Always

by Nicola Griffith

  Forty or so people did not come close to filling the space, which was bigger than I’d expected, and more than fifty feet high in the center. In the far left corner, carpenters sawed and hammered; in another, two middle-aged men with paint-spattered clothes said something to a woman in a white coat at a makeshift counter, who was brushing back her mid-blond hair with her wrist. I hung a tag on the woman. A man and woman were walking with loaded plates over to a woman who presided over what looked like piles of Goodwill clothes. One man jumped off a platform about fifteen feet high onto an inflated bag that made a gassy whoosh, and then rolled off and started climbing back up to the platform while air compressors thumped. At the far end, in a blaze of lights, about two dozen people crouched behind cameras and cranes and dollies—they seemed to have adapted some of the decades-old rail tracks inset in the floor—or paced out marks, while a worried-looking man with glasses checked and rechecked snaking cables and a control board. Two men were lifting something from a box and onto the pile of old clothes. I hung a tag on them, too. There were monitor screens everywhere, even by the entrance and food counter; people glanced at them reflexively every so often. Something squawked over my head: a speaker on a makeshift shelf nailed to a joist. No one yelled Lights! or Camera! or Action!

  I went back to the two men. One of them, slim and cocky as a flamenco dancer, had turned to say something to a woman dismantling an arc light, but the other was looking in my direction, and it was immediately clear why my subconscious had told me he didn’t fit. He had dark hair and a bony face—the kind of face teenage boys develop during their first major growth spurt. I doubted he was even sixteen, far too young to be on a film set. An anomaly, but not a danger.

  The woman in the white coat was the caterer. She said something to the two men with the paint-spattered clothes that made them laugh, then pointed with a big knife to a platter of sandwiches, and went back to chopping. Perhaps it was the big knife that had flagged my attention. It shouldn’t have. My subconscious should have put the knife and the coat and the food together and given me the green light. I watched a little longer, but she just kept chopping, and she chopped like a caterer. No threat there.

  Now people began to glance at me: quick flicking looks. Perhaps it was the suit. But they were obviously used to strangers. No one came over to find out who I was.

  After a while, a pattern emerged: the woman with the heap of clothes was sorting through them, hanging some on the racks behind her, laying some on the table, dropping others in a series of cardboard boxes. The costumer. The worried man with the glasses was some kind of technical coordinator. I couldn’t tell who was the director or the producer or cinematographer, but every now and again someone would walk over to a man who sat to one side of the soundstage with a clipboard and pen that glinted gold. He also wore glasses, and the self-conscious frown I’d seen people adopt when they feel uncertain but want to look authoritative. In half a dozen places there were easels with placards that declared: FERAL: A FINKEL AND RUSEN PRODUCTION. Underneath, in hand lettering: LADYHAWKE MEETS DARK ANGEL! Everyone wore jeans or khakis or cutoffs. Several were very young, too young to drink, but only the one I’d tagged earlier was still obviously school age. No one looked remotely like a star.

  Judging by the body language on the soundstage—moments of stillness, tightened jaws, short nods—it looked as though there were two sets of opinion about something. Before it could be resolved, a large truck pulled up outside, followed by another. There was a slamming of cab doors and the rattle of a tailgate, then the beep-beep-beep of a large vehicle backing up slowly.

  A handful of people detached themselves from their tasks and headed my way, just as three people came in, two men and a woman with short, glossy hair, each pushing and pulling two loaded wardrobe rails, and laughing. Someone on the soundstage started shouting names, and half a dozen more people left what they were doing and made for the exit. Three or four more took the opportunity to head for the food counter and get some coffee. I wandered a little closer.

  A few more of those flicking glances but they didn’t interrupt their conversation. There was a massive coffee urn and a commercial espresso maker. Most people seemed to prefer the urn.

  The caterer was handing a plate to one of the carpenters. “. . . to Rusen. Tell him I know he’s busy. Tell him I said to eat.” He ambled off, plate in one hand, coffee in the other, towards the soundstage.

