“What a brave girl. You don’t give two pins, do you?”
“Was I all right?”
“Better than that! You looked so very pleased and wicked, like a little spoilt child. It was so pretty of you, so apropos.”
“Will Giancarlo be happy with me?”
“I have no idea. He probably thinks you’re a terrible brat to ham it up that way. But don’t worry, it made the night for the rest of us.” Novak chuckled. She hadn’t seen Novak truly pleased before; he was like a man who’d just pulled off a trick billiard shot with a rubber cue. “Giancarlo will come around, once he hears them talk about you. Giancarlo’s very clever in that way. He never judges anything until he sees what it’s done to his public.”
Maya tumbled hard from her crest of elation. The real world felt so deflated suddenly. Quotidian, wearied, flat. “I did the best that I could.”
“Of course you did, of course you did,” he soothed. “You mustn’t cry, darling, it’s all right now. It was very nice for us, it was different. They hire the pros to walk properly for them, and you were very sincere, they can’t buy that.” Novak took her elbow and led her backstage to a watercooler.
He deftly filled a cup with pristine distillate and gave it to her, one-handed. “It’s so remarkable,” he mused. “You can’t show a garment to advantage, of course, because you’re only a little beginner. But you truly have that look! Seeing you there, it was like archival video. Some Yankee girl from the twenties, in her too-tight shoes, so touchingly proud of her wonderful gown. What déjà vu, what mono no aw arel. It was uncanny.”
Maya wiped at her tears, and tried to smile. “Oh, I’m so bad, I’ve ruined that wonderful job Philippe did on my eyes.”
“No, no, don’t fret now.” Novak stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Maya, we’re going to do a proper photo shoot. You and I. We can bring your Philippe in on the job, we can bill for him. When you are working on assignment for Giancarlo, it’s very nice to have some good expensive people you can bill for.… ”
“I should go thank Giancarlo. Shouldn’t I? He really did me a huge favor, letting me go on. I mean, compared to all these professionals … And they were so kind to me, they weren’t jealous at all.”
“They are veterans. You’re far too young to make them jealous. You can thank your friend Giancarlo on the net. It’s better for us to leave now.” Novak smiled. “You’ve beaten them, darling, you beat them like sick old dogs. We’ll go now. It’s always best to leave them wanting more.”
“Well, I’ll get dressed, then.”
“Wear that gown. You can keep it. They had to hurry, so they had to ruin it.”
“Well, I’d better return this incredible wig at least.”
“Take the wig with us, we’ll hold the wig. Just to make sure they call.”
She managed to get rid of the pinching shoes. When she emerged from the dressing room she found Novak clawing one-handed at the air in the corridor, as if fighting off a phantom horde of gnats. He hadn’t gone mad, he was only using the menus on his spex. He was calling them a taxi.
Novak led her deftly past half a dozen random well-wishers backstage. The professionals all seemed quite pleased and amused with her, in their rigid and terrifying fashion. They escaped the amphitheater by a stage exit. It was cold outside, cold enough to frost the breath. The sweat leapt off her bare neck and shoulders into the Roman night. She shivered violently.
When they rounded the corner of the Kio, the paparazzi spotted them. A dozen of them dashed up, yelling at her in Italiano. They were the youngest of the paparazzi, which accounted for the fact that they were willing to dash. Some of them held up ragged halos of fiber-optic flash wire, drowning the damp pavement in sudden gouts of light. Maya smiled at them, flattered. When they saw this response they yelled more loudly and with greater enthusiasm.
“Does anyone here speak English?” Maya said.
The paparazzi, circling them and staring through their gleaming lenses, held a quick shouted consultation. A young woman hurriedly shoved her way through from the back. “I do, I speak English! Will you really talk to us?”
“Sure.”
“Great! We all want to know how you pulled that off.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, how did you get your big break?” said the girl, hastily plucking the translation cuff from her ear. She was American. “Did you do it yourself?”
“No, of course not.”
“Oh, so you owe it to your escort here? Does he sponsor you? What’s your relationship with this guy exactly? And what’s your name, and who is he, anyway?”
