Jove Brand is Near Death

by J. A. Crawford

  “It’s a big scoop.” Dina swung off the couch and headed over to her laptop. Not long after, a printer built into the desk started spitting out papers.

  “When’s the big day?”

  “Next Friday,” Dina said, not looking up. “We’re having a big to-do here.”

  “You’re opening up the Cove?” There was no hiding my surprise.

  “For the first time since filming Endless Watch. We got all kinds of stuff planned. A media presentation. Oh, and get this: I’m going to have a bunch of Jove Brand types, decked out to the nines, serving the guests.”

  “Coronations demand such extravagances. Is Dean upset his big day is a public relations event?”

  “He’d better get used to it,” Dina turned a ream of paper towards me. “Standard NDA.”

  “I haven’t talked yet.”

  Dina shoved a pen into my hand. “And you never will.”

  When I’d signed and initialed to her heart’s content, Dina fed the stack into a scanner also built into her desk. It bought me a little more time.

  “Missy mentioned you had a Russian-based production problem last time out.”

  Dina took a moment to decide how much trouble she wanted to get me in. “A problem named Grigori Fedorov.”

  “Sounds evil already.”

  “He’s been laundering his dirty billions buying up international properties. Got into the German film business off some tax dodge they had over there. Imported the concept to Russia, where he founded Veles Productions.”

  “The Veles that makes the Brand knock-offs?” I asked.

  “The very same. Fedorov is the guy behind the Cherno Perun movies.” Dina blew raspberries. “Buncha schlock.”

  I didn’t say so, but I liked the Cherno Perun movies. Schlock had its place. “I’m listening.”

  “Five years ago, during pre-production on Named Brand, Fedorov made overtures. Wanted to cofund. I humored him, but we do all our financing in-house these days.”

  “Which is quite the accomplishment,” I pointed out.

  Dina gave a bow. “Thank you very much. Anyway, Fedorov was also feeling out if we would sell.”

  “How much?”

  “Two point five,” Dina said.

  “Billion?”

  “Dollars, not rubles.” Dina waved a dismissal, which was her version of air-quotes. “It was all hypothetical of course. He never came out and made an offer.”

  “Lot of that going around.”

  “When we turned him down, which we did by pretending we never got wind of it, a certain amount of muscling occurred.”

  “How serious did it get?”

  “We won’t be filming anywhere near Russia anytime soon,” Dina replied. “Fedorov’s got his own little army. Hires Russian ex-military, gangsters. All guys with confirmed kills. I had to hire my own ex-military guys to fend them off.”

  The type of people who would know how to crush a throat. “Sounds like a peach. Where can I find him?”

  “He bought a defunct offshore oil rig. At the time people thought it was nuts. The well had long run dry.”

  “He mounting missiles on it or something?”

  “Offshore gambling,” Dina replied. “The rig falls under international waters, so he opened a casino for wannabe one-percenters.”

  “Can you get me in?”

  Dina gnawed on her lip. “I don’t know. Fedorov has been after Brand a long time. Maybe even back when you were filming Near Death.”

  Her accusation made sense. Like Niles Endsworth, I had replaced the first choice for Jove Brand, who had overdosed in Fedorov’s corner of the world. I watched Dina waver. She still cared. The time for me to act tough had come.

  “Hey.” I used a finger to lift Dina’s chin and caught her eye. “I can handle it.”

  Dina shook her head to chase away the birth of a smile. “Your acting hasn’t improved any, but okay. It’s your funeral.”

  10

  On my way down the stairs, I got a look at the family room from above. The layout formed a bull’s-eye. In the center of the room, a round fire pit burned. It was encircled by an inner ring of couch, behind which was a band of marble flooring. It had to be on purpose.

  Every Brand film opened on a white screen. The silhouette of Jove Brand’s hand holding his Quarreler raised into frame in first-person, as if the audience were Brand. In an explosion of fire and smoke, the audience took an arrow’s-eye view, gliding through stylized depictions of the coming scenes, which provided clues about the plot. As the title theme rose to a climax, the audience zoomed toward a distant bull’s-eye, piercing its center to land in the first shot of the film.

