Get Real

16

WHAT WITH THE MASSIVE last-minute changes in the story line of The Stand, Doug didn’t get home on Monday evening till well after seven. There were so many subsidiary decisions to be made, or remade, so much new research to be done. For instance, they had to be certain the actual officiator at the Grace-and-Harry wedding twenty-some years ago wouldn’t come out of the woodwork to sue everybody in sight for calling him a con man. So much to do, so little time.

Fortunately, to make up for all this sudden scrambling, Doug was bringing Darlene Looper home for an evening of confabs. A little later, they’d go out for dinner in the neighborhood, during which he would describe to her the concept of Heist! (provisional), but for now, there was time to relax and get to know one another a little better. “It’s a humble hovel,” he announced grandly, unlocking the door, “but it’s my own,” and he pushed it open to everything wrong.

In the first place, he would never leave the lights on in the empty apartment all day long, and in the second place, this was not an empty apartment. There were several people in the room, the most prominent being someone who could retire the phrase “most prominent” if he wanted to. A giant in black trousers and a vast black turtleneck sweater who suggested somehow a black hole that had come to Doug’s living room from deepest space, he was turning in his huge mitts the life-size brass banana with Doug’s name etched into it that had been given him by his employers in celebration of the completed first season of The Stand. That the banana was not a crop that could be grown on the Finch’s upstate New York farm had been completely irrelevant; the operative consideration, Doug believed, as with most things, had been phallic.

Now, in the corners of the room not occupied by the giant, Doug saw faces he recognized, that at least suggested some explanation for this invasion: Stan, Andy, and John, all pawing through Doug’s artifacts. Plus, in another corner, a young guy with the eager look of a born pickpocket.

“The householder,” said the giant, in deep organ tones, and Andy looked around, dropping several of Doug’s books onto the coffee table as he said, happily, “There you are! We thought you’d never get home.” Then, noticing the dumbfounded Darlene peeking over Doug’s shoulder, his happy smile switched to a look of concern, and he said, “Doug? Is this a bad time?”

In the reality business, Doug had learned to recover fast when hit with surprises; adapt, play the scene you’ve got, fix it later in the editing room. “As a matter of fact, Andy, this is a very good time. I was going to tell Darlene all about you guys at dinner, so now we can all get on the same page at the same time.”

Stan, never far from paranoia, said, “Tell her all about us? Which all is that, Doug?”

“Come in, Darlene,” Doug said, and when she sidled past him into the room he shut the apartment door and said, “Darlene, these guys are going to be in another reality show we’re just putting together, that I want you for. That’s Andy, that’s Stan, and that’s John, and I don’t know these other two.”

Andy, a natural master of ceremonies, said, “The kid is Judson, and the guy with the banana is Tiny.”

Doug said, “Tiny?”

“It’s a nickname,” the big man growled, and put the banana down.

Darlene, who also adapted fast, grinned a little loosely at Tiny and said, “It doesn’t do you justice. I’m sure it doesn’t.”

Andy said, “Doug? You want her for the show? Walk me through this.”

“Let’s all sit down,” Doug said. “As long as we’re all here.”

There were chairs and sofas to accommodate them all, but not much over. Once they were all seated, Darlene said, “Doug? What kind of reality show are they going to be in? Not a farmstand.”

“How do I phrase this?” Doug wondered, “The fact is, these guys are, uh…”

“Crooks,” John said.

“Criminals,” Tiny grumbled.

“Thieves,” Stan said.

“Professional thieves,” Andy expanded, and grinned. “Licensed and bonded.”

Darlene said to Doug, “You’re going to do a reality show about professional thieves? Doing what?”

“Thieving,” Doug said,

“Professionally thieving,” John explained.

“I don’t understand,” Darlene admitted. “These people even say they’re thieves, and you give them the keys to your apartment?”

“I didn’t give them the keys to my apartment,” Doug told her. “Apparently, they don’t need the keys to my apartment.”

Stan said. “How is this—Darlene, is it?”

“Yes,” she replied simply.

“Darlene,” he repeated, and said to Doug, “what’s she gonna do on the show?”

“You can’t have an all-male national television series,” Doug explained. “Not even professional wrestling. Darlene was going to have a part on The Stand this year, but it didn’t work out, so it occurred to me she could be a very good addition to our show.”

“As?” Stan asked.

“As,” Doug told him, “a gun moll.”

Everybody else looked blank, while Darlene looked appalled. “A gun moll!”

“Sure.” Doug spread his hands, “What’s a gang without a gun moll?”

“I don’t have a gun,” Darlene said.

“That comes with your costume.”

“And I don’t want a gun.”

“No bullets,” Doug assured her, “Just the gun, as a prop. On your thigh, I thought.”

The kid, Judson, said, “Darlene, how old are you?”

She looked at him with curiosity. “Twenty-three.”

To Doug, the kid said, “A moll is going to have to be hooked up with one of the guys in the gang.” Smiling at Darlene, he said, “I’m almost twenty, and I’ve always liked older women.”

This development came as a very unpleasant surprise to Doug, who realized at once that he hadn’t thought the ramifications through. Darlene was going to slip through his fingers even before he ever got his fingers onto her.

