She would not call him Maestro.
It would have been the smart thing for Celia to say on her first visit to the studio, even if Lucio Frazzi would have demurred. But at the last second, she balked.
We're making midnight movies, not a damn opera.
Instead, she half-bowed, half-curtsied, unaware of what was appropriate on this side of the Atlantic. Frazzi waved it away, studying her with his one good eye.
The middle-aged director was shorter than she'd thought, but no less commanding. A natty Bohemian with steely hair poking out from beneath his black flat cap, he mumbled a quick something at Rosso.
Rosso replied, his sneer melting to a full-on grimace. Since the go-between had picked her up from the Peretola airport two hours ago, he'd asked her to refer to Frazzi as Maestro no less than a dozen times. Almost as many times as she'd had to slap his hand off her ass.
Celia knew it was going to be a long two weeks.
This was Italian Hollywood, after all.
But it was a chance to go from Z-movies to B-s.
Alphabet climbing.
And if it meant she'd get to knee some wannabe in the balls, so much the better.
"The maestro welcomes you to Tiberius Studio. If there's anything you need to make yourself more comfortable, you ask."
Celia glanced around the workspace. Beside the heavy tables and racks upon racks of latex, plasters, and paints, they had thrown an ill-used cot in the corner and a battered nightstand for her things. Her tour had only revealed the set mock-ups for The Outside, the odd workspace, and prop storage. Hers was the first sleeping arrangement she'd seen.
On the ride over, she'd tried hardlining Rosso about getting a hotel. He'd only laughed, inviting her to spend two hours in a suite downtown.
This is how we do things, he'd said.
This is how we make the magic happen.
This is a boy's club.
"It's an honor, Mr. Frazzi."
Rosso winced, not bothering to translate.
Frazzi said something else and chuckled, his one good eye twinkling beside the black eyepatch that obscured the other.
If you'd listened to Nonna back in Dayton, you'd be speaking Italian right alongside them.
Rosso snorted. "You're short. Is good."
Prickling, Celia started to say something, but Frazzi raised a silencing hand, gesturing at the workspace, the molds, the latex. Rosso translated. "You know why you're here?"
As if she'd caught a flight to Florence on a whim.
As if she couldn't be bothered to keep a thought in her pretty little head.
"You need help with the gore effects."
"But why?"
She blushed, hating herself for it. "Dario liked my work."
Rosso shook his head. "Karina McNall. She quit."
At the mention of her name, Frazzi tore off his cap and punted a wooden stool, sending it crashing against the metal racks.
Celia winced. "What?"
"Do you know nothing?"
She had seen most of Frazzi's oeuvre, admittedly only at midnight double features. Seven Tombstones and a Raven. The Mansion by the Graveyard. Don't Torment a Platypus. The Grandfather of Gore was a legend, at least among a certain crowd.
It's why you're here, right?
Karina McNall had been the lead actor in Frazzi's last two movies, the current production concluding the de facto trilogy. Doors to Beyond, or something like that. She was blonde, gorgeous, and the sole competent actor, an American the director used for international appeal.
And the things she'd put up with: bleeding eyes, lost fingers, torn throat. She'd been thrown from a roof, buried in a coffin full of worms, and had a maggot tornado blown at her. The woman must have had monastic patience, and if even she had finally quit--
"Her scenes. They were never finished." Rosso threw a sympathetic glance back at Frazzi, who wrung his cap between his hands. "Including her death."
"My condolences. Why?"
The director murmured and waved his hand.
"She--did not care for the script changes." Rosso said the last like an inside joke, running a hand through his longish hair, but no one smiled. "Which is why he needs you."
Frazzi gestured to the worktable at the end of the room. As Celia drew nearer, she saw them.
Binders full of photographs. The actress shot at every conceivable angle. Long shots. Close-ups. Body-specific.
Her chin. Her forehead. Her teeth.
As she rifled through them, many centered only on the eyes.
Her migraine thundered to life.
No.
Impossible.
The director rambled to his assistant for almost a full minute. She only caught two words.
Savini.
Ohio.
"You will make a mask. A cast, both so lifelike as to deceive the eye. And the final set-piece--"
"What she wouldn't do?" Her mouth was on autopilot, her mind already reeling.
For the first time, Frazzi smiled.
Rosso sighed. "To throw herself from the balcony. Impale herself on a fencepost."