“I’m Maya and this is Mr. Josef Novak. There’s certainly nothing illicit about our relationship.”
Novak laughed. “Don’t tell them that! I’m deeply touched to be a source of scandal.”
“How do you know Giancarlo Vietti? How old are you? Where are you from?”
“Don’t tell them anything,” Novak advised, “let the poor creatures feed on mystery.”
“Don’t be that way,” begged the young paparazza. She forced a business card on Maya. The flimsy card showed nothing but a name and a net-address. “Can I interview you later, Signorina Maya? Where are you from?”
“Where are you from?” Maya said.
“California.”
“What city?”
“The Bay.”
Maya stared at her. “Wait a minute! I can’t believe this! I know you! You’re Brett!”
Brett laughed. “Sorry, that’s not my name.”
“But it is! Your name is Brett and you had a boyfriend named Griff and I bought one of your jackets once.”
“Well, my name’s not Brett, and if anybody had one of my jackets it sure wouldn’t be a runway model for Giancarlo Vietti.”
“You are Brett, you had a rattlesnake! What on earth are you doing here in Roma, Brett? And what have you done to your hair?”
“Look, my name’s Natalie, okay? And what does it look like I’m doing here? I’m hanging around on a cold pavement outside a couture show trying to pick up scraps, that’s what.” Brett pulled off her spex and stared at Maya in pained surprise. “How come you know so much about me? Do I really know you? How? Why?”
“But it’s me, Brett! It’s me, Maya,” Maya said, and she shuddered from head to foot. A finger’s width of glue popped loose on her back. She was freezing. And she suddenly felt very bad. Nauseated, dizzy.
“You don’t know me,” Brett insisted. “I never saw you before in my life! What’s going on in there? Why are you trying to fool me?”
“The cab’s here,” Novak said.
“Don’t go now!” Brett grabbed her arm. “D’you know there’s a million girls who’d kill to do what you just did? How’d you do that? What do I have to do, to get that lucky? Tell me!”
“Don’t touch her!” Novak barked. Brett jumped back as if shot.
“If you knew what it was like in there,” Novak told her, “you’d go home tomorrow! Go lie on the beach, be a young woman, live, breathe! There’s nothing for you there. They made sure of that long before you were born.”
“I feel so bad, Josef,” Maya wailed.
“Get in the taxi.” Novak shoveled her inside. The doors shut. Brett stood stunned on the pavement, then jumped out and hammered at the window, shouting silently. The taxi pulled away.
Next morning she found she’d gotten write-ups on the net. There were white tuberoses from Vietti and eight calls from industry journalists. One of the journalists had called from the hotel lobby. He was camping out there.
They had breakfast smuggled into Novak’s room. “You’re not at the point where you can talk to real journalists,” Novak told her. “Journalists are the class enemies of celebrity models. They become hormonally excited when they discover any fact that will cause you deep personal pain.”
“I’m not a celebrity model.” She certainly didn’t feel the part. She’d had to shred the couture gown. It had required cleansing cream, a long-handled l
oofah, and half an hour to scrub the glue from her skin. She hadn’t dared to sleep in the intelligent wig, and in the morning she discovered it limp and dead. She couldn’t even manage to boot its software.
“That’s true enough, but a pile of sand is not yet Bohemian crystal, my dear.”
“I want to be a photographer, not a model.”
“Don’t be hasty. You should learn how to work to the camera before you torment other people with a lens. A few location shots will teach you proper sympathy for all your future victims.” Novak patted his grizzled lips with a napkin, stood, and began emptying his travel case on the bed.
The false bottom of his case held two deep layers of gray equipment foam. Four sets of highly specialized spex. Lenses in 35 mm, 105, 200, 250. Two ductile fisheyes and a photogrammeter. A tripod. Filters. Two camera bodies. Sync cording. Ten meters of tunable laser fiber-optic lighting cord. Gaffer tape. A fat graphics notebook with a high-powered touch-up wand and backup storage. Multi-head photofloods, roll-up reflector cards, filter frames, adapter rings, matte foil, a pocket superconductor.
