The gruff man, in his sixties, with abundant white hair and cool eyes, looked down at Rune.
"So you think you can act?" he asked sternly.
Before she could say anything he turned and walked back into his office, leaving the door half-open. It was an old-fashioned office door, with a large window of mottled glass in it. The sign, in gold lettering, read: ARTHUR TUCKER, ACTING AND VOICE INSTRUCTION.
Rune stepped into the doorway, but stopped. She didn't know whether she'd been dismissed or invited in. When Tucker sat down at his desk she continued inside and closed the door behind her.
He wore dark slacks and a white shirt and tie. His dress shoes were well worn. Tucker was slightly built, which made him seem younger. His legs were thin and his face chiseled and handsome. Bushy white eyebrows. And those piercing green eyes… It was hard to hold his gaze. If Tucker were a character actor he would've played a president or king. Or maybe God.
"I don't know whether I can act or not," Rune said, walking up to the desk he sat behind. "That's why I'm here."
The office on Broadway and Forty-seventh was a theater museum. The walls were covered with cheap-framed photos of actors and actresses. Some of them Rune had seen in films or heard of-but nobody was very famous. They seemed to be the sort of actor who plays the male lead's best friend or the old wacko woman who shows up three or four times during a movie for comic relief. Actors who do commercials and dinner theater.
Also on the walls were props, bits of framed fire curtains from famous theaters now gone, Stagebill covers pasted on posterboard. Hundreds of books. Rune recognized some titles; they were the same as Shelly Lowe had on her bookshelf. She saw the name Artaud and she remembered the phrase again: the Theater of Cruelty. It brought a jolt to her stomach.
Tucker went through an elaborate ritual of lighting a pipe and a moment later a cloud of smoke, smelling of cherry, filled the room.
He gestured to the chair, sat. Lifted an eyebrow, saying in effect, keep going.
"I want to be a famous actress."
"So does half of New York. The other half wants to be famous actors. Where have you studied?"
" Shaker Heights."
"Where?"
" Ohio. Outside of Cleveland."
"I don't know any academies or studios there."
"It was the middle school. I was in the Thanksgiving pageant."
He stared at her, waiting for her to go on.
No sense of humor, she noted. "That's a joke."
"Uh-huh."
"I was also a snowflake once. And in high school I painted backdrops for SouthPacific… That's another joke. Look, sir, I just want to act."
"I'm a coach," Tucker said. "That's all I am. I improve, I don't create. If you want to go to school, study drama, come back, I may be able to help you. But for now…" He motioned toward the door.
Rune said, "But my friend said you're the best in the city."
"You know one of my students?"
"Shelly Lowe," Rune said and pressed the button of the little JVC camcorder in her bag. The lens was pointed upward, toward Tucker. She knew she wouldn't get the whole angle, but she'd see enough. Also, she thought the little black border might give it a nice effect.
Tucker turned to look out the window. A pile driver in a nearby construction site slammed a girder down toward the rock that Manhattan rested on. Rune counted seven bangs before he spoke. "I heard what happened to her." Tucker's ruddy face gazed at Rune from under those bushy white eyebrows. Did he brush them out like that? Rune changed her mind: He'd be a much better wizard than a president. A Gandalf or Merlin.
Rune said, "Whatever else about her, she was a good actress."
After a long moment Tucker said, "Shelly Lowe was my best student." A faint, humorless smile. "And she was a whore."
Rune blinked at the viciousness in his voice.
Tucker continued. "That's what killed her. Because she sold herself."
Rune asked, "Had she been coming to see you long?"
Reluctantly Tucker answered her question. Shelly had been studying with him for two years. She'd had no formal training other than that, which was very unusual nowadays, when schools like Yale and Northwestern and UCLA were producing the bulk of the professional actors and actresses.
Shelly had a superb memory. She was like a chameleon, slipping into parts like someone possessed by the character's spirit. She had a talent for dialects and accents. "She could be a barmaid from northeast of London, then change herself into a schoolteacher from Cotswold. The way Meryl Streep can."
Tucker spoke these words of admiration with troubled eyes.
"When did you find out about her film career?"
