Get Real (26 page)

The kid, out of breath, barreled into the room and shoved the lamp out of the way of the door. “You have a gun,” he told Kelp.

“I know that,” Kelp said. “Come on, I don’t wanna leave him alone.”

So they trooped through a few more rooms, all as tasteful and anonymous as the living room and all, being interior rooms,
comfortably air-conditioned. Dortmunder went second into the kitchen, following Kelp, and there on the floor, as advertised,
was one of the largest Asian men he’d ever seen. Not in the Tiny league, but big enough so you wouldn’t want to argue with
him.

Dortmunder noticed the frying pan on the wooden island in the middle of the room and said, “You hit him with that.”

“Right.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yeah,” Kelp said. “I checked. I figure he’ll be out for a while.”

“So we should find the money,” Tiny said, “and go.”

“It’ll be in some sort of safe,” Dortmunder said, “disguised as something else.” Looking around, he said, “I think it’ll be
in the kitchen.”

Nobody else liked that idea. Tiny said, “Why?”

“Because,” Dortmunder told him, “everybody will think it’s in the bedroom.”

“
I
think it’s in the bedroom,” Tiny said. “So I’ll look in there, and you can look around at this kitchen here all you want.”

“Thank you.”

“And,” Tiny said, “you two guys look around the rest of the place.”

“I kind of like that living room,” Kelp said.

“I have no opinion,” the kid said, “so I’ll just look around.”

So the three of them left Dortmunder with the unconscious Asian. He considered the man. Find something to tie him up? No;
the guy seemed really out, and the quicker they found the cash and got out of here the better. So, merely glancing from time
to time at his silent companion, to be sure nothing had changed over there, Dortmunder considered the room.

It was a well-appointed kitchen. A wide double sink, with doors beneath fronting stored cleaning products. A big refrigerator,
with two doors above, freezer on the bottom A big six-burner gas stove with two ovens beneath, both of them really ovens.
Two dishwashers, one large and one small, next to one another. Cabinets mounted on the walls above the counter, and more cabinets
under the counter. A broom closet, full of brooms.

Dortmunder opened all the cabinet doors, and behind every one of them was a cabinet, most of them less than half full, a couple
empty.

The island was a rectangular wooden block on wheels. He moved it to the side and studied the tile floor under it, and it was
nothing but a tile floor. He opened both dishwashers and they were both dishwashers.

Had he been wrong? He’d just believed that people wanting to conceal a safe in this apartment would use the kitchen. It was
little more than a matter of faith, but it was a faith he didn’t want to give up.

He checked everything again. All the cabinets were cabinets, none with a false back. Refrigerator refrigerator. Freezer freezer.
Dishwashers dishwashers. Stove stove. Broom closet broom closet.

Wait a minute. He opened both dishwashers for a third time, and this time he pulled out the top racks of both, and the top
rack of the smaller dishwasher was only half as deep as the other.

Aha. He closed both dishwashers, tugged on the front of the smaller one, and nothing happened. He studied the controls on
the front of the thing. One control turned it on and off, the other two dealt with the length and purpose of the cleaning
cycles. Leaving the on/off off, he turned each of the other two controls forward and back, slowly, bent over the counter,
listening very hard.

There. A satisfying little
click.

Now he tugged on the front of the machine and it rolled out into the room, trailing wires and flexible pipe. And behind it,
across the rear half of the space, was the front wall of the safe. A dial in the middle of that square face asked him if he
knew the combination.

Not yet, but don’t go away.

Dortmunder left the kitchen, moved through the apartment, and found the kid in the very soothing pastel-colored dining room,
turning the large heavy dining room chairs one at a time upside down, staring at all those identical bottoms, and putting
them back.

When Dortmunder walked in, the kid looked at him, maintaining his stoop, and Dortmunder said, “Get everybody. I found it.
In the kitchen.”

He didn’t even bother to gloat.

N
OW THEY ALL
deferred to Kelp. Seated cross-legged on the floor in front of the safe, the displaced dishwasher next to his left elbow,
he removed various small tools from here and there in his jacket and arrayed them on the floor in front of himself.

Dortmunder said, “You know this kinda safe?”

