Doug said, “That’s why I wanted to come directly to you first thing this morning.”
“Thanks,” Babe said, with some ironic emphasis. Brooding across his office, past the tattered and bloodstained and smoke-smeared mementos of a long life reporting from the edge, he said, “If we say yes, then it’s only Knickerbocker Storage they’d be after? Only the—what is it—third floor?”
“Well, the first floor, too,” Doug told him. “They’ll need to steal some vehicles to put the stolen goods into.”
“Oh, of course,” Babe said. “Silly of me not to think of that. But if we said yes, could you keep them to just those two floors?”
“I think so,” Doug said. “I’m pretty sure I could.”
“Not by telling them, ‘Don’t think of a blue elephant.’”
“No, no, I know better than that. I wouldn’t even mention the second floor.” Doug leaned forward, pretended to consult a clipboard, and said, “Now, for our camera crews, you’re gonna need footage on the third floor, and footage on the first floor, and footage out front, coming and going. That’s really all you need.”
“Good,” Babe said.
Putting the imaginary clipboard onto his lap, Doug leaned back and said, “You know, there might be a kind of silver lining in all this.”
“Shoot it to me at once,” Babe said.
“Inside the company,” Doug said, “there are rumors and questions sometimes, you know that.”
“Of course,” Babe said. “That’s true in any large organization.”
“Some of those rumors have centered on Varick Street.”
“Which is very bad,” Babe said, “We really don’t want people wondering about Varick Street. I’ve wished there was a way to get everybody to think about something el se.”
“Well, if we pull off The Gang’s All Here,” Doug said, “and stage a robbery in that same building, nobody will believe for a minute there’s anything else going on in Varick Street.”
Babe, for the first time in the conversation, smiled. “If we could bring that off,” he said, and shrugged. “Well, we’d have to bring it off.”
“Scary,” Doug said.
“Scary we eat for breakfast,” Babe told him. Suddenly decisive, he said, “Green-light it.”
“Thanks, Babe.”
Doug got to his feet, the imaginary clipboard falling to the floor, and Babe said, “Oh, by the way.”
“Yes?”
Babe shook his head. “I don’t like that title.”
19
A WEDNESDAY NIGHT, just one week since the organizational meeting at the OJ, and Dortmunder and Kelp were walking, not for the first time in their lives, on a roof. It was the roof of the GR Development building, sixty feet above Varick Street, and out around them the night was well advanced, it now being not quite four in the morning.
It was a cloudy night, not cold, and not particularly dark. The city generates its own illumination, and on cloudy nights that glow is reflected down onto the streets and parks and rooftops, for a soft Impressionist cityscape.
Dortmunder and Kelp, dressed in dark grays to blend into the prevailing color scheme, walked the roof above Varick Street and looked around to see what they could see. The building they stood on was flanked by two much larger, taller, heftier structures extending both ways to the corner. To the north was the stone pile containing the Chase bank at basement level and street level and one level up. From the look of the many sentry lights visible in the upper windows, most of the tenants above Chase had also thought long and hard about the issue of security.
To the south, the other building’s ground floor housed a restaurant supply wholesaler, whose strategy in the realm of security lighting was one illuminated wall clock at the rear of the showroom, in the pink glow of which were tumbled all the fast-food counters, bartops, banquettes, ovens, walk-in freezers, and wooden cases of dinnerware recently collected from enterprises that had unfortunately stumbled into nonexistence and whose gear was now awaiting the next hopeful entrepreneur with a certified check in his pocket. The floors above this bric-a-brac were uniformly dark except for the red neon EXIT sign the fire code requires at every level.
That had been Dortmunder and Kelp’s route in. A low-security door on the side street, leading to the woks and barstools, had given them easy access to the building and then its stairwell and eventually the sixth-floor office of an olive oil importer through whose window they had stepped to get here on the roof.
There were several protuberances on this roof, and all were of interest, but the most interesting of all was the three-foot-by-five-foot cinder-block box, seven feet tall, in the left rear corner. This would be the terminus of the iron staircase that zigzagged up the interior. Inside that gray metal door would be the top of that staircase, and down that staircase would be GR Development, and then Scenery Stars, and then Knickerbocker Storage, and then, last but far from least, Combined Tool.
While Dortmunder held a shrouded flashlight to marginally increase the illumination, Kelp studied the staircase door, bending over it, squinting at it, not quite touching it. “It’s got an alarm on it,” he decided.
“We knew that,” Dortmunder said.
“It looks like it’s connected to a phone line,” Kelp said. “So it won’t make a lotta noise right around here.”
“That’s good.”
“It’ll do something somewhere, though. Lemme see what we can do here.”
While Kelp continued to study the problem before him, Dortmunder braced his wrist against the doorjamb to keep his light beam steady while he studied the world around them. Although he saw many lit windows in the wall above the Chase bank, it didn’t appear to him that any of those rooms were currently occupied. The windows in the wall down the other way were dark, and the buildings across Varick Street were too far away to matter, so it seemed to Dortmunder they were unobserved at this moment and would be likely to go on being unobserved anytime they happened to come up here at three-thirty in the morning. It was a reassuring thought.
