Another Thing To Fall

by Laura Lippman

  He saw a car pull in, not the usual one, and he wondered if they were onto him, trying to trip him up. He watched the driver help her out of the car, as if she were fragile. Ah, she was anything but, he was sure of that. If only he could get to her, talk to her. Then she would be on his side, he was sure of it. Once they met, face-to-face, she would be his.

  Chapter 10

  Places in Baltimore often have many lives. Tess recognized the soundstage on Eastern Avenue as a former department store, one of the better ones — Hochschild Kohn, she thought, but maybe Hecht's — that had then been demoted to bargain chain status before settling into life as a members-only big lots store. It anchored the end of a sad and lonely strip mall, where at least half the stores were vacant. A small band of protesters — ah, the disgruntled steelworkers — marched along a grassy strip, earning a few halfhearted honks of support for their cause, but they looked pretty harmless to Tess. She parked and walked the perimeter of the freestanding building, noting the entrances. There was a fire door in the rear, but otherwise no way in and out of the building. That was good.

  The front, however, had no security — no lock on the door, no one sitting at the front desk just inside the doors. A worker tried to wave her in the direction of a sign that said EXTRAS HOLDING, even as Tess insisted she was here to meet with Greer. The young woman arrived just in time to save Tess from being shunted off to a wardrobe fitting.

  "Isn't that a little slipshod?" Tess asked. "Anyone could get in, under the guise of being an extra."

  "Oh, you wouldn't get far," Greer said. "Strangers are noticed pretty quickly."

  "Still, it's a risk, and I'm here to assess weaknesses. Remember, I'm watching Selene only during her nonwork hours. It's up to the production to make the workplace as secure as possible. And most of the problems have happened at work, right?"

  Greer was turning out to be one of those people who simply didn't answer questions not to her liking. "I suppose you want a tour of the set," she said. "Flip said I should take you around, if that's what you want."

  Tess didn't really care about a tour, but Greer sounded grudging, as if she resented being given this task, and her attitude made Tess perverse.

  "Love to."

  The former store had been more or less stripped down to its concrete floors, with a labyrinth of plywood now taking up half of the space. Vast and high ceilinged, the building held the morning's chill and then some.

  "I'll take you to the sets we're not using, first." Greer headed toward the maze, and Tess had one brief paranoid fear that Greer was planning to lose her in it, that Tess would end up wandering for days among artificial rooms.

  "This is the Mann rowhouse," Greer said, stopping in front of a living room that played to every stereotype of how blue-collar workers lived, replete with shag carpeting, velvet paintings, and a plaid La-Z-Boy. "We're not using it in the current episode, because that's set almost entirely in the nineteenth century."

  "It looks a little wide," Tess murmured. "But then, that's the problem, isn't it? Film isn't very good at conveying narrow spaces like eleven-foot rowhouses."

  "What do you mean?" Greer appeared to be offended by the mere suggestion that a film could fail to emulate real life.

  "My boyfriend and I went to New York this summer, and we toured this amazing museum in a former tenement, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the kind of place you saw in The Godfather, Part II, or Once Upon a Time in America." Tess didn't bother to add that she had been motivated to visit the museum because of memories of books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or the All-of-a-Kind Family series. Film was the only language spoken here, the only cultural reference that anyone seemed to get. "And the thing is, the real tenements were so tiny, so claustrophobic and dark. Even in the best films, the tenement sets are too big, too filled with light. I'm guessing it's going to be the same for this rowhouse."

  "We have a very good DP," Greer said, still haughty.

  "DP?"

  "Director of photography."

  "Oh." Tess decided not to suggest that Francis Ford Coppola and Sergio Leone might have had good directors of photography as well. DPs. She was a quick study. She would learn to talk the talk, if that's what it took.

  The next set was a run-down meeting room. "The union hall." Tess stepped into the room, marveling at the level of detail — the newspaper splayed across the Formica-topped table, the mismatched chairs, the faded memos tacked to the bulletin board, the coffee cups. There was even a fake coffee stain on one table. Tess couldn't help but approve of such conscientiousness.

