see,” Annie said. “We’re dealing with an ego.”
“Like the CN Tower.”
Annie’s spritzer arrived.
“Maybe I’m ahead of you on this, kiddo,” I said.“Cam’s on the Festival of Festivals board. That’s the reason for the questions?”
“Him on the board is last year’s news.”
“Yeah? What’s the latest poop?”
Annie held her wine glass by the stem and took a tiny sip.
She said, “Charles’s fronting a counter-festival. I don’t know who’s actually booking the films. Guess we’ll find out more at the press conference. Anyway, Charles’s name is on top of the information releases, and his office is listed as the festival’s headquarters. He resigned from the Festival of Festivals board in the spring and started this new deal. The Alternate Film Festival it’s called.”
“Cam, it sounds like, is going head to head with Helga Stephenson.”
“Almost,” Annie said. “The Alternate starts Sunday night and runs to Saturday. That makes a fairly consistent overlap with the Festival of Festivals.”
“Enterprise like that, it doesn’t strike me as one of the great and wise commercial decisions.”
“Helga isn’t particularly bothered,” Annie said. “Actually, Charles is going at it pretty intelligently. Keeping everything small-scale but quite interesting. He’s using one theatre only, the Eglinton, which is the nicest in the city if you ask me, and he’s got a festival theme of sorts.”
“What sort?”
“Mildly radical, I guess you could say,” Annie said. “Movies from Third World countries, movies black people made in Chicago on small budgets. Minorities stuff. Chicanos in New Mexico, like that.”
I said, “Right up Cam’s alley.”
“Well, tell me. What I need’s background. How come a criminal lawyer’s doing a movie festival?”
Don and Karen didn’t care to know the answer to Annie’s question. They checked out of our conversation and returned to the dilemma of their Sunday-morning movie. Annie took another miniature taste from her spritzer. She’d made a half-dozen passes at the drink, and the level of wine, soda and melting ice hadn’t dropped a quarter-inch. She was thirty-five years old and hadn’t learned to drink like a man.
I said, “Cam’s speciality is minorities. In his law practice I’m talking about. People he acts for, they’re, oh, Jamaican guys charged in stick-ups. Hong Kong kids doing extortion over in Chinatown. What else? Sikh bombers. Those are Cam’s clients. He defended the Moonies last year.”
“Moonies?” Annie said. “They don’t go with the rest.”
“Just because a group is rich and diabolical doesn’t mean it can’t be a minority.”
“The Reverend Sun Myung Moon aside,” Annie said, “your friend Cam sounds okay. Altruistic I might describe him.”
“Some of my colleagues at the criminal bar say Cam’s the only lawyer in town can afford his clientele.”
“Well, well, aren’t we snide at the criminal bar.”
“Cam isn’t, by the way,” I said, “my friend.”
“No?”
“He thinks I’m frivolous.”
“Now I’m really panting to meet Cameron Charles.”
I said, “The point about Cam affording the Jamaicans and the Sikhs and the Hong Kong kids, it’s usually Legal Aid pays their bills. Pays little, I probably told you before, and pays late. And Cam—here’s the real point—he’s conspicuously wealthy.”
“Not from the law, I take it.”
“From Dad and Granddad. Those signs on construction sites all over the city are theirs. CharlesCorp. They build condos.”
Annie jotted a couple of lines on the notebook’s blank pages. The ice was melting more rapidly in her glass, and the level of liquid was approaching the overflow mark.
I said, “This is probably totally unfair to Cam, but I think of him and I think of the magazine piece Tom Wolfe wrote a lot of years ago, the article about Leonard Bernstein and all the New York people with the money that took up the Black Panthers.”
“I didn’t get to Tom Wolfe till Bonfire of the Vanities.”
“Radical chic, Wolfe called it,” I said. “These upper-class Manhattan liberals—this is how it goes—they had so much money they could afford to feel guilty about how lousy it is to be black in America. So who do they identify themselves in public with? The most radical and maybe violent edge of the black movement. The Panthers. But it was their money that made the posture possible.”
“The way you’re putting it, that comparison, Cameron Charles sounds like a dabbler.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s consistent, give Cam that. His clients, for one thing, and a couple of years back, he went on some kind of task force to El Salvador. And he’s in the Globe every five minutes with letters about the Palestinians, the Tamils, black South Africans. All of a piece, the minority thing.”
“That makes the Alternate Festival make sense.”
“There you go, honeybun,” I said. “That the background stuff you were looking for?”
“And so charmingly done.”
Annie’s drink was trickling down the sides of her wine glass and soaking the paper coaster underneath. She looked at the pocket watch on the chain around her neck and read the time.
She said, “Charles’s press conference and lunch is getting going about now.”
“Beats me how you can read that thing upside down.”
“Practice,” Annie said. “First couple of months I had it, I used to turn up an hour early or an hour late for appointments.”
“Where’s the lunch?”
“It’s a press conference too.”
“Matter of priorities.”
“Both are steps from here.”
Annie dropped her notebook into a cloth shoulder bag knitted in greens and blues. The notebook disappeared. Prince Edward Island would have disappeared into the shoulder bag.
I said, “Whole world’s steps from here. You have that impression?”
Don and Karen had attained the moment of decision.
“No changing at the last moment,” Karen said to Don.“Once I mark it, this is final. The David Lynch, okay?”
