“Neb.”
“Neb?”
“Live in Neb. Omaha, Neb.”
“Oh, God!” He swung her around, started her towards the front steps.
“Where going?” she asked.
“Coffee. And some spirits of ammonia.”
“Want a drink.”
“Okay. We’re going for a drink.”
By the time he got her into the living room, she was walking by herself. He left her near the entrance hall and felt for the light switch, as usual knocking his left knee against the long table under it. He turned on the lights and swung around to look at her.
She was about nineteen, a Dresden doll of a girl, flaxen hair falling in a long bob over her shoulders, slim ankles rising from absurdly high-heeled evening slippers, her small body almost lost in a mink coat two sizes too big for her. Her eyes, under dark lashes, were gentian blue; her skin was the color of ivory; her face was composed and blank. She looked like a child playing grown-up in her mother’s clothes.
“Want to tell me your name now?” he asked.
She paid no attention. Instead, weaving a little but in no danger of falling, she crossed to the gray marble fireplace and stared up at the slates and pinks of the Bermuda landscape by Wing Howard. “Pretty,” she said.
He came across the room to her. “Look,” he said. “Will you drink some coffee?”
She turned her head and smiled mysteriously, showing tiny, perfectly formed teeth, but her face remained blank. It was as if he were speaking to her in a foreign language.
“You’ll drink,” he said grimly. “If I have to pour it down your throat.”
Still smiling, she looked up at the picture again.
“And take off your coat!” He found he was shouting, lowered his voice. “It must be eighty in here. And if you feel sick, there’s a powder room off the entrance hall.”
She remained silent, lost somewhere in Bermuda.
On his way to the kitchen the sliver of light from the not-quite-closed door to the study made him think of “Black’s the fashion for dying …” The Fates were sure as hell conspiring to put off Caresse’s big speech. He’d have to get rid of the girl pronto, just make sure she was able to drive, and then get back to the script. It had to be ready at eight. Quarter to eight, actually, because the actors would be on the set at eight.
By taking hot water from the sink faucet, he was able to get the percolator going almost at once. As he watched the geyser darken under the glass dome, he thought about the girl. Miss Omaha. Certainly not a would-be suicide. Too composed for that. Just drunk, and probably turning into a convenient driveway to sleep. And forgetting to turn off the engine. That figured. As for Miss Omaha herself; about as cute as they came. A real doll, but probably older than she looked. They were almost always older than they looked.
He put two cups on a wooden tray, reflecting that it was useless to try to guess who or what she was. The mink coat, if it fitted, would mean that she came from a wealthy family, but it looked as though she had borrowed it from someone. Her face could belong to anyone, a high school girl, a model or a debutante. He poured a little coffee into one of the cups, saw it was tar black. He put the percolator on the tray and started for the living room, thinking, if she wanted to remain a creature of mystery that was fine with him.
She was standing by the tall bookshelves on the room’s far wall, still wrapped in the mink coat. She seemed to be examining his row of James Gould Cozzens first editions. “Books,” she said, without turning and to nobody in particular.
“Yes. Very good,” he said. “Books.” He put the tray on the marble coffee table by the fireplace, started to fill the cups. “And over here. Coffee.”
She turned her head, let gentian eyes rest on him. Her lips curled in a faintly derisive smile.
“A couple of cups,” he said. “And then, if you can’t drive, I’ll call a taxi.”
It was still a foreign language. Her face remained empty, her expression bland, composed, mysterious. He felt sudden irritation.
“Come here!”
She turned and came slowly towards the table, a sleepwalker in a dream garden. When she halted a few feet away, he saw that the waxen, perfectly textured skin of cheeks and forehead was damp with perspiration.
“Take that damn coat off,” he said.
Obediently, she took off the coat, letting it fall in silken ripples at her feet. Coffee leaped from the cup he was holding, scalded his leg. A choking sound rose from his throat. Outside of a silver crucifix, suspended between two firm, pink-tipped breasts, Miss Omaha was stark naked.
