by Adrian Speed
“How did he take his meals?”
“According to his aug he either went to the canteen on level thirty, had someone bring him some food, or just ignored it.” Delgado’s eyes narrowed. “If he’d been poisoned it would have shown up during the medical examination.”
I raised a finger. “Unless he was poisoned with an opiate. Then it would be masked by all the opiates he deliberately put there.”
“I’ll make a note to check the augs of everyone who brought him food or drink.” Delgado pulled out her slate and tapped the orders into it. We reached the elevator and another police checkpoint. They parted for Delgado but eyed us with suspicion. “Just need to go up a floor here and we’ll be in digital compositing.”
In the short elevator ride I turned my eyes to Sir Reginald. He hadn’t said anything since we inspected Jonathon’s body and was fiddling with his cane while staring at nothing. I knew that look. He already thought he knew what killed Jonathon; he was just waiting for the final pieces of evidence to present themselves. It was infuriating to think he had seen something in that room that meant more than I thought. I managed to catch his eye and the great grey irises somehow spurred me to continue. Even though he had an idea of what was happening, he wanted me to press forward.
The elevator opened and a sign informed us in English and Spanish that we had reached digital compositing. Unlike the open plan offices downstairs, the corridors closed in here and as we followed Delgado I could see through the glass that it was just banks and banks of computers.
“They have their own render farm in the building?” I asked.
“Render farm? I don’t think any film studio has needed a render farm since the twenties. No. Everything’s done in real time now.”
Delgado led us through the corridors to a set of wide double doors, fireproof and soundproof with a plastic fur edging to keep the sound in. Above the doors a sign announced ‘Digitial Compositing Studio A’ and a digital screen said ‘Currently Filming: 100 Days’.
Delgado shouldered open the door and my eyes widened. The studio was filled with red and gold. Thirty feet of red velvet climbed to the ceiling, dotted with portraits of the French nobility and dripping with gold leaf. It was if I had walked into the palace of Fontainebleau itself.
Delgado heard my gasp. “First time in a holo-tank?”
“PI pay hardly affords luxuries,” Sir Reginald spoke for me as my mouth opened and closed. The illusions were almost as good as those I had once seen in the ninety-ninth century. “It’s all done with lasers my dear,” Sir Reginald explained. “Where two lasers meet creates a radiant ball of light. This apparatus does the same with hundreds of millions of lasers.”
“Ha, you some kind of tech geek then, Sir Reginald?” Delgado cocked an eye. “Don’t know many PIs who know hologram tech.”
In one corner of the vast laser room sat Napoleon, slumped in a chair, exhausted. His hair was beginning to fall out and a paunch was threatening to break the buttons on his tight waistcoat. Heavy-lidded eyes stared a thousand yards away, aching with sadness. He looked as if the last of his pride had just been broken, as if the last of his hope lay smashed at his feet. The only sound was the ticking of the clock.
Napoleon wasn’t alone. Four men in resplendent frock coats waited to gain the Emperor’s attention. They held leather binders full of papers and were trying to catch the emperor’s eye. They balanced on the balls of their feet like birds, trying to decide whether they should step in front of Napoleon’s gaze or not.
“Sire,” one of the men in the frock coats broke the silence. "The Duke of Tarantum has brought for your signature the treaty which is to be ratified tomorrow."
“Ah. Marshall,” Napoleon barely turned his head to face the speaker. “So here you are.”
“Is your majesty… indisposed?”
“Yes.” Napoleon’s voice was barely a breeze in the trees. “I have… I have passed a very bad night.”
Napoleon froze solid; the figures in the room walked backwards out of the salon and closed the door behind them. Then the door opened again, the gentlemen in the frock coats all swaggered into the room and Napoleon stared into the distance.
“Sire,” one of the men stepped forwards again.
“I think Delacroix’s in the editing booth.” Delgado cut over the scene and waved Sir Reginald and me through the darkness of the studio floor to a bank of computers and a desk flush with the floor. “Here we are. Raymond Delacroix?”