  She was taken aback, however, by the view through the "window" — an extremely realistic photographic backdrop of the waterfront, with cranes rising in the distance, the blue smear of the harbor just beyond.

  "So the things we see through the windows in a movie or television show — they're not real?"

  Greer looked amused, superior — Tess's intent. People tend to reveal more to those they consider ignorant.

  "Of course not. Think about the lighting and continuity issues created by a real window."

  "But it looks so real. I mean, on film. Here, it looks like a photograph, but on a screen, you can't tell."

  "The camera has no depth perception," Greer said. "And, of course, sometimes they cut in a shot of the real view — say a character had to look out the window and see something in particular. You edit that shot in, and it heightens the illusion. But look up and you can see the lights hanging from the ceiling, which allows us to light the view for day or night."

  It was an intriguing insight, but Tess wasn't sure she liked this behind-the-scenes view of things. While movies weren't as magical to her as they had been, back in her late teens and twenties, she still wanted to be able to suspend belief, not think about all the ways she was being fooled. She didn't share these thoughts with Greer, however. Instead, she continued to inspect the set with pretended awe, as she assumed most people did.

  "You said they were filming today?"

  "They are, but it's way off in another corner of the set, where we've created Betsy's world." We, we, we. To hear Greer tell it, she was part of everything that happened on Mann of Steel. "I'll take you there."

  Tess had not necessarily wanted to watch filming, but she figured she should. Observing Selene at work might give her a sense of what her charge would be like at rest. Restless, she supposed.

  They wound their way through the maze, stepping over endless rivers of coiled cords and cables, until they finally found themselves in a thriving hive of activity, where young men and women — and they were overwhelmingly young, Tess noticed — rushed around with ferocious certainty. She was shocked at how many people there were working — twenty, thirty, maybe even forty. It was hard to keep track, given how they kept moving. Maybe Mann of Steel could be a good little economic engine for Baltimore, assuming these technical folks were locals, not imports.

  "Last looks," someone called out, and Tess watched as makeup and hair people swarmed Selene and a puffy middle-aged man — oh dear, it was Johnny Tampa, seriously gone to seed. "Last looks" turned out to be a flurry of pampering — makeup was tweaked, hair smoothed and coaxed into position. One woman produced a camera and shot Polaroids of both actors, instructing them to hold up their hands.

  "Continuity, again," Greer said, as if sensing what Tess was about to ask. "We have to keep careful records, so if there are reshoots, or other scenes in this time frame, everything matches up. If Selene's wearing a ring, we can't have it disappear later."

  A round-shouldered man lumbered over to Selene and Johnny, mumbled something inaudible to them. Selene, stroking her much-amplified mane of hair, nodded absently while Johnny Tampa looked confused, not unlike an animal that had just been poleaxed. The round-shouldered man shuffled away. Whoever he was, his posture made him quite the saddest sack that Tess had ever seen.

  "The director," Greer said. "Wes Stark. Flip calls him Willie Stark, but I'm not sure why." Tess thought about explaining All the Kin
g's Men to Greer but knew she would be depressed if Greer's only point of reference was Broderick Crawford. Or even worse, Sean Penn.

  "But I thought the woman, the one who's been running the crew, calling out some of the orders—"

  "First AD. Assistant director, Nicole. She's really good, and Stark's smart enough to cede a lot of power to her. Smart or lazy — he doesn't like to leave the video village if he can help it. At any rate, she's pulling his bacon out of the fire on this ep."

  Something in the phrase, the bit about pulling Stark's bacon, didn't ring true to Tess. She didn't doubt its veracity, having no basis to judge his performance. But she didn't believe it was Greer's unique opinion. Someone must have told her that, or Greer had overheard that scrap of phrase and decided to appropriate it.

  "You need to watch from the village," Greer said. "Where the director is."

  "Oh, I'm fine here," Tess said.

  "You may be fine, but Johnny's not. You're in his eye line, and he freaks out when there are strangers watching him."