“I would say,” Kelp said, “the conversion in here was about fifteen years ago. That’s when this kind of safe was popular.
Well, it’s still popular with me.”

“Can you get in without leaving any marks?”

“It’ll take a little longer that way, but sure. How come?”

“Let’s see what’s in there.”

So Kelp donned his stethoscope, ooched himself a little further in under the counter, and, while pressing the stethoscope
to the face of the safe, began slowly to turn the combination dial.

Clong.
They all turned to look, and Tiny was putting the frying pan back on the island. “He was stirring,” he said.

“He shouldn’t have done that,” Dortmunder said.

“Quiet,” Kelp said.

So they shut up and watched, and Kelp painstakingly did his turns and his listenings, then ooched back out from under the
counter and said, “I think so. Let’s see.”

A handle stood to the left of the dial. Kelp grasped it and turned it down to the right, and the safe said
chack,
and yawned open.

“There we go.” Kelp sounded pleased, but not full of himself.

“Nice job,” Dortmunder said.

They all stooped to look in at the metal box, which was three-quarters full of greenbacks. They were all neatly banded into
stacks, but the pile of stacks was thrown in there every which way, making it hard to get a sense of what they had.

“They’re pretty messy, these guys,” the kid said.

Dortmunder said, “When Doug described them, I thought they wouldn’t be people to clean up after themselves a lot. Andy, what
are they? Hundreds?”

Kelp reached in to root around among the stacks. “A lot of hundreds,” he said. “Some fifties. Some twenties.”

Tiny said, “Dortmunder, you have something in mind.”

Dortmunder said, “We take half of it.”

Nobody could believe that. Tiny said, “All that cash, and we leave half of it?”

“They don’t know how much they’ve got in there,” Dortmunder said. “Andy didn’t mess up their safe. We were always gonna put
that window back together anyway, so we do that. We take half, we put everything back the way it was, and there’s no sign
anybody was ever here except a little glass cutter line on the window nobody’s ever gonna notice and the bump on that guy’s
head.”

“Two bumps,” said Tiny. “Three, if he stirs again.”

Kelp said, “Your idea is, they don’t know we found the money, so nobody’s after us for anything.”

“And,” Dortmunder said, “we can still collect the other money from the reality people.”

“I like this,” Kelp said.

“Just a second,” Dortmunder said, and turned to the under-counter cabinets, where he’d seen a clump of supermarket plastic
bags. He took out four, doubled them for more strength, and passed them to Kelp. “Take most of the hundreds,” he said, “a
lot of the fifties, and some of the twenties. Leave it still looking kinda full and very messy.”

“You know,” Kelp said, “I’m getting a little cramped under here.”

“I’ll do it,” the kid said.

“Good.”

Tiny lifted Kelp to his feet by his armpits. As the kid got into position to transfer bundles of cash to the plastic bags,
Kelp said, “If we’re gonna go ahead and finish the reality thing and take stuff out of the storage rooms, I’ve been thinking,
I might have a guy to take it all off our hands.”

Dortmunder said, “What kinda guy is this?”

“He does big box stores full of crap,” Kelp said. “He can always take a consignment.”

“What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have a name, that anybody knows. He’s called My Nephew.”

“I’ve heard of this guy,” Tiny said. “He’s not somebody you ask to hold your coat.”

“That’s true,” Kelp said. “On the other hand, he doesn’t pay by check.”

“How’s that look?” the kid said.

On the floor beside him now, the two pairs of plastic bags bulged with cash. The interior of the safe, depleted, still contained
a lot of cash, messily arranged.

“Good,” Dortmunder said. Slowly, he smiled. “You know,” he said, “every once in a while, things work out. Not exactly the
way you thought they would, but still, they work out. Not bad.”

When they counted it all later that night in Dortmunder’s living room, counting it quietly because May was asleep elsewhere
in the apartment, the total came to 162,450 dollars. After some quick computations, the kid informed them this meant 32,490
dollars apiece.

Definitely, a profitable evening on Varick Street. “I begin to believe,” Dortmunder said, “that a jinx that has dogged my
days for a long long time has finally broken.” And, for the second time in one day, he smiled.