  As I stepped off the stairs, the fire pit rose up from the flagstones on three legs, stopping six feet off the floor to reveal a hidden staircase. This was how I met Dean Calabria, heir apparent to the Jove Brand franchise.

  Dean was a good-looking kid, but he didn’t much resemble his mom or sisters. Tall and lean with tight curls of fair hair, his features were more northern Italian. Michelangelo might have carved him, once upon a time.

  “Damn it, Dean, use the elevator like everyone else,” the sister who had greeted me said, fanning the air. “Now there’s ash everywhere.”

  “Goldpecker does what he wants, Diana,” a different sister said.

  Dean and Diana. Like many monarchs before her, Dina had named all her children after herself.

  A fine-boned girl slipped out from behind Dean to join his sisters on the couch. She was maybe four years older than Dean, but there was no such thing as too early when it came to working your way into a dynasty.

  Last out was Niles Endsworth, the next Jove Brand. He was wearing a vintage short sleeve button-down, left undone to display his chiseled physique. His white swim trunks were likewise drawn from a bygone era where the shorter the leg was, the better.

  “Can’t let Jove Brand leave without shaking his hand,” Dean said, hopping out of the secret stair with practiced grace.

  When Dean extended a hand, I knew what was coming.

  I hated shaking hands. It wasn’t just the useless ritual or that so many guys spent the day cradling their crotches for comfort. I couldn’t stand the arm wrestling. The unspoken fight for domination, as if a handshake meant anything.

  Having nothing to prove, fighters employed a light touch. A career fighter didn’t have ego problems. Any delusions of grandeur got beat out of you coming up. All that cockiness was an act to sell tickets. Being liked was fine, but if you could get people to hate you enough, they’d pay anything to watch you lose.

  Fighters had their own handshake. They made their living with their hands, so they took care of them. Hands were fragile things, with all those little bones. All of mankind’s know-how and we’ve never managed to build a machine as adjustable or articulate as the human hand. Not even Ray Ford, and you better believe he’d tried.

  Dean’s fingers brushed past mine as he delivered the fighter’s faint, secret squeeze. I returned it with a grudging smile.

  I could feel Niles’s gaze locked on me as he studied my every move. If he was looking for a Jove Brand role model, I hoped I was last on his list. Not wanting to leave him out, I offered my hand. His shake mirrored mine perfectly.

  When we broke grip, I nodded at his ensemble. “Hunter’s Moon, right?”

  Niles froze at my words. It was a stark reminder that most of the world believed I was the killer. I kept talking to prevent further awkwardness.

  “Your outfit. It’s what Bryce Crisp is wearing in the cyborg shark-attack scene. I’m buddies with the guy that built that shark.”

  Niles snapped back to the moment with a caught-schoolboy grin. “You’ve found me out, old boy.”

  “Nothing wrong with dressing for the part you want.”

  Niles crossed his arms. “You never know when you’re in for a swim.”

  I tilted my head at his non sequitur. It sounded familiar. Not only the words themselves, but also their delivery.

 
Dean stepped between us to break our moment. “Thanks for stopping by, Niles. I’ll text you about that thing.”

  Niles took the offered escape route with a nod. “No rest for the righteous.”

  Again, his reply tickled at my memory. Still, the way Dina’s daughters watched Niles leave told me he was going to be box-office gold.

  “Come on down to the man cave,” Dean said. He tugged on my blazer as he turned, pulling me along like a little kid aching to show off.

  I had to admit it was hard to say no to him. “I guess I got a minute.”

  “No guests below, Dean-o,” Diana said. “You know the rules.”

  Dean rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. There’s going to be two hundred people down there next week. What’s one now?” He looked at me like I had a say in the situation. “Anyway, Jove Brand never talks, right?”

  “Right.”

  Dean smiled like I had given him something and disappeared into the staircase. I copied his eager skip down.

