by Adam Cesare
“Signore Bronze,” Umberto asked the empty clearing. The director’s voice was recognizable, but weak. There were no more cries for help, only quick labored breaths.
Then Umberto’s eyes fell on the hole in the ground, the small pistol lying right in front of it, and all at once he pieced together what must have happened.
A jail break? Really?
How could the “legendary” Tito Bronze be so stupid?
The sunrise was almost complete now, but the morning haze resulted in heavy shadows. Umberto had to cup his eye as he peered over the edge of the well.
“What happened to you?” Umberto asked. He was only able to make out the tip of Tito’s silver beard staring up at him from the blackness of the well.
Below, the old man gave a wet cough and moaned as he cleared some phlegm, and possibly blood. His body didn’t seem far enough down to be at the bottom of the well. The fat old bastard was probably stuck halfway, wedged between the coarse sheets of limestone as they angled closer together.
“Throw me the bucket. Pull me up,” Tito wheezed. It was apparent that he was expending great energy just to say a few words.
“How badly are you hurt?” Umberto asked, ignoring the director’s demands for the time being.
“I’m fine. Throw me the rope and pull me up!” The scream came at great cost. Umberto could hear the crumbling of rock as Tito’s body wedged itself deeper into the hole.
“No,” Umberto said. “It won’t hold you.”
“Yes, it will.”
“I’m not strong enough to pull you up,” Umberto said.
His mind was now made up. The old woman with the shell necklace spoke to him, reminded him of how badly Tito Bronze had harmed his career. Tito had put him in schlock, picture after picture. For Tito Bronze, Umberto was a joke.
This man was no friend of his.
“Mr. big action star, not strong enough? No!” Tito tried to sound chummy, but there was too much desperation in his voice to sound anything but terrified and anguished.
Umberto’s response was moving away from the edge.
“That’s my boy,” Tito said, from down in the hole.
Umberto picked up the Korovin and put it in the waistband of his loincloth. With his foot, he edged the water basket further away from the mouth of the pit.
“I’m going to wake Denny and have him get the camera,” Umberto said.
“What for? Where’s the rope?” Tito was beginning to sound desperate. Umberto ignored him and went looking for the camera.
He was going to finish this movie by himself.
Chapter 23
Cynthia
She’d been close enough to know that Tito’s first shot was a miss. As the bullet whizzed by, Jacque let go of her hand.
That was her signal to run off into the jungle. and she did, not able to look back for the second shot, and the pained scream that immediately followed it.
The foliage bordering the village was thicker in this area, her feet were being torn up with every step, but still she ran.
If Jacque had been shot to buy her an extra few moments to escape, Cynthia was not going to let his sacrifice be in vain.
After running until the trees were tall and the canopy dark above her, she turned and listened. There had been no more gunshots, but there wasn’t any sound from Jacque’s footfalls, either.
Her face throbbed, her feet bled, but still she was able to summon her newfound jungle-walking abilities to make a soundless trek back to the west side of the village: the place where Jacque should have broken through the tall grass and into the jungle to meet with her.
The treeline thinned as she approached the village, and she watched the sunrise begin in the east. She held her breath as she walked and let it out in small, quiet bursts as she surveyed the empty village.
She got close enough to see that the small panels that had been laid on top of the well were missing. That had been Jacque’s plan, and it looked like it had worked, Tito’s small pistol teetering on the edge of the hole.
She allowed herself a smile, an expression that felt both grotesque and triumphant as it stretched across her face.
“Hey.” His shaky voice made her jump in surprise. She had Jacque wrapped up in her arms before he could say anymore.
“We did it,” was all she said before the wetness of the embrace stopped her.
She looked down at her filthy blouse, now soaked in blood.
Jacque’s blood.
“No.” Her own voice sounded small and defeated. It made tears blur her vision.
“I’m alright,” Jacque said. She daubed her eyes, turned him around, and saw that he was either lying or wrong. There was a small dark hole below his left shoulder blade, the flesh around it puckered and bruised.
The gunshot was close to his spine, heart and lungs. It oozed as she placed her hand next to it, only applying the slightest pressure. Jacque gave a quick hiss in response.
There was no exit wound in his chest. The bullet was still rattling around in there, and she wasn’t going to go digging for it with the tiny blade she’d used to kill Denny.
Still holding him tight, feeling the warmth of his body as it began to fade under her palms, she pushed him to the forest floor. She helped him flatten the sharp grass beneath his back and lower himself to the ground. They were very close to the outskirts of town; but with Denny dead and Tito at least incapacitated, there was only one very loud person they had to keep an ear out for.
“Tito fell in the well,” Jacque said, giving a faint laugh and smiling. His mouth was speckled with blood, like a girl who’d mistakenly smudged lipstick all over her front teeth.
“I know, good job,” Cynthia said as she packed fallen leaves under his wound, letting Jacque’s body weight do the work of applying the pressure. This probably wasn’t the most sanitary way of dressing the wound, but it was all she had.
