The door banged open and Fisher walked into the studio wearing a dark suit and limping slightly. He pulled off his sunglasses and stood for a moment, framed in the Los Angeles sunlight for one moment before the door closed behind him.
“Where were you?” asked Caplan as Fisher approached the set. “We were almost ready to get rolling without you. I tried calling like four times.”
“Three times,” said Fisher. “I got your calls.”
“Why didn’t you answer them?”
“I was momentarily tied up.”
“Well, you’re going to need to get out of that suit. We need you to be ready for action in two minutes.”
Fisher wordlessly pulled off his expensive jacket, which Caplan could just now see was slightly ripped. There was a small red stain on his lapel, too. Fisher fished something out of his waistband and put it on a nearby table.
“What the hell? Is that a gun?”
Fisher looked at him like he’d never heard a question so naïve. “Of course, it is,” he said. Then he added, “Thanks for reminding me.” He reached over and picked it up and did something Caplan couldn’t quite see. A magazine fell out into his hand. He did something else Caplan couldn’t see. A stray round popped out of the chamber. Fisher palmed this, too.
“It was loaded?”
Fisher gave him a withering look.
“Where the hell have you been?” Asha walked up. “We’re rolling in one minute. Brent, get on the set. Fisher, you come with me.”
Somehow, despite having been away all weekend – supposedly out of the country – Fisher walked onto the set minutes later and immediately assumed character. He executed his lines flawlessly, even though Asha had handed him his script mere moments before.
“He told me he glanced at it this past weekend, but didn’t really get a chance to get into it,” Asha told Caplan.
“Did he say why?”
“He demurred like always. Some hints about a secret life fighting crime or whatever. We all know it’s nonsense.”
“I thought it was being a secret agent.”
“Yeah, whatever, Same difference.”
“No, it’s not. You ought to know. We make action movies for a living. We should know the difference between Batman and Maxwell Smart.”
They watched as Fisher incapacitated several stunt doubles. As he stepped over their prone bodies, a starlet dressed in an evening gown walked into the set. Within seconds, Fisher had removed his shirt, revealing his muscled back.
“Cut,” yelled Asha. She walked over to explain the next scene to Fisher, and as she did so she noticed what appeared to be a scar on Fisher’s back. Having worked with him for several months now on a project that required him to film roughly twenty percent of scenes without his shirt, Asha knew the scar was new. She told Caplan about it later.
“Do you think he’s taken to cutting himself just in order to show up here with cool scars?”
“I don’t know. This guy is weird. The lengths he goes to just to maintain this secret agent persona. You’d think at a certain point he would just admit it was all a joke and that he’s just covering up the fact that he’s socially awkward – and doing a bad job of it I might add.”
They were standing outside the studio smoking cigarettes and watching the sunset. Fisher and the others had all gone home for the day. Fisher had mumbled something darkly about going out of town that night, but said he’d be back by morning if he was back at all.
“Yeah. It’s sad.”
“Yeah. I mean, you’d think of all the people you could tell about your secret agent act, it would be a bunch of people who act in spy films for a living.”
“You’d think.”
The man behind the desk took his sunglasses off. His face betrayed no emotion. He laid his sunglasses on the desk and raised his hand, as if indicating that the man standing by the door could speak now.
“It’s working,” he said. “They suspect nothing. They have no idea.”
The man behind the desk nodded. “Good,” he said. “Good job. You’ve pulled it off, then. Clever. I half expected this to blow up in your face. I never would have thought to try it.”
“They’re so busy making fun of me for pretending to be a secret agent that they’ll never know the truth.”
“Who would have guessed that an actor who does a poor job pretending to be a spy on weekends would be the perfect cover?”
“There’s also the benefit of getting to listen to the ideas these screenwriters come up with. They’re always thinking up things we’d never come up with on our own.”
“There’s always that. Where would we be without them?”
“I dunno. Probably still testing LSD on pigeons I guess.”
The man behind the desk said nothing.
“Can I go?” asked Fisher.
The man behind the desk nodded. Fisher saluted and walked out. When the door was fully closed, the man behind the desk put his sunglasses back on. But before he did so, he grinned.