‘Of course,’ Venables said. ‘Equipment, hey? Cameras, lights, the megillah. This you arrange later. Right now it’s money — and Monty knows what he’s doing, who he sends his boys to. He sent you to me, so signed with him or not, it’s OK by me. Receipts you can give me if you like. For my part, I ain’t got no big worry about you. Not for five thousand.’ And he beamed again with the simple pleasure of the rich man who was once very poor.
It was a look Abner had seen often enough in his years of hustling money for his films; the man for whom the real pleasure was not to be part of a major artistic endeavour, which would have been Abner’s own reason for investing in anything as chancy as a film, were he rich enough, but for the pleasure of handing out cash as though it didn’t matter to people to whom it mattered a great deal. And he relaxed a little, and realised as he did so that he had become suspicious suddenly. But there was no need. This man was straightforward enough. No mysteries here. Just joy. Because he had the first real bite on Postscripts and it had only taken him just over a week to do it.
He went back first to Simmy Gentle. The man had seemed interested enough in the project; said he’d talk to his partner. Well, Abner now had the first nibble, he had a way of leaning on him, and there was no point in wasting time. Gentle had been seriously interested, he knew that. It was almost certain that by the end of the afternoon Abner would have the guarantee of more of the underwriting of his film that he wanted, and he moved fast through the crowded streets towards Wardour Street, elated at being at last on the way. With money from Gentle — and to add to it, it might perhaps be worth leaning on the Rossily woman too, which was an attractive prospect — he could leave the money angle alone for a while and concentrate on research.
The best bit that was, and he hugged to himself his childish excitement, revelling in it. When he’d been a kid he’d always saved the best bit of his dinner till the end, leaving all his mashed potatoes in a heap so that he could gobble it all at once, and here he was thinking in the same sort of way. Crazy, and he whistled softly through his teeth as he walked, letting his thoughts mill around his head uncontrolled, till they melded into a comfortable sense of well-being; mashed potatoes and Venables’ cheque and Miriam Hinchelsea and old Etting and behind it all the image of his film actually growing, taking form as an entity, something real and not just a hope, a mere dream, a distant project. A real film, reels of celluloid, entries in the reference books, and people talking about Postscripts when they heard his name instead of Uptown Downtown all the time.
But his euphoria dwindled and vanished when he got to Gentle’s office. The man was there, he knew he was, for he could see his distorted shape through the dimpled glass on his office door, but the girl outside steadfastly denied he was, standing in front of the door and staring mulishly at Abner as she shook her head at everything he said.
‘Mr Gentle told me to come back after I made some other contacts,’ he said, trying to keep his voice and his temper in check. It wasn’t the girl’s fault she had to tell lies. The bastard should come out and tell his own, if he wanted to. ‘Is he saying now he doesn’t want any part of my project? Because if not, that’s fine by me. There are others who do. But I need to know where I am. When a man shows interest and tells you to come back and then refuses to see you, you get sore, you know? For all I know he’s one of these rip-off guys who knows a good project when he sees one and wants all of it instead of just a little bit of the action. I left him with one of my sets of pages and I don’t go out of here till I get ’em back. Or find out what he’s doing with ’em.’
‘I really can’t say, Mr Wiseman,’ the girl said and looked almost piteously at him and Abner glared back and thought, the kid’s terrified. And tried to remember her name, some damn fool name too — and then it came to him.
‘Listen, Tiffany,’ he said winningly and perched one buttock on the edge of her desk. She was standing with her back to Gentle’s office door, protectively, and Abner knew it would help to give her space. ‘Listen,’ he said again. ‘I’m not a difficult man, but you have to understand my situation! I offer him a really hot property, one that interests him enough to keep the details with him, he tells me he likes it and that he’ll talk to his partner. Says come back Friday. OK, it’s Friday and here I am. And now he won’t see me. Why not? If he’s decided he doesn’t want in, fair enough. If his partner hates the whole deal, fair enough — but he doesn’t have to treat me like I’m some sort of walking pesthouse, does he, hiding in his office? Do me a favour, Tiffany. Phone in there, tell him I’m not going to bite, ask him to let me have back my treatment even if he doesn’t want to speak to me, and then I’ll go.’
