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.