It was still early for the airport, but it occurred to me that I could beat rush hour if I started right away. So I went across to the subway stop and got on the A train. It was a long ride and acutely tedious. I had forgotten to get a paper. But I could congratulate myself on saving five dollars on the JFK express. At Rockaway Boulevard I got out and waited for the train to Howard Beach. Then another change for the bus and then the TWA terminal.
I checked in and gave up my bag after taking the books out of it. There were hours left to kill and I exhausted the shops rather quickly. At an Olde English Pub in the terminal I consumed a vile excuse for a London broil and drank a couple of beers, which made me sleepy.
Now there was nothing at all to do but wait. I left the restaurant and parked myself in a leatherette chair near my gate. Muzak and the droning flight announcements hit me like Phenobarbital, and soon I felt much like a switched-off machine, an acceptable state. My flight boarded at twenty to seven. Kevin had booked me a window seat. Sweet of him, I thought. But there was some sort of tower delay and by the time the plane took off it was completely dark.
I turned down the meal and drank midget bottles of bourbon through the dinner service. Afterward I declined the movie also and instead read a bit of the thriller I’d bought the day before, so long ago it seemed. Small-time gangsters were murdering each other in Detroit, very relaxing. In a half hour I closed the book and put out the light. I was nowhere and it was no time and even my personality had been left behind somewhere along the way. Probably it would turn up to meet me in Rome, but by then its character might have changed. A change is as good as a holiday ...
But I woke up before the flight was over, with a clutching fear that I had lost something. Or rather I had hidden something, and now I couldn’t remember where or even what it was. I searched myself and found everything I was supposed to have: addresses, ticket, passport, checks, money. By then there was no chance of sleeping anymore. I ordered a cup of coffee and cracked the blind on my window.
Outside the airplane, the sky was melting into gray. I set my watch ahead to Rome time.
Once, I was very good at hiding things.
The sealed film cans. WARNING EXPOSED FILM OPEN IN DARK ROOM ONLY. Too risky, though, for more than once or twice.
Inside cameras or other items of equipment. Also risky, and only good for a small-volume, high-gain load.
The double suitcase switch. Almost one hundred percent risk free for the carrier. But there’s a better than average chance of losing the package.
And later there were other and better schemes. With Kevin as producer and me as head technician. But that had been a long time ago and this trip I had nothing to hide or recover.
So what did I have to be nervous about? Well, maybe it was just that there were about two more hours to Rome and I wasn’t going to be able to sleep and there was nothing to do but rattle the bones in the closet. But the skeleton that came strolling out this time wasn’t Kevin and it wasn’t Lauren. It was Jerry Hansen, who really was dead and had been for four years.
Jerry Hansen was twenty-three when I was thirty-five and he had just come out of NYU film school with three or four nice-looking sixteen-millimeter shorts and some impressive abilities as a cameraman and a naïve but consuming desire to become a director. Jerry Hansen got his diploma and walked all over town, dropping off his résumé, much as Kevin and I had done ten or twelve years before. But by the time Jerry got around to it, Kevin had rented a cubbyhole in the West Forties under the name of Chameleon International Filmworks, and this was one of the places Jerry dropped into.
If Jerry’s experience was the typical one, his visit to Chameleon would have been the brightest spot in a weary and frustrating day. Because on your first trip, you never get past the receptionist. The receptionist is always a woman and always young and usually gorgeous and she has on a pair of shoes worth more than your annual income, and in the couple of years she’s had her job she’s brushed off hundreds of star graduates from film school. She tells you the production manager is in California, and you hand her the résumé, and after the first few times you practically run for the door so as not to see what she does with it
The worst part, in my judgment, is how your feet get terribly blistered and sore. But I have a high tolerance for humiliation, or used to in those days.
Kevin didn’t have any receptionist. Chameleon was a one-and-a-half-man operation, if you count my peripheral involvement. Kevin had an answering machine and that was it, so he didn’t have any buffer when Jerry Hansen knocked on the door. Also he was between projects and he had quarreled with his last camera crew. Also he liked Jerry, who was a likable guy.
