City of Spies (13 page)

“But nobody told me...” Pagan began. Then she closed her mouth and gave him a sickly sweet smile instead. Weeks of working with this man lay ahead. Sugar drew more flies than vinegar and all that crap. Although vinegar was getting more tempting all the time.

“Hi, Dave,” Pagan began again, favoring her costar with a genuine smile, and then beamed that smile like a spotlight at the director. “Mr. Anderson. Your powers of telepathy don't appear to be working, so if you'll kindly speak aloud the place you'd like me to be when the shot begins, I'll be delighted to oblige.”

She draped the words in so much honey, and swept her lashes down over her cheeks so demurely, that he read her tone instead of listening carefully to her words and puffed out his chest.

“Movie's like a marriage, sweetheart,” he said. “As long as you promise to honor and obey, we'll get along great. Come on over here.”

He walked her to her position in the line of dancers, and pointed to the camera, which sat on a metal track that had been laid over the black-and-white marble floor.

“The camera's over there, getting your left profile when the shot begins,” he said in a tone so condescending she couldn't help a look of surprise. “See it?” he added, mistaking her look for confusion. “We'll dolly—that means move the camera—around this way. See where the metal track goes? As you and Dave speak your lines. We'll rehearse it a few times before we roll, so don't worry. You've got a few tries before it has to be perfect. Makeup!” He bellowed for the makeup lady so loud Pagan flinched. The woman who'd been dusting Dave hustled over to dab at Pagan's cheeks with a powder puff.

Victor turned on her. “Where the hell have you been?”

The woman frowned, puzzled. “I'm sorry, Mr. Anderson. I was finishing up with Mr. McKinney...”

“If I see her nose shine like this again before a shot I'm going to fire you, okay?” Victor gave her a tight smile. “Okay, then. Do we all understand what's going on here, girls?” He favored them both with raised eyebrows and widespread hands of an exasperated man. The makeup woman didn't look at him, but kept pressing powder carefully onto Pagan's face. Pagan made her eyes round and innocent, and nodded.

“Good,” he said, nodding. “Don't make me have to explain it again.” As he stalked away, he muttered, “Women!” loud enough for everyone nearby to hear.

“What an ass,” Pagan said under her breath as he strode away. “I won't let him fire you. What's your name?”

“Janet,” the woman replied. “Thanks, but don't worry about me. Save yourself.”

Lips pressed together tight, eyes lit with warning, Janet threw Pagan a look and jogged off.

Dave walked up, smiling at Pagan. “Sorry about that. What is his problem?”

“Nobody told me where to go, or that the shot was coming up.” Pagan couldn't help defending herself. Thank God Dave was funny and sane. They'd gotten along swimmingly during rehearsals.

Dave made a face. “That's weird. A nice PA came and got me ten minutes ago.”

“Well, I'll be making best friends with that PA today, that's for sure!” Pagan said.

“Don't worry about it. You're the biggest star on the movie and you look gorgeous.”

Good old Dave. His wife was a lucky woman. “Thanks, Dave. Gotta say, that's a hell of a tux they put you in.”

“Tell me about it.” Dave put his weight on his left foot and shook out his right leg. “They made the crotch too high to give me a bigger bulge, so if you see me wincing while we dance, it's not your fault.”

Pagan's eyes couldn't help traveling down Dave's lean torso to the area in question, which did indeed show a clear outline of his anatomy.

“I mean, look at this!” With a lifelong actor's complete lack of modesty, Dave shook his hips like a go-go dancer. The bulge at his crotch didn't budge. “It's really jammed in there. I don't care, but my character is kind of a decent guy, so you'd think he'd tell his tailor to be more subtle, you know?”

Pagan laughed, some tension in her shoulders easing. The dancers around them were tittering. “I think the same tailor made my bra.”

“Romance!” Victor shouted from behind the camera. “This isn't comedy, it's romance. Hand me that.” He twitched a megaphone from the hand of an assistant and put it up to his mouth, although they were only about twenty feet away from him. “This is a ball thrown by the American embassy, and it's the greatest night of your lives! Romance! Happiness! Sex! That's what this scene's about, so let me see it. Actors—you know when to say your lines as the dance progresses. Let's rehearse. Sound!”