Karl Fabro
The limousine was just where he had left it, which was a damn good thing because the stitch in his side was getting worse with every step. His heart was fluttering, too, and he felt a strange constriction in his chest, like a leather band being tightened. Excitement, of course, but what if it should be his heart! He felt sweat run from his armpits.
Dawes, as always, failed to hear him until it was too late to do anything but worm out from under the wheel, mumbling the customary inane excuses while he opened the door himself. He would have said something, but he was too out of breath. He sank back on the foam rubber seat, mechanically reaching for a cigar. One of these days he’d fire the bastard whether Irene liked it or not.
Dawes’ superior crumpet-and-tea voice floated back above the noise of the starter. He knew what the question was without hearing it. “I’ll tell you when to go home,” he growled. “Drive west out Sunset.”
“Yes, Mr. Fabro,” Dawes said, and eased the limousine away from the curb.
He lit a match, held it to the cigar. “What time is it?”
“Eleven twenty-five.”
The acrid smoke from the Upmann Imperial cut the phlegm in his throat. He inhaled deeply, savoring the clean, burning sensation, and then let smoke dribble from his mouth. On a tooth his tongue found a piece of wrapper. He spat it at Dawes’ back, feeling better except for the soggy ball souring in the pit of his stomach. Nerves, or maybe the Stroganoff he’d eaten at Lucey’s before the studio showing. He ought to start playing tennis again.
But how could he? he thought savagely. With each day bringing a series of crises designed expressly to thwart and harass him. More people, he’d once read somewhere, wanted to be head of a movie studio than President, and he wished to hell they could try it. It wasn’t all laying stars and cashing $3,500 checks. Not one in a million, not one in twenty million would last a week.
He must have muttered something because Dawes asked, “Did you speak, Mr. Fabro?”
“Shut up,” he said. “I’m trying to think.”
Not one in twenty million, he repeated to himself. Take today, for instance. A classic in ulcer production. Even eliminating what he had just done, risking heart and lungs, and what he now had to do, there’d been enough grief to last an ordinary businessman a year.
Even at ten o’clock in the morning, approaching his massive desk with the falsely cheerful greeting of Miss Earnshaw ringing in his ears, he had sensed the day’s sinister potentialities, reading with a soothsayer’s subtle eye the chicken entrails that lay in the form of torn sheets of New York Teletype, memos, please calls, confidential notes, and morning and afternoon appointment lists on the brown travertine surface. There were no cigars in the humidor, either, and some fool had failed to turn on the air conditioning, even though the Santa Ana was already blistering the city.
The ordinary troubles he had dispatched quickly. To the petulant queries from New York he dictated the usual evasive answers. He barred Abe Luskman from the studio for life, for the double-cross with Metro on the Fielding book. He suspended Whiteman, the assistant casting director, pending investigation of the rape charges. He cut two hundred thousand out of the Three’s a Crowd budget, okayed Technicolor for the South Sea story, mediated an hysterical quarrel between Tony Walton, head of make-up, and Linda Trevor, agreed to spend another fifty thousand on the Nautilus project, and, in a series of person
al interviews, soothed the variously injured egos of half a dozen actors, musicians and producers. The still pettier matters, involving minor producers and writers, he shoved into T. J. Lorrance’s eager hands.
For a moment Fabro’s mind rested on T. J. Someone, probably Abe Luskman, had once said, “Zanuck and Warner got yes-men, but in Lorrance Karl Fabro’s got the only maybe-man in Hollywood!” That wasn’t bad. The pink-and-white rabbit, with his twitching lips and skimpy J. Press clothes, always seemed to be saying yes or no, but when you unraveled one of his involved sentences, filled with contingency clauses and on-the-other-hands, it invariably came out maybe. Still, could be he was better than a yes-man. If you heard yes enough, you got to believe it. And T. J. was useful. He was a sort of IBM rabbit when it came to remembering things. He could be counted on to do what he was told to do. And he was faithful. The only man he trusted at the studio. That alone made him invaluable.
