"Most people run their listings on Internet-accessible sites," she told him. "You can use the software to access the sites and find out what's on the market. Now, what you need, not that it's my business or anything, is a chic place for this bread store, an address that would make people be willing to spend lots of money on bread. If it was my store, I'd want it to be the chicest bread store in the city. I'd want movie stars who just happened to be in town, you know-doing 'Letterman' or maybe filming some scenes from their next big movie-to drop by and pick up a few rolls. Of course, movie stars can't eat rolls. Too many calories." She shrugged. "I'd want it to be the kind of place where the Knicks would do their carbo-load before a game, or the mayor would grab some biscuits, or some famous fashion designer would want to be seen. I'd want P. Diddy buying his pumpernickel from me."

"Have you got a store in your software that would guarantee me that kind of business?"

"No guarantees, Casey-Woody Junior. But I bet I could find you some storefronts to look at in Manhattan. Downtown in a funky neighborhood where you might get a decent rent."

"How far downtown?" he asked. P. Diddy wouldn't buy his pumpernickel in City Hall Plaza, would he?

"I'm thinking Lower East Side, Alphabet City, down around there."

Susie's neighborhood. Christ. He'd be selling pumpernickel to P. Diddy and Susie Bloom.

Hell, he couldn't let her determine where he would set up his store. She didn't want to be in his life, so fine-she could buy her damn pumpernickel somewhere else. She could pick up bread at Bloom's when she was doing her third-floor stints there. For all he cared, she could suck on stale pizza crusts at Nico's.

"So, where do you have this software?" he asked.

She smiled seductively. "You want to come on up and see my laptop?"

If he went on up, her laptop was all he'd want to see, especially after she snorted another equine laugh. He would have to play the scene carefully to keep her from being insulted over his refusal to see anything else. He would have to convince her he was a gentleman who wanted to become better acquainted with her before he shifted his attention from her laptop to her lap.

He wouldn't be lying if he said that, either. Who knew what might happen if he and Eva got better acquainted. He might give her some laughter coaching. She might lose the gold cross. They might catch a Jet Li flick and she might like it. Never say never.

And in the meantime..."Yeah," he said, "I'd love to see your laptop."

"I'm feeling really stupid," Susie complained.

Rick adjusted the tripod slightly higher, then checked the videocam's screen. He wished he could be working with a real camera and film stock. But given the drecky budget Julia had provided for his project, that wasn't going to happen.

To save money, he and Susie were sharing a motel room. The motel they'd found had resembled an Infidelity Inn, each room opening directly onto the parking lot and none of the walkways particularly well lit. A private investigator would have to use a flash to catch any hanky-panky on film.

Their room was walled in pink plastic vinyl textured to resemble paneling. The bathroom was smaller than what he had at home-he could easily piss into the toilet from the shower, but he couldn't wash his hands afterward, because the sink was located in the bedroom, not the bathroom. The window overlooked a parking lot and the sill resembled a scene from a housefly version of The Killing Fields. Susie had screamed when she'd opened the blinds and discovered the carnage, at least a dozen dead flies lying feet up along the ledge. Rick had given them a quick burial in the toilet.

They'd eaten dinner last night at a restaurant across the parking lot from the motel because they'd been given discount coupons for the place when they'd checked in. He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting-lobster, maybe; they were in Maine, after all-but the cuisine had seemed more suited to Arkansas. Chicken-fried steak? Hush puppies? In Maine? The waitress had called all her customers "Hon" and the background music had included a lot of songs with lyrics about loyal dogs, dirty low-down cheats and what a great country America was.

Okay, so he didn't have a gazillion-dollar budget. He wasn't doing this film the Steven Spielberg way. He couldn't afford to give his star her own trailer and stylist. He couldn't dawdle on this shot, because the only lighting he had to work with was what Mother Nature was kind enough to provide, which that morning was a lemon-white watered-down sun that made Susie look as though she was suffering from hepatitis.

But damn it, he was going to make his movie. And she was going to make it with him, because she'd said she would. And everything would be great if she'd only stop whining.

