The Lost Expert, page 19
JOEL MCCANN (CONT’D)
(reading)
“On the Rugged Margins: The Lost Expert, Harold Allan’s Mystical Man in the Mountains.”
McCann reaches into his coat pocket and puts a thick envelope on the tray near the bed.
JOEL MCCANN (CONT’D)
Mr. Allan sends his hearty congratulations.
THE LOST EXPERT
I’ve already been paid. I can’t accept that.
JOEL MCCANN
The duchess’s family is exceedingly grateful. They’ve thrown their heartfelt support behind the Allan campaign.
Joel McCann pushes the envelope of money closer to the Lost Expert.
JOEL MCCANN (CONT’D)
Consider the money an investment. In your operation. Rent an office. Get an assistant, maybe this dame? You can’t keep doing everything out of that bakery. This is your moment! Mr. Allan just wants to help.
THE LOST EXPERT
How is the duchess?
JOEL MCCANN
(sighing)
Poor girl. She’s a bit of a lost soul. By now she should be on a boat back to Europe.
THE LOST EXPERT
Has she said anything? About what happened to her?
McCann shrugs. From beneath the sheets, the Lost Expert pulls out the crumpled sketch of Beaoman. He puts it on the tray in front of McCann.
THE LOST EXPERT
Do you know this man?
Joel McCann smiles indulgently. He puts on a pair of reading glasses.
JOEL MCCANN
Eyes aren’t what they used to be, I’m afraid.
THE LOST EXPERT
Does he work for you? Have you seen him around, as part of your larger organization?
JOEL MCCANN
He doesn’t look familiar.
THE LOST EXPERT
Look again, please, Mr. McCann.
It’s important.
JOEL MCCANN
(squinting at the picture)
I can’t place him.
THE LOST EXPERT
He goes by Beaoman. He was involved in the disappearance of the duchess. He was also involved in that other case, the Bartner brother. I know how that sounds. But I believe it to be true. Have you seen him? Is he connected in anyway to the Allan organization?
JOEL MCCANN
(smiling indulgently)
I assure you, all of Mr. Allan’s advisors are handpicked and completely trusted.
THE LOST EXPERT
This man, he operates under the surface. He may have different identities. He may be using a different name. He might be altering his appearance. He’s more than just dangerous.
JOEL MCCANN
(frowning)
What do you mean? Like he’s some kind of shape-shifter? You serious about this?
THE LOST EXPERT
Do you believe in pure evil, Mr. McCann?
JOEL MCCANN
Listen. You’re tired. You need to rest.
I’ll ask around. See what I can find out. In the meantime, rest up. We need you focused on growing your organization. On this.
McCann taps on the headline.
JOEL MCCANN (CONT’D)
This is what you should be focusing on. And of course (glancing toward the hallway and the waiting Esther) on your lovely wife and son.
McCann leaves. The Lost Expert, wincing, closes his eyes. Pink message slips rain down on him from above. The Lost Expert jerks back into awareness.
ESTHER
(dropping the last of the message slips)
I’m not your secretary, Mr. Lost Expert.
Esther spins away.
THE LOST EXPERT
Esther!
Esther turns back, her face angry.
THE LOST EXPERT
Thank you.
Esther’s face softens.
ESTHER
(stepping toward the Lost Expert’s bed)
Is it true?
THE LOST EXPERT
Is what true?
ESTHER
(pointing to a newspaper picture of Allan, her voice tinged with bitterness)
Are you really on his side?
THE LOST EXPERT
Esther, he’s not what he seems.
ESTHER
But he hates us.
THE LOST EXPERT
He’s just saying things to get elected. They all do it.
ESTHER
But he says he’s going to make all Jews sign a register? And close up the shtetl? No one in and no one out?
THE LOST EXPERT
He won’t do those things.
ESTHER
How do you know?
THE LOST EXPERT
I won’t let him.
ESTHER
You better not.