  I examined the food: roast chicken breasts in rosemary, bread, rice salad, pasta salad, potato salad, skewers, two piles of roast beef sandwiches and tuna salad sandwiches, ready-cut pizza, and fruit on shaved ice. While I watched, the caterer lifted out the half-empty fruit platter and replaced it with halved strawberries and melons still oozing from the knife. Her hands were gloved, small for her height—she was five six or seven—and her movements as clean as a poem. I was surprised and not sure why. She felt my gaze and looked up. Grey-blue eyes, soft as dove feathers.

  A crew member trundled a cart of shrubbery between us. Two others waddled by with potted palms. Most of them were heading towards the soundstage, where a woman halfway up a ladder was pointing and ordering this here and that there in a seemingly endless series of commands. Midstream she yelled, “Joel. Joel!” The man at the control panel pushed up his glasses and frowned. “Cut the stage lights.” Joel pointed at his watch and shook his head. “There won’t be any shoot at all if you keep those . . . Ah, hell with it—” She jumped down from her perch and strode over. She waved her arms. A moment later the arc lights went down with a thunk. The activity onstage seemed to increase. The man with the pen sat by himself, but now there was a plate of chicken on the floor by his foot. Rusen. I walked over. Up close the fineness of his sandy hair and his smooth skin told me he was in his late twenties or very early thirties, much younger than his clothing style or attitude. He looked rather forlorn, like an eight-year -old in a suit who has just lost his first chess championship.

  “Busy time?” I said.

  He looked up, mouth pursed, then leapt to his feet. “I’m so very glad you could—” He realized his hands were full, and turned and dropped the clipboard on his chair. He held out his hand again. I shook it and smiled gravely, wondering who he thought I was. “They’ll be at this for a while longer, but, please, come this way. We”—he remembered the food, and picked it up—“I have to—Bri?” The boy at the props table, the one with the bony face, looked up. “Bring me a coffee, would you, and—no, no, never mind, Ms. Felter and I will get our own.”

  Ms. Felter? The boy, Bri, at least, didn’t seem surprised by Rusen’s mental U-turns. The man I’d seen Bri with earlier—also young, but not a teenager—joined him. Rusen and I walked to the counter, where the carpenters were taking advantage of the temporary chaos to get another cup of coffee. The caterer was chatting, standing wide-legged and easy, knife moving idly this way and that as she talked, taking up her space a little too aggressively, the way women who have been raised with a lot of brothers tend to do in a group of men. It was clear she had never considered using the knife for anything but food preparation; there was no awareness of its edge and balance as it related to the soft skin of the men around her.

  She saw Rusen. “Hold it,” she said, to her audience and to Rusen, who stopped guiltily and waited while she filled a cup from the urn, added a pretty swirl of cream and a sprinkle of sugar, and handed it over. He looked apologetically at me before he took it, which made her frown. She studied me, and after a moment she picked up her knife and hefted it. Perhaps the body language was unconscious, but the message was clear: if you hurt him, I’ll hurt you. I smiled. After a measuring moment, she nodded. Something about the way her head moved made me realize she was very tired. She turned back to Rusen, looked at the plate, raised her eyebrows. “Yes,” he said. “I will.”

  Rusen led me outside to one of the trailers, which was crammed with a heavy-duty digital editing suite at one end and a miniature office set up at the other. I sat on an office chair, a brand that c
osts almost a thousand dollars. He put his coffee and his plate down carefully.

  “Now I appreciate that we’re several days behind schedule, Ms. Felter, but I hope the fact that CAA has sent you all the way up to our humble set bodes well, despite the, ah, the various delays.”

  Felter. CAA. An accounting firm? It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t correct him. I would learn more and, if it seemed desirable, would take advantage of his confusion. “Go on.”

  “The cancellation from Fox was very disappointing but I have high hopes, very high hopes, that our unique brand of televisual entertainment will find its niche.”

  “Niche?”

