This time Cal asked where he could stand.
Emilio had changed his jacket. A radio spoke from his pocket while he studied a sheet of paper covered with numbers.
“For what?”
“The couple. Portraits. The light's better on the other side.”
“Not during lunch service.”
“It's just me now. They wouldn't come until later.”
Emilio looked through the passage toward the arch. He turned his paper over and drew a line with a pen.
“Stairs on your right. Up one. The little door. Don't go left. Left takes you to the kitchen roof and it's locked.”
“Thank you.”
“And don't bring them through here without telling me. They'll stop to talk in the doorway.”
“I won't.”
Emilio had gone back to the paper. Cal almost asked what it was, then didn't. He had the passage.
The stairs smelled of detergent and hot bread. A metal door at the top stood open on a block of wood. Cal went through it into a shallow outdoor recess, with the hotel's pale wall on his left and a low screen of ornamental planting beyond the rail. Across the narrow service court, an upper terrace faced him at the same height. Its square balusters were molded to look like stone. A short run of rail ended in a broad corner post beneath a bougainvillea.
The sun hit the terrace beyond it. The recess where he stood remained in shade. A couple seated on the bench across the way would catch a clean edge of light. It could work if the background wasn't full of service traffic.
Cal checked the sound of the air-conditioning units below. Too much for conversation, fine for pictures. He took a little view from the doorway, then started the camera again and moved along the recess to see what appeared around the post.
Lena stood on the opposite terrace.
He let the camera settle. Her green dress was a darker shade out here. She had put on sunglasses. Felix was leaning beside the corner post, pink jacket caught under one elbow, his face turned up toward hers.
There were people you could film for an hour and get nothing but a well-guarded face. Lena didn't guard hers. She placed it. The attentive face for the planner, the impatient face in the corridor, that small unprepared smile for Adrian's sore hand. He wanted to see what she did with Felix.
He moved the lens clear of a leaf. The near rail cut off their legs. Through the camera he could get her from the ribs up, Felix's left shoulder and one hand. Not useful for the portrait test, but better than the wall.
Felix said something Cal couldn't hear. His mouth rounded around a word, then flattened. Lena shook her head.
Cal lowered the camera an inch. He could hear more without his own breathing against the eyepiece, but only fragments crossed the court.
“…not leaving it…”
Felix put his hand on her wrist. She took it away.
“You don't get to decide that.” His voice carried now.
Lena looked toward the door behind her. Cal stood back into the recess. He was stealing a private argument, which was poor preparation for the intimate artistic relationship he hoped to establish. He kept recording.
Felix turned to follow her glance, his hip against the low rail. As he turned back, he lifted one hand, palm up. There was something almost pleading in the gesture.
Lena stepped into him and shoved him with both hands.
He had time to grab her forearm. Cal saw his fingers catch, saw Lena wrench free and push again against his chest while he was tipping backward. The pink jacket slipped off the post. Felix disappeared beyond the rail with it.
The sound came from below. Not loud. A heavy object dropped on a hard floor.
Lena had one hand stretched out over the empty rail. Her other hand gripped the corner post. She stayed like that long enough for Cal to see where Felix's fingers had dragged one sleeve down.
He forgot the camera. It pressed against his chest as he went to the edge of the recess.
Felix lay in the service court below, between a drain and a closed loading door. One arm was bent beneath him. A shoe had come off and landed near the wheel of a small linen cage. His face was turned enough for Cal to see the open mouth. A dark mark was spreading on the concrete beneath his head.
“Jesus,” Cal said.
The word didn't cross the court. Lena was looking down at Felix. She touched her wrist, then looked along the empty terrace in both directions.
Cal stepped back before she looked up.
Inside the stairwell a radio crackled. Someone laughed, far below. He could go down the stairs, say there had been a fall, bring Emilio. He didn't need to describe it correctly the first time. People would come. Someone could still go to Felix. He had seen people survive things they should not have survived.
He pulled his phone out.
The lock screen showed 12:43. Juno had sent a picture of a lunch tray with two sandwiches on it. Under it: Twenty minutes. Then I eat yours.
He went to the call screen. His thumb rested above the numbers.