Script 14
CHRIS FELT THE SHEET on top of him, light and cool against his hot skin. He opened his eyes. He saw black-on-grey shapes, a drifting surface skein of purple nothingness. Dark, he thought. Or perhaps his eyes were covered. Bandaged? A possibility that should have filled with him anxiety. He thought to wave a hand in front of his face.
WAKING UP AGAIN.
Quiet and dark; he held his body still. He heard his own breathing. It was slow and steady. I flew, he remembered. He felt only a little exultant. I flew. Lying there, trying to form another coherent thought, he gradually detected the scent of a separate body. There was someone else in the room with him. Chris breathed in through his nose: cigar, leather, sweat, a hint of decay.
Reed.
Reed was there, by his bedside. Reed was talking — had been all along, Chris realized, his growled voice moving in and out, over and under, like a radio station slipping through signal.
“… Great stuff by the way, Holmes. You shoulda seen Ally’s face! Jesus Christ, when you wake up you’re going to be sorry! Anyway, we got it. Got it all! Wait till they get a load of this. Press is going to have a field day. I swear, Holmes, for a second you just hung there, up in the sky, like a fucking phoenix. In the future — god, I hate that word almost as much as I hate those cunty air quotes people are always using — you can jump all you want, it won’t matter. Nothing will matter, Holmes. We won’t die or be born. We won’t even be human. When I was pitching this, one of the producer a-holes asked, ‘Is this science fiction?’ I was like, ‘Fuck no this isn’t science fiction!’ Who the fuck do they think I am? James fucking Cameron? No offence, Holmes, unless you’re secretly a Titanic fan, in which case fuck you …”
CHRIS OPENED HIS EYES. Alison was looking down at him. Reed was gone, a fever dream.
“Thomson. How are you feeling?”
The sun shimmered through the lightly covered window, casting a halo over Alison’s light brown hair. Chris blinked and squinted, trying to adjust to the brightness. Was it morning? Early afternoon?
“Do you want some water?” Alison leaned over him. “Are you hungry? Do you want me to —”
He kissed her, sitting up suddenly, opening his arms, and pulling her in. She stiffened, surprised, then kissed him back. Her mouth tasted like blueberries and honey. His mouth was raw, salt and iron, blood and heat. They rolled together. He was on top, then she was on top. She pulled off her polo shirt, revealing a sheer bra, dark nipples against pale pink fabric. Then her small breasts against his bare chest.
ALISON DOZED. CHRIS LAY awake, smelling her silky hair splayed out next to him, soft and scented with lilac. Climb, Reed had told him, talking through an endless night that Chris felt sure had been several nights, days and days of nights. Climb. He could feel it receding, like a distant lightning storm, its thunder still echoing. Were they together? Were they a couple? What had happened? Had he fallen? Jumped? Flew?
“Thomson?” Alison stirred, waking.
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
Chris squinted at the high ceiling, painted a sky blue and softly lit by a small, simple chandelier. The light starred into blurry, overlapping pattern. His stomach was long and taut, strained, empty.
“Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Good. I’m … I was worried about you.”
“I’m okay. Really. I feel fine.”
“Are you hungry?” Alison asked.
“No. I’m not hungry. I feel empty,” Chris said dreamily. “Like him. Like The Lost Expert.”
“Empty?”
“Empty. If you lose everything. When you lose everything. Then you’re just empty.”
Alison propped herself on an elbow. “Thomson. It’s too much. You aren’t the Lost Expert. You have to eat. You have to take care of yourself.” Seeing his cocked grin: “What are you smiling about? You and Reed. You’re a couple of pigs in shit, aren’t you?”
Alison rolled out of the bed, out of his reach. She stalked angrily across the carpet, paused abruptly at the door to the ensuite bathroom: “I’m not going to save you, Thomson. If that’s what you think. That’s not how this is going to go.”
