“You’re getting hosed, doll,” said Lorraine.
“She knows a treasure when she sees it,” said Ralph. Ceinwen pulled out her wallet. She had been spending so much time at the library she still had cash. Fred walked up while Ralph was putting the still in a folder, then in a paper bag.
“What did you get?”
“Mysteries of Udolpho,” said Gene. Fred peered at her but before he said anything, the smoking jacket called out from the door.
“Yo, Freddie.” Fred jumped at the sound of the man’s gruff, nasal voice. “So tomorrow, we gotta date?” The man was going bald in a way that left a Florida-shaped peninsula of hair still jutting down his forehead.
“Yeah, tomorrow at seven.”
“Aces.” He made a little salute and was gone.
“What in the hell?” asked Gene. “You’re seeing Steve?”
“We have some, um, business,” said Fred. “So, ah, Ceinwen, you ready to head out?”
She slid the still between the pages of her monograph Xerox, to protect it. “Yes, let’s.”
As they swung out onto 82nd Street Ceinwen thought about quitting while she was ahead, but then she remembered why she wanted to talk to Fred. He was yanking off his tie and staring bleakly down the street toward First Avenue. She did a half-pirouette to face him.
“Hey. You wanna get a drink or something?”
He stuffed the tie in his coat pocket. “I’d love one.”
2.
FRED LED HER UP A FEW MORE BLOCKS AND AROUND THE CORNER TO a downstairs place barely visible from the street. It used to be a speakeasy, he told her. Inside it was tiny, with a long, carved bar and wooden booths along the opposite wall, the seats so high-backed that when you sat down you felt as though you had a private room. They found an empty booth and Ceinwen ordered her usual wine. He asked for a bourbon and downed about half as soon as it arrived. If she wanted to get anything out of Fred before he got what Matthew called rat-arsed, she better figure out why he was so miserable.
“Why do you have to meet with this screwball?”
He took another gulp. “Raymond Griffith, know who he is?” She shook her head. “You’ve seen All Quiet on the Western Front, right? He’s the French soldier, the one who dies in the trench with Lew Ayres. He was a comedian in silents, a really good one. We’ve got a two-reeler of his in the collection and I’m trying to restore it. I got one reel okay but the other one had some heavy damage and it isn’t going to look very good. Steve, he’s got a big collection and I know he’s got some Griffith. On a hunch I call him and Steve’s all coy and ‘why don’t you hop on over to the screening tonight, Freddie, whaddya say.’ And tonight he says yeah, he’s got it all right. Says his copy is in great shape and I could probably even use his print to make what I’ve already done look better.” Fred was the only person she’d ever met who stammered less when he got a glass of liquor in him.
“That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, maybe it would be if he’d drop off the reels or let us send a messenger like a normal person. But no. He wants me to go to his place.” She got it now. She felt herself blushing for Fred. He knocked back all but a half-inch of his drink and gestured to the waiter for another. “I don’t usually drink this fast, by the way.”
“Are you saying …” This was terrible. No wonder he was so upset. He eyed her grimly and she fumbled for the right turn of phrase. “Steve, he, um, he likes you?”
Fred backed himself into the corner of the booth like he was Tippi Hedren being attacked in The Birds. “What? NO.” He swallowed the last of his bourbon and scooted toward her, his voice a bit lower. “I—god, no. No, no, no.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that you were saying …”
“I didn’t mean anything like that. I like silents, I like my work, there’s a lot I’ll do, but not that.” The waiter arrived with the drink and she could have sworn it never actually made table contact before Fred grabbed it.
“Okay, okay. So why do you have to go to his place?”
He propped his head against the booth and closed his eyes. “He wants to show me Topo Gigio.” Another hit of bourbon, eyes still shut.
“I don’t know his movies.” How bad could they be?
He choked and had to grab his napkin. “Topo Gigio isn’t a director. He’s a mouse. A puppet. He was on TV.”
“Oh. Mostly all I watch on TV is movies.” She was dying for a cigarette.