Across the court Lena's shoes struck the terrace tiles. He looked up. She had left the rail and was walking toward the door, fast but not running. She stopped to retrieve something from the bench. A small white bag. She put it over her shoulder and went inside.
Cal took a step after her without moving from his own patch of shade. The camera strap caught on the rail. He lifted it free.
The red recording light was still on.
He stopped it.
He knew what he'd seen. He needed to know what he had.
His hands worked without deciding: playback, last file, scrub back. Felix's shoulder filled the little monitor, the frame jerking as Cal had lowered the camera. Lena entered it. Her hands came up. Most of Felix's body was below the near rail. There was a flash of pink moving out of frame and the branch of bougainvillea shaking. Cal's own movement destroyed the rest. Sound, a short scrape, then the dull impact underneath the hum.
He played it again.
It wasn't what he'd seen. It was enough to make someone ask what she'd done.
He turned the sound down and brought back her hands.
A wedding film paid him enough to keep the company alive for a month if he didn't pay what it already owed. Two days ago he'd searched used-camera prices and closed the page when he recognized his own model in the lowest listing. Yesterday he'd spent forty-seven minutes on the phone persuading the rental company that being good for the money and having the money were the same thing.
He looked at the paused image. Lena's face was clear. Both hands out.
No one had given him this. He had been standing in the right place.
The stairwell radio spoke again, closer. He turned off the monitor and put the phone in his pocket without calling.
The man coming up the stairs carried a flat cardboard box, large enough to fill the doorway. Cal held the door for him. Inside were small glass vases nested in brown paper. One rattled as the man squeezed past.
“Thanks,” the man said.
“Sure.”
Cal went down. At the turn in the stairs he stopped, one hand on the wall. A sensation like the start of vomiting came and went. He waited until it passed, then went on.
Emilio was at the foot of the stairs, talking into his radio. Cal could touch his sleeve. Say his name. Ask for help.
“Any good?” Emilio asked, lowering the radio.
Cal looked at him.
“The spot,” Emilio said. “For your pictures.”
“Maybe. I need to speak to the bride.”
“Everyone does.”
Emilio pointed toward the public corridor. Cal went that way.
He saw her outside the dressing rooms, speaking to an older woman with Adrian's wide forehead. The woman was holding a silver clutch in both hands, as though it contained something she meant to throw. Lena listened. She had taken off her sunglasses and adjusted the sleeve Felix had pulled. Her white bag hung from her shoulder.
Cal slowed before he reached them.
“It's the time we agreed,” Lena was saying.
“It was the time you agreed.”
“Pam, he wants you there.”
“Then he can ask me.”
The older woman turned away. She looked at Cal's camera, then his face, and moved past him without speaking.
Lena opened the dressing-room door. Cal stepped forward.
“I need a minute.”
“With Adrian?”
“With you.”
Her hand remained on the door. “We'll do the pictures at three.”
“I was across from the terrace.”
The corridor's other door opened. A woman came out carrying shoes in both hands. Lena held her dressing-room door wider and moved back to let Cal in.
There were flowers in here too, low arrangements of white roses on a table under a mirror. Two garment bags hung on a rail. A half-eaten pear sat beside a makeup brush. He noticed all of it because he didn't want to look at her wrist.
She closed the door.
“Who else was with you?”
“Nobody.”
“Your assistant?”
“No.”
She put the white bag down very carefully. He wondered what was in it. For the first time since the terrace he pictured himself being the next person, Lena's two hands on his chest. The room had another door, partly open onto a bathroom. Nothing moved in it.
“Let me see,” she said.
He stayed where he was and turned the monitor toward her. He didn't give her the camera.
He played the moment. The tiny figures moved; Felix vanished. Lena watched without leaning closer. When the clip ended, she looked at Cal's face.
“Did you go down?” she asked.
“I saw him.”
“Did you go to him?”
“No.”
She glanced at the closed door.
He could still leave through it. Nothing had been said about money. He could walk straight to the lobby and call. Explain the delay as shock, explain the camera, explain why he had followed her. It was still a story he could tell without hearing himself in it.
Lena said, “What do you want?”
He had imagined that part on the walk. He had imagined her offering. He had not imagined how humiliating it would be to have to ask, like every other man who had brought a project and a camera into a room with money.
She waited.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said.