10

WHEN THE PHONE on the Murch kitchen wall sounded at eight-fifteen on Thursday morning, both mother and son frowned at it from their twinned breakfast helpings of white toast, much grape jelly, black coffee, and a matched set of Road & Track magazine. They watched the phone through its ensuing silence, and when it sounded a second time Stan said, “That isn’t for me. I don’t know anybody up at this hour. It’s taxi business.”

“You don’t do taxi business on the phone,” she said, but nevertheless she got to her feet, crossed to the phone, slapped it to her ear, and snapped, “Go ahead,” giving nothing away.

Stan, striving to appear as though he wasn’t watching and listening, watched and listened, and was surprised when his mother abruptly smiled and said, with no ill will at all, “Sure I remember. How you doing?” Then she turned, still smiling, extended the phone toward Stan, and said, sweetly, “It’s for you.”

Oh. Getting it, Stan said, “Reality check,” got to his feet, and took the phone, while his triumphant mother went back to her breakfast and her SUV comparison appraisals. Into the phone, Stan said, “Yeah, hello. You’re up early.”

It was Doug from yesterday, all right, “Reality,” he said, “waits for no man, Stan.”

“Where are you, a Chinese fortune cookie factory?”

“Ha ha. Listen, it’s time we got started.”

“Doing what?”

“The Gang’s All Here. You like it?”

Stan had the feeling he was in the wrong conversation somehow. He said, “Like what?”

“The title. The Gang’s All Here. You like it?”

“No.”

“Well,” Doug said, sounding just a little hurt, “it isn’t written in stone.”

“No, it wouldn’t be.”

“What we’ve got to do,” Doug said, determinedly getting down to business, “is make a start here. I don’t need the whole five men yet, but I want to get together with you and John and Andy soonest.”

Stan still wasn’t comfortable with the idea that this civilian knew everybody’s name. He said, “Where do you want to do this, your office?”

“No. We’ve got a rehearsal space downtown, we—”

“Wait a minute,” Stan said. “You got a rehearsal space for reality shows?”

“It isn’t like that,” Doug said. “It’s a big open space, like a loft, it gives us the chance, try out some ideas, smooth out some problems before we really get moving.”

“Okay.”

“When do you think you guys could get there?”

“Well, I’ll have to talk to the other two, they probly aren’t up yet.”

“Out burgling all night? Yuk yuk.”

“No.” Stan could be patient, when he had to be; it comes with being the driver. “We don’t punch a clock, see,” he explained, “so we like to sleep in.”

“Of course. I tell you what. I’ll give you the address, my cell number, call me back and tell me when we can meet. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“It’s down on Varick Street,” Doug said, “below Houston, the freight elevator opens onto the sidewalk, that’s where the bell is.”

“Okay.”

“We’re the fifth floor, that’s the top floor, the name on the bell is GR Development.”

“I’ll call you back,” Stan said, and hung up.

“Taxi business,” his mother said, and snapped a page in Road & Track.

11

WHEN KELP CAME strolling down Varick Street at two that afternoon, he saw Dortmunder ahead of him, facing a building in midblock, frowning at it while he frisked himself. Kelp approached, interested in this phenomenon, and Dortmunder withdrew from two separate pockets a crumpled piece of paper and a ballpoint pen. Bending over the paper held in his cupped left palm, he began to write, with quick glances at the facade in front of him.

Ah. The right third of the building, at street level, was a gray metal overhead garage door, graffiti-smeared in a language that hadn’t been seen on Earth since the glory days of the Maya. To the immediate left of this was a vertical series of bell buttons, each with an identifying label. These were what Dortmunder was copying onto a cash register receipt from a chain drugstore.

Reading the labels directly, since Dortmunder’s handwriting was about as legible as the Mayan graffiti, Kelp saw:

5 GR DEVELOPMENT

4 SCENERY STARS

3 KNICKERBOCKER STORAGE

2 COMBINED TOOL

The building, broad and old, was made of large rectangular stone blocks, time-darkened to a blurry charcoal. On the street floor, to the left of the garage, were two large windows, barred for security and opaque with dirt, and beyond them at the farther end a gray metal door with a bell mounted in its middle at head height. The upper floors showed blank walls above the garage entrance and three windows each, all looking a little cleaner than the ones down here.

Putting paper and pen away, Dortmunder acknowledged Kelp’s presence for the first time: “Harya doin?”

“I wanna see the inside of the place,” Kelp told him.

“We can do that,” Dortmunder said, and pushed the button for five.

They waited less than a minute, and then a mechanical voice from somewhere said, “Yeah?”

“It’s John and Andy,” Dortmunder told the door.

“And Stan,” Stan said, having just walked up from farther downtown.

“And Stan.”

“I’ll be right down.”

They waited about three minutes this time, while beside them the slow-moving traffic of southbound Varick Street oozed by, the two nearer lanes headed for the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey, the farther happier lanes not. Then, with a lot of metallic groaning and creaking, the garage door lifted and there was Doug Fairkeep with the grin he wore like a fashion statement, saying, “Right on time.”

They boarded. The elevator, big enough for a delivery truck, was just a rough wooden platform, with no side walls of its own. Ahead of them the building was broad and deep, and this level was used as a garage, for a great variety of vehicles. There were cars and vans and small trucks, but also what looked like a TV news truck, a small fire engine, an ambulance, a hansom cab without the horse, and a lot more. If it had wheels, it was in here.

Doug stood next to a compact control box attached to the building’s front wall, and when he pressed a button on it the door began noisily to lower. The elevator started up before the door finished coming down, which was a surprise, though nobody actually lost his balance.

The platform they rode rose slowly through the building, too noisily for conversation. On the second floor—Combined Tool—a clean off-white wall stood at the side, but no front wall. Out there a hall extended to the left, also off-white, with one closed office door in the part they could see.

Third floor: Knickerbocker Storage. On this level too there was a wall to their left, not recently painted anything. This wall extended straight back to the rear of the building, with double doors spaced along the way. Apparently the idea was, a truck or a van could come up the elevator to this floor, then drive along that hall and stop to unload at one or another set of doors.

Four: Scenery Stars. No wall either left or straight ahead, and no interior walls either except in the far right corner; probably a bathroom. In the far left corner a flight of black iron stairs rose up from rear to front, and thick black iron columns stood at intervals to bear the weight. The large space was full of stacks of lumber, piles of paint cans, tables covered with tools, tall canvas stage flats. A bald man in sunglasses sat at a slanted drafting table near the stairs, drawing on a large pad with pen and ruler under a bare bulb with a broad tin shade like the one in the back room at the OJ. He didn’t look toward them as their platform rose up past him.