Woman In Chair Film
A Short Story from Horrormaxx Vol. 1 by H.T. Boyd
I have been sent to New York City to broker the exchange of a high-value VHS tape.
—
At twenty-two hundred hours local time, I arrive in Manhattan via a flight called GA712; an airbus direct from London.
A tunnel discharges me to a brightly lit, crowded pavilion of benches and snack vendors. This place is John F. Kennedy airport; a place they named for a man they shot in the head on live television. Here, in this dead man’s namesake, are wailing babies, fat men eating hamburgers from paper wrappers, and smooth-chinned businessmen who bark orders on their gray brick cellular phones.
A PA system plays Jingle Bell Rock.
I put on my sunglasses and head for customs.
—
It is almost 0000 hours by the time I get my passport stamped.
I exit onto a train platform, now. This place too is occupied by the crowds of the blue-jean-and-baseball-hat Americans. Some flash me overly earnest smiles. Why? I don’t know. There’s something so desperate about these people. That obligation to smile. That neediness for joy. Approval. Victory. The American is never satisfied. Always hungry: for friends, for food, for time. Money. Entertainment.
A light snow falls on me; it dusts my shoulders where I stand beside the tracks with heels upon the yellow line.
I look up as I await the train. The sky is without stars in this corner of the world. I look up and all I see are the spires of glass block buildings and, above them, twinkling helicopters or airplanes swimming in a gray candle smoke.
They had warned me the city of New York smells of rats and rotten vegetables; it appears these warnings were correct.
—
After a transfer, I find myself on one of the famous New York subway train cars. Orange chairs like something from an asylum, graffiti carvings, and flickering light. Advertisements.
I travel below the earth in black grime tunnels on a screeching metal monstrosity. At every stop more people board. Tourists. Locals. Vagrants. Children. The train becomes so congested I worry that I will suffocate. Beside me, a pair of teenagers wrestle; opposite me, an old couple loudly argue in Chinese. To my cat’s eye corner, a woman exposes herself in an outfit of torn leather underwear, her face full of thumbtacks and safety pins.
Halfway through the ride, a man who smells of armpits enters our car. He plays a broken violin; he walks the crowded aisle expecting pocket change. When people give him their quarters and dimes he tells them: Merry Christmas.
I keep my head down. I wear headphones and play my tapes of electronic jazz. I close my eyes and pretend I do not smell the rats and urine and that unique American stink of fried milk bowels and cheap perfume. I think of my house beside the forest in my home country. I think of my mission here, and the tape I have been sent to retrieve.
—
I serve as the left hand of a man known to most simply as Starikova. He is my Pakhan— my boss. I belong to him.
Once, decades ago, he was what an American calls a soldier of fortune, but he found this work much too dangerous, and instead became a smuggler. He dedicated the early eighties to importing contraband niceties from Kazakhstan and into Novosibirsk. Such things like chocolates. Coffees. Perfumes. Televisions.
Along the way he realized a special skill for film distribution.
Before the fall of the Soviet Union, Starikova was known as Novosibirsk’s Movie King. He smuggled in films in a myriad of formats and realized methods for their mass duplication, or pirating as the Americans call it. Quickly he found himself a crime boss of sorts with his large network of shops and sellers, not just in Novosibirsk, but in St. Petersburg and Moscow too, and all the small towns along his smuggler’s road at the border.
His best selling items were home media players. Cheap VHS and Betamax systems constructed by a bootleg factory in India. Half of these machines didn’t even work, but people still paid top dollar for them; because people love movies. Don’t they? It’s a simple universal constant and it was one Starikova understood well. He amassed a fortune simply by duplicating little black boxes with Hollywood movies on the tape: popcorn flicks and summertime blockbusters with Tom Cruise or Val Kilmer and big explosions. Alien invasion movies. Cowboy movies. Movies about ghosts or teenagers living college wetdream.
By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Pakhan Starikova found the opportunity to expand his empire and invested in more legitimate filmmaking operations. Now he launders his fortunes through a company called Shedevry Kino. Shedevry Kino imports movies and home entertainment systems legally and distributes them along his existing networks, but by no means does his entire organization operate within the confines of the law.
In more recent years, Pakhan Starikova’s most fortuitous venture, and perhaps his most personal obsession too, is pornography. If Starikova was once the movie king of Novosibirsk, today he would be better suited for the title of Porno King of Novosibirsk.
Not only does he import adult films (as Americans call them) but he funds their production and export. He operates a studio in Novosibirsk out of his own home and also runs a nearby discotheque, a mere front to launder his money and entice young women to appear in his movies.
