Donald Westlake - What's The Worst That Could Happen?

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.”