He can’t have it. Max looked at the ring, glinting and winking on his finger. It felt so good there, so warm, so right. This is my trigram!

The Watergate apartment. He expects me to be there, next.

I could still be wrong, he thought, trying to soothe himself. It could still be something else, anything else. There’s still more to the answer, there’s the one moving line that I haven’t consulted yet, the nine in the second place. That could change everything.

Max turned the page. He bent his head over The Book. He read the two sentences, then read them again, then looked up at himself in the window.

It’s about him. The Book has done it again, and I can’t argue. First it described me, as I am at this moment. Then it described the situation that was coming closer to me. Then it pointed to the person who had caused that situation. And now it says what that person is doing:

Nine in the second place means:

A one-eyed man who is able to see.

The perseverance of a solitary man furthers.

He’s coming to get me.

35

“John! Ssshhh! John! Wake up! Pssst! John! Ssshhh!”

“I’m awake, I’m awake,” Dortmunder grumbled, and opened his eyes to look at a color-deprived room with the lights on dim.

Andy was leaning over him, still jostling his shoulder. “You fell asleep, John,” he said.

“What gives you that idea?” Dortmunder sat up to put his feet over the edge of the bed, and looked around. It was a big bed with a big soft spread on it. His shoes were on the tan wall-to-wall carpet. The room looked like it should be in the Carrport house. “What time is it?”

“A quarter to five. He isn’t coming, John.”

“Sure he’s coming,” Dortmunder said. “He’s got to talk to Congress tomorrow. Today. You don’t stand up Congress.”

“He isn’t coming here at quarter to five in the morning, John. You want a cup of coffee?”

“Yes.”

“You want some breakfast?”

“Yes.”

Andy went away at last, and Dortmunder got up from the bed, creaking a lot, and went over into the bathroom, where there was a fresh toothbrush in the medicine chest, along with many other little amenities.

This was some apartment. Two large bedrooms, each with its own full bath, plus a long living room, a pretty good compact kitchen, a smallish dining room, and a half bath off the hall between living room and bedrooms. Also off the living room was one of those balconies with all the concrete teeth, providing a view of Virginia’s low hills over the river. The design throughout was like the inoffensive design at Carrport, except this was much more basic and minimal, without the antiques and little fineries that would fit so nicely into the pocket of a passing wayfarer. There was damn-all here to steal, if it came to that. Unless you felt like roaming the halls with a television set in your arms, which they didn’t at all feel like doing, you could leave this place starved for a sense of accomplishment.

The lights had been on all over the apartment, turned low, when they’d arrived, so they’d left them like that. It made it easy to move around the place, and wouldn’t startle Fairbanks when he arrived. Except the son of a bitch wasn’t arriving.

In the dining room, also dimly lit, Andy had set a nice spread at one end of the table, toast and jam and butter and orange juice and milk and coffee. “Looks good,” Dortmunder admitted, as he sat down.

“There was Cheerios,” Andy said, “but it had little bugs in it.”

“No,” Dortmunder agreed.

“I figured,” Andy said, “one thing you don’t want your food to do is walk.”

Dortmunder filled his mouth with toast and butter and jam and said, “I wonder where the hell Fairbanks is.”

Andy looked at him. “What?”

So Dortmunder chewed for quite a long while, and swallowed coffee with the toast and the other stuff, and said, “Fairbanks.”

“I wonder where the hell he is,” Andy said.

“Me, too,” Dortmunder said.

“He was supposed to be as regular, this guy,” Andy said, “as a person full of bran.”

Dortmunder said, “Things started going wrong when all of a sudden he’s off the radar screen for the weekend.”

“Maybe he knows you’re after him,” Andy said, and grinned to show he was kidding.

Nevertheless, Dortmunder took the idea seriously, but then shook his head. “No way. He can’t know there’s anybody looking for him, not yet. And even if he did, the last time we saw each other, I didn’t look like somebody was gonna go after anybody.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Andy said, and he might have been smiling in an unacceptable way, but before Dortmunder could be sure one way or the other, Andy’d covered his mouth with his coffee cup.

Dortmunder chewed some more jam and butter and toast, and thought about things. He drank coffee. “Maybe there’s something on television,” he said.

Andy looked at him. “You mean a movie? Watch a movie?”

“No. Maybe there’s something about Fairbanks.”

Andy didn’t get it. “Why would there be something about Fairbanks on television?”

“Because,” Dortmunder said, “the guy is rich and famous, and Congress is pretty well known itself, so maybe when the one goes to see the other, there’s something about it on television.”

“Huh,” Andy said. “I never would of thought of that. Could be you could be right.”

“Thank you, Andy,” Dortmunder said, with dignity.

After breakfast—they left the dishes in the dining room for the maid service—they went into the living room, where there was a television set you wouldn’t want to carry around the halls. It was as big as a drive-in movie, a huge screen almost up to the ceiling that made everything look slightly gray and grainy; not out of focus, exactly, but as though it were a copy of a copy of a copy.

At 5:30 in the morning, there were things being broadcast on this giant TV that maybe didn’t look as scary at normal size. Dortmunder and Kelp watched a number of programs with disbelief before they found a news channel—not CNN, some other one—that promised a morning update of “congressional activities,” which conjured images of congresspeople playing volleyball and Ping-Pong, so they settled down to watch the giant people of that station on this giant screen, who just kept on promising the congressional activities update while showing countless commercials of grown-ups eating candy bars intermixed with noncommercials of grown-ups shooting at each other. It was nearly forty minutes before the blond lady with the bionic teeth said, “And now the congressional update,” and then another nine minutes of posturing and flapdoodle from other active congresspeople before paydirt was finally struck:

Appearing before the subcommittee on entertainment tax reform this morning will be media mogul Max Fairbanks, chief executive officer of the giant entertainment and real estate conglomerate called Trans-Global Universal Industries, better known as TUI. Mr. Fairbanks’s appearance is scheduled for eleven o’clock, when he is expected to tell a sympathetic committee that only by the removal of the World War II–era entertainment luxury tax will the American film and television and multimedia industry be able to compete in the global markets of tomorrow, by producing the top-quality artistic and entertainment production which the industry, with a solid financial base, would be able to provide, were it not for this onerous tax.

“Whadaya bet,” Andy said, “this station here is one of the things he owns?”

“Pass,” Dortmunder said.

So what now? Would Fairbanks be here tonight or not? He was supposed to, but on the other hand he was supposed to have been here last night, too. Figure he’s got this 11:00 A . M . thing with these sympathetic congresspeople, where he’s asking them to let him keep more of the money. Afterward, won’t he take some of them to lunch or something? Or maybe they take him to lunch, at taxpayers’ expense, just to help out the poor guy. Then after that he’s not supposed to do anything till tomorrow, when one of his private planes would take him to Chicago.