Get Real (13 page)

Quigg, not looking at Marcy, slapped his attaché case on the table and sat in front of it to click its lid open. He too had
carried a lot of paperwork here, but somehow he’d done it much more neatly than she. Oh, well, some were neat and some were
not.

Marcy took a chair across the table from Quigg, dumped out her shoulder bag, and was sorting through its contents (Quigg’s
materials were now neatly stacked in front of him) when the cone of noise came back, this time carrying, in addition to Doug,
five more or less scruffy people, two of whom were the ones she’d met with Doug almost two weeks ago at Trader Thoreau.

The whole crowd came this way, Doug saying, “This is most of us, only two more to come. Marcy, Sam—”

But the introductions, if that was what he’d planned, were interrupted by the loud bell-ringing again, and Doug said, “Here
they are. Introduce yourselves, I’ll be right back.” And off he went to the platform to make that noise again.

The youngest of the newcomers, a nice-looking boy of a kind Marcy hadn’t expected to see on a show called, even temporarily,
The Crime Show,
stepped forward, grinning at them, and said, “Hi. I’m Judson, and this—”

“We’ll need full names,” Quigg said. He didn’t sound at all friendly or welcoming. “Did you bring an attorney?”

They looked blankly at one another. One of them, a gloomy slope-shouldered guy Marcy remembered from Trader Thoreau as being
named John, shook his head at Quigg and said, “You mean a lawyer? In our line of work, if you need a lawyer it’s already too
late.”

“And no agent,” Quigg said. “So you are all principals in this matter.”

“We’re the new stars,” said John.

“Well, I’m Quigg,” Quigg said. “I’ll be dealing with your payroll matters, tax matters, workmen’s comp, all of that. So what
I’ll need from each of you is full name, address, Social Security number.”

Another general blank look. A sharp-featured guy among them said, “It sounds like we’re being booked.”

“And not being paid,” John pointed out.

“You’ll all receive an advance payment,” Quigg snapped, “but not until
after
the processing.”

It seemed to Marcy that Quigg was alienating everybody, which wouldn’t be a good thing for her own purposes. And here came
that cone of noise again. “Maybe we should wait,” she said diplomatically, “for Doug to get back and explain everything.”

“That sounds good,” said the young one, Judson. Somehow, Marcy found herself thinking of him as the kid.

This time, Doug brought with him on the elevator a short man in black leather jacket, black turtleneck, scuffed blue jeans,
and serious workboots. Leading the newcomer over to the others, he said, “Okay, group, this is our first story session on
The Crime Show,
a title that may change, and we have some preliminary stuff to set up. So that’s Sam Quigg of—”

“We met him,” John said. He didn’t sound all that excited about it.

“Okay, fine,” Doug said. “And this is the latest member of our cast, Ray Harbach. Ray, you’ll get to know all these people.”

“I’m sure I will,” Ray said. He had a swell voice, which went with a rich full head of luxuriant dark hair.

The sharp-featured guy said, “Doug? What does Ray do in this cast? Not another gun moll.”

“No,” Doug said, chuckling as though somebody had made a joke. “Ray has some experience in your world, which he’d rather not
talk too much about—”

“Then he’s smart,” said a guy that Marcy had been trying not to notice. He was a man monster, very scary looking. He didn’t
so much remind her of one of those wrestlers on television as of three or four of them rolled into one.

“But, Tiny,” Doug said (Marcy blinked at the name), “he also has experience in the worlds of television and theater and he’ll
be a great help to you guys in working out your parts.”

John said, “What experience?”

“I did a very good
Glengarry Glen Ross,
” Ray said, “in Westport.”

“Oh,” John said. “An actor.” He said it in a very flat way, as though he hadn’t made up his mind what he thought about it.

Ray didn’t take offense. Grinning at John, he said, “It makes a very nice cover.”

“I can see it,” said the sharp-featured guy. “The cop says, ‘What are you doing with that fur coat?’ and you say, ‘It’s my
costume.’”

“When I’m doing
The Entertainer,
” Ray said.