I wasn’t working with Kevin so much by then. I had worked my way around to an editor’s card and I was happy enough with that. It brought a lot less confusion and slightly better hours and a significantly smaller number of people who could jerk me around. Cutting was mostly an affair between me and the equipment, and I liked it that way. I was married by then, even if we weren’t exactly living together, and the security was appealing too. As for the other side of the business, I’d been retired for a couple of years. Not to mention qualms of conscience, the older I got the less I liked the idea of big jail, and the longer you keep doing a thing the more probable it is that someone will find out about it.
But I was still on the board of directors of Chameleon International Filmworks. In point of fact, I was the board of directors. And it still felt good to get a camera in my hands from time to time.
I liked Jerry Hansen too, once I met him, a couple of months later, when Kevin had his new thing cooking. He was eager and smart and seemed reliable enough to handle the heavy pressure of an understaffed shoot. There was a touch of avuncular interest on my side too, since he quite reminded me of myself at that age.
So the board of Chameleon International Filmworks approved the hiring of Jerry Hansen as second cameraman, first camera AC, and general “step ‘n’ fetchit” for the making of a pilot for cable TV. On spec. I won’t say anything about the concept except that it was as dumb and pointless as the best of them. The production end was one of those nifty bits of prestidigitation which have brought Kevin a certain amount of success by this time and will probably bring him a lot more before he’s done. The actors were getting paid out of profits. Jerry Hansen was getting a little over lunch money, a lot of promises, and a nice new line for his résumé. A couple of students would PA for a credit line. Kevin had the cash for film stock and rentals and the sound man, an old connection of ours who was known only as the Sparrow. You actually wrote out checks to him that said “Sparrow” and nothing else. He was a little odd, but sound men run to peculiar anyway, and he was good and patient and not too expensive and he would work without a boom man if it was in any way possible. I was first cameraman and I was getting paid too, after I explained to Kevin that I was too old and too busy to work for free.
A skeleton crew like that and you love each other or kill each other. And nobody got killed on this shoot, at least not right away. The Sparrow and Kevin and I already could work together with the efficiency of a single organism. Jerry Hansen fit in well, better than might have been expected. He knew what he was doing, but not so well that he couldn’t follow directions. He learned fast and he had enormous stamina. So I loved him. We all did.
It certainly wasn’t Jerry’s fault that the project ran out of money. If anyone was to blame it was Kevin, but you always run out of money anyway, it’s rule number one. And Kevin had to take all the heat, which was mainly coming from the actors at first, some of whom were beginning to make union noises, though it was a bit late in the game for that. Kevin used up what was left of his psychological credit convincing them that everything would be okay.
Did I know what was coming? Sure I did. But knowing my reservations on the subject, Kevin talked to Jerry first. I can just imagine how it went.
… See, Jerry, this is a very expensive business, you understand that … See, Jerry, we got bad cash f
low problems right now ...
Well, Jerry was in for the distance anyway. He needed the picture to get finished. Besides, he loved us too by then. If the basic idea bothered him any I never heard about it. I don’t think he did any blushing and shrinking.
I did, though, when Kevin got around to me. And when I found out he was talking about dope I got really disgusted. You move enough dope to make anything and it takes up a lot of room. Which I pointed out to Kevin.
He’d already set up the buy, Kevin told me. Besides, I didn’t really have to get involved. Jerry Hansen had already agreed to do the traveling.
Then I got more mad. I didn’t think Kevin should be using Jerry for things like that. He was too young. He might choke. Kevin was manipulating him.
He wasn’t any younger than we used to be, Kevin suggested. And Kevin would go along to make sure everything went smooth.
So who needed me?
Advice, Kevin told me. I threw him out.