The soundman switched on the Nagra recorder and watched the tape wind into the plastic spools. The boom man hoisted the pole holding the microphone that would pick up their dialogue, although, because the music was playing, that would also be rerecorded later and dubbed back in. “Speed.”

“Roll camera,” Victor shouted. He seemed to grow taller and more pleased with himself with every command.

“Rolling,” said the cameraman.

“Begin playback!”

“Playback!” shouted the assistant director.

Someone switched on a second recording device attached to a speaker behind the camera. A slow Southern reel swam blearily up to speed. Its very American strains sounded out of place here in an Argentine courtyard.

“Action!” Victor announced.

“Five, six, seven, eight!” Jared's voice shouted the count from somewhere beyond the fluffy dresses of the dancers.

In perfect unison, the line of female dancers, with Pagan near one end, walked forward in time to the music toward the line of male dancers. Dave lifted his hand at the right moment, and Pagan took it. They swayed, circled and swayed again.

“Why, Daisy,” Dave said to Pagan in character, his voice half an octave lower than his normal tones. “You dance divinely. I had no idea.”

“Don't sound so surprised, Billy,” Pagan replied in Daisy's playful tone. “You're not the first man I've ever danced with.”

A cloud settled on Dave's handsome brow as the lines of dancers parted and then came back together. He wrapped his arm around her waist and they spun, looking into each other's eyes. “You dance quite...expertly, in fact. How many others have there been?”

Pagan fought off a feeling of revulsion at that line. Why did men care so much if a girl had been with other men? Daisy was a caricature of virginity, but if she had fooled around—so what?

She wished her character could throw the accusation back into Dave's character's face. “How many others have
you
been with?” Let's see how boys liked being judged that way, too.

Instead, as Daisy, Pagan pushed his arm off her waist and glared. “What are you implying?”

Dave kept circling her, even though they were no longer touching. “You just seemed so sweet, so innocent, when I saw you at the races yesterday. Tonight... You're different tonight.”

Again with the sweet and innocent. No wonder she hated the script. “Dancing's not illegal, last time I checked,” Pagan said, a fond smile taking over her face as her character remembered the tango she'd danced the night before with that seductive Argentine man named Juan. “Are you afraid of a little competition?”

“Cut!”

The music and dancers kept swaying for two awkward beats, and then came to an uneven halt.

Dresses and tuxedoes parted as Victor strode toward Pagan and Dave. “You were terribly offbeat during that last line, sweetheart,” he said.

My favorite thing in the world is to have a ridiculous egotistical jackass erroneously criticize me while calling me sweetheart.

That's what she wanted to say. Or better yet, she wanted to kick him. In the shin. Or the crotch.

It hurt to rein in her natural reaction, but she was a decent actress, damn it, and she would get through this day without killing Victor Anderson even if it gave her an ulcer. He was a minor distraction in the dance she was dancing right now. She would have more difficult steps to get through today.

Victor went on. “You bobbled the steps when you said ‘little competition,' and that's when you should be the most confident, the most on beat. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Oh, she understood. But she hadn't been off beat. She'd bet a hundred dollars she'd been precisely on beat. But if she told Victor that...

Choreographer Jared had walked up to consult, and began, diplomatically, “I'm not so sure she was offbeat there, Victor...”

He said it in the softest, most conciliatory tone possible, but Victor rounded on him.

“No fairy's going to tell
me
when someone's off the beat.”

Jared went pale, eyes wide. But Victor had no time for that. He turned on Pagan again. “Stay. On. Beat. Get me?”

“I will,” she said, her throat tight, hand itching to smack him, just once, for Jared.

“Again!” Victor shouted, and stomped back to the camera, smacking his whip against his boot.

And so it went for hours as the temperature rose under the blazing lights and the humidity forced the makeup assistants to run around dabbing at foreheads and cheeks between every shot.

