Adrian wanted to stand where he could still see the empty screen.
“That bit at the beginning,” he said. “With the doors opening. I never see that. I'm always already in there.”
Cal glanced back at Juno. She was disconnecting the delivery drive. Pam had gone over to ask her something, and two guests were waiting behind Pam with their phones in their hands.
“She found the order,” Cal said.
“You got it made.” Adrian put a hand on his shoulder. “Listen. What you said to me about a proper film. Not this. Your thing.”
No Visitors. Cal had stopped saying the name to people unless he thought they could supply something. He had begun to dislike the attentive expression that arrived before the refusal.
Adrian's hand was heavy. The abrasion at the base of his thumb had begun to heal. Cal remembered him holding it out after the bus story, refusing to let them think it hadn't hurt.
“I can give you the house,” Adrian said. “The people who run it. How it works when there's nobody staying. You told me that's what you wanted. The machine behind it.”
“A house isn't the whole film.”
“It's a place to begin. You'll see what else comes with it.”
Adrian took out his phone. He scrolled past messages without reading them and made a call. Cal watched the screen, almost unwillingly. He had heard this kind of promise delivered against a dead phone at parties.
“Mara. It's me. Are you at the house?” Adrian listened. “No, the other house. Yes. I'm putting you on speaker for a minute. Cal Mercer's here.”
A woman said hello. Wind battered her end of the call.
“He'll come tomorrow to look around. I want him on the gate list. He's making a documentary. He can see the grounds, the plant room, the service side. Whatever he needs to look at to tell us how to start.”
“With a crew?”
Cal had not meant to lean closer. He was beside the phone now.
“Just me, for the first visit.”
“What time?”
“Ten.”
The word came out before he had considered whether ten was possible. He saw the film begin: the long arrival, a landscape whose entrances were designed for separate classes of people. The air-conditioning machinery concealed behind bougainvillea. Men in work clothes moving things out of sight before the beautiful people came. He could make an opening without asking Gideon whether the kitchen cups felt derivative.
“Text him the details,” Adrian told her. “I'll send his number.”
“All right. I need notice before anyone starts filming staff. We have people on rotation.”
“You'll work that out with him.”
She asked him something about a generator contractor. Adrian answered it, at length, with an impatience that sounded wonderfully ordinary. He remembered an invoice number, or claimed to, and asked her to check before paying. Cal stood through the conversation as if he were already part of the household's expenditure.
When Adrian ended the call he sent Cal's contact. A minute later Cal's phone vibrated. Mara had supplied the gate address and a time. She would meet him at the service entrance. It was a practical little message with an aerial image of the turn from the road. The image did more to him than an offer of money.
“I want to commission it,” Adrian said. “We'll talk about what it costs. You need to see it first. I don't want another person selling you fog.”
Cal enlarged the little aerial image. He could see a service road beyond the gate.
Across the room Juno had finished with the guests. She lifted the interviewer microphone and looked toward the chairs. Cal raised a hand to show he'd seen her.
Adrian's hand left his shoulder.
“I'm not doing that with her.”
Cal let his phone fall to his side.
“You spoke to her.”
“I said I'd speak. I didn't agree to be made into another little criminal show. You saw what she put out.”
“I was in it.”
“Exactly. You were in it. Everybody saw you. Who had to stand up and say what you were actually doing? Me.”
He hadn't raised his voice. People passing them could have mistaken it for a conversation about the film they'd just watched. Cal moved a little farther from the chairs, and Adrian came with him.
“She heard me hire you,” Adrian said. “She stayed there and filmed you. Then she put her name on it and sent it out, and you got to be the man whose face people point at. She didn't call me before she did it. She didn't give a damn what I might say.”
Cal had wanted someone to say that. Hearing it now was like finding a dry place in clothes he'd been wearing wet all morning.
“She didn't crop your instruction out,” he said.
“I'm aware of that. I was there.” Adrian looked over Cal's shoulder. “I know what I asked you to do. I know what he was doing to us. I'm not asking you to take the blame for me.”
Behind him Juno adjusted one chair, then put it back. She wasn't watching them now. She was checking B's sound through one earpiece.
