“I’m glad you brought that up, Doug,” Andy said. “What with romance rearing its head and all—”
“And gun molls,” John said.
“Those too,” Andy agreed. “We were about to forget the whole point of this meeting.”
Doing his best not to show how peeved he was, Doug said, “Oh, there’s a point to it?”
“We want to talk over with you,” Andy said, “the place we’re gonna rob.”
Darlene said, “You’re really gonna rob something?”
“Otherwise,” Doug told her, “it isn’t reality.” Turning to Andy, he said, “You picked something? What, a bank, something like that?”
“Not exactly,” Andy said. “You remember, we talked about, if we took something from one of those corporations up above you, then, if we got caught, it was always just gonna be a gag anyway.”
“I remember,” Doug said. “I feel quite ambivalent about that, if you want to know the truth. But you picked a target for the heist?”
“Knickerbocker Storage,” Andy said.
The name might have rung a bell for Doug in its proper context, but not here. He frowned, thinking this idea seemed like awfully small potatoes for an entire gang of professional crooks, and said, “Storage? You want to break into some storage place? What for?”
John said, “Storage is what people do when they don’t want to throw something away.”
“It’s valuable,” Stan explained, “but they got no use for it right now.”
“People put all kinds of things in storage,” the kid said.
“Gee,” Darlene said, smiling at the kid, “I guess they do. Prom gowns and jewelry and everything.”
“Antique cars,” Andy suggested. “Paintings. Jewelry. Furniture.”
“All right,” Doug said, though reluctantly. “But you’ll have to, uh, case the joint first, be sure there’s stuff in there worth taking. That’s the kind of thing we want to film, you know, all the lead-ups.”
Andy said, “Oh, sure, we’ll take a look ahead of time. We’re not out to get somebody’s old collection of LPs.”
“Videotapes,” the kid said.
“Back issues of Road & Track,” said Stan.
“Dial telephones,” said John.
Andy gave him a look. “You’ve got a dial telephone.”
“Not in storage.”
“All right,” Doug said. “If you go in there to check it out, and it looks like there’s things worth taking, then that’s where you—What do you call it? Pull the heist?”
“The job,” Andy said.
Doug, his irritation over Darlene forgotten, at least for the moment, said, “Really? You call it a job?”
“It’s what we do,” Tiny said.
“All right, fine,” Doug said, accepting the point. “But where exactly is this storage place? You have one in particular in mind?”
“I told you,” Andy said, sounding surprised. “Knickerbocker.”
“In your rehearsal building,” John added. “Down on Varick Street.”
“My—Varick Street? Our own building?”
“That was the idea,” Andy said. “Remember?”
“But—” Dumbfounded, Doug said, “Let me think about this.”
“Take your time,” Andy offered.
Doug stared at his switched-off, but at least still here, television set. The idea of watching a group of burglars doing their burglaries had been amusing and interesting in the abstract, but when it was suddenly a case of watching them burgle from yourself, it was quite something else.
The instinct to say, “Take from those people, not from me,” was a very strong one. But wasn’t it the same, no matter who the victim was? Get Real had stumbled heedlessly into a project of aiding and even encouraging a felony. That these people would be performing their felonies anyway, with or without Get Real’s encouragement, didn’t make it any more right. In fact, if Monopole, the corporate entity that owned the building and also owned Get Real, took the loss in this matter, rather than some innocent bystander, it might even be a moral mitigation, mightn’t it? Mightn’t it?
“They’ll be insured,” Stan told him, to help his thought processes. “Nobody’ll lose a thing.”
“I just can’t do this on my own,” Doug said. “I’ve got to describe it to Babe. I mean, maybe he’ll say we just can’t do anything like that.”
“Here’s the thing,” Stan said. “At first we were thinking about something else. There’s a Chase bank on the corner.”
“There’s a Chase bank on every corner,” Tiny said.
