The Cutting Room (22 page)

“We care very much about people,” he said deliberately. “But we also care about our candidate’s security. I mean—who knows who you are?”

I looked him right in the eye.

“Webby does,” I said.

This unnerved him, as I had hoped it might. With a deep sigh, he stood up and raised a slightly shaking finger.

“Hold on just a minute?”

He rushed toward the inner office, where Webby awaited—reluctantly, Claude had assured me—this visit from the Kripps. But the candidate could afford to alienate no constituency, especially since the trivial couple had cornered him on his own home turf. Maybe he’d even work it to his advantage and leak the whole thing to the press. The headline:
WEBBY WON’T PRESERVE CINEMA SMUT.

Forget film preservation, I thought. This is about self-preservation. And maybe it always had been.

Like an actor in a farce, the receptionist began to knock just as the door flew open. He faltered and nearly fell, right into the arms of boss, Congressman, and kidnapper Webby Slicone.

“Whoa, whoa, there,” the little big man said affably.

“Excuse me, my God, I’m sorry,” the young man panted, flustered by having touched and so offended him.

“That’s all right. But I thought for a minute we were gonna do the Frug!”

Webby let out a laugh much larger than his receptionist’s, who was ten years too young to remember the dance or even the decade from which it sprung.

Still smiling, Webby looked across and right at me. Even from a few feet away, I could see the makeup that covered his eyelids and filled in the wrinkles even his facelift couldn’t fix. He gave no indication that he had ever seen me before.

“This, uh, guy was sent by your ten o’clock,” the receptionist stammered.

“Well, okay,” Webby said agreeably. “What are we waiting for?”

The assistant looked at Webby with a stunned gaze of relief, as if to say,
What a man, oh, what a man you are.

As I sat opposite him, I realized that I had only ever heard Webby say words from a speech or lyrics from a song. That is to say, I had never witnessed him being himself. But the difference between public persona and private person was minuscule. He still charmed, still sparkled, still smiled. Even when he was being as blunt as to say, “Well, I think you have something I need. Isn’t that right?”

I felt a mild shudder at the success of my deductions. My fear was mild, as well. Having been close to powerful people had made me less enamored of them, to put it mildly, and less afraid. Mostly, I just felt disgust.

“And vice versa,” I said. “Though I’m interested to know how you knew.”

“What do you mean? The Kripps always have some dirty movies to cham-peen. Then we negotiate. That’s your bag, too, isn’t it?”

I smiled—at Webby’s flower-power lingo, not his obfuscation. Though Claude had given me their list of films to preserve—many from the Sixties and still controversial—it sat, folded and forgotten, in my pocket.

“Look, let’s not play games,” I said. “There are lots of things at stake. Like your career.”

Webby made an
I’m impressed
face. Then he shrugged and got down to business, ending his opening act.

“Get up,” he said.

I paused. Then, uneasily, I slowly stood, not knowing what to expect. Webby rose at the same time, and approached me.

Without another word, starting at my chest, he patted me down harshly. Then he stopped at the tiny bulge in my front pants pocket.

I had purchased a little tape recorder at an electronics store on the way there. Now Webby removed it, popped out the tape, palmed it, pocketed it, and handed the machine back.

I had been too cute for my own good, and I knew it. But Webby didn’t seem angry. Sitting again, he simply proceeded, as if a nasty formality was out of the way.

“I’m just surprised that you’ve come in person,” he said.

“Self-reliance,” I said. “Isn’t that your credo?”

Webby smiled a bit, but unkindly. “More than you’ll ever know.”

“So tell me how you were tipped off.”

“Maybe I had a report from Mr. Magoo,” he said, meaning, I guessed, the “blind” man. “Though I certainly wasn’t going to trust a cop enough to tell him the truth.”

I nodded, having assumed this.

“And maybe they tailed that little chipmunk lady you were with at the rally.” Right again. “And maybe I was surprised when you all landed up at the Krippses’. I never figured the Flintstones for blackmailers.”

“They’re not,” I said. “This only involves you and me. And Stu Drayton and Ben Williams. And a boy named Little Bobby. And Orson Welles.”

