Chapter 23

Down among the many waiters and parking attendants awaiting the next expectant command for service, Ari’s eyes focused on the brightly-lit masts of the boat as he spoke into his cellular phone.  “That’s it, Harrison.  I can’t work this way.  Why?  I’ve just taken ten minutes to tell you why.   You hired me to bring back something that would save your magazine.  You call my pictures different… ‘truth.’  Working this way, they are pure shit.”

Harrison pushed back in his chair.  His opulent office with its high windows, imported woods, stone and fresh flowers did little to support the power he knew he had, but was required to modify at that moment.  Behind him, the brightly lit skyline windows of Manhattan spilled onto his shoulders and bathed his head in a power halo.  For a moment, the reflection he could see on the opposite wall of polished marble suggested an image of monumental power.  No, he thought, I’m not that kind of supremacy.  Ari is.  “Okay.  Okay, Ari.  It doesn’t matter.  Calm down and do your thing.  Do it your way.  It’s Okay.”

“Okay because you’re the one saying it will sell?  That, I don’t know, Harrison.  But, I’ll make them.  You sell them.  Just don’t ever again ask me to snap pictures of party freaks because they have some kind of celebrity status.”

He reached for his drink.  “I know, because that doesn’t work for you.  It’s Okay.”

“It’s not Okay, damn it.  Here I am standing with a bunch of wires and an Itty-Bitty  “pulp” camera and transceiver that belongs to the other kind of photographer.  Let Leonard have fun with that shit.  I’m heading for my locker.  I’m taking my miniature camera out and I’ll steal my kind of images and then I’m going back to the island and sleep.  That is if it’s ‘Okay’ with you.”

“It’s Okay.  Of course. But, please, Ari, just don’t get caught.  For Christ sake, don’t get caught.”  He gulped his drink.

“Jesus, Harrison.  Why the hell would I allow myself to get caught?”

Harrison slowly laid the telephone back in its cradle as Ari’s final words rang in his ears.  He poured himself another drink from his crystal decanter and stood up from his desk and gazed out the window.  Intermittently pulsating from a digital readout atop a skyscraper came the date and time… time that was getting short.  He turned around and threw a darting glance at the audited report lying on his desk.  The corners of the cover were dog-eared from his many reviews.  He couldn’t afford to get caught either.  Explaining grab shots of a party, the kind that Leonard could capture in stealth fashion was easy.  Illegal Paparazzi shots were common buys.  The problem was the media had been banned from this party and the shots from Ari’s camera might beg to be published.  “Might,” he thought to himself.  He knew the probability was high that Ari’s work would be compelling.  He also knew it was dangerous to be so enthralled with one man’s work… to be committed to one man’s work.  He knew something else as well.  He was feeling all kinds of changes.  His business might be gone tomorrow.  His life might be inexorably changed with a stroke of the pen approving an “Ari” magazine cover.  He looked around his office.  There were few experiences that were exciting to him anymore.  Ari’s collages hanging on his walls represented one of them.  Suddenly, Harrison knew beyond any doubt that Ari’s work at the party would be brilliant, most likely revelatory, most likely generative of windfall sales.  What bothered him most though was the power he had relinquished to Ari in the last phone call.  He feared it might be awkward at best to explain, and suicidal if the results caused celebrity lawsuits to start pouring in, especially one from Pasolini himself.  He sat down, reached into his drawer, opened a prescription bottle, and swallowed a couple of tiny pills, washing them down with a final gulp of his vintage bourbon.  In the old days, he thought, lawsuits only made for more sales.  Times were different now and Hurito’s orders to avoid trouble occupied his mind like a hypnotic trance.

Trouble. 

“Fuck,” he whispered to himself.  He picked up the phone and dialed.  “I think I’m in trouble,” he said softly into the mouthpiece.  “What do you mean, Sweetheart?” came the response with Southern sugar coating.

***

Samantha moved with the grace of a true stage queen as she swept past the eclectic stacks of drunken silk-bedecked guests, brocades, velvets and black tuxedos.  This was a simple application of what she knew how to do so well… intimidate.  Tuxedos were of special fun for Samantha as they typically suggested a power that the wearer rarely had.  Each of the recipients of the Samantha “eye-rivit” cowered to avoid the moment when power is expected to encounter power.  But like she knew… there was little real power to confront, except possibly the tuxedo clad man that waited at the bottom of the gangway, with collar open, dangling white cuffs beneath his coat, and as Sam drew closer, her glance darted between the intensity of the young man’s unblinking dark eyes and the curious red blinking coming from the open bloom of the large gardenia housed in the ribbon wrapped clear plastic box held between his hands.  Yes, even to Max the Warrior, the strange expression coming up fast on their descent was particularly unsettling.  Samantha passed the man on the right, Max on the left. 

