High Risk 5.2

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[Continuing chapter five]

“You’re on time,” Straebo said, emerging from the gloom. “Good habit to get into.”

“Good morning,” Casey said. Jerry Straebo looked like several of the inner circles of Hell. His face was puffy, and below each eye was a wrinkled arc of bruised flesh that suggested a deflated tire tube. The director’s eyes had the glittering, unfocused look of someone who’d been forced to use stimulants just to get his heart pumping today. I wonder if Eve Adams caught up with him? Casey thought. Sure looks as if someone did. “I don’t suppose a man could get a cup of coffee,” he said.



“We’re on short rations here.” Straebo gestured vaguely at the huge, empty hangar of a building. “Normally this place would be locked up this morning. In order to complete your test, I’ve brought in a few people who aren’t currently required by other productions. We’ll all be going home again as soon as we’ve finished here.” There had been dozens of people at the airport for yesterday’s shooting. This morning’s crew seemed to consist of Straebo; an older woman who seemed to be an assistant of some sort; a couple of overall-clad men who were shifting either scenery or lights; and a thin, stork-like man who supervised them, fiddling from time to time with the gates—ears, Casey had heard them called—that controlled the size of the beam cast by the lights. The few lights that were lit seemed to be throwing off smoke, and the thin man’s hair was a weird, wiry halo whenever the light caught it. It was as if his head was topped with a multitude of filaments removed from light-bulbs. Unlike yesterday’s filming, there was no table of food and coffee, and nobody he saw held so much as a cup.

Casey nodded his understanding. “I can wait for coffee, I guess.”

“I see you’re wearing the same clothes you wore last night,” Straebo said.

“They’re pretty much the only clothes I own right now, Mr. Straebo. The rest of the country may be riding on the coat-tails of Wall Street, but somebody forgot to invite me to the party.”

“Well, we can’t have you testing looking like that. Susan, get this man into something suitable.” He thought for a moment. “What would be suitable?”

The middle-aged assistant—a woman wearing the worn, bemused expression of a mother of many small children—walked up to Casey and Straebo. She looked at Casey for a few seconds, then smiled at him. “With nobody in Wardrobe it’d be impossible to find much anyway. How about if I just put him into one of Hart’s costumes from High Risk?”

“If you can find one that hasn’t gone back to storage or the agency, that would be splendid.” Straebo dismissed her with a tired wave. “Make it fast, though. My head is killing me.”

Susan took Casey back outside, and in a moment Casey realized that the strange, low, wooden building was in fact a collection of dressing rooms. “I don’t think Conrad will mind us borrowing his room,” Susan said, pulling a ring of keys from the bag slung over her shoulder.

“Do you do this sort of thing for everyone who walks in off the street?” Casey asked as she opened the door.

“By this sort of thing do you mean breaking into a man’s dressing room, or do you mean a screen test?”

“Either one, I suppose.” Casey resisted the urge to whistle. The building looked like a down-at-the-heels bunkhouse from the outside, but Conrad Hart’s dressing room was a sanctum out of Casey’s dreams, reminiscent of a good squadron mess. In fact, the overstuffed armchair could have been lifted directly from 85 Squadron’s mess in May 1918. Only the makeup counter, mirrors lining the wall in front of it, suggested that this wasn’t just a gentleman’s den.

“Well, we’re still figuring out exactly how this sound-test thing is supposed to work,” Susan said. “Maybe Jerry’s using you as a guinea pig. Though if that was his plan, he could have come up with a better time to do it than Sunday morning. Here, try this.” She pulled a suit from a closet and handed it to him. It looked like any suit you might see on any man walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Casey wondered if the movie magic was something they sprinkled onto the costumes once you were wearing them.

“It was easier before sound,” Susan continued. “Slap some makeup on the kid, get them in front of the camera and see how well they responded to simple directions and how much the camera liked them. Now we have to have a script to work with, and pretty much a whole crew. The cost of doing these things is going to go up, and we’re going to have to set aside more time for them. I see a day not too far off when it’ll take two hours or more just to get ready for a test. And I’m willing to bet you that time won’t add anything to our paychecks.”

While Susan complained, Casey stepped behind a screen and shrugged out of his clothes and into the suit. The wool scratched a bit but it was thin and felt comfortable. In fact, without the jacket on he felt much more at home in this suit than he did in what he thought of as his working clothes. “I like this,” he said, returning to face Susan. “Think anyone’ll notice if I wear it home?”

“You’re asking the wrong girl,” Susan said, giving him a quick glance. “This morning I wouldn’t care if you tap-danced naked down Sunset Boulevard.” She looked at him again, more carefully this time, and a small grin softened her expression. “You know, that thing fits you better than it does Conrad. I wonder if Jerry’s thinking of having you double for him out at the airfield?”

“He didn’t say anything to me about it. Now what do we do?” Casey started for the door.

“Not yet, fly-boy. I want to slap some makeup on you.”

“You’re kidding. What do you take me for?”

“Not that kind of makeup, you sap. I’m talking about motion-picture makeup. Under those lights you might wind up looking like a ghost. Or a raccoon,” she said, raising a weathered finger to trace the arcs under his eyes where the goggles sat. “Why are your cheeks darker and the skin around your eyes so pale?”

