Wages of Sin (16 page)

“Breathe,” Reggie said in her ear, but Mary Lou couldn't seem to do that either.

Miss Lelourie had leaned in to her and looked about to say something else, when her attention was caught by Peter Kohl, the director, who bore down on her, his jutting, pointed beard leading the way.

“Remy, Remy, my beautiful, fiery pirate. There you are.” The director's gaze passed over Reggie and Mary Lou as if they were no more than props on his set, and fastened onto the face of his leading lady, warm and intimate, and more like that of a loving father than a man who had apparently once shared her bed.

“Now, this is what I want from you, Remy darling,” he said. He draped his arm over her shoulder, steering her toward the ship. “You are angry, and the anger is like an inferno inside of you. You are an outlaw. An outlaw who has undergone moral reparation of a sort, this is true, for you are in love. In love!” He flung his arms out in a flamboyant embrace of the word, held them in the air a moment and then let them fall with a sag of his shoulders. “But, still, you are an outlaw. Let me see the outlaw, darling. Let me see it.”

To Mary Lou's surprise Miss Lelourie turned and smiled at her before allowing herself to be led away by her director. Mary Lou hesitated, not sure if she was supposed to follow, and then she got the strangest feeling that someone was watching her.

Alfredo Ramon leaned against the door to his dressing room, looking handsome and piratical. His dark eyes stared at her wide open, intense and unblinking, like those of a cat about to pounce on a mouse. Mary Lou wasn't sure, though, if he was really looking at her or simply through her.

She started to smile at him and then she remembered suddenly how she had spied on him while he'd been thrusting that needle into the bulging blue vein in his arm. She looked down at her feet, instead, feeling vaguely ashamed, and when she looked back up again, he was gone.

“Hey, let's go, kiddo,” Reggie said, grabbing her arm and pulling her along after him. “Are you putting down roots? We're about to shoot.”

Remy Lelourie walked across the gangplank and climbed onto the ship's poop deck. She simply stood there, with her arms down straight at her sides and her head slightly lifted, and though Mary Lou could see no overt change in her expression, her very presence seemed to alter from the inside out, and suddenly it was all there, in her eyes and mouth, in the set of her shoulders and the arch of her neck. She was a pirate, an outlaw.

Peter Kohl had been watching her through a camera's viewfinder and now he stepped away from it and clasped his hand over his heart in a mockingly dramatic gesture that seemed oddly sweet. “
Lieber Gott,
Remy darling. You have slain me.”

She broke the pose in an instant, becoming herself again. She leaned over the rail, laughing at him. “You mustn't succumb to my charms yet. The picture's only half finished.” She lifted the edge of the bloodstained bandage and scratched her scalp. “Why am I wearing this thing around my head?”

“Because you are wounded, Remy darling.”

“Peter, darling. I was stabbed in my arm, not my head. I distinctly remember being stabbed in the arm.”

He came to the edge of the giant tank and stood staring up at her, with his hands on his hips. “But the bandage around your head looks so romantic. What is a bandage around the arm? Nothing. A bore. Leave it as it is and we'll worry about fixing things later.”

He picked up a megaphone from off his director's chair, and somebody yelled out, “Ready on the set.” The orchestra launched into “The Ride of the Valkyries.” The giant fan started up, and waves slapped against the sides of the ship, the sails billowed. Somebody yelled, “Smoke! Let's have some smoke!” and the fireworks man shot smoke bombs over the masts, and a white haze began to drift through the rigging.

Remy Lelourie laughed and drew her sword, and magic happened.

Remy Lelourie knew that a scene was working when she could feel herself being seduced by the magic of her own image in the camera's eye. She gave herself to the camera, gave every breath and drop of sweat, pried herself wide open for the camera. She loved the camera with a hungry, grasping, needy love, and the camera responded by loving her back.

They did twelve different takes: all with long shots, mid shots, and close shots, the seven Mitchell cameras all grinding away simultaneously, shooting hundreds of feet of black and white film. Then Jeremy Doyle climbed on board and did the innovation filming with his 35mm Eyemo handheld camera, lying on the deck on his back and shooting up, climbing up to the crow's nest and shooting down, dangling from the ship's rail by his legs and shooting sideways—while she and Alfredo Ramon clashed swords and romped across the deck again and again, leaping over broken spars and burning hatches, and swinging from the rigging, and Peter Kohl conducted the tempo like an orchestra leader, moving it up, bringing it down.

