What's The Worst That Could Happen Part 22

"And the twins," Stan said, "Bim and Bo.

"Them, too," Ralph agreed, and the door opened, and Kelp came in, looking a little dazed. "They're layin around on the floor out there," he said, "like a neutron bomb."

"Uh huh," Dortmunder said.

Kelp continued to hold the door open, and in came a medium range intercontinental ballistic missile with legs. Also arms, about the shape of fire hydrants but longer, and a head, about the shape of a fire hydrant. This creature, in a voice that sounded as though it had started from the center of the earth several centuries ago and just now got here, said, "h.e.l.lo, Dortmunder."

"h.e.l.lo, Tiny," Dortmunder said. "What did you do to Rollo's customers?"

"They'll be all right," Tiny said, coming around the table to take Kelp's place. "Soon as they catch their breath."

"Where did you toss it?" Dortmunder asked.

Tiny, whose full name was Tiny Bulcher and whose strength was as the strength of ten even though his heart in fact was anything but pure, settled himself in Kelp's former chair and laughed and whomped Dortmunder on the shoulder. Having expected it, Dortmunder had already braced himself against the table, so it wasn't too bad. "Dortmunder," Tiny said, "you make me laugh."

"I'm glad," Dortmunder said.

Kelp, expressionless, picked up his gla.s.s and went around to the wrong side of the table, where he couldn't see the door without turning his head.

"You should be glad," Tiny told him. "So you got something, huh?"

"I think so," Dortmunder said.

"Well, Dortmunder," Tiny said, "you know me. I like a sure thing."

"Nothing's sure in this life, Tiny."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Tiny said, and flexed his arms, and drank, so that for the first time you could see that he had a tall gla.s.s tucked away inside that hand. The gla.s.s contained a bright red liquid that might have been cherry soda, but was not. Putting this gla.s.s, now half empty, on the table, Tiny said, "Lay it on us, Dortmunder."

Dortmunder took a deep breath, and paused. The beginning was the difficult part, the story about the G.o.ddam ring. He said, "Does everybody know about the ring? The ring I had?"

"Oh, sure," Stan said, and Ralph said, "I called you, remember?" and Stan said, "I called you, too," and Tiny, who had not called, laughed. This was a laugh, full-bodied and complete, the real thing, a great roaring laugh that made all the cartons around the walls vibrate, so that he laughed to a kind of distant church bell accompaniment. Then he got hold of himself and said, "Dortmunder, I heard about that. I wish I could've seen your face."

"I wish so, too, Tiny," Dortmunder said, and Tiny laughed all over again.

There was nothing to be done about Tiny; you either didn't invite him to the party, or you indulged him. So Dortmunder waited till the big man had calmed himself down - caught his breath, so to speak - and then he said, "I been trying to get that ring back. I tried out on Long Island, and I tried here in the city, and I tried down in Washington, DC. Every time I missed the guy, so I never got the ring, but every time I made a profit."

"I can vouch for that," Kelp said, and glanced over his shoulder at the door.

"But by now," Dortmunder said, "the problem is, all the stuff I lifted from this guy, he knows I'm on his tail."

Kelp said, "John? Do you think so?"

"The fifty thousand we took from the Watergate," Dortmunder said. "I think that's the one that did it."

Tiny said, "Dortmunder? You took fifty G outta the Watergate? That's no third-rate burglary."

Once again, Dortmunder let that reference sail on by, though by now he was coming to recognize its appearances, like Halley's Comet. He said, "I think the guy was suspicious before that, when we cleaned out his place in New York -" "Dortmunder," Tiny said, "you have been busy."

"I have," Dortmunder agreed. "Anyway, after that, the guy changed his MO. Before then, he was very easy to track, he's this rich guy that tells his companies where he's gonna be every second, and Wally - Remember Wally Knurr?"

"The b.u.t.terball," Tiny said, and smiled in fond recollection. "He was amusing, too, that Wally," he said. "Could be fun to play basketball with him."

Not sure he wanted to know exactly what Tiny meant by that, Dortmunder went on, "Well, anyway, Wally and his computer tracked the guy for us, until all of a sudden - the guy's name is Max Fairbanks, he's very rich, he's an utter pain in the a.s.s - he went to the mattresses. n.o.body's supposed to know where he is, n.o.body gets his schedule, he shifted everything around, Wally can't find him no matter what."

"You got him scared, Dortmunder," Tiny said, grinning, and gave him an affectionate punch in the arm that drove Dortmunder into Ralph, to his left.

