Rake

by Scott Phillips

“No one ever inquired.”

  She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and took a sip of her aperitif. “You can’t wait for someone to inquire, you have to be aggressive. Who’s your agent?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “We’ll have to get you one,” she said, perusing the day’s specials, clipped onto the plastic menu. “There’s monkfish medallions tonight, it’s usually good here. In fact the seafood is always good here.”

  “I don’t believe in them, generally,” Fred said, with a touch of fear in his voice.

  “In monkfish medallions?” Marie-Laure said.

  “Agents.” I was relieved to hear him say this, because it occurred to me that an agent might fuck up our deal if he got involved too soon. Just then the waiter came with Fred’s and my drinks, and Fred took a long, nervous swig of his.

  “Don’t be a dumbass,” she said. “How much did you get for that novel?”

  Fred looked as though she’d just inquired as to his sperm count, or past sexual encounters with barnyard animals. He took another swig and answered. “Five hundred euros.”

  Marie-Laure rolled her eyes. “My God, you need an agent more than any writer I ever met. I’ll set you up with one, all right?” Fred looked to me in supplication as she turned her attention back so completely to the menu that a response didn’t seem called for. The waiter, an unusually tall, white-haired specimen who would have been even taller had his neck not been bent permanently forward from years of leaning down to listen to diners, appeared tableside at this juncture to take our orders. Thick, snowy-white hairs grew from his ears, a detail that fascinated me to such an extent that I forgot completely what I’d decided to order and had to reconsult the menu.

  When the waiter left, Marie-Laure finally spoke and fixed on Fred as if I weren’t there. In fact, now that I thought of it, she hadn’t addressed a word to me since “Salut.”

  “You have other novels?”

  “One other I’m working on.”

  “How can you work on it while you’re doing this script?”

  “I can do two things at once. They’re different forms.”

  “How many scripts have you written?”

  He hesitated, but he was so intimidated by her stare that he didn’t dare lie. “This is the first.”

  “That’s good,” she said, to his and my surprise. “You haven’t learned any bad habits. Just get the formatting right and you’ll be fine.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. I read Squirm, Baby, Squirm, and you have an excellent sense of structure, plot, and pace. In fact when I read it I thought, this is practically filmable right off the page as it is. The part where his twin sister discovers she’s pregnant with her own brother’s doomed baby gave me chills.”

  Fred was clearly unused to such face-to-face compliments, and his face burned red. He was sweating, too, and I had the feeling Marie-Laure inspired the same reaction in him that she did in me.

  “How come you didn’t try to buy it for the network? Too racy?” I asked, and she turned to me as if I’d interrupted a private conversation.

  “Don’t be a fucking idiot. This isn’t the United States, where you can’t even show a tit without causing a national panic attack. It’s because visually it should be a movie, for the cinema. Anyway, we don’t work with the kinds of budgets where we can send a crew to Bangkok.”

  A timid little man wearing a bowtie approached the table holding something with both hands at chest level, and when I turned to greet him I thought he was going to faint. “Excuse me,” he said, “but are you the actor who plays Dr. Crandall on Ventura County on the television?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “I wonder if you’d be so kind as to inscribe this for my mother?”

  He extended the object in his hands. It was a copy of the latest Télé 7 Jours, from whose cover I stared in my OR scrubs, grim in my determination to save some critically ill or injured soul. “How would you like me to sign it?”

  “‘For Eugénie,’ please.”

  I whipped out my trusty marker and wrote it, my real name and “Dr. Crandall Taylor, MD” after that. He smiled and returned to his table, where he was dining with a well-dressed fellow several decades his junior, who gave me what seemed to me a rather resentful glance.

  “Honestly,” Marie-Laure said, annoyed that I’d stopped following her conversation with Fred. “I don’t know how you put up with that.”

  “It’s all right. I knew what I signed up for when I became an actor.”

  “But the impertinence of interrupting a private conversation . . .”

  “Begging your pardon, Marie-Laure, but I was hardly part of that conversation.” I gave her my famous TV glare, a visual dressing-down with one eyebrow raised in judgmental disdain. It needed to be done at this stage, lest she think me a fool or an underling to be ordered around—a delicate matter, since there really was no question that I needed her help, and rather desperately.

