141.
When he wakes in the morning, someone seems to have been knocking at his door for hours.
The same driver who met Vikar at the airport and drove him to the hotel now drives him through a depressed part of Madrid to an ugly industrial building twenty minutes away. In the editing room Vikar finds bread, butter and jam but no knife to spread them, coffee and bottled water, and a stack of film cans that have just arrived from a lab. There are no instructions from Viking Man or anyone else.
For a while Vikar sits staring at the cans. He eats the bread with the butter and jam that he spreads by using the other end of the china pencil with which he’ll mark the print. He doesn’t drink the coffee.
142.
He sits a while longer staring at the cans. He believes his life itself is in a kind of jet lag. After half an hour he gets up and begins stripping away posters, photos and memos from the room’s largest wall until it’s bare.
He takes the film can on top and separates the lids. He threads the film through the drive mechanism of the viewer. For the moment he doesn’t concern himself with what kind of splices to make, with fades or dissolves or wipes, let alone with lighting or color. He’s putting miles of film into order, which means locating the sequences that he’s marked in the script, and the camera set-ups within each sequence.
143.
Over the weeks to come, first he’ll match the exposed film with the soundtrack, then select a representative still from each setup, sometimes more than one.
If there is, for instance, a sequence in which the Berber chieftain lops off the head of a thief, Vikar will choose a single still of perhaps a flying head, or a head rolling on the ground. He’ll print an enlargement of the still and number it and tack it onto the bare wall that he’s stripped. He’ll group set-ups chronologically into sequences, then number and group sequences as they’re represented by the set-up stills, until finally he’s determined the sequence for everything that’s been shot. He’ll catalog images and sounds by a synchronization code, then begin splicing together footage. Sometimes he’ll make a decision for one take over the others when the choice seems clear, particularly from a technical standpoint.
As Vikar does this, more rushes come each day or sometimes arrive every two or three days, or occasionally two or three times in one day. He works nine hours a day. Around one o’clock his driver brings lunch, and sometimes he eats dinner around ten o’clock in the Spanish fashion. Not once in the weeks to come will he receive a phone call from Viking Man.
144.
At night, after his work, he falls asleep in the back of the car, and the driver shakes him awake when they reach Vikar’s hotel. Vikar doesn’t go out into the city at all; he doesn’t care about the city. Madrid is a ghost town, fixed in the suspension of the Generalissimo’s pending death. Black wrought iron wreathes the city’s doors and balconies and fountains and windows. As the weeks pass, on the Fuencarral below his hotel window Vikar notices first the appearance of one streetwalker, then another, then another.
145.
After he’s been in Madrid three weeks, one night on the way back to his hotel Vikar wakes not to the driver’s touch but rather the jostling of the car, and realizes he’s blindfolded.
He also realizes his hands are bound. “What’s happening?” he says; he can feel someone on each side of him in the backseat. “What’s happening?” he says again, and someone answers, “Please do not talk. We will be there soon.”
“Where?”
“Please do not talk.”
146.
Soon he feels the car come to a stop. All the doors open and someone pulls Vikar out of the backseat. Led blindfolded for several minutes, at one point Vikar trips and two men catch him and pull him to his feet.
They stop and there’s the metal creak of an opening door. “There is a step here,” someone says. Vikar lifts his feet to step inside the door, which he hears pulled closed behind him.
147.
Vikar assumes he’s been arrested by the same officials who interrogated him in customs when he entered the country. When the blindfold is taken off, he expects to see the fan of Miss Natalie Wood waiting for him.
Instead he’s in some sort of warehouse. On the far side is what appears to be a makeshift soundstage with a bed, and in one corner a particularly old moviola. Lined against the wall are a dozen guns and rifles and rounds of ammunition.
There’s also a small screen and projector with a low table nearby and someone sitting on a stool watching a movie. Vikar looks around him; one of the men, his driver, holds several film canisters. The other men wear rifles on their shoulder or guns in their belts. The figure on the stool doesn’t turn to look at Vikar but continues watching the movie.
148.
When the man on the stool turns from the movie to Vikar, he doesn’t look like a policeman or customs official.
He’s slight in stature, dark, in his late twenties. He wears dark pants and combat boots and a kind of workshirt; a scarf is tied around his neck. On the table next to the stool where the man sits, next to a bottle of wine and several glasses, Vikar sees a military issue.45.
The man on the stool notes Vikar’s bound hands. “Untie his hands,” he says to the other men. He says to Vikar, “I apologize for the ropes. Please,” and indicates another nearby stool for Vikar to sit. He turns his attention back to the movie, and together the two men watch.
149.
The movie is about a young bride who travels to Thailand to be with her French diplomat husband. Among the embassy’s aristocratic females, the bride has a number of sexual relationships, then is sent by her husband to be trained by an older man in the art of sexual submission.
Vikar believes that the young woman is very attractive but perhaps the movie is not so good. “This film is not allowed in my country,” the man on the stool says to Vikar. “You know of this actress?” Over the man’s shoulder, Vikar watches the driver of his car set the film cans on the editing table.
“No.”
“Miss Sylvia Kristel,” the man says, as though this explains everything.
“Is she French?”
“The film is French. She is …” he thinks, “… Dutch, I believe.”
150.
They watch awhile longer, the man riveted by the Dutch actress. Then he reaches over and turns off the projector. He says, “You are Señor … Vicar? How do you say it?”
“Vikar.”
“Like a church name.”
“With a k.”
This isn’t altogether clear to the other man but he says, “I am Cooper Léon. Are you hungry?”
“No, thank you.” There are seven or eight men besides Cooper Léon. One is an older man who sits on the soundstage bed smiling at Vikar, and who appears to Vikar to be wearing some sort of military costume and make-up, although from the distance Vikar can’t be sure.
“Have a little wine,” says Cooper Léon, who takes the bottle from next to the pistol on the table and pours a glass and hands it to Vikar. “Of course Cooper Léon,” says the man, “may not be my real name. Or it might. It might be that my parents really did name me after Gary Cooper who fought for the Republic in For Whom the Bell Tolls. If that is so, then it places you in a potentially untenable position, since I have told to you my real name.”
“But it might not be your real name,” says Vikar.
“Exactly. It is as with the chamber of a gun that may or may not have a bullet in it. But the larger point is that if you cooperate, you will be all right in either case and it will not matter if it is my real name.” Cooper Léon says, “Do you know who we are?”