“Say,” I gasped, “this isn’t half bad.”
I heard a whirring sound.
Maggie Botwin’s camera was focused to catch my moment of incipient inebriation.
“You carry your camera everywhere?”
“Yep,” she said. “No day has passed in forty years that I have not trapped the mice among the mighty. They don’t dare fire me. I’d cut together nine hours of damn fools on parade and première it at Grauman’s Chinese. Curious? Come see.”
Fritz filled my glass.
“Ready for my closeup.” I drank.
The camera whirred.
32
Manny Leiber was sitting on the edge of his desk, guillotining a big cigar with one of those one-hundred-dollar gold Dunhill cigar cutters. He scowled as I walked in and around the office, studying the various low sofas.
“What’s wrong?”
“These sofas,” I said. “So low you can’t get up.” I sat. I was about a foot from the floor, staring up at Manny Leiber, who loomed like Caesar, astride the world.
I grunted myself up and went to collect cushions. I placed three of them on top of each other and sat.
“What the hell you doing?” Manny scuttled off his desk.
“I want to look you in the eye when I talk. I hate breaking my neck down there in the pits.”
Manny Leiber fumed, bit his cigar, and climbed back up on the desk rim. “Well?” he snapped.
I said, “Fritz just showed me a rough cut of his film. Judas Iscariot’s missing. Who killed him?”
“What!?”
“You can’t have Christ without Judas. Why is Judas suddenly the invisible disciple?”
For the first time I saw Manny Leiber’s small bottom squirm on the glass-top desk. He sucked his unlit cigar, glared at me, and let it blow.
“I gave orders to cut Judas! I didn’t want to make an anti-Semitic film!”
“What!” I exploded, jumping up. “This film is being released next Easter, right? That week, one million Baptists will see it. Two million Lutherans?”
“Sure.”
“Ten million Catholics?”
“Yes!”
“Two Unitarians?”
“Two—?”
“And when they all stagger forth on Easter Sunday and ask, ‘Who cut Judas Iscariot out of the film?’ how come the answer is: Manny Leiber!”
There was a long silence. Manny Leiber threw down his unlit cigar. Freezing me in place, he let his hand crawl to the white telephone.
He dialed three studio digits, waited, said, “Bill?”