Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  Then McCabe was name-checked again in regard to the subsequent murder of Ms. Glades homicide in the garment district, a shocking ritualistic homicide involving grisly postmortem mutilations apparently derived from or inspired by examples from a past photo series by McCabe. Where previous speculation and circumstantial evidence might have led to McCabe as a possible lead or suspect, his very disappearance pointed to the more gruesome possibility that he, too, had become a victim.

  * * *

  Chambers had no way of knowing he had missed spotting Elias at LAX by about seven minutes. His body count for his “unilateral expungement” stood at nine, not counting Dominic Sharps.

  PART EIGHT

  JULIAN

  My previous romance prior to meeting Char had been the kind of crazy-making miscalculation that makes you reorder your entire view of yourself.

  For one thing, Rebecca Effner was a fellow photographer. That alone kicked the pins from beneath most of the social fencing intended to get people either hired or laid. For another, her work was staggeringly good. Like me, she had preferred film over digital, raw light over pixels. I met her at a gallery showing of hers called Old Bars—almost Weegee-like photo studies of tarnished dives, barely hanging on as the new century crushed them.

  I asked her what she did at the old bars.

  “Get shitfaced,” she said. “See who fucks, who fights. Waste my time in the jaded pursuit of empty thrills and try not to see my existence as a hollow lie. You know—the usual.”

  She was attractive instead of pretty, smart instead of glib, more willowy than thin, with all-seeing violet eyes and raven hair so dark and thick it seemed Indian. Her face was an inverted teardrop with a bit too much forehead versus chin, yet organized around those fascinatingly shaded eyes. Falling for her in the moment was too easy—sometimes it just happens that way. So everything I could conjure in the way of monopolizing her time sounded like just another lowball come-on, which I guess it was, because then I could plead being blindsided.

  Once she backtracked to study my work she felt a reciprocal connection, and we encountered each other socially but never privately. There was always some obligation, mission, or relationship—hers or mine—in the way. We were rarely in the same city at the same time, and so for nearly two years we compared notes via phone and e-mail on all the ways love can firebomb itself. And the deeper we got, the more pointedly the lowering specter of sex between us went unremarked.

  That unspoken tension meant that losing the distance was inevitable. It was just a matter of time. It was an attraction to hold in reserve, like a secret crush. We had to come to a day, sooner or later, unless one of us died.

  We shared nervous drinks in the bar at the Mark Hopkins, unsettled by each other’s physical nearness. We were meeting each other on neutral ground, unchaperoned, and could not have been more gunshy and uncomfortable. It was shaping up to be the worst first date ever, since we already knew so much about each other without … you know, that other thing.

  Finally she said, “It didn’t hit me until I was at the airport. I am flying to San Francisco to sleep with this man. Then I thought, do we make out? Are we brotherly sisterly? Just one of the many reasons I held off for so long. But late at night, we’re both thinking about the same thing. I hate the tension and don’t want it to spoil the other things we have, rare things, valuable things, and at the same time I hate the ‘let’s just be friends’ speech worse than anyone.”

  This was not the Rebecca I had grown to cherish for her caustic wit and unflinching vision. This Rebecca was scared and uncertain, and if I rang wrong she would shield herself with icy formality … because I would do the same thing.

  “In the lobby?” she said, eyes downcast. “When we were ten feet away, then three, then we went into that automatic hug like it was the most natural thing in the world? Then I knew we’d been having the same damned thoughts, and I wasn’t totally loopy. So here’s what I think: the best and simplest solution is to just hold hands and jump. If it’s a disaster, then it’s a disaster and we shake hands and stay amigos. But if there’s something else there—anything else—I’ll torture myself for the rest of my life if I don’t find out. Feel free to tell me to shut up at any time.”

  We were so apprehensive that we’d gotten two rooms. I wound up in hers. It was a temporary vacuum in which we existed only for each other, separate and away from every other concern in our individual lives.

  Everything that could have gone wrong, did.

