Niko
Chapter ten
“The apartment isn’t the problem,” Max said on the phone. “I want to be fair to the apartment. Rafe’s place is clean and bright, but there’s not one thing in it I can point a camera at.”
I had the shelf boards for the Ravenswood job stacked on the bench and a marking gauge in my hand. “Uh huh.”
“Are you working? You’re working. I can hear you not listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“Then repeat back the last thing I said.”
“Not one thing you can point a camera at.”
“That’s—okay, word for word.” A car door shut on his end. “So here’s where we are. Everything we’ve filmed with Rafe so far has been on sidewalks. That’s fine at first, but now people want something at home. They want to see a couch and a man in his kitchen, looking like he makes food there.”
“So shoot his kitchen.”
“I’ve been in Rafe’s kitchen. There’s a coffee maker and a toaster.
The entire apartment is like a very nice hotel room where nobody has ever checked in.
” I heard wind noise, and then Max moved away from it.
“I’ve solved the problem. There’s a place on Elston that rents furniture for still photos.
I picked out a console table, six feet long, made of reclaimed barn wood.
It’s gorgeous. On camera, you’d swear the boards came out of a barn built in 1890. ”
“And where did they come from?”
“A shop on Elston.”
“And how old are they?”
“Niko.”
“When did they make the piece, Max?”
He exhaled into the phone. “It looks like 1890.”
I picked the gauge back up.
“I can hear you doing the face.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You didn’t have to. It’s a prop, Niko. It sits in the back of a shot for eleven seconds. Nobody’s marrying it.” A beat. “Okay. If it’s so bad, what if the piece in that shot was one of yours?”
“No.”
“You don’t have to be in it. Your face and name would never appear. We don’t tag—“
“No.”
”—it’s a beautiful object sitting there doing what beautiful objects do—“
“Max.”
He stopped.
I ran the gauge down the board and struck my line. The shop was quiet.
“Okay,” he said. “Elston, it is. The shot is Thursday at ten a.m. He’s got a game that night, so we’ll be out by noon.”
“Thursday,” I said.
“Love you.”
He hung up.
I stood there with the gauge in my hand and looked across the shop at a console set against the north wall under a drop cloth. It had been there for four years.
I built it the winter I turned twenty-four, out of a walnut slab I bought before I could afford it. It had a waney edge along the back. I’d priced it twice and then took it off the floor when customers showed interest. Max had asked to feature it more than once. I told him no every time.
Nobody was marrying the barn wood piece, but two million people would look at it in the room with Rafe and decide what kind of life he led at home. It was furniture built to be a prop, but Rafe was real.
I pulled the cloth off the console.
After backing the truck up to the roll door, I had the console loaded, strapped, and blanketed in twenty minutes. At my building’s loading dock, I had my tailgate, a ramp, and gravity on my side.
On the other end, it would require a two-man carry.
Rafe’s building had a move-in zone out front with a sign promising towing if I stayed in it past thirty minutes. I backed in and stepped inside to check the lobby. It had a leasing office that was dark, a package room with a keypad, and an enormous artificial tree. There was no doorman or desk.
I went back to the truck, put the tailgate down, and got my phone out.
Niko: I’m downstairs. Need a hand with something.
Thirty seconds later:
Rafe: coming
He came out forty seconds later in a T-shirt and no coat, and stopped when he saw what was on the tailgate.
“Oh,” he said.
“It’s a console.”
“I remember it from the shop.” He walked around the side of the truck, hands behind his back. “It’s yours.”
“It’s mine, but I’m loaning it to you.”
“No, I mean—you made it.”
“Four years ago, out of a beautiful slab of walnut.”
“Max said there was a table coming,” Rafe said. “For the shoot.”
“I’m replacing it with this.”
“Okay.” He paused. “Am I supposed to know why?”
I removed the straps.
“It’ll photograph better,” I said.
“Okay.”
I pulled the blanket off and folded it over my arm. Rafe looked at the full length of the piece. He reached out, but his fingers didn’t land.
“You can touch it,” I said. “It’s a table.”
He rested his palm on it and ran it down the length. Then he found the waney edge along the back, where the bark had come off and the shape of the tree remained. He slowly ran his thumb along it.
“That’s the outside of the tree,” I said.
“You left it.”
“That’s where it stopped growing. It seemed rude to cut it off square.”
He grinned, took his hand back, and joined me at the tailgate end.
“Where do you want me?”
“This end. Both hands under, fingers flat. If you hook the edge, you’ll lose a knuckle the first time we turn.”
He put his hands where I suggested. “On three?”
