Ride the Titanic! (17 page)

As if in answer to my question, a sudden explosion of banging and grinding starts up somewhere in the bowels of one of the sub-assemblies, just as a patrician-looking gentleman approaches us. ‘Glides’ is the more accurate verb – because if Adolfo Mercurio, Fincantini shipyard’s senior representative, were wearing a toga instead of his hard hat and pristine white coveralls, he could easily pass for a Roman senator in Caesar’s time.

‘Che pensa, signor?’
Robbie says brightly, his accent impeccable.

The rest of their conversation continues in high-speed Italian, which makes their exchange more operatic than informational; hands flying, eyebrows rising, heads nodding, shoulders shrugging, until finally the curtain rings down and Robbie turns to me.

‘He says that evidence to the contrary, Fincantini intends to ship the first pressure hull subassembly on time and on budget.’

‘Guaranteed?’

More Italian, longer this time, concluding with Mercurio muttering into his walkie-talkie, and seconds later another white-overall-clad engineer bounces onto the catwalk and runs toward us, shouting as he comes closer.

‘Massimo Diliberto at-a-your service,’ he says in highly-accented English. ‘But please call me Max, and it is my great honor and pleasure to escort you fine gentlemen through this wonderful process taking place on our main erection hall.’ He sweeps his hand out like the Pope inviting the crowd to dance in St. Peter’s Square. ‘Please know that I am at the present moment, fully prepared to answer any questions you can conceivably ask.’

A stern-looking Mercurio mutters something to Max, whose face falls and grows somber as he leads us away.

‘What’d he say?’ I whisper.

‘Told Max to cut the small talk. Fat chance of that. This guy loves his submarines almost as much as women.’

‘But we’re only building a pressure hull.’

‘Only,’ Robbie huffs. ‘Like it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.’

The sputtering white-blue glare of arc-welding lights up the interior of Hull Section #388-A, that, when complete, will contain the
Carpathia Rescue
scene, the last scene in the daytime ride. Two welders kneel opposite each other, attaching a massive steel angle bracket to what Max explains will be the maintenance access hatch. Used for outer hull repairs and emergency access, the hatch is the size and shape of an ordinary door. But it still requires the same watertight integrity of the much larger, garage door-sized ingress and egress hatches, located fore and aft, where the
Titanic’s
EMV lifeboats will enter and exit, plus the equally large amidships hatch, where the riders board.

While Max chatters on about how precise the welding solder ‘sweeps’ need to be, both welders stop, flip up their helmets, smile and say in perfect unison, ‘
Buon giorno, signori.’

Max’s proud smile conveys his approval. ‘
Con permeso
, allow me to introduce the Esposito sisters, Christina and Carlotta. The finest seam-welders in all of Italy.’

‘
Ciao, amici
,’ they chime, as if working in Dante’s Inferno with welding torches is the most glamorous thing in the world to do. Max waves them back to work. They turn simultaneously, as if connected by an invisible string, flip down their welding helmets, dial up their torches to white hot heat with a resounding WHOOSH and attack the brackets with a cheerful vengeance.

Max bounces up and down on his heels with unbounded enthusiasm. ‘This, as you see, is perfect proof that we are using our most talented workers for your amazing project. No slackers, no lazy bones, not ever! When such a fantastic project such as
Ride the Titanic
must be accomplished with utmost perfection, it is to the Esposito sisters we turn with complete
confidenza
.’

Robbie cuts short Max’s aria by swamping him with a long technical treatise in Italian, which gives me time to absorb the chaos happening all around me and try to discover the order that must be hiding in its place. Or so I hope.

After years of experience in ride design, I’m no stranger to the world of make-believe. Starting out as stupendous electrical and mechanical jigsaw puzzle pieces sailing around on an ocean of blueprints, mad-as-a-hatter people like me meticulously assembled and installed these disparate parts of theme park rides for Disney,
Five Flags
or Universal Studios.

