by Otto Penzler
“I told you it’d be all right, honey,” Pat whispered. “I told you not to worry about your boy while I was around to take care of him.” Then he grinned at Jerry, and his eyes closed and he was asleep.
Jerry tiptoed out of the room to find his own girl.
THE TWELFTH STATUE
ONE OF AMERICA’S greatest but most underappreciated mystery writers was the Brooklyn-born Stanley Bernard Ellin (1916–1986), a three-time Edgar Award winner and the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master honoree in 1981. Upon his return to civilian life after serving in the army during World War II, his wife agreed to support him for a year (they had a small chicken farm) while he tried to make a career as a writer. Just before the deadline, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine accepted his short story “The Specialty of the House” (1948), which went on to become a relentlessly anthologized classic of crime fiction and was adapted for an episode of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Many more of his stories were adapted for TV by Hitchcock and other series. Six of his stories were nominated for Edgars, two of which, “The House Party” (1954) and “The Blessington Method” (1956), won; his superb novel The Eighth Circle (1958) also won an Edgar. In addition to a number of his works having been adapted for television, many have been produced as feature films. Dreadful Summit (1948), his first novel, was filmed by Joseph Losey as The Big Night (1951), starring John Drew Barrymore, Preston Foster, and Joan Lorring. Leda (1959), a French film directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Madeline Robinson and Jean-Paul Belmondo, was based on his second novel, The Key to Nicholas Street (1952). A short story, “The Best of Everything” (1952), became Nothing But the Best (1964), directed by Clive Donner and starring Alan Bates, Denholm Elliott, and Harry Andrews. House of Cards (1967) was filmed with the same title in 1968, directed by John Guillermin and starring George Peppard, Inger Stevens, and Orson Welles. The abysmal Sunburn (1979), starring Farrah Fawcett, Charles Grodin, and Art Carney, was based so loosely on The Bind (1970) that Ellin asked that his name be removed from the credits.
“The Twelfth Statue” was first published in the February 1967 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in Kindly Dig Your Grave and Other Wicked Stories (New York, Davis, 1975).
STANLEY ELLIN
ONE FINE MIDSUMMER evening, in the environs of the ancient city of Rome, an American motion picture producer named Alexander File walked out of the door of his office and vanished from the face of the earth as utterly and completely as if the devil had snatched him down to hell by the heels.
However, when it comes to the mysterious disappearance of American citizens, the Italian police are inclined to shrug off the devil and his works and look elsewhere for clues. There had been four people remaining in the office after File had slammed its door behind him and apparently stepped off into limbo. One of the people had been Mel Gordon. So Mel was not surprised to find the note in his letter box at the hotel politely requesting him to meet with Commissario Odoardo Ucci at Police Headquarters to discuss l’affaire File.
He handed the note to his wife at the breakfast table.
“A Commissioner, no less,” Betty said gloomily after she had skimmed through it. “What are you going to tell him?”
“I guess the best policy is to answer everything with a simple yes or no and keep my private thoughts private.” The mere sight of the coffee and roll before him made Mel’s stomach churn. “You’d better drive me over there. I don’t think I’m up to handling the car in this swinging Roman traffic, the way I feel right now.”
His first look at Commissioner Ucci’s office didn’t make him feel any better. It was as bleak and uninviting as the operating room of a rundown hospital, its walls faced with grimy white tile from floor to ceiling, and, in a corner, among a tangle of steam and water pipes, there was a faucet which dripped with a slow, hesitant tinkle into the wash basin below it.
The Commissioner seemed to fit these surroundings. Bald, fat, sleepy-eyed, his clothing rumpled, his tie askew, he asked his questions in precise, almost uninflected English, and painstakingly recorded the answers with a pencil scarred by toothmarks. Sublimation, thought Mel. He can’t chew up witnesses, so he chews up pencils. But don’t let those sleepy-looking eyes fool you, son. There might be a shrewd brain behind them. So stay close to the facts and try to keep the little white lies to a minimum.
