Christopher had been talking for nine minutes. Vinnie had counted.
The back office at the Bing smelled like Silvio's cologne and the cigarettes Christopher kept lighting and forgetting to smoke. Bass from the floor came up through the carpet in dull, steady thumps, the rhythm of a song Vinnie didn't recognize. He sat in the leather chair Silvio kept for meetings, Sambuca untouched on the desk in front of him, two coffee beans drifting on the surface where there should have been three. The bartender had forgotten one. A small thing. The kind of detail Vinnie's brain catalogued and filed for no reason.
"Jon Favreau — you ever heard of him? Swingers?" Christopher paced. Three steps, turn, three steps. "He's not on this one but his agency, they got people. Real people. Connected. Not our way. Their way. Hollywood way."
"I follow."
"And I got the script. Read it." Christopher made a flat gesture with both hands, like he was leveling sand. "Two and a half hours, I didn't get up to piss once. That's how good it is."
He stopped. Looked at Vinnie like he was supposed to react.
"That's good, Chris."
"It's better than good. It's the real thing."
Vinnie picked up the Sambuca, turned the glass once, set it back down. He knew how this story ended. Different one. Couldn't say so. He'd known for six months and the knowledge sat where it always sat — a useless weight on a shelf in his head that he passed every time he opened a door.
"Tell me about the deal," he said.
"The deal. Yeah. So." Christopher pulled out a folded paper from his inside pocket. It had been folded enough times to lose its corners. "Two-fifty total budget. We got one-fifty committed. Tony's in for fifty. We need another hundred."
"Bonded production company?"
"Yeah, definitely. We're working on that part."
"Working on it how?"
Christopher hesitated. The pitch had a rhythm and the rhythm just stumbled. "I mean — we know we need it. There's a guy. We're talking to him."
"Distribution."
"We got a guy, he knows people at — I think he said Miramax. Or it might've been New Line. One of them."
The whole thing was air. Vinnie watched him try to make the air into a structure. Christopher had read a Robert McKee book and seen L.A. Confidential and now he was a producer. In another life, with another mother, with a few honest mentors and no uncle named Tony, he might have been one. He had the hunger. He didn't have anyone around him who could read a cap table.
"Send me the paper, Chris."
"The paper."
"Cap table. The bond. The distribution deal when you have it. I won't make a decision without it. But send it." Vinnie touched the watch on his wrist. Sal's Omega. The leather strap was darker where Sal's pulse had been. "I'll look."
Christopher exhaled. He'd been holding something. "Tony said you'd be like this."
"Like what."
"Said you'd want to see everything. Said most guys, they hear the word movie, they're either out the door or already counting the box office in their head. He said you'd want the structure." Christopher smiled, all teeth. "He likes that about you."
Vinnie didn't answer. Tony was profiling him to his own crew. That was useful to know. It was also the kind of useful information that came at a price, because if Tony was telling Christopher how Vinnie thought, Tony was telling other people too.
"There's something else." Christopher came around the desk, sat on the edge of it. Closer than Vinnie liked. "Movies, man. That's the real power. You think Tony's powerful? Tony's got, what, half of Jersey on a string. You make a movie people watch, you got the whole country in your head. Every kid in Akron, Ohio watching your shit. Thinking about your guys. That's power."
He said it like he'd practiced it. He probably had.
Underneath the swagger and the rehearsed line and the script he hadn't actually written, there was a person who wanted to put something in the world that would last. Vinnie had seen the look before, on his MBA cohort, on the ones who left finance for screenwriting and came back broke. The look was the same. The life was different.
"I hear you, Chris."
"Yeah?"
"I hear you. Send me the paper."
Christopher nodded. Took it as a yes. Took most things as a yes. He shook Vinnie's hand and his palm was damp and Vinnie did the polite handshake — not too long, not too short, the way Sal would have done it — and Christopher left the office, and the door swung closed, and the bass came back to fill the space he'd vacated.
Vinnie sat for a minute with the Sambuca. Drank it. Two beans for luck or none. He didn't believe in either.
Silvio was at the bar in the front room with a glass of red and the Star-Ledger folded to the racing page. He looked up when Vinnie came out. The dancer on the closest pole — short, dark hair, maybe twenty-two — saw Vinnie and waved. She didn't know him. He didn't know her. He raised two fingers in a small wave back because it was easier than not waving and Silvio watched the whole exchange with the half-smile he wore when he was reading a room.
"Marchetti."
"Sil."
"He give you the pitch?"
"He gave me the pitch."
Silvio set the paper down. Took off his glasses, polished them on the end of his tie. Put them back on. "And?"
"I told him to send me the paper."
"Smart." A beat. "He'll forget to send it."
"I know."
Silvio's half-smile became three-quarters of one. He picked the paper back up. "Tony asked me to ask you. So I asked. Good night, Vincent."
"Good night, Sil."
Tommy was parked at the curb with the engine on. Newspaper on the dash. Cigarette in his hand burned almost down to the filter. Vinnie got in.
"Home?"
"Home."
Tommy pulled out, made the turn onto Route 17. The Bing's sign flickered in the rearview. They drove in silence for two miles before Tommy spoke.
"How'd it go."
"It went."
"Tony's nephew, huh."
"Tony's nephew."
The Pulaski Skyway came up. The Hudson on the right, black, and Manhattan past it — a row of small lights that meant nothing at this distance. Vinnie watched it pass and thought about Christopher pacing. The kid was talented. The kid was a weapon pointed at the kid's own chest. The kid would press the trigger over and over for the next eight years and Vinnie's job was to make sure nobody he cared about was standing behind him when one of those triggers went off.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"If Christopher reaches out to anybody on our side about the movie — Marco's old guys, the bookmakers, anybody — route it to me. Don't take meetings on his behalf. I don't want anyone on our calendar with him."
Tommy flicked ash out the window. Considered it. "The Hollywood thing."
"The Hollywood thing."
"Same answer as the boat?"
"Same answer."
Tommy nodded once. The matter was closed. The boat had been a Bayonne pretender six weeks ago who'd wanted Vinnie to front a hundred grand for a charter operation that wasn't going to charter anything. Vinnie had passed. Tommy had remembered.
They came off the skyway and the lights of Jersey City started pulling them in. Vinnie touched the Omega's leather strap. Then the Saint Michael under his shirt — small habit. He thought about Sal, and Christopher, and Tony, and how Tony had said I had good teachers to a man with no teachers at all.
"Tommy."
"Yeah."
"Drop me at the house. You go home. I'll see you Monday."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
Tommy nodded. The Cadillac slid through the orange wash of the streetlights and Vinnie watched a kid on the corner light a cigarette and miss the flame the first two tries. The kid finally got it on the third strike and Vinnie watched the small red point of it bob up the sidewalk and disappear.
He'd send Christopher's paper back unopened if it ever came. He already knew it wouldn't.
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