His voice was bitter again. "A month ago. She never said a word about it. I was stunned." He laughed with derision. "And the irony is that when it came to her legitimate auditions she wouldn't take just any job. She didn't do commercials or musical comedy. She didn't do dinner theater. She wouldn't go to Hollywood. She did only serious plays. I said to her, 'Shelly, why are you being so pigheaded? You could work full-time as an actress if you wanted to.' She said, no, she wasn't going toprostitute herself… And all the while, she was doing those… films." He closed his eyes and moved his large head from side to side to shake off the unpleasantness. "I found out a month ago. Someone was returning a tape at the video store I go to. I glanced at it. There she was on the cover. And, what's more, it was under the name Shelly Lowe! She didn't even use a stage name! When I found out I can't tell you how betrayed I felt. That's the only way I can describe it. Betrayal. When she came in for the next lesson we had a terrible fight. I told her to get out, I never wanted to see her again."
He spun around to face out the window again. "Every generation has its candidates for genius. Shelly could have been one of those. All of my other students-" He waved his hand around the room, as if they were sitting behind Rune. "They're talented and I like to think that I helped them improve. But they're nothing compared with Shelly. When she acted youbelieved her."
Just what Tommy Savorne had said, Rune recalled.
"It wasn't Shelly Lowe on stage, it was the character. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, the Greek classics, lonesco, Ibsen… Why, she came this close to the lead in Michael Schmidt's new play." He held his fingers a millimeter apart.
Rune frowned. "The big producer? The guy gets written up in the newspapers?"
He nodded. "She went to his EPI-"
"What's that?"
"Equity Principal Interview. It's like an audition. She met with Schmidt himself twice."
"And she didn't get the part?"
"No, I guess not. That was just before our fight. I didn't keep up with her." Tucker ran the stem of his pipe along his front lower teeth. He was not speaking to Rune as he said, "My own acting career never went very far. My talent was for coaching and teaching. I thought that with Shelly I'd leave behind someone who was truly brilliant. I could makethat contribution to theater…"
He stared at a photo on the opposite wall. Rune wondered which one.
"Betrayal," he whispered bitterly. Then he turned his gaze to Rune. She felt naked under his deep eyes, shaded by the brush of his eyebrows. "You seem very young. Do you make those films too? The ones she did?"
"No," Rune said. She was going to make up something, the sort of job a girl her age should be doing, but with those strange currents shooting out from his eyes-a green version of Shelly's blue laser beams-she just repeated the denial in a whisper.
Tucker studied her for a long moment. "You have no business being an actress. Pardon my bluntness but you should look for another line of work."
"I just-"
But he was waving his hand. "I wouldn't do you a favor by being kind. Now if you'll excuse me." He pulled a script toward him.
It wasn't much of a list.
Rune sat at her desk-Cathy's old battered gray government-issue. She'd pushed it right next to the cracked front panel of L &R's air conditioner, which was churning out about a tenth of the BTUs it once had. She closed the Manhattan phone book.
There were only two A. Llewellyns listed and neither of them was an Andy. That left only the remaining twenty million citizens to survey in the other boroughs, Westchester, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Shelly's most recent boyfriend would have to go unquestioned for the time being.
Larry walked into the office and glanced at Rune. "Whatcha doing, luv?"
"Looking up things."
"Things?"
"Important things."
"Well, if you could postpone your search for a bitI've got something important for you."
"Letters to type?"
"Yeah, well, I wasn't going to mention it but those last ones? They were 'ardly the best typing job I've ever seen."
"I told you I wasn't a typist."
"You spelled the man's name three different ways in the same bleedin' letter."
"Was that the Indian guy? He had a weird name. I-"
"But his first name was James and that's the one you misspelled."
"I'll try to do better… You have my distributor for me yet?"
"Not yet, luv, but what I do 'ave is the people for this advertising job, right? In the next room. Did the estimate go out yet?"
"I typed it."
"But did it go out yet?"
Rune said patiently, "It's going to go out."
"So it 'asn't gone out yet?"
"It's finished, though."
"Rune, they're 'ere. Now. We're going to talk concepts today. They should've 'ad the estimate before this meeting."
