She didn’t quite know how to take that word. Settling into her chair, she said, “A proposition?”
“A job, kind of. But weird.”
“John’s gonna describe it to you now,” Kelp said, and looked at Dortmunder, as alert as a sparrow on a branch.
Dortmunder took a breath. “It’s reality TV,” he said, and went on to describe how Murch’s Mom had introduced Doug Fairkeep into their lives and what Doug Fairkeep had proposed, including the payoff.
Somehow, every time he told that story he got the same kind of dead-air silent reaction. Now May and Kelp both gave him the glassy-eye treatment, so he said, “That’s the story, May, that’s all there is.”
She said, “Except the next day, when they drag you all off to jail.”
“Doug Fairkeep says we’ll work around that.”
“How?”
“He doesn’t say.”
May squinted, much the way she used to squint back when she chain-smoked. “I’ll tell you another question,” she said. “What is it you’re supposed to steal?”
“We didn’t go into that.”
“It might make a difference,” she said.
Dortmunder didn’t get it. “How?”
“Well,” she said, “if they were going for laughs, like. Like if you hijacked a diaper service truck, something like that.”
Kelp said, “I’m not gonna hijack any diaper service truck.”
“Like that,” she said.
Dortmunder said, “May, I don’t think so. What they do is, they find people got some sort of interesting lifestyle or background or something, and they film the people doing what they do, and then they shape it, to make it entertainment. I don’t think they’re goin for jokes, I think they’re goin for real.”
“Jail is real,” she said.
Dortmunder nodded, but said, “The problem is, so is twenty G.”
“Looks to me,” Kelp said, “as though you oughta go back and see this guy and ask him a lot more questions.”
“I’m realizing that,” Dortmunder admitted. “You wanna come along?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Kelp said, as casual as an aluminum siding salesman. “No need for me to poke my face in at this point. Murch’s Mom didn’t rat me out to the guy.”
“No, she didn’t,” Dortmunder said.
“But I tell you what I’ll do,” Kelp said. “Come home with me and I’ll Google him.”
Dortmunder frowned. “Is that a good thing?”
“Oh, yeah,” Kelp said.
6
DOUG FAIRKEEP’S IMMEDIATE BOSS at Get Real was a barrel-bodied bald sixty-year-old named Babe Tuck, who had come over from the news side after thirty years as a foreign correspondent. In the company bio online, a hair-raising read, were listed the times he’d been gassed, kidnapped, shot, abandoned in mid-ocean, set fire to, poisoned, dropped from a helicopter, and tied to the railroad tracks. “I’ve had enough of the real world,” he’d announced, when making the transfer to Get Real. “Time to retire to reality.”
Everybody was a little afraid of Babe Tuck, partly because of his history and reputation, but also because his mind was seriously twisted. He not only came up with the most outrageous ideas for reality series, he then went on to make them work. The One-Legged Race, for instance. All those wheelchairs, all those colostomy bags, all that bitching and complaint. Apparently, the fewer the limbs you had, the bigger the ego, to compensate.
So Doug had been pretty sure Babe wouldn’t immediately reject the idea of filming professional criminals performing a professional crime. All it needed was for Babe to see how the idea could be made practical. Therefore, all he said was, “We’ll have to run this by legal,” when Doug finished describing the layout of the show.
Doug smiled. “We’ll have to run this by legal,” was obviously a way to say, “Yes, if…” That was fine. The if would work itself out; all Doug had needed was the yes.
“I’ll talk to them over there,” he offered, “or you can. Whatever you want.”
Making a note on the legal pad on his desk, Babe said, “I’ll make an appointment. Now we come to the question, violence.”
Doug sat back in the leather visitor’s chair, Babe’s office being grander than his own, which was only right, but not garishly so, which was gratifying. “The cabbie,” he said, “Mrs. Murch, told me her son and the other guys didn’t like violence, avoided it whenever they could.”
Babe nodded, frowning at the note he’d just made. “Does this make them a little too Milquetoasty?”