"That's not so bad."
"Between her legs."
"Oh."
Fucking men.
"And skewer her eyes on tree branches. She didn't care for the--penetration."
I should mace you.
"You want me to make a cast of someone's face. Someone who's not here."
"And mask. You are an artist, no?"
"It can't be done."
"Dario says differently. That you are a sorceress with the brush."
Both men stared at her. She felt her career tottering.
Celia chewed her lower lip thoughtfully.
This is it, kid. Your big break.
You want to stay in Dayton forever?
"When can I start?"
* * *
They set her workspace up with a projector and a middle-aged operator, whose three functions appeared to be ogling her, chain smoking, and feeding reels into the machine.
Celia watched the rough footage with notepad in hand, the faintest hints of a migraine still churning. She'd already begun sketching the models for McNall, breaking down the contours of the actor's high cheekbones and proud chin, but her eyes--
There was something elusive there, some raw quality in the aquamarine that compelled attention even in the unpolished clips. She could see why Lucio had been so taken with her. Even Celia was developing a fascination.
The plot, for what little interest had been paid to it, appeared to revolve around a resurrected warlock, a requisite portal, and Karina their sole descendant. Frazzi's daughter, India, played the supporting role with a nepotistic amount of screen time, and Celia was shocked that it appeared to be set in Louisiana.
Had they been stateside?
There were plenty of night shots, characters with pancaked gore looming from the shadows in crumbling cemeteries. The dead warlock drove people to madness, then rammed them against protruding nails, glass, and even in one memorable scene a religious icon. Throats were slit, eyes gouged, and skulls somehow crushed by hand. A character vomited up what appeared to be their entire chest cavity in a stunning tribute to Frazzi's disregard for anatomy.
The effects were fabulously grotesque, and the disturbances piled on.
What's more, Celia was startled at how many close-ups there were of the actors' eyes.
Staring.
Reacting.
Glaring.
Screaming.
Without a narrative to follow, the film began to grind her down.
Some of the scenes provided were soundless, others in full-on ADR. That wasn't uncommon in Italian films, she knew. Scenes were shot in silence so the crew could tear apart and build sets, saving cost and time, but what surprised her was the resultant lack of effort. Mouths flapped as if the actors were gumming peanut butter, and she wondered if they were even trying to say their lines.
Out of all of them, McNall was the only one who didn't seem to be phoning it in.
But the discordant elements grew stranger. In some exterior shots, random animal sounds had been added, monkeys screeching in the bayou. Some of the signs in the interior shots were clear fabrications when studied, the most obvious being DO NOT ENTRY. Characters operated on a bizarre dream-logic that sent them careening off in the least likely directions.
Rather than making the film absurd, however, she found it unnerving. The film had the disorienting effect of a nightmare, the sense that something awful was happening without being able to describe why.
She wasn't--
Celia glanced back at the operator, who had produced a bottle of Moretti and was starting to replay the opening scenes. She was about to ask him to stop before she glimpsed something beyond him.
Blonde hair, drifting past in the darkness.
The door shutting behind her.
Of course Celia recognized the woman.
She'd spent the last two hours studying that face.
Rosso bustled into the room through the same door, waving a hand at the operator to kill the projector. "You have seen it?"
"Yeah." Head pounding, Celia tried to be objective. "The eye gouges in the hotel and crypts are a little sloppy, and India's cast for the organ-hemorrhaging is awful. If you'd be willing to reshoot, I can clean those up, make--"
"Do not tell Frazzi." Scowling, Rosso glanced behind him. "Perhaps India--"
She walked him through the gag, refining the cast and scaling back the viscera. "I mean, it's why you brought me here, right?"
He stared at her for a moment, considering. "How do you feel?"
"Migraine." A dull thunder ground against her temples like broken glass, and she popped two aspirin in front of him, dry swallowing. "Discomfited. Kind of gross."
"Ah. The beauty of the Maestro."
"The director. Who seems to think that the human body consists of ninety-percent red paste." Celia's father had been a medic in the Korean War, and some of the keepsakes he'd stored in the attic had fascinated her, even as a child. Bashing Frazzi's imagery wasn't going to further her career options, but there had been something so off-putting about the violence, so extreme that it was either mock it or accept a week of sleepless nights. "You guys realize there aren't monkeys in Louisiana?"