Regaining his balance, Dortmunder said, "The one place he's still scheduled for that everybody knows about is next week in Vegas."

Ralph said, "That's the only exception?"

"Uh huh."

Ralph tinkled ice cubes. "How come?"

"I figure," Dortmunder said, "it's a trap."

Kelp said, "John, you don't have to be paranoid, you know. The Vegas stuff was set up before he went secret, that's all."

"He'd change it," Dortmunder said. "He'd switch things around, like he did in Washington and like he's doing in Chicago. But, no. In Vegas, he's right on schedule, sitting out there fat and easy and obvious. So it's a trap."

Tiny said, "And you want to walk into it.

"What else am I gonna do?"

Dortmunder asked him. "It's my only shot at the guy, and he knows it, and I know it. If I don't get the ring then, I'll never get it. So I got to go in, saying, okay, it's a trap, how do I get around this trap, and I figure the way how I get around this trap is with the four guys in this room."

"Who," Tiny said, "you want to amble into this trap with you."

Ralph said, "This won't be a Havahart trap, John."

Stan said, "What do I drive?"

"We'll get to that," Dortmunder promised him, and turned to Tiny to say, "We go into the trap, but we know it's a trap, so we already figured a way out of it. And when we come out, I got my ring, and you got one-fifth of the till at the Gaiety Hotel."

Tiny pondered that. "That's one of the Strip places, right? With the big casino?"

"It makes a profit," Dortmunder said. "And so will we," Kelp said, looking over his shoulder.

Tiny contemplated the proposition, then contemplated Dortmunder. "You always come up with the funny ones, Dortmunder," he said. "It's amusing to be around you."

"Thank you, Tiny."

"So go ahead," Tiny said. "Tell me more."

39.

The wood-cabinet digital alarm clock on the bedside table began to bong softly, a gentle baritone, a suggestion rather than a call, an alert but certainly not an alarm. In the bed, Brandon Camberbridge moved, rolled over, stretched, yawned, opened his eyes, and smiled. Another perfect day.

Over the years since he'd first arrived out here, Brandon Camberbridge had tried many different ways to rouse himself at the appropriate moment every day, but it wasn't until his dear wife, Nell, had found this soothing but insistent clock on a shopping expedition to San Francisco that his awakenings had become as perfect as the rest of his world.

At first, long ago, he had tried having one of the hotel operators call him precisely at noon each day, but he hadn't liked it; the prospect of speaking to an employee the very first thing, even before brushing one's teeth, was unpleasant, somehow. Later, he'd tried various alarm clocks of the regular sort, but their beepings and squawkings and snarlings had made it seem as though he were forever coming to consciousness in some barnyard rather than in paradise, so he'd thrown them all out, or given them away to employees who were having trouble getting to work on time; the gentle hint, before the axe. Then he'd tried radio alarms, but no station satisfied; rock music and country music were far too jangling, and religious stations too contentious, while both E-Z Lisnen and cla.s.sical failed to wake him up.

Trust Nell. The perfect wife, in the perfect setting, off she went into the wilds of America to come back with the perfect alarm clock, and again this morning it bonged him gently up from Dreamland.

Responding to its unaggressive urge, up rose Brandon Camberbridge, a fit and tanned forty-seven, and jogged to the bathroom, then from there to the Stairmaster, then from there to the shower, then from there to his dressing room where he fitted himself into slacks (tan), polo shirt (green, with the hotel logo: -), and loafers (beige), and then from there at last out to the breakfast nook, where, along with his breakfast, there awaited his perfect secretary, Sharon Thistle, and the view out from his bungalow to his perfect paradise, the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, here in sunny sunny Las Vegas.

"Good morning," he cried, and seated himself before half a grapefruit, two slices of crispy dry toast, a gla.s.s of V-8 juice, and a lovely pot of coffee.

"Good morning," Sharon said, returning his smile. A pleasantly stout lady, Sharon combined the motherly with the quick-witted in a way that Brandon could only think of as perfect. She had her own cup of coffee before her at the oval table placed in front of the view, but she would have had her real breakfast hours ago, since she still lived the normal hours that Brandon had given up seven years back when he'd taken over this job as manager of the Gaiety. The life of the hotel was centered primarily in the evening hours, spilling both backward to the afternoon and forward to late night, and it seemed to Brandon that the man responsible for it all should be available when activity in his realm was at its height. Thus it was that he had trained himself to retire no later than four every morning, and spring back out of bed promptly at noon. It was a regimen he had come to relish, yet another part of the perfection of his paradise.

