QB VII (19 page)

“You’re the end.”

“I admired you when you used to be a writer.”

“Very funny. Did Shawcross put you up to that?”

“No. I read the books, then I saw the movies. I’m leaving in a half hour. Why don’t you follow in another half hour. I’ll be waiting for you.”

The young lemon-rinsed stud burst back into the scene. “I say, Shawcross didn’t want to see me at all. Rather cheeky of you,” he said indignantly.

Abe turned his back to Madame Alba and faced the stud. He lifted his eye patch revealing an ugly sight “Want to make something of it junior,” he asked.

The stud fled.

“Jesus Christ,” Abe said, “lavender walls, lavender carpet, lavender bedspread.”

“I adore this suite. It goes with my black hair.”

“Before I sweep you off your feet how about buying me a drink.”

Abe stared at the rug, sipped, then looked to the settee opposite where she was neatly blended in soft flowing lace.

“Mind if I call you Maggie?”

“No, I rather like it.”

“Well, Maggie, no bore in the world likes someone with a long, sad story and I’ve got one. I’m afraid you picked lousy company. Frankly, I ought to be with a hooker in the Soho. I can’t afford you.”

“I go down for one of two reasons. Mostly for diamonds as you know. My last sponsor, a French aircraft manufacturer, was very un-French in his jealousy and kept me under virtual lock and key for two years.”

“Here’s to all our plush prisons. Why me, Maggie?”

“Of course you must know how attractive you are. Besides, I have a thing about writers. They’re all little boys in need of mothering, and you are the saddest little boy I’ve ever seen.”

“Will you hold me all night and tell me not to be scared and all those words I’ve longed to hear from my wife?”

“Yes.”

“Christ, the dialogue between us is worse than the book I just wrote.”

“What the critics never seem to learn is that the world runs on a few dozen clichés. We spend our lives repeating ourselves.”

“It’s 1962 already,” Abe said. “I’m forty-two years old. I’ve got a son eighteen and a daughter fifteen. I’m married almost twenty years to a decent woman who had no business being a writer’s wife. You can’t put into someone what the Lord didn’t give them. She’s let me down. I’ve had numerous affairs and have long since ceased to feel guilt, but I know that we all pay for what we do and someday it’s going to come crashing down on me. On the other hand I get almost no satisfaction from my affairs because I’m really not seeking bodies. I’m looking for peace and the conditions to write what I really want to write.

“I was twenty years old when I did my first novel. Yesterday, twenty-two years later I turned in a manuscript that was pure unadulterated crap. What little dignity and self-respect I had I surrendered by writing this book.

“Look at me, Maggie, monogrammed shirt and tailored eye patch. You know, two days ago was Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we’re supposed to meditate about ourselves and our lives. My dad, God rest his soul, passed away on Yom Kippur. I promised him something and I lied. Look at my goddam monogrammed shirt.”

In the morning it was Laura who was pensive and misty-eyed. She poured his coffee. There’s nothing more exquisite than contemplating an affair,” she said, “and nothing more sobering than having it, unless you run into Abraham Cady. It’s lovely to have a man who knows how to take care of you. You said as much when you looked through me at the cocktail party last night.”

Abe shrugged. “You’ve got to establish who’s boss.”

“Only one other man was able to treat me that way, my husband. I was very young, just over twenty and Carlos was fifty when we met I was already playing musical yachts. I thought the marriage would be dull but worth the security. But the bed was a battlefield and he was a master tactician in his kind of warfare. Abe, I have a lovely villa on the Costa del Sol at Marbella and two free weeks. Let me pamper you.”

“I’ve got a thing about going to Spain,” he said.

“Your brother’s been dead almost twenty-five years. Perhaps it might be a good idea to see his grave.”

“One by one I seem to have given up most of my ideals. Even being with a woman like you is wrong. Consort of munitions dealers, widow of a prominent fascist.”

“I know. The underlying hatred is what makes us so exciting. Do you know how I learned about you? From a German actress who was your mistress. What vicarious thrills come from love-hate. Darling, I’ve said please. We won’t even have to leave the villa.”

“All right, let’s go.”

