Peril

There was something wrong with the whole thing, Stark decided, something left out or hidden. Mortimer wasn’t telling him the whole story, and in recognizing that austere fact, Stark felt a terrible sense that his old associate had crossed a fateful line. After all, Mortimer’s saving grace had always been that he clearly understood his own substantial limitations, the fact that in any test of wit or will he would surely come out the loser. For that reason Stark had never doubted that Mortimer would play straight with him, if for no other reason than to do otherwise would inevitably spell disaster. But now Stark suspected that Mortimer had taken a crooked road.

But why?

SARA

She was tired by the middle of the afternoon, but she knew she had to fight it. Years before, a talent agent had counseled Sara to be “perky.” A guy who owns a club is looking for a girl with spark, he’d said, even in a torch singer he’s looking for a spark. Sara had assumed that she would need to show the same spark now that she’d tried to show years before. Especially since the job she sought was one that required her to greet the public, answer the phone.

And so for the past hours, in the assorted jobs she’d sought since leaving the coffee shop, she’d tried to be bright-eyed, sharp . . . have a spark. She offered a quick smile and a ready hand. But it hadn’t worked, and as the minutes passed, she’d seen the interviewer slowly drift away, then rise, mutter a quick “Thanks for coming in,” and escort her to the door. Nor could she blame these people for not hiring her. She was in her late thirties, a woman with no experience, her résumé a blank page. They had seen it in her eyes, seen through the sparkling mask that in some indefinable but alarming way she was at loose ends, would be trouble down the line. She knew that they couldn’t guess the force that drove her, but that didn’t matter. They wanted someone relaxed, someone easy, someone who believed that if you did everything right, things would work out, someone with experience but no past, a blank slate they could write their company’s logo on. They did not want a woman who answered their questions quickly and added nothing, a woman in whom they could hear the aching groan of a tightly wound spring.

She thought of the man who’d interviewed her for the job of receptionist in his hair salon, the way he’d looked at her hair, like it was a nest of squirming snakes, Thank you, we’ll be in touch. Then there was the woman at the attorney’s office, dressed like a man, who talked like a man, and whose flinty gaze said Now you’re sorry, right, for wasting your life, well, too late, sister.

The final job was located on Avenue C, a neighborhood Sara remembered well from her days in New York. Back then it had been a dangerous place, but now, as she moved down Sixth Street, she marveled at how much things had changed. There were young professionals on the street, along with the usual tradesmen and delivery people. Tompkins Square Park, once a mire of drug addicts, was now both park and playground, a well-tended expanse of green where children scurried in all directions while their well-heeled parents looked on.

Addison Film Works was located just off the park, the building a bit more dingy than the ones around it. There was no doorman, only a spare foyer with walls painted institutional gray and an ancient elevator that creaked and trembled as it rose to the fourth floor.

The door was at the end of a corridor stacked high with cardboard boxes and black towers of videotape. The name of the company was printed in block letters on frosted glass. A single name was written in the lower left corner of the glass: Art Gillman.

A stubby, overweight man in a dark double-breasted suit greeted Sara as she came through the door. “I’m Art Gillman,” he said. His hair was a lackluster brown, very thin on top, parted low on the left side and then swept over to cover spaces that would otherwise have been bald. “Sorry for the mess. I just got back from L.A.” He shrugged helplessly. “When I’m out of the office, things go to pot.”

Sara smiled weakly.

“So, what do you go by?” Gillman asked.

“Go by?” Sara asked.

“Name.”

“Samantha,” she blurted out before she could stop herself. “Samantha Damonte.”

Something registered in Gillman’s eyes. “That’s good. I like that. Samantha Damonte.” He stripped off his jacket, hung it on a wooden hat rack, then dropped heavily into a seat behind a cluttered metal desk. “You work in the film business before?”

“No,” Sara admitted.

Gillman nodded toward the single empty chair that rested in front of his desk. “Have a seat.”

Sara did so.