  Tess decided not to point out that someone who freaked out when strangers were watching was a bad fit for the acting profession.

  Greer led her to an encampment of director's chairs, some of which did have names on their backs. Here was Flip, along with the tiniest adult woman that Tess had ever seen, her chair fitted with a wooden footrest higher than the others, so her legs didn't swing free. The back of her chair identified her as Charlotte MacKenzie. So that was the bean counter who had cut her fee and reduced Lloyd to an intern. Ben wasn't in his chair. He was several feet away, standing next to a cart piled high with food. Flip glanced up, caught Tess's eye, greeted her with a curt, professional nod. Ah, she had segued into the category of "help," alongside Greer. She no longer qualified for the thick charm Flip had piled on when trying to hire her. As long as his checks cleared, she didn't give a damn.

  "Here you go," Greer said. "If you want to watch, you can take Ben's chair and I'll get you a headset."

  "Oh, I—" But Greer was off, catching a man by the sleeve and bringing Tess back what looked like a small battery pack with headphones.

  "Just remember to give it back to me, okay? Don't walk off with it, whatever you do."

  "I wouldn't—"

  "Do you want sides?"

  "You mean like french fries?"

  Greer gave an exaggerated sigh and thrust some pages into Tess's hand — not a script, proper, but just a few pages, including the scene in question — then rushed away again, returning to her natural orbit at Flip's elbow. She considered Tess a waste of time, and Greer clearly didn't value people unless she felt they could do something for her. She wanted to be around those with power, and Flip was the power source here.

  "Rolling… action… fuck." The camera, a two-headed behemoth set on a wheeled cart, had snagged on its track. Workers rushed to it, not even waiting for instruction, already aware of what they had to do to fix the problem.

  Ben wandered over to Tess, having snagged a handful of miniature candy bars, but waved Tess back into his seat when she tried to surrender it to him.

  "Exciting, isn't it?"

  "I suppose so," Tess said.

  "I was being sarcastic. The most exciting thing on a movie set is craft services. The food," he added helpfully, brandishing a Snickers. "Movie sets are lousy with free food."

  "Isn't that hard on the actors?"

  "Harder on those of us who have no incentive to maintain our boyish figures." More sarcasm, she figured, as Ben still had the bean-pole skinniness of an adolescent who had grown six inches in the past year. Tess's greyhound had more body fat. "Although some actors aren't as disciplined, and it gets to be a problem."

  "Really?"

  "Let's just say that our Mann of Steel is at risk of becoming Man of Flab." He flapped a candy wrapper at the two actors on the set, Selene and Johnny Tampa. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. He was a shadow of his former heartthrob self. Well, not a shadow. Something considerably more substantial than a shadow.

  "He doesn't look so bad," Tess said, out of loyalty to her teenage crush.

  "He split two pairs of pants yesterday and we lost almost an hour finding a third. Okay, they're getting ready to film again, so you know to be—"

  "Quiet on the set. Sound speed. Rolling. Action."

  Ben cocked an eyebrow at Tess and held a finger to his lips. He joined Flip and Lottie at the monitors, but she didn't feel entitled to jockey for the best view. Besides, she sensed that Greer might tackle her if she tried to get too close to Flip. She stayed in Ben's chair, catching only a glimpse of the actors through the equipment and personnel circling around the set, but able to hear every word they said over the headset. It was a short scene, nonsensical without the context of the larger story. Mann seemed to be trying to pass himself off as a sailor, but Betsy Patterson, who had dated a sailor or two in her time, kept catching him in lies and misstatements. "Are you wellborn?" she asked at last, and the scene ended, apparently on a hilarious close-up of Johnny Tampa, considering the question. All in all, it was no more than two minutes, but they filmed it again and again from different angles, while the director, the stoop-shouldered man, kept pulling Tampa aside to chat. No one had anything to say to Selene, and Tess had to admit that she was convincing as Betsy Patterson, perhaps even more captivating than the real-life coquette, managing the trick of being innocent and knowing at the same time. But Johnny seemed tentative, off in a way that even a civilian could discern.