Maya blinked. “I thought you said you hadn’t brought proper equipment.”
“I said I hadn’t brought equipment to the show,” Novak said. “Anyway, this gear is nothing much. Since I was forced to come here, I thought I might shoot—I don’t know—a few of those lovely Roman manhole covers.… But a couture shoot! Oh, what a challenge.”
“Won’t Vietti help us? He’s got a million flunkies on staff, he ought to give us anything we want.”
“Darling, Giancarlo and I are professionals. The game between the two of us has rules. When I win, I give Giancarlo exactly what I want to give Giancarlo. He shuts up and pays me. When I lose, Giancarlo offers me the full and terrible burden of his tactful advice and help.”
“Oh.”
Novak examined his bedspread arsenal of digital photon-benders and tugged thoughtfully at the bulbous end of his large, aged, cartilaginous male nose. “A couture session is no mere still life, it truly needs a team. You don’t take couture shots, you make them. The stylist for the clothing, the set dresser … a decent studio service is invaluable for props. A location scout … Hair designer, cosmetician very certainly …”
“How do we get all these people?”
“We hire them. After that, we bill Giancarlo for their services. That’s the good part. The bad part is I have no decent contacts in Roma. And, of course, since I am devastated by business failure, I have no capital.”
She gazed at him thoughtfully. She knew with deep cellular certainty that Novak had plenty of money, but extracting it from him would be like drawing ten liters of blood. “I think I have a little money,” she said tentatively.
“You do? That’s exciting news, my dear.”
“I have a contact in Bologna who might help us. She has a lot of friends in virtuality and artifice.”
“Young people? Amateurs.”
“Yes, Josef, young people. You know what that means, don’t you? It means they’ll work for us for nothing, and then we can bill for whatever we like.”
“Well,” Novak allowed thoughtfully, “they’re still amateurs, but it never hurts to ask.”
“I can ask. I’m pretty sure I can ask. Before I can ask, though, I’m going to need some equipment for asking. Do you happen to know a nice discreet netsite in Roma that runs defunct protocols?”
That question was no challenge for Josef Novak. “The Villa Curonia,” Novak said at once. “Of course, the old and wicked Villa Curonia. What a lovely atmosphere for a location shoot.”
The Villa Curonia was a former private residence in Roma’s Monteverde Nuovo. The shaggy green heads of indiscreet palm trees loomed behind its glass-topped brick walls. A certain eccentricity in the facade suggested that its builder had been some opium-smoking D’Annunzio aesthete with aristo relations in the highest and creepiest circles of the early twentieth-century Curia.
Inside, the villa had an arch-heavy interior courtyard with a dry fountain and pedestaled statue of Hermes, perfect for the midnight meetings of bagmen. The three-story east wing was riddled like cheesecloth with power leads and fiber optics, all scuffed parquet flooring and silent ivory corridors and monster antique virch-sets squatting like toads behind the locked doors of servants’ cubbyholes. Two comically sinister brothers named Khornak were running the place, for heaven only knew what sub-rosa cabal of backers, and under their aegis the ancient building had achieved the silk-padded atmosphere of a digital bordello. A Roman house of assignation for man-machine liaisons.
Novak was busy and methodical, Maya busy and nearly manic. Benedetta proved very helpful. Benedetta was tireless once she perceived a link to her own ambitions.
Brett arrived on a rented bicycle around three in the afternoon. Maya ushered her past the sidewalk guard post and the glowering Khornak brothers.
“This place is so amazing, it’s so refined,” Brett marveled. “It was so nice of you to ask me here.”
“You can stop gushing at me just any time now, Brett. Tell me something—tell me how you got to Roma.”
“You really want to know? Well, my first stop in Europe was Stuttgart, but the rents are so high there and the people are so snobby and full of themselves, so I just started doing a kind of wanderjahr, and, well, all roads lead to Roma, don’t they? And nobody was interested in what I could do with clothes, so I kept asking around and I got this kind of piecework spex job with this tabloid net, and I hang around on the shows and cafés and sometimes I get lucky and spot somebody who ranks.”
