Max (52 page)

They were sitting in the private dining room in the commissary. The studio had closed down. The kitchen workers and the waiters and busboys had gone home, and only the guards were left, at the gates and patrolling the lot. Max and Snyder had lit cigars, and watching them through the murky haze, Feldman speculated that just breathing in their smoke all those years should have hooked him to nicotine.

‘So what are you and Max in such a sweat over?' Snyder went on. ‘I say, write it off and the hell with it.'

‘You don't write something like this off until you know what it is,' Feldman said gloomily, ‘and then you don't just write it off. You been around long enough to know that, Sam. We're a public corporation. We'd have to call a meeting of the board and present them with the facts and figures, and then it's up to them what kind of action they intend to take, and negligence and lousy management are bad enough, but there could be more than that.'

‘What do you mean, more?'

‘No matter what happens, we got to have an audit right away, and God only knows what we'll turn up. Jake couldn't be in this alone.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you can't do it all with the books, not in this business. You have to have someone on the road, someone who deals with the theatre managers and with certain people on the lot. Jake couldn't do that. For one thing, he was a little worm who nobody would play games with, and for another, he knew the books but he didn't really know a damn thing about how pictures are made.'

‘Ruby,' Max said hopelessly. ‘He's talking about my son of a bitch brother.'

‘Comeon, Ruby? Ruby's a –'

‘Go ahead, say it. Ruby's a cheap tin horn sport. Ruby's a nickel drifter. Who'd ever believe that Jake Stein, little Jake Stein, would keep some tramp in a house in the Hollywood Hills and shower jewels on her? One thing you got to say about Ruby – he's got more class than Jake Stein. And something else you can be sure of, if Ruby's got his hand in the till, my brother Benny's right in there with him.'

‘Max, you don't know that,' Snyder protested.

‘Don't be kind to me, Sam. We been together too long to bullshit each other. We got us some real trouble, and the question is, what do we do?'

‘What we do,' Feldman said, ‘we have to move very quickly. For the moment, Joe Klepper has taken over Jake's job. He's young and ambitious, and if he wasn't in this with Jake, it won't take him long to find Jake's tracks. There are five other men and women in the accounting department who might be in this or who might smell it out. If anyone else blows this open, our position will be untenable. We have to do it ourselves. As far as Ruby is concerned, I've warned you for years, Max, that he has sticky fingers; but we don't know yet that he's guilty, or Benny or anyone else.'

‘How do we find out?'

‘It's two weeks before the board meets, and I think that gives us enough time. My wife's cousin, Arnie Greenberg, has gone into business here in LA. His partner is Mike Hendon, a local boy. They're both certified public accountants, and they're young and honest and trustworthy. I think we should hire them immediately, pay them a fat bonus to drop everything else and work on this day and night. They'll do an audit that only we have access to. It can't possibly take in everything in that time, but it may well point in the main directions.'

‘At least we won't be blowing off in the dark,' Snyder said.

‘Max?'

Max nodded tiredly. ‘Yeah, I suppose so.'

The others left, and Max walked back to his cottage. Fritzie Cooper, with whom he had a date that evening, was waiting for him. Max never dated his stars. For one thing, he felt great distaste for the stories about his contemporaries in the other film companies, of them browbeating poor, defenseless, and innocent stars into bed with them. While he had yet to find a defenseless and innocent star, the stories left a bad taste in his mouth. And for another, stars were simply too skinny. Fritzie Cooper was a round and pleasant one hundred and thirty-five pounds, a good-natured, easygoing woman from Findlay, Ohio, who tired of the smell of oil wells and small-town morality and betook herself and her high school acting ability to Hollywood. Max discovered her waiting counter in a hash joint on Hollywood Boulevard and gave her a job as a contract supporting actress. There was no question of a quid pro quo, and it was not until a month or so after she had come to work on the lot that Max encountered her and asked her to have dinner with him. After that, he took her to dinner and bed perhaps once a week. Max had always found it difficult to believe that women could like him for himself. When he looked into the mirror, he saw a thin, worried Jewish face with a receding hairline; but looking into a mirror he never saw his warmth, his generosity, or his pleasure in women. And in turn, women enjoyed him. Fritzie was only twenty-five years old, and Max was only two years short of fifty, but she mothered him. Most of the women Max took to mothered him.