“He hasn’t been on in years. The Ed Sullivan Show. I guess he was on Italian TV too. It took four people or something to move him around on the show. Um, can I bum one of those?” She handed him a cigarette and lit them both. “Steve’s obsession besides old movies is Topo Gigio. And he has his own puppet, and he’s really proud that he can move Topo Gigio all by himself. And if you go over there to get a print out of him, that’s the price you have to pay. You sit there for hours while he waves his fucking mouse puppet at you.” She couldn’t manage it any longer. The laugh rolled out with the smoke. “He does the voice too.” She let out a howl. “It’s got an accent, this mouse. I’m glad you think this is funny.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin. “Yeah, Isabel thinks it’s funny, too. Last year she let me set up a meeting with Steve, by myself, even though she knew I’d have to meet the puppet. Never said a word.”
She got her voice under control and said, “Don’t you think maybe you’re making too big a fuss over this? It’s just one night.”
“That’s what Isabel said. Why don’t you ladies try it, then. You should have seen her face. ‘I’d go too, but I have an engagement,’” he mimicked, in a pretty good version of Isabel’s refined drawl. “And she’ll have another party tomorrow, just wait.” Another swig. “She likes torturing me.”
Something about the way he muttered that last part made Ceinwen give him a closer look. He was taking a drag off the cigarette and coloring slightly under his five o’clock shadow.
Fred had a crush on Isabel.
Maybe this shouldn’t be a shock. Isabel was smart. And she was beautiful. Admittedly, if she felt like it, Isabel might snap a man’s balls off at the crotch and roll them across the floor like Christmas ornaments. But she was definitely beautiful.
“So yeah. Be me when you grow up. Four years at Tisch and, um, two more years for the master’s degree. Some training at MoMA, couple of years at Eastman House and then, when you’re ready for the big time, you go talk to a puppet. Did I mention that?” She started laughing again. “You have to talk back to the mouse or he pouts.”
“At least your honor is safe,” she choked out.
He was almost done with this drink, too. “I’d be better off just sleeping with the guy.” He paused. “I didn’t say that. Never tell anyone I said that.”
“You mean Isabel? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Isabel would kill me anyway. She’s huge on ethics. And I’m huge on not dying. You want to know my big ultimate career goal, me being your role model and all, that’s it. Not getting killed by Isabel.”
Ceinwen imagined Isabel wearing a negligee, propped against satin pillows and ordering Fred around the bedroom. Fred was probably imagining the same thing. Maybe that was what all men wanted. Someone to give them a hard time. Matthew hadn’t broken up with Anna because Ceinwen was too nice to him. She should stand him up.
She would, too. Next week.
“I wouldn’t think Isabel would worry much about ethics. She seems kind of ruthless.”
He sat up straighter and gave her a look like the one he’d given Matthew. Watch it, she thought, this is his dream girl you’re running down. “She’s incredibly ethical. That’s how I got hired.” He was almost done with the second bourbon.
“She hired you because you’re honest?”
“Sort of.” She waited. “I shouldn’t be …” He took another swallow. “All right, if I tell you this, you have to swear you won’t tell anybody. Not one person. Especially not …”
“Matthew?”
“Yeah. Es
pecially not him. You know Chris Bixby, the one I said got us that Vermont collection and retired? It wasn’t true. He was fired. Where’s the waiter?” He motioned to the man again.
“Maybe you should switch to beer.”
“Good idea.” He asked the waiter for a Heineken and another wine for her, although she wasn’t nearly finished.
“Was Bixby stealing movies?”
“Not exactly. He had a side deal with some collectors. They’d pay him a fee, couple of hundred dollars, and he’d lend them a negative to print. Well, the Brody doesn’t have many negatives. So, um, then he started lending out the prints to copy. The guy running things before Isabel never even noticed. But she wanted to know all about how everything was working, and she was, ah, taking inventory. And when she found some stuff out of order and she couldn’t find some other stuff, she got suspicious. So she called in Chris and he, ah, he admitted it pretty quickly. He wasn’t a master criminal, just a film geek in an archive.”