“Pale? Let me see.” Casey walked to the mirror and looked. “I don’t see what you’re talking about,” he said. I know I washed thoroughly this morning.

“Maybe most people won’t notice,” Susan said. “But there’s definitely a difference in skin-tone. Does that happen because you fly?”

“The planes I fly don’t have exhaust systems,” he said. “And they burn oil. So the parts of my face that aren’t covered by goggles or a scarf get pretty filthy. But it’s not as if I don’t wash.”

“Like I said, maybe most people won’t notice. But the camera will. Sit down, and let me fix you up.”

It took maybe ten minutes, and when she’d finished Casey couldn’t really see much difference. He could feel it, of course: his face seemed wet, sticky, as if he was wearing a too-tight mask. But Susan gave him another appraising look, then nodded. “Good,” she said. She grabbed a hat from the rack by the door, tossed it to him. “Let’s go.”
Back on the sound stage, someone gave Casey a few sheets of type-script, a jumble of words that made next to no sense to him, and told him to study the scene. This turned out not to be as difficult as he’d dreaded: there weren’t that many words on the page, and he was only expected to say about half of them. He was pretty sure he’d memorized everything he was supposed to say and do by the time Susan came for him again. As he let himself be led to the set, Casey noticed that the wire-haired, bird-like man had stopped fiddling with lights and was now fiddling with the camera.
They’d brought a young woman to share the test with him, a very pretty brown-haired girl Susan introduced to him as Margot Griffith. Margot had done this sort of thing before, but not so many times that she was inclined to lord her experience over Casey. She added a few hints to the store he’d got from Susan, and after a few minutes in which they were bundled about by Straebo and his makeshift crew as if they’d been a pair of dress-maker’s dummies, Margot whispered, “Good luck,” Straebo shouted, “Places!” in a voice that trailed off to a hung-over whimper, and the intensity of the light increased so much that Casey almost felt the breath being sucked from his lungs.
He wasn’t too sure of what happened next. Straebo shouted something, then shouted some more and they did it again. Straebo muttered something that Casey couldn’t hear, and then the lights dropped back to their previous level. Margot, Casey noted, was staring at him, her mouth open. Either he’d been brilliant or his ineptitude had left her speechless. I’m pretty sure I said everything I was supposed to, he thought.
Then the lights returned to blinding-white form, and Casey felt his makeup beginning to melt and bubble in the heat. “Hi,” a voice said from somewhere outside the corona of incandescence, and then the stork-like man emerged into the halo of light. His hair was even more amazing close-up. Casey guessed that it added a good four inches to a height that was already substantially above average. “Casey, right?” the man said. “I’m Smokey Burnett. I’m your cameraman today.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Casey said, offering his hand. “Thanks for coming out. I know what a pain it must be to have to give up your only day off.”
“Oh, it’s not a problem,” Burnett said. “I’m between pictures right now. Haven’t worked for two glorious weeks. So this morning is a chance for me to file off some of the rust—I start a new job tomorrow.”
“In that case, I’m glad to be able to help you out.”
Burnett laughed. “That’s the spirit,” he said. Then he looked at Casey for a moment, apparently thinking. “Listen,” he eventually said. “If you really want to help, why don’t you and Margot just sit around here and talk for a few minutes? That way I can run a bit more film through the camera.”
“Sure,” Casey said. “Anything to help.” He turned to Margot. “Uh… what do we talk about?”
“Anything,” Burnett said, walking back into the darkness. “Did I hear right that you were a pilot in the War?”
Margot turned out to be an excellent conversationalist. She seemed genuinely interested, not so much in the whole fighting-the-Hun thing, but in the pleasures of flying. She had a sense of humor, too. Casey enjoyed the next five minutes, and was honestly sorry when Burnett interrupted them to announce that he was out of film, Straebo was out of the building, and Casey’s screen test was finally over.
One final surprise awaited Casey when he stepped out of the stage and into the blinding sunlight. “You Casey?” a uniformed guard asked.
“That’s me.”
“Mr. Straebo wanted me to tell you you’re to use this truck to get yourself back to Glendale. We can’t spare anyone to drive you. He says the truck is yours to use until you’ve bought yourself a car.”
The guard pointed to a worn Model T truck with a board-sided cargo bed. The truck was probably older than the planes he was flying for Monarch, but Casey didn’t care. He’d been without a car for even longer than he’d been without a plane, and in California it was getting ever harder to live without a car, unless you cherished being dependent on the schedules of the Pacific Electric Red Car.
“Hey, thanks,” Casey said. “Anything I need to know about how she runs?”
“Nothing I can tell you, pal,” the guard said. “If she’s got problems, I expect you’ll find out about ‘em soon enough.”

The truck started on the first turn of the crank, probably because the engine was still warm. For a moment, Casey just sat behind the wheel, enjoying the rattle of the engine and way it made the truck shake, like a horse anxious to start running. It occurred to him that he had all of Sunday afternoon and evening to himself, with nowhere he had to be and nothing he had to do. He was his own man, with a full tank of gas and the entirety of Hollywood to explore.

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