Light from the mercury vapor tubes bounced off the overhead diffusion screen, turning the ship's deck into a sauna. Smoke from the bombs and hot ash from the Klieg lights floated through the air, turning their eyes red and swollen and searing the breath from their lungs. By the fifth take, Freddy was so badly winded his breath was singing and he was cursing under his breath in his nasal Bronx accent.

“Cut,” Peter finally bellowed through his megaphone. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is a wrap.”

Jeremy Doyle swung down off the rigging, landing feet-splayed in front of her. He was holding his camera, Remy realized, the way she had held the sword.

She pulled off the bandage and tilted her head back, pushing her fingers through hair damp with sweat. “Well, Jere?” she said, smiling, exhilarated, still half in the part. “Was I enough of an outlaw, do you think?”

The cameraman gave her his fearsome, lopsided grin. “A real firebrand.”

Laughing, she blew him a kiss as she trotted down the gangplank.

Peter Kohl was pacing the edge of the tank, blue penciling the photoplay, already preparing for Monday's filming. He was vibrating now with nervous energy, which meant that he was feeling good about the scene they'd just shot. After a string of flops, he needed this movie, needed it badly, and the more brilliant the daily rushes were looking, the more scared he became that something would happen to ruin it all for him.

Remy took a slow, circuitous route back to her dressing room, stopping to thank everyone who'd been involved in the shoot. Her skin itched beneath the heavy makeup. She was dying to get her hands on some cold cream.

The smell hit her in the face when she opened the door to the little caravan. Crushed rose petals—hundreds of them, it seemed—were strewn all over the floor, filling the small space with their sweet, overripe smell. And written in lipstick across the dressing table mirror in that same elaborate hand:

Are you scared yet, Remy?

Mary Lou Trescher was amazed at how fast the studio emptied out once the shooting was done. It was barely coming on to lunchtime when the last bank of lights was shut down and everybody who was anybody had already disappeared into their dressing rooms and offices. Reggie told her that later this afternoon, after the film was processed, they would all get back together again to watch the dailies, which meant, he said, that they were going to screen the footage just shot that morning.

Mary Lou didn't want to leave, but of course nobody was going to invite her to watch any dailies, and so she wasn't either surprised or disappointed to find herself back out on the docks, among hogsheads of sugar on flat wagons and oystermen unloading their luggers.

Reggie was going to a speakeasy to celebrate the end of the day's shooting with some of the other electricians. Mary Lou gave him a big hug and kiss as a thank-you for so special a morning and then she walked alone to the corner where she could catch a streetcar going toward home. The riverfront was crowded with traffic this time of day, but Mary Lou was still caught up in the magic and she floated down the sidewalk with stars in her eyes and a head full of dreams.

It took her a moment to realize that someone was calling her name and another moment to figure out where the shout was coming from. Then she noticed that a man was waving at her from a car that was idling at the red streetlight. She recognized him right off and so she waved back at him and smiled.

He stuck his head out the window and motioned her over. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

Mary Lou looked down the block, but the streetcar was nowhere in sight. She was afraid the light was about to change, and so she made up her mind fast, stepping off the curb and almost into the path of a bicyclist who bellowed at her to get out of the way.

She had to run then to dodge an oncoming beer truck, even though her mama would have probably died to see her only daughter running across the street like a hooligan. The man got out of the car to open the door for her, and she used her best smile on him, the one everybody said was so much like Remy Lelourie's. “This is swell, thanks.”

It was his silence, the strange rudeness of it in the face of her own courtesy, that made her pause as she was climbing into the car, and turn half around to look at him. Which was why she saw, for just that split second, the edge of his hand slicing through the air, before it slammed into the side of her neck.

Her legs buckled and the world blurred, and he caught her beneath the knees and slid her onto the car's seat. His mouth brushed against her ear, whispering.

“It's going to feel good, baby. So good.”

Chapter Twelve

I
did some thinking,” Fiorello Prankowski said, “while that goon in a white coat was digging the bullet outta my arm with something that felt like a shovel. I decided the guy was shooting at you. Yeah, it was you he was after and all's I did was get in the way.”

