Mario nodded in return. “Where’s Stella?”
“Hotel. She got a sitter for Suzy,” Johnny said.
“Listen,” Mario said abruptly, “I want you to adopt Suzy. Legally, that is.”
Johnny blinked. He said, “Stel wants to, I know. But why is that necessary? Why not keep the courts out of it?”
“Because,” Mario said, with a glance at the flying rig, “if anything happens to me, Lucia’s too old to manage.”
“Sure, fella. Anything you want. But Center Ring, right before a show, isn’t the time or the place for discussing that kind of stuff. Listen, Matt, we’ll all be having dinner with Lucia—she did get in to town all right, didn’t she?”
“Sure, at our hotel.”
“Good. We’ll discuss it then. Jim Fortunati’s back with the movie people, and he’s been hunting you all morning. Go back there and protect the Santelli reputation for being on time, okay, while I find a man who can tighten up a couple of screws without me standing over him! We’ve only got about—what is it?—eighteen hours to opening, and my wire act isn’t here yet. They were supposed to be flying in from Rome—they’re probably marooned out at Idlewild or somewhere.”
Leaving Johnny to his fretting and hassling they went out the big bay doors. In the enormous back of the building, on the second floor, one of the rooms had been set up as an office marked SHALIMAR FILMS, INC. Wally Mason, the director, was there with assorted cameramen, advisors, and everything else for a crew on location. Jim Fortunati was there, too, and talking to him was a thickset, familiar form; for a moment Tommy thought his eyes must be playing tricks on him.
Angelo! What the hell is he doing here? Tommy’s jaw tightened. Is he still spying on us? Three thousand miles from home? But it was Mario who put the question:
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“In case you didn’t know,” Angelo said, “I’m an officer of the union. I’m here to look out for your interests.”
Tommy said, in no friendly tone, “I thought Broadman was our union rep.”
“Broadman thinks a catcher is something that plays for the Dodgers,” Angelo said. “I bumped him off the job for incompetence.”
“The hell you did!” Mario exploded. “You just couldn’t let anyone—”
Tommy raised a hand in warning. “Hey, hold it!” Mario turned his back abruptly on Angelo, pasted on his best professional smile, and went off to say hello to Jim and the movie crew. When they had dragged Mario off for a conference with the stand-in, Jim Fortunati drew Tommy aside.
“What’s going on? I don’t want to butt in, Tom, but, damn it, kid, I can’t imagine this happening in the Santellis. Tonio would never have brought his act here in this shape. What’s wrong? Is it just nerves? I know what Matt’s nerves are like. I wouldn’t blame him, with that damned missed trick hanging over his head. But Angelo? He’s usually completely calm—the soul of patience. Always has been. What’s eating him now?”
Carefully, Tommy said, “As you can see, Matt and Angelo aren’t—aren’t on the best of terms these days. It’s never been quite the same since Angelo quit the act. But it’ll blow over before we get to work.”
Fortunati gave an expressive shrug. “It better,” he said, and went away.
Dinner was an ordeal. They went to a place in Greenwich Village called Mamma Vestri’s, a well-known restaurant run by an old friend of Lucia’s from thirty years before. Mario had wanted to talk about Suzy, but the noise and explosive camaraderie of the place made serious conversation impossible. The billowy, gray-haired woman who ran the place had once been a circus star herself—it seemed impossible, when you looked at her—and she hovered over them, especially Lucia, and had to be brought up to date on every grandchild and third cousin. Tommy, squeezed into a corner beside Mario, could feel Angelo’s eyes on them, and was almost afraid to move.
In God’s name, does he think we’ll hold hands in public, or something, embarrass Lucia in a place like this?
That night he woke out of a fitful sleep, hearing Mario cry out. Instantly Tommy was across the narrow space between their beds and at his side. Mario was sitting bolt upright, staring straight before him. Tommy spoke to him, but he seemed not to hear, striking out with his hands as if thrusting them out in the last-minute gesture to ward off a neck-snapping blow.
“No,” he whispered, a shattered, ragged sound, “no, I can’t—”
Tommy shook him hard, and he blinked and came all the way awake. Tommy knew better than to ask about the nightmare; those nightmares were all too familiar to them both by now. But he feared this one might be a storm warning for another fit of acute depression settling down on Mario, and he couldn’t afford that. Not now.
