by Otto Penzler
They were standing in front of File’s headquarters when the bike pulled up—Mel and Betty, Cy, MacAaron, and File—having the usual morning squabble about the day’s shooting schedule. As the girl dismounted, now gingerly holding the parcel in both hands as if it were made of fine glass, her skirt rode up over her thighs, and Mel saw File do almost a comic double-take, the man’s eyes fixing on the whiteness of exposed thigh, then narrowing with interest as they moved up to take in the whole girl.
What made it worse, Mel thought, was the quality of flagrant innocence about her, of country freshness. He glanced at Betty. From her expression he knew the same word must have flashed through her mind as his at that instant. Alice.
The bearded driver of the motorbike came up to them, the girl following in his shadow as if trying to keep out of sight. Close up, Mel saw that the driver’s straggling reddish beard was a hopeless attempt to add years and dignity to a guileless and youthful face.
“Signor File, I am here as you requested.”
“Yeah,” File grunted. He turned sourly to Mel. “You wanted statues? He’s the guy who’ll take care of them for you.”
“Paolo Varese,” said the youth. “And this is my sister, Claudia.” He reached a hand behind him to draw her forward. “What are you afraid of, you stupid girl?” he asked her teasingly. “You must forgive her,” he said to the others. “She is only a month from Campofriddo, and all this is new to her. It impresses her very much.”
“Where’s Campofriddo?” asked Betty.
“Near Lucca, in the hills there.” Paolo laughed deprecatingly. “You know. Twenty people, forty goats. That kind of place. So Papa and Mama let Claudia come to live with me in Rome where she could get good schooling, because she did well in school at home.”
He put an arm around the girl’s narrow shoulders and gave her a brotherly hug which made her blush right red. “But you know how girls are about the cinema. When she heard I was to work here where you are photographing one—”
“Sure,” Cy said impatiently, “but about those statues—”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Paolo took the parcel from his sister, tore open its wrappings, and held up before them a statuette of a robed figure. It was beautifully carved out of what looked like polished white marble, and, Mel saw with foreboding, it was not quite two feet tall.
“The statues were supposed to be lifesized,” he said, bracing himself for another bout with File. “This one—”
“But this is only the—the—” Paolo struck his knuckles to his forehead, groping for the word “—the sample. They will be lifesized. Twelve of them, all lifesized.” He held out the sample at arm’s length and regarded it with admiration. “This is Augustus. The others will be Sulla, Marius, Pompey, Caesar, and Tiberius himself, all copies of the pieces in the Museo Capitoline, all lifesized.”
Mel took the figurine and found it surprisingly light. “It’s not marble?”
“How could it be?” Paolo said. “Marble would take months to work, perhaps more. No, no, this is a trick. A device of my own. If you will show me where I am to work, I can demonstrate it for you.”
His sister anxiously tugged at his arm. “Che cosa devo fare, Paolo?” she asked, then whispered to him in more rapid Italian.
“Oh, yes.” Paolo nodded apologetically at File. “Claudia has a little time before she must go along to school, and she would like to look around here and see how a cinema is made. She would be very careful.”
“Look around, hey?” File considered this frowningly, his eyes on the girl. “Well, why not? I’ll even show her around myself,” and from the way Claudia’s face lit up, Mel saw she knew at least enough English to understand this. “And I have to go back to town in a little while,” said File, “so I can drop her off at her school on the way.”
Paolo seemed simultaneously alarmed and delighted by this kindness. “But, Signor File, to take such trouble—”
“It’s all right, it’s all right.” File curtly waved aside the stammered gratitude. “You just get on the job and do what you’re being paid for. Goldsmith here’ll show you the shop.”
Watching File motion the girl to follow him and then briskly stride off with her in his wake, Mel felt an angry admiration for the way the man handled these little situations. You had to know him to know the score. Otherwise, what you were seeing was a small white-haired grandfatherly type, concealing a heart of gold beneath a crusty exterior.
