City Of Spies. Nina Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ costume fittings the next morning. She’d awoken at 2:00 a.m., unable to fall back asleep while her mind raced, wondering whether she’d made the right decision to come all this way to shoot a terrible film.

      She was risking her career, a career that had recently been revived on the brink of death due the accident and her conviction for manslaughter. The comedy she’d shot in Berlin had started to warm the public to her once again because it was actually funny. And Daughter of Silence was likely to win over the critics. But one truly terrible picture and not only might the audiences turn away, but the studio might rethink using her in anything else of quality. She was still a box office risk. Taking this part in Two to Tango might turn her into something worse—box office poison.

      And what if Devin never showed up? What if he’d been hurt or killed? Okay, so that was a farfetched late-night fear whispering in her ear. But he could’ve been pulled into another assignment, in which case they’d stick her with some idiot who didn’t understand her, someone who wouldn’t allow her to get what she needed out of this whole patriotic mission thing.

      And now, fittings. Given how much she hated the character she was playing in the movie, Pagan was not looking forward to seeing the clothes Daisy would wear.

      “If there are too many frilly dresses, I’m rioting,” she said, finishing her second cup of coffee.

      Mercedes didn’t look up from the morning paper. “Trying on hand-tailored clothes is such a chore.”

      Great. She couldn’t even be grumpy with justification. Because Mercedes was right. It was one of the most irritating things about her.

      “Girdles are torture devices,” she muttered, and put her cup down with a click.

      “Bras are worse,” Mercedes said. “But on the plus side, they make your chest look like it’s about to launch two rocket ships. And rockets are cool.”

      Pagan laughed, threw a long trench coat over her jeans and wrinkled white shirt and left to find Carlos waiting for her in the hotel lobby.

      The day was already slightly breathless with heat as she walked out of the hotel. Overhead, the flags flapped in a strong summer breeze. Sunshine blared off the windshields of passing cars. Carlos drove her by the gates of what he said was a famous cemetery and north to an area called Palermo.

      Through her open car window, Pagan watched stylish women in pencil skirts walking small dogs on the sidewalks and men in summer suits eating outside at cafés or gazing at shop windows. Large leafy trees lined many of the streets, and between the tufts of greenery she caught glimpses of multistoried blocks of gracious stone buildings and open parks with splashing fountains.

      What a contrast to the divided city of Berlin. When she’d been there in August, Berlin had been visibly recovering from the huge destruction wreaked by the Allies during the war. Buenos Aires had avoided the war altogether, like all of mainland United States, but with these magnificent mansions and wide, well-kempt avenues, this city was more like a dream of Paris than New York.

      The wardrobe department was lodged on the second floor of another genteel stone building with decorative flower finials over the windows. The door at the end of the dark hallway led to a huge open room with sunlight cutting yellow squares on the hardwood floors and racks of clothing. A sewing machine whirred invisibly nearby. Between the headless mannequins and shelving with metal bins for accessories, Pagan could see that the opposite wall was covered in mirrors.

      “Hello?” she called out, brushing past a rack of black jackets. Tony Perry’s name was scrawled on big yellow tags attached to each one. “Madge?”

      “Pagan, honey!” a woman’s scratchy voice called from somewhere to her right. “Over here!”

      Pagan spotted a column of smoke trailing up near the ceiling and wound her way between ball gowns, shelves of hats and rows of linen trousers toward it. “They’ve buried you alive, Madge. I’m here to save you.”

      She rounded a trestle of frilly yellow skirts to find Madge Popandreau, wardrobe mistress for Two to Tango, seated at a huge black sewing machine. She had her eternal cigarette clutched between narrow, red-lipstick-smeared lips, her sharp black eyes following the line of white tulle as she threaded it under the bobbing needle. Madge had frizzy unnaturally black hair pulled back in a giant bun, square, deft hands and an eagle gaze that could spot the head of a pin on a sequin-covered dress.

      “I’m just finishing up your petticoat for the big rumba number. Throw on that black suit for me in the meantime, will you, sweetie? Mind the pins.” She jerked her head toward a rack of clothes with tags that bore Pagan’s name. “Rada!”

      “Coming.” The voice was gloomy and Russian. A lanky young woman with a leonine mane of dark blond hair emerged between racks of fur coats. “Hello,” she said to Pagan in the same sad tone. “I will help you with the clothes.”

      “You wearing a girdle, honey?” Madge asked, still sewing, and didn’t wait for a reply. “If she’s not, get her one, will you, Rada?”

      Rada nodded and scanned Pagan’s hips as she took off her trench coat. “No girdle today?”

      “I’d rather jiggle like Jell-O,” said Pagan.

      Rada nodded mournfully, as if Pagan had announced a sudden death, slid the tape measure from around her neck and whipped it around Pagan’s hips. “A full-body one is required for this suit.” She shook her head. “It is very tight.”

      “I don’t need to breathe,” Pagan said as she slipped off her sneakers and unbuttoned her jeans. Near-nudity was the norm in wardrobe. Rada turned, and pulled a black sheath of elastane and straps off its hanger attached to the suit.

      Pagan wiggled and wrestled her way into it, adjusting the bra straps, as Rada slipped the silky wool suit off its hanger. The pencil skirt was tight as hell at the waist—Rada hadn’t been kidding—and it clenched tighter still as it slid down her hips.

      “I know you’re all about the A-line Dior these days, honey,” Madge said. “You like to be able to move, maybe have a snack, like a real-life person. But this director, Victor, he didn’t want you looking human and told me to make it as close-fitting as possible. I said okay, since you don’t have to dance in it.”

      Victor sounded like a treat. Pagan hadn’t met him yet, and was dreading it more each day. “I might need to walk,” she said, squeezing her feet into the four-inch black heels that went with the suit. “I don’t think I could sit down in this.”

      “We’ll get you a slant board,” Rada said.

      The dreaded slant board, a simple contraption that allowed actresses to recline on a wooden board that could be leaned back at an angle to take the weight off your feet.

      “Those things make me feel like I’m about to be buried at sea,” she said.

      “Before you die, this director wants to see every twitch of your derriere. It’s a part of his ‘vision,’” Madge said tartly.

      “Twitching, but not jiggling,” Pagan said, eyeing her clearly outlined rear end in the mirror. “So he likes ’em fake.”

      “We are here to create illusion,” Rada said, her sorrowful voice lending the sentence an unexpected profundity. “Reality is of no importance.”

      “Film’s an СКАЧАТЬ