CHAPTER 114 - Smile (2)

Agent Hollis.

Hollis was the antagonist; the psychotic lawman drunk on his hatred of drug dealers as heretics desecrating his shining city on the hill.

To Olivier Brassac, that Ferroni had cast an African-American man for the role, in an epoch where the CIA was known to instigate drug trafficking in LA, was certainly a choice. Was Cooper’s inclusion preventative political correctness? Hollywood was known for this. Was this… Dr David Cooper, really good enough to carry the villain’s role solo? A revenge flick like The Pro lived and died on the charisma of its villain. A lame duck antagonist—made for a lame revenge, adorable blonde or otherwise.

Whatever the case, Brassac recognised at a glance that the African-American man in the mustard three-piece suit was a stage actor and a veteran. He saw it in the way the man’s body and his feet moved with independent confidence.

On which stage had he seen so much righteous delusion?

Brutus?

Cassius?

Or…

Mark Antony?

A few scenes ago, Hollis had been shown consorting with Josie’s father, demanding with a terrifyingly friendly demeanour that Mr Novak either return the “goods” by midday, or face a biblical wrath.

Now, the Novaks’ clock had run out.

Via a jump-cut, a hand landed on the banister, followed by a top-down close-up of the simmering ultraviolence brewing in Hollis’ eyes. His pupils, slightly unfocused, were watching something in the middle distance like he was reading some secret script from God.

He entered the corridor with his men behind him, caring nothing for the heavy armaments his goons slung around their shoulders. In a camel coat and a pristine white shirt, his back straight and his eyes glazed with barely contained madness, Hollis strode through the Novaks’ unlocked door.

Unlocked—because earlier, Josie had left in a hurry, promising milk for her little brother, simultaneously on an errand for Marcel, for offering her a sympathetic handkerchief.

The background music was low and slow, matching Hollis’ footfalls, but otherwise unremarkable. Brassac recognised the tune: it was the kind used for TV, drawn from a library of pre-purchased rights, typical of indie films, and typical of Ferroni, a made-for-cable director.

He noted with some amusement that the young man behind Hollis was none other than Sony’s music prodigy, the rapper who sold just as well in France as he did in the USA, because of a duelling duet called Doves Cry. The rapper stayed at the stairs while the door swung shut behind his chief.

Inside the apartment, Hollis and his men herded the family like cattle into the living room. The little boy scrambled under the kitchen table, hugging his toy dinosaur, ignored for now.

Hollis had caught the father red-handed, in the midst of a crossword of all things, while all around him, the evidence of his attempt to cheat the DEA was self-evident.

“Mister… Hollis… I was going to make the weight, I was… going to…”

Hollis’ expression of disappointment was exquisite, like a father finally losing the last ounce of patience for a son he had hoped would find the most marginal of success.

He raised a finger, a slow, reprimanding finger, with malicious patience bordering on sadism, to the man’s cracked lips.

“How yet resolves the governor of the town?” Hollis spoke in tongues, his voice so deep, and yet so clear, that it was hypnotic. “This is the latest parle we will admit…”

A bolt of lightning shot through Brassac. He knew that speech! As a Frenchman who bought films, English films, how could he not? It was a line from the rapine of Harfleur! It was the English king, telling the French fortress what he would do to their families if their gates stayed shut.

Hollis gently patted the sweating father’s face, and picked up the little drug sachets between his fingers.

He tsked. Twice.

“Therefore… to our best mercy give yourselves…” he said, offering mercy when Brassac knew there was none. He was a cat, toying with a mouse, and he was deciding who would die first. Should his family watch him die, or?

Brassac felt his abdomen contract.

He knew the speech.

He knew the lines.

… It was… visceral foreshadowing.

And the man’s voice. Brassac could not believe it. The sound-mixing was the definition of mediocre, and yet the voice seemed to nestle itself into the chest of every attendee. Where Hollis’ acting was superb, his voice possessed a quality that rose above almost everything he had seen thus far in the film, including the girl’s luminous, ridiculously expressive eyes.

A pistol slid from the holster under Hollis’ arm. Black like a Bible cover, unpolished and unglamorous, a tool, a means to an end.

The camera followed the muzzle, arriving at the eldest daughter.

“With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass, your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants.”

On virgins, the aim moved to the whimpering teen.

On infants, it moved to the wide-eyed boy.

Brassac stifled a professional smirk. It was obvious that they shot the scene without the gun, for the young actor’s gaze was off-centre, at the lens, rather than the executioner standing above him with a Glock.

“Please, Mister Hollis… Please…” Mr Novak fell to his knees. “Not… not my family…”

The fellow playing Walt Novak was a TV actor, and the difference between his middling desperation and Hollis’ sadism was enough to make Brassac wince.