“There’s a Chase bank on this corner,” Stan insisted, “on Varick Street. We thought about it, Doug, because it’d be convenient for your camerapeople and all, but you’d have to do it in the daytime and there’s too much tunnel traffic right outside the door. But this place, this Knickerbocker, we can go in there anytime at night when there’s no traffic at all, we can take a truck or two from downstairs, load them up, zip zip, we’re through the tunnel into Jersey.”
“I can’t say anything about it,” Doug said. “Not till I talk it over with Babe.”
“Back at the start,” Andy said, “you said anytime we didn’t feel comfortable about something, we could call the whole deal off. We won’t feel comfortable unless we hit Knickerbocker Storage.”
“I’ll talk to Babe,” Doug promised. “Tomorrow morning, first thing.”
“Then we shouldn’t keep you hanging around any more,” Andy said, and Stan said, “Leave me a message with my Mom.”
“I will.”
They all trooped out, and it wasn’t until they were well gone that Doug realized Darlene had gone with them.
17
DARLENE DIDN’T BELIEVE they were really serious. This was her third reality show—fourth, if you counted The Stand, though you probably shouldn’t—and in her experience nothing that happened in reality was serious. She’d been a contestant on Build Your Own Beauty Parlor and a survivor on The Zaniest Challenge of the Year! and would have been a fiancée on The Stand if that fellow hadn’t turned out to be all icky, and she had to say that not one of those shows had been any more serious than first love.
This one, that Doug Fairkeep kept calling The Gang’s All Here although apparently he really didn’t want to, would just be more of the same. This “gang” wasn’t going to steal anything. They were just a bunch of guys who could look like bank robbers in some B movie somewhere, that’s all.
Just look at the variety of people inside the “gang”: that was the giveaway. All of these cast-to-type characters, the ugly monster for the “muscle,” the sharpie with the line of patter, the gloomy mastermind, the testy driver, and the innocent youth, that last one so the audience would be able to see it all through his eyes. Everything but a black guy, so maybe you didn’t need a black guy any more.
One good thing about the arrival of the “gang” at Doug’s apartment was that it opened Darlene’s options considerably. She had just reached the point where she’d have to decide if she would go to bed with Doug (a) now, (b) indefinitely later, or (c) never, when circumstances suddenly changed and off she could go for an evening’s mixer with the fellas.
Darlene Looper was a product of North Flatte, Nebraska, a town that had had its peak of population and importance in the 1870s, after the railroad arrived and before the drought arrived. The railroad turned out to be a sometime thing, but the drought was the natural condition of the Great Plains, it being a kind of a joke on the European settlers that they got there in the middle of a rare rainy streak.
All the time Darlene was growing up, North Flatte was getting smaller, until there was nobody left who cared enough to correct the POP. sign on the edge of town, which would apparently read 1,247 forever. (In truth, the comma had moved out a long time ago.)
When your town is too small for a movie theater and your combined regional high school is an hour away by bus and too small to have a football team—much less anybody to play against—you are a deprived
teenager, and there wasn’t a teenager in town who didn’t know it and didn’t dream of the day when the Trailways could take them away to anywhere in the world that wasn’t N. Flatte, Neb.
The first place the Trailways took Darlene was St. Louis, where she got a waitress job at a diner, lost her virginity, had an abortion, and learned how to avoid that sort of thing in the future, by which she didn’t mean abstinence. The waitress job gave her money and independence and leisure to go to the movies a lot, which was already an improvement over North Flatte, where the choices had been television or comic books, and not much of either. The movies taught her that a girl with looks and self-confidence and native wit could do well for herself, at least for a few years, as an actress, and so the Trailways next deposited her in LA.
Where she lucked into an apartment-mate named Bette Betje, a few years older than herself and trying her hand at the same racket, who gave Darlene some invaluable advice. Never do porn; once you enter that ghetto, even the Pope couldn’t get you out. Make sure there are never any naked photos of you anywhere. Never screw more than one man on any job location. Don’t gamble on anything, don’t get a weird haircut, and don’t fall in love.
