“Stick to Lynch,” Annie said. “Good choice.”
I paid the bill and kept my mouth shut.
6
ANNIE SAID, “Cameron Charles goes first cabin.”
The long tables in front of us had starched white cloths that were covered in goodies fit for kings and press. Platters of fat oysters in crushed ice. Little squares of quiche in chafing dishes, smoked salmon. Three or four salads, one with hefty chunks of avocado. Two guys in tall white chef ’s hats and long white chef ’s aprons were standing behind the tables. One was slicing a roast of beef cooked rare, and the other was slicing a roast turkey cooked tender. The champagne wasn’t domestic and it wasn’t the ersatz Spanish bubbly. It was Veuve Clicquot.
Forty or fifty invitees were munching and slurping and milling around the room. It was the largest of the conference rooms that open off the west corridor in the Park Plaza Hotel. There was thick green carpeting on the floor, and down at the far end of the room, a lectern and a microphone waited for someone’s use, probably Cam Charles’s. Cam was nowhere in sight, but a sextet of tall and immensely chic young women seemed to be handling the role of hostesses more than capably. They circulated, made introductions, and bestowed dazzling smiles at random.
“The ladies have PR firm stamped all over their silk Saint-Laurents,” Annie said.
“Ladies?” I said. “What ladies? Don’t notice any ladies.”
“Tell your eyeballs to stop spinning.”
I dipped one of my shrimp into a tomato-and-horseradish sauce of surpassing richness.
“Job like yours,” I said, “a person could blow their cholesterol level off the scale.”
“Don’t kid yourself, sweetie,” Annie said. “This event is the exception.”
“You telling me life isn’t a regular round of wining, dining, and other bribery for you swells on the movie beat?”
“Free coffee at advance screenings,” Annie said. “In styrofoam cups.”
I was making inroads on a little silver dish of macadamia nuts when someone slapped me cheerily on the shoulder. I turned and found Trevor Dalgleish on my flank. The slap, for all its cheeriness, gave my equilibrium a shake. Trevor packed some heft.
“Well, well, Crang,” he said, “the movies bring all sorts together.”
“At this shindig, Trev, I’m an appendage,” I said. “Annie here’s the main act.”
I made the introductions, and Trevor lathered the charm on Annie.
“I’m a fan,” he said to her. “Wouldn’t miss you on that morning show. Wednesdays, isn’t it, and Fridays?”
Annie answered in words that were suitably grateful and humble, and Trevor followed up with more commentary that proved he really did listen to Annie’s reviews.
Trevor Dalgleish was handsome in a beefy, Teddy Kennedy style. He looked older than his age, which was early thirties, a little grey around the temples, a bracket of deepening lines in the cheeks. But he exuded vigour. The vigour was of an upper-crust sort that usually comes from riding horses and hitting squash balls. Trevor had a faint sound of hoity-toity in his voice.
“Trev’s another one of us,” I said to Annie when Trevor’s gushing wound down. “Criminal lawyer.”
“An associate of our host’s,” Trevor elaborated.
“Of Cameron Charles’s?” Annie said, perking up, maybe scenting some inside dope for her coverage of the Alternate Festival. “Really? And are you involved in the movie end too?”
Trevor assumed a modified aw-shucks look.
“Cam’s assigned me to book a handful of the festival’s films,” he said. “Fascinating to see the movie business from a different perspective.” Trevor didn’t get any further with his perspective. One of the tall, chic visions interrupted him. She was standing at the fringe of the crowd, waving one arm in the air, and she was asking us in her loudest voice if we’d care to bring our champagne glasses and coffee cups to the other end of the room.
“Showtime,” Annie said.
Three guys who looked more rugged and sweaty than the rest of us guests peeled off and strapped themselves into television cameras that had been resting on the floor behind the serving tables. A dozen others, radio types, got out pocket-sized tape recorders. Annie had a notebook and pen in her hands, and so did everyone else around me. I was the only stiff in the room who wasn’t working.
Cam Charles looked sleek. He made his entrance from a door in the wall on the right side of the room and walked to the lectern. Cam had olive skin and black hair that was combed back flat from his forehead. His face and body showed a bit of excess weight, but if he was plump, it was a firm variety of plump. Dark and sleek and plump. Cam looked like he should be mated to an otter. He had on a light grey double-breasted suit, a darker grey shirt with a white collar and white french cuffs, and a blue tie with a delicate pattern. Cam tapped his finger on the microphone and got back a satisfying bump on the sound system.
“Welcome to the first annual Alternate Film Festival,” he said into the mike. “I’m Cameron Charles.”
The guys with the TV cameras switched on their lights, and the radio people held their tape recorders in the air.
“I’m only going to take a few minutes of your valuable time,” Cam said.“The young ladies will have printed material for you as you leave, schedules and so on. What I have for you in my short time is an announcement of a purpose.”
Cam paused. It was for one of his dramatic effects. I’d seen him do it a hundred times in court. I hated it all one hundred times.
“And an announcement of a very important surprise,” Cam said.
The sophisticated press got scribbling. Cam the silver-tongued devil had done it again.
“As many of you will know,” Cam said, “I chose to leave the other film festival in town”—that drew a small snicker, Cam’s emphasis on “other”—“and my reason had to do with purpose. The Festival of Festivals has no purpose beyond simple entertainment. Mindless entertainment in too many instances of the films they choose to offer the public. At the Alternate Festival, my associates and I do have a purpose, and it is this: simply put, we will show films that, through theme or story line or character, through attitude, through the intent of the filmmakers themselves, make a statement about the reality of power and politics in the world today.”
More people were filtering quietly through the door on the right side of the room. There were twelve or fourteen men and women, mostly men, and they gathered congenially a few steps back of Cam. They must have been the associates he was talking about in his speech. The man immediately behind Cam made an odd associate. He was Harp Manley, veteran bebop trumpet player and recent movie actor.
“We have secured a film from South America that I assure you is stunning,” Cam was saying into the mike. “It was made inside Chile, unknown to the Pinochet regime, and smuggled out of the country and into our hands. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, it is a devastating delineation of oppression under a military government.”
One more man joined the clump of associates ranged back of Cam. I recognized him too. It was Beige Jacket. Different jacket, something in lightweight plaid this time, but it was the same moustache, same thinning hair, same Perry Mason build.
“That guy over there,” I said to Annie in a low voice. “In the plaid jacket. He mean anything to you?”
“From the neck down, he could stand in for Raymond Burr.”
“It’s said if people spend long enough in one another’s company, they begin to