Mario Puzo - The Last Don

The next day she cleared out her checking account and her savings account. She made intricate travel arrangements so that her movements could not be followed. Two days later, when Boz came home from work, she and the baby had disappeared.

Six months later Athena surfaced in Los Angeles, without a baby, and started her career. She easily got a mid-level agent and worked in small theater groups. She starred in a play at the Mark Taper Forum that led to small parts in small movies, and then was cast in a supporting role in an A movie. In her next picture she became a Bankable Star, and Boz Skannet re-entered her life.

She bought him off for the next three years, but she wasn't surprised by what he did at the Academy. An old trick. This time just a little joke … but the next time, that bottle would be full of acid.

«There's a big flap at the Studio,» Molly Flanders told Claudia De Lena that morning. «A problem with Athena Aquitane. Because of the attack at the Academy Awards, they're worried she won't go back to work on her picture. And Bantz wants you at the Studio. They want you to talk to Athena.»

Claudia had come to Molly's office with Ernest Vail. «I'll call her as soon as we finish here,» Claudia said. «She can't be serious.»

Molly Flanders was an entertainment lawyer, and in a town of fearsome people she was the most feared litigator in the motion picture business. She absolutely loved fighting in the courtroom, and she nearly always won because she was a great actress and had a superb grasp of the law.

Before getting into entertainment law, she had been the premier defense attorney in the state of California. She had saved twenty murderers from the gas chamber. The worst any of these clients had to suffer was a few years for different degrees of manslaughter. But then her nerves had given way and she had switched to entertainment law. She often said it was less bloody and it had greater and more witty villains.

Now she represented A-picture directors, Bankable Stars, top-notch screenwriters. And on the morning after the Academy Awards, one of her favorite clients, Claudia De Lena, was in her office. With her was her screenwriting partner of the moment, a once famous novelist, Ernest Vail.

Claudia De Lena was an old friend, and though one of the least important of Flanders's clients, the most intimate. So when Claudia asked her to take on Vail, she agreed. Now she regretted it. Vail had come with a problem that even she couldn't solve. Also, he was a man she could feel no affection for, though she usually learned to like even her murder clients. Which made her feel a little guilty about giving him bad news.

«Ernest,» she said, «I went over all the contracts, all the legal papers. And there is no point in your continuing to sue LoddStone Studios. The only way you can get the rights back is to croak before your copyright expires. Which means sometime in the next five years.»

A decade before, Ernest Vail had been the most famous novelist in America, praised by critics, read by a vast public. One novel had a franchise character LoddStone had exploited. They bought the rights, made the picture, and achieved an enormous success. Two sequels also made a fortune in profit. The Studio had on its drawing board four more sequels. Unfortunately for Vail his first contract had given all the rights to the characters and title to the Studio, on all planets in the universe, in all forms of entertainment, discovered and undiscovered. The standard contract for novelists who had not yet amassed clout in movies.

Ernest Vail was a man who always had a grim, sour expression on his face. For which he had good reason. The critics still acclaimed his books, but the public no longer read them. Also, despite his talent, he had made a mess of his life. During the last twenty years his wife had left, taking their three children with her. On the one book that had become a successful movie, he had made a one-time score, but the Studio would make hundreds of millions over the years.

«Explain that to me,» Vail said.

«The contracts are foolproof,» Molly said. «The Studio owns your characters. There's only one loophole. Copyright law states that when you die all rights to your works revert to your heirs.»

For the first time Vail smiled. «Redemption,» he said.

Claudia asked, «What kind of money are we talking about?»

«On a fair deal,» Molly said, «five percent of gross. Figure they get five more pictures out of it and they are not disasters, total rentals, a billion worldwide, so we're talking around thirty or forty million.» She paused for a moment and smiled sardonically. «If you were dead, I could get your heirs a much better deal. We'd really have a gun to their heads.»

Vail said, «Call the people at LoddStone. I want a meeting. I'll convince them that if they don't cut me in, I'll kill myself.»

«They won't believe you,» Molly said.

«Then I'll do it,» Vail said.

«Talk sense,» Claudia said amiably. «Ernest, you're only fifty-six years old. That's too young to die for money. For principle, for the good of your country, for love, sure. But not for money.»

«I have to provide for my wife and kids,» Vail said.

«Your ex-wife,» Molly said. «And for Christ's sake, you've been married twice since.»

«I'm talking about my real wife,» Vail said. «The one who had my kids.»

Molly understood why everybody in Hollywood disliked him. She said, «The Studio won't give you what you want. They know you won't kill yourself, and they won't be bluffed by a writer. If you were a Bankable Star, maybe. An A director, maybe. But never a writer. You're just shit in this business. Sorry, Claudia.»

Claudia said, «Ernest knows that and I know that. If everybody in this town wasn't scared to death of a blank piece of paper, they'd get rid of us entirely. But can't you do something?»

Molly sighed and put in a call to Eli Marrion. She had enough clout to get through to Bobby Bantz, the president of LoddStone.

Claudia and Vail had a drink together afterward in the Polo Lounge. Vail said reflectively, «Big woman, Molly. Big women are easier to seduce. And they're much nicer in bed than small women. Ever notice?»

Not for the first time Claudia wondered why she was so fond of Vail. Not many people were. But she had loved Vail's novels, still did. «You're full of shit,» she said.

Vail said, «I meant big women are sweeter. They bring you breakfast in bed, they do little things for you. Feminine things.»

Claudia shrugged.

Vail said, «Big women are good-hearted. One brought me home from a party one night and really didn't know what to do with me. She looked around the bedroom exactly like my mother used to look around her kitchen when there was nothing in the house to eat and she was figuring out how to throw a meal together. She was wondering, how the hell we were going to have a good time with the materials at hand.»

They sipped their drinks. As always, Claudia warmed to him when he was so disarming. «You know how Molly and I became friends?» Claudia said. «She was defending some guy who had murdered his girlfriend and she needed some good dialogue for him to use in the courtroom. I wrote the scene just as if it were a movie, and her client got manslaughter. I think I wrote the dialogue and the plotline for three other cases before we stopped.»

«I hate Hollywood,» Vail said.

«You just hate Hollywood because LoddStone Studios screwed you on your book,» Claudia said.

«Not just that,» Vail said. «I'm like one of those old civilizations like the Aztecs, the Chinese empires, the Native American Indians, who were destroyed by a people with more sophisticated technology. I'm a real writer, I write novels to appeal to the mind. That kind of writing is a very backward technology. It can't stand up against movies. Movies have cameras, they have sets, they have music and they have these great faces. How can a writer conjure that up with just words? And movies have narrowed the field of battle. They don't have to conquer the brain, only the heart.»