PART FOUR
Section 15
CHRIS OPENED THE WINDOW and breathed in. The air drifting up from the Great Lake at the bottom of the city was cool and damp, familiarly tinged with hints of seaweed, car exhaust, and the coming winter. Home. He could keep his head down here. Stay out of trouble. Acid surged through his empty stomach. Up north, he’d been ravenous, but ever since the desert, he’d lost his appetite. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He felt light all the time, lighter than air, ready to float away. They were on Queen Street West now, Toronto’s beating heart. Chris watched his driver try to pass a slowly accelerating streetcar. His driver braked abruptly and curse-muttered as his attempt was cut off by the streetcar’s warning clang and a fast-arriving lane of parked cars. They fell into place behind the other vehicles inching forward only slightly faster than the perambulators window-shopping on the sidewalk.
Suddenly feeling eyes on him from the street, Chris retreated inside and raised the tinted window. He contemplated the intimately familiar panorama from his new, protected vantage. The store specializing in Asian papercraft; the boutique bookstore selling what Krunk liked to call “hipster porn”; Manila, a new “it spot” of “reinvented” upscale Filipino cuisine; a pop-up ice cream shop, summer tenure almost done as reflected by waning lines for the latest food craze of charcoal-infused black sundaes served in kale-cone bowls dyed an alarming mahogany.
Eventually, they passed the café. Chris imagined the cook, Syed, sweating over the béchamel sauce, a Syrian with an engineering degree concocting the special of the day — croque monsieur with side salad. Did Syed have an engineering degree? Everyone joked about it, but nobody really knew. They called him Sid the Kid, though Syed was a grizzled man anywhere between forty and sixty. They preferred to think of him as one of them, young, feckless, different only in ways that enhanced, rather than diminished, possibilities. Chris craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the girl behind the register. Was it Rachel, working the breakfast shift? Who else could be sporting such an unruly mane of blond hair? She’d texted him — Thomson Holmes. She had a new agent. After the movie finished shooting, she was thinking of moving to L.A. He’d promised to call her.
“Here we are, Mr. Holmes.”
“Thanks.”
Trained now, he waited for the driver to open his door. He felt the bulge of cash Berinstain had given him. He’d taken it. But hadn’t spent any. Before the desert, he’d stopped trying to tip the functionaries. For one thing, he’d had no idea how to access any of Thomson Holmes’s money even if he wanted to. For another thing, whenever he’d tried to go off the script already written for him, he’d ended up setting in motion whole chains of unfortunate events — rewrites, wardrobe crises, cracks in the thin veneer of filmic continuity, Reed freaking out, people losing their jobs.
Keep calm and, as his pal would say when confronted with the sight of fawning celebrities going through the motions on the red carpet, be a good little movie star. It’s not like he was asking them to open the car door, work the buttons of the elevator, appear next to him with a giant umbrella if there was even a hint of a rain cloud in the sky. They just did it and they expected him to expect it. Trying to stray from all of that was a surprising amount of work. It sounded ridiculous. But it was true. Being served and waited on and letting other people do every little thing for him — it wasn’t fun, it took a kind of steely effort. Even not tipping took something out of him.
The players and their set had moved to the small park only a few blocks away from his and Laurie’s apartment. Laurie, he suddenly thought. He hadn’t spoken to her in days. Possibly weeks. He owed her for this month’s rent. Guilt flamed on his cheeks.
There were fewer trailers on this more compact set, though they’d still managed to take over the entire side of a park and a block and a half of prime parking. Tina met him, sporting her ubiquitous clipboard and headset. She crackled a message, received a reply. Tina said something to him about his trailer. Chris ignored her. He looked around for Alison. Tina went on, loudly apologizing about something, an inconvenience, nothing concerning, they had a guy, he was dealing with it. When they got near Holmes’s deluxe portable, it became clear what she was talking about. The smooth white siding sported an eye-catching extra.
Day-Glo graffiti.
Chris froze. The sprayed-on words, each line written in a different fluorescent hue.
