Leading Man (24 page)

So I wrote more e-mails pleading with Eliska to change her mind. I apologized for being such an insensitive clod. I promised to do better in the future. I even offered to bring her a denim catsuit with an ABBA patch—“So America!” I wrote—if she’d have just one cup of coffee with me. Eventually, I wore her down and she relented. She agreed to meet me in Old Town Square. But this time, she made clear, there would be no drinking of Becherovka. And definitely no kissing.

As with all his roles, Lyon threw himself into the part of General Grant with an intensity that would have had Robert De Niro and Russell Crowe elbowing each other and rolling their eyes. He spent seven months on the facial hair alone, growing and trimming until he got the beard and mustache precisely right. He read dozens of biographies, pored over tintype photographs taken during the Civil War, even consulted historians on what the future eighteenth president’s voice sounded like. The consensus, judging from the scratchy, whiskey-soaked snarl Alistair ultimately settled on, was a combination of the Dark Knight and a broken garbage disposal.

“My friend!” Alistair greeted me when I arrived on the field in the suburbs of Prague where the Battle of Chattanooga was about to be re-created. Alistair was outfitted in a Union officer’s dress uniform and carrying an unsheathed sword with a golden pommel. A hundred extras in sack coats and forage caps were sitting
on the grass in front of the facade of a fake antebellum manse that had been erected for the scene. Horses with nineteenth-century military saddles were grazing nearby. “We really must stop meeting like this,” the star joked. Then he put his arm around my shoulder and walked me toward a couple of rocking chairs on the fake mansion’s real-enough porch, where we could conduct the interview until the shooting began.

There was a time when this sort of cozy rapport with a star would have thrilled me. I would have relished the jealous glances I was drawing from the cast and crew. I would have felt special, important, higher up on the food chain, as Suki Monroe put it. But not anymore.

Oh, I liked Alistair well enough. In a way, bumping into him all those times, especially at Sammy’s memorial, had made him the closest thing I had to a friend in the celebrity world. But I didn’t care about his General Grant movie, about his acting, about any of the things I was supposed to be writing about for
KNOW
magazine. All I wanted was to get the interview over with so that I could get back to my hotel room in time to change before meeting Eliska at the clock tower in Old Town Square at six that evening, as we had arranged in our last e-mail exchange. That was all this trip to Prague was about.

“How is your philosophical study of fame going?” Alistair asked me as I set up my voice recorder, testing the microphone the way I had a hundred times before. “Have you unlocked the secret yet?”

“I gave up caring,” I answered honestly. “The whole thing started to seem silly. I don’t think there is any big
secret. As far as I can tell, people look wherever the camera is pointed. It doesn’t matter who it’s pointed at. You’re famous because it happens to be pointed at you a lot of the time. If it were pointed at me, I’d be famous too.”

Alistair tapped his nose with a finger. “Exactly,” he said. “Congratulations. You have figured out the secret. Too bad for you.”

“Why too bad?” I asked.

“Because now your job is going to be a lot less fun. Now you know the truth. The camera has all the magical powers. The people you interview aren’t special at all. They don’t have any magic. They just happen to be in front of cameras. How boring.”

“I guess I’ll have to find something else to write about,” I said, turning on the voice recorder.

The traffic on the highway into Prague made me want to take back all the rotten things I’d ever said about the 405 freeway. It took the production crew’s transport van more than an hour to travel the twenty kilometers to my hotel near Wenceslas Square. I barely had time to change my shirt before meeting Eliska. I was halfway out the door when the phone on the desk began chirping in its exotic European way. I made the mistake of picking it up.

“Max, you better get on the next flight to New York,” Carla said. She sounded even more stressed than usual. “There’s a bloodbath going on over here.”

“What are you talking about, Carla?” I really didn’t have time for this. It was already five-thirty.

“Layoffs, Max. They’re laying off a quarter of the staff. The stock market dropped another six hundred points today. It’s sheer bedlam. You should get back here.”

I stood frozen with the phone to my ear. I couldn’t speak. It was happening—I was finally getting out, and I didn’t even have to write a resignation letter. I was being fired. My pulse was racing. It was petrifying but also, I couldn’t deny it, thrilling.

“It’s terrible, Max,” Carla went on. “I’m so upset I smashed my Al Gore snow globe against the wall. At least they’re giving people decent severances. One month’s salary for every year you’ve worked here. That should help take some of the sting out of it, but still …”

I did some quick math. I’d been at the magazine fourteen years. I’d be getting over a year’s salary! The possibilities were breathtaking. Together with the miles in my frequent flyer account, I could go anywhere in the world and do anything I wanted, at least for a while. Total, absolute freedom—how often does that opportunity get dangled in front of you? Or else, I thought, maybe I’d just stick around Prague for a while. That sounded pretty appealing, too.

