Life Blood --II---Page 5

Besides, ten to one the guy was bluffing, seeing if he could scare us.

I refocused. "Mr. Russo, it may ease your mind to know that
our security is managed by a former agent for the FBI. He was
with them here in New York till about a year ago, when he came
to us full time. His name is Agent Lou Crenshaw. You're welcome
to check him out. He's familiar with union issues, and he carries a
.38. He also has plenty of friends down at 26 Federal Plaza. So if
you have any lingering concern about our security procedures,
why don't you run it by him?"

The mention of Lou seemed to brighten David's listless eyes.
He leaned back in his chair and almost smiled.
        He had good reason. The favor he'd done for Lou, and
indirectly for me, was enough to inspire eternal loyalty. Lou would
face off against half of Hell's Kitchen for David Roth.
        "That ain't the point, exactly," Russo said, shifting

uncomfortably. "Thing is, Roma could do good distribution for you. We work with a lot of people."

"Then why not submit a formal proposal? In writing. I'm in

charge and that's how I do business. If your numbers work, then we can talk."

"Just trying to be helpful." He glared at me, then seemed to
dismiss my presence. I disappeared from his radar as though
lifted away by an alien spacecraft, and he turned back to David.
"You know, Dave, me and you've kinda drifted apart lately. Old
friends oughtn'ta do that. We ought to keep more in touch. I think
we get along okay."

In other words, get this pushy broad out of my face.

"It's just business, Nicky," David said, trying to conjure an
empty smile. "Business and pleasure don't always mix."
        Yes! David, tell the creep to leave us alone. Tell him.
        "Doing business with me ain't a pleasure?" Nicky Russo
 asked, hurt filling his voice. He'd brought out a large Havana and
was rolling it in between his thumb and forefinger. "I figured we
was best friends. Paisans."

"We're not not friends, Nicky. We've just got different goals in life. You know how it is."

I worked my way around behind his desk and glanced out the
window. The lingering day was beginning to cloud over, a perfect
match for my state of mind. After this I had a late appointment
with Dr. Hannah Klein. I feared she was going to end my baby
hopes.

"Yeah, well," Nicky Russo said finally, rising, "I gotta be

downtown in a little while, so I guess we can talk about this later."
        "Okay, sure." David made a shrugging sign. Like: Women!
What can you do? Then he got up too. "Look, Nicky, let me chew on this. Maybe I'll get back to you."

"Yeah, you think about it, all right?" He rose without a further
word and worked his way out the wide double doors, stumbling
through the ficus forest as he struck a match to his cigar.

"David, don't sign anything with him. Don't. I'll handle the

Teamster stuff if it comes up. I know how to talk to them."

"Okay, okay, calm down. He was just seeing if he could push
me. I know him. You called his scam with that talk about Lou. By
tomorrow he'll forget about the whole thing." He looked at me, his
eyes not quite yet back in focus. "Thanks. You can say things to
him I'd get cement shoes for. Nicky's not really ready for people
like you. He has this macho front, but he doesn't know how to

handle a professional woman with balls."

"You're welcome. I guess." Balls? I adored those vulnerable male bits, but I preferred not to think of myself in those terms. Truth was, Nicky Russo played a large part in my personal
anxieties. "But I mean it. N. O."

"I hear you," he said, sighing. Then he snapped back to the

moment. "So where do things stand otherwise?"

I'd come for an after-the-fact green light of the day's shoot, but already I was thinking about Hannah Klein. "David, I'm going to find out in about an hour whether Steve and I are ever going to
have a baby. But truthfully I don't think I'm pregnant. I think it's
over." It hurt to say it. He knew about Steve and me—I'd written
some language on maternity leave into my contract—and I think he was mildly rooting for us. Or maybe not.

"Could be it's all for the best," he declared. He'd sat back

down, picked up a pencil off his desk to distract himself, and was whirling it pensively, one of his few habits that made me crazy. "Maybe you were destined to make movies, not kids."

I listened to his tone of voice, knowing he often hid his real
feelings with safe, sympathy-card sentiments. He rose to
eloquence only when nothing much was at stake. He'd even sent
me flowers and a mea-culpa note twice as a makeup after we'd
had a disagreement over costs and scheduling. And one of those
times, I should have sent him flowers. Sometimes I wondered why
we worked so well together. The truth was, we operated on very
different wavelengths.

Some history to illustrate. Over the past eight years, before I
teamed up with David, I'd done three "highly praised"
documentaries. But getting to that point meant busting my behind
for years and years at the lower end of the professional food
chain. After NYU, I toiled as a script supervisor on PBS
documentaries, about as close to grunt work as it comes.
Eventually I got a fling as a production assistant, assembling
crews, but then the money dried up. (Thank you, Jesse Helms.)
Whereupon I decided to try capitalism, working for three years as
an AD on the soaps: first Guiding Light, then As the World Turns,
then Search for Tomorrow. I can still hear the horrible music.
Then a connection got me a slot at A&E as a line producer. Eight
months later the series got canceled, which was when I decided
the time had come to take my career into my own hands. I hocked
every last credit card, went to Japan, and made a documentary.
The result: I was an "overnight" success. Men started addressing
me by my name.

My first film was about the impact of Zen on Japanese

business. As part of my research, I shaved my head and lived
three months at a Kyoto temple, eating bean curd three meals a
day, after which I had enough credibility to land long interviews
with Tokyo CEOs. I then sold the edited footage to A&E. When it
became a critical hit, they financed a second film, about the many
gods of India and how they impact everything about the place.
There, I also got caught up in the mystical sensuality of ragas,
Indian classical music, and took up the violin (one of my major
professional mistakes). Next I moved on to Mexico's southern
Yucatan to film a day in the life of a Maya village for the Discovery
Channel. They wanted me to add some footage from Guatemala,
but I scouted the country and decided it was too scary. Instead, I
spent several months in Haiti filming voodoo rituals, again for
A&E. And met Steve.

Then one day I checked my bank account and realized that,
financially speaking, I was a "flop d'estime." I was doing the kind
of work that does more for your reputation than your retirement
plan. I decided to go more mainstream and see what happened.
But to do that I needed a commercial partner, a backer.

Ironically enough, when I first teamed up with David, he had bottom-line problems too, but from the opposite direction. He was busy disproving the adage that nobody ever lost money
underestimating the taste of the American public. He knew
something was wrong, but what?