Gumshoe Gorilla (16 page)

Kurt and Miranda ducked into an alcove and pressed themselves against the wall, breathing heavily. Kurt took off the gold rimmed glasses he'd been wearing as a disguise and cooly slipped them into the breast pocket of his suit.

"Tell me again how easy this is going to be?" he said.

"Oh dis?" Miranda said, in the exotic East European accent she reverted to in personal conversations. "A valk in ze park. You should have been there ven I vas casing ze Louvre. Mind if I borrow dis?"

She grabbed his umbrella and shoved it out around the corner, just in time to trip a Russian gangster as he ran by. Kurt leapt on the villain, ready to finish the job.

"AND CUT" yelled the director.

He took a few seconds to review the playback on his monitor.

"That's a take. Swap 'em out."

The actor who'd been playing Kurt stepped out of the shot and came over to Veronica's table for reassignment. I thought this one was Charles, but I couldn't swear to it. With three identical brothers running around on the set, trying to keep an eye on the right Rockland was like trying to follow the queen in a game of three card monte. It didn't help that the show was shooting scenes in four different locations in the building, shuffling the actors around between them while the crews set up different camera angles and lighting. How anybody could keep track of it all was beyond me, but somehow Veronica did. She held up her fingers in the "five minutes" sign, and the actor who might be Charles collapsed into a nearby chair.

While that was going on, Miranda had found her mark for the beginning of the scene and was joined by another one of the Rockland brothers, this one wearing nothing but a towel. A kid whose name I hadn't learned yet stepped out with a clapboard and "slated" the scene in a lighting quick staccato.

"CzechMates, season 4, episode 6, scene 37, version D, violence ratings three through seven, sexual content ratings eight to ten. All interest groups except lesbian and female passive."

"And... ACTION!"

Again, our heroes ducked into the alcove, pressing themselves against the wall, breathing heavily. Kurt looked at Miranda. Sweat glistened on his chest.

"Tell me again how easy this is going to be?"

"Oh, dis?" Miranda said. "A valk in ze park. You should have been there ven I vas casing ze Louvre. Mind if I borrow this?"

She ripped off Kurt's towel and deftly wrapped it around the face of a Russian gangster as he ran by. Kurt moved in to finish the job.

"AND CUT!"

The gangster got up and handed Kurt back his towel. Kurt held it absent-mindedly without putting it on. They all looked to the director, waiting to hear whether that was a take or they would have to redo the shot. From somewhere next to me I heard a soft chuckle.

"You might wanna close your mouth darlin'," Veronica said in an exaggerated Texas twang. "before flies start wanderin' in."

"Oh, sorry," I said.

I tried to take my eyes off the actor playing Kurt. But Hell, I'm only human.

"Which one is that, anyway?" I asked.

"Oh, bashful there? That's Bernie."

"How can you tell?"

"I don't know. You just develop a knack for it, after a while. Now if I can pry you away from the scenery for a moment, I need you to run down to the costumer's truck and get a guard shirt. The stunt double up on Location Three ripped his during a fall."

"I'm on it!" I said, feigning as much enthusiasm for the job as I could.

I was supposed to be playing the bright-eyed intern, who was just so happy at this chance to observe a show in the making. Skye had called in a favor with Veronica to get me this unpaid gig. She might have mentioned that in Hollywood, "intern" is short hand for "slave labor". Since I wasn't union, all Veronica could legally use me for was to run errands. And when I say "run" I am not speaking metaphorically. The woman was tougher than a triathlon trainer.

Reluctantly, I pulled myself away from the shoot. But not before I took one last look at Bernie. One of the makeup girls was spritzing his chest with a spray bottle. The fringe benefits on this case almost made up for all the jogging.

Anyway, I ran down the stairs to the parking lot. --And notice that I do say "the stairs", and not "the elevators". You see, the High Museum has only two sets of elevators, and Veronica had decreed that those were reserved for shuttling around actors and equipment. Apparently, in the show's pecking order, an intern rates substantially lower than klieg lights and boom mics.-- So, I ran down the stairs, got the shirt from the costumer, then ran back up seven flights to location three.

I had never actually been in the High Museum of Art before that day, but I was getting to know every inch of the place in intimate detail. There were actors and technicians and what not spread out all over the building, and invariably one of them forgot something, or broke something, or needed something, and Veronica sent me to get it for them. I had crisscrossed the building so many times that the tread was wearing off my sneakers. Guess this is what they mean by the "glamorous Hollywood lifestyle".

I paused on the top landing to pull out my palmtop and see if they were in the middle of a shot. There was no "quiet" flag by Location Three, so I opened the door and jogged through the galleries towards the shoot. I passed a few weird paintings, including a pornographic reworking of
The Last Supper
, and a burned out frame that someone had put up on the wall. The museum was having a big Calerant retrospective. --A purely artistic decision, I'm sure, and not an attempt to cash in on the publicity surrounding the artist's death or the ongoing murder trial.-- The exhibit wound its way up the building in a slow spiral, starting with his earliest work and ending at the center of the top floor, where Group Three was currently shooting.

I entered the gallery and made my way through the crowd of people to the stuntman who was awaiting my delivery. He took it without so much as a "thank you". Another one of the Rockland brothers was up here, rehearsing a scene with a woman who was about the same height and build as Ivanava Jones, the actress who plays Miranda. They were standing in front of a metal sculpture holding a television monitor, on which the security camera footage of Calerant's murder played over and over again in an endless loop.