“On up.”
“Up,” he said, and we lifted it.
I pulled my end around and walked backward while Rafe walked forward. The lobby door had an accessibility plate that I bumped with my hip.
We carried it to the elevator. When it came, we turned the piece, and the door closed.
Rafe punched six on the keypad. As the numbers climbed, he tipped his head back against the wall. I watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall when he swallowed.
“I go to the rink at four,” he said.
“Who’s the game with?”
“Nashville.”
“Are they any good?”
He nearly smirked. “They’re okay.”
The elevator opened onto a hallway carpeted the color of a rainy day. Rafe walked backward as we carried the console to his door.
“Down,” he said. “The keys are in my pocket.”
We carried the console into Rafe’s living room; I walked forward, and I immediately saw the wall.
Positioned above a gray sectional was a woven tapestry that ran near six feet across and ran almost to the ceiling, reds and ochre and a blue so deep it read black from across the room, laid into shapes with hard edges that seemed to sit differently depending on where I was standing.
It was hand-woven on a loom. That was legible from twelve feet away, the way you can tell a hand-cut joint across a room.
“Left,” Rafe said. “Little more. Right there’s good.”
When the console was safely down, I walked up to the sectional. Up close, the tapestry was better. The weaving was tight, and the color changes were smooth.
That’s Rafe, I thought. He’d chosen it. For himself.
I looked at the rest of the room, dominated by the gray sectional and a large off-white rug. A dining set sat on the opposite side of the room with four matching chairs.
A man who chose that weaving wouldn’t choose that couch. Where did he go?
“You want water or anything?” Rafe asked. “There’s coffee. It’s not—“ He looked at the machine. “It’s decent coffee.”
“I’m good.”
He got himself a bottle of water out of the fridge and drank it. When I looked around the room again, I spotted a gear bag by the door, packed and zipped. A hockey stick tube leaned against it. They were the only signs that an athlete lived in the space.
The bathroom door opened down the hall, and Max came out walking backward, holding a light stand at arm’s length.
”—the outlet in there is haunted, or maybe the entire wall is. I’m not using that wall.“ He caught sight of me and stopped dead. “You brought a table.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You brought the table.“ He set the stand down, came over, and crouched at the end. He ran his fingers along the waney edge. “For four years I’ve been asking about this table.”
“It’s not for the shot.”
He looked up at me.
“It’s for the room,” I said.
“Uh huh,” Max said, and rose, dusting his knees. He turned to look at the long wall with the tapestry. “This is the wall. We’re shooting everything against it.”
“Do you want me to take it down?” Rafe asked.
“It doesn’t come down,” I said.
Max looked at me. “I want it up,” he said. “It’s why it’s a good wall. God, look at it. That’s texture. You can’t buy texture, that’s—“ He stopped, spun around and pointed at me. “Don’t say anything.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to say you can buy texture on Elston.”
Rafe leaned against his counter, drinking his water and watching the two of us.
“Where do you want the table?” he asked.
“Where do you want it?” Max asked.
“Wherever’s good for you.”
“Under the window.”
Thirty seconds later, after I helped Rafe move it, Max looked at it from five feet back with one eye shut. “It’s fighting the light.”
We moved it to the wall by the hall. Max studied it for eleven seconds and had us move it back three feet. Then he stood with his hands on his hips.
“Okay, real question. Centered on the window or centered on the couch? Rafe. Your apartment. Your call.”
“They both look good.”
“That’s true,” Max said. Then he had us move the sectional near the window and center the table under the tapestry.
I crossed my arms over my chest. A man not caring where a table sat was not unusual, but thirty minutes earlier, Rafe had run his thumb along the waney edge and treated it like a treasure.
Max placed his light where he wanted it, clipped a diffuser on, and the room’s light turned warm and even. He clapped once and turned into the version of himself that two million people watch.
“Walkthrough, then the couch, then cutaways.” He held up his phone. “So you guys have been asking about this man’s apartment—“
Rafe was good.
He came around the counter on the beat Max wanted and stopped where Max wanted him to stop. Max asked him what nobody warns you about in the NHL, and Rafe said the pillows. Max laughed a half-count late so it would land on a cut.
Rafe’s phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it and turned away.
“Take it,” Max said. “I’ve got B-roll.”
He took it two steps into the hall, raking fingers through his hair.
“Yeah.” A pause. “No, put me with Heath. Not the third pair; they’ll sit on the wall and we’ll lose the entry.
” A pause. “Because he steps up at the line every time. He’s done it twice this month.
” Another pause, shorter. “Then I’ll take the left side. Tell him no on the other thing.”
