Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw Page A

agent, “I’d take him, if I could tear the pencil out of his hand.” Until now, nobody had managed to tear the pencil out of his hand.
    “It’s still rough,” Delaney said, waving at the screen, “but I’ll whip it into shape yet. If I don’t die from Italian exasperation first.” He stood up. “Look, Jack, you stay here and run it a couple of times and get familiar with it. Maybe you might even read the script again this afternoon. Then, tomorrow at seven thirty, we start dubbing.”
    “Okay.”
    “I made a date for you with Despière,” Delaney said, shoving his dark glasses onto his face. “At Doney’s. Ten to one. He wants to get some dope from you for his piece. About my early triumphs.” Delaney smiled thinly. “Lie to him a little, like a good friend.”
    “Have no fear,” Jack said. “I’ll make you sound like a combination of Stanislavski and Michelangelo.”
    “Use your own judgment.” Delaney laughed and patted Jack’s shoulder. “Guido’s waiting for you outside with the car. And there’s a cocktail party tonight at eight o’clock. He’s got the address. Anything else I can do for you?”
    “Not at the moment.”
    Delaney patted his shoulder again, paternal, friendly. “See you at eight,” he said. “All right, Hilda,” he said to the secretary, and the woman stood up, docile and plain in a frayed cloth coat, and followed him out the projection-room door.
    Jack took a deep breath, then looked at the screen with distaste, envying Sugarman his three months in the museums and cafés and his escape to America. Then Jack pressed the button and the room went dark and once more the unconvincing images started passing across the screen, pretending at tragedy.
    As he watched the man whose voice he would eventually simulate, Jack thought about Delaney and the appointment he had made for Jack with Despière, and smiled to himself. It hadn’t been only chance, Jack realized now, or a desire to do Jack a good turn, or even a desire to make the picture better, that had made Delaney call Jack down to Rome, although all these considerations had gone into it. Delaney knew Jack was a friend and loyal, and that he remembered Delaney from his good days, and he wanted all that in the article that Despière was writing. For all his exterior bluffness, Delaney had always been a clever and devious man. It was clear that he hadn’t changed. He maneuvered people subtly to his advantage and, as much as he could, controlled the working of chance. But even recognizing the maneuver, Jack could only feel pity for Delaney because he believed in its necessity. When Jack first knew Delaney, a newspaperman could write that he was the Antichrist and raped choirboys and Delaney wouldn’t as much as cross the street to get the man to change a line. Age, Jack thought, failure…
    Five thousand dollars, Jack thought, watching the silly, handsome face on the screen. Five thousand dollars.
    Despière was sitting at one of the small tables outside Doney’s when Jack pushed through the slowly moving lunchtime crowd of tourists, clerks, movie people, and buxom girls on the Via Veneto. The noonday sun was warm and for an hour or two it made everybody feel that Rome was a wonderful place to be in the winter and you could see it on the faces going by and hear it in the pleased tones of the voices speaking a dozen different languages on all sides.
    “Sit down,” Despière said, touching the chair next to his, “and enjoy the sunshine of Italy.” Jack settled in the chair and ordered a vermouth from one of the white-jacketed waiters who fought their way irritably through the passers-by with their trays, carrying tiny cups of coffee and thin individual bottles of Campari and vermouth. “Dottore,” Despière said, “I was afraid for you last night. You looked like a man who was preparing to come down with something serious.”
    “No,” Jack said, lying, remembering the night he had passed, “it wasn’t anything. I