Upgunned (20 page)

Conversely, I zapped energy directly into her eyes, determined to outlast her until she dropped
her
gaze, not to look at any part of me, but as the more primitive submissive response to direct scrutiny. I won this time, because it was my job to look at things.

“It's called the Salon Fantastique du Exotique,” said Mason. “I was just telling Artesia. Just the ‘Salon,' for short. It'll be somewhere in the Village. It's at a different place every time. Very expensive and strictly A-list.”

I told him I'd heard of it. Poor Artesia didn't have a clue, but by god she was willing to learn.

“The Salon hasn't been in America for nearly seven years, but things loosened up once the Iron Curtain fell down.”

“That was like recently, right?” said Artesia.

“They stuck to Russia and China,” said Mason. “Picked up a few new members in Xiang Province—at least, that's what I read on the Salon Web site before
that
ate shit and died. And they're finally coming back to New York. And when they do, I think we should go, and see if we can get Jules here to shoot some pictures, right?”

Jules?

I allowed it, seeing as how Mason Stone could buy my entire family tree several times over, or shitcan me because he disliked the cut of my jib. I asked him how he has come by this information, which usually classed at about the same stature as an urban legend.

“I subscribe to their newsletter.” He pulled a broad reaction so everyone would get the joke and Artesia laughed politely. “Naw, you know how it is—I know some people who know some people. Who know.”

Artesia had a dragon tattoo encircling her left ankle, something that Makeup would blot out for the camera with a special matte base cream and a layer of powder to match her skin tone. A removable mask for permanent ink. They used this stuff on some of the models I had shot, the ones shortsighted enough not to want a career.

Mason cut to the cookie: “I can get us in. Maybe even you,” he said, meaning me.

“Only if you promise it's as weird as you say,” said Artesia, in full coax mode.

“Weird is the word,” said Mason. “Double scoops.” Nearly everything he said was convincing. He had once played the president of the United States. Viewers
wanted
to believe everything this man told them. But his talent was the artful depiction of human emotion, and I wondered what he was really feeling behind the firewall of his broadcast persona. I let him know how to find me if I was not at hand, and if he turned out to be for real.

Then I snapped the first photo of them together ever printed, one that later did good traffic on wire services and Web sites. Mason turned his head so his profile was emphasized. Artesia lit up as though on a hot switch. She could carbon copy that smile any time she spotted a camera lens. She derived energy from exposure.

Artesia was not wearing a bra, and had nipples the size of the crown on a Tootsie Pop. She caught me looking. I lost.

*   *   *

My so-called office was one floor down and on the opposite side of the building from Andrew Collier's spread. Somewhere in the maze between was my benefactor, Tripp, crunching schedules with first AD Gordo. And three feet away from me was Arly Zahoryin, videographer.

Not “playback.” That was a more essential cog in the modern moviemaking mechanism: the person with the video links to all the operating cameras, who supplied instant playbacks for the director and thereby kept hard evidence of every take. That guy's name was Sinkevitch (I think) and we had traded cordialities, but nothing real. To him I was a glorified paparazzo. But if Arly Zahoryin could befriend him, I could too.

“Sinky's invaluable,” said Arly. “Especially if you need fresh batteries on the fly; he's got a whole drawer of them. I get a spare set of phones and a radio hookup to the audio feed from him every day, if the actors don't hog them all. You might wanna try that, too—when you can eavesdrop the feeds off all the live mike channels, it's a heads-up on where to be.”

As long as I didn't cheese Arly out of the set of headphones on which he had permanent squatter's dibs—that was pretty clear.

We were in a ten-by-ten afterthought of a room mostly consumed by a very large and apparently decommissioned ceiling duct and two big desks, the old, drab, metalwork, military kind. Both desks locked, which was an advantage since both of us could store valuable gear here. Arly had four cameras that each cost about five grand, not to mention two computers and a bewildering array of auxiliary gear, including a double-handled stabilizer that, when he wore it with the camera, made Arly look as though he had been in a serious automobile accident since it was a square frame of metal that fit around his head and neck.

