Evening in Byzantium (7 page)

“The interview is over,” Gail McKinnon said. “He’s been talking for a half hour.”

“Did you give her anything she can use?” Craig asked Murphy.

“If you mean did I use any dirty words,” Murphy said, “I didn’t.”

“Mr. Murphy was most informative,” Gail McKinnon said. “He said the movie industry was bankrupt. No money, no talent, and no guts.”

“That’ll help a lot the next time you go in to make a deal,” Craig said.

“Screw ’em,” Murphy said. “I got my pile. What do I care? Might as well enjoy telling the truth while the mood is on me. Hell, there’s a picture going into production that’s been financed by a tribe of Apache Indians. What the hell sort of business are you in when you have to get script approval from Apache Indians? We ordered lobster for lunch. You got any objection to lobster?”

“No.”

“How about you?” Murphy asked the girl.

“I love it,” she said.

Oh, Craig thought, she’s here for lunch. He sat down on one of the folding canvas chairs facing her.

“She’s asked me a lot about you.” Murphy jabbed a blunt finger in the direction of the girl. “You know what I told her? I told her one of the things wrong with the business is it’s driven people like you out of it.”

“I didn’t know I had been driven out,” Craig said.

“You know what I mean, Jess,” Murphy said. “So it became unattractive to you. What’s the difference?”

“He was most complimentary about you,” Gail McKinnon said. “You would blush with pleasure.”

“He’s my agent,” Craig said. “What do you expect he would say about me? Maybe you’d like to hear what my mother used to say about me when she was alive.”

“I certainly would.” The girl reached down toward the tape recorder. “Should I turn it on?”

“Not for the moment.” He was conscious of the girl’s small smile. She put the dark glasses on again. Once more she was an antagonist.

“Gail says you’re being stony-hearted,” Murphy said. It didn’t take him long to call girls by their first names. “Why don’t you give her a break?”

“When I have something to say,” Craig said, “she’ll be the first to hear it.”

“I take that as a promise, Mr. Craig,” the girl said.

“From what I heard my husband spouting for the last half hour,” Sonia said, “you’re wise to keep your thoughts to yourself, Jesse. If it was up to me, I’d put a cork in his mouth.”

“Wives,” Murphy said. But he said it fondly. They had been married twelve years. If they ever fought, they fought in private. The advantage, Craig thought, of late marriages.

“People ask too many questions,” Sonia said. She had a quiet, motherly voice. “And other people give too many answers. I wouldn’t even tell that nice young lady where I bought my lipstick if she asked me.”

“Where do you buy your lipstick, Mrs. Murphy?” Gail McKinnon asked.

They all laughed.

“Jess,” Murphy said, “why don’t you and I wander down to the bar and leave the girls alone for a cozy little preluncheon slander session?” He stood up, and Craig stood, too.

“I’d like a drink, too,” Sonia said.

“I’ll tell the waiter to bring one for you,” Murphy said. “How about you, Gail? What do you want?”

“I don’t drink before nightfall,” she said.

“Journalists were different in my day,” Murphy said. “They also looked different in bathing suits.”

“Stop flirting, Murphy,” Sonia said.

“The green-eyed monster,” Murphy said. He kissed his wife’s forehead. “Come on, Jess. Apéritif time.”

“No more than two,” Sonia said. “Remember you’re in the tropics.”

“When it comes to my drinking,” Murphy said, “the tropics begin just below Labrador for my wife.” He took Craig’s arm, and they started off together on the flagstone path toward the bar.

A plump woman was lying face down on a mattress in front of one of the cabanas, her legs spread voluptuously for the sun. “Ah,” Murphy murmured, staring, “it’s a dangerous coast, my boy.”

“The thought has occurred to me,” Craig said.

“That girl’s after you,” Murphy said. “Oh, to be forty-eight again.”

“She’s not after me for that.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

“Take an old man’s advice. Try.”

“How the hell did she get to see you?” Craig said. He had never liked Murphy’s hearty approach toward sex.

“She just called this morning, and I said come along. I’m not like some people I know. I don’t believe in hiding my light under a bushel. Then when I saw what she looked like, I asked if she had brought her bathing suit with her.”

“And she had.”

