Donald Westlake - Get Real

“We’ll work around it,” Fairkeep assured him. “We got a great staff, crack people. Like Marcy here.”

They all contemplated Marcy. “Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

“So we’ll all kick it around,” Fairkeep said. “Beat the bushes, burn the midnight oil. You’ll bring your expertise, we’ll bring ours. And you guys never have to go one step forward if you’re not comfortable.”

Dortmunder and Stan looked at each other, and Dortmunder knew Stan was thinking just what he himself was thinking: We don’t have anything else. Twenty grand to playact with a bunch of clowns with cameras. Plus the per diem.

Dortmunder nodded at Fairkeep. “Maybe,” he said firmly.

“Me, too,” said Stan.

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.”

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.