فصل 16

Chapter 16

WITH ALL the actors except Dr Letter in place in the Gennargentu Mountains of Sardinia, Mason turned his attention toward recording the doctor’s death for posterity and his own viewing pleasure. His arrangements had long been made, but now the alert must be given.

He conducted this sensitive business on the telephone through his legitimate sports book switchboard near the Castaways in Las Vegas. His calls were tiny lost threads in the great volume of weekend action there.

Mason’s radio quality voice, minus plosives and fricatives, bounced from the National Forest near the Chesapeake shore to the desert and back across the Atlantic, first to Rome: in an apartment on the seventh floor of a building on the Via Archimede, behind the hotel of the same name, the telephone is ringing, the hoarse double rumpf of a telephone ringing in Italian. In the darkness, sleepy voices.

“Cosa? Cosa c’e’?”

“Accendi la luce, idiota.”

The bedside lamp comes on. Three people are in the bed. The young man nearest the phone picks up the receiver and hands it to a portly older man in the middle. On the other side is a blond girl in her twenties. She raises a sleepy face to the light, then subsides again.

“Pronto, chi? Chi parla?”

“Oreste, my friend. It’s Mason.”

The heavy man gets himself together, signals to the younger man for a glass of mineral water.

“Ah, Mason my friend, excuse me, I was asleep, what time is it there?”

“It’s late everywhere, Oreste. Do you remember what I said I would do for you and what you must do for me?”

“Well, of course.”

“The time has come, my friend. You know what I want. I want a two-camera setup, I want better quality sound than your sex films have, and you have to make your own electricity, so I want the generator a long way from the set. I want some nice nature footage too for when we edit, and birdcalls. I want you to check out the location tomorrow and set it up. You can leave the stuff there, I’ll provide security and you can come back to Rome until the shoot. But he ready to roll on two hours notice. Do you understand that, Oreste? A draft is waiting for you in Citibank at the EUR, got it?”

“Mason, in this moment, I am making-“

“Do you want to do this, Oreste? You said you were tired of making hump movies and snuff movies and historical crap for the RAI. Do you seriously want to make a feature, Oreste?”

“Yes, Mason.”

“Then go today. The cash is at Citibank. I want you to go.”

“Where, Mason?”

“Sardinia. Fly to Cagliari, you’ll be met.”

The next call went to Porto Torres on the east coast of Sardinia. The call was brief.

There was not a lot to say because the machinery there was long established and as efficient as Mason’s portable guillotine. It was sounder too, ecologically, but not as quick.

II - FLORENCE