While he was thinking, Kelp was taking from one of his many pockets a short length of wire bounded at each end by an alligator clip. The first clip he attached quickly to a bolt head jutting from the door just above the lock and handle. Then he thought a while before attaching the other to a screw head on the door frame. Nodding in agreement with himself, he took another wire from another pocket, this one with an earphone at one end and what looked like a stethoscope at the other. Earphone into his ear, he listened at a wire on the door, then said, “Listen to this.”
Dortmunder took the thingy and listened at the same wire. “It’s a little hum.”
“That’s right. If it stops humming when I cut this here, we go.”
“Gotcha.”
Dortmunder listened intently. Kelp watched intently, clipper in hand, and snipped a wire.
“Still humming.”
“We like that,” Kelp said.
Now Kelp worked with more confidence. The alarm wires led to a metal plate on the door that extended beyond the edge of the door to its metal frame. If the door were opened, the plate would lose contact with the frame and sound the alarm, somewhere, to somebody.
As Dortmunder stepped back to give him room, Kelp loosened the plate and turned it so its contact was only with the metal door. The ends of the wire he’d snipped he bent back and stuck to the door with bits of nonreflecting electrical tape. He studied what he’d done, then nodded and said, “Listen some more.”
“Right. Still humming.”
“If it stops, we’re outa here.”
“You bet.”
Kelp turned his attention to the lock on the door. Needle-nose pliers and a thin metal plate came from more of Kelp’s pockets. The faint humming in Dortmunder’s ear was really very soothing, and then the door eased open, outward. Kelp cocked an eye at Dortmunder, who, ear to earphone and stethoscope to wire, had moved with the door.
Dortmunder nodded. “Humming.”
“We�
�re done.”
Kelp pocketed his equipment and then, by Dortmunder’s muffled flashlight, they went down the iron stairs, closing the roof door behind themselves. At the bottom of that flight, GR Development, they started confidently forward and then abruptly stopped.
“It’s different,” Kelp said.
“It’s all walls or something,” Dortmunder said, shining the light around.
“We need more light,” Kelp decided.
Guided by the stone side building wall, they worked their way around the newly obstructed space until they came across light switches, which turned on glaring overhead fluorescents, and in that light they could see these several pieces of walls, all eight or ten feet high, rough wood or canvas, propped up with angled two-by-fours nailed into the floor.
“It’s like a set,” Kelp said.
“From the wrong side,” Dortmunder said. “Is there a way in?”
There was. Around the rough unfinished wall they came to an opening, and now they could see that what had been built was a broad but shallow three-walled room without a ceiling. A dark wood bar, a little beat-up, stretched along the back wall, on which were mounted beer posters and mirrors that had been smeared with something that looked like soap, so they wouldn’t reflect. A jumble of bottles filled the back bar, plus a cash register at the right end. Barstools in a row looked as though they’d come directly from the wholesale restaurant supply place next door, and so did the two tables and eight chairs in the grouping in front of the bar. At the right end of the bar stood two pinball machines, and at the left end a doorway into darkness.
Kelp, in wonder, said, “It’s the OJ.”
“Well, it isn’t the OJ,” Dortmunder said.
“No, I know it isn’t,” Kelp said, “but that’s what they’re going for.”
“Pinball machines?”
“I know what Doug would say,” Kelp told him. “Visual interest.”
“You can’t talk next to a pinball machine.”
“They won’t have pinball machines in the back room,” Kelp said.
“Let’s take a look at it.”
But the space at the left end of the bar didn’t lead to anything but a canvas wall painted a flat black. Standing in front of it, they looked at one another and Kelp said, “It’s gonna be some of these other walls.”
It was. Out of the stubby bar set and down to the right they found two parallel walls propped up to look something like the hall at the OJ, except twice as wide and many times cleaner. Instead of the catchall onetime phone booth there was a many-shelved wooden hutch piled with neat stacks of tablecloths and napkins. There were two doors on the left side, marked DOGGIES with a cartoon dog in a cardigan smoking a pipe and KITTIES with a cartoon slinky cat in a long tight black gown smoking a cigarette with a long holder. Also, the doors didn’t open.
The door at the end of the hall did open, but didn’t lead anywhere, and particularly didn’t lead to the back room. That they found in another quadrant of the rehearsal space with two of its walls propped on dollies so they could be rolled forward and back to accommodate a camera. The table was the right shape, round, and the chairs were the right era, old, but there were no liquor cartons stacked up in front of the cream-painted walls.
“No boxes,” Dortmunder commented.
“Probly,” Kelp said, “it makes it too busy behind people’s heads when they’re filming.”
“Probly.”
Dortmunder sat at the table, automatically taking the chair that faced the open door. The hanging light was a little too high and a little too clean and it didn’t have a bulb in it. “You know what I feel like,” he said.
“No,” Kelp said, interested. “What?”
“One of those guys fakes an autobiography,” Dortmunder said. He gestured at the table, the chairs, the walls. “We haven’t done anything and already this is a lie.”
