Get Real

11

WHEN KELP CAME strolling down Varick Street at two that afternoon, he saw Dortmunder ahead of him, facing a building in midblock, frowning at it while he frisked himself. Kelp approached, interested in this phenomenon, and Dortmunder withdrew from two separate pockets a crumpled piece of paper and a ballpoint pen. Bending over the paper held in his cupped left palm, he began to write, with quick glances at the facade in front of him.

Ah. The right third of the building, at street level, was a gray metal overhead garage door, graffiti-smeared in a language that hadn’t been seen on Earth since the glory days of the Maya. To the immediate left of this was a vertical series of bell buttons, each with an identifying label. These were what Dortmunder was copying onto a cash register receipt from a chain drugstore.

Reading the labels directly, since Dortmunder’s handwriting was about as legible as the Mayan graffiti, Kelp saw:

5 GR DEVELOPMENT

4 SCENERY STARS

3 KNICKERBOCKER STORAGE

2 COMBINED TOOL

The building, broad and old, was made of large rectangular stone blocks, time-darkened to a blurry charcoal. On the street floor, to the left of the garage, were two large windows, barred for security and opaque with dirt, and beyond them at the farther end a gray metal door with a bell mounted in its middle at head height. The upper floors showed blank walls above the garage entrance and three windows each, all looking a little cleaner than the ones down here.

Putting paper and pen away, Dortmunder acknowledged Kelp’s presence for the first time: “Harya doin?”

“I wanna see the inside of the place,” Kelp told him.

“We can do that,” Dortmunder said, and pushed the button for five.

They waited less than a minute, and then a mechanical voice from somewhere said, “Yeah?”

“It’s John and Andy,” Dortmunder told the door.

“And Stan,” Stan said, having just walked up from farther downtown.

“And Stan.”

“I’ll be right down.”

They waited about three minutes this time, while beside them the slow-moving traffic of southbound Varick Street oozed by, the two nearer lanes headed for the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey, the farther happier lanes not. Then, with a lot of metallic groaning and creaking, the garage door lifted and there was Doug Fairkeep with the grin he wore like a fashion statement, saying, “Right on time.”

They boarded. The elevator, big enough for a delivery truck, was just a rough wooden platform, with no side walls of its own. Ahead of them the building was broad and deep, and this level was used as a garage, for a great variety of vehicles. There were cars and vans and small trucks, but also what looked like a TV news truck, a small fire engine, an ambulance, a hansom cab without the horse, and a lot more. If it had wheels, it was in here.

Doug stood next to a compact control box attached to the building’s front wall, and when he pressed a button on it the door began noisily to lower. The elevator started up before the door finished coming down, which was a surprise, though nobody actually lost his balance.

The platform they rode rose slowly through the building, too noisily for conversation. On the second floor—Combined Tool—a clean off-white wall stood at the side, but no front wall. Out there a hall extended to the left, also off-white, with one closed office door in the part they could see.

Third floor: Knickerbocker Storage. On this level too there was a wall to their left, not recently painted anything. This wall extended straight back to the rear of the building, with double doors spaced along the way. Apparently the idea was, a truck or a van could come up the elevator to this floor, then drive along that hall and stop to unload at one or another set of doors.

Four: Scenery Stars. No wall either left or straight ahead, and no interior walls either except in the far right corner; probably a bathroom. In the far left corner a flight of black iron stairs rose up from rear to front, and thick black iron columns stood at intervals to bear the weight. The large space was full of stacks of lumber, piles of paint cans, tables covered with tools, tall canvas stage flats. A bald man in sunglasses sat at a slanted drafting table near the stairs, drawing on a large pad with pen and ruler under a bare bulb with a broad tin shade like the one in the back room at the OJ. He didn’t look toward them as their platform rose up past him.

Five: Another big open space with black iron support columns and corner bathroom, but this one brighter, with large windows and skylights. The iron stairs at this level rose up to a closed trapdoor. Sofas and chairs and tables were scattered around in no order, as though waiting to be assembled into a stage set, but still the space seemed mostly empty.

Three men rose from sofas toward the middle of the room and waited to be introduced. Doug led the way to them, then said, “Andy, John, Stan, this is my boss, Babe Tuck.”

