He dragged his eyes away from the screen and rubbed behind his ear again. “Well, the OSHA thing is killing us.”
“Apart from that.”
“There have been some delays. Annoying things. Little things.”
“Such as?”
“The lighting tech spending five hours getting the set lit right, and then coming back from break to find someone’s messed it all up. Hours of night footage lost on the way to the lab. When we reshoot during the day using day-for-night exposures, we find it’s all screwy, though the camera guy swears it was set up right. Not so little, that one.”
“Write it all down. E-mail it to me.” I gave him the address. I couldn’t spend every minute with my mother. It would give me something to do while I waited for Monday. And unlike Atlanta, this time I’d be helping people to help themselves. “I’d also be happy to take a look at your accounts, see if I can see a way out of this mess, but I’d understand if you felt uncomfortable with that.”
If he didn’t give it to me, I’d just take it, but there was no harm in playing nicely, especially when it saved time and effort.
“I’ll have to talk to Finkel about that,” he said. “Anything else? Did you read the promo material?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Oh,” he said.
“But my friend Dornan here is a big fan and would no doubt love to hear all about it. He was just telling me about Killer Squirrels.”
“Oh, jeepers. You saw that? What did you think?”
Dornan paused, then shrugged. “Well, it’s a fine film if you’re twenty and out of your head and it’s two in the morning and there’s nothing else on the telly.”
Rusen laughed. “Boy, it’s awful, all right. It was way before my time but even Anton admits it. Feral, now… Oh, this one’s sweet, real sweet. It’s about this girl—young woman, I guess—who wakes in an alley completely naked, and it’s night, and she’s in a strange city. There’s all this—”
“I’ll be on the set,” I said, and they both nodded.
“…with shots of steam, strategically placed to keep it PG-thirteen, but it’s not cheesy, not even a bit, it’s ambience, and then there’s this noise…”
I shut the door on their strategic wisps of steam. The second woman from the craft-services table was lugging a stack of crates out to the Film Food van. Inside, the food line was down to four people: the bony-faced Bri and his friend, one of the carpenters in overalls, and the assistant wardrobe woman. I watched while Kuiper served them what looked like Thai food, shook her head at something the last one said, and picked up her huge knife again, this time to divide a big, squashy-looking cake. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” she said, and no one got it. She seemed used to it. She wiped down the counter, those muscles around her wrists sliding over each other like the reins of a stagecoach, controlling everything precisely, checked the coffee urn, added coffee and water, and then turned to the pile of fruit waiting on her chopping board. She pretended she didn’t see me. I let her chop for a while. Her hair was twisted up into a knot, and as the knife thunked rhythmically on the board, a loose swatch hanging by the side of her neck shook. Sometimes it looked blond, sometimes light brown. Her earlobe was as pink as a baby’s tongue.
“Good evening,” I said. If I hadn’t been paying attention I would have missed the fractional hesitation between chopping. “Has Rusen eaten anything yet?”
“He’s carrying a lot of weight on this picture. He needs to eat.” She sounded defensive.
“What about the director?”
She snorted and kept chopping.
“I found out what CAA is.”
“You must be thrilled,” she said. Then she sighed. “Rusen told me who you are.” It was an apology, I think.
I filled one of the cups with a stream of pungent coffee. I felt her watching but took my time, adding just the right amount of cream. Didn’t stir. Sipped. Even more assertive than it smelled. “So,” I said, and when I looked up, she was chopping again. “Unusual to find a caterer who knows Caesar’s commentary.”
“You really know how to endear yourself to a girl.”
“I expressed it badly.”
“No, you didn’t. I could quote you more: quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui… But your eyebrows are already in your hair, proving my point. You couldn’t be more surprised if I were a trained hamster singing ‘Happy Days.’ ”
No, I wanted to say, let’s not do it this way. Let’s talk Latin. Do you know Petronius? Ovid? The Aeneid? But her look could have drilled granite. “Tell me about this production.”
“Not my place. I’m a caterer.” Chop, chop.
“But clearly Rusen talks to you. Why is that?”
She didn’t say anything. I swallowed more coffee, noticing for the first time in months the slight tightness on the right-hand side of my throat where a razor had opened the skin like silk. That had been a rusty blade. Kuiper’s knife would cut bone deep without effort. “All right. Let’s talk about catering. If I said I was planning a wedding at the Fairmont and wanted you to cater for three hundred guests, what kind of menu would you suggest?”
“You’re not planning a wedding.”
“I’m just—”
“Bullshitting me. I don’t know why.” The knife thunked energetically on her board. She’d take her fingers off if she wasn’t careful.
In this light, her hair was the color of sandstone. She was like sandstone: a spire of rock rising from an otherwise featureless desert. No toeholds. I thought about toes for a minute, wiggled mine in their boots. Sipped at my coffee. Now that it was cooler it was beginning to taste almost smoky, not at all like that stuff from Tully’s. “So,” I said, “Rusen talks to you.”
“It’s not a crime.”
“But as you’ve pointed out, you’re a caterer.”
She turned around. “And that, of course, makes me not worth talking to.” It was interesting, the basic dichotomy between her behavior and her face. She sounded and acted as though she were angry, or perhaps very sad, but the set of her facial muscles and the few, faint lines told a story of laughter and enthusiasm and occasional stubbornness. That was the woman I wanted to talk to.
“I’ve never been on a film set before in my life. I have no idea how it works. I own this warehouse. It’s in my best interest to see that the production is profitable and keeps paying rent.”
“So you’re just here to help.”
“Well, yes.” Isn’t that what I just said? “I’m trying to understand how things operate. It might help everyone. So, please, tell me how sets like this work.”
“There aren’t any other sets like this one. There are a lot of raw people. Finkel’s an old hand, but he’s not here, and Rusen’s carrying everything. And it’s his first film. He was a software architect.” An image of someone building a skyscraper from Dalí-like drooping girders popped into my head. “He’s smart, but this isn’t film school. This might be my first craft-services job, but at least I’ve been on movie sets before.”
“So he talks to you.” Does he like it when you talk Latin?
“He hired me. You could say we’re learning our jobs together.”
A job. “So he asks your advice on things? When there are problems. And there have been problems. You said so.” Just a job. Very good. “More than there should have been?”
“Like I say, there are a lot of beginners. Two of the camera operators. The sound guy. But there are a lot of old hands, too. Grips, carpenters, technical—”
“Joel,” I said, looking at her small hand with its big knife.
“Joel. Peg. Kathy in costume.”
“Which is why I’m wondering if there’s been some deliberate sabotage.” I was also starting to wonder how to describe her hair. Sandstone wasn’t quite right. Not blond, exactly. Not brown, either. All sorts of different snakes of color in this light, and shiny.