After a moment he went on, 'There's also a little matter of the finance charges on the furniture and some other things they bought. I did some figuring. It looks to me as if the interest rate was between nineteen and twenty percent.'
Wes Gropetti whistled softly.
Barbara queried, 'When your Personnel man talks to the creditors, the way you said he would, can he (to anything to get the furniture bill or finance charges lowered?'
'The finance charges, maybe.' Leonard Wingate nodded. 'I'll probably work on that myself. When we call a finance outfit and use our company's name, they're apt to listen and be reasonable. They know there are ways a big auto manufacturer can put the squeeze on, if we take a mind to.
But as to furniture . . .' He shook his head. 'Not a chance. Those crooks'd laugh. They sell their stuff for as much as they can get, then turn their paper over to a finance company at a discount. It's little guys like Knight - who can't afford it - who pay the difference.'
Barbara asked, 'Will he keep his job? Rollie, I mean.'
'Providing nothing else happens,' Wingate said, 'I think I can promise that.'
Wes Gropetti urged, 'For Christ sake, that's enough talk! Let's eat!'
Brett DeLosanto, who had been unusually quiet through most of the evening, remained so during the meal which followed. What Brett had seen tonight - the conditions under which Rollie Knight and May Lou lived; their cramped, mean room in the run-down, garbage-reeking apartment house; countless other buildings in the area, either the same or worse; the general malaise and poverty of the major portion of the inner city - had affected him deeply. He had been in the inner city before, and through its streets, but never with the same insight or sense of poignancy he had known within the past few hours.
He had asked Barbara to let him watch tonight's filming, partly from curiosity and partly because she had become so absorbed with the project that he had seen little of her lately. What he had not expected was to be drawn in, mentally, as much as he had.
Not that he had been unaware of ghetto problems of Detroit. When he observed the desperate grimness of housing, he knew better than to ask: Why don't people move somewhere else? Brett already knew that economically and socially, people here - specifically, black people - were trapped. High as living costs were in the inner city, in suburbs they were higher still, even if the suburbs would let blacks move there - and some wouldn't, still practicing discrimination in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Dearborn, for example, in which Ford Motor Company had its headquarters, at last count didn't have a single black resident, due to hostility of white, middleclass families who supported wily maneuverings by its solidly established mayor.
Brett knew, too, that efforts to aid the inner city had been made by the well-meaning New Detroit Committee - more recently, New Detroit Inc. - established after the area's 1967 riots. Funds had been raised, some housing started. But as a committee member put it: 'We're long on proclamations, short on bricks.'
Another had recalled the dying words of Cecil Rhodes: 'So little done - so much to do.'
Both comments had been from individuals, impatient with the smallness of accomplishment by groups - groups which included the city, state, and federal governments. Though the 1967 riots were now years away, nothing beyond sporadic tinkering had been done to remedy conditions which were the riots' cause.
Brett wondered: If so many, collectively, had failed, what could one person, an individual, hope to do?
Then he remembered: Someone had once asked that about Ralph Nader.
Brett sensed Barbara's eyes upon him and turned toward her. She smiled, but made no comment on his quietness; each knew the other well enough by now not to need explanations of moods, or reasons for them. Barbara looked her best tonight, Brett thought. During the discussion earlier her face had been animated, reflecting interest, intelligence, warmth.
No other girl of Brett's acquaintance rated quite as high with him, which was why he went on seeing her, despite her continued, obstinate refusal to join him in bed.
Brett knew that Barbara had gained a lot of satisfaction from her involvement with the film, and working with Wes Gropetti.
Now Gropetti pushed back his plate, dabbing a napkin around his mouth and beard. The little film director, still wearing his black beret, had been eating Beef Stroganoff with noodles, washed down generously with Chianti. He gave a grunt of satisfaction.
'Yes,' Brett said, 'do you ever want to get involved - really involved - with subjects you do films about?'
The director looked surprised. 'You mean do crusading crap? Chivvy people up?'
'Yes,' Brett acknowledged, 'that's the kind of crap I mean.'
'A pox on that! Sure, I get interested; I have to be. But after that I take pictures, kiddo. That's all.' Gropetti rubbed his beard, removing a fragment of noodle which the napkin had missed. He added, 'A buttercup scene or a sewer - once I know it's there, all I want axe the right lens, camera angle, lighting, sound sync. Nuts to involvement! Involvement's a full-time job.'
Brett nodded. He said thoughtfully, 'That's what I think, too.'
In his car, driving Barbara home, Brett said, 'It's going well, isn't it? The film.'
'So well!' She was near the middle of the front seat, curled close beside him. If he moved his face sideways he could touch her hair, as he had already, several times.
'I'm glad for you. You know that.'
'Yes,' she said. 'I know.'
'I wouldn't want any woman I lived with not to do something special, something exclusively her own.'
'If I ever live with you, I'll remember that.'
It was the first time either of them had mentioned the possibility of living together since the night they had talked about it several months ago.
'Have you thought any more?'
'I've thought,' she said. 'That's all.'
Brett waited while he threaded traffic at the Jefferson entrance to the Chrysler Freeway, then asked, 'Want to talk about it?'
She shook her head negatively.
'How much longer will the film take?'
'Probably another month.'
'You'll be busy?'
'I expect so. Why?'
'I'm taking a trip,' Brett said. 'To California.'
But when she pressed him, he declined to tell her why.
Chapter 19
The long, black limousine slowed, swung left, then glided smoothly, between weathered stone pillars, into the paved, winding driveway of Hank Kreisel's Grosse Pointe home.
Kreisel's uniformed chauffeur was at the wheel. Behind him, in the plush interior, were Kreisel and his guests, Erica and Adam Trenton. The car's interior contained - among other things - a bar, from which the parts manufacturer had served drinks as they drove.
It was late evening in the last week of July.
They had already dined - at the Detroit Athletic Club downtown. The Trentons had met Kreisel there, and a fourth at dinner had been a gorgeous girl, with flashing eyes and a French accent, whom Kreisel introduced merely as Zoe. He added that she was in charge of his recently opened export liaison office.
