Get Real

45

NOW 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.