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  And there they all were, seen from behind, from the side, from above. Never angled enough to show a face, but always making it clear which character was speaking, and always making sure the characters’ personalities came through.

  Dortmunder watched himself and Kelp and Tiny and the kid and Rodney the bartender discuss the latest ball scores, and he could almost believe he was watching something that had happened. That was them. The lighting was a little distorted, the shadows a little angular, so that everybody and everything seemed more menacing, tougher, more interesting, but nevertheless still them. Look at that.

  And here came Ray and Darlene, he looking like a finger-snapping crook in a Broadway musical, she like the singer in the honky-tonk, and not at all bad to look at. There were greetings, Kelp’s little remarks to Darlene no longer seemed so stupid, and then Ray announced he had news, and asked Rodney for the use of the back room, and it was over.

  It had only been about three minutes long, but they all reacted as though they’d been asleep for hours, or maybe it was more like the sleep that goes on for years after you’ve eaten the poisoned apple. In any case, they all roused themselves from lassitude, blinked at one another, and the kid spoke first: “That was neat!”

  Babe stood, smiling around at them all, and said, “Doug, I think you have a winner here. We just want to be sure to keep that tone.”

  “Oh, I know we can,” Doug said. He was grinning from ear to ear, “Can’t we, Roy?”

  “Absolutely,” Ombelen said. “This is very gratifying, fellows. I’ll see you all here at ten a.m. on Friday, day after tomorrow.”

  “See you then,” the gang said.

  As they all trooped down the stairs, Tiny spoke, only loudly enough for his own group to hear: “A meet, at Dortmunder’s.”

  32

  DOUG WATCHED them go down the stairs, listened to the fire door slam, then closed this upper door and turned to the group, to Babe and Marcy and Ombelen and Muller, now on their feet in the Combined Tool living room, and beamed as he said, “That went very well.”

  Babe said, “You notice, the first thing John asked about was the lock on this door here.”

  “Well, it is pretty elaborate, Babe. Anybody’s likely to notice it.”

  Muller said, “They were all very interested in this place. They wanted to know, what are the secrets here?”

  “Well,” Babe said, “what we told them is almost completely true. Secrets that don’t concern any of us here.” Nodding at Muller’s wheelie suitcase, he said, “Except for a little cash going through, every once in a while.”

  Muller said, “They might very well be interested in that cash, if they knew it existed.”

  “Well, it’s leaving with you today,” Babe said. “And the next time there’s our cash in here is when the Brits wire the gang their payments and we draw it out of the New York bank.” He grinned and spread his hands. “If they want to steal their own pay, they’re welcome to it.”

  “But something like that,” Marcy said.

  They all looked at her. Babe said, “Something like what?”

  “What if,” Marcy said, “they were going along with all this only because they wanted to steal something else?”

  Babe frowned. “Like what?”

  “I don’t mean for real,” Marcy said. “I mean, in our story line. Could we get that in, get an audience to understand that the gang is agreeing to be filmed only because they really intend to steal something else entirely?”

  Babe said, “I keep asking, steal what from us? We don’t have anything useful to them.”

  “I don’t know,” Marcy said. “A camera truck? Those are very valuable.”

  Scoffing, Babe said, “What are they gonna do with a camera truck? Peddle it under the table to NBC?”

  “I don’t know,” Marcy said, “but it would be a nice complication if they meant to steal from us as well as from the storage place. Okay if I think about it a while?”

  “Think all you like,” Babe told her.

  Doug said, “But, Marcy, I’ll tell you what you do have to think about. Factions.”

  Marcy looked abruptly guilty, as though suddenly realizing she hadn’t prepared her homework. “I know,” she said. “I’ll work on that, Doug, I really will.”

  Muller said, “Excuse me, I am only an outsider here, but if you do not object to the question, factions? What factions?”

