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people get cleaned out.”
    “Clean out the Saudi Arabian embassy,” Babe suggested.
    Laughing, Doug said, “I’ll pass that idea on.”
    “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?

7
    A T 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