Following Bette’s rules and her own sense of self-preservation, Darlene did moderately well in LA. She was always going to be soft-bodied, which would prove a problem someday but for now meant she could play younger than herself. At twenty-three, she could still audition for high school roles in commercials and infomercials and lesser horror films, and occasionally get one. Then came reality.
Reality was a revelation to Darlene. It seemed to her it must be very like the way the soap operas used to be, when they were the hottest thing around. Sure you’re all professionals, but nevertheless you’re getting together every day like kids in a barn to put on a show. It’s open-ended, it’s seat-of-the-pants, and it’s fun.
It also, through The Zaniest Challenge of the Year!, brought her to New York and a new roommate, Lauren Hatch, an investigative reporter wannabe, currently a gofer for an online gossip columnist. A skinny, sharp-featured laser-eyed workaholic, Lauren was Darlene’s age but appeared to have no interest in sex of any kind unless it concerned other people and could be spread on the Slopp Report.
The Stand was supposed to have been Darlene’s big break, playing a real-life bride on prime-time television, known and loved by the whole world. Doug had explained to her that the marriage would have to be a legal one, but the fix was in and an annulment would be the easiest thing in the world. All she had to do was swear in court she hadn’t meant it when she said, “I do,” which would be the truth, and there she’d be, single again, with an already guaranteed exclusive on the Slopp Report (a four-hour exclusive) in which she would explain that marriage wasn’t for her, she was wedded to her career.
Well, that hadn’t happened, entirely because Kirby Finch was something that had never been seen in North Flatte, Nebraska, at least not by Darlene, so far as she knew. He was entirely unnatural, Kirby was, and Darlene considered herself well out of it, particularly with the “gang” already in place to give her another chance of a lifetime.
Of course, if she were to hook up with the “gang,” she’d have to hook up with one particular member of it. Group sex could be implied in the world of reality, but not confirmed. Besides, Darlene, who hadn’t tried it, didn’t think she’d like it.
So it kind of came down to the kid and the sharpie, and it wasn’t an easy decision. They were very different, but both were fun, both were quick-witted, both could look appropriate as her escort; at an awards dinner, say.
The question was, which would be right for her, her needs, her future, her image. There was a lot to be said for both of them. Fortunately, she didn’t have to decide right away.
From Doug’s place they walked, not very far, to a bar/restaurant on West Fifty-seventh Street called Armweary’s, a funky dark wood place, pretty full for a Monday night, with waiters who appeared to be waiters and not actors between gigs. The place was loud, but not too loud to hear the people at your table, and Darlene quickly noticed that, while everybody had a lot to say, nobody had anything at all to say about the show they were going to be on or the “robbery” they were going to pretend to commit. All of that seemed to be off-limits somehow, so, even though there was a lot about this crowd and their series she would love to know, she was smart enough not to push the envelope.
They all chipped in to buy her dinner, which was sweet. Then it was time to go, and out on the sidewalk, while she was preparing herself to say it had been a wonderful evening but she was really tired right now, all the others were telling one another so long and planning when they would meet again.
The kid did finally turn to her and say, “How do you get home?”
“Oh, I just walk up to Seventy-sixth Street,” she said. “It’s nothing, I do it all the time.”
“Oh, okay,” he said, and everybody took off, in various directions.
Walking up Broadway, Darlene found herself brooding over the fact that not one of them had even tried to come home with her. She hadn’t wanted any of them to, but still.
Awful thought. They weren’t all Kirbys, were they?
18
BABE TUCK SAID, “You agreed to what” “Well, we didn’t exactly agree,” Doug said, seated across the pockmarked old wooden desk Babe had brought with him from his foreign correspondent days. “Andy just suggested, if we could find a target from inside our own corporation, then, if something went wrong, we could all claim it was never going to be a real robbery anyway.”
