next to General Manufacturing. There they found awaiting them the truck previously loaded to their specifications by Lester Vogel employees, with a lie freshly painted on both doors that read,

  R & M

  INDUSTRIAL

  &

  MEDICAL

  GAS SUPPLIES

  This misinformation was done in the style of the actual R&M, a legitimate outfit up in Las Vegas with a variety of regular customers ranging from hospitals and dentists to factories like General Manufacturing to Strip hotels. This truck was then driven north, back to Vegas, by Stan, with Tiny beside him.

  The rear of the Gaiety, like all the hotels along the Strip, contains a loading dock where food and drink and other supplies are brought in, and access to this loading dock is controlled by a guard in a guard shack with a red-and-white bar which should always be kept down to block access, but which is almost always kept up instead because there’s never been any reason to keep it down, and it’s an irritation to have to keep raising and lowering the damn bar every time the butcher arrives, the baker arrives, the linen service arrives, the vintner arrives, the oxygen supplier arrives, on and on.

  Yes, the oxygen supplier. The casino part of each Strip hotel is widespread, but it is also low-ceilinged and windowless, so that its air supply, except out at the very edge of the slot machines near the check-in desk and the main entrance, is completely artificial. It is air-conditioned, of course, with temperature and quality controlled from an air room near the rear of the hotel, next to the kitchens and very close to the loading dock. But air-conditioning isn’t all. Each night between midnight and 8:00 A . M ., the controlled air delivered from this room to the vast casino area is sweetened with just a little extra oxygen, to make it a richer air than human beings normally breathe on the planet Earth. This richer air makes people feel more awake, happier, more energized. Because of this, they don’t feel like going to bed, not quite yet. They feel like staying up, playing at the tables just a little longer, trying just a little harder. Who knows? Luck might turn.

  The Las Vegas casinos are vacuum cleaners, designed for only one specific purpose: to suck the money out of the customers’ pockets, purses, savings accounts, insurance policies and cookie jars. To this end, between midnight and eight every morning, just to squeeze a little extra out of the civilians, they sweeten the air.

  At the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, the company that supplies the oxygen in the tall slender green canisters, like World War II torpedos, is R&M, which delivers once a week, usually on Tuesday. The fresh canisters are lined up at one end of the loading dock, from where hotel employees wheel them on dollies back to the air room. The empties are wheeled out and stood at attention near the full ones, to be taken away next time by R&M. When the R&M truck arrives at the guardshack every week, the driver waves a yellow manifest at the guard, which the guard doesn’t bother to read, merely waving back, and the R&M truck drives through, to make its delivery and pick up the empties.

  And so it happened tonight. Monday instead of Tuesday; not a big deal. Stan slowed as he approached the guardshack and waved a yellow sheet of paper that looked a lot like a manifest, unless you were to actually hold it in your hand and read it, when it would turn out to be an advertising flyer from a local SavMor Drug Store. If
the guard behaved as he always did, merely waving them through, fine. If he decided, either because he was a new guy on this job or because Monday after all is not Tuesday, to look at the manifest, then Stan would show him the other thing he had with him, which was a Glöck machine pistol. Stan would flash the truck lights twice while he and the guard discussed the fine points of the Glöck, and then Jim O’Hara, in a crisply dry-cleaned Gaiety security service uniform exactly like the guard’s, would emerge from the nearby parking lot to take over the guard’s duties for the rest of the night, while the guard would spend a no-doubt restful period of time under Tiny’s feet on the passenger side of the truck before being tied up and left in a location where he would most likely be found by kindly people before anything really bad happened.

  Fortunately for the guard’s blood pressure, however, none of that was necessary. The familiar name on the side of the familiarly shaped slat-sided truck, the familiar green canisters strapped upright in the back, the familiar yellow sheet of paper waved in the familiar fashion, were enough; the guard waved them through.

  At one end of the loading dock there was a small office with a window facing out over the concrete platform where goods were unloaded from the trucks. The older heavier security guard at the small desk inside that office was there to receive deliveries, to call the right employees in the hotel to come sign for stuff and pick up stuff, and also generally to discourage pilferage. This guard saw the normal R&M truck make a U-turn and back up against the loading dock. He saw the driver and the driver’s extremely burly assistant get out of the truck, hike themselves up onto the platform, and wave in his direction. He waved back, and phoned the air room: “The oxygen guy’s here.”

  “What? Tonight? It’s Monday!”

  “They’re here,” said the guard in the office. “They’re unloading now.”

  “Shit,” said the guy in the air room. “Nobody tells me anything. Okay, be right out.”