"Cute. The little conductor, telling the maestro how to play." Rosso pressed closer, looming over her on the stool. Trying not to gag at the overpowering stench of Brut wafting off his leather jacket, Celia resisted the urge to retreat. "Do not question. His is the unsettling touch. Disparate elements seep into his films like slow poison. Out of sequence, they are mere sufferings, but when placed in line--alchemy."
Celia knew that Rosso was storing this up for later. Her at groin height, looking up at him with wide dark eyes.
You're a long way from home.
"Whatever. I thought you said McNall quit?"
His smirk faltered. "Hm?"
"The blonde lady. Could have sworn I saw her leave just as you came in."
Just like that, the smile was back. "I saw no one."
* * *
Celia presented her third effort in the best possible light, her temples grinding as she awaited the Maestro's arrival. The need for approval chafed her, but it wasn't her money, and she'd hitched herself to the director's train. To the stars or off a cliff, she'd be right alongside him.
The night before had been restless, her headache never really ceasing. With the crew leaving after midnight, Celia had been left alone in the grand studio, the empty spaces a warren of shadows amongst dead sets.
Unable to sleep, she'd walked the building, traipsing through the haunted hotel's lobby, Karina's bedroom, the crypt. The balcony and colossal protruding tree loomed, the facade of the Queen Anne hotel tottering over the white picket fence, and she studied this most of all, the encroaching forest painted against the far wall, fake trees dotting the yard for perspective.
The gag itself wouldn't be hard, she knew. Once Frazzi had filmed the jump, they'd put the actor on a bicycle seat drilled into the post, supporting their weight while remaining invisible beneath the gown. Celia had already visualized the execution, the camera zooming into the jagged wooden edge, the branches jabbing into the cast and pushing its eyes aside like pesky jelly. Spasming and kicking, the actor would be a three-point ruin as the tiny hoses behind the mask spewed a fountain of scarlet.
Savini of Ohio.
But she'd had the uncomfortable feeling of being watched. Not hokey, as if the dead warlock from the film was still strutting the boards, but rather--something else.
Someone else.
She'd kept imagining blonde hair drifting around corners, wafting at the edges of her vision.
And the eyes.
The first two masks she'd done were garbage. She'd recognized her failure immediately and attributed her error to the earlier photos. Some of them, she swore, were slightly altered, different than the film. There was no personality, the mix of intrigue and vulnerability that made Karina McNall so absorbing, and the frustration had stifled her. They were on a schedule, and needed her to produce. But this--
Celia knew gold when she saw it. A lifelike representation of the face that now haunted her hours.
Nothing could have prepared her for the director's reaction.
Lucio Frazzi bulled into the room. Rosso trailed him like an ill-smelling kite. The maestro spit two words. Her heart sank.
"Who's this?"
Frazzi gestured at the model's orbital sockets, the aquamarine eyes. What he spat at Rosso was a steamrolling train.
"Chin is correct, but the cheekbones need to be higher. And the eyes, all wrong." Rosso paused, ingesting another tirade. "There is no vision here. No spirit. One's eyes are inherited wisdom. All Karina saw imprinted there."
Frazzi swatted the cast from the table, steely hair flying from beneath his cap, and growled. Rosso smirked. "What you have produced is only paint."
Clenching her fists, Celia resisted the urge to raise a photo up to the facial cast. She could see Karina in her mind's eye, hair flowing about her shoulders, welcoming. Reacting. Screaming.
"With all due--"
"Without the eyes, there is nothing. Karina, he has known for years. Known her, with a man's eye for woman." Rosso watched Frazzi storm out of the workspace. "Perhaps that is the problem."
Celia swallowed a dozen curt responses as the go-between disappeared. She followed him out onto the studio floor, where the crew had gathered around an exterior window.
Frazzi leapt into his chair, shouting for action.
Without warning, India was slammed against the breakaway pane by an arm wearing a dark glove. The glove's wearer, a crew member out of the shot, was doing his best to stay awake.
Frazzi shouted, and they did it again. This time, the glass shook with the impact, cracked, then shattered.
The maestro shouted, and the glass was replaced. Again.
And again.
And again.
His own daughter.
* * *
Celia ran through the rough footage again, then a third time, the reek of cigarette smoke filling the room as the operator downed Moretti after Moretti.