I’m also no stranger to the kind of construction it takes to do something this, especially at Disney and Universal, where you learn to work amidst piles of unrecognizable parts, mounds of dirt, beeping earth movers and spider-legged cranes swinging steel girders into position – not to mention the later stages, where the ride components are in place and brawn is replaced by brains as the technical crews weave electronic webs in, out and around the rides, filled with LED lights, loudspeakers, polished steel rails, doors that open suddenly to reveal a surprise effect, like nitrogen blasters to startle you, and unexpected dips in the guide track to wake you up. All of which is controlled and regulated by miles and miles of wiring, color-coded red, green, blue, white, striped, and then banded and coiled, bundled and tucked safely out of the way of the swooping, swinging ride vehicles.

What I AM stranger to are the jigsaw pieces sprawled out over Fincantini main assembly hall being part of MY dream and mine alone. And if I can trust Robbie and Max – and I have to at this stage – is that my dream is ever so slowly coming true. That makes all the difference.

A year’s worth of meetings with bankers, sub-contractors, artists, engineers, and public relations people has moved
Industrial Smoke and Mirrors
from a funny-sounding company to a competent organization with a president – me – two vice-presidents – Joe and Lewis – and an ever-growing pyramid of contract employees ranging from motion capture supervisors to EMV design team leaders.

As a former contract worker, I suffered my share of micro-managers and learned the value of staying off talented people’s backs and letting them accomplish their tasks – providing they understand what you want. That’s my job – and Lewis’s and Joe’s. We go forward with the artistic and mechanical aspects of the ride, while Mr. Wu handles the
White Star Grand Hotel
part of the project with Herbie Gottschalk as his advisor and mentor.

Sounds like a plan to me.

By now Max has clambered, monkey-like, high into the inner recesses of the pressure hull section directly beneath the maintenance hatch. He spreads out his hands to show clearance.

‘See how perfectly the
Carpathia’s
decking ties into the anchor points. . .here, here and here.’

‘Any wiggle room?’ I call up to him.

‘
Scusi, signor, ‘
weegel?’’

‘Margin of error,’ I explain. ‘We’re mating these sections in Las Vegas, remember?’

Max beams. ‘Ah, but of course.’ He scampers back down and stands before us. The blue-white arc of the welding cast shifts shadows on the curved surface of the pressure hull as he comes to attention and snaps off a military-sharp salute.

‘
Signor
Mercurio has assigned me to be your personal on-site representative and to absolutely guarantee that what Fincantini promises. . .’ He pounds his chest in a Roman Centurion-style salute. ‘Is precisely what Fincantini will deliver.’

‘Ever been to Vegas?’ I say.

‘Only on the YouTube.’ Max rubs his hands with anticipation. ‘To say I am excited is a lie. I am rather, how you say, completely on top of the moon.’

‘Over the moon.’

‘
Si,
‘over.’’

‘Like to gamble?’

‘A little.’ A quick smile. ‘But mostly I like to gamble with love.’

Robbie adds, ‘When your wife’s not looking.’

Max looks pained. ‘But, Roberto, my friend, that is who I mean. My wife, Elena, she is everything to me. And every day I must gamble to win her love.’

Robbie says. ‘Just don’t gamble with my submarine,
capice?’

Max places both hands over his heart, ‘
Io promeso.’

I say, ‘Listen, Max, what’s the real deal with your delivery schedule? Mercurio is blowing smoke up my ass. I can feel it. So don’t you try.’

Max questions my slang like a baffled safecracker. When I explain it he brightens and laughs. ‘Wonderful. ‘Smoke up the ass.’ This I must remember. And yes,
Signor
Mercurio does – on many occasions – bend the truth to clients because that is his job, you see.’

‘Hell of a job.’

‘But he does not believe he is lying.
Assolutamente no!
He believes he is telling the truth of his heart, not his head. And in this way he remains honest, because in his heart he WANTS your project to be delivered on time, so that is what he tells you. But in his mind he knows we are at least six months behind schedule, maybe seven.’

