One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  Zack and Danny Silvermine had both fallen silent, leaving only the soft sounds of tire-hum and air-conditioning, which I didn’t at first notice. Putting down The Man Who Was Overboard, I leafed through Salute the Devil and saw how it had been done. That had been my first script, my very first attempt to write anything in fiction, and it was all talk from beginning to end. Later I’d learned more about letting action carry the story, but that first one was dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. Following the advice of my three mentors—Ross, and Bly, and Terry Young, my reporter friend in New York—I’d “opened it up” by setting all the talk in different places; on the rifle range, in the stable, among the cadets while they marched. What Danny Silvermine had done was shift all those scenes down onto only two sets, the senior cadets’ locker room and the faculty lounge.

  But wouldn’t that merely emphasize what was amateurish and inept in the story? I leafed through this careful product of the word processor, with its justified right margins and eye-catching use of italics and boldface, trying to see at a glance if the result was better or worse or just the same, and then I became aware of Zack and Danny watching me, waiting. I turned back to the first page: Salute the Devil, by Samuel Holt. I said, “You didn’t give yourself a credit.”

  Danny giggled, either from nervousness or relief, impossible to tell. “Oh, I figured we’d work that out,” he said. “Whatever you want, it’s fine with me. My ego isn’t involved in that part, Sam.’’

  But can you be a good writer—or even a good rewriter—if your ego isn’t involved? I didn’t ask that question, merely dropped the script back onto the other one and said, “I’ll have to read them, of course.’’

  “Oh, of course!’’

  “But at first glance it looks as though you’ve done a good job. I wouldn’t have known how to redo Salute.”

  “It was all there,’’ Danny assured me, leaning forward, spreading his hands. “You provided the substance, Sam, I just noodged it around a little.’’

  Zack said, “Sam, if you decide to proceed with this, I’ll tell you something right here in front of Danny. He’s a detail man. If you go on the road with him, he’ll get the details right.’’

  Danny squirmed with pleasure, like a puppy. “It’s what I love to do, that’s all. Provide the setting, let the artist be free to create.’’

  Everybody in Los Angeles is an artist. To meet a producer who claimed not to be an artist was refreshing, and made me warm to him. “I’ll read them,’’ I said.

  “That’s all I could ask, Sam. I want you to know I appreciate it.’’

  Zack said, “Next week, Sam, you’ll give me a call?”

  “Don’t rush the man!” Danny cried, hurrying to my defense, demonstrating how he’d behave if we went on the road together in a more meaningful way than in this limousine.

  Beyond the chauffeur, out in the glare, the huge green sign announced Manchester boulevard; LAX was near.

  “I’ll read them on the plane,” I said. “Then take a few days to think it over. ’ ’

  “Of course,” Zack said.

  “So next week’s no problem,” I said. “Early next week.”

  “That’s fine, fine.”

  “I really appreciate this, Sam.”

  We all smiled together in perfect harmony, we were polite, Zack was pleased and avuncular, Danny was effusive, and the chauffeur slowed for Century Boulevard.

  20

  Unless requested otherwise, airlines prefer to preboard infants in arms, unaccompanied minors, people in wheelchairs, and celebrities; it makes it easier to maintain the passenger flow. That’s why I was surprised to find someone already in the window seat next to mine when I came onto the L-1011 with three children of divorce and a resigned-looking Oriental couple bearing twins in arms. My fellow preboarders turned right toward coach when they entered the plane, I turned left, and there he was, my seatmate, the pre-preboarder.

  My first impression of him, a hard-bodied man in his fifties wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit, was of a top-ranked corporation or divorce lawyer, but such a man wouldn’t be preboarded like this. A senator? That seemed possible until I reached my seat and he turned to look at me, when I saw that he was European. Foreign, anyway.

