After a small delay, as if she needed time to process the fact that he had actually said something clever, she laughed. It was a rather metallic, rat-a-tat sound, but it seemed genuine enough. She had a hard, almost scary edge to her. He liked it.

“Whitney Talbot,” she said. “I’m here to-”

“I know. You follow her everywhere? To the bathroom and stuff?”

“I let her have her bathroom breaks in privacy.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“What?”

“I mean, this soundstage, it’s a big space. And it might seem secure, but who knows? I mean, you’re here to protect her, right?”

“Right,” she said, after a beat.

“If I were you, I’d never let her out of my sight. You never know what she’s going to be up to.” He turned his head to the side, in case his profile jogged her memory. Pride vanquished, he said: “The Boom Boom Room?”

She looked puzzled. “Is that one of the strip clubs still operating on the Block?”

“No, it was a television show, about kids put in a school-within-a-school on special detention, kind of like The Breakfast Club – oh never mind. A lot of people watched it, back in the day.”

“I didn’t watch a lot of television, growing up. I was kind of outdoorsy.” She said it nicely, apologetically, not in the snobby way some people had. He almost believed her, except he didn’t believe anyone who claimed not to watch television. Who didn’t watch television? It was like… not brushing your teeth, or refusing to shower, odd to the point of being uncivilized. Everybody watched television. There had been a time, around season four of Boom Boom, when he couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without being recognized. He hadn’t always enjoyed the attention, but he hadn’t been stupid enough to wish it away, and he had been genuinely surprised when it stopped. Since then, it was as if he couldn’t get quite enough oxygen in his blood, as if he were living at 75 percent. He had plenty of money, he had been smart that way, but his financial stability was scant comfort. He wanted another success in this business, and to get that, he had to pretend to be in love with some twenty-year-old twat. He hated her. He needed her. Well, that’s why they called it acting.

Dinner was wrapping up. He couldn’t help noticing there was a lot of leftover pizza. He wondered if he should take it home. No, it wouldn’t be any less fattening at breakfast tomorrow, only colder. He wondered if he should try to take the blonde home, but he supposed she had to stick close to Selene. Besides, she hadn’t seemed terribly interested. No, he would just go home and get into bed, read a few pages of the latest Robert Harris. He had tried to get Flip and Ben to read Harris, engage them in the rules of alterna-history, but to no avail. They seemed to think that because Napoleon had, in the end, forced the divorce between his brother and Betsy Patterson, they could remove her from history with no real effect. But what about Betsy’s son? You couldn’t just eliminate people from history. That was a kind of murder.

The PAs were calling them back to work, but Johnny spotted Lottie huddled with the director and showed her the magazine.

“Look what was in my trailer.”

Lottie glanced at the photos. “It’s not so bad, Johnny. Besides, it can’t hurt to be considered in the same class as Mel Gibson and Alec Baldwin.”

“That’s not the point. Someone sent it to me, to unnerve me.”

“You’ve got to start locking your door,” Lottie said. “I thought, after the Nair-”

“It came in the mail. And it proves the Nair wasn’t an isolated incident. You know who’s behind this. Why don’t you do something about it?”

“Selene’s got a bodyguard now,” Lottie said. “She can’t go anywhere without being seen.”

“Well, maybe the bodyguard is in on it, then. Someone’s doing her dirty work. We can’t go on like this. She doesn’t want to be here. I hate working with her. How are we going to get through this season, much less another one if we’re lucky enough to get picked up?”

“Johnny.” She sighed, weary as his mother, although she was several years younger and barely came to his collarbone. “Let’s just get this scene and let everyone go home, okay?”

The stand-ins had cleared the set, and he and Selene took their places. In this scene, Mann had brought Betsy to his home in twenty-first-century Baltimore – although, damn Flip and Ben, he still didn’t know how – to persuade her that he really was from the future, that it was possible for him to know her fate. Tomorrow, they would go on location in Green Mount Cemetery, and he would show Betsy her own tombstone. He wasn’t crazy about that scene, which seemed unduly influenced by the graveside scene in A Christmas Carol – and the Mr. Magoo version at that. But that was Ben and Flip for you. They hadn’t read Dickens, but they knew their Mr. Magoo. Today, however, they were in the Mann family rowhouse, and Betsy was supposed to be overwhelmed by the modern ingenuity of the La-Z-Boy recliner. Was this stuff really as sly and ironic as everyone else seemed to think? Or was it stupid and vapid? You couldn’t tell everything from the words on the page. So much depended on the editing, the look. And the performances, although Ben and Flip seemed to have lost sight of that as well.

“Quiet on the set. Sound speed. Rolling… action.”

Selene, in character, gave him a flirtatious look. Sure enough, garlic fumes were everywhere. He gave her one back, topping it with a wink, and they ran their lines, building up to their big kiss in the La-Z-Boy. Johnny Tampa could kiss, he knew that much about himself. There was no one he couldn’t kiss, under any circumstances. He could tongue a dog, a real one, or even French a potato if that was what he had to do. He was a great kisser, on camera. Off camera, it didn’t interest him that much. He preferred it impersonal because he had grown tired of girls staring at his face, as if they couldn’t believe they were with Johnny Tampa. And then there were those who hadn’t known they were with Johnny Tampa, and that had been even worse.

“Cut,” yelled the director, who then walked over to Johnny. He lowered his voice, his style when giving notes. “Lose the wink, okay, Johnny? It’s way too lecherous for Mann.” As usual, Wes had no notes for Selene.

The crew was too professional to sigh, but Johnny could feel everyone slumping. After all, they were now three hours over the day. Meanwhile, Selene, who had set him up to flub the scene, could barely suppress her smile as she threw herself back into the La-Z-Boy.

Chapter 20

It was Tess’s nature to be suspicious of anything that came too easily, and finding Alicia Farmer fell into that category. With Lottie’s piece of paper in hand, all Tess had to do was drive to the address listed and wait for someone to show up. Was Lottie trying to manipulate her? “Trust no one” was beginning to seem a very apt motto for this job.

At least the address itself was surprising, a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Baltimore. Tess had assumed that someone in the television business would have settled into one of the hip, emerging areas favored by the postcollege crowd. Alicia Farmer lived in a small brick bungalow on a large, irregular plot, a diamond shape that looked as if it had been created by accident when the street was widened a few years back. The result was that the house sat slightly apart from the others, lonely and isolated, like the first kid to go in the stew pot in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

No one answered her knock, so Tess took a quick walk around the house, which looked well tended, although a new deck seemed to have been abandoned in midconstruction. She then took up residence on the bench at the bus stop across the street. Sitting in a car for long periods of time caught the attention of nosy neighbors, but one could sit at a bus stop all afternoon and no one would notice.