“This isn’t about nothing like that.”
“No?”
“You’re good with us, Mr. Duplessis. We wouldn’t ask for more than’s our fair share.”
“What can I do you for?”
“We got a strange one for you. Comes with you and your sister’s name attached. If your names hadn’t got mentioned, I doubt we’d be here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Fellow came up our way in a kind of car.” He waved behind him, at the road. The other men on the stopped motorcycles, and the two horses, including Eke’s own, seemed to flicker their attention back the way they’d come as well, as if Eke had their sight lines tethered to his hand by invisible threads.
“A working car?”
Eke paused to shake his head, signifying something outside the box. “Not like one any of us ever seen. It’s big. Kind of an armored car. A supercar, I guess you’d say.” Later, Journeyman would reflect on how Eke’s nomenclature stuck: supercar. Perhaps the inevitable term. “He won’t come down from it, says he’ll talk to Sandy Duplessis or Madeleine Duplessis only. He also knew the name of your sister’s farm out there.”
“You couldn’t . . . get him out of his car?”
“Well, not if we didn’t dynamite him out of it. Which, I can tell you, we were prepared to do, until he began shouting your name down. Like I said, it’s been a puzzler. We’re not afraid of him, mind you. Some proposed turning him back the way he came, but others felt we wouldn’t mind taking a look at the operation of the thing, if we could get him down from it without dynamite. We thought you and your sister might want to at least give him a hearing before we made the call.”
“Down?” Journeyman couldn’t visualize this. Also, he was distracted by something he’d noticed: that two of the Cordon’s men bore bandages on their limbs. One, a thick hump of gauze at the juncture of his shoulder and neck. Had they been in some kind of battle? Were these wounds acquired in wrangling this supercar? Or should Journeyman take their tales of periodically invading hordes more seriously than he had?
“He’s seated up pretty high,” said Eke. “You’ll see.” He glanced over his shoulder. Now Journeyman heard it and saw it. Not the car itself, which remained around a few bends and below a few rises. Just the rumbling cloud it raised, on a still and sunny afternoon. Eke appeared a bit rattled by the thing he’d been trying to describe, that thing coming.
What were Journeyman’s feelings, at that immanence, that Tuesday when it first came, before it rounded into view? Was he rattled too?
Certainly. But something more. Journeyman felt an abject throb of who-he-used-to-be. Someone in a quote, unquote “supercar” had come bearing his name as his bona fides? Journeyman might be more than the town’s emissary to the Lake of Tiredness and the butcher’s sluice boy. He might be an important person on this peninsula.
“This man—he really knew my name?” Surely, there was a trick in this. The dust cloud grew nearer. Otherwise, time had stopped. A crow moved from branch to branch, a blob of shadow on the sun-daubed road. Journeyman could so easily have stayed longer bantering with Jerome Kormentz, and missed this strange caravan rolling through. Perhaps then Eke would have implicated whomever he’d come across, instead of Journeyman.
“Your name, Mr. Duplessis. No mistaking that.”
“Did he give his?”
Eke scratched deep into his beard with strong fingers. “Yes, he did. Said Peter Todbaum. Said you’d know him.”
7.
The Starlet Apartments, Part 1
WHEN HE AND PETER TODBAUM were twenty-four, and two years clear of Yale, he’d lost track of Todbaum for a short while.
This was in the time before Journeyman had been awarded his private nickname, let alone accepted its verdict.
Journeyman had been living in New York City, working as an assistant at FSG, writing short stories that no one wanted to publish, when Todbaum got back in touch. Todbaum had acquired an agent and was going to Hollywood. He wanted Journeyman with him, as co-writer on a stack of ideas he promised Journeyman he’d already developed and vetted with his representation, and which only needed Journeyman’s hand. Journeyman, not William Goldman or Nora Ephron. Todbaum had a place picked out for them in Burbank, where they’d shack up and bash out treatments and it would be a great adventure, like Yale without all the pointless Yale stuff, and with a good deal more cocaine. Hearing it, Journeyman was sold. He was there in a heartbeat.
The place was the Starlet Apartments, a classic ’30s two-story complex curled around a pool. Monthly rentals, with a motley assortment of long- and short-term occupants, plenty of empty apartments too. This was in Burbank, right under the shadow of the high-walled Warner Bros. lot. Todbaum joked that the place was named for its traditional use as a lunchtime casting couch liaison site, and his joke was likely right.
The two holed up there at the Starlet to bat out projects poolside and in the paltry second-floor suite they shared, with the AC cranked. At night, they drove to West Hollywood bars in Todbaum’s father’s cast-off BMW, where they drank shots of Jägermeister and tried to pick up women, many of whom were considerably older than they were. At this, they never once succeeded, nor did they mind. The young men were too full of themselves and their projects to mind. Todbaum’s agent called every few days to ask how their work was coming along; he champed at the bit to get them into “good offices” as soon as the material was ready. And so, half the time, even at the bars, even blitzed on German digestif, they ignored their surroundings and continued to work, to brainstorm their notions for screenplays and television shows. They worked side by side in deck chairs while the complex’s other young tenants tried to entice them into the pool.
Blitzed or hungover, Journeyman fastened himself to the task. In his mind, he and Todbaum were Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, perhaps; Todbaum the bullshitter, Journeyman the hands on the keyboard. Todbaum would circle Journeyman where he sat, reeling out great fugues of self-infatuated improv, doing voices, abruptly changing lines or names of characters, forcing Journeyman to hurriedly xxxxxxx out endless lines on their Canon Typestar. Then Todbaum would jerk the pages from Journeyman’s hands to scribble further emendations, or ball them up to toss into the suite’s corners. They hammered out one whole script, a horror movie based on one of Journeyman’s unpublished stories, and four or five long treatments, several of them broad, idiotic comedies pegged for stars of the day, Carrey or Martin or Murphy.
Their pet project, one of Todbaum’s supply of “killer pitches,” was a science fiction movie he called Yet Another World. This was a tale of alternate nightmare Earths. One was their own version of reality, the other an Orwellian techno-dystopia, a kind of cyberpunk extrapolation from the Cold War ’50s, when the two worlds had bifurcated. The story began when the two worlds discover a portal that allows them to communicate, one with the other (the exact means of communication was unclear, a thing Todbaum relied on Journeyman to think up). Yet Another World was also a love story, with an impossible obstacle: a man from the dystopian cyberpunk world (Harrison Ford, probably, or Bruce Willis) would fall in love with a scientist from their world (Michelle Pfeiffer was Todbaum’s pick; he thought she’d be hot in glasses).