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Doug headed for the door, patting the receiver in his pocket. “We don’t know each other,” he said.

  “Oh, sure,” she said.

  3

  DORTMUNDER WAS DUBIOUS about this. “What’s in it for us?” he wanted to know, employing the plural form of the motto on his (stolen) family crest: Quid Lucrum Istic Mihi Est.

  “Well,” Stan said, “according to my Mom, he’ll wanna pay us.”

  “To let him make a movie of us boosting something.”

  “That part can’t be exactly right,” Stan said. “We’ll just listen to what he has to say. Is that him?”

  They had taken an outdoor table at Trader Thoreau along the line of black wrought-iron fence separating the dining area from the pedestrian-and-vehicle area, which gave them an excellent view of the broad facade of the office tower across the avenue. Out of those doors now had come a purposeful youngish guy in a tan jacket, who paused to peer across at this café, then looked to left and right to see which intersection was nearest (neither), then struck off to his right.

  “That’s him, all right,” Dortmunder said. “He’s wired. See him pat the pocket?”

  “I see him.”

  “I’ll keep him,” Dortmunder said.

  “Good.”

  Which meant Stan would keep an eye on that building entrance to see what else might come out, while Dortmunder followed Doug Fairkeep’s progress to the intersection, where he had to stand fidgeting while he waited for the light to change.

  “Fat girl in red.”

  Dortmunder looked, and Stan was right. The girl was young and short and very nervous. Also, that shin-long red coat was too heavy for this time of year, making her look more like a sausage than a person. She too started off to the right, then apparently saw Fairkeep still stuck at the DON’T WALK sign, and veered around to hurry off in the opposite direction so abruptly that she knocked two other people out of their orbits, though neither actually fell to the ground.

  Meanwhile, Fairkeep’s traffic light had finally changed, permitting him to cross the avenue, and as he came nearer they could see he was a pleasant-looking guy in his early thirties, with that kind of open helpful manner that people’s mothers like. Which didn’t mean he was trustworthy.

  Or particularly swift. He reached the entrance at the far end of the wrought-iron fence, then stood there gaping around, apparently not able to figure out who anybody might be, until Dortmunder raised an arm and waved at him.

  Then the guy came right over, big smile on his face, hand stuck out for a shake from several yards away, and when he got close enough he said to Dortmunder, “You must be Mr. Murch.”

  “In that case, I got it wrong,” Dortmunder told him. “I’m John. This is Murch. Siddown.”

  Still smiling, Fairkeep put his unshaken hand away and said, “I’m Doug Fairkeep.”

  “We know,” Dortmunder said. “Siddown.”

  So Fairkeep sat down and said to Stan, “I had a very pleasant chat with your mother yesterday.”

  “I heard about that,” Stan said. “Usually, she’s a little better at keeping her lip buttoned.”

  “Oh, don’t be hard on your mom,” Fairkeep said, with a little indulgent smile. “She could tell I didn’t mean any trouble for you guys.”

  Dortmunder said, “What do you mean for us guys?”

  “I work for Get Real,” Fairkeep explained. “We produce reality shows and sell them to the networks. Maybe you’ve seen some—”

  “No,” Dortmunder said.

  Fairkeep was almost but not quite hurt. “No? How can you be sure you never saw even—”

  “John and I,” Stan explained, “don’t do much TV.”

  “I do the six o’clock news sometimes,” Dortmunder allowed, “for the apartment house fires in New Jersey.”

  “Well, reality TV,” Fairkeep told them, regaining the wind in his sails, “is the future. You don’t have these fake little made-up stories, with actors pretending to be spies and sheriffs and everything, you’ve got real people doing real things.”

  Dortmunder gestured at Trader Thoreau and its surround. “I got all that here.”

  “But not shaped,” Fairkeep said. “Not turned into entertainment.”

  Stan said, “Why doesn’t she come sit with us?”

  Fairkeep looked at him. “What? Who?”

  “Your friend,” Stan said, and pointed to where she lurked just outside the fence in crowded pedestrian land, being knocked about by elbows and shoulders as she tried to pretend she wasn’t taking pictures with a cell phone. “The fat girl in red.”

