Get Real

4

ANDY KELP, A SHARP-FEATURED GUY with a friendly grin, casually dressed in black and dark grays, said to the checkout clerk, a skinny doorknob-nosed seventy-year-old supplementing his Social Security with some minimum-wage retail work, “I wanna see My Nephew.”

The clerk scratched his doorknob with a yellow fingernail. “Oh, no,” he said, “there is no such person.” Gesturing at this cavernous big-box discount store all around them, he said, “It’s just the name of the place.”

Kelp nodded. “He’s about five foot one,” he said, “and he weighs over three hundred pounds, all of it trans fats. He dresses out of a laundry basket and he always wears a straw hat and he talks like a frog with a sore throat.”

“Oh, you know him!” the clerk said. Reaching for the phone beside his cash register, he said, “Most people don’t. They don’t know My Nephew’s a real guy.”

“Lucky them. Tell him it’s Andy from the East Side.”

“Okay, I will.”

Kelp stepped aside while the clerk was on the phone, to let the next customer, a short round Hispanic lady totally concentrated on her own business, wheel into place an enormous shopping cart piled sky-high with Barbies, all different Barbies. Either this lady had an awful lot of little nieces or she was some kind of fetishist; in either case, Kelp was happy to respect her privacy.

“Okay,” the clerk said to him, getting off the phone. “You know the office?”

“It’s my first time here.”

“Okay.” Pointing with his doorknob, the clerk said, “You go down to the third aisle, then right all the way to the end and then left all the way to the end.”

Thanking the man, Kelp left him amid the Barbies and followed the directions through this big near-empty space, with not quite enough customers and not quite enough merchandise to create confidence.

This was the My Nephew experience. He tended to open his discount centers in marginal areas of the city and New Jersey and Long Island, never pay the rent or the utilities, and get thrown out twelve to fifteen months later, with the loss of a certain percentage of his stock. Since his landlords and his suppliers were usually as iffy as he was, and since he created a new corporation with every move, there were never any very serious consequences, so My Nephew could always go on to open another marginal store in another marginal area of Greater New York that hadn’t heard from him for a while. It was a living.

At the end of the clerk’s directions stood a closed door, bearing two pieces of information: MEN painted in black at eye level, and OUT OF ORDER handwritten in red Flair pen on a shirt cardboard masking-taped a few inches lower down. Kelp knocked on OUT OF ORDER and heard a frog croak, “What?”

That was invitation enough; he opened the door and stepped into a small windowless messy office with My Nephew seated at the dented metal desk, looking exactly like Kelp’s description of him, or possibly worse. “Hello,” Kelp said.

“Andy from the East Side,” My Nephew croaked. “You’re a long way from home.”

“I had a bit of luck,” Kelp told him, and frowned at the wooden kitchen chair facing the desk. Deciding it was neither diseased nor likely to collapse, he sat on it.

“I don’t like luck,” My Nephew said. He sat hunched forward, fat elbows splayed on the desk to left and right.

“It has to be treated with respect,” Kelp agreed. “And that’s why I’m here.”

“Luck don’t usually bring people to this neighborhood,” My Nephew said. “Tell me about it.”

“It seems,” Kelp said, “there’s a spring storm out in the Atlantic. Way out in the Atlantic.”

“So I shouldn’t worry.”

“It’s an ill wind, you know. And what this ill wind means, there’s two semis in a lot over by the Navy Yard hooked to containers full of flat-screen TVs supposed to be on their way to Africa right now.”

“Only the storm.”

“That ship may not get here at all. So I’m told by the warehouseman gave me the tip.”

My Nephew shook his heavy gray head beneath his gray straw hat. “I would not be a seaman,” he said.

That was too obvious to comment on. Kelp said, “It could be, I could move those semis.”

“What make are we—?” My Nephew interrupted himself. “Second,” he said, and reached for his phone, so it must flash a light instead of ringing.

Kelp sat back, in no hurry, and My Nephew said to the phone, “What?” Then he nodded. “Good,” he said, hung up, and said to Kelp, “Gimme a minute.”

“Take two.”

Now My Nephew got to his feet, a complicated maneuver in three distinct sections. In section one, he leaned far forward with his broad palms flat on the desktop. In section two, he heaved himself with a loud grunt upward and back, becoming more or less vertical. In section three, he weaved forward and back, feet on floor and palms on desk, until he found his equilibrium. Then, lifting the palms from his desk and taking a loud breath, “Be right back,” he said, turned, and waddled more briskly than you would have thought possible to a metal fire door in the wall behind the desk. He opened this door, stepped through a space barely wide enough for the purpose, and left, the door automatically shutting behind him.

Kelp had seen street out there. My Nephew’s in a business conversation, he gets a phone call, he says one word, he leaves the building. This sequence suggested to Kelp that it could be some previous purveyor of irregular goods, not unlike Andy Kelp himself, had been a bit sloppy and had led police attention to this building, giving My Nephew the motivation to vacate. Probably it would be Kelp’s smart move now to follow My Nephew’s lead.

The door My Nephew had taken, which Kelp now took, led to a side street of warehouses across the way from the blank rear of the big-box store. Trucks of various sizes and descriptions were parked on this side only. My Nephew was nowhere to be seen. In a minute, neither was Kelp.

Three blocks from My Nephew—the building, not the man—and very close to the subway station that was his current goal, Kelp felt the cell phone in his jacket pocket vibrate against his heart. (He much preferred, in all situations, silence to noise.) Unpocketing it, opening it, he said, “Yeah.”

“Maybe a conversation.” The voice, Kelp recognized, belonged to a frequent associate of his named John Dortmunder.

“I’m very open,” Kelp said, which was more true now than it had been ten minutes ago.

“Where are you?”

“Outer rings of Saturn.”

“Brooklyn, huh? How long to get here?”

“Forty minutes,” Kelp said, and was exactly right.