“We aren’t in this for an autobiography,” Kelp reminded him. “We’re in it for the twenty G.”
“And the per diem.”
“And the per diem.”
Dortmunder got to his feet. “Anything else around here?”
There wasn’t; at least, not of interest to them. So they switched off all the fluorescent lights and, by Dortmunder’s blurred flashlight beam, went on down one flight to Scenery Stars, where there was nothing that caught their eye, except, on a table, scattered photos of the real OJ and the real Rollo in profile and the real sidewalk outside.
Dortmunder said, “I hope Rollo didn’t see them take that.”
“No, it looks okay,” Kelp said. “But even so, those guys could pass for tourists.”
“Easily.”
On down they went to Knickerbocker Storage, the “target” of their robbery, where two security cameras were installed at opposite ends of the hall where they hadn’t been before. Their view was down along the line of closed storage spaces toward one another. They didn’t appear to be operating.
“Looks like they’re giving us a little extra work,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder glowered. “I don’t need that.”
“We’ll talk to them.”
“Not right away. We don’t want them to know we’ve been here.”
“When we come back,” Kelp said, “to see their idea of the OJ, to get a little tour, we’ll be very surprised on the way up. ‘Oh, cameras!’”
“No cameras would be better,” Dortmunder said.
Kelp said, “Well, let’s see what other surprises they got for us.”
They went on down the next two flights, skipping past Combined Tool because they knew there was nothing they could do about that now. On the ground floor, among the automobile menagerie, they skirted the corners of the building and found the main electric service, which someday they might want to interrupt, in a large black metal box in the left rear corner, under the stairs.
Next to this service box, almost impossible to see, was another find, a gray metal fire door, blocked by a few cardboard cartons and a couple of spare tires. They cleared it, Kelp did his stethoscope trick, and they found that this door too was alarmed. They used the same methods to de-claw it, and stepped outside, not having to move the boxes and tires because the door opened outward.
This was a cul-de-sac, a completely enclosed space blocked by the inner walls of buildings on all four sides, each of them with a fire door for access. Looking up by the very uncertain light back here, not wanting to chance a flashlight out here, they could see one small window on the left at each story, which must be for the bathrooms. There were no bars over the second-story window.
Dortmunder nodded at that window. “I bet that isn’t as easy as it looks.”
“You know it.”
They went back inside, made sure their changes to the door didn’t show, and made their way through automotive world to stand on the platform of the elevator and look up at the second floor opening.
“We can’t unalarm the elevator,” Kelp said.
“I know.” Dortmunder waved the flashlight beam along the floor edge above them. “Next time we come here,” he said, “we’ll have to bring a ladder. Either to go up through here or out to that window.”
“We can stash it out there.”
“Good.”
Stepping off the elevator platform, Kelp said, “Okay, we’re done for tonight. What do you think, should we bring Stan a car?”
“All the way to Canarsie?”
“I guess not.”
So they climbed the stairs back to the roof and headed for the olive oil importer’s exit, leaving the GR Development building as ready as a Thanksgiving turkey at noon.
20
HAVING BEEN SUMMONED to Babe Tuck’s office Thursday morning, Doug arrived to find a very dapper fortyish man with a large brushy-haired head and a wide op art necktie seated in one of the big leather chairs facing Babe’s beat-up desk. This fellow stood as Doug entered the room, as did Babe on the other side of the desk, and the new man turned out to be very short, out of proportion t
o both the large head and the neon necktie. Doug guessed at once that he was an actor.
Babe made the introductions: “Doug Fairkeep, producer of The Crime Show, this is—”
Doug said, “The Crime Show?”
“Temporary title,” Babe told him.
“I’ll think about it.”
“This is,” Babe insisted, “Ray Harbach. With your agreement, I think I want to add him to the show.”
Surprised, Doug said, “As the bartender?”
“No, one of the gang.”
Now Doug frowned, deeply. “Babe, I don’t know,” he said. “They’re pretty much a unit.”
“I feel,” Babe said, “what with one thing and another, we need eyes and ears inside the gang. You know what I mean. We don’t want any surprises, Doug.”
“No, I don’t suppose so.”
“We deliver surprises,” Babe told him. “We don’t collect them.” Gesturing at the chairs, he said, “Come on, at least let’s get comfortable.”
As they all sat, Ray Harbach took a small magazine from his jacket pocket and extended it toward Doug, saying, “I thought, to introduce myself, I’d show you my bio from my last Playbill.” He had a deeply resonant voice, as though speaking from a wine cellar. “We write those ourselves, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
Ray Harbach had left the Playbill conveniently folded open to the page with his bio, which was fifth among the cast, and which read:
RAY HARBACH (Dippo) is pleased to be back in the Excelsior Theater, where he appeared three seasons ago as Kalmar in the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Other theater roles have included work by Mamet, Shaw, Osborne, and Orton. Film: Ocean’s 12; Rollerball. Television: The New Adventures of the Virgin Mary and the Seven Dwarfs at the North Pole; The Sopranos; One Life to Live; Sesame Street. I want to dedicate this production to my father, Hank.
Get Real Page 9