Even though she didn't have a trailer and a stylist, Susie evidently intended to behave like a prima donna. As her director, he'd have to humor her. "What's the matter?" he asked gently, when what he really wanted to ask was, Are you on the rag or what?

"Well, I'm standing in the middle of a potato field," she said.

He hoped it was a potato field. This early in the summer, before the crops began ripening, every field looked like every other field to him. For all he knew, she could be standing in a cornfield or a pumpkin field or a zucchini field. The soil was loose and gray, powder dry and striped with rows of bushy green sprouts that on the camera's monitor resembled large, dense sprigs of parsley.

He was a New Yorker. What did he know about agriculture?

"That's a great opening line," he remarked, hoping to encourage her. She'd scribbled, read to him and crossed out a lengthy list of opening lines last night, her voice arching from her bed to his. He'd tried to pretend he was interested as he'd channel-surfed in search of a classic movie or a baseball game. All her opening lines had sounded better to him than anything he could have come up with. He was a director, not a scriptwriter. Susie was the writer in the family, so he deferred to her.

"I'm standing in the middle of a potato field in Maine," Susie repeated, apparently unaware that Rick had hit the Record button. "And I'm holding a potato-" she lifted her hand to display the potato they'd purchased at a supermarket across the street from the motel "-and, I mean, what am I, Susie Bloom of Bloom's in New York City, doing in the middle of a potato field in Maine?"

"What are you doing?" Rick asked.

"I'm thinking..." She stared at the rock-shaped spud in her hand. "I'm thinking I know more about latkes than I do about raw potatoes."

"Tell me about latkes," Rick urged her.

Her eyes sharpened on him. She must have realized that he was taping her and her complaint had become part of the movie. A sly smile caught her lips. "Latkes are what potatoes were born to become," she said. "Latkes are high in calories, high in salt, high in fat-and a life without latkes is not worth living."

He didn't know if she was ad-libbing, and he didn't care. "What about knishes?" he called to her.

"Knishes are fine. Knishes are delicious." She shoved absently at the droopy sleeves of her black mesh sweater. She also had on slim black jeans. The black looked striking against the soft new green of the plants sprouting around her, even if it accentuated the yellow undertone of her skin in the faded morning light. "The thing about a knish is you can eat it on the move. It's like a hot dog, only with less protein and a greater chance of causing heartburn-depending on the hot dog, of course. Latkes, though...You sit down and eat them off a plate, with a fork. They're part of a meal. You need sour cream or applesauce to dip them in. You're with family. Maybe it's Hanukkah or some other holiday. Latkes represent a lot more than knishes."

"How about potato salad?" he cued her.

"How about it? Bloom's has the classic kind, with mayo and celery and hard-boiled eggs cut into it, and a red bliss potato herbed salad with a vinegary dressing. You like potato salad, you'll like what Bloom's has." She sighed, tossed her potato into the air and glared at him. "Jesus. I sound like some over-the-hill actress doing commercial spots because I need the money."

"You're not doing it for the money," Rick said. "I'm not paying you."

Her glare intensified. "No kidding."

"If this comes out good," he argued, "Julia will give us more money for another one-and you'll get paid for that."

She tossed the potato up and caught it again. If only she could juggle, he'd film her tossing three potatoes in a figure-eight pattern, or maybe a potato, a turnip and a bowling pin. Instead, he had to rely on tricky camera angles for visual interest. "Remember that poem you wrote last night?"

"The potato poem?"

She'd penned it during the eleven o'clock news. She'd emerged from the minuscule bathroom clad in a baggy T-shirt and moaning over the lack of a hotel-supplied hair dryer, then plopped herself in the center of her bed, grabbed the legal pad and scribbled furiously. When he'd asked her what she was writing, she'd said, "A poem about potatoes." He hadn't been sure whether she'd been joking; her tone had been drenched in sarcasm.

Apparently, she had written a poem about potatoes. "You want me to read the poem in the film?" she asked. "Now?"

"Yeah. I'll edit it into the right place later." She shrugged, then dug into a pocket of her jeans and pulled out a sheet of yellow legal paper folded multiple times. She flattened it out, squinted at it and read: "'Potato. Hard word, Ts and Ps, unyielding vowels.