A sculptor’s studio had been partitioned off in the carpenters’ shop near the entrance to the sound stage, and it was already crowded with the materials and equipment for the making of the statues. The sculpturing process itself, as Paolo described it in rapt detail, was intriguing. A pipework armature, the size of the subject, was set up, its crosspiece at shoulder height. From the crosspiece, wire screening was then unspooled around and around down to the base where it was firmly attached, the whole thing making a cylinder of screening in roughly human proportions. To this was applied a thin layer of clay which was etched into the flowing lines of a Roman toga. As for the head—
Paolo took the statuette, and, despite Betty’s wail of protest, ruthlessly chipped away its features with a knifeblade.
“It would take a long time to model the head in clay,” he said, “but this way it can be done very quickly.”
He brushed away marble-colored flakes, revealing beneath them what appeared to be a skull, although its eyes and nose sockets were filled in. He tapped it with a fingernail. “Hollow, you see. Papier maché, such as masks are made of. One merely soaks it in this stuff—colla—you know?”
“Glue,” said Betty.
“Yes, yes. Then it can be quickly shaped into a whole head. It dries almost at once. Then clay goes over it for the fine work, and here is our Roman.”
“How do you get it to look like marble?” Cy asked.
“Enamel paint is sprayed on, white and ivory mixed. That, too, dries while you wait.”
“But the clay under it is still wet, isn’t it?”
“Oh, no. Before the paint goes on, one uses the torch—the blowtorch, that is—up and down and back and forth for a few hours. But with all this it takes only one day. So there will be twelve statues in twelve days, as I have promised Signor File.”
“Do you have the designs for the other statues with you?” Cy asked, and when they were produced, much crumpled and stained, from Paolo’s pocket, it was clear that File had once again made himself an excellent deal.
Standing at the open door of the shop ready to take their departure, they saw File heave into sight with Claudia, direct her into the Cadillac, and climb behind the wheel.
“Beautiful,” breathed Paolo, his eyes on the car rather than his sister. Then as the car headed for the gate, he reminded himself of something. “La bicicletta! La bicicletta!” he shouted after the girl, waving toward the motorbike propped on the ground before File’s office, but she only made a small gesture of helplessness, and then the car was out of range.
Paolo shrugged in resignation.
“The autobus out here is very irregular, so she is supposed to bring me here on the bicycle each morning and then use it herself to go to school. That means I must take the autobus home at night, but today it looks as if I will be able to drive myself home without any trouble.”
“There’s a piece of luck,” Betty said drily. “You know, Paolo, Claudia is a very pretty girl.”
“But how well I know.” Paolo raised his eyes to heaven in despair. “That was one reason I had so much trouble with Mama and Papa about permitting her to live with me here, where she could improve herself, become educated, perhaps become a teacher at school, not the wife of some stupid peasant. They are good people, Mama and Papa, but they hear stories, you know? So they think all the men in Rome want to do is eat the pretty little girls. They forget Claudia is with me, and that I—”
“Paolo,” Betty cut in, “sometimes she is not with you. And while I don’t know about all the other men in Rome, I know
about Signor File. Signor File likes to eat pretty little girls.”
The boy looked taken aback.
“He? Really, signora, he does not seem like someone who—”
“Faccia attenzione, signore,” said Betty in a hard voice. “Il padrone è un libertino. Capisce?”
Paolo nodded gravely.
“Capisco, signora. Thank you. I will tell Claudia. She is already sixteen, not a child. She will understand.”
But, Mel observed, there were days after that when File, contrary to his custom, left the lot in midafternoon and returned only late in the evening, if at all.
Betty observed this as well.
“And you know where he goes, don’t you?” she said to her husband.
“I don’t know. I suspect. That’s different from knowing.”
“Look, dear, let’s not split hairs. He’s with that child, and you darn well know it.”