  Which is why there had been no ravishment on my first night with Char. Then again, now I knew Char had not been real, either.

  Rebecca still got in touch from time to time, but much less frequently, her messages and talk either brightly superficial or guarded and wary, her verve adulterated. We never spoke of San Francisco, had no cute snapshots or souvenirs, and a shroud had settled over what shreds of bonhomie we had left ourselves. I knew for a fact that she had been in and out of L.A. at least ten times in the past three years, but we did not kid ourselves by trying to do lunch. Until we talked about it, nothing would improve, and I could imagine this stalemate being one of my few regrets if Gun Guy ever caught up to me the way I imagined he might.

  I successfully followed Char to a pub on Amsterdam called OMFG, where I knew exactly what she would order—salmon salad and two glasses of Pinot Grigio with a chaser of seltzer, no ice, yes lime. Bubble water always cranked up her pee meter, so she would probably hit the Ladies’.

  Sleazy? You bet.

  I could not simply accost her on the street; too many variables, too many watching eyes. A tell-all at Clavius’s was out of the question. I could have babbled some of this via a long-distance call from L.A., but imagined how much more deranged it would sound to someone who had the option of hanging up. I needed to see Char, see her with my eyes, in person and without Clavius, and try to tell her as much as I could to her face. She was in danger but would wrongly think distance from me would neutralize that threat. It was the only day of the week I would not be missed from the Vengeance Is set, and right-now-this-minute was the best of a bad field of options. Or no options—who knew when I would get another opportunity, if I lived?

  Pissed off, was Char? You bet.

  I had to bracket her in the restroom. She yelped as though goosed by a pervert before her eyes slowly took me into focus, sans goatee. I never wore hats and now she needed a beat to figure out it was me under that brim.

  “Goddammit, Elias!” Her face blushed luridly. Her heart must have been racing.

  “I know, I know—everything about this is wrong, but I need you, I need you, I need you to listen to me right now!”

  She would start hitting me any second. I had my palms up passively. To grab or restrain her would waste our time.

  “I’m not a screamer, Elias, you asshole, but I will scream my tits off. This is not fucking funny.” Her eyes had gone mine shaft dark.

  “Please just listen,” I said. “That’s all.”

  What better time for another patron to enter the Ladies’? Just like in the movies, I crowded Char into a stall and flipped the latch. She was trying to meter her breathing, looking at me as if I were a dog pie on the sidewalk, while we enjoyed the aerosol noise of someone else pissing. What the hell, right? Passionate drunks copulated in toilets all the time. There must be something about the smell of excrement, air freshener, melon hand soap, and composted tampons that turns some people on, I guessed.

  “Do you remember Mister Kimber, from that night at the loft?”

  “Do you know that you’re eyebrow-deep in shit?” she snapped, harsh. “They think the Soviet killed herself.”

  “I know.”

  “Joey is dead.”

  I did not know that. My gut bungeed.

  “At least, I’m pretty sure it’s Joey, from what I heard. Clavius is out for your blood for involving him. And you look a lot like a jerkoff trying to run away from the police. That about cover it?”

  She blew her nose on a streame
r of toilet paper and dug in her pocket for her coke vial. She tapped out two lines on the back of her hand. “Disapproval is not allowed,” she said, then aspirated the cocaine.

  “Kimber is the guy who set me up,” I said. “I have no idea what his actual name is. He set me up to frame Dominic Sharps with blackmail photos. Sharps died. But Kimber or whatever his name is went ahead with the scheme anyway. I used Clavius paper for the photos as a sort of SOS. When you left Nasja’s camera on RECORD, I got video of Kimber talking about killing Sharps. It all went viral and now the mysterious Mister Not-Really-Kimber is killing everyone I know, everyone who saw him. Everyone.”

  “Jesus christ,” she said, still sniffing. “I’ll have whatever you’re on.”

  “I don’t understand it, Char. All I know is people are dying. Kimber saw you. Worse, he saw you on that night.”

  “The night he took that stupid framed print of yours.”