"Sorry. I'll bring it in."
He sighed. "All right, let's go meet everybody. If they ask we'll tell 'em we were 'olding on to the estimate till this meeting. It was intentional."
"Larry, you shouldn't do advertising. It-"
"Oh, one of your boyfriends called."
"Yeah, who?"
" 'ealy, something like that. Wants you to call."
"Sam called? Great. I'll just be-"
"Later."
"But-"
He held the door open and smiled threateningly. "After you, luv."
Rune heard the name but forgot it immediately.
Larry was droning on, looking impressed as he recited, "… the second biggest wallet and billfold manufacturer in the United States."
Rune said, "How interesting."
The man with the company and the unmemorable name-Rune called him Mr. Wallet-was about fifty, round and sharp-eyed. He wore a seersucker suit and sweated a lot. He stood with his arms crossed, hovering beside a doughy woman in her late twenties, who also crossed her arms, looking with flitting eyes at the lights and cameras and dollies. She worked for the company too and was his daughter. She was also, Rune found out, going to act in the commercial.
Larry pretended to miss Rune's eyes as they made a circuit of the ceiling at this news.
Another young woman, horsey, with a sensible pageboy haircut and an abrasive voice, said to Rune, "I'm Mary Jane Collins. I'm House O' Leather's advertising director. I'll be supervising the shoot."
"Rune."
Mary Jane extended her bony hand, the costume jewelry bracelets jingling. Rune gripped it briefly.
Daughter said, "I'm a little nervous. I've done voice-overs but I've never been on camera before."
Mr. Wallet: "You'll do fine, baby. Just forget that-" He looked at Mary Jane. "How many people are going to see her?"
"The media buy should put us at about fifteen million viewers."
He continued, "Fifteen million people are going to be watching your every mood… oops, I mean move." He laughed.
"Daddy." She smiled with a twisted mouth.
Mary Jane read some papers. To Larry she said, "The budgets. I haven't seen the revised budgets."
Larry looked at Rune, who said, "They're almost ready."
He mouthed, Almost?
Mary Jane's dark hair swiveled as she looked down at Rune. "Almost?"
"A problem with the typewriter."
"Oh." Mary Jane laughed with surprise. "Sure, I understand. It's just that… Well, I would'vethought you'd have them for us before this. I mean, this is the logical time to review them. Even today is a little tardy, in terms of timing."
"Another couple hours. I glued the key back on." Larry said, "Rune, maybe you could go work on them now."
Rune said, "I thought we were going to talk concepts." "Oh," Mary Jane said, looking down at her, "I hadn't understood you were in a creative position here at the studio." "I-"
"What do you do, exactly?"
Larry said, "Rune's our production assistant."
Looking her up and down, Mary Jane said, "Oh." And smiled like a fourth-grade teacher.
Mr. Wallet was looking at a huge roll of a backdrop, twenty feet across, mottled like a pastel Jackson Pollock painting. "Now, that's something else. You think we can use that for the shoot? Mary Jane, what do you think?"
She glanced toward it and said slowly, "Might just fly. We'll put our thinking caps on about it." She turned back to the desk and opened her briefcase. "I've done a memo with all the schedule deadlines." She handed the paper to Rune. "Could you run and make a copy of it?"
Larry took the paper and held it out to Rune. "Sure she will." His eyes narrowed and Rune took the sheet.
"I'll be back in just a minute. I'll run just like a bunny."
"Daddy, will they have a makeup person? I don't have to do my own makeup, do I?"
Rune vanished through the door into the office. Larry followed.
"I thought you said it was bleedin' finished."
"Thee fell off your cheap-ass typewriter. That's the most-used letter in the English language."
"Well, go buy a new fuckin' typewriter. But I want those estimates in a half hour."
"You're a sellout."
I don't 'ave time for your bleedin' lectures, Rune. You work for me. Now get the copies made and get those estimates to us."
"You're going to let those people walk all over you. I'm looking out for your pride, Larry. Nobody else's going to."
"You gotta pay the rent, honey. Rule number one in business: Get the bucks. You don't have any money you don't get to do what you want."