“When I didn’t want to turn over the recorder,” Doug said, “Stan offered to throw me under a bus. A moving bus.”
Surprised, Babe said, “That’s a little violent.”
“I didn’t take it literally,” Doug assured him. “I took it to be Stan telling me he would do what it took, so he was showing me the extreme case. Naturally, I gave him the recorder before we got anywhere near there.”
“So there’s a threat of violence,” Babe said, “without the actual violence. That’s good, I like that.”
“These guys,” Doug said, “have a certain grungy kind of authenticity about them that’ll play very well on the small screen.”
Nodding, looking at his notepad, sucking a bit on his lower lip, Babe said, “What are they gonna steal?”
“That’s up to them,” Doug said. “We didn’t get that far.”
“No widow’s mites,” Babe cautioned. “No crippled newsie’s crutches.”
“Oh, nothing like that,” Doug said. “Our demographic would like to see some snooty rich people get cleaned out.”
“Clean out the Saudi Arabian embassy,” Babe suggested.
Laughing, Doug said, “I’ll pass that idea on.”
“But not yet,” Babe said. “Let’s clear it with legal first, make sure we know what we’re doing and we can actually do it. Not too much contact right at first.”
“I won’t move,” Doug promised, “until I get your say-so.”
“Good thinking,” Babe said. “I’ll get back to you.”
Doug smiled all the way from Babe’s office to his own, where Lueen looked up from her suspiciously clean desk (what did she actually do around here?) to say, “Somebody named John called for you.”
Ah, John: the gloomy one. Following on Babe’s desire for no premature contact, Doug said, “It’s late in the day, Lueen, I’ll get back to him tomorrow.”
Pushing a pink While You Were Out slip across her desk toward him, she said, “He especially said he wanted to talk to you today. ‘No surprises,’ he said.”
Doug frowned. “No surprises? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Beats me. There’s the number anyway.”
Doug picked up the slip, looked at it, and saw immediately Lueen had made a mistake. “No, it isn’t,” he said.
She gave him a skeptical eyebrow. “What do you mean it isn’t?”
Holding the pink slip in his left palm, he tapped the phone number with his right index finger. “Lueen,” he said, “this is my phone number.”
She seemed pleasantly surprised. “Well, how’d he do that?”
Doug felt the earth shift slightly; an unpleasant sensation. Pushing the phone slip back toward Lueen he said, “You dial it. And I would very much prefer it if you got my answering machine.”
“No skin off my nose,” she said, made the call, and said, “John?”
Doug moaned minimally, and Lueen said, “Sure, Doug is right here. Hold on.”
“I’ll—I’ll take it at my desk,” Doug said, and fled to his office, where he picked up the phone with both hands, as though it just might make some kind of fast move on him. Into it he said, “Hello?”
“Doug?” John’s voice.
“What are you doing in my apartment?”
“It’s a nice place, Doug, you got good taste. Only that woman Renee moved out, I guess.”
“A year ago,” Doug said, and then thought, I can’t have a calm conversation with the
man, he’s in my apartment. “What are you doing there?”
“Waiting for you. Quiet place for a meet. Only could you bring a six-pack? We like Heinekens.”
“Heinekens,” Doug echoed, and hung up the receiver.
What pier had he walked off here?
7
AT FIRST, Dortmunder couldn’t figure out why he was suddenly hearing a jangly version of “The Whiffen-poof Song” on chimes. He looked across Fairkeep’s neat if anonymous living room at Andy, seated at his ease on the other tan leather armchair across the kilim carpet, and as the final bah ricocheted around the gray-green walls, leaving only a metallic echo of itself, Andy said, “Doorbell.”
Dortmunder said, “He’s ringing his own bell?”
“Well,” Andy said, being an understanding sort of guy, “he’s not used to the situation. You oughta be the one that lets him in, he knows you.”
