Always (7 page)

“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.

The director shouted, the camera whirred, the stunt actor dived onto the bag.

“Better,” the caterer said to herself, nodding.

“It looked exactly the same to me.”

“Nope. He tucked his chin more: not so much face.” She was studying me again, and now that she was still I could see the vast fatigue moving below the surface. “So, Aud Torvingen. You didn’t say why you were here, but I can guess. And my answers are the same as they were last week: I have no clue about and no interest in finding out just how fast this company will crash and burn. My business is food, not reporting bad management.”

“Bad management?”

“Gone deaf?”

I shrugged. It didn’t work on everyone. “Tell me why you think the set’s badly managed.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Now that I believe: you want something so you expect you’ll get it. You people are all the same. I don’t know what song and dance you sold Rusen in his trailer but I’ve been around film half my life”—she must have started barely in her teens—“and I’m not in the market for bullshit. Oh, and anything you take from this table, you pay for.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“Walking in here in Armani like a CAA toad, and Rusen going all gooey-faced, like you’ve just offered him prime time for his useless pilot?” She pointed the knife at me. “Sure you are.”

Her grey eyes were red-rimmed, and the shadow under them almost matched her irises. She had been up a very long time. She clearly wasn’t happy. Let her keep her knife, then. “I’d really like to talk to you about your thoughts on the management of this set.”

She picked up a cloth and wiped the blade. “I don’t need people like you getting in my way. Stunt work wraps after this and the crew’ll want coffee before hair and makeup arrive to do the actors and we have to start all over again.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“With any luck at all I’ll be sleeping all day tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night?”

She turned her back to me and started chopping. She swayed very slightly. I wondered how many hours she’d been up. There was a smear of tomato between her pocket and her lower ribs where she might have leaned against a counter. It would stain if she didn’t put it to soak soon, but that would be the last thing she would want to do when she got home, exhausted. Maybe she had someone to do that for her.

IT WAS
six-thirty by the time I got back to the hotel. Pascalle gave me several suggestions for places to eat in typical Seattle neighborhoods. I scanned the list. One had the same prefix—547—as Kuiper’s business number. The Jitterbug, in Wallingford. It seemed as good a place as any. I got directions, then collected Dornan from his room.

We drove north on I-5 and exited on North 45th. After a mile or so I took a random left and drove slowly down a quiet, tree-lined street. Crafts-man bungalows mainly, with gardens tending towards the English country cottage perennial, but the well-lit front rooms were affluent and urban: paintings and sculpture, books, exposed brickwork and oiled wainscoting, brushed-steel audio-visual equipment, good lighting, sophisticated interior color.

“These people have got to be Scandinavian,” Dornan said. “Look at the cars.”

Most houses had two cars to a driveway, one an old favorite such as a dull red Saab from the late eighties, or a mustard yellow Volvo of the same era, the other something new and imported: a Lexus RX, a Subaru, an Audi. Maybe I should have rented a Ford. “They’re good cars.”

“And so very practical.”

Dornan mused aloud on the Norwegian nature of the city: a hotel on the edge of the water called Edgewater, a wine bar in a bungalow called the Bungalow, a bakery called the Bakery. “The Boulangerie doesn’t count,” I said. “It’s in French.”

I got back onto 45th and in the Jitterbug we were seated in a booth in the cozy back bar.

Dornan, after a lengthy conference with the server about the pros and cons of triple sec (sweet) and Cointreau (less so), ordered another kamikaze, and I chose a pilsner. The calamari we shared as an appetizer was fresh and tender.

I told Dornan about my visit to OSHA and EPA, and Corning.

“So you think she’ll actually tell you what’s going on on Monday?”

I shrugged. “She’ll tell me or I’ll find out on my own. It’s not rocket science. Like any other investigation, you just follow the money. But why do the work if I can get her to admit her part?” This way I wouldn’t have to bother bringing charges or being a witness.

“I thought you were just going to sell and walk away.”

“I am.” Probably.

“Then this is about you wanting to win first?”

“Something like that.”

“You could just kick her round the block a few times.”

“This is less effort.”

He gave me the look that said he knew there was more to it, something to do with what had happened with my self-defense class, but said only, “What do you suppose rockfish is?”

We asked, and were told that Europeans called it mullet, which set me thinking about red mullet and how the Romans had prized them. I ordered the Thai steamed rockfish, he took the oven-roasted chicken.

“The drive to the warehouse was nice,” I said as we ate, and told him about it. “But the site had no security. I just walked right onto the set. I tried to talk to the producer but he—What?”

“Set? A film set?”

“A company called Hippoworks is filming a TV pilot.”

“What kind of pilot?”

I thought about it. “It’s called
Feral.
”

“Who’s starring?”

I shrugged.

“Christ, Torvingen, it could have been someone famous. You could have had lunch.”

“Do you want to go?”

“It’s a film set.”

I took that as a yes. “I’m going back tomorrow. You can come if you want. I have to talk to one of the producers. And maybe this most annoying woman, who seems to have some opinions.” I dug out her card. “She runs a catering company, oh, excuse me, craft services. Film Food.”

He looked at the card, gave it back, grinned. “Is she Norwegian?”

“You can’t say things like that when you meet my mother.”

“I don’t intend to say anything to your mother except ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Are you picking her up from the airport?”

“The consulate will see to that.” She would be taken off the plane and ushered through the VIP courtesies and probably be at the Fairmont before the economy passengers were clearing the gate—if she was flying. For all I knew, she could be arriving by train or car. However she traveled, at some point she would be standing in her suite at the Fairmont, and then she would phone me.