piled with crates of live chickens rolls onto the pier past a large sign reading ERIE LACKAWANNA FERRY COMPANY.
Under that in smaller letters is “Departures from Manhattan on the hour and the half hour, 4 A.M. to 8 P.M.”
Detectives Pete McDevitt and Pat Roark stand under a clock that says 2:25, poised, alert and ready to step out from behind the makeshift ferry shed. Then McDevitt says, “Now,” and moves to his right. Roark at the same moment moves to his left.
Roark served a year in Korea. Firemen are navy; cops are army. Quinlan knows this. The next line is his:
“Okay Nails, freeze.”
“Cut!”
The truck with the chickens went into reverse and parked next to a mint-condition 1955 Oldsmobile and an old-fashioned ambulance the size and shape of a station wagon.
Before the first take Mitchell Graham had said, “Sean, you’re so perfectly in period that I feel like I should film you in black-and-white.”
As McDevitt that day, Zach Terry wore his hat at the same great angle as Quinlan did. Graham noticed that. After the first take he told Quinlan, “It’s distracting to have both of you with your hats alike. Could you straighten yours?”
The game was called protecting the star. Sean knew that game. McDevitt’s hat was an important prop today. He shifted his own fedora.
“Perfect,” said the director.
A featured player yields gracefully in the hope that a director will remember when casting in the future. Quinlan wondered how many movies Graham would direct after this one. He wondered what his own career would look like if an indictment came down in California.
Crews were setting up for the next scene, which would be shot in front of an old three-story building just across from the piers. For the movie a sign had been erected on the front that read MURPHY’S FINE FOOD AND DRINK. ROOMS BY THE DAY OR WEEK.
Once this had actually been a waterfront tavern with rooms rented to sailors on the upper floors. For a while after the waterfront shut down it had been a notorious gay bar called the Wrong Box.
Carter Boyce, the actor playing Jimmy Nails, was in costume and taking a practice walk toward the ferry shed. Carter Boyce was a nice guy who happened to have a mug two feet wide with bad news written all over it.
In the next scene, Jimmy Nails was supposed to have just come down the wooden exterior stairs that led from the second floor of Murphy’s. He had an overcoat on his arm and carried a satchel.
The scene of Nails on those stairs had been completed the day before through the miracle of second-unit work.
Detectives McDevitt and Roark stand exactly where they were at the end of the last shot. In the background as they start to move toward Murphy’s, the Oldsmobile and the chicken truck roll off the dock in one direction, a red Studebaker station wagon goes by in the other.
Twenty feet away from them Jimmy Nails drops his luggage and overcoat and swings a double-barrel shotgun their way. McDevitt, acting instinctively, whips off his fedora and flings it at Nails’s face in one gesture. Jimmy, his eyes rolling like a trapped beast, is a creature of instinct and empties a barrel at the hat. Roark’s gun jumps into his hand and he fires three times. Jimmy Nails goes down firing the second barrel into the ground.
The hat flying through the air and getting blasted into felt confetti was being shot that same week by a special-effects outfit in California.
“Thanks,” Roark says.
“That hat cost me seven bucks at Rothman’s,” says his partner, his buddy.
“Cut. Let’s put Zach and Sean about a foot farther apart,” said Graham. “And Sean, slower on the reaction. Let the hat surprise you as much as it does Carter. Sean, are you with us?”
Quinlan nodded. For a moment he’d felt like the back draft of the vintage vehicles was pulling him away from this time and place.
Over several takes the vintage Studebaker blew a tire and the wind and the sun played hell with Mr. Terry’s hair. Half a dozen people surrounded him, spraying his chestnut locks.
“Exposure to the elements…”
“It’s not, of course, but the light makes it look thin.”
“… lighting adjustment…”
This Quinlan knew was also about protecting the star, as was the scene they kept enacting. McDevitt needed to save Roark’s life to mitigate, for the audience, the fact that his misjudgment was going to cost Roark his life.
As they prepared for what turned out to be the last take, Quinlan couldn’t stop thinking, each time he looked at Zach Terry, that this was the bastard who was going to get him killed.
At some point during the last couple of takes, Sean Quinlan became aware of a figure from his disreputable past. Rollins stood across the street dark and sharp in a navy blue suede jacket and soft leather shoes and watched everything that went on.
When they were finished with
“We had some rare adventures, you and I,” Rollins remarked, when they settled into a back booth, “a pair of theater students out looking for adventure.”
“And not caring where they found it.”
“Always on the right side of the law, though.”
“Not as I remember. There was the time we unloaded the Quaaludes those crazy guys from NYU manufactured in their chemistry lab.”
“We weren’t caught. That’s being on the right side of the law, as far as I’m concerned. Glad you got in touch. I’ve been following your career. Sorry about the divorce. Monica Celeste must be loaded.”
Quinlan shrugged. “I see you’re still the Well-Dressed Passerby,” he said. “That routine keeps working for you?”
“In any large city there are always the lost, the confused, and the lonely that need an assist from a passing stranger.” Rollins gave a charming smile. “Actually, though, I’ve gone legit. I’m in the tourist business—tours of various old New Yorks. You heard about that?
“We have people taking daytrips to 1890s New York. Out in Brooklyn in a couple of spots you can walk down a street and almost think it’s a hundred and twenty-five years ago. Any decade you can think of, people want to see the remains.”
Rollins smiled. “It’s an amazing confluence, you being back in town and making this movie.
Sean gave a grin. “In tough times people want to go elsewhere,” Rollins said. “With every corner of the planet going down the drain, the places they favor are in the past. Some lunatics even want to go back to the Great Depression. Like this one isn’t bad enough for them. But I don’t ask questions; I just set up the tours. Who would have guessed that a master’s degree in history from Columbia would stand me in such good stead?”
“Especially since you never went there.”
Rollins shrugged. “What makes it all weird and twisted and thus makes it my kind of enterprise is that some of the clients believe that if they can find a place with enough artifacts that evoke a certain time, they’ll get a jolt and wind up there.
“Most of them want to go back to the seventies, the sixties, the fifties. They figure things would be comfortable enough. ID requirements were still loose back then. Sliders know enough about those times that they could make a nice living betting on the World Series and buying Xerox stock. One said that if he could get back to 1950 he’d have almost sixty years before stuff got really screwy.”