  Doug gestured at the television screen where they’d recently watched the snippet of their still-unnamed show. “In that footage,” he said, “they’re all agreeing with one another all the time. There’s no factions, there’s no arguments, there’s no choosing sides. You can’t have drama that way.”

  “I see,” Muller said, though he sounded doubtful.

  Marcy said, “Doug’s right. They have to struggle toward a consensus, it can’t all be too easy. The only problem is, it seems as though they do all get along. It’s up to me to find a way to get them to disagree about something.”

  “You have to,” Doug told her. “We want them fighting with each other. We want some yelling, people waving their arms around. They’re all too happy with one another. We need some conflict.”

  “If possible,” Marcy said.

  33

  YOU PEOPLE ARE CRAZY, ” Dortmunder snarled. “You want to do this thing?”

  They were seated with beers in Dortmunder’s living room, Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny and the kid, and to Dortmunder’s appalled disbelief it turned out the rest of them all wanted to go on with the show.

  “It’ll be fun,” the kid said, not for the first time, but what would you expect from the kid?

  What you would not expect is for Kelp to say, “I thought we looked pretty good on that thing. I want Anne Marie to see it,” referring to his live-in friend.

  And what you would really not expect is for Tiny to say, “Whadaya in such a hurry for, Dortmunder? We’re in no hurry to go anywhere.”

  “The whole idea,” Dortmunder said, “is go along with these people until we know what our target is, then disappear and wait, then clean them out. That’s the whole idea. That’s what we’re doin all this for. We’re not here to be in a movie.”

  “TV show,” Kelp corrected.

  “Reality show,” the kid amended.

  Tiny said, “Dortmunder, you know as well as I know what was in that bag by the door in there that’s goin out by plane today. Now we know what that place is used for, and we were almost right, it’s for their money courier, but that doesn’t mean there’s money in there all the time, only when they’re moving it. And today they’re moving it, so now there’s nothing in there.”

  “Which was the reason to wait,” Dortmunder said. “Disappear, let them start to forget us, then clean them out.”

  “John,” Kelp said, “the next time there’s gonna be money in that place it’s gonna be our money, from England. You wanna go steal your own money?”

  “Money from wages,” Dortmunder said, “is not the same as the same money from theft. Money from theft is purer. There’s no indentured servitude on it, no knuckling under to whatever anybody else wants, no obedience. It isn’t yours because you swapped it for your own time and work, it’s yours because you took it.”

  “Basically, Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “I agree with you. But there’s an extra little spin on it this time.”

  “Because it’s fun,” said the one-note kid.

  “Also,” Tiny said, “I agree with Kelp. I want Josie to see this thing. I want to tell you, Dortmunder, I’m impressed by every one of us, and that’s also you. I looked at those guys in that back room, I believed them.”

  Dortmunder sat back, appalled. “I don’t know what’s happening here,” he said. “You people have completely forgot who and what you are. You want to go down to that place, day after day, and pretend to be, pretend to be I don’t even know what.”

  “Ourselves,” Kelp said.

  “You don’t have to pretend to be yourself,” Dortmunder said. �
�You are yourself.”

  “But this is fun,” the damn kid said. “John, listen, just relax into it. We’ll do this for a while, and then we’ll get paid something, and then it’ll be over or it’ll stop being fun or whatever, and then we’ll go in and clean them out.”

  “We’ll keep an eye on Varick Street,” Kelp said, “until some other time Muller’s staying there, so we’ll know there’s money there, and we’ll know it isn’t ours, and it’ll be just as pure as anything you want.”

  Rising, the kid said, “I’ll get us another beer while you guys talk. There’s more beer in the refrigerator, isn’t there, John?”

  He took Dortmunder’s sigh for a yes.

  Early that evening, he was alone again in the apartment when May came home with her daily donation from Safeway. She reached the living room doorway, looked in, and said, “John? What’s wrong?”

  “You won’t believe this, May.”

  She said, “Is there time for me to put the groceries down and get a beer?”

