(1969) The Seven Minutes (39 page)

Advancing toward the luminous area, Barrett could make out the klieg lights and a surprisingly small motion-picture camera poised high on rollers which were placed on tracks. Near the camera, three men were conferring - one pulling at an eyeshade, another knotting his bathrobe, the third bringing a lighter to his cigar. Beyond them, within the square of klieg lights, was a set furnished as a carpeted master bedroom.

‘Zo, we got it straight now?’ the stubby man with the cigar said

‘Let’s stop wasting time and get going. Harry, don’t ‘orget to lather your face again. Where in the hell are those goddam dames? Still in the can ? Go in there and drag them out if you have to. Why in the name of Christ can’t they have diarrhea on their own time? Come on, now - move!’

Hands on hips, he turned away in disgust, and then he became aware of his visitor.

He came forward. ‘Barrett?’

‘Yes, I -‘

He stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Norman Quandt.’

They shook hands. Quandt was just under middle height, squat and muscular, garbed in a checkered sport shirt and doeskin slacks. Behind the receding hairline the remaining hair had been heavily greased in an unsuccessful effort to keep it straight and flat. His general aspect was lumpy-tuberous. His forehead was broad, his eyes were close together above a short pug of a nose. His lips were thick, and there was a slight dribble from the cigar corner of his mouth. His jutting chin needed shaving. He appeared to be in his early forties.

When Quandt spoke again, Barrett noted that the man had the habit of not looking at the person he was addressing and that his voice was a rasp that grated on the nerves like a fingernail run down a blackboard.

‘Don’t have much time for anyone today,’ he was saying, ‘but that Jap of yours conned me into seeing you, and I said yes because anyone who’s trying to kick that smart-ass Duncan in the balls deserves at least ten minutes of my time.’

‘I appreciate it, Mr Quandt.’

‘Yeah. Well, soon’s this take is over, we can talk.’ He surveyed the set. ‘Ever see one of these girlie shorts being made before ?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘You’d be surprised what a market there is. There’s maybe two hundred public theaters we get them released in. Nothing dirty, if that’s what you think. Strictly sexploitation stuff for an audience that likes to see good-looking dames in the buff. We’re also making those beaver pictures - you know, mostly closeups of a wriggling dame’s snatch - the ones that are so popular in bars and nightclubs all over the country. There’s a big audience ready and waiting, respectable people, so why not give the public what it wants. Nothing wrong with that, eh?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘I always try to make my pictures a little classier than the competition. I don’t cut corners. Those twenty-minute shorts take maybe five days to shoot, and they budget in at around twenty thousand dollars each. We shoot them in sixteen-millimeter, which is good enough, and we try to get a high-quality canned sound track. Most of the competition, they don’t do any editing and the stories don’t have any plot. But we use a moviola, and I always write out some

kind of story plot ahead of time. It pays off better at the box office.”

‘I imagine it does.’

‘It does.’ Quant wiped away the spittle from his mouth and searched off. ‘Where in the devil are those goddam dames? Oh, yeah, here they come. You’ll see what I mean about not cutting corners, Barrett. Some of my competitors, they use beat-up hags with faces that’d stop a clock, with drooping tits and splayed asses and varicose veins, just so’s they don’t have to pay much. Not me, not Norman C. Quandt. I go by my own feelings about women. I like lookers, head to toe. I casf strictly by my crotch. If a babe walks in, and she’s stacked, and I feel a stirring in my crotch, then I know that’s how everybody in the audience is going to feel. That’s for me. Most of my girls have aspirations to be class models or starlets. Lots of them are teen-agers or in their early twenties, either just out of high school or working their way through college, and they’re clean enough to eat.’ He gave a gross cackle. ‘And sometimes I do, sometimes I do.’

Barrett made no comment. His initial reaction to the producer had hardened. He definitely did not like Norman C. Quandt.

‘See those two dames,’ said Quandt. ‘Pay them each a hundred twenty-five a day. Name any other dames who get that for just taking off their clothes for six hours.’ He made a megaphone of one hand. ‘Nancy! Linda P he bellowed. ‘Your places are chalked. Take it up just where you come in, Linda! Okay, Sims, roll it!’

