“I seem to remember something about the case. Wasn’t she a little young for him?”
“Hell, he’s at the age when they really go for the young ones. Not that Sime’s so old. It’s only the last year his hair turned gray, and it was the girl’s death that did it to him.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“Sure, I’m sure. I saw them together a couple of times that spring, and I got X-ray eyes, boy, it’s one thing being a writer does for you.”
“Where did you see them?”
“This is your own idea, no doubt.”
“Yeah, but it makes sense,” he said with some fanaticism. “I been watching him for years, like you watch the flies on the wall, and I know him. I can read him like a book.”
“Who wrote the book? Freud?”
Sammy didn’t seem to hear me. His gaze had roved to the far end of the pool, where Graff was posing for more pictures with some of the girls. I wondered why picture people never got tired of having their pictures taken. Sammy said: “Call me Oedipus if you want to. I really hate that bastard.”
“What did he do to you?”
“It’s what he does to Flaubert. I’m writing the Carthage script, version number six, and Sime Graff keeps breathing down my neck.” His voice changed; he mimicked Graff’s accent: “Mâtho’s our juvenile lead, we can’t let him die on us. We got to keep him alive for the girl, that’s basic. I got it. I got it. She nurses him back to health after he gets chopped up, how about that? We lose nothing by the gimmick, and we gain heart, the quality of heart. Salammbô rehabilitates him, see? The boy was kind of a revolutionary type before, but he is saved from himself by the influence of a good woman. He cleans up on the barbarians for her. The girl watches from the fifty-yard line. They clinch. They marry.” Sammy resumed his own voice: “You ever read Salammbô?”
“A long time ago, in translation. I don’t remember the story.”
“Then you wouldn’t see what I’m talking about. Salammbô is a tragedy, its theme is dissolution. So Sime Graff tells me to tack a happy ending onto it. And I write it that way. Jesus,” he said in a tone of surprise, “this is the way I’ve written it. What makes me do it to myself and Flaubert? I used to worship Flaubert.”
“Money?” I said.
“Yeah. Money. Money.” He repeated the word several times, with varying inflections. He seemed to be finding new shades of meaning in it, subtle drunken personal meanings which brought the tears into his voice. But he was too chancy and brittle to hold the emotion. He slapped himself across the eyes, and giggled. “Well, no use crying over spilled blood. How about a drink, Lew? How about a drink of Danziger Goldwasser, in fact?”
“In a minute. Do you know a girl called Hester Campbell?”
“I’ve seen her around.”
“Lately?”
“No, not lately.”
“What’s her relation to Graff, do you know?”
“No, I wouldn’t know,” he answered sharply. The subject disturbed him, and he took refuge in clowning: “Nobody tells me anything, I’m just an intellectual errand boy around here. An ineffectual intellectual errand boy. Song.” He began to sing in a muffled tenor to an improvised tune: “He’s so reprehensible yet so indispensable he makes things comprehensible he’s my joy. That intellectual – ineffectual – but oh so sexual – intellectual errand boy. Whom nothing can alloy... Dig that elegant ‘whom’.”
“I dug it.”
“It’s the hallmark of genius, boy. Did I ever tell you I was a genius? I had an I.Q. of 183 when I was in high school in Galena, Illinois.” His forehead crinkled. “What ever happened to me? What happen? I used to like people, by damn, I used to have talent. I didn’t know what it was worth. I came out here for the kicks, going along with the gag – seven fifty a week for playing word games. Then it turns out that it isn’t a gag. It’s for keeps, it’s your life, the only one you’ve got. And Sime Graff has got you by the short hairs and you’re not inner-directed any more. You’re not yourself.”
“Who are you, Sam?”
“That’s my problem.” He laughed, and almost choked. “I had a vision of myself last week, I could see it as plain as a picture. Dirty word, picture, but let it pass. I was a rabbit running across a desert. Rear view.” He laughed and coughed again. “A goddam white-tailed bunny rabbit going lickety-split across the great American desert.”
“Who was chasing you?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a lopsided grin. “I was afraid to look.”
Chapter 18
GRAFF, came strutting toward us along the poolside, trailed by his twittering harem and their eunuchs. I wasn’t ready to talk to him, and turned my back until he’d passed. Sammy was yawning with hostility.
“I really need a drink,” he said. “My eyes are focusing. How’s about joining me in the bar?”
“Later, maybe.”
“See you. Don’t quote me on anything.”
I promised that I wouldn’t, and Sammy went away toward the lights and the music. At the moment the pool was deserted except for the Negro lifeguard, who was moving around under the diving tower. He trotted in my direction with a double armful of soiled towels, took them into a lighted room at the end of the row of cabañas.
I went over and tapped on the open door. The lifeguard turned from a canvas bin where he had dumped the towels. He had on gray sweat-clothes with CHANNEL CLUB stenciled across the chest.
“Can I get you something, sir?”
“No, thanks. How are the tropical fish?”
He gave me a quick grin of recognition. “No tropical-fish trouble tonight. People trouble is all. There’s always people trouble. Why they want to go swimming on a night like this! I guess it’s the drinking they do. The way they pour it down is a revelation.”
“Speaking of pouring it down, your boss is pretty good at it.”
“Mr. Bassett? Yeah, he’s been drinking like a fish lately, ever since his mother died. A tropical fish. Mr. Bassett was very devoted to his mother.” The black face was smooth and bland, but the eyes were sardonic. “He told me she was the only woman he ever loved.”
“Good for him. Do you know where Bassett is now?”
“Circulating.” He stirred the air with his finger. “He circulates around at all the parties. You want me to find him for you?”
“Not just now, thanks. You know Tony Torres?”
“Know him well. We worked together for years.”
“And his daughter?”
“Some,” he said guardedly. “She worked here, too.”
“Would Tony still be around? He isn’t on the gate.”
“No, he goes off at night, party or no party. His fill-in didn’t show up tonight. Maybe Mr. Bassett forgot to call him.”
“Where does Tony live, do you know?”
“I ought to. He lives under your feet, practically. He’s got a place next to the boiler room, he moved in there last year. He used to get so cold at night, he told me.”
“Show me, will you?”
He didn’t move, except to look at his wristwatch. “It’s half past one. You wouldn’t want to wake him up in the middle of the night.”
“Yes,” I said. “I would.”
He shrugged and took me along a corridor filled with a soapy shower-room odor, down a flight of concrete steps into hothouse air, through a drying-room where bathing suits hung like sloughed snakeskins on wooden racks, between the two great boilers which heated the pool and the buildings. Behind them, a room-within-a-room had been built out of two-by-fours and plywood.