Barbara D'Amato - [Cat Marsala 09] Page 8

  "It certainly could be worse. You could have had a complete separation. We might be talking surgery. Arthroscopic surgery or open surgery."

  "And as it is?"

  "You'll have to wear an elastic support. And don't fall again, even a little slip-and-fall. Don't let anybody pull on your arm. Don't climb trees or ropes."

  "You're kidding. Climb trees? I'm having trouble lifting a frappemochaccino."

  "Good. Baby it. Come back in a week. And call right away if it seems to be getting worse. Sometimes there's hidden damage."

  * * *

  "Frankly," said Larry Mazzanovich, "I don't give a rat's ass for Oz."

  We were in his site office, a trailer in a sea of mud at a construction area on West Randolph. The whole block was a maze of wood forms, stacks of equipment, and very deep footing holes into which a pile driver was driving pilings. Some of the pilings were surrounded by lattices of rusty iron rebar. The rebar looked big enough to have been designed for the Space Shuttle launch site.

  "Why not?"

  "It's just bullshit stuff for kids."

  "So why did you get involved with it?"

  "The Oz Festival? Hey, if the city likes it, I like it. All I'm saying is I don't like it."

  "Uh-huh. So what kinds of festivals do you like?"

  "Taste of Chicago. Food from one end of the park to the other. Now that's okay. The BluesFest isn't bad, either."

  This was getting me less than nowhere, so I said, "You're a contractor? And an alderman?"

  "Well, alderman isn't a full-time job. Plus, suppose you're voted out? Gotta have something to fall back on." He shrugged. Mazzanovich was a shar-pei kind of man, all wrinkles. Not the dry, fine wrinkles of old age, but big rounded folds. His eyes hid behind folds, and plump cheek folds bracketed his mouth. His hair was coarse, medium long, and spiky. There was a thin layer of gray dust over his skin and hair, as if cement powder settled on him all day. He wore chinos and muddy boots.

  "And you're building this place? A new hotel?"

  "A major luxury hotel. I'm a contractor but I'm not a general contractor. I'm a cement contractor."

  "Oh. Did you do cement contracting for the Oz Festival?"

  "Don't be stupid. You don't pour cement for a Grant Park event. The city's real careful you don't do anything that would change the park. You can't so much as trim a tree. Can't trim the grass, for God's sake. Jeez, you have to get a permit to walk on it, practically. What they went through to get an okay to paint the walkways into Yellow Brick Roads, you wouldn't believe. It's removable goddamn paint, see? They're gonna run a solvent and a scrubber over it later! Like a vacuum Zamboni! All the world out there's trying to make paint more permanent, and we're lookin' for stuff that don't last. Shouldn't wash away in the first rain, but shouldn't last, either."

  "So what was your role?"

  "Advise the city board that advises the Park District."

  "I see."

  "Whattaya want, anyway? I don't wanta be rude, here, but I got a job to do. And the cops already wasted half my morning."

  "I'm sure you realize that Barry Marsala is my brother—"

  "Hadn't thought about it. I probably woulda guessed he was some kind of relative."

  "And because you and he and Taubman and Pottle were all in the area when Tom Plumly was stabbed, I thought you could tell me something about what happened."

  "Very good! Cute! Subtle! You wanta ask me if I stabbed him, ask me if I stabbed him. Listen, I don't have any objection to a girl being loyal to her brother, but you're not gonna start some rumor that I murdered the guy. Because I didn't, and I would take it very, very amiss if any slander got going. See what I mean?"

  "I only want to understand what happened."

  "And you think I'm gonna tell you?"

  "Why not? You talked with the cops, didn't you? And it's not a secret, whatever you told them, is it? If it's the truth, why not tell me, too?" He didn't look impressed. "Get me off your back."

  He smiled unpleasantly. "You're not on my back, kid. You're not powerful enough. This is Chicago, remember, and there's people in this city who can really get on your back."

  Still, he hadn't said no, so I asked, "Was Plumly okay when he left you and the other two men?"

  He looked at me with just a whiff of respect. "Persistent, aren't you? Yeah. He was just fine. When he left us, he was just fine and dandy. He was walkin', wasn't he? He went over to your brother."

  "You're right. He ran over to my brother. Had you said anything to make him run away?"

  "Nope. Musta needed to talk to him real bad."

  "What had you been talking about?"

  "The festival, of course. Two of the food stands hadn't done what we told 'em. One was using hazardous cooking fuel. There's rules about that kind of thing. One had dancing girls on the banner. Unclothed dancing girls. Not right in a kids' festival."

  "I see. The cops told me last night they couldn't find you after Plumly died."

  "Musta not looked very hard. The traffic getting out of there was a goddamn bitch. I mean, everybody musta charged outta there at the same time."

  "When they heard the shots."

  "Can't exactly blame 'em, can you? It took me half an hour to get outta Grant Park Underground and an hour and a half to get from there to my house."

  "You parked in the Grant Park Underground?"