“Signor File was a cinema producer exclusively? He had no other business interests?”
“That’s right, Commissioner.”
And so it was. File might have manufactured only the cheapest quickies of them all, the sleaziest kind of gladiator-and-slave-girl junk, but he was nonetheless a movie producer. And his other interests had nothing to do with business, but with dewy and nubile maidens, unripe lovelies all the more enticing to him because they were unripe. He loved them, did File, with a mouth-watering, hard-breathing, popeyed love. Loved them, in fact, almost as much as he loved his money.
“There were two other people besides yourself and your wife who were the last to see the missing man, Signor Gordon. One of them, Cyrus Goldsmith, was the director of the picture you were making?”
“Yes, he was.”
And a sad case, too, was Cy Goldsmith. Started as a stunt man in horse operas, got to be a Second Unit Director for DeMille—one of those guys who handled chariot races and cavalry charges for the Maestro—and by the time he became a full director of his own, of low-budget quickies, he had absorbed too much DeMille into his system for his own good.
The trouble was that, whatever else De-Mille’s pictures might be, as spectacles they are the best. They are demonstrations of tender loving care for technical perfection, of craftsmanship exercised on every detail, and hang the expense. Quickies, on the other hand, have to be belted out fast and cheap. So Cy made them fast and cheap, but each time he did it he was putting an overdeveloped conscience on the rack, he was betraying all those standards of careful movie-making that had become ingrained in him. And, as the psychology experts would have it, a compulsive perfectionist forced to do sloppy work is like someone with claustrophobia trapped in an elevator between floors. And to be trapped the rest of your lifetime this way—!
That’s what happened to Cy, that’s why he hit the bottle harder and harder until he was marked unreliable, on the skids, all washed up, so that finally the only producer who would give him work was good old Alexander File, who paid him as little as possible to turn out those awful five-and-dime spectaculars of his. This is no reflection on others who might have been as charitable to Cy. The sad truth is that Signor File was the only producer on record who, as time went on, could keep Cy sober enough for a few weeks at a stretch to get a picture out of him, although, unless you like watching a sadistic animal trainer put a weary old lion through its paces, it wasn’t nice to watch the way he did it. A razor-edged tongue can be a cruel instrument when wielded by a character like File.
And, of course, since he was as small and skinny as Cy was big and brawny it must have given him a rich satisfaction to abuse a defenseless victim who towered over him. It might have been as much the reason for his taking a chance on Cy, picture after picture, as the fact that Cy always delivered the best that could be made of the picture, and at the lowest possible price.
“Regarding this Cyrus Goldsmith, Signor Gordon—”
“Yes?”
“Was he on bad terms with the missing man?”
“Well—no.”
Commissioner Ucci rubbed a stubby forefinger up and down his nose. A drop of water tinkled into the wash basin approximately every five seconds. Very significant, that nose rubbing. Or was it simply that the Commissioner’s nose itched?
“And this other man who was with you that evening, this Henry MacAaron. What was his function?”
“He was director of photography for the picture, in charge of all the cameramen. Is, I should say. We still intend to finish the picture.”
“Even without Signor File?”
�
��Yes.”
“Ah. And this MacAaron and Goldsmith are longtime associates of each other, are they not?”
“Yes.”
Very longtime, Commissioner. From as far back as the DeMille days, in fact, when Cy gave MacAaron his first chance behind a camera. Since then, like Mary and her lamb, where Cy is, there is MacAaron, although he’s a pretty morose and hardbitten lamb. And, incidentally, one hell of a good cameraman. He could have done just fine for himself if he hadn’t made it his life’s work to worshipfully tag after Cy and nurse him through his binges.
“And you yourself, Signor Gordon, are the author who wrote this cinema work for Signor File?”
“Yes.”