  It did the trick. She melted immediately. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “Of course you were part of it. So tell me about your project. Who’s attached so far?”

  “Just me.”

  Fred looked panicked. I’d just admitted that, in essence, there was no project except as it existed in our heads. But I was giving Marie-Laure a shot at the ground floor; besides, she was a pro, and there’d be no fooling her.

  “That’s good. No one we’ll have to get rid of if I come up with someone better.” She took a tiny chunk of bread and nibbled thoughtfully. “Can I read the script?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You haven’t even started it, have you?”

  “We have,” I said, which was more or less true, since we’d been talking about it, which is half the process of writing. “But it’s not ready yet.”

  “How long?”

  I looked over at Fred. “Two weeks,” I said, and those panicky eyes got a little wider.

  “What’s the concept?”

  “I’m an archaeologist, and I find the arms of the Venus de Milo.”

  She nodded, lower lip protruding in a pensive manner I found very fetching. I certainly hoped I was going to take her home with me tonight. “That’s good. Comedy or adventure?”

  “A little of both. Of course it can be tailored to your tastes.”

  “No, no, suit yourselves and I’m sure it will be fine for our needs.”

  The meal itself (on my part, onion soup, trout meunière, a decent Alsatian Riesling, profiteroles—the sort of meal one might have ordered in the same restaurant a century earlier) was consumed without discussion of business matters, not because of any scruples or good manners on my part or that of Fred, but because Marie-Laure seemed to consider the matter closed for the time being. When the coffee came, Fred was unable to contain himself any longer.

  “When do we get paid?”

  Marie-Laure shrugged. “Ask him,” she said, gesturing toward me. “The network is interested, but there will have to be a finished script before we can commit.”

  Poor Fred looked like he was going to cry.

  •••

  Marie-Laure declined my invitation to return to the suite with me. “It’s my husband’s birthday,” she said before gracing me with a perfunctory set of bisous and climbing into her cab. Fred had already started walking back to wherever he lived, and I was at loose ends for the rest of the evening.

  I pulled my phone from my inside jacket pocket and scanned my texts (I’m from the old school; I never interrupt a dinner with friends or colleagues for phone calls or texts). To my delight, one of the messages was from Annick: “Meet me? New club: Hanoi Hilton. Afterward, yr hotel?” Beneath this was an address on a pedestrian street in the fifth, near a bookshop I used to frequent. I hopped in a cab just as someone cried out in near hysterical excitement: “Crandall!”

  •••

  More of an alley than a street—I imagined that furniture delivery days must have been interesting affairs here—the street fe
atured only two businesses, the aforementioned bookshop, closed for the night, and a nightclub whose signage featured a painting of bald, fat Brando from Apocalypse Now, beneath a neon sign reading, yes, HANOI HILTON. I supposed no one had consulted a trademark lawyer before opening up, and wondered whether the inevitable financial settlement with the hotel chain would leave them with enough operating capital to reopen with a new name. To the sound of earsplitting disco music I descended a narrow stone staircase of medieval construction and at the bottom arrived at a checkpoint, at which a giant of Polynesian origin stood taking the cover charge and stamping the hands of those who left.

  “Fifteen.”

  “That includes how many drinks?” I asked.

  “Drinks are extra,” he said. Behind him on the walls were movie posters, both predictable—Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter—and idiosyncratic, forgotten titles like The Boys in Company C, and at least one—Hamburger Hill—that wasn’t set in Vietnam at all. As I fiddled with my wallet at a dilatory rate of speed, a grinning, dark-haired man in an expensive suit approached, his hand extended in greeting. If my guess was right, he was the owner or the manager, and I was about to save a cool fifteen euros.

  “Forget it, Sammy, the doctor doesn’t pay for anything around here.”

