Scar Flowers (4 page)

Chapter 2

Thursday,
March 30, 11:58 p.m.

When Paul reached the seventh floor, Simon and the girl were not in sight. It didn’t matter; where else could they have gone but his suite, next
door to Nadia’s room? All the trouble he’d gone through to get her that room, and she’d hardly thanked him.

Nadia. Not a saint’s name.

Not her real name, either.

“When you come to the film festival, I’ll take you to the private parties, the best premieres.
You can meet my nephew, and I can show you my house; it’s just over—”

“Paul, won’t your colleagues wonder who I am? They’ll want to know about
us. How we met.”

He
laughed, but she would not let the subject drop.

“Everyone will want to know
who I am.” She looked at him with those eyes of hers, hazel ringed with gold and green. A green-eyed redhead—God help him. “Too bad I’m not someone from the industry. Someone who already has a relationship with you.”

“Well, there
’s someone I used to date years ago. Nadia. She was a fight choreographer and did a few stunts, but she mostly worked in Europe. I don’t think anyone at the festival would know her.”

“Good.
Call me Nadia, then. But remember: I’ll be your
ex
-girlfriend.”

“Did you see them?” he asked when she let him in. “Was I right?”

“That’s your concern. Is that all you have for me?”

Despite the restored glamour of its public spaces and the suites
that StarBorn rented for VIPs, the standard rooms contained plastic veneer furniture, framed prints bolted to the walls. She had switched all the lamps on to wash the room with smeared yellow light.

His eyes strayed to the television—
St. Sebastian
, with Simon Mercer as screenwriter, director, and star. Onscreen Mercer stood tied to the black trunk of a tree with all its limbs cut off as Roman soldiers held back a jeering crowd. Paul had discovered the studio’s latest star director when he stumbled onto this picture—not that Fran recalled that, once she had signed Mercer. An ambi-tious, well-realized film despite the casting decision—you couldn’t tell if this Sebastian was Hispanic, Mediterranean, or just suntan-ned. Mercer himself was supposed to be an underground heart-throb, with his long-nosed collage of a face that looked pieced together from ancient statues and moody advertisements for designer jeans.

“Why’re you watching this again?” He set the magazine, with his book tucked inside, on the coffee table.

What was left of
Mercer’s tunic hung in rags from his shoulders and waist. He looked up as his sentence was pronounced. The crowd murmured, and a Centurion with a bow and quiver raised his arm, narrowed one eye to take aim.

Paul wanted to look away, but there it was: the first arrow, with its brief flight and sharp thud of impact. The saint shuddered, as if it had
knocked the breath out of him. Much better than a painting or woodcut. After a pause, a moment in which you wondered whether the damage could be overcome and saw from Sebastian’s face that it could not, realistic blood snaked down from the shaft. A mortal wound.

Agony. The agony of the saints. Holy, a pure chord of suffering and devotion, like sunlight hitting a retina. Agony meant passion, suffering
, but most people today thought that it meant lust. Just like obsession, which was supposed to mean possession by evil. Now it was either a smug psychological diagnoses or a refer-ence to sex. Where and how had the confusion crept in? The tarnishing of truth.

Tarnish could be stripped away with pain.

“Weren’t you the one who told me how brilliant this film was?” She picked up a skirt from the back of a chair, held it up in front of herself. Her hair, waved like a ‘40s movie star’s, draped and slid over her shoulders with each movement. “You said it was the most realistic representation of a saint you’d ever seen.”

Paul sat on the love seat, disturbing a stack of dresses.

“You’re packing? We’ve got three more days. You haven’t even seen my place.” Something heavy hidden under the clothes caught his hand: books.
The Art of Fight Choreography
and
Basics of Filmmaking
. He cleared his throat. “About Mercer . . . I’ve hardly met him. He might be rude to you. You know how some of these artist types are.”

“Simon being rude
isn’t what you’re worried about. It’s whether he’s too nice to me.” She held up a pantsuit and looked at herself in the mirror.

“He’s probably gay. Sebastian is their patron saint, after all.”

