The Sea Came in at Midnight (14 page)

“What do you mean if these are the guys you think they are?” said Angie.

“Guy named Mitch Christian. I know him really well. I know him
really
well. I did a movie once for him and his wife, who was almost as crazy as he was, before she dropped out of the whole thing. You should stay away from him.”

Angie was annoyed. She had become cynical enough to suspect Maxxi’s friendly little warning really had an ulterior motive—that with Maxxi’s career as a punk singer having gone the way of the rest of the Scene, and her career as a dancer now going the way of her body, maybe she wanted this last gig for herself. Maybe she knew this Mitch guy even better than she said and she was paranoid Angie might move in on her action. “You want this shoot for yourself, don’t you?” said Angie.

“That’s not it,” Maxxi insisted.

“You think I’m going to move in on whatever you’ve got going with this guy.”

“Christ, Angie, that’s not it.” Angie wound up walking out; but though she kept telling herself she was onto Maxxi, the conversation stayed with her all night and the next morning and, if anything, grew louder and more persistent in her head the whole ride on the downtown subway the next afternoon, on the third of October 1981. Unable to completely dismiss Maxxi’s warning, she was already anxious even before she ran into the strange woman at the warehouse where the film was being shot. Lurking in the shadows of the building across the street, the woman crossed the street in time to cut Angie off at the door.

Angie looked up at the number over the door to make sure it was the right address. Don’t go in there, the woman said, very tough in an old, worn black-leather jacket with a cigarette dangling from her mouth; she had a slash of a mouth and hard eyes, dark hair chopped off just above the shoulders, and she looked vaguely familiar, like someone in the business Angie might have seen before, though not at all like an actress, not at all the type—are you the type? whispered that part of Angie she didn’t speak to, but whose whereabouts she knew at all times—harsh, at least in her mid-thirties, perhaps older, which for this business was old.

“Who are you?” said Angie. Unconsciously she began to bite her thumbnail but stopped herself, reclaiming her cool. She had already cleared too many hurtles in her own mind to be dissuaded now. Casting aside her cigarette, the other woman appeared agitated; maybe she was on drugs. She is an actress, Angie decided, another has-been like Maxxi scoping out the competition before the director arrives. “Sorry,” Angie said bluntly, “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t need this job, believe me.”

“Listen,” the woman began, but Angie brushed past her, pushed open the door, and started up the long narrow stairway. Late-afternoon sunlight blasted the wall at the head of the stairs through an unseen window. When Angie reached the top, she turned to see if the woman in the black-leather jacket was behind her, but the stairwell was empty; turning the corner at the top of the stairs, Angie found herself on the second level of the warehouse, the sun hitting her in the eyes before she had a chance to shield them. The window framed the World Trade Center a few blocks away, and the sun was momentarily slipping through the sliver of daylight between the two towers. The warehouse space appeared empty; then a door in the far wall across the room opened, and a man holding an eight-millimeter camera stared out at her. He disappeared again into the back room, and through the open door Angie thought she heard him say to someone else, “It’s here.”

Another man came to the door. He was smoking a cigarette and looked at her for a moment. “We’re waiting for Mitch,” he finally said, “don’t go anywhere.” Then he vanished too. She could hear more discussion in the back room between the two men, and then the staccato monologue of someone on the telephone. Angie circled the open area of the warehouse, stopping from time to time in front of the window, watching the sun set behind the World Trade Center and the river beyond that. Every once in a while the man with the camera would look out the door to see if she was still there, and this would be followed by more conversation with the other man, in voices that grew quieter and more tense. She sensed a general concern that she might leave. After a couple more minutes of waiting and listening for the sound of the door downstairs and the arrival of the director, she made her way over toward the back room where she assumed the film was being shot.

Through the open door she could see a single light. There was no sign of the two men, though she could still hear them, occasionally talking but mostly just moving around. There was nothing else in the back room except a large black chair with a high back and black leather shackles bolted to the arms and legs and neck. Seeing it, Angie felt something she had never felt before, even in her worst moments; she felt the bottom fall out of her life, plummeting into dark.

