We went through a pair of twenty-six-foot doors and into a battleship-gray soundstage that was being rebuilt to resemble the interior of a Mayan ziggurat. The doors were open to let in the air and the light. Above and around us dozens of men and women in shorts and T-shirts clung like spiders to scaffolding as they attached vacu-formed plastic panels to a wooden frame. The panels had been cast to look like great stone blocks. There were the sounds of hammers and saws and screwguns and the smell of plastic cement and paint, and somewhere a woman laughed. It was warming as the day wore on, and some of the men had their shirts off.

A heavy man with a Vandyke beard and a roll of architectural plans noticed Peter and started toward us. Peter frowned and said, “Nick, T.J., gimme some space here, huh?”

Nick gestured toward the beard and T.J. went over and intercepted him. Blocking backs.

We turned left past a couple of guys building something that looked like a sacrificial altar and squeezed between two backdrop flats and over a tangle of electrical cables into a little clearing that had been set up as a sort of office with a desk and a phone and a coffee machine. There was another Webcor candy machine next to the desk. Peter slammed it with his elbow and a PayDay candy bar dropped out. Dani said, “Peter has a candy machine like this on all of his sets. It’s part of his contract.” She said it like a press release.

Peter said, “Go find Langston, willya, Dani? Tell’m we’re hiding back here and ready to rock.”

Dani squeezed back between the flats and disappeared into the darkness. Nick hung back behind the flats, still not liking me.

Peter said, “Man, I can’t take a shit, the pogues aren’t after me about something. That’s why we gotta hide.” He tore the wrapper off the candy, stuffed most of the bar into his mouth, and dropped the wrapper onto the floor. I wondered how often he brushed.

I said, “Tell me how you met.”

“I was at USC when I met her. I was casting a film and put up flyers for actors and Karen called for a reading. It was a ripoff of those biker flicks in the sixties. Eighteen minutes, synced sound, black and white. You wanna see it?”

“Is Karen in it?”

“No. I didn’t give her the part.”

“Then I don’t need to see it.”