“What!” shouted the producer. “You’ve been on our lot for six weeks? Madge!”
“I’ve phoned your office twice a day, six days a week, fathead — that makes seventy-two times not counting Sundays that I’ve tried to talk to you, you misbegotten apology for an idiot’s stand-in! And you wire New York for my address!”
“Why — doesn’t — somebody tell me these things!”
“Here I’ve parked on my chassis,” roared Ellery, “in that doge’s palace your minions gave me to doze in — a month and a half, do you hear? — losing weight, fretting my fool head off, dying by inches not a hundred feet from your office — and you look for me in New York!” Ellery’s voice grew terrible. “I’m going mad. I am mad. Do you know what, Mr. Butcher? Nuts to you. Double nuts to you!”
And he hurled the telephone majestically from him.
Clark came scurrying back, rubbing his hands. “Oh, wonderful, wonderful. We’re set. We’re in!”
“Go away,” said Ellery. Then he screeched: “What?”
“Hasn’t been done since Garbo gave her last interview to Screen Squeejees,” said the agent gleefully. “Telling Butch where he gets off! Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“No,” said Ellery, feeling his forehead, “now — we’re — getting somewhere?”
“Great guy, Butch. Biggest man in pictures. What a break! Get your lid.”
“Please. Please. Where are we going?”
“To see the Boy Wonder, of course. Come on!”
And the agent bustled out, looking delighted with life, the world, and the whole confused, thunderous march of events.
For a moment Ellery sat still.
But when he found himself putting a match on his head, sticking his hatbrim into his mouth, and rubbing a cigaret on his shoe, he made a gibbering sound and followed his personal representative from the apartment with the fogged air of one who will never understand.
Each studio in Hollywood has its Boy Wonder. But Jacques Butcher, it was admitted by even the other Boy Wonders, was the Boy Wonder of them all.
This paragon occupied a four-room bungalow office in the heart of the quadrangle of executive buildings on the Magna lot. The bungalow, thought Ellery grimly, was some unknown architectural genius’s conception of the kind of Spanish edifice a Spanish executive in charge of the production of Spanish motion pictures would erect in his native Spain amid blood, mayhem, and the belch of batteries. It was very yellow, stuccoed, Moorish, and archified; and it was tiled and roofed and patioed as no structure outside a cocaine-addicted hidalgo’s nightmare had ever been. In a word, it was colossal.
The Second Secretary’s office in the edifice, having been designed in the same faithful spirit to house females, resembled the interior of a Moorish prince’s zenana.
Ellery, scrutinizing this plaster and silken gingerbread, nodded unpleasantly. The Sultan of Production was probably lolling on an amethyst-studded throne puffing on a golden hookah and dictating to two houris in g-strings. As for Mr. Alan Clark, his manner had grown less and less enthusiastic as Mr. Queen grew more and more steel-dignified.
“Mr. Butcher will see you in a moment, Mr. Queen,” said the Second Secretary piteously. “Will you have a chair?”
“You,” said Mr. Queen with a nasty inflection, “are Madge, I presume?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ha,” said Mr. Queen. “I will be delighted to have a chair.” And he had a chair. The Second Secretary bit her budding lip, looking as if she wanted chiefly to burst into tears.
“Maybe we’d better come back tomorrow,” whispered the agent. “If you’re going to have an antagonistic attitude—”
“Let me remind you, Alan,” said Mr. Queen complacently, “that coming here was your idea. I’m really looking forward to this audience. I can see him now — burlap bags under his eyes, dressed like a Radio City typist’s conception of Robert Taylor, with a manicurist on one hand and a eunuch on the other—”
“Some other time,” said Clark, rising. “I think maybe tomorrow—”
“Sit down, friend,” said Mr. Queen.
Clark sat down and began to snap at his own fingernails like a tortured turtle. A door opened; he jumped up again. But it was only a washed-out male, obviously the First Secretary.
“Mr. Butcher will see you now, Mr. Queen.”
Mr. Queen smiled. The Second Secretary looked faint, the First Secretary paled, and Clark wiped his forehead.
“Nice of him,” murmured Mr. Queen. He strolled into the First Secretary’s domain. “Ah, quite like my preconception. In the worst of possible taste. Le mauvais gout.”
“Yes, Mr. Queen,” said the First Secretary. “I mean—”
“By the way, what’s the proper form? Does one genuflect and kiss the royal hand, or will a deep bow from the waist suffice?”
“A kick in the pants would be more like it,” said a rueful voice. “Kamerad!”
Mr. Queen turned around. A young man was standing in the doorway holding his hands high. He wore a soiled pair of slacks, openwork sandals on bare feet, and a lumberman’s plaid shirt open at the throat. More wonderful than that, he was smoking a chipped clay pipe which fumed foully; his fingers were stained with ink; and he had not shaved his heavy young beard, judging from its vigorous sprout, in at least three days.
“I thought—” began Mr. Queen.
“I certainly rate one,” said the Boy Wonder. “Will you dish it out now, or can we talk things over first?”
Mr. Queen swallowed. “Are you Butcher?”
“Guilty. Say, that was the dumbest stunt I’ve ever seen pulled in this town, and we’ve pulled some beauties here.” He shook Ellery’s hand crisply. “Hello, Clark. You Queen’s agent?”
“Yes, Mr. Butcher,” said Clark. “Yes, sir.”
“Come in, both of you,” said the Boy Wonder, leading the way. “Don’t mind the spurious magnificence of this dump, Queen. The damned thing was wished on me. It was built by old Sigmund in the free-lunch days, when he was tossing away the stockholders’ dough like a hunyak on Saturday night. I’ve tried to make my own workroom livable, anyway. Come on in.”
Ellery almost said: “Yes, sir.” He came on in.
It wasn’t fair! With his sharp green eyes and red hair and boy’s smile and beautifully disreputable clothes, Butcher looked like a normal human being. And the holy of holies! From the exterior and anteroom decoration, one had a right to anticipate lushness along Latin-Oriental lines, with tapestries and tiles and inlaid woods of precious pastels. But no drapes smothered the sun; the walls had been repaneled in clean pine; an old missionwood desk bearing the scars of golf-shoes and cigaret burns stood higgledy-piggledy in the midst of a congress of deep, honest chairs; the desk was littered with clues to toil — yellow paper covered with ink-scrawls, a clay model of a ballroom set, an old typewriter with a battered face, photographs, mimeographed scripts, a can of film; books that looked as if they were being read bristled in the pine walls; and a small portable bar beside the desk stood open, crowded with bottles, and accessible to a nervous elbow, as a bar should.
“Ripped out all the junk,” said the Boy Wonder cheerfully. “You should have seen it. Sit down, boys. Drink?”
“It isn’t fair,” moaned Mr. Queen, getting into a chair and cowering.
“What?”
“He says he needs some air,” said Alan Clark hastily.