The view before him as he ate his breakfast was of his life, and his livelihood. From here, he could see over manicured lawns and plantings and wandering asphalt footpaths to the swimming pool, already filled with children no doubt shrieking with joy. (In this airconditioned bungalow, with the double-paned gla.s.s in every window, one didn't actually hear the shrieking, but one could see all those wide-open mouths, like baby birds in a nest, and guess.) Beyond the pool and some more plantings rose the sixteen-story main building of the hotel, sand-colored and irregularly shaped so as to give every room in the hotel a view of some other part of the hotel, there not being much of anything beyond the hotel that could reasonably have been called a view.

To the left he could just glimpse the tennis courts, and to the right a seg ment of the stands circling the BattleLake. Above shone the dry blue sky of Las Vegas, a pale thin blue like that of underarm stick deodorant. From the trees, had the windows been open and the children in the pool silenced, one could have heard the recorded trills of bird song. Who could ask for anything more? Not Brandon. Smiling, happy, he ate a bit of grapefruit - the boss's grapefruit was always perfectly sectioned, of course - and then said, "Well, what have we today?"

"Nothing much," Sharon told him, leafing through her ever-present steno pad, "except Earl Radburn."

Ah.

Earl Radburn was head of security for all of TUI, which meant he was technically in charge of the security staff here. But their own chief of security, Wylie Branch, was a very able man, which Earl understood, so Earl, except for the occasional drop-in, more or less left Wylie alone to do the job. So Brandon said, "Just touching base, is he?"

"I don't think so," Sharon said, surprisingly. "He wants to meet with you."

"Does he? And what do you suppose that's all about?"

But even as he asked the question, Brandon realized what the answer must be, so he amended his statement, saying, "Oh, of course. The big cheese."

"Yes, I suppose so," Sharon said, with her understanding smile. The rapport between Brandon and Sharon, it sometimes seemed to him, was almost as perfect as that between himself and his dear wife, Nell, who at the moment was away on another of her shopping expeditions into the wilds of America, this time to Dallas.

Brandon picked up his toast and said, "Has he arrived?"

"Flew in from the East this morning," Sharon reported. "We had a cottage open."

"Good," Brandon said, and bit off some toast, and ruminated on the state of his world.

For instance, of course they had a cottage open. In the old days, the six cottages around the Battle-Lake were almost always completely booked, with clients ranging from oil sheiks to rock stars, but since the shift in emphasis all over this city to a family trade, and the shift of those splendid high rollers of yesteryear to other oases of relaxation, mostly outside the United States, the cottages - two and three bedrooms, saunas, whirlpools, satellite TV, private atria, completely equipped kitchen, private staff available on request, all far beyond the budget of the average family - were empty more often than not, and were used these days mostly by TUI executives and other businesspersons having some relationship with TUI. In fact, when the big cheese himself, Max Fairbanks, arrived next Monday, he too would be put in one of the cottages the best one.

But here was Earl Radburn already, on Wednesday, a full five days in advance of the big cheese, which did seem like overdoing it a bit. Swallowing a smooth taste of coffee, Brandon said, "Have you set up an appointment?"

"Three P. M." the irreplaceable Sharon told him, consulting her steno pad. "With Wylie Branch, in cottage number one."

Where the big cheese would stay. "Ah, well," Brandon said. "Into every life a little boring meeting must fall. We've survived worse."

Outside, the silent children shrieked.

Not since the glory days of Versailles, with its completely artificial cross shaped great ca.n.a.l on which gondolas took palace guests for outings, sham battles were fought by real ships, and musical extravaganzas by torchlight were presented on great floating barges, had the world seen the like of the BattleLake at the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino on the Strip at Las Vegas. The recirculated waters of the lake housed thousands of fish imported from all five continents, gliding sinuously together through the plastic lily pads near the concrete sh.o.r.es overhung with plastic ferns and miniature plastic weeping willows. At the hotel end of the lake yawned a great cave opening, closed by barred gates at all times except when the ships came out. These were great sailing ships, men-o-war and frigates, one-half life-size replicas of such famous seagoers as John Paul Jones's Bon Homme Richard, Captain Kidd's Adventure, and Sir Francis Drake's The Golden Hind.

Radio-controlled, these ships wheeled and ran, regardless of wind, their sails flapping every which way as they fired loud and smoky broadside after loud and smoky broadside, sometimes at one another, to the cheers of the crowds in the stands ash.o.r.e. Some ships were even equipped with masts that would suddenly flop over and dangle, having presumably been severed by a musketball from somewhere or other.

