Woman’s voice: Si?
Henry Berger: Let me speak to Carlos Soto, please.
Woman: Not here.
Berger: Is there some place I could reach him? I’m an old friend.
Woman: He has no old friends. There is no place to reach him.
Berger: I wouldn’t be calling unless it were important.
Woman: Leave your name and place and he will locate you.
Henry Berger gets into a taxi, gives the driver an address, and settles back into his seat. After a moment, he has an intuition and glances out the back window to see a black limousine keeping pace. They turn a corner and the limousine, some fifteen yards behind, also turns. Henry Berger insructs the cab driver to do what he can to shake the car behind them. The driver, after initial confusion, says: “You mean the way do in Amercian movies? 1 do my best for you.” The cab makes an abrupt left turn at the next corner, then speeds two blocks and turns left again. In a few seconds the limousine reappears in pursuit. The driver says that he has not shown them his best yet. After narrowly avoiding a collision with a truck — this after a succession of hairpin turns — the cab loses its pursuer. Berger looks at his watch, shakes his head despairingly at the loss of time.
Cut to Berger going though the front doors of an apartment building that might have seemed elegant in the îyio’s. There is an odd quiet in the building, the lobby (which has a fountain at the center) desolate. Berger takes the lift up, rings the buzzer at 50, waits, rings again, tries the door. The door is open and he goes in, calling “Carlos?…Carlos?” There is no answer, no sound of life. The stub end of a cigarette, however, is still burning in an ash tray. The bedroom door is closed and Berger knocks on it twice before going in. He stops after taking two steps into the room, turns his head. We see at a blurred distance, as if Berger were glancing at them out of the corner of his eye, the corpses of a man and a woman on the bed. Berger is profoundly upset, sits down in the living room at the edge of the sofa. A matchbook on a coffee table catches his eye — Cafe Fleurs de Mal, he reads upside down..
A knock at the front door — perhaps it was the fifth or sixth knock — recalled his attention.
He let himself out of the study — the door sticking briefly — and hurried down the long flight of stairs, wondering why his visitor had overlooked the bell. It was the kind of knock that policemen in movies made in the middle of the night.
He thought he knew who it was even before he opened the door to let his son in.
Tom stood there, frowning apologeticaly, his swollen canvas suitcase a foot or so behind as if it had trailed him there without his notice. He had the look of someone who didn’t plan to stay.
Terman waited a moment before inviting him in, frozen himself in the doorway, considered embracing his son, cosidered taking his hand, considered acknowledging some pleasure in his presence, but found himself committed to silence and inaction. He remembered an appointment he had and asked Tom if he knew the time.
“Am I too late?” Tom asked.
Terman went behind his son to gather up the lone suitcase — was that all there was? — and asked in passing where he had been, mumbled the question.
“Let me take that,” Tom said, pulling it from his father, the case suspended momentarily between them, the object of a tug of war. Terman gave it up and Tom carried the suitcase in himself.
“I don’t know how I missed you,” Terman said. “If it was my fault, I apologize.”
Tom dropped heavily into a chair, the springs crunching under his sudden weight. “It’s not too comfortable,” he said. “It’s not the lap of luxury so to speak.”
Terman took the rebuke personally, indicated that the larger of the two couches was the most reasonable place to sit, a piece of information Tom acknowledged with a nod, though he didn’t trouble himself to move. Perhaps he liked being uncomfortable, Terman thought, perhaps that’s what he wanted. “Did you spend the night in a hotel?” he asked him.
“No,” Tom said.
“Where were you all night?”
Tom studied the question from all sides. “Around,” he said.
Where did the time go? Terman noticed that it was already after two (seven minutes after) and he phoned Max to say he had been detained unavoidably. “Tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten why I wanted to see you,” Max said. “No doubt it will all come back to me in a blinding light when you get here. How’s young Oedipus making out?” When Terman got off the phone, Tom had his eyes closed.
He was going to shake him but discovered he was reluctant to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Tom” he whispered. “Tom.”
“Sleepy,” the boy murmured, the voice dredged from some pocket of childhood.
“Tom,” he whispered, “your room is on the third floor, second door to the left from the main stairway. I have to go out a while on business. There’s some cheese in the refrigerator, stilton and brie, which should tide you over if you get hungry. Will you be all right?”
There was no response from the sleeping form, barely the sound of breathing. The boy had a mustache or the beginnings of one, yet seemed younger than his age, seemed with his eyes pressed shut like a fearful and vulnerable child. Terman took a blanket from the hall closet, a faded pink blanket that might have come with the house or been donated by Isabelle for some occasion he disremembered, and put it over Tom’s lap.
“Tom,” he said, standing over the sleeping figure, unwilling or unable to leave, “I’m going now.”
It was twenty-five to three and he took a taxi, despite feelings of impoverishment, so as not to be any later than was already unavoidable. The days went too quickly, he thought, moved in accelerated time, didn’t know when to stop. He was forty only last year and in less than a month he would be forty-five. Where had his life gone?
Max’s secretary, Valerie Lowe, reputed also to be his mistress, had her hand on his shoulder, was shaking him with unreasonable zeal. He had been getting layed in a cathouse in some obscure town in Idaho while waiting for his car to be gassed. When rude hands were laid on him. “You were snoring obscenely,” Valerie said.
Two men of a certain age were coming out of Max Kirstner’s office, expensive suits, one of whom, an investor in films, Terman had met before.
The other, a hawk-faced man, prematurely white-haired, came over and shook hands. “Luke Terman, is it? I’m a great fan of yours.”
Terman aspired to conceal his dislike for his ostensible admirer, took the other’s hand. “What a coincidence,” he said. “I happen also to be a fan of yours.”
“Mutual admiration society, are we? I doubt you even know my name.”
“I may not know your name,” he said, “but I have your number.”
When the men were gone Max apologized in his perfunctory way for having kept Terman waiting in the anteroom. “I’m not my own man,” he said. This remark, which he used at every opportunity, self-parodying and ingratiating as it seemed, was an excuse, Terman knew, that permitted Max almost anything.
“Whose man are you this week?” Terman asked.
Max looked over his shoulder in parody of a man pursued. “Let’s repair to the inner sanctum,” he said out of the side of his mouth.
Terman trailed his employer and collaborator into the elegantly cluttered inner office, sat down before invited to.
Max took out a bottle of brandy and two coffee mugs from his desk — it was the way they always started — and poured them both a drink. “Do you have anything for me?”