“That’s about what I imagined. You must know a lot of secondhand shops around here, right?”
“You mean clothing stores? Sure. This is Roma, there’s zillions. The Via del Corso, the Via Condotti, you can get all kinds of stuff for cash in Trastevere.… ”
“Josef is upstairs, running through his files in Praha. He’s going to instantiate me some clothes from his files, some clothes from the twenties. That’s the theme of the shoot. You know the style of that period?”
“Well, sure I do, sort of. In the twenties they were real big on, like, camisades and aubades with lastex and tulle and lots of optical fringe ribbon.”
Maya paused. The camisades sounded plausible, but she couldn’t recall having ever worn so much as a centimeter of optical fringe ribbon. “Brett, we’re going to need some props for the session. Something to inspire Josef. He hasn’t worked this way in a long time, so we need something very atmospheric, something very … well, very Glass Labyrinth, very early-Novak. Josef Novak was always very big on the inherent poetry in things … on that very strange intense poetic thingness that certain, uhm, things possess.… You have any real idea what I’m talking about here?”
“I guess so.”
Maya handed her a fat cashcard. Brett checked the register band and her eyes widened.
“Old playing cards,” Maya told her. “Crescent moons. Ladies’ gloves. Colored yarn. Netting. Weird twentieth-century scientific instruments. Obsolete prosthetics. Driftwood. Prisms. Compasses. Brass-tipped walking sticks. Some ratty stuffed animals with scary glass eyes, like minks or weasels or, you know, ermines. Broken windup toys. Do you know what a phonograph was? Well, never mind the phonographs, then. Do you get my general Novak-ish drift here?”
Brett nodded uncertainly.
“Okay, then take that money I just gave you, scout out some junk shops, tell them you’re my stylist. You’re working on my photo shoot for Giancarlo Vietti. Try to borrow whatever you can, rent what you can’t borrow, and don’t buy anything unless you’re willing to keep it yourself. We’re in a big hurry here, so round up any vivid friends that can help you. Bring it all back here to the villa. Travel quick. Forget the bike, use taxis. If you get in trouble, call me. Time is of the essence, and money is basically no object. Understand all that? Okay, get going.”
Brett stood blinking.
“What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just
that it’s so exciting. I’m just so glad to be really doing this.”
“Well, do it quick.”
Brett scampered off. Josef’s first instantiations arrived by courier. They were costumery. They weren’t about comfort or wearability. They were camera props, they were about photons.
Back in the twenties, they had still been very big on natural fibers, but there was no fabric in these costumes. They were all microscopic shirrings and shrinkings and tiny little squirms of extruded plastic. The costumes didn’t breathe well and they rustled loudly when they moved, but they looked angelic. When you pinched or tucked them into place they stayed that way and laughed mockingly at gravity.
“Looks like you got us our money’s worth.”
“The Khornak brothers are robbing us,” groaned Novak. “Sixteen percent transaction fees! Can you believe that?”
Maya peeled a tangerine cape-dress from the top of the heap and held it to herself. “That won’t be a problem as long as they’re discreet.”
“Maya, before we begin this, give me an answer. Why is this being financed through the defunct production company of a dead Hollywood film director?”
“Is it?” Maya said, examining the printed sleeves. “It was supposed to be financed through the student activities budget of a Bolognese technical college.”
“That childish dodge might fool a very impatient tax accountant. It won’t fool me, or these miserable little fences either.”
Maya sighed. “Josef, I happen to have a little grown-up money. A certain grown-up gave it to me, and he really shouldn’t have done that. That money is no good for me, and I have to get rid of it. This villa is a very good place to do that. Isn’t it? This is a black-market underwire netsite. This is Roma, a very old and very wicked town. And this is the fashion industry, where people always spend absurd amounts of money for really silly reasons. If I can’t launder hot money under these circumstances, I’ll never be able to do it.”
“It’s risky.”
“My life is risk. Never mind the stupid money. Show me what beauty is.”
Novak sighed. “This isn’t going to be beauty, darling. I’m very sorry, but it will only be chic.”
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