“Get me a cigarette, Lucky,” Mario said with a long, expelled breath. Tommy rummaged in the night table for a pack and threw it at him. On second thought, he came and sat on the edge of Mario’s bed, lighted one for himself from the glowing tip of Mario’s, and shoved an ashtray at him.
“Take the ashtray, damn it. Smoking in bed is how people get killed.”
“That isn’t the way either of us is going to get killed, and you know it as well as I do.” In the pale light of a blue neon sign across the street from their window, Mario’s smile was only a strained grimace. He dragged at the cigarette, the tip glowing and brightening, then fading, for a minute or two. Then he said into the darkness, “I dreamed I was on the rig. Not the one we’ve been using—the old forty-foot one we had with Lambeth. I was going for a triple, and somebody was using a slow-motion camera, and for some reason it made me move in slow motion. Like they were beaming it at me with a slow-motion ray or something.”
It was dark, but Tommy could feel through the bedclothes his convulsive shudder. “And when I was close up—it took me forever to get around for all three turns, slow motion, like I said—I realized it wasn’t you, or even Angelo, in the catch trap. It was Lucia, and I knew I couldn’t grab at her like that . . . .” His voice trailed off into silence. “Hell, I can’t imagine why it scared me so. But it did. It did.”
Tommy leaned over him in the darkness, not knowing what to say. Hugging him close for a moment, he could feel that Mario was still trembling.
He shouldn’t be in this kind of shape just now. Was it all that family stuff last night, or Angelo turning up? After a moment he let the hug move into another touch, a caress which over their years together had become an invitation. But Mario only sighed, a deep sigh that seemed to be dragged up from the deepest part of him.
“That used to solve damn near everything when we were kids, didn’t it?” The ragged tremor was gone from his voice. “We ought to get back to sleep, if we can. It’s going to be a rough day.” But when Tommy had clambered back into his own bed, Mario reached out in the darkness, as he had done in the old days, to clasp hands across the narrow space between their beds. He said into the darkness, “I was thinking. About the—the Greeks. And the way they were. You were only supposed to go so far, or the gods didn’t like it. If you did more than that, they called it hubris and they struck you down. I wonder. How far can I go? Those old gods don’t mean anything to me.” His hand was warm in Tommy’s; it reminded Tommy, somehow, of the days in the Santelli trailer. They fell asleep that way.
He woke up, in gray dawn light, to find Mario’s bed empty. Across the room, Mario was sitting at the dresser, writing on hotel stationery. Rubbing his eyes, Tommy demanded, “Who are you writing to? Damn near the whole family is here, aren’t they?”
“Johnny and Stel, mostly. We didn’t get to talk last night. I want to put down everything in writing. Just in case.”
When Tommy left, the wastebasket was filled with crumpled drafts, and Mario still hadn’t shaved. On the top of one of the loose sheets, Tommy could see Mario’s scrawled writing, Dear Liss, but he didn’t say anything.
“You go ahead, Tom, tell them I’ll be along. It’s almost six in California. I want to make a phone call. Then I think I’ll ring Stella’s room an
d get her to come and sign this before I go down.”
Tommy stood with one hand on the doorknob, feeling more helpless than he had ever felt in his life. He could not think of anything to say that would not trigger one of Mario’s storming rages, and Mario, facing the ordeal of a lifetime—for, however it turned out, the missed trick sequence was going to be delicate and dangerous—could not afford any more strain on nerves already as raw as the skin on his bad wrist. Tommy went out, grabbed a bite of breakfast alone, and went straight to the Garden.
At any other time it would have pleased him to note that they had been allotted the star’s dressing room, the same one usually given to the world’s heavyweight boxing champion. Now it barely skimmed the surface of his preoccupation.
He watched his unfamiliar face in the mirror as the makeup men transformed him into a reasonable replica of Reggie Parrish, with the mustaches that had been the earlier catcher’s trademark. Even through his deep preoccupation he watched the change with professional curiosity and interest. But he felt strangely depersonalized. He no longer knew who he was. Was there any such person as Tom Zane? Had he been entirely swallowed up in Tommy Santelli? He wasn’t quite himself, nor quite Reggie Parrish, either. Was there anyone in the mirror at all? Who was that strange face in there?