Hard food, hard skin, long buried, soil clinging.

Who was the first person To cook a potato? Who thought To toss this rock, this gray rock into the fire, To break through that skin, to eat the molten heart?

Heat releases the potato from its hardness, Smooths it, soothes it, Melts raw starch into comfort.

Potatoes hug us from the inside. They Live within us. Sustain us. Assure us.

Fill us, fuel us, sometimes fool us.

They are the root of all."'

Rick didn't quite get poetry, but Susie's poem sounded terribly profound to him. It would make a great voice-over. The root of all...Pretty cool.

He taped some long, panning shots of the field, a concrete shed in the distance, rolling hills in the greater distance. When he was done, Susie, her crinkled paper and her potato joined him back at the van. "That was good," he told her.

"What does it have to do with Bloom's?"

"Trust me," he said, because he lacked a better answer. For him, movies always came together in the end, in the editing. Sure, he wrote out a shooting script. He had some vivid ideas of what he wanted to appear on film. But the meaning never rose to the surface until he could run his tape through the computer and get everything into some sort of order.

"I trust you," Susie said dubiously. "Julia doesn't. Are we going to show knishes and latkes in the film?"

"Absolutely," Rick said, making a mental note to include some videos of knishes and latkes. "Maybe even blintzes, too. Let's find another backdrop and we'll tape some stuff on blintzes."

"Potato blintzes are boring," Susie muttered, climbing into the driver's seat and tossing her potato behind her into the tangle of video equipment and camping gear. "Cheese or fruit blintzes are much better."

"We'll segue into that. We can start with potato blintzes, then move on to blueberry blintzes. What we need is a blueberry farm." He wedged his camera and tripod behind his seat, then opened a map. "I'm pretty sure they grow blueberries around here somewhere."

She leaned over the gear stick to study the map with him. It showed the Maine shoreline, lots of red and blue roads-interstate highways and rural routes-and counties outlined in dotted brown, and islands flocked along the shoreline. Shadings indicated mountainous areas, and Baxter State Park and Acadia National Park appeared as emerald patches against the beige background.

Nowhere did the map indicate the location of blueberry farms.

Of course, nowhere did the map indicate potato farms, either, but they'd found this one. Rick gazed out the windshield at the tidy rows of foliage, wondering whether they might in fact be blueberry plants. He didn't think so.

"Crank her up," he said, gesturing toward the ignition key. "We'll find a blueberry patch somewhere."

Susie pursed her lips and started the engine. "Somewhere. Sure."

"Don't be so nasty," he said as she steered down the narrow asphalt lane. "I mean, what's wrong? We did some excellent filming this morning." He fingered the fuzz on his chin, his own private proof that the movie was going to be fine. He never shaved during a project. Just as baseball players had their routines-spitting on their palms, fingering their Saint Christopher medals, banging their bats against their cleats-to bring luck and improve their performance at the plate-Rick had his rituals, too. While working on a film, he didn't shave, he avoided chewing gum and he wore briefs instead of boxers. He'd established the chewing-gum rule after a very early exercise in a film class had come out all jittery because he'd been chomping on a wad of bubble gum while the camera had rested against his cheekbone. The briefs had been the brainchild of a psychotic but brilliant professor of his who'd sworn that filmmakers had to restrict their sexual appetites so all their ardor would pour into their art. Rick didn't have such a wild sex life to begin with, but he figured briefs were more restrictive than boxers. As for not shaving, it saved time, so what the hell. He liked cultivating that little soul patch.

"Did Anna ever mention my beard?" he asked Susie as she steered down the ruler-straight row, passing more agricultural fields.

"Not really."

"What do you mean, not really? She sort of mentioned it?" He hoped he didn't sound too eager.

"Actually, no. She never mentioned it."

"What does she think of me, Suze? Does she absolutely hate me?" He braced himself, although he considered the odds of Susie answering yes pretty slim.

"No, she doesn't hate you."

"Then why won't she hook up with me?"

"There's a long distance between not hating someone and hooking up with him," Susie pointed out. "Where am I driving, Rick? Give me a hint."

"Keep going straight. We're going to hit a main drag in another mile or so." He gazed at the map, not really seeing it. "I mean, because I really like her."