‘My God!’

Max tries to calm me down with a startled flutter of his hands ‘Please, do not convey what I have said to
Signor
Mercurio, for he will become upset.’

‘I don’t care who gets upset or who gets fired to fix your backlog, but our ride components start sliding into your pressure hull September first. No matter what. You got that?’’

Max ponders this in silence, and then says, ‘Las Vegas. It is nice in September, yes?’

‘Why?’

‘Because that is precisely when your ride will start sliding in. And I will be there to guarantee it.’

‘But you just told me-’

‘
Noi siamo Italiani.
We are Italians. Yes, the calendar is against us by at least six – maybe seven –terrible months. And yes, today we are in great difficulty. But that is not to say that the situation cannot change and that we will make up for lost time.’

‘You’re damn right you will because I’m going to tell Mercurio that if he doesn’t. . .’

‘Please do not kick a mule,
signor.
He might kick back and delay your journey even further.’

‘You mean after all this talk of delay, you’re telling me that it’s going to turn out right in the end?’

Max shrugs. ‘I have seen miracles before. I will see them again. It is the Italian way.’

‘What way is that?’

‘
Tutto fa broddo quando lei ha fame.
Everything makes soup when you’re hungry.
’

Robbie says, ‘Massimo means that everyone and everything eventually will come together to make a good product. Right Max?’

‘Promeso.’

I step closer. ‘Tell you, what,
paisan,
you screw the pooch and you’ll end up in the soup yourself, along with Mercurio and all the others, diced into little pieces.
Capice?
’

A chastised Max slips away, soon swallowed up into the clanging, deafening chaos of the assembly floor filled with curved steel, flashing welding torches and the reddish-gold shower of sparks from grinding wheels.

‘Are we cooked?’ I say at last.

Robbie smiles. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘What the hell happened? We gave them a reasonable delivery schedule.’

‘Delays. Steel got poured wrong. EMV egress hatch specs were backwards.’

‘But six months?’

‘He says seven, maybe.’

‘We’re screwed if that’s true. We’ve got loans to service, people to. . .’

He silences me with a demonic, Jack Nicholson-like grin. ‘You’ve got to ride the ride. Isn’t that what you’re always preaching to everybody?’

‘Not when it’s eating me up like this.’

‘Save enough of yourself for September first. I got a feeling Max knows exactly how much this Italian nuthouse can deliver when the jig is up.’

‘From what I can see, it already is.’

Winston Churchill once wrote, ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ And so I do, two days and five thousand miles later, when Xia’s
Gulfstream
whisks me away from Trieste and lands me in Hollywood, where I discover to my relief the green screen filming of the ride scenes is ahead of schedule. The good news is confirmed by a headset equipped, deadly-serious, middle-aged ‘third assistant director’ who meets me at Universal Studio’s Virtual Stage #2 and escorts me down an endless, brightly lit, utterly empty, high-ceilinged hallway.

‘How’s Ms. Whitney working out?’ I say. ‘Cracking the whip?’

The man slows but doesn’t stop. ‘Sir, I’ve been in this business for a long time and I’ve never worked with someone like her.’

‘That bad, huh?’

He grins but says nothing.

What happens next is hard to explain. My escort opens a massive, twenty foot-high sound stage door to reveal a green-colored world filled with grease-covered, filthy-looking men racing around in a panic, screaming at the top of their lungs. One of them runs straight at a complicated-looking camera in the middle of the circular sound stage, and comes to a halt barely inches from it and screams into the lens,

‘How many times I got to tell you blokes to clear out? She’s going down and there’s not a bloody thing we can do to stop her. You hear me?’

His last lines come out as a tortured howl. He twists away to join a scrambling, slipping, sliding mob of engineers and stokers converging on a specific spot on a vast, blank green wall.

‘CUT!’ Ellie’s familiar, breathy voice calmly booms out over a hidden loudspeaker. ‘Great job everyone. Reset to G-6, please. Let’s go full effects this time.’