Webby smiled, and the makeup cracked at the sides of his eyes. He began to sing, “ ‘Orson Welles, and rain on the roof’ . . .
Orson Welles?
What the hell does
he
have to do with this?”

“Never mind. I just want their son back.” I paused. “And the bag the guy with the mask took from L.A.”

Webby nodded, mildly interested. “
That’s
the Welles connection?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, I will make no deal ‘before its time,’ ” Webby said, with his usual dated references, in this case to Welles’s old wine commercials. “In other words, baby, where’s the thing?”

Unlike Stu Drayton, I didn’t think Webby’s lack of specificity—he meant the Filofax, of course—came from caution. I just thought that “thing” was his all-purpose expression, the way it had been for many people in, say, 1969. Like some celebrities, he was not discreet at all; he thought that everything he did or said was worth celebrating.

“Well, you political guys understand tit for tat,” I said, “don’t you?”

“The last person who used that expression with me was Raquel Welch,” he said, then gave a little Bob Hope–like
grrrr
owl of desire.

I did not smile, and I could have sworn that flop sweat had started on his brow. I was a tough house, and Webby wasn’t used to that.

“I want the kid home first,” I said.

“First of all, Jack,” he said, with a Sinatra-like sneer, “how do I even know you’re for real? All I know is that you had a Filofax shaken out of you. What if it’s a fake? I mean, I’ve never even seen you before.”

“Oh,” I said, starting to sweat a bit myself, “I think you have.”

Now I knew the other reason I had wanted to handle this alone. This indeed
was
a personal thing between Webby and me.

Maybe it was the look he had given me at the rally, being hustled away. Maybe it was a feeling I had had, fighting over little Orson at the car. Maybe it was how it felt to face him now.

But something told me that Webby Slicone was the man in the mask.

Sitting there, it had started with my remembering
Secret Ceremony
, that Elizabeth Taylor film. It was sold to TV as part of a package that included other—now obscure—late-Sixties Universal pictures. These “adult” movies had new material specially shot for network consumption, creating “acceptable” subplots to replace censored scenes and maintain a proper running time. One of them was
The Night of the Following Day
, a Marlon Brando film about—and here was the connection—kidnapping.

That led me to think about families in general, and circuitously, to
Kings Row
. The old Warner Brothers classic was adapted from a bestseller about small-town life that was shocking for its time. The movie version, as Warner studio memos bear out, had to censor many elements, including the incestuous relationship between a girl and her father. In the film, the relationship just became one of neurotic protectiveness; the father and daughter were played by Betty Field and Claude Rains.

That made me think of Webby’s friend, Ronald Reagan, who had his legs removed in the film—“Where’s the rest of me?”—and that made me think of Charles Coburn, who played the doctor who cut them off.

Coburn, the portly character actor, won an Oscar for his role in
The More the Merrier
, starring Jean Arthur. But one of his other classic roles was in
The Devil and Miss Jones
, also with Arthur, in which he played a millionaire who secretly went to work in his own department store, to investigate worker conditions.

And that made me think that Webby had done his own dirty work, had indeed pulled the switch.

“And
where
exactly have I seen you?” the politico asked, sweat now obviously caking his face.

“At the end of a gun in L.A.,” I answered, “and at the end of a boy in Massachusetts.”

I believed it for other, less trivial, reasons. The humming in L.A.—“The New Math”—could have been Webby’s need to be found out, a shrink might suggest. Or maybe it was his desire to be recognized, even doing stuff like that, his psycho celebrity thing. Or it might have been mere nervousness, a clutching at the familiar, as I did with facts of trivia.

Or else, by committing his own murders, Webby was that rare thing: a true conservative. No help or handouts for him. You almost had to respect the guy for it.

Almost.

“Oh, give me a break,” Webby said, rolling his eyes. “You’ve flipped your wig.”

“Not your problem now, with the plugs,” I said, pointing to his head.

To be honest, Webby probably did it himself for the same reason Ben Williams surrounded himself with Dick Burkes and Little Bobbys: He trusted nobody. It was a lot easier, I thought, to be trivial than it was to be important.

There was one more, most obvious, possibility: He was simply out of his goddamn mind.

