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  Babe said, “Now hold on. There are contracts involved here. Obligations.”

  “Take us to court,” Kelp advised. Turning to Dortmunder, he said, “Ready, John?”

  “Never more.”

  Darlene had now apparently figured out which way she was going: teary. “Oh, please,” she wailed. “You can’t stop now. We did so much great footage. You should see Ray and me on the lake in Central Park, it’s the sweetest thing you ever saw in your entire life.”

  “That really was a terrific scene, John,” Ray said. “If you saw that scene, you’d definitely want to keep going with this show.”

  “Then it’s a good thing,” Dortmunder said, “I didn’t see it. Good-bye, Doug.”

  Kelp said, “What is it people say? It’s been real.”

  The four of them headed for the stairs. Behind them, Doug cried, “But what if we sweeten the pot? Why don’t you guys get an agent? John! How do we keep in touch?”

  37

  MONDAY AFTERNOON, Stan decided it was time to let the rest of the guys in on what he’d learned down on Varick Street. It was going to be a blow to them, it was going to dash a lot of their hopes, but they’d be better off knowing it sooner rather than later. Stan hated to be the bearer of bad news, but he really had no choice.

  The fact is, there was no caper there, not on Varick Street. Last night, having time on his hands and a little curiosity that had been building for quite a while now as to the contents of the rooms in Knickerbocker Storage, Stan had paused before removing that lovely pink Chevy Corvette from the ground floor to go upstairs, ease his way into a couple of the storage rooms, and just have a look at what they might be taking with them on the night.

  Which turned out to be nothing. Crap. Wicker hampers full of old clothes, some of them clean. Tired scratched equipment for every known sport. Girly magazines from the fifties, for God’s sake. Boxes of framed photos of weddings; how many times should you get married before you’re ready to stop keeping a record? In a word: no dice.

  It was only right to tell the guys. Their smart move, once he brought them up to speed on this, was to quit that reality series and get back to the real world. Out there somewhere, there was still dishonest work to be done.

  He himself would be hitting Varick Street just one more time, to pick up that nice green Subaru Forester with the camera mountings replacing the front passenger seat, a minor flaw that he knew Maximillian’s crack garage crew would have no trouble eliminating. But all that would be much later tonight; between now and then, it was time to make a meet.

  When he tried, he couldn’t manage to make contact with any of them directly, which meant they were all still laboring away in the vineyards of reality, but he did get to leave messages for them, after one false start.

  The false start was that, the first time he phoned John, there was nobody home at all, and of course John wouldn’t know an answering machine if it reared up and spat him in the eye, which it would. But then, when he called Andy’s place, the phone was answered by Anne Marie, Andy’s live-in friend, and after he identified himself and they used a minute in small talk he said, “Would you tell Andy I wanna get the guys together, I got some news for them they’re gonna wanna know.”

  “Sure, Stan. Where and when?”

  “I think we need to visit the OJ at ten,” Stan said. “Kind of like a reentry portal to the actual world.”

  “I’ll tell him,” she promised, and he went on to call Tiny’s number, where J. C.’s answering machine said, “This is the J. C. Taylor voice mail. Mr. Taylor is unavailable at this moment. Your call is important to us, so please leave your name and number after the beep. And have a nice day. Or night.”

  Giving this machine the same message he’d given Anne Marie, Stan added, “I don’t think the kid has a voice mail, so maybe, Tiny, you can tell him what’s what. And if any of us finds himself in a living room somewhere, maybe we oughta pick up an answering machine for him. It would be a nice thing to do, and he’d actually use it.”

  After that, he paused for a refreshing beer, tried John’s number again, and this time got May, whose, “Hello?” was delivered on such a rising curve of mistrust that he hastened to say, “It’s Stan, May, how you doing, it’s just me, Stan.”

  “Oh, hi, Stan. We haven’t seen you for a while.”

  “I been working different parts of the street from the rest of the guys,” Stan said. “But I picked up some info here and there that I think everybody oughta know, so I’m asking people to make a meet tonight at the OJ at ten.”

