Cheating at Solitaire(6)
“Don’t be ridiculous. You make her sound like, I don’t know—”
“It doesn’t matter what I make her sound like, Michael. It’s true. And as long as she’s here, Marcey and Arrow are going to be shit out of control more days than not. And the longer that goes on, the more money you’re going to lose. You ought to be grateful as hell that Stewart Gordon is a thorough professional, because if he’d been less of one he’d have walked off this picture weeks ago.”
“He can’t walk off the picture. He’s not important enough.”
“He’s something better than important,” Carl said, think-trying that it was completely useless trying to explain to Michael that some people did not judge the success of their lives by how well they were doing in the movies. “He’s independent, Michael. He’s stashed most of the money he’s ever made—”
“It can’t amount to much.”
“It’s more than he needs to live on,” Carl said, “which means he doesn’t have to work if he doesn’t want to. And the pair of them are driving him nuts. And I don’t blame him. You’ve got to do something to get those two away from Ken-dra Rhode, at least for the next few months, or you’re not going to have a picture at all. And that’s assuming that Arrow doesn’t run away and get married to the latest toy boy.”
“Oh, God,” Michael said. “I thought we got rid of the toy boy.”
“We got rid of the first one, more or less. The divorce is in the works, at any rate. But there’s a new one, one of the camera people, not a serious one—one of the grips, I think—”
“Can we just fire him and get him off the island?”
“I’m already on it. But I stopped in at that little pub place on my way here this afternoon, and Marcey was all by herself at a table drinking champagne cocktails and letting her dress fall off her, and Arrow was missing in action completely. So I don’t think the news is good. You’ve got to let me do something about Kendra Rhode.”
There was a very long silence on the other end of the line. Carl wished he could be surer of the cell phone reception in the inn. He needed to get himself a refill. Michael Bard-man’s voice came back on the line.
“You can’t do something about Kendra Rhode,” he said. “She’s a Rhode. They’re, what, like the third-richest family in America?”
“Hardly. It’s a whole new world these days. Old money barely makes the cut. I’m not talking about having her whacked, Michael. I’m talking about hiring her.”
“Hiring her for what?”
“For a picture. You’ve got to have a picture somewhere that she could be some use in. Or at least, seem to be some use in.”
“I can’t hire her for a picture. And besides, even if I tried, what makes you thing she’d say yes?”
“Make it a big picture. Brad Pitt. Sean Connery. Make it a picture she can’t refuse.”
“You must be out of your mind. whatever in God’s name makes you think that somebody like Brad Pitt would agree to work with her?”
“You don’t actually have to hire her, Michael. You just have to pretend to hire her. Ask her out to the coast for exploratory conversations. That kind of thing.”
“Sometimes I think you’re seriously in need of medication. The woman can’t act. She can barely speak, from what I can see. And that family has lawyers. You can’t just go jerking her around and then thumb your nose at her. She’d sue.”
“By which time you’d have your picture in the can and it wouldn’t have cost more than a single arm and leg. A few more weeks of what’s been going on out here and your totals are going to look like the Social Security budget. You won’t even need to inflate the expenses to make it look like it’s been losing money, because it will be losing money.”
“I don’t see what Social Security has to do with it,” Michael said. “It’s a young picture, except for Stewart Gordon. Young actors. Appeal to the high school set. Rated R so that they’ll all feel good about themselves for sneaking in under the rating.”
The Oscartown Inn looked out onto a picturesque village square, picturesque because it had been calculated to look that way, square because it had been hacked out of a tangle of existing streets when the Powers That Be decided that they wanted the town to look like the “real” New England. That would have been in the 1930s, when people like ken-dra Rhode tried as hard as they could to stay out of the public’s sight, and places like Margaret’s Harbor were important because they were places where rich people could go to live richly and not be observed by anyone doing it.