“I think he might have clipped me,” Jacque said. His tone hadn’t been this light the entire trip, and the combination of morbidity, smiles and hopelessness did something to Cynthia. She laughed, not for his benefit, but because she found genuine humor in the situation. The laughter made her tears flow faster and fiercer. They splattered Jacque’s bare chest and neck.
“What’s that?” Jacque said and gave her hand a firm squeeze with his blistered fingers. She had not heard Umberto enter the camp and choked as she tried to hold in her laughter and sobs.
The Italian looked even worse than the last time she’d seen him. His sunburn had begun to peel, the pink splotchy skin underneath looking alternatively leathery and inflamed. Prominent veins stuck out from his neck and arms, moving across his skin like inchworms as he walked over to the well and spoke into it.
Most of his makeup had washed away. Only his fur loincloth remained, and it had shriveled against his buttocks as the pig’s flesh began to dry.
Tito spoke from the hole in Italian, but she could barely hear him, so it didn’t matter that she couldn’t understand him. If Umberto was able to pull his boss to safety, then the teams would be even: one wounded man to each side.
Cynthia followed Umberto’s gaze to the gun. She cursed herself for not running out and picking it up while she had the chance.
Umberto stuffed the pistol in his skin-belt next to his machete, which had been cut up his thigh, leaving deep gouges as he ran. Rising to stand, Umberto kicked the basket and rope further away from the well. It didn’t look to Cynthia like he was going to try helping Tito to the surface any time soon.
Jacque coughed, and she put a bloody finger to his lips, silently pleading with him to hold it in. His respiration was shallow, and his lungs sounded like they were beginning to flood.
He’s going to die on this island, she thought, remembering that the plane and any hope of rescue did not arrive until tomorrow morning.
She removed her finger when it was clear that Umberto was walking away from them, back into town. Jacque’s brow was beaded with a cold sweat and she brushed his
hair as she watched Umberto walk through the huts, ducking inside each one, looking for something.
Finally, he reached the hut where Denny’s body was stashed. Cynthia hadn’t done much to hide what she’d done. She just covered Denny with the bed roll after she could not get his eyes to close.
It was hard to tell from this distance, but Umberto didn’t seem surprised to find the cameraman’s dead body. Instead, he stayed in the hut for a moment, and came back out with the camera propped on one shoulder.
He came back to the edge of the well and spoke in Italian some more, motioning to the camera, playing with the knobs and switches until finally it whirred to life.
Umberto pointed it up at the rising sun, then down into the hole. He spoke some more, louder this time, his voice carrying the familiar cadence of a director.
“Action!” he yelled, taking the gun from his loincloth.
He waved the end around the hole in small circles until firing once, stopping to say something, and then again. He knelt, trying to stay out of his own shadow while angling the lens down into the hole.
Cynthia didn’t want to, but she gasped.
Umberto turned to her, took his eye from the viewfinder, and smiled.
Chapter 24
Umberto
Umberto hated talking to other actors. Not only were they self-absorbed, and always looking for Umberto to introduce them to Roland Pressberg or Tito Bronze, but they always said the same annoying phrases.
The one Umberto had grown to hate most was:
“What I really want to do is direct!”
Not only was it a cliché, but the men who usually said it were bad, ineffectual actors who would probably make worse directors.
Now here he was, getting his first taste of being director, writer, star and D.P. of his own film, and he wanted more. The other side of the camera was pure power.
Even more so was the gun.
Tito had begun to beg near the end, once Umberto had said “Action!” and realized what he was going to do. Umberto had dwarfed the old man, used that very special word to subsume him.
In a way, Bronze was dead before the bullets entered his face, broke out his front teeth, and exploded out the back of his head.
The sun was up now, but it was casting hard shadows, and it was still difficult to see what was going on in the hole. Umberto had cranked the exposure way up, hoping that even if the film was overexposed, Tito’s frightened expression would be captured in some way.
After he shot him, Umberto made sure to get some coverage of the body, kneeling low to the ground and sticking the lens as close to Tito’s face as he could get.
He had only gotten one take, but he guessed that the footage was miraculous. Finding the girl had been an added bonus, her gasp getting his attention, even with the camera still humming in his ear. Her near-platinum blond hair made her easy to spot against the greens and browns of the jungle.
All the fatigue and queasiness that had accumulated over the last few days was gone. Umberto held his head and his camera high as he ran towards the girl. He could see that she was panicked.
She was a tiny blonde fawn in his headlights, unsure whether to run or to give up.
He broke through the grass and saw why she was hesitant to run. There lying next to her was the writer, the leaves and saw-grass around him pooling with blood.
As he approached, the girl huddled over him with her arm outstretched, clutching a small blade. The corners of her eyes were impossibly white, possessing all the fury of a mother animal protecting her nest.
Umberto just shook his head. “Stupid girl, I don’t want him. What kind of grand finale would it be without my co-star?”
His words were unintelligible to her, he knew that, but it didn’t matter. He tightened his grip on the camera and took a step towards her, swatting away the hand that held the knife.
She grunted and screamed as his fingers reached for her scalp. The blade dug into his forearm, drawing a deep red line across his skin. There was no pain, so he continued his momentum, catching a wad of her hair and yanking her onto her backside. The knife slipped from her hand from either the blood or the shock.
