We had boarded this air-conditioned vehicle in the cool shadowed parking level of Zack’s building, where it had been waiting for us near the elevators, and then we went out to the traffic and the bright day, muted by the sheets of black on side and rear windows. As we drove along, Danny talked and Zack talked and I tried to listen, but after my conversation with Ross — and particularly after what he had browbeat me into agreeing to — it wasn’t easy. My eyes kept straying to the surrounding traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard and then on the San Diego Freeway, where no swarthy men peeled out of the jumble in Chevy Impalas.
Belatedly, it had occurred to me that I hadn’t managed to tell Ross about the deaths of the actor and the makeup man. I’d started to, I’d said there’d been three murders, but then we’d been sidetracked by the outrageousness of his intentions and I’d never gotten back to it again. Would it have made any difference? Probably not. Ross, whose overdeveloped sense of drama had led him into this mess in the first place, could see nothing now but the drama — and the success — of the book he was going to write.
Why had I let him talk me into it? Was it because all he was asking me, as all I was asking Zack, was to be permitted to work? At some point in the discussion with Ross, it had seemed to me that I didn’t have the right somehow to keep him from his career, as though the job were more important than the life, as though threats to the life were irrelevant if the job could get done; like the German director Werner Herzog risking himself and his crew in South American jungles to get a movie made. Was all that as stupid as I now thought it? Did my identification with Ross’s plight as a worker get in the way of my common sense? Should I reneg on our agreement?
“Of course,” Zack was saying, “Sam will have a clearer picture of all this once he reads the scripts.”
“Oh, sure, sure.” Smiling, Danny Silvermine looked at me and massaged his knees. “I hope you won’t mind the liberties I took,” he said. “Just to fit it on the stage, you know. But the heart of the material was already there, and I left that alone. It’s not often you meet an actor who’s a real natural writer too.”
“It didn’t feel natural,” I told him. The world seen through the tinted glass beside me was blue-tinged, watery, but beyond Danny’s compact head, beyond the dispassionate chauffeur and out through the windshield, the day was bright and washed-out and glaring, like an overexposed print. Lying in submarine shadow on the empty fourth seat beside me, beyond the refrigerator, were the two slender scripts, both in baby-blue folders imprinted in gold. The Man Who Was Overboard was on top. Remembering my earlier curiosity as to which was the other script Silvermine had thought adaptable, I reached over to pick them up, shuffled the bottom one onto the top, and read Salute the Devil. Oh, the military school. But how could that work onstage?
Zack and Danny Silvermine had both fallen silent, leaving only the soft sounds of tire-hum and air-conditioning, which I didn’t at first notice. Putting down The Man Who Was Overboard, I leafed through Salute the Devil and saw how it had been done. That had been my first script, my very first attempt to write anything in fiction, and it was all talk from beginning to end. Later I’d learned more about letting action carry the story, but that first one was dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. Following the advice of my three mentors — Ross, and Bly, and Terry Young, my reporter friend in New York — I’d “opened it up” by setting all the talk in different places; on the rifle range, in the stable, among the cadets while they marched. What Danny Silvermine had done was shift all those scenes down onto only two sets, the senior cadets’ locker room and the faculty lounge.
But wouldn’t that merely emphasize what was amateurish and inept in the story? I leafed through this careful product of the word processor, with its justified right margins and eye-catching use of italics and boldface, trying to see at a glance if the result was better or worse or just the same, and then I became aware of Zack and Danny watching me, waiting. I turned back to the first page: Salute the Devil, by Samuel Holt. I said, “You didn’t give yourself a credit.”
Danny giggled, either from nervousness or relief, impossible to tell. “Oh, I figured we’d work that out,” he said. “Whatever you want, it’s fine with me. My ego isn’t involved in that part, Sam.”
But can you be a good writer — or even a good rewriter — if your ego isn’t involved? I didn’t ask that question, merely dropped the script back onto the other one and said, “I’ll have to read them, of course.”
“Oh, of course!”
“But at first glance it looks as though you’ve done a good job. I wouldn’t have known how to redo Salute.”
“It was all there,” Danny assured me, leaning forward, spreading his hands. “You provided the substance, Sam, I just noodged it around a little.”
Zack said, “Sam, if you decide to proceed with this, I’ll tell you something right here in front of Danny. He’s a detail man. If you go on the road with him, he’ll get the details right.”
Danny squirmed with pleasure, like a puppy. “It’s what I love to do, that’s all. Provide the setting, let the artist be free to create.”
Everybody in Los Angeles is an artist. To meet a producer who claimed not to be an artist was refreshing, and made me warm to him. “I’ll read them,” I said.
“That’s all I could ask, Sam. I want you to know I appreciate it.”
Zack said, “Next week, Sam, you’ll give me a call?”
“Don’t rush the man!” Danny cried, hurrying to my defense, demonstrating how he’d behave if we went on the road together in a more meaningful way than in this limousine.
Beyond the chauffeur, out in the glare, the huge green sign announced MANCHESTER BOULEVARD; LAX was near. “I’ll read them on the plane,” I said. “Then take a few days to think it over.”
“Of course,” Zack said.
“So next week’s no problem,” I said. “Early next week.”
“That’s fine, fine.”
“I really appreciate this, Sam.”
We all smiled together in perfect harmony, we were polite, Zack was pleased and avuncular, Danny was effusive, and the chauffeur slowed for Century Boulevard.
20
Unless requested otherwise, airlines prefer to preboard infants in arms, unaccompanied minors, people in wheelchairs, and celebrities; it makes it easier to maintain the passenger flow. That’s why I was surprised to find someone already in the window seat next to mine when I came onto the L-1011 with three children of divorce and a resigned-looking Oriental couple bearing twins in arms. My fellow preboarders turned right toward coach when they entered the plane, I turned left, and there he was, my seatmate, the pre-preboarder.
My first impression of him, a hard-bodied man in his fifties wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit, was of a top-ranked corporation or divorce lawyer, but such a man wouldn’t be preboarded like this. A senator? That seemed possible until I reached my seat and he turned to look at me, when I saw that he was European. Foreign, anyway.
I don’t know how to define that idea, how this mongrelized melting pot of ours has managed to come up with a distinctive American look — or several distinctive American looks, I suppose — but we have, and this fellow was none of them. His coarse pepper-and-salt hair was cut full, emphasizing its waviness in a dramatic way I thought of as Italian. There was nothing unusual about his suit and vest and maroon-figured tie, but the white shirt’s collar points were too long and narrow, giving him to my American eyes a vaguely untrustworthy look. Similarly, his mouth was thin-lipped, almost colorless, and looked unused to smiling, while his cheeks were rounded, almost puffy, noticeably so in his otherwise hard-boned face, suggesting something alien in his normal diet. (Americans tend to go puffy lower in the face, sagging down onto the jawline.) The skin of his face was leathery, tanned by sun or wind and faintly pocked with some childhood disease. His eyes were small and darkly brown, and they glanced at me in brief disinterest before returning to the airline copy of The Economist he was leafing through.