Read Online Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw - Free Book Online Page B

time. The grapevine these days is run on laser beams.”
    “It hasn’t been turned down yet,” Craig said. “Nobody’s seen it but me.”
    “Who wrote it?”
    “A kid,” Craig said. “You never heard of him. Nobody ever heard of him.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “I’d rather not say at the moment.”
    “Even to me?”
    “Especially to you. You talk your head off. You know that. I don’t want anybody getting to him.”
    “Well,” Murphy said grudgingly, “that makes sense. Do you own it? The screenplay?”
    “I have an option. For six months.”
    “What did it cost?”
    “Peanuts.”
    “Is it about somebody under thirty years old with plenty of nude scenes?”
    “No.”
    Murphy groaned. “Christ,” he said. “Two strikes against you from the beginning. Well, let me read it, and then we’ll see what we can do.”
    “Hold off for a few days,” Craig said. “I want to go over it again and be sure it’s ready.”
    Murphy stared hard at him without speaking, and Craig was almost sure that Murphy knew he was lying. Not just how he was lying, or where, or for what purpose, but lying.
    “Okay,” Murphy said, “when you want me, I’m here. In the meantime, if you’re smart, you’ll talk to that girl. At length. And talk to every newspaperman you can get hold of. Let people know you’re alive, for Christ’s sake.” He drained his glass. “Now, let’s go back for lunch.”
    They had lunch at the cabana. The cold langouste was very good, and Murphy ordered two bottles of Blanc-de-Blanc. He drank most of the wine and did most of the talking. He quizzed Gail McKinnon roughly but good-naturedly, at least at first. “I want to find out what the goddamn younger generation is about,” he said, “before they come and slit my throat.”
    Gail McKinnon answered his questions forthrightly. Whatever she was, she was not shy. She had grown up in Philadelphia. Her father still lived there. She was an only child. Her parents were divorced. Her father had remarried. Her father was a lawyer. She had gone to Bryn Mawr but had quit in her sophomore year. She had gotten a job with a Philadelphia radio station and had been in Europe for a year and a half. Her base was London, but her job allowed her to travel a good deal. She enjoyed Europe, but she intended to go back and live in the United States. Preferably in New York.
    She sounded like a thousand other American girls Craig had met in Europe, hopeful, enthusiastic, and obscurely doomed.
    “You got a boy friend?” Murphy asked.
    “Not really,” she said.
    “Lovers?”
    The girl laughed.
    “Murph,” Sonia Murphy said reproachfully.
    “I’m not the one who invented the permissive society,” Murphy said. “ They did. The goddamn young.” He turned again to the girl. “Do all the guys you interview make a pass at you?”
    “Not all,” she said, smiling. “The most interesting one was an old rabbi from Cleveland who was passing through London on his way to Jerusalem. I had to fight for my life in the Hotel Berkeley. Luckily, his plane left in an hour. He had a silky beard.”
    The conversation made Craig uncomfortable. The girl reminded him too much of his daughter Anne. He did not want to think of how his daughter talked to older men when he wasn’t there.
    Murphy rambled on about the decline of the movie industry.
    “Take Warner’s, for example,” he said. “You know who bought Warner’s? A cemetery business. How do you like that for crappy symbolism? And the age thing. They talk about revolutions devouring their young. We’ve had a revolution out there, only it’s devouring its old. I suppose you approve, Miss Smart-Face.” He was becoming belligerent with the wine.
    “Partially,” Gail McKinnon said calmly.
    “You’re eating my lobster,” Murphy said, “and you say partially.”
    “Look where the old have got us,” Gail McKinnon said. “The young can’t do any worse.”
    “I know that song and dance,” Murphy said. “I