Babe Tuck, a tough-looking sixty-year-old with the barrel shoulders of a street fighter, nodded without smiling and said, “Doug has high hopes for you.”

Dortmunder said, “We feel the same way about him.”

Nobody offered to shake hands. Babe Tuck put his own hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels a little, nodded again as though agreeing with himself, and said, “I suppose you’ve all been inside sometimes.”

“Not for a while,” Dortmunder said.

Stan said, “We don’t go where that’s likely to break out.”

“You’re probably like most guys,” Babe Tuck told them. “You got no idea how lucky you are to be inside an American prison. Except for the rapes, of course. But the rest of it? Heated cells, good clothes, regular food. Not even to talk about the medical care.”

“I wish I’d looked at it that way,” Kelp said, “back then.”

Tuck grinned at him. “Make the time pass easier,” he suggested. “Do you know the longest life expectancy in America is in our prisons?”

“Maybe,” Kelp said, “it just seems longest.”

Tuck liked that. His eyes lighting up, he turned to Doug, gestured at Kelp, and said, “Keep a mike on this one.”

“Oh, I will.”

“Well,” Tuck said, “I just wanted to see our latest stars, and now I’ll leave you to it.” Nodding toward Doug, he said to his three latest stars, “You’re in good hands with Doug.”

“Glad to hear it,” Dortmunder said.

Walking off toward the platform elevator, Tuck said, “I’ll send it back up.”

“Thanks, Babe.”

No one said anything until Tuck reached the platform, crossed it to the control panel on the building wall, and pressed the down button. He was patting his pockets, frisking himself like Dortmunder, as the platform descended, leaving a startlingly large rectangular hole.

Doug now turned to the last introductions. “Fellas, this is Roy Ombelen, he’s your director.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” said Roy Ombelen, a tall man thin enough to be a plague victim, dressed in a brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, bright yellow shirt, paisley ascot, dark brown leather trousers, and highly polished black ankle boots. On a gold chain around his neck, outside the shirt, hung what looked like a jeweler’s loupe.

Kelp gave this vision his most amiable grin. “And charmed right back at you.”

Ombelen looked faintly alarmed, but managed a smile. “I’m sure,” he said, “we’ll all hit it off just famously.”

“You got it.”

“And this,” Doug said, “is our designer, Manny Felder.”

Manny Felder was short and soft, in shapeless blue jeans, dirty white basketball sneakers large enough to serve as flotation devices, and a too-large gray sweatshirt with the logo Property of San Quentin. He peered at them through oversize tortoiseshell glasses taped across the bridge with a bit of duct tape, and, in lieu of “hello,” said, “The most important thing we gotta consider here is setting.”

“Setting what?” Dortmunder asked.

“The setting.” Felder gestured vaguely with unclean hands. “If you got your diamond, and you put it in the wrong setting, what’s it look like?”

“A diamond,” Stan said.

Ombelen said, “Why don’t we all sit, get comfortable? You—John, is it?”

“Yeah.”

Pointing, Ombelen said, “Why don’t you and Andy slide that sofa around to face this way, and Doug, if you could help Manny bring over those easy chairs…”

Following Ombelen’s brisk instructions, they soon had an L-shaped conversation area and sat, whereupon Ombelen said, “What Manny was talking about was mise-en-scène.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dortmunder said.

“The setting,” Felder insisted.

“Yes, Manny,” Ombelen said, and told the others, “what we’re looking for is places you frequent, a background to place you in. For instance, do you lot have a lair?”

The three latest stars compared bewildered looks. Dortmunder said, “A lair?”

“Some place the gang might gather,” Ombelen explained, “to plan your schemes or—what is it?—divvy the loot.”

Kelp said, “Oh, you mean a hangout.”

“Well, yes,” Ombelen said, “But not, I hope, a corner candy store.”

Stan said, “He’s talking about the OJ.”

“Ah,” Ombelen said, perking up. “Am I?”

Dortmunder said to Stan, “We can’t take these guys to the OJ. That blows everything.”

Ombelen said, “I understand we’re dealing with a certain delicacy here.”

“No matter how good your boss thinks American prisons are,” Dortmunder told him, “we don’t want to be in one.”

“No, I can see that,” Ombelen said, and frowned.

