Chapter 2 High Heels and Strobe Lights #2
She went past wardrobe. She went past the makeup room.
She turned right where the corridor turned left toward the studio floor, into the executive wing, and she put her hand flat on the door of Dressing Room 2, which was not hers, which belonged to nobody, which was where the network parked its guests’ coats.
Seven minutes fifty.
Inside, the room smelled like carpet shampoo and cigarettes from 2006. There was a rack, and on the rack were four jackets and a garment bag, and on the shelf under the mirror, in a neat row like offerings, were three phones.
Two were cheap. One was not.
Mina sat down on the little bench in front of the mirror, in a sports bra and the bottom half of a nine-kilo costume, with her hair still pinned into the architecture of the dance number, and took out of the lining of the costume a thing that looked like a portable charger, because it was a portable charger, and was also not.
The phone had a passcode. That was fine. She was not going to open it.
She set the device face down on the shelf and laid the phone on top of it, back to back, the way you would if you were charging one from the other, and it began.
Four minutes twenty.
She used the time. This was Manila and she was in a room with a mirror and no cameras, and so she redid her lash line, because if she came out of an eight-and-a-half-minute wardrobe change without having fixed her face somebody would one day wonder what she had been doing instead, and Mina had learned the shape of that kind of question at nineteen and had never once let one form.
Three minutes.
She thought about Josephine of Isla Puting Bato, fifty-one, seventeen floods, and about the pumping station at the end of that road, which had a number, which was Station 14, and which she had personally driven past six weeks ago and photographed because the intake screens were dry and clean, and intake screens are never dry and clean on a working pump.
Two minutes ten. The device ticked over to a solid green and Mina put the phone back in its exact place in the row, at its exact angle, and put the charger back in the lining, and stood up.
The door opened.
Calderon’s bodyguard filled it.
He was about thirty-five, built through the shoulders, with a jacket cut a size generous on the left side, and he looked at the phones on the shelf first, which told her everything about what he was, and then at her.
“Ma’am.”
“Kuya,” Mina said, delighted. “You scared me.”
“This is not your room.”
“I know! Mine is full of the finale costume, it is on a frame, it is like sharing a room with a chandelier.” She was already moving toward him, into his space rather than away from it, and her hands were out and open and busy, and this is the whole trick, because a man cannot hold a thought about a shelf while a famous woman is walking into him talking.
“Ay, are you the one from the news? The one who caught the man at the Senate? No. Sorry. You look like him. Are you insulted? You should be insulted, he has a terrible face.”
“Ma’am, I need you to.”
She had reached him. Around her throat, hanging loose, was a length of gray silk from the dance number, and she took the two ends of it in her hands as she came, the way a woman does when she is about to tie something and is not thinking about it.
“Do you know what is behind you?” Mina said.
He turned his head, which was not his fault. It is what a head does.
What was behind him was a prop cart from the fight-choreography package they had shot for the teleserye tie-in, parked in the corridor since Thursday because nobody had come for it, holding two foam swords, a plastic bolo, a stack of breakaway bottles, and a pair of rattan sticks, twenty-eight inches, unfinished, the real kind, because the choreographer was old-school and did not believe in foam for anything you held in one hand.
Mina put the silk across the front of his throat, crossed her wrists, and stepped through.
It was not violence. It was arithmetic, and it was over in under two seconds: his own turning momentum, her body dropping under his center, the silk taking the pressure at the carotids and not the windpipe, because the windpipe makes noise and the carotids do not.
She went down to one knee with him and let him come to rest against the door frame in a sitting position, the way you would set down a bag of rice.
He would be out for about nine seconds and confused for about thirty.
Mina counted four of the nine, breathing, listening to the corridor.
Then she took the rattan sticks off the prop cart, put one in each hand, and stood over him.
He came up out of it the way they do, all at once, hands going for the floor.
“Sir,” Mina said, in a different voice, the loud bright one, the one from the show. “Sir, are you okay? Kuya, I am so sorry, we were running the choreo and you walked straight into the mark.”
He blinked at her. He blinked at the rattan sticks.
“The what?”
“The fight run. For the teleserye?” She held up the sticks and did a small embarrassed flourish with them, exactly like a woman who has done four hours of stage combat and no more.
