"Were you impressed?" Kahn asked.
"By whom?"
"The witness."
The car was in motion. Sam always felt a bit queasy in a moving vehicle, a reaction he attributed to his ulcer, or perhaps only to his proximity to Kahn, who seemed to be occupying a great many moving vehicles with him of late. He was constantly amazed by the fact that Kahn was not related to someone in the company. He could not imagine how anyone as imbecilic as this young man had ever managed to get through law school, no less become an employee of the firm, all without being someone's nephew. "The witness left me cold," he said, and belched.
"Excuse me" Kahn supplied.
"Do me a favor," Sam said. "When we get to Leo's office, shut up."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean shut up. Don't talk about the witness, don't talk about the case, just shut up and listen. You'll learn a great deal about law and high finance and tits."
"I know all about those already," Kahn said, offended.
"You can never know all about tits," Sam answered. "There's always something new to learn. The subject is inexhaustible."
"And I don't happen to like that expression," Kahn said. "I don't happen to like that expression," he repeated.
"Tits?"
"Yes, that."
"Did the witness impress you?" Sam asked, shrugging.
"Yes."
"In what manner?"
"I think he was telling the truth," Kahn said. "I think Driscoll did steal the play. Why else would Willow have moved for dismissal on a jurisdictional technicality? I'll tell you why. He knows his man stole the play, and he's afraid to put him on the stand."
"That's ridiculous," Sam said. "Willow was only trying to save time, energy, and money. If he could have got the case kicked out of court today, that would have been the end of it forever."
"I still think Driscoll's guilty. And I wouldn't be surprised if Ralph Knowles dipped into the company files, too, when he was writing the movie."
"My young friend," Sam said, "have you ever been thrown out of a seventh-floor window?"
"What?"
"All you have to do in the presence of Leo Kessler is suggest — suggest, mind you — that API was in any way a party to this plagiarism, and I can guarantee he will hurl you seven stories to the street below, where you will be crushed by oncoming traffic."
"Then you do think it was plagiarism?"
"Who said so?"
"You just called it plagiarism, didn't you?"
"I should have said alleged plagiarism," Sam amended, and then shrugged again.
"Well, what is your position?" Kahn asked.
"My position is the position Artists-Producers-Interna-tional pays me to maintain. There was no plagiarism involved here, neither on the part of James Driscoll nor on the part of any person or persons employed by API. That is my position."
"That's your official position."
"That's my only position."
"But how do you feel personally?"
"I feel fine, thanks, except for my ulcer."
"You know what I mean."
"Sure, I know what you mean."
"Well?"
"There was no plagiarism," Sam said flatly.
They had come uptown past Canal Street, where the big black limousine had nosed its way silently through the truck traffic heading for the bridge, making a sharp left turn onto Third Avenue. The Chinese banks and groceries had given way to the wholesale clothing and lighting fixture stores, the fleabag hotels and flophouses only sparsely represented until just now, when they suddenly appeared like dim gray specters in the blinding snow. Derelicts shuffled along the sidewalks here and lay in gutters and doorways, making Sam sick just to look at them. His most vicious nightmare was one in which he suddenly woke up divested of his law degree and his position with API, his house in Massapequa gone, his boat scuttled, everything he had fought for in the past twenty years vanished with the night to leave only a trembling immigrant Italian struggling with the language, selling chestnuts on a Bronx street corner for five cents a bag. He awoke from this dream each time in a cold sweat, the smell of roasting chestnuts in his nostrils, and each time he held his hands out in front of his face, peering at them in the dark, certain that the fingers would be stained brown from the juice of the nuts. His wife would say, "Go to sleep, Sam, you had a bad dream," but he would lie awake trembling in the dark, terrified by his near miss — they had almost taken it all away from him, they had almost closed the jaws of the trap before he'd had a chance to scurry out of it. He could not account for the basis of this dream, since he had never in his life sold chestnuts in the Bronx. Nor, for that matter, had he ever even lived in the Bronx. Moreover, neither of his parents were immigrants, and they had never been really poor. The dream-trap was more like a race memory that could be traced back to a grandfather he had never known — and yet his grandfather hadn't sold chestnuts, either, so what the hell could it be? His grandfather had come to this country when he was twenty-one years old, after studying economics at the university in Milan. When he arrived here, he had been given a job immediately in a bank on the Bowery, where he dealt mostly with Italian-speaking immigrants. The job paid a good salary each week, and he had managed to save enough for the purchase of the house in Massapequa, which had since been passed down to Sam's father and recently to Sam himself. So what was this business with the chestnuts? And why did the sight of all these ragged bums all over the sidewalk trouble Sam so badly?
He was grateful when Cooper Union appeared on the left of the limousine. In the small park outside the school, a coed in a black hooded parka, her legs crossed, leaned forward eagerly to divulge some secret of the universe to a budding young artist or engineer, and another girl, wearing a paint smeared smock and lighting a cigarette, came through the glass-paneled doors of the building, looked up at the sky, and sniffed the snow, ahh, to be young again.
Sam took in a deep breath. The Bowery and its dregs were falling behind the car, the hock shops appeared now like glittering toadstools. Beside him, he could smell the always-present slightly sour smell of Michael Kahn, as though someone had recently burped him but neglected to wipe his lips afterwards. Sam closed his eyes, and remained silent for the rest of the trip uptown.
There were wags in the industry, as there will be wags in any industry, who were of the opinion that the initials API did not really stand for Artists-Producers-International but stood instead for Asses, Pricks, and Imbeciles. If such was truly the case, the facade of the organization revealed neither ineptitude nor villainy, but seemed instead to echo a benign and somewhat informal attitude toward crass commercialism. The New York API offices covered the entire sixth, seventh, and eighth floors of the Longines-Wittnauer Building at 580 Fifth Avenue, just next door to Brentano's. The decorating scheme of the offices had been carefully calculated to disarm by none other than Mrs. Leo Kessler herself, better known in the industry as Katie Kessler, whose credit card — SET DRESSER: KATRINA L. KESSLER — had flashed from a hundred or more silver screens in the past two decades. To her further credit, the offices seemed to relax all visitors immediately, setting the tone for businesslike discussions in an atmosphere as informal as the living room of a Bel Air ranch. There were some who preferred the mid-Victorian decor of MCA's offices, with its old English prints in the elevators, and its green leather furniture, but Sam Genitori never failed to experience a slight lessening of tension the moment he stepped off the elevators here, and he silently thanked Katie each time.