Lookout Cartridge (17 page)

But Dagger’s footwork, however prone to seasonal gout, seemed unconvincing when we lost our film. Look, he said, if we could get it back, then sure let’s go after it, but we can’t.

I said, We might get something—like what was the motive?—passing vandal breaks in when you just happen to be out, leaves I don’t know how many camera lenses and a miniature telly and a hundred pounds cash in a cupboard he’s taken the trouble to jimmy open, and three new Sony cassette-recorders unopened in their boxes—but wait, this fellow is a cinephobe, smells film in quantity, and passing your house that morning his crazy nostrils inflated scenting twenty-five hundred feet of movie film and up he came to your flat and, if I may reverse the likeness, saw like a tourist-vampire what he could smell.

Something may happen yet, said Dagger, but so we find out who did it, what then? Beat up on him? confiscate his wife?

Maybe my friend was getting tired. But hadn’t he cared as much as I? Think how he’d darted from face to face at Stonehenge, from robes to giant stone to bluejeans, from one of the new Druids to the American mute with his green beret to the American Indian we’d dragooned through the little long-haired English woman at the bonfire in Wales—back to the midnight mumbo-jumbo which in some sentimental transcendence engrossed the lay cast into a scene not false, not trivially tourist, that through a luck like magic seemed then—and even now when I know some of what else was going on—to complete our film, so I almost thought Dagger’s sense of it was like mine. Such intentness, the on and off of the Beaulieu motor, the certain passionate defensiveness of rhythm, the concentration of forehead, mouth, wrist, shoulder that framed Dagger off from all the others there who unlike him were, until the last invisible sprocket, potential for these last feet of our film. No, I could understand in his later resignation only fatigue, not reason. For he had been as much into that film as I.

At least he didn’t say now, Well anyway we shot it.

Yet if I failed here now in New York, that’s what I’d be saying: At least I tried.

But if I took the gloves off, my openings might disappear and there’d be nothing to get hold of.

Well, as I was checking to see if in the pages I’d brought there were any references to the Unplaced Room, Monty Graf phoned. Had I thought about his proposition? I said I thought I might sell the diary as a scenario for a feature film. He said Very funny, and said by the way I didn’t expect him to believe we’d only had one small rush and the rest hadn’t been processed. For why have that and nothing else?

It’s certainly implausible, I said.

I think your film isn’t destroyed, he said.

I would like to think that, I said.

And you and DiGorro are holding out for something.

If so, I said, why have I had no offer from Aut?

You haven’t fed him enough of the diary.

Haven’t fed him any of it.

The guy who gave you those pages works for Aut. But OK, how does the stabbing fit the pattern?

Claire can’t have seen much of it, I said.

But you seem to have seen a lot in it, Cartwright.

I looked at the phone receiver by my chin thinking the gloves were coming off.

I was not speaking while thinking. I was only thinking, while there was either silence on the line or Monty Graf speaking, mentioning again that we were holding out for a big payday (but not suggesting we were blackmailing anyone), mentioning the time of the stabbing (but not mentioning the florist’s). I was thinking Sub would be in the nation’s capital till Sunday, and Monty Graf seemed to conceal more about my presence at and interest in the stabbing incident than I thought Claire (unless she had information beyond her own actual experience) could have given him to conceal.

So he had gotten to Gilda.

But her position had to be merely an accidental observer’s.

Gilda, if Gilda, was an opening to an avenue opened only through other openings. Your vehicle passes at speed and one slot open shows another slot beyond so long as you glimpse at the instant your vehicle comes into line.

What opened Gilda to Graf?

All right, I said before summarily hanging up, you yourself said I was in trouble. So I need someone I can trust.

I phoned the florist’s at the accident corner hoping Gilda would answer.

She said little except she’d drop up on the way home after work. I didn’t think the florist was her husband.