It is another universal constant Starikov seems to have recognized; that there is money to be made on the world’s stranger tastes; on men’s most perverse fantasies and darkest desires.
I wish I could unsee some of the things I have seen. Some of the films he has made, those which I have helped in the facilitation of creating. Starikova is thought by any decent man to be a cancer, but I am the left hand of this cancer. I have sold my soul for the fruits born of his dirty work and I will serve this man until my dying breath.
—
It is deeper into the night when I emerge into the subway exit tunnels; now I am in central Manhattan. Here, lurking among the crowds, I walk a long hallway of white tile basked in electric green light. It reminds me of a public shower. The walls are occasionally plastered with movie posters that have been defaced with permanent markers; their Hollywood stars now bear faces of death with blacked out eyes and slurs written across their foreheads.
Above me, I hear the growl of more yellow taxis and the howling of street lunatics.
—
The topside streets do not smell any better than the tubes. I turn up the volume on my headphones and maneuver through more destitute homeless and pleading beggars. Stray dogs eat at snow-covered hills of garbage bags. The yellow taxi cabs drive too fast on streets of black ice slime. Behind black windows, rich people eat steak and drink red wine.
Whenever business takes me to the United States, I only bring a single backpack. This is so I do not have much to lose in the event of a theft. My bag contains a hygiene kit, three pairs of underpants, three pairs of socks and three undershirts. I wear the same outfit for the days that I am here. I wear America-style blue jeans and a sharp-collared cowboy shirt. I have a leather duster with broad padded shoulders and cape that extends to my ankles. This outfit is to make me appear like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. I do this so street gangs do not try to domineer me.
I complete this appearance with shield sunglasses; a large visor that covers the top half of my face. I wear these glasses at all times, even at night, so prospective combatants cannot predict my vision.
As I walk through a more abandoned area, I lower the music on my headphones so I might better hear a surprise attack.
“Hey Mister Shades! Mister Shades!”
Suddenly, a black boy jumps into my direct path. An overgrown child with snotty nose and a bright orange snowcap. He is lucky I do not break his nose. He waves a box of eight-tracks. He calls me Mister Shades again and tries to sell me some of his wares of black boy music. He tells me they would make a good Christmas present for my sweetheart. I walk past him, and he readily moves on to the next stranger.
I do not respect this boy, but I am empathetic of his trade.
This is how I got my start, twelve long years ago.
There was once a time when I drank water from the storm drains and ate food from the refuse bins. I was once a boy of the alleyways, selling whatever I could find to get by.
I came under the employ of Starikova when I was but thirteen years old. Not directly. I worked for one of his underbosses who used young boys for general labor. I was paid next to nothing to work tape copying machines and move boxes about a warehouse. Simple work fit for an idiot, but I did it well, and held onto this job because the alternative was freezing in the streets.
My true calling was revealed in a few years time, when I was a teenager. A competitor pirate organization came to Novosibirsk and because I figured myself tough, I volunteered for retaliatory operations. These were simple jobs initially, like running rival street kids off our corners, but soon I was shutting down competitors by breaking their duplication machines with a baseball bat. Later I burned trucks and cut off the fingers of shop owners who refused to sell our products.
My ruthless efforts did not go unnoticed or unrewarded.
By the time I was a man, I was a close associate of Pakhan Starikova; a minion of the underground porn king of Novosibirsk. I am officially paid as a security officer for his film studio, a job which primarily consists of beating actresses who wish to exit their contracts with Shedevry Kino. This, or making certain objectors to his business— disappear.
Now, I have become the left hand of the boss himself. His body man as they might say in an American movie, with my own room inside his palace compound. I stand over him in his daily meetings, I drive him to and fro. I am the man’s shadow, only leaving when I am assigned to handle his most delicate missions. Such as this.
I believe he regards me as a close personal friend, though these are feelings I do not reciprocate.
Starikova was once a serious man. But old age has made him an eccentric fool. He is a small, portly, snickering drunk. He has the mind of a child: prone to tantrums and random acts of cruelty. He has the diet of a child as well: American foods, like can-spray cheese and candy milk cereals. In spite of his portly shape he often dresses in leather body garments like those worn by Michael Jackson or Eddie Murphy’s Raw.
I believe it was the movies; he watched too many and they melted his mind. Gave him cavities of the brain. Now his life is an endless cycle of vodka, pornography and bullying the unlucky girls he calls his girlfriends.