  “Goldpecker strikes again,” Diana said to our backs.

  The spiral staircase lurched as the fire pit lowered back into place. I snatched the handrail for balance. Dean was watching me over his shoulder.

  “Sorry, man. I should have warned you. They’re right, you know. I could have taken the elevator, but come on.”

  Once stabilized, I got busy gawking. The cavernous space was more than two stories tall. The walls were natural rock but the floor had been tiled in stormy blue. The pattern would seem random to anyone who hadn’t seen Endless Watch, where Roman Brackish, during his infamous monologue, revealed it to be a map of the bottom of the sea.

  “Mom cleared everything out for the party.” Dean’s voice echoed through the empty chamber as I stopped to stare.

  Calabria Cove hadn’t changed since its appearance on film more than forty years ago. The hallways, softly lit from hidden recesses, whorled like the inside of a conch shell. Navigating their uneven curls was disorienting. We passed a half dozen circular iris doors on the journey to the one that capped the passage.

  Dean typed a code into a clamshell pad and the door twisted open, groaning and screeching. That caught me off guard. In Endless Watch, the iris portals had hummed softly. They must have muted out the racket during post-production.

  “They don’t make them like they used to, huh?” I shouted over the metallic whine.

  “I don’t think they ever made them like this,” Dean shouted back.

  We stepped into a room with more square footage than my condo. It also had a hell of a better view—the far wall was completely windowed to look out over the sea. Familiar as the room looked I couldn’t place it, probably because Dean had converted it into a gym.

  Weight racks stood against one wall, each bar stacked with poundage appropriate for Dean’s age and build. There was a lane set up for sprint and shuttle runs, along with a stationary bike and a rowing machine. A big trampoline sat next to a pipe-framed structure designed for a variety of body weight exercises.

  A full-sized ring and cage occupied the far side of the room, past an obstacle course of hanging bags. Gloves and headgear waited on shelves. Flat screen televisions and speakers were mounted at regular intervals along the walls, their remotes holstered on the equipment throughout the room. Even with brisk ventilation and sparkling gear, the dried sweat lingered through the bleach. Dean spent a lot of time in here.

  It was a fighter’s paradise, but I felt for the kid. Growing up in Calabria Cove must had been like living in a submarine, but Dean was too valuable to let roam.

  “What do you think?” Dean asked. “What am I missing?”

  Dean could swim in the ocean and he could run on the beach. But he wasn’t asking me about getting a cryo tank. What I saw behind his smile made my heart hurt.

  “What do you train?” I asked.

  Dean snagged a remote velcroed to the jungle gym and tapped a button. Iris doors groaned open to admit a well-built guy ten years my junior. Shaved and tattooed, he was already in a rash guard and shorts, on standby whenever Dean whistled.

  “Stavros, what do I train?” Dean asked, walking over to where the gloves were shelved.

  “Everything,” Stavros said. I had a suspicion his accent wasn’t real.

  Dean pulled off his shirt to show the base coat of what would one day be an impressive physique when his body matured. He was balanced throughout, not ignoring his legs the way kids his age did, chasing big biceps. He geared up right, first strapping on his shin pads then gel wraps. He slipped on one glove and was going for the other when he remembered something.

  “Check this out,” Dean said around the glove hanging from his mouth. It made him look like a puppy. He keyed the remote. The screens lit up and I had no choice but to gaze upon my sins.

  Dean had been watching Near Death.

  “I don’t care what people say, this is the best one,” he said.

  It was queued up to the office-building fight, which routinely won online polls as the most notorious scene in Jove Brand history. Along with budgetary issues and tight time constraints, Near Death was light on story. With his cast and funding stripped away, Kit had been forced to rewrite the script on the fly. This led to comically long set-piece fight scenes in order to pad the movie so it would reach the contractually required ninety minutes.

  There were two such scenes in Near Death. The first was staged in a warehouse, where the trial to prove myself worthy of being Jove Brand took a deadly turn. That one went for eighteen minutes and was immediately followed by a motorcycle chase scene that went on for another twelve, before the zipline sequence and helicopter stuff.