Then Jerry Hansen called me and said that he was working on a special project with Kevin and he wasn’t sure about some of the details and Kevin had said that maybe I could help out. Wasn’t I pleased with that recommendation? I bit my tongue, however. Jerry was getting into the fun part, being circumspect on the telephone.
In my concerned avuncular mode I asked him if he’d considered other options.
No, he said, he was committed to the picture.
Committed to the picture, Lord God.
I screamed at Kevin for setting me up that way and then we made up and I was in. It wasn’t qualitatively different from any of the others, because I was always just the planner. I don’t have the nerves to carry. I shiver and shake crossing borders even when I don’t have anything, which is always. But I was a good planner and this was one of my better plans and it really should have worked.
Nova Scotia, that was the first point, even though it was halfway around the world from the point of origin. I insisted and since I was the expert who never failed, Kevin finally went along even though it cost more time and trouble. It’s always better to pick a point of entry where people aren’t overly worried about your kind. Off-loading in Nova Scotia was not going to be much of a problem.
Transport. Jerry Hansen, financed by Kevin, became owner of a sixty-nine Buick with a fresh paint job and a few thousand more miles left in the engine and a lot of wasted space which I redesigned to suit his evil purpose. I drew the pictures and even found a guy in Brooklyn to do the work. Jerry would drive and Kevin would ride and after the bay crossing they would be home free.
We sat down, the three of us, with the maps and the diagrams and so forth, and talked and argued until there seemed to be no uncertainties left. Jerry was alert but he didn’t seem overconfident and by the time they left I was reasonably sure that it would be okay. It would have been too, if not for the dogs.
It was ten days or two weeks before I heard anything. They’d gone up fast and got leisurely once they were on the island. The plan had them masquerading as a couple of buddies on a camping trip, and they had the clothes and equipment to play the part. I wasn’t in touch because I didn’t want to be. Then Jerry Hansen made all the papers by getting himself shot dead while resisting arrest at the stateside end of the crossing.
It was a small item and the story was dead two days later when Kevin showed up at my door. He’d spent most of the interim sitting in the back of a bus, but he didn’t much look it. He was clean and shaved and seemed very calm, though I found out later that he’d come to me because he was afraid to go home at first.
“So what the hell happened?” was the first thing I said. Kevin asked for a drink, not very typical. The story by him was simple enough. Everything had happened according to specs until the ferry to Portland. Then, at U. S. Customs there, they turned up with a pack of K-9 dope-sniffing dogs. Kevin didn’t know why and I didn’t either. The most they could have been looking for were personal-use busts on tourists, nothing like what they got. Oh happy day for the K-9 patrol.
“But what about Jerry?” I said then. “Nobody needs to be dead, a deal like this.”
“I know,” Kevin said. “He choked. It was like you said. I should have listened to you.”
“Choked how?”
“He ran,” Kevin said. “He just … ran. The dogs pointed and he hopped out of the car and took off. They gave him warning shots and he didn’t stop and that was it. “
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
Well, now. Kevin finished his drink. It turned out that Kevin hadn’t been in the car at all. Kevin had boarded the ferry and left it on foot and had not been anywhere near the car on either crossing.
I asked him why that was. Kevin told me that it had just felt like the right thing to do at the time.
“We killed Jerry Hansen,” I said.
“He killed himself,” Kevin said, and gave me a careful look.
“Hey,” he said. “I feel as bad as you.”
We sat there for a minute until Kevin thought it was time to change the subject.
“God,” he said. “I’m really in the hot seat now. I borrowed money for this deal, you know.”
Kevin was wrong. It wasn’t time to change the subject yet. I snatched him out of his seat and pinned him to the wall with my left hand and smashed three holes in the Sheetrock beside his head with my right fist. Cut hell out of my hand and if I’d hit him even once I think it would have killed him. To the credit of his nerve or foolishness, he wasn’t overly impressed, though he did go a little pale. I let him go and backed off.
“What’s that all about?” Kevin said, brushing off his shoulders.
“Tell me one thing,” I said. “On the way over. Did you see any dogs?”