“By some strange chance,” Murphy said. He laughed. “I don’t fool around, and Sonia knows it, but I do like to have pretty young girls in attendance. The innocent joys of old age.”

They were at the little service hut by now, and the uniformed waiter there stood up as they approached and said, “
Bonjour, messieurs
.”

“
Une gin fizz per la donna cabana numero quarantedue, per favore,
” Murphy said to the waiter. Murphy had been in Italy during the war and had picked up a little Italian. It was the only language besides English that he knew, and as soon as he left the shores of America, he inflicted his Italian on the natives, no matter what country he was in. Craig admired the bland self-assurance with which Murphy imposed his own habits on any environment he entered.

“
Si, si, signore,
” the waiter said, smiling either at Murphy’s accent or with pleasure at the thought of the eventual tip Murphy would leave him.

On the way to the bar they passed the swimming pool set in the rocks above the sea. A young woman with pale blonde hair was standing on the side of the pool watching a little girl learning how to swim. The little girl had hair the same color as the woman’s, and they were obviously mother and daughter. The mother was calling out instructions in a language that Craig could not identify. Her tone was soft and encouraging, with a hint of laughter in it. Her skin was just beginning to turn rosy from the sun.

“They’re Danes,” Murphy said. “I heard at breakfast. I must visit Denmark some day.”

On inflated mattresses set back from the ladder leading to the sea two girls were lying face down, enjoying the sun. Their halters were discarded so that there would be no telltale strips of city-white skin across the tanned, beautiful young backs. Their brown rumps and long legs were smoothly shaped, appetizingly tinted. The bikini bottoms were merely a symbolic gesture toward public decorum. They were like two loaves of newly baked bread, warm, edible, and nourishing. Between them sat a young man, an actor Craig recognized from two or three Italian films. The actor was equally tanned, in swimming trunks that were hardly more than a jockstrap. He had a lean, muscular, hairless body, and a religious medal hung on a gold chain down his chest. He was darkly handsome, a superb animal with black hair and very white teeth, which he showed in a pantherish smile.

Craig was conscious of Murphy beside him staring down at the trio next to the sea.

“If I looked like that,” Craig said, “I’d smile, too.”

Murphy sighed loudly as they continued walking.

At the bar Murphy ordered a martini. He made no concessions to what his wife called the tropics. Craig ordered a beer.

“Well,” Murphy said, raising his glass, “here’s to my boy.” He gulped down a third of his drink. “It’s wonderful finally catching up with you. In person. You don’t hand out much information in your letters, do you?”

“There’s not much to say these days. Do you want me to bore you with the details of my divorce?”

“After all these years.” Murphy shook his head. “I never would have thought it. Well, people have to do what they have to do, I suppose. I hear you’ve got a new girl in Paris.”

“Not so new.”

“Happy?”

“You’re too old to ask a question like that, Murphy.”

“The funny thing is I don’t feel a day older than the day I got out of the army. Stupider but not older. Hell, let’s get off that subject. It depresses me. How about you? What’re you doing down here?”

“Nothing much. Lazying around.”

“That kid, that Gail McKinnon, must have asked me in a dozen different ways what I thought you were after in Cannes. You want to work again?” Murphy glanced speculatively at him.

“Might be,” Craig said. “If something good showed up. And if anybody was crazy enough to finance me.”

“It’s not only you,” Murphy said. “Anybody’d have to be crazy to finance almost any movie these days.”

“People haven’t been knocking your door down asking you to get me to work for them, have they?”

“Well,” Murphy said defensively, “you’ve got to admit you’ve sort of dropped out of things. If you really want to work, there’s a picture I’m putting together … I might be able to swing it. I thought of you, but I didn’t bother writing you until it was more definite. And there wouldn’t be much money in it. And it’s a lousy script. And it’s got to be shot in Greece, and I know about you and your politics …”

Craig laughed at the torrent of Murphy’s excuses. “It sounds just dandy,” he said. “All round.”

“Well,” Murphy said, “I remember the first time you came to Europe, you wouldn’t go to Spain because you didn’t approve of the political situation there, and I …”

“I was younger then,” Craig said. He poured some more beer into his glass from the bottle on the bar in front of him. “Nowadays, if you wouldn’t shoot a picture in a country whose politics you didn’t approve of, you wouldn’t expose much film. You certainly wouldn’t shoot a picture in America, would you?”