  I don’t know how to define that idea, how this mongrelized melting pot of ours has managed to come up with a distinctive American look—or several distinctive American looks, I suppose—but we have, and this fellow was none of them. His coarse pepper-and-salt hair was cut full, emphasizing its waviness in a dramatic way I thought of as Italian. There was nothing unusual about his suit and vest and maroon-figured tie, but the white shirt’s collar points were too long and narrow, giving him to my American eyes a vaguely untrustworthy look. Similarly, his mouth was thin-lipped, almost colorless, and looked unused to smiling, while his cheeks were rounded, almost puffy, noticeably so in his otherwise hard-boned face, suggesting something alien in his normal diet. (Americans tend to go puffy lower in the face, sagging down onto the jawline.) The skin of his face was leathery, tanned by sun or wind and faintly pocked with some childhood disease. His eyes were small and darkly brown, and they glanced at me in brief disinterest before returning to the airline copy of The Economist he was leafing through.

  My luggage consisted entirely of one attache case containing Danny Silvermine’s scripts, other reading matter, materials concerned with the lawsuit that was taking me east, and a beautiful green silk sweater I’d found in a shop in the Rodeo Collection, as a present for Anita. Since there’s so very little of the materialistic about Anita, she’s hard to shop for, so I wind up buying whatever reminds me of her, regardless. This Italian sweater reminded me of Anita’s eyes; whether she ever wore the thing or not was up to her.

  My seat, as usual, was 2-C; nonsmoking, aisle, on the north side of an eastbound plane to avoid glaring sunlight. Dropping The Man Who Was Overboard onto this seat, along with a yellow legal pad and a ball-point pen, I stowed my attache case in the overhead bin, told the stewardess I’d like the orange juice, thank you, without the champagne, and settled myself down to wait for New York.

  The only flaw in preboarding is the long long wait before the plane takes off. While we were still on the ground, my seatmate went steadily through every bit of reading matter in The Economist and then turned to another of the several airline-copy magazines he’d stashed in the seat pocket; another advantage of preboarding, getting to pick first through the available magazines. He chose The Atlantic next, beginning with the puzzle at the back, which he slowly but inexorably filled in, in ink, with long pauses while he brooded into space, searching out the answers.

  And I read The Man Who Was Overboard. When I finished, I’d made barely half a dozen notes, and those were mostly perfunctory. Danny Silvermine had done his job well, keeping most of my dialogue, bridging and explaining scenes that couldn’t be transferred from film to stage. If you accepted the original premise, that this was a story worthy of recycling in another medium, Danny had done a clean and craftsmanlike job. My only problem was with the original premise. Was this script as tired as I thought it was, or was I the only one so totally weary of Packard and all his works?

  Deciding a double dose might help answer the question, and the plane still not having taken off—though first class was now about two-thirds full—I got to my feet, retrieved the attache case, switched scripts, put the case away, and sat down with Salute the Devil to see my seatmate frowning at me. “I beg your pardon,” he said with an accent that wasn’t quite English, “but have we met? Forgive the intrusion, it’s simply that you look familiar.”

  The person who knows he knows me but doesn’t know why is fairly common, particularly now that PACKARD is fading into history. Something told me this man would not have been a regular viewer. I said, “I’m an actor; you’ve probably seen me on television.”

  “Oh, is that right?” He seemed pleased, though the thin-lipped mouth didn’t exactly smile. “Where I live,” he said, “I see mostly cassettes. Is you
r work available on cassettes?”

  “In a limited way,” I said. “I was on a series for a while called PACKARD.”

  He nodded, politely trying to remember the name. “Would that be a detective show?”

  “Yes.”

  With a brief headshake he said, “Then, forgive me, I would be unlikely to watch. I am a detective myself, you see, and the difference between television and my own experience ...”

  “Yes, of course.” When American cops tell me such things, as sometimes happens, I always assume it’s a kind of snobbery, but wherever this fellow came from, police work was undoubtedly very different from the American TV version.