“What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause—” Hollis took him by the hair, and made him watch.

With a single, violent sweep, he swept the white powder, the loose sachets and the scale off the table in a burst of sudden violence, bringing the tension to an unbearable crescendo.

“—If your pure maidens FALL—”

BANG—

Brassac had expected more diatribe, but Hollis’ timing was paradoxically jarring and perfect. Before he had even finished—before the audience was ready—he fired.

There was no suppressor, no thump. It was the sound of a real pistol in a small room, and the girl on the couch, Tanya, with her flailing hair, jumped into the cushion in a burst of gore and lay still.

Half the theatre jumped. They had been mesmerised by that voice—and then—

Mrs Novak screamed, and the men pressed her back into the seats.

Mr Novak, on his knees, wept like a woman.

“What rein can hold licentious wickedness?” Hollis demanded of his victim, putting his face close enough to kiss. Hollis was sweating now, as a man in fervent prayer. He then walked around the father, around the table, like a tiger pacing on stage.

“Murder, spoil, and villainy,” said Hollis, an apostrophe, to God.

NovelPhoenix contains the author's chapter as posted, while this version was taken without permission. Reading there supports their creative work.

He finally stopped behind Walt, who was weeping and drooling and whimpering. Anyone who did not know the sequence of the speech would have thought he was ready to execute Walt or slit his throat.

But that would be too unimaginative.

Brassac braced himself, and he could see among his row that at least a dozen people knew the speech as well as he.

By now, the wife’s shrieking had been reduced to a mess of grief and despair.

Hollis took Mr Novak by the chin and lifted the man’s face with such tenderness that it appeared as though they were lovers.

“Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused—”

BANG—!

The second shot came. This time it was Mrs Novak, and she snapped back like a rag doll, toppling onto the floor.

Terribly, his speech wasn’t finished yet.

There was one more victim, one too young and too paralysed to act. Hollis straightened and held Mr Novak’s head to make sure that he could see.

“Your naked infants SPITTED upon pikes—”

“No—”

Brassac almost screamed internally when he finally heard the SFX. The camera showed nothing, only the barrel of the smoking gun pointed under the table.

Then Hollis cheerfully told the father to stand up.

“Don’t be a stranger, Walt,” he said. “Finish your crossword, and maybe…”

Walt Novak got up off his knees and went to the kitchen counter, where the folded newspaper was still beside the kettle. He stood beside it, holding a pen because a psychopath with a gun had told him to.

Hollis backpedalled, hinting that the punishment had been delivered.

Then came the line, the final killing line.

“Your fathers taken by the silver beards—and their most reverend heads dashed to the walls—”

BANG—

BANG—

BANG—

BANG—

He fired four times without hurry, the muzzle rising and falling like a horizontal metronome. The wallpaper burst open, and a dark flower bloomed under Walt’s shirt.

Behind Hollis, a door opened, and Tull came in with his pistol drawn. He stepped over the corpses carefully, his eyes growing wild, and then he saw what was under the kitchen table, and his aim dropped an inch. He looked at Hollis, as if truly seeing the man for the first time.

Hollis slid the gun back into his holster, and he looked straight at Kelvin Grant’s Tull, with an expression that was undeniably fatherly.

“Do you see what it costs to save this city? That we are Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen?”

Tull nodded. Understanding. Not understanding.

Finally, the African-American thespian demonstrated yet another display of theatrical prowess. Visibly, through a high-angle close-up, the actor stretched his neck, cracked his back, and the cruel king drained out of his body. It almost looked like a transformation of sorts when he resumed his guise again, like a Lovecraftian creature slipping back into a meat suit. When he spoke again, the American-accented Shakespeare was gone, and the sound of New York returned to his lips.

He took out a silver cigarette case and tapped out a pure white menthol stick.

“Smoke?”

Tull shook his head. The young man’s eyes were nothing short of wild.

“Your loss. Clean this up.”

Hollis lit up, a happy plumber after clearing a clogged drain.

In his seat, Brassac realised that his hands were cold and rigid.

He had come to Utah for one actor only, Rémy Aubert, and now he had found a new favourite in a man whose name he had never heard, delivering a speech that confessed to war crimes against the French. His mind was already on the question of how they would dub this scene. Who in French cinema could match this man’s voice?

His advice would be that they leave it.

They could use subtitles and let his audience feel, as he had felt, the full force of that deep, resonant voice delivering death and destruction. As for the sequence, he noticed that a few of the shots were stitched from other takes. It was as if an editor had cut and recut the same scene dozens and dozens of times until the speech finally stuck.