Arly himself was endomorphic and gawky, with a prematurely sloping neck and a notable degree of pattern baldness for one so young—he could not have been much more than Joey's age, but could probably have passed for Joey's dad. Sometimes genetics really fuck us over. Arly was dead-earnest and clueless all at the same time. Yes, he wanted to direct. No, he had no idea what. He had been prepared for opportunity's knock for nearly a decade. Yes, he would tell you all about it at length if you did not flee. That boy was a talker.

“Studios keep trying to do all the supplements in-house now,” he said as I shucked gear in the office, much like an infantryman dropping pack and rifle to catch sleep against a tree. “But I've done Andrew's last three movies and he requested me. The budgets for add-ons to the DVD are drying up. The golden age for video is already over. But people want to buy discs that have extra stuff, even if they never watch it. They think it's more bang for the buck but the studio gets it, not me.”

There followed a lengthy and complex explanation of budgets for such things. Arly seemed deeply organized, but not very inspired.

“Tripp probably told you that rap about how the videographer is the lowest form of life on a set. That was a joke we started.” Arly clearly did not appreciate the longevity of the humor. “See, I'm one of the few people that has to make nice to
every single person
on the set, because even the caterer can make me move out of the way. The camera crew doesn't have to know the grips except when they need something from them. The effects guys don't talk to the actors unless the actors request a peek at the green screen stuff on monitors. The stunt guys don't know who the gaffers are. But I have to know everybody and depend on their tolerance. Then there's Tripp and Gordo, who'll come along with that little wave that says ‘don't shoot this,' y'know, when somebody pitches a fit or things go wrong on the set and I'm there, recording. I shoot it anyway 'cos, what the hell, I'm not gonna betray them and stick it on YouTube or something. That guy, Richard? Mason Stone's bodyguard?”

“Black trench coat,” I said.

“Yeah, his name's Fearing. Richard Fearing—Dick Fearing, how's that for appropriate? He comes over to me. ‘Whatchoo wanna shoot that for?' he says. ‘Nobody wants to see that.' Mason had ducked behind a flag to change his shirt. That's great for the video because it shows Mason is down with the crew, not flippity enough to have to go back to his trailer just to switch shirts, right? But now I got Dick Fearing all up in my biz, protecting his client from exposure, like, literally, he thinks. Now, I can pussy out and run to Tripp. If I run to Gordo, Gordo will make that face that says I'm wasting his time
again
. Or I can come back at Dick, who is a foot taller than me. So I lay it out for Dick: all my footage has to clear a thousand levels of approval, one of which is Mason Stone's. Nothing gets out that the company doesn't want out. And I tell Dick, this was like, yesterday, that he can look at anything I shoot on playback anytime he wants. I'm supposed to be here; I'm part of the crew. And he backs off, man, and goes, ‘Naw, it's okay.' It was like a friggin'
test
or something.”

The subliminal was clear as vodka, too:
I took on Mason Stone's bodyguard and won
. These were the kind of hurdles jumped during the beginning of actual production. Arly's fervent hope was that by week two, nobody would care if he was around; he would blend.

“That reminds me,” I said. “I'd prefer not to be visible on your footage, if you know what I mean. It's a tax thing. I'm not really here, okay?”

“Well, it's inevitable that you'll be on some footage. But I won't post it for a podcast or anything. It'll be on my log and here in the office, but if you don't want it out there, it won't be.”

I had to trust him that far. He gave my proposition a swift nod as if he did not want to be distracted by the main thrust of his next point.

“We've basically got the same job, y'know,” he said. He was constantly trying to upgrade his own status, even tacitly. He felt pilloried and unappreciated. Deeper in the resentment lobe of his brain he knew that perfectly acceptable hero shots could be culled off his video, but I had the “photographer” designation and he did not. More than once I would probably position myself in what he saw as his roost for a shot, and in a very real sense, I outranked him.

Which was itself strange because I was used to being the boss of my own set during shoots. Here on the flip side of the country, I was part of a team and much more vulnerable to the opinions of others as to what I should or should not be doing. Yet within limits I was relatively free-range. I still could not shake the feeling that at any moment a grown-up would wander in and say, “What do you think you're doing here? Who said you could be here?”