  "What did I just tell you? Sure. It's the closest place." He didn't show any sign of guilt, but then he'd brought up the subject. Maybe he'd done it intentionally in order to act as if the underground brought back no special memories for him.

  I said, "Why didn't you stay around after Plumly was killed?"

  "Why would I? Didn't know anything helpful. Also, didn't want to get involved."

  "So it took you two hours to get home? Where do you live?"

  "Northbr— uh, North Side," he said.

  "An hour and a half to the North Side! It ought to take you twenty minutes."

  "No shit. Talk to IDOT."

  IDOT is not idiot, although people have been known to make the mistake intentionally. It stands for Illinois Department of Transportation.

  Underneath the trailer the earth began to tremble. I had to stop myself from grabbing the edge of the desk. Mazzanovich perked right up. "Hey, kid," he said. "Gotta go. Here comes the mud truck." A gigantic bright red cement mixer lumbered down the dirt ramp, looking like a pregnant fire extinguisher. "See, when you're doing footings, the batch of cement has to be poured while the batch underneath is still wet, or it won't bond. You get a truck caught in a traffic jam and you maybe have to dig out a whole piling. So you basically don't hang around with your thumb up your ass."

  Mazzanovich was out of the trailer, down the wood steps, and on the ground in seconds, shoving his hard hat onto his head.

  * * *

  I walked away from the construction site. Looking back, I saw Mazzanovich waving his arms at the cement truck driver, and a second man standing near one of the pilings, also gesturing.

  I wondered what it was that was so different about Mazzanovich now. It was the hat. The hard hat had covered that crest of spiky hair. The hair that stood up on top of his head. If he'd been running his hands through it, would it stand up straighter? And if he had, would it, in the right light, remind a person of the funnel on top of the Tin Woodman's head?

  10

  A WHIZ OF A WIZ

  "I expected to see models and mock-ups," I said to E. T. Taubman, the lighting designer who had lit the Oz Festival so magically.

  His studio covered the entire fifth floor of a converted warehouse building on Chestnut west of State. Actually the studio was only half a dozen blocks from my apartment, which was in an old warehouse building near the El. Six blocks and maybe 2.5 million dollars away. This was a primo postgentrification zone.

  The studio's floor was that very, very heavily varnished original wood with all the grooves, chinks, scars, and stains preserved as if set in amber. It fairly screamed "artist." The area
was divided into two large rooms and one huge one. I had entered directly off the elevator, although there was a sliding metal door that could be bolted to keep people from just jumping off the elevator at the fifth floor and walking in uninvited.

  Taubman said, "Yeah, I used to have analog models of the sets, but I couldn't stand dealing with them anymore. Nobody does it that way now. It's all CAD."

  By which he meant computer-assisted design. If I'd thought about it, I would have realized that cybertech had eaten lighting design the same way it had overwhelmed architecture or animation or basically anything. By "analog" I guessed he meant "real."

  Taubman walked into the farther room, the huge one. I assumed I was to follow. Taubman was a tall, very thin man, who walked with a kind of rambling awkwardness. "Thin as a one-sided board," my grandfather would have said. He had reddish-blond hair, so short that his pale scalp showed through, and an angular, bony face. He wore a white silk shirt, beautifully cut navy pants, and black shoes.

  "Here," he said. "Models."

  One corner of the room was filled with a sort of shoal of computer tables, the kind with swing arms for monitors and slide-out low trays for keyboards. There were several printers, including two color printers and one extrawide. Also, of course, he had a fax machine, and a little monitor and keyboard that looked as if they continuously ran his e-mail. A twist of fat cables led out of the clutter to a trio of big Pioneer plasma screens hung like paintings in a row on the plain brick wall. Taubman folded his long bones into a complicated-looking desk chair. Everything on the chair that could possibly adjust adjusted. It didn't just go up and down. From the levers on the side I could see that the seat tilted, plus you could tilt the back separately from the seat, and after Taubman sat, he nudged the arms with his elbows, clicking them into an apparently favorite position. The chair had wheels, of course, a lever to control the seat height, a back-tilt lever, gears that locked the arms in place, and an adjustable lumbar pad. There was a half-keyboard attached to rods protruding out of each arm, like the sort of thing you might have if you were a very rich paraplegic. You could work lying way back if you wished.

  Taubman took all this technology as a given, and simply flicked a mouse ball. A buttoned list called STUDIO came up on the left screen. He clicked one button and the lights went out. He clicked another. Hunter-Douglas blackout shades slithered down smoothly over the windows. Because the shades ran in steel frames, the huge room became almost completely dark. Then he clicked again, and the right-hand panel lit up. SETS, it said, at the top of a long list.

  "Check this out," he said. He scrolled down the list to the words "Mourning Becomes Electra Steppenwolf" and hit two keys.

  A giant all-white log cabin appeared in the middle screen. At the tap of another key it opened like a dollhouse. Inside were four cutaway rooms with 1890s-looking rustic furniture, also all in white.