It was a warm evening, the area lying under the benign heat of the Santa Ana desert wind, and they dined in the garden at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Max was glum, and Fritzie said to him at least five times, ‘Come on, Maxie. Cheer up, old chap.' She had been dating some of the British actors who had swarmed into Hollywood and, chameleon-like, she mimicked them without being aware that she was doing so. Looking at her round, pink-cheeked face and her blond curls, Max grinned in spite of himself, and she in turn began to laugh in real delight. He was quite aware of the absurdity. But then, from the very beginning, his world had been totally absurd.

‘Why don't you get it off your chest, old dear, and tell me all about it.'

Max thrust a finger at her. ‘Right out of
Sanderson's Girl
.

‘How did you know?'

‘Sweetie, I own the studio. I read the scripts. I see the movies.'

‘Oh, Max, you must think I'm very stupid.'

‘I think you're delightful.'

‘Do you? Truly? Then I want a big fat New York steak with french-fried onions and french-fried potatoes.'

‘You shall have it.'

In some strange way, Max realised, it all made sense – or as much sense as most things.

Feldman had aged, He had shrunk, or perhaps his width made him appear smaller, his width and his little belly protruding against the tight vest of his three-piece suit and his fringe of gray hair around his mostly bald skull. After all, a quarter of a century had gone by since Max had first said to him, ‘How about it, Freddy. You want to be my lawyer?'

‘Well, I'd have to take that up with my employers.'

‘What employers? You mean Meyer Sonberg and his brother? You got more brains in your little finger than both of them put together. They're loser lawyers, crumb bums, ambulance chasers –'

‘Come on, Max.'

‘You remember back on Henry Street, them tough Irish kids from St Mark's Place used to come around looking for trouble, and we used to beat the shit out of each other. Only, when they caught you alone, you talked them out of it. I'll never forget that. Well, I want a lawyer in my company, someone who can talk the bad guys out of it.'

Twenty-five years ago; still Max remembered that first time. Perhaps Feldman remembered it too, looking around Max's office, then telling him, ‘Send Shelly home.'

‘Why? It's only four-thirty.'

‘You don't need her anymore today. I don't want anyone outside who might overhear us. Let her cut the telephone and go home.'

Max stared at Feldman for a long moment. Then he went to the door and told Shelly Greene to call the studio switchboard and tell them no more calls and then go home.

‘I'm not taking any chances,' Feldman said. ‘I don't want to be overheard. Not that this won't come out, but I want it to come out straight and properly, not as gossip.'

‘If you don't think having Greenberg and his partner all over the place, demanding every record and checkbook we own and pulling out the ledgers from ten years back – Well, if you don't think that has everyone gossiping and speculating, and three days ago they bring in five young snotnoses who act like they own the lot –'

‘I told them to, Max. I told them time was running out and they should bring me whatever they had.'

‘From all this hush-hush crap, they brought you something.'

‘Yes.'

‘All right. Don't sit there like some half-assed judge. What have you got?'

‘We'll start with Jake Stein. They've only gone back seven years. In that time, it appears – mind you,
appears
, because this still is not a regular no-holds-barred audit – that he stole close to five million dollars. Now understand me, this is Jake Stein as captain of the swindle. From what Greenberg and his men can come up with, two other men are directly involved and a number of others are indirectly involved.'

‘Who are they? Ruby and Benny.'

‘That's right.'

‘I suspected those two bastards were skimming the theatres for years, but how can you get that out of an audit of the studio books?'