  Sammy looked unconvinced but waved me past the velvet rope, and my benefactor introduced himself as Mathieu as he led me to the bar. I ordered a shot and a bottle of Carlsberg as Mathieu introduced me to all and sundry—hostesses, three bartenders, several older gents whom I took to be investors, current or potential—and as we drank, any number of attractive young women approached. I signed a couple of dozen autographs, including at least five on human flesh, before things calmed down enough for Mathieu to talk.

  “So what brings you here?”

  “Trying to get a movie made,” I said.

  “No, here to the club?”

  “Meeting a friend,” I said. “I haven’t seen her, though.”

  He looked across the room at Sammy, who was having some sort of problem with a group at the checkpoint. “Just a minute, I have something I want to discuss with you.”

  I started watching a staggeringly beautiful brunette of thirty-five or so dance with a burly twenty-year-old with blond dreadlocks and no sense of rhythm whatsoever. She looked determined to put him in his place either on the dance floor or elsewhere, and I made a mental note: If they separated, and if Annick didn’t show, I was going to make a play for her.

  A girl danced for the crowd in rags in a bamboo cage suspended above the dance floor, her hot pants torn in just the right way to show a tantalizing glimpse of bush and her T-shirt ripped so that most of her right breast was visible. She was, I suppose, intended to represent a female POW, perhaps one who had disguised herself as a man in order to get into the air force and fly bombing missions over Hanoi.

  Nursing my beer and looking around I wondered how you got a bank to loan you the money for such a venture. Maybe I could invent some similarly off-putting idea for a drinking and dancing establishment and reinvent myself as an entrepreneur, adding “well-known impresario of the Parisian nightlife” to my CV. A serial killer–themed nightclub, maybe, with Eddie Gein–inspired human-skin masks lining the walls. Bartenders dressed as John Wayne Gacy in full clown makeup. Portraits on the walls of BTK and Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez. (Why were all the serial killers who came to my mind American? I’m well aware that Europe and specifically France have produced any number of homicidal monsters. Maybe the theme needed to be that specific in order to interest investors.)

  I had that funny, prickly feeling again that I was being watched, which of course I was, surreptitiously or openly by two thirds of the people in the club. But again this was different, that sensation of being spied on with hostile intent, and though it was almost certainly nonsense, I was nonetheless on my guard.

  I finished my beer and headed for the bathroom, finding it empty. I urinated with the overwhelming yet indistinct thumping of the bass passing through the door, a reasonably good likeness of R. Lee Ermey painted on the opposite wall and visible in the mirror. Ermey reminded me a good deal of my own drill sergeant in the dawning days of my military career, and I wondered what had become of cranky old Sergeant McMillan. Probably making the retirees run drills down in Florida. I should track him down, maybe pay a visit; he was the one who taught me my first choke hold. Seeing my enthusiasm and sensing a kindred soul, he took me under his wing and instructed me in the way of the warrior. Unarmed, I was capable of killing an attacker in any of a dozen ways, a knowledge that leads paradoxically to a state of great calm via a lack of fear.

  As I zipped up, the door opened and the young man with the blond dreadlocks entered, an expression of undiluted anger on his face, and called me a fucking sack of shit.

  He pulled back his fist in an attempt to sucker punch me, but he was pitiably slow and I got in a good shot to his solar plexus. He dropped back against the wall, right into a painting of Tom Berenger dying in Platoon, and I planted my heel down hard on his metatarsals. The first blow had taken his breath away, so he didn’t scream, but as he slid down to the tile flooring he certainly fucking wanted to. In my jacket pocket was a telescoping steel tactical baton my friend Byron, a cop and former advisor to the show on police matters, had given me as a gift before I left, but its use didn’t seem necessary now.

  “Here’s the thing about dreads,” I said. “They look great if you’re black, but if you’re a pasty blond white kid they make you look like a douchebag and a poser.”

  •••

  When I got back to the bar I was told Mathieu was waiting in the private salon. This was located behind a door guarded by another Polynesian, this one even bigger than Sammy, who opened up and waved me inside. Waiting for me in the luxuriously appointed room were Mathieu and the brunette my assailant had been dancing with, whom Mathieu introduced as Esmée. Not knowing whether she was attached to Mathieu, and having just been attacked by another of her admirers, I didn’t press my attentions on her, but her cocked eyebrow suggested an interest in getting to know one another.

