Evening in Byzantium (3 page)

“I’m not saying anything the French don’t know. They glory in being intolerable.”

“How’re the kids?”

“As usual. Well-balanced. One angelic. One devilish.”

Constance had been married twice, once to an Italian, once to an Englishman. The boy was the result of the Italian and had been thrown out of four schools by the age of eleven.

“Gianni was sent home again yesterday,” Constance said matter-of-factly. “He was organizing a gang-bang in his art class.”

“Come on, Constance.” She was given to exaggeration.

“Actually, I think he tried to throw a little girl with glasses out of the window. He says she was looking at him. Anyway, something perfectly normal. He can go back in two days. I think they’re going to give Philippa a copy of
The Critique of Pure Reason
as a term prize. They took her IQ, and they say she could be president of IBM.”

“Tell her I’ll bring her a navy blue sailor’s jersey from here.”

“Bring her a man to put inside it,” Constance said. She was certain that her children, like herself, were swamped in sexuality. Philippa was nine. To Craig the girl didn’t seem much different from his own daughters at that age. Except that she didn’t stand up when grownups came into the room and that she sometimes used words from her mother’s vocabulary that he would have preferred not to hear.

“How’re things down there?” Constance asked.

“Okay.”

Gail McKinnon got up politely and went out to the balcony, but he was sure she could still hear what he was saying.

“Oh,” Constance said, “I put in a good word for you last night with an old friend of yours.”

“Thanks. Who was it?”

“I had dinner with David Teichman. He always calls me when he comes through Paris.”

“Along with ten thousand other people who always call you when they come through Paris.”

“You wouldn’t want a girl to have dinner alone, would you?”

“Never.”

“Anyway, he’s a hundred years old. He’s coming down to Cannes. He says he’s thinking of starting a new company. I told him you might have something for him. He’s going to call you. Do you mind? At the worst, he’s harmless.”

“He’d die if he heard you say that.” David Teichman had terrorized Hollywood for more than twenty years.

“Well, I did my bit.” She sighed into the phone. “I had a bad morning. I woke up and reached out and said, ‘Damn him.’”

“Why?”

“Because you weren’t there. Do you miss me?”

“Yes.”

“You sound as though you’re speaking from a police station.”

“Something like that.”

“Don’t hang up. I’m bored. Did you have bouillabaisse for dinner last night?”

“No.”

“Do you miss me?”

“I’ve already answered that.”

“That’s what a girl might call a very cool reply.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Do you wish I was there?”

“Yes.”

“Say my name.”

“I’d rather not at the moment.”

“When I hang up, I’m going to be prey to dark suspicions.”

“Put your mind at rest.”

“This call has been an almost total waste of money. I dread tomorrow morning.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to wake up and reach out and you won’t be there again.”

“Don’t be gluttonous.”

“I’m a gluttonous lady. Well, get whoever it is out of the room and call me back.”

“Will do.”

“Say my name.”

“Pest.”

There was a laugh at the other end of the wire. Then the click as Constance hung up.

He put the phone down. The girl came back into the room. “I hope I didn’t cramp your style,” she said.

“Not at all,” he said.

“You look happier than before the call,” the girl said.

“Do I? I wasn’t aware of it.”

“Do you always answer the phone that way?”

“What way?”

“Craig speaking.”

He thought for a moment. “I suppose so. Why?”

“It sounds so—institutional,” the girl said. “Don’t your friends object?”

“If they do,” he said, “they don’t tell me about it.”

“I hate institutions,” she said. “If I had to work in an office, I’d—” She shrugged and sat down in the chair at the breakfast table. “How do you like what you’ve read so far?”

“Early in my career I resolved never to make a judgment on unfinished work,” he said.

“Do you still want to go on reading?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ll be still as the starry night.” She slumped in the chair, leaning back, crossing her legs. Her sandalled feet were actually clean, he noticed. He remembered how many times over the years he had ordered his daughters to sit up straight. They still didn’t sit up straight. The nonerect generation. He picked up the yellow pages that he had put down when he answered the telephone and began reading again.

“At the time of this interview,” he read, “Craig received McK in the living room of his hundred-dollar-a-day suite in the Hotel Carlton, the pinkish gingerbread headquarters for the VIPs of the Cannes Film Festival. He is a tall, slim, slow-moving, bony man with thick graying hair worn long and carelessly brushed back from a forehead deeply ridged by wrinkles. His eyes are a cold pale gray, deeply set in their sockets. He is forty-eight now, and he looks it. His glance is hooded, the eyelids characteristically almost half-shut. One gets the impression of a sentinel scanning the field below him through an aperture in a fortress wall. His voice, from which not all traces of his native New York have disappeared, is slow and husky. His manner is old-fashioned, distant, polite. His style of dress, in this town of peacock adornment for men and women alike, is conservative. He might be a Harvard professor of literature on a summer holiday in Maine. He is not handsome. The lines of his face are too flat and hard for that and his mouth too thin and disciplined. In Cannes, where a number of the assembled notables had either worked for him or with him and where he was greeted warmly at every appearance, he seemed to have many acquaintances and no friends. On two of his first three evenings at the festival he dined alone. On each occasion he drank three martinis before and a full bottle of wine with his meal, with no noticeable effect.”

Craig shook his head and put the yellow pages down on the bookcase near the window. There were still three or four that he hadn’t read.

“What’s the matter?” the girl asked. She had been watching him closely. He had been conscious of her stare through the dark glasses and had carefully remained expressionless while he read. “You find a bubu?”

“No,” he said. “I find the character unsympathetic.”

“Read on,” the girl said. “He improves.” She stood up, slouching. “I’ll leave it with you. I know what a strain it is reading something with the author watching you.”