A catcher. Any catcher. No, not any catcher. Mario’s catcher, who, like Reggie Parrish before him, was bearing a dreadful responsibility.
His life is in my hands.
But it always has been. Everybody’s life is in everybody else’s hands, on the rig. I’ve always known that. Why is it hitting me now, all of a sudden?
Bart Reeder’s words about suicide among their kind came back to him. Mario couldn’t be planning anything like that. Not consciously. He might make scathing remarks to Angelo about his church, and he never went to confession anymore, but inside, where it counted, Mario’s conscience was pure Catholic. Some things never changed.
No, he’s not planning suicide. But maybe he’s hoping. A chill iced Tommy’s blood, because he had caught himself thinking, Maybe we’d both be better off.
No. He couldn’t afford that kind of thought. Not for a minute. Not for a second.
I’ve got to do something. But, dear God, what can I do? It was the nearest thing to a real prayer that Tommy remembered in his whole life.
Mario was late, later than a Santelli would ever have been. He and Stella joined Tommy, fresh from the makeup men and in their Parrish costumes, at the foot of the rigging only moments before the lighting men finished working with the stand-ins. Angelo, sitting on the fly bar and swinging gently back and forth, was also wearing the silver and white of the Parrish troupe, and Tommy saw, startled, that his hair, too, had been dyed to the pale blonde of the stand-in’s. He called to the lighting man, “Okay, that does it. Don’t you move that bar half an inch either way, or I’ll hold you responsible!” He rolled over the bar and dropped neatly, but not stylishly, into the net. He waded to the edge and vaulted down over it.
“Good evening, Signor Mario. It’s about time you showed up.”
“I’m here, I’m here.”
Mario fiddled with the tape at his wrist, and Tommy said, “Here, let me fix that. You never get it tight enough.” He bent to the job, and it flashed over him that it was this, more than anything else, that he had remembered during his Army years, the small routine job, before every show, of making sure that Mario’s vulnerable wrists were securely strapped. “Clench your fists,” he said, but he could feel Angelo’s eyes on them, and fumbled with the tape.
Angelo came over to them, wearing his professional face.
“Okay, Matt, here’s the story,” he said briskly. “I was up all night on the phone to California. It’s all set up; they’re all fixed, out there, to fake that missed triple and bounce-out sequence in the lab. We’ve got plenty of footage on missed triples, and I’ve got the bounce-out from the spreaders, and the fall.” Mario opened his mouth to protest, but Angelo said, “It’s done. I did it three times this morning onto the mats, so it’s already in the can with plenty of protective footage. It’s all set up, Matt, so you can quit worrying about it.”
Mario jerked his wrist free of Tommy’s hands and opened his mouth in outrage, but Angelo gestured him to silence. “No use talking about it, kid. It’s already done, finished up, in the can. Nothing more for you to worry about. Nothing to it.”
Mario glared at him, a loose end of the tape dangling grotesquely from his wrist.
“What the hell is this, Angelo? Are you so jealous you can’t even let me have this? Or do you think I’m afraid?”
“Sure, you’re afraid,” Angelo said stolidly. “You’ve always been afraid of stunt work, and when people get scared, they get killed. I know all about that, remember? Don’t be a damn fool, Matt. This isn’t some kind of endurance contest, a test of courage, that kind of bullshit. It’s my job, and I did it. Now you get on with yours and no more prima donna stuff, okay?”
Tommy, watching, thought, Oh-oh, that does it. Angelo’s matter-of-fact statement had been worse than any taunt.
Mario was dead white under the makeup. He said, “To hell with you, Angelo! It doesn’t need to be faked! Parrish did it, I figured out how to do it, and I’m going to see that it’s done right—no fakery! Get out of my way, Angelo! I’m not afraid, and I’m going to prove it to you once and for all!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Matt, I tell you I already got it in the can–” Angelo began, but Mario seized the aerial ladder and started to climb. Angelo pulled him roughly back. By this time they had collected a crowd. Mason came from behind the cameramen, hands on hips, scowling.