It was, of course, my biggest risk yet. But I was emboldened by the Sherlock-like skill—if I may say so myself—I had shown of late, with the stakes the highest they had ever been. I was growing into this job, I thought, and not a minute too soon.

“Cheap shot,” I said, about the hair. “Sorry.”

Webby leaned as far forward as he could without falling headfirst into his desk. His face looked like a desert under a savage sun: blanched, cracked, and split. I feared that his entire surgery might undo itself, his skin falling down, his hair springing off, like some old Warners cartoon.

“Why should I be jerked around,” he asked furiously, “by the likes of you?”

I looked him right in his—improbably blue—eyes.

“Because,” I answered, “I’ve got nothing to lose. I mean”—and here I laughed, with a lack of vanity he could never know—“look at me!”

I had him there. Webby just stayed, staring, squinting, growing older by the instant, until he became an ancient.

“Well, after I win the election,” he whispered, “you can kiss your bippy goodbye.”

He made his fingers into a gun. With a quiet “kapow,” he squeezed off a shot and killed me. Then he pressed a button on his desk intercom.

“Send in my eleven o’clock,” he said.

No real bullets or blows had been exchanged. There were no bruises or scars to be healed. I had simply been right, and—ironic, wasn’t it?—the best man had won.

That night at the Krippses’, dinner was eaten in silence.

It was takeout Chinese this time, no home-cooked meal. Claude, Jeanine, and I ate all we took, if only to pass the time. Awakened from a sedated sleep, Alice just picked. Even Gilda did not beg for scraps, at least not aggressively; in the odd way of animals, she shared the house’s unhappiness.

It had been a full twelve hours since my—I thought—successful negotiation with Webby Slicone. Still, there had been no word of Orson.

Jeanine had not approved of my attending the meeting alone, of keeping the Krippses in the dark, of still not telling the cops. She thought I was merely protecting my sole possession of
Ambersons
, and acting inhumanely. I did not disabuse her of this notion, in case I failed, or—fearing a future of intimacy with her—succeeded. The point was moot for the moment, anyway; she had not so much as kissed me since the night before.

“More moo-shu pancakes?” I asked, trying for any kind of response. She shook her head
no
.

I did not tell her about the stamped package now lying beneath the bed we had shared. The Filofax was ready to go to Webby, waiting only for him to make the first move.

“How’d the meeting go?” Claude asked, for the first time since I had returned.

“Fine,” I said, with excruciation, as Jeanine glared at me. “But he’s adamantly against preserving
Bonnie and Clyde
or
Straw Dogs
. He said, maybe after the election.”

“Well, he’s always been pragmatic,” Claude said. “But imagine someone still fighting over thirty-year-old films. Shows you what power that period of filmmaking still has. Interesting, isn’t it?”

Hopefully, he had directed this inquiry to Alice. Trivia ceased to have any interest for her; she returned only an indifferent shrug.

Jeanine lifted her plate loudly and took it into the kitchen. Hearing me lie—and Claude respond to my lies—was just too much for her.

“Well,” Claude said, obviously comforted by the conversation’s distraction, “thanks for going to bat for us, anyway.”

“Sure,” I said.

From the kitchen, I heard Jeanine running water much harder than was required to clean her plate.

I thought of the cuts made in Peckinpah’s
Straw Dogs
, reducing the sodomy climax of the rape scene—at least in this country—to fast flashes, nearly incoherent. Personally, I thought the Kripps were pushing it by proposing that Webby preserve that one. But I had to admire their audacity, disguised by their homey domesticity.

“Any word from the police?” I asked.

Claude shook his head, as if this truly worsened their unbearable tragedy. Alice bit her lower lip and stared into the distance blankly.

Then the dog raised its head.

Only I noticed Gilda’s action or her small, subsequent whinny of unease. Then her moaning grew. She got up and trotted, suspiciously, out of the room.

“Our neighbor usually walks his Jack Russell about now,” Claude explained.

I could have taken this as the truth, but I was too jumpy. So, discreetly, carrying my plate, I rose and followed the dog to the front door.

Samuel Fuller’s film,
White Dog,
had been held up for distribution in the U.S., on charges of racism. Like the Peckinpah film, it had been released, uncut, overseas.
Dogs
of all kinds seemed to suffer in the United States.