In the most oblique way possible, I asked if I could use Arly's computer to check some stuff on the Internet. Generally, if you claim some software foul-up, people will accept your need even if you are standing there with a laptop in your hand, due to the common acceptance of technology as evil. Every such “deal” I made with Arly was based on a polite lie—my imaginary tax bogey, my non-fouled-up laptop, which worked fine. We were all trapped in this big machine together.

“Sure, no prob,” Arly said. “I'll make a log-on for you. What do you want to be called?”

I thought about it for a minute. “Mister Kimber,” I said.

*   *   *

That Sunday it was Mister Kimber who staked out HawkNest, Clavius's Upper West Side base of operations, hoping for a glimpse of Char. I wore a Panavision gimme cap (courtesy of Arly Zahoryin's coat rack) and big sunglasses, feeling like the idiot I was. The new Mister Kimber had no class at all when it came to disguises.

Knowledgeable producers call it “film jail”—the removal of yourself from the world at large while a production is shooting. Calls don't get returned, bills stack up, friends and lovers go unanswered … unless they are inside the hermetic universe of the movie, which demands to be the only thing that matters for a large chunk of time. Urgent world news items had only the vaguest echoes here, akin to village rumors. Stepping beyond the boundaries of
Vengeance Is,
even for a single day off, felt like a loss of rhythm. Smart crew members slept and got drunk (or vice versa) and never “left” the persistent bubble of the film at hand, even on their days off. For overtime days there was a thing called “turnaround,” which was supposed to guarantee a worker eighteen hours before the next call-time, but this margin got cheated more than the unions would like to admit. One of Tripp's solutions to last-minute schedule trims was to admit we had to go to six-day weeks when he had originally planned for five. That made the whole shoot more intense, but also more exhausting, overtime be damned. It solidified the chain-link limits of the
Vengeance Is
universe. Active movies were very much like cocaine. You accomplished a staggering amount in a short moment of time; then, when the hot period passed, the slowdown felt deadly, like walking in sudden hypergravity.

Usually, by then, you were exhausted enough not to care.

Very quickly on that Sunday, my first day off, I found myself circling and twiddling. I thought I'd bomb down to St. Mark's on the C train or the #1 and grab a slice at my favorite East Coast pizza dive. I thought I might drop in to see what was new at the American Museum of Natural History, which still has a calming, cathedral-like atmosphere, and was not very far at all from Clavius's pretentiously named bastille, HawkNest.

Who was I kidding, really?

A blessed breeze had agitated the hanging humidity, reducing the ambient city odors of seawater, garbage, and soot to background accents. HawkNest was below Columbia University on the Hudson River side of Broadway. I stationed myself in a nicely grungy black-painted storefront called Espressoholic, got rocket-boosted on very strong Cuban coffee, and proceeded to spy on the building's doorman with my telephoto lens. He stood sentry about a block away.

It took about two hours before Char emerged, solo. She was wearing a vested leather outfit, a beret, and had seemingly also gotten the “big sunglasses” memo, but it was her. I knew her stride, her carriage when in heels. Nobody else has Char's legs.

I tailed her to Maxilla & Mandible, where she tarried among bones and fossils (it was a good choice for offbeat gifts), then she snagged a cab downtown. I snagged another, resisting the urge to say, “Follow that car.” She spent about half an hour inside a chain drugstore near Columbus Circle, then headed for a lunchtime watering hole on Amsterdam. She seemed to be working her way south toward the garment district, where I knew I'd lose her. She probably had a fitting, or wardrobe approval, or perhaps Clavius was underwriting some nascent idea of her own spinoff apparel label.

What was I thinking, really?

I supposed I could have handed a cryptic note to the doorman:
DANGER. WARNING.
Crazy Elias, who just trashed his own loft in L.A., needs to warn you about crazy people crazier than himself.
But Char did not have an escort, and acted blasé enough to indicate that she either did not know or did not care someone might be following her.