I would enjoy nothing more than to see Starikova disemboweled; but he is the reason I do not drink from storm drains or forage my meals from dumpsters. He is the reason I am not that boy hustling eight tracks from the alleyways. I am Starikova’s dog and I am his loyal dog.
—
Shedevry Kino has provided me lodging with private bed and kitchen. This is by request, as I do not trust American restaurants and their menus consisting of cheese and cola. I visit a dank and disheveled supermarket near my final destination, a bodega they call this; here I collect my meal provisions for this trip.
A black cat wanders the aisles freely to eat mice and cockroaches. It nuzzles against my ankles before I kick it away.
I purchase tinned salmon, cabbage, parsley, rice and potatoes; enough food for three days. The cashier tries to make conversation with me before I direct my finger to my headphones.
—
I check in to a brand name lodge near Times Square. The lobby is disguised to seem as though it were a luxury hotel, but no one knows a bootleg better than I do. This is a den of bed bugs for tourists from Iowa. At the main entrance a hollowed out piano sits beside an overly decorated Christmas Tree of plastic branches and bulbs that flash in primary colors.
I must remove my headphones to speak with a man at a tinsel-wrapped check-in desk.
The man here, behind a computer, is black skinned. He is elderly. He wears a humiliating velvet fez and an admiral jacket with cheap yellow epaulets. In his elaborate uniform he appears to me like a disgraced warlord, awaiting execution. A golden name tag reads Tahir.
Tahir is uncomfortable with his computer. His eyes seem diseased. They are red and yellow. He asks me if I’m checking in.
“Shedevry Kino,” I say to him, firmly.
“For check-in?” He struggles with the computer. “Shuh-Dovery.”
“Shedevry Kino,” I correct him.
“Yes, yes— Say it for me one more time?”
“Shedevry Kino.”
English is not his first language. I can hear it on his tongue. I can hear his hatred. His fatigue. He hates this language like I do; pig language of devils who eat fried lard.
A man half his age, pudgy Germanic in a clip-on tie, passes behind him.
He moos like a cow, “Hey, Tahir, buddy—George had to run home, okay? He’s got a tummy bug or something. So, can you go retrieve the luggage carts off eight and six?”
The desk manager makes a pained smile, “Yes, sir.”
“And while you’re up there, we have noise complaints for room 813; can you stop by, tell them to knock it off?”
“Yes sir.”
The manager almost walks away before he stops. “Oh, and, the McConnors party are wrapping up in Conference B, can you help Sharice put away the chairs?”
Tahir speaks like nails are being driven under his fingernails, “Uh—Yes-Yes, sir.”
The clip-on cow chuckles, for my sake. “But, uh, worry about all this stuff when the line dies down, checking in customers comes first, of course, hahaha.”
Clip-on cow smiles at me like we are dear friends before he disappears.
Tahir, blinks hard. It is clear this job has shrunk his soul to the size of a mere pebble. He’s been stunned. His diseased eyes stare vacantly at a computer screen.
“Shedevry Kino,” I say a fourth time, prodding him back into operation.
He gets me a key and tells me I’m on the top floor in room 904.
“Our complimentary breakfast is served from six AM to—”
I walk away before he can continue speaking.
—
I find my room is of poor design. Everything is colored like champagne. A crooked picture hangs behind my bed of blonde children sprinting from a lighthouse.
I lay down my bag and stare at my reflection in a bubble television facing the bed.
I can hear New York out my windows. Six million screaming devils and their yellow taxi horns. I turn on the TV and turn the channel over to an infomercial for 1-800 number psychics who will help you win the lottery, and find missing loved ones.
Americans will believe anything.
—
I smoke cigarettes and prepare a dinner of ukha. The TV masks the noise of the city while the boiling fish and cabbage mask the city's stink.
I boil my soup in cheap pans from the room’s private kitchen. Ukha is no gourmet meal, but I am convinced that any locally prepared food would land me in hospital.
When my meal is prepared I pour it into bowl; it is a brownish brine, flecked with green parsley and chunks of white potato and nuggets of cheap salmon from a tin. It stinks like home. I will eat this same meal six times until it is time to return to Russia.
I ash my cigarette and arm myself with a spoon, but before I can take a bite, there is a knock on my door.
I recognize my visitor through the peephole. It is the man named Tahir in red velvet and bowtie. He is sweating. I open my door; and he smiles at me, so wide it seems as though he may collapse into death from the exertion.
“Mister Kino,” he grins, joyless.
Kino is not my name. It’s the last half of my company name and simply the Russian word for ‘cinema,’ but I do not correct him.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” he rasps, “Is your room to your liking?”