The writer tried to sit up, but Umberto pushed him back down with the heel of his foot, focusing the camera on his pained expression as more pressure was applied to the wound on his back.
The girl screamed some more, no doubt pleading with Umberto to leave the dying man alone. He would indulge her, but she should have instead been begging for her own life.
He moved the end of the camera, watching with his uninjured eye through the viewfinder as the grass he was dragging her through tugged at the exposed flesh of her arms. The saw-grass left cuts on her arms that looked miniscule on film but were probably agony to endure.
Once he’d wasted enough film on her red-faced screams on the trip back to camp, he switched to a long shot of the village, the wooden stake and fire in the middle.
It was an establishing shot of where his film’s final scene—the grand finale—would take place.
Chapter 25
Cynthia
She had lived through all of this for what?
Her scalp throbbed from where Umberto had dug his well-manicured nails in, dragging her to the center of town before lifting her off her feet and binding her by her wrists to the wooden stake by the fire. Gravity had left her arms mercifully free of sensation, her shoulders howling in pain for the first few minutes before the feeling of nothingness had spread to her whole body.
She watched as Umberto tried to figure out the tripod.
Cynthia wondered how it was possible that someone who had worked on movies for the bulk of his life was having a difficult time getting the legs even, not realizing that there was a level built into the base of the instrument to help him. She was going to be tortured and mutilated by an idiot, in all likelihood not even in focus. It figured.
After five more minutes of teaching her exotic curse words, Umberto re-shouldered the camera, deciding to go handheld for her death sequence.
As he approached her, there was a click, and the camera cranked to life.
“Action,” he whispered. It was the only English she’d ever heard him speak.
He reached out a hand to her, grabbing for her shirt, ready to rip it off of her like he did to Daria.
Daria. The thought conjured up one last morsel of reserve rage inside her.
She arched her back against the smooth, aged wood of the stake, and waited until Umberto was in range.
The sleazy Italian licked his upper lip, cleaning his amber mustache with his tongue and beginning to laugh under his breath. “Good movie,” he said to her, trying to soothe but only disgusting her. “Big star.” Motioning first to himself, and then to her.
The back of his hand brushed against her breast, and she let him have it, pulling herself up by the wrists and kicking him in the stomach with both feet. He doubled to the dirt. His free hand clutched the lens, more concerned with catching the camera than grabbing his stomach.
He remained crouched. His breath was labored for a moment as Cynthia wriggled against the wood, trying to rip the tape off her hands but finding it impossible to get a tear started.
Umberto hefted himself to his feet again, this time the machete filling his free hand. He didn’t speak, only shook his head and gave her a slight tssk before laying the blade flat against her neck. She tried to shrink away from its cold touch.
But there was nowhere to go.
Umberto left the edge of the machete where it was and brought the camera so close to her face that she could see herself in its lens. Her image was bubbled and distorted, a fish-eye version of herself that she did not wholly recognize.
It wasn’t just the swollen nose or the bruises: she was a different person than she had been three days ago. She kept her eyes on her own reflection, letting the whirr of the camera become white noise as Umberto giggled to himself, moving the tip of the blade over her body, tickling her navel and then bringing
it lower.
She would not give him the satisfaction of a response: she would ruin the movie by being an uncooperative, unemotional participant. A bad actor.
Before long, the camera dropped lower, focusing on the swell of her blouse instead of the blank expression she had willed to her face. He knew what she was trying to do, and it was making him agitated.
His giggle turned into a protracted growl as he poked at her thighs with the duller edge of the blade. She didn’t look down, but she could feel the blood begin to dribble down her knee.
“You won’t get what you want,” she said, perfectly aware that he wouldn’t understand. He took his eye from the viewfinder and stared at her, raising the machete high, letting her know that if she wouldn’t cooperate, he would bring it down on her neck.
“Fuck you,” she said. He probably knew that one, had most likely heard it directed at him by a thousand different women in a dozen different languages.
“No. Fuck you,” he said, eye back behind the camera, arm reeled all the way back.
As he began to swing, there was a sound like a ceramic bowl breaking under a pillow. Umberto’s eye went gloss, and behind it a light was switched off. He listed for a second, the weight of the camera pulling him over and down.
He collapsed, the back of his golden hair mottled with dark, sticky blood.
Jacque attempted to give him a second blow with the large rock, but he could not lift it with both hands. It thudded to the ground, landing in the small of Umberto’s back.
“You’re alive,” Cynthia said. It seemed the only thing to say. Her surprise was genuine.
Jacque didn’t speak. He stumbled towards her like a drunk, looking unaccustomed to using his feet and taking wide clumsy steps to get to her. Squishing her against the stake, he leaned into her for support while he undid the tape around her wrists.
She kissed his neck as he worked, but if he felt it, he gave no indication.
As he unwound the last piece, she fell a few inches back to solid footing. Her knees buckled, and they crumpled to the dirt together.
“Thank you,” she said, and he nodded in response.
