CHAPTER 116 - Don’t You (Forget About Me)

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”

— Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities

While the audience ate their popcorn, Olivier Brassac dreaded la nuit d’avant, a trope crudely termed by armchair critics as the “climax” before the climax.

Brassac hoped that it had been cut completely.

He was one of the unlucky few who had been given the raw Vasseur script, before the editing, before the young actress’s parents stepped in to censor Vasseur’s artistic vision. Gaumont had been immensely thankful for the legal challenge—though it did not say so openly. The times were changing; it was no longer acceptable or fashionable for young actresses to work with older love interests, no matter the rationale.

Ten years ago, Brassac hadn’t cared for the multi-page footnote explaining why Josie would lead Marcel to bed, and he didn’t care for it now.

Only now was there a bed.

And Josie was on it.

And somewhere on the other end was a camera, and a gentleman.

Josie had taken off her blood-soaked clothes, showered, and washed herself of Marcel’s sin. She sat now in oversized pyjamas, her shoulders still glistening and her blonde hair wet and plastered against her cheeks. She looked catatonic. Tull’s death had struck her with no less weight than Petey’s.

Brassac wondered where Ferroni would draw the line.

If the two embraced on the bed, it would be bearable. Uncomfortable, but bearable. An unfeeling man and a frightened child. Barring the prudish British, a European audience would find it comprehensible, but here was Park City, and the zeitgeist of Hollywood of late had been empowerment over exploitation.

If they kissed, even on the forehead, even initiated by Josie, the needle moved toward the unnecessary.

And if, as per the original, he slipped into bed and the young actress slept next to him?

Brassac chewed his lower lip. It was a fetishistic thing to do. It was unbecoming.

Thrice, Ferroni had pulled un lapin du chapeau. Euphemia Fontaine’s Josie. David Cooper’s Hollis. Kelvin Grant’s Tull. Encore un? Could he do it a fourth time?

On screen, Josie hugged her knees.

As per the stylistic motif, no sliver of skin showed beyond the collarbone and the battered face; the only addition was a pair of trembling feet in soft ivory light.

“I’ll get more milk,” Marcel declared, standing up. Simple as he was, even he knew he had done something unforgivable.

The response, as per the original script, made Brassac wince.

“Please,” Josie begged with her voice and her eyes. “Please don’t leave me alone.”

The Parisian procurer prepared himself for Hollywood’s perpetual appetite. The girl was small, vulnerable, and pretty, and the man was large, looming and laconic. The blasé dialogue was an invitation, a siren song.

It was inferred consent, however flawed.

Then—just as Brassac was prepared for cringe—a miraculous thing happened.

Marcel slowly, methodically moved behind the tub chair he used as a bed, and began to push it towards Josie. As a connoisseur of a thousand catalogues, Brassac understood immediately. Here was another foreshadowing that had come home to roost: Chekhov’s chair, he called it, and it was brilliant.

For the entirety of the film, nothing in the room had moved. Not the glass. Not the milk. Not the fridge. Not the plates. Not the table, nor the chairs.

Now a neurodivergent-coded character who had lived at least three decades without changing his routine was, out of the milk of human kindness, changing himself. He carried the heavy leather chair the last stretch with two hands and set it down beside the bed.

Then Marcel sat with the same posture as he had always sat in the chair, with his arms by his side, his left hand close enough to reach the gun nestled in its holster. Gingerly, he retrieved the Beretta and placed it on the bedside table beneath the ancient lamp that had come with his lease.

“I am here,” the Pro whispered, and not a word more.

When the camera cut to wide, Brassac saw a curious thing. He saw a painting he could recognise by name, one familiar to a film procurer who frequented Paris’ many museums. The single lamp had made the scene chiaroscuro, so that Josie became a child wreathed in white sheets, and Marcel a fatherly guardian in earthen colours.

The girl child slept.

Her guardian did not.

The next cut brought the wide shot closer, so that Marcel’s body intruded upon the softly breathing vision of his blonde ward in white satin.

Then his hand moved, his pistol hand.

It did not move towards her pale face, or her rising breast, or her tiny waist or her white wrist. It moved across the gap between the chair and the bed, and it arrived at her ankle, where her feet stuck out from under the blanket, warm and bare.