Andy’s decision to attend this meeting after all had been the result of that Google search done on the computer in Andy’s apartment, which had not only given them Fair-keep’s address, and Ivy League college record (low Bs), and marital status (un), and DVD rental preferences (date movies, mostly), but had also, once Andy switched to a different question, described the entire corporate Christmas tree of which Get Real Productions was a shiny but small bauble on a lower branch. Armed with this knowledge, and being in possession of Fairkeep’s residence, Dortmunder rose, crossed to open the apartment door, and said, “You made good time.” (He felt it would be better to begin with a pleasantry.)
Eyes wide, straining to scan every bit of the room at once, Fairkeep said, “I took a cab.”
“Well,” Dortmunder said, to reassure him, “ourselves, we didn’t take anything.”
Fairkeep’s stare froze on Andy. “Who’s this?”
“This is Andy,” Dortmunder said, closing the door. (Fairkeep flinched, then tried to cover it.)
“How ya doing?” Andy said.
“Andy,” Dortmunder explained, “will be another one on the payroll if it comes to that.”
Seeing nothing amiss, and nothing missing, Fairkeep grew a lot calmer, saying, “Well, if it comes to that, we’re gonna need something more than first names.”
“When we’re just batting it around,” Andy said, “first names are friendlier. Yours is Doug, right?”
Before Fairkeep could answer that, Dortmunder gestured generally at the room and said, “Which chair is yours, usually?”
“What?” Fairkeep gaped around, apparently baffled by the question, then pointed at the chair where late Andy had sat. “That one.”
“Fine,” Dortmunder said, “I’ll take that one over there.”
“And I’ll,” Andy said, “be very happy on this sofa here.” And sat down with a big smile.
Seeing both his guests seated on his furniture, Fairkeep belatedly and abruptly also sat, rocking the armchair a bit. “You wanted to talk to me.”
“We had some more questions,” Dortmunder told him. Having plotted the whole thing out in his mind, he started with question number one: “What is it you want us to steal?”
Surprised, Fairkeep said, “I don’t know. What do you usually steal?”
“Things that turn up,” Andy said. “But you don’t have any particular valuables in mind.”
“No. We don’t supply the story line, you do. We film you doing what you do—”
“And then you shape it,” Dortmunder said, “and make it entertainment.”
“That’s right,” Fairkeep said. “Even if the setup’s kind of artificial sometimes, you—Let me give you an example.”
“Good,” Dortmunder said.
“Let’s say we rent a house, and we furnish it,” Fairkeep said, “and we put spycams all through the house, and we get a bunch of college kids, boys and girls, and we pay them to live in the house. But the gimmick could be, they have to spend the whole summer vacation there, they can’t ever step outside the house. Anybody leaves the house, they’re out of the game. We ship in food, and they can watch TV, and like that. And they don’t know each other before they start. And we can make up any rules we want to make up, make it different from any other show like that.”
Dortmunder said, “And you get people to do this? All summer?”
“We’ve got waiting lists,” Fairkeep said.
Dortmunder nodded. “And people watch this.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“I am surprised.”
“The point being,” Fairkeep said, “in a situation like that, what’s gonna happen? Who falls in love, has a fight, can’t hack it. We do the setup, but then they just do themselves. Same with you.”
Andy said, “Only, where’s our setup?”
“Well, with you,” Fairkeep told him, “you’re the setup. Like we’re shooting one now, The Stand, it’s a farm family upstate, they’re running a vegetable stand out by the road, they’re a quirky family, kind of kooky, but they’ve got to make this stand work, they really need the money. Maybe you’ve seen it. The Stand.”
“Never,” Andy said.
“Oh, well,” Fairkeep said, “they did that stand thing anyway, long before we came along, but now we shape it—”
“—And make it entertaining.”
Fairkeep’s nod at Dortmunder was a little uncertain. “That’s right,” he said. “So whatever you want to do, that’s what you do, and we’ll film it.”
Andy said, “Well, we were thinking, if it was gonna be like that, maybe it would be good, you know, what you call your tie-in—”
“Product placement,” Dortmunder suggested.
