Get Real d-15

by Donald E. Westlake

  Harbach said, “You know, I don’t emphasize that stuff on my résumé.”

  “This time,” Babe told him, “you need to. We want the gang to accept you as one of them.”

  Doug said, “Babe, why are we adding him to the show? I mean, I know why we are, to have a spy inside the gang, but what do we tell them is the reason?”

  “They are experts,” Babe said, “at crime. Ray here is an expert at acting in front of a camera, at selling a scene. He’ll be able to coach them, help them be more realistically what they already are.”

  Harbach said, “I’m gonna need legal protection here, if this is gonna lead to an actual robbery.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Babe told him. “Legal’s putting together a contract addendum now, explaining what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. We’ll get it to your agent this afternoon.”

  “That sounds good,” Harbach said. “When do I meet this gang?”

  Doug said, “Our sets are about ready. I was gonna call them this afternoon to make a first run-through tomorrow.” To Babe he said, “They don’t like it if you call them in the morning.”

  Harbach laughed. “Already,” he said, “they sound like actors.”

  21

  THIS WAS PROBABLY the most exciting day of Marcy’s life. She’d been working for Get Real only four months now, and The Crime Show was only her second reality series, and it was so much more interesting than The Stand, which was, after all, finally only about a family selling vegetables beside the road. But The Crime Show! Real criminals committing a real crime, right there in front of your eyes! In front of her eyes.

  Yes, Doug had given her the assignment: she was the designated production assistant on The Crime Show. Therefore, late Friday morning, her shoulder bag so loaded down with documents she was bent almost double, so she looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s little sister, she joined Doug and Get Real’s personnel director, a dour skinny nearly hairless man named Quigg, in a cab from the Get Real offices in midtown down to the company’s building on Varick Street, a place about which she’d heard vaguely from time to time, but before this had never actually seen.

  And which was not that impressive, once she did lay eyes on it. Some kind of warehouse thing, apparently, on a commercial street with an awful lot of one-way traffic headed south.

  “We’ll be the first, so we’ll go in this way,” Doug said, unlocking and opening the graffiti-scarred metal front door, but what other way would you go in? Through the graffiti-scarred garage door over there to the right?

  Maybe so; the three entered a space like a very crowded parking garage and Doug, saying, “We’ll have to take the elevator up,” switched on overhead fluorescent lights and led them a zigzag path through all the parked vehicles to a big open rectangle, like a rough-wood dance floor.

  But once they were all there, he pushed a button on a control panel on the front wall and suddenly the floor jolted upward! Marcy was so startled she wrapped both arms around her shoulder bag, as though it could help her stay upright, and gaped without comprehension as floor after floor went by.

  There. It stopped, at a level with almost no walls, no sensible rooms, just odd pieces of furniture here and there, and Doug said, “The sets are one flight up, but we’ll be more comfortable down here for the paperwork.”

  “I’ll need a table,” Quigg said, stepping off the platform elevator with a sniff, looking around as though he wanted to fight with somebody.

  “Everything’s here,” Doug assured him. “Just pick what you want and push it all together.” Turning back to Marcy, he said, “Come on, you can put your stuff over here.”

  She followed him, saying, “Doug? What is this place?”

  “This is where we build the sets,” he told her. “Upstairs is the rehearsal space.”

  “And downstairs?”

  He shrugged. “Businesses. Tenants. Nothing to do with us.”

  Off to the right were a dining room table and half a dozen accompanying chairs, in light maple, furniture in some old-fashioned style, the cushioned seats shabby and peeling. But it was all solid, with good working space on the table, so Marcy dumped her shoulder bag there with a thud, like a body thrown out a window.

  Doug said to Quigg, who’d barely moved, but stood in one place looking disapproving, “Sam? Use the same table as Marcy, you’ve both got to process these people.”

  So Marcy and Quigg shared the table, though not much else, and Doug wandered around, whistling behind his teeth. “This is a very interesting moment, boys and girls,” he said, looking at the floor as he paced. “The beginning of the new adventure.”

  Marcy thought, are Quigg and I boys and girls? But then a loud ringing sound came from downstairs and Doug looked startled, then consulted his watch and grinned. “They’re early,” he said, “but we were earlier. You two sit tight.” And he walked back to the elevator, pushed the button, and descended in a great cone of noise.

  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 kn
ow 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!”

  22

  NOBODY 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.