After the third taped run-through of the bar scene, Roy Ombelen told Darlene and Rodney the barman they were finished for the day and they’d be getting a callback when they were next needed, which would be sometime after tomorrow. They left, and when the receding elevator racket finished, Ombelen led his five players and his camerapeople and two other guys who had something to do with light and sound and his producer to the hall set with the fake restrooms.
And now there was a delay because the lighting was all wrong and something was screwed up with the sound, so the reality stars of tomorrow were told they could go back and lounge on the OJ set while the hall was being perfected.
Once away from the cameras and the role-playing, Dortmunder found himself returning to his right mind, and he wished he could talk with the others, or at least with Kelp, about this situation, but of course he couldn’t, not with Harbach here. So he sat in silence, telling himself the things he would have been telling Kelp, things he already knew, until he couldn’t stand it any more, and that’s when he stood and said, “Andy, let’s walk a little.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Kelp said.
Harbach looked briefly as though he might volunteer to walk with them, but the kid, recognizing what Dortmunder was up to, chose that moment to say, “Ray, I keep thinking you look familiar somehow. Would there be any television shows I might’ve seen you on?”
“Well,” Harbach said, “I don’t suppose you’ve watched a lot of soap operas,” by which time Dortmunder and Kelp were already on their feet and out of the OJ set, so that danger was averted.
This was still a pretty big building, and there was still a lot of underused floor space away from the three sets. Dortmunder and Kelp strolled through this, and Dortmunder said, “What are we gonna do here?”
“Well,” Kelp said, “we still got the problem of the tenant.”
“I know that. We gotta come back tonight and see if he’s still there. And this time, I gotta come along, because if we can go in, I wanna be there.”
“Okay, sure. But what if he’s still there?”
“I dunno about this TV thing,” Dortmunder said. “I mean, it wasn’t too bad after a while—”
“Once you got used to the cameras. And the guy carrying the microphone in the air over your head.”
“He didn’t bother me so much,” Dortmunder said, because he’d barely noticed that guy. “But, Andy, this isn’t what we do. What we do is, we go in, we pick up what we pick up, we go out. One, two, it’s done. This thing, they rehearse it over and over.”
“Maybe,” Kelp said, “the guy will be gone tonight. And we can give up our TV career.”
“Hey, Andy! Hey, John!”
It was Doug, over by the sets, waving to them, so they went over there and Kelp said, “Are we ready for my close-up?” which Dortmunder didn’t get, but which apparently Doug did, because he laughed and said, “Just about, Norma. I wanted to tell you guys, when they’re done taping today, I’d like you to stick around a little. Babe’s coming back downtown, and he thinks he might have the solution to our problem.”
Kelp said, sounding as enthusiastic as though he actually intended to go through with this reality thing, “That’s great, Doug. I figured we could count on Babe.”
“Oh, yeah,” Doug said. “Babe’s been around the block a couple times. He knows what’s what. You’re not gonna put anything over on Babe.”
“That’s great news,” Dortmunder said.
The taping in the hallway, once they got their technical problems out of the way, didn’t take long at all. Two of the cameras were used, both behind the group, one high and one low, panning forward as the group moved.
Even being wider than the hallway in the original OJ, this one was still not wide enough for all five to walk abreast, so they proceeded in a little cluster, telling each other the made-up stuff they’d been given by Marcy, about how they hadn’t seen one another in a while, and how it was good to get the gang working together again, and how they couldn’t wait to hear Ray’s news.
Three times they did this, walking down the same hall to the same doorway to nowhere, the cameras trailing like large black dogs, and the third time, when Ombelen called, “Cut!” Dortmunder turned around and looked back there, and saw, just beyond the cameras and the camerapersons and the soundman with the long sound boom and Ombelen and Doug, there was Babe Tuck. And standing beside Babe Tuck was a very rigid-looking guy, balding, spectacled, in a three-piece black suit and pale blue shirt and dark blue tie.
Beside Dortmunder, Kelp coughed a little, putting his hand up to his mouth. Behind that hand, “Zeitung,” he muttered.
30
DOUG WAS ASTONISHED when he turned around to see Babe walking toward the set with Herr Muller at his side, and for just a second he thought, Did he send all the way to Munich for Herr Muller, and how did he get here so fast? Then he realized Herr Muller must have already been here in the States, maybe even staying in Combined Tool, and the coincidence just seemed like a good omen. Well, Herr Muller owed him a good omen, didn’t he?
Doug wasn’t originally supposed to know anything about the double life of Herr Muller, and still wouldn’t, if it hadn’t been for a strange event that had happened almost three years ago during The Stand’s first season and just after Babe came over to reality from news. Until then, Doug had only known Richard Muller the way most people did, as a well-thought-of serious documentary filmmaker on subjects like South African gold mining or contemporary Arab slave trade that the American commercial television market hadn’t much use for but that the Europeans ate like candy. He had known that Herr Muller had a production deal with Trans-Global Universal Industries (TUI), one of the highest business levels above Get Real, and that on his occasional trips to the United States he might use Get Real’s facilities for interviews or editing, and in the normal course of events that’s all he would have known.
The day it happened, Herr Muller was in a morning meeting with Babe and, just by coincidence, he and Doug took the same elevator down, Doug on his way to lunch, Herr Muller apparently on his way to a plane, given the large garment bag he carried over one shoulder and the wheeled suitcase he towed behind. Doug knew the man well enough to nod and smile, and Herr Muller did likewise.
When they reached the lobby, all hell had broken loose. The space from the elevators to the revolving doors onto Third Avenue was full of milling querulous people, demanding explanations, being ignored. The doors were blocked by uniformed city police, frisking everybody before letting them leave the building, checking into all handbags and other parcels: a very slow process. Two more policemen by the elevators kept announcing that no one was to go back upstairs. Everybody had taken the elevator down, and everybody would now leave the building. Slowly.
The cops guarding the elevators would not answer any questions, and in fact would say nothing but that nobody was permitted to make a U-turn. It was a bit like rush hour in Hell.
“Well, this is a mess,” Doug said, and looked at Herr Muller to see the man as pale as a white wine spritzer. He really did look as though he might faint. Doug said, “What is it?”
“I cannot be searched,” Herr Muller said. He did not have a marked accent, but the kind of overcareful pronunciation that marked the foreign-born.
Doug was aghast, but in the film business this sort of thing is never entirely impossible. Leaning closer to the ashen man, pitching his voice under the clatter of the crowd, he said, “Drugs?”
“No no!” Herr Muller almost gained strength from the accusation, but then his terror struck him again, and he clutched at Doug’s arm, saying, low but shrill, “It is money. Cash money. Company cash money.”