And had already slipped, from the grin she was now bestowing on the kid. “Your name is Judson?”

“Right,” he said, grinning back.

“What do they call you?”

“The kid,” everybody said,

She laughed. “Well, kid,” she said, “it’s nice to meet you.”

“You, too.”

Nose now firmly out of joint, Doug said, “What I don’t get is, what’s everybody doing here? How come everybody’s in my apartment?”

“I’m glad you brought that up, Doug,” Andy said. “What with romance rearing its head and all—”

“And gun molls,” John said.

“Those too,” Andy agreed. “We were about to forget the whole point of this meeting.”

Doing his best not to show how peeved he was, Doug said, “Oh, there’s a point to it?”

“We want to talk over with you,” Andy said, “the place we’re gonna rob.”

Darlene said, “You’re really gonna rob something?”

“Otherwise,” Doug told her, “it isn’t reality.” Turning to Andy, he said, “You picked something? What, a bank, something like that?”

“Not exactly,” Andy said. “You remember, we talked about, if we took something from one of those corporations up above you, then, if we got caught, it was always just gonna be a gag anyway.”

“I remember,” Doug said. “I feel quite ambivalent about that, if you want to know the truth. But you picked a target for the heist?”

“Knickerbocker Storage,” Andy said.

The name might have rung a bell for Doug in its proper context, but not here. He frowned, thinking this idea seemed like awfully small potatoes for an entire gang of professional crooks, and said, “Storage? You want to break into some storage place? What for?”

John said, “Storage is what people do when they don’t want to throw something away.”

“It’s valuable,” Stan explained, “but they got no use for it right now.”

“People put all kinds of things in storage,” the kid said.

“Gee,” Darlene said, smiling at the kid, “I guess they do. Prom gowns and jewelry and everything.”

“Antique cars,” Andy suggested. “Paintings. Jewelry. Furniture.”

“All right,” Doug said, though reluctantly. “But you’ll have to, uh, case the joint first, be sure there’s stuff in there worth taking. That’s the kind of thing we want to film, you know, all the lead-ups.”

Andy said, “Oh, sure, we’ll take a look ahead of time. We’re not out to get somebody’s old collection of LPs.”

“Videotapes,” the kid said.

“Back issues of Road & Track,” said Stan.

“Dial telephones,” said John.

Andy gave him a look. “You’ve got a dial telephone.”

“Not in storage.”

“All right,” Doug said. “If you go in there to check it out, and it looks like there’s things worth taking, then that’s where you—What do you call it? Pull the heist?”

“The job,” Andy said.

Doug, his irritation over Darlene forgotten, at least for the moment, said, “Really? You call it a job?”

“It’s what we do,” Tiny said.

“All right, fine,” Doug said, accepting the point. “But where exactly is this storage place? You have one in particular in mind?”

“I told you,” Andy said, sounding surprised. “Knickerbocker.”

“In your rehearsal building,” John added. “Down on Varick Street.”

“My—Varick Street? Our own building?”

“That was the idea,” Andy said. “Remember?”

“But—” Dumbfounded, Doug said, “Let me think about this.”

“Take your time,” Andy offered.

Doug stared at his switched-off, but at least still here, television set. The idea of watching a group of burglars doing their burglaries had been amusing and interesting in the abstract, but when it was suddenly a case of watching them burgle from yourself, it was quite something else.

The instinct to say, “Take from those people, not from me,” was a very strong one. But wasn’t it the same, no matter who the victim was? Get Real had stumbled heedlessly into a project of aiding and even encouraging a felony. That these people would be performing their felonies anyway, with or without Get Real’s encouragement, didn’t make it any more right. In fact, if Monopole, the corporate entity that owned the building and also owned Get Real, took the loss in this matter, rather than some innocent bystander, it might even be a moral mitigation, mightn’t it? Mightn’t it?

“They’ll be insured,” Stan told him, to help his thought processes. “Nobody’ll lose a thing.”

“I just can’t do this on my own,” Doug said. “I’ve got to describe it to Babe. I mean, maybe he’ll say we just can’t do anything like that.”

“Here’s the thing,” Stan said. “At first we were thinking about something else. There’s a Chase bank on the corner.”

“There’s a Chase bank on every corner,” Tiny said.

“There’s a Chase bank on this corner,” Stan insisted, “on Varick Street. We thought about it, Doug, because it’d be convenient for your camerapeople and all, but you’d have to do it in the daytime and there’s too much tunnel traffic right outside the door. But this place, this Knickerbocker, we can go in there anytime at night when there’s no traffic at all, we can take a truck or two from downstairs, load them up, zip zip, we’re through the tunnel into Jersey.”

“I can’t say anything about it,” Doug said. “Not till I talk it over with Babe.”

“Back at the start,” Andy said, “you said anytime we didn’t feel comfortable about something, we could call the whole deal off. We won’t feel comfortable unless we hit Knickerbocker Storage.”

“I’ll talk to Babe,” Doug promised. “Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

“Then we shouldn’t keep you hanging around any more,” Andy said, and Stan said, “Leave me a message with my Mom.”

“I will.”

They all trooped out, and it wasn’t until they were well gone that Doug realized Darlene had gone with them.