  “On the other hand,” he went on, musing, tapping the nearly complete Atlantic puzzle with the tip of the pen, “I can remember being amused by The Rockford Files r

  “The class act,” I agreed.

  Dipping into a vest pocket, he came out with a white card, which he handed me, saying, “May I introduce myself? Hassan Tabari.”

  The card was expensive stock, the lettering a smooth and faintly Oriental script. His name was in the middle of it, and in the lower right were two lines that read, Minister of Justice, Principality of Dharak. I said, “Dharak. I’m sorry, I don’t think I . . .”

  He was amused, and now he did smile, with closed lips. “We know nothing of one another’s worlds, I see. We are one of the emirates between Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. ’ ’

  “Where they’re bombing the oil tankers?”

  His expression became grim and angry. “Disgraceful,” he said. “There's a crime for you, but no detective work involved. Unarmed neutral ships are bombed and strafed, innocent sailors slaughtered, and the murderers defiantly announce themselves.”

  “Iran and Iraq.”

  “Precisely.” He turned his left hand palm upward. “And who is to arrest them?”

  “No one,” I agreed.

  “There are so many outlaw states in the world.” He was coldly furious, a strong man frustrated. “And too many, I’m afraid, in my own neighborhood.”

  We were interrupted then by the stewardess doing the safety announcements as the plane at last was towed back away from the gate and taxied itself out toward its runway. As one stewardess read the drill over the sound system, another one with a fixed smile stood at the front of the cabin, showing the safety card, demonstrating the operation of the seat belt and life jacket and oxygen mask. When at last she was finished, I turned back to Hassan Tabari and said, “By the way, my name’s Sam Holt.”

  The name meant nothing to him; in some ways a relief, in some ways disconcerting. Extending his hand, he said, “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  His hand was firm, leathery, dry. I said, “Are you on your way home?”

  “No, only to New York, to talk with our U.N. Mission. I was in Los Angeles conferring with the police there about a pair of my co-nationals who had behaved badly. I was permitted to question them to see if there were implications for me at home. Fortunately, there were not.” His expression almost sly, he said, “It would appear they received their ideas about bank robbery from television.”

  Until he’d said that last part, I’d half-believed the co-nationals he was talking about were the people who’d tried to run me off the San Diego Freeway, the ones Ross was tied up with. It would have been a ridiculous coincidence, but if coincidence didn’t happen in this world, we wouldn’t need a word for it. However, the lions Ross saw himself as taming weren’t bank robbers, and they weren’t—unfortunately—in the hands of the Los Angeles police.

  In any event, I now understood why he’d been boarded ahead of those who normally go first. A government minister from a strife-torn corner of the world who had just been visiting with the police in Los Angeles would have somewhat more than the normal clout.

  He said, “And you? I see you’re reading a script. On your way to an acting job?’’

  “I wish I was,” I said, and told him briefly about the lawsuit against the comic book company.

  Again he was amused, though distantly. “You must forgive me,” he said, “if I think your problems not entirely . . . serious.”

  “In comparison with the Mideast, you mean.”

  “In comparison with life.”

  “Life is an accumulation of details, isn’t it?” I asked him. “Police work is, I know.”

  He bowed his head, though still amused, saying, “I am properly chastised. You’re right, the details must be attended to. Whether we are doing our laundry or changing the world, the point is that it must be done. But still, that is a script,” he added, pointing to Salute the Devil in my lap.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And so it is in some way work, and must be done, and I must not keep you from it. I shall return to my own very engaging puzzle, which does not have to be done, which is its charm.”

  He nodded to me, with his near smile, and as the plane at last lifted off the runway, he neatly filled in one more word of his puzzle. I opened Salute the Devil and read, but aware of a nagging uncertainty: Which of us, in that last exchange, had been put down?