Rather than adjust to the unspooling horrors, though, her unease only grew. With each viewing, she discovered more discrepancies in the shots, odd angles chosen, discordant and mistranslated items in the backgrounds.
Most of all, she absorbed McNall.
The enticing way the actor's head would tilt when introduced, one eyebrow slightly raising. The tiny nod of her chin as punctuation on a scream. The faintest of scars along one cheekbone, a minuscule white line no more than a centimeter across, adding character and vulnerability to each movement.
But the eyes--
Frazzi was right, damn it.
There was an allure there, a sharp intelligence. A sly humor to her view of the world, with a vulnerability that drew people in. Celia had made sketch after sketch of just the actor's eyes, trying to match them perfectly.
The combination of pupil and iris. The black furrows radiating through the oceanic color, the thin limbal ring that hedged in that palette.
She was closer than she'd ever been.
Emboldened, she began her fourth as the operator called it a day. Taking her time on the subtler details, she tried to weave in all she'd learned. The grinding behind her eyes swelled into thudding agony.
As silly as it sounded, Celia felt she knew Karina.
Intimately, even.
But she hadn't been able to shake the feeling of being watched. Every so often, as she went to the racks to resupply, she thought she spotted the light bob of fair hair, rounding corners in the occulted distance of the set. A pale face, glimpsed in the shadows. The slightest glint of aquamarine, reflected in the workspace lights.
It's your imagination.
No one calls you halfway around the world as a prank.
Karina McNall is not lurking on set.
But she didn't believe it.
Either way, they would still need the FX for the stunt. Why only increase the difficulty in making it?
It would be so good to finally meet her.
Just for reference, of course.
Just to see if you got all the curves right.
Her heart quickened. The warm feeling below her belly was nothing, only homesickness.
When she was finished, the end result almost breathed.
She held it up to her face.
It would be the most natural thing in the world to put it on.
There was a slight scuffle behind her, and Celia dropped the mask to the table, jerking her head around to the illusory shadows.
She thought she saw the door glide shut.
The faintest glimpse of fair hair.
Racing over to the entrance, Celia threw it open. But all there were on set were shadows: the looming Queen Anne and tree a pitched gallows.
* * *
"Bellisimo!"
Well out of the shot, Celia crouched behind the faux bed. The cast of India's gaping, broken mouth she'd refined, and she now pumped gelatinous blood through the gap. When Frazzi gave the word, she began thrusting the entrails through.
Rosso had procured them at the local butcher, and they reeked, on the verge of complete spoilage. The go-between hadn't thought to refrigerate them, only plopping them down in a paper sack at the corner of the workspace.
It was repugnant. It was awful.
And it worked.
Lucio Frazzi shouted, leaping from his chair and strutting onto the set. Traipsing through the gore, he gave her an uncomfortable half-hug and in Italian sang her praises.
At least, that's what she thought he was doing. Rosso had already gone to investigate the mask, so she had no idea if she was being celebrated or damned.
Then Frazzi gestured her back to her workspace.
Just like that, the migraine came thundering back.
For a moment, she had felt like part of the production.
Part of the magic.
The director flung open her door, treading bloody bootprints inside. She followed, a leaf caught in the tailwind of a gory hurricane, and watched him storm over to the heavy worktable at the far end of the room.
Holding them up to the light, he lifted first the mask, then the cast. Rosso perched on the corner stool, a cigarette dangling, thumbing disinterestedly through her sketchpads.
With a shake of his head, the director let her work fall to earth.
McNall's chin shattered, the shards spiraling in a slow doldrum across the concrete floor.
Fury limned her vision in scarlet. She had flown halfway around the world. Given up her day job clerking, dead end though it was, to be here. And to be treated--
Spitting a few sentences at Rosso, Frazzi slumped on the nearby stool, running a hand through his steely hair.
Rosso was unmoved. "The Savini of Ohio, Dario called you. We take a chance. But as time runs out, you fail."
Before she could speak, Rosso pushed on. "The sculpture, adequate. The likeness, exquisite. But the eyes--"
Inexplicably, Frazzi began to sob.
The horrible urge to go to his side and comfort him rose in her.
Celia stomped it to death.
What's wrong with you?
"--they are not Karina's. None of her spirit. None of her heart."
