Читать книгу Civil Twilight - Susan Dunlap - Страница 10

6

THE GUARD AT the set checked me in.

“Duffy’s right here,” he said, grinning.

He wagged his black stump of a tail. It was a big statement for a dour Scotty. But Duffy adores being on the set. I keep running into people who remember him from this western or that romance. He’s done Fala three times that I know of in FDR biopics. There’s a mystique about him. In a business that puts a high premium on superstition, he’s viewed as such a good luck omen the directors send cars for him.

I’d inherited him when his previous owner scarpered minutes before the sheriff’s arrival on a location set in the high desert. He’d paused only to leave me Duffy and a bag of what I assumed would be dog supplies but turned out to be lock picks and a few other useful items that explained the fellow’s hasty departure. He’d never come back for Duff. On the lam or in the can; I chose to believe the former.

We walked on to the base of California and I stood a moment staring at the eerie sight. The California Street cable car shoots down the slope from Nob Hill nearly to the Bay. It stops abruptly just beyond the corner of Drumm, where the intersection smacks up against Market. Traffic pours down California, shoots across Drumm, then merges in one great lump ready to shove across Market on a light that’s never green long enough. There, old green streetcars with tiny high windows, resurrected from the streetcar graveyard in Brooklyn, and sunny orange cars with big happy windows, retired from Milan, ferry excited visitors up and down the broad thoroughfare. But not tonight. Tonight Market was blocked off, traffic detoured to Mission. Drumm was silent, and nothing moved on California. The last time I’d seen it this still was right after the Loma Prieta quake.

Just above the intersection, a cable car sat empty. At the west end of the block, another was poised to head down. Cardboard mock-up autos, created in studio, lined the downhill lane as if waiting for the light to change so they could shoot across Market to points south and east.

“Running behind,” Jed Elliot, the second unit director greeted me. “Only half an hour.”

I shrugged, trying to hide how relieved I was. Location costs—equipment, salaries, site fees—were big budget issues for producers and no one wanted to be responsible for delays that threw production into the next day.

Elliot and Duffy eyed each other. Then Duffy jumped into his chair. The fingers of fog were reaching over Nob Hill, less than a mile west of here. Thirty minutes was about as long as the thin fog shot would hold. Once it got its elbow over the hill, it would punch down thick and heavy. After that Jed Elliot would be dealing with a night shot and the lighting would need to be reworked, not to mention all the script adjustments. There was going to be heavy pressure to wrap on the first run-through. If we did manage to start at 7:00, we’d be fine, though.

Karen Johnson had been going to meet me here at 8:00 P.M. Instead, where would she be by then? Where was she now? In jail? In San Jose? San Francisco’s a peninsula, so there’s only one way to go if you don’t dare take a hot car across a bridge. And John . . . What had she gotten John into? I’d liked her; but now. . . I just hoped Gary’d picked up my message.

I walked up the block and around the corner to the stunt car, a shiny burnt-orange convertible that would look great in the shots—assuming we still had some light. The modifications had been minor—extra air bags, padded lap harness that wouldn’t show, a good sized weight in the passenger side of the trunk. This part of the gag would be straightforward: around the corner, clip the uphill cable car, shimmy my own ride as if losing control, side swipe a couple junkers, appear to straighten out and crash into the downhill cable car. It was a precision run, meaning it had to be done in one take. The light wouldn’t hold, and the junkers could only be hit once without looking like, well, junkers.

“Straight fiction shot.”

The cameraman laughed.

In the final cut the scene would show the actress I was doubling speeding across Front Street to the corner of California, glancing across at the wedge of the 101 California building that juts toward the corner like a sharp cake knife. Assuming the street made a gentle 45 degree curve, she’d continue alongside the building, not realizing she was in the middle of the intersection. Because the building side road was an illusion, it required, after clipping a cable car, cutting left, sharply and instantly. It’d be a great visual.

A bit of poetic license was the slope. In the final cut I’d be shooting down the steep incline of California Street. That incline, however, was actually four blocks west. Between Front and the Bay, the street was flat. Put a marble on the sidewalk here and it’d stay dead still. Tomorrow I’d drive the incline. Later that shot would be edited in.

I checked the tires, slid under the chassis to make sure everything was connected. This little orange sports car wasn’t new, but it wasn’t a junker of the caliber I’d driven in other gags. The problem with those old cars is there’s a reason they were junked and that probably didn’t happen at the point when they had one hard ride left in them. I’d slid under one and found brake cables dragging.

With this car, though, everything looked good. It was the second unit director’s job to make sure it was. Still, Jed Elliot wasn’t the one who’d be slapping it into two eight-ton cable cars. A stunt double who wants to live triple-checks everything. It scared me how close I’d come to not having enough time. I walked to the corner to eye the slide patch. The slippery base had been laid the width of the cable car plus five feet beyond, to allow me to spin while on it and be off the edge the moment I needed traction to pull out.

I slid in, clasped the belt, visualized the gag: from turning the key, letting up the brake, feeling the pressure of the gas pedal under my foot, to picking up speed as I turned onto California, then hard-righting the wheel to skid right, and sending the tail left to clip the cable car. I ran through it, started again, this time visualizing the front of the cable car, the “60” in the middle of its front end, feeling my arms and shoulders thrust right as I pulled into the skid. I felt the impact, saw the skid, the steering wheel spinning back through my hands, the clutch as I pulled left into the turn, brushing a dummy dressed to represent a terrified tourist. A yard beyond that would be the low ramp. I needed to yank the wheel full left so I hit the ramp already into the turn and got enough centrifugal force for the 360.