“Deputy Inspector.” A man moved in the shadows and hit the keyboard. The simulation of Napoleon froze and after a few knobs were twisted the lights came up in the rest of the studio. The man’s voice spoke with the voice of Napoleon. Or rather, I realised, Napoleon spoke with his voice. But he didn’t look anything like Napoleon. He was tall, over six foot, with shaggy black hair coiled into dreadlocks and skin the colour of tobacco. His face was open and honest, and clear laughter lines dug into his cheeks despite his youth. But he wasn’t smiling now. He tried to hide his attempt to remove the remains of tears from his eyes as just adjusting his glasses. His aug was built in to the thick dark frames. He was the first person I’d seen in the twenty-second century to wear glasses. “Deputy Inspector,” he said again once the light was back to normal. “I was just… looking over the film.” He looked at Sir Reginald and me. “More questions?”
“This is a PI, Sir Reginald Derby, from England. He’d like to talk to you.”
“But… I don’t have to talk to him…” Delacroix picked up on the careful language used by Delgado.
“It is well within your rights not to talk to anyone, Mr Delacroix, that’s the nature of the United States constitution; however, I think you will find us quite a sympathetic ear.” Sir Reginald’s speech did little to stir Delacroix’s heart. His expression hardened and he sat down in his chair. “You had an argument with Mr Sotheby-Arnold at 1 a.m. last night. Would you like to tell us what that was about?” Sir Reginald asked. He tugged at his cufflink and I knew he didn’t expect an answer.
“What’s the point?” Delacroix muttered. “You have his aug. You can listen to the whole thing if you want.”
“Yes, we could,” Sir Reginald admitted. A silence fell that Sir Reginald hoped Delacroix would fill. He didn’t. The actor continued to glower at us over the controls as if waiting for us to go away. Eventually I broke the silence.
“I’ve never actually been in a movie studio before,” I said, taking a chair and sitting down next to Delacroix. “Would you mind showing me how it works?” Delacroix eyed me with suspicion but shrugged.
“Sure,” he waved me in closer. “Now, I’m no expert like an editor or a director, but I know my way around the table. This screen is the monitor, that’s what the final film looks like, and this screen is the wide, that shows us the whole composition, and this screen is the select, you can toggle on and off different parts of the composition in there. So, like, if I wanted Napoleon to have on his dress uniform,” Delacroix tapped away on some keys to bringing up a file manager and selected Napoleon’s dress uniform, “there, now he’s in the clothes he wears when he’s at Waterloo.” In the holo-tank the Napoleon changed instantly into the new clothes, hiding his paunch under a greatcoat and his balding head under a hat. “We can change anything about the scene in here. You can change the lighting, the models, the textures. And if you were somehow not satisfied with my performance you could go into the wire frame and just punch things up a bit, or take things down a notch.” Delacroix said with a smile. “Normally you’d send that sort of thing over to the digital artists to work on, but it can be done here if you’re a perfectionist.”
“I get the feeling Jonathon did it here a lot, then.”
“Oh no, he’d never change an actor’s performance.” Delacroix shook his head. “He’d just fire them,” he added bitterly.
“Doesn’t it kind of feel like cheating though? Rigging these dolls to copy you? You could probably shoot the whole movie with one actor.”
�
��Oh don’t tell me you’re one of those Third Wave French cinema fans,” Delacroix rolled his eyes. “This process makes cinema more inclusive. I’m almost two metres tall and I’m playing Napoleon thanks to digital costuming. Do you think a guy like me could have played Napoleon a century ago? Or even two centuries ago?”
“Well...”
“No, this way the best actor always gets the part,” Delacroix insisted. “The person who best embodies the soul of the character should always get the part and with this technology we can make that happen. You know how on stage they’d let women play Hamlet or a white guy play Othello because they embody the spirit of the character better than anyone else? Well with this technology they can still give their performance without gender-swapping Hamlet or white-washing Othello.”
“Still seems a bit soulless...”