“So what? For one thing, Mother of the Gracchi, sixteen, going on seventeen, is not a child in these parts, as her brother himself remarked. For another thing, you’ve done all you could about it—angels could do no more. As far as I’m concerned—”
“Oh, sure. As far as you’re concerned—and Cy and Mac, too—you’re just glad Alex isn’t around all the time, no matter what.”
There was no denying that. It was a godsend not having File always underfoot, and they weren’t going to question whatever reason he had for staying away from them. Their nerves were ragged with overwork and tension, but the picture was near completion, and all they needed was enough stamina to finish it in style. Considering the drain that File was on their stamina—complaining, threatening, countermanding orders—the sight of that Cadillac convertible pulling out of the gate in the afternoon was like a shot in the arm.
For that matter, Mel wasn’t sure that even if Paolo suspected what might be going on he would be so anxious to rock the boat himself. The commission to do the statues, he had confided to Mel, meant enough money to see him through a difficult time. It was lucky Signor File had asked the Art Institute to recommend someone who would handle the commission at the lowest possible rate, because as one of their prize graduates the year before, he, Paolo, had got the recommendation. Very lucky. Money was hard to come by for a young sculptor without a patron; the family at home had no money to spare, so it was a case of always scratching for a few lire, taking odd jobs, doing anything to get up enough for the next rent day. But now—!
So from early morning to late at night, stripped to the waist and pouring sweat, Paolo toiled happily at the statues, and one by one they were carted away to the sound stage and mounted in place on the set there. The first six, faces in stern repose, looked good in the establishing shots; the ones that followed, faces distorted with madness, looked even better. The last to be done, and, Mel thought, the most effective of all according to the sketches of those agonized features, would be Tiberius in his madness.
When this was in its place along with the other five in the corridor of the palace, and MacAaron had made his trucking shots and closeups, the picture was all but finished. Finished, that is, except for Cy’s editing—the delicate job of cutting, rearranging, finding the proper rhythm for each scene, and finally resplicing the whole thing into what would be shown on the screen. In the last analysis, everything depended on the editing, but this would be Cy’s baby alone.
With the end in sight none of them wanted to rock the boat. And then, one stormy night, it came close to capsizing.
The storm had begun in the late afternoon, one of those drought-breaking Roman downpours that went on hour after hour, turning the meadows around them into a quagmire and covering even the tarmac with an inch of water. At midnight, when Mel and Betty splashed their way to the car, they saw Paolo standing hopelessly in the doorway of the carpenter’s shop looking out into the deluge, and so they stopped to pick him up.
He was profusely grateful as he scrambled past Betty into the backseat. He lived in Trastevere, but if they dropped him anywhere in the city he could easily find his way home from there.
“No, it won’t be any trouble taking you right to the door,” Mel lied. “You just show me the way.”
The way, as Paolo pointed it out, lay across the Ponte Sublicio and to the Piazza Matrai, in the heart of a shabby, working-class district. The apartment he and his sister occupied was in a tenement that looked centuries old and stood in an alleyway leading off from the piazza. And parked in solitary grandeur at the head of the alley was a big Cadillac convertible.
Mel’s foot came down involuntarily on the brake when he saw it, and the little Fiat lurched to a stop halfway across the piazza. At the same moment he heard Paolo make a hissing sound between his teeth, felt the pressure of the boy’s body against the back of the driver’s seat as he leaned forward and stared through the rain-spattered windshield.
And then, as if timing his approach to settle all doubts, File came into view down the alley, heading for the Cadillac at a fast trot, head down and shoulders hunched against the rain. He had almost reached it before Paolo suddenly roused himself from his paralysis of horror.
He pushed frantically at the back of Betty’s seat. “Signora, let me out!”
Betty stubbornly remained unmoving. “Why? So you can commit murder and wind up in jail for the rest of your life? What good will that do Claudia now?”
“That is my affair. Let me out. I insist!”
