Nightwork

'Millions, lad, millions.' He sighed sentimentally. 'My delightful little friend has let me read the script, too. Most literate. Full of fancy and provocation. Essentially innocent in my opinion. Almost decorous from a sophisticated point of view, but a little bit of everything for every taste. Something like a combination of Henry Miller and the Arabian Nights. But my delightful lady friend - she's directing it herself, by the way - she got the script almost for nothing from a young Iranian who can't go back to Iran - but even though she's making it on a shoestring - some of the most lucrative of these particular works of art are made for under forty thousand dollars - I think Deep Throat cost no more than sixty - as I was saying, her bookkeeping doesn't quite match her talent - she's just a slip of a woman - and when she told me she needed fifteen thousand dollars to complete the picture...'

'You said you'd give it to her.'

'Exactly.' He beamed. 'Out of gratitude she offered me twenty percent of the profits.'

'And you said you'd take it?'

'No, I held out for twenty-five.' He beamed again. I may be a friend, but I'm a businessman first.'

'Fabian,' I said. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.'

'In the long run,' he said, 'you'll smile. At least smile. They're having a screening of what they've shot thus far this evening. We're all invited. I guarantee you'll be impressed.'

'I've never seen a pornographic movie in my life,' I said.

'Never too late to begin, lad. Now,' he said briskly, 'I suggest we go down to the bar and wait for Lily. She can't be too long. We can cement our partnership in champagne. And I'll treat you to the best lunch you've ever eaten. And after lunch we'll take in the Louvre. Have you ever been to the Louvre?'

'I just arrived in Paris yesterday.' 'I envy you your initiation,' he said.

* * *

We had just about finished a bottle of champagne when Lily Abbott strode into the bar. When Fabian introduced me as an old friend from St Moritz, she did not show, by as much as the blink of an eye, that we had ever gone so far as to shake hands in Florence.

Fabian ordered a second bottle.

I wished I liked the taste.

13

We were eight in the small screening room. My feet ached from the Louvre. The room smelled of twenty years of cigarettes and sweat. The building on the Champs Elysees was a shabby one with creaky, old-fashioned elevators. The peeling signs of the businesses on the floors we passed all looked like advertisements for concerns that were well into bankruptcy and minor evasions of the criminal code. The corridors were dimly lit, as though the people who frequented the building did not wish to be clearly observed as they came and went. With Fabian, Lily, and myself were Fabian's delightful French lady, whose name was Nadine Bonheur. At the console in the rear was the cameraman on the picture, a weary, gray professional of about sixty-five who wore a beret and a permanent cigarette hanging from his lip. He looked too old for this sort of work and kept his eyes almost completely closed at all times, as though he did not want to be reminded too definitely of what he had recorded on the film we were about to see.

Seated together on the far aisle were the two stars of the film, a slender dark young man, probably a North African, with a long, sad face, and a pert, pretty young American girl by the name of Priscilla Dean, with a blonde ponytail, an anachronistic, fresh-faced relic of an earlier generation of Midwestern virgins. She was primly dressed and looked as proper as a starched lace apron. 'It's a pleasure, I'm sure,' she said, her voice pure Iowa. I was introduced without ceremony to the others, the atmosphere businesslike. We might have been assembled for a lecture on the marketing of a breakfast food.

A bearded, long-haired man sitting apart, who was wearing a soiled denim jacket and who looked as though he had just bitten into something extremely distasteful, merely grunted when I said hello.

'He's a critic,' Fabian whispered to me. 'He belongs to Nadine.'

"Appy to make the acquaintance,' Nadine Bonheur said to me, looking up from a clipboard and extending her hand. Her hand was silky. She was small and slight, but with a perky full bosom, half of which could be seen over her low-cut black dress. She was tanned a beautiful even shade of brown. I imagined her lying naked on the beach at St Tropez, surrounded by equally unclothed dissolute young men. 'See what that hassole of a projectionist is doing,' she said to the cameraman. 'We only 'ave the room for teartty minutes.' Her accent in English was the sort that sounds charming to Americans.

The cameraman shouted something in French into a telephone on the desk in front of him and the lights dimmed.