“‘Their’ saint?” She draped the suit over a chair. “You’re starting to sound obsessed.”

“Don’t use that word.”

“If you’re worried, tell him you invited me here to win me back.”

“I wasn’t implying—”

“Weren’t you? Tell me more about Nadia then. I want to make sure I get it right.”

“His panel is tomorrow. That’s what you’re getting ready for. You wouldn’t even go to the awards dinner with me.”

“Paul.” Her voice softened, and she sat across from him. “You hate yourself for whining and pleading with Fran, so why not practice being strong with me?”

Her fingers found the cameo brooch at her throat. She saw him looking and smiled.

“You wore my Valentine’s Day present,” he said. “So you are here to be with me.”

Her mouth turned down. She unfastened the brooch and set it on the dresser.

“Can I trust you?” she asked, her back to him. “I need to know that you hear what I say to you.”

“Leah, I heard you. Can you hear me?”

Leah. Not a saint’s name either. Leah, an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “clearing” or “glade.” In Hebrew, it meant “weary one.” She did look tired now. Tired of him.

“My name is Nadia here. And the point isn’t to make you feel bad. I didn’t come down here just for you, and you shouldn’t trust anyone who says something like that. Right?” She turned to look at him, brows raised, but he said nothing. She sighed. “Then get me a copy of the
Babylon
script. All I have is the synopsis.”

He stared.

“Just get it. Then you’ll be settled with me about this.”

“Why is Mercer so important? He’s a gimmick artist, not a director.”

“You’re right. He’s just like anyone else. In fact, he’s very much like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Had he heard wrong? “Really?
After the olive, I thought he was going to slap you.”

“I’ll prove it to you, since you’ve dared me. Which means I’ll need your help for a few more days.”

In Greek, Leah meant “glad tidings.” The thought almost made him laugh.

“It won’t take any longer than that,” she said. “I know you like setting challenges. Otherwise you wouldn’t have sent me
St. Sebastian
.” Paul’s face grew hot, but she only added, “Yes, I’m going to the panel tomorrow, and I’m going alone.”

They couldn’t fight here. The entire floor was rented to the studio’s guests. He went to his room and returned with his copy of the shooting script, which she took and shut the door without a word. He knocked again.

“Leah?” He kept his voice low.

The second hand on his watch crawled around the face four times before he heard a flutter and a clang from her room, as if she had thrown something against the blinds. A magazine, perhaps
.

Or a script.

Go back to the Assyrians, and the name Leah meant “mistress” or “ruler.” Paul waited another minute, then returned to his room.

Friday, March 31,
9:45 a.m.

Paul glanced at the
film festival brochure in his lap. The panel on “Story and Symbol in the Visual Narrative” was scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes.

At the front of the conference room,
panelists talked to the moderator, a former StarBorn employee named Gloria who was now a film festival coordinator. When he turned to check the en-trance, Leah stood just inside the door by the coffee urns.

“Le—Nadia!” He raised his brochure to catch her eye.

She frowned but came down to accept the seat he’d saved her. Going to the panel alone, she had said. Searching for Mercer was more like it. Glee rose in his chest as he said, “Looking for someone?”

Her eyes were on Mercer, who
had just entered with two men, the
taller of whom wore a Rolex. They both sported golf shirts and calfskin shoes, and the shorter man’s jaw was lined with manicured stubble. Mercer, in jeans and a fitted black shirt, pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyelids.

“
I’m over here,” Paul said. He kept his voice low but not so soft that she might think he’d be afraid to raise it. She was not wearing the cameo today.

“You’ve changed from the Paul I know,” she said without turning. “I’m starting to think you don’t need to see me anymore.”

The smell of his neighbor’s toothpaste mixed with the odor of overly sugared coffee, chemicals from freshly printed festival brochures, and new carpeting. He wished for an open window, fresh air.

“Only
last week you were all too glad to get my help,” he said.

Mercer left his companions and
headed toward the dais, where Gloria showed him to his chair and introduced the panelists.

“Mr. Mercer, if you could address your outsider status
that you mentioned this morning,” she began.