It was evil. It was far beyond any quaint notions of mere depravity, far beyond anything even an apocalyptic age would comprehend, beyond a terrorist’s bomb or a genocidal rampage or a nuclear holocaust, because it was clearly a chair for an execution, and an execution performed for no other reason than to give pleasure to someone, somewhere, watching it. It was an empty hole in the century where there had once been a soul. A whole new instinct screamed in Angie’s ears, and in a flash she thought of all the other more familiar instincts she had been ignoring, she thought of Maxxi’s warning and the woman downstairs in the black-leather jacket. The moment Angie saw the chair she knew that if she didn’t get herself out of there in the next minute, she would never see the sun hit the bottom of the World Trade Center, she would never see the fall of night, except for the longest night. The moment she saw it, the part of herself she thought she had so successfully kept at arm’s length crept up behind her and whispered in her ear: Saki, go sit in the chair. Go sit in the chair, because it’s been a long time since you were anyone’s bright little star, and nothing matters, and there is honor in annihilation, but in God’s disownment there is only the void.

She could hear one of the men coming and she pivoted where she stood, staring back out at the setting sun, slowly strolling back toward the window. Behind her she could feel the man with the camera standing in the doorway watching her again, and that whole new instinct told her that he was standing there trying to figure out what she might have seen in the back room, what she might have understood. She decided that if she heard him take a single step in her direction she would bolt; otherwise she paused, hoping he would disappear into the back room one more time, giving her escape a head start. When she looked over her shoulder he was gone, and she walked quickly toward the stairs. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, both men had reappeared.

The men didn’t bother to call out to her to stop. They knew that she understood the situation and that everyone understood that everyone else understood the situation. Lurching down the stairs in her ludicrous stiletto heels, with the sound of the men right behind her, Angie wondered if she could stop just long enough to take off one of the shoes and use it as a weapon; she decided she would be overpowered before she had the chance. All the way down the narrow stairway she kept thinking the warehouse door at the bottom would open any moment and the man they had been waiting for would appear, and she would be trapped.

Just as Angie reached the bottom, the door did open. She drew back from it, but it wasn’t another man, it was the woman in the black-leather jacket, who now grabbed Angie by the wrist and pulled her out of the stairwell and into the street, and then stepped back into the building, slamming the door shut behind her. For a moment, alone in the street, Angie actually stood there staring at the door, transfixed, out of some perverse curiosity to see who or what would eventually come through it, listening to the sounds of the scuffling and loud voices beyond it.

Then she kicked off both shoes and ran. Twenty-four hours later, she was on a plane to London, and nine months later, sitting in a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, she met the Occupant.

T
HE WOMAN IN THE
black-leather jacket had been waiting there for some time. It certainly wasn’t unlike Mitch to be late, but after an hour passed she began to relax a little, thinking maybe nothing was going to happen after all.

It was a warm fall day and the sky was full of helicopters, which seemed more lulling than ominous, as though the entire city was being fanned in the heat. This particular backstreet was a deserted one, of course, which was undoubtedly why Mitch had chosen it. There was no traffic except a single Ryder truck that wandered through, lost:
I fell into the arms,
a song from several years before played from the truck radio going by,
of Venus de Milo.
Then Louise saw Angie, a good-looking young Asian girl with that hard veneer all these girls acquired so quickly, and crossed the street to head her off. She had no idea what to say to her; she hadn’t expected to have this conversation, instead she had expected Mitch.

There was no stopping her anyway. All these girls thought they knew how to take care of themselves. They all thought they were very tough, very cool. So Angie pushed her way past and disappeared into the warehouse, and Louise continued waiting for the man who had not so long before been her partner, her accomplice, her husband. About ten minutes later, when she heard the panicked steps inside the building coming down the stairs, she immediately knew the girl had grasped the situation and was making a run for it; Louise opened the door and Angie, at the bottom, recoiled for a moment. Then Louise pulled her out into the street and stepped into the warehouse to meet the men in pursuit.

They tried to push past her in the same way Angie had pushed past her ten minutes before. Louise didn’t know either of them; they weren’t regulars, but then this was the sort of thing where there were no real regulars. They knew who she was, however—everyone in the business did—and everyone knew she had once been married to Mitch; so, for the moment, at least until Mitch arrived, rough stuff was out of the question. At an impasse, cut off by Louise from the street, they just stood on the stairs looking at her until one said to the other, “We better get out of here,” and then to Louise, “You better get out of here too.”

“I got out,” Louise replied, “a while ago. Besides, girls like that don’t go to the cops.”

“I’m so relieved to hear it,” said the guy who had spoken.

“At this point she’s terrified enough she’ll probably be out of the country in twenty-four hours.”

“That may be a good idea all the way around.” The two men turned and ran back up the stairs, the light at the top starting to fail. “Mitch is going to be unhappy,” the one called back down to her.

