Black Is the Fashion for Dying (8 page)

Gordon halted by Blake, eyeing the camp and speaking at the same time. “How'd it go?”

“At least it doesn't scan this time.”

Gordon nodded and called, “Billings!”

Bililngs, peering through Camera C, turned his head

“Is that camera clear?”

Jenkins, on the TV platform, answered, “Yes, sir. Doesn't show in the monitors.”

“Brother!” Gordon said. “If TV's wrong, this is going to be the greatest shambles since
Queen Kelly.
”

Blake followed him over to the platform, peered with him into the monitors. Jenkins was right. No cameras were visible. Each screen showed only the camp, three interlocking segments from three points of view. In one he could see the hunters' tent, from which Ashton Graves would presently emerge, and the tent into which Caresse would be carried. In the second monitor, almost a reverse angle, was the camp-fire with the cooks working around it, and in the third was the opening in the jungle made by the trail. Neat, he was forced to admit. If it worked. And it probably would, with Fabro's luck. All that had to be done, once the scene was filmed, was some moderately expert cutting.

Gordon had checked sound and lights and was calling for Herbie. Somebody said, “He's gone to get Basil Trabert.” And Gordon said, “I'm going to make a eunuch of that squirt some day,” and added, “if he isn't one already.”

Blake asked, “How'd the close-up of Caresse go?”

“She really gave,” Gordon said. “First orgasm ever produced by gunpowder.”

Silence began to descend on the sound stage of its own accord. It was the first time Blake had ever seen it happen. Usually it took a series of profane threats on the loudspeaker system to bring even a semi-hush, but he supposed this strange voluntary quiet was due to curiosity over the new technique. Then, thinking about it, he abruptly realized it would mean no jobs, or at best only part-time jobs for half the men on the set if the speed-up worked. No wonder they were curious.

Gordon, squinting into the middle monitor, suddenly gave a cry of anguish.

“What's the matter?”

“That bloody Alf!” Gordon swung from the monitor. “No Webley in the bloody holster!”

There wasn't. The holster, hanging from the pole in front of the hunters' tent, was empty.

“Herbie!” Gordon shouted. “Herbie! Herbie!”

“I'll get it,” Blake said, trotted across the camp to the wardrobe cabinet by the far wall.

Seated cross-legged on the floor, Alf and his assistant were cleaning revolvers. They stared as Blake rounded the cabinet, and then Alf, clapping a hand to his forehead, exclaimed, “
Mama mia!
” and bounded to his feet and began to ransack a drawer in the cabinet.

“What'sa matter?” the assistant asked.

“Webley! We forget Webley!” Alf produced it from the drawer, flipped out the clip, saw that it was empty, said, “Blanks! Where in hell blanks?”

Galvanized, the assistant joined him at the drawer. “White box!” he said. “White box. Here. White box!” He lifted the white box from the drawer, let a stream of shining blanks cascade into his hand. “How many?”

“Fill 'em up,” Alf said, rapidly thumbing blanks into the clip. “Give 'em plenty.” He wedged in the final blank, wedged the clip in the automatic, said, “
Mama mia!
” again and ran off towards the set, waving the Webley in the air.

When Blake got back to the platform, Herbie was making his report to Gordon. “… all in place. Hunting party. Litter bearers. Lisa. Graves.”

Gordon swung around to face the set. “Graves. Ashton Graves!”

From inside the hunters' tent Graves' muffled voice replied, “What is it, old boy?”

The tent flaps were pushed apart and Graves emerged. He limped to the tent pole from which the holster hung, the Webley now in it, and halted, blinking in the bright light. He looked like a man with malaria or jaundice, Blake thought, his corpselike skin turning the make-up that was supposed to be suntan a muddy yellow. But that was all right. As McGregor, the old white hunter, he was supposed to be sick.

“You know your lines, Ashton?” Graves asked.

Graves nodded.

“Can you say 'em?”

Graves nodded again.

“Let's hear you say, ‘The pickled parrot poked the pretty polly.'”

Graves managed a sickly smile. “Sobriety test, old boy?”

“Say it!”