“Soulless? You think this scene is soulless?” Delacroix pointed at sad Napoleon. “Do you think any director other than Jonathon would have had the cajones to put a scene like this into their action blockbuster? Do you think they’d have understood Napoleon well enough to make the entire 100 Days be about his crumbling ego? Jonathon knew how to get to the heart of the character, and knew how to get the best performance as Napoleon–”
“By firing you,” Sir Reginald cut in. I looked up from Delacroix. Sir Reginald had wandered into the holo-tank and was looking through the books on Napoleon’s shelf. He didn’t look like he had a single care in the world.
“Jonathon didn’t fire me...” Delacroix grumbled. “He... decided to let another actor try to run some of the more action-heavy scenes using my dialogue.”
“That’s not what you said during your argument with him last night.” Sir Reginald plucked a book from the shelf of the holotank. It floated above his fingers, massless. Sir Reginald frowned as he opened the book and flicked through it.
“I... last night...” Delacroix’s brow furrowed. “Oh god.... you’re gonna bring it all out...” Delacroix slumped over his thighs. “You’re going to keep needling at me until you know everything.”
“That is our job, Mr Delacroix.” Sir Reginald snapped the book shut silently and threw it over his shoulder. It returned to the book case. He strode to the editing desk. “I don’t want you to tell me anything you feel uncomfortable with, but right now it looks like you are the last man to see Mr Sotheby-Arnold alive and you had every motive to be angry with him. All I’d need to do is find a scrap of heroin on you to convince any judge in the state that you deliberately overdosed him.” Delacroix flinched at the word heroin as if he’d been struck.
“Jonathon... he was... he was my frenemy? My... hate-friend?” Delacroix put his head in his hands. “I’d never want any harm to come to Jonathon. We just... we’ve had this... this thing going on ever since Juliard. Johnathon, he always wanted to control things, right? He had that... busybody thing going even when he was a kid. I never liked that, but he was fun to be around. We worked together, we worked well together. He knew how to pull a show together better than anyone. Heck, half the time I used to feel like he only made me like him because he wanted me in his productions. But... but he did know how to make you feel wanted, you know? He’d always get an extra pallet of mango soda when catering because he knew I liked it. I’d never want to hurt him.”
“I’m told you punched him in the face last week.”
“Yeah, OK, so maybe I’d wanna hurt him but I’d never want to kill him.” Delacroix took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “When you’re making a film everything gets wound up so... tight. You know? It’s a magic feeling when everything works. You watch everything come together, the props, the character rigs, the actors, the action, the score, everyone is like a touchdown. Then when it starts to come apart it’s like someone’s twisting off your fingers one by one. You can feel everyone’s exhaustion and it amplifies your own. The character rigs never look quite right. The props never fit into frame properly. You do the same scene over and over and over again and its still not good enough. That’s when you start to explode.”
“And that’s when you take heroin,” I said. Delacroix froze.
“I don’t do that anymore.” Delacroix said. “I got clean years ago.”
“But Jonathon didn’t,” I said.
“He... has it so much harder than I ever did.” Delacroix slumped down again. “All that tension is amplified a thousand times for him because he’s the one in control of it all. I am just a cog in the machine, and I feel it. I hate to think how he felt half the time.” Delacroix sighed. “About four years ago, we were just finishing up Holocaust: The Musical and I came in on the Monday to do some reshoots and it didn’t look like Jonathon had slept since we broke on the Friday evening. And he hadn’t. He and Billy Ray had worked on the film all weekend, and when Billy Ray went to sleep, Johnathon just kept working. I knew he was going to burn out, so I gave him some heroin tablets to help him sleep.”
“That’s like trying to knock someone out by dropping a bridge on them,” I gasped.
“Trust me, Jonathon needed a bridge to fall on him if he was going to stop moving; he had so much energy, so much insane energy all the time.” Delacroix slid his glasses back on. “But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t. I was angry, I was furious, but I didn’t kill him.” His eyes pleaded with me to believe him.
“I believe you,” Sir Reginald said.
“You... you do?”