‘That's what frightens me, Max. We can't. What we get is another side of it, cardboard companies that don't exist, acting as suppliers. For example, an outfit called Creative Market Research, market analysis and consulting. We've paid them three thousand dollars a month for seven years. Ruby has the authority to sign checks regarding distribution. It's a laundry outfit, pure and simple. Take another type of thing. A film is budgeted. The director is in there for fifty thousand. He kicks back ten thousand to Ruby.'

‘You got proof of that?'

‘Ralph Leone – five pictures, five kickbacks, fifty thousand to Ruby. Ruby has been billing Jake Stein for years – consultant, unit manager, production manager.'

‘And Benny?' Max asked icily.

‘Benny. Why in hell must I give this to you?'

‘Because I'm telling you to.'

‘All right. You know with every picture we make on location, there's a cash slush fund, three to five hundred dollars a day. It bribes the cops, pays for background homes, and pays the releases from background people we want to use –'

‘You telling me something I don't know?' Max demanded angrily.

‘OK. The unit manager dispenses it. Sam Snyder's been talking to a couple of unit managers. They both pay off Benny, which probably means that every unit manager working outside the lot is paying Benny fifty dollars a day. Nice money – and, goddamn it, Max, they all think you're in on it, that you're skimming the company.'

‘That little bastard. What else?'

‘You want me to go on? It's sickening. There are four office workers who don't exist, two guards, two carpenters – Jake Stein was a genius. And we haven't even touched distribution, where Ruby is king shit.'

Max's cheeks were quivering. He closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘My own flesh and blood.'

‘Easy, Max, please,' Feldman pleaded. ‘We got to handle this.'

‘How? How? Just tell me how in hell we handle this?'

‘All right. The board of directors meets in three days. You have to explain that Stein's death and Stein's house instigated our action. Then you make full disclosure of everything we have, everything, and then I'll make a motion that we postpone any decisive action on the board's part until a complete audit is made, and I'll suggest that we bring in a firm of prestigious San Francisco accountants to do the audit. It will probably take them a couple of weeks, and that will give us some breathing space.'

‘For what?'

‘At this moment, I just don't know. I want to read some law and consult some colleagues.'

‘And what happens to those two shithead brothers of mine?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Do they go to jail?'

‘Max, I just don't know. Give me a chance to think and inquire.'

Ruby was three inches taller than Max, and with his even, sunburned features, his dark, curly hair, and his tight body, he appeared a good deal less than his forty-four years, and one and another of the many girls that slid in and out of his life had remarked that he really couldn't be Max's brother, they looked so different. Ruby was a valid Hollywood product. There were only two topics of conversation in his life, sex and movies. His areas of interest were somewhat broader. He played golf and tennis, and he enjoyed being in the company of the stars. His name had been linked to half a dozen lady stars, and in this linkage there was some truth and some puffery.

Max found him on the tennis court behind their Beverly Hills house, meticulously clad in white flannels and white short-sleeved shirt and in the company of three giggling blondes. Ruby, who had one divorced wife in New York and another in Los Angeles, contented himself with a suite of rooms in the Beverly Hills Hotel as his own residence, at the same time he felt free to use the huge house that Max had built for Sarah and Freida, the forlorn unmarried sister. Nominally, it was Max's residence, but he almost never slept there. Benny, who headed up the New York office, still in the old Hobart Building on Fourteenth Street, preferred a hotel to Sarah's Beverly Hills house, since a hotel gave him full opportunity to use the female facilities his brother Ruby so generously supplied. Ruby had built the tennis court himself. ‘Didn't cost you a nickel,' he explained to Max, and Sarah found that the sight of her two younger sons playing this strange game behind her house was curiously satisfying. Even in the most bitter days of poverty on Henry Street, Sarah had never been given to self-denial, and it was absolutely astonishing how easily she fell into the life of Beverly Hills. At age seventy-one, she was still healthy and vigorous and determined to take full political advantage of her role as Max Britsky's mother. And as ever, Ruby was her staff and delight.

For a few minutes, Max watched her staff and delight returning a tennis ball to his blond opponent, and then he walked onto the court and said to Ruby, ‘Tell the girls to go home. I want to talk to you.'