She stood there and looked at him for a long moment, doubt in every line of her body, and then, unwillingly, walked round the desk to get to her phone and intercom. Deliberately he didn’t move, so that she couldn’t reach across her desk to get to it from the side she was on, and he knew she wouldn’t come closer to him than she had to. He hated using tactics like this, but after the years he’d spent in this business he knew how to handle the tricky ones. And Gentle, he felt all the way through to the middle of him, was very much a tricky one.
He waited until she had reached the phone on the far side of the desk and picked it up. It was an odd thing he’d noted a long time ago; people could never just drop a phone hand-set when they were in a hurry. They always had to hang it up properly and he used that knowledge with all the timing skill he had. As she tucked the phone against one ear and reached for the buttons, he got to his feet smoothly and moving very directly but not seeming to hurry, had Gentle’s office door open and was inside before she could stop him.
Gentle was sitting behind his desk, watching the door with an odd expression on his face; not precisely scared, Abner thought briefly as he saw the face smooth out in reaction, but still very uneasy.
‘Hi, Mr Gentle,’ he said affably. ‘Good to see you. You said to come back Friday.’
Gentle stared at him, nonplussed, as Tiffany, her face twisted with anxiety, came running into the room to stand beside Gentle’s desk and glare at Abner. She was half her employer’s size but was clearly ready to defend him physically if she had to, and Abner smiled at her more cheerfully than ever, as she cried, ‘Oh, Mr Gentle, it wasn’t my fault, honestly it wasn’t. I tried to stop him but he said just to phone you and I couldn’t get to the phone from the front and- ’
‘It doesn’t matter, Tiff,’ Gentle said and got to his feet. ‘Er — cup of coffee, Mr Wiseman?’
‘Great,’ Abner said heartily. ‘Always like talking business over coffee. Feels civilised, you know?’
He felt better. There was no way he’d take a penny of involvement from this guy now, but there was equally no way he was going to leave here without knowing why the man had behaved like such a shit. To hide in his office and refuse to see him? Crazy!
‘So, Mr Gentle,’ he said and settled himself in the chair in front of the desk. ‘Here I am, coming back as you said I should. How did you get on with your partner then when you showed him my project?’
Gentle flushed and sat down heavily. ‘That man,’ he said with sudden savagery, ‘is enough to make you spit.’
‘Oh? Why should that be? I thought he was just — what was it you said? A sleeping partner. The money man, was all. You’re the one that runs things. That was the way you put it across to me when I was here.’
Gentle looked uncomfortable. ‘So, all right. Maybe I — Listen, I don’t know what it is, or why it is, but my partner says lay off, so lay off I got to. I run a good business here, and I make a lot of successes. The money’s coming in big and there’s more to come, but when I started it wasn’t so good. I had to have a lot of backing. You know the way it is in this business! You don’t start with peanuts. And like the man said, you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, and me I always wanted the best. Commercial, you understand, but the best. We may do blood and guts movies, but they’re the best guts.’
‘I believe
you,’ Abner said, still affable. ‘Why shouldn’t I? You seemed like an honest guy when we met,’ and the emphasis he put on ‘seemed’ was slight but unmistakable.
‘Listen, Wiseman, what can I do? Sure, I liked your project. Sure I thought I’d like a piece of it. We could have worked well together, but there it is. The man didn’t like it, and there’s not a thing I can do about that! You think I didn’t try to find out why he didn’t like it? Of course I did! The more I thought about your project the more I reckoned you’re on to a good one. As long as I could have persuaded you to open the thing out a bit, get a big bankable name up front — maybe Streep or even Streisand — God knows she’s got the looks for it — we could have had a winner. A class movie that’d make money, better than Sophie’s Choice but with that sort of feel about it, you know?’