And he rested his hand there, at the base of the tibia, holding the tiny foot as one might hold a pistol grip.

It was an act that was as absurd as it was sweet.

The act of a father choosing a daughter over a gun, an umbilical act, only his ward wasn’t awake to see it.

Brassac leaned back.

He was impressed. Beyond impressed.

He had hoped that Ferroni would avoid the question, only for it to be answered with full marks. He wanted to applaud the script doctor.

The camera panned up.

Fade… to black.

Before Brassac could exhale, the next scene arrived with a slap.

A literal, brutal slap, delivered from Hollis to Lorenzo.

On NovelPhoenix, the author publishes this chapter for readers. The copy displayed here was made without their approval.

Beneath a familiar frescoed ceiling, the social club was in chaos. The jukebox lay shattered. Broken photographs and broken frames covered the floor, as did Lorenzo’s prized photos of his daughter’s wedding, his favourite boxers, and pictures of the Popes he displayed like college degrees.

The beating continued for a few more seconds. Lorenzo, true to the code American cinema had long deified, gave up nothing. He told Hollis to shoot him if he dared, that he had friends in high places, that the DEA wouldn’t be able to protect him. Hollis smirked, then picked up a photo from the floor. A cute photo of Lorenzo’s younger daughter.

“This your girl?” Hollis’s voice reverberated through the theatre. “She’s very pretty.”

There it was again, the thematic whiplash. The lady who wrote the script had a knack for it. Nonetheless, for Brassac, the threat struck a nerve.

In the end, nothing of value was extracted from Lorenzo.

Josie and Marcel were safe… for about sixty seconds.

A cross-cut later, the landlady called the DEA.

Brassac sat up. He had almost forgotten about the old woman in the housecoat in the hallway, peeping through a crack in the door. There were people like the landlady everywhere in Paris, des corbeaux who refused to mind their own business, who made the smallest infraction their whole identity. It was she who had seen Josie go up and down for the milk, and it was she who had spied the pair of them coming home.

Now it was she who stood in the kitchen with a DEA pamphlet that had been slid under her door, and she dialled their number without guilt, without remorse, with glee.

She told them that she never trusted the man upstairs. She told them he paid in cash and never asked for a repair in twenty years. She told them about the little blonde slut who did not die with the rest of her criminal family, and instead opened her legs for the suspicious tenant.

La délation. Like the bastards during the Occupation.

What Brassac felt now… was utter admiration. Even the landlady had been foreshadowed. Everything was interlaced. Everything was interlocked. Every detail was paying off. Not a second of the first thirty minutes was wasted. It was the kind of film a lover of cinema could watch over and over again.

The old woman hung up, blissful and satisfied.

A stark contrast to the agitated audience.

Act Five.

At some point, Brandon Bradshaw had stopped taking notes and settled down to enjoy the film. This was the kind of film, he decided, where the audience would walk out of the cinema and remember almost every detail. The argument would not be whether the film was enjoyable or memorable.

It would be “What was your favourite part?”

Compared to the bed scene, the siege set piece was… so-so.

It was the failing of indie films, one that Bradshaw would take into account in his writing. Once again, it was one of those scenes that was saved by the sheer charisma of the actors, and in this case, Dr David Cooper came through again.

What were obviously twenty-day players playing the role of a hundred were pooled at the bottom of the building. A man dressed as a group supervisor with negligible acting skills asked Cooper whether they should send in the backup. The look Cooper gave him—the bottled psychosis—was enough to send the day player reeling.

“Send in EVERYONE!” Cooper howled the command, so that it reverberated through the theatre, and Bradshaw wondered for a second if dust would start falling down from the ceiling. A minute later, bodies filled the stairwell with riot equipment and long arms. The uniforms were a little off, and so were their irregular armaments. As was the fact that if a critic looked closely, he could clearly see the same faces running up the different stairwells. At certain junctions, viewers had no idea whether they were police, SWAT, or DEA, because they were wearing whatever the costume budget could summon for the day.

The gunplay was done well and convincingly, but the true action remained confined to the apartment.

