Chương 174: CHAPTER 100 - People Get Ready

"What is the city but the people?" William Shakespeare Coriolanus NYC. Eric Lee's office Sony Music Entertainment Monday. The wire took eleven seconds. For her first multi-million-dollar transaction, Euphemia Fontaine had expected a ribbon, a flute of golden bubbles, and celebratory poppers. What she got instead was Eric in his swanky new corner office, turning his monitor forty-five degrees on its swivel so she could read a reference number in a monospaced font.

"Done."

"It's done?"

"Two million dollars," he said.

"Ferroni can expect it Tuesday in the expense account."

"It's Monday…"

"Not in the system, it isn't." Eppie took note of the primitive 2008 system for her future transactions. Say what one will, there were benefits to crypto that traditional banking could not begin to imagine, such as the complete lack of safeguards and regulations. Two million greenbacks… Eppie waited to feel something from the [System], like a pat on the back, or a sudden influx of [Causality]. What she got was silence.

She wondered, for a sad moment, what the original Euphemia would feel if she knew that in a year, she had made more money than Euphemia would in her entire lifetime, if Euphemia lived until ninety.

"You must be very confident," her Newfoundland said after a moment's consideration.

"You don't have a distributor, right? What if they want net profits?"

"We'll make sure they won't." Eppie smiled in such a way that Eric shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Cuz we'll be swimming in liquidity while the whole financial system's running around like a headless chicken.

"Besides, I'll ask Trent for distribution."

"Mr Davis?!" Eric looked taken aback.

"He's in music, though."

"He's a c-suite with a direct line to Sony Pictures." Eppie sat on the edge of her lawyer's desk. It wobbled. Very carefully, she removed herself before Eric noticed. Eric didn't.

"Is your money safe?"

"Safe enough, since the trust's purchased an asset." Eppie tapped her contract.

"I got fifty-six per cent equity, and backends, and an asset."

"If Sony distributes, they take fifteen to thirty-five," Eric jotted down their intake on a sticky note.

"Advertising gets recouped. Equity—that's me—gets recouped, THEN there's net profit, fifty-fifty between finance and filmmaker—which is Ferroni's crew, me, and…me and Ferroni."

"And there's other savings." Eppie tapped the contract again.

"The picture needs music. It needs a score, right? There are two source cues, radio playing in the bodega and the stairwell. We'll just use my own licensed music, priced at market. Dream a Little and In the Pines both have the right feel, with a little old-timey remix added in."

"It's clean." Eppie clapped.

"It's the same money; it just goes round."

"Right around." Eric Lee put his glasses down on the desk, very carefully, then kneaded his brows.

"Say that last part again," he said.

"Slowly. And listen to yourself doing it."

"Am I wrong?" Eric sighed.

"Where I come from, a charity that puts money into a company and then bills that company for services provided is self-dealing. You're going to go to jail." He let that sit.

"Not the trust. You. An excise tax on you, correctable within a window, and if it isn't corrected, a second one at two hundred per cent, and a very short line in the Attorney General's annual report." Eppie stared. In 2028, thanks to a certain family, Charity Trusts were free-range corporate havens…

"The trust is obliged to make money. The difference is you," said Eric.

"Not the trust. The trust may profit from your decision until the cows come home. You may not be enriched by it. Not by a dollar, not by a licence fee, not by a favour." Eppie relaxed.

"Jeez, scared me there." She sidled up to Eric. Her lawyer was so reliable!

"Fine. Then I'll take nothing. No licence. No fee. Nothing."

"You can't take nothing either," Eric tried pushing her off the desk. Eppie was far too strong for a six-foot Newfoundland in a suit. When she refused to move, Eric slid his chair away.

"How can you not know that the Screen Actors Guild won't permit a member to work for free?" Eric said this with a satisfying relish.

"A history of young women working for exposure made rates mandatory. You show up on that set and take a dollar less than the scale, end of production." Eppie stared at him. [System] Is this true?

"So I'm obliged to be paid."

"Five hundred and four dollars a day, for three days. Sign it without editorial commentary." Eppie winced. What was it that the Lost Generation used to say in the mid-20s? [System], am I cooked? How much [Causality] was minimum wage? Surely, I won't go into the negatives for a few days, right? The [System] declined to comment.