  “I’ll tell John,” she promised. “You’re sounding good, Stan, How’s your Mom?”

  “Terrific,” Stan said. “She’s out with her cab right now, but she’ll be back pretty soon.”

  “Tell her I said hi. And I just got back from the Safeway, so what I’m gonna do is sit down and put my feet up.”

  “Good idea,” Stan said. “I’ll probably do the same.”

  Five in the afternoon. All over town, people were sitting down and putting their feet up. Stan, too.

  38

  WHEN DORTMUNDER WALKED into the OJ at ten that night, Rollo was off to the right end of the bar, in conversation with a tourist. There were many ways to tell he was a tourist, such as the binoculars and camera both hanging from straps around his neck, the sunglasses pushed up onto his forehead, the many-pocketed camouflage jacket with the maps jutting out of most of the pockets, his pants cuffs tucked into the top of his heavy-duty hiking boots, and the fact that he was trying to pay for his beer in euros.

  Rollo was having none of it. “We only do American money,” he explained. “It isn’t worth much, but we’re used to it.”

  “%#&_#&%$*@ @¼&%#$,” said the tourist, and went on holding out the colorful little piece of paper.

  Meanwhile, to the left end of the bar, the regulars were discussing the Internet. “It’s the biggest scam in the world,” one of them was saying. “I mean, why go through all that? The first thing you gotta do, even before you start, you gotta go out and put good cash money right down and buy this adding machine kind of thing.”

  “Computer,” a second regular suggested. “They call it a computer.”

  “Sure,” said the first. “And what does it compute? It’s an adding machine.”

  “Well,” said the second regular, “I think it’s more than that. I mean, I don’t know this myself, but the way I understand it, this machine connects to everything everywhere. Somehow.”

  “So?” said the first regular. “My phone connects to everything everywhere. My television connects with everything everywhere.”

  A third regular now joined the discussion, saying, “Just last week I got a wrong number from Turkey. The guy wanted me to reverse the charges. I told him what to reverse.”

  Meanwhile, the tourist, still waving his euro, was now trying blandishment. “&%$&&@*+, &&%$)**,” he wheedled, with what he apparently hoped was a winning smile.

  It lost. “If it isn’t green,” Rollo said, “I got no use for it. Pass that thing at the UN or somewhere.”

  To the left, a fourth regular had joined the conversation, while Dortmunder waited patiently in the middle, resting his forearms on the bar, reading the labels on the bottles across the back, remarking to himself how few of them he thought he’d be able to pronounce. This fourth regular began by announcing, “It’s all another government giveaway to the big farm interests, like those subsidies and pushed-up crop prices and all that stuff. If you do sign on to this Internet thing, you know what they make you do? You gotta sign up for shipments of salty meat!”

  The second regular veered around as though he’d just seen an iceberg. “You do?”

  “It’s true,” the fourth regular insisted. “I read about it, I read about it a couple times. People got all this meat, they don’t know what to do with it.”

  The first regular, doubtful, said, “I think you got something wrong in there.”

  “No way, Jose.”

  The first re
gular lowered an eyebrow. “Do I look Hispanic to you?”

  “I dunno,” the fourth regular said, undaunted. “Lemme see you dance the mambo.”

  “Keep it down over there,” Rollo said. Many years of experience had taught him the precise moment for a calm but firm intervention.

  The fourth regular kept his mouth open, but perhaps spoke something different from what he originally intended. “All I know is,” he said, “the government’s overdoing all this crap. They’re intruding on everybody’s lives. They’re sticking their nose in everywhere.”

  “The camel under the tent,” said the third regular, the one with the pal in Turkey.

  This comment was met with such a profound silence that Dortmunder could clearly hear that the tourist had now decided to get on his high horse and was demanding his rights, or respect, or a fair hearing, or a retrial, or something, all in a firm voice punctuated by a fingertip, from the hand not holding the euro, bonk-bonk-bonking the bar. “%#$&&,” he said. “*&+@%%$# %&*++%$, $%#&@1/4**& $%& +*%$# *$%&$+@@.”