  “You mentioned a movie,” Mathieu said. “As it happens Esmée is an actress as well as a model.”

  “Is that so. I knew I’d seen you before,” I said, though this wasn’t the case.

  “Mostly commercials. A small part in a Dutch film last year.”

  “Her husband is one of the investors here. Is your film funded yet?”

  “Not completely. We’re still looking for co-producers.”

  Esmée smiled, and I could easily imagine that face on screen. Her head was large in proportion to her body, and if that sounds like a backward compliment, it isn’t. Head-to-body ratio is one of the key elements of stardom, determining how a person photographs. Look back at the great stars of twentieth-century cinema: Bogart, Bette Davis, Gabin, Gable—all had enormous heads in relation to their bodies. It’s no different in modern times: Hoffman, Depardieu, Julia Roberts, Jackie Chan. Picture Philippe Noiret with his head slightly smaller, and suddenly he’s your neighborhood grocer, or trash collector. Without his massive head threatening to capsize his tiny body every time he takes a step, Tom Cruise is the guy who tears the tickets at the movie theater, not the giant on the screen.

  “As it happens my husband is looking for a project to fund, something I could be in.”

  “Something that might feature the club as well. Is there room for a nightclub scene?”

  “Absolutely, it’ll fit right in. I’m meeting with the writer in the morning.”

  “Splendid. Maybe you can bring him along tomorrow night? The place should be a bit more lively. In the meantime, anything you want from the bar is on the house.”

  The door opened and the blond kid with dreadlocks stepped inside. He looked chastened, though not necessarily by me. Esmée’s expression grew stern.

  “Are you ready to take me home now?” she asked. No, let me amend that; though posed in the form of a question, it was n
onetheless a command. She turned to me, all smiles again. “Let me introduce my stepson, Bruno.”

  •••

  It was around three in the morning when I got out of the taxi in front of the hotel, and for once there was no one passing on the sidewalk to stop and point. The lobby was nearly empty, and the man at the reception showed no sign of recognition as he handed me my key and wished me a pleasant night’s sleep. As I climbed into bed, by myself for once, I almost felt as though I were someone else.

  MERCREDI, QUATRE MAI

  AS A YOUNG MAN I CARRIED AROUND A GREAT deal of anger, and I used to be a brawler. Not the kind I am now, where somebody else starts the thing and I finish it, but the kind who looks for trouble and starts it when there’s none to be found. When I was seventeen years old I got into a fight over a girl and put the other guy into the hospital with a broken clavicle. When I came before the judge for sentencing he offered me a choice, much like the choice the army gave me later on: I could go to jail for a year and a half, or I could enlist. What the hell, I thought, the army sounded like a good way to bust some heads, and I joined up. I did so well in Basic Training they kicked me upstairs, and I kept on acing every test they gave me until I got into U.S. Army Special Forces. The Green Berets.

  Once in, I continued to outperform all my peers intellectually and physically. I’d finally found something I was good at, better than anybody else around me. I was born to be a warrior.

  The trouble was, I kept that anger coiled in me like a spring, and all the training was doing was wrapping that spring tighter and tighter. I hadn’t found a way to let it out, and then one day, having been taught a couple of dozen ways to kill a man with my bare hands, an opportunity for release presented itself while I was buying a six-pack of beer.

  A young enlisted man was shopping with his doughy, sad-looking wife and two kids. Despite the wear and tear visible on her face, she was no more than twenty-five and retained sad vestiges of a genuine beauty lost to disappointment, early motherhood, and life on an army base. One of the few advantages for family men in the armed services is the base PX, where prices are a fraction of what they are in civilian grocery stores, but this guy wasn’t happy about the bargains to be had; he was bitching and moaning to his wife about the amount of food she was loading into their cart. One of the kids, a boy of about six with a blond crewcut bleached by the sun, grabbed a package of potato chips from the shelf and tore it open. The dad, a corporal, saw this and yanked his son by the arm and, while the kid was still in midair, smacked him across the face.