Free What's The Worst That Could Happen by Donald Westlake Page B

the phone rang a second time, and May appeared in the doorway with a mug of tea. She looked around at everything and saw the black box and said “What’s that?” just as the box suddenly made a loud, high–pitched, horrible noise, like a lot of baby pigeons being tortured to death all at once. May’s eyes widened and the tea sloshed in her mug and she said, “What’s that? ”

    The pigeons died. The box chuckled to itself. Dortmunder said, “It’s a fax. Apparently, this is the only way Wally likes to talk now.”

    “Here it comes,” Andy said.

    Dortmunder and May watched in appalled fascination as the box began slowly to stick its tongue out at them; a wide white tongue, a sheet of shiny curly paper that exuded from the front of the thing, with words on the paper.

    Andy smiled in paternal pleasure at the box. “It’s like a pasta machine, isn’t it?” he said.

    “Yes,” Dortmunder said. It was easier to say yes.

    The white paper, curling back on itself like a papyrus roll, kept oozing from the box. Then it stopped, and the box made a bell bing sound, and Andy reached down to tear the paper loose. Straightening, he went back to the sofa, sat down, took some beer, unrolled the fax — he looked exactly like the herald announcing the arrival in the kingdom of the Duke of Carpathia — and said, “Dear John and Andy and Miss May.” Smiling, he said, “What a polite guy, Wally.”

    “He’s a very nice person,” May said, and sat in her own chair. But, Dortmunder noticed, she didn’t sit back and relax, but stayed on the edge of the chair, holding the mug of tea with both hands.

    Andy looked back at his proclamation, or whatever it was. “I just picked up an internal memorandum of Trans–Global Universal Industries, which is Max Fairbanks’s personal holding company, and his plans have changed. Instead of going to Nairobi, he’s coming to New York —”

    “Good news,” Dortmunder said, with some surprise, as another person might say, Look! A unicorn!

    “He’s going to be arriving tomorrow night —”

    “Wednesday,” May said.

    “Right — because he has an appointment with his Chapter Eleven judge on Thursday. Then he’ll leave for Hilton Head on Friday and go back to the schedule the way it was before.”

    “He’s going to be here, ” Dortmunder said, tinkling the ice in his empty glass. “Staying here. Two nights. Where?”

    “We’re coming to that now,” Andy said, and read, “In New York, Fairbanks stays with his wife Lutetia at the N–Joy Theater on Broadway. I hope this is a help. Sincerely, Wallace Knurr.”

    Dortmunder said, “The what?”

    “N–Joy Theater on Broadway.”

    “He stays at a theater? ”

    “It isn’t Washington, at least, John,” May pointed out. “It’s New York. And you know New York.”

    “Sure, I do,” Dortmunder said. “The guy lives in a theater. Everybody in New York lives in a theater, am I right?”

Chapter 16
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    Although the two pillars upon which TUI had always stood were real estate (slums, then office buildings, then hotels) and communications (newspapers, then magazines, then cable television), the corporation had also from the beginning spread horizontally, like crabgrass, into allied businesses. In the last few years, the real estate and communications sides of the firm had grown more and more useful to one another, combining their specialties to create theme parks, buy a movie studio, and carve tourist centers from the decayed docksides and crumbled downtowns of older cities. And now, most recently and most triumphantly, they had come together to construct, house, and operate a Broadway theater.
    The center of Manhattan Island is the absolute zero point of the triangulation of entertainment and real estate in the capitalist world. Here, millions of tourists a year from all around the planet are catered to in and around buildings constructed on land worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a foot.

    Max Fairbanks