“You sit with me,” Adrian said. “You know us. Ask me why I asked you to take him away. Ask me what he was doing in the middle of my wedding. I'll answer you. We'll make something people can actually understand.”
“And she films it.”
“You can film it however you want.”
Adrian started toward the chairs. Cal followed. The room had become a little emptier. Some guests had gone out to eat; others lingered with the reluctant interest of people who had been told the second feature was about them. Juno met Adrian beside the interviewer chair.
“I'll sit here,” he told her, indicating the other one. “Cal's doing the questions.”
“No.”
He kept moving. “Let him have that.”
He pointed at the microphone. Juno didn't give it to him. Adrian sat down, tested the back of the chair and pulled it a few inches away from the table. Cal had filmed men who took their seats that way in rooms where people wanted them dead. The room usually accommodated them before they noticed.
“We agreed what this was,” Juno said.
“I saw the film. It was beautiful. Thank you. I'm not doing the rest under your direction.”
She looked at Cal. He was still standing beside the empty interviewer's chair with Mara's map on his phone.
“You want to do it?” she asked him.
He could have said no and made the room easy. He put the phone in his pocket instead.
“Give me a minute.”
Juno held the microphone out. He took it. It was warm where her hand had covered the metal. Adrian nodded, satisfied, and leaned back. Cal sat down opposite him.
From this height the reflections in the glazing were wrong. He knew how he would move the chairs. He would put B nearer the screen, use A for Adrian's face and let the view of water remain a little high behind his shoulder. It would be possible to make the man look exactly as Cal had first liked him, too large for the expensive room, interested in the person speaking to him. He would ask a question that let Adrian tell a story, then lead him toward what had happened at the bar. Cal could get a performance other people couldn't get. He had always thought this about someone.
“When did you last speak to Gideon?” he asked.
Adrian's eyes moved to Juno. She was still standing, one hand resting on the back of Cal's chair.
“Not that,” Adrian said.
“People are going to ask.”
“Then people can ask me where they ought to ask me. This is about what happened out there. To you. To my wife. We don't have to do their job for them.”
Cal rubbed his thumb across the microphone's seam. It had a small ridge where the metal met the mesh. He had held this microphone for drunk uncles, frightened children, people making an announcement they would regret before morning. He could get Adrian through ten minutes without another admission. He could make the interview the defense he had come here to hear. The gate would open tomorrow.
Juno took her hand off the chair. The removal made him look up.
“I'll collect B,” she said. “You can use your own.”
Cal watched her reach for B's handle.
“Wait.”
She stopped, but didn't release the camera.
Cal got up. He put the microphone on the chair she had chosen for herself, cable arranged so it wouldn't slide off. Then he moved his chair back to where she'd set it. It scraped loudly. Adrian looked at the empty seat, then at him.
“You're not going to make me answer to her.”
“I can't make you do anything. She asks the questions if we do this.”
“After what she did to you.”
Cal felt heat in his face. Juno heard it too; he could see that she had. Her hand remained on B.
“I know what she did.”
Adrian waited for more. Cal didn't trust Juno with his life as a public object. He had seen what she would do with it. The microphone lay between them anyway.
“Then we don't do it,” Adrian said.
Juno let go of B, reached past Cal and switched off its standby display. “All right.”
Adrian stood. For a moment Cal thought he would take the chair and move it himself. Instead he took out his phone.
“Don't go to the house,” he said.
Cal heard Mara answer on the second ring. Adrian turned slightly away from them but not far enough to conceal the words. No visit. Not tomorrow. He'd explain later. When he came back his face had closed in a way Cal hadn't seen when Gideon insulted him.
“You can tell her,” Adrian said. “You can tell her how much she cost you.”
He walked toward the open side door. A guest touched his arm, wanting to congratulate him on the film, and he stopped so abruptly the woman stepped back. Then he took her hand between both of his and thanked her. The politeness looked painful.
Cal's phone vibrated. Mara apologized for the change and canceled the visit. He read the message once. There was no reason to keep the map open.
Juno sat in the chair he had returned to her. The microphone was still on it; she moved it to her lap. Neither of them began packing.
“I wanted that,” Cal said.
She looked at his phone, then away. “I could see.”
He set the phone on the table. The canceled visit remained on its bright screen until it went dark.