Sitting back in his chair in the attitude of a grandfather at the end of a full meal, Mooney reached for the bottle of cognac on the table, brought it to his lips, and took a good-sized swallow. “Thirsty work, this.” He anticipated a burp, worked it up from his innards, gave full sound to it. He blinked and smiled in happy relief at his audience, and they applauded.
“The craft, the skills,” Mooney said. “Barrymore once said, he’d rather have straight legs than know how to act. Of course, Barrymore had straight legs.” He paused to allow his audience to laugh, and they did. “An actor must learn how to move in his clothes. You know that a man moves differently in a toga than he does in blue jeans… than he does in medieval hose… than he does in black tie. But do you know an actor must learn these skills? Even if an actor does not smoke those dirty weeds…” Disdainfully, Frederick Mooney waved his hand at a woman smoking a cigarette, “… he must learn to handle a cigarette as if he were addicted. One handles a cigarette differently than one handles a cigar. Few actors are, in themselves, violent people. No acting schools I’ve heard of have pistol firing ranges. Yet when an actor handles a gun, he must have learned to do so… so naturally that the gun seems an extention of his hand—not something strange and foreign to him, but something so much a part of his being, so necessary to his mental attitudes that the audience knows he can use it and will use it. My training was such, having been dragged up through the music halls of England and the carnivals of America as well, I not only learned the rhythms of Shakespeare, but how to handle a sword and fence with it as if my life depended upon it. I learned to ride a horse both like a Guardsman and an American Indian. John Wayne once said that he didn’t know much about method acting, but he sure knew how to stop a horse on the mark. Of course, John Wayne could stop a horse on the mark.” Again his audience chuckled. Looking at his audience, tying them all together by his gaze, Mooney saw Fletch. In his eyes there was only the barest flicker of recognition. He continued his lecture. “It may not seem it to you—oh, you who watch an actor act and think you can judge him, but who haven’t the slightest knowledge or appreciation of the skills he employs to entertain you—but an actor must learn to ride a horse and a motorcycle, to use a rope, a lariat, to drink from a wine flagon, and open a bottle of champagne, to hold a violin, and to perform a right uppercut to the jaw—perfectly.”
Mooney stopped talking. He moved his eyes over the surface of the small table before him like a farmer looking for first signs of a crop. He seemed to find no growth, and his look was sad.
Finally, sensing his lecture was over, the people began asking him questions.
Mooney folded his arms over the table and dropped his head. “Nothing’s true,” he muttered. “Nothing’s true. It’s all a lie.”
Fletch worked forward through the crowd. He stepped over some people sitting on the floor.
“Nothing’s true.”
Fletch picked up Mooney’s flight bag. Mooney raised his head slowly and looked Fletch in the eye a long moment.
“Ah, Mister Paterson.”
“Came to carry your bag,” Fletch said.
“Kind of you.” Widely, he pointed at the bottle on the table and at the bag. “That bottle goes in that bag,” he said.
Fletch put the cork in the bottle and the bottle in the flight bag.
“Yes,” Mooney answered, standing up, “and I’ve still got it.”
Mooney stumbled a few times picking his way through the crowd but never actually fell. Fletch did not hold onto him. At that moment, Mooney was far from being the graceful, competent person he was just describing, with all the skills of an actor.
The people who were most kind in getting out of his way, letting him pass, were those most apt to reach out to him, touch him, touch his clothes as he passed.
“I want to say good night to the dog,” Mooney said to Fletch. “Dog?”
“The black dog.”
Again, when they were in the less congested bar area, Mooney said, “I really would like to say good night to that dog.”
“I don’t see a dog, Mister Mooney.”
“Big, black dog,” Mooney said. “Name of Emperor.”
Fletch looked around. “I don’t see any dog, Mister Mooney.”
“He’s on the other side of the bar,” Mooney said.
“Why don’t we go this way? It’s quicker.”
“All right.” He smiled wonderfully at Fletch. “I’ve given that lecture ten thousand times,” he said. “Know it as well as the ravings of
At the entrance to the alley, Mooney looked back into the bar. “A clean, well-lighted place,” he said.
24
The phone rang and Fletch was off the bed and across the room answering it before he really knew what he was doing.
“Hello?”
“Fletch?” It was Martin Satterlee ready to dispense information.
“Good morning, Martin.” Fletch sat in the chair next to the telephone table. “What time is it in New York?”
Through the windows to the balcony first light was in the sky.
“Five fifteen a.m.”
“Then it must be here, too.” Moxie was not in his bed. She had chosen to spend the night in a hammock on the balcony. “Find anything?”
“Not as much as we could have found if we hadn’t been interrupted. An hour ago, the authorities swooped into Peterman’s office, where we were working, and laid claim to all Ms. Mooney’s financial records. Asked us politely but firmly to leave.”
“They were quick. Did you show them Moxie’s authorization?”
“Of course. It was not my scheme to be thought a burglar in the night. They had papers from a higher authority.”
“Their piece of paper beat your piece of paper, huh?”
“Their piece of paper was signed by a judge. My piece of paper was signed by a movie star.”
“So you’re going to tell me everything is all right, and Moxie was just having a bad dream about all this…”
“Does
“No.”
“No.”
“No, don’t think so.”
“Of course. That’s the film Moxie is making now.”
“Are they actually making it?”
“I’m not sure. They have been.”
“No.”
“These are all films supposedly being made—I should say, financed—by Jumping Cow Productions.”
