The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  ‘I know. But we can fight it out with Alex right down the line.’

  ‘Sure we can.’

  ‘Mel, I’m on the level. Would you believe me if I told you this was the last picture I’ll ever work on?’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  Cy smiled crookedly. ‘Not from what the doctors had to say. This is strictly between you and me and Mac – Betty, too, if you want to let her know – but I’m all gone inside.’ He patted his sagging belly. ‘It’ll be a big deal if the machinery in here holds out for this picture, let alone another year.’

  So that was it, Mel thought wonderingly, and just how corny can a man wind up being after a long hard lifetime? That explained everything. Cy Goldsmith was a dying man close to the end of his string, and this picture was to be his swan song. A good one, the best he was capable of, no matter how Alexander File felt about it.

  ‘Look, Cy, doctors can make mistakes. If you went back to the States right now and saw a specialist there – maybe tried the Mayo Clinic—’

  ‘That’s where they gave me the word, Mel, at Mayo. Straight from the shoulder. You want to know how straight? Well, the first thing I did before flying out here on this job was to hop back to LA and make all the arrangements to be put away in Elysian Park when the time came. A big mausoleum, a nice box, everything. The funny part was that I felt a hell of a lot better when I signed those papers. It gave me a good idea why those old Romans and Egyptians wanted to make sure everything was all set for the big day. It makes you look the facts in the face. After that, you can live with them.’

  At least, Mel thought, until this picture was made the way you wanted it made. And, in the light of that, Cy had paid him the handsomest tribute he could. Everything depended on the script, and it was Mel Gordon who had been called a long way to work on it.

  ‘Tell me one thing, Cy,’ he said. ‘It was your idea to get me out here on this script, wasn’t it? Not Alex’s.’

  ‘That’s right. Doesn’t that prove I can win a battle with Alex when I have to?’

  ‘I guess it does,’ said Mel. ‘Now all we have to do is win the war.’

  And it was war, even without shot and shell being fired. Once File had the first draft of the complete script in his hands and had drawn up a shooting schedule from it, he quickly caught onto the fact that something strange was going on. After that, life became merry hell for everyone involved in the making of Emperor of Lust.

  Including, as Mel pointed out to Betty with satisfaction, File himself. For the first time in File’s career one of his pictures lagged steadily behind its schedule as Cy grimly ordered retake after retake until he got what he wanted of a scene, doubled in brass as his own Second Unit Director, drilling Roman legions and barbarian hordes in the fields outside the lot until they threatened open rebellion, bullied Mel into endlessly rewriting one scene after another until the dialogue suited the limited capabilities of the cast without losing any of its color or sense.

  For that matter, all the conspirators doubled in brass. Mel found himself directing two-shots between his writing chores. MacAaron took over lighting and sound mixing despite roars of protest from outraged union delegates. Even Betty, toiling without pay, spent hours drilling Wanda Pericola in the pronunciation of her lines until the two of them hated the sight of each other.

  Long days, long nights for all of them, culminated usually in the projection room where they wearily gathered to see the latest rushes while File sat apart from them in a cold fury delivering scathing comment on what he viewed on the screen and what it was costing him. The most grotesque part of it, Mel saw, was that File never understood what they were trying to do and flatly refused to believe the explanation of it that Betty gave him in a loud and frustrating private conference. As far as File was concerned, they were deliberately and maliciously goldbricking on the job, sabotaging him, driving him to ruin, and he let them know it at every turn.

  In the long run it was his own cheapness that kept him from doing more than that. As Cy noted, he could have fired them all, but contracts cut ice both ways. Firing them would mean paying them off in full for having done only part of the picture, and replacing them would mean paying others in full for doing the other part, and this for File was unthinkable.

  ‘I know,’ Mel said. ‘All the same, I wish there was some way of keeping him off our backs for five minutes at a time. Now if he’d only find himself some nice little distraction—’

  It wasn’t the wish that made it so, of course. But for better or worse, early next morning along came the distraction.

