There was a dry smile on his lips. Eric said, “What’s his deal?”
“Oh, a bit on the surly side. Edgar warned me, said it would be best not to talk to him, but I ignored that advice and went to his house. Took about two minutes for him to run me off the place. Threw a beer bottle at my car as I was leaving.”
“Charming.”
“Hospitable, no question. But assuming he isn’t going to be more helpful with you than he was with me, Edgar’s all I have to offer.”
“Okay.”
“So, how’d you get into this business?” Kellen said. “Want to be a filmmaker all along, or was it a hobby that turned professional, or…?”
He let his voice trail off, waiting, the question asked in absolute innocence, but Eric was feeling anger bleed through him. I was a filmmaker, he wanted to shout, and if a few breaks had gone my way and a few assholes had stayed out of it, you’d be asking me for an autograph right now.
“I went to film school,” he said, trying to keep his voice loose. “And then I worked out in California for a while. I was a director of photography on some stuff.”
“Things I’d know?”
Yes, things he would know. But if he named those, he saw the inevitable follow-up question—What films have you worked on recently? And what would Eric say to that? Why, you mean you haven’t seen the Anderson wedding video? Or the Harrelson funeral piece? What, you live in a cave, man?
“Probably not,” he said. “I couldn’t stick it out there, so I came back to Chicago and started doing my own thing.”
Kellen nodded. “ ‘Director of photography’—what’s that mean, exactly?”
“You run the cameras and the lighting crew. The director’s in charge of the film as a whole, obviously, but the DP is in charge of the images.”
“Getting the ones the director wants?”
Eric gave a small smile. “Getting the ones he needs. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they aren’t.”
Kellen’s face was showing genuine interest, but Eric didn’t want to step any deeper into this conversation. He said, “You know, I’d actually like to get a few shots in here,” basically just to buy some silence.
“You got plenty to work with,” Kellen said. “Check out the fireplace.”
Eric turned to look at the fireplace near the bar. It, like the hotel, was both beautiful and massive. The facade was built out of river stones, with a mural painted across their surfaces. The mural depicted swirling blue waters and lush green fields, a small image of the hotel set back and to the left, behind a buckeye tree. In the upper-right corner, perched above the tumbling water, was Sprudel—the West Baden companion to French Lick’s Pluto, god of the underworld. He looked more like a gnome than a devil, but it was enough to remind Eric of the black train, and that sent a dark flourish through him. He had seen the train. No doubt about it. So what the hell did that mean? Was he losing his damn mind?
“Was a time they burned fourteen-foot logs in there,” Kellen said. “Imagine that, right? Like cutting telephone poles in half and tossing them into the fireplace. You ought to get a shot of it.”
Eric nodded, got the camera out but didn’t put it on the tripod, just stood and held it up to his shoulder, turned and focused on the mural and watched the Sprudel figure fill the lens.
There was a piano not far from the bar, a full-size grand, and a man in a tuxedo was playing it. Eric swiveled to catch a shot of it, and the piano player saw him, looked back at the camera and winked. For some reason that made Eric turn away immediately, lower the camera and click it off and put it back in the bag. When he straightened from the bag he was dizzy, and squares of light floated in front of his eyes when he faced the rows of bottles behind the bar.
“Did that quick,” Kellen said.
“Light’s wrong,” Eric muttered, reaching for his drink. He took a long swallow and blinked a few times, waiting for steadiness to return. It didn’t.
The size of the rotunda was getting to him now, giving him a strange sense of vertigo even though he was standing at the bottom of it, feet firm on the floor. The place was just too damn open and too damn big. He and Kellen were standing at the short length of bar that extended into the atrium, but opposite them the bar was enclosed, secluded in a small room with wood paneling and dim lights. He suddenly wanted to get in there. Into the tighter space, into the dark.
But Kellen Cage was still talking, going on about the Waddy Hotel and a Negro League baseball team called the Plutos, so Eric put one hand on the bar and one foot on the brass rail to steady himself, had another long pull of the Grey Goose. Let the guy talk, don’t freak out. There was no problem here. Everything was fine.