The man holding the service door open wanted Cal to thank him. Cal wanted him to move.
They looked at each other across a stack of folded tablecloths.
“This isn't an entrance,” the man said.
“It's got everything.”
“For us.”
Juno had gone ahead to put the interview material on the editing drives. Cal was supposed to bring back a few views of the hotel before the welcome-event preparations filled them with chairs. He had found a service passage opening toward the water, with a handsome low arch that would make the hotel look a century older than it was. A cart of dirty breakfast trays stood in the arch. The man controlling the cart had a silver name badge: EMILIO.
“Ten seconds,” Cal said.
“I have forty people waiting for these.” Emilio touched the linen stack.
“They can wait ten seconds.”
He heard it once he'd said it.
Emilio let the door go. Cal caught it with his elbow before it struck the camera. Inside, someone was calling for the banquet captain.
“That's you?” Cal asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Emilio. I'm Cal.”
“I know. Everyone's waiting for the photographer.”
“Filmmaker.”
Emilio pulled the tray cart out of the arch. One of its wheels clicked. He held it there, looking at Cal. Cal took his ten seconds, then five more while a boat crossed the water. Emilio's eyes moved from the lens to the boat and back to Cal.
“You need the boat?”
“It helps.”
“I need the plates.”
Cal stopped recording.
As Emilio wheeled the cart inside, the man calling him appeared with a folder and a question about tomorrow's dinner service. Emilio gave an answer without opening the folder. Seventy-eight fish, twelve beef, four meals not to touch the bread table. He took the folder anyway.
Cal had once known ammunition from the noise it made passing overhead. There was probably a living to be made from knowing the fish.
He went back through the public corridor, past a display of giant shells too clean to have come from anything alive. A woman on a ladder was tying white ribbon around a railing. Below her, Lena Voss stood barefoot on a square of tissue paper.
She wore a pale green dress and a hotel robe that had slipped off one shoulder. Someone had pinned the hem up and left two pins in the robe's lapel. She was looking at a photograph on a planner's phone. The planner spoke quickly. Lena listened without moving.
Cal lifted the camera.
“Not this,” Lena said.
He lowered it.
She looked at him now. Her hair was clipped at the back; a fine damp curl lay against her neck. The photographs he'd been sent had made her severe. In person, concentration accounted for some of it.
“Is it the dress?” he asked.
“It's the robe. I'll have the dress off in ten minutes and the robe on in every picture.”
The woman on the ladder laughed. Lena didn't seem to notice.
“Do you want to look at anything?” Cal asked. “Adrian was good.”
“What did he talk about?”
“A bus.”
Her face opened. It happened before she could manage it.
“Did he show you his hand?”
“Twice.”
“He put a Band-Aid on it before dinner. I thought he'd cut it again. He wanted the waiter to ask.”
She smiled at the thought, then looked down at the pins in her hem.
“Yes. Let me see that later.”
“Lena,” the planner said, “we have to move the arrival picture inside if the flowers aren't—”
“No. Move the flowers.”
“They're attached.”
“Then leave them. People can arrive without the picture.”
She stepped off the tissue. The planner followed her, still talking about a thing with which she no longer had a problem.
Cal watched Lena go. He had been paid to collect her beauty and found her impatience better. He raised the camera again, but there were only the pins on the floor and the woman at the railing, waiting to be told whether she should finish.
“You missed it,” someone said behind him.
The man was wearing a pink linen jacket over a shirt the color of wet cement. He had a small plate and was eating something with his fingers. A pale crumb clung to his lower lip.
“Usually do,” Cal said.
“No, I've seen your work. You wait.”
“Do I?”
“Until somebody's finished looking attractive.”
He offered the plate. Cal took a small fried thing whose center was still hot enough to hurt. The man watched him decide whether to spit it out.
“They're cheese,” he said, too late.
“I got there.”
“Felix Rusk.”
“Cal Mercer.”
“I know. I bought the picture.”
Not the film, then. “Which one?”
“The boy in the suit.”
Cal looked at him properly.
It wasn't the photograph people usually knew. A boy outside a wrecked municipal building, in an adult's suit with the trouser cuffs folded over. Everyone who reproduced it called him a child soldier. He had been waiting to get married.
“Little print or big print?” Cal asked.
“Little. You charged enough.”
“Was it signed?”
“Very.” Felix wiped his fingers on a napkin. “You put a paragraph under it.”
“That was the dealer.”
“It was your handwriting.”
Cal remembered the paragraph. He wished he didn't. He had been twenty-seven and had not yet learned that a photograph could survive without him saying something important beneath it.
“I've got a new signature now,” he said.