Abner stared at him, loathing him with every part of himself. This was the sort of film man he most hated, who had about as much subtlety and sensitivity as a crack Panzer division and all the intelligence of a flock of sheep on a dull day. To have made Postscripts with any involvement from such a one would have been sickening. He was well out of it. But he was intrigued now. He needed to know why the chance had been taken away from him. It would give him enormous satisfaction to tell this guy what he thought of him and his judgement and to walk out of here taking his property with him and leaving him begging for it. But he wasn’t being given that chance. The bastard was turning him down, so he needed to know why. Postscripts might not yet fully exist, but it was his baby all the same, had its own personality and integrity, and he’d protect it as fiercely as he knew how.
‘But there’s an end of it,’ Gentle was saying. ‘The man didn’t like it, won’t have any part of it. And there’s not a thing I can do. Here’s your treatment. I was going to post it back to you. I don’t like seeing a man I’ve got to turn down, I can’t pretend I do. That was why I told Tiffany to say I wasn’t here. But there it is, you made me. So here’s your pages and I wish you all the luck in the world with ’em. Believe me, I wish I was part of the deal. It could be a good one if you do it the way I said.’
‘Oh, believe me, Mr Gentle,’ Abner said earnestly and with mock deference as he got to his feet and took the pages from the man’s hand. ‘There’s no way ever I’d do it your way. You can be sure of that. And as for your partner — I don’t know who the guy is, but it’s my guess, he’s an Arab, right? You should have told me that in the first place instead of talking bullshit about toning down the Jewish angle. I’m not bigoted, you know. If a man has his own religious attitudes that make him hate Jews and not want to be involved in — ’
‘No!’ It seemed to matter to Gentle that Abner understood and he leaned across his desk, shaking his head hard. ‘It’s not like that! Heller, an Arab? Do me a favour! He’s as much a Jew as you are!’
‘Heller?’ Abner had put the pages away and zipped his bag and turned to go and now his chin came up and he stared at Gentle with startled eyes. ‘Heller? Would that be — ’ And he stopped and trawled his memory for the name and then it came up. The man Garten had spoken about. ‘Would that be Victor Heller?’
Gentle stopped and then sat down again, and bent his head over his desk, fiddling with some pieces of paper there. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘It really isn’t important. Like I said, he’s a sleeping partner, and now I really have to get on. Goodbye, Mr Wiseman. I’m sorry we couldn’t do business, but you see how it is. Win ’em, lose ’em is the way the business runs. Goodbye. Tiffany! Show Mr Wiseman out!’
And Abner was too surprised and confused to refuse to let her do it.
Fourteen
He bought himself lunch in a pub, needing time to think, and a noisy smoky room was as good a place as anywhere to do that. He ordered bread and cheese and beer (and it wasn’t a patch on the same meal eaten that day in Oxford with Miriam Hinchelsea, he thought with a moment’s pang), and as he chewed his way through it tried to put some order into his view of his situation.
Why on earth should the man Heller — and he tried to visualise him from that one brief moment in Nagel’s office when he had seen him, and totally failed; all he could recall was a dark overcoat and an old-fashioned homburg hat — why should such a man block his project? Because that was how he saw what had happened in Gentle’s office. His efforts had been blocked, hard. Gentle had been almost sewn up as a backer; he would have been hell to work with and Abner might eventually have rejected his involvement, but it had definitely been on offer, until this friend of Monty Nagel had screwed it up. Why? It didn’t make sense, because hadn’t it also been Heller who had put the man Garten in touch with him to help with the project?
He closed his eyes and tried to remember exactly what Garten had said. He could see the cruddy room in that cruddy club, could smell the sourness of the cheap wine, hear the rattle of the music coming from an old phonograph, and the man Garten rose before his eyes, sleek and oily in manner beneath his shabby ill-kept appearance.
‘Heller?’ the creamy voice murmured again as clear in Abner’s memory as though it were speaking in his ear now. ‘Who does Heller deal with most? We’ll try a few names on you — Benson the distributor, no? Or Sampson, his colleague and — not that one either? Jimmy Brandon, Joe Mandelson, Lee Capetelli, Monty Nagel — ’ And Abner’s eyes snapped open.