“Better take this stuff with you.” Craig gestured toward the small pile of pages. “I am a notorious loser of manuscripts.”

“Not to worry,” the girl said. “I have a carbon.”

The phone rang again. He picked it up. “Craig speaking,” he said. Then he looked across at the girl and wished he hadn’t said it.

“My boy,” the voice said.

“Hello, Murph,” he said. “Where are you?”

“London.”

“How is it there?”

“Expiring,” Murphy said. “Inside of six months they’ll be turning the studios into feeding lots for Black Angus bulls. How’s it down there?”

“Cold and windy.”

“It’s got to be better than here,” Murphy said. As usual, he spoke so loudly that everybody in the room could hear him. “We’re changing our plans. We’re flying down tonight instead of next week. We’re booked in at the Hotel du Cap. Can you have lunch with us tomorrow there?”

“Of course.”

“Perfect,” Murphy said. “Sonia says give him my love.”

“Give her my love,” Craig said.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m coming,” Murphy said. “I want a few days rest. I don’t want to have to run into Cannes to talk to spitballing Italians three times a day.”

“Your secret is safe with me,” Craig said.

“I’ll call the hotel,” Murphy said, “and tell them to put the wine on ice.”

“I was thinking of going on the wagon today,” Craig said.

“Not on my time, my boy,” Murphy said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Craig said, and hung up.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” the girl said. “That was your agent, wasn’t it? Bryan Murphy?”

“How do you know so much?” Craig asked. His tone was sharper than he intended it to be.

“Everybody knows who Bryan Murphy is,” the girl said. “Do you think he’d talk to me?”

“You’ll have to ask him yourself, Miss,” Craig said. “I’m not his agent, he’s mine.”

“I imagine he will. He’s talked to everybody else,” she said. “Anyway, there’s no rush. We’ll see how things work out. It’d be nice if I could listen in on you two talking for an hour or two. In fact, the best way to do the whole job,” she went on, “would be to let me hang around with you for a few days. An admiring silent presence. You can introduce me as your niece or your secretary or your mistress. I’d put on a dress. I have a wonderful memory, and I won’t embarrass you by taking notes. I’ll just watch and listen.”

“Please don’t be so insistent, Miss McKinnon,” Craig said. “I had a bad night.”

“All right, I won’t bother you anymore this morning,” she said. “I’ll just flee and let you read the rest of what I wrote about you and let you think it over.” She slung her bag over her shoulder. Her movements were brusque, not girlish. She was not slouching now. “I’ll be around. Everywhere. Wherever you turn, you’ll see Gail McKinnon. Thanks for the coffee. Don’t bother to see me out.”

Before he could protest any further, she was gone.

H
E paced slowly around the room. Its appearance displeased him. It was a room for frivolous transients whose only decision each morning would be whether or not to go swimming and what restaurant to choose for lunch. He tapped in the top of the Scotch bottle and put the bottle away in a cabinet, then picked up his clothes and the sweating half-filled whisky glass. He took it all into the bedroom, dumped the clothes on the bed in which he had slept. The sheets and blankets were tangled. Uneasy sleeper. The second bed was neatly turned down. Whatever lady the maid had prepared it for had slept elsewhere. It made the room seem lonely. He went into the bathroom and emptied the whisky glass into the basin and rinsed it. The counterfeit of order.

He returned to the living room and carried the little folding table with the breakfast tray out into the hall. He locked the door behind him as he went back into the apartment.

There was an untidy pile of brochures and advertising throwaways for various films on the desk. He swept them all into the wastebasket. Other people’s hopes, lies, talents, greed.

The letters he had tossed on the table lay next to Miss McKinnon’s manuscript. He decided on the letters. Finally, they would have to be read and answered, anyway. He tore open the letter from his accountant. First things first. That primal concern—the income tax.

“Dear Jesse,” his accountant wrote, “I’m afraid the 1966 audit is going to be a tough one. The agent on your case has been in and out of the office five times, and he’s a bastard. I’m writing this from my home myself, on my own typewriter, so there won’t be a copy, and I advise you to burn it when you’ve read it.

“As you know, we’ve had to waive the three-year limit of review on your 1966 return; 1966 was the last time you made any real money, and Bryan Murphy set up this deal with a European company because you shot most of the picture in France and the deal looked good to everybody because it seemed that the money your company borrowed against potential profits would be treated as capital gains rather than ordinary income. Well, the IRS is challenging the basis of the deal, and this agent is a real bloodhound.

“Also—and this is for your eyes only—this particular agent looks like a crook to me. He as much as intimated to me that if you did business with him, he’d O.K. the return as filed. For a price. He intimated that eight thousand dollars would do it.

“Now you know that I never touch anything like that. I know, too, that you’ve never gone in for any such shenanigans, either. But I felt that you had to know what the score was. If you want to do anything about it, you’d better come out here soonest and talk to the bastard himself. And don’t tell me what you say to him.

“We could go to court and almost certainly win, as the deal is on the up and up and should stand scrutiny in any court of law. But I have to warn you that the legal costs would probably run you about $100,000. And considering who you are and your reputation, the papers would have a field day with a tax-avoidance case in which you were involved.

“I think we can settle with the bastard for between sixty and seventy-five thousand. My advice is to settle and get a job quick and make it up in a year or two.

“When you answer this, send your letter to my home address. I’ve got a big office, and you never know whom you can trust there. Aside from the fact that the Government is not averse to opening mail these days. Best regards, Lester.”

Make it up in a year or two, Craig thought. It must have been sunny in California.

He tore the letter into small pieces and threw them into the wastebasket. Burning it, as the accountant had suggested, would have been too melodramatic. And he doubted that the Internal Revenue Service went as far as bribing the chambermaids of the Côte d’Azur to piece together the shreds of letters they found in wastebaskets.