Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

“Something in pictures, you mean?”

“What else do you do in Hollywood?”

“But you don’t know anything about the industry.”

“Shelley,” he said softly, “I’ll be able to do anything I want. Anything.”

She studied him, her violet eyes narrowing to points of black light. “Are you serious? You’re going to produce a picture?”

“Yes, I guess you could say that. Of course. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“What picture?”

He raised a hand for the waiter, wishing for him to come immediately, and ordered more drinks. Then he leaned back and said carefully, “Let’s put it this way. I’m in the market for ideas.”

“Are you? That’s a coincidence.” Shelley tapped her glass slowly with one mauve and perfect nail. “There’s a book that Global is planning to buy for Lisa Gordon. But it would be so right for me. If someone else got it, that is. If someone else were able to get it.”

“That’s a coincidence.” He smiled boyishly, the smile she used to say she liked. “Because what I had in mind was to make a great picture for Shelley.”

When he returned to his apartment, there were eighteen hours left of the twenty-four. Despite the successful lunch, there was a fist of tension at the back of his neck that would not uncurl. He made a martini and sat staring down at its olive eye. Then he picked up the phone and called the elderly widow whom he had escorted to Faust. Adopting the bantering manner she liked, he inquired about the charity ball she was staging, automatically wangled an invitation, and finally extracted the true object of his call, a telephone number.

He dialed it, adjusting his mental posture to one of deference; to the famous film critic who answered, he posed as a graduate student researching the adapting of novels to the screen. He sought the critic’s opinion of several recent films, and then casually mentioned the novel Shelley had suggested. When the critic spoke of it enthusiastically, he asked, in a casual, speculative manner, which writers and directors would be most capable of translating such a property to the screen. He hung up with a half smile that could not seem to grow; he sat fingering the back of his neck, and told himself that he needed to get out.

An hour later he headed for an art gallery on Madison Avenue. The crowd at the opening was already so dense that there was no way, or need, to see the paintings; he thrust himself in among the bodies and soon had collected enough comments to deliver them to the artist as if they were his own tribute. Then he was free to turn to the real business of the evening.

Moving among the crowd with studied aimlessness, he talked to a Senator’s mistress and the president of a Fifth Avenue store, telling them that he was going to make a film; the sudden interest in their eyes became a glint in his own. He told the wives of three industrialists that Shelley Garnett would be starring in his picture; the warmth in their voices became a cool assurance in his own. He told two art critics of the major literary property he was going to buy and the screenwriter and director he planned to hire; the attentiveness in their manner became a certainty in his own veins.

By nine o’clock the crowd had thinned, but its power was still with him. With the insolence of confidence, he attached himself to the painter and to the man’s plans for dinner with a few influential clients.

When he got home at two o’clock, he did not know whether his exultation was the racing of his own pulse or the throbbing attention of the inner listener. He paced the living room in wide, jagged arcs; finally he took a sleeping pill and forced himself to lie on the bed.

Around five o’clock his staring eyes closed, but behind their lids a dream began almost at once: at the end of a flame-colored carpet, down which he walked for dozens of triumphant yards, he was greeted by a massive figure in red.

John wiped his face with a gray handkerchief and turned to the last entry in his notebook. He was making his daily report to the gentleman known simply as M, who sat behind a battered desk in an office that had seen better centuries. M wore a gray cape as thin as smoke, and a chronic scowl.

“Merchandise check on Judson A. Wick,” John read. “Requested Fame and Influence. Field: none. When pressed, subject chose the film industry, a desire inspired by watching a friend’s success. Here is the printout on his mental processes: Settled on becoming a producer, a notion which he got from his ex-wife. Decided to produce a certain novel, an idea which came from the same source. Determined that the novel was brilliant, by checking the opinion of a noted film critic. Selected a screenwriter and director, names he also got from the critic. Subject ended the trial period feeling confident and self-assured, a state which he induced by seeking out the reactions of influential persons at a fashionable cultural event.”

M glowered. “Do you mean there wasn’t even one of his own? Not one opinion or desire?”

“No, all were derived from other people. I believe he even got the idea of selling his soul from the Gounod opera.”

“Damnation!” roared M. “There are too many like him! They’re ruining my business! I need some kind of consumer protection. It’s fraud, that’s what it is — people trying to sell me borrowed merchandise. If I didn’t check them out first, they’d bankrupt me.” He sighed, in a shower of sparks. “Why are the ones without a soul of their own always the most eager to sell?”

John smiled wryly. “I’ll have the incident erased from Wick’s mind.”

“What mind?” snarled M. “Just suppose I took people like that. Where’s my profit? Where’s my pleasure? Turn them into servants, procurers of other souls, and they’d feel right at home. No agony at all.” His glance darted hotly over John’s face. “Not like you, eh. Doctor?”

“No, not like me.”

“Well,” sighed M, “get back out into the field. And see if you can find me someone like you. Someone with clear title to his property.”

Something in the depths of John Faust’s eyes glowed in pain for a moment. Then he closed his notebook and left the office wearily and sadly.

James Raleigh had just finished stenciling with gilt spray paint the words The Facsimile Shop on the narrow front window when the two men came in.

Raleigh, a plump jovial man with silvering hair, wiped his hands on a chamois cloth and approached them, smiling politely. It was almost three o’clock now and they were the first customers of his first day. “Gentlemen,” he said, “May I assist you?”

Neither man spoke immediately. Their eyes were making a slow circumspect inventory of the small shop, taking in the copy of Sesshu’s Winter Landscape on the wall beside the door, the gold-painted, delicately amber-inlayed replica of Pectoral of Lioness from Kelermes, the fake gold and ivory Cretan Snake Goddess from the Sixteenth Century B.C., the imitation Egyptian Seated Scribe, of red-hued limestone — each of which, among other items, adorned the single row of display shelves in the center of the shop.

The taller of the two men, dressed in a conservative gray sharkskin suit and a pearl-gray snapbrim hat, picked up the Seated Scribe and rotated it in his hands. He had craggy features and a cleft chin, and he studied the synthetic work of art with cool hazel eyes. After a moment he said conversationally, “Nice bit of craftsmanship.”

Raleigh nodded, smiling. “Its prototype dates back to 2500 B.C.”

The man looked at him quizzically. “Prototype?”

“Why, yes. You see, everything in my shop is a facsimile of the original objet d’art. I specialize in genuine imitations — sculptures, paintings, and the like.”