Kevin didn’t answer.
“Did you see any dogs on the way over?” I said again. I was having trouble keeping my voice level.
“It’s not my fault,” Kevin said. “I don’t see why you think it’s my fault any more than yours.” And he never did answer the question. Kevin was never very much for direct lying. He always just sort of omitted things.
That was pretty much the end of me and Kevin. Up until the day before yesterday, that is. I had precious little sympathy for the spot he was in, though events seemed to prove that it really was a tight one. Kevin had borrowed money, and borrowed it from some extremely serious people. Well, at the time I thought I wouldn’t be sorry to see him get his kneecaps smashed or his fingers kicked in a drawer, so I didn’t offer any help or comfort. But in the end nothing like that happened. Kevin scuttled the picture and bankrupted Chameleon (for that part I had to sign papers) and I don’t know what else he may have had to do, but he came through it all without a visible scratch, untouched, so far as I could see, in either body or soul.
I had not touched him either, though in the technical sense I’d come quite close, and four years later I was still uncertain why I had jumped him in the first place. Certainly it had been far and away too late for me to make any useful defense of the innocence of Jerry Hansen. Maybe that was why I’d sheered off and hit the wall instead.
Because I couldn’t prove and didn’t even really know that Kevin stepped aside deliberately to let Jerry Hansen take the fall. That was only a suspicion, a feeling I had. Maybe Kevin had only had a feeling too, that something would go wrong and that it would be serious and that he would do well to step out of its way. That’s the same sort of instinct that gets you out of the path of a speeding car, and Kevin had all these reflexes refined and sharpened to a rare degree. And a reflex never stops to worry about bystanders. So it might be beside the point to accuse Kevin of any sort of deliberation at all, or give him credit for it either.
If that was the case, I reflected, sleepless on the plane to Rome, then Kevin was innocent, and could only be called innocent in any transaction he happened to be involved in. Though this innocence of his was simply a vacancy, a vacuum. And the winds which whirled around it could do all sorts of damage to anyone in the near vicinity of Kevin.<
br />
We killed Jerry Hansen. With my relentless flair for the morbid, I have often rehearsed the scene. I am confident that Kevin braced him well. Kevin made him feel and trust that fortune would favor him on this business, as it always seemed to favor Kevin’s ventures. Kevin would have made Jerry Hansen believe that he was untouchable too.
Then Jerry Hansen would have been so thoroughly convinced of it that he would not have believed in the dogs when they turned up, nor in the police or their guns or their power to harm him. So I can imagine him sliding out of the car and beginning to run, without any sense of genuine danger, in perfect faith that Kevin’s luck would save him.
But unfortunately, Kevin had only enough luck to cover himself on that particular day.
Kevin was and remains a very lucky guy, and I have always wondered how fully he was aware of his luck and how much he could control it, if at all. I was wondering about that again when the stewards pulled up all the blinds and startled the drowsy passengers with the sudden light of Italian morning. So I forgot about Kevin and his quirks. Now, with the Rome airport floating up under the wings, if I was going to worry about anyone’s luck it would be my own. And for the moment I felt lucky enough, equal to whatever wrinkles and twists might be waiting for me down below, in Rome, and Come sei bella, Roma, as the old song runs, amore mio.
PART II
“COME SEI BELLA” AND SO FORTH
6
EVER SINCE AIRLINE PILOTS started to be younger than I am, since they have begun to resemble careless teenage drivers, I have been slightly nervous of flying in airplanes. But what really makes me nervous is the guards in the Rome airport, who really are teenagers, who have nifty berets and sashes and spit-shined boots, and who carry teensy submachine guns, usually at the ready. I stand in the long line for the passport check, my hands already beginning to tremble a bit (though this time I’m innocent), and I think, if one of these guys trips, it’s all over.
So I was really very uncomfortable when two of them came and pulled me out of the line. They were polite, but definite, and don’t forget the machine guns. They spoke to me in Italian, which I was too flustered to understand.
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