I could no more have asked Graf how he’d arrived at Gilda (as I was sure he in fact had) than I could quite explain why we’d put off processing our exposed film except that we’d tacitly wanted to get it all together first (maybe worried too about how good it was, though to judge from the rush the focusing and light were right), and twice Dagger’s man in Soho whom I’d not met and who was going to give us a break on price had said Hang on till Monday week, and then besides we were on the move a bit, and on our own respective businesses in addition to the film, Dagger part-time teaching for the University of Maryland at the U.S. base at Bentwaters, I among other things arranging for five seven-foot leather chesterfields to be made and shipped to the States, my price only a little more than a third the New York retail for the same sofa—and all this made the delay in processing the film seem natural enough.

In the diary pages I’d packed for the trip there were only the two references to the Unplaced Room. One was the last-minute thought that lavalier mikes round the neck might give more presence to each speaker and even be easier to hide. But Dagger borrowed an omnidirectional and we stuck it behind an earthen ewer, ran the cable off the back of the table and around the outer legs of the deserter’s chair, which took the evidence pretty well off camera. We told our principals please not to pour.

The other reference was in my record of an explanation some weeks later to my son Will the night before our climactic Stonehenge; he’d asked how the Nagra sound unit kept in phase with the Beaulieu and I told him—albeit with mere terms—that the camera has in its motor a sync pulse generator whose output frequency is exactly proportional to the camera’s optical record. But finding this second reference on a diary page I found also something else and it was in my head, not on paper: it was something I remembered: that in the midst of this clear
abc
given to my serious son—in fact I believe exactly
between
reflecting on the banality of what was said in the Unplaced Room and on the other hand wondering (
a
) what even Will whose electricity puts mine to shame would be able through these technical terms to know in the moist isobars of his fingertips, and (
b
) if my own idea for the Stonehenge scene would survive on film—I had seen again (and now for more than that instant of actual glimpse) a thing that the featured hands in Suitcase Slowly Packed had slipped between the black V-neck sweater and the green-and-white plastic bottle of shampoo which Lorna and I use: the thing was a face, a snapshot of a man’s face which had been apparently a bookmark in a paperback that had been knocked off the adjacent chair when the hands picked up a pair of red-white-and-blue beaded moccasins and the snapshot had fallen out. I’d been close enough to glance but not really look, for I was holding a mike just off camera close enough to catch the voice of the hands. The actor from Connecticut arrived just as we finished shooting and I forgot to ask Jenny about the snapshot—for it was Jenny whose hands packed that immemorial suitcase and who decided what to pack. Later when Dagger was praising her for a steady but unrehearsed-looking naturalness, I thought maybe he was thinking how when the book dropped the hands casually picked up the snapshot and packed it, then the shampoo, then the book. And days, weeks later the eve of Stonehenge the picture came back with Will in our garden and the technical explanation I reeled out for him as we both stared down at our tortoise in the twilight, its claws and snake-head withdrawn into the stone of its shell—for that afternoon Dagger had said we’d use the Suitcase Slowly Packed not on its own but as a cut-in shot in the middle of the following scene, the Marvelous Country House. I hadn’t liked the idea, I guess partly because it subordinated Jenny’s role, but I figured we could negotiate when we came to the editing. It was a dark snapshot but I wouldn’t swear it wasn’t color.

Gilda came early. Before she came I phoned Outer Film. I couldn’t get Phil Aut and I passed on the message that one of his employees had broken into a friend of mine’s apartment and I was getting the police on it through an influential person of my acquaintance named Monty Graf. The secretary said Mr. Aut was flying to London tonight.

I phoned the charter man at four and just as he was saying What else do you do to keep busy at that end? the doorbell went and before I could shelve the receiver I said, If I wanted to could you get me a charter-rate flight sooner than the return I’ve got?

Gilda wore a flowered raincoat. She looked all around her.

Back on the phone I said, I mean like a charter within a charter.

The charter man said, You could get to be my best customer.

He gave his home number and I said I’d be in touch.