“Well,” I finally said, “I’m really going to miss you, Carla. You’ve always been good to me. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it …”

“What? No, wait a second, Max,” she interrupted. “You’re not getting laid off, you moron. You’re getting promoted. You’re the new bureau chief. That’s why you should get back here. There’s a big meeting at the end of the week. You should show your face at it. It’d be a smart political move for you.”

“This can’t be right,” I said, stunned. “What about D. B. Martin? He’s the bureau chief! He’s always been the bureau chief.”

“Fired,” Carla said. “At least he will be if we can ever find him. You don’t know where he is, by any chance?”

I was devastated. In the course of a five-minute phone conversation, I’d tasted the sweet air of liberty, only to be shoved back into my cage, the door clanging shut on my nose. I didn’t want to be bureau chief! Yes, okay, at one point I’d have killed for the job. Hanging out with celebrities day and night, being accepted by them as if I were one of their own, having them suck up to
me
for a change—there was a time when I would have found all that beyond irresistible. Now, though, the idea made my stomach turn. There was no way I could do it. I held the phone to my chest for a second. I was having trouble breathing.

“Carla,” I said, the words coming out of my mouth almost before I realized I was saying them, “fire me. Lay me off. I’m begging you.”

I made it to the clock tower at six on the button. I know because Death started gonging his bell the second I arrived. There was still some daylight left in the slate-gray sky, and the cobblestone square was full of tourists taking pictures and feeding crumbs to the pigeons. I planted myself conspicuously in front of the clock tower and waited for Eliska. And waited. And waited some more.

After fifteen minutes, I sat down on a bench and began to lick my wounds. She wasn’t coming. I’d made the trip to Prague for nothing. I watched as people ambled past
me in the square. A sweet old couple holding each other’s arms. A family with a baby in a stroller. Two skinheads kicking a soccer ball. I began to wonder if quitting my job had been such a brilliant decision. All I wanted to do now was curl up on my sofa in Venice with a remote control and a bag of cheese puffs. I sighed, buttoned up my coat, and was about to get to my feet.

“You thought I upstood you again?” Eliska said. She was suddenly in front of me, out of breath. “I’m sorry I’m late, but they stopped tram service at Vozovna Vokovice again. I had to run the whole way here. I don’t know why they keep shutting down that station …”

I was so relieved I jumped up and almost gave Eliska a kiss. I stopped myself just in time. Her cheeks were flushed and her honey-blond hair was a tangled mess from her rush from school to the square, but she was even lovelier than I remembered. I couldn’t stop staring into her big green eyes. She stared back with a curious gaze. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You look like you’ve heard a ghost.”

“
Seen
a ghost,” I corrected her. “And I’m fine, really. I’m great. It’s just so wonderful to see you again. I was afraid you weren’t coming.”

“No,” she said, studying my face. “You are not fine. I can see that very clearly. You’ve been through a lot. You look different somehow.”

“Different in a good way or a bad way?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’ll let you know when I decide.” Then she smiled, took my hand in hers, and walked with me across the old cobblestone square.

The big block letters on the marquee spell out the words
JOHNNY MARS IN
“
LIVE FREE OR KILL
.” Next to the ticket office, inside a poster display case, is a one-sheet with an illustration of Jack Montana dangling from the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Outside the theater it’s beginning to snow. Sammy and I are standing on the sidewalk, zipping up our coats, about to start the walk back home. We are sixteen years old
.

“I get to choose the next movie,” Samantha says. “And I’m telling you now—it’s going to have subtitles.”

“Oh, c’mon,” I say. “Are you telling me you didn’t like this movie? That scene in the power plant with the killer Nazi gymnast? When Jack Montana drops her down the ventilation shaft and says, ‘Just letting off some steam.’ You didn’t love that?”

“It was okay,” Sammy says. “But you know I’m not as big a fan of Johnny Mars as you are. I honestly don’t understand what you see in the guy.”

“He’s cool,” I try to explain. “He can handle any situation.
No matter what happens, he’s always in control. I’d give anything to be like that.”

“You don’t have to be an action hero,” Sam tells me. “I like you just the way you are.”

I grab her by the waist and lift her up, the way Jack Montana did with the Nazi gymnast in the power plant. “Just letting off some steam,” I joke as I carry her down the snowy sidewalk. She laughs and kicks until I put her down and let her go
.