Get Real (3 page)

Fairkeep beamed. “Great!” From inside the jacket came a fancy pen and a cheap pad. “Give me a contact number,” he said.

“I’ll give you my Mom’s number,” Stan told him. Since he lived with his Mom, this was also Stan’s number, but Dortmunder felt
Stan wasn’t wrong to try for a little distance here.

Fairkeep copied down the number Stan rattled off, then said, “Where is this? Brooklyn?”

“Right.”

“What is it, her cell?”

“No, it’s her phone,” Stan said. “On the kitchen wall.” He wouldn’t give out her cell phone number in the cab; Mom wouldn’t
like that.

“My mom has a phone like that,” Fairkeep said, sounding sentimental, and smiled again as he put away pen and pad. “I’ll talk
to my bosses,” he said, “and I’ll be in touch.”

“Fine.”

They were all about to stand when Marcy said, “Excuse me.”

They looked at her, and she was looking at Stan, so he was the one who said, “Yeah?”

“That’s my only cell phone,” Marcy said. “It’s got all my friends on it, and my speed-dial, and just about my entire life.
Couldn’t you just delete the pictures out of there, so I could get my phone back?”

A little surprised, Stan said, “Maybe so,” and pulled out the phone. Studying it, he said, “It’s different from mine.”

“I know,” she said. “They’re all different, I don’t know why they do that. Push that button there to get to the menu.”

It took the two of them a few minutes to burrow together down into the depths of the phone, but they finally did find where
some slightly out-of-focus long-shot pictures of Dortmunder and Stan were located, and successfully removed them. Then Stan
handed the little machine back to her and said, “I wouldn’t want you to go around without your life.”

“I appreciate it,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

A
NDY
K
ELP, 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.

D
ORTMUNDER FINISHED DESCRIBING
the situation and waited to hear what Kelp had to say, but Kelp just sat there, nodding slowly, looking at Dortmunder as
though he were a rerun on that turned-off television set over there. They were seated together in Dortmunder’s living room
on East Nineteenth Street, with its view of the airshaft, Dortmunder in his usual armchair and Kelp on the sagging sofa. Kelp
wouldn’t take the other armchair because it was the exclusive property of Dortmunder’s faithful companion May, who at the
moment was still at her supermarket checkout job at the Safeway, bringing in the more or less honest part of their joint income.

Dortmunder nudged a little. “Well? Whadaya think?”

“I think,” Kelp said judiciously, “I think I need another beer.”

Dortmunder hefted the can in his own fist, found it empty, and said, “Yeah, me too.”

Rising, Kelp said, “You stay there, John, I’ll get it. The exercise will do me good. Give me a chance to think about this.”

“I know, it’s a little different.”

Heading for the hall, Kelp said, “The twenty G I kinda understand. It’s the other parts.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be back,” Kelp said, but as he stepped through the doorway Dortmunder heard the sound of the apartment door open, down
at the end of the hall. Kelp looked to his right, smiled in a way that suggested he now felt no ambivalence at all, and said,
“Hey, May.”

She appeared in the doorway, a tall slender woman, her neat black hair with gray highlights. She was lugging a grocery sack,
her daily self-bestowal bonus for working at that place. “I just have to take this stuff to the kitchen,” she said.

Kelp said, “I was on my way to get us both a beer. You want one?”

“I’ll bring them,” she said. “You sit down.” And she headed on down the hall toward the kitchen.

So Kelp came back and settled once more onto the sofa, putting his empty on the coffee table as he said, “I tell you what.
When May comes in, tell her the story. Maybe I’ll get a better read on it if I look at it from the side, like.”

“Good idea.”

So, a minute later, when May reappeared, unencumbered except for three beer cans that she distributed, Dortmunder said, “I
got a very strange proposition today.”

She didn’t quite know how to take that word. Settling into her chair, she said, “A proposition?”

“A job, kind of. But weird.”

“John’s gonna describe it to you now,” Kelp said, and looked at Dortmunder, as alert as a sparrow on a branch.

Dortmunder took a breath. “It’s reality TV,” he said, and went on to describe how Murch’s Mom had introduced Doug Fairkeep
into their lives and what Doug Fairkeep had proposed, including the payoff.

Somehow, every time he told that story he got the same kind of dead-air silent reaction. Now May and Kelp both gave him the
glassy-eye treatment, so he said, “That’s the story, May, that’s all there is.”

She said, “Except the next day, when they drag you all off to jail.”

“Doug Fairkeep says we’ll work around that.”

“How?”

“He doesn’t say.”

May squinted, much the way she used to squint back when she chain-smoked. “I’ll tell you another question,” she said. “What
is it you’re supposed to steal?”

“We didn’t go into that.”

“It might make a difference,” she said.

Dortmunder didn’t get it. “How?”

“Well,” she said, “if they were going for laughs, like. Like if you hijacked a diaper service truck, something like that.”

Kelp said, “
I’m
not gonna hijack any diaper service truck.”

“
Like
that,” she said.

Dortmunder said, “May, I don’t think so. What they do is, they find people got some sort of interesting lifestyle or background
or something, and they film the people doing what they do, and then they
shape
it, to make it
entertainment.
I don’t think they’re goin for jokes, I think they’re goin for real.”

“Jail is real,” she said.

Dortmunder nodded, but said, “The problem is, so is twenty G.”

“Looks to me,” Kelp said, “as though you oughta go back and see this guy and ask him a lot more questions.”

“I’m realizing that,” Dortmunder admitted. “You wanna come along?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Kelp said, as casual as an aluminum siding salesman. “No need for me to poke my face in at this point.
Murch’s Mom didn’t rat
me
out to the guy.”

“No, she didn’t,” Dortmunder said.

“But I tell you what I’ll do,” Kelp said. “Come home with me and I’ll Google him.”

Dortmunder frowned. “Is that a good thing?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kelp said.

D
OUG
F
AIRKEEP’S IMMEDIATE BOSS
at Get Real was a barrel-bodied bald sixty-year-old named Babe Tuck, who had come over from the news side after thirty years
as a foreign correspondent. In the company bio online, a hair-raising read, were listed the times he’d been gassed, kidnapped,
shot, abandoned in mid-ocean, set fire to, poisoned, dropped from a helicopter, and tied to the railroad tracks. “I’ve had
enough of the real world,” he’d announced, when making the transfer to Get Real. “Time to retire to reality.”

Everybody was a little afraid of Babe Tuck, partly because of his history and reputation, but also because his mind was seriously
twisted. He not only came up with the most outrageous ideas for reality series, he then went on to make them work.
The One-Legged Race,
for instance. All those wheelchairs, all those colostomy bags, all that bitching and complaint. Apparently, the fewer the
limbs you had, the bigger the ego, to compensate.