Donald Westlake: Get Real

Dortmunder said, “And you get people to do this? All summer?”

“We’ve got waiting lists,” Fairkeep said.

Dortmunder nodded. “And people watch this.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I am surprised.”

“The point being,” Fairkeep said, “in a situation like that, what’s gonna happen? Who falls in love, has a fight, can’t hack it. We do the setup, but then they just do themselves. Same with you.”

Andy said, “Only, where’s our setup?”

“Well, with you,” Fairkeep told him, “ you’re the setup. Like we’re shooting one now, The Stand , it’s a farm family upstate, they’re running a vegetable stand out by the road, they’re a quirky family, kind of kooky, but they’ve got to make this stand work, they really need the money. Maybe you’ve seen it. The Stand. ”

“Never,” Andy said.

“Oh, well,” Fairkeep said, “they did that stand thing anyway, long before we came along, but now we shape it—”

“—And make it entertaining.”

Fairkeep’s nod at Dortmunder was a little uncertain. “That’s right,” he said. “So whatever you want to do, that’s what you do, and we’ll film it.”

Andy said, “Well, we were thinking, if it was gonna be like that, maybe it would be good, you know, what you call your tie-in—”

“Product placement,” Dortmunder suggested.

“That, too,” Andy agreed. “What we were thinking, Doug, if we lifted something that was connected to your own company some way, it might give us an inside track on things.”

“A mole, like,” Dortmunder said.

“And the other thing,” Andy went on, “if the cops suddenly showed up to bust us, we could all just laugh and say it was all in fun, we were never gonna lift anything anyway.”

“An insurance policy,” Dortmunder said.

Fairkeep looked doubtful. “Take something from Get Real? There isn’t anything at Get Real. We want you to aim a little higher than office supplies.”

“We weren’t,” Andy said, “thinking of Get Real.”

“Oh, you mean Monopole,” Fairkeep said, sounding surprised that Andy would know about that. “Our big bosses?”

“Well, not your big bosses,” Andy told him, taking a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. Opening it, consulting it, he said, “What we got from Google is, Get Real is a subsidiary of Monopole Broadcasting, doing commercial TV and cable and Internet broadcasting and production and export. Sounds pretty good.”

“Yes,” Fairkeep said. “But Monopole isn’t—”

“Now, Monopole,” Andy said, frowning at his list, “is sixty percent owned by Intimate Communications, and that’s owned eighty percent by Trans-Global Universal Industries, and that’s owned seventy percent by something called SomniTech.”

“My God,” Fairkeep said, sounding faint. “I never worked it out like that.”

“Now, all of these are East Coast companies,” Andy said. “Among them, they’re in oil, communications, munitions, real estate, aircraft engines, and chemistry labs.”

Fairkeep shook his head. “Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?”

Dortmunder said, “Doug, somebody in that mob has to have some cash.”

Fairkeep blinked at him. “Cash?”

“Doug,” Andy said, “we can’t resell an aircraft engine.”

“But there is no cash,” Fairkeep told him. “Per diem for the crew on the road, that’s all.”

“Think about it, Doug,” Dortmunder urged. “Somewhere in all those companies, all those businesses, and a lot of them are overseas, somewhere in all that there’s got to be someplace with cash.”

Shaking his head in absolute assurance, Fairkeep said, “No, there isn’t. I have never seen cash in—” And then he kind of stuttered, as though he’d just had one of those mini-power outages that makes you reset all your clocks. In a second, less than a second, power was restored, but Fairkeep continued the sentence in a different place. “—Anywhere. It just isn’t done. Even Europe, Asia, all those transactions are wire transfers.”

Dortmunder had seen that little blip, and he was sure Andy had, too. He said, “Well, Doug, will you at least think about it?”

“Oh, sure,” Fairkeep said.

“Good.” Getting to his feet, because the explanation for the power outage would not be found in this room, not today, Dortmunder said, “We’ll be in touch.”

Surprised, Fairkeep said, “Is that it?”

“For today. We’ll get back in touch when we fill out the roster.”

“Oh, the five men, you mean,” Fairkeep said. “But you don’t even know what the robbery is yet, so you don’t know if you’ll need all five.”

Rising from the sofa, Andy said, “Here’s a rule for you, Doug. Never go in with fewer crew than you need.”

JUDSON BLINT WAS TIRED of opening envelopes. Oh, sure, every envelope he opened was another check, twenty percent of which would go directly into his own pocket, the easiest money he could ever hope to find, and slitting open envelopes with a very good letter opener was not exactly hard labor, but still. Here he was, at a desk in a seventh-floor office in the Avalon State Bank Tower in midtown Manhattan, slitting open envelope after envelope, scanning into the computer the return addresses, keeping track of the check totals, and even though he knew very well what he was actually doing was mail fraud—in fact, three different mail frauds, as any federal law officer would know at once—there were still some moments, and this was one of them, when what he was doing here just felt like a job.

So here he sat, late on this Wednesday afternoon in April, when spring fever should by all rights have had him in its grip, and still he was making these repetitive movements, with the envelopes and the letter opener and the check piles and the scanner and the pen and the ledger, and if this wasn’t work, Judson wanted to know, then what the hell was it?

The inner office door opened and J. C. Taylor came through. A dangerous-looking black-haired beauty in her mid-thirties, she paced forward like a predator who’d just picked up a fresh scent. Behind her in her office was Maylohda, the fictitious South Pacific island nation she used in her developing-country scams. (So many people want to help!) Looking at Judson, she said, “You still here?”

“Pretty heavy today, J. C.,” he said. “I’m done with the detective course and the sex book and I’m just finishing up with the music.”

“Don’t stay too late,” she advised. “You don’t want to get stale.”

“No, ma’am, I won’t.”

“Ma’am,” she said, with a scornful look, and left. Judson shrugged—it was so hard to know the right reactions to people when you were barely a person yourself at nineteen—and went back to, face it, work.

He always saved the music business for last, because those people were the most fun. The people who just wanted to be a detective at home in their spare time or just wanted to look at dirty pictures at home in their spare time were pretty cut-and-dried, merely sending in their money, but the people who sent music to Super Star Music to have lyrics set to it, or alternatively, lyrics for an infusion of music (sometimes A’s request meshing just fine with B’s, so what came in could be shipped right back out again, neither participant any the wiser), tended to write confessional letters of such mawkish cluelessness that Judson wished there were, somewhere in the world, a publisher gutsy enough to put out a collection of them.

But that was not to be, since dispassionate self-knowledge is not a quality held in much esteem by the majority of the human race, so not enough people would find the product funny. Oh, well; at least he could enjoy the sincerity of these simpletons, to ease his own stress in the workaday world.