The Cutting Room by Laurence Klavan Page B

stood. Then, practically grabbing me by my shirtfront, he pulled me quickly through before anyone else could follow.
    I was passed from this big bouncer to a wiry, weasly one. Holding my arm at the muscle, he traveled with me through a revolving door into the lobby.
    There, it was strangely but wonderfully silent.
    “Come with me,” he said seriously, in English.
    We rode up in an empty elevator, tinny rock and roll playing, as if from far away.
    “Movie star?” I asked knowingly.
    He looked at me with pitying disbelief.
    “Soccer,” he said.
    “Soccer?”
    Shocked, I just shrugged. Europe certainly had a different standard for celebrity. At a top floor, he led me down a long vermilion hallway, until we reached the last of only three suites. He knocked once, then twice, then three times.
    Something about the code made me start to sweat.
    Suddenly, the door was flung open. My companion moved artfully aside, and I was yanked within by a thick fist attached to my belt.
    The door was closed behind me, the bouncer standing at my back. I faced a room of five muscular men, all of whom I thought I recognized from the postcards sold on the street. Where was the rest of their team?
    They looked at me, then at one another, with small and unkind smiles. One spoke Spanish to his teammate, who replied. Then another spoke to me, in very fast Catalan, and I only shrugged.
“No comprende.”
    This made all of them laugh. Then one nodded to the bouncer behind me. Very roughly, I was frisked. Immediately, of course, he found my gun.
    The bouncer chucked it to one of the soccer players. I grabbed for it, but it flew past my fingers. Not adept with his own hands, the player bobbled it, and it fell on the dark blue carpet. I bent to retrieve it, and immediately they all stood and swarmed around the weapon.
    One kicked it away from my hand. It slid to the foot of a second, who tapped it to a third. This one lifted it with the tip of his shoe. It went flying into the chest of the fourth, who butted it back down to the floor. As the game went on, they laughed and kept crying,
“No comprende! No comprende!”
    With each kick, I had tried to reclaim my possession. At last, I found myself, panting, on all fours, beside it, surrounded by the team. Each eyed me, hungrily, as if I would be the next ball they bounced.
    I looked for any avenue of escape. Rising, I turned right—but expertly, player number one blocked my path, crouched, and ran in place. So I spun around, toward the front door. The bouncer, weaving more imprecisely, was covering it.
    I cut left, only to be stymied by another player, who—adhering to the rules—avoided using his arms. He brought his knee up forcefully into my groin. The pain propelled me backward, right into the extended foot of a third player, who, pushing in the back of my knee, sent me crashing to the floor, from whence I had come.
    I lay there, reeling from my effort and agonized by my injury. Then an interior door of the suite opened. The players turned. Another man entered the room.
    “Jorge,” one of them said, in greeting.
    He was tall, dark, and very handsome. I definitely recognized his face from the postcards. He looked down at me with an oddly familiar kind of disdain.
    “What kind of movie producer carries a gun?” he said.
    He had been handed the weapon by one of his sycophant colleagues. From his cocksure and impatient manner, I figured Jorge must be the Ben Williams of Spain. I slowly found my feet in front of him. At least he spoke Spanish and not just Catalan.
    “I guess you haven’t been to America very often,” I said.
    This made him smirk and so allowed his teammates to smirk, as well. Butt last, Jorge placed the gun inside his belt, like a soccer player playing sheriff. I thought about how Ronald Reagan’s famous appearance as “the Gipper” in
Knute Rockne, All American
had been missing from the film’s prints for years, and had only been restored recently. Some kind of legal