Donald Westlake - Get Real

“They have?”

“They just walk in, don’t ask me how. They don’t raise a sweat, and they don’t leave a mark.”

Babe frowned over this. “What you’re saying is, if we say no to the specific after we already said yes to the general, they’re going to be curious.”

“And they have a capacity to satisfy their curiosity.”

Babe nodded. “So, do you want to give them the go-ahead?”

“I don’t know what I want,” Doug said. “Either we give them the green light and hope for the best, or we find some reason to say no, some reason that doesn’t have them wandering around Varick Street just to see what’s what.”

“And you don’t have that reason.”

“No, sir.”

Babe made a face. “There’s that sir again. You know, Doug, any reason we give them is going to make them curious. And if they walk off the series, if they’re out of our lives, there’s no motivation for them to not move in to Varick Street and try to find out just what we were keeping to ourselves.”

Doug said, “That’s why I wanted to come directly to you first thing this morning.”

“Thanks,” Babe said, with some ironic emphasis. Brooding across his office, past the tattered and bloodstained and smoke-smeared mementos of a long life reporting from the edge, he said, “If we say yes, then it’s only Knickerbocker Storage they’d be after? Only the—what is it—third floor?”

“Well, the first floor, too,” Doug told him. “They’ll need to steal some vehicles to put the stolen goods into.”

“Oh, of course,” Babe said. “Silly of me not to think of that. But if we said yes, could you keep them to just those two floors?”

“I think so,” Doug said. “I’m pretty sure I could.”

“Not by telling them, ‘Don’t think of a blue elephant.’”

“No, no, I know better than that. I wouldn’t even mention the second floor.” Doug leaned forward, pretended to consult a clipboard, and said, “Now, for our camera crews, you’re gonna need footage on the third floor, and footage on the first floor, and footage out front, coming and going. That’s really all you need.”

“Good,” Babe said.

Putting the imaginary clipboard onto his lap, Doug leaned back and said, “You know, there might be a kind of silver lining in all this.”

“Shoot it to me at once,” Babe said.

“Inside the company,” Doug said, “there are rumors and questions sometimes, you know that.”

“Of course,” Babe said. “That’s true in any large organization.”

“Some of those rumors have centered on Varick Street.”

“Which is very bad,” Babe said, “We really don’t want people wondering about Varick Street. I’ve wished there was a way to get everybody to think about something el se.”

“Well, if we pull off The Gang’s All Here, ” Doug said, “and stage a robbery in that same building, nobody will believe for a minute there’s anything else going on in Varick Street.”

Babe, for the first time in the conversation, smiled. “If we could bring that off,” he said, and shrugged. “Well, we’d have to bring it off.”

“Scary,” Doug said.

“Scary we eat for breakfast,” Babe told him. Suddenly decisive, he said, “Green-light it.”

“Thanks, Babe.”

Doug got to his feet, the imaginary clipboard falling to the floor, and Babe said, “Oh, by the way.”

“Yes?”

Babe shook his head. “I don’t like that title.”

AWEDNESDAY NIGHT, just one week since the organizational meeting at the OJ, and Dortmunder and Kelp were walking, not for the first time in their lives, on a roof. It was the roof of the GR Development building, sixty feet above Varick Street, and out around them the night was well advanced, it now being not quite four in the morning.

It was a cloudy night, not cold, and not particularly dark. The city generates its own illumination, and on cloudy nights that glow is reflected down onto the streets and parks and rooftops, for a soft Impressionist cityscape.

Dortmunder and Kelp, dressed in dark grays to blend into the prevailing color scheme, walked the roof above Varick Street and looked around to see what they could see. The building they stood on was flanked by two much larger, taller, heftier structures extending both ways to the corner. To the north was the stone pile containing the Chase bank at basement level and street level and one level up. From the look of the many sentry lights visible in the upper windows, most of the tenants above Chase had also thought long and hard about the issue of security.

To the south, the other building’s ground floor housed a restaurant supply wholesaler, whose strategy in the realm of security lighting was one illuminated wall clock at the rear of the showroom, in the pink glow of which were tumbled all the fast-food counters, bartops, banquettes, ovens, walk-in freezers, and wooden cases of dinnerware recently collected from enterprises that had unfortunately stumbled into nonexistence and whose gear was now awaiting the next hopeful entrepreneur with a certified check in his pocket. The floors above this bric-a-brac were uniformly dark except for the red neon EXIT sign the fire code requires at every level.

That had been Dortmunder and Kelp’s route in. A low-security door on the side street, leading to the woks and barstools, had given them easy access to the building and then its stairwell and eventually the sixth-floor office of an olive oil importer through whose window they had stepped to get here on the roof.

There were several protuberances on this roof, and all were of interest, but the most interesting of all was the three-foot-by-five-foot cinder-block box, seven feet tall, in the left rear corner. This would be the terminus of the iron staircase that zigzagged up the interior. Inside that gray metal door would be the top of that staircase, and down that staircase would be GR Development, and then Scenery Stars, and then Knickerbocker Storage, and then, last but far from least, Combined Tool.

While Dortmunder held a shrouded flashlight to marginally increase the illumination, Kelp studied the staircase door, bending over it, squinting at it, not quite touching it. “It’s got an alarm on it,” he decided.

“We knew that,” Dortmunder said.

“It looks like it’s connected to a phone line,” Kelp said. “So it won’t make a lotta noise right around here.”

“That’s good.”

“It’ll do something somewhere, though. Lemme see what we can do here.”

While Kelp continued to study the problem before him, Dortmunder braced his wrist against the doorjamb to keep his light beam steady while he studied the world around them. Although he saw many lit windows in the wall above the Chase bank, it didn’t appear to him that any of those rooms were currently occupied. The windows in the wall down the other way were dark, and the buildings across Varick Street were too far away to matter, so it seemed to Dortmunder they were unobserved at this moment and would be likely to go on being unobserved anytime they happened to come up here at three-thirty in the morning. It was a reassuring thought.

While he was thinking, Kelp was taking from one of his many pockets a short length of wire bounded at each end by an alligator clip. The first clip he attached quickly to a bolt head jutting from the door just above the lock and handle. Then he thought a while before attaching the other to a screw head on the door frame. Nodding in agreement with himself, he took another wire from another pocket, this one with an earphone at one end and what looked like a stethoscope at the other. Earphone into his ear, he listened at a wire on the door, then said, “Listen to this.”