The camera looks perfect, looks like it’s been sitting in the darkroom all night. Not a scratch.
“How can I thank you guys?” Sylvia asks.
Leni stops herself from smiling and says, “Listen, here’s a little tip. Never say that to anyone in my profession, okay?”
Sylvia laughs and then realizes Leni’s not joking. Leni takes a step back from the window, looks up and studies the Shack. She’s wearing jeans and a burgundy silk blouse, ankle boots and a leather bomber jacket that’s cracked and fading from chocolate to dusty white.
She shakes her head and says, “You like sitting in this thing all day?”
“It’s not bad.”
“It looks bad.”
“You get used to it.”
Leni walks back up to the window and says, “You can get used to anything. That doesn’t mean you like it.”
“It’s a job. I don’t have to think.”
“You have something against thinking?” Leni says.
They stare at each other until finally Sylvia shakes her head no.
Leni changes the subject and says, “Hugo said to tell you there was no film in the camera when he got it back. He said sorry about that.”
“Dammit,” Sylvia says. “I had some great shots of the riot.”
“There’ll be other riots, Sylvia.”
“Not for me.”
Leni says, “That’s because you’re stuck in this goddamn camera-thing all day. Honest to God, I’d lose it in there. I’d get claustrophobic. I hate small places like that.”
“It gets pretty annoying sometimes. The day can go by pretty slowly.”
“See, my days, they fly. They’re gone. I get up, I get out, I do things. I walk around. I see people.”
“What about work?”
Leni shakes her head. “It’s not like I work every day. Average week, I work maybe three days. Nights a lot. Hugo loves shooting at night. He says people are more relaxed at night. I don’t know. Everyone’s different.”
“What do you—” Sylvia starts and then stops herself, embarrassed.
“What do I make, right? That’s what everyone wants to know. That’s the big question.”
“I didn’t mean to be rude—”
“It’s not rude,” Leni says. “If I didn’t want to tell you, I wouldn’t tell you. I do all right. I’ve got an arrangement with Hugo, so I’m not really the norm. I’ve got kind of this contract thing with Hugo. So I’m a little different. But the average is four, five hundred. The guys make more, right.”
“Five hundred a week,” Sylvia says.
Leni gets a big kick out of this. “A day, Sylvia. Five hundred a day. The real names, the women who headline, they can go up to a grand a day, a few go higher. Once you’re up there you can put together a more complex package, you know? You can have contingencies. You’re a name, you might take back a point or two after the net.”
“That’s over a hundred grand a year.”
Leni leans on the lip of the window’s counter. “You’re assuming you work fifty-two weeks a year, Sylvia. You know what you’d look like, you worked fifty-two weeks a year?”
Sylvia’s embarrassed but too intrigued to shut up. “She can’t help asking, “How did you get into this business?”
Leni pushes her hair off her face and says, “How’d you end up sitting inside a camera, Sylvia?”
“I just needed a job.”
“There you go.”
“It’s a little different, Leni.”
“Why’s it so different?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t just answer some ad—”
“That’s exactly what I did.”
“C’mon.”
“That’s how everyone I know got into it. You answer an ad.”
“What? You open a newspaper and it says woman wanted to get naked and be filmed having sex with strange men.”
The words sound insulting after they’re out there, but Leni just smiles and says, “It’s a little more subtle than that.”
“Like what? What does the ad say?”
Leni takes a long breath and says, “You’re really fascinated by this, huh?”
Sylvia feels defensive. “It’s just really foreign to me.”
“Honey,” Leni says, “you don’t know foreign. You’ve never even seen foreign.”
“You make that sound so depressing.”
“You hear it that way. It isn’t anything to me. It isn’t one way or another.”
“How long have you been working?”
Leni doesn’t answer. She leans down and actually sticks her head inside the window and looks around.
“It’s incredible to me that you sit in here all day,” she says. “It can’t be healthy.”
Sylvia shrugs. “I’ve got a radio. I bring a book. I can read. I get a lot of reading done.”
Leni stares at her and says, “Listen, you’re so curious, what’re you doing for lunch? You must eat lunch. They let you eat lunch, right?”
“Yeah, they let me eat lunch. I usually just just run down to that convenience store and grab a yogurt.”
“A yogurt,” Leni repeats and Sylvia nods.
“You want to go to lunch?” Leni asks. “I know a place. We’ll have something. I’ll give you the lowdown.”
“Thanks, but I can’t leave.”
“You just said you run to the convenience store.”
“That’s like five minutes. You can leave to go the bathroom or on a quick errand—”
“Aren’t they generous.”
“Really,” Sylvia says, “I’ve got to stay here.”
“Yeah, I know,” Leni says. “You’re just so busy. The lines are backing up here.” “Business is dead. I’m amazed the place is still open.”
“Sylvia, no one’s going to miss you for a half hour. I know a place five minutes from here. You’ll love this place.”
“Leni, I can’t just—”
“You have to, Sylvia. It’s not healthy in there. You’ve got to trust me on this.”
“I can’t. They’ll be furious.”
“What will they do, huh? They’ll fire you? It’ll be really tough picking something up this stimulating. And I’m sure the money is tremendous, right? You said yourself the place’ll probably close up in a month—”
“I never said—”
“—and will they give a damn about you when it does? This is crazy, Sylvia. Do something fun for a change.”
Ten minutes later, they pull up next to Kunitz Tower at the top of Behrman Hill and just sit there for a few minutes looking at the thing. It’s a sixty-foot tall, two-and-a-half story monument built of boulders and cobbles and designed to look like a mini feudal castle. The structure is acutally two towers joined together by an open-air archway.
Sylvia lives less than five miles from the Tower, but she’s been here exactly twice — on a grade school field trip and in high school, parking with a boy names Bobby Fenton on their first and only date. She wonders now what ever happened to Bobby.
The Tower is surrounded by a circular gravel road that in turn is surrounded by a scrubby, overgrown woods that covers the hill. Supposedly the view from the top of the Tower is tremendous, but to get there you’ve got to walk up these dank and grungy stone stairwells that always stink of urine. The rumor is that during the day the drunks and the gay hustlers share the place peacefully, but at night it belongs to the teenage punkers whose malt liquor bottles get tossed from the observation parapet. Today, the place appears empty.
Sylvia looks at Leni and raises her eyebrows for an explanation.
“The Floating Kitchen,” Leni says and climbs out of the car.
They walk to the stairwell opening and start up.
“It’s a hit-and-run operation. The owners haven’t scored a restaurant or a license yet, so they jump around. They’ve been using the Tower for about a week now. No signs. No advertising. They get by on word of mouth. It’s a family operation. The Zumaeta clan. From a village called Puquio in Peru. Everybody works. The old man, Jorge, he came north about six years ago. Worked as a cabbie and a barkeep. Put in like a hundred hours a week. Work and sleep. Lived on coffee. Brought everybody up one at a time. Soon as he had enough cash — bang, here comes son number one. Six months later, bang, here comes a daughter. The last to come was Maria, the wife. She held the fort back home until they’d all hit the road. Jorge sets them all up with work. Same deal, they work till they drop. Then six months ago, Daddy gets the idea for the restaurant. Keep everyone together. Capitalize on Maria’s fantastic cooking skills. Only they can’t afford to buy a place. So Maria comes up with the idea of the Floating Kitchen. They find empty spaces, move in and set up shop. And as luck would have it, the Zumaeta’s moveable feast is now the hottest trend in the Zone.”