  There was. When she was back in the living room, in her chair, Dortmunder said, “You think you know people,” and then told her about his day. When he was finished, he said, “So? Whadaya think?”

  “What do I think?” She shrugged. “John, honestly, it doesn’t sound that bad.” Smiling, she said, “I’d like to see that show myself. Tell you the truth, it kind of sounds like fun.”

  Dortmunder sighed into his beer.

  34

  STAN DIDN’T LIKE having nothing to do, and so, when he had nothing to do, he did something. Wednesday afternoon, while the others were off taping their debuts with the reality people, Stan subwayed from Canarsie to Manhattan, walked over to Varick Street, took up a position across the way from the Get Real building and up at the next corner, leaned against a light post as inconspicuous as a Russian spy in a fifties movie, folded his arms, and waited.

  After a while he saw his own group come out of that building and walk away toward Tiny’s limo around the corner, discussing things. He didn’t join them or call to them or anything because he was working his own gag now, single-o.

  A while later another limo arrived and the Get Real people came out of the building, including the German guy he’d seen through the Combined Tool back window, who was now lugging a garment bag and a wheelie suitcase. The limo driver stored his stuff in the trunk while the tunnel traffic struggled around them, and then that group was away, too.

  Once they were gone, Stan crossed the street, walked down to that building, and entered it by using the dummy key he’d made the last time he was here. Inside, he switched on the overhead fluorescent lights and looked around.

  Vehicles, vehicles everywhere. Big ones, little ones, new ones, old ones, valuable ones, junk. Whistling behind his teeth, Stan wandered among all these wheels and used his cell phone to take pictures of the ones he thought might be of interest. He stopped after he’d chosen six, not wanting to be greedy, then picked for tonight’s transportation a relatively modest black Dodge Caliber, mostly because it was pretty close to the garage door and wouldn’t require shifting too many other vehicles around to get it out of here.

  The Caliber had apparently been used one way or another in movie- or television-making, because the passenger floor in front was littered with several random screenplay pages and the entire back area was a foot deep in plastic coffee cups and fast food trays. The glove box contained four different lipsticks, a package of condoms, and a cell phone; people are always leaving their cell phones.

  Well, all of this would be somebody else’s problem, farther down the line. Stan merely drove the Caliber out to Varick Street, then left it athwart the sidewalk as he ducked back in to close the garage door.

  Satisfied with the day’s work, he steered the Caliber down through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and thence by many secondary streets across Brooklyn to Canarsie, pausing along the way to pick up from a closed movie rental place a DVD of Pit Stop (1969, Brian Donlevy, with a cameo from George Barris, famous custom car builder) to watch that night with his Mom.

  Leaving the Caliber at the curb on a side street a couple blocks from home, he returned to it Thursday morning to find it was still there, so he drove it onto an even more remote area than Canarsie, a neighborhood—if that isn’t too fancy a word—somewhere out there that was in a way Brooklyn, in a way Queens, and very nearly but not quite, Nassau County.

  Along a commercial boulevard of quiet desperation, one particular enterprise, Maximillian’s Used Cars, seemed so natural, so inevitable, it might have grown there, from a seed dropped by a passing asteroid. Under flapping three-sided pennants in bright crayon colors huddled a wan fleet of cars that hadn’t known love for a very long time, despite the whitewashed words bellowing from their windshields: !!!CREAMPUFF!!! !!!ULTRASPECIAL!!! !!!TRIPLE-A-ONE!!! And behind this assembly of sad sacks stood the office, a small pink stucco structure that looked vaguely as though it might have been transplanted from some arid part of inland California.

  Stan drove the Caliber—a thoroughbred, in this neck of the woods—past the lot and turned in at the anonymous driveway that would go behind the place. He stopped in an area of tall unkempt weeds beside the white clapboard backs of garages, and got out, taking the Caliber’s keys with him. Stepping through an unlocked gate in a chain-link fence, he followed a shrubbery-flanked path to the rear of the pink office structure. A back door here opened into a gray-paneled office populated by a thin severe hatchet-faced woman typing rapidly on an off-brand computer with a sound like a cocktail party for crickets. She looked up, but didn’t stop typing as she said, “Hello, Stan. Long time.”