  “Please, please—this isn’t about you and me. Just get yourself safe. Get behind Clavius’s walls and surrounded yourself with bodyguards and don’t come out until it’s over.”

  She was still weighing me for telltale signs of madness. “You’re not joking,” she said more slowly. “You believe in this fantasy.” A quick stab of pain at her temples caused her eyes to mist as she tried to massage her head. “The loft was wrecked. I told the police you wrecked it, because I left. Clavius said he had explained everything to you. You’re not doing anything to prove you haven’t gone batshit; I mean, look at you.”

  Post-urination, our guest had left one of the taps dripping. It echoed.

  “I had to call Tripp,” I said. “Get under. Get out. New identity.”

  “Stop it,” she protested. “Just shut up!” She left the stall to lean on the sink and watch me over her shoulder, in the mirror, weary, as though the marrow had been drained out of her while she wasn’t looking. “I heard about the tattoos and piercings on the people they found in your loft,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that was Joey and his girlfriend, Velma—”

  “Varla.”

  “—but nobody could tell because their faces were blown off!”

  Lay low? Dude, you can stay at my place. Gun Guy had nailed Joey, I was sure of it, and Joey hadn’t been involved at all, except by knowing me. And inadvertently saving my bacon with the enlarger. Tickling the information about the cat food planet from the Internet. He had gone so far as to offer me a fake ID before I went into Tripp’s witness protection program.

  Even Joey had paid the ghastly price for being my friend.

  Char turned back from the steel lip of the bowl sink. “You said, when it’s over. When is it over?”

  “When I’m dead, I think.”

  “Well, be sure to let Clavius know when that happens. He needs his giclées done on time.”

  Her body was making those preparing-to-leave movements.

  “Char, I—”

  “You nothing,” she said. “You never know when you’re over; you can’t amputate anything even when it’s killing you. You just wait for gangrene to rot it off. I’m going now. Don’t follow me. It’s been fucking hell knowing you. Best of luck with your career. Asshole.”

  She hadn’t even gone to the bathroom. At best she would have managed three drops. All the rest had vented as superheated steam.

  I wanted very badly to talk to Rebecca Effner, but I had no idea how to find her anymore.

  * * *

  Day seven was mostly second-unit motion control shots at the airplane hangar in New Jersey. Hunnicutt brought his birds and Garrett Torres, antagonist, was holed up in his hotel room in the city, front-loading orange juice and antibiotics to head off an impending cold that made his distinctive voice sound as though he had been inhaling helium. Collier was also doing pickups on angles of various gunfights, which required a lot of costume changes—bits and pieces from all over the movie. Most of it was MOS—“mitt out sound”—but the sound cart was present so I brought my new camera blimps.

  Shooting during shooting, so to speak, required the blimps—big soundproof boxes in which the cameras were imprisoned into silence on the set, so I can capture an image or two you might glimpse as an eight-by-ten in a press packet, or a saucy shot in an advertisement a year from now when the movie is being marketed. Film magazines, coming-soon Web sites, and suchlike hungry for the skinny on production had to go through the publicity liaison to get their mitts on my images. Spooky Sellers—that was really her name, supposedly—was the PR person responsible for setting up interviews and spin-doctoring all media access to the production in progress, and it was a new feeling to have somebody at my back that way, like Mason Stone must have felt about his personal soldier, the imposing Dick Fearing. Spooky was short, round, blonde, bobbed, blue-eyed, and flirty. We played at getting her to stand still long enough for me to get a decent photo of her (with her clothes on, I mean), and quickly developed a shorthand signal language. When she cocked her hand into a sort of bird shape, like Lurch or Vlad, that meant “get over here and cover this.” A little wave behind her back meant “stress alert—don’t shoot this.” And so on.

  She, too, was trapped in constant doubt over her own importance, and came off a bit needy when she tried to peel me free for an after-hours cocktail. The way she put it was, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but…”

  No way I could risk it, so I begged off, pleading work.

