“But not yet,” Babe said. “Let’s clear it with legal first, make sure we know what we’re doing and we can actually do it. Not too much contact right at first.”

“I won’t move,” Doug promised, “until I get your say-so.”

“Good thinking,” Babe said. “I’ll get back to you.”

Doug smiled all the way from Babe’s office to his own, where Lueen looked up from her suspiciously clean desk (what did she actually do around here?) to say, “Somebody named John called for you.”

Ah, John: the gloomy one. Following on Babe’s desire for no premature contact, Doug said, “It’s late in the day, Lueen, I’ll get back to him tomorrow.”

Pushing a pink While You Were Out slip across her desk toward him, she said, “He especially said he wanted to talk to you today. ‘No surprises,’ he said.”

Doug frowned. “No surprises? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Beats me. There’s the number anyway.”

Doug picked up the slip, looked at it, and saw immediately Lueen had made a mistake. “No, it isn’t,” he said.

She gave him a skeptical eyebrow. “What do you mean it isn’t?”

Holding the pink slip in his left palm, he tapped the phone number with his right index finger. “Lueen,” he said, “this is my phone number.”

She seemed pleasantly surprised. “Well, how’d he do that?”

Doug felt the earth shift slightly; an unpleasant sensation. Pushing the phone slip back toward Lueen he said, “You dial it. And I would very much prefer it if you got my answering machine.”

“No skin off my nose,” she said, made the call, and said, “John?”

Doug moaned minimally, and Lueen said, “Sure, Doug is right here. Hold on.”

“I’ll—I’ll take it at my desk,” Doug said, and fled to his office, where he picked up the phone with both hands, as though it just might make some kind of fast move on him. Into it he said, “Hello?”

“Doug?” John’s voice.

“What are you doing in my apartment?”

“It’s a nice place, Doug, you got good taste. Only that woman Renee moved out, I guess.”

“A year ago,” Doug said, and then thought, I can’t have a calm conversation with the man, he’s in my apartment. “What are you doing there?”

“Waiting for you. Quiet place for a meet. Only could you bring a six-pack? We like Heinekens.”

“Heinekens,” Doug echoed, and hung up the receiver.

What pier had he walked off here?

AT FIRST, Dortmunder couldn’t figure out why he was suddenly hearing a jangly version of “The Whiffen-poof Song” on chimes. He looked across Fairkeep’s neat if anonymous living room at Andy, seated at his ease on the other tan leather armchair across the kilim carpet, and as the final bah ricocheted around the gray-green walls, leaving only a metallic echo of itself, Andy said, “Doorbell.”

Dortmunder said, “He’s ringing his own bell?”

“Well,” Andy said, being an understanding sort of guy, “he’s not used to the situation. You oughta be the one that lets him in, he knows you.”

Andy’s decision to attend this meeting after all had been the result of that Google search done on the computer in Andy’s apartment, which had not only given them Fair-keep’s address, and Ivy League college record (low Bs), and marital status (un), and DVD rental preferences (date movies, mostly), but had also, once Andy switched to a different question, described the entire corporate Christmas tree of which Get Real Productions was a shiny but small bauble on a lower branch. Armed with this knowledge, and being in possession of Fairkeep’s residence, Dortmunder rose, crossed to open the apartment door, and said, “You made good time.” (He felt it would be better to begin with a pleasantry.)

Eyes wide, straining to scan every bit of the room at once, Fairkeep said, “I took a cab.”

“Well,” Dortmunder said, to reassure him, “ourselves, we didn’t take anything.”

Fairkeep’s stare froze on Andy. “Who’s this?”

“This is Andy,” Dortmunder said, closing the door. (Fairkeep flinched, then tried to cover it.)

“How ya doing?” Andy said.

“Andy,” Dortmunder explained, “will be another one on the payroll if it comes to that.”

Seeing nothing amiss, and nothing missing, Fairkeep grew a lot calmer, saying, “Well, if it comes to that, we’re gonna need something more than first names.”

“When we’re just batting it around,” Andy said, “first names are friendlier. Yours is Doug, right?”

Before Fairkeep could answer that, Dortmunder gestured generally at the room and said, “Which chair is yours, usually?”

“What?” Fairkeep gaped around, apparently baffled by the question, then pointed at the chair where late Andy had sat. “That one.”

“Fine,” Dortmunder said, “I’ll take that one over there.”

“And I’ll,” Andy said, “be very happy on this sofa here.” And sat down with a big smile.

Seeing both his guests seated on his furniture, Fairkeep belatedly and abruptly also sat, rocking the armchair a bit. “You wanted to talk to me.”

“We had some more questions,” Dortmunder told him. Having plotted the whole thing out in his mind, he started with question number one: “What is it you want us to steal?”

Surprised, Fairkeep said, “I don’t know. What do you usually steal?”

“Things that turn up,” Andy said. “But you don’t have any particular valuables in mind.”

“No. We don’t supply the story line, you do. We film you doing what you do—”

“And then you shape it,” Dortmunder said, “and make it entertainment.”

“That’s right,” Fairkeep said. “Even if the setup’s kind of artificial sometimes, you—Let me give you an example.”

“Good,” Dortmunder said.

“Let’s say we rent a house, and we furnish it,” Fairkeep said, “and we put spycams all through the house, and we get a bunch of college kids, boys and girls, and we pay them to live in the house. But the gimmick could be, they have to spend the whole summer vacation there, they can’t ever step outside the house. Anybody leaves the house, they’re out of the game. We ship in food, and they can watch TV, and like that. And they don’t know each other before they start. And we can make up any rules we want to make up, make it different from any other show like that.”

Dortmunder said, “And you get people to do this? All summer?”

“We’ve got waiting lists,” Fairkeep said.

Dortmunder nodded. “And people watch this.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I am surprised.”

“The point being,” Fairkeep said, “in a situation like that, what’s gonna happen? Who falls in love, has a fight, can’t hack it. We do the setup, but then they just do themselves. Same with you.”

Andy said, “Only, where’s our setup?”

“Well, with you,” Fairkeep told him, “you’re the setup. Like we’re shooting one now, The Stand, it’s a farm family upstate, they’re running a vegetable stand out by the road, they’re a quirky family, kind of kooky, but they’ve got to make this stand work, they really need the money. Maybe you’ve seen it. The Stand.”

“Never,” Andy said.

“Oh, well,” Fairkeep said, “they did that stand thing anyway, long before we came along, but now we shape it—”

“—And make it entertaining.”

Fairkeep’s nod at Dortmunder was a little uncertain. “That’s right,” he said. “So whatever you want to do, that’s what you do, and we’ll film it.”

Andy said, “Well, we were thinking, if it was gonna be like that, maybe it would be good, you know, what you call your tie-in—”

“Product placement,” Dortmunder suggested.

“That, too,” Andy agreed. “What we were thinking, Doug, if we lifted something that was connected to your own company some way, it might give us an inside track on things.”

“A mole, like,” Dortmunder said.

“And the other thing,” Andy went on, “if the cops suddenly showed up to bust us, we could all just laugh and say it was all in fun, we were never gonna lift anything anyway.”