Graves hesitated. The set was unnaturally silent. Eyes watched from everywhere: the native cooks by the fire, the shapes on the catwalks above, the people massed back of the cameras. Blake felt a surge of pity. The poor legless guy. A great star once. And still a fine actor. To be subjected to this. Still, Gordon had to be sure.

Suddenly Graves spoke, his voice steady, each word perfectly distinct, perfectly enunciated.

“Could kill Caresse, completely compunctionless,” he said slowly. “Calumnious, carnivorous, concupiscent, consummately contemptible creature.”

If the set had been silent before, it was an etherless void in outer space now. Time had stopped and in stopping had stopped sound. Blake, listening to nothing, discovered he was not breathing. He breathed.

“Okay, Ash,” Gordon said at last. “I'll go along with that.”

Time started again. A breathy whispering filled the stage. Graves limped back to the tent, let the flaps fall behind him. Herbie, beside Blake, whistled softly. “Zow! What's calumnious mean?”

“It ain't good,” Blake said.

Gordon, back on the platform again, said, “Let's roll, Herbie,” and Herbie pulled the mike, held cupped in a palm, to his lips and the loudspeakers said:

“
Quiet, please. Quiet on the set. This is a take.
”

Tense but not hurrying, Gordon examined the monitors. Blake moved closer, knowing he would never be noticed. This was something, this brainstorm of Fabro's. He wondered what effect it would have on writers. Gordon, bent over the middle monitor, said, “Roll 'em.”

“
Roll 'em,
” the loudspeakers repeated.

The hoods on the three cameras dropped into place. One by one the three cameramen signaled, each directing O's made with thumb and forefinger at Billings, standing on the other side of Blake.

“All rolling,” Billings said.

Gordon was still staring into the middle monitor. “Somebody move that holster around in front,” he said. “So we can see it.”

Blake edged sideways between the monitors, ran across the set. In reaching for the holster, he dislodged the belt from the nail holding it to the tent pole. He managed to catch the belt before the holster hit the ground. He steadied the swinging holster with his left hand, was bringing both holster and belt up to the nail again when the Webley slid out and would have fallen if he hadn't clutched holster, pistol and belt to his stomach. Cursing himself for his clumsiness, he got the pistol back in the holster, untangled the belt and hooked it over the nail. He brought the holster around to where it would be in direct view of the center camera, made sure the pistol wasn't jammed, then ran back to the platform.

Herbie grinned as he came around the monitors. “You carrying a Union card?” he demanded.

“Moses!” Blake said. “What Union would have me?”

Somebody said, “Shut up!” Gordon had backed away from the monitors, was peering over them at the waiting set. Jaw firm, tufted brows pulled flat over narrowed eyes, sharp-angled face taut with concentration, he looked like a destroyer captain about to sail into battle. He stood motionless for a long moment, then, barely moving his lips, he said, “Action.”

“
Action!
” the loudspeakers echoed.

The camp servants by the fire, three brown-skinned men in loose-fitting white garments and a scrawny boy wearing a breechclout, began to chatter in what Blake supposed was some Indian dialect. Presently Graves emerged from the tent, his face somber, faintly apprehensive, as in the script, and paused by the Webley hanging from the tent pole. “
Be quiet!
” he told the chattering servants and turned from them and stared out at the dark jungle.

Too fast, Blake thought, and then decided it was just right. The audience wouldn't be interested in the old white hunter; it would want to know what Ahri and the others were doing. What Ahri was doing was running from the edge of the jungle towards the tent, a frantic Eurasian girl, slim golden legs flashing below the tucked-up sari, lovely face twisted with apprehension for her beloved Masterson. Graves swung around as she approached, said, “
Ahri! Where did you come from?
” and she began, properly breathless, to reveal the details of the murder plot.

Blake, seeing her not as Ahri but as Lisa Carson and feeling the unsettling glow seeing her always produced, heard only disjointed fragments of the scene. He wondered how angry she really was. He should have refused to make the changes. So he got fired. Only a month to go, anyway, and there wouldn't have been any quarrel. And no naked blonde to explain. Brother! How would he ever explain her? When there was no explanation? He couldn't even say truthfully that she was drunk because when he had bundled her into her coat and pushed her out the door and into her car she had cut loose with some of the most lucid profanity he had heard since his Navy hitch. It didn't make any sense at all.

