5

DORTMUNDER FINISHED DESCRIBING the situation and waited to hear what Kelp had to say, but Kelp just sat there, nodding slowly, looking at Dortmunder as though he were a rerun on that turned-off television set over there. They were seated together in Dortmunder’s living room on East Nineteenth Street, with its view of the airshaft, Dortmunder in his usual armchair and Kelp on the sagging sofa. Kelp wouldn’t take the other armchair because it was the exclusive property of Dortmunder’s faithful companion May, who at the moment was still at her supermarket checkout job at the Safeway, bringing in the more or less honest part of their joint income.

Dortmunder nudged a little. “Well? Whadaya think?”

“I think,” Kelp said judiciously, “I think I need another beer.”

Dortmunder hefted the can in his own fist, found it empty, and said, “Yeah, me too.”

Rising, Kelp said, “You stay there, John, I’ll get it. The exercise will do me good. Give me a chance to think about this.”

“I know, it’s a little different.”

Heading for the hall, Kelp said, “The twenty G I kinda understand. It’s the other parts.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be back,” Kelp said, but as he stepped through the doorway Dortmunder heard the sound of the apartment door open, down at the end of the hall. Kelp looked to his right, smiled in a way that suggested he now felt no ambivalence at all, and said, “Hey, May.”

She appeared in the doorway, a tall slender woman, her neat black hair with gray highlights. She was lugging a grocery sack, her daily self-bestowal bonus for working at that place. “I just have to take this stuff to the kitchen,” she said.

Kelp said, “I was on my way to get us both a beer. You want one?”

“I’ll bring them,” she said. “You sit down.” And she headed on down the hall toward the kitchen.

So Kelp came back and settled once more onto the sofa, putting his empty on the coffee table as he said, “I tell you what. When May comes in, tell her the story. Maybe I’ll get a better read on it if I look at it from the side, like.”

“Good idea.”

So, a minute later, when May reappeared, unencumbered except for three beer cans that she distributed, Dortmunder said, “I got a very strange proposition today.”

She didn’t quite know how to take that word. Settling into her chair, she said, “A proposition?”

“A job, kind of. But weird.”

“John’s gonna describe it to you now,” Kelp said, and looked at Dortmunder, as alert as a sparrow on a branch.

Dortmunder took a breath. “It’s reality TV,” he said, and went on to describe how Murch’s Mom had introduced Doug Fairkeep into their lives and what Doug Fairkeep had proposed, including the payoff.

Somehow, every time he told that story he got the same kind of dead-air silent reaction. Now May and Kelp both gave him the glassy-eye treatment, so he said, “That’s the story, May, that’s all there is.”

She said, “Except the next day, when they drag you all off to jail.”

“Doug Fairkeep says we’ll work around that.”

“How?”

“He doesn’t say.”

May squinted, much the way she used to squint back when she chain-smoked. “I’ll tell you another question,” she said. “What is it you’re supposed to steal?”

“We didn’t go into that.”

“It might make a difference,” she said.

Dortmunder didn’t get it. “How?”

“Well,” she said, “if they were going for laughs, like. Like if you hijacked a diaper service truck, something like that.”

Kelp said, “I’m not gonna hijack any diaper service truck.”

“Like that,” she said.

Dortmunder said, “May, I don’t think so. What they do is, they find people got some sort of interesting lifestyle or background or something, and they film the people doing what they do, and then they shape it, to make it entertainment. I don’t think they’re goin for jokes, I think they’re goin for real.”

“Jail is real,” she said.

Dortmunder nodded, but said, “The problem is, so is twenty G.”

“Looks to me,” Kelp said, “as though you oughta go back and see this guy and ask him a lot more questions.”

“I’m realizing that,” Dortmunder admitted. “You wanna come along?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Kelp said, as casual as an aluminum siding salesman. “No need for me to poke my face in at this point. Murch’s Mom didn’t rat me out to the guy.”

“No, she didn’t,” Dortmunder said.

“But I tell you what I’ll do,” Kelp said. “Come home with me and I’ll Google him.”

Dortmunder frowned. “Is that a good thing?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kelp said.

6

DOUG FAIRKEEP’S IMMEDIATE BOSS at Get Real was a barrel-bodied bald sixty-year-old named Babe Tuck, who had come over from the news side after thirty years as a foreign correspondent. In the company bio online, a hair-raising read, were listed the times he’d been gassed, kidnapped, shot, abandoned in mid-ocean, set fire to, poisoned, dropped from a helicopter, and tied to the railroad tracks. “I’ve had enough of the real world,” he’d announced, when making the transfer to Get Real. “Time to retire to reality.”

Everybody was a little afraid of Babe Tuck, partly because of his history and reputation, but also because his mind was seriously twisted. He not only came up with the most outrageous ideas for reality series, he then went on to make them work. The One-Legged Race, for instance. All those wheelchairs, all those colostomy bags, all that bitching and complaint. Apparently, the fewer the limbs you had, the bigger the ego, to compensate.

So Doug had been pretty sure Babe wouldn’t immediately reject the idea of filming professional criminals performing a professional crime. All it needed was for Babe to see how the idea could be made practical. Therefore, all he said was, “We’ll have to run this by legal,” when Doug finished describing the layout of the show.

Doug smiled. “We’ll have to run this by legal,” was obviously a way to say, “Yes, if…” That was fine. The if would work itself out; all Doug had needed was the yes.

“I’ll talk to them over there,” he offered, “or you can. Whatever you want.”

Making a note on the legal pad on his desk, Babe said, “I’ll make an appointment. Now we come to the question, violence.”

Doug sat back in the leather visitor’s chair, Babe’s office being grander than his own, which was only right, but not garishly so, which was gratifying. “The cabbie,” he said, “Mrs. Murch, told me her son and the other guys didn’t like violence, avoided it whenever they could.”

Babe nodded, frowning at the note he’d just made. “Does this make them a little too Milquetoasty?”

“When I didn’t want to turn over the recorder,” Doug said, “Stan offered to throw me under a bus. A moving bus.”

Surprised, Babe said, “That’s a little violent.”

“I didn’t take it literally,” Doug assured him. “I took it to be Stan telling me he would do what it took, so he was showing me the extreme case. Naturally, I gave him the recorder before we got anywhere near there.”

“So there’s a threat of violence,” Babe said, “without the actual violence. That’s good, I like that.”

“These guys,” Doug said, “have a certain grungy kind of authenticity about them that’ll play very well on the small screen.”

Nodding, looking at his notepad, sucking a bit on his lower lip, Babe said, “What are they gonna steal?”

“That’s up to them,” Doug said. “We didn’t get that far.”

“No widow’s mites,” Babe cautioned. “No crippled newsie’s crutches.”

“Oh, nothing like that,” Doug said. “Our demographic would like to see some snooty rich people get cleaned out.”

“Clean out the Saudi Arabian embassy,” Babe suggested.

Laughing, Doug said, “I’ll pass that idea on.”