The Chancellor Manuscript (11 page)

The girl laughed. It was a pleasant laugh.

“We didn’t wake you, did we? You’re always up so early.”

“No, Radie, I was in the surf,” lied Chancellor for no reason.

“Hold on. Here’s Mr. Morgan.” There were two clicks.

“Hello, Peter?”

“How are you, Tony?”

“Christ, forget about me, how are
you?
Marie said you called last night. Sorry I wasn’t home.”

Chancellor remembered. “I apologize. I was drunk.”

“She didn’t mention that, but she said you were mad as hell.”

“I was. I am. I was also drunk. Apologize to Marie for me.”

“No need to. What you told her made her angry, too. I was greeted at the door with a lecture about protecting my authors. Now, what’s this about
Counterstrike!?”

Peter adjusted his head on the pillow and cleared his throat. He tried to rid his voice of bitterness. “At four thirty yesterday afternoon a studio messenger brought me
the completed first draft of the screenplay. I didn’t know we’d started.”

“And?”

“It’s been turned around. It’s the opposite of what I wrote.”

Morgan paused, then replied gently. “Wounded ego, Peter?”

“Good God, no. You know better than that. I didn’t say it was badly written; a lot of it’s pretty damned good. It’s effective. I’d feel better if it wasn’t. But it’s a lie.”

“Josh told me they were changing the agency’s name—?”

“They’ve changed everything!” interrupted Chancellor, his eyes blinking in pain with the rush of blood to his head. “The government people are all on the side of the angels. They don’t have an impure thought in their heads! The manipulators are … 
‘them.’
Weird exponents of violence and revolution and—so help me God—with ‘faintly European accents.’ Whatever the book said has been turned inside out. Why the hell did they buy it in the first place?”

“What does Josh say?”

“As I remember, and I do vaguely, I reached him around midnight my time. I guess it was about three this morning in New York.”

“Stay around the house. I’ll speak to Josh. One of us’ll get back to you.”

“All right.” Peter was about to offer a last apology to Morgan’s wife when he realized the editor was not finished. It was one of those silences between them that meant there was more to say.

“Peter?”

“Yes?”

“Suppose Josh can work things out. I mean with your studio contract.”

“There’s nothing to work out,” interrupted Chancellor again. “They don’t need me; they don’t want me.”

“They may want your name. They’re paying for it.”

“They can’t have it. Not the way they’re doing the film. I’m telling you, it’s the opposite of what I said.”

“Is it that important to you?”

“As literature—hell, no. As my own personal statement—hell, yes. Nobody else seems to be making it.”

“I just wondered. I thought you might be ready to start the Nuremberg book.”

Peter stared at the ceiling. “Not yet, Tony. Soon, not yet. I’ll talk to you later.”

He hung up the phone, the apology gone from his mind. He was thinking about Morgan’s question and his own answer.

If only the pain would disappear. And the numbness. Both had lessened, but they were still there, and when he felt either or both, the memories returned. The shattering glass, the blinding light, the crunching metal. The screams. And his hatred of a man high up in a truck who had disappeared in the storm. Leaving one dead, one almost dead.

Chancellor swung his legs over the edge of the bed onto the floor. He stood up naked and looked around for his bathing suit. He was late for his morning swim; the dawn had turned into day. He felt guilty somehow, as if he had broken an important ritual. Worse, he understood that the ritual took the place of work.

He saw his bathing suit draped over a chair and started toward it. The telephone rang again. He reversed direction and answered it.

“It’s Joshua, Peter. I’ve just spent an hour talking with Aaron Sheffield.”

“He’s a winner. Incidentally, sorry about last night.”

“This morning,” corrected the agent, not unkindly. “Don’t worry about it. You were overwrought.”

“I was drunk.”

“That, too. Let’s
get to
Sheffield.”

“I suppose we have to. I gather you got the drift of what I told you last night.”

“I’m sure most of Malibu Beach could repeat the better phrases word for word.”

“What’s his position? I won’t budge.”

“Legally that doesn’t make any difference to him. You have no case. You have no script approval.”

“I understand that. But I can talk. I can give interviews. I can demand that my name be removed. I might even try to get the courts to change the title. I’ll bet a case can be made for that.”

