by Konstantin
I’d thought of him again as the scene shifted to another blurry interior and a shot of Cassandra, dressed now and hunched above a telephone. Skinny’s wind-up voice was distant on the other end, but the fear and anger in his words were close at hand and unmistakable.
“Don’t call here, for chrissakes…” “How did you get this number, you crazy bitch…” “Why are you calling me…” “What do you want from me…” “Fucking bitch— I’ll kill you, you call again…” “Just leave me alone…” “Please…just leave me alone.”
But she wouldn’t. I’d heard Cassandra’s side of the conversation before, on David’s voicemail. Her words were different in the video but she covered the same scary ground, and she was relentless.
“Why don’t you write me anymore? Why don’t you call? You think you can just ignore me? If you won’t take my calls, maybe your wife will.”
Their back-and-forth was a tortured accompaniment to more images of Cassandra on the telephone, and to shots of a blur-faced Skinny walking the streets, hailing taxis, entering and leaving unidentifiable buildings, and completely unaware of the camera trailing him. In the course of maybe ten minutes of video, his initial surprise gave way to anger, his anger mutated to fear, and his fear dissolved in desperation. By the end of it, Skinny’s synthesized words were lost in human sounds— quavers, sniffles, maybe tears— and I was surprised by the bud of sympathy that had grown for the bastard.
“Just leave my wife out of it, for chrissakes. Please, she’s got nothing to do with this— nothing at all. Just tell me what the hell you want from me. Please…”
Finally Cassandra did:
“I want to see you again, one last time.”
Like the investigation sequence, the final scene— the interrogation, Monroe called it— was shot in black and white, though the blacks were somehow deeper and the grays more silvery. It brought Cassandra and Skinny back to what looked like the same hotel room, where the drapes were still drawn but the bed was made up. Skinny was awkward, and stiff with anger, but he sat as directed in a straight-backed chair. Cassandra was perched on the edge of the bed, with her white hands on her knees. She wore a white blouse, a dark suit jacket, and tailored pants, and her auburn hair looked black and lacquered. Her bearing was military and her tone was clinical. Her questions were simple and direct.
“Why did you do it…” “Did you think about your wife or your children— what would happen if they found out…” “Did you think of the risk…” “Was it just the sex…” “Is that all it takes?”
Skinny reached for defiance at first, but he was beaten before he ever walked through the door. His resistance degraded quickly, from combative, to petulant, to whiny, and the last fight went out of him in a shuddering breath that left him folded and shrunken before the camera. But when his first answers came, they didn’t please Cassandra.
“ ‘I don’t know’ is no answer…” “How can you say it has nothing to do with her…” “I didn’t just happen—you came looking for me, and you came back for more.” She shredded Skinny’s evasions like a terrier and flung the scraps aside until he was spent and she had the bone in her teeth.
“I did it because I wanted to, because I wanted you. Once we got started, the things we did— I couldn’t think of anything else. It made me feel handsome— powerful. I didn’t think about her or the kids…I didn’t give a damn about them.”
Skinny’s voice wound down like a tired spring and his narrow frame slumped in the shadows. Cassandra was perfectly still and her face was a white mask.
“And you’d do it again, wouldn’t you?” she asked. “You’d do it now if you could?”
Skinny looked at her, dazed and uncertain. When he spoke, there was pleading in his voice. “If I could,” he said softly. The screen went dark.
A shadow fell across the table and Chaz Monroe returned with his drink and a bowl of salted nuts. The noise of the bar crowd came back with him. He raised his glass to me again and drank.
“Hard to get out of your head, aren’t they?” he said. I nodded. “They have that squirmy-sexy thing going on: the utter submission of a beautiful woman to a nameless, faceless man, and all before the cameras— except that she’s the only one who knows the cameras are there, and she’s the one who set the whole thing up. Abuse, self-abasement, voyeurism: it’s quite the trifecta. And then she turns the tables.” He tossed some cashews into his mouth and washed them down with scotch.
“Todd didn’t steer you wrong on the reliquaries,” he said. “They only make sense after you’ve seen the videos, and then they pack a punch.”
They did indeed. An empty condom wrapper, Cassandra’s torn hosiery, her underpants, a soiled washcloth— all last seen on screen, in Cassandra’s hands or in Skinny’s. Their presence behind the glass of the curio cabinet gave the events in the video a reality, an immediacy, that was undeniable and invasive. But those mementos, from Interview Two, were positively quaint next to the souvenirs in the other cabinet: the spent matches, the dollops of melted candle wax, the green silk tie from the hotel drapes, the white plastic grocery bag, the neatly cut square of bed linen, stained with what looked like blood. A chill went down my spine.
