“Oh, now,” Babe said.

Marcy said, “I was just starting to tell them about the action today. All of you are in the bar here, including Darlene, and you’re all just talking about your old successful robberies, with changes, of course, with changes. And then a mysterious man comes in and sits in the back there, back near where the door would be if there was a door.”

“That’s me,” Babe said.

“Everybody becomes aware of him because he’s just watching people, but nobody knows who he is.”

“Mine is one of the faces we can show,” Babe said. He sounded modest about it.

“And then the camera,” Marcy said, “the camera sees, and so do the people at home, that Darlene knows who he is, and doesn’t want anybody else to catch on. Is he her father? An ex-husband? A hitman, sent to kill her by somebody from her past? She seems to be afraid of him, right, Darlene?”

“I’ve been practicing,” Darlene said.

Marcy approved. “Good.” To the others she said, “So this is a mystery and some suspense, and we’ll run it out as long as we can. But for today, you all just become aware of him, but don’t do any big reactions, don’t try to talk to him or anything like that. Okay?”

“You want us to be cool,” the kid said.

“Exactly.”

So everybody agreed with that idea, and then Babe said, “I’ve been around these shows a few years now, even dreamed up a couple of them, but I’ve never actually been in one before. Seemed like a good time to get my feet wet.”

Roy Ombelen said, “And we’re very glad indeed to have you among us, Babe. And now, lady and gents, if we could begin with Rodney in place, and Tiny and Judson sitting at—”

“Oh, that’s me,” the kid said. “I almost forgot.”

“I believe in names,” Roy told him. “In any event, you’ll both be at the bar, chatting with Rodney, nothing important, and then you other four come in all together. Now, Darlene, I need you at the left end of the group along the bar, so when Babe comes in you’ll have a clear view of him. The group chats—”

“About the hits of yesteryear,” Kelp said.

“Even so. Now we’ll be doing an existing storefront entrance for Babe’s coming into the bar from the street, so at the moment that’s supposed to happen, Darlene, I’ll snap my fingers. You look over that way, toward the pretend door, and you see him. You’re startled, and then you cover up, and the conversation goes on. Everyone all right with that?”

Everyone was all right.

“Good.” Roy turned to Babe, saying, “Now, you don’t look at anybody, you just come in and walk to the right end of the bar, away from the others. Rodney, you go to Babe. He orders a beer, you give him the can and the glass, he pays you and goes back to that table there, and you go back with the group. Okay?”

Everybody was still okay.

“We’ll probably,” Roy said, “have to take a break at that point to relight that table, but up till then, you people just do your conversation, that’s the ostensible focus of our scene. Okay?”

Still okay.

“Very good. Places, please.”

So everybody slid once again into reality. Kelp found it an easy place to be, no difficult demands, just talking like tough guys. Nobody even thought about cameras any more.

Kelp watched Darlene, and she really did a nice job of it. A real actress, she knew how to get the effects with really very small moves.

Meanwhile, the group cut up old jackpots, the bank in the trailer, the emerald they had to keep going back and getting again and again, the ruby that was too famous to hock so they had to put it back where they got it, the cache of cash in the reservoir. The time just seemed to go by.

Walking up Seventh Avenue with Dortmunder when the day’s work was done, Kelp said, “I didn’t think Babe was very good at that stuff.”

“I know what you mean,” Dortmunder said. “He was too stiff like.”

“He doesn’t have a natural ease in front of the camera.”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, “his is really a very small part, it won’t matter much.”

“And the rest of us,” Kelp said, “can carry him.”

42

STAN DROVE the GMC Mastodon hybrid from where he’d found it, alone and unattended on a dark side street in Queens, across Northern Boulevard to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to Manhattan, the quickest most direct route after midnight, which this was, making today Wednesday, three weeks since the Wednesday since they had first heard of the existence, from Stan’s Mom, of Doug Fairkeep and reality.

Once in Manhattan, Stan paused at various street corners to pick up some friends. By the time he turned westward onto Fourteenth Street from Park Avenue, he had Dortmunder to his right and Kelp beyond that, with the kid in the usually roomy backseat making do with whatever was left over after Tiny came aboard.

“Even late at night,” Stan explained, as they drove toward Varick Street, “I can’t just park forever in front of that building. There’s still some tunnel traffic at any hour, so the cops come by a lot to keep it clear, and if a cop decides to tell me to move along he just might also decide to have a look at my paperwork first.”

“We know how it works,” Dortmunder said.

“Good.” Stan braked for a red light, and never even glanced at the patrol car parked in the bus stop. “What I’ll do,” he said, “I’ll let everybody off and then just go around the block until I see you all.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said.

“If it turns out,” Stan said, “you have a little problem and I shouldn’t wait around but just go home, try to open that garage door. Like a signal.”

Kelp said, “What if we wanna give you a signal you should come in and help out with something?”

“I don’t think we’re gonna need that signal,” Stan said.

There was no more discussion along those lines, and then they reached the building, hulking dark in the middle of the block next to the well-illuminated bank building stretching to the corner. Stan drove past the GR Development building to the darker big structure at the next corner, where he stopped. His passengers all got out to the sidewalk there and, as Stan drove off to begin his orbits, the kid did a whole lot of quick stretches and bends to counteract the effects of spending the last half hour squeezed between Tiny and the ungiving flank of the Mastodon.

Meanwhile, the others followed Kelp around the corner. They were going in the same way Dortmunder and Kelp had slipped in two weeks ago. At the small side door, Kelp bent briefly over the lock meant to protect from pilferage the deep fryers, menu holders, and microwave ovens of the restaurant supply wholesaler who called this place a living. The kid had caught up by the time Kelp was pushing open the door to lead the way inside.

The stairwell, as they now knew, was on the far side of this building, across all these unemployed furnishings. Trooping through, guided by the pink light from the wall clock at the rear of the showroom and then the dim lights at every level of the stairwell, up they went to the sixth floor and into the offices of the olive oil importer who would provide the window through which they could step onto the GR Development roof.

That door, down into Get Real, had still not been restored to service, so they simply went in and down the stairs. At the second floor, Combined Tool, Dortmunder and Tiny stopped, while Kelp and the kid continued on down to the massed vehicles on one.

With one flashlight, held by the kid, they threaded through the cars to the rear door and out, where they now had to work with only the light that New York City’s sky continued to reflect down onto the crowded jumble below. Over there in the corner was the ladder, which they quickly moved into place, slanted up to beside the pantry window. Kelp climbed the ladder as the kid held it, and when he was in position he took the handled suction cup from one of the pouches in the rear of his jacket, fixed it into place against the middle of the pane of the lower half of the window, and took out the glass cutter he’d purchased new, with his own money, at a hardware store on Bleecker Street yesterday afternoon.