  For just an instant, Fairkeep turned as red as the fat girl’s coat, but then he laughed, open and cheerful, and said, “You guys are something. Sure, if you want. Where is she?” Not waiting for an answer (because he obviously knew she would be behind him to focus on the other two at the table), he twisted around and waved to her to join them.

  She obeyed, but hesitantly, as though not sure she’d interpreted the gesture properly, and when she neared them Fairkeep said, “Join us, Marcy. Marcy, this is John and that’s Stan Murch.”

  Marcy perched herself on the leading edge of the table’s fourth chair, but as she opened her mouth to speak a waiter appeared, harried and hurried but somehow with a smooth still inner core, to say, “For you, folks?”

  Stan said, “We all want a beer. Beck.”

  Fairkeep said, “Oh, nothing for me, thanks.”

  “You’re paying for it,” Stan told him, “so you might as well take it.” He nodded to the waiter, who was anxious to be off. “That was four Beck.”

  Slap, four paper napkins hit the table and the waiter was gone.

  Stan said, “Marcy, let me look at that phone.”

  “Sure.” She handed him the phone, and he smiled at her as he pocketed it.

  Fairkeep said, “Hey—”

  “While we’re at it,” Dortmunder said, “why don’t you give me that receiver now? It’s there in your right pocket.”

  “My what?”

  “The thing that’s recording us,” Dortmunder said.

  Fairkeep bridled. “I’m not going to give you any company equipment!”

  Stan said, “You know, we could get the same effect if we just throw you under that bus there.”

  Fairkeep turned and looked at the bus. “It’s moving pretty slow,” he said.

  Dortmunder said, “That could make it worse.”

  Fairkeep thought about that, while Marcy sat and stared from face to face. Whatever was going on, she was pretty sure she wasn’t qualified at this level.

  Then all at once Fairkeep offered a broad smile, like the sun coming out on a previously cloudy day, and said, “You guys really are something. Here.” Taking the little gray metal box from his pocket, handing it to Dortmunder, he said, “You don’t want the mike, do you?”

  “No need.”

  The waiter returned then, to slap bottles and glasses and a check on the table. “That’ll be twenty-six dollars,” he said.

  Fairkeep, about to reach for his wallet, reared back and said, “Twenty-six dollars!”

  “I just work here,” the waiter said.

  Fairkeep nodded. “Maybe I should,” he said, and put two twenties on the check. “I’ll need a receipt.”

  “I know,” the waiter said, and sailboarded away.

  Dortmunder said, “Cash? I thought guys like you always used credit cards.”

  “Cash,” Fairkeep told him. “I leave a ten percent tip and put in for twenty.”

  Stan laughed. “Doug,” he said, “you’re a desperado.”

  “No,” Fairkeep said, unruffled, “but you guys are. Here’s what I’m offering, if I get an okay from you and an approval from my bosses up above. Twenty thousand a man, plus six hundred a working day per diem. That’s for up to five men, and what you’re selling us is permission to film you at work, doing what we needn’t go into in any detail but that which makes you of interest to us. We would expect to be filming a few days a week for no fewer than
six and no more than twelve weeks.”

  Dortmunder said, “Filming us doing what we do.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What we do for real.”

  “That’s why it’s called reality.”

  “And then,” Dortmunder said, “you’re gonna show all this on TV.”

  “That’s the whole point of it.”

  “The part I don’t get,” Dortmunder said, “is the part where we don’t go to jail.”

  “Oh, I know there’s gonna be a few problems along the way,” Fairkeep said, cheerily confident. “There’s always a few problems, and we work around them, and we’ll work around the problems this time. Believe me, this one is gonna be easy.”

  Dortmunder looked at him. “Easy,” he said.

  “Compared to the dominatrix series we did,” Fairkeep told him, “this is a snap. That one was nothing but problems. And laundry.”

  “So what we’re gonna do that you’re gonna make a movie of is break the law. I mean, break a bunch of laws; you never get to break just one.”

  “We’ll work around it,” Fairkeep assured him. “We got a great staff, crack people. Like Marcy here.”

