Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [16]
The sun, which had been warming us, began to sink behind the olive-green hills, seemingly setting them alight. A donkey-drawn wagon, led by a grizzly old geezer wearing a blue smock, passed clip-pity-clop below the terrace’s stone retaining wall, and we caught the scent of its cargo of roses on the evening breeze. The roses were bound for the perfumeries in Grasse. Then a fat baker’s boy puffed by our table, one of those huge wicker baskets of freshly baked baguettes strapped to his back, and we could smell that too. “If she’s waiting for somebody,” said Hymie, “he’s shamefully late.”
The woman with the gleaming hair seated alone two tables to our left appeared to be in her late twenties. Somebody’s gift package. Her fine arms bare, her linen shift elegant, long bare legs crossed. She was sipping white wine and smoking a Gitanes, and when she caught us sneaking glances at her, she lowered her eyes, pouted, and reached for the book in her straw shoulder bag, Bonjour tristesse,11 by Françoise Sagan, and began to read.
“Do you want me to invite her over to join us?” asked Boogie.
Hymie scratched his purply jaw. He made a face, wrinkling his forehead. “Naw. I think not. If she joined us, it could spoil everything. Gotta make a phone call. Back in a couple of minutes.”
“He’s beginning to bug me,” I said to Boogie. “As soon as he gets back, I think we ought to split, man.”
“No.”
Hymie, back soon enough, began to drop names, a failing I cannot tolerate. Hollywood manna. John Huston, his buddy. Dorothy Parker, big trouble. The time he had worked on a screenplay with that stool-pigeon Clifford Odets. His two-day drunk with Bogie. Then he told us how his commanding officer had summoned all the air crews to a briefing in a Nissen hut before they took off on their first mission. “I don’t want any of you girls faking mechanical trouble three hundred miles short of the target area, dropping your bombs on the nearest cow patch, and dashing for home. Gosh darn it. Holy smoke. You would be failing Rosie the Riveter, not to mention all those 4-F hymies raking it in on the black market stateside and fucking the girls you left behind. Better shit yourselves than try that story on me.” Then he added, “Three months from now, two thirds of you will be dead. Any stupid questions?”
But Hymie survived, demobilized with some fifteen thousand dollars in the bank, most of it won at the poker table. He made straight for Paris, moving into the Ritz, he said, and not drawing a sober breath for six months. Then, down to his last three thousand dollars, he booked passage on the Île de France, and lit out for California. Starting as a third-assistant director, he bullied his way up the ladder, intimidating studio executives, who had served with honour in the War Bond drives on the home front, by wearing his flight jacket to dinner parties. Hymie churned out a Blondie, a couple of Tim Holt westerns, and one of Tom Conway’s The Falcon series, before he was allowed to direct a comedy featuring Eddie Bracken and Betty what’s-her-name? You know, like the stock-market brokers. Betty Merrill Lynch? No. Betty Lehman Brothers? Come off it. Betty like in those ads. When la-de-da speaks, everybody listens. Hutton. Betty Hutton. He was once nominated for an Academy Award, was three times divorced, and then the House Un-American Activities Committee caught up with him. “This sleaze-bag Anderson, my comrade,” he said, “a five-hundred-dollar-a-week screenwriter, was sworn in by the committee and told them he used to come to my house in Benedict Canyon to collect weekly Party dues. How was I to know he was an FBI agent?”
Surveying our table, Hymie said, “There’s something missing. Garçon, apportez-nous des cigares, s’il vous plaît.”
Then a Frenchman, obviously past it, well into his fifties, pranced onto the terrace. He was sporting a yachting cap, his navy-blue blazer with the brass buttons tossed over his shoulder like a cape: he had come to claim the young woman who sat two tables to our left. She rose