Fifteen minutes to go. Ahead, the crew was adjusting one of the in-place cameras set against the corner of the building. There’d be other fixed cameras rolling and, once I started, the camera cart with a driver every bit as skilled as I was would be ahead on my left. It was going to be a tight run for him. He’d have to be as aware as I was of the ramp. If he was too close when I did the 360, I’d slam him into the wall.

I began to picture it one more time, now focusing on the end of the run. But when I closed my eyes, the picture in my mind was not the street in front but the road leading up to Coit Tower. And Karen Johnson. How could she have done something as stupid as stealing a cop car? Was it a publicity stunt? She sure handled the car like a getaway driver. Could John possibly be right about Gary setting the whole thing up? Giving her directions to Madame Velvet’s house where John was so unaccountably thrown off his stride, and anxious for me to be gone.

But if Gary didn’t set it up, if she had stolen the car on her own, could she have known John would be waiting at Coit Tower? Not impossible. Webb Moratt knew. And just what was John expecting, all dolled up in his suit like that?

John! I kept coming back to his expression—more like anguish than simple anger.

“You okay?” Jed Elliot leaned toward the window. He looked barely warm enough in a heavy fleece jacket and watch cap.

“Fine.” I willed myself not to shiver in the fifty degree night, sitting there in a spaghetti string halter. Be tough, shoulders! “I’ve done plenty of car work.”

“Sure.” He meant that he didn’t know me, yet.

“I was fine driving this baby yesterday, right?”

“Three minutes. Fog’s good, but the light’s going faster than we figured, so we need to do it in one.”

Keeping my hand relaxed on the wheel, I smiled up at him. “Right.”

As he walked away I eyed the road ahead. The cameraman stubbed out a cigarette and slid into his cart. In the thickening fog his little open vehicle looked like a refugee from a soapbox derby.

Even if I’d just been driving here to dinner—meeting Karen Johnson for a shared meal “above our element”—I’d be slowing down and paying attention to headlights as the first bit of fog blurred the air. Had this been real life, here on California Street, cars would have been bumper to bumper, taillights glowing like Christmas balls. Jed had done a good job simulating it. He’d set up dummies, cardboard mock-ups of a BMW, Mercedes, two Hondas and a Ford, with the two breakaway cars I’d hit. Beyond the cardboard set-up was the spew cart, the obligatory display of fruit or vegetables, or in this case fish, that would be hit, depositing its contents all over the road. However, the fog was Jed’s friend: even the oldest dummy would look fine tonight.

John! Where was he—

Focus! Focus or die! I exhaled oh-so-slowly and tried to clear my mind.

“Thirty seconds!”

“Engine!”

I turned the ignition. It seemed an eternity before it caught. Outside I heard the grunt of the camera cart starting up.

“Clear the set! Get off!” someone yelled. I shot a glance across the street. Was there someone in eggshell blue over on the sidewalk? Could Karen really be here? “Action!”

I punched the gas. Continuity would pick up ten feet before the corner, where I left off yesterday. I needed to hit 30 there. Fog smeared the windshield. The car burst through it, like stepping off the hundred-foot pole. Focus! 25, 30. I eased the wheel left, as if falling for the illusory road next to the wedge of 101 California.

The first cable car loomed, and I jimmied the wheel in “panic.” The camera cart cut in close. I hit the slip pad, yanked the wheel hard right. Then the skid, and I was slamming the rear fender into the front corner of the cable car. Fog blurred the street. I cut left, down California, shimmied onto the cable car tracks, overcorrected full out, smacked the first junker, bounced left, hard-righted into the second. The dummy pedestrian popped out. I skimmed it, slammed the brake.

The car lurched—hard-right, hard-left—as I hit the ramp and clung to the wheel. It bounced, spun, going wide toward a lamppost on the far sidewalk. The front bumper missed but the rear smacked it. Metal crunched. Drifting out of the circle, I yanked the wheel back into the spin. The second cable car was two yards to my left. I went up over the sidewalk, slammed into the fish wagon from the back. Big, sloppy, silvery fish flew against the windshield. Slime turned the glass gray. I couldn’t see anything.

The cable car was dead ahead, the passengers’ bare legs dangling from the outside benches. I stood on the brakes. The shrill squeal cut the air.

A fish flew over the windshield into my face.

“Sheesh!” I said as I pulled to a stop and someone opened the door. “Did you have to get day-old fish?”

He didn’t react.

I snapped the belt free and was out of the car. “The cameraman okay?”

Another fish hit me. “Jes’ fine, thank you.”

Shoes hitting pavement, disembodied cheers came through the fog. “Good work!” Jed was calling. “You get it all?” he was asking. In reply, the cameraman was flinging another fish. Duffy was barking, then he leapt into my arms, making everyone laugh.

I’d lucked out. This time. What a day it had been since that call from Gary. It scared me how closed I’d come to losing focus. I had a fire gag coming up in a couple days. Fire’s fire. If I couldn’t focus then, I’d die.

It was night now. The streetlights blurred the road surface under the fog and I was glad I wasn’t the one making sure every dead fish was swept away. Duffy jumped down. I headed west toward the corner where I’d started. It was just the second unit—the stunt crew—here tonight. They’d be a few minutes packing up before we met at Harrington’s, the site of the per diem. It was the few minutes I needed. Common sense told me this was the last place Karen Johnson would come. Common sense said I’d imagined that flutter of blue cloth.

But, still, I wasn’t ready to rule it out.