From his tone Mel had the feeling there would be murder committed if Betty yielded. Then File was out of reach. The Cadillac’s taillights blinked on, started to move away, then disappeared down the Via della Luce. Paolo hammered his fist on his knee.
“You had no right!” he gasped. “Why should you protect him?”
Mel thought of the next morning when this half-hysterical boy would have a chance to catch up to File on the lot.
“Now look,” he said reasonably, although it struck him that under the circumstances reason was the height of futility. “Nobody knows exactly what happened up in that apartment, so if you keep your head and talk to Claudia—”
“Yes,” Paolo said savagely, “and when I do—!”
“But I’ll talk to her first,” Betty announced. “I know,” she said as Paolo started to blurt out an angry protest. “It’s not my affair, I have no right to interfere, but I’m going to do it just the same. And you’ll wait here with Signor Gordon until I’m back.”
It was a tedious, nerve-racking wait, and the ceaseless drumming of the rain on the roof of the car made it that much more nerve-racking. The trouble was, Mel glumly reflected, that not having children of her own, Betty was always ready to adopt any waif or stray in sight and recklessly try to solve his problems for him. Only in this case, nothing she could say or do would mean anything. The boy sitting in deadly silence behind him had too much of a score to settle. The one practical way of forestalling serious trouble was to warn File about it and hope he had sense enough to take the warning to heart. If he didn’t—
At last Betty emerged from the building and ducked into the car.
“Well,” said Paolo coldly, “you have talked to her?”
“Yes.”
“And she told you how much she was paid to—to—?”
“Yes.”
Paolo had not expected this. “She would never tell you that,” he said incredulously. “She would lie, try to deceive you the way she did with me. She—”
“First let me tell you what she said. She said your agreement with Signor File was that you would get a small payment for the statues in advance and the rest of the money when the work was done. Is that the truth?”
“Yes. But what does that have to do with it?”
“A great deal. Everything, in fact. Because Signor File told her that if she wasn’t nice to him, you would never get the rest of the money. He would say your work was no good, and, more than that, he would let everyone know this so that you’d never get a chance at such commissions again. So what your sister thought she was sacr
ificing herself for, signore, was the money and the reputation she was sure you would otherwise be cheated out of.”
Paolo clapped a hand to his forehead.
“But how could she think this?” he said wildly. “She knows there was a paper signed before the lawyers. How could she believe such lies?”
“Because she is only a child, no matter what your opinion is of that, and she had no one to tell her better. Now when you go upstairs, you must let her know you understand that. Will you?”
“Signora—”
“Will you?”
“Yes, yes, I will. But as for that man—?”
“Paolo, listen to me. I know how you feel about it, but anything you do to him can only mean a scandal that will hurt Claudia. Whatever happens will be in all the newspapers. After that, can the girl go back to school? Can she ever go back home to Campofriddo without everyone staring at her and whispering about her? Even if you take him to court—”
“Even that,” Paolo said bitterly. He placed a hand on the latch of the door. “But I must not keep you any longer with my affairs.” And when Betty reluctantly leaned forward so that he could climb past her out of the car, he added, “You do not understand these things, signora, but I will think over what you have said. Ciao.”
Mel watched him disappear into the tenement, and then started the car.
“It doesn’t sound very promising,” he said. “I guess I’ll have to slip Alex a word of warning tomorrow, much as I’d like to see him get what’s coming to him.”
“I know.” Betty shook her head despairingly. “My God, you ought to see the way those kids are living. A room like a rathole with a curtain across the middle so they can each have a little privacy. And rain seeping right through the walls. And the furniture all orange crates. And a stinking, leaky toilet out in the hall. You wouldn’t believe that in this day and age—”
“Oh, sure, but la vie Boheme is hardly ever as fancy as la dolce vita. Anyhow, whatever Alex is paying for this commission means some improvement in those living standards when he settles up.”