“What is it this time, Angelo? You union bastards wrecked the other Parrish film. You going to wreck this one, too?”
Still holding Mario’s arm, Angelo said grimly, “This man is not a competent stuntman. I have a right to refuse to allow anyone to do a trick for which he is not competent.”
“Good God, he’s the best flyer in the business—you told me that yourself!”
“He is. The best flyer. I trained him, and I know what he can do and what he can’t. He was hired to do the flying in the film, not to double in the stunt falls. That’s my business, not his—”
Mario tore his arm free and squared off against Angelo. “Where the hell do you get off, telling me what I can and what I can’t do? You’re not even in the act anymore, you bastard!”
Angelo’s eyes flickered rage, but his face was set like iron. “You’re in my union now, Matt, and in my profession you’re not even a good amateur. And I’ll tell you what you can and what you can’t do. You stick to your flying.” He turned to Mason and said, “You can check with the California union office by phone, if you want to. I spent three hours at it, last night. It’s all fixed up out there, to do it in the lab—” Mario got a grip on his temper. Tommy, watching, not daring to put in a word, beard the old deadly calm at the center of his rages, the calm that signaled bone-deep storms below.
“Angelo, they can’t fake this thing. It wouldn’t be right!”
“What do you mean, they can’t? I tell you, they’ve done it—it’s all in the can. When they get it printed, even you aren’t going to be able to tell the difference, kid.”
“You don’t understand,” Mario said in quiet desperation. “This is the one thing that can’t—no, that mustn’t—be faked! Have you read the script? Angelo, this isn’t a bunch of stunts—it’s a life we’re doing here, and this was the crucial moment in that life, the thing that determined what he was! Don’t you realize that? So far, everything we’ve done on film has been absolutely authentic, and now it’s got a life of it’s own. It’s art, not fakery—can’t you tell the difference? Haven’t you been in to see the dailies? Can’t you feel the spirit of this thing? It ought to be Parrish’s own fall, the big stunt, just the way it really happened, all in one continuous shot, the way it really happened, the camera right on it, no faked shots and switches—Angelo, can’t you see? It’s art,
not a fake—it wouldn’t be right!”
Tears were rolling down Mario’s face, but Angelo’s had gone to stone. “You were always the family expert on art. I never did know what the hell you were talking about. There’s no art in getting yourself killed on camera. All I know is, I’m a stuntman, and a union man, and my job is to protect the workers on this lot, and that means you, too. You stick to your flying. That’s what you’re getting paid for.” There was open contempt as he looked at Mario’s tears, and it seemed to Tommy that there was embarrassment, too. “Matt, for God’s sake, get hold of yourself!”
Mario said, his voice low and dangerous, “I’m not taking orders from you anymore. All my life, yes, but not now. I’m going to do this, and you’re not going to stop me.”
“Oh, yes, I am,” said Angelo. He took Mario’s shoulders firmly in his and pulled him physically off the aerial ladder. He said, “What you think you’re going to do is impossible. That’s it, period, that’s all there is to say about it. We fake it or it doesn’t get done at all.”
“I don’t accept that anything’s impossible,” Mario said. His voice was low and shaking. “I know you want to think I can’t do it, but I’m not going to let you—let you tell me, anymore—”
Even Tommy, who was closest to them, did not see what happened next, or hear what Angelo said, but there was a short, sharp struggle as Mario tried to pull away from him, the aerial ladder twisting. Mario hit him, hard, and Angelo stepped back, blood breaking from his swollen lip. He shook his head, looked at Mario, and said, bitter contempt in his voice, “I expected a lot better than that.”
Mason, exasperated beyond endurance, called, “Kill ’em! Take fifteen, everybody!” as he looked at Mario’s white and shaken face, Angelo’s bleeding mouth.
Stella said quietly, “I’ll go and get you some coffee, Matt,” and went toward the machine in the lobby.
Angelo strode away. Tommy, after a moment of motionless shock, ran after him. He caught up with him in the dark hallway outside the office assigned to Jim Fortunati. He grabbed Angelo’s arm and spun the bigger man around.
The Catch Trap Page 82