As for now, in the dark, using only his fingers, he typed, “Ne laissez personne d’autre l’avoir,” and sent it through on international roaming charges.

Like Hollis, he could also use a cigarette.

Kel had three lines in the entire first half of the film, delivered to a girl with two cartons of milk. He had been waiting for the lines forever, and now, they were here.

Watching his own subpar acting had been cringeworthy. Next to Dr Cooper’s performance, his amateurish skills were beyond obvious. He wished more than anything to have worked harder, asked for longer takes, and to have trained before he showed up, expecting to somehow be as good as the professionals, or at least be as good as Eppie.

O Lord, how wrong he was.

How humbled he was by the reality of it.

And now he waited for the scene, and its anticipation made his stomach churn and the rear of his throat bitter with bile.

He saw Eppie come up the first flight with the slippery cartons held against her hip, looking totally natural as the background music grew to whispers, then silence. It was the silence of realisation, the slow, horrific realisation that her family was no more.

That Petey was no more.

She reached a half-landing and stopped just as they had filmed. There were three men standing guard in the doorway of her apartment with heavy jackets and tucked-away firearms.

Kel was one of them.

He watched himself turn around in the doorway, still acting horrified from witnessing the boy’s death, and deliver the single syllable he had taken multiple takes to achieve.

“Hey.”

For a singer, he knew his voice like the back of his hand, so it was beyond strange that to Kel, he sounded like someone he did not know. Beside him, Valorie Sanders was gripping Eppie’s hand so tightly that he was shocked the blonde didn’t squirm. A quick glance at everyone else indicated that the tension had reached the climax, as Ferroni had planned.

A sudden wave of thankfulness washed over Kel.

Eppie’s eyes turned from the scene to regard him.

Kel looked away, too embarrassed to answer.

On the screen, the girl walking past barely looked at him. She shifted the carton on her hip because it was slipping, and she smiled at him with the same smile that she had used twice before in the film. Tull, his character, tried to smile back. His smile was stiff because Kel sucked. Narratively, of course, it was because Tull was suffering from PTSD.

“You live up here?” Tull asked.

The girl nodded. It was a small and demure nod, the way children nod at adults.

She walked past Tull, not fast and not slow, with the bag swinging. An actress playing an unwitting actress, trying to survive the distance needed to reach the door at the end of the corridor.

“Go on, then.”

Eppie went on.

She reached the last door, Marcel’s door, and she shifted the bag to one hand as she knocked. She waited, and Tull and his men watched the girl wait, their guns within reach.

She held up the milk like a shield, like an offering.

“Please…” The sound mixing made the whimpering loud enough to hear, even as it was understood to be a whisper.

“Please…”

The exchange went on as timeless as the day Kel saw it acted out for the first time.

The door opened.

And the girl was home.

The cinema let out a collective breath so audible that there was no doubt as to the scene’s success.

Kelvin Grant sat in the dark, with his hands numb between his knees, and thought about what he wanted, and what his mother had said, and realised, ashamedly, that she was right.

It was only later that Brandon Bradshaw realised that he had stopped writing somewhere around the second gunshot.

So much for the notes.

But it wasn’t like he needed them now.

Please.

It was just a single syllable from a kid with a bag of milk at the door, and he had felt stricken with unbidden emotion. He had thought the speech at Harfleur would have been the highlight, but this, the second scene, had arrived too fast and too soon, and possessed too much weight.

It was so good that it was sickening.

If the rest of the film was two out of four, this scene and the one before would lock it at three. In this singular scene, he had felt so invested in Josie, that he wanted to leap into the apartment to unbolt the door himself, and to let her in.

Had the film tried to toy with him and had Marcel rejected the girl, he would have walked out in protest. Then the door opened to the immense relief of the entire cinema, and Marcel said those immortal words that would be quoted in every single review he would deliver for the film.

“Welcome… welcome home.”

Her face bloomed like a flower.

She was home.

The audience melted.

Out of curiosity, he looked down towards the fourth row, where the actress and the crew for Paramount’s Single-A sat. The young actress had a hand over her mouth, trying to fight what came naturally. The others sat as grave men, realising that, between this scene and Hollis’ speech, their fates were sealed.

How could an academy comedy compete with what they just saw? Regardless of its manifestation of a scandalous literary classic, they had no Aubert and no Cooper; the distance was too far to be bridged.

He thought about the articles written about the girl, and he thought about the crowd singing her Bully Boy shanty. Whatever happened in the next few days, she would make them eat their words.

But Brandon was a professional.

Three asterisks remained on his notepad.

Three out of four, maybe more... but only if... Ferroni managed to stick the landing too.