"And I want a lawyer other than me to look at three. I do music, you understand? Copyright. This is… unfamiliar territory." He straightened the folder on his desk, which was how she knew the next part was the part he actually cared about.

"Out of curiosity, who's your co-trustee for the Karmatronic Trust?"

"There isn't one."" Unwise," Eric said unkindly.

"Eppie. You are sixteen years old, and you are the sole trustee of an eight-figure charitable trust with no protector, no co-trustee, and an account partner who takes his instructions from you and his salary from your Trust. If something happens…" I am pretty sure I could survive anything, as long as I have [Causality]. If not, what was the point of having liquidity anyway?

"I'll think about it," she said. Eric growled. She kneaded his shoulders like a cat.

"I'll be fine."

"You better be." Her lawyer took his eyes around the office.

"We came all this way for you."

"Really?" Eppie kneaded harder, pushing Eric back into his office chair." Not for a corner office with a view?" 214 Rivington Street. Tuesday. They had one table, because they were artists, and carrying a decent table up four flights was against occupational health and safety. Eppie arrived at ten past eleven with two boxes of coffee from the place on Ludlow and was met at the top of the stairs by Jack Ferroni, who took both boxes off her, looked at them, and slipped her a fifty.

"You can't buy the crew coffee."

"Why not?"

"Because you're the money and the co-lead." He was already carrying them inside.

"Conflict of interest." Inside, the room held six people and smelled of dust and paint stripper and, faintly, of a hundred years of other people's cooking. The two windows were open. Somebody had swept. There were fold-out chairs here and there, still unused.

"Everybody," said Ferroni.

"This is Euphemia Fontaine. She's Josie." There was a general shifting. What it should have been was the sound of adults acting professional when made to work with a child. What it really was—was the sound of people reacting to money walking into the room. As the youngest, Eppie decided she should make the first move. To have her seniors, and adults at that, greet her would establish the wrong kind of hierarchy.

Sweeping her gaze across the gathered crew, she gave them a beaming, sunny smile, clocked at [25] [Charisma], then shook the hand of the closest person.

"You must be Bebe. It's a pleasure to meet you, Ma'am. I love what you've done with Marcel." Bernadette Blau's eyebrows went up about three millimetres; she leaned in, Eppie leaned in, and the two shared a professional hug.

"I am glad you liked it." This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"More than that," Eppie assured her.

"I loved it."

"This is Norbert," Bebe said.

"Our editor and master of the hard drives. Over there is Hugh, our cinematographer. Andy over yonder is our gaffer." Norbert, to Eppie, was an enormously bookish man in a cardigan, who was clearly intimidated by her oppressive [Comeliness], or at least her openness to a hug. Hugh Delaney was sixty-one, proudly Irish, and had shot two hundred episodes with Ferroni over the years.

Andy Reyes was their gaffer from the same veteran crew, looking as American as apple pie, and more than happy to share a moment with their starlet. Their final member was none other than Rémy Aubert, in a Parisian linen jacket, in the corner, with his legs crossed, his gruff face grinning, his whole body exuding anticipation. + Karmic Causality They liked her. Eppie could feel it happening, because all six of them had watched her walk the corridor.

She let herself enjoy it for about forty minutes, and then she looked at the chairs. There were eight chairs at a table for six people and her. They were missing a person.

"… Are we missing our Hollis?" she asked the group. The temperature of the room changed by a degree and a half.

"Indeed," said Ferroni.

"We are sans Hollis." Everybody stopped enjoying themselves.

"Still nothing?" said Bebe.

"I've got a list." Ferroni turned a page over on the script in front of him.

"Reiner's available."

"Non," said Aubert, shaking his head.

"Ganz wants it, and Ganz is forty grand for four days. Not expensive, but he's a one-trick pony."

"Non." Aubert shook his head again.

"I have a few recommendations. Like Jeremy over at—""He is twenty-six with an impressive beard," said Bebe, without looking up.

"Hollis is a psycho with a pension he is never going to collect. He won't have the gravitas, not with the limited time he's on screen."

"Well, those are the ones I know, for now." Ferroni pushed the list away.

"We need somebody big enough to scare the audience and small enough to still be answering his phone when we call. That's not easy to find."

