“Is this a good idea?” Juliette said, watching as Golonski helped Mercy up onto the low wall that ran around the top of the tower, held her hand for a few seconds, then let go. Even from below it was easy to see how the wind blew against her dress and her hair. “That does not look safe to me at all.” At that moment, Mercy swayed and grasped at the air in front of her, as if she might fall. But as Juliette, Gabe, and Devlin gasped, they could see Mercy laugh as if it were a joke and jump down with a dramatic flourish.
“I’m sorry, did you say something?” Carson answered, her eyes on the screen.
“I said, do you think that’s safe?”
“No,” she said, her voice riddled with sarcasm. “We’ve loosened every other brick and greased the rest. Of course it’s safe. Do you see the nets? Do you see the slides? Do you see the wire around her waist? I know it is a burden to feel you are the most insightful person in the room, but we do actually know what we’re doing. With any luck,” she said, speaking to Joseph and the cinematographer, “we can get this in a few takes. They’ve both been unbelievably great today.”
“If you don’t mind them going totally off script,” grumbled Joseph.
“Not totally,” Carson said soothingly. “Not in every scene. Not in spirit anyway. But I think Ben’s right to let them have a few extra takes to experiment. When the nominations come rolling in, you can take full credit.”
Golonski disappeared from the screen and a minute or two later emerged from the tower, hands deep in his jacket pockets, and took his seat behind the monitors.
“Can you hear me?” he said, as he put on his headset. “You all right, Mercy?” Mercy nodded. “Is the wind too much?” Mercy shook her head. “Well, we’re going to follow your lead, my darling. So if you feel uncomfortable up there or change your mind about the double, all you have to do is say so. Otherwise, it’s up to you and Michael, right?” Mercy nodded.
Taking off the headset, he turned to Usher, who was standing back a bit, in the shadows. “What the fuck is she on anyway? Besides the booze?”
Usher pursed his lips in a small regretful way. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d say cocaine and opiates. If I had to guess.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic. You’re pretty useless, aren’t you? Though I must say,” he added, watching as one camera went close on Mercy’s face, with its huge golden eyes and air of tragedy, “she looks amazing. In a haunted, fucked-up kind of way. Which is just what I need. Okay,” he said, putting the headset back on. “Give me places.”
“Places,” commanded the assistant director quietly into his headset, “places.”
“Quiet on the set,” the stage manager yelled, which made Juliette smile despite her concern. A movie, she thought, they’re making a movie, and an embarrassing shiver of excitement twitched her stomach. The AD counted down, “And five, four, three . . .” and they were rolling.
With the wind whipping their hair and clothes, O’Connor’s artist began. He made the case for the secular world, spoke of true love as the one real miracle in a random universe, God’s living pledge to his children. There would be no sin, he insisted, in exchanging one vow for another. But Mercy’s young nun would hear none of it. She acknowledged her love, her passion, and absolved her lover of whatever sin he might have committed, as she, not he, had made the vow that was broken. She loved God too well to return to Roberto’s arms, but she loved Roberto too well to be able to take up the veil again with a shred of honesty. Standing on the wall high above the fatal ground, she evaded his outstretched hands, his pleading words, his anger. She spoke instead of the joy of surrender, which she had now known both with God and man, how one voice cried hold on, and the other, just as strong, called for her to let go. Which one was God?
It was three pages’ worth of dialogue, and even before the midway point, when Mercy climbed onto the wall, Golonski called for take after take. Michael stuttered over a certain phrase, changed it, then changed it again, found a certain hollow-voiced anger that seemed to be working. Mercy slid in tone from heartbreak to borderline madness before falling into a high clear monotone that was full of both rapture and exhaustion. Watching her droop between takes, Juliette wondered if her buzz had worn away; at one point, she saw Mercy slip something into her mouth and assumed it had.