“Yes. Everything is fine—You can go.”
I begin to shut the door before he stops me.
“Oh, oh, I’m afraid I do have to ask you a—yes—sorry—uh—yes— There have been several complaints from the other guests on this floor. Apparently they aren’t happy with the smell of fish coming from your room here, and I’m afraid it’s disturbing their sleep. Could we ask that you open a window?”
“No.”
“Management would appreciate it if you would open a window and if in the future you refrained from cooking fish—If you’d like I can give you a coupon for the in-house dining menu—”
I take a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign from the nearby shelf and flaunt it to the man. Then I hang it on my door and slam it shut.
—
I eat my dinner and watch another infomercial for a cheap plastic product that poorly dices onions with a button. It can also chop nuts. Why anyone would want to be this is a conundrum to me. What drives Americans to fill their lives with so much junk?
I make two phone calls.
I call a secretary for Starikova to let him know I have arrived safely and that I am on schedule. I then call the translator for the film exchange. She tells me what time I can expect her at my hotel.
There is nothing more to do but preserve my energy. I sleep to the sound of information commercials.
—
The next morning I shower and I do push-ups. I consider a walk; but I do not wish to be assaulted or mugged. In truth I do not wish to see this city at all. I have no interest in green Statue of Liberty or the big candy store malls or any of the museums bragging about America’s rape of the world. Starikova was sure to tell me of the great pleasures to be had here. That New York is one big carnival. He raved of dishes of deep fried pork and cheeses. Beer in oversized novelty jugs. Clubs full of feel good drugs and easy women—but I’ve seen enough of this tomfoolery at his compound.
Instead, I stand on my balcony and I watch the gray snow. It is harder today. It speckles at my ninth floor window before it turns black in the streets.
I chain smoke cigarettes and watch the vermin squiggle below, in and out of taxis and holes into the underground. It reminds me of watching an ant pile. I remember visiting the woods as a child and pissing on ant hills. I enjoyed watching all the ants panic. I wish I could take a piss now and drown the streets of Manhattan. Send all these devils running from their buildings.
I laugh. I blow smoke.
—
This hotel room is a prison, but I will be free soon.
For twelve grueling hours I sit at the end of my bed and watch TV. I listen to my electric jazz tapes. I do push-ups. When there is nothing left to do I stand naked before the mirror. I stare into the eyeballs tattooed over my nipples and the church steeples framed between them. Arms of skulls and knives and spiders. A cackling demon at the neckline.
My biography in black ink. The branding of my story. The road that took me from the streets to a room in a palace. To here in New York— and the tape that will fly home with me.
—
At long last, the sun sets. A gray cloud borrows its glow from the city and makes the sky look like one great television screen without a signal.
I receive a phone-call at nineteen-thirty hours. Right on schedule. The front desk tells me I have a guest and I tell them to send her up.
Moments later there is a knock at the door. I check myself one last time in the mirror. I make sure my shirt is well ironed. That no hairs are out of place in my shoulder-length slick-back. Finally, I put on bulky shield sunglasses.
When I open my door, my translator awaits me.
Vittoria wears a blouse and horse-riding trousers that are tight around her figure like an hourglass. The top is navy color blue with a pattern of white ponies. She wears Texas boots of cow leather. She is quite high fashion. She is like a girl from a magazine with her seventy-five dollar haircut and a face of symmetrical features.
“Привет,” she says with a proud smile.
I say the same thing back to her.
She speaks to me in English, her accent is pitiful. “Good fortune—to find you here in—bigcity New York.”
I don’t care to sit around and play English lesson.
I speak to her in Russian, “We have time to wait; the restaurant is not so far away—” I point at a chair beside the bed. “Садитесь.”
Vittoria is of interesting character; she speaks five languages and trades international art for her primary income, among other, less reputable, vocations. She is wealthy. She is young. She is what they call a globetrotter and what they call self-made. Many men pine for her, but not myself; I find her greatly ignorant. A girl who runs with wolves thinking them shepherd dogs.
Though I invited her to sit on a chair, she takes to laying on her stomach on my bed, legs kicking, shoulders arched like a cat begging for affection. I adjust my sunglasses and sit near her, stone faced. I do not give her the attention she so craves.
She is dark skinned and quite well fed and not so delicate for a woman. Her hair is chocolate gold and it is curly. Perhaps it is her eyes that are most interesting. They are the color of olives and honey. At times they make her seem like a witch of a storybook.
She again tries for English, bouncing her words as if to sing, “He wears his sunglasses at night.”
