I glanced at the books but found no relationship. Burnham Wood patted the side of his machine, which stood, rumbling, like a great gray elephant. The Mafioso Machine shivered and stopped.
“The idea struck,” said Burnham Wood, “one desert night when a cement mixer passed me at high speed. I wondered if it was on its way to make concrete boots for lost Italian gangsters. I laughed, but the idea haunted me and woke me in the middle of the night months later. I had to fuse my library with this great monster, find a way, I thought, to travel this cement elephant back in time.”
I skirted the great gray beast as it tumbled and whispered, rotating and ready to travel.
“The Mafioso Cement-Mixing Machine?” I said. “Explain.”
Burnham Wood touched the F. Scott Fitzgerald books on their shelf and placed one in my hands.
I opened the book. “The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. His last. He didn’t live to finish it.”
“Here then.” Burnham Wood stroked his great machine. “Shall I tell you what’s inside? All the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years of time, going back fifty years. We’re going to run those hours and days to help Scotty get some extra time to finish this novel. It was going to be his best but wound up a half-broken record played late nights while we drank far too much.”
“And,” I said, “just how are you going to do this?”
Burnham Wood produced a list. “Read. Those are the destinations my machine will visit to do the job.”
I stared at the list and began to read.
“B. P. Schulberg, Paramount, right?”
“Right.”
“Irving Thalberg, MGM? Darryl Zanuck, Fox?”
“Correct.”
“Will you visit all these people?”
“Yes.”
“You have directors at various studios, producers, floozies he once knew, bartenders all over creation. What will you do with them?”
“Find ways to move them, bribe them, or, when necessary, beat them up.”
“What about Irving Thalberg? He died in 1936, right?”
“And if he’d lived a bit longer he might have been a good influence on Scotty.”
“What are you going to do about a dead man?”
“When Thalberg died there was no sulfanilamide in the world. I’d like to sneak into his hospital room the week before his death and give him the medicines that might cure him and let him go back to MGM for another year. He might have hired Scotty for something better than the things they gave him.”
“That’s quite a list,” I said. “You sound like you’re going to move these people like chess pieces.”
Burnham Wood showed me a flush of hundred-dollar bills. “I’m going to spread these around. Some of these moguls might be tempted to move. Stand close. Listen.”
I stood close to the great rumbling machine. From its interior I heard far cries and gunshots.
“It sounds like a revolution,” I said.
“Bastille,” said Burnham Wood.
“Why would that be inside?”
“Marie Antoinette, MGM—Fitzgerald worked on it.”
“My God, yes. Why would he write a thing like that?”