Rake (5 page)

I liked the way he thought. “Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I find this chunk of marble.”

“Does it have to be marble?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Because I have another idea about what he could find.”

“Shoot.”

“A mummy.”

“No. It’s not a horror movie. Try not to get distracted, okay? He finds a chunk of marble, and something about it makes him think, hmm, this is familiar. Where have I seen this particular type of marble before?”

“What type of marble is it? Do we need to research the different kinds?”

His inability to stay focused was starting to worry me. “Forget that for a second. Anyway, he digs some more and he figures it out. You want to know what he finds?”

“I guess.”

I looked down the bar to make sure the bartender wasn’t listening. They say execution is everything and inspiration counts for very little, but this was the sort of high concept that could get easily hijacked by the wrong sort of character. I leaned in and said quietly, “He finds a pair of arms.”

“Skeletal arms?” Fred said.

“Marble arms.”

“Okay. Marble arms. What happens next?”

“Don’t you get it?”

“I guess I don’t.”

“They’re the Venus de Milo’s arms.”

He looked blank. “That’s your idea?”

“That’s it.”

“What else is there?”

“That’s the start of the movie. Now we figure out the rest.”

“There was already a movie maybe thirty years ago with Noiret and Annie Girardot about an archaeologist and a statue with a missing part.”

“Jesus, really? The Venus de Milo?”

“No, it was a statue of Jupiter and they stole his leg.”

“Then I don’t see what the problem is.”

“I didn’t say there was one.”

“Good.” I was getting a little tired of his tendency to piss on my ideas, but in the end it was probably good to have someone playing devil’s advocate.

“Did you read my book yet?”

“Haven’t had the chance.”

•
     
•
     
•

I’d phoned Marie-Laure and suggested she join us for dinner, in hopes that she would take a personal interest in the project and also that the network might pick up the tab. I was a little disappointed, then, when we arrived at the address she’d given me to find a quaint little restaurant on a street behind the arcades on the rue de Rivoli, a dark-walled place serving an old-fashioned cuisine and making the most of a nineteenth-century ambience. It was perfectly charming, mind you, the kind of place where you were likely to get a very good meal, but I’d been hoping for a sign that the network held me in somewhat higher esteem.

An outbreak of whispering erupted when I walked in the door and presented myself to the maître d’, at least half a dozen diners urging their companions to turn around and look at who just walked in. I smiled and affected an air of approachable affability and winked at one plump, blushing matron as we passed her table on our way to our own, causing her to burst into a fit of giggling.

Marie-Laure was already there, and when I introduced her to Fred she frowned and cocked her head sideways, repeating his name.

“Did you write
Squirm, Baby, Squirm
?”

He appeared stunned. His novel, I gathered, hadn’t garnered many sales or reviews, and this may have been the first time anyone ever recognized his name as the author thereof. “I did.”

“I thought it was superb. Very provocative, particularly the sex scenes between the brother and sister.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you ever sell the film rights?”

“No one ever inquired.”

She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and took a sip of her aperitif. “You can’t wait for someone to inquire, you have to be aggressive. Who’s your agent?”

“I don’t have one.”

“We’ll have to get you one,” she said, perusing the day’s specials, clipped onto the plastic menu. “There’s monkfish medallions tonight, it’s usually good here. In fact the seafood is always good here.”

“I don’t believe in them, generally,” Fred said, with a touch of fear in his voice.

“In monkfish medallions?” Marie-Laure said.

“Agents.” I was relieved to hear him say this, because it occurred to me that an agent might fuck up our deal if he got involved too soon. Just then the waiter came with Fred’s and my drinks, and Fred took a long, nervous swig of his.

“Don’t be a dumbass,” she said. “How much did you get for that novel?”

Fred looked as though she’d just inquired as to his sperm count, or past sexual encounters with barnyard animals. He took another swig and answered. “Five hundred euros.”

Marie-Laure rolled her eyes. “My God, you need an agent more than any writer I ever met. I’ll set you up with one, all right?” Fred looked to me in supplication as she turned her attention back so completely to the menu that a response didn’t seem called for. The waiter, an unusually tall, white-haired specimen who would have been even taller had his neck not been bent permanently forward from years of leaning down to listen to diners, appeared tableside at this juncture to take our orders. Thick, snowy-white hairs grew from his ears, a detail that fascinated me to such an extent that I forgot completely what I’d decided to order and had to reconsult the menu.

When the waiter left, Marie-Laure finally spoke and fixed on Fred as if I weren’t there. In fact, now that I thought of it, she hadn’t addressed a word to me since “
Salut
.”

“You have other novels?”

“One other I’m working on.”

“How can you work on it while you’re doing this script?”

“I can do two things at once. They’re different forms.”

“How many scripts have you written?”

He hesitated, but he was so intimidated by her stare that he didn’t dare lie. “This is the first.”

“That’s good,” she said, to his and my surprise. “You haven’t learned any bad habits. Just get the formatting right and you’ll be fine.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. I read
Squirm, Baby, Squirm
, and you have an excellent sense of structure, plot, and pace. In fact when I read it I thought, this is practically filmable right off the page as it is. The part where his twin sister discovers she’s pregnant with her own brother’s doomed baby gave me chills.”

Fred was clearly unused to such face-to-face compliments, and his face burned red. He was sweating, too, and I had the feeling Marie-Laure inspired the same reaction in him that she did in me.

“How come you didn’t try to buy it for the network? Too racy?” I asked, and she turned to me as if I’d interrupted a private conversation.

“Don’t be a fucking idiot. This isn’t the United States, where you can’t even show a tit without causing a national panic attack. It’s because visually it should be a movie, for the cinema. Anyway, we don’t work with the kinds of budgets where we can send a crew to Bangkok.”