She chuckles, I say nothing.
“It is a song,” she explains, smacking my shoulder; suddenly she transitions to Russian, she is surprisingly adept at the language for a foreigner, “How long have you been in America?”
I tell her twenty-two hours.
“I landed an hour ago,” she says. “Plane travel has left me restless— do you have alcohol?”
“Starikova has forbidden us from drinking any alcohol before this deal. He wants our senses keen.”
Vittoria rolls her eyes like a spoiled teenager. “Starikova—” she changes to English, “Control Freak—” back to Russian. “How is he? Every month now he is sending me a gift of some kind. Nesting Dolls. And clocks. And silk kerchiefs. It’s all so sweet.”
“Pakhan Starikova is the devil,” I tell her. “He lives only for the suffering of others.”
Vittoria holds her nose up. “This is just how he presents himself to his business associates. Beneath his exterior, he is a man of vision and passion. He is a revolutionary. The Russians are a repressed people; he understands the animal trapped inside the man; a beast of violence and lust and desire. He yearns to free the animal; to tell its story.”
“Animals have no stories to tell.”
Starikova has long been enamored with Vittoria, just as she is with him. He speaks of her often and tells me of the wicked things he’d like to do to her. At times she is an object of his obsession and he will become quite enraged when she does not return his phone calls.
“Сигарета,” Vittoria commands of me, snapping her fingers.
I hand off a cigarette and light it for her at her lips.
She rolls it around her fingers; I don’t think she actually wants to smoke, she just wants something to play with. Ash rains onto my linen sheets as she hardly ever takes a genuine drag.
“Tell me about it,” she inspects her unsmoked cigarette.
“Tell you about what?”
“The deal for which I am to serve translator—no one would discuss it on the phone—it is all so…” She pauses and then switches to English, “Cloak and dagger.”
I watch the TV. Car chase in southern American woods.
She continues to press me, “All I know is Big Boss Starikova is renting a new movie from the Zalatori’s? Tonight we are to visit the world’s most expensive—eh—Blockbuster Video? So, what is this movie he wants to see so bad?”
I say nothing.
“Must be some special movie to fly the both of us to New York city.”
I say nothing, still.
And she pesters me, “You’re awful quiet. Nervous? Tell me, is it a horror movie Starkova is buying? Are you a—eh— scaredy cat?”
“Tonight’s meeting is for the purchase and transfer of a snuff film,” I tell her. “Черная видеокассета.”
“I had assumed this—D’uh,” she rolls her eyes.
Of all the things I have done for Pakhan Starikova, none are as vile as those actions I have commit to obtain him his black tapes.
Starikova is an avid collector of snuff films. They are his most prized possessions. He keeps them in a safe with his paper cash holdings. These are tapes of accidents. War training films. Videos of performance stunts gone wrong. Even films seized by police of pervert serial killers. Mere ownership of these films is an offense worthy of imprisonment in Russia, but this has never slowed him down.
He watches his black tapes in private, for inspiration and pleasure alike. Sometimes, if he’s had enough to drink, Starikova will put on these horrid films to shock his house guests at dinner parties. Vittoria was in attendance for one such incident. She was translating a dinner with the Zalatoris’ at Starikova’s palace compound when he abruptly put a black tape on; horrible movie of Russian teenager being tied to a tree by a gang of men. While the other Italians vomited or ran from the room, Vittoria watched quietly with a finger tapping upon her chin. She watched all nineteen minutes— of innocent child being played with like a toy and ultimately disposed of with fire. When it ended, she told Starikova the piece was Насильственное искусство; brutal art. She even dared to call it brave.
“What is this one about?” she asks me.
“Starikova tells me it’s the worst one money can buy.”
Her eyes twinkle, a sadistic excitement, “Yes—and?”
“I have already told you all the information I am privy to.”
“But surely you know something of its contents? A clue? Is it a movie star death tape? A celebrity autopsy? Is it the video from the man with the horses? The one he has sought so long?”
I say nothing.
“You must know something,” she pleads, she says my name with hand on the crook of my elbow. “Where’s the video from? What happens in it? How did the Zalatoris’ get their hands on it?”
“You should not show excitement for such dreadful materials; they are cigarettes for the soul. They will turn your heart black.”
“I beg you; tell me something— ”
I weigh the silence. I gaze at the carpet at the end of my boots; filthy. The color of stray dogs.
“I can tell you this: Pakhan Starikova has sought this video for some time; a black tape of profound filth. It is said the content is so shocking, that when one views it, their hair will turn white before the film’s end— this is all I know. I can say no more.”