  21

  Because this was a dinner flight we had the movie first, Hassan Tabari obediently lowering his window blinds at the stewardess’s request, but then switching on his reading light, having consumed The Atlantic by now and moved on to Scientific American, in which at last he showed some selectivity, not devouring it all, skipping over the article on insect larva. In the meantime I had finished both of Danny Silvermine’s scripts and had decided to show them to Anita while I was in New York, because maybe I was the wrong person to say whether or not they worked, whether or not the basic idea was a good one, whether or not Packard was still viable. The movie was a pretty poor comedy I’d already seen parts of on cassette, but I watched it anyway, feeling lazy and disoriented, needing distraction from my two problems. Danny’s scripts were problem number one, and, of course, Ross was problem number two.

  (The lawsuit responsible for this trip got hardly any of my attention at all.) It might have been easier to limit my fretting to Danny Silvermine if it hadn’t been for the presence of Hassan Tabari. Because of the part of the world he came from, and because of the pool company that called itself Barq, he couldn’t help but remind me of Ross, about whom I had done absolutely nothing of any use, with the single exception of getting Doreen away from him and his friends.

  The movie, as all bad things do, came to an end. I removed the headset, and was trying to decide which of Tabari’s magazines I would ask to borrow when the man himself raised his window blinds, put down Scientific American, and said, “The person who performed the role of the doctor in that film is Lebanese, you know.”

  “Oh, really?” I tried to remember the actor’s name; it had been a smallish part, about the size my friend Brett Burgess gets hired for. “I hadn’t known that,” I said. Nor had I been aware of Tabari at any time looking at the screen.

  “His mother was French,” Tabari explained, “so he took her name when he became an actor. Westernizing, you see.”

  “Ah.”

  “So,” he said, shrugging, “we are not all bombers of defenseless sailors, hijackers of innocent tourists.”

  “All Arabs, you mean.”

  He considered the term, and rejected it. “All Moslems,” he decided. “After all, the Iranians are not Arabs, as they never tire of announcing. The dispute is religious rather than racial. In fact,” he said, suddenly voluble, shifting position so he could face me more comfortably, “I sometimes think the internal Moslem struggle is infinitely more important than Arab versus Jew. That one is merely about territory, but the war within Islam is for the soul of the world.”

  To have such an overblown hyperbole come from so restrained and self-controlled a man at first startled and then amused me, which must have shown in my face, because he cocked an eyebrow at me and said, “Do you think I overstate the case?”

  “Slightly,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” he agreed, and nodded,
and said, “but only very slightly. We control the world’s energy for the next century. We shall decide whether or not the machines of western civilization turn. Don’t you think we will have some say as to what that civilization looks like?”

  “It’s possible,” I admitted.

  “The fundamentalist sects,” he said, “have captured Iran, taken control of Libya, assassinated Sadat, helped to destabilize Lebanon, performed terrorist acts against you of the West, and are creating great trouble and concern in every moderate Moslem nation. Even Saudi Arabia is not as proof against the virus as it appears.” This was far from any area of expertise I might claim. I said, “We can see the struggle’s going on, all right.”

  “But who are these people in white nightdresses, eh, slaughtering one another?” The twist he then gave his mouth could not have been called a smile. “The Jewish lobby in this country makes no distinctions among Arabs,” he said, “and therefore America does not, and that is a very bad mistake.”

  “I’m really not up on all this,” I said, wondering how to get back out of this conversation, deciding the thing to do was find a need to visit the lavatory.

  Tabari leaned back, shaking his head at himself, as though aware he’d gone too far, made me nervous. “I’ll say only this,” he told me. “Our fundamentalists are to us a more violent form of what your fundamentalists are to you. The sort of people who a generation ago forced the famous Scopes monkey trial and still today try to keep evolution out of your schools. The kind of people who bomb abortion clinics. In America these people are merely an irritant, one point of view among many at the fringes of a strong center. In my part of the world there is no center, there are only the extremes. You would not like a world, Mr. Holt, that would please some of our imams.”