Gilda’s green-flowered mac lay between us on the brown couch which concealed inside its folded day bed mattress my blanket. I knew the blanket to be the same magenta as the fitted carpet Rose had paid a lot of money for. Gilda stared at it. Upon the carpet’s magenta ground was a fine labyrinth of apricot lines that gave a kind of Moslem chic.

I don’t have much time, she said. She was different today. We looked at each other’s knees. I thought I was at last at the beginning, and I thought of the Unplaced Room which, if our film had not been destroyed, would have come first.

Listen, I said. I know.

She turned to me and when she spoke the rust-colored enamel butterfly glinted: You want to know what the insurance man asked me?

Yes.

He was insurance like you’re the family doctor.

She described him.

She was talking about Monty Graf, who I’d thought must have found the accident scene through Claire but who Gilda said had come with a couple of plainclothesmen and a uniformed sergeant. Monty Graf had identified himself as an insurance investigator but not in the hearing of the policemen. Gilda had offered nothing about me at first and her brother-in-law the proprietor didn’t recall me. But Monty Graf had asked if a bearded man in a trenchcoat with a small mole in the middle of his forehead had been at the accident and Gilda added to this that the man had come back again after lunch. She didn’t know why she answered nor why her questioner had bothered to identify himself, she liked his soft voice,
it
seemed to be telling
her
things but afterward she knew little more that was new than the name Cartwright. She’d said I was concerned about the stabber, what he looked like, what happened to the car, and it sounded as if her questioner wanted to make sure I had not spoken to the stabber.

Did he tell you anything else besides my name?

What name?

Cartwright.

Oh, she had thought that was his, for he’d said so. She put her raincoat across her lap. She wasn’t the same person as before in the florist shop and on the street corner. She wasn’t amused, though not against me either.

My name is Cartwright, I said, and I don’t know what the stabbing has to do with me. I believe it’s important.

I went on: Because I’ve been making a film.

Gilda stared at the rug. Her eyes went relentlessly over it but her head did not move.

This film was destroyed before it was developed. Can you understand that? And I am finding out why. So I was on my way to see someone who’s involved when I happened into this stabbing, but the person I was seeing—who was as I said involved in the film and maybe its destruction—appears down the block behind me and when I see her she turns around and disappears.

That’s too bad about the film, said Gilda.

My voice said, What’s it matter, nobody reads any more.

I do. Why’d you say that?

They read more in England where we made the film.

Why were you making it in England?

It’s where I live.

You don’t live here?

I come here, I don’t live here.

Where am I, then? said Gilda.

She stood up looking toward the hall at an angle which if her eyes could have moved her would have led toward Sub’s bedroom.

I said, A friend’s.

Here I thought I was in your place. I saw the unmade bed.

Why did this man use my name, I said.

Gilda sat again and reached for my hand: What kind of film?

Why, if you want to know, it began with an Unplaced Room. Just a room that could be anywhere, that was the point,
a
point.

What kind of a point can you make out of that, said Gilda.

Well look at this room. What’s New York about it?

When’s your friend coming home?

My friend’s in Washington for the weekend.

Gilda stood up and walked to the hall. If you ask me, he called himself Cartwright because he wanted me to tell someone else that a man named Cartwright came asking about the murder.

Tell who?

She slid her right hand into a sleeve, and I found Dagger’s Beaulieu eye and at some key distance my naked eye triangulating upon a shimmering apex alternating into color and black and white as if between two ambiguously interesting lens focuses—and I went to Gilda instantly and held the other lapel so she could slip her left hand in.

She waited, not turning.

Helping you on with your flowers, I said.

Gilda still did not turn. You’re American, right?

As if she might want to get off with me but, while staring at (or toward) the big unmade bed in Sub’s room, wondering if I was circumscribed.

With my finger I drew a circle on her back beginning inside one shoulder blade, touching the neck and her spine above the small.

In the hall her green flowers were dark.

OK, she said, and was at the door. This is interesting, I’m trying to figure if I know something about this that you don’t.

She wanted Sub’s phone number and I wrote it down for her.