  My job was to stealth around the main unit all feline, unobtrusively; most often I bumped into Arly with his video camera, trying to do the same, always two steps too late. Click: here was Mason Stone joking with the grips, Styro coffee cups all around. Click: here was Collier framing a shot with his hands; that would be good for the profile Cinema Sleuth would run on him, eight months later.

  I was invisible. Nobody ever shot pictures of the unit photographer. The routine was soothing. Elias McCabe had major problems; Julian Hightower did not.

  Before lunch I dumped my RAW files into my laptop for logging and hijacked Arly’s computer to dredge up something more on what Mason kept calling the Salon, making it sound like a fleshpit he just had to experience.

  The clues online were vaporous. The full name was the Salon Fantastique de l’Exotique, with just the right pinch of phony, feelthy French leer, which made it hard to Google since I couldn’t read French (although the translation software could still provide hours of hilarity). One brief bit compared the Salon to the Grand Guignol, others likened it to the freak shows of carnival days gone by. Freak shows were technically illegal in our highly moral age, which is why the Jim Rose’s Circus Sideshow did not deal in deformity. Most of the orts I clicked had not been updated since 1999.

  You probably don’t remember a notorious short story titled “Spurs.” It was the foundation for one of Tod Browning’s most notorious films, the 1932 MGM version of Freaks.

  Alternate title: Nature’s Mistakes.

  Which became my doorway to finding out about the Salon.

  Supposedly, the Salon Fantastique de l’Exotique came into being when sideshow freak tents and exhibitions of “oddities” on carnival midways were forced into extinction by political correctitude. One army of do-gooders erased the visible means of support for rubber men and alligator women around the world, while another wave protested that “those people” should be able to earn a living. While the social outrage swam round and round, freak shows were banned, outlawed, and finally obliterated in the 1970s and ’80s. Now the only place you could find pickled punks or two-headed calfs were in remote highway stopovers, removed from civilization in most other ways as well. It took longer to happen throughout Europe, but gradually, the ogre of civil rights shot itself in the foot there, too. Social propriety disenfranchised them even more, when most wanted to exploit themselves, and preferred working to poverty and marginalization. Even calling them “freaks” became a no-no, despite the fact that’s what they comfortably called themselves.

  I could see where this was headed.

  The Salon s
tarted in Russia or somewhere in the Ukraine. Nasja may have even mentioned it once or twice. Strictly underground, members only, a combination of traveling speakeasy and Algonquin Round Table of human oddities who had banded together and learned a very important trick from the world of porn.

  I used to know a fellow named Moonshine who ran a burger and biker bar called the Kickstand in Nevada. Since he wasn’t inside the boundaries of Cook County where prostitution had been conditionally legalized, you had to know about his bungalow of sex rooms in order to ask for them. It was a little maze of chambers outfitted with big showers, towels, lube, toys, a dentist’s chair, a mechanical bull, suspension racks, torture gear, cuffs, masks, rope, a wet bar, and a handy take-out menu for food delivery. Renting the rooms for play purposes was illegal, but allowing their use for free was not—provided you paid what Moonshine called a “beverage charge,” an appropriately astronomical fee that got you the same booze he served at the bar inside the Kickstand for real-world prices. You paid the beverage fee by the hour and were served through a discreet airlock slot (like a miniature of the door on my now-defunct darkroom back in L.A.) which, just by happy coincidence, fed into the sex rooms. You then enjoyed your refreshment inside one of these rooms, which, by sheerest chance, just so happened to be loaded with gear designed to enhance the fornicatory experience. You weren’t obligated to utilize any of those nasty contraptions, of course. You could ignore them if you wanted to.

  Just as the Kickstand had, the Salon discovered a template for resurrection and commerce in the loophole of the “beverage charge.” Problem was, their clientele was so high-class that groundlings were never able to enjoy any placard-waving outrage. It was a mythic tease, a fancy having everything to do with the jaded tastes of the upper crust, just like the legendary strip bar in Hollywood where you can, it is rumored, be serviced in various ways by TV and movie actors on the wane.