D
OUG’S HORRIBLE
W
EDNESDAY
actually started pretty well. Marcy and the gang were adding story complications down on Varick Street, the other production
assistants, Josh and Edna, were working under an open assignment to come up with other reality subject matter, the debacle
that had been
The Stand
was now filed and forgotten, and the only reason to come into the midtown office at all was that’s where he was expected
to be. Also, although he would never have admitted it to anybody, he had the irrational but obsessive conviction that during
the daylight hours the apartment was haunted, by people who had lost their jobs.

He was reading Josh and Edna’s latest bad ideas—but they were trying—a little after eleven that morning when Lueen stuck her
sardonic head into his office doorway to say, “Your master’s voice.”

“I serve no master but my art,” Doug told her, but went off to see what Babe wanted.

Babe wasn’t alone in the room. Seated facing him across the desk, back to the door, was someone Doug initially took to be
a Sikh in a white turban. Babe nodded toward Doug and said to this gentleman, “Here’s Doug Fairkeep now.”

The man uncurled in a savage rising spin to his feet, shoulders hunched, fists clenched, the face he now showed Doug convulsive
with rage. He’s not going to punch me, Doug thought in terror, he’s going to turn me into an oil spill.

Then the man’s implacable forward momentum abruptly disappeared, like smoke, and he rocked back on his heels, opening his
hands as he said, “That is not him.”

Babe said, “That is Doug Fairkeep.”

“He lied.”

“The man last night, you mean. That’s what I assumed.”

First clearing his throat to be sure he still had a voice, Doug said, “Babe? What is this?” And he now could see that the
man was not a Sikh in a turban but some sort of Asiatic in a thick bandage around his head.

“Mr. Mg was staying on Varick Street last night,” Babe said.

“Asleep,” accused Mr. Mg. He was still very angry at
somebody.

“A man who apparently didn’t know Mr. Mg was there,” Babe went on, “came in, turned on the light, said he was Doug Fairkeep
and that he sometimes slept there when he missed his last train and—”

“Never,” Doug said. “Never any of it.”

“I know that, Doug.”

“Never slept there. Never went in there on my own. Never take trains anywhere.”

“Hit me with piece of iron,” Mr. Mg said.

Babe said, “Mr. Mg was treated in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s this morning, then came up here to tell us about it.”

Doug said, “How’d he get in?”

“He did not break in,” Mr. Mg said.

“Doug,” Babe said, “that’s the part I don’t get. Whoever this was, he has a way to get into Combined Tool without forcing
anything.”

“Babe,” Doug said, “
I
can’t do that. You’re the only one I know can do that.”

“Well, Mr. Mg as well,” Babe said. “Some other of our overseas associates.”

I just told the gang about these Asians, Doug thought. He said, “Babe, do you think it was
The Heist
gang?”

“Of course I do,” Babe said. “But how could they pull that off? You tell me.”

“I can’t,” Doug said. “What’d they get?”

“Nothing,” Babe said.

“I looked carefully,” Mr. Mg said. “Nothing is gone. The money I put in my suitcase earlier, still there.”

Doug said, “And the, uh…”

“The safe?” Babe shook his head. “If they did look for it, they didn’t find it.”

“I examined,” Mr. Mg said. “Not touched.”

“Well, that’s good, at least,” Doug said, and it was, because if they’d gotten the money Babe would have hounded them all,
made their lives a living hell. Then he had another thought and said, “Was it reported to the police?”

“Nothing to report,” Babe said, “Nothing taken, no breaking and entering.”

“I do not talk with police,” Mr. Mg said.

Doug asked him, “What did you say in the emergency room?”

“Fall in shower. Twice.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Mg, I really am, but there’s nothing I can do. Babe, is there anything I can do?”

“No, that’s all right,” Babe said. “Mr. Mg just needed to see you, that’s all.”

“Well, here I am,” Doug said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Mg. Safe flight.”

He turned away, but Mr. Mg said, “Doug Fairkeep.”

Doug turned back. “Yes?”

Mr. Mg nodded. “He knows your name,” he said.

The next problem was even worse, and came in the form of a one-two punch. First the news came, in midafternoon, that with
only the one show,
The Heist,
in production, and with nothing on the air, and with nothing in development, Get Real was being eliminated. Its assets would
be folded in with its superior, Monopole, and all of the staff, except for Babe and Doug, would be let go.