Babe said, “The fact is, it’s a reality show with a difference. Explain it, Doug.”

“We will follow,” Doug said, “a group of professional robbers as they plan and execute an actual robbery.”

Harbach cocked a large head. “An actual robbery?”

“Not entirely,” Babe said.

Doug said, “Babe, if they don’t do it, what’s the show about?”

“I understand that, Doug,” Babe said, “which is why we’re going along with the target, even with the additional complications.” To Harbach he said, “Get Real has corporate owners, and one of the thieves came up with the idea, if they chose a target that was owned within the umbrella corporation, it would give them a fallback position if the police happened to get involved.”

Harbach nodded. “I get it. Pretend it was never gonna be real.”

“Right.” Babe made a little fatalistic shrug gesture he’d learned many years ago in the Orient. “Unfortunately, the target they chose is a sensitive one, for reasons we don’t want them to know about.”

Harbach did his own shrug. “Tell them to pick something else.”

Doug said, “Then they’ll know we’re hiding something, and they’ll want to know what it is, and we don’t want them curious because we are hiding something.”

Harbach looked interested. “Oh, yeah? What?”

Babe said, “We’re hiding it from you, too. That way, if they start to think something’s going on, you won’t know what it is, but you’ll be right in there with them, you’ll know what they’re thinking, and you can pass it on to us.”

“So I’m the mole.” Harbach didn’t seem to mind that.

“The reason we cast you,” Babe said, “we were looking for a guy who’s a good solid actor, good credits, good rep, but also has some little dodgy elements in his past.”

“Oh, come on,” Harbach said. “I had a few wild times in my youth, but that was over long ago.”

Doug said, “Ever do time?”

Harbach was appalled. “Prison? My God, no!”

Babe said to Doug, “What Ray has is just enough of a background to make him plausible for our group.”

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.