Nicola Griffith - Always

I examined the food: roast chicken breasts in rosemary, bread, rice salad, pasta salad, potato salad, skewers, two piles of roast beef sandwiches and tuna salad sandwiches, ready-cut pizza, and fruit on shaved ice. While I watched, the caterer lifted out the half-empty fruit platter and replaced it with halved strawberries and melons still oozing from the knife. Her hands were gloved, small for her height—she was five six or seven—and her movements as clean as a poem. I was surprised and not sure why. She felt my gaze and looked up. Grey-blue eyes, soft as dove feathers.

A crew member trundled a cart of shrubbery between us. Two others waddled by with potted palms. Most of them were heading towards the soundstage, where a woman halfway up a ladder was pointing and ordering this here and that there in a seemingly endless series of commands. Midstream she yelled, “Joel. Joel!” The man at the control panel pushed up his glasses and frowned. “Cut the stage lights.” Joel pointed at his watch and shook his head. “There won’t be any shoot at all if you keep those… Ah, hell with it—” She jumped down from her perch and strode over. She waved her arms. A moment later the arc lights went down with a thunk. The activity onstage seemed to increase. The man with the pen sat by himself, but now there was a plate of chicken on the floor by his foot. Rusen. I walked over. Up close the fineness of his sandy hair and his smooth skin told me he was in his late twenties or very early thirties, much younger than his clothing style or attitude. He looked rather forlorn, like an eight-year -old in a suit who has just lost his first chess championship.

“Busy time?” I said.

He looked up, mouth pursed, then leapt to his feet. “I’m so very glad you could—” He realized his hands were full, and turned and dropped the clipboard on his chair. He held out his hand again. I shook it and smiled gravely, wondering who he thought I was. “They’ll be at this for a while longer, but, please, come this way. We”—he remembered the food, and picked it up—“I have to—Bri?” The boy at the props table, the one with the bony face, looked up. “Bring me a coffee, would you, and—no, no, never mind, Ms. Felter and I will get our own.”

Ms. Felter? The boy, Bri, at least, didn’t seem surprised by Rusen’s mental U-turns. The man I’d seen Bri with earlier—also young, but not a teenager—joined him. Rusen and I walked to the counter, where the carpenters were taking advantage of the temporary chaos to get another cup of coffee. The caterer was chatting, standing wide-legged and easy, knife moving idly this way and that as she talked, taking up her space a little too aggressively, the way women who have been raised with a lot of brothers tend to do in a group of men. It was clear she had never considered using the knife for anything but food preparation; there was no awareness of its edge and balance as it related to the soft skin of the men around her.

She saw Rusen. “Hold it,” she said, to her audience and to Rusen, who stopped guiltily and waited while she filled a cup from the urn, added a pretty swirl of cream and a sprinkle of sugar, and handed it over. He looked apologetically at me before he took it, which made her frown. She studied me, and after a moment she picked up her knife and hefted it. Perhaps the body language was unconscious, but the message was clear: if you hurt him, I’ll hurt you. I smiled. After a measuring moment, she nodded. Something about the way her head moved made me realize she was very tired. She turned back to Rusen, looked at the plate, raised her eyebrows. “Yes,” he said. “I will.”

Rusen led me outside to one of the trailers, which was crammed with a heavy-duty digital editing suite at one end and a miniature office set up at the other. I sat on an office chair, a brand that costs almost a thousand dollars. He put his coffee and his plate down carefully.

“Now I appreciate that we’re several days behind schedule, Ms. Felter, but I hope the fact that CAA has sent you all the way up to our humble set bodes well, despite the, ah, the various delays.”

Felter. CAA. An accounting firm? It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t correct him. I would learn more and, if it seemed desirable, would take advantage of his confusion. “Go on.”

“The cancellation from Fox was very disappointing but I have high hopes, very high hopes, that our unique brand of televisual entertainment will find its niche.”

“Niche?”

“Niche, did I say niche?” He chuckled, but it didn’t sit well on his boyish face and he kept glancing over my right shoulder. “What I meant to say was demographic. I am still convinced that we have an untapped market in the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old male and female urban viewership.”

“Still?”

“Yes, yes, it’s true we’ve been trying for eighteen months now to secure a network deal, but they seem to lack vision, they’re not willing to get behind a new concept, to take a glorious risk!”

“Risk?”

His blink rate rose and he started to tap his pen on his thigh. “Not that this project’s risky. No, not at all. Not in the sense of perhaps failing. No, no, it’s sure to succeed, practically guaranteed.”

I said nothing, having no idea what he was talking about.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and sighed, and smoothed his face with his left hand. “Using that word was foolish. I know there are no guarantees in show business. Let me begin again. I believe in this project; I believe we have a good product. The delays are not our fault. We have a good crew who are willing to work, and we can be back on schedule by the beginning of next week. I’d be willing to give your agency a very substantial part of the back end in exchange for…” He stopped. Sighed again. “I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I? Oh, jeezy petes, I wish Finkel was here. He’s good at this.”

Finkel and Rusen. Producers. “Mr. Rusen, I’m not from CAA. I own this property.”

“You’re the landlord?”

“Yes.”

“You got my letter? I was beginning to think Ms. Corning hadn’t forwarded it. I was getting desperate.”

“You sent me a letter?”

“Yes. About the EPA stuff? They wouldn’t talk to me, and Corning said it would all have to go through you. She said—Ah, jeepers. You didn’t get it, did you. You’re going to kick us out.”

“No.”

“You’re not going to break the lease?”

“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.”