The team first came together late one Tuesday evening in my apartment. There was none of the usual gradualism about the process; I had none of them, and then I had all of them. Their sudden appearance as a complete unit was certainly gratifying, but also unexpected, and therefore I was less immediately grateful than perhaps I could have been, or should have been, because I was immediately on guard for negative implications. Was I being rolled? Had they come with an established agenda? I had begun the process days before, in the normal way, which was to make tentative approaches to the key players, or at least to let it be known that I was in the market for certain
But they all came at once. I was reluctant to let myself believe such an event was a response to my reputation; after all, my reputation has neither increased nor decreased in value for many years, and I never met a response like that before. Nor, I felt, could it be a response to my years of experience; the truth was I had long ago transitioned to the status of an old hand, and generally I felt my appeal had been dulled by overfamiliarity. Which was why I looked the gift horse in the mouth: as I said, I was suspicious. But I observed that they seemed not to know one another, which was reassuring, and which removed my fears of a prior conspiracy against me, and they were certainly appropriately attentive to me: I got no feeling that I was to be a passenger on my own ship. But I remained suspicious nonetheless, which slowed things down; and I think I might even have offended them a little, with my slightly tepid response. But: better safe than sorry, which I felt was a sentiment I could rely on them to understand.
My living room is not small—it was two rooms before I removed a wall—but even so, it was somewhat crowded. I was on the sofa that gets the view, smoking, and they were facing me in a rough semicircle, three of them shoulder to shoulder on the sofa that faces mine, and the others on furniture brought in from other rooms, except for two men I had never met before, who stood side by side close behind the others. They were both tall and solid and dark, and they were both looking at me with poor-bloody-infantry expressions on their faces, partly resigned and stoic, and partly appealing, as if they were pleading with me not to get them killed too soon. They were clearly foot soldiers—which, obviously, I needed—but they weren’t the hapless, runty, conscripted kind: indeed, how could they be? They had volunteered, like everyone else. And they were fine physical specimens, no doubt trained and deadly in all the ways I would need them to be. They wore suit coats, of excellent quality in terms of cut and cloth, but rubbed and greasy where they were tight over ledges of hard muscle.
There were two women. They had dragged the counter stools in from the kitchen, and they were perched on them, behind and to the right of the three men on the sofa—a kind of mezzanine seating arrangement. I admit I was disappointed that there were only two of them: a mix of two women and eight men was borderline unacceptable by the current standards of our trade, and I was reluctant to open myself to criticism that could have been avoided at the start. Not public criticism, of course—the public was generally almost completely unaware of what we did—but insider criticism, from the kind of professional gatekeepers who could influence future assignments. And I wasn’t impressed by the way the women had positioned themselves slightly behind the men: I felt it spoke of the kind of subservience I would normally seek to avoid. They were very nice to look at, though, which delighted me at the time, but only reinforced my anticipation of later carping. Both wore skirts, neither one excessively short, but their perching on high stools showed me more thigh than I felt they intended. They were both wearing dark nylons, which I readily admit is my favorite mode of dress for shapely legs, and I was truly distracted for a moment. But then I persuaded myself—on a provisional basis only, always subject to confirmation—that they were serious professionals, and would indeed be seen as such, and so for the time being I let my worries go, and I moved on.