"I know you do." Susie lifted her sunglasses from the dashboard and slid them up her nose. "She knows you do, too."

"And she doesn't want to hook up with me." He sighed. The distance between not hating and hooking up seemed to him immense. In miles, that distance would take him from Maine well past Manhattan. Probably all the way to the Florida Keys.

"She likes you, Rick. She thinks you're fun. She also thinks you're a cheapskate and a mooch."

"Me?" Indignation seized him, even though he had to admit Anna was right. "I can't help it that I'm always broke."

"Sure you can. You could get a permanent job. Do you think I waitress at Nico's because that's my career goal? I want to write poetry. I want to explore the world. I need money to live, so I wait tables at Nico's."

"Whoa, slow down," he urged her. Just ahead, looming on the road's shoulder, was a gigantic lobster, faded red. "I've got to get a shot of that."

"You can't put lobsters in the movie," she warned.

The hell he couldn't. Somehow, someway, he was going to find a place for that lobster in his film. "Trust me," he said as she slowed the van to a halt. He unbuckled his seat belt and reached behind him for the camera. Then he got out of the van and shot that sucker, up, down and from every side. The lobster itself was about six feet long, perched on its tail atop a concrete base that added another two feet to its height, and it was one of the ugliest pieces of fiberglass roadside art he'd ever seen-paint peeling from the claws, chips flaking from the shell and one feeler noticeably shorter than the other. He was half in love with it. He wished there were some way to liberate it and bring it home with him.

He pressed gently against it. It rocked and teetered. Hunkering before it, he realized that the concrete base was eroded pretty badly. He straightened, hugged his arms it and gave a tug. It came loose.

"Oh my God!" Susie yelled through the open door. "What are you doing?"

"We can use this lobster, Suze. It's going to be perfect in the movie." A leitmotif, he thought, a recurring image throughout the video.

"First of all, you can't just take it. That would be stealing. And second of all, it's a lobster. We already had this discussion, Rick. You cannot use a lobster in the movie."

"First of all," he retorted, "I'm not stealing it, because I'm going to leave some money for it." He lugged the lobster, which was fairly light despite its bulk, to the rear of the van, swung open the doors and set to work pushing things around to clear a space for it. "And second of all," he shouted forward to her, pausing to pull five twenties from his cash stash in a pocket of his duffel and an envelope from another pocket, "it's a kosher lobster."

"What the hell does that mean?" Susie had climbed out of the van and marched around to the rear so she could glower at him up close and personal. "There's no such thing as a kosher lobster."

He took a moment to jot a note on the envelope-and really, the statue had to be worth significantly less than the hundred bucks he was leaving. He sealed the money inside the envelope and wedged it into a crack in the concrete base. Then he returned to the van to continue wiggling the lobster into place inside.

"Since when do you give a rat's ass about kosher?" he asked.

"Since Julia asked me to make sure you made a good infomercial."

"I'm going to make the best damn infomercial in the history of infomercial making," he bragged, already tired of Susie's negativity even though they'd spent less than thirty hours together since they'd departed from New York City yesterday. If she was going to be so pessimistic and cranky, he was going to unleash his ego. Film directors had enormous egos. It was a requirement. He could out-diva her any day of the week.

"Most infomercials suck," she argued. "So what are you saying? Yours is going to suck less?"

"Mine is going to be brilliant!"

"Yeah, right. A six-foot plastic lobster. Real brilliant."

"It's 'the root of all,'" he said, quoting from her poem.

"The root of all bullshit," she grumbled, stomping back around to the front of the van and taking her seat behind the wheel.

He finished shoving equipment around and eased the door shut, careful not to slam it and accidentally damage the lobster's tail.

Kosher lobster, he thought as he circled back to the passenger seat. Why not? This infomercial was going to be brilliant. And Susie could stuff a sock in it.

"How much money did you leave?" she asked as he strapped himself into his seat.

"A hundred bucks."

"A hundred bucks? What are you, crazy?"

"No. And I'm not such a cheapskate, either. You can tell Anna."

"Julia told me to keep an eye on our budget. A hundred bucks for a fake lobster?"