  Rollo at this point held up a hand palm outward in the universal traffic-cop sign for “stop.” “Hold on,” he told the tourist. “I got an actual customer here, one that doesn’t deal in wampum.” Turning to Dortmunder, he said, “You’re the first.”

  “We’re five tonight,” Dortmunder told him.

  “I know, the beer and salt told me. Let me give you the makings for you and the other bourbon.”

  During this exchange, the regulars had been wondering if a blog was something you could catch and the tourist was giving Dortmunder the fisheye as though suspecting somebody around here was trying to jump the line.

  If so, it was successful. Rollo slid the tray with the glasses and the ice and the Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon—“Our Own Brand”—along the bar to stop in front of Dortmunder, but then he said, “Hold on.”

  “Hold on?”

  Rollo was looking over Dortmunder’s shoulder, so Dortmunder turned and here came Tiny and the kid. “Just in time,” Dortmunder said.

  “Which means somebody’s late,” Tiny commented.

  The tourist didn’t like it that an entire crowd seemed to have taken his place at center stage, but he was bewildered as to what to do about it. Holding up his euro to show it to the three of them, he said, “&%*$*@, &*$@+ *&%*+,” his manner now showing a plea for international friendship here, some common fellowship, human understanding.

  Tiny reached out and tapped the tourist on the binoculars. The tourist flinched, and looked alarmed. Tiny told him, “What you want to do is, when in Rome, don’t be Greek.”

  The tourist blinked. All languages, even his own, seemed to have deserted him.

  Rollo, having been busy, slid Tiny his bright red drink and said to the kid, “What’ll it be tonight?”

  “Well, I think I’d just like a beer,” the kid said.

  Rollo, deadpan, gave Dortmunder a lightning-fast look that said, “I believe our little boy is growing up,” then turned and drew a draft as Dortmunder picked up his tray and Kelp, arriving, said, “I’m a little late, let me carry that.”

  “Yes,” Dortmunder said, and, empty-handed, led the way toward the regulars, who were now trying to figure out if the Internet could look back at you.

  “Wait a second,” Kelp said.

  So they all stopped, and Kelp turned to the regulars to say, “The answer is yes. Just a little while ago there’s a woman right here in New York City, she works for the Apple Store, you know, the computer store, and somebody burgled her apartment and took a lot of stuff including her home computer. Now, she’s very savvy about computers, and she knew a way, from another computer, how she could talk to her computer and tell it to take pictures of where it found itself. So it did, and there’s the two guys who boosted it, so she took their pictures down from the other computer and gave them to the cops, and pretty soon the cops got the perps and the woman got her computer and her other stuff back, and the moral of that story is, do not commit a crime anywhere near the Internet.”

  Kelp nodded at them, to be sure they’d followed his story, and then said to the others, “Okay, let’s go.” And the four of them took off around the regulars, who were sitting in a row there now like an aquarium full of thunderstruck fish, and on down the hall, where the kid said, “Andy, that’s cool. Did that really happen?”

  “Yes,” Kelp said. “And let it be a lesson to you.”

  Solemn, the kid held up his beer glass in a toast to lessons learned. “It is,” he said.

  39

  AROUND THE BACK ROOM TABLE, they sorted themselves by order of appearance, Dortmunder facing the door, Tiny and the kid flanking him with their oblique views toward the door, Kelp first closing the door and then taking the chair beyond the kid, with its oblique view away from the door.

  As they settled into their places Tiny said, “Stan is the one called this meet, and Stan is the one that isn’t here. I call this rude.”

  Dortmunder said, “There’s probly an explanation.”

  Tiny lowered a brow at him. “You always think the best of everybody,” he accused.

  “Not always,” Dortmunder said, and the door opened and Stan came in.

  “Uh-huh,” Tiny said.