Confronted by an ominous red eye, the limousine braked to a cushiony halt. Fabro glanced out the window, saw on the hill to his right the incongruous hulk of the Beverly Hills Hotel, half Edwardian and half Statler-modern.
“Let me know when we get to Bel-Air,” he said, as the car slid forward again. After a moment, he added, “You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then say yes, sir!”
A day of crises, he reflected, shifting the Upmann to a corner of his mouth. But not of defeat. Even the Dark Circle fiasco had turned out well. It had been a close thing, though. And in a way his fault for listening to that artistic jerk from New York. No, not completely his fault. New York had hired Claude Remigen. New York had flown him out with the producer-director contract that made him an untouchable. Of course Benjy, on long distance the same day, warned, “Stage smashes don’t necessarily mean movie smashes, Karl, so keep a noose on his balls.” But what did that mean? He couldn’t put him to shooting tests. And Dark Circle hadn’t sounded bad: a detective story with the Devil as the heavy. A modern allegory, Remigen said, a morality play in the machine age.
Morality play, Fabro grunted in amusement. Jesus! Those faces when the lights came up after the executive showing in the studio theater. He hadn’t seen anything like it since the press preview of Aaron Slick From Pumpkin Creek. For once, the department heads were too stunned to speak. A major disaster. Two million down the drain.
One by one they had turned to him, waiting for a cue. That was when the idea came, as he had known it would. As it always had.
“Whodunit!”
They eyed him blankly.
“New ending, couple of new scenes, a few cuts.”
“Take out the allegory?” Remigen cried.
“Yes, Mr. Remigen. We make it into a quality detective story.”
The others began to grin, seeing it was the only way out. Screaming, all fairy now, Remigen fled, hysterically threatening to tear up his contract. That was fine, too. Sixty thousand left to go on it, and the changes wouldn’t cost half that. He’d hurried to teletype Benjy the details, knowing in advance what the answer would be.
“Bel-Air, Mr. Fabro,” Dawes said.
“Take the main gate.”
“Yes, sir.”
So here we go, Fabro thought. The main gate. Not a bad title. Starring Caresse Garnet. Only that couldn’t be now. Caresse was kaput. Too bad, in a way.
But nothing could last forever. Abruptly, he blanked Caresse out of his mind, let his thoughts wander back over the day again. Dark Circle converted into a personal triumph. And an even greater triumph with Tiger in the Night. That could really amount to something. A new way of making motion pictures.
The idea wasn’t actually his. Standish, of CBS, had dropped it at a party one night for anyone to pick up. “You movie moguls are still in the horse-and-buggy days,” he’d said, his swarthy, cocksure face scornful. “Six, eight, ten weeks for a feature-length picture. One set at a time, one camera, one set-up. Waits for lighting, for sound, for the camera to be hauled up, for actors to rehearse, learn their lines, find their places. Maybe three minutes of film a day.”
“So?” Harry Greenspan had asked.
“So TV has passed you clucks by and you don’t know it. We use cameras, plural. Six or eight of ’em if necessary. And we shift from set to set, audio and lighting ready and waiting, as fast as the actors can get there. Result: for fifty-two minutes of shooting, a fifty-two minute show!”
“Quality,” Harry Greenspan had muttered.
“So, okay. We don’t have the quality. That’s budget. You give me the scripts and the sets and the actors and I’ll give you quality until it comes out your ears!”
And there the idea lay until Tiger in the Night began to run over. Five days finally, at sixteen thousand a day, and Benjy screaming louder each day. And three-quarters of yesterday lost because of Caresse Garnet. He’d called Standish then, borrowed one of his production assistants, and cornered Josh Gordon in the Directors’ Building.
“Television monitors. Six cameras. Four sets. Simultaneous action,” Gordon had muttered as he outlined the production assistant’s scheme. “What you need is the ringmaster from Ringling Brothers’ circus.”
“You won’t do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you read your contract, Josh?”
“Yeah, I’ve read it, Fatso, and I know you can make it stick, but I don’t have to like it.”
“Suppose I gave you credit for the idea?”
