Cheating at Solitaire(106)
Gregor sighed. “I take it we’re not talking about the old West,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bennis said. “No, the posses are the entourages, what these people call their entourages. Most of them travel with huge crowds of people. Assistants. Makeup artists. Hair people. Other people who just seem to be along for the ride. Iris said something about one woman who does nothing but carry water for somebody. I’m sorry, I can’t remember who. Anyway, the posses are huge, usually between thirty and fifty people, and they’re all paid. And they’re not in Margaret’s Harbor, because Michael Bardman had a full-time fit about the way they were mucking up the filming. Apparently the movie is over budget and behind schedule, and somewhere around the middle of October he told Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret to send their people home for the duration or he’d fire both of them. And he didn’t just tell them. He wrote a letter and he leaked the letter to CNN, so it was all over everywhere. Anyway, they took the hint, and the entourages dispersed to points unknown, probably back to California. So there was nobody to alert the press when Arrow and friends took off for Las Vegas. Do you see what I mean?”
“Sort of,” Gregor said. “This was a stealth operation.”
Bennis laughed. “Nothing with these people is really a stealth anything,” she said, “but without the posses it was a lot easier for them to move around without being noticed, and they did. They were in Vegas for hours before anybody from the press realized they were there. They came in on a private jet. Kendra Rhode’s private jet, by the way. They hired a car to take them to the hotel. They checked in. They got dressed up and went out. They had time to pose for that picture you saw, and probably a lot of other things, and it was nearly eleven before the regular press knew they were there. And then they weren’t for much longer. They just retreated to the Hugh Hefner Suite and made like a fortress. And then, the next day, they came home.”
“With somewhat more publicity?”
“A little more,” Bennis said, “but it was very early in the morning, around six or seven, so not as much as you might think. And it’s driving everybody crazy. Because this local guy, the one Kendra Rhode turned into something like her personal photographer on Margaret’s Harbor, he was with them, and people saw him taking pictures, but the only picture that’s ever come out has been that one I told you about, the one you saw, with all of them together. There are people who’d pay a lot of money for a few more of them, especially if there are any from inside the Hugh Hefner Suite. Iris said people have contacted this guy, this—”
“Jack Bullard,” Gregor said.
“That’s right. That’s it. People have contacted him, but all he says is that he doesn’t have anything to sell, which nobody on earth believes. The best guess there is that he’s saving them up for a book for later, that there’s something really nasty in what he’s got, something unusual. But so far, not a thing. And Iris says the word around town is that Kendra Rhode has dumped him anyway—nobody will say why.”
“But presumably because of something in the pictures,” Gregor said.
“I told you I could do better than just look up things on the Internet,” Bennis said. “Is any of this any help to you at all? Does it make any sense? None of these people make any sense to me, and I’ve been around famous people most of my life.”
Gregor was going to tell her there was a difference between fame and celebrity—it was a lecture he’d heard more than once from Father Tibor—but Clara Walsh had slammed back the dressing room’s swinging door and was marching on him, men’s room atmosphere be damned.
3
When Gregor finally went into the Versailles Room, it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, although it was odd enough. The room lived up to its name in some ways. The walls were all lined with mirrors, making the space look seven or eight times as large as it was. And the space was large enough. Gregor had been to the palace at Versailles. He had seen the original Hall of Mirrors. It was, by modern standards, a rather smallish room, nothing to rival even Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, never mind major public spaces like the Colosseum or Madison Square Garden. This space was twice the size of the room it was trying to imitate, yet in spite of that, and in spite of the illusion created by the mirrors, the men and women sitting in row after row of wooden folding chairs looked cramped. The cameras and the light crews just looked out of place.
Still, in spite of all Clara Walsh’s talk—and Stewart Gordon’s—about ravaging hordes, the crowd was polite and orderly enough, and at least the front ranks of it were filled with people Gregor recognized from news outlets he understood. CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, Fox. The names were familiar and familiarly unthreatening, and for some reason all their major correspondents seemed to be in their forties or above. It was in the rows at the back that Gregor could see the trouble coming. All those were filled by people he did not know, from places he had never heard of, and most of the correspondents were young. That, he thought, would be the Internet contingent, the infamous blogs, the people he was supposed to be afraid of. He tried to concentrate on the rows in the middle, where most of the print media was. The New York Times was up front, but the Cleveland Plain Dealer—well. Gregor supposed that Cleveland was used to taking a backseat to New York.