—Looks like business is still good, Hal said.
—Not too bad, as a matter of fact. You know how folks are around here. They’re tough and hardworking but prone to a spell here or there. A poor old bird out there, just a few minutes ago, tried to pawn her wedding ring and her undergarments. So I bring her back here for a private tutorial. They call this the confessional, the pawnbrokers, because it’s where the worst cases come to unburden themselves. Which brings us to you, Hal Bender, because something tells me you’re not here to play fetch with my dog.
—What’s his name?
—Beauty, and she’s a her.
—Pretty dog.
—Thus the name. Would you like a cigar?
—Why not.
* * *
Alroy pulled open a desk drawer, took out two cigars, and proceeded to trim and light both, before handing one to Hal. This seemed like some bizarre debtor’s ritual, the man with the money leaving a trace of his own saliva on the proffered cigar. Hal took it and dried the end with two fingers below the edge of the desk so Alroy couldn’t see. He brought it to his mouth and took a pull of smoke.
—Our big picture is about to release, starring Sabine Montrose and Lester Summers. The week of Halloween, if we can get the edits made.
—And what’s this one about?
—A consumptive widow who runs an electrified hotel and preys on her male guests.
—Naturally.
Alroy chuckled into a stream of cigar smoke.
—The thing is …
—Oh boy, yes, there’s always a thing. Without a thing I wouldn’t be in business. Go on.
—We’re cash-strapped and we need an injection of funds to finish out the film and pay for distribution.
Some nodding into a smoky pause.
—I see. And is there a particular number you had in mind for this painful injection?
Hal rolled his cigar between his fingertips and watched the dog go to the corner and lie on an afghan that somebody’s Prussian grandmother had crocheted.
—We need fifteen thousand dollars, maybe twelve if there are no more hiccups.
Hal had never seen Alroy at a loss for words, but now there was an inscrutable expression on his face.
—Do you have any idea what that amount of money looks like?
Hal shrugged and waited to be told.
—You lay out the hundred dollar bills, one level deep, and they cover the top of this desk.
—I know it’s a lot.
—Eight dollars a square foot.
—What’s that?
—How much an apartment with a view costs on the Upper East Side.
—Right.
—So you’re buying two of them with this amount of money. Two one-thousand-square-foot apartments. I assume the banks have all said you’re out of your fucking braincase?
Hal nodded, crossed his legs.
—And whatever investors you’ve got over there in New Jersey, we can assume they also have no appetite for this scheme. Therefore, what we’re left with is this: the son of a two-bit, shithouse gambler who wants to make it into the big leagues coming back to his old neighborhood for a visitation with Uncle in his walnut-colored church shoes. Your mother would not be pleased, Hal Bender.
—Flossy now lives in the Catskills in a cottage I paid cash for. Her opinion of this scheme has nothing to do with it. Is it possible? Can you secure that kind of money?
* * *
Alroy savored a whirl of cigar smoke against his tongue.
—Interesting ploy. Put the lender on the back foot, maybe inflame his pride and vanity like a case of hemorrhoids. Your old man would be tickled. He was a backer of such antics. One time I saw him fake a broken leg to get out of a debt payment.
Alroy looked across his desk at the mountain of receipts and documents.
—I can rustle together that amount and a lot more, but the question is what’s my return on a risk of this largesse. If old John were sitting in that chair he would be farting into my upholstery and writing in the ledger right about now and saying the odds of getting back the funds are quite small. In his droopy-eyed, palsy-handed way, he’d say, Alroy, I advise against it.
—Where is old John?
—Buried in a plot out in the Flatlands.
—My condolences.
—He drank himself into a pine box. A prodigious accountant who couldn’t keep tabs on what went into his own mouth. If I were willing to find that sort of money, you’d have to understand I’d need bona fide collateral and the interest would be widow-maker rates.
—I would only need the loan for a year, at the most. How much interest?
—Forty percent, calculated monthly, but paid in weekly installments. I would also need the title to whatever property you’ve got over there in the wilds of New Jersey.
—The bank’s still got a note on the property.
—That’s unfortunate.
—What about the title to the theater down the street?
—I doubt it’s worth that much, but it’s a start. How about you also put me in for a percentage of the new motion picture ticket sales?
—Three percent.
—Twenty.
—I can’t do that. I have dozens of other investors I have to pay out.
—If the film doesn’t see the light of day, then you’ve lost everything. Even Beauty can see that, can’t you, girl?
—Twelve percent. That’s all I can manage.
Alroy hummed, arranged a pile of carbon copies into a neat stack on his desk.
—Give me three days and then we’ll meet back here for the final arrangements.
Hal rested his cigar on the ivory ashtray and got up to leave.
—Take it with you, Alroy said.
They shook hands and Alroy got up from behind the desk and opened the office door for Hal.
* * *
When Hal was halfway through the warehouse, Alroy came walking up behind him, the Labrador at his side.
—Actually, if you have a second, there’s something I want to show you.
Hal followed him down into a row of shelved boxes, Alroy’s head turned as he talked.
