Free Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell

black eyes glittering in the darkness behind it. A small dry voice spoke to me in Italian.
    “Mi dispiace,” I said. “Non parlo l’italiano bene.” It was one of my more useful phrases. I slipped the QED letter through the crack and it was drawn away. After a moment the voice spoke again.
    “Inglese?”
    “Americano. “
    “Triste.”
    There was an insult, if you like. However, the door did open at this point. A small froglike woman stood on the sill, swaddled crown to toe in dusty black. She stepped to one side and beckoned me in. I couldn’t recall how to ask which floor so I just started up the stairs.
    The QED letterhead appeared again, taped to a door on the fourth floor, the top. I rapped on the door and there was no answer, but the catch slipped and the door creaked open a bit, so I went in. A thirtyish woman was sitting behind a butcher-block table in what looked like a rudimentary kitchen, with a small espresso pot and a cup on the table in front of her.
    “Hello,” I said. “I am the film editor from New York.”
    “Non parlo l‘inglese, signore.”
    Terrific. She was dressed like a doll, in a tiny white dress with an enormous red bow at the waist, bows on her shoes, a red bow of lipstick where her mouth must be. She had a sort of flapper haircut, with flat dark bangs chopped level with her eye sockets. After she had spoken she smiled widely, a bright empty smile which suggested that no one was at home behind it. I recalled the business at the airport with some discomfort. She looked like she was doped to the gills.
    The smile ended abruptly, like a light bulb burning out. She turned to her left and called.
    “Dario?”
    No reply. The woman turned back to me, smiled again more briefly, and took a sip from her coffee, leaving a crimson smear on the rim of the cup. I dropped my bag and strolled around the table into the rest of the apartment, a sort of attic space with many alcoves coming off the central area like bones from the spine of a fish. The ceilings were angled and low, and there were skylights here and there. Toward the rear there was a door that looked as if it might go somewhere, and I opened it, resisting an impulse to jump to one side as I did so.
    The first thing I noticed was a Steenbeck flatbed against the rear wall, a world-class editing machine, its presence a reassuring sign that someone was actually planning to cut a film in this place. I did wonder how they ever got it in, though; it was about the size of a Volkswagen and far and away bigger than any of the doors. Stacked on the floor around it were reels of film and sixteen-millimeter mag stock, and a couple of empty bins.
    There were also two people in the room. A squat frizzy-headed man was operating the flatbed, which I saw he had misthreaded. I also noticed that the image on the screen was negative, which meant that they were playing with original footage and probably scratching it all to hell. The second man lolled on the bed in a tangle of unwound film, which he was busily smearing with fingerprints.
    “Che cazzo fai?” I screamed, another useful phrase which is an impolite way of asking people what the hell they are doing.
    The man on the bed raised himself on an elbow. He seemed a bit of a dandy: pleated pants, silk shirt, a sort of ascot at his throat.
    “We cut zee film now,” he said languidly.
    “Not like this you don’t,” I said. I went to the flatbed and unplugged it and ripped the plug off the end of the cord. This got everyone’s attention. The man at the flatbed leaned back with his mouth hanging open and the other sat all the way up on the edge of the bed.
    “Work print,” I said. “Nobody touches anything again until there is a work print. Do you understand?”
    It was clear that they did not.
    “Work print,” I screamed. “Goddamn.”
    I went back into the other room and dug the manual out of my bag. There is a useful section in the back which translates basic terminology into different