The Seattle City Council website told me that, in addition to two councillors and two alternates, the zoning committee had three legislative assistants, one of whom was Johnson Bingley. JB.
Bingley turned out to be twenty-eight, recently married, and to have blond hair (and an expensive haircut) and a political science degree from UC Irvine. With a bit of work I turned up the abstract of his dissertation: a piece of nonsense about interstate politics that was all generalities in a blatantly cut-and-paste plagiaristic style. Bingo. Criminals looked for short-cuts. Entry-level politics were full of them.
I did another long, slow search to make sure Bingley was the only staffer with the initials JB. He was it. But ETH was his boss. The question now was, on which side of righteousness did ETH fall?
A cloud scooted away from the sun and I shaded my eyes. I closed the laptop and unhooked my phone, weighed it. I didn’t know whom to call, Kick or Dornan, and I didn’t know what I’d say if they answered.
I plugged it back in and started a deeper search on Edward Thomas Hardy.
I DROVE BACK up Myrtle, past Kick’s house. No van in the driveway. It was only midday, but traffic on 45th was almost stationary. It got hot in the car, but I didn’t want to roll up the windows and turn on the AC.
Traffic crawled over the bridge, and again through downtown. As I got closer to the warehouse my stomach tightened.
Kick’s van wasn’t in the parking lot. Where were they? What were they doing?
The set rang with the clang of hammer and wrench on metal pipe: people putting together a huge scaffold. It was hot. Joel hovered, looking worried, occasionally consulting what looked like a wiring diagram. Everyone—the costumers, Bernard, Peg—was carrying pipes, hauling on command, or standing back to admire the growing edifice.
There was no sign of Kick or Dornan, and the food on the craft-services table was conspicuously packaged sandwiches and a coffee urn with the lid taped down.
“Any idea where they are?” I said to Peg.
She put down her end of a piece of scaffold. “Where who are?”
“Kick. Dornan.”
“Dornan’s her friend?”
No, Dornan’s my friend. “How about Rusen?”
“Editing.”
“Where?”
“On the Avid.”
I said merely, “It’s probably a good idea to wear gloves when you do this kind of work.”
I went back out into the parking lot, to the trailer, and knocked. Traffic roared in the distance. I knocked again. The door opened. Hot, rebreathed air rushed out. Rusen blinked at me. He had that can’t-change-focus look of someone who has spent twelve hours sitting in one place staring at a screen. He hadn’t shaved for at least twenty-four hours. He’d had even less sleep than I had.
“May I come in?”
“May… ? Sure, sure.”
Inside, images were frozen on six screens. He sat on the chair in front of them, seemed momentarily confused when I remained standing.
“Something urgent?”
“Not urgent. But we do need to discuss your problems with OSHA and EPA.”
“Problems? Right. OSHA. EPA.” He focused on the screens, reached for the console, paused, hand above the big hockey-puck frame-by-frame advance control. “Do you mind if I just finish this…”
Scene? Act? Track? I had no idea. As soon as his hand touched the controls, he seemed to lose touch with his verbal centers. I looked around until I found a chair, rolled it over, and watched for a while.
He turned the big dial on the console, and one of the pictures would move forward. He’d dial it back, and forward again. He’d look at one of the other screens, punch a button, dial that back and forth. And another. Sîan Branwell stood and sat, stood and sat, stood and sat, turned and turned back, over and over. He muttered something to himself, chewed the cuticle on his right-hand ring finger, dialed again. Nodded. Punched other buttons. Ran one of the pictures again. The turn of her head was subtly different. Perhaps two frames missing before the screen cut to her beginning to stand, then back. Or—no, he had zoomed in. I didn’t know you could do that. It was like watching someone play God, rearranging time, making the puppets dance differently. It didn’t look as though he were going to stop anytime soon.
“Rusen.”
“Um?” He didn’t look at me.
“Rusen.” I leaned forward, laid a finger on the back of his hand. He blinked, focused on it. Blinked again. Looked at me. Reluctantly withdrew his hands from the console, tucked them under his thighs.
“Sorry. Boy howdy, that thing’s addictive.”
“Yes. We need to—” But he was focusing on the screens again. Visual capture. I studied the console. Identified what appeared to be the master power switch. I had no idea, though, if it was all saved to disk or whatever one did with these things. I looked again, until I began to understand the layout. Then I reached out and turned off one of the screens.
He jerked as though he’d been shot. I turned off a second.
“No,” he said. "No.”
“It’s just the screens,” I said. And extinguished the others in rapid succession. “You haven’t slept, I’m guessing you haven’t eaten. There isn’t enough oxygen in here to sustain a bacterium, and we need to talk about a few things. I think you should take a break.”
He considered it, then reached out and punched a button. A background whine I hadn’t noticed powered down. He stretched. His spine cracked. He looked at his watch. Frowned.
“Let’s go eat something.”
He squinted and shielded his eyes from the sun before stepping down from the trailer, like a drunk leaving a bar in the middle of the day. I let him adjust and didn’t talk until we were sitting down in the corner of the set farthest from the scaffolding and he was biting into a turkey sandwich. I let him chew and swallow, chew and swallow, and look around for a minute.
I looked around, too. Where were they? I turned back to Rusen.
“How’s it going? The editing?”
“Good. Better than good. Working with the Avid’s making me wonder if I shouldn’t have shot in digital to begin with.”
I gestured for him to explain.
“The digital editing. It feels so fluid. And the quality… I don’t see the difference. I thought I would. We shot on film. Expensive, but better visual quality. Or that’s the conventional wisdom.” He shook his head. “So, anyhow, we take the film and make a digital copy, and I edit the copy. That way it doesn’t matter if I mess up. I’m just doing a rough cut. A real editor will do all the fine work, and cut the negative.” He bit, chewed, swallowed. “But editing is… well, I’d no idea. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Imagine if we’d shot digital from the beginning. The effects, boy. I can make this film say anything on this machine. It’s like… it’s like statistics. I can rearrange the story completely. Which is good, because I’ve completely changed the ending. Or I think I have. Which means we have to change the beginning. Otherwise it won’t make sense when we blow everything up.”
“You’re going to blow up my warehouse?”
“Not literally. But we’ll build around that scaffolding, shoot some stuff on the soundstage, then take it outside, and blow it all up in the parking lot. At least I think we will. The director was supposed to figure all this stuff out with the stunt guy. But if we’d been doing this in digital, there’s all kinds of effects…” His eyes lost focus again.
“So why didn’t you just shoot in digital to begin with?”