Monroe saw me shiver and caught the drift of my thoughts. “Have you ever heard the word ‘bitch’ so overused?” he said. “I don’t sleep with women myself, but I certainly like them more than Cassandra’s fellows seem to. And it’s fascinating how similar their notions of the erotic all seem to be. The pervasiveness of popular culture, I suppose.” Monroe played with his little beard. “There’re two or three doctoral dissertations in there, at least.”
“At least,” I said. “Are the other videos as rough as Interview Four?”
Monroe gave it some thought. “It’s one of the grittier ones, I’d say, and mostly on account of Bluto. He required no prompting.”
“Bluto?”
He smiled. “It’s what I call Cassandra’s costar in Four.”
I’d thought of him as Sunburn, for his vivid tan line and the skin peeling off his beefy shoulders, but Monroe’s name was a better fit. I thought about the squat, hirsute body, and about the things he said to Cassandra, and did to her, and I shivered again.
“What do you mean by ‘prompting’?”
“I mean that in some of her later works, Cassandra encourages the men to their extreme behavior. Or maybe ‘goads’ is a better term.” Monroe shook his head. “As if she weren’t taking enough risk.”
More images of Cassandra and Bluto ran through my head: his thick hands on her supine body, the melting wax, the plastic bag stretched over her face, the green cord around her neck. I felt another chill.
Interview Four began no differently from Two, with e-mail messages and hidden camera footage of a first meeting in an unidentified bar. Where Skinny had worn a sedate blue suit, Bluto was dressed in a checked sport coat and chocolate-colored trousers, and where Skinny had been full of stipulations, Bluto was all accommodation, rendered in a high-pitched, synthesized voice.
“Sure, whenever you want— my schedule is flexible and I’m easy…” “Uptown, downtown, it’s all the same to me…” “Around the corner, right now? Hey, I’m good to go.”
Things changed in the hotel room. The colors were more vivid than in Interview Two, and so was the sex, which started out edgy and quickly went over the edge. Each of their encounters began with Bluto explaining— in graphic detail— what he intended to do, and with Cassandra acquiescing.
“Will it hurt?” she asked.
“It won’t hurt me a bit, baby,” Bluto said, and laughed.
“Will it hurt me?”
“Probably. Do you care?”
“Not much,” she said. Her voice was soft and without affect.
Cassandra’s pursuit of Bluto played out differently, too. Her first phone calls elicited only derisive laughter from him, and following him yielded only distant shots of a bulky man getting in and out of a black Town Car. It took a threat to visit his in-laws, somew
here in the wilds of New Jersey, to get his attention.
Unlike Skinny’s, Bluto’s anger didn’t falter into fear. His was instead slow burning and rumbling, and when Cassandra wouldn’t fuck off as ordered, he seemed almost to welcome the prospect of meeting her one last time. He swaggered into the hotel room, shoulders rolling, and stood by the bed with his hands on his belt. He barely waited until she’d shut the door to speak.
“Okay, bitch, you wanted me and here I am. So drop your drawers and bend over and we’ll get to it quick.”
Cassandra’s laugh was small and tight. “That’s not what I had in mind this afternoon.”
“It’s not your mind I’m talking about, bitch,” Bluto said, and he grabbed Cassandra’s arm and threw her on the bed. He stood over her and unfastened his belt buckle. “Now bend over.”
Cassandra shook her head and pointed to the clock on the nightstand. “What time does that say?” she asked calmly.
“What?”
An edge came up in Cassandra’s voice. “Are you going deaf? I asked you what time was on that clock.”
“What the fuck—”
“Because at three o’clock exactly, and every twenty minutes after that, I have a call to make. And the party on the other end gets very nervous if I’m not prompt. Very antsy.”
“What are you talking—”
“Knowing where I am and who I’m with isn’t enough, I guess. This party still wants to hear from me. Every twenty minutes. Promptly. My voice.”
Bluto was quiet, and it was almost possible to see the calculations playing across his pixilated face. When he spoke again his voice was softer. “What? That’s supposed to scare me?”
Cassandra laughed again and got off the bed. She smoothed her jacket and tucked in her blouse. “Not you, tough guy. Now sit down.” She pointed to a chair and after a brittle moment Bluto sat in it.
He was hardly pleasant after that, but he didn’t raise a hand to Cassandra again. She worked him for what seemed a long time, pausing periodically to step into the bathroom and make her calls. Bluto was more familiar with his own appetites than Skinny was with his— more fond of them, and certain that they required no explanations or excuses. So there was no hemming or hawing when he finally ran out of obstinacy and decided to answer Cassandra’s questions, no heavy sighs or tears, and but a single regret.
“No, I didn’t think about my wife and kids— and why the hell should I? What business is it of theirs? I thought about fucking you six ways from Sunday, and nothing else. You had a lot of promise and I’m only sorry you turned out to be such a freakin’ headcase.” It was impossible to say whether that satisfied Cassandra, but she seemed to know that she’d gotten all she was going to get.