These sea battles took place twice a day, at 4:00 P. m. and again half an hour after sunset, the earlier one being devoted mostly to wheeling and racing, while the evening show featured gaudy broadsides and at least two ships catching spectacularly afire.

The sound effects for all the battles came from speakers in the trees s.p.a.ced around the lake, the same speakers that produced birdcalls at other times of the day, so that the effect was truly stereophonic, meaning you couldn't tell exactly where any particular sound came from, but a loud boom occurring at the same instant that a ship out on the lake released a great puff of white smoke led most observers to conclude that the boom and the smoke were somehow connected.

The lake ranged from four to nine feet deep, and tourists were not encouraged to throw coins into it, but many of them did anyway, which meant a problem with the homeless, three of whom had so far drowned in their efforts to harvest some of the cash stippling the Gunite bottom. Still, the Battle-Lake was a major tourist attraction, at least as popular as that other place's volcano, and so the occasional loss of a homeless person (who by definition was not a paying customer, after all) was a not unreasonable price to pay.

What a way to go, here in Paradise, your hands full of coins, your lungs full of recycled water.

When Brandon entered the s.p.a.cious living room of cottage number one at three that afternoon, Earl Radburn in his knife-crease tan clothing stood at the picture window, with its view out over the Battle-Lake, at the moment peaceful, with the tall Moebius shape of the hotel beyond it. Hearing Brandon enter, Earl turned and said, "I don't like that lake."

"Most people speak well of it."

"Most people don't have to protect a fellow with ten billion dollars."

How do you respond to a statement like that? Brandon looked around, and over in the conversation area he saw Wylie Branch sprawled in the angle of the sofas, one arm thrown out over the sofa-back on each side, one cowboybooted foot up on the gla.s.s coffee table. His tan chief of security uniform was its normal neat self, but next to Earl Radburn's air-brushed display even Wylie looked sloppy. And when he sat all casual and easygoing like that, like the rancher he would have been if his daddy hadn't played too many tables too long here in Vegas - at other people's joints, needless to add - when he seemed completely relaxed and amiable like this, it almost always meant he was utterly riled about something. Looked as though Earl had already put Wylie's nose out of joint.

And now the d.a.m.n man was trying the same thing with Brandon, who would not rise to the bait. Nodding at the lake, he said, "Well, Earl, if you're worried about submarines coming up out of there to kidnap Mr. Fairbanks and take him away to Russia or someplace, make your mind easy. The lake has no outlet, and n.o.body with a submarine is currently registered at the hotel."

Ignoring that, Earl came away from the window toward the conversation area, saying, "We got a very specific problem here this time."

"Which us boys," Wylie explained, smiling broadly the while, "ain't up to handling by ourself" Earl, who really could be obtuse, took that statement at face value: "We'll bring in whatever additional manpower we decide we need," he said. "Wylie, of course, your people will be at the center of our defensive structure, since they already know the terrain."

Wylie's smile grew as broad as that cave mouth over there. "Us dogs will surely appreciate that bone, Earl," he said.

Which snagged Earl's attention for just a second or two, Brandon could see the faint loss in the man's momentum, but Earl's capacity for narrow concentration could sail past bigger boulders than Wylie Branch's irritation. Almost immediately back on track, Earl seated himself at catty-corners to Wylie (but out of arm's reach, Brandon noted) and said, "Sit down, Brandon, let me tell you about it."

No point getting annoyed at Earl; he was who he was. So Brandon merely sat down, some distance from both of them, and Earl said, "Mr. Fairbanks played a little joke a while back that he's beginning to regret."

Ah. Although Brandon himself had never seen this side of the big cheese's character, there had always been rumors throughout TUI that Max Fairbanks had an antic element within him that could suddenly erupt in messy or embarra.s.sing ways. He waited eagerly to hear what the man had done this time, and Earl went on, "There's a corporate house out on Long Island, off New York City -"

"I've been there," Brandon a.s.sured him. "On several retreats and seminars."

"Well, Mr. Fairbanks was there," Earl said, "a few weeks ago, and he caught a burglar."

Wylie made a surprised laugh, and said, "Well, good for him."

"If," Earl answered, "he'd left well enough alone. But he didn't. He had to go ahead and steal a ring from the burglar."

Brandon said, "He did - He stole from the burglar?'

With a low chuckle, Wylie said, "That happens, yeah," which gave Brandon an unexpected look into the workings of the Gaiety's security force.

Earl said, "The burglar escaped from the police, small-town cops, and he's been after Mr. Fairbanks ever since, either trying to get his ring back, or revenge, who knows."