Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

“But that’s make-believe.”

“It’s plausible, though, isn’t it?” she asked me. “If it wasn’t at least plausible, it wouldn’t have been such a big hit.”

This was the last reaction I’d expected. In fact, I’d been fully braced for Anita to share the same attitude of barely repressed scornful amusement as Terry. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

Laughing, Terry said to me, “There you are, Sam. You should go ahead because otherwise you’re nothing but a passive wimp. And because it is after all your life and reputation on the line. And because, even though your background for this sort of job may be halfassed, it’s anyway plausible.”

“Right,” Anita said.

I nodded. “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.

Because I was trying to keep my presence in New York — and its reason — as quiet as possible, and also because I didn’t want people to be on guard when talking with me, I’d asked Julie to use my false name, Ed Dante, when she phoned ahead to introduce me. I’d also asked her to give false reasons for my wanting to meet these people. With Kay Henry, for instance, Dale Wormley’s agent, she had described me as an actor she’d met in Florida, who was without an agent and who she thought highly of; professionally, that is. At my request, she’d also suggested I might be right for the part in the Rita Colby play that Wormley had been cast for. This was a little dangerous, asking Henry to study me up close as a Dale Wormley substitute, but couldn’t think of a better way to get around to the subject I was actually interested in.

There wasn’t much I could do about my raffish appearance, except dress a little more conservatively and comb my wig down more flat, but I thought I could get away with it if I acted like a conceited boob. Agents think of actors as conceited boobs anyway, so Henry shouldn’t have any trouble believing I’d made the visual mistake of this moustache under the impression it made me look like a ladykiller. The hardest thing for any of us to do is deliberately place ourselves in a bad light, but that was my acting exercise for the day, so I’d give it my best shot.

My appointment with Henry was for ten. His address was a townhouse in the east forties off 3rd Avenue, converted to offices. He had the third floor of five, with the street floor shared by a travel agent and florist, the second occupied by a food brokerage (whatever that is), and the top two floors given over to InterArab Imports (whatever that is, and it doesn’t sound good).

I arrived a few minutes early, on purpose, and took the slow small elevator up to three, stepping out to a receptionist’s area doing its absolute damnedest — or Bloomingdale’s damnedest, I guess — to look like a private person’s living room, though what it actually looked like was a moderately important room in a small well-endowed museum. The receptionist, a cool anorexic English girl in black, sat at a Chippendale reproduction writing table, its legs as polished and curved and slender as her own, visible beneath. Chintz sofas and chairs, nice old floorlamps, and coffee tables and end tables echoing or complementing the writing table’s design, all worked toward the same homey effect. It was an interior room without windows, its peach-colored walls furnished with 19th-century English family portraits: curly-haired little girls in white, with puppies; stern stout gentlemen with their hands on globes. It was a large room, with several seating areas, at two of which little clusters of people sat, talking together animatedly, gesturing broadly with hands and eyebrows, keeping one eye alert toward the elevator in case Liza Minelli should chance to drop by. It was easy to see how Julie Kaplan could have stayed here all day, after the killing of Kim Peyser, when she’d been afraid to go home.

The receptionist gave me a jaded look as I emerged from the elevator and sauntered toward her. “Hi, beautiful,” I said, and smiled like an idiot under my moustache. “Would you tell Mr. Henry that Ed Dante’s here?” Instead of trying to disguise my well-known voice, I used the flat nasal Long Island twang I’d grown up around.

“Of course,” she said, cool and professional. “If you’ll take a seat...”

I kept the stupid smile, and leaned forward, shifting some of my weight to my palm, pressed down on her table. “And what’s your name?” I asked.

She was used to jerks. “Miss Colinville,” she said, clipping the syllables off, her eyes astonishingly hostile.

“Brrrr,” I said, still grinning as I turned up the collar of an imaginary overcoat. “I’ll be over there fighting frostbite,” I told her, pointing at an empty area of the room.

“You do that,” she agreed, but she did release a faint and frosty smile as she reached for the phone to announce my presence.

That was sufficient. I wanted to be enough of a jerk to go with my appearance, but not so obnoxious that no one would talk to me. So I went over and sat on a flowery sofa and beamed at the groups of chatting people as though I’d just love to join in. As expected, they worked very hard not to be aware of me.

The fact is, within obvious limits we do decide what we look like. Our clothing, jewelry, eyeglasses, hairstyles, way of standing and walking, a hundred other things, all go together to create that person who is not exactly us but is the person the rest of the world sees. Every element of that involves a choice, and in our choices we make a lot of declarations, including which other human beings we’re most comfortable having contact with.

So that’s what I was using now. Ed Dante — that is, this Ed Dante, in Kay Henry’s office — was an amiable but sleazy guy who tried to cover his inadequacies with a lover-boy image and failed. With very slight changes of appearance and manner, he had become much less dangerous and off-putting than the guy who’d been acting tough down in Miami. You probably still wouldn’t want him for your best friend — unless you were a failed Errol Flynn yourself — but you wouldn’t mind being in the same room with him for a while. At least, that was the idea.

It was twenty to eleven before the icy Miss Colinville ushered me into the inner office. In those forty-five minutes, a number of cast changes had taken place out here. A bright-eyed cheery girl who could have been Julie Kaplan’s cousin came out from the inner sanctum and a couple of the people from one of the chatting groups went away in the elevator with her. Other people from this waiting area went inside, came out, left. A few times, the elevator opened to produce either a messenger delivering a package — scripts, mostly, from the look of them — or an actor to pick up a check; or at least a slim envelope. Most of these people (except the messengers) portrayed ebullience and hopefulness and happiness all the time, as though life itself were one endless audition.

As I sat there, the place got me more and more depressed — partly because it reminded me of my own early days in this trade, and partly because it emphasized how short and relatively painless my own apprenticeship had been — but I maintained the de rigueur ebullient brightness through it all, leafing through the Billboards and Varietys on the coffee table near me, smiling at my fellow supplicants, occasionally winking at the oblivious Miss Colinville.

Who at last, after one more brief murmured conversation into her telephone, rose and nodded to me and turned toward that gleaming mahogany door. I dropped the month-old Variety I’d been leafing through, and followed, and found myself in a different world.

The corridor was white-walled, with sunken fluorescent ceiling lights. Theater and movie posters lined both sides, filling the left but broken by doorways on the right. Following Miss Colinville, I saw that these right-hand doorways led to two assistants’ offices — both assistants deep in discussion with clients, at the moment — a supply room, a unisex restroom and an empty small conference room. At the far end, the corridor opened out, without doorway or door, into Kay Henry’s office.