  “Niche, did I say niche?” He chuckled, but it didn’t sit well on his boyish face and he kept glancing over my right shoulder. “What I meant to say was demographic. I am still convinced that we have an untapped market in the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old male and female urban viewership.”

  “Still?”

  “Yes, yes, it’s true we’ve been trying for eighteen months now to secure a network deal, but they seem to lack vision, they’re not willing to get behind a new concept, to take a glorious risk!”

  “Risk?”

  His blink rate rose and he started to tap his pen on his thigh. “Not that this project’s risky. No, not at all. Not in the sense of perhaps failing. No, no, it’s sure to succeed, practically guaranteed.”

  I said nothing, having no idea what he was talking about.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and sighed, and smoothed his face with his left hand. “Using that word was foolish. I know there are no guarantees in show business. Let me begin again. I believe in this project; I believe we have a good product. The delays are not our fault. We have a good crew who are willing to work, and we can be back on schedule by the beginning of next week. I’d be willing to give your agency a very substantial part of the back end in exchange for . . .” He stopped. Sighed again. “I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I? Oh, jeezy petes, I wish Finkel was here. He’s good at this.”

  Finkel and Rusen. Producers. “Mr. Rusen, I’m not from CAA. I own this property.”

  “You’re the landlord?”

  “Yes.”

  “You got my letter? I was beginning to think Ms. Corning hadn’t forwarded it. I was getting desperate.”

  “You sent me a letter?”

  “Yes. About the EPA stuff? They wouldn’t talk to me, and Corning said it would all have to go through you. She said—Ah, jeepers. You didn’t get it, did you. You’re going to kick us out.”

  “No.”

  “You’re not going to break the lease?”

  “It’s in both our interests for you to be able to stay and do your work.” The place may as well be earning until I decided what to do with it. “Let me be sure I understand you. You tried to talk to the EPA?”

  He nodded. “But they said I wasn’t the owner and it would have to go through whoever had the legal authority to make decisions. I looked at the lease, and I thought that would be Corning, but she said, no, it was you. She suggested I write a letter explaining things. She said she’d forward it. That was seven weeks ago.”

  “And OSHA?”

  “They’re talking to me. At least they were. I thought I was getting somewhere, but then the guy I was dealing with got transferred or something, and the new guy, Zhao, said we’d have to start over. And I was beginning to despair, because with Finkel away, there’s just too much stuff to do. And he’s better at this kind of negotiation than me.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He had a family emergency.” He made a vague gesture with his pen.

  “When will he be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When will you know?”

  “Not sure about that, either.”

  I breathed slowly and evenly. “If you had to guess, when do you think it might be?”

  “A week? His boy’s sick. Real sick.”

  “It might be better not to wait.” He looked nervous, more like that child chess player than ever. “I’ve already talked to Zhao at OSHA, and to EPA. Informally. Most of the write-ups are minor infractions: they only investigated because they had to, it’s the law, but if you make suitable apologies and promises, they’ll let you off with a stern letter and a proposed inspection schedule.”

  “Yeah, that’s what the first guy said.”

  “We can persuade Zhao to agree, but you’ll have to make the approach, as a representative of the employer, and it’ll have to be cap in hand.” I frowned. I had no idea why I was offering to help. Perhaps it was because he so clearly needed it. “Do you have any of their correspondence here?”

  He blinked, then nodded, then scooted his chair to a keyboard and tapped a few keys. “What do you need?”

  I remembered one of the OSHA sheets. “They have complaints about severely limited natural ventilation, potential to accumulate or contain a hazardous atmosphere, and other things relating to a definition of a confined space. Which this warehouse clearly isn’t. That would be a place to begin.”

  “Confined space,” he said, and touched four keys. The printer began spitting.

  “That was fast.”

  “New software,” he said. “My design. It works like a spreadsheet, so you can organize by category, but virtually—you don’t have to designate the category beforehand. The tricky part was the search engine. I came up with a sweet algorithm . . .” He leaned forward and stopped tapping, and as he talked about each problem he had solved he started to look less like a precocious child than a confident MBA. When it was time to lead the conversation back to OSHA all his vagueness was gone.