"Bullshit." Unsure which of them to direct it to, Celia glared down a point in the middle. "I've studied every article you've given me. I've been through the photos half a dozen times, watched the footage until that operator was ready to marry me. That's your lead actress. At least, until you fucking broke it."
"No." Rosso lit another cigarette, grinding out the first on the cover of her sketchpad. "Perhaps if you watched--"
The director hissed something at Rosso, staring him down.
Rosso turned back to her. "The maestro is an artist. The sequence, it is incomplete. Not yet."
"The director, and I've got my doubts. Unless it's a different movie, I've seen the fucking footage."
"Shut your whoring mouth." Rosso stood, tossing her sketchbook aside, and stepped towards her. The waft of Brut filled the air like a threat of violence, and for a moment she realized just how far from home she really was.
Anything can happen here.
Anything at all.
"We need the mask. The cast. This is how we make the magic happen."
"Who are you kidding?" Celia fought the urge to retreat. "Just bring in McNall."
Rosso froze. Frazzi only stared at her.
"Are you saying she's not here? Come on. I've seen her on set. Hell, in this fucking room."
"No." Rosso recovered, mumbling something to the director. "Impossible."
"It would be so much easier--"
Rosso pushed it aside. "It's not possible."
Frazzi rose, an Atlas crushed beneath the world. He whispered something to Rosso, then headed for the door.
"We left her in Louisiana," the go-between translated, and disappeared.
* * *
In the end, Celia went back to work.
It was that or quit, and she refused to skulk back to Dayton with nothing.
Worse, she had something to prove.
Celia viewed the rough footage over and over, swatting the operator's hands aside whenever they drifted near. Evidently the repeat exhibitions had led him to believe she wanted to bear his child.
The film crept inside her. With each viewing, she spotted more and more of the discordant touches Lucio had become famous for. Bizarre paintings. Strange writing. Objects in the background that didn't belong. Random side-jabs of dialogue with no relevance or deliberate obfuscations.
It was discomfiting, to say the least. The trancelike, haunted state it infused in her was ghastly, the pounding migraines an astral visitation that shook her to her core.
But, at last, she'd found the flaw.
Brushing aside her failures, Celia started again, setting up the pictures and sketches for reference. As the rejected operator slumped over on his stool, she was aware of someone else in the room, the sensation of eyes upon her.
Good.
Let them see.
She didn't turn, only raced back and forth to the shelves, gathering plaster, paint, brushes, latex.
It had always been there. The slightest dash of heterochromia descending from McNall's right pupil, a thin strip of hazel like an upside-down t amongst the aquamarine.
Why didn't you see it sooner?
The answer was simple.
You weren't ready.
The unwelcome thought chimed within her skull, and she tried to clear it, busying her hands and emptying her mind as both the mask and cast gained shape.
After so many tries, it was easy.
She knew it as if it were her own face.
Footsteps closed the distance behind her, light and breathy against the bare floor. Celia paid them no mind.
Time melted. Finally, Celia set down the mask and cast, slipping an exploratory finger into the orbital sockets, plopping out the spectacular eyes with a sideways thrust.
She felt cool breath on the back of her neck, the warmth of another person leaning in close, radiating heat against her skin.
Wisps of blonde hair floated in her periphery.
As she began to turn, she heard a clap.
Then the presence was gone.
"Bellisimo."
* * *
Teetering on the faux balcony, Celia's heart raced, disbelieving, eyes blind.
At least she'd be going back to Dayton with something.
This is how we make the magic happen.
Frazzi had approved the final product without hesitation, all enmity gone. With hurried words and telling glances from Rosso, she'd been praised as a Michelangelo, the likeness she'd created deemed perfect.
Then they sprung the trap.
Without McNall, they had no similar actor.
No one to finish the shots.
And Celia was of a height--
Celia had to point out that she was nowhere near as endowed, but Rosso waved it away as mere costuming. She'd subsequently drawn blood, negotiating her role in the next two productions. The Thirteenth Chapel. Menagerie of Souls.
But it should have been obvious.
Someone had to do the stunt.
On paper, it wasn't this live nightmare. Just leap from the balcony, narrowly miss the fence, and slam into the shallow dug-out filled with foam.
Walk away with a career.
Above the bayou, she felt the blonde hair flowing around the mask she wore, the welcoming caress about her shoulders.
The director's vision had been spelled out a dozen times.