  "Is that all generated by the computer?" I asked.

  "Sure."

  "Why is everything white?"

  "It's easier to see what you're lighting that way. You can always restore the colors and textures later." He typed another few letters and the set went dark, with a single oil lamp on the digital table casting flickering shadows on the nonexistent walls. Two more keys and dawn rose outside the windows.

  "Oh, my!" I said. I was really enchanted. "This is a lot better than dollhouses." Morning sunlight was already slanting in through the hazy air.

  "I didn't design the sets, though," he said. "I just light them." He let evening fall in the Electra cabin and then quickly flipped through at least twenty more all-white sets. There were Empire drawing rooms, medieval inns lit only by the fireplace, beaches, a tree house, many, many period rooms. And in all of them you could tell the time of day and the mood, just from the lighting.

  "You don't just light them," I said sincerely.

  "Oh. Thanks."

  "These can't be exactly like the actual stage productions, though," I said.

  "Nothing is. This software actually lets us get closer to what the final production's going to look like than the old miniatures did."

  I made him show me more. There was a craggy moor, a Scottish castle, and a stone-flagged courtyard with a gallows. Each was bathed in a different sort of light. The moor was soft and bluish, the castle was bathed in harsh, full, cold daylight, the courtyard was sad, very early morning, with a tinge of red at the horizon. It wordlessly proclaimed "the morning of an execution." For each he pulled up photos of the real productions. They looked almost the same, except not so good as the digital ones.

  "This is amazing. Is this your principal business?"

  "I wish. By rights, there ought to be enough money in theater lighting in Chicago for a person to survive. But there isn't. It doesn't matter how talented you are."

  He clicked the room lights back on.

  "So do you mean you'd rather do theater than festival lighting?"

  "Usually. The Oz Festival was more fun than most, because it was more imaginative."

  "More profitable, too, I would think."

  "They pay reasonably well," he said, a bit sourly.

  "Well, that, too, but I meant the publicity. You got a huge media boost from it."

  "Yeah. Wasn't that color spread in Chicago magazine excellent? I do edgy work, but the magazine really picked up on the best parts. The Day-Glo, and the neon tubing on the merry-go-round. The cover photo rocked! Very discerning, weren't they?"

  He certainly didn't seem uncomfortable about the fact that a woman had been killed near his edgy merry-go-round. Suddenly he remembered he was supposed to be modest. "Of course, the Oz Festival caught a lot of PR because this year is the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Wizard of Oz. It wasn't all just because of my lighting."

  Hey, no kidding.

  I said, "Do you do music festivals? Or rock concerts?"

  "The major rock stars have their own lighting people. I do some of the Grant Park music festivals. I do some industrials."

  "Industrials? You mean like factory lighting?"

  He snorted. "God, no. Like restaurants. Sometimes lobbies, like corporation lobbies. That stuff is mainly a matter of designing just the right mood. For a restaurant, the mood you set can make or break them. Imagine cafeteria lighting in L'Heure Bleu, for instance."

  "I see what you mean."

  I wandered around the room, looking at his stock of equipment— various lightbulbs, several dozen different types, socket styles, holders, mounts, pedestals, clamp-ons, plus small light boards with computerized circuits that did the same job huge boards used to do, and piles of rolled wire. When I was a child, there were only a couple of dozen kinds of lightbulbs in general use. My dad told me that when he was a child there were only four— twenty-five watt, fifty watt, hundred watt, and hundred-and-fifty watt. He was exaggerating, but not by much. Now, judging by Taubman's shelves, there were hundreds upon hundreds— not just different wattage but par count and focus angle and filament type, and more and more and more.

  "Do you keep all these to use?"

  "No. Wouldn't pay. You need very large numbers for installations. There's no point in my being a lightbulb warehouse. I just have a few examples here if I need to check one out."

  "A few examples?"

  "Yes. Just to look at. Then I try to duplicate that light on Softplot. That's the main software I use. Anyway, let's see what I can show you about the— um— the Oz Festival." He played around with a couple of swift keystrokes and the screen filled with an aerial overview of Grant Park.

  "Okay. Look. The streets and permanent paths and Buckingham Fountain and so on are obvious here. These contour lines show the elevation of the ground. You know there are little rises, and some flat, low areas—"

  "Yes. I know roughly where they are. And I can see them there."

  "We wanted to take advantage of nice things in the terrain. This is an early sketch version. At this point we hadn't even thought of putting in the castle. The first plan was to
have a central vendor area that was all green and to call it the Emerald City. But then your brother said we had to have a small on-site office and— uh— somebody said everybody loves castles. So we made the office a castle."

  The plan changed. It no longer looked like a sketch. Like all CAD design, it looked a bit too polished. The terrain map showed the placement of booths and rides and light sources.

  "Orange is my designation for the existing park lights. All the other lights are installed specifically for the festival."

  "Does your data include underground plans, like tunnels and Grant Park Underground, and so on?"