  Stan, with some amazement, said, “Harriet, Max bought you a computer?”

  “The motor vehicle forms are online now,” she said, still cricketing away. “He hated it, he hated the whole idea of it, but then he worked out my taxi fares all the time to the DMV, and this was cheaper.”

  Stan nodded. “That must have been a bitter blow.”

  “He got so mad,” she said, “he said he was gonna sell the place and retire. I said, ‘From what?’ and he went into his office to sulk.”

  “How long ago?”

  “About three weeks.”

  Stan looked at the closed connecting door to the front office. “You think he’s over it by now?”

  She laughed, a mirthless sound. “He’s in there now,” she said, gesturing with her jaw at the connecting door while continuing to cricket. “Go cheer him up.”

  “Well, I’ll say hello, anyway,” Stan said, and crossed to step through to the outer office, closing the door behind himself. The cricket sound disappeared.

  This office was dominated by its windows, giving a different but no more lovely view out onto the wares under offer. Within, the office was dominated by Max himself, a big old man with heavy jowls and thin white hair, wearing a dark vest hanging open over a white dress shirt smudged across the chest from his habit of leaning forward against his used cars. There was a time when he had smoked cigars, until the doctor told him the cigars were actually smoking him, so he didn’t do that any more, but still kept all the moves, so that people looking at him kept thinking they were missing something.

  At the moment, Max was crouched at his desk like a leopard at a water hole, watching the two or three potential customers wandering the lot, their needs perhaps being attended to by Harriet’s nephew, an eager faun in a three-piece suit. Stan observed for a minute, but then, when Max made no move to acknowledge his presence, he forced the issue: “Whadaya say, Max?”

  Max exhaled as noisily as if he still smoked those old cigars, dropped back into his swivel chair, continued to glare outward, and said, “I say I don’t like it, that’s what I say.”

  “Don’t like what, Max?”

  At last Max looked Stan in the eye, and nodded, though not with much satisfaction. “Morning, Stanley.”

  “Good morning. What don’t you like?”

  For answer, Max glared again out the window. “Any o
f those birds look like a television person to you?”

  “What, a repairman? I don’t think they have those any more.”

  “No, a reporter,” Max said, as though the word were synonymous with “dungheap.” “Ever see any of those people on the air?”

  Interested, Stan stepped closer to the windows and considered the candidates. “Not unless it was a perp walk,” he decided. “What’s up, Max?”

  “Siddown, Stanley, you’ll give me a crook in my neck.”

  So Stan sat in the client’s chair and said, “You’ve had a problem with reporters?”

  “No, and I don’t want any. But one of these local channels, busybodies, on their six o’clock news, they been doing a deep investigative thing on customers and the people that sell to customers.”

  “Aha.”

  “If you ask me,” Max said, “what they’re investigating is people that sell to customers without using their crappy TV station for advertising.”

  “That makes sense,” Stan said. “You don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “I wanna bite some hand. They’re goin after all kinds of legitimate businessmen, Stanley. Furniture stores where you don’t pay any money down. That’s a worthy thing, isn’t it?”

  “Sounds it.”

  “So what if they come to take the stuff back next year and sell it all over again to the next yo-yo? It was never anything but junk anyway.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And appliance stores, those too,” Max said, “and—you know it—used car dealers.”

  Stan nodded. “They been to see you, Max?”

  “No, but they hit one in the Bronx, and they hit one in Staten Island, nailed them for perfectly ordinary business practices, but, you know, the stuff that’s difficult to explain to the layman.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Max did his best to look pathetic. “Stanley,” he said, “I don’t want to be under scrutiny, you know that.”

  “None of us does, Max,” Stan agreed. “It’s like a contagious disease.”