“It’s unlikely.”

“Josh, they’ve changed the whole meaning!”

“The courts might see the money you’ve been paid and not be impressed.”

Chancellor blinked again and rubbed his eyes. He exhaled wearily. “I think you’re saying they wouldn’t be impressed. Period. I’m not Solzhenitsyn with the Siberian camps or Dickens on the death of children in the sweatshops. All right, what can I do?”

“Do you want it put plainly?”

“When you begin like that, the news isn’t good.”

“Some good can come out of it.”

“Now I know it’s terrible. Go ahead.”

“Sheffield wants to avoid discord; so does the studio. They don’t want you giving those interviews or going on talk shows. They know you can do that, and they don’t want the embarrassment.”

“I see. We reach the heart of the matter: gross receipts at the box office. Their essential pride, their manhood.”

Harris was silent for a moment. When he continued, it was in a soft voice. “Peter, that kind of controversy wouldn’t affect gross receipts one iota of a percentage point. If anything, it would hype them.”

“Then, why are they concerned?”

“They really want to avoid embarrassment.”

“They live in a perpetual state of embarrassment out here. They can’t even recognize it I don’t believe that”

“They’re willing to pay your contract in full, remove your name from the screen credits if you wish—not the title, of course—and deliver a bonus equal to fifty percent of the book purchase.”

“Jesus
.…” Chancellor was stunned. The figure Joshua Harris alluded to was in the range of a quarter million dollars. “For what?”

“For you to walk away and not make waves over the adaptation.”

Peter stared at the billowing drapes in front of the glass doors. There was something very inconsistent, terribly wrong.

“Are you still there?” asked Harris.

“Wait a minute. You say controversy could only help the receipts. Yet Sheffield’s willing to pay all that money to avoid controversy. He’s got to lose. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m not his analyst. I just heard the money. Maybe he wants to keep his balls intact.”

“No. I know Sheffield, believe me; I know the way
he operates. His balls are expendable.” Suddenly, Chancellor understood. “Sheffield has a partner, Josh. And it’s not the studio. It’s the government. It’s Washington! They’re the ones who don’t want the controversy. To quote from a far better writer than I’ll ever be, they ‘can’t stand the light of day’! Goddamn it, that’s
it
.”

“It crossed my mind,” admitted Harris.

“You tell Sheffield to shove his bonus. I’m not interested!”

Again, the agent paused. “I may as well tell you the rest. Sheffield’s collected statements from all over Los Angeles and points north and south. The picture isn’t pleasant. You’re described as a wild alcoholic and something of a menace.”

“Good for Sheffield! Controversy hypes the gross receipts. We’ll sell twice as many books!”

“He says he has more,” continued Harris. “He claims he has sworn affidavits from women who accuse you of rape and physical abuse. He has photographs—police photographs—that show the damage you’ve inflicted. One’s a kid from Beverly Hills who’s fourteen years old. He has friends who’ll swear they removed narcotics from you when you passed out in their homes. He says you even attacked his wife, which is something he’d rather not make public but will if he has to. He says they’ve been cleaning up after you for weeks.”

“They’re lies! Josh, that’s crazy! There’s no truth in any of that!”

“That may be the problem. There’s probably a few grains of truth. I don’t mean the rape or the abuse or the narcotics; that stuff’s easily manufactured. But you’ve been drinking, you haven’t returned calls, there’ve been women. And I know Sheffield’s wife. I don’t rule her out, but I’m sure you weren’t the cause of it.”

Chancellor lurched from the bed. His head was spinning, the pain in his temples throbbed. “I don’t know what to say! I don’t believe this!”

“I know what to say; I know what to believe,” said Joshua Harris. “They’re not playing by any rules I’ve ever heard of.”

Varak leaned forward in the velvet sofa and opened his briefcase on the coffee table. He withdrew two file folders, placed them in front of him, and moved the case
to one side. The morning sun was streaming through the windows overlooking Central Park South, filling the elegant hotel suite with shafts of yellowish white light.

Across the room Munro St. Claire had poured himself a cup of coffee from a carafe on a silver tray. He sat opposite the intelligence man.