“Tomorrow, noon flight to Madrid. I have a car there. Well drive to Málaga for the night and then on down the coast to Marbella.”

He turned over inside him at the mention of the names on the Spanish land, and he was unaccountably thrilled at the idea of seeing it.

“I have to go,” she said; “there’s an important painting going on auction at Sotheby’s after lunch.”

He grabbed her wrist “Phone your bid in for someone else to make. I’m taking you back to bed.”

They stared at each other for a long period, neither of them yielding. “Very well,” she said at last.

15

T
HE VILLA
A
LBA, OUTSIDE
Marbella, rose from the moody sea as an intricate part of a massive rock on a myriad of levels, cavelets with waterfalls spilling into shimmering pools, and the traditional Spanish white arches and red tiled roofs and floors were enhanced by expansive use of glass and flying wings and jutting patios. It was a violently colored place of great splashes of modern art which were abruptly muted by an ancient tapestry or a wormwood religious statuette.

The villa was set in a baked, terraced land outlined by tall spikes of cypresses that ran to the ragged shores and their long golden stretches. The sands had been trampled under by the hordes of Hannibal and the hordes of bikini clad tourists. A place inundated with lore and Roman walls and the yachts of a fast-paced international set. Of Gothic and Moorish pillage and rape and latter day orgies.

For all the splendor of her home, Abe found an intrinsic sadness about it for nowhere was there to be found a portrait or remembrance of another human being. This was Laura Margarita Alba, strange and lonely as the sea.

Nearby, the swirl of high social nothingness was centered at the Marbella Beach Club of Prince Max von Honenhole-Langenberg. In other times Laura made her presence felt there, and she was a most fascinating hostess of bronzed sun people and rotted old aristocracy whose incredible dribble rarely went beyond who was sleeping with who.

For now she wanted Abe alone. They ravaged each other with a controlled fury born out of physical and spiritual starvation. The long years of emptiness found sudden fulfillment and they squandered it on each other until they had exhausted themselves into spending their time in a magnificent daze. The selfish woman now lavished upon him unselfishly, her will commanded by his.

At times in the middle of the night when both of them were restless they would sit in the shallow end of the pool and watch the machinations of the sea or walk down to the thatched hut in a private cove and talk until dawn. And in the morning they would lay in a half shuttered room in semidarkness with a soft breeze over their bodies as the only intruder. The servants moved around like whispers wondering about this man in the señora’s life.

In the middle of the second week mutual thoughts began creeping in of why this shouldn’t go on forever though neither of them spoke about this.

The tryst was invaded in the person of Lou Pepper, executive vice-president of International Talent Associates, a monolithic agency representing a lion’s share of the creative people in show business.

Lou was a tall, thin man with a sleepy face whose dominating feature was seventy Sy Devore suits, all dark.

“Maggie, meet Lou Pepper, a wart on the ass of humanity.”

“Save the incredibly funny dialogue for your next screenplay. I didn’t fly here because you are exactly my favorite person. Well, are you going to offer me a drink?”

“Give him a glass of water. Well, how’d you find me?”

“Most writers have two eyes so nobody recognizes them in public. Everybody knows the eye patch.”

“Let’s go out to the patio. You come too, Maggie. I want you to hear all this. Mr. Pepper is a very important executive. He doesn’t travel thousands of miles to see a mere writer.”

“You see, Señora Alba, Abe and I didn’t part on the best of terms, when he stomped out of Hollywood two years ago after being handed the best three picture deal any writer was ever offered.”

“Tell Maggie that you told me that any time I didn’t want your services you’d tear up the contract you wrung out of me.”

“Abe has a long memory but even agents have to live.”

“Why?”

“At any rate, I’m still selling your new novel.”

Laura looked from Abe to Lou Pepper, distressed at the harsh language and the hostility between them and angry at the intrusion. Even with Abe, who overtly hated him, Lou Pepper would have to go into an egocentric advertisement of himself before getting into the details. He settled with a drink and droned.

“As soon as Milton Mandelbaum took over as head of American Global Studios he called me in. ‘Lou,’ he said, ‘I’m going to lean on you heavily.’ Milt is high on you, Abe, always has been. He keeps talking about the wonderful times you had together in London during the war, the bombing missions he flew with you, the whole schmear. I told him a Cady novel is coming. He put ten thousand on the line just to read the book and have first refusal rights. Mind if I take my jacket off.”