  She arrived riding pillion on a noisy motorbike – a small slender girl with one arm around the waist of the bearded young man who drove the motorbike and the other arm clutching to her a bulky parcel done up in wrapping paper. A northerner, Mel surmised, taking in the fair skin, the honey-colored hair, the neatly chiseled, slightly upturned Tuscan nose. A skinny, underfed kid, really, but pretty as they come.

  They were standing in front of File’s headquarters when the bike pulled up – Mel and Betty, Cy, MacAaron, and File – having the usual morning squabble about the day’s shooting schedule. As the girl dismounted, now gingerly holding the parcel in both hands as if it were made of fine glass, her skirt rode up over her thighs, and Mel saw File do almost a comic double-take, the man’s eyes fixing on the whiteness of exposed thigh, then narrowing with interest as they moved up to take in the whole girl.

  What made it worse, Mel thought, was the quality of flagrant innocence about her, of country freshness. He glanced at Betty. From her expression he knew the same word must have flashed through her mind as his at that instant. Alice.

  The bearded driver of the motorbike came up to them, the girl following in his shadow as if trying to keep out of sight. Close up, Mel saw that the driver’s straggling reddish beard was a hopeless attempt to add years and dignity to a guileless and youthful face.

  ‘Signor File, I am here as you requested.’

  ‘Yeah,’ File grunted. He turned sourly to Mel. ‘You wanted statues? He’s the guy who’ll take care of them for you.’

  ‘Paolo Varese,’ said the youth. ‘And this is my sister, Claudia.’ He reached a hand behind him to draw her forward. ‘What are you afraid of, you stupid girl?’ he asked her teasingly. ‘You must forgive her,’ he said to the others. ‘She is only a month from Campofriddo, and all this is new to her. It impresses her very much.’

  ‘Where’s Campofriddo?’ asked Betty.

  ‘Near Lucca, in the hills there.’ Paolo laughed deprecatingly. ‘You know. Twenty people, forty goats. That kind of place. So Papa and Mama let Claudia come to live with me in Rome where she could get good schooling, because she did well in school at home.’

  He put an arm around the girl’s narrow shoulders and gave her a brotherly hug which made her blush bright red. ‘But you know how girls are about the cinema. When she heard I was to work here where you are photographing one—’

  ‘Sure,’ Cy said impatiently, ‘but about those statues—’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Paolo took the parcel from his sister, tore open its wrappings, and held up before them a statuette of a robed figure. It was beautifully carved out of what looked like polished white marble, and, Mel saw with foreboding, it was not quite two feet tall.

  ‘The statues were supposed to be lifesized,’ he said, bracing himself for another bout with File. ‘This one—’

  ‘But this is only the – the—’ Paolo struck his knuckles to his forehead, groping for the word ‘—the sample. They will be lifesized. Twelve of them, all lifesized.’ He held out the sample at arm’s length and regarded it with admiration. ‘This is Augustus. The others will be Sulla, Marius, Pompey, Caesar, and Tiberius himself, all copies of the pieces in the Museo Capitoline, all lifesized.’

  Mel took the figurine and found it surprisingly light. ‘It’s not marble?’

  ‘How could it be?’ Paolo said. ‘Marble would take months to work, perhaps more. No, no, this is a trick. A
device of my own. If you will show me where I am to work, I can demonstrate it for you.’

  His sister anxiously tugged at his arm. ‘Che cosa devo fare, Paolo?’ she asked, then whispered to him in more rapid Italian.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Paolo nodded apologetically at File. ‘Claudia has a little time before she must go along to school, and she would like to look around here and see how a cinema is made. She would be very careful.’

  ‘Look around, hey?’ File considered this frowningly, his eyes on the girl. ‘Well, why not? I’ll even show her around myself,’ and from the way Claudia’s face lit up, Mel saw she knew at least enough English to understand this. ‘And I have to go back to town in a little while,’ said File, ‘so I can drop her off at her school on the way.’

  Paolo seemed simultaneously alarmed and delighted by this kindness. ‘But, Signor File, to take such trouble—’

  ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ File curtly waved aside the stammered gratitude. ‘You just get on the job and do what you’re being paid for. Goldsmith here’ll show you the shop.’