  They all contemplated Marcy. “Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

  “So we’ll all kick it around,” Fairkeep said. “Beat the bushes, burn the midnight oil. You’ll bring your expertise, we’ll bring ours. And you guys never have to go one step forward if you’re not comfortable.”

  Dortmunder and Stan looked at each other, and Dortmunder knew Stan was thinking just what he himself was thinking: We don’t have anything else. Twenty grand to playact with a bunch of clowns with cameras. Plus the per diem.

  Dortmunder nodded at Fairkeep. “Maybe,” he said firmly.

  “Me, too,” said Stan.

  Fairkeep beamed. “Great!” From inside the jacket came a fancy pen and a cheap pad. “Give me a contact number,” he said.

  “I’ll give you my Mom’s number,” Stan told him. Since he lived with his Mom, this was also Stan’s number, but Dortmunder felt Stan wasn’t wrong to try for a little distance here.

  Fairkeep copied down the number Stan rattled off, then said, “Where is this? Brooklyn?”

  “Right.”

  “What is it, her cell?”

  “No, it’s her phone,” Stan said. “On the kitchen wall.” He wouldn’t give out her cell phone number in the cab; Mom wouldn’t like that.

  “My mom has a phone like that,” Fairkeep said, sounding sentimental, and smiled again as he put away pen and pad. “I’ll talk to my bosses,” he said, “and I’ll be in touch.”

  “Fine.”

  They were all about to stand when Marcy said, “Excuse me.”

  They looked at her, and she was looking at Stan, so he was the one who said, “Yeah?”

  “That’s my only cell phone,” Marcy said. “It’s got all my friends on it, and my speed-dial, and just about my entire life. Couldn’t you just delete the pictures out of there, so I could get my phone back?”

  A little surprised, Stan said, “Maybe so,” and pulled out the phone. Studying it, he said, “It’s different from mine.”

  “I know,” she said. “They’re all different, I don’t know why they do that. Push that button there to get to the menu.”

  It took the two of them a few minutes to burrow together down into the depths of the phone, but they finally did find where some slightly out-of-focus long-shot pictures of Dortmunder and Stan were located, and successfully removed them. Then Stan handed the little machine back to her and said, “I wouldn’t want you to go around without your life.”

  “I appreciate it,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

  4

  ANDY KELP, A SHARP-FEATURED GUY with a friendly grin, casually dressed in black and dark grays, said to the checkout clerk, a skinny doorknob-nosed seventy-year-old supplementing his Social Security with some minimum-wage retail work, “I wanna see My Nephew.”

  The clerk scratched his doorknob with a yellow fingernail. “Oh, no,” he said, “there is no such person.” Gesturing at this cavernous big-box discount store all around them, he said, “It’s just the name of the place.”

  Kelp nodded. “He’s about five foot one,” he said, “and he weighs over three hundred pounds, all of it trans fats. He dresses out of a laundry basket and he always wears a straw hat and he talks like a frog with a sore throat.”

  “Oh, you know him!” the clerk said. Reaching for the phone beside his cash register, he said, “Most people don’t. They don’t know My Nephew’s a real guy.”

  “Lucky them. Tell him it’s Andy from the East Side.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  Kelp stepped aside while the clerk was on the phone, to let the next customer, a short round Hispanic lady totally concentrated on her own business, wheel into place an enormous shopping cart piled sky-high with Barbies, all different Barbies. Either this lady had an awful lot of little nieces or she was some kind of fetishist; in either case, Kelp was happy to respect her privacy.

  “Okay,” the clerk said to him, getting off the phone. “You know the office?”

  “It’s my first time here.”

  “Okay.” Pointing with his doorknob, the clerk said, “You go down to the third aisle, then right all the way to the end and then left all the way to the end.”

  Thanking the man, Kelp left him amid the Barbies and followed the directions through this big near-empty space, with not quite enough customers and not quite enough merchandise to create confidence.