Victor had nothing to say when Dave stepped on Pagan's foot during the seventh take, or when the camera operator forgot to change out the mag and they ran out of film midshot. But Rada received sneering remarks as she sewed up a rip in Pagan's hem, and Pagan endured a steady stream of condescending eye rolls, angry corrections and one very loud declaration that teenage actresses would one day be the death of them all.

She took it all without screaming back or punching him in the throat, but she stopped smiling. By lunch break the set simmered with tension, silent except for the blare of the music playback and Victor's braying voice.

But lunch at least brought a chance for Pagan to sit, on a towel, and take off her evil shoes. A kind set nurse dabbed her two fresh blisters with ointment and was just finishing bandaging them as Mercedes walked up.

“M! Sorry I can't stand up,” Pagan said. “Thanks, Sandy,” she added to the nurse, who was getting up to go. “That's a huge help.”

“Bleeding for your work, I see,” Mercedes said, raising her eyebrows at the mound of white frills that surrounded Pagan like a frothy sea. “Who says movie stars have it easy?”

“At least I get to dress up as a wedding cake on a warm summer day,” Pagan said, taking a plate with a sandwich and potato chips on it from an assistant as Rada wrapped a huge napkin around her neck to protect the dress. “Thanks, Brian. Can I get a Coke, too? You're a doll.” To Mercedes she said, “There's lots of food, but let me guess. You already ate.”

“Can't be late to meet with the astronomy professor.” Mercedes bounced on her toes in anticipation. She never got this excited about anything. Pagan almost didn't recognize her nervous smile. “Is Devin around? I want to thank him for setting this up.”

“Not yet, but I'll tell him if I see him.”

Mercedes sat down next to her, careful to avoid stray flounces. “How's it going?”

“Well, so far the director's insulted my nose, my weight, my dancing, my enunciation, my fingernails—he wants to use a hand double for the close-ups where Dave holds my character's hand—and my upbringing.” Pagan kept her voice low. “So—great!”

“He's thorough,” Mercedes said, her voice dry, looking around. “Which one is he?”

Pagan slung her eyes over to a table set up in the shade where Victor had corralled Dave and men from the crew to sit with him for lunch. She had not been invited, which suited her just fine, thanks. “He's the
pendejo
holding court over there, with the gray streaks in his hair. He's lucky my mother's not here. She'd make short work of him.”

Mercedes regarded Victor Anderson with her flat, assessing gaze. “Anyone wearing those pants has no right to insult anyone.”

Pagan laughed as Mercedes got to her feet. “Do you have to go already? You were just helping me back to sanity.”

“Can't be late.” Mercedes's small smile of happiness returned. “Good luck with...whatever it is that happens today.”

“Same to you!” Pagan said to her friend's back as she strode down the colonnaded hallway toward the stairs up to the observatory. At the very least, this trip was turning out to be a success for Mercedes. Even if Pagan had to endure weeks of Victor Anderson and never got into Von Albrecht's house or saw him or any of that, at least her best friend was getting to fulfill some of her dreams.

Loud, angry voices echoed off the stone columns and the marble floor from across the courtyard. Pagan craned her neck and bit into her sandwich. A security guard was waving at a group of people on the opposite side of the courtyard and yelling in Spanish. They were yelling back.

She could just catch the words:
“Esta es nuestra escuela,”
meaning, “This is our school,” and something about
“tenemos el derecho”
—“we have the right.” It sounded like some students were angry they couldn't cross the courtyard, which was currently being repolished by a team of people with cloth mops.

The security guard responded with canned phrases like, “We have the permission of the school president,” and “Signs were posted,” as another guard walked over to back him up.

Quick arguments followed, until a more reasonable female voice interrupted with words Pagan couldn't overhear. She could see, however, that a pretty dark-haired girl in a chic white shift dress was making the students' case.

She must have been convincing, because a few minutes later, Pagan was done with her sandwich and the group of students had been allowed to go around the outside edges of the courtyard to get across it. Their path brought them within twenty yards of Pagan, as they headed off the same way Mercedes had gone.