Images of Bluto’s blurred face, looming above her, were insistent, and they made my jaw ache. I heard Monroe’s voice from far away. “You’re sure about that drink?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Are the others as bad as Bluto?” I asked.
Monroe thought about it. “He’s the most brutal, I think, but there are tense moments in all the interrogation scenes.” He drank some scotch and ran a hand over his chin. “Of all the dangerous things she does in her videos, I think those segments are the scariest.”
He was right. Alone in a hotel room with an angry, scared, and cornered man— she was juggling chainsaws. There’d been just a hint of danger with Skinny, a moment when her back was turned and his hand went up, but it went no further than that. There’d been more than a hint with Bluto.
“Does she always get them talking at the end?”
Monroe bumped ice around in his glass and looked up at me. His eyes were blurry and his little beard was dusted with salt. His words were nearly lost in the din of the place. “Always,” he said. “They posture and threaten and evade and lie, but in the end they answer.”
It didn’t surprise me. From what I’d seen, Cassandra was good at getting people to talk, very good. She was patient and firm and seemed to have an innate understanding of the theater of interrogation— of the fragile chemistry of power, fear, and empathy that drove it along, and the cocktail of guilt and vanity and fatigue that could bring it to confession. She would’ve made a good cop that way.
* * *
I paid off Chaz Monroe and poured him into a taxi, and I walked up Smith Street in the general direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Besides some bar stragglers and a few late diners, I had this stretch of Brooklyn to myself. But if the cold and wind had cleared the sidewalks, they did nothing for my head, which was still full of Holly Cade. Holly, Wren, Cassandra— the equation played and replayed, cut with lurid images from her videos and snippets of dialogue from her bad plays, a bleak and desperate loop. I’d completed one part of the job David had hired me for: I’d found out who Wren was, and what it was that she wanted from him. Now if only I knew what the hell to do about it.
12
The sky was freighted with heavy clouds on Tuesday morning, and the local news was freighted with snowstorms, churning up the East Coast, driving down from Canada, and colliding all over New York. The timing was uncertain— maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day— but the predictions were dire.
“Bullshit,” Clare muttered, and tore a piece of toast in half. “They get all hysterical but they never get this stuff right.” She smeared some strawberry jam on the bread and went back to the Times.
She’d arrived early this morning, as I was getting back from my run, and we’d been sitting in amiable silence since, she leafing through the paper and I writing a report for David. I drank some orange juice and read it over.
The facts were straightforward, albeit strange: Holly was making another video and, unbeknownst to him, my brother was her costar. She’d shot most of it already, and now she was gearing up for the grand finale. For that she needed David to make a return appearance.
What to do with these facts was the problem. Ignoring Holly’s demands was one option, though a risky one. She had proven relentless in pursuit of her quarries, and the hours of video documentation she presumably had of her sessions with David would give her a lot of leverage. But leverage ran two ways. Orlando Krug had said that Cassandra was jealous of her privacy, and the kind of art she was making required anonymity— so the threat of revealing her secret identity might actually pull some weight. But Holly was also demonstrably nuts, which made her motives hard to read and her reactions impossible to predict. I sighed and ran my hands through my hair. The speculation was pointless, I knew— a little game I was playing to keep from dwelling on the videos themselves.
Twelve hours or so had given me perspective enough to see them as unique and beautifully made works. And I knew also that Holly’s former colleagues Moira Neal and Terry Greer had understated her talents as an actress. She was remarkable, and her ability and willingness to abandon herself to a role was frightening. But the queasy, sticky feeling the videos evoked still lingered. The desperation they depicted left me bleak, and their contempt and studied cruelty made me angry.
And it was impossible, of course, not to cast David as one of those faceless, mechanical men— impossible not to think about what had brought him to Holly, and what she’d captured of him with her hidden cameras. Impossible not to wonder what reserves of rage and brutality she’d tapped, and how much encouragement he’d needed. The more I thought about him the less I knew; the more he was a silhouette, receding down a darkened hallway.
Maybe it was the smell of toast that brought the memory back. Maybe it was the threatening light in the sky.
It was a bleak February Wednesday and I was home from boarding school, not for vacation but because I’d been caught, for the third time, smoking a joint in the woods behind my dorm. The dean of students said a month’s suspension might teach me a thing or two, and he’d been right. I’d learned that I could buy decent weed at decent prices from our building’s late-shift doorman, and that the weeknight bartenders at Barrytown, over on First Avenue, wouldn’t card you if you tipped well enough. I’d s
lept until three that day, and would’ve slept later if not for the noise. It was my parents.
My mother had delayed her midwinter pilgrimage to Boca that year, and my father was making a rare foray from his study, and they’d decided to have it out right outside my bedroom door. As was often the case in those days, I was the convenient excuse. It was nothing new and I tried to tune it out, but they were uncharacteristically loud.
“What’s he doing with himself?” my mother said.