The sound of Ella, the script girl, turning a page in the master script brought his attention to the set. Ahri was saying her last line, “
Oh, believe me, McGregor! I speak the truth. If the woman comes in—alone
—” and then the bearers came trotting down the jungle path with Caresse, one arm still dangling from the litter.

He turned to look at Gordon, crouched back of the monitors, and saw he was nodding in approval. Evidently Lisa had done well. He swung back to the set, saw Graves was already leading the bearers towards the Phelps' tent. Lisa, alone now in Camera A, was eyeing the Webley. As the litter bearers followed Graves into the tent, Gordon jumped from the platform and crossed between Lisa and Camera A, to a position behind Camera C. Blake started to shout to him that he was spoiling the scene, and then realized it didn't make any difference. The necessaiy footage of Lisa by the pistol had been taken. What a rat race! He went around the monitors and followed Gordon's path to Camera C.

In the tent Graves was telling the bearers to put the litter on the cot. Caresse's face, a camellia pinned to the top of the dingy brown blanket covering her, was twisted into a sort of derisive grimace, even in her pretended unconsciousness managing to convey Barbara Phelps' feeling of evil triumph.

“
Gently!
” Graves warned the bearers. “
She's a woman … not a sack of rice!
”

The bearers moved back from the cot and Graves bent over Caresse, began to pull back the blanket. At the same time Lisa's voice cried: “
Woman!
”

Graves turned, and so did Blake and Gordon and the other people back of the camera. Lisa was running towards the tent entrance, the Webley clutched in her hands, her face wild.

“
A devil, perhaps
—” she cried. “
But not a woman!
” and as Graves lunged for her she darted past him and fired twice, point-blank, at the hated foreign creature on the litter. Then Graves grappled with her.

Blake felt his spine tingle icily. It was quite a scene. Lisa really looked murderous. As though she actually meant it. Camera C, pulling back slowly as the struggling pair emerged from the tent, forced him back, too. He was watching them wrestle by the campfire and at the same time trying to find a vantage point clear of the camera when the “
Halloo there!
” came from the hunting party. Lisa stopped struggling, and the pistol, torn from her hands, fell beside the fire.

The hunters marched wearily out of the jungle, Phil Alton and Trabert shoulder to shoulder, their khaki shirts and trousers grass-stained, their heavy boots caked with mud. Back of them was the dead tiger, head and tail swinging below the pole to which its feet were tied, and back of the tiger were the rifle bearers and guides. Camera C, panning, almost caught Blake again and while he was evading it he missed seeing Lisa run to Phil Alton, heard only over his shoulder her “
Ah, Masterson … you didn't
…
you didn't!
”

When he finally turned, Ahri was clutching Alton and Graves was limping towards them. Alton caught Lisa's shoulders, held her away from him. “
Now, now, Ahri. What's all this about?
”

“
Murder, I'm afraid,
” Graves said.

Just the right inflection, Blake thought, as though Graves were announcing tea. At least Gordon understood the value of underplaying a scene. He looked for Gordon, saw he was back on the monitor's platform. He looked at the tent. Caresse would be sitting up now, calling: “Masterson! Come here, please!”

Camera A was in place, but there was no movement in the tent. After a moment, Gordon left the platform, crossed past the campfire to the tent entrance. “Okay, Caresse,” he said. “You win.” He paused a second, then added: “I was a naughty boy. I lost my temper. I apologize.”

He went into the tent, bent over the cot and spoke to Caresse in a low voice. Then he came out again, his face expressionless.

“Cut!” he said. “And thank you!”

Bewildered, the three cameramen switched off their cameras. But no one else moved. The set remained silent. Gordon looked across to the platform, squinting against the lights. “Herbier?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We've got a problem with Miss Garnet. Call Fabro.”

“Yes. sir.”

“And while you're on the phone—call an undertaker.”

T. J. Lorrance

It never failed to awe him, the ordered functioning of Karl's brain at an office conference. The bewildering jig-saw statistics of production, the mixed apples, cabbages and sealing wax of motion picture making—actors, costs, story, sets, time—always emerging from the electronic banks behind the jowled mask as elementary arithmetic, simple digits capable of being added or subtracted by a child. A kind of mathematical fascism, Lorrance thought. It actually terrified him.