Sam had to giggle a bit as the blinking red dot stealthily went into rapid fire mode as they passed each other and she had to throw one word back over her shoulder.  “Clever.

A few steps beyond, both turned for a second look, but it… whatever it was, they thought, was gone. 

“Clever?  What?” asked Max.  Samantha hesitated but a moment before she smiled, took Max’s hand, and gripping it tight, led him into the darkness beyond the glitter, the party.

Ari, meanwhile, pondered what he might be able to create from this last minute impromptu daring.

 ***

“…the headlines?  Who gives a good God Damn about headlines, look at these pictures.”  The conference room was always of austere heaviness when the two men battled, but Harrison was jubilant, and no one was going to take the moment away from him.  He tossed the 8 x 10’s at Hurito.  A grin consumed the small stature of the Profile’s owner.  He had to come around, for Harrison was right.  “Did I say that?”  “You sure as hell did,” jumped Harrison.  “You sure as hell did.”  He leaned over Hurito’s shoulder, smiling as never before, as the little man who once sold U.S. papers in Kyoto for a one-thousand percent profit picked up the pictures and studied each one… “Eleven enough for the spread you want?” 

Harrison, still shaking his head in wonder, nodded.  As he looked at the Samantha that no one knew, the Max everyone thought they knew, all he could think was…

***

“How the hell did you get them?” 

Cradling the cell phone beneath his chin, Ari took a sip of the coffee he had just poured.  “Shit… hot.  God Damn… shit!!  As he puckered his lips and reached inside the water glass for some ice, Harrison’s voice became further animated. 

“What?  I don’t get… you’re breaking up, Ari.  Damn it, you’re…”  Ari stood up in the bright alpine sunlight and switched ears.  “Better?  Shit that was hot.”   

“What?” muttered Harrison. 

Ari turned his phone another direction and looked out across the roofs of Zermatt at the Matterhorn.  “Even satellite transmission can get upstaged by the right kind of mountain.”

 “The Pasolini pics, Ari.  You just didn’t grab those.  She’s looking right at your lens.  And Max… he never gets near a lens.  How’d you do it?” 

Ari turned the stationary telescope toward the Matterhorn and in his customary fashion answered the question … with a question.  “Did the emperor like them?”

       “Like them?  He loved them.  He really liked them.” 

        Ari focused the telescope.  “Which probably means he’ll have a small birth experience when I send him the finished product, right? 

        “How soon,” urged Harrison.

        “The finished?  I’ve got a week, right?”

        Harrison grimaced.  “Ari… sure a week.  Don’t get distracted on me now, Okay?” 

        “How could Zermatt be a distraction?” 

        “Zermatt? She’s there?” urged Harrison with a gravity that screamed “deadline.”

         Ari smiled, “Yes.  Yes, she is.  I can almost touch her.” 

         “Touch her?” 

As Ari left Harrison suspended and hung up, he fine-tuned his focus on the three images moving their way across the glacier.  His only frustration was not being roped up with her and Max as the guide led them toward the base of the mountain.  There was one other frustration, he thought; imaging the danger that personified this woman.  He sat back down, lifted his laptop and opened and closed the separate files containing Samantha’s party images...  the majority of which captured her thoughtful… deep… always looking straight at the camera, as if knowing it was recording her every move.  There was the gangway; the parking lot; the heliport; the dimly lit shoreline below the castle suite; the moonlit pure white sands framing the naked bodies of the newlyweds; and finally, the unabashed leisurely walk at sunrise up the sand embankment to their suite.  It was this last 2000mm shot that kept his attention.  The formal gown, the tuxedo, the shoes.  All of it in the foreground as the couple moved their naked bodies up toward the castle’s bastion of heavy walled safety.  This shot, with but a short glance from Samantha over her shoulder in the direction of his lens, kept him intrigued.  Was she aware of him?  Daring him?  It was a strange way to think of her right now, but at this moment, she struck him as a modern day Eve… luring the “Adams,” the viewers, the voyeurs of the world  to some kind of forbidden fruit.

    He glanced up from his computer and toward the glacier, wondering how far this totally compulsive woman was going to go, or how far Max would let her go.  He once again glanced down at his computer and the last picture.  He touched several keys and the image took on a parchment texture.

    “Maybe… Maybe,” he hesitantly whispered to himself as he began feverishly moving the digital pen forwards, back, up, down across the screen, changing from brush to small palette, to air brush and back to brush as he blended the colors and lines into… he paused and stared at the colored layers becoming a mysterious smoke-like image.  He quietly exhaled the acrid Gauloises smoke across the screen.  “My God…”