"They're obnoxious."
"True."
"He smells bad."
"He does not."
"Somebodysmells bad. And that woman, that Mary Jane, is a dweeb."
"What the 'ell's a dweeb?"
"Exactly what she is. She's-"
The door opened and Mary Jane's smiling face looked out, her eyes perching on Rune. "Are you the one who's in charge of lunch?"
Rune smiled. "You betcha."
"We should probably get a head start on it… We were thinking in terms of salads. Oh, and how's that copying coming?"
Rune saluted with a smile. "It's on its way."
The next day at eleven-thirty Sam Healy picked her up outside of L &R and they drove north.
"It's just a station wagon." Rune, looking around inside, was mildly disappointed.
Sam Healy said, "But it's blue and white, at least." It also hadbomb squad stenciled in large white letters on the side. And a cage, empty at the moment, that he explained was for the dogs that sniffed out explosives. "You were expecting…?"
"I don't know. High-tech stuff, like in the movies."
"Life is generally a lot lower-tech than Hollywood."
"True."
They drove out of Manhattan to the NYPD explosives disposal facility on Rodman's Neck in the Bronx.
"Oh, wow, check this place out. This is totally audacious."
It was essentially a junkyard without the junk. Her feet bounced up and down on the floorboards as they pulled through the gate in the chain-link fence, crowned with spirals of razor wire.
To their left was the police shooting range. Rune heard the short cracks from pistols. To their right were several small red sheds. "That's where we keep our own explosives," Healy explained.
"Your own?"
"Most of the time we don't dismantle devices. We bring them here and blow them up."
Rune picked up her camera and battery pack from the backseat. There was a green jumpsuit there. She hadn't noticed it before. She tried to pick it up. It was very heavy. The helmet had a green tube, probably for ventilation, coming out of the top and hanging down the back. It looked just like an alien's head.
"Wow, what's that?"
"Bomb suit. Kevlar panels in fireproof cloth."
"Is that what you wear when you disarm bombs?"
"You don't call them bombs."
"No?"
"They're lEDs. Improvised explosive devices. The Department's a lot like the military. We use initials a lot."
They walked into a low cinder-block building that reeked of city government budget. A single, overworked air conditioner groaned in the corner. Healy nodded at a couple uniformed officers. He carried a blue zipper bag.
She glanced at a poster. rules for boiling dynamite.
There were dozens of others, all with bullet points of procedures on them. The clinical language was chilling.
In the event of consciousness after a detonation, attempt to retrieve any severed body parts…
Jesus…
He noticed what she was reading and, maybe to distract her from the gruesome details, asked, "Hey, want to hear the basic lecture on explosive ordnance disposal?"
She looked away from the section on improvising tourniquets and said, "I guess."
"There are only two goals in dealing with explosives. First, to avoid human injury. Destroy or disarm by remote if at all possible. Goal number two is to avoid injury to property. Most of our work involves investigating suspicious packages and sweeps of consulates and airports and abortion clinics. Things like that."
"You make it sound, I don't know, routine."
"Most of it is. But we also got odd jobs, like a couple weeks ago-some kid buys a sixty-millimeter mortar shell from an army-navy store in Brooklyn and takes it home. He and his brother're in the backyard playing catch with it. Supposed to be a dummy-all the powder drained out. Only the kid's father was in Nam and he thinks it looks funny. Takes it to the local precinct station. Turns out it was live."
"Ouch."
"We got it taken care of… Then we get a lot of false alarms, just like the Fire Department. But every once in a while, bingo. There's a suitcase at the airport or a bundle of dynamite or a pipe bomb and we've got to do something with it."
"So somebody crawls up and cuts the wires?"
Healy said, "What's the first goal?"
Rune grinned. "Don't get anybody's ass blown up."
"Mine included. First we evacuate the area and set up a frozen zone."
"Frozen?"
"We call it a frozen zone. Maybe a thousand yards wide. Then we'll put a command post behind armor or sandbags somewhere within that area. We have these remote-control robots with video cameras and X rays and stethoscopes and we send one up to take a look at the thing."
"To listen for the ticking?"