"And who does not need eight takes?" said Aubert.

"Because we can afford two," Ferroni agreed.

"Give or take." Delaney spoke for the first time in twenty minutes.

"How about a stage actor?" Aubert's head came round." Oui," he said.

"Hollis' rhetoric is theatrical. He talks at people, not with them. That is not film acting; that is oratory. We need someone who captivates but also frightens."

"This is NYC," said Norbert.

"There's plenty of stage actors willing to do four days for under forty grand, right?"

"From where?" said Ferroni.

"I don't know theatre. Also, I am based in LA." We're all LA-based, and Aubert is Parisian… Eppie, who had been listening in silence, suddenly thought: Dr Cooper. The thought arrived complete, as if prompted by a [System]. She had seen Cooper show off his chops in theatre, and in a second—a few lines at most—he commanded a room of actors. Once Cooper got used to the lighting and the focus, he could do this. With his innate knowledge of space and stage markings, he could do this in two takes.

But she couldn't just tell them to find and hire her old teacher. As Eric said, she was the picture's financier. She was its leading actress. The crew isn't going to like that. Enough favours had gone into making the film already. Therefore, she said, to nobody in particular: "We still need to meet our diversity casting, right? Half the days, half the parts?"

"Go on." Aubert looked at her, as did the others.

"The Bronx has several local theatres. Immensely talented, from what I've heard. They started by doing Shakespeare in rooms over laundromats, performances on old basketball courts. That's where the actors learned to be enormous in tiny rooms, or in outdoor spaces with no lighting rig. You should start looking there, especially if you need classical actors. Actors who would love nothing more than a chance to star in a film—that's the place where I'd start." She drank her coffee.

Rémy Aubert sat forward with his elbows on his knees.

"Where does one find this? A black box. In the Bronx?" he asked in his accented English.

"I am… also from LA," Eppie said sheepishly.

"My old teacher taught me this." Ferroni considered her words.

"I guess I know where we're going next," he declared to the group.

"Tomorrow. Somebody find me a listing. Meanwhile, the corridor. I'll start Art on Monday." A pause.

"We can't touch the walls, so whatever we get has to walk in and walk out. Beyond that, we're still waiting for permission from the residents." The rest of the crew murmured in agreement. Eppie sat with her ankles crossed and her face facing the north window, where the light was a pale shaft shining into an empty room. She was learning a lot. From money, to place, to people—it was just…

overwhelming, how many stakeholders there were in a simple film, how many lives were invariably touched by merely existing in the focal point of a lens capturing the light. It was exhausting. Truly exhausting. But also incredible. Fox Street Longwood, the Bronx. Wednesday. The storefront of Fox Street Theatre had been a florist, then a check-cashing place, then a church, so the acoustics were solid.

When the house lights went down, the audience sat in forty-eight folding chairs beneath the backwards words THE LORD IS. David Cooper had walked the rows himself, picking out the chairs that needed urgent repairs. He would do this himself, because Verna didn't have eleven dollars for replacement hinges when she needed sixty for new gels. Cooper felt a little absurd. Twenty-two years, and he was back in the Bronx, fixing chairs in a theatre by hand.

Nonetheless, what he felt wasn't resentment; it was restfulness, something close to peace. He was not unhappy about it. That was what Costello had failed to understand when he left, and the part his wife, Monica, had understood without words, which was why he loved her more than anything. His wife was also very good with the household budget. She had given him a deadline for his artistic sabbatical. Severance had been decent; Burton had been many things, but he had not been cheap.

That said, Miles was going into his senior year. Nia was going into her second. Between them were education expectations built on a household income that had existed in May, and the forms for that were due in the autumn and would ask him, in writing, what he currently earned. The other column was the greatest American question of all: insurance. He had eighteen months of it. He was paying for it himself now, the whole premium, the school's share and his, four figures a month for the four of them.

Unlike his audience, an insurer did not care what a man had done for the American theatre. The moment he had arrived at his old haunt in June, Cooper had put out his feelers. Three conservatories, two universities, a private school in Riverdale that would have been beneath him a year ago, had not returned his second call. All of them had been warm. Lukewarm. Honoured.