Clipboard Tina was still talking. A V of geese moved high overhead, beginning their habitual journey south. A passing car honked repeatedly as it cruised by — protesting the movie set’s appropriation of most of the park and all the parking in the neighbourhood.
A power tool kicked into action. Chris felt a physical jolt. A man in coveralls was aiming a serious-looking nozzle at the graffiti words. Water shot out in a thin, painful-looking jet. Spray bounced off the trailer’s thin side. Immediately, ‘The’ and ‘Girl’ began to dissolve into angry orange streaks.
Then Reed was beside him, red-faced and breathing heavily.
“What in the hell is this? If this is who I think it is, then let’s just say there are worse things than being blackballed.”
“She didn’t have anything to do with it,” Chris said slowly.
“Oh yeah?” Reed’s normal angry squint turned confused under his ball cap.
“It’s a message.”
“A message?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean? A message from who? About what?”
Chris didn’t answer. Dripping streaks, the remains of the half-blurred words formed orange-tinged mutant tears dropping on the closely cropped grass. Reed looked around desperately. He spied Tina waiting at a discreet distance. “Alison,” he barked at her. “What’s the twenty on Alison?” He steered Chris toward the trailer. “You have a bit of a rest, and we’ll pick this up later, okay, Holmes?” Looking back at Tina desperately. “Alison? Where’s Alison?”
Chris let Reed usher him into the trailer. Reed set him in a leather armchair, opened his bottle of water, and handed it to him. Chris drank from it automatically.
“Now, you just take it easy. Alison will be by. Any minute. You’ll have some lunch. We’ll get to the bottom of this!” Reed backed out.
The door to the trailer clanged shut. Ask him about the girl. The girl, Chris thought. The girl, the girl, the girl. What had Thomson Holmes done? And to whom? Was that why he’d disappeared? What do they want from me? What am I supposed to do? His phone buzzed. Alison, he thought, grabbing it up.
Script 14
INT. KITCHEN, THE LOST EXPERT’S APARTMENT — DUSK
THE LOST EXPERT sits at the kitchen table. The kitchen slowly darkens with the fading light of day. SARAH sits across from him. She picks up an overstuffed envelope and takes out a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. She starts counting them.
SARAH
(looking up in mid-count)
All this from one job?
The Lost Expert nods gravely.
SARAH
That’s amazing.
THE LOST EXPERT
(expressionless)
The client was very generous.
SARAH
(smiling teasingly)
You didn’t even talk about money, did you?
THE LOST EXPERT
No.
SARAH
But you found him? Whoever they were looking for?
THE LOST EXPERT
Yes.
SARAH
(wonderingly)
And then they just paid you all of this?
The Lost Expert sighs. Sarah gets up and walks over to where he sits stiffly in his chair, staring at a patch of fading, peeling paint above the kitchen counter. She puts her arms around him, leaning into his neck.
SARAH
I’m so proud of you. And I’m glad we’re back. But you have to promise. No more of that other stuff. With those people. Okay? Do you promise? We have to start looking out for ourselves, for the baby. Okay? Do you promise?
The Lost Expert, his gaze on the money on the table, nods curtly.
INT. BEDROOM, THE LOST EXPERT’S APARTMENT — NIGHT
SARAH, in a white camisole, is on top of THE LOST EXPERT. Her eyes are shut. The camera gradually moves to the Lost Expert’s face. His eyes are open, staring up at the stained ceiling.
EXT. THE POOR SOUTHWEST END OF THE CITY —
MID-MORNING
THE LOST EXPERT walks past crumbling three-storey walkups with bars on shaded windows and grills blocking the bottoms of circular wrought iron fire escapes. On the next block there are shabby storefronts, many of them empty, their windows adorned with faded For Rent signs and bright orange signs blaring the Maverick Party campaign slogan: Join the Army. Some windows also display blue Jewish stars with an orange circle and slash over them. A GIRL on a wooden scooter goes by.