"Yep. Exactly." He nodded at her. "You'd think every-body'd be using battery-powered digital timer-detonators-Hollywood again. But ninety percent of the bombs we deal with are really crude, homemade. Pipe bombs, black or smokeless powder, dynamite, match heads in conduit. And most of these use good old-fashioned dime-store alarm clocks. You need two pieces of metal coming together to complete the circuit and set off the detonating cap. What's better for that than a windup alarm clock with a bell and clapper on top? So, we look and listen. Then if it really is an IED and we can disarm without any risk we do a render-safe. If it's a tricky circuit or we think it'll go off we get it into the containment vehicle." He nodded toward the field near the shack. "And bring it here and blow it up ourselves."
They walked outside. Two young men stood a hundred yards away from them in one of the three deep pits dug into the field. They wound what looked like plastic clothesline around a square, olive-drab box.
Rune looked around. She said, "This looks just like the Underworld."
Healy frowned. He asked her, "Eliot Ness?"
"No, like Hades, I mean. You know, hell."
"Oh, yeah-your analysis of the crime scene the other day." Healy looked back to the men in the pit. He said to Rune, "You have to understand something about explosives. In order to be effective, they have to be explosive only under certain conditions. If you make this stuff that blows up when you look at it cross-eyed, well, that's not going to be real useful now, is it? Hell, most explosives you can destroy by burning them. They don't blow up; they just burn. So to make it go bang, you need detonators. Those're powerful bits of explosive that set off the main charge. Remember the C-4 that they used in the second bombing? If you don't have the detonator surrounded by at least a half inch of C-4 you might not get a bang at all."
She heard enthusiasm in his voice. She thought how good it is when you've found the one thing in life that you're really good at and that you enjoy doing for a living.
"That's what we look for," Healy continued. "That's the weak point in bombs. Most detonators're triggered electrically. So, yeah, we cut the wires, and that's it. If somebody wants to get elaborate they could have a timed detonator and a rocker switch, so that even if you cut the timer, any movement will set off the bomb. Some have a shunt-a galvanometer hooked up to the circuit so that if you cut the wire the needle swings to zero because the current's been cut andthat sets off the bomb. The most elaborate bomb I ever saw had a pressure switch. The whole thing was inside a sealed metal canister filled with pressurized air. We drilled a tiny hole to test for nitrate molecules- that's how bomb detectors at airports work. Sure enough, it was filled with explosives. There was a pressure switch inside. So if we'd open the canister the air would have escaped and set it off."
"God, what did you do?"
"We brought it up here and were just going to detonate it but the word came from downtown they wanted to check the components for fingerprints. So we put it in a hyperbaric chamber, equalized the pressure inside and outside, opened it up and rendered it safe. It had two pounds of Semtex in it. With steel shot all around.
Like shrapnel. Purely antipersonnel. Mean, son-of-a-bitch bomb."
"You got the robot into the chamber?"
"Well, no. Actually I dismantled it."
"You?"
He shrugged and nodded to the pit, where the two men had finished their wrapping exercise and were retreating to a bunker of concrete and sandbags.
"They're practicing setting off military charges. That's an MI 18 demolition block. About two pounds of C-4. For blowing bridges and buildings, trees. They've wrapped it with detonating cord and'll set it off by remote control."
Over the loudspeaker came a voice: "Pit number one, fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!"
"What do they mean?" Rune asked.
"That's what they used to yell in coal mines when they lit the fuse on the dynamite. Demolition people use it now to mean there's about to be an explosion."
Suddenly a huge orange flash filled the sky. Smoke appeared. And an instant later a clap of thunder slapped their ears.
"Boaters hate us," Healy explained. "City gets a lot of claims for broken windows."
Rune was laughing.
Healy looked at her. "What?"
She said, "It's just weird. You brought me all the way out here to give me a lesson on IEDs."
"Not really," he said, considering.
"Then why did you invite me?"
Healy looked away for a moment, cleared his throat. His face was ruddy to start with but it seemed he was blushing. He opened his attache case and took out a couple of cans of diet Coke, two deli sandwiches, a bag of Fritos. "I guess it's a date."