Barrett’s attention was fixed on the set. A tall, mature girl with tousled black hair and haughty features, wearing a short frilly nightgown, strolled onto the scene, halted in front of a dressing-table mirror, and lazily stretched before it. A moment later a short buxom blond girl, younger and more voluptuous, garbed as a traditional French maid, in a brief ballet-type black skirt, appeared behind the brunette carrying a department-store box that had apparently just been delivered. The lady of the house, still facing the mirror, told the blond maid to put the delivery on the bed and then help her dress. The blond maid dropped the box on the bed, scurried off the set out of camera range, and returned carrying her mistress’s tennis racket and tennis outfit. Languidly the lady of the house reached down and lifted her nightgown, and slowly, ever so slowly, she drew it over her head.

Beside him Barrett heard the camera move in closer on the scene as the nude star half turned toward the camera, cupping her tiny firm breasts in her hands. After a moment she spoke to the maid, who handed her the tennis shorts. She drew on the shorts, and then, taking the tennis racket from the maid, she weighed it, stepped even closer to the camera, and, bare-breasted, began to practice her serve and her forehand. At last she exchanged the racket for her halter, pulled it on, ordered the maid to lay out her new purchases, and hurriedly exited.

The voluptuous young maid watched her go, then quickly went

to the bed and opened the newly delivered box. She held up three pairs of bikini panties and admired them. Reluctantly she laid them out on the bed, then went and found the vacuum cleaner. She turned on the vacuum, working it over the carpet toward the camera, then pushed it away, her back to the camera, and bent over to remove the vacuum bag. As she bent over, her brief skirt flipped up, and her bare pink buttocks were revealed.

Barrett realized that Quandt had glanced over his shoulder to wink. Barrett tried to offer a weak smile of approval.

The scene was continuing. The blond maid had been drawn back to the bed by Madame’s recent purchases. She was holding a pair of bikini panties against her own torso. Suddenly she decided to try them on. With quick fingers she unzipped her maid’s uniform, slipping out of the sleeves of the garment and pushing it down her hips until the uniform fell to the floor. After she stepped out of it, she stood for a few seconds without a stitch on, adroitly hiding her shaved vagina with one hand. Then, turning sideways to the camera, she took up the bi kini panties and stepped into them. Now, imitating her mistress, she posed before the mirror and promenaded about the set as the camera moved in closer and closer. The black wisp of bikini briefs seemed to accentuate the whiteness of her globular breasts, which were huge and bobbing. While she was doing her pantomiming about the bedroom, the master of the house appeared, face freshly lathered, shaving brush in one hand, expecting his wife and seeing this happy spectacle instead. He fell back slightly and watched, leering. As the maid danced around, she suddenly came face to face with the master. Her hands went to her open mouth, then down to her panties, and the breasts quivered steadily. In fright, she ran back to her vacuum sweeper, pushing it with one hand as she first tugged to pull off the panties and then retrieved her maid’s costume with the other.

‘Cut!’ bellowed Quandt. ‘Good work! That’ll give us a four-crotch rating from every critic in the country. Okay, take five, and then carry on. I’ll be tied up for a few minutes, but I’ll be back.’ He grasped Barrett’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s get some sunshine.’

They left the garage and emerged into the daylight. Quandt pointed to the rusting white enamel patio table, with several canvas chairs around it, which was set between the orange trees.

‘Not bad, was it?’ said Quandt, as they sat.

‘If you like girls, which I do,’ said Barrett, putting on his sunglasses and finding his pipe.

‘Now, what do you want to know?’ asked Quandt, throwing away his cigar stub and unwrapping a fresh cigar. ‘You want to know how I first got my hands on The Seven Minutes, is that it?’

‘For the most, yes. I’ve heard Philip Sanford’s version.’

‘Who in the hell is Philip Sanford?’

‘The publisher you finally resold the novel to, the one I’m defending in - ’

‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember. The fancy college kid with the fidgets.’

‘He’s now the head of Sanford House.’

‘Big deal,’ said Quandt, chewing on his cigar. ‘Let me see. Yeah. It was a number of years ago, when I was having a pretty good success with my paperback line. I’d never been to the old country, and I made up my mind to take off a month and gander the sights, and I don’t mean the Eiffel Tower and that crap, my friend. I mean I wanted to have a firsthand look at some of that highly touted French and Italian snatch.’ He grinned, removed his cigar, wiped the corner of his mouth. ‘I tell you, you don’t know what the weather is until you get blown by some broad in Paris. Those French chicks are something. Anyway, anyway, where was I?’

‘You were discoursing on fellatio,’ said Barrett dryly.