—The thing about pawnbrokers is they’re superstitious and nostalgic. Sometimes, we keep things, like collectors, because we’re drowning in other people’s bad luck and we hope they’ll come back for their goods. Technically, anything they don’t claim is either mine outright or I can sell it at public auction. But sometimes I hold on to stock because I want things to take a turn for the better. Twenty to thirty percent of people don’t ever reclaim their items.
He turned to face Hal.
—Do you know what that means?
—No idea, Hal said.
—That seventy to eighty percent of people find a way to solve their problems. That gives me comfort, it does.
* * *
He pulled down a dusty box from a shelf and handed it to Hal. On the lid, the word Bender had been written in ink. Hal didn’t have time to brace himself before he was staring into the box, his mouth stiffening at the sight of Chester’s church shoes, size twelve, a gold fob watch engraved with his initials, a box camera, a silver hip flask, assorted personal items, including a bone-handled hairbrush that had once belonged to Flossy.
—I want you to go ahead and take Chester’s things. Not sure why I kept them all these years anyway, since I could have sold them off. Maybe send them to your ma up in the Catskills. But understand this, Hal Bender, if this arrangement goes sideways, if it falls in the trough, there’s going to be a lot more than your old man’s shoes in a box. I will take your life down to the studs to get this kind of money back. Do you comprehend my meaning?
* * *
Hal stared into the bloodshot, yellowed whites of Alroy’s eyes. He nodded but said nothing, unsure whether he hated himself or Alroy Healy more in that particular moment. Then he was walking back through the warehouse and out into the bustling storefront, where Brooklyn on hard times stood fidgeting in line, a b
ox of his father’s unredeemed pledges in his hands.
17
Last Day of Shooting
The final sequence kept Chip Spalding awake at night. For weeks he’d been studying the last two pages of the photoplay, making notations, drawing schematics, but now that the final day of shooting was here, he felt sure he was going to die. Like other daredevils and high-wire performers, his thoughts turned ominous or religious on the eve of a harrowing stunt. His mind had always ticked over with the probabilities of life’s hazards—December is the worst month for armed robbery, German shepherds are the dogs most likely to bite—but now he saw his death as clearly as his own callused fist.
* * *
Wearing a black velvet gown and a highly flammable wig, he would set himself on fire in the wire-frame gondola below the airship and jump into the Hudson, while the hydrogen-filled dirigible ignited above him as he fell. The fatal mistake that screened nightly in his dreams was a coil of rope wrapping around his left foot, so that when he jumped he never hit the river. Instead, he dangled by one leg from the exploding airship, upside down and on fire, while the fishermen and clammers of Manhattan and New Jersey looked on.
* * *
In his loft above the stables, he prepared himself for the stunt, but also for death. He took out the addressed letters he’d written years ago to his family and set them on his neatly made bed. Next, he picked up his mother’s vellum-paged bible and flipped open to her favorite passages from Jeremiah, during the unrelenting drought. They did not say, “Where is the LORD who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that none passes through, where no man dwells?” When he was growing up, his mother had viewed the Outback as a land of deserts and pits, and these words were her solace. Jeremiah became a story of a troubled man transformed into a prophet, a weak man becoming strong. Chip had seen himself in those passages, but also his father’s failures, and the life his English mother might have had if she hadn’t ended up stranded in the bush with a big brood of hungry kids and a drunkard for a husband.
* * *
He stood naked in front of the mirror, lathering himself in wool fat. The fire gel recipe hadn’t changed much over the years, but now it contained more glycerol, making it gelatinous and harder to spread. From a distance of twenty feet, and with clothing covering all but the hands and head, the camera would never see it glistening amid all that fire. Once he was fully slicked, he put on a pair of wet cotton skivvies and then the velvet dress and the wig. The makeup girl would do his face, so he left it dry for now. The horses had been unsettled in the night, picking up on his mood, and he called down easy now while he stared at his ridiculous feminine double. He laughed nervously and took a bow into the mirror: Nice knowing you, Mademoiselle Spalding.
* * *
At least the final sequence was going to take place in daylight, on the rim of dawn, but that also meant they had a small window to get it right. Claude wanted to capture it in slanting light, Manhattan silvering up in the background. Besides, the dirigible could only be set alight once. Chip found himself holding his breath as he came out of the stables and walked across the field, as if the pocket of space in front of him were already scorched.
* * *
The set looked like a battleground, even before the sun was up. In an ingenious cost-cutting move, Hal and Claude had bussed in more than a hundred Bowery bums overnight to serve as extras for the mob scene. In exchange for fifty cents and two hot meals, the men were lured into an omnibus, twenty at a time, so they could spend the day shooting. Given the early hour, however, Chip could see that some of the men awaiting instructions up on the hill were still drunk, or half asleep. They were in their own tattered suits or overalls or shirtsleeves—that would be part of the effect, the suggestion of an entire town of spellbound, indolent men awaking from their stupors—while Helena moved among them with a cart, patiently handing out cups of coffee and donuts to sober or brace them awake. The burning torches wouldn’t be handed out until the cameras were ready to roll.
