St. Cyr merely bellowed. This simple, primordial approach seemed to be the only one that made sense to Summit's greatest investment and top star.
With this whip-hand over the beautiful and brainless DeeDee, St. Cyr quickly rose to the top in Hollywood. He had undoubted talent. He could make one picture very well indeed. He had made it twenty times already, each time starring DeeDee, and each time perfecting his own feudalistic production unit. Whenever anyone disagreed with St. Cyr, he had only to threaten to go over to MGM and take the obedient DeeDee with him, for he had never allowed her to sign a long-term contract and she worked only on a picture-to-picture basis. Even Tolliver Watt knuckled under when St. Cyr voiced the threat of removing DeeDee.
'Sit down, Martin,' Tolliver Watt said. He was a tall, lean, hatchet-faced man who looked like a horse being starved because he was too proud to eat hay. With calm, detached omnipotence he inclined his grey-shot head a millimeter, while a faintly pained expression passed fleetingly across his face.
'Highball, please,' he said.
A white-clad waiter appeared noiselessly from nowhere and glided forward with a tray. It was at this point that Martin felt the last stiles readjust in his brain, and entirely on impulse he reached out and took the frosted highball glass from the tray. Without observing this the waiter glided on and presented Watt with a gleaming salver full of nothing. Watt and the waiter regarded the tray.
Then their eyes met. There was a brief silence.
'Here,' Martin said, replacing the glass. 'Much too weak. Get me another, please. I'm reorienting toward a new phase, which means a different optimum,' he explained to the puzzled Watt as he readjusted a chair beside the great man and dropped into it. Odd that he had never before felt at ease during rushes. Right now he felt fine. Perfectly at ease. Relaxed.
'Scotch and soda for Mr. Martin,' Watt said calmly. 'And another for me.'
'So, so, so, now we begin,' St. Cyr cried impatiently. He spoke into a hand microphone. Instantly the screen on the ceiling flickered noisily and began to unfold a series of rather ragged scenes in which a chorus of mermaids danced on their tails down the street of a little Florida fishing village.
To understand the full loathsomeness of the fate facing Nicholas Martin, it is necessary to view a St. Cyr production. It seemed to Martin that he was watching the most noisome movie ever put upon film. He was conscious that St. Cyr and Watt were stealing rather mystified glances at him. In the dark he put up two fingers and sketched a robot-like grin. Then, feeling sublimely sure of himself, he lit a cigarette and chuckled aloud.
'You laugh?' St. Cyr demanded with instant displeasure. 'You do not appreciate great art? What do you know about it, eh? Are you a genius?'
'This,' Martin said urbanely, 'is the most noisome movie ever put on film.'
In the sudden, deathly quiet which followed, Martin flicked ashes elegantly and added, 'With my help, you may yet avoid becoming the laughing stock of the whole continent. Every foot of this picture must be junked. Tomorrow bright and early we will start all over, and—'
Watt said quietly, 'We're quite competent to make a film out of
'It is artistic!' St. Cyr shouted. 'And it will make money, too!'
'Bah, money!' Martin said cunningly. He flicked more ash with a lavish gesture. 'Who cares about money? Let Summit worry.'
Watt leaned forward to peer searchingly at Martin in the dimness.
'Raoul,' he said, glancing at St. Cyr, 'I understood you were getting your—ah—your new writers whipped into shape. This doesn't sound to me as if—'
'Yes, yes, yes, yes,' St. Cyr cried excitedly. 'Whipped into shape, exactly! A brief delirium, eh? Martin, you feel well? You feel yourself?'
Martin laughed with quiet confidence. 'Never fear,' he said. 'The money you spend on me is well worth what I'll bring you in prestige. I quite understand. Our confidential talks were not to be secret from Watt, of course.'
'What confidential talks?' bellowed St. Cyr thickly, growing red.
'We need keep nothing from Watt, need we?' Martin went on imperturably. 'You hired me for prestige, and prestige you'll get, if you can only keep your big mouth shut long enough. I'll make the name of St. Cyr glorious for you. Naturally you may lose something at the box-office, but it's well worth—'
'
Deftly Martin reached out and twitched it from his grasp.
'Stop the film,' he ordered crisply.
It was very strange. A distant part of his mind knew that normally he would never have dared behave this way, but he felt convinced that never before in his life had he acted with complete normality. He glowed with a giddy warmth of confidence that everything he did would be right, at least while the twelve-hour treatment lasted….
The screen flickered hesitantly, then went blank.
'Turn the lights on,' Martin ordered the unseen presence beyond the mike. Softly and suddenly the room glowed with illumination. And upon the visages of Watt and St. Cyr he saw a mutual dawning uneasiness begin to break.
He had just given them food for thought. But he had given them more than that. He tried to imagine what moved in the minds of the two men, below the suspicions he had just implanted. St. Cyr's was fairly obvious. The Mixo-Lydian licked his lips—no mean task—and studied Martin with uneasy little bloodshot eyes. Clearly Martin had acquired confidence from somewhere. What did it mean? What secret sin of St. Cyr's had been discovered to him, what flaw in his contract, that he dared behave so defiantly?
Tolliver Watt was a horse of another color; apparently the man had no guilty secrets; but he too looked uneasy. Martin studied the proud face and probed for inner weaknesses. Watt would be a harder nut to crack. But Martin could do it.
'That last underwater sequence,' he now said, pursuing his theme. 'Pure trash, you know. It'll have to come out. The whole scene must be shot from under water.'
'Shut up!' St. Cyr shouted violently.
'But it must, you know,' Martin went on. 'Or it won't jibe with the new stuff I've written in. In fact, I'm not at all certain that the whole picture shouldn't be shot under water. You know, we could use the documentary technique—'
'Raoul,' Watt said suddenly, 'what's this man trying to do?'
'He is trying to break his contract, of course,' St. Cyr said, turning ruddy olive. 'It is the bad phase all my writers go through before I get them whipped into shape. In Mixo-Lydia—'
'Are you sure he'll whip into shape?' Watt asked.
'To me this is now a personal matter,' St. Cyr said, glaring at Martin. 'I have spent nearly thirteen weeks on this man and I do not intend to waste my valuable time on another. I tell you he is simply trying to break his contract—tricks, tricks, tricks.'
'Are you?' Watt asked Martin coldly.
'Not now,' Martin said. 'I've changed my mind. My agent insists I'd be better off away from Summit. In fact, she has the curious feeling that I and Summit would suffer by a mesalliance. But for the first time I'm not sure I agree. I begin to see possibilities, even in the tripe St. Cyr has been stuffing down the public's throat for years. Of course I can't work miracles all at once. Audiences have come to expect garbage from Summit, and they've even been conditioned to like it. But we'll begin in a small way to re-educate them with this picture. I suggest we try to symbolize the Existentialist hopelessness of it all by ending the film with a full four hundred feet of seascapes— nothing but vast, heaving stretches of ocean,' he ended, on a note of complacent satisfaction.
A vast, heaving stretch of Raoul St. Cyr rose from his chair and advanced upon Martin.
'Outside, outside!' he shouted. 'Back to your cell, you double-crossing vermin! I, Raoul St. Cyr, command it. Outside, before I rip you limb from limb—'
Martin spoke quickly. His voice was calm, but he knew he would have to work fast.
'You see, Watt?' he said clearly, meeting Watt's rather startled gaze. 'Doesn't dare let you exchange three
