“Ah, Sylvia! I frigh’n you, yes?”
“I thought it was Phoenix Pictures.”
“You mean I — pull treek?”
“Yes you, lovely you.”
“Sylvia! Coon do soch t’ing you.”
“But, I was ready for you. And that reminds me, Vicki, I’m afraid I have just the teentsy-weentsiest bit of bad news for you.”
“Bad news for me?”
“I’m afraid you won’t be a producer for Phoenix much longer, marrying actresses Dimmy Spiro wants for the sarong trade. Since Phoenix wouldn’t do the right thing by me I did the right thing by it, and picked up a few shares that Dimmy forgot about, enough to give me control. So next week you and Dimmy and me are all out, and Phoenix gets sold to Metro or Warners or whichever company it is that wants to buy it. And all three of us are free, or will be. Isn’t that nice?”
Vicki looked as though he had been hit with some singularly horrible nagaika. He winced, closed his eyes, breathed deeply. Then: “Sylvia! Why do you thees to me?”
“Why you do that, and them, and those, to me?”
“I do notting to you! Only lahve you!”
“I think you’ve forgotten that little contract we signed together, with the extra page in that I swear I never saw until later, the one that gave me to Dimmy for seven years, with no way I could get out of it if he kept on paying me the miserable little salary it allowed me. And that gave you a great big salary as producer of my pictures, although the only thing you had ever produced up to then was girls for Dimmy’s parties. Do you remember about that? Do you remember how I begged you for a release from that dreadful contract?”
“Sylvia, why we no make new dill?”
“It’s impossible, Vicki.”
“We ’ave soch fine, big plan for you—”
“I wouldn’t sign with you and Dimmy if you were the last producers on earth. And just so neither one of you try any tricks with the S-S Corporation, that nice little dummy company you got me to organize, I might as well tell you I haven’t got that stock I bought, not one share of it. It was bought for Hazel, and it’s all in her name, and there’s no way Phoenix can be saved, or you and Dimmy can be saved, or I can be made to work for you!”
“Sylvia! You brek me ’eart.”
“However, enough of that. Who’s the bride?”
“Is girl I met. Nize girl.”
“She lives here.”
“Lil while only.”
“Ah, the divorce question again?”
“Si and so and sa.”
“Do I know her?”
“Shoon be surprise.”
“...I do?”
“Is Hezzel. Is your seester Hezzel.”
Chapter Three
She had been holding her glass up to the light, watching the bubbles drift up the stem, but now set it down. Then she stared at Vicki as if she were trying to realize what he had said, to sort it into its various implications, to grasp what it meant. He, his face momentarily in repose, his eye everywhere but on her, seemed to have changed a little; the glow had left him, and he suggested still another characteristic of the Middle Europe that had produced him: a capacity for slippery schemes, not prosecuted in offices, where Americans cut throats, but in the boudoirs of women and other haunts of the helpless. His dark good looks were quite sinister under her stare, and he merely shrugged when she burst out: “Vicki, you can’t seriously mean what you say?”
“Min? Sure, I min. Hezzel nize girl.”
“You must be — gagging or something. You can’t go through with it and face what hell will have waiting for you.”
“Hell? Can be. Who knows?”
He was distressed but vague, and she stood up, the tears glittering in her eyes. “I don’t speak of myself. I suppose it was too much to hope for, that I could get rid of you and Dimmy and Phoenix all in one day. But why did you have to pick on Hazel? You know she’s practically an institutional case right now? You know—”
“Then why you no take her to court?”
“In other words, if she’s not herself, then I ought to have put her away. And if she is herself, she’s perfectly free to marry you, and the stock is yours, and I’m yours, to make sarong pictures as long as Dimmy tells me to — and then you’ll have her put away.”
“But, I lahve her, Sylvia! I—”
One pretty fist caught him in the mouth, and its fluttering throb gave way to a tight pursing, as he touched it with his handkerchief to see if it was cut. She began to stride up and down with a slow, feline glide. As she talked, her breath came in deep inhalations and her fingers laced and unlaced: she wasn’t a woman giving way to emotion, but like one trying to repress it, and the agony of this effort gave a measure of what she felt. “You — bird of prey. You’re no more capable of loving her than of loving me or any woman in your life. To you, none of us mean anything except what you can get out of us, and once you had your big reunion with Dimmy and he showed you how to cash in on the handkissing and the dancing and the title, that was our bad day. And especially a bad day for any girl named Shoreham. I think I’m going back to my trade, Vicki. Waiting on the table is a lot more respectable than working for you and Dimmy.”
“Yes is ver’ nize work.”
“So that’s where she’s been going.”
“You gambol so moch, Sylvia.”
“Yes, I’ve gambled a lot. After I got her out of California, away from the chartreuse and the B-and-B and cointreau you kept filling her up with, she had a crackup and I had quite a time with her. And then when she wanted to drive up in the mountains, because they made her feel good and helped her get back to normal, I was only too glad to let her do it. I couldn’t go with her. They made me feel giddy and light-headed and sick. So, I let her go alone, and to have something to do while I was hanging around here, I gambled. I gambled $100 a day, quite a lot, but nothing to what you and Dimmy cheated me out of these two years. And all that time she wasn’t driving in the mountains at all. She was meeting you—”
“Sylvia! I see her two-three-four time.”
“You’ve been coming to this place a week, and what places did you go to before that? I know, now, that it was liquor I smelled on her breath, and not cactus candy as she said. Thanks for that, Vicki. You know it’s the worst thing in the world for her, but you didn’t stop at it, did you? Not if that was the way to keep her coming to that lovely shack of yours.”
She continued her restless pacing, seemed to get older as her face took on a desperate, haggard look. He remained motionless, perched on the edge of the big desk, staring unwinkingly at nothing. With wolfhounds at his feet, peasant girls behind him, a banker at one side, trying to collect his money, a dead deer on the other, head hanging limply down, a falcon on his finger and a feather in his cap, he would have made an excellent oil painting of Europe and How She Got That Way. He barely moved when she stopped suddenly and said: “This isn’t your think-up, Vicki. It’s too good and you haven’t got the brains. I see Dimmy’s fine Hungarian hand in it. Is he here?”
“Dimmy? Can be. I—”
But as though in answer to her question, the door opened and three men entered. One was short, fat, and pale, and looked oddly like an obese penguin. One was small, thin, and freckled, with unnaturally blond hair and light shifty eyes with no lashes on them. He looked like an albino rat. And one was tall, lithe, and sunburned, with delicately-carved features and luminous eyes, so luminous they suggested the moon-agates that marble players use as shooters. He looked like a horse who aspired to lofty things, such as popcorn instead of oats. All three advanced on Sylvia at a noisy run, their arms outstretched, their mouths forming big grins. She backed off with a snarl. With no apparent sense of embarrassment, the tall man and the freckled reduced speed to a walk, then strolled over to a framed photograph of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, and stood studying it. The third man, the short fat one who looked like a penguin, came to a full stop, and stood looking at Sylvia as though she had cut his heart out and he wished she would give it back. Then he said: “Sylwia! Is me! Is Dimmy!”