He hung up.
“Sorry. Line stuff.”
“Your coach?” Max asked.
“Assistant.” He picked his water back up. “It’s nothing.”
It was more than that and required more engagement from Rafe than anything Max was doing.
“Cutaways,” Max said. “Give me the counter, give me the coffee thing, give me—“ He swung the phone around, hunting. “Give me literally anything else in this apartment.”
There was nothing else worth seeing in that apartment.
“There’s the—“ Rafe looked around his own home and came up empty. “There’s the wall.”
“The wall is act three. We’re saving the wall.”
Max shot the console for a while, close, tracking slow down the length of it, and I stared at the ceiling. Max picked up his coffee, drank it, and made a face.
“That’s cold,” Rafe said. “I can—“
“It’s okay.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“It’s okay, Rafe.”
They did the couch. Max had what he needed in nine minutes, checked the time, and started pulling the diffuser off the clip.
“Wilmette at one. If I’m late, they give the kitchen to a guy who does drone shots. Rafe, I need you on Tuesday. I’ll text you. Niko, I love you, but touch nothing.” He wound a cord around his elbow, shoulder already through the doorway. “The light’s the reason. Tell him the light’s the reason.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Max said. “Talking to myself. I do that.” Then he was gone.
The apartment was quiet. Rafe was in his kitchen, and I leaned on the end of his counter. I walked over to the tapestry wall.
Close up, the reds weren’t one color. They were three or four different shades, stacked in bands so narrow you had to be within arm’s length to catch it.
I raised my hand but didn’t touch it.
“You can touch it,” Rafe said, echoing my words about the console. “It’s a rug, basically.”
“It’s a lot of things, but a rug isn’t one of them.”
“No.” A pause. “It isn’t.”
He walked over and stopped a foot behind my shoulder, close enough that I could feel the heat off him through my sleeve.
“The colors. So close, it’s probably the same lot. They held one back and used it twice, thirty inches apart, so it’d rhyme. That’s sophisticated planning.”
“She was good,” Rafe said.
I glanced over. He was close.
“You said she,” I said.
“I met her.”
He didn’t say more, and I turned to face him.
“Why is this the only thing in here that looks like somebody cared about making it?”
Rafe stood beside me with his hands at his sides. He looked at the wall again and then at the sectional. He shrugged.
“I just—I liked it.”
I didn’t have words. So I said, “Huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I pulled a tape measure out of my back pocket. It was always there because measurements were half of my work.
“You need help?” Rafe asked.
“Hold this.”
He put a thumb on the end of the tape at the corner, and I walked it out to the far side. When I came back for it, our knuckles brushed.
“You can let go now.”
“Right.” He let go. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to a tape measure.”
“I was apologizing to you.”
“That’s probably worse.”
He laughed—a short, sharp sound. I placed my hand flat on the wall and ran it along the length as I walked from one corner to the other.
“The floor’s not level.”
“Is that bad?”
“Quarter inch across ten feet. Every wall in this city is out of plumb. Buildings settle.” I let the tape snap back. “The piece’ll sit tight on this end and show daylight under the other. It’s nothing. I’m telling you so when you see it, you don’t think it’s a problem with the table.”
“Okay,” he said. “You could have not told me.”
“You would eventually have seen it.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“You would.” I looked at him. “You stared at a bar in Dallas.”
He blushed slightly and looked at the tape measure in my hand.
I positioned the console where I wanted it, slightly off-center with the tapestry. It fit better with the colors in the weaving.
“In the afternoon,” I said. “Three or four o’clock this time of year, that window’s going to lay light straight across the top of this. Walnut turns red in low sun. You’ll get forty minutes of it and then it’s gone.”
“I’m not usually here at three.”
“Then you’ll see it in the summer.”
He looked at the table under the weaving for a long moment.
“That’s better,” he said. “That’s a lot better. They look like they match each other.”
“They don’t. One came off a mountain in South America and one came off a slab I bought here in Chicago. They’ve got nothing to do with each other.”
Rafe kept looking at them.
“Sure,” he said.
Down in the lobby, Max had propped himself against the fake plant with his phone up, thumb going.
“It took twenty minutes to get to the elevator,” he said without looking up. “In a six-story building. What were you doing up there?”
“Measuring.”
He looked up from the phone. “Okay. So I’ll swing back Tuesday and get the table on my way to the—“
“Leave it.”
I turned toward the door and saw a reflection of Max’s face in the glass for half-a-second. His mouth was open, but he wasn’t saying anything.
“Okay,” he said.