“Захватывающий!” she says, she references the VHS player sitting atop the bed. “Perhaps we will have to have a—er—sneak peek—before you take it back to Russia.”
“I do not watch such films,” I tell her. “Not if it is by choice.”
She makes an ‘aw’ noise, the sound a person might make to reference a puppy or kitten, then asks me if I’m Мальчик as she laughs loudly and shakes my shoulder.
—
I fuck Vittoria if only because it kills twenty minutes. Neither of us undress, nor do we kiss. I simply lower her trousers and take her standing, leaning over the bed. It is simple and quick and dispassionate, but somehow it seems necessary. Some natural consequence of her private company.
When it is over, Vittoria and I smoke cigarettes. We watch information commercials; one is for a cockroach trap. It is a platform of sugar and glue with a plastic cover over it. They call it a roach motel. A cartoon roach crawls in and the next shot reveals him with X’s over his eyes.
When it is twenty-three hundred hours, Vittoria and I leave the hotel. We walk gangland streets of chipped brick buildings and brown snow and honking yellow taxi cabs. There are many people out due to the Christmas time season—and because Vittoria is so beautiful and has large breasts, there are many men who stare at us. I feel like she is a target upon my back. It makes me feel as though I am walking through a jungle and all the hungry beasts are following us to pounce.
“A beautiful night!” Vittoria says to me, in English.
I have nothing to say.
A car slows down beside us and a man lobs himself out the passenger window. He shouts some obscenity, but it is said too quickly for me to understand it.
“Fucka—your mother!” Vittoria blasts back in return as they drive away.
She walks closer to me after this.
—
We travel fifteen blocks to the southside of Manhattan. We arrive at an upscale restaurant and butchery called Fortunado’s. It is a fifty year old business in ownership of gangsters associated with the Zalatori’s. We find it situated at the end of Little Italy with front windows boasting the severed heads of pigs and skinned rabbits.
Vittoria and I enter the establishment. Fortunado’s is quite opulent. Over mirrored floors of chessboard pattern, Americans eat freshly slaughtered pork and house-made noodles. They swill large glasses of beer and grape wine. The young people somehow seem artificial, like wax statues; they are made of stage make-up and special undergarments that shape their bodies to seem more food-starved. The old people appear sick. They are bloated and red from their American dairy and lifetime of smoggy air.
A young girl awaits us at a wooden podium. She is small. She wears a black tie and a man’s shirt.
“Hi, I’m so sorry, the kitchen has just closed. I’m afraid we’re not seating new tables.”
Vittoria snaps, she speaks like her words are meant for a slave, “We have private party with Palo.”
“Oh! Of course, right this way!”
—
The hostess takes us past the dining area and its gameboard floors. We soon go through a bustling kitchen where brown men with hairy arms cook meat and wash dishes to the tune of rock and roll music. We are only here but a moment, soon we pass through a back door, and down a grim, stone staircase. This bottoms out at a frozen meat locker and basement butchery.
Like the subway exits, this is another hallway of white tiles and green light, only here, instead of movie posters, the walls are lined with headless and halved pigs on hooks; the mist of refrigeration vents.
The hostess guides us to a door at the meat locker’s rear; but she takes us no further.
Vittoria makes no hesitation. She opens the door.
Here, beyond the butchery, is a small office. A hang-out spot for card games and contraband storage. The room is hardly more than a couch and a card table. It is lit by a lone light bulb that hangs from the ceiling over a ratty twine carpet. The walls are stacked with crates of newly imported VHS. Some of the Zalatori’s micro-budget Gialo.
Two men await us.
“Vittoria!” Palo sings. “Bella cara, Vittoria.”
Palo Zalatori hops from his seat at the card table and embraces our translator, putting her breasts square against his gold cross necklace. They kiss each other’s cheeks. He must say something charming in his half Spanish, half French, cow language. It makes her laugh so hard she has to clutch her chest.
Palo Zalatori is from Naples. He is excitable like a Chihuahua dog. He boasts long California surfer hair and wears a low cut suede shirt the color of cotton candy.
He is accompanied by a bald man in a black hat. This man does not stand up to greet us. He is large and has a face of flesh burns and scars. I assume him to be nothing but the muscle. Perhaps a body man himself. He eats a dinner of tomato sauce and gray veal.
Palo comes to me and butchers the Russian language while shaking his hands in the air, “Privyy-yet—e Correcto?—er—Doba—dobaryy Vetcha—vetcher.”
