The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  Elizabeth Ann did everything possible to forestall it. Even in the small hours when all the rest of the company had gone and Paul had disappeared somewhere so that we four were left alone with her, she maintained a sprightly poise, an air of amused patience. She wanted us out of there, but she wasn’t going to say so. Instead, she darted about, bright and quick as a hummingbird, intent on straightening a table cover, arranging a chair, placing empty glasses on a tray.

  ‘Oh, sit down,’ I told her at last. ‘Stop playing parlormaid and sit down. I want to talk to you.’

  She didn’t sit down. She stood before me regarding me with pretty bewilderment, fingertips pressed to her cheek. ‘Talk? About what?’

  So I told her. Loudly, angrily, and not too coherently, I let her know my feelings about the peculiar tactics she had used to get her husband his prize. As I spoke, her bewilderment deepened to incredulity. Then she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead in a gesture meant to express mortal suffering.

  ‘How can you say such things?’ she whispered. ‘Someone like you jealous of Paul’s success? I can’t believe it.’

  Sid hooted raucously. ‘Marvelous,’ he said. ‘Three sentences, three cliches. A perfect score.’

  ‘And you,’ said Elizabeth Ann, wheeling on him, ‘posing as Paul’s friend and telling stories behind his back. Well, if that’s the kind of friend you are, I’m glad he’s decided—’

  She stopped short in simulated panic, but she had both the Goldsmiths frozen to attention now. The silence grew until it started to ring in my ears.

  ‘Go on, dear,’ Elinor said in a hard voice. ‘He’s decided what?’

  ‘To change dealers,’ Elizabeth Ann said in a rush. ‘To let the Wedeking Galleries represent him from now on. It’s all settled. After we get back from Russia, Wedeking is handling all his work.’

  Wedeking was the biggest and the best. It had few modern artists on its list, but if you were a millionaire in a buying mood, its marble showroom on 57th Street was the place to buy a Rembrandt or a Cezanne. And now an original Paul Zachary. It must have been hard for the Goldsmiths to comprehend that. Paul was their boy. They were the ones who had discovered him, who had beat the drums for him, who had helped carry him through the hard times, and who should now share his triumphs with him. They and Nicole. Now they were getting the same medicine she had got, and it stuck in their throats.

  Sid lurched from his chair. ‘I don’t believe it.’ He looked around the room. ‘Where’s Paul? Where is he, damn it? We’re going to settle this before I get out of here.’

  ‘It is settled,’ said Elizabeth Ann. ‘Anyhow, he’s in the studio. He doesn’t like people going up there.’

  ‘Since when?’ Sid demanded.

  ‘For a long time,’ Elizabeth Ann said with hauteur. ‘I’ve never been in the studio at all. Not ever. I don’t see why you should have special privileges.’

  I thought Sid was going to hit her. He took a step forward, his hand upraised, then managed to restrain himself. His hand, when he lowered it, was trembling; all color had drained from his face. ‘I want to see Paul,’ he said thickly. ‘Now.’

  Elizabeth Ann knew the voice of authority when she heard it. Nose in the air, she led the way disdainfully up the staircase to the studio, tried its door, flung it open.

  It was brilliantly lighted, and Paul in shirtsleeves, dinner jacket flung on the table beside him, was touching up what seemed to be a completed nude on the wall. When he turned to us, I saw that he was very drunk, his eyes glassy, his brow furrowed by frowning incomprehension. From the accumulation of empty bottles and glasses on the premises, it was obvious that for quite a while the studio had been not only a workroom but a private saloon.

  He swayed on his feet. ‘My dear friends,’ he said, enunciating each word with painstaking effort. ‘My – dear – wife.’

  Like Elizabeth Ann, I had never been in that studio. It was a large room, and on display in it were a number of Paul’s experimental works. But more than that, and startling to behold, the room was a shrine to Nicole.

  One whole wall was covered with the early portraits of her, the life studies, the charcoal sketches. On a stand in the middle of the floor was a bust of her done long ago in our room on Rue Raspail. And the nude Paul had been working on was of Nicole. A splendid picture I had not seen before, where the image of Nicole, vibrant and warm and fleshy as the living woman had been, sat poised on the edge of a chair, looking into the eyes of the viewer as if he were a mirror, loving him because he was her husband.

  Before he had entered the room, Sid Goldsmith had been fuming aloud with rage. Now, taking in the scene with wondering eyes, he seemed struck dumb. So were we all. And drawn magnetically by that inspired nude, the fresh streaks of oil glistening on its surface, we gathered before it in silence. There was nothing to be said about it that would not sound fatuous. It was that good.

  It was Elizabeth Ann who broke the silence.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ she suddenly said in a tight voice, and I saw that for once the mask had slipped, and what showed beneath it was the face of the Medusa. ‘I don’t like it. It’s ugly.’

  Paul focused on her blearily. ‘Is it?’

  Elizabeth Ann pointed around the room. ‘Can’t you see what she looked like? She was just a plain, sloppy woman, that’s all she was!’ Her voice rose shrilly. ‘And she’s dead. Don’t you understand? She’s dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it!’

  ‘Nothing?’ Paul said.

  The siren of a police car sounded outside the living-room windows. I had been so deep in my thoughts that I had forgotten where I was and why I was there. Now as the sound faded and the car raced off down the street, I looked up with a start, realizing where I was, realizing that the policeman standing at the kitchen door was beckoning to me that it was my turn for quesioning. The Goldsmiths were watching me with concern. Janet tried to smile at me.

  I got to my feet with an effort. How much of this, I wondered, would the lieutenant want to hear. Very little, perhaps. Only the final scene in that room upstairs, because that was all that was needed for the records.

  ‘Nothing?’ said Paul, and Elizabeth Ann said venomously, ‘That’s right – nothing. So stop thinking about her and talking about her and living with her. Get rid of her!’ The long-bladed knife was close at hand on the table, invitingly close, and she snatched it up. ‘Like this!’

  She was, as I have said, addicted to playing the heroine out of melodrama, so I knew what was in her mind then. It was that similiar scene in which the outraged heroine slashes apart the canvas on which the image of her hated rival is painted. And she was ignorant. Tragically ignorant. How could she know that this picture was not on canvas, but on masonite which is as smooth and resistant as a polished sheet of steel?

  She raised the knife high as we stood watching in stupefaction, then with all her strength she drove it downward into the painted flesh of her rival. And in that last stroke of folly and ignorance, the blade, clutched tight in her hand, slid in a flashing arc over the impenetrable surface of the painting and plunged full into her own body.

  The Twelfth Statue

  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.

&nb
sp; ‘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 of DeMille into his system for his own good.

  The trouble was that, whatever else DeMille’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 Signore 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 can’t just 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 air-mailed 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 s
eries 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 cafe 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.