Counting Dortmunder and Kelp and Anne Marie already established in Las Vegas, this meant a crew of twenty, four times Dortmunder’s maximum. The result was, Dortmunder kept changing the plan this way and that way. His problem was, he didn’t have enough for all these people to do, but he knew they all wanted to be part of the action. And, of course, they would all want part of the profit, as well.
As would Lester Vogel. Out there in Henderson, at General Manufacturing, on this Sunday morning, some of Lester Vogel’s employees were at work on an unusual special order, preparing a consignment and loading a truck, to give A.K.A.’s pal John just exactly what he’d asked for. “I don’t know, man,” the workers told each other, shaking their heads. “I wouldn’t do this.” But then again, they didn’t know how this special order was going to be used.
Sunday in Las Vegas. The wedding chapels and slot machines were busy. The sun was shining. Everything was calm.
51
Max slept on the plane, in his own private bedroom aft, and didn’t awake until the steward knocked, then opened the door to say, “Excuse me, sir, we’ll be landing in ten minutes.”
Max blinked, disoriented. “Landing where?”
“Las Vegas, sir. I’ll have breakfast for you out here.” And he bowed himself out, shutting the door.
Las Vegas. It all came back to him now, and Max sat up and smiled. Las Vegas. Here he would have meetings over the next two days in connection with his purchase of a partial stake in two small southwestern TV cable companies; and meetings concerning land of his along the Mexican border in New Mexico; and meetings concerning a few western politicians who could use his counsel, advice, and money. And here, here, he would rid himself once and for all of that goddamned burglar!
In coming here from Sydney, with a pause for a meal and a business discussion in San Francisco, Max had crossed twelve time zones, and had briefly moved backward in time from Sunday to Saturday, before returning to Sunday again in mid-Pacific. At this point, his body clock hadn’t the foggiest idea what time it was, but he hardly cared. It was Sunday here in Las Vegas, some daylight hour of Sunday—harsh sun glared outside the small windows of his bedroom—and he had arrived ahead of the original schedule, at Earl Radburn’s suggestion, to be sure the bait would be already firmly fixed inside the snare at the Gaiety before the mouse came to sniff the cheese.
Max washed and dressed, and soon went out to the main cabin, where the deferentially smiling steward ushered him to the table set for one; snowy linen, china with his own symbol on it in the dark red known as garnet, one bright red rose in a cut glass vase, a sparkling tumbler of orange juice, the smell of toast, the pale yellow of a thin square of butter on a small white dish, red strawberry jam agleam in a shallow bowl, a folded white napkin with a slender garnet border. Lovely.
As Max settled himself into the comfortable chair, the steward poured his first cup of coffee and murmured, “Your omelette will be along in just a moment, sir.”
“Thank you.”
A second steward entered, with newspapers: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the London Daily Telegraph. They were placed on the table near Max’s right hand, and then that steward withdrew.
Outside the window, the flat vista baked; gray runways and tan dead ground and low airport buildings in no color at all. Smiling upon this view because he was safely insulated from it, Max said to the remaining steward, hovering nearby, “What time is it here?”
“Three-twenty, sir. Your car will come at four. I’ll just go get your omelette now, sir.”
Things are looking up, Max thought, as he drank his orange juice. I can feel it. Las Vegas is where all the bad karma gets worked out of the system, and I’m on top of the world again. This is where it happens. Endgame.
He spread jam on toast, the cool knife in his right hand, and on the third finger of that hand the lucky ring glinted and gleamed.
It wasn’t a car that came for Max forty minutes later, it was a fleet of cars, all of them large, all except his own limo packed with cargos of large men. He couldn’t have had more of a parade if he were the president of the United States, going out to return a library book.
His own limo, when it stopped at the foot of the steps from the TUI plane, held only Earl Radburn and the driver. Earl emerged, to wait at the side of the car, while half a dozen bulky men came up to escort Max down those steps, so that he corrected the previous image: No, not like a president, more like a serial killer on his way to trial.
The president image had been better.
But actually, Max realized, halfway down the steps from the plane, both images were wrong. It was all wrong. He stopped, and two of his guards bumped into him, and then fell all over each other apologizing. Ignoring them, Max crooked a finger at Earl, turned about, shoved through his escort—it was like pushing through a small herd of dairy cows—and went back up and inside the plane, where his breakfast-serving steward leaped up guiltily from the table where he’d been sprawled, finishing Max’s breakfast and reading Max’s newspapers.
Max ignored that, too, though in other circumstances he might not. Turning away from the red-faced stammering steward, now quaking on his feet, Max faced the doorway until Earl entered the plane, saying, “Mr. Fairbanks? You see something wrong out there?”
“I see everything wrong out there, Earl,” Max told him. “We aren’t trying to scare this fellow off, we aren’t trying to make it obviously impossible for him to get anywhere near me, we’re trying to lure . . . him . . . in.”
Earl stiffened, even more than usual: “Mr. Fairbanks, your security—”
“—is primarily my concern. And I will not feel secure until we have our hands on that burglar. And we won’t get our hands on that burglar unless he believes he can at least make a try for me.”
Earl clearly didn’t like this. An enforcer to his toes, he had wanted to do by-the-book security here, without regard for the specifics of the situation. But he did at least recognize who was boss, so, with clear reluctance, he nodded once and said, “Yes, sir. What do you suggest?”
“Three cars,” Max told him. “Two men each in the front and rear cars. You and I and the driver in the middle car. No one else. No cars out in front, none trailing along behind. No snipers on the roofs. No helicopters. No people on street corners with walkie-talkies. Earl, I want to arrive at the Gaiety in as normal a manner as possible, as though I didn’t have a care in the world.”
“Sir,” Earl said. He nodded once more, permitted one small sigh to escape his thin lips, and exited to undo a whole spiderweb of security.
Max still wasn’t exactly making an anonymous entrance. They brought him in his limo around to the rear of the hotel, through the employee parking lot, and over to the high wall of shrubs shielding the hotel grounds from any view of parked unwashed automobiles. Max emerged from the limo at last to find himself in another dairy herd of bulky men in suits, who insisted on flanking him all the way through the gate in the shrubbery and across the paths and landscaping to the cottages, and thence around the secondary cottages, and at last to cottage number one, where they left him and, alone, he went inside.
All the drapes inside cottage one were firmly drawn, and all the lights switched on, as though he’d suddenly gone backward again into night through all those time zones. On their feet, waiting for him, were two men, one of whom he recognized, the other not. The one he recognized was his manager here, Brandon Camberbridge, a solidly reliable if unimaginative cog in the giant machine of TUI. The other, in tan uniform, bearing an expression of unassailable self-confidence, would be head of security here; the local Earl.