Get Real (12 page)

“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.

H
AVING 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 to 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.

“I see,” Doug said, and handed the
Playbill
back. “Thanks.”

Pocketing the
Playbill,
Harbach said, “I get the idea this is something a little different here.”

“To begin with,” Doug said, “it’s a reality show.”

Harbach smiled with the self-confidence of a man who will never run out of small parts to pay the rent. “Then what do you
need me for?”

Babe said, “The fact is, it’s a reality show with a difference. Explain it, Doug.”

“We will follow,” Doug said, “a group of professional robbers as they plan and execute an actual robbery.”

Harbach cocked a large head. “An
actual
robbery?”

“Not entirely,” Babe said.

Doug said, “Babe, if they don’t do it, what’s the show
about?
”

“I understand that, Doug,” Babe said, “which is why we’re going along with the target, even with the additional complications.”
To Harbach he said, “Get Real has corporate owners, and one of the thieves came up with the idea, if they chose a target that
was owned within the umbrella corporation, it would give them a fallback position if the police happened to get involved.”

Harbach nodded. “I get it. Pretend it was never gonna be real.”

“Right.” Babe made a little fatalistic shrug gesture he’d learned many years ago in the Orient. “Unfortunately, the target
they chose is a sensitive one, for reasons we don’t want them to know about.”

Harbach did his own shrug. “Tell them to pick something else.”

Doug said, “Then they’ll know we’re hiding something, and they’ll want to know what it is, and we don’t want them curious
because we
are
hiding something.”

Harbach looked interested. “Oh, yeah? What?”

Babe said, “We’re hiding it from you, too. That way, if they start to think something’s going on, you won’t know what it is,
but you’ll be right in there with them, you’ll know what they’re thinking, and you can pass it on to us.”

“So I’m the mole.” Harbach didn’t seem to mind that.

“The reason we cast you,” Babe said, “we were looking for a guy who’s a good solid actor, good credits, good rep, but also
has some little dodgy elements in his past.”

“Oh, come on,” Harbach said. “I had a few wild times in my youth, but that was over long ago.”

Doug said, “Ever do time?”

Harbach was appalled. “
Prison?
My God, no!”

Babe said to Doug, “What Ray has is just enough of a background to make him plausible for our group.”

Harbach said, “You know, I don’t emphasize that stuff on my résumé.”

“This time,” Babe told him, “you need to. We want the gang to accept you as one of them.”

Doug said, “Babe, why are we adding him to the show? I mean, I know why we are, to have a spy inside the gang, but what do
we tell
them
is the reason?”

“They are experts,” Babe said, “at crime. Ray here is an expert at acting in front of a camera, at selling a scene. He’ll
be able to coach them, help them be more realistically what they already are.”

Harbach said, “I’m gonna need legal protection here, if this is gonna lead to an actual robbery.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Babe told him. “Legal’s putting together a contract addendum now, explaining what you’re doing and why you’re
doing it. We’ll get it to your agent this afternoon.”

“That sounds good,” Harbach said. “When do I meet this gang?”

Doug said, “Our sets are about ready. I was gonna call them this afternoon to make a first run-through tomorrow.” To Babe
he said, “They don’t like it if you call them in the morning.”

Harbach laughed. “Already,” he said, “they sound like actors.”

T
HIS WAS PROBABLY
the most exciting day of Marcy’s life. She’d been working for Get Real only four months now, and
The Crime Show
was only her second reality series, and it was so
much
more interesting than
The Stand,
which was, after all, finally only about a family selling vegetables beside the road. But
The Crime Show
! Real criminals committing a real crime, right there in front of your eyes! In front of her eyes.

Yes, Doug had given her the assignment: she was the designated production assistant on
The Crime Show.
Therefore, late Friday morning, her shoulder bag so loaded down with documents she was bent almost double, so she looked
like the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s little sister, she joined Doug and Get Real’s personnel director, a dour skinny nearly
hairless man named Quigg, in a cab from the Get Real offices in midtown down to the company’s building on Varick Street, a
place about which she’d heard vaguely from time to time, but before this had never actually seen.

And which was not that impressive, once she did lay eyes on it. Some kind of warehouse thing, apparently, on a commercial
street with an awful lot of one-way traffic headed south.

“We’ll be the first, so we’ll go in this way,” Doug said, unlocking and opening the graffiti-scarred metal front door, but
what other way would you go in? Through the graffiti-scarred garage door over there to the right?

Maybe so; the three entered a space like a very crowded parking garage and Doug, saying, “We’ll have to take the elevator
up,” switched on overhead fluorescent lights and led them a zigzag path through all the parked vehicles to a big open rectangle,
like a rough-wood dance floor.

But once they were all there, he pushed a button on a control panel on the front wall and suddenly the floor jolted upward!
Marcy was so startled she wrapped both arms around her shoulder bag, as though it could help her stay upright, and gaped without
comprehension as floor after floor went by.

There. It stopped, at a level with almost no walls, no sensible rooms, just odd pieces of furniture here and there, and Doug
said, “The sets are one flight up, but we’ll be more comfortable down here for the paperwork.”

“I’ll need a table,” Quigg said, stepping off the platform elevator with a sniff, looking around as though he wanted to fight
with somebody.

“Everything’s here,” Doug assured him. “Just pick what you want and push it all together.” Turning back to Marcy, he said,
“Come on, you can put your stuff over here.”

She followed him, saying, “Doug? What is this place?”

“This is where we build the sets,” he told her. “Upstairs is the rehearsal space.”

“And downstairs?”

He shrugged. “Businesses. Tenants. Nothing to do with us.”

Off to the right were a dining room table and half a dozen accompanying chairs, in light maple, furniture in some old-fashioned
style, the cushioned seats shabby and peeling. But it was all solid, with good working space on the table, so Marcy dumped
her shoulder bag there with a thud, like a body thrown out a window.

Doug said to Quigg, who’d barely moved, but stood in one place looking disapproving, “Sam? Use the same table as Marcy, you’ve
both got to process these people.”

So Marcy and Quigg shared the table, though not much else, and Doug wandered around, whistling behind his teeth. “This is
a very interesting moment, boys and girls,” he said, looking at the floor as he paced. “The beginning of the new adventure.”

Marcy thought, are Quigg and I boys and girls? But then a loud ringing sound came from downstairs and Doug looked startled,
then consulted his watch and grinned. “They’re early,” he said, “but we were earlier. You two sit tight.” And he walked back
to the elevator, pushed the button, and descended in a great cone of noise.