Louise nodded at this information, unimpressed. “Mitch is a very dangerous man,” she answered, “if you happen to be young, female, securely bound and gagged with duct tape.” She opened the door and stepped back out into the darkening street, where there was no sign of the girl. There was also still no sign of Mitch. She waited a while longer, watching from her place in the shadows across the street as the two men exited the warehouse three minutes later, in a hurry, with only the camera in hand. Then she walked over to the World Trade Center, where she caught a cab to her flat in the Village.

That night she expected Mitch to either call or come by, if not to complain about her fucking everything up for him, then at least to get the things he had left the night before. She was sorry when he didn’t; she wanted all traces of him out of there. She had no idea why she had let him spend the night; she hadn’t seen him in almost three years and his appearance had been a surprise, and if there was one thing Louise had always hated in life, it was surprises. Put more exactly, she had no idea why she had slept with him, but that was a particularly depressing line of questioning because then she would have to ask herself why she’d ever married him in the first place, and the problem wasn’t that she didn’t have any answers, but that she did, and she had been trying to live down those answers for three years now. So the night before had been a brief lapse that she had succumbed to in a haze of wine, and it hadn’t been over ten minutes before the phone rang and it was Mitch’s current object of abuse, a punk singer and uptown stripper who called herself Maxxi Maraschino. Louise could hear her crying as Mitch hung up the phone laughing. “Crazy bitch,” Mitch had chortled.

“I can’t believe I was married to you,” said Louise. “I can’t believe I had sex with you again just now.”

“Yeah, well,” said Mitch, pulling on his clothes, “you and I know that’s not the half of it, don’t we.”

“The next time I should just go down into the street and suck off the first guy who comes along. It would be a more elevating experience.”

He finished dressing. “I’m going to do it tomorrow,” he announced as he was leaving.

“Do what?”

“You know what.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about.” He was gone about five minutes when the phone rang again; it was now three-thirty in the morning. It was Maxxi. Not so many years before her somewhat successful but altogether brief career as a singer, Maxxi had been strapped naked to a table and sodomized by several faux-bikers in one of Louise and Mitch’s earlier film ventures. Mitch isn’t here anymore, Louise told her. Maxxi started crying again, until finally Louise said, Oh stop. He’s not worth it.

He’s a pig, said Maxxi.

He’s worse than a pig, said Louise. He’s a monster.

“I’ve heard the stories,” said Maxxi.

“We’ve all heard the stories.”

“I’ve heard them about you, too.” There was a pause and Maxxi added, “I have a friend who’s doing a shoot with him tomorrow. I’m worried.”

“You should warn her.”

“I tried but she wouldn’t listen.”

“Well, maybe next time she’ll listen.”

“Next time?” said Maxxi.

All right, Louise had sighed, and asked where the shoot was. Now, a little less than twenty-four hours later, back at her apartment, Louise expected she would at least hear from Maxxi if she didn’t hear from Mitch, and looking at Mitch’s stuff in the corner, she decided if he didn’t show up by morning she would toss it. Finally around two o’clock she fell asleep and woke at eight, the night having passed quietly. She bundled up Mitch’s things in a plastic garbage bag and took the bag downstairs to dump in the trash, stealing the neighbor’s newspaper on the way back up. She made a cup of coffee, toasted a bagel, and took a shower while the paper sat on her bed at least two hours before she got around to it, and even then she almost missed the story on the front page of the city section. Many of the grisly details were omitted, the
New York Times
always being a very tasteful sort of paper, but over the days that followed she pieced together the rest of it, if that wasn’t a rather tactless way of putting it, given the way the top of him had been sliced clean off as he stood in an open convertible trying to get a shot of God knows what—Mitch thought anything he committed to film was by definition brilliant—probably never seeing the low overhang of the tunnel before it sent his head sailing through the display window of the PanAm ticket office. In the days afterward, more than a few people wondered aloud why the driver of the car hadn’t warned him the tunnel was coming, or perhaps she had tried and he didn’t hear her over the traffic around him; as it happened, the impact of Mitch hitting the tunnel had sent the car spinning first into a concrete wall and then into a truck that crumpled the car like an accordion. Killed on impact, the driver had been identified in the paper as Nadine Sienkiewicz of Ludington, Michigan, sometime “dancer” and punk rocker known over the years to perform under the name Maxxi Maraschino, long rumored to have been the exiled phantom member of the Shangri-Las.