They were having lunch at the soda fountain in Kress's Five-and-Dime, sitting before a marble-topped counter, on swivel stools, beneath a canopy of hanging ferns. Since Rourke had said he was treating, Fio had decided they ought to splurge and go to some place classy for a change.

“Go ahead and figure it that way,” Rourke said, “if it makes you feel any better. And since you're the guy with his arm in a sling and a hole in his hat, I can always console myself with the thought that whoever he is he's a hell of a bad shot. So as long as I keep you alongside me, give him something to hit when he's aiming at me, then I'm safe.”

Fio had finished off two cherry cokes, a muffaletta, and a plate of soufflé potatoes, and now he was eyeing the banana cream pie. “Yeah, well what you got to do is look at the big picture, and in the big picture, in the grand scheme of things, so to speak, you're the one who's always getting shot at. You had them Chicago outfit guys after you all last summer. Tossing pineapples around and ripping up the place with machine guns. Maybe they've come back down for a second go at you.”

Rourke washed down the last of his oyster sandwich with a swig of coffee so hot it burned the roof of his mouth. “You done eating?” he said to Fio, reaching for his money clip. “Because if you're done—”

“Nobody said done. Done is after I have dessert. Done is after the piece of banana cream pie I deserve on account of all the blood I lost when my arm got in the way of that slug meant for you.”

Rourke drank more coffee while the soda jerk brought Fio his pie. He started eavesdropping on the conversation of the two young women sitting on the stools next to them. One had just gotten engaged and she was telling her friend all about it. Her fiancé had stuck the ring in a chocolate ice cream cone and she had almost swallowed it.

Remy Lelourie, he thought, wasn't ever going to marry him, and he had been a fool ever to entertain the fantasy. She was scared of almost nothing in this world, but she was terrified of that. He had asked her once. Her answer had been to cry and then to make love to him and then to give him no real answer at all.

“Before you got shot at,” Fio was saying, “when you were coming to the gallant rescue of that Humanitarian Cult woman, I thought I saw Cornelius Dupre hanging back on the fringes of the crowd.”

“He's just a kid, Fio.”

“He's only two years younger than his brother, and that Titus is old enough to have raped two girls, then strangled them and dumped their bodies in the river…or wherever he put the first one. That boy is probably thinking his brother wouldn't be getting electrocuted tonight, if it weren't for you. I was up at the lake, fishing and getting a bad case of sunburn on the back of my neck when all that was going down, so the Dupres can't be blaming me for all their troubles.”

Rourke drank more coffee and let it go. Fio's way of working through a case was to rattle off at the mouth, while his brain percolated and sifted through the details. He was one of the best homicide detectives New Orleans had, even though he'd been born and raised and had spent most all of his years on the job in Des Moines, Iowa. He'd come to New Orleans on a case seven years ago, met the woman who sold hats in Maison Blanche, married her, and tried bringing her home to Iowa. New Orleans girls didn't transplant well, though, and so last year he'd ended up coming back here for good.

Maybe, Rourke thought, he should just go ahead and buy Remy a ring and give it to her in an ice cream cone.

“What I don't want to be thinking,” Fio went on after a few moments of blessed silence had passed, “is that the shooting had squat-all to do with our crucifixion killing, because that case is already so balled-up it's making my head hurt. And everybody is behaving like they're trying to run a shuck on us. I don't know if I want to be the first to say it out loud, Day, but just who are the bad guys here? A bunch of priests? I'm having a hard time getting my head around the notion that the Church found out Father Pat was a woman, panicked at the thought of the scandal, and put a hit on her. Him.”

“You ever heard of the Borgias?”

“They some old New Orleans Mafia family?”

“Some old Italian family,” Rourke said, hiding a smile. “In the fifteenth century one of them became Pope. Poison was his preferred method of doing a hit, but sometimes he had his enemies tortured to death in a dungeon he had built for that purpose. He was also maybe screwing his own sister. Our archbishop is another tough old bird, who didn't get where he's at making nice. Contracting for murder is a big line to cross, though. And, besides, it wouldn't make sense to take care of the kind of problem Father Pat presented for the Church in such a way that the problem called attention to itself. It wasn't until he turned up dead and an autopsy was done that Father Pat's secret came out.”