“But we want a real robbery,” Babe pointed out. “That’s the whole idea. Reality on the edge.”
“I think they’re a little insecure,” Doug said. “They’re not used to doing a burglary with cameras pointed at them.”
“You told them we’d cover their asses? Halo their heads? Alter their voices?”
“They know all that,” Doug agreed. “It’s just, I think, it’s just all a little too strange. They want some kind of reassurance.”
“An escape hatch,” Babe suggested.
“Exactly.”
“I can under stand that,” Babe said. “There’ve been times when I wouldn’t have minded an escape hatch myself.”
“So in theory,” Doug said, “it’s not an idea we’d reject out of hand.”
“A little strange to steal from yourself,” Babe said, and shrugged. “But I suppose the network could stand it. Might even be something salutary in it.”
Politely, Doug said, “Salutary?”
“See our own vulnerabilities from the outside,” Babe explained. “Find out where we need to shore up our defenses. So they’ve picked some underbelly of ours, have they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What?”
Doug seemed reluctant to speak, and then he said, “Sir, before that, let me—”
“You’re calling me sir a lot,” Babe said, not as though he liked it.
“Am I?” Doug could be seen to replay his mental tape. “Oh, yeah, I guess I am. I guess I’m nervous.”
“About what, Doug?”
“First, si—Babe, let me say we agreed at the beginning, if anything ever made them uncomfortable, they didn’t have to do it.”
“Of course.”
“They now say it’s this target, or they’re not gonna be comfortable.”
“Then,” Babe said, “you’d really better tell me the target.”
“The storage facility on Varick Street.”
“The—Varick Street?”
“They say they wanted a place in that neighborhood to make the filming easier,” Doug explained. “There’s a Chase bank on the corner—”
“Of course there is.”
“They say they considered doing that,” Doug said, “but they’d have to do it in the daytime, and there’s too much tunnel traffic out front, and they’d never get away. So they decided to go with the storage facility in our building.”
“On Varick Street.”<
br />
“It’s called Knickerbocker Storage.”
“I know what it’s called,” Babe said.
“They say the losses will be covered by insurance, and that’s true, so that should make it even easier for us to say yes.”
“Doug, Doug, Doug.”
Doug said, “I know. Babe, I thought about this, and thought about it, and we’ve got a double problem here.”
“How so?”
“If we say yes,” Doug said, “we’re exposing ourselves in ways we can’t even be sure of. But if we say no, if we scrub the whole operation, Babe, what do we tell them is our reason?”
“We don’t want to do it,” Babe said. “We don’t have to give reasons.”
“Babe,” Doug said, “these are professional burglars. They can smell profit around corners. If we say no, not that place, you can hit anywhere else in our whole corporate structure, but you can’t do anything to Varick Street, they’re going to wonder why.”
“Let them wonder.”
“Babe,” Doug said, “I live in an apartment in a new high-tech building. My door has a hotel-type card instead of a key.” He took it from his shirt pocket to show it. “We’ve got doormen, closed-circuit TV. Those guys have taken to dropping by my apartment.”
“They have?”
“They just walk in, don’t ask me how. They don’t raise a sweat, and they don’t leave a mark.”
Babe frowned over this. “What you’re saying is, if we say no to the specific after we already said yes to the general, they’re going to be curious.”
“And they have a capacity to satisfy their curiosity.”
Babe nodded. “So, do you want to give them the go-ahead?”
“I don’t know what I want,” Doug said. “Either we give them the green light and hope for the best, or we find some reason to say no, some reason that doesn’t have them wandering around Varick Street just to see what’s what.”
“And you don’t have that reason.”
“No, sir.”
Babe made a face. “There’s that sir again. You know, Doug, any reason we give them is going to make them curious. And if they walk off the series, if they’re out of our lives, there’s no motivation for them to not move in to Varick Street and try to find out just what we were keeping to ourselves.”
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