Finally cornered, Josie Novak begged the Pro to stay with her. They would die together, father and child. That was the tragedy she was willing to accept, to take responsibility for.

“I am not going,” she cried into the camera, as convincing as ever, though the tears took away from the gravity of the scene, at least in Bradshaw’s opinion. “I’m not, I’m not, you can’t make me, Marcel, I’m not—”

Marcel, who had at this point of the film maybe said forty words, merely moved her from room to room towards the chute where the garbage was disposed. At this point, he had killed maybe a dozen more people; holy fool that he was, even he understood there was no return to normalcy.

“No. No. Marcel, no—”

He shoved the plant they had raised into her arms. It was a generous thing now, bigger than when the film began with broad leaves that they had both watered. Earlier, she had been fighting him, punching him, pushing him, but with the plant in her arms, she had to hold it lest it fall. Marcel was smarter than he looked.

He pulled open the chute.

The girl whimpered.

Then he lifted her by the waist as if she weighed nothing and slid her into the dark square, feet first, plant and all. With a single hand, she held on to him, and he held her.

“Live,” he said to her, then let go.

Then he fought his way through the siege again, in the only way he knew how: methodically, meticulously, cold and cool. From the corpses, he gathered enough unblooded pieces to make a disguise. After a particularly nasty flashbang, he hid around a corner and reached out for help when the other men came in. In the chaos and the panic, they passed him down, screaming for a medic.

When the opportunity arose, he slid into the stairwell for the fire escape, and half stumbled, half collapsed, leaking blood from the dark blue nylon fabric.

He was mortally wounded, but he kept on.

He had a promise to keep.

Then he ran into Hollis.

Hollis came up the stairs alone with the gait of an executioner. He was, in Bradshaw’s well-learned mind, something of a Pyrrhus making his way to the burning city of Troy, looking for Priam to make mincemeat of, and looking for a daughter to bleed and butcher.

They almost passed each other—but Hollis was an animal with a nose for vengeance, and he fired, uncaring, into the suspicious body of a wounded subordinate.

Marcel fell.

And Hollis stood over him, triumphant, arrogant, and enormous, with a patience that bordered on affection.

“There you are…” He grinned at Marcel. “Ah, thou art the best o’ the cut-throats.”

Macbeth. Brandon nodded with satisfaction. Very nice. Very apt. And it made for a fitting eulogy… for Hollis.

Then Hollis began to kick the dying Marcel like a sack of stubborn potatoes, expending what rage and sanity he could spare, for Tull, for the boy who should have lived and become his protégé. Marcel turned over, exposing his back, and Hollis kept kicking.

The blood oozed.

Hollis kicked and kicked—then, after a particularly heavy blow, he seemed suddenly spent. He seemed to realise that someone was missing. The girl was missing.

“Don’t you worry,” Hollis said. “We’ll find your little BITCH.”

He giggled then, and the sadism was thick enough to make Bradshaw sick to his stomach.

He drew his Glock.

With his foot against the dying man, he kicked him over.

Marcel’s hands came apart. On his chest, a row of grenades no longer had pins.

On screen, in a close-up of a face that was mangled almost beyond recognition, Marcel smiled.

“Touché.” Hollis smiled in turn, as if they were old chums.

The explosion was shot from the street using a frontage that was built as a model. The sound mixing tossed in screams and howls and panic and sirens, then debris rained over the police scrambling to find shelter. It was a cacophony of light and sound, done on a budget, shot at a Dutch angle to make the scale look far larger than it was.

Then, through the smoke, the film cut to a hatch.

From a hatch in a back alley, unobserved by the police, which was a narrative convenience, a skinny girl crawled out on her hands and knees in a teal and purple windbreaker and ripped jeans, clutching a potted plant.

She was filthy, unrecognisable.

Her hair was more brown than blonde.

In a long shot that emphasised the verticality of the Bronx’s alleyway, she turned around with visible determination and began to walk into the light.

There was a little more of the film left, though reasonably, it could have ended here. In his notebook, his pen had already made the pattern for a fourth asterisk.

Were the credits NOT going to roll?

Such a… bold choice.

Bradshaw hoped that, whatever the next eight minutes contained, his mind would not be changed. After everything he had seen, however… he had faith.