Yes, because it’s not worth explaining to this dough-faced cop the difference between an author and a rewrite man. When it comes to that, who’s to say which is the real creator of any script—the author of the inept original or the long-suffering expert who has to make a mountain out of its molehill of inspiration?
Commissioner Ucci rubbed his nose again, slowly and thoughtfully.
“When all of you were with Signor File in the office that evening, was there a quarrel? A violent disagreement?”
“No.”
“No. Then is it possible that immediately after he left he had a quarrel with someone else working on the picture?”
“Well, as to that, Commissioner—”
An hour later, Mel escaped at last to the blessed sunlight of the courtyard where Betty was waiting in the rented Fiat.
“Head for the hills,” he said as he climbed in beside her. “They’re after us.”
“Very funny. How did it go?”
“All right, I guess.” He was dripping with sweat, and when he lit a cigarette he found that his hands were trembling uncontrollably. “He wasn’t very friendly though.”
Betty maneuvered the car through the traffic jamming the entrance to the bridge across the Tiber. When they were on the other side of the river she said, “You know, I can understand how the police feel about it because it’s driving me crazy, too. A man just can’t disappear the way Alex did. He just can’t, Mel. It’s impossible.”
“Sure it is. All the same he has disappeared.”
“But where? Where is he? What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. That’s the truth, baby. You can believe every word of it.”
“I do,” Betty sighed. “But, my God, if Alex had only not mailed you that script—”
That was when it had all started, of course, when File airmailed that script the long distance from Rome to Los Angeles. It had been a surprise, getting the script, because a few years before, Mel had thought he was done with File forever and had told him so right there on the job. And File had shrugged it off to indicate he couldn’t care less.
The decision that day to kiss off File and the deals he sometimes offered hadn’t been an act of bravado. A TV series Mel had been doctoring was, according to the latest ratings, showing a vast improvement in health, and with a successful series to his credit he envisioned a nice secure future for a long time to come. It worked out that way, too. The series had a good run, and when it folded, the reruns started paying off, which meant there was no reason for ever working for File again or even of thinking of working for him.
Now File suddenly wanted him again, although it was hard to tell why since it was obvious that a Mel Gordon with those residuals rolling in would be higher-priced than the old Mel Gordon who took what he could get. In the end they compromised, with File, as usual, getting the better of the deal. The trouble was that he knew Mel’s weakness for tinkering with defective scripts, knew that once Mel had gone through the unbelievably defective script of Emperor of Lust he might be hooked by the problems it presented, and if hooked he could be reeled in without too much trouble.
That was how it worked out. File’s Hollywood lawyer—a Big Name who openly despised File and so, inevitably, was the one man in the world File trusted—saw to the signing of the contract, and before the ink was dry on it, Mel, his wife at his side, and the script of Emperor of Lust under his arm, was on his way to a reunion with File.
They held the reunion at a sidewalk café on the Via Veneto, the tables around crowded by characters out of Fellini gracefully displaying their ennui in the June sunlight and by tourists ungracefully gaping at the Fellini characters.
There were four at their table besides Mel and Betty. File, of course, as small and pale and hard-featured as ever, his hair, iron-gray when Mel had last seen it, now completely white; and Cy Goldsmith, gaunt and craggy and bleary-eyed with hangover; and the dour MacAaron with that perpetual squint as if he were always sizing up camera angles; and a newcomer on the scene, a big, breasty, road-company version of Loren named Wanda Pericola who, it turned out, was going to get a leading role in the picture and who really had the tourists all agape.
Six of them at the table altogether. Four Camparis, a double Scotch for Cy, a cup of tea for File. File, although living most of each year abroad, distrusted all foreign food and drink.
The reunion was short and to the point. File impatiently allowed the necessary time to renew old acquaintance and for an introduction to Wanda who spoke just enough English to say hello, and then he said abruptly to Mel, “How much have you done on the script?”
“On the script? Alex, we just got in this morning.”
