It never occurs to me to ask Dagmar how she knows this. She has her sources, some of them uncanny.
“Keep out of trouble, now,” she says. “Don’t interrupt my vacation again.”
“I’ll do my best,” I say, and she hangs up.
It’s at that point that my nerves give a snarling leap as big, booming gunshots ring out over the compound. I dive behind the sofa.
Bodyguards, I think, might not be such a bad idea.
It turns out to be the Mexican police who are shooting. They’ve warned the tabloid reporters that the airspace above the hotel is to be treated as a crime scene, and that the drones should be recalled, but the reporters as usual ignored the warnings. Except this is Quintana Roo, not Beverly Hills, and the PFM okayed the use of shotguns to knock the drones from the skies. In addition, any stranger caught with a radio controller is dragged from his vehicle, beaten silly, and tossed in jail.
I stay indoors while the skeet shooting goes on, and falling birdshot rattles down the palm-leaf roof and rains onto the patio. In no time at all, the airspace over the hotel is free of clutter, which makes it easier for Tracee, the sound tech, to slip into my cabana after nightfall. She thinks she’s comforting me after Loni’s death, but in fact she’s easing my anxieties about a lot of things that I couldn’t explain to her if I tried.
Next day, new call sheets appear, and we find out that production will resume the following day. My bodyguards, four of them, arrive in Cancun on the same flight as Mrs. Trevanian, the agent from the completion-bond company. The bodyguards are the gents carrying weapons, but Trevanian is the one who can kill the movie by cutting all of Loni’s scenes and turning the story into nonsense. She’s a sinister figure in a navy blue suit, with a determined way of walking that sends a cold warning shuddering up my back. She looks as if she already knows what she’s willing to pay for and what she’s not.
That afternoon there’s a memorial for Loni. We all get together in one of the producer’s cabanas and take turns talking about how wonderful she was, and all the while I know Mrs. Trevanian is deciding my future in another room. I have a hard time finding anything to say at the memorial. Other people are effusive, chattering on about their happy memories of Loni; but I’m just depressed, struck dumb with grief at the knowledge that Mrs. Trevanian is going to destroy my chances of being a movie star.
I drag myself away from the memorial as soon as I decently can, and I try to learn my next day’s lines while in a frenzy of anxiety.
Tom comes to tell me after dinner that the meeting didn’t go well. Mrs. Trevanian insisted that it was not necessary to replace Loni but only to cut all her scenes. When Hadley shrieked, tore at his facial hair, and cried that without those scenes the film would be incoherent, Mrs. Trevanian said that Desperation Reef was an action blockbuster and that action blockbusters didn’t have to make sense. “Haven’t you seen the Transformers films?” she asked.
I sink deep into my sofa and restrain a whimper of despair. My visions of superstardom are being shot down, just like the spy drones, and I know they’re not coming back. This movie is going to crash, and afterwards, nobody’s going to spend another couple hundred million dollars on someone as certifiably freaky-looking as I am.
My only choice will be to go on working for Dagmar until she gets tired of me, and then I’ll be back on the beach, a nobody, like I was three years ago.
“This whole thing will have been for nothing,” I moan. “Loni will have died for nothing.”
“Yeah well,” Tom says, “what can we do?”
“Raise more money?” I say.
He gives me a skeptical look. “It’s a little late for that,” he says.
“Seriously,” I say. “How much would it cost to shoot all Loni’s scenes with another actress? We don’t have to hire a big star or anything—just some competent, reliable …”
Tom is trying to be kind. “Who else has Loni’s sex appeal? Who else looks as good in a bikini? The character’s a femme fatale.”
“California is full of girls who look good in bikinis,” I point out, truthfully enough.
Tom goes into his tablet computer and scrolls through figures. “Not counting Loni’s paycheck,” he says, “reshooting all Loni’s scenes will cost ten million dollars.”
I stare at him. Loni’s only in a few scenes. “Ten million dollars for—”
“Most of it’s for the cigarette-boat chase,” he says.
Oh Christ, I’d forgotten about the cigarette-boat chase, mainly because I hadn’t shot my part of it yet. Loni had already shot her half, and after I shot my bit, the two parts would be edited together, along with many, many expensive shots, already in the can, involving stunt doubles, explosions, and gunfire, to make it seem as if I had barely managed to evade murder by Loni and a group of cartel gunmen, all of whom get blown up in a flaming crash that cost a fortune in special effects.
“Look,” I point out, “if we don’t shoot the rest of the boat chase, we’ll save millions of dollars. Just put those millions of dollars into hiring a new actress, find some cheap substitute for the boat chase, and reshooting Loni’s scenes.”
Tom looks at me blankly. “I made that suggestion. Trevanian turned it down flat. It’s absolutely not approved.”
“But the money’s already in the budget!”
“Not anymore, it isn’t!”
The cords on Tom’s neck are standing out. There’s despair in his tone. He’s already been through this argument.
For a desperate moment I consider putting up the money myself. With my savings and investments, and of course the cash sitting in the Caymans, I might just pull it off.
But no, that’s insane. Motion pictures are the worst investments in the world. Worse than investing in brand-new factories for buggy whips and antimacassars and snoods. Hollywood has a way of making people’s money disappear.
And even if no one tried to steal my money outright, even if everyone on the picture did his best, all it would take was a screwup in one department to make the movie a flop. The studio could demand a catastrophically bad reedit or bungle a last-second transfer into 3D, the composer doing the score could have a tin ear, the trailers could suck, the publicity department could be at war with the producers and sabotage the promotion, and all my money would disappear.
In which case, I’d be out of work and broke.
I lean back in the sofa and try not to snivel. “We’re fucked.”
“Hadley’s on the verge of shooting himself,” Tom says.
“Better if he shot Mrs. Trevanian.”
“Well,” Tom says, “we can always hope for a last-minute backer with a big check.”
I reach for my phone. “I’ll call Bruce.”
Bruce’s phone goes straight to voice mail. It’s annoying that he has other clients and a personal life, but I suppose it’s only to be expected.
I put the phone away. “I’ll try again later.”
Tom is looking back out the door, where one of my guards is pacing around.
“Where did the guards come from?” he asks.
“You’re paying for them,” I tell him. “It’s your due diligence. Even Mrs. Trevanian would agree.”
“Fuck!” he yells. But that’s the only objection he makes.
I go over my lines one more time, and then I hear a shotgun boom out as another tabloid drone makes a run at the hotel. I give up. No one’s come to console me in a long time, thank God, and so I decide it’s time to stroll over to my bar and open a bottle of reposado. A couple of shots down, and I realize how to raise the money to make the movie as it ought to be made.