Doug piped up then, saying, “Roy, we don’t have to use actual places. We’ll make sets.” To Dortmunder and the others, he said, “For this show, because of the special circumstances, we won’t have to use authentic places. Just the guys in them and what they’re doing, that has to be authentic.”

“Well,” Ombelen said, “the site of the robbery, wherever that is, that can’t be a set. That has to be the real place.”

“Of course,” Doug said.

“I’d wanna see this OJ,” Manny Felder said.

Stan said, “Why? If you’re not gonna use it.”

“I gotta get the feel for it,” Felder said. “Whatever I make, I gotta make it so when you’re in it it’s the place that looks right for you.”

“This OJ,” Ombelen said. “What is it, a bar?”

“We use the back room of a bar,” Dortmunder told him. “It just looks like the back room of a bar, with a table and some chairs.”

“But Manny’s right,” Ombelen said, as across the way the elevator/platform rose noisily into view, and stopped. Once its racket ended, “We would need,” Ombelen explained, “the feel of the entire place, the ambience, the bar itself, the neighborhood, the customers. There must be a bartender. He’s an important character.”

Kelp said, “That doesn’t work. We can’t let you have Rollo.”

“That’s the bartender?” Ombelen shook his head. “Not a problem. We’ll cast that.”

Doug said, “Maybe a good spot for some comic bits.”

“But,” Ombelen said, “we’ll have to see what the original looks like, so we know how to do our casting.”

“Agreed,” Doug said, and turned to the others. “We’re not gonna use anybody’s real name, or anything’s real name, so your OJ will stay private, it’s yours. But Manny’s right, we’ve got to see it.”

The three exchanged glances, frowns, minimal head-shakings, and then Dortmunder said, “All right. This is what we do. We give you the address and you go there—maybe tonight, it’s better after dark—and you look around, maybe take a picture or two. But not suspicious or sneaky, not like you’re from the state liquor authority. No conversations. You go in, you buy your drink, you drink it, and get outa there.”

Felder said, “What about this back room?”

“You do it, only by yourself,” Kelp told him, “You can take all the pictures you want back there.”

“That’s good, Andy,” Dortmunder said.

“Thank you.”

“All right,” Felder said. “How do I get to this back room?”

“The johns are down the hall from the left end of the bar,” Dortmunder said. “Nobody can see you back there. At the end of the hall is a door on the right. That’s us.”

“Easy,” Felder said.

Stan said, “But only one of you guys goes. We don’t want everybody running into the men’s room together, it isn’t that kind of joint.”

Doug said, “Understood. We’ll probably go tonight. I take it you won’t be there?”

“Absolutely not,” Dortmunder said.

Doug looked around at his creative team. “Is there anything else?”

Felder looked unsatisfied. He said, “Any more settings?”

“Manny,” Doug said, “I don’t think so. Just generic Manhattan streets, apartments.” To the others he said, “You all live in apartments, right? In Manhattan?”

Again they exchanged troubled looks. This time, reluctantly, Stan said, “I live in Canarsie.”

“But that’s wonderful!” Doug said, and Ombelen too lit up in a way that the name “Canarsie” doesn’t usually evoke.

Stan said, “You can’t use it, it’s just where I live, it doesn’t have nothing to do with nothing.”

“But you come to Manhattan for the heists,” Doug said, eyes bright with pleasure. “Stan, you commute!”

“Yeah, I guess. I never thought of it like that.”

“But that’s good,” Doug said. “Gives us another demographic. The burglar who commutes to his job.”

“I like it,” Ombelen said. “I could do some very nice visuals with that.”

Doug peered at them all with his freshest, most bright-eyed face. “Anything else? Any little details I should know?”

“I don’t think so,” Dortmunder said. “In fact, I know so. No.”

“Well, this has all been very good,” Doug said, and actually rubbed his hands together. “We’re moving along here. I’ll be back in touch when we’ve got something to show you. And meanwhile, see if you can decide what exactly you’re gonna steal. That’s Manny’s other setting, and he’ll need to know it pretty early.”

“One little favor,” Felder said.

They looked at him. Dortmunder said, “Yeah?”

“Nothing too dark, okay?” Felder spread his hands, looking for understanding and assistance around here. “Somewhere where we can see what you’re doing.”

Kelp laughed, mostly in amazement. “You know,” he said, “usually, everything we do, what we’re trying for is just the reverse of that.”