Fontaine

She found you work before any of this started, she found you work last month, and she will have something on Tuesday. Nobody remembers being introduced to her.

Fifties, unhurried, dresses like a woman who has an accountant. She works a stall at Grand Central Market — genuinely works it, six days a week, selling very good coffee — because a booth where everyone eats is the best office in Los Angeles.

What the crew knows

• Ten per cent, stated up front, never negotiated and never padded, for as long as anybody can remember — and Marko Zorić down in San Pedro charges exactly the same, which is how the crew knows ten is the rate rather than her habit.
• She will not tell you who the client is, and she will tell you that she is not telling you, which is a courtesy most fixers skip.
• She has turned work down on the crew's behalf without mentioning it. They found out later, from somebody else.
• She has one rule about selling the same thing twice, and she states it once, without emphasis: sell knowledge to as many people as will buy it, and never sell silence you have already broken. She is not being moral about it. She is explaining who gets blamed.
• She has been doing this long enough to have outlived three of her regular crews, and she does not talk about them.

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