  “Two more things. Are there any minors on the set?”

  “Minors? Children?”

  “The laws are slightly different for anyone under sixteen. You’d have to be careful. Also, you might want to consider getting security at the door. You have a lot of valuable equipment here.”

  “We have access cards. And when we’re shooting we have a person on the door, but there’s always someone around—” His pocket tweedled. “Excuse me.” He answered the phone. “Rusen. Boy, already?” He looked at his watch. “You’re right. Okay. One minute.” He folded the phone away. “Sorry about that, hadn’t realized how late it’s getting. They’re ready to run tape on a stunt shot we’ve been trying to set up for hours. Want to watch?”

  IN THE warehouse everyone—props and catering and wardrobe and grips— was standing close to a monitor and checking obsessively. Rusen walked to his place by the soundstage, which now looked like a messy jungle with a vinyl floor. The heavy scent of lilies was overpowering. My throat itched.

  Two of the people who had brought the extra costumes earlier now stood with the caterer, juice cartons in hand. She had wide shoulders, a tight waist flaring into rounded hips, and muscles on her fingers and forearms and neck. I guessed her back was also finely muscled, and her legs. It was muscle that comes with intensive training from an early age, the kind a trapeze artist or free climber or high diver develops. Not something acquired behind a food counter.

  She was drinking water from a bottle labeled Rain City while the wardrobe assistant woman talked.

  “. . . so I said, No shit? And he said, ‘Do I look like I’m kidding, ma’am?’ So John and me”—the assistant nodded at the man next to her—“got out of the car and they opened up the van and made us show receipts for, like, half the shit we bought this afternoon until they decided to believe we hadn’t stolen it. I thought Kathy was gonna punch my lights out for being so late. But if—”

  A klaxon hooted, lights flashed red. Everyone instantly shut up and turned to the monitor, and then it was so quiet I could hear John breathing through his mouth. When I looked at the monitor I saw that through the eye of the camera the soundstage now looked like a huge florist’s wholesalers. I looked up at the stage and the image disappeared, back at the monitor and it reappeared. All about perspective.

  “Roll sound,” a man with a self-important goatee
and one heavy gold earring said loudly. “Roll camera. And . . . action!”

  The diver, now dressed in the kind of tight black gear Hollywood thinks elite law-enforcement units wear, ran along his platform, looked behind him, and took a dive onto his air bag.

  “Cut!”

  Some thin applause from the direction of the soundstage. The caterer said to no one in particular, “Waste of film.”

  “C’mon, John,” the wardrobe woman said. “Kathy’ll be having shit fits.” They left. I stayed. The caterer tipped her head back and finished her water. Her throat moved strongly as she swallowed, but she moved just a fraction more slowly than I expected. She watched me as she crushed her bottle— she wasn’t wearing gloves now; her fingers were short and powerful—then picked up the large triangular knife and turned back to her chopping board. I couldn’t tell what she was cutting. Sometime in the last half an hour she had retied her hair.

  “What did you mean, that it was a waste of film?” I said.

  Her chopping didn’t miss a beat. “They’ll have to reshoot.”

  “Why?”

  Chop, chop, chop. “You could see his face.”

  “It looked good to me.”

  Now she turned around. “It wasn’t good. I should know. I did that job for six years.”

  “But not anymore?”

  She gestured at her counter and chopping board with her knife. “What does it look like?”

  It looked like tomatoes. I smiled. “I’m Aud Torvingen.”

  “Well, good for you.”

  I kept smiling. She was busy. I was a stranger. Perhaps she thought I was here to hurt Rusen in some way. “I don’t know your name.”

  She pointed the knife at a Plexiglas sign that said Film Food and held a small tray of business cards. I picked one up. “Victoria K. Kuiper.”

  “But no one calls me that,” she said, with a certain satisfaction, and started to turn away, but the klaxon hooted again, and the red light flashed, and we turned obediently to the monitor.