“Are you sure I can’t get you a cup?” asked Bravo.

“No, thanks. I’ve gone through several pots this morning. Incidentally, I appreciate your flying up. It saves time.”

“Every day is vital,” replied St. Claire. “Every hour those files are missing is an hour we can’t afford. What have you got?”

“Just about everything we need. My primary sources were Chancellor’s editor, Anthony Morgan, and his literary agent, a man named Joshua Harris.”

“They cooperated so easily?”

“It wasn’t difficult. I convinced them it was standard procedure for a minimum-security clearance.”

“Security clearance for what?”

Varak separated a page in the left file folder. “Before his accident Chancellor had the Government Printing Office send him the transcripts from the Nuremberg tribunals. He’s writing a novel on the trials. He thinks Nuremberg was rife with judicial conspiracies. That thousands of Nazis went unaccountable, free to emigrate all over the world, transferring huge sums of money wherever they went.”

“He’s wrong. It was the exception, not the rule by any means,” said Bravo.

“Regardless, some of those transcripts still have a security classification. He didn’t get those, but he doesn’t know that. I implied that he did, and my job was simply a routine follow-up. Nothing serious. Also, I said that I was a fan of Chancellor’s. I enjoyed talking to people who knew him.”

“Has he written this Nuremberg book?”

“He hasn’t even started it.”

“I wonder why.”

Varak scanned another page as he spoke. “Chancellor was nearly killed in an automobile accident last fall. The woman with him was killed. According to the medical records, with another ten minutes of internal bleeding and pathogenic toxemia, he would have died. He was in the hospital for five months. He’s been patched together;
eighty-five- to ninety-percent recovery is anticipated. That’s the physical part.” Varak paused and turned a page.

“Who was the woman?” asked Bravo quietly.

Varak shifted his attention to the folder on his right. “Her name was Catherine Lowell; they’d been living together for nearly a year and planned to get married. They were on their way to meet his parents in northwest Pennsylvania. Her death was a terrible shock to Chancellor. He went into a long period of depression. It’s still with him to some degree, according to both his editor and agent.”

“Morgan and Harris,” added Bravo for his own clarification.

“Yes. They sweated out his recovery; first the physical injuries, then the depression. Both men admitted that during the past months there were times they thought he was finished as a writer.”

“A reasonable assumption. He hasn’t written anything.”

“He’s supposed to be now. He’s in California co-authoring the screenplay of
Counterstrike!
, although nobody expects him to do very much. He has no experience in films.”

“Then, why was he hired?”

“The value of his name, according to Harris. And the fact that the studio could have an advantage over others for his next book. Actually, that’s the way Harris engineered the contract.”

“Which means he wanted Chancellor involved since he wasn’t working on anything.”

“In Harris’s opinion, his house in Pennsylvania, and his memories, were holding Chancellor back. It’s why he wanted him in California.” Varak turned several pages. “Here it is. Harris’s words. He wanted his client to ‘experience the perfectly normal Gargantuan excesses of a temporary Malibu resident.’ ”

Bravo smiled. “Are they having a positive effect?”

“There’s progress. Not much, but some.” Varak looked up from the paper. “That’s something we can’t allow.”

“What do you mean?”

“Chancellor will be infinitely more valuable to us in a weakened psychological condition.” The intelligence man gestured at both file folders. “The rest of this describes a
fairly normal man before the accident. Whatever hostilities or excesses he had were transferred to his writing. He didn’t display them in his lifestyle. If he returns to that normality, he’ll be naturally cautious, he’ll retreat when we don’t want him to. I want to keep him off-balance, in a state of anxiety.”

St. Claire sipped his coffee without comment. “Go on, please. Describe this life-style.”

“There’s not much, really. He has an apartment in a brownstone on East Seventy-first Street. He gets up early, usually before dawn, and works. He doesn’t use a typewriter; he writes on yellow pads, Xeroxes the pages, and uses a typing service in Greenwich Village.” Varak again looked up. “That could be an advantage to us in his research. We can intercept the originals and make our own copies.”

“Suppose he works in Pennsylvania and has them driven in. Delivered by messenger.”

“Then, we’ll get inside the Village offices.”

“Of course. Go on.”