“What’s that got to do with it? You used to take one look at a script and start popping with ideas like a real old-fashioned corn popper. You mean making out big on the idiot box has gone and ruined that gorgeous talent?”
Once, when payments on house, car, and grocer’s bills depended on the inflections of File’s voice, Mel had been meek as a lamb. Now, braced by the thought of those residuals pouring out of the TV cornucopia, he found he could be brave as a lion.
“You want to know something, Alex?” he said. “If my gorgeous talent is ruined you’re in real bad trouble, because the script is a disaster.”
“So you say. All it needs is a couple of touches here and there.”
“It needs a whole new script, that’s what it needs, before we make sense out of all that crummy wordage. After I read it I looked up the life of the emperor Tiberius in the history books—”
“Well, thanks for that much anyhow.”
“—and I can tell you everything has to build up the way he’s corrupted by power and suspicion and lust until he goes mad, holed up in that palace on Capri where they have the daily orgies. And the key scene is where he goes off his rocker.”
“So what? That’s in the script right now, isn’t it?”
“It’s all wrong right now, with this Jekyll into Hyde treatment. All that raving and rug chewing makes the whole thing low comedy. But suppose no one around him can see that Tiberius has gone mad—if only the audience realizes it—”
“Yeah?” File was warily interested now. “And how do you show that?”
“This way. In that corridor outside Tiberius’ bedroom in the palace we want a row of life-sized marble statues. Let’s say six of them, a round half dozen. Statues of some great Romans, all calmly looking down at this man who’s supposed to be carrying on their traditions. We establish in advance his respect for those marble images, the way he squares his shoulders with dignity when he passes them. Then the big moment arrives when he cracks wide open.
“How do we punch it across? We leave the bedroom with him, truck with him past those statues, see them as he sees them—and what we see is all his madness engraved on their faces! Get it, Alex? The faces of those statues Tiberius is staring at are now distorted, terrifying reflections of the madman he himself has finally become. That’s it. A few feet of film and we’re home free.”
“Home free,” echoed Cy Goldsmith. He gingerly pivoted his head toward MacAaron. “What do you think, Mac?” and MacAaron grunted, “It’ll do”—which from him was a great deal of conversation, as well as the stamp of high approval.
“Do?” Wanda said anxiously. “Che su
ccede?”—because, as Mel knew sympathetically, what she wanted to hear was her name being bandied about by these people in charge of her destiny; so it was only natural when Betty explained to her in her San Francisco Italian what had been said that Wanda should look disappointed.
But it was File’s reaction that mattered, and Mel was braced for it.
“Statues,” File finally said with open distaste.
“Twelve of them, Alex,” Mel said flatly. “Six sanes and six mads. Six befores and six afters. This is the key scene, the big scene. Don’t shortchange it.”
“You know what artwork like that costs, sonny boy? You look at our budget—”
“Ah, the hell with the budget on this shot,” Cy protested. “This scene can make all the difference, Alex. The way I see it—”
“You?” File turned to him open-mouthed, as if thunderstruck by this interruption. And File’s voice was penetrating enough to be heard over all the racket of the traffic behind him. “Why, you’re so loaded right now you can’t see your hand in front of your face, you miserable lush. And with the picture almost ready to shoot, too. Now go on and try to sober up before next week. You heard me. Get going.”
The others at the table—and this, Mel saw, included even Wanda who must have got the music if not the words—sat rigid with embarrassment while Cy clenched his empty glass in his fist as if to crush it into splinters, then lurched to his feet and set off down the street full-tilt, ricocheting into bypassers as he went. When MacAaron promptly rose to follow him File said, “Where are you going? I didn’t say I was done with you yet, did I?”
“Didn’t you?” said MacAaron, and then was gone, too.
File shrugged off this act of mutiny.
“A great team,” he observed. “A rummy has-been and his nurse-maid. A fine thing to be stuck with.” He picked up his cup of tea and sipped it, studying Mel through drooping eyelids. “Anyhow, the statues are out.”