“What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that it’s so exciting. I’m just so glad to be really doing this.”
“Well, do it quick.”
Brett scampered off. Josef’s first instantiations arrived by courier. They were costumery. They weren’t about comfort or wearability. They were camera props, they were about photons.
Back in the twenties, they had still been very big on natural fibers, but there was no fabric in these costumes. They were all microscopic shirrings and shrinkings and tiny little squirms of extruded plastic. The costumes didn’t breathe well and they rustled loudly when they moved, but they looked angelic. When you pinched or tucked them into place they stayed that way and laughed mockingly at gravity.
“Looks like you got us our money’s worth.”
“The Khornak brothers are robbing us,” groaned Novak. “Sixteen percent transaction fees! Can you believe that?”
Maya peeled a tangerine cape-dress from the top of the heap and held it to herself. “That won’t be a problem as long as they’re discreet.”
“Maya, before we begin this, give me an answer. Why is this being financed through the defunct production company of a dead Hollywood film director?”
“Is it?” Maya said, examining the printed sleeves. “It was supposed to be financed through the student activities budget of a Bolognese technical college.”
“That childish dodge might fool a very impatient tax accountant. It won’t fool me, or these miserable little fences either.”
Maya sighed. “Josef, I happen to have a little grown-up money. A certain grown-up gave it to me, and he really shouldn’t have done that. That money is no good for me, and I have to get rid of it. This villa is a very good place to do that. Isn’t it? This is a black-market underwire netsite. This is Roma, a very old and very wicked town. And this is the fashion industry, where people always spend absurd amounts of money for really silly reasons. If I can’t launder hot money under these circumstances, I’ll never be able to do it.”
“It’s risky.”
“My life is risk. Never mind the stupid money. Show me what beauty is.”
Novak sighed. “This isn’t going to be beauty, darling. I’m very sorry, but it will only be chic.”
“All right, then maybe I’ll settle for glamour. I’m a woman in a hurry. I want it so much, Josef. I just have to have it now.”
Slowly Novak nodded. “Yes. I can see that quality about you. That’s just where your allure lies, darling … that’s it, that’s you, and that is this moment, exactly.”
Philippe arrived at half past three to do her face. Philippe brought along a gift: a couture wig from the Emporio Vietti. This new wig boasted a built-in translation unit doing forty-seven major global languages through a translucent cord that snaked to the wearer’s right ear. It was, said Novak, “very Vietti” to pointedly ignore their purloining of the other wig and then double the ante by sending along a much nicer one.
The wig came preprogrammed with a set of three twenties hairstyles, Vietti’s tactful method of elbowing his way into the shot. It would have been crass to turn down such a handsome gift, and one that she needed so much. But Novak was angered by this little jab from his old patron. The irritation sent Novak into a frenzy of spontaneous invention.
“This I want from you, darling,” Novak muttered. “Let me tell you what is happening tonight. The thrill of the uncanny lies in the piquancy of oxymoron. You remember what life was like in the twenties? Well, of course you don’t. You can’t, but you must pretend that you do, just for me.… When Giancarlo and I were young in the twenties, anything seemed possible. Now it’s the nineties, and anything truly is possible—but if you’re young, you’re not allowed to do anything about those possibilities. You understand me?”
She nodded, stone-faced, careful not to damage her cosmetics. “Yes, Josef, I do understand. I understand perfectly.”
“The uncanny is beauty macchiato, darling, beauty just a little spotted—with the guilty, with the monstrous. That’s what Vietti really saw in you, when he said that he saw something cute. You see, my darling, in order to make this world very safe for the very old, we have changed life for the young in ways that are truly evil.”
“Is that really fair, Josef? You’re being very harsh.”
“Don’t interrupt me. Vietti cannot recognize that truth without recognizing his own complicity. That was why he was intrigued.” Novak waved his single arm. “Tonight, you become the long-dead youth of the gerontocracy, in a dangerous liaison with the crushed youth of modernity. An impossible conspiracy, a dreamlike violation. Something that plays at sentiment and nostalgia, but conceals a core that is a little dangerous, a little perverse. I’m going to push that old man’s face into it. He won’t see all of it, because he can’t allow himself to see the full truth; but what he can see of it, he will be forced to love.”
They set to work. Maya lurking in svelte black by a half-dead antique virtuality engine. Maya passing a stuffed weasel and a stuffed envelope to a sullen half-naked errand boy (played by one of Brett’s Roman acquaintances). Maya in a set of virching goggles like a domino mask, letting her signet ring be kissed by the Khornaks’ burly security guard. (The glamour-struck guard was especially good in his role.) Maya spurning a packet of dope stickers and pretending to smoke a cigarette. A pensive Maya in candlelight, crouching in her high heels over a little playing-card castle of Roman bus tickets.
Ten, then a dozen, then a score of kids showed up at the villa netsite, in their street couture. Novak fed them into the shot. Faceless and crawling at her feet, their cheap and vivid gear gone half-grotesque in shadows.
When Maya saw the raw shots on Novak’s notebook screen, she was elated and appalled. Elated because he had made her so lovely. Appalled because Novak’s fantasy was so revelatory. He’d made her a bewitching atavism, a subterranean queen of illicit chic for a mob of half-monstrous children. Novak’s glamour was a lie that told the truth.
Novak took a cab back to the hotel at half past one in the morning. The old man had not given so much of himself in a long time. He was palsied with an exhaustion that only a man in his one hundred twenties could manifest.
With Novak’s departure, the Khornak brothers, who had been growing very nervous about the vivid kids, threw everyone out in a scattered welter of props and equipment.
The kids drifted off with cheery good-byes, rattling off on bicycles, or cramming half a dozen into a cab. When Brett and Maya inventoried the borrowed props they discovered that the extras had magpied off with a dozen or so small but valuable articles. Brett was reduced to tears by this discovery. “That’s so typical,” she said. “Really, you give people a chance, a real chance for once, and what do they do with it. They just slap you in the face.”
“They wanted souvenirs, Brett. They gave us their time and we didn’t pay them a thing, so I don’t mind. Really, a stuffed weasel can’t be worth all that much.”
“But I promised the store people I’d take good care of everything. And I let the kids in on something really special, and they robbed me.” Brett shook her head and sniffled. “They just don’t get it here, Maya. These Roman kids, they’re not like us. It’s like all the life has been squeezed out of them. They don’t do anything, they don’t even try, they just hang out on the Spanish Steps and drink frappés and read. Good heavens, these Roman kids read. You just give them some fat paper book and they’ll sit there and nod out for hours and hours.”
“Roman kids read?” Maya encouraged, sorting shoes. “Gosh, how classical of them.”
“It’s awful, a terrible habit! In virtuality at least you get to interact! Even with television you at least have to use visual processing centers and parse real dialogue with your ears! Really, reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat.”