The waiter set the drinks down and Fred took a swallow.
“She fired him?”
“She fired everybody. Two curators, three lab technicians. She even fired the receptionist. Way I heard it, um, she called them into the lobby and you know, there aren’t any chairs, and she stands them up in a row and she says, you’re history.” He pulled up his arms and fired an imaginary rifle.
“They were all in on it?”
“Just Bixby. But she, um, assumed the others had to know he was doing it, so she fired them for not blowing the whistle.”
Whoa. Isabel was one tough hombre. “What was the receptionist doing?”
“I, um, think she just didn’t like the receptionist and figured now was her chance. So I’m up at Eastman House and it was all right. I mean, they do great work, but man, I hated Rochester. Rochester, god, it makes Buffalo look like Paris. And I, um, I had been trying to get out but there’s not that many places, you know? And I heard the Brody was hiring and I sent my CV. And I included a cover letter, um, it was long and I went on a bit about preservation and film, and how if we didn’t keep film history alive everybody was just going to sit around watching, I don’t know, Friday the 13th and shit like that. And, um, I closed with some stuff about art and about losing a big part of our legacy as American citizens.” He picked up his beer, looked at the top of the bottle, and set it back. “It wound up being two pages long. Single spaced. I got carried away, kinda.”
“I don’t think so at all,” she said. “I agree with all of that. I bet Isabel does, too.”
“Isabel …” He trailed off. Was he imagining something? Like Isabel in a bikini, cataloguing film fragments with him? “Um, I don’t know how much she cared about this stuff when she took the job. She was a lobbyist before.”
Well, that fit, for sure. “Who for?”
“The American Bar Association.”
She better not laugh, he might slam down his beer and leave in a huff. “She’s a lawyer?”
“Yeah. Never practiced. Didn’t have to, her family’s loaded. But, um, she’s the kind of person who has to work and she’s gotta do everything perfect. And me being so over-the-top made her think I was the same way. She called me and said I had exactly the right attitude, even though I was just an assistant, and she flew up to see me work. I spent a day, um, showing her the stuff I’d done and next thing you know I’m back in New York and I’m in charge of restoration and preservation at the Brody.”
He was hammering his beer almost as fast as the bourbon. She drained the last of her first wine and started on her second.
“Did she go after the collectors?”
“Nah. Not worth it. They returned everything, they always meant to. We need them, anyway. I mean, hey, Kevin Brownlow was a collector. Old Brody was a collector. Collectors are the only way a lot of this stuff survives. But archives and collectors, they, um, have this weird relationship. They think we’re stuffy academics, and we think they’re crazy obsessives.”
“Who’s right?”
He grinned. “We both are.”
She thought of all the people at the Bangville meeting, and the tables piled with reels. “Do you know who Bixby was working with?”
“One of them was Gene.”
“Wow. Did you ever say anything to him?”
“Nope. He knows I know, though. And I’m sure he knows who else was doing it. They all know each other, from things like Bangville and that convention up in Syracuse.”
Finally, her opening. “Like maybe that guy in Vermont? What was his name?”
Fred squinted, and she was afraid he was going to clam up, or ask her why she cared about the Vermont collector. Instead he put a hand under his chin, blew some smoke into the middle distance, and said, “Anderson. That was his name. I don’t know, maybe, but I think Chris wanted the collection so he could feed it to other guys. Not the other way around. A hardcore, big-time collector, he doesn’t give up his stuff. Not unless something forces him to.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “Like, you know, death.”
No Andersons in the cast or crew, and none that she knew of at Civitas, either. Damn. She’d have to dig more, somehow. At least she had the still.
And she was enjoying Fred. He was working his way up to saying something else; she could tell because he was clearing his throat for the third time.
“Ah, you’re not a student, right? Because, you know, I think it’s great you want to do restoration. Not that many of us. Everybody wants to run off and, um, be the next Scorsese. But these places want a film degree. I don’t think you need it, myself, but they’ll want it.”