An hour passed, then another. They were closing in on three, and everyone was cracking their necks and stomping their feet to get the circulation going. Carson asked Golonski if he had gotten what he wanted, and he nodded. “Almost,” he said, then called for one more take. “And have some fun with this one.” Mercy smiled, and pulled Michael toward her, whispered something in his ear. He shook his head. She stroked his hair, kissed his mouth, lingering there as if it were painful to part from him, then nodded with a wild beckoning smile. They took their places.
The scene began unfurling like a tapestry brought to life. Though she was cold and bored, though any concern she had had for Mercy’s state of mind had long since vanished in the numbing repetition of the takes, Juliette was suddenly riveted. By O’Connor’s anguish, his character’s increasingly frenzied inability to understand, much less stop, what was happening. By Mercy’s luminous zealotry. Wild and gorgeous, her nun walked a knife’s edge between transcendence and insanity and it was breathtaking to watch, as if an angel stood on the tower wall, reeling between the madness of sexual desire and divine love. Mercy swayed and shivered, flung open her arms, threw back her head as if she were standing on solid ground, not hundreds of feet in the air. As she neared her climactic lines, she began to walk along the wall, her arms held out from either side, like a child on a balance beam, and her voice took on a singsong quality that made the hair on Juliette’s arms rise. When Gabe spoke, she elbowed him in annoyance; she could not bear to miss a word.
“I said,” he hissed, “she’s walking the wrong way.”
“What?”
“Look,” he said, taking Juliette’s headphones off and yanking her away from the mesmerizing glow of the monitor. He pointed up to the top of the tower, where Mercy’s white figure was just visible, heading along the ramparts to the back of the tower.
“There’s no net on the back side,” Gabe said. “No slide. No nothing. She’s supposed to go to her left. She’s supposed to walk toward the front.”
On the monitor, O’Connor pleaded, fell to his knees, while Mercy stood, her hands held out palms-up like the Blessed Mother, the wind whipping her hair into a halo.
“She’s on the wrong side of the tower,” Juliette said to Carson, to Golonski. When neither responded, she pulled Carson’s earphones off.
“What the fuck?”
“Mercy’s on the wrong side of the tower,” Juliette said loudly, pointing up. “She’s supposed to go stage left, she’s moving stage right.” When Carson did not respond instantly, Juliette leaned over to grab Golonski, but the producer yanked her arm back.
“She’s fine,” Carson hissed. “Look at her, she’s totally in control. She’s got spotters, she knows what she’s doing. Just look at her, she’s amazing. They’re amazing. It will be over in a minute and she’s not doing the jump anyway. We’ll add that later with CG.”
Juliette looked around. Everyone on the set was silent, rapt, everyone on the set could see what she saw, what Gabe saw. It was a multimillion-dollar production, being overseen by professionals, involving some of the top names in the business. No one seemed the least bit nervous, no one seemed the least bit concerned. They were all swept away by what was happening, two actors delivering what might be the performance of a lifetime on top of a bell tower in Tuscany.
On screen, Mercy made her final proclamation. Michael’s artist took two small steps forward and held out his hand. Slowly the nun lifted her hand as well, then looked down at him, with one small, anguished, ecstatic glance that turned Juliette’s blood to ice. She had seen that look before, on the fountain in Florence high above a sea of paparazzi.
“Mercy, don’t!” she shouted, all but throwing Carson to th
e ground as she shoved her way to Golonski so she could yell into his mic. “Michael grab her, grab her now, now!” The director promptly cracked Juliette across the jaw. Devlin sprang from nowhere to put him in a headlock and they all watched the monitor as Mercy Talbot turned, her face beatific, her posture perfect, bounced on her toes once, twice, then threw herself into nothingness.
Chapter Fourteen
IT WAS, THEY ALL agreed later, only by the grace of God that O’Connor managed to catch her without going over the side himself. The wire around her waist might have saved her had Mercy not decided, about seven takes in, that it was driving her crazy and, unbeknownst to anyone, taken it off. When Michael tried to explain how he had done it, what actual physical movements he had made, he couldn’t. But somehow he managed to spring from a kneeling position, throw himself against the wide ledge, and hook his hands under her arms just as she went down, down to where there was no safety net, no inflatable slide, nothing but two hundred feet of empty space ending in earth and rock.
