Get Real (11 page)

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

A
W
EDNESDAY 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.