It had been Nagel who had been the link there too. He had sent Heller to Garten and Garten to Abner to help him with the research for Postscripts, yet now it seemed that Heller had also stepped between Gentle and Abner to prevent the financing of Postscripts. Had Nagel been instrumental in that too? There was no logic in it at all.
He sat brooding over the remains of his bread and cheese, reviewing all that had happened since he had arrived in London. Was he getting paranoid, seeing mysteries where none existed? Because he saw them everywhere. It was a mystery that Venables had handed over five thousand pounds so easily; because now Abner thought about it, pushing aside his euphoria, it had been too smooth altogether. On the one hand the fat little man had talked about the importance of being businesslike, yet on the other he had refused a receipt for the cash and even more significantly had agreed to hand it over before negotiating a percentage of Postscripts for himself with Nagel, acting as Abner’s agent. Who behaved like that in a sensible world? To have let himself be dazzled by the ready offer of a cheque, Abner told himself bitterly, had been positively juvenile. He should have known better; and reached into his pocket and took out the cheque and looked at it.
It seemed all right; the date and the sum of money were properly written in and the signature was clear, written in rather childish round characters that almost ran off the sheet. What would happen, he wondered, if he presented the cheque? Would Venables claim he had bought Abner’s property for that sum? Was that why he’d refused a receipt and been willing to pay up before negotiating his share of profits? If Abner sent a receipt later, unless he sent it with a messenger and got a signature for it that made it clear it was a loan against a percentage to be agreed and not for an outright sale of his project, it could lead to losing control of his own film. And where was the guarantee that he’d ever get the sort of signed document he needed out of Venables?
He held the cheque and for a moment contemplated tearing it up. There was something very odd going on here and the safest way had to be to get out of the deal altogether, badly as he needed money to start work on the film; but he stopped just as he was about to make the tear. No, that wasn’t necessary. As long as he didn’t cash the cheque, no harm was done. But he could still get some use out of it, as a lever to get money out of others, and of course as evidence. In case someone else came along to try to set him up.
He moved sharply on the sagging old leather bench in the corner of the pub and stared at the people clustered round the bar in front of him. Was he going out of his mind and getting as suspicious and hostile as Frieda was, imagining dangers round every corner, being secretive and remote just to make himself feel safe? That was a h
orrible prospect; he had turned his back on Frieda because she was like that. It couldn’t happen to him. Could it?
He paid for his food and left the pub to stand in the street outside, uncertain of what to do next. Nagel was out of London till Monday. Abner would be at his office first thing that morning to find out what he was up to, but right now he felt useless, and that was a dreadful feeling. There must be something he could do today, right now; and he stared round at the crowded street where the wet road gleamed with patches of rainbow colours from oil-leaking cars and vans as though it would somehow answer his need for him.
And, incredibly, it did. A man who was hurrying along with his head down against the cold wind almost ran into him as he stood on the kerb and lifted his head, startled, to apologise, and then stared at him blankly and said, ‘Hey — Who’d ha’ thought it! Abner Wiseman? What the hell are you doin’ here, for Chrissakes? I haven’t seen you since Christ knows when and I run into you here? Whatdya know about that? Abner goddamn Wiseman!’ and he shoved a large hand at Abner, grabbed one of his and began to shake it furiously as Abner stared at him, memory struggling to place the face now beaming at him. It was maddening; there were times when he had total recall to an uncanny degree and yet here he stood, staring at a man he knew well and totally unable to put a name to his face.
The other man laughed at him, pleased as a child who has played a successful Hallowe’en trick. ‘Jeez, you’ve forgotten me! Makes a guy feel really good, that does. Listen, try thinkin’ of barbecued ribs and rice’n’peas, hey? If that don’t make you remember …’
It worked. As the memory of the smoky taste filled his mouth it was as though he were there again, in that bar in the South Bronx, with the whole crew sitting around him and shouting and laughing and teasing and knocking back the beer, cold pale American beer, and he was sitting in the middle of them flushed and bursting with excitement. They’d finished the last day on location, got all the film in the can, as clean and neat a wrap as anyone could hope for, and ahead of him stretched the months of editing and all the rest of the post production, and he knew he had a good film; Uptown Downtown was going to be a winner all the way.
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