“You were crying before we came in,” Sir Reginald said. “Guilt about Mr Sotheby-Arnold’s death falls off you like flaking skin. If you had killed him on purpose you would have confessed a dozen times by now.” Sir Reginald settled his grey eyes on Delacroix. “But you do feel responsible. You introduced him to the drug that killed him.” Sir Reginald leant over the desk and lent his palms on the monitors. “I presume you are no longer Sotheby-Arnold’s supplier?”
“Me? No, I got clean. I haven’t touched anything harder than alcohol for two years.”
“Excellent,” Sir Reginald stood up sharply. “Deputy Inspector, is Billy Ray Simon in the building?”
“Er... uh....” Delgado raised her slate and looked through it. “Yes. Yes he’s down in one of the conference rooms on level seventeen.”
“Then if you wouldn’t mind, I would sincerely like to speak with him.”
“C’mon then.” Delgado waved us back to the exit.
“Wait,” Delacroix stood. “You... you guys have looked through Jonathon’s aug, right? He... he didn’t go shoot up because of... because of what–”
“No, no, Raymond, relax.” Sir Reginald crossed the space and rested a hand on Delacroix’s shoulders. “Mr Sotheby-Arnold was an addict, and his addiction was far beyond the pressures of an argument with you. He would have died tonight no matter what, I assure you.”
“I... thank you.” Delacroix settled back into his chair. “Thank you.”
When the doors were firmly closed behind us Delgado broke the silence. “You didn’t look through his aug. For all you know–”
“I know that few of us could stomach a death on our conscience. There is no need to lay one at Delacroix’s feet.” Sir Reginald’s face hardened as he spoke. “Now take me to this producer who is so happy to let his talent go without sleep for days at a time.”
Chapter XXII
We could hear Billy Ray long before we could see him. His boisterous New Yorker accent echoed through the hallways of floor seventeen like an avenging ghost. He had taken roost in a corner conference hall. When we opened the doors the view was blinding. Rain lashed at the windows and swirled down to the distant streets around Fifth Avenue. Billy Ray was silhouetted against the window, holding a telephone against his ear with one hand and the back of his neck with the other.
“Don’t do this to me Hideyoshi, don’t do this to me, don’t Pearl Harbor this,” Billy Ray shouted down the phone. “Funding will hold as long as the Sothebys are still in, and they’re not going to leave. It’d be like crapping on their son’s grave. All the actors are still in place,
all the rigging, all the sets; we just need a new director. Heck we can just bump the editor if we need to. The film is going to release on time, I swear. We won’t even lose a day of schedule. The pigs are gonna be out of the building within an hour and we can start back up. Now, are you going to start printing, or do I have to fly to Tokyo and hit the switch myself? Good, I’m glad.” He pulled the phone away from his head. “Sam, get me European Distribution–”
“Ahem,” Delgado coughed in the doorway.
“Hideyoshi, I’ve gotta go,” Billy Ray said. “Yeah, yeah, a wishy-washy to you too.” He hung up the phone and turned to us. “Hi there Deputy, I’ve got kinda a lot of work here stopping the entire film crashing down like the World Trade Centre, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to carry on–”
“Hello Mr Simon, my name is Sir Reginald Derby, I would like to ask you some questions about Mr Sotheby-Arnold’s death.”
“Wow, that was a polite way of saying you’ve got my thumbs in a vice and are gonna start turning until I squeal.” Billy Ray strode towards us. He towered over Sir Reginald, almost as tall as Delacroix. “You reckon George III was so polite when he surrendered to Washington?”
“Do you have something to squeal about, Mr Simon?” Sir Reginald inclined his head. “Should I put your thumbs in a vice?”
“Clever dick too, eh? You know I deal with men twice as clever as you and way more polite whenever I fly into London, and they all think they’re gonna run roughshod over the colonial, and you know what they all end up doing when I’m through talking to them? They bend over, and give me everything I want.” Billy Ray towered even more. “So go ahead clever dick, ask your questions, I’ll just carry on working.” He pulled out a slate from his pocket. “I can text and testify.” He stepped back and fell into one of the conference chairs, swivelling on it and swinging his feet up on the table. He was texting before he even sat down.