Quandt looked at him sharply, then said, ‘That book, yeah. I figured if I’m going to write the trip off with IRS, I’d better prove it was business. So I started asking around if there was anything available in my line. And some hotel concierge said there was a once-famous French publisher of spicy books who’d recently gone out of business. That was this Christian Leroux. So I looked him up. Most of his line was junk, worthless, full of big words, long sentences, no good. But one of the books was The Seven Minutes, and that one I dug pretty good. So I made Leroux an offer. Maybe like seven hundred fifty bucks for the whole world copyright, and he grabbed. He was down at the heels, pretending to be a gentleman, but the holes and ragged edges were showing and he was hungry. While he made a stab at bargaining, I knew he’d take my offer, and he did. The next time I saw him was for the contract signing, which we did at the American Embassy in order to have it notarized right then. That was the whole caper.’

‘What was this Leroux like?’

‘Just another frog. Well, maybe a little more impressive. He looked like a guy who once wore monocle and spats. You know, tight-assed. Big thatch of grayish hair. Bugle of a nose. Pretty good English. Kind of wheezy and asthmatic. I only saw him twice.’

‘Did he speak at all of the author of The Seven Minutes - you know, J J Jadway?’

Quandt tried to think. He held up his cigar. ‘Once. Yeah, once. It was when he turned over the original contract to me. It wasn’t signed by Jadway, but by some woman named Cassie McGraw, and I said who in the hell is that. Leroux said, well, he said, matter of fact, he’d never had personal dealings with the author, Jadway, because Jadway was shy and didn’t like to meet people - you know those writer nuts - especially not on business, and so he had delegated all his dealings to this broad he lived with, this Cassie McGraw, an American girl, and she signed the contract and got the money and everything, because she had his power of attorney in this deal. So when I was satisfied the old contract was legit, I

accepted the new one.’

‘But Leroux admitted to you he’d never personally met Jadway?’

‘Well, now, I’m not positive. Maybe he did talk to him once or twice, but that’s all.’

“What about this Cassie? Are you sure Leroux told you Cassie McGraw was Jadway’s mistress?’

‘Yeah, I remember that. He said - not in these words - that Jadway had found this American broad in Paris and been humping her a year or more than that. Because I remember Leroux saying what a beautiful kid this McGraw girl had been, and how lucky Jadway was. And I guess Jadway used his dame for the model of the horny dame in his book, because I remember in one of Jadway’s letters something about how he owed his heroine to the only woman he had ever loved.’

‘Letters,’ said Barrett, suddenly sitting up. ‘You said Jadway’s letters. You mean you’ve read letters actually written by Jadway ?’

‘Yeah, sure, didn’t I mention it ? Tell you how that was. About a year or so after I got The Seven Minutes, I decided that if I cut the dull passages, left in only the sex, it might be a hot seller. So I began to think of publishing it as a paperback. Then I realized I wanted to put something on the back cover about Jadway, and I didn’t have a damn thing. I needed some info for exploitation, you know. So I dropped Leroux a note asking for more info. You know what that frog prick did ? He wrote me back and said he had a small file containing some clippings about Jadway’s book when it came out, and he had three or four letters from Jadway in which Jadway told a little about his life in Paris as a writer - how he wrote the novel, what he’d had in mind, stuff he’d set down at Leroux’s request which had been delivered by hand by this Cassie McGraw. Leroux said I could have the whole caboodle, but I’d have to pay for it. Pay for it ? That mudderfucker. How do you like that ? I wanted to say, Up yours, Jack - but I needed the stuff. So what could I do ? So I offered him twenty bucks, and he accepted, and I sent him a check, and he sent me the file of Jadway’s clips and letters.’

A thrill of expectation shot through Barrett. Suddenly Quandt’s face resembled a map of the Promised Land. ‘Mr Quandt, those letters, can I see those letters?’

Quandt squirmed, and he seemed embarrassed. ‘Well, I’ll tell you about those letters,’ he said. ‘When I sold the book to Sanford, I forgot to give him the letters. And when I moved West, after my court trouble, I took my files out of storage and had them sent to me here from Philadelphia. And there in one of the files was a folder with those letters. Well, I just let them sit. I had other things in my mind. Then, a few weeks ago, whenever it was, when our crummy fuck beggar of a District Attorney arrested that schnook bookseller for trying to make a living off the book, and that crazy kid raped that girl, and overnight the book and Jadway was spread all over the papers and on television, and there was all that publicity