I was tempted to stay and see what they were shooting, but I knew that I'd better hurry back to Veronica. And besides, I'd already given up trying to piece together the plot from the fragments of the show that I was seeing. There were just too many scenes, being shot too many different ways. Along one plot line, Kurt had gotten into the museum by posing as an art critic. In another, he'd decked a guard and taken his uniform. And then, of course, there was my personal favorite, where he posed as a nude model for an art class. After that, however, I got completely lost. Supposedly, Skye was keeping all these plotlines straight in her head, but I don't know how she was doing it. She must have had a photographic memory and a brain that can work in eight different directions at once.

I jogged back down to Location One, where the director was in a huddle with Veronica and Skye. Probably trying to figure out how to juggle the actors around for the next set of scenes. The meeting ended a few seconds later with the Director telling everyone to break for lunch.

I joined the mass of people heading up the stairs and then across the sky bridge to the top of the parking deck. The caterer had set up tables and chairs there, and a big buffet line. I will say this for the studio: it sure does feed its people well. Caesar salad, and pasta salad, and seafood salad, and barbecue, and tuna steak, and some of those huge farm-raised shrimp in a tangy mango sauce. While I was loading up my plate, Veronica stepped into line behind me.

"So how are you enjoying your first day in television?"

I almost told her that my legs were killing me and she was a slave driving bitch. Almost.

"I'm just so happy to see how a real shoot works!" I said, smiling.

I tell you, if anybody on this show deserved an Emmy, it was me.

Veronica smiled back.

"Come on, I'll introduce you to some of the crew."

We took our plates and threaded our way between tables populated by a colorful mix of technicians and fake gangsters and even a few phony Cherokee in war paint. --Don't ask. I hadn't figured out how the tomahawk-wielders fit into the plot yet. -- I did a quick scan of the crowd, and spotted two of the Rockland brothers sitting at the same table. One was in a security guard's outfit, the other in a bathrobe. They were energetically chatting up a couple young women who had tool belts hanging on the backs of their chairs. The third brother, in the dark suit, was over in a corner by himself. As I watched, Skye came over and gave him a kiss. OK. At least now I knew which one was Charles.

Veronica lead me over to a table that still had a couple of empty chairs and introduced me to the rest of the group.

"Hey everybody! This is my new intern, Susan."

I smiled and waved. I was using the background I had worked up for "Susan LaCroix", a bored rich girl from Savannah. It was a little high brow for this job, but I figured that old Susan might be so fascinated by show businesses that she'd do anything to break in.

We went around the table doing the name thing. The fat guy with the bleached-out hair was Arnie, one of the makeup artists. The woman with the leather pants and the shaved head was Jo-Jo, the props master. And the blond in the black jump suit was Rianna, one of the four different actresses who plays the part of Miranda. Unfortunately (for her) she isn't the one whose face or voice is used in the final show, so all that anybody ever sees of her acting is from the neck down.

I sat down with my new acquaintances, and started my lunch. And got my first lucky break of the day. Veronica, it turned out, had one redeeming feature: she was a gossip. And even better, so were all her friends. Over the course of the next ten minutes, the four of them shared enough dirt to keep the
National Enquirer
running for an entire year: A certain married gaffer (whatever that is) who was knocking boots with the fight coordinator. A stunt double whose heroin habit was starting to get in the way of her work. A camera operator whose husband had just told her that he was applying for gender reassignment surgery.

I sat back and listened, as this fountain of information gushed before me. None of the dirt directly pertained to Charles Rockland, but it was still an invaluable roadmap to the maze of interlocking cliques in the cast and crew. Someone on this show had to know what Charles was up to. It was just a matter of finding out who that person was, and how I could get leverage on them. And here was Veronica, handing me the keys to the kingdom.

The universe really was being inexplicably nice to me all of a sudden. I made a mental note to buy a meal for the next homeless person I saw. Keep my karmic debts paid up.

While I listened to my companions dish, I kept one eye on the table with Charles and Skye. They were chatting with a couple of gangsters and an assistant director, but every so often they'd pull out of the conversation and sign to each other for a few seconds. I wondered what they were saying. And I also wondered if Charles had known how to sign before he met Skye, or if he'd learned it just to talk to her. I saw him make a big gesture with his arms, and Skye broke out into laughter. They looked happy together. But that's never stopped a man from cheating before.

At another table, the other Rockland brothers were prosecuting their offensive with the two electricians. I was beginning to spot those little differences that Veronica had mentioned. The one in the bathrobe seemed to do most of the talking, and kept leaning across the table, as if to say something intimate to the girls. The other one, in the guard uniform, leaned back in his chair, as if watching the conversation from the outside, and seemed to spend most of his time laughing at his brother's jokes.

I wonder what it had been like for them growing up. Being one of five identical brothers, raised by the ultimate in pushy stage mothers. OK, so Virginia Rockland wasn't the only single mother who'd ever bought genetic material from the estate of a dead movie star. (I read an article somewhere that Tom Cruise alone has posthumously fathered over five thousand children. I'll bet if he'd known how extensively his heirs were gonna strip mine his frozen corpse he would have requested a cremation instead.) No, Virginia was simply the first one to come up with the idea of mass production. After all, the problem with actors has always been that you can only work them for sixteen or seventeen hours a day, and they can only be in one place at a time. Unless, that is, you happen to have two actors who look so much alike that they can play the same part. And then, why at stop two? Or three? Or four?

In the end, we can thank our lucky stars that artificial wombs are so expensive, and Virginia only had enough savings to incubate five clones. Otherwise, we'd be up to our asses in Rockland brothers. Fun as that might be, in some circumstances.

I could also count myself lucky that two of the brothers don't even work on the
Czechmates
show. Otherwise I don't know how I'd ever keep 'em all straight. Albert has his own film career, and prefers not to work with his brothers. And then there's Eddie who... well, let's just say that between sex scandals and drug arrests, Eddie seems to have a full time job providing fodder for the tabloids.