He sings this gibberish with the excitement of a schoolboy. I say nothing. I sit down at the card table with folded hands. The Bald Man In The Black Hat acknowledges me with the tip of veal at the end of his fork. He buries it in his teeth.
“Let’s be—uh—getting straight down to’the businesses, huh?” Palo cheers in pitiful English.
He sits. Vittoria sits. Our chairs are cheap and squeak loudly.
Palo wastes no time romancing Vittoria; he hangs an arm around her neck and chews on her ear with small talk in impenetrable Italian. She giggles. Fermata, she tells him.
Eventually, I find Palo Zalatoi speaking directly at me.
Vittoria translates into Russian, “Er—Palo asks if your hotel is to your liking?”
“Tell him I do not wish to make small talk. I wish to begin our dealings.”
The Zalatori family are clowns. They made their money in the sixties moving heroin from Middle East to the New York ports, but somewhere along the way became a bogus film studio not unlike Shedevry Kino. We would not do business with them if Starikova was not so fond of their dirty movies. The Zalatori Production Company produces garbage horror movies on shoestring budgets, films about forest beasts and cannibals and motorcycle terror gangs. Since 1978 Palo Zalatori’s father has produced nearly thirty-two films. Spaghetti sauce movies whose production launder very real blood money.
Palo suddenly turns serious, he snaps his fingers twice. On cue, The Bald Man in The Black Hat sets down his fork. He reaches into his breast pocket and out it comes—the VHS film.
The very black tape I have been sent here to retrieve. He sets it gently at the table’s center before returning to his dish to loudly slurp noodles.
It’s an ordinary brick of black plastic. It has viewing windows to white spools of reflective metal tape. On the back are two plastic gears; they stare upon me, like eyes. A label is on the front, in pen it reads squiggly gibberish I have no hope to understand.
“E ora il dolce!” Palo is ever so flamboyant; “Film-a pazzesco! Film-a selvaggio! L’capo Starikova lo adorerà!”
Vittoria gets to translating to Russian, “The movie is— it will be the pride of Boss Starikova’s collection.”
I nod. Slowly. Palo has a reputation for overselling his work.
Palo babbles on; he must rapid-fire twenty words a second. Vittoria struggles to keep up with him.
“He says the tape is—er—it does not translate—film di donna sulla sedia—a ‘woman in chair film.’ He says the woman is quite striking in her beauty. She is tied down. There are—many men—and they, er, violate the woman for about an hour with her, a variety of tools as she—gives much blood.”
Palo keeps talking and Vittoria narrates over him, struggling at times to keep up.
“There is uh, play with the butt, er—he says there’s scenes—of strangulation—of—horror—but, truly it is the woman’s beauty and her desire to live that make it such the quality picture that it is. To witness such suffering, in such detail, it is a treat Boss Starikova will remember for all his years.”
Palo says his last piece. He makes pizza-pasta gibberish then grins wide and explodes his hands outwards.
“She is so full of life,” Vittoria translates. “Her slow death is an explosion of misery.”
I tell her to tell them that I agree.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she tells me. “You can’t just tell them you agree. You haven’t seen his movie. Did you misunderstand me? Did I mistranslate something?”
“Tell them: 'I agree,’ Vittoria.”
She does. Palo then mutters to the man with the burned face. He shrugs and eats a noodle.
I feel weak having all of my words go through a translator, so, I speak to these clowns in English, the only language we all halfway speak. “It. Has. To Be. The Best. Movie. Ever made—Or—Starikova—makes no more—deals—ever again.”
Palo raises his hands, he says something to Vittoria.
She translates, “He assures you, it is.”
“Tell them I did not fly 2000 miles to hear empty promises.”
She does. They telephone back more groveling about how great their ‘Woman in Chair’ film is.
“Ask them about the specifications.”
She telephones, then telephones back, “He, er, wants to know what do you mean ‘specifications’?”
I clarify, “The camera and sound equipment. The lighting quality. Pakhan Starikova wants high-definition. High fidelity or there is no purchase.”
The prompt is filtered through Vittoria; Palo speaks all about the lights and the brand of microphone. As last details, Vittoria informs me that Palo operates the camera himself and he has a long resume as a cinematographer.
I nod once more. My shield sunglasses fall down the bridge of my nose so I pull them back up. The three Italians look to me, inspecting their own warped reflections in my lenses.
I lean in and ask Vittoria’s left ear, “Ask them their price.”
She poses the question to Palo. Palo puts words into her right ear and gives them back to me.