“In the industry or the culture?” Mercer pulled the micro
-phone closer. “In the industry, as a former independent director I’m what’s known as newly assimilated, thanks to StarBorn Studios. Happily so, for my agent and my accountant especially. I have a unique perspective on popular culture because my ethnic background is so diverse that I have no real racial identity. As filmmakers, your perspective is your art, your gift. That’s the important thing.” He pushed the microphone back toward his neighbor.

“Would you care to elaborate on your heritage?”

Mercer didn’t actually roll his eyes, but just about. “For those of you with calculators, the formula is three-eighths Métis, one-eighth Cree, and a scant one-half mongrel European with a jigger of French-Canadian. I’ve got that memorized for when I talk to Indians from the rez. Exact heritage and whether you were raised on a reservation or not—and I wasn’t—matters in native culture. And which tribe . . . Métis is French for mixed, usually French or British with Indian. Politically, the Métis aren’t considered true Indians by some, but that just means I don’t have a tribe to answer to if I end up making a flop with StarBorn’s money.”

That got a laugh.

The moderator smiled. “In thirty seconds or less, how would you say your identity—or lack of it—affects your career? Is it a liability or a blessing?”

“I got a grant for Native Americans to get into film school—a blessing. But when I tried to get financing for
St. Sebastian
, the first twenty investors I approached couldn’t make the leap from imagining me as some kind of Tonto to my playing a Christian martyr. That perception of Indians as stoic, as either side-kicks or savages, has been the hardest barrier. And I’m not even really Indian.”

Beside him,
Leah sat riveted, hands clutching her brochure. What did she find so interesting? Mercer slouched and turned his name card end over end. His shirt was wrinkled, one cuff frayed and both unbuttoned. His gestures, when he stretched or pushed the hair out of his eyes, had a languid, feminine quality, and his rumpled hair could be either purposely styled or just unwashed.

F
ran had fallen for it too. Paul had heard from her about Mercer’s publicity stunts, sending one lead actress, then his wife, dressed as her film character to talk shows, to go onstage with mud and grass plastered in her hair, shred her clothes with a razor, wander into the audience, and interview the other guests with absurd questions. For his
Critical Mass
premiere, Mercer hired “paparazzi” and rented a red carpet for stars’ entrances; the event took place in a dilapidated drive-in theater in Kansas. Of Mercer living in his car while he made a documentary on street people, Fran said it made him a “fresh voice.”

Shrewd marketer was more like it.

“. . . before contact with white culture, native visual artists were concerned only with conveying the essence of a thing—not what the eye sees. And that frees the thing from a restricted iden-tity and makes it a symbol.” Mercer dropped his name card on the table. “So does associating any visual element with a character, even something as simple as light and shadow. Symbol supersedes culture. You don’t need a decoder to watch a well-crafted movie, no matter who made it.”

Paul checked his watch. Almost over.

“Thank you, Mr. Mercer.” Gloria consulted her notes. “The panelists will now take questions.”

A college-age
d woman in the front row raised her hand. “I wanted to ask Mr. Mercer—when you were at NYU, why’d you drop out of the directing program?”

“Good question.” A few audience members laughed, but he did not smile. “
I got sick and tired of arguing with instructors with esoteric sensibilities who claimed the right to decide what was and was not a real film. I figured I could learn everything directing on my own instead of arguing semantics all day, so I switched to the acting program. Directors should learn more about what their actors do. Casting is extremely important.”

“Do you still have your scars from
Poppies Are Red
?” The woman asked. She whispered to the friend sitting next to her, who giggled.

Gloria reminded the audience to restrict questions to symbolism and
narrative.

“It’s
okay,” said Simon. “That leads me back to financing and my grant. Neither of those got me publicity or helped my work get seen. When I made
Poppies
, about kids who cut themselves, a friend called me a liar because I cut my arms before I went looking for people to film. But you have to have sympathy for your subject, or your movie is cold and your actors don’t trust you. My cuts got me on the news, and distribution. But people misunderstood; they thought I did it as part of the native tradition of the sun dance, where you hang from a pole from hooks in your flesh to celebrate the cycle of life.” He leaned back. “I had to tell them the only sun dance in my heritage is the film festival of that name. And that the native sun dance is a Lakota thing, not Métis.”