A timid little man wearing a bowtie approached the table holding something with both hands at chest level, and when I turned to greet him I thought he was going to faint. “Excuse me,” he said, “but are you the actor who plays Dr. Crandall on
Ventura County
on the television?”

“I am,” I said.

“I wonder if you’d be so kind as to inscribe this for my mother?”

He extended the object in his hands. It was a copy of the latest
Télé 7 Jours
, from whose cover I stared in my OR scrubs, grim
in my determination to save some critically ill or injured soul. “How would you like me to sign it?”

“‘For Eugénie,’ please.”

I whipped out my trusty marker and wrote it, my real name and “Dr. Crandall Taylor, MD” after that. He smiled and returned to his table, where he was dining with a well-dressed fellow several decades his junior, who gave me what seemed to me a rather resentful glance.

“Honestly,” Marie-Laure said, annoyed that I’d stopped following her conversation with Fred. “I don’t know how you put up with that.”

“It’s all right. I knew what I signed up for when I became an actor.”

“But the impertinence of interrupting a private conversation . . .”

“Begging your pardon, Marie-Laure, but I was hardly part of that conversation.” I gave her my famous TV glare, a visual dressing-down with one eyebrow raised in judgmental disdain. It needed to be done at this stage, lest she think me a fool or an underling to be ordered around—a delicate matter, since there really was no question that I needed her help, and rather desperately.

It did the trick. She melted immediately. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “Of course you were part of it. So tell me about your project. Who’s attached so far?”

“Just me.”

Fred looked panicked. I’d just admitted that, in essence, there was no project except as it existed in our heads. But I was giving Marie-Laure a shot at the ground floor; besides, she was a pro, and there’d be no fooling her.

“That’s good. No one we’ll have to get rid of if I come up with someone better.” She took a tiny chunk of bread and nibbled thoughtfully. “Can I read the script?”

“Not yet.”

“You haven’t even started it, have you?”

“We have,” I said, which was more or less true, since we’d been talking about it, which is half the process of writing. “But it’s not ready yet.”

“How long?”

I looked over at Fred. “Two weeks,” I said, and those panicky eyes got a little wider.

“What’s the concept?”

“I’m an archaeologist, and I find the arms of the Venus de Milo.”

She nodded, lower lip protruding in a pensive manner I found very fetching. I certainly hoped I was going to take her home with me tonight. “That’s good. Comedy or adventure?”

“A little of both. Of course it can be tailored to your tastes.”

“No, no, suit yourselves and I’m sure it will be fine for our needs.”

The meal itself (on my part, onion soup, trout meunière, a decent Alsatian Riesling, profiteroles—the sort of meal one might have ordered in the same restaurant a century earlier) was consumed without discussion of business matters, not because of any scruples or good manners on my part or that of Fred, but because Marie-Laure seemed to consider the matter closed for the time being. When the coffee came, Fred was unable to contain himself any longer.

“When do we get paid?”

Marie-Laure shrugged. “Ask him,” she said, gesturing toward me. “The network is interested, but there will have to be a finished script before we can commit.”

Poor Fred looked like he was going to cry.

•
     
•
     
•

Marie-Laure declined my invitation to return to the suite with me. “It’s my husband’s birthday,” she said before gracing me with
a perfunctory set of
bisous
and climbing into her cab. Fred had already started walking back to wherever he lived, and I was at loose ends for the rest of the evening.

I pulled my phone from my inside jacket pocket and scanned my texts (I’m from the old school; I never interrupt a dinner with friends or colleagues for phone calls or texts). To my delight, one of the messages was from Annick: “Meet me? New club: Hanoi Hilton. Afterward, yr hotel?” Beneath this was an address on a pedestrian street in the fifth, near a bookshop I used to frequent. I hopped in a cab just as someone cried out in near hysterical excitement: “Crandall!”

•
     
•
     
•

More of an alley than a street—I imagined that furniture delivery days must have been interesting affairs here—the street featured only two businesses, the aforementioned bookshop, closed for the night, and a nightclub whose signage featured a painting of bald, fat Brando from
Apocalypse Now
, beneath a neon sign reading, yes,
HANOI HILTON
. I supposed no one had consulted a trademark lawyer before opening up, and wondered whether the inevitable financial settlement with the hotel chain would leave them with enough operating capital to reopen with a new name. To the sound of earsplitting disco music I descended a narrow stone staircase of medieval construction and at the bottom arrived at a checkpoint, at which a giant of Polynesian origin stood taking the cover charge and stamping the hands of those who left.

“Fifteen.”

“That includes how many drinks?” I asked.

“Drinks are extra,” he said. Behind him on the walls were movie posters, both predictable—
Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter
—and idiosyncratic, forgotten titles like
The Boys
in Company C
, and at least one—
Hamburger Hill
—that wasn’t set in Vietnam at all. As I fiddled with my wallet at a dilatory rate of speed, a grinning, dark-haired man in an expensive suit approached, his hand extended in greeting. If my guess was right, he was the owner or the manager, and I was about to save a cool fifteen euros.

“Forget it, Sammy, the doctor doesn’t pay for anything around here.”

Sammy looked unconvinced but waved me past the velvet rope, and my benefactor introduced himself as Mathieu as he led me to the bar. I ordered a shot and a bottle of Carlsberg as Mathieu introduced me to all and sundry—hostesses, three bartenders, several older gents whom I took to be investors, current or potential—and as we drank, any number of attractive young women approached. I signed a couple of dozen autographs, including at least five on human flesh, before things calmed down enough for Mathieu to talk.