“To obtain a special item—like this—he is requesting—a high price. He asks that you consider his personal risk taken to obtain the film and the great lengths the Zalatori’s have gone to please Boss Starikova in the past—”
I interrupt; “—Enough groveling. Tell him to give me a price.”
She says this to Palo and she returns a moment later to repeat his words, “Three Hundred Thousand American dollars—Hold on.”
Vittoria and Palo argue, as they do, their hands pinch at the air. I find myself bored. I regard The Bald Man In The Black Hat. He eats the last of his veal puck as he maintains an eager focus to Vittoria’s chest.
“Sorry—” Vittoria apologizes to me. “—I thought he misspoke—the price is three hundred thousand American dollars.”
“Tell him that’s agreeable.”
Her honey olive eyes pop. She doesn’t translate, instead she asks me, “Are you sure? That is a high price for a single movie—it is just a tape.”
“It is a black tape. The best ever made. There is no price too high for Starikova. Say this to Palo. Every word.”
I nod to Palo, a soft drop of the nose. She translates Starikova’s sentiments and Palo grins. Then, the Italian reaches out to shake my hand.
We shake and The Bald Man In The Black Hat drops his fork.
—
There is a small window beyond the card table, it is where the wall meets the ceiling. It looks out at the street level. I watch the high heels and penny loafers of rich, drunk Americans as they scramble for yellow color taxi cabs in the steadily rising snow. Above us, where there was once the sound of rock music and chefs, there is now a heavy silence. The place has emptied out after closing time and the air has filled with the sound of hissing refrigerator pumps from the nearby meat-locker. This and the noise of faraway traffic on Broadway.
The Bald Man In The Black Hat leaves us. There is only myself, Palo and Vittoria. We discuss the trivial details of how we will arrange for the exchange of the cash. But once these details are finalized, we shake hands once more.
Palo beams, “Ora che abbiamo finito, possiamo festeggiare!”
“What did he say?” I ask.
Vittoria switches to her pitiful English. “Now, the deal is done, we have a party!”
The Bald Man In The Black Hat returns to the room, careful to only poke his head in.
Palo asks him, “Il ristorante è vuoto?”
“All empty,” The Bald Man In The Black Hat confirms.
Palo smiles at Vittoria, but gives his command to his servant, “Prendi lo champagne, vero?”
“Al momento. Al Momento.”
The Bald Man in The Black takes the cue. He disappears once more.
“Un momento!” Palo grins at us as he stands up, he wags a finger. “Un momento! Attendere qui!”
Soon he disappears too, pinching the skin of my neck three times on his way out the door.
Vittoria and I are alone again; a three hundred thousand dollar VHS tape sits on its backside before us. I take it up, into my hands. It’s so light. It’s so—empty. Black plastic and magnets. Components of gears and plastic switches. A cursive title on the front, Donna Sulla Sedia. Just thinking of its contents make me wish to weep—but Pakhan Starikova will be pleased and I will make a handsome sum from this deal.
Vittoria snaps her fingers at me, “Сигарета.”
I take out my pack. She kisses a cigarette and I light it for her.
I remark, “kаждую затяжку тяни, как последнюю. Это может быть твоя последняя сигарета в жизни.”
“A funny thing to say. ”
“Something they used to say when we were kids in the warehouse.”
After her first drag she stares at the tape with a bored expression.
Smoke exits her nostrils, “So, the world’s greatest snuff film, it’s all yours now.”
“It is Pakhan Starikova’s—”
She touches my shoulder. “Three hundred thousand! Must be some gorgeous woman in that chair.”
I have no response to this. I stare at the tape. I think of Hell.
“Let us see about that champagne,” I say.
Vittoria and I stand from the card table.
I walk behind her as we exit the backroom and return to the basement butchery.
As we enter the tile floor butchery, Vittoria is surprised to discover that the room has been rearranged. The split-belly pigs have been gathered off to one side. Where there was once a walkway there is now an empty dentist’s chair sat in the center of the room. A table nearby is situated with duct tape, and hand-cuffs—a drill—a hammer. Lastly, a high end VHS camera is situated on a tripod, affixed with a flashlight and directional microphone. It faces the chair. Its motor softly hums. A red light blinks a dozen times a second.
Vittoria stammers. Her cigarette falls out of her mouth and goes bouncing at her heels. She examines each of us, one at a time, but our faces offer no explanation. No comfort. No answers.
The Bald Man In The Black Hat locks the door to the upstairs.
Palo locks the door to the meeting room.
I load the blank VHS into the open, awaiting, slot of the camera.