Doug said, “Darlene, nobody thinks you or Ray did anything you weren’t supposed to.”

“And neither did we,” Kelp said. “Maybe even more so.”

Babe was beginning to look bedeviled. “If you people didn’t take those cars,” he said, “and I don’t believe that for a second, but if you didn’t take them, who did? Who else would?”

“Babe,” the kid said, surprising everybody. When Babe met his look, he said, “How many people have keys to this building?”

Babe frowned at him. “I have no idea,” he said. “So what?”

“A hundred?” the kid asked. “A thousand?”

Now Babe did try to think about it, and shrugged. “Probably more than a hundred,” he said. “Certainly less than a thousand.”

And the kid said, “And you trust every one of them?”

Exasperated, Babe said, “I don’t even know every one of them. What difference is that supposed to make?”

“There’s all those cars down there,” the kid said. “Just sitting there. Mostly, nobody cares about them. They’ve got the keys in them, Babe. More than one hundred people know they’re there.”

Babe shook his head. “And why,” he said, “did it just happen to happen now, when you people are in the building? Free run of the goddam building.”

“Well,” the kid said, “if I was working up in your midtown offices, and I knew all these cars were down here, and I had a key to the building, and I knew you were working down here with this gang of criminals, wouldn’t I think maybe this would be the perfect time for a new set of wheels?”

Troubled, Babe looked at Doug. Troubled, Doug looked at Babe.

Dortmunder said, “The fact is, we all live right here in Manhattan. We’re not going anywhere that needs cars. Four cars? I don’t even need one car.”

Doug said, “Babe? I think they’re telling the truth, I really do. What’s the advantage to them? And look at all the great footage we got.”

Babe could be seen to waver. “I don’t know,” he said.

“I do,” Tiny said. Turning to Dortmunder, he said, “This isn’t working. We seen ourselves on the little screen, we got our twenty-four hundred except for the taxes, it’s time to get out of here. We got some real capers we could work on. No more of this make-believe.”

The kid said, “I think Tiny’s right.”

Stricken, Doug said, “No! John? Andy? You don’t want to give up, do you?”

“As a matter of fact,” Kelp said, “and now that the kid brought it up, I think I do.”

Dortmunder suddenly felt lighter, in all his parts. It was as though a low-grade fever he’d had, that he hadn’t even realized he was suffering from, had broken. They’d done a lot of this reality thing, they knew how it worked, who needed any more of it? “I think,” he told Doug gently, “I think what you got here is an extremely short reality series.”

Babe said, “Now hold on. There are contracts involved here. Obligations.”

“Take us to court,” Kelp advised. Turning to Dortmunder, he said, “Ready, John?”

“Never more.”

Darlene had now apparently figured out which way she was going: teary. “Oh, please,” she wailed. “You can’t stop now. We did so much great footage. You should see Ray and me on the lake in Central Park, it’s the sweetest thing you ever saw in your entire life.”

“That really was a terrific scene, John,” Ray said. “If you saw that scene, you’d definitely want to keep going with this show.”

“Then it’s a good thing,” Dortmunder said, “I didn’t see it. Good-bye, Doug.”

Kelp said, “What is it people say? It’s been real.”

The four of them headed for the stairs. Behind them, Doug cried, “But what if we sweeten the pot? Why don’t you guys get an agent? John! How do we keep in touch?”

MONDAY AFTERNOON, Stan decided it was time to let the rest of the guys in on what he’d learned down on Varick Street. It was going to be a blow to them, it was going to dash a lot of their hopes, but they’d be better off knowing it sooner rather than later. Stan hated to be the bearer of bad news, but he really had no choice.

The fact is, there was no caper there, not on Varick Street. Last night, having time on his hands and a little curiosity that had been building for quite a while now as to the contents of the rooms in Knickerbocker Storage, Stan had paused before removing that lovely pink Chevy Corvette from the ground floor to go upstairs, ease his way into a couple of the storage rooms, and just have a look at what they might be taking with them on the night.

Which turned out to be nothing. Crap. Wicker hampers full of old clothes, some of them clean. Tired scratched equipment for every known sport. Girly magazines from the fifties, for God’s sake. Boxes of framed photos of weddings; how many times should you get married before you’re ready to stop keeping a record? In a word: no dice.

It was only right to tell the guys. Their smart move, once he brought them up to speed on this, was to quit that reality series and get back to the real world. Out there somewhere, there was still dishonest work to be done.

He himself would be hitting Varick Street just one more time, to pick up that nice green Subaru Forester with the camera mountings replacing the front passenger seat, a minor flaw that he knew Maximillian’s crack garage crew would have no trouble eliminating. But all that would be much later tonight; between now and then, it was time to make a meet.

When he tried, he couldn’t manage to make contact with any of them directly, which meant they were all still laboring away in the vineyards of reality, but he did get to leave messages for them, after one false start.

The false start was that, the first time he phoned John, there was nobody home at all, and of course John wouldn’t know an answering machine if it reared up and spat him in the eye, which it would. But then, when he called Andy’s place, the phone was answered by Anne Marie, Andy’s live-in friend, and after he identified himself and they used a minute in small talk he said, “Would you tell Andy I wanna get the guys together, I got some news for them they’re gonna wanna know.”

“Sure, Stan. Where and when?”

“I think we need to visit the OJ at ten,” Stan said. “Kind of like a reentry portal to the actual world.”

“I’ll tell him,” she promised, and he went on to call Tiny’s number, where J. C.’s answering machine said, “This is the J. C. Taylor voice mail. Mr. Taylor is unavailable at this moment. Your call is important to us, so please leave your name and number after the beep. And have a nice day. Or night.”

Giving this machine the same message he’d given Anne Marie, Stan added, “I don’t think the kid has a voice mail, so maybe, Tiny, you can tell him what’s what. And if any of us finds himself in a living room somewhere, maybe we oughta pick up an answering machine for him. It would be a nice thing to do, and he’d actually use it.”

After that, he paused for a refreshing beer, tried John’s number again, and this time got May, whose, “Hello?” was delivered on such a rising curve of mistrust that he hastened to say, “It’s Stan, May, how you doing, it’s just me, Stan.”

“Oh, hi, Stan. We haven’t seen you for a while.”

“I been working different parts of the street from the rest of the guys,” Stan said. “But I picked up some info here and there that I think everybody oughta know, so I’m asking people to make a meet tonight at the OJ at ten.”

“I’ll tell John,” she promised. “You’re sounding good, Stan, How’s your Mom?”

“Terrific,” Stan said. “She’s out with her cab right now, but she’ll be back pretty soon.”

“Tell her I said hi. And I just got back from the Safeway, so what I’m gonna do is sit down and put my feet up.”

“Good idea,” Stan said. “I’ll probably do the same.”

Five in the afternoon. All over town, people were sitting down and putting their feet up. Stan, too.