Night Film(182)
As I said this, I’d been watching Gallo’s face. The second I’d said human trafficking, I knew I’d hit the bull’s-eye.
And thank Christ—because I was bluffing: I had no friend at the ICE, and not a single witness. For the last few days, I’d pored over my hastily rewritten notes, trying to nail down something, anything, to use against Gallo. I kept returning to her nickname, mentioned by both Peg Martin and Marlowe Hughes: Coyote. A coyote was a wild prairie dog, but it was also slang for anyone who escorts illegal aliens over the Mexican-U.S. border. They could range from makeshift mom-and-pop organizations to those sponsored by billion-dollar drug cartels.
Peg Martin had specifically mentioned the film crew had used the nickname, and thus I wondered if it was because Gallo had been their actual coyote. That, combined with her birthplace in Mexico and Marlowe’s assertion that Gallo did Cordova’s dirty work, I made the theoretical leap that it just might be Gallo who had transported all of the illegal aliens to The Peak. The arrangement probably was that they worked crew on his film for three months, witnessing any number of appalling acts, and then, after being sufficiently threatened so they’d never spill the beans, were free to go. It was unquestionably a long shot, and I hadn’t expected it to work—until now, when I’d watched the color drain out of Gallo’s face.
She’d transformed considerably in the years since her bright-eyed teenage wedding photo—even since the day she’d accepted Cordova’s Academy Award for Thumbscrew. It was as if all those decades serving the director, standing in such close proximity to him, had petrified her, made her gray hair grow coarser and wirier, her low brow heavier, her lips tighten as pulled string. There seemed nothing left in her that was light or carefree. But perhaps that was what happened when one decided to forever orbit a hulking planet with a mass that dwarfed one’s own.
She hadn’t moved a muscle, only watched me intently. She put down the phone.
“What do you want, Mr. McGrath?”
“To have a heart-to-heart.”
“We’ve nothing to discuss.”
“I disagree. We can start with Ashley Cordova being dead at twenty-four, then I have another problem, the fact that everyone I’ve talked to about Ashley has gone missing, including a man’s house burned to the ground. If you talk to me, maybe my friend at ICE will let slide your slave-labor operation.”
She looked furious but bit her tongue, striding deliberately to the bar in the corner and pouring herself a drink.
“If that was slave labor, then millions would die to be slaves,” she muttered. “They lived like kings.”
“They couldn’t leave. So technically they were prisoners.”
“It was how they paid for the crossing—all agreed to ahead of time. There was no coercion and no lies. At the end of production, we could hardly get them to go. They wanted to stay on forever.”
“Like children not wanting to leave Epcot. Touching.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What do you hope to gain out of all this?”
“The truth.”
“The truth.” She smirked, quick as a spark off a defunct lighter, then looked serious. I could see she was genuinely shocked by my showing up here—of that I was certain—and seemed now to be deciding how best to handle the situation, the quickest way to be rid of me. She must have decided to play along, at least for now, because she cocked her head to the side and smiled stiffly.
“Can I get you a drink?”
“So long as it’s not poured over arsenic.”
She fixed me a glass of Jameson from the same bottle she’d served herself, and hurried over, thrust the glass at me.
I noticed, as she sat down on the couch adjacent, she actually had a small wheel tattoo on the back of her left hand—exactly as I’d read weeks ago on the Blackboards. The anonymous poster had claimed it was evidence Gallo and Cordova were the same person. Staring at her rigid profile now, I considered the possibility that the director and his assistant were one and the same, that this was Cordova. But there was something about the woman, in her stocky lieutenant’s bearing, in her flitting eyes, so subservient and unfulfilled—as if the eternal object of her attention was not present, but standing somewhere in the wings.
No, she was most certainly not Cordova. I was positive. And she was stalling.
“Before you demand to see the scaffolding, Mr. McGrath,” she said, staring me down, “make sure it is what you actually want to see. The cranks and the ropes and the metal supports. The rust and the heavy chains. Lights painstakingly positioned overhead. It’s a different reality than what’s on-screen. And much less thrilling.”
She tilted her head, as if struck by a new thought, closely scrutinizing my face and smiling thinly.
“It’s funny. I’d have thought you of all people would have been on to her. You really never saw it?”
“Saw what?”
“Surely you must have noticed hints, here and there, clues—”
“Hints of what?” Suddenly I sensed I no longer had the upper hand in this situation, that Inez Gallo had recovered—or I’d never had her in a corner in the first place.
She raised an eyebrow. “You really never figured it out?”
“Figured out what?”
“Ashley was sick.”