“Well, anyway, boys and girls,” Doug said, more accurately this time, “first Sam is going to do all the personnel stuff with
you people, and then you’ll get together with Marcy here and start to work out our story line. Marcy,” he told the others,
“is the production assistant on the show, she’s the one to keep control of the throughline.”

“She
shapes
it,” John said, “and makes it
entertainment.
”

“That’s right,” Doug said, in the same flat tone as John when he’d said “actor.” Then, ebullient again, he said, “The sets
are one flight up, but we don’t have to look at them today, we’ll come back Monday for that. For now, we want to get the paperwork
squared away and start to work out our plotlines and our character arcs.”

“One thing I noticed, coming up,” the sharp-featured guy said. “There’s cameras now at Knickerbocker Storage.”

Grinning, Doug said, “Andy, that just makes it a little more dramatic.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Andy said. “It makes it a no deal.”

Taken aback, Doug said, “No deal? What do you mean?”

The kid said, “You can’t just follow us around and toughen up your act when you see what we do.”

“That’s right,” John said. “Doug, you can’t keep changing the place, so every time we get here it’s different.”

“And tougher,” Andy said. “Look, Doug, if you got cameras, you got people watching them, right?”

“Not all the time,” Doug said. “They feed to our central security office uptown, those people have a lot of cameras to monitor.”

“Monitor means watch,” John said.

Doug said, “But can’t you—Can’t you work around them somehow?”

“How do we do that?” Andy wanted to know. “If we leave them there, the guys watching the cameras watch
us.
If we turn them off or cover them, the guys watching the cameras know something’s wrong, and who do they call?”

“Nine one one,” John said.

Deeply troubled, Doug said, “I thought you’d have some cute way around that. You know, do footage of the place, empty, and
then run a film of that for the cameras, something like that.”

In a very flat voice, John said, “Now we’re making movies, and then we’re putting the movies inside surveillance cameras.
We’re pretty good.”

After a short unhappy silence, Doug sighed and shrugged and said, “We’ll remove them.”

“Thank you, Doug,” John said.

*   *   *

That was the low point of the day. The high point came later, unexpectedly, and involved Ray. Sam Quigg had finished his own
work and departed in less than half an hour, but then it had been Marcy’s task to find out who these people were and what
each of them would contribute to the ongoing plot of
The Crime Show
(tentative).

As in robbery movies, each of the gang had a specialty. There was the driver, there was the muscleman, there was the lock
expert, there was the planner (though not quite the leader, somehow) and there was the kid.

Which left Ray Harbach. What would his role be in the gang? Was there another specialty to be filled? It seemed as though
the gang was already complete.

Marcy talked to each of them, getting a sense of his skills, his character, his position within the group ethos, and it was
interesting how it all fit together. It really didn’t seem as though it needed a Ray Harbach, though Doug definitely did want
him aboard. “Ray’s gonna be a real addition to the group dynamic,” he insisted.

“How?” Marcy asked.

“A real addition.”

So Marcy, in the interviewing, asked the man himself. “Ray,” she said, “do you have some specialty, some expertise, some way
you’ll fit in with the rest of the group?”

“I can pretty much fill in most character roles,” he told her, not boastfully, but merely as a fact.

“No,” she said. “I mean
here.
In
this.
”

He looked blank. “In this?”

The others were all within earshot, lolling on couches and chairs, idly listening in, commenting on each other’s comments
from time to time, and now the monster called Tiny, sprawled across much of a settee nearby, growled, “What she wants to know
is, whadaya contribute? How you gonna pull your weight?”

“When you’re not being King Lear,” said Andy, not unkindly, “whadayado on
our
team?”

“Oh,” Ray said. “Gotcha. I’m a wall man.”

Nobody seemed to know what that was. Stan the driver spoke for them all when he said, “And what does that look like?”

Again Ray looked around the big space, thinking. Then he got to his feet, said, “It looks like this,” and walked over to the
rough stone side wall. Without fuss, he climbed it, finding toe- and fingerholds in the tiniest crevices and crannies, moving
steadily, angling over to the right as he went.

This building had ten-foot ceilings, which didn’t give Ray much room to show his skill, but it was immediately apparent he
had some. “Wow!” Doug cried, leaping to his feet. “What a visual!”