* * *
Chip gave a wave as he walked down to the cliffs, and several of the bums whistled and cheered at the man in the black dress. There were three camera units that were going to film in parallel: Nash Sully and a crew up at the hotel stage with the Bowery men, Claude down at the cliffs with the dirigible, and a third cameraman lying down on the cantilevered cliff stage, six feet below the edge, aiming up as the airship floated out over the river. Once Chip was in makeup and doused in kerosene, he would head back up the hill and wait for Claude’s signal through the bullhorn. The bums would light their torches, all the cameras would roll, and Chip would take off running as the mob pursued him down the hill.
* * *
An actor doubling as Lester Summers—who was already on another set in the mountains behind Los Angeles—would lead the charge. At the cliffs, Chip would launch the airship and begin to rise just as Lester’s double took hold of the rope ladder. The double would jump back to earth after a few seconds, but not before setting the rope ladder on fire with his torch. Claude would film the advance, Nash Sully would film the retreat, and all three cameras would capture the incineration above the Hudson from the different vantage points. The burning hotel would be threaded in with the old footage of the razed mansion, a cutaway as the widow disappeared in flames into the river.
* * *
The final shots of Sabine and the children had been filmed the day before, in the garden maze and in the attic, so Chip was surprised to see Sabine, Pavel, and the bleary-eyed children sitting on a picnic blanket in the predawn light beside the cliffs. Sabine was braiding Cora’s hair while Leo and Pavel were arranging a small flotilla of toy battleships across a tartan sea. When Chip caught his eye, Leo jumped up and came running over to him, an apple in one hand.
—Can I touch it? he said, chewing and pointing at Chip’s gelatinous fingertips.
—Very gently. I need to keep every part of me slicked up.
Leo allowed his index finger to land on the gel for a brief moment, before rubbing some of the residue between his fingertips.
—Feels like the bottom of a slug, he said.
Sabine, Pavel, and Cora got off the blanket and came over.
—I’m surprised you’re all on the set today, Chip said.
—I wouldn’t miss my own terrifying death for anything, Sabine said.
—We wanted to see the consumptive go up in flames, to make sure it is realistic, Pavel said.
—Can I give you something for good luck? asked Sabine.
—I need all the luck I can get.
She produced a frayed blue ribbon from her dress pocket and tied it onto a button of the black velvet frock.
—This was part of the very first costume I ever wore onstage. I usually keep it in my pocket when I perform.
A talisman, Chip thought, because she also knows the whiff of death when she smells it.
—Are you sure you want the children to watch? It won’t be too much for them?
—Nonsense. They deserve to see the blazing stunt that will make you famous.
She kissed his cheek.
—Tell the makeup girl not to be stingy with the lavender powder and the kohl. When she dies, I want her to be ravissante.
* * *
Chip turned for the staging area, where Jimmy Thorpe stood by the tethered dirigible. Since no one else could be in the dirigible with him when he set himself on fire, the airship would idle as soon as Chip moved away from the controls. Two dinghies with life preservers and a medic were floating on the Hudson, within a hundred yards of the designated impact spot, marked by a red buoy. The New Jersey Shellfish Protector, off duty and paid by the hour, was also floating below, keeping watch to ensure no fishermen or commercial boats came within the cordon.
* * *
Chip could feel his bowels feathering and his skin prickling under all that glycerin. His vision blurred and
his windpipe tightened as the makeup girl applied the kohl and lavender powder. Entering the chute was how other daredevils described it, the narrowing of the mind’s eye and the dimming away of sense in the final moments before you slipped beneath the surface. Jimmy Thorpe had once described how the airship was constructed—the big envelope fabricated from goldbeater’s skin, from hundreds of cow or oxen intestines, all of it sealed to hold an entire atmosphere of hydrogen, chugged along by two seven-horsepower engines. He was being carried to his death, Chip thought, beneath the amalgamated stomachs of a herd of cattle. It was fitting, somehow, a return to the farm.
* * *
With his makeup applied, he asked for the tub of gel and smeared his face and neck while Claude inspected him. Once the gel was applied, across his lips and eyebrows and nostrils, he couldn’t talk, so Claude didn’t bother asking him how he felt about the sequence. Instead, they looked in silence one more time at the clipboard that listed the steps and the timing of each. Once he manned the airship, he had thirty seconds to drift before the burning fuse line neared the base of the muslin-wrapped gondola, then ten seconds to light himself on fire, stand, and jump from a height of one hundred feet. They had timed the ascent and calculated the pitch numerous times to ensure he could get over his watery target. But if a sudden gust of wind forced the airship back onto the cliffs, or if he couldn’t clear the undercarriage, he would have a minute at most before the gas-filled envelope above his head burst into flame. He turned to Sabine and the children on the blanket and gave a salute, then he waved at a grave-looking Hal Bender, who was standing out of the shot in a camelhair coat with the collar up. Chip doused himself in kerosene and gave two thumbs up.
The Electric Hotel: A Novel Page 23