Ten minutes left. Leah glanced toward the aisle.

As Gloria announced the end of the session, Paul caught Leah’s arm before she could leave and asked her about their schedule for the rest of the day. The panelists stepped down from their seats into a crowd of audience members—all but Mercer, who slipped out a back door that film-festival security shut firmly behind him.

“Paul,” Leah interrupted him. “Isn’t that your friend, the moderator? Gloria! How good to see you again!”

1
1:06 a.m.

Simon checked his cell phone for messages as he walked down the service hallway. Security promised him
that this route was the fastest way past the crowd; he had an hour to finish pack-ing and catch a cab to LAX.

The hallway stretched away in bands of light and shadow,
dim-lit pastel green walls. Halfway to the elevators, two women appeared. One was petite, too well-dressed to be a hotel employee. Lithe legs, arms hanging loose. High-heeled boots.

Familiar. His skin prickled.

The
petite woman paused by a water fountain, leaving him no room to get by, not without being rude. Nadia—that was her name. Behind her came the moderator from the panel, who almost collided with her when she stopped.

“Mr. Mercer
,” Nadia said. She stood with one hand on the strap of her purse. A carved jade ring on her right hand—an intri-cately knotted design that could be a dragon or a fish.

“
I hope you’ll forgive me about last night,” she said. “Nadia Weston,” she added and extended her hand.

“
Simon Mercer.”

Her hand
felt surprisingly narrow in his. Strong grip, as if she wanted to prove something.

H
er collar, made of a silky white fabric, had caught under her lapel. He wanted to straighten it, touch it to see if it were as insubstantial as it looked. The buttons on her blouse, mother of pearl, gave off a rich sheen.

“We’re on our way to security.” Gloria slid past them, looked over her shoulder.

“I’ll be right there, Gloria,” said Nadia. “I wanted to talk to Mr. Mercer anyway. I need a job.” The wide space between her eyebrows made her look skeptical or amused. Thick upbrushed auburn hairs, tapering toward the outsides of her eyes, a bit mannish. Strange; his impression from last night was of someone more feminine.

“
As what,” said Simon. He took a breath, let it out, reached into his car coat, but came up empty. What had he been looking for in there anyway? “What do you do?”

A strange expression flickered across her features
. Satis-faction or smugness. He should take charge, not repeat her words back at her.

“
You need a fight choreographer, don’t you?” she said. “On
Babylon
.”

Fight choreographer.
He remembered—people he had to call, things he had to decide about casting, sets, the shooting schedule. A rush of pride and anticipation surged through him at the thought of his film. Nothing else today had brought him that feeling. Nothing else but talking to her. Something about the way she planted her feet and stroked one finger across the strap of her purse: once, twice, and then it fell still.

“I thought it was urgent that you find your wallet
, Nadia.” Gloria crossed her arms.

“Of course. Mr. Mercer?”

He pulled himself back to the present, and her eyes met his: amused, affectionate. They both smiled. Simon reached into his front pocket and pulled out a card.
So that’s where they were; why couldn’t I find them before?
“Send me your resume.”

She did not
look at the business card he held out.

“
It’s a hassle to set up appointments,” she said. “You can interview me here.”

“
Now?” Was she going to get unreasonable?

“Ms. Weston, security is this way—”

Nadia
said, “Ask me: armed or unarmed. Left-handed or right-handed. A fight is as much about the reaction as the attack. No one would’ve noticed our exchange last night if you hadn’t walked out angry.”

Simon rubbed his neck. Her attitude was ballsy and direct.
He could use that.

“
You’d better take my card, then. And send me your resume.”

She took
the card, but this was obviously not how she wanted the conversation to end.
Welcome to showbiz, Ms. Weston.

Nadia stepped aside. As he walked by her, she tucked the card in her pocket.