Not one of them had a line in a budget for a fifty-two-year-old department head who had come out of a national news story for shattering Fame High's reputation. That was the thing he had not understood in May, and Costello had understood perfectly. Everybody agreed he had done the right thing—unless they sat on a hiring committee. He did not regret it, of course. To ignore it was worse. If he had let sleeping dogs lie, he would have been a hypocrite with a job, teaching theatre he didn't believe in. So: no regret.

And no job. And so, he was back on Fox Street, at age fifty-two, repairing the same folding chairs. Verna Sharpe was his old student. She found him in the second week. She ran the Longwood Company out of the storefront on a budget of nine thousand dollars a year, and she had recognised him when he came through the door for a job. We can't pay you. She said. Not someone of your calibre. Cooper had said: I know. She had said: I can feed you. You can stay in the attic. It'll save you some money.

He had said: Oh, thank God. Verna laughed then. She had always been a beautiful child, and now she was a wonderful playwright and producer, carrying the torch he had lit three decades ago. So he took up residence in the theatre. He ran the warm-up. He gave notes that would have cost some uptown New Yorker tuition at Guilliams. He had fixed the second act of their last play, Fences, in about forty minutes via theoreticals his students struggled with.

Verna paid him in cash when there was cash, which was twice, and in food the rest of the time, and the food was extremely good. Last month, someone's mother, a lady named Delia, had brought him the most delicious Creole cuisine he had had in years. He had eleven private students now, at forty dollars an hour, in a rented room above a dance studio on Prospect. Two of them were serious. One of them was going to be very good, and could not afford him.

She didn't know that he had told her mother that Verna was covering it. She hadn't. Verna needed new gels. Their present play was William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Longwood did it in modern dress because they had no money, which was a chief reason anybody ever did anything in modern dress. Wendell's Brutus wore a bad suit. Caesar wore a better one.

The conspirators wore what men on Southern Boulevard wore in July, and when Verna's daughter came on as Portia in scrubs at the end of a double shift, the whole room understood the passion. Cooper played Cassius. There were too many lines, and none of the other senior actors had time to learn them. The original actor, after a month, told them he had been given shifts he could not refuse. Cooper knew Cassius.

Cassius was a lean and hungry man in his early fifties who had watched somebody else be given the thing he spent his life qualifying for. He was a man of personal ambition, who saw danger in Caesar, and took the opportunity, no matter the cost to his country. 6: 48 PM. The room was packed.

They had all come to see the legendary David Cooper, returned at last to the place he had called home at a darker time of the burning Bronx, when the streets were flooded with narcotics, and the youths saw scant hope in their future, when he taught Macbeth to gang members. There were critics among the audience, and industry folk. They had come to see a piece of curio before it vanished forever.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus His voice was a controlled whisper, and he could see it moving his audience. That had always been his greatest gift. The voice, deep and resonant, baritone, so that it vibrated the bones somewhere under the sternum and arrived through the soles of the audience's shoes. His voice brought its own reverb. And we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. So he set it down low, and slowed it.

Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. Somebody in row two said mm out loud, the way you would in church. Cooper loved that. There was a closeness, an intimacy in community theatre that was lacking in the gilded halls of professional, high-budget productions. The fault is not in our stars. After the performance, there was no coffee in backrooms.

Afterwards there was the taking down of the chairs, and two local boys sweeping, and Delia's foil trays going round, and Cooper going through the ancient things, checking hinges. Midway through the third row, he found two men standing in the dim light, under the worn gold paint of the former church, not leaving. The older one was in a corduroy jacket that had been expensive at some point in the Clinton administration. He had a notebook in his hand. The other was French.

What he wore was Parisian and in linen, and he was grinning. Cooper had spent fourteen years in Los Angeles. He knew what a man from the industry looked like. A producer, maybe, and a screen actor. A French one.

"Gentlemen," he said.

"We're closed for the night."

"Dr David Cooper?" said the one with the notebook.

"Yes? That's me."

"Jack Ferroni." He put his hand out.

"This is Rémy. Rémy Aubert. I am a director and producer." The Frenchman extended his hand. Cooper took it. The man's face looked familiar, but Cooper couldn't place it.

"Jacques," said Rémy Aubert, staring at Cooper's face.

"C'est lui."