Out popped the cuff links. Abe knew it was a big deal because Lou always gave himself away. His armpits went on him. Deals were the way agents got their sex. Lou remained calm. That indicated he was certain of his ground. The begging and crying and breast beating would come later.

“Milt is interested in you as a total person. He wants to see you flourish. He’s talking participation in profits.”

“The way that studio keeps books they wouldn’t have had a profit if they had produced
Gone with the Wind
.”

“As writer-producer it’s a different ball game.”

“But, daddy, I don’t want to be a producer.”

“You’re sanctimonious, Abe. What the hell did you write that piece of crap for, posterity? You had dollar signs from bedroom scene one through fifty. You want to hear the deal?”

Abe had been cut down, suddenly, cruelly.
The Place
wasn’t going to fool anybody. “What’s Mandelbaum got in mind,” be said in almost a whisper.

“Two hundred thousand for
The Place
plus escalation clauses based on sales. Two hundred thousand for your services as a writer and producer and ten percent of the profits. Well throw a few bones to the publishers to keep it up on the best seller list.”

Abe shoved his hands in his pockets and walked out toward the precipice and looked down where a calm sea merely swelled in and out of the rocks. “I guess this makes me one of the highest paid hookers in the world,” he mumbled to himself.

Lou Pepper, sensing the kill, swiftened the pace. “You get a producer’s cottage with your own can and bar and privileges in the executive dining zoom and a parking space in the private lot.”

“I’m moved, sincerely.”

Lou continued to talk at Abe’s back. “Plus first class travel to L.A. and twenty-five hundred a month living expenses. Samantha has agreed to come to L.A. with you.”

Abe whirled around. “Who in the hell gave you permission to see her. You set me up.”

“You happen to live in England, where should I go, to China?”

Abe laughed sadly, returned to his chair and clapped a hand in a fist over and over. “Lou Pepper doesn’t travel halfway around the world for a piddling forty thousand dollar commission. Who else have you got locked into the deal, male star, female star, director, cameraman, composer ... all who just happen to be represented by your agency.”

“Don’t act like there’s anything underhanded. Studios don’t like to keep payrolls with big stars. It’s up to the agencies to put the package together and lay it in their laps. Mandelbaum was interested in an entire deal he can sell his board.”

“You think your crowd plays rough, Maggie. What Mr. Pepper has here is a two million dollar package. That’s two hundred thousand dollars in commissions plus pieces of the picture. But, there’s a hitch. No star or director will commit to a property without a screenplay ... that is, unless Lou Pepper can deliver the most commercial writer in the business, namely me. So he knocks down two hundred thousand in commissions, fifty thousand of which will be paid to the International Talent Associates’ Geneva office and eventually find its way into a numbered account belonging to J. Milton Mandelbaum.”

“You’ve got a great imagination, Abe, that’s what makes you such a fine writer. Hand a man a half million dollars and be spits on you like you’re dirt.”

“Did you give Mandelbaum an option on my next book?”

“Your next three, Abe. I told you, Mandelbaum likes you as a total person. We all want to see you become a rich man. I’ve got to put in some calls to L.A. and New York. I’ll be at the Marbella Club. Torture yourself on your own time. I’ll tell you about reporting dates tomorrow.”

Abe paced the patio spitting out epithets, then crumpled. “He knows I haven’t got the guts to blow this deal. If I did, he’d see to it
The Place
never sold to another studio. Anyhow, I’ll become the kind of writer Samantha always envisioned.” He filled a half tumbler full of Scotch.

Laura took the glass out of his hand. “Don’t get drunk tonight.”

“I’m busting! Let’s drive up the coast.”

“You’ll get us killed.”

“Maybe I want to—I’m going alone.”

“No, I’ll drive with you. Let me pack a few things for overnight.”

They did not return to the villa until late the next evening after a wild ride in her Porsche along the treacherous twisting sea road to Málaga. There were a dozen messages to call Lou Pepper.

Laura flung open the door to the living room where a haggard David Shawcross waited.