“That’s a laugh. If Benjy hasn’t got a teletype from you in New York right now, claiming full credit, I’m Eisenhower, bare-assed in a snowdrift.”
The limousine’s engine raced as the hydromatic dropped down a gear. Fabro saw they were climbing a sleep grade, saw Dawes looking at him through the rear-view mirror. “We’re almost at the top of Bel-Air, Mr. Fabro.”
“Didn’t I tell you Caresse Garnet?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, consider yourself told.”
Six cameras and all, it must have worked fine. Around three he’d sent T. J. down to do some snooping and before Gordon caught him and threw him off the set, he learned they’d already shot nine pages. Which meant if tomorrow went as well, Tiger in the Night would make the deadline he’d set, pick up three of the lost days. And he’d be taking bows for a new technique that might save the industry.
If it wasn’t for Benjy, with his memo-pad mind, the day’s ultimate crisis, this lousy appointment with destiny could have been put off for another year. And by then it wouldn’t be a crisis. There was the teletype message, of course, the last of the day from Benjy, obviously sent from his office after dinner. It read:
Dark Circle yours but changes must not exceed $30,000.
Have you forgotten Caresse Garnet?
But it was past seven when the message arrived and he had arranged for Miss Earnshaw to say, if questioned, he’d left the studio by then. He should have known that was too easy, though. Did know, in a way, because he’d set up a mental chessboard in that gloomy hole on Highland, drinking the raw Scotch, obviously just made in the back room, and figuring eventualities. One of which had burst upon him the moment he set foot in his house at eleven.
Two half-filled glasses in the living room and the pink splotches on T. J.’s cheeks indicated he and Irene had been holding one of their cozy, implausible chats, and for an instant he wondered darkly, as he had a dozen times before, what there could be between them. By God! If it was what he half thought. That would be something. Cuckolded by a mouse!
Twitching uneasily, T. J. volunteered, “Irene’s on the phone.”
“What are you doing here?”
“You told me to wait for you, Karl.”
He grunted, fishing for the ice that was never in the silver bucket. “Call Blake.” At least there was Scotch. He upended the bottle over a double old-fashioned glass. “Find out if he’s finished.”
“He’s working at home.”
“He’s got a phone, hasn’t he?”
Irene, ente
ring, brushed by T. J. at the hall door. Her plump face was flushed, too, and she was smiling.
“No ice,” he said.
The smile went away. “Papa wants to speak to you.”
“Oh, God!”
“He’s been calling every half-hour.”
“Doesn’t he ever sleep?”
“Now, Karl. You know Papa when he’s got something on his mind.”
He went to the unlisted phone in the study, knowing exactly what it was. “If it’s Caresse Garnet—” he began.
Benjy’s guttural East Side voice cut him off. “You give me trouble over her, Karl?”
“I just forgot.”
“The corporation don’t pay you for forgetting.”
“No, Benjy. But damn it, I had so much to do today—”
“Don’t lie.” Benjy’s voice fell to a confidential croak. “Can Irene hear you?”
“No.”
“Are you … involved with this one?”
For a split second he was tempted to say yes. But Benjy would never let it drop there, if only for Irene’s sake.
“No,” he said. “I’m not involved.”
“Then, why?”
“I think she’s a valuable property.”
“That you said last year, and quick two more flops she makes for us.”
He had no answer to this. After a time Benjy spoke again. “There is something smells not so good here, Karl.”
“All right. I’ll tie a can to her.”
“She must be notified before twelve.”
“Damn it, Benjy, I said I’d do it!”
A tsking sound came from Long Island. “Such a temper my son-in-law’s got,” Benjy said, and hung up.
By the time he’d found the legal forms in his desk and filled them in, T. J. was with Irene again in the living room. The pair spoke simultaneously when he came in, like children trying to placate an angry governess, saying: “Blake—” and “I’ve got your ice, darling.”
“What about Blake?”
“He says the script’s done.”
At least that was something. He took the double old-fashioned glass from Irene, drained it. “Have Dawes bring the Fleetwood around.”
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