Amid screams and gasps, he yanked her up and over the wall, where she promptly collapsed into what could only be called a disassociative state. “I don’t understand, why did you do that?” she kept asking blankly, as crew members rushed to cover her and Michael with blankets. Both on the ground and on the tower bedlam ruled. “What the fuck! What the fuck!” Golonski screamed over and over, nodding like a preprogrammed bobble-head until Joseph Andrews finally, and with visible pleasure, slapped him. Twice. Beside them, Carson was strangely silent, staring wildly at the best boy as he vomited into a tub of geraniums.
Not that Juliette had time to notice much; the moment her heart began beating again, she was shoving past everyone to get to the tower. Thudding up the steps, she soon became part of a swarm, bodies panting with adrenaline, fueled with anxiety. She burst out onto the roof and in two steps was by Michael’s side. But he held up his hand in a warning gesture, and so she went down on her knees, as close to him as the circle he had drawn would allow. Usher was instantly hovering over Mercy, unhooking his ubiquitous black satchel so he could lift her. But Gabe cut him off with such deadly authority that the rock star fell back, stumbling over Juliette. Determined to remain as close to Mercy as possible, Usher followed Gabe back down the steps.
Vials of Xanax appeared from the pockets of virtually every person present. Grizzled cameramen and burly electricians wiped their pale and sweaty brows, their hands shaking as they passed a bottle that had appeared out of nowhere. Even O’Connor took a swig. He relaxed just a little but still he did not move.
“How did you know?” he asked finally, still not quite looking Juliette in the face. “How did you know she would jump?”
“I saw her face,” she said, and when he shook his head in self-recrimination she explained, briefly, the incident in Florence.
“Why would she do something like that?” he asked softly. “Why would she want to kill herself, in front of everyone?”
“I don’t think she wanted to kill herself,” Juliette said, actually surprised by the suggestion. “I think she was fucked up and carried away and didn’t realize she was on the wrong side of the tower.”
“I didn’t, either.” His tone was bitter. “I was so caught up in the scene, in what we were doing, that I just forgot.” He looked at her finally and his face was blank with disbelief. “I forgot the camera and the mic, forgot she was a thousand feet off the ground, I forgot she was Mercy Talbot and a total mess, I forgot that we were even making a movie. There was just the wind and the sound of her voice, and my heart was breaking . . .” He looked at Juliette as if she weren’t there.
“It’s okay,” Juliette said soothingly, putting a hand on the back of his neck. “Everyone else forgot, too. Everyone except Gabe. We were all watching the artist and the nun, but he was still watching Mercy.”
“When I heard you, for a minute I didn’t even know who you were. But I did see her turn and I thought, Wait. And then I saw her bounce and I thought, She’s not supposed to actually jump, but I didn’t want to break character when it was going so well.” He laughed harshly. “God forbid I break character when it was going so well.”
“But you did,” she said reassuringly. “You saved her life.”
He shook his head. “I have no idea how I did it. It’s like I blacked out or something.”
“Well, that’s okay, because I’m pretty sure they’ve got it all on film.”
“Dear God,” O’Connor said, rising to his feet as suddenly as he had sat down. “Somebody better tell Golonski to destroy that, and fast. Or it’ll be making the rounds on YouTube, and that’s all this poor screwed-up picture needs.”
Following him, Juliette tripped over something. It took her a few moments to realize it was the very thing she had been trying so hard to get her hands on. Picking up Usher’s black bag, which was surprisingly heavy, she stuck it under her sweater.
As they came to the bottom of the tower, Michael was swallowed by a swarm of crew led by Carson; as they offered him water and wine and ecstatic praise, Juliette stepped back into the shadows inside the tower. Perching on a cask of Vin Santo, beneath the salty silhouettes of pork legs slowly aging into prosciutto, she pulled Usher’s bag from under her sweater and felt along the lining until she found the small secret zipper and opened it.
