Nicola Griffith - Always

“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 THEwarehouse 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.”