  "Someone put Nair in Johnny's face cream yesterday," Ben whispered to Tess during one of the breaks. "He smelled it before he put it on, but it freaked him out. He could have ended up losing his eyebrows if he had used it."

  "Where was this?"

  "In his banger. Trailer. We have a bank of trailers on the parking lot, which the actors and day players use as dressing rooms."

  Tess made a mental note that the trailers were something else she would have to be concerned about. Meanwhile, she was able to piece together much of what was happening on her own — two cameras, for example, took simultaneous "A" and "B" shots, which reduced the amount of time spent on coverage. The director never told either actor how to say a line but spoke more generally about the emotion he was looking for, the tone. They were on the ninth take, and even Tess could tell that they were finally getting what they wanted from Tampa when three bars of an Iguanas' song trumped the tender scene. Para donde vas? Her cell phone. Oops.

  "Whose fucking cell phone was that?" Lottie leapt from her chair — a not inconsiderable feat for her, given the distance to the ground. Her voice was soft but vicious. "I was serious about the fine, I will fucking fine you, I will have your fucking head, what kind of idiot doesn't turn his phone off—" When she realized that the culprit was Tess, she softened her approach, but only slightly. "Oh, you must be the… security detail. Monaghan. Well, I guess no one told you, but there are signs posted all over the fucking place. You can read, can't you? Greer—"

  She motioned to the young woman and leaned toward her, giving her what Tess could only suspect was a whispery scolding.

  "I'm sorry," Tess said. "It was all my fault. Greer did tell me." She thought that might win her a look of gratitude from Greer, but the young woman had a panicky, stay-away-from-me expression. Flip looked sheepish, knowing he had arranged for Greer to bring her here, while Ben's usual smirk was in place. Tampa was clearly frustrated, having been interrupted just as he was beginning to calm down. Only Selene seemed oblivious to everything going on around her, playing with her hair even as a woman kept poking at the elaborate upsweep with a long comb.

  "Thanks," Tess said, waving as she stepped backward. "I'm going to run over to my office, but I'll be back when Selene's finished for the day. Give me a thirty-minute heads-up, so I can be here when she's ready to go."

  Still moving backward, she gave what she hoped was a nonchalant wave, only to trip over a mass of cables. Righting herself, she fought the urge to run from the soundstage, settling for a bri
sk walk. It was only when she was in her car that she realized she had, in fact, fled with the headset that Greer had explicitly told her to leave behind. Poor Greer, she'd probably be blamed for that as well.

  "Great hire," Ben said to Flip a little later as they were preparing the setup for another scene, a dinner party. It was going to be an absolute ballbuster — three full pages of dialogue, half of it Tampa's. He was so good in his other scenes, but he seemed to fall apart whenever he had to act opposite Selene. A problem, given that the network kept pounding on them to write more for her. Their chemistry had been good initially but had deteriorated as Selene's part expanded.

  Flip nodded absently, not catching the tone — a habit of Flip's, not catching the tone of things in real life. Then, on a double take: "Hey, don't be an asshole. She's okay."

  "You really think this is going to solve anything, assigning her to Selene?"

  Flip gave him a measuring kind of look. Ben wondered if his old friend guessed that Ben's real concern was how he could continue seeing Selene if she was watched every minute she was off set. But how could Flip know? How could anyone know? Selene was as intent on keeping their secret as he was. Or so she had said.

  But all Flip said was: "I think it's going to solve a lot of our problems. You'll see."

  "And if it doesn't?"

  Flip shook his head, as if refusing to acknowledge this possibility. Greer — nearby, always nearby, always hovering, always spying, God, how Ben hated her — looked defensive, as if her work, her decision, had been challenged. Ever since she had started working for Flip, she seemed increasingly confused about her role in things, apparently believing that the orders she carried out were her orders. Ben wished that she would make a fatal mistake — insult Flip's wife, or confess to a profound admiration for Flip Senior. She was an operator, this one, although not as smooth as she thought she was, not nearly as smooth.