“I don’t know,” Murphy said. “My politics is take the money and run for the hills.” He motioned to the bartender for another drink. “Well, then, if the Greek thing develops, do you want me to call you?”

Craig swished the beer around in his glass. “No,” he said.

“This is no time to be proud, Jess,” Murphy said somberly. “You’ve been out of it, so maybe you don’t realize. The movie business is a disaster area. People who were getting seven hundred and fifty thousand a picture are offering to work for fifty. And getting turned down.”

“I realize.”

“If you’re over thirty, it’s don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Murphy gulped at his drink. “Everybody is looking for some longhaired kid that nobody even heard of who’ll make another
Easy Rider
for them for under a hundred thousand. It’s like a sudden blight has fallen from the sky.”

“It’s only movies, Murph,” Craig said. “Your best entertainment. Don’t take it so hard.”

“Some entertainment,” Murphy said darkly. “Still, I worry about you. Listen, I don’t like to bring up unpleasant matters, especially on a holiday, but I know you must be worrying about dough just about now …”

“Just about now,” Craig said.

“Your wife’s got lawyers all over the country, practically, and a pair of them have been in with a court order to look at my books to make sure I haven’t smuggled any funds out to you that she can’t get her hands on, and I know she’s taking you for half, plus the house. And what you’ve got in the market …” Murphy shrugged. “You know what the market’s like. And you’ve been living for five years with almost nothing coming in. Goddamn it, Jess, if I can swing the Greek thing, I’m going to make you do it. Just for walking around money until something breaks. Are you listening to me?”

“Of course.”

“I’m making as much of an impression on you as on a stone wall,” Murphy said gloomily. “You took it too hard, Jess. So you had a couple of flops. So what? Who hasn’t? When I heard you were coming to Cannes, I was delighted. Finally, I thought, he’s coming out of it. You can ask Sonia if I didn’t say just that. But you just stand there giving me the fish eye when I try to talk sense.” He drained his martini and motioned for another. “In the old days, if you had a flop, you’d come up with five new ideas that next morning.”

“The old days,” Craig said.

“I’ll tell you what you have to do
these
days,” Murphy said. “No matter how much talent you have or how much experience you have or how nice you are to your mother, you can’t just sit back and wait for people to come to you begging you to take their ten million dollars to do a picture for them. You’ve got to get out and hustle up an idea. And develop it. Get a screenplay. And a damn good screenplay. And a director. And an actor. An actor somebody still wants to see. There’re about two left. And a budget this side of a million dollars. Then I can go in and talk business for you. Not before. Those’re the facts, Jess. They’re not nice, but they’re the facts. And you might as well face up to them.”

“Okay, Murph,” Craig said. “Maybe I’m ready to do just that.”

“That’s better. That girl says she saw a script on the desk in your room.”

“At this very moment,” Craig said, “there are probably scripts on the desks of a hundred rooms in the Carlton Hotel.”

“Let’s talk about the one on yours,” Murphy persisted. “What is it—a screenplay?”

“Uhuh. A screenplay.”

“She asked me if I knew anything about it.”

“What did you tell her?”

“What the hell could I tell her?” Murphy asked irritably. “I don’t know anything. Are you interested in a screenplay?”

“I suppose you might say that,” Craig said. “Yes.”

“Whose?” Murphy asked suspiciously. “If it’s been turned down by one studio, forget it. You’re just wasting your time. The grapevine these days is run on laser beams.”

“It hasn’t been turned down yet,” Craig said. “Nobody’s seen it but me.”

“Who wrote it?”

“A kid,” Craig said. “You never heard of him. Nobody ever heard of him.”

“What’s his name?”

“I’d rather not say at the moment.”

“Even to me?”

“Especially to you. You talk your head off. You know that. I don’t want anybody getting to him.”

“Well,” Murphy said grudgingly, “that makes sense. Do you own it? The screenplay?”

“I have an option. For six months.”

“What did it cost?”

“Peanuts.”

“Is it about somebody under thirty years old with plenty of nude scenes?”

“No.”

Murphy groaned. “Christ,” he said. “Two strikes against you from the beginning. Well, let me read it, and then we’ll see what we can do.”