“No, I’m not a student. But I’m thinking of going to film school. I just need to find the money. They tell me the aid parameters are changing all the time.”
“I hope so,” he said glumly. “I’m still paying off my loans. You, um, you also have to do a lot of physical stuff. There’s a lot of chemicals and sometimes mold so you can’t have allergies or anything.” She had her hand braced on the side of the booth, and he was looking at the curve of her arm. “And, um, you do a lot of hauling things around, like film canisters.”
“What, you think I can’t carry things?”
“It’s not that,” he said quickly. “It’s just that it’s heavy and stuff, and you’re …” His eyes wandered for a minute and he snapped them back to meet hers. “You’re, um, petite.” He looked back at her arm. “Your build is petite. You’re a very petite woman.”
Ceinwen had noticed that when men found an adjective to describe you that they thought was tactful, they liked to repeat it a few times.
“Is there food here?” she asked.
They ordered French fries and calamari and more drinks, and he told her some more about the Brody, about the difference between preserving a film, where you just made sure a copy was made and stored properly, and trying to restore the movie to what it used to look like. He drank his beer, a bit more slowly, and he told her about the places collectors got their prints—a lot of 16-millimeters from TV stations, it turned out. She mopped up some cocktail sauce that had dripped off her last piece of calamari, and she thought of a network of collectors, who all knew each other. And maybe, too, they knew how, and where, everyone got their stuff.
“Isabel’s not going tomorrow night,” she said.
“No way.”
“That’s too bad. I can’t imagine anyone forcing a puppet show on Isabel, can you?”
He snorted. “No.”
This was not a man who was going to take a hint. She pulled out her cigarettes and offered him one. She lit his, then hers, exhaled and said, “Would you feel better if you had some company?”
3.
FRED WAS MEETING HER OUTSIDE STEVE’S BUILDING AT SEVEN, BEFORE her shift ended. That meant she couldn’t go to work. The only way you left early from Vintage Visions was on a stretcher. Lily’s attitude was that if you could pick up a phone, you could sell old clothes. Ceinwen felt pretty rough already, but she chain-smoked three cigarettes to get her voice t
o the right level of husky. She cracked her knuckles and dialed the number.
Roxanne put her on hold. Then Lily: “I’ve got a store to run here.”
And good morning to you, too. “I can’t make it. I’m sick.”
“What, were you drinking? You need to work today. I got no one else for the counter.”
“I can’t. I’ve been throwing up.” Jim had walked in and was listening.
“You’re pregnant?”
“I’m sick. I think it’s stomach flu.”
“You know what I think?” Oh god, another one of Lily’s questions. “I think—”
She lost the rest because Jim yanked the phone cord and it crashed to the floor. Before she could speak he put a hand over her mouth. From the receiver she could hear Lily shrieking her name. Jim held up his other hand and counted out slowly with his fingers—one, two, three, four, five. Then he took his hand off her mouth and picked up the phone.
“Hello, Lily? This is Jim. Good to hear your voice again … No, I don’t want to chat. She dropped the phone. She had to run to the bathroom.” He pulled the receiver a little further from his ear. “Are you saying you want me to describe what she’s doing? … Oh. Okay then … I’m sure she’ll be better tomorrow. She doesn’t want to leave you in the lurch … Yes … Okay … I’ll tell her. Have a great—” He looked at the receiver, then hung up. “She says if you don’t come in tomorrow, you’re fired.”
“Thanks.”
“Lily’s special way of saying get well soon.”
“I mean it. That was beautiful. I’m so glad it’s your day off.”
“Had to do something. Watching you try to lie is painful. There’s coffee if you want it.” He went into his bedroom.
She carried the coffee back to the living room. Matthew should be at Courant for office hours by now. This was going to teach him a lesson. A lesson in what, she wasn’t sure, but a lesson. She said hello and he launched in before she could say anything else.
“Listen, would it kill you if we switched movies tonight? I know it’s Walsh, but I’m dying for color. What about Angel Heart? You could at least try to keep up with what’s new.”
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