  Watching File motion the girl to follow him and then briskly stride off with her in his wake, Mel felt an angry admiration for the way the man handled these little situations. You had to know him to know the score. Otherwise, what you were seeing was a small white-haired grandfatherly type, concealing a heart of gold beneath a crusty exterior.

  A sculptor’s studio had been partitioned off in the carpenters’ shop near the entrance to the sound stage, and it was already crowded with the materials and equipment for the making of the statues. The sculpturing process itself, as Paolo described it in rapt detail, was intriguing. A pipework armature, the size of the subject, was set up, its crosspiece at shoulder height. From the crosspiece, wire screening was then unspooled around and around down to the base where it was firmly attached, the whole thing making a cylinder of screening in roughly human proportions. To this was applied a thin layer of clay which was etched into the flowing lines of a Roman toga. As for the head—

  Paolo took the statuette, and, despite Betty’s wail of protest, ruthlessly chipped away its features with a knifeblade.

  ‘It would take a long time to model the head in clay,’ he said, ‘but this way it can be done very quickly.’

  He brushed away marble-colored flakes, revealing beneath them what appeared to be a skull, although its eyes and nose sockets were filled in. He tapped it with a fingernail. ‘Hollow, you see. Papier mache, such as masks are made of. One merely soaks it in this stuff – colla – you know?’

  ‘Glue,’ said Betty.

  ‘Yes, yes. Then it can be quickly shaped into a whole head. It dries almost at once. Then clay goes over it for the fine work, and here is our Roman.’

  ‘How do you get it to look like marble?’ Cy asked.

  ‘Enamel paint is sprayed on, white and ivory mixed. That, too, dries while you wait.’

  ‘But the clay under it is still wet, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, no. Before the paint goes on, one uses the torch – the blowtorch, that is – up and down and back and forth for a few hours. But with all this it takes only one day. So there will be twelve statues in twelve days, as I have promised Signor File.’

  ‘Do you have the designs for the other statues with you?’ Cy asked, and when they were produced, much crumpled and stained, from Paolo’s pocket, it was clear that File had once again made himself an excellent deal.

  Standing at the open door of the shop ready to take their departure, they saw File heave into sight with Claudia, direct her into the Cadillac, and climb behind the wheel.

  ‘Beautiful,’ breathed Paolo, his eyes on the car rather than his sister. Then as the car headed for the garage, he reminded himself of something. ‘La bicicletta! La bicicletta!’ he shouted after the girl, waving toward the motorbike propped on the ground before File’s office, but she only made a small gesture of helplessness, and then the car was out of range.

  Paolo shrugged in resignation.

  ‘The autobus out here is very irregular, so she is supposed to bring me here on the bicycle each morning and then use it herself to go to school. That means I must take the autobus home at night, but today it looks as if I will be able to drive myself home without any trouble.’

  ‘There’s a piece of luck,’ Betty said drily. ‘You know, Paolo, Claudia is a very pretty girl.’

  ‘But how well I know.’ Paolo raised his eyes to heaven in despair. ‘That was one reason I had so much trouble with Mama and Papa about permitting her to live with me here, where she could improve herself, become educated, perhaps become a teacher at school, not the wife of some stupid peasant. They are good people, Mama and Papa, but they hear stories, you know? So they think all the men in Rome want to do is eat the pretty little girls. They forget Claudia is with me, and that I—’

  ‘Paolo,’ Betty cut in, ‘sometimes she is not with you. And while I don’t know about all the other men in Rome, I know about Signor File. Signor File likes to eat pretty little girls.’

  The boy looked taken aback.

  ‘He? Really, signora, he does not seem like someone who—’

  ‘Faccia attenzione, signore,’ said Betty in a hard voice. ‘Il padrone e un libertino. Capisce?’

  Paolo nodded gravely.

  ‘Capisco, signora. Thank you. I will tell Claudia. She is already sixteen, not a child. She will understand.’