“It is a whole thing, there are nine of us, we have been rehearsing in the corridor because Studio 2 is being used for the Christmas special which is being shot in August, do not ask me why, I have stopped asking.” She crouched, hand out.
“Can you stand? Do you want water? Please do not tell my producer, she will kill me, I am not supposed to swing anything indoors.”
He took her hand. They always take the hand.
“I did not see,” he said. He was rubbing his neck now and not liking the way it felt and not yet able to say why. “You hit me?”
“The stick came around and you came around and I am so sorry, ha, my timing was off because I have a boy visiting from America and I have not slept.” Mina laughed at herself, and the man laughed too, because everyone in the country had been reading about the boy from America since eleven thirty that morning.
“Are you sure you are okay? Kuya, honestly, do you want me to call the medic?”
“No. No, ma’am. It’s fine.”
“You are being so nice about this.” She was walking him out into the corridor now, one hand light on his forearm, steering, and the door of Dressing Room 2 swung shut behind them on a shelf holding three phones in a neat row at their exact angles.
“Come, I will introduce you to the tricycle driver. He won a rice cooker. He is the funniest man in the.”
She stopped.
Hal was standing at the corner where the executive wing met the corridor to wardrobe, holding an iced coffee in a plastic cup with a straw in it, wearing a lanyard that said GUEST.
Mina had four things in her hands and her head.
She had a bodyguard on her right elbow with a mark coming up on his neck he had not seen yet.
She had two rattan sticks. She had a device in the lining of a costume nine meters away with a hundred and seven seconds of a public official’s life on it.
And she had, standing at the end of a fluorescent corridor at nine minutes past six in the evening, a man she had been in love with for eleven months, who had been in her country for six hours, who had a straw in his mouth, and who was looking directly at her.
She did not know how long he had been there.
That was the thing. That was the entire thing, and it went through her cleanly and left a cold line behind it, because there is exactly one question that matters in that moment and she could not ask it.
So she did what she did.
“Baby!” Mina said, at full brightness, and every muscle in her face and shoulders and hands rearranged itself into a woman delighted by a coincidence. “You found the executive corridor. Nobody finds the executive corridor. How did you get past Tess?”
“Tess likes me.”
“Tess likes nobody.”
“Then I have made real progress.” Hal came down the corridor. His eyes went, without hurry, to the bodyguard, and to the man’s hand where it was still rubbing the side of his own neck, and then to the two rattan sticks in Mina’s left hand, and then back up to her face. “Everything okay down here?”
“Ay, no.” She turned it into a laugh at her own expense, wide open, nothing held back. “I hit this poor man.”
“You hit him.”
“With a stick! We were running the fight choreo in the corridor and he walked into my mark and I got him across the shoulder.” She put a hand flat on the bodyguard’s arm. “Kuya, tell him. Tell him I have apologized.”
“She apologized,” the man said. He was still not entirely with them. “It was the shoulder.”
“It was the neck,” Hal said.
The corridor was quiet for about a second and a half.
“It was the neck,” the bodyguard agreed, sounding surprised about it.
“You want ice for that?” Hal held up his cup. “I have got a whole cup of it and I am not going to finish it. That is not a joke, take the ice, my grandmother would come out of the ground.”
And that was how it went. The bodyguard took the ice.
Hal fished the cubes out into a folded napkin from the craft table with the unhurried competence of a man who had wrapped a lot of things in a lot of warehouses, and pressed the napkin into the man’s hand, and told him to hold it there for ten minutes and not to sleep on that side tonight, and the bodyguard thanked him twice and went off down the corridor to find his principal.
Then Hal and Mina were alone in the executive wing with a prop cart.
“Choreography,” Hal said.
“Choreography.”
“Huh.” He looked at the cart. Foam swords. A plastic bolo. Breakaway bottles. And a gap where two rattan sticks had been, which he had already worked out, because Hal Rivera had spent nine years being paid to notice when a count came up short. “Baby, how many are in the fight scene?”
“Twelve of us.”
“Fourteen.” He nodded at the cart. “That is four foam swords, one bolo, a dozen bottles, and it was two sticks.”
Mina looked at him.