“It’s wonderful,” Marcy said, in awe. “Just wonderful.”

They all loved it, and all got to their feet now as Ray moved horizontally along the wall, just beneath the ceiling, until
he reached the rear of the building. There he made the turn onto the back wall and continued on as far as the first window,
then descended easily to the floor. There, Darlene gave him a huge bear-hug and kiss that made him blink, but then he grabbed
her and gave her the kiss right back again.

The gang’s acceptance of Ray now, as they congratulated him and patted him on the back, was so clear that it became apparent,
by contrast, that they had not actually accepted him before, but had just been going along with Doug with a wait-and-see attitude.

Andy, when the congratulations died down, asked Ray, “So how do you do this? Single-o?”

“No, I had two or three guys I’d work with,” Ray said. “I’d go up a wall to some window nobody’d think to lock, let myself
in, come downstairs, deal with any alarms and then open the front door. Usually then I’d leave, I wasn’t gonna carry a lot
of stolen goods around with me, and later they’d give me my share.”

Andy approved. “That sounds like a very good plan.”

“That’s why,” Ray said, “when the crew got caught, and nobody could figure out how they got into the place, somebody finally
squealed, you know, for a better deal—”

“Always,” said Tiny.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Ray. “So they had my name, they had a witness, but he’s a guy under indictment and they can’t
really prove anything against me. I kept saying it was a mistake, all I am is an actor, I’m no human fly, so what could they
do? I got leaned on a lot but then they hadda let me go.”

“Good thing for us,” Stan said, which was the final seal on Ray’s acceptance.

After that, Doug said it was time to quit for the day, they’d all meet again on Monday to start working out the story details,
and then, when everybody left, Doug took Marcy to lunch at a diner near the tunnel (wow!), where she spent the first part
of the meal trying to absorb it all. “That Ray,” she said, still in wonderment.

“Babe told me he’d done some shady stuff in the past,” Doug, said, “but he didn’t say what. Maybe he didn’t know.”

“You know, Doug,” Marcy said, her mind beginning to work again, “that kind of gives us our opening, doesn’t it? The first
scene of the first episode.”

“Tell,” he said.

“We open on Ray,” she said, waving her fork, on which a piece of chicken breast was cooling, “climbing the outside of the
building on the corner.”

“The Chase bank.”

“Either corner, whichever works. We see him looking in windows, climbing all the way up, then going across the roof and back
down the other side to the roof of
our
building.”

“And over the side,” Doug said.

Marcy nodded. “That’s right. He goes down the back of our building, where nobody can see him. He’s alone, so there’s no dialogue,
just city noises. He looks in windows, and when he looks in at the storage place he does a big reaction. Then he leaves, and
he goes to the bar, and he tells the others what he’s seen.”

Beaming like a lottery winner, Doug said, “Take the weekend, Marcy, write it up, we’ll lay it on the guys on Monday. All of
that movement without dialogue. What a grabber. We’ve got
Rififi
here, Marcy. Write it up!”

N
OBODY WAS HAPPY
with the meeting just past. Once Doug and Marcy had walked away southward, waving and smiling, cheered by recent events,
and once Ray had hailed a cab to take himself and Darlene somewhere else, the two of them also expressing pleasure at the
unfolding of their adventure, the other five stood on the sidewalk on Varick Street and frowned together.

“Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “this is not good.”

“I know that,” Dortmunder said.

“Nothing is happening,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder nodded. “I know that, too.”

Kelp said, “The trouble is, these clowns are in no hurry to get their reality up and running.”

“And meanwhile,” Stan said, “what are we doing on our own plan? Nothing.”

“We don’t have a plan,” the kid said. “We have a door we can’t get through, to something we don’t know what it is behind it.”

“I can feel,” Tiny said, “discouragement creeping on. We gotta sit and meet.”

Kelp said, “You mean tonight, at the OJ?”

“No,” Tiny said, “I mean now, at Dortmunder’s. Stan, use your cell, order out a pizza, extra pepperoni, I’ll whistle up the
limo.” And he stomped off around the corner, to the limo he never left home without, due to his size and his disinclination
to rub shoulders with the civilian world.

“Tiny’s right,” Stan said, breaking out his cell.