Games of State - Tom Clancy [1]
Oil could stain the relics, so the tall, slender brunette wiped her hands on her School of Visual Arts sweatshirt before picking up the authentic Sturmabteilung dagger she'd come for. Her large, dark eyes shifted from the silver-tipped brown metal sheath to the brown hilt. In a circle near the top were the silver letters SA. Below them were a German eagle and a swastika. Because of the tight fit, she slowly withdrew the nine-inch weapon and examined it.
It was heavy and horrible. Jody wondered how many lives it had ended. How many wives it had widowed. How many mothers had cried because of it.
Jody turned it over. The words Alles für Deutschland were etched in black on one side. When Jody had first seen the knife the night before, during rehearsals, a veteran German actor in the cast had told her it meant All for Germany.
"To live in Germany back then, " the man had said, "you were required to give everything to Hitler. Your industry, your life, your humanity. " He'd leaned close to her. "If your lover whispered something against the Reich, you had to betray her. What's more, you had to feel proud about betraying her. "
"Thompson, the knife!"
Director Larry Lankford's high voice ripped Jody from her reflection. She pushed the dagger back into the sheath and hurried to the trailer door.
"Sorry!" she yelled. "I didn't know you were waiting!" She jumped down the steps, rushed past the guard, and ran around the trailer.
"You didn't know?" Lankford yelled. "We're waiting to the tune of two thousand dollars a minute!" The director's chin rose from his red ascot and he began clapping. "That's thirty-three dollars," he said with a clap, "sixty-six dollars, ninety-nine dollars--"
"I'm coming," Jody panted.
"--one hundred and thirty-two--"
Jody felt foolish for having believed Assistant Director Hollis Arlenna, who'd said that Lankford wouldn't be ready to shoot for another ten minutes. As a production assistant had warned her, Arlenna was a little man with a big ego, and he fed it by making other people feel small.
As Jody neared, the AD stepped between her and the director. Breathing heavily, Jody stopped and handed him the dagger. He avoided her eyes as he turned and jogged the short distance to the director.
"Thank you," Lankford said affably as the young man handed him the blade.
While the director showed his actor how to hand the dagger to his son, the assistant director backed away from them. He didn't look at Jody, and stopped well short of where she was standing.
Why am I not surprised? she thought.
After less than a week on location, Jody already knew how the film business worked. If you were smart and ambitious, people tried to make you look stupid and clumsy so you weren't a threat. And if you screwed up, people distanced themselves from you. It was probably that way in any business, though movie people seemed to have made a bitchy art form of it.
As Jody walked back to the prop trailer, she thought about how much she missed the support system she and her friends had had back at Hofstra. But that was college and this was the real world. She wanted to be a film director, and she was lucky to have landed this internship. She was determined, to come through it stronger and wiser. And as pushy as the rest of them, if that was what it took to survive.
As Jody reached the trailer, the elderly German guard gave her a reassuring wink.
"These bullies can't yell at the stars, so they yell at you," he said. "I wouldn't worry about it."
"I won't, Mr. Buba," Jody lied, smiling. She picked