  Stan, closing the door, saw he had a choice between the chair next to the irritated Tiny or the chair with its back fully to the door. As he hesitated over these selections, he said, “Sorry I’m late, but I got an explanation.”

  “I thought you would,” Dortmunder said.

  Stan put his beer and his salt on the table and his body on the chair next to Tiny. “This time a year,” he said, “you got your tourists, that flood just picking up, you got your Europeans with their luxury apartments in Manhattan just opening them up for the new season, you even got your American travelers wanna see is New York as scary as their uncle said. So this time a year,” he concluded, “I don’t take the Belt Parkway. It’s fulla sightseers that don’t know how to drive in New York. Or anywhere else.”

  Kelp said, “This is the explanation?”

  “This is the preamble,” Stan told him. “I just want you to know I know what I’m doing. So on city streets, I know where the construction is, I know where the national pride day parades are, I know where the strikes and the demonstrations are, so I pick my route. Tonight, I come up Flatlands and Pennsylvania and Bushwick and the LIE to the Midtown Tunnel, because inbound isn’t that bad in the evening hours, and then up the FDR to Seventy-ninth and through the park. This is the plan.”

  “This isn’t a plan,” Tiny said. “This is a travelogue.”

  Dortmunder said, “Tell us, Stan. What went wrong?”

  “It’s all working,” Stan said. “I’m all the way to Manhattan, I’m on the FDR. There’s pretty thick traffic, but it’s moving along. I’m in the middle lane and I see, maybe three cars up in the right lane, this Honda that the left front wheel comes off.”

  That got everybody’s attention. Kelp said, “What? It just fell off and lay on the ground?”

  “Hell, no,” Stan said. “It kept going. And the Honda has this balance, so it keeps going, too. But the wheel’s going faster than the cars, and when the guy driving the Honda sees this wheel pull out in front of him, he panics.”

  Tiny nodded. “Many would,” he said.

  “So he hit the brakes,” Stan said. “And there goes his equilibrium. He’s doing fifty, his left front hits the roadway, all at once he looked like six Hondas going in six different directions all at once, including straight up. It was like a dance, only fast. And now everybody else’s hitting the brakes, and the Honda’s all over the road, and when it finally stops it’s blocking all three lanes, with parts falling off and scattered around the general neighborhood. All the traffic from behind is pressing way up, there’s no way to go forward, and there’s no exit anywhere near there. We’re stopped.”

  The kid said, “What happened to the wheel?”

  “It kept going,” Stan said. “It was in front of the
crash, so it just kept going. Unless it took the Triborough it’s in Westchester by now.”

  Dortmunder said, “What about the guy in the Honda?”

  “Well, I guess he’s all right,” Stan said, “only the Honda has kind of closed around him so he can’t get out. Eventually they had to cut him out, so that was another delay.”

  The kid said, “Who cut him out? The cops?”

  “No,” Stan said. “The cops got there first and just stood around and made phone calls. Then the ambulance, that can’t do anything because this guy’s like a canned ham and they still gotta open the can. Then the fire department shows up and they got this special machine for opening up vehicles at times like this that things have gone a little worse than usual.”

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, “there was no way you could plan for that.”

  Stan said, “Oh, you can plan for anything, that doesn’t matter. The point is, though, they finally got us outa there and the rest of it was a snap. Even the bicycles popping wheelies on the park transverse weren’t a problem. But I’m late, and I’m sorry, and that’s the reason.”

  “And you got,” Tiny said, “something to tell us.”

  “Yeah, that’s why we’re here.”

  Kelp said, “We also got something to tell you, but you called the meet, so you go first.”

  “Okay,” Stan said. “While you guys’ve been playing with the reality people, I’ve been dropping into Varick Street a little later at night.”

  “We know that,” Kelp said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Stan shrugged and said, “Well, anyway, last night I decided to take a look at Knickerbocker Storage, and I know that’s what we got our hopes fixed on, now that the cash for Europe thing doesn’t work out, but the truth is it’s no good. I hate to tell you this, guys, because I know you’re counting on it, but there’s just no caper there.”