“That, too,” Andy agreed. “What we were thinking, Doug, if we lifted something that was connected to your own company some way, it might give us an inside track on things.”
“A mole, like,” Dortmunder said.
“And the other thing,” Andy went on, “if the cops suddenly showed up to bust us, we could all just laugh and say it was all in fun, we were never gonna lift anything anyway.”
“An insurance policy,” Dortmunder said.
Fairkeep looked doubtful. “Take something from Get Real? There isn’t anything at Get Real. We want you to aim a little higher than office supplies.”
“We weren’t,” Andy said, “thinking of Get Real.”
“Oh, you mean Monopole,” Fairkeep said, sounding surprised that Andy would know about that. “Our big bosses?”
“Well, not your big bosses,” Andy told him, taking a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. Opening it, consulting it, he said, “What we got from Google is, Get Real is a subsidiary of Monopole Broadcasting, doing commercial TV and cable and Internet broadcasting and production and export. Sounds pretty good.”
“Yes,” Fairkeep said. “But Monopole isn’t—”
“Now, Monopole,” Andy said, frowning at his list, “is sixty percent owned by Intimate Communications, and that’s owned eighty percent by Trans-Global Universal Industries, and that’s owned seventy percent by something called SomniTech.”
“My God,” Fairkeep said, sounding faint. “I never worked it out like that.”
“Now, all of these are East Coast companies,” Andy said. “Among them, they’re in oil, communications, munitions, real estate, aircraft engines, and chemistry labs.”
Fairkeep shook his head. “Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?”
Dortmunder said, “Doug, somebody in that mob has to have some cash.”
Fairkeep blinked at him. “Cash?”
“Doug,” Andy said, “we can’t resell an aircraft engine.”
“But there is no cash,” Fairkeep told him. “Per diem for the crew on the road, that’s all.”
“Think about it, Doug,” Dortmunder urged. “Somewhere in all those companies, all those businesses, and a lot of them are overseas, somewhere in all that there’s got to be someplace with cash.”
Shaking his head in absolute assurance, Fairkeep said, “No, there isn’t. I have never seen cash in—” And then he kind
of stuttered, as though he’d just had one of those mini-power outages that makes you reset all your clocks. In a second, less than a second, power was restored, but Fairkeep continued the sentence in a different place. “—Anywhere. It just isn’t done. Even Europe, Asia, all those transactions are wire transfers.”
Dortmunder had seen that little blip, and he was sure Andy had, too. He said, “Well, Doug, will you at least think about it?”
“Oh, sure,” Fairkeep said.
“Good.” Getting to his feet, because the explanation for the power outage would not be found in this room, not today, Dortmunder said, “We’ll be in touch.”
Surprised, Fairkeep said, “Is that it?”
“For today. We’ll get back in touch when we fill out the roster.”
“Oh, the five men, you mean,” Fairkeep said. “But you don’t even know what the robbery is yet, so you don’t know if you’ll need all five.”
Rising from the sofa, Andy said, “Here’s a rule for you, Doug. Never go in with fewer crew than you need.”
8
JUDSON BLINT WAS TIRED of opening envelopes. Oh, sure, every envelope he opened was another check, twenty percent of which would go directly into his own pocket, the easiest money he could ever hope to find, and slitting open envelopes with a very good letter opener was not exactly hard labor, but still. Here he was, at a desk in a seventh-floor office in the Avalon State Bank Tower in midtown Manhattan, slitting open envelope after envelope, scanning into the computer the return addresses, keeping track of the check totals, and even though he knew very well what he was actually doing was mail fraud—in fact, three different mail frauds, as any federal law officer would know at once—there were still some moments, and this was one of them, when what he was doing here just felt like a job.
So here he sat, late on this Wednesday afternoon in April, when spring fever should by all rights have had him in its grip, and still he was making these repetitive movements, with the envelopes and the letter opener and the check piles and the scanner and the pen and the ledger, and if this wasn’t work, Judson wanted to know, then what the hell was it?
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