What's The Worst That Could Happen?

“I’m not even going to ask,” May said, taking it from him. “Thank you, Andy.”

“Sure.”

Dortmunder, who didn’t believe he was the one who had carried the control into the bathroom in the first place, but who saw no point in starting an argument, said, “Can we go now?”

“Sure,” Andy said, and they left.

The corridor was long, not too brightly lit, and empty. Here and there, room service trays with meal remnants waited on the floor. Dortmunder and Andy went down to the end of the corridor, turned right, and here was another identical corridor, with identical carpeting and lighting and room service trays. Midway along, an illuminated green sign on the right, up near the ceiling, said EXIT . “Down there,” Dortmunder said.

Halfway along the corridor, under the green exit sign, were the elevators, on the right, the i

Unmarked and locked. Andy spoke to it, gently, and soon it opened, and they stepped through into a square room filled with rough wooden shelves on which were piled stacks of linen, of toilet paper, of tissue boxes and boxes containing soap and shampoo and body lotion. To their left was an open space in front of two sets of elevator doors.

“One of these,” Dortmunder said, nodding at the elevator doors. “Ought to be, anyway.”

“Maybe the one that’s coming,” Andy said.

Dortmunder listened, and could hear the faint buzzing whirr of an elevator moving upward through its shaft. “Not to this floor, though,” he said.

“Well, maybe,” Andy said. “Let’s wait back here.”

Dortmunder followed him, and they faded back into the rows of supplies, just as the whirring stopped and they heard the elevator doors open. Andy lifted an eyebrow at Dortmunder—see?—and Dortmunder lowered an eyebrow at Andy: yeah, I see.

Looking through mountains of clean towels, they watched a guy in a black-and-white waiter outfit push an empty two-tiered gray metal cart out of the elevator. Its doors closed behind him as he opened the door to the main corridor, pushed the cart through, and disappeared.

Speaking softly, Andy said, “Gone to pick up those trays.”

“So we’ve got a few minutes.”

They left the supplies, went over to the elevators, and Andy pushed the up button. The elevator that had brought the waiter was still there, so its doors immediately opened. Andy held them open while he and Dortmunder studied the simple control panel inside. It was just black buttons with numbers on them, 31 the highest number (they were at the moment on 26) and 17 the lowest number, with two more buttons below 17, marked KITCHEN and LAUNDRY .

“So it must be the other one,” Andy said.

“Or,” Dortmunder said, contemplating the control panel, and thinking about how his luck tended to run, “we didn’t figure it right.”

“What else could it be? So we’ll hang around here till the waiter comes back through, and then we’ll bring up the other one.”

“We’ll see what happens,” Dortmunder agreed.

They released the elevator door and went back to the stacks of towels. “It probably won’t be just a button,” Dortmunder said. “I mean, if we’re right about it. It’ll probably be a key, for the security.”

“Sure. You can go to any other floor in that elevator, but you can’t go to that floor unless you’ve got the key.”

The waiter opened the door from the hall and pushed in the cart, now piled high with trays and dishes and utensils. He maneuvered the cart, which was apparently unwieldy when full, around to the elevator, thumbed open the doors, pushed the cart aboard, pushed a button inside, and disappeared.

Immediately, Andy went out and pushed the up button. There were no lights or indicators to say whether or not the other car was coming; they could only wait and see.

“Of course,” Dortmunder said, following, “they might have the other one shut off at night.”

“Why? They got a lot of stuff to do all night long. And you know? Come to think of it, maybe we should duck back in there again.”

“What for?”

“Well, just in case,” Andy said, “when the elevator gets here, and the door opens, there’s somebody aboard.”

“Right,” Dortmunder said.

So they went back to the towels and waited, and soon the other elevator did arrive, and when its doors opened, it was empty. Andy hurried to it before the doors could shut again, and he and Dortmunder studied the control panel, which was identical to the first one. “Naturally,” Dortmunder said.

“They’ve gotta clean,” Andy insisted. “Somehow, they’ve gotta clean. Rich people clean a lot, they hire whole companies to clean.”

“Let’s take a look on seventeen,” Dortmunder said.

The corridor on seventeen had almost the same colors of walls and doors and carpet as the corridor on twenty-six, but not exactly, so that your first idea was that something had gone wrong with your eyes. On that floor, Dortmunder and Andy checked out all three service clusters, north, west, and south (west being the one that should be above the Fairbanks apartment), and found nothing they hadn’t already seen on twenty-six. Sighing, Andy looked at his watch and said, “And it was go

“It is simple,” Dortmunder said. “We can’t get in.”

“There’s gotta be a way. Do they keep a maid chained up in there? How does she get new soap? How does she get rid of the old sheets?”

They were standing in the public corridor again, near the public elevators in the middle section. The Fairbanks apartment should be directly beneath their feet. Dortmunder looked up and down the corridor and said, “We need another door. A door without a number on it.”

“Sure,” Andy said.

They moved southward down the corridor, and by the time they’d got to the turn they’d found three unmarked locked doors, unlocked them all, and found first a room full of maids’ carts and vacuum cleaners, then a room full of television sets and lamps, and then a bathroom, probably for staff. So they turned and went the other way, and north of the elevators they found a locked and unmarked door that opened to a great tangle of pipes; heat or plumbing or both. And the next door they opened was an elevator, with a maid’s cart in it.

“Well, look at that,” Andy said.

“Somebody coming,” Dortmunder said, having heard the public elevator stop, down the hall. Moving as one, like a very small flock of birds wheeling in the air, they stepped into this new hidden elevator and let the door snick shut behind them.

Now it was dark. They both patted walls until Andy found the light switch, and then it was okay again.

This was an elevator like the service elevators, simple and rectangular and painted industrial gray. Its control panel was even simpler: two buttons, neither of them marked. And just to remove any last vestige of doubt, the maid’s cart contained boxes of stationery marked, in fussy lettering, MF or LF .

There was a keyhole in the control panel, just above the buttons. Andy stooped to study it, then straightened again and said, “No.”

Dortmunder looked at him. “No?”

“This is not your ordinary lock,” Andy said.

“No,” Dortmunder agreed. “It wouldn’t be.”

“Your ordinary lock I shrug at,” Andy explained. “But not this. And I suspect,” he went on, “that it probably has an alarm in there behind it, to go off in some security office somewhere if anybody sticks a bobby pin or anything in that keyhole.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Dortmunder said.

“In fact,” Andy said, “it would be my opinion that it would be safer to go through the floor and shi