  But, Mel observed, there were days after that when File, contrary to his custom, left the lot in midafternoon and returned only late in the evening, if at all.

  Betty observed this as well.

  ‘And you know where he goes, don’t you?’ she said to her husband.

  ‘I don’t know. I suspect. That’s different from knowing.’

  ‘Look, dear, let’s not split hairs. He’s with that child, and you darn well know it.’

  ‘So what? For one thing, Mother of the Gracchi, sixteen, going on seventeen, is not a child in these parts, as her brother himself remarked. For another thing, you’ve done all you could about it – angels could do no more. As far as I’m concerned—’

  ‘Oh, sure. As far as you’re concerned – and Cy and Mac, too – you’re just as glad Alex isn’t around all the time, no matter what.’

  There was no denying that. It was a godsend not having File always underfoot, and they weren’t going to question whatever reason he had for staying away from them. Their nerves were ragged with overwork and tension, but the picture was near completion, and all they needed was enough stamina to finish it in style. Considering the drain that File was on their stamina – complaining, threatening, countermanding orders – the sight of that Cadillac convertible pulling out of the gate in the afternoon was like a shot in the arm.

  For that matter, Mel wasn’t sure that even if Paolo suspected what might be going on he would be so anxious to rock the boat himself. The commission to do the statues, he had confided to Mel, meant enough money to see him through a difficult time. It was lucky Signor File had asked the Art Institute to recommend someone who would handle the commission at the lowest possible rate, because as one of their prize graduates the year before, he, Paolo, had got the recommendation. Very lucky. Money was hard to come by for a young sculptor without a patron; the family at home had no money to spare, so it was a case of always scratching for a few lire, taking odd jobs, doing anything to get up enough for the next rent day. But now—!

  So from early morning to late at night, stripped to the waist and pouring sweat, Paolo toiled happily at the statues, and one by one they were carted away to the sound stage and mounted in place on the set there. The first six, faces in stern repose, looked good in the establishing shots; the ones that followed, faces distorted with madness, looked even better. The last to be done, and, Mel thought, the most effective of all according to the sketches of those agonized features, would be Tiberius in his madness.

  When this was in its place along with the other five in the corridor of the palace, and MacAaron
had made his tracking shots and closeups, the picture was all but finished. Finished, that is, except for Cy’s editing – the delicate job of cutting, rearranging, finding the proper rhythm for each scene, and finally resplicing the whole thing into what would be shown on the screen. In the last analysis, everything depended on the editing, but this would be Cy’s baby alone.

  With the end in sight none of them wanted to rock the boat. And then, one stormy night, it came close to capsizing.

  The storm had begun in the late afternoon, one of those drought-breaking Roman downpours that went on hour after hour, turning the meadows around them into a quagmire and covering even the tarmac with an inch of water. At midnight, when Mel and Betty splashed their way to the car, they saw Paolo standing hopelessly in the doorway of the carpenter’s shop looking out into the deluge, and so they stopped to pick him up.

  He was profusely grateful as he scrambled past Betty into the back seat. He lived in Trastevere, but if they dropped him anywhere in the city he could easily find his way home from there.

  ‘No, it won’t be any trouble taking you right to the door,’ Mel lied. ‘You just show me the way.’

  The way, as Paolo pointed it out, lay across the Ponte Sublicio and to the Piazza Matrai, in the heart of a shabby, working-class district. The apartment he and his sister occupied was in a tenement that looked centuries old and stood in an alleyway leading off from the piazza. And parked in solitary grandeur at the head of the alley was a big Cadillac convertible.

  Mel’s foot came down involuntarily on the brake when he saw it, and the little Fiat lurched to a stop halfway across the piazza. At the same moment he heard Paolo make a hissing sound between his teeth, felt the pressure of the boy’s body against the back of the driver’s seat as he leaned forward and stared through the rain-spattered windshield.

  And then, as if timing his approach to settle all doubts, File came into view down the alley, heading for the Cadillac at a fast trot, head down and shoulders hunched against the rain. He had almost reached it before Paolo suddenly roused himself from his paralysis of horror.