No drugs, no weapons, just a series of neatly wrapped stacks of euros.
He probably could buy Cerreta, she thought, noting the denomination (five hundreds) and trying to do the math while struggling against disappointment. What had she expected to find in there? Ten pounds of heroin? A letter confessing to Lloyd’s murder? Mercy had said Usher was asking for a weekly stipend. He had asked if she knew who the local drug connection was. Had Usher been planning to set up shop over here?
She slung the bag over her shoulder and assumed a casual expression as she left the tower, feigning relief when she caught sight of Usher hurrying toward her.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I thought I was going to have to search high and low. Here,” she said, handing him the satchel. “I guess in all the craziness you dropped this.”
Michael must have made his fears known; Carson not only confiscated the memory cards from the cameras, she confiscated the cameras. And everyone’s cell phones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, and personal cameras. Anything and everything that could have possibly recorded an image of that moment, she collected, and directed two personal assistants to find and delete any images from that night.
“You all signed confidentiality agreements,” she said when a few people protested. “And part of that agreement, if you bothered to read it, was that you not bring any recording device to this shoot. Frankly, I am shocked to see how many of you have disregarded this rule. So you can either let us go through them and return them to you, or you can relinquish them permanently.”
Mercy had been taken back to her room in Casa Padua, where she emerged from her state of shock and became coherent enough to shake her head in bewilderment. The new pages had said stage right, she insisted. No, she hadn’t thought to look beneath her because the new pages, the ones she had gotten a few hours before call, had said she was to move stage right.
“And I double-checked with Joseph and Golonski,” she said. “I asked them if these changes were final and they said yes.”
According to the director and the screenwriter, the stage directions had never been changed and phrases like “understandably distracted,” “grief over her mother,” and “lit up out of her mind” were making their way through the relief-drunk conversation until Mercy, with a snort of indignation, sent a PA in search of the pages. When he found them, they said, most distinctly, that she was to move stage left.
“These are different pages,” she insisted. “They’re not even the same color. The ones I had were greener. Remember, Juliette, you were there, you saw them . . .”
Juliette shook her head. “I didn’t. I mean, I saw new pages, but I didn’t read them.” She looked at the bright yellow page
s, yellow like a tennis ball. “The color looks the same to me, but you did say they had changed the staging.”
“See?” Mercy said triumphantly.
“Mercy,” Carson began patronizingly, her eyes looking over Mercy’s head at Golonski in silent complicity, “you can’t blame the script. You were in an altered state. The wind, the scene . . .”
“But you saw me going in the wrong direction.” Mercy paused, her face pale. “Why didn’t anyone try to stop me?”
To this, there was no answer. Carson and Golonski made replies, unfinished sentences about not realizing she had removed her safety harness, how they had been more than happy to have a stunt double, about being transfixed by her work, how they assumed she was making an artistic judgment call. But the words were so clearly attempts to defend the indefensible that even Carson seemed to lose her poise. Finally, however, she pulled herself together.
“Mercy,” Carson said, firmly turning the tables, “you’re acting like you fell. But you didn’t fall, you jumped. And nowhere in any version of the script were you supposed to jump. Not to mention your decision to take off your safety harness. So why don’t you tell us this: what exactly were you trying to do up there?”
With great deliberation, Mercy pulled a bottle of pills from somewhere in the depths of her costume and swallowed two.
“What I’m always trying to do,” she said. “Now get the hell out of here. All of you.”
With equal parts reluctance and relief, Carson and Golonski filed out. Juliette wavered in the doorway. Gabe, however, sat down in the window seat, picked up a paperback from the adjacent bookshelf, and waved Juliette away. Mercy didn’t acknowledge him one way or another but that didn’t seem to disturb Gabe in the least. He just leaned back and read his book.
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