  Those scenes together weren’t objectively terrible. They stood up alongside other late-nineties low-budget genre films. Of course, those were the ones we shot early, rapidly burning through time and money.

  The scene currently on Dean’s screen was pure filler. We had sixty-seven minutes of movie and needed ninety, before title sequence and credits. Had those counted, Near Death would have had the slowest credit roll of all time.

  I’ll never forget the morning when Kit came to me for help, palm glued to his forehead, hair standing wild—the look of a man who had freshly compromised his vision. He stared right through me, straight into creative hell.

  “Ken, I need you to stretch this out. Whatever works, man.”

  The result was twenty-three straight minutes of me beating up stuntmen, as Jove Brand worked his way, floor-by-floor, to the top of an office building. I punched and kicked my way through the lobby, stairwells, and cubicles. We rotated the ten stunt guys we had through wardrobe like an assembly line, recycling the cannon fodder. Different jackets and jumpsuits. A mix of hats, sunglasses, and facial hair. It didn’t help much.

  Layne Lackey ran the numbers once. In those twenty-three minutes, I single-handedly took out one hundred and ninety-nine foes. It worked out to eight and a half guys a minute, or a bad guy every seven seconds.

  I did my best to mix it up, putting all the styles I knew or could fake into play. The office-building fight had it all. Jumping and spinning kicks of every flavor. Kung Fu, boxing, and judo. If it was found in an office, it got smashed over someone’s head: chairs, monitors, keyboards. I slammed those same ten guys through doors, desks, and copiers.

  I broke fourteen necks, twenty-three arms, and thirty legs. I dislocated shoulders and snapped wrists. I also violated every rule of the ring: breaking fingers and gouging eyes and fish hooking. I bit and I head butted.

  But above all, I chopped throats.

  I honestly couldn’t tell you what it was with me back then, but Near Death made me the Michael Jordan of throat chopping. I attacked the neck from every angle. Whatever I needed to do to get at your windpipe I did: pulled your tie, uppercut your chin out of the way, ripped your hair back from behind. Nothing was keeping me from landing on that airway.

  If you forced me to answer, I guess I had it in my head that a secret agent like Jove Brand would be a quick, efficient
killing machine. In movies, guys took a dozen punches to the face without them leaving a mark. They got booted like a field goal and popped right back up ready for more. Going for the throat felt vicious and final. Being too close to the material, I failed to realize how much I was leaning on it at the time.

  God bless those stuntmen. Near Death was my first and only movie. I had no idea what worked on camera, what looked good. Those Shensei guys sold the hell out of my moves, hitting everything full tilt, reacting to my blows as if Hercules was behind them. If not for their expertise, the flick wouldn’t have been anywhere near watchable.

  Even so, the sequence was a tonal mess. A monotonous grind with no sense of beginning, middle, or end. There was no indication of when it was finally going to stop, the painted floor number on each staircase going up and up. The viewer got the point around floor three, but the scene wasn’t even getting started. There was a frat game where you took a shot every time you saw a new staircase. A proud convention patron once told me every fall it put at least one of their rushes in the hospital.

  “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this, man,” Dean said, his eyes glued to the screen.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Staring at the floor was my only reprieve. If only Ray had made me earplugs.

  “Are you kidding? This is what got me training. Those older Brand movies, I mean, I get the appeal, but those guys couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag.”

  Oh, the folly of youth.

  “The first Brand was actually a pretty tough guy,” I said. “He was SAS before he got discovered from those cologne ads. There are stories about him clearing out bars when the punters would give him lip.”

  “Nah, I mean, I hear you, but you got to give yourself some credit,” Dean replied. “Your switch knee counters are so clean. And you were like, what, only three years older than me then.”

  Stavros snorted. It didn’t bother me. I’d suffered Stavroses my whole life. Dean faced up on a banana bag and laid in a decent combination: jab, cross, low-kick, high-kick. A good sequence, on paper. Slick but sterile.