Felix finished the last fried ball. “Hope you've kept the pictures.”
He liked the man against his will. Felix had recognized the suit correctly; when Cal asked, he remembered the bride standing beyond the edge of the frame, holding the boy's borrowed shoes. He had bought the photograph because of those shoes. His own father had owned one good pair and worn them only when he needed somebody's permission.
“God, he'd have liked this place,” Felix said, looking up at the polished ceiling. “Would've stolen all the towels.”
He put his plate on a table that had been prepared to receive nothing but a large arrangement of orchids. Cal pointed toward a waiter. Felix either didn't see or didn't care.
“You'll be here Sunday?” he asked.
“That's the plan.”
“Get some pictures of Lena before everybody else gets her. She disappears when she has people around.”
“She's pretty easy to find.”
“That's what I mean.”
Lena had returned at the far end of the hall with her robe gone and shoes on. Felix raised his hand. She saw him. For a second she stood completely still.
Then she came toward them.
“I thought you were coming at three.”
“Good to see you too.” He leaned to kiss her. She gave him her cheek. “I wanted to get settled.”
“Are you settled?”
“Almost. There are a couple of things.”
“Later.”
“That's been a busy day for you. Later.”
Cal pretended to inspect his camera. Neither lowered their voice.
“We're not doing it here,” Lena said.
Felix smiled, but not at her. He looked toward the orchids, as if searching for the plate he had just put down.
“A partner distribution isn't a wedding present.”
“Felix.”
“And I'm not one of your contractors.”
That was enough to make Cal move. He gave them an apologetic nod and went toward the lobby, where the air-conditioning could manage a temperature the hotel advertised. He did not look back until he reached the glass doors. Lena and Felix were walking away together. She had put a hand on his arm, lightly, to steer him around the woman coming down from the ladder.
In the lobby, a man sat beneath a huge painting of a red rectangle. Cal recognized him and kept walking. He took six more steps before his own name brought him back.
“You going to pretend you didn't see me?” Gideon Sloan asked.
“I was giving you the option.”
“Sit down.”
Gideon shifted the newspaper from the empty chair. He was smaller than Cal remembered from the awards photographs, with a deep tan and a soft white collar. He had financed three films Cal loved and one Cal had watched on a plane because the alternative was a map showing how much flight remained.
Cal sat on the front half of the chair, camera between his knees. “I didn't know you were coming.”
“Adrian invited me. I like him.”
Gideon folded his newspaper. “Are you doing the speeches tonight?”
“If anyone gets through them.”
“I want mine. Separately. I'm giving him something, and I want the bit where he sees it.”
“What are you giving him?”
“His father's watch. Had it repaired. His sister couldn't find anyone who would touch it.” Gideon reached into his pocket and brought out a little leather case. He didn't open it. “Don't cut to the watch when I open this. Stay on him.”
“We can put another camera on the watch.”
“Fine. But I don't want to lose his face because somebody's afraid nothing's happening.”
Cal shifted forward. “I can do that.”
“Send it to me first. Don't have somebody put it under a song.”
“I'll send you the whole piece.”
Gideon put the case away. He was already unfolding the newspaper when Cal said, “I'd like twenty minutes.”
He stopped.
“With you,” Cal said. “This weekend. About No Visitors.”
“Is that still going?”
Cal had sent the proposal fourteen months earlier. A film about people who had arranged to own entire small worlds: an island, a private airfield, a half-built city on a coast. No one he needed would let him in. After a while he had stopped buying flights to hear no in person.
“It is now.”
“I've got a call in five minutes.”
“Sunday morning. Before the boat. You don't even have to come down.”
Gideon looked at him across the folded paper.
Cal could hear his own bargaining eagerness. “I'll bring something short.”
“Ten-thirty,” Gideon said. “614. Twenty minutes.”
“I'll be there.”
“Don't bring a crew.”
Cal stood before the man could decide that twenty minutes was too much. He could get the watch from another angle, quietly, and stay on Adrian himself. It would cost him nothing except a little more work. He walked out of the lobby thinking about the sound he would need, the place Gideon would stand, and then the door of room 614 opening for him on Sunday.
Then his phone rang. Juno.
“Where are you?”
“Coming back.”
“They're asking about the terrace portraits. You said you'd look at the light.”
“I am.”
“You said it was too high.”
He looked through the glass toward the courtyard. The sun was coming down hard on the main terrace, cutting faces into parts. From the service passage, the side of the building had thrown a clean, narrow shadow across an upper balcony. In another twenty minutes the light would come straight along it.
“I've got a better place,” he said.
He went back toward Emilio's door.