Glimpsing the horror, McNall would pivot in terror. Spreading her arms wide, she'd jump.
But with their insistence on making the eyes a part of the mask, Celia couldn't see a thing. That she would trust her life to someone who thought the human skull could be crushed by hand was unimaginable when she'd first boarded the plane to Florence.
Still, here she was.
Karina McNall, her face a perfect likeness.
And about to do what the actor would never.
Her suggestion made flesh, they'd filmed the last part first. Celia had perched on a bicycle seat drilled into the fence, a scarlet swath of gore painted between her legs as she straddled the sawed-off post. The branches were affixed to the front of the mask, the red ruin of the gorgeous eyes only goopy runnels against the construct.
They'd filmed the gore shots next, the cast working flawlessly. The tree punctured the orbitals, pushing the crafted eyes out in a carmine spray. It was strange, seeing her work actualized to this extent, her own face honed to perfection then destroyed in less than five minutes, but by then the cast was only a construct again.
They didn't need it anymore.
They had Karina now.
But the jump--
Celia stood on her mark, the world dark around her. She'd tried it without the mask three times that afternoon, each leap a breathtaking feeling of weightlessness, an untethering that seemed to go on forever as Karina's gown rustled and fluttered before she slammed into the pit of foam.
They could have made the hole bigger, at least. Farther away from the fence post, which admittedly looked pretty fucking jagged from the balcony.
But this was it.
Impossible.
From somewhere below her, Frazzi yelled for action. The world dwindled to a rush of sound and feeling.
Pivot. Three steps.
Boosting herself, the rough wood beneath her fingers.
Spreading her arms, she let Karina fly.
* * *
Rosso stopped by her workspace just as Celia was finishing packing her bag.
"The maestro. He needs to see you."
She'd expected as much. Craved it, really, even with the migraine grinding behind her eyes, so much worse since yesterday. Part of her still recoiled from the need, a puppy at the master's leg, but Celia had put so much into the project it was a wonder she was still breathing.
She followed Rosso through the abandoned sets, the stricken stage, the balcony and fencepost where she'd become McNall, if only for a few hours. Their steps were absurdly loud in the empty space, devoid of people, bereft of light.
Rosso led her to a grey door she'd never seen before.
Without a word, he pushed it open.
Frazzi was inside the dim room, a leather chair resting before the projection screen. The go-between crossed the room in silence.
The director fixed her with his one good eye and motioned her to sit, steely hair tucked under his flat cap.
"Do you want to see?"
That the words were in English startled her, and suddenly, she wasn't so sure. It occurred to her that she could simply walk out. Go home. Be the Savini of Ohio.
Maybe that wouldn't be so bad.
But that was crazy.
You made the magic happen.
And you need to see.
Blonde tendrils drifted across her face, obscuring her vision. "What really happened in Louisiana?"
Frazzi only smiled.
The film began.
A discordant jangle of prog-rock, then sweeping synth across the black swamp. Celia felt herself sinking deeper into the chair as she saw her image on screen, the scenes clumsily bleeding into each other. The director wasn't showing her the raw footage.
This was a rough cut of the film itself.
As side characters tottered into parodies of gore, she realized that what Rosso had said was true. There was a grand alchemy to the sequence, each discordant element a component of a spell. It was madness, but a beautiful, bludgeoning insanity. With each new horror crashing waves against her mind, Celia felt herself begin to drift, the thudding pain easing.
She smiled.
There she was, in the lobby of the haunted hotel. Racing with India through the deserted basement of the courthouse. Seeking sanctuary in the nave of the abandoned church.
Without a glance at his work, Frazzi stared only at her, black eyepatch a gaping void. His one good eye winked infernal in the projected light.
The footage was gorgeously abhorrent.
There she was, digging in the old cemetery. In Room 39 as India was butchered across the way. In the crypts beneath the hotel.
A grotesque glory birthing.
There she was, in the hospital morgue as the dead began to swarm. At the old library, burning the book. Back on the balcony, with a convulsive shudder of flight.
She watched herself fly, if only for an instant.
Her body pierced.
Her aquamarine eyes torn from her head.
Then how did she now see?
As the film faded to black, a crash of synth and drums erupted, a maelstrom at the cessation of the world. Then nothing.
"Karina," Lucio breathed.
She slid her hand into his. "Maestro."