26

HE CALLED my Mom this afternoon,” Stan said, as Kelp got into this nice Chevy Gazpacho that Stan had borrowed half an hour ago from a perfectly legal parking place on West Forty-ninth Street.

Shutting his door, putting on his seat belt—because who wants to listen to all that ping-ping-ping—Kelp said, “Doug? What’d she tell him?”

Stan put the Gazpacho in gear and continued on downtown. “What we said. I’m out of town into California a while, considering my job prospects.”

“Good.”

Last night’s expedition to Varick Street, like this one tonight, had been only the two of them, since they didn’t need a whole crowd to gaff one window. They’d brought a different car from a different neighborhood last night, gone through the house like smoke, Kelp up the ladder while Stan held it, and sufficient epoxy glue was spread there to hold USS Intrepid in place. A gas-pipe explosion could take out the entire block, but that window would not leave that frame.

Tonight would be step two of the plan: Cut out the lower pane, carefully place the pane inside the room, case Combined Tool to find out at last what the hell was in there, gently epoxy the pane back in place, and depart. John had wanted to come along tonight, just because it was a kind of a matter of personal pride for him to walk around inside that forbidden city, but he’d come to understand it wasn’t necessary; soon they’d be going in for real.

Now, Stan parked in a temporarily legal place a couple blocks from Varick Street, and he and Kelp used paper towels to wipe down anything they might have touched in the car. When they were done here, Kelp would cab uptown and Stan would subway to Canarsie, and eventually the city would take charge of the Gazpacho. In the meantime, Kelp carried the thick tube of epoxy and the strong suction cup with a handle.

The walk to Varick Street and through the building was uneventful, but when they went out the back door to the areaway and looked up the lights were on in Combined Tool. “What the hell,” Stan said.

“Ssh,” Kelp whispered. Pointing toward the ladder, he whispered, “We gotta see.”

“Good.”

They went over to get the ladder, extended it without difficulty, and leaned it against the wall between two of the kitchen windows. Stan whispered, “I’m not doing that thing like you and the kid did, with two people at once up on this thing. You go up and come down, and then I’ll go up and come down.”

“I like that.”

Stan held the ladder and watched Kelp climb. The light from the kitchen was bright enough that he’d have to be careful up there looking in. His head bent far back, Stan watched as Kelp eased up and over, and then the light was on part of Kelp’s face including his right eye, and he was looking in.

Well? Get on with it. Stan wanted to call up to Kelp, Come on, what’re you looking at up there, what’s going on, but he knew he couldn’t do that, and eventually Kelp did come back down the ladder. He looked at Stan, shrugged in a manner that didn’t communicate anything, and gestured for Stan to take his turn.

Stan said, “What’s up there?”

“Look at it,” Kelp advised.

So Stan did. Up he went, and slowly eased his face into the light, and what he was looking at was the profile of a man seated at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal and reading a newspaper. The word “Zeitung” was the biggest word Stan could see on the newspaper, so it was in German.

The man himself was about fifty, thin, balding, spectacled, wearing a pale yellow dress shirt and dark patterned tie under a buttoned-up black vest, plus dark pants and black shoes. Very formal dress for eating cereal on Varick Street in Manhattan at one in the morning.

Stan went down the ladder. “We can’t do it,” he whispered. “Not with him in there.”

“I know it.”

“And you were all supposed to meet Doug here tomorrow. Except you weren’t going to.”

“Well,” Kelp said, “it looks as though we’re gonna meet Doug here tomorrow.”

27

WHEN DORTMUNDER WALKED into the fake OJ at ten o’clock on Monday morning, Doug was there with Ray Harbach and Darlene Looper and Marcy and the flamboyant director, Roy Ombelen, plus a stocky fiftyish man in a bartender’s white apron and white shirt—though rather too white, in fact—who looked as though he might be Rollo’s mild-mannered cousin from San Francisco. More tofu than meat.

“Good morning, John,” Doug said. He had the harried look of a man having to remind himself to look cheerful. “Where’s the others?”

“They’ll be along,” Dortmunder said. He himself was feeling grumpy, since he’d thought everything would be done by now. They would set things up for the break-in, that was the plan, then disappear from Doug’s Global Positioning System, wait a week, and clean out Combined Tool and Knickerbocker Storage. Let Doug and his pals believe anything they wanted to believe, they wouldn’t be able to prove a thing. If they went so far as to look at a lot of old mug shots they might eventually identify one or more of their former reality-stars-to-be, but they still wouldn’t be able to prove anything, and Dortmunder and associates would all have rock-solid alibis for the night in question.

But it wasn’t to be. All at once, Combined Tool had turned into a pied-à-terre for a guy reading a Zeitung. They obviously couldn’t do their pre-heist survey with him there, and there seemed to be no way to find out who he was, or how long he intended to stay, or what he had to do with Combined Tool.

So there was nothing for it but to stick around a little longer, because none of them, not even Tiny, wanted to just walk away with no profit and no answers. Which was why he was here again, saying to Doug, “You wanted to start something today?”

“Roy’s going to tell you about it,” Doug said, “but it ought to wait till the rest arrive.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said, and went into the non-OJ to sit at a booth on the right, which was, in fact, a little more comfortable than the ones in the original. Looking around he saw three cameras, hulking black things on big elaborate swivel-chair-type wheel arrangements, each camera attached by a black wire to the earphones of a cameraperson slouched negligently in a chair, reading a tabloid, while Doug and the others murmured together a little ways off.

He had barely made himself comfortable in this booth when that loud doorbell sounded, signaling the arrival of the rest, brought here in Tiny’s current limo. Doug hurried off to let them in.

Dortmunder had come here separately because he’d wanted a little solitary time to think over this unpleasant new development and had therefore decided to walk down from Nineteenth Street, hoping to find a solution to their problems along the way. Some hope.

Soon Kelp and Tiny and the kid appeared, and when they came over from the elevator they all started in about how terrific this imitation OJ was, and Dortmunder suddenly remembered, That’s right! I’m supposed to be seeing this thing for the first time. Instead of which, he’d just moped in and said something grumpy and sat down.

Well, fortunately, Doug and the others hadn’t noticed that slip, and now everybody else was making up for it; maybe overdoing it just a bit, but not bad.

Should he join them, suddenly overcome by this OJ clone? No; better just leave it alone.

Once everybody calmed down, Roy Ombelen assembled them at the tables in the non-OJ while he described what was going on. (Today his shirt was fuchsia, ascot teal, corduroy trousers café au lait, shin-high boots apricot.) “I realize,” he told them, “the security concerns you fellows are constricted by go a bit beyond the, shall we say, run of the mill? It is our firm intention not to recognizably film your faces, because such film we wouldn’t be able to use anyway.”