  This was the My Nephew experience. He tended to open his discount centers in marginal areas of the city and New Jersey and Long Island, never pay the rent or the utilities, and get thrown out twelve to fifteen months later, with the loss of a certain percentage of his stock. Since his landlords and his suppliers were usually as iffy as he was, and since he created a new corporation with every move, there were never any very serious consequences, so My Nephew could always go on to open another marginal store in another marginal area of Greater New York that hadn’t heard from him for a while. It was a living.

  At the end of the clerk’s directions stood a closed door, bearing two pieces of information: MEN painted in black at eye level, and OUT OF ORDER handwritten in red Flair pen on a shirt cardboard masking-taped a few inches lower down. Kelp knocked on OUT OF ORDER and heard a frog croak, “What?”

  That was invitation enough; he opened the door and stepped into a small windowless messy office with My Nephew seated at the dented metal desk, looking exactly like Kelp’s description of him, or possibly worse. “Hello,” Kelp said.

  “Andy from the East Side,” My Nephew croaked. “You’re a long way from home.”

  “I had a bit of luck,” Kelp told him, and frowned at the wooden kitchen chair facing the desk. Deciding it was neither diseased nor likely to collapse, he sat on it.

  “I don’t like luck,” My Nephew said. He sat hunched forward, fat elbows splayed on the desk to left and right.

  “It has to be treated with respect,” Kelp agreed. “And that’s why I’m here.”

  “Luck don’t usually bring people to this neighborhood,” My Nephew said. “Tell me about it.”

  “It seems,” Kelp said, “there’s a spring storm out in the Atlantic. Way out in the Atlantic.”

  “So I shouldn’t worry.”

  “It’s an ill wind, you know. And what this ill wind means, there’s two semis in a lot over by the Navy Yard hooked to containers full of flat-screen TVs supposed to be on their way to Africa right now.”

  “Only the storm.”

  “That ship may not get here at all. So I’m told by the warehouseman gave me the tip.”

  My Nephew shook his heavy gray head beneath his gray straw hat. “I would not be a seaman,” he said.

  That was too obvious to comment on. Kelp said, “It could be, I could move those semis.”

  “What make are we—?” My Nephew interrupted himself. “Second,” he said, and reached for his ph
one, so it must flash a light instead of ringing.

  Kelp sat back, in no hurry, and My Nephew said to the phone, “What?” Then he nodded. “Good,” he said, hung up, and said to Kelp, “Gimme a minute.”

  “Take two.”

  Now My Nephew got to his feet, a complicated maneuver in three distinct sections. In section one, he leaned far forward with his broad palms flat on the desktop. In section two, he heaved himself with a loud grunt upward and back, becoming more or less vertical. In section three, he weaved forward and back, feet on floor and palms on desk, until he found his equilibrium. Then, lifting the palms from his desk and taking a loud breath, “Be right back,” he said, turned, and waddled more briskly than you would have thought possible to a metal fire door in the wall behind the desk. He opened this door, stepped through a space barely wide enough for the purpose, and left, the door automatically shutting behind him.

  Kelp had seen street out there. My Nephew’s in a business conversation, he gets a phone call, he says one word, he leaves the building. This sequence suggested to Kelp that it could be some previous purveyor of irregular goods, not unlike Andy Kelp himself, had been a bit sloppy and had led police attention to this building, giving My Nephew the motivation to vacate. Probably it would be Kelp’s smart move now to follow My Nephew’s lead.

  The door My Nephew had taken, which Kelp now took, led to a side street of warehouses across the way from the blank rear of the big-box store. Trucks of various sizes and descriptions were parked on this side only. My Nephew was nowhere to be seen. In a minute, neither was Kelp.

  Three blocks from My Nephew—the building, not the man—and very close to the subway station that was his current goal, Kelp felt the cell phone in his jacket pocket vibrate against his heart. (He much preferred, in all situations, silence to noise.) Unpocketing it, opening it, he said, “Yeah.”

  “Maybe a conversation.” The voice, Kelp recognized, belonged to a frequent associate of his named John Dortmunder.

  “I’m very open,” Kelp said, which was more true now than it had been ten minutes ago.

  “Where are you?”

  “Outer rings of Saturn.”