"We can offer you a great deal of money, Mr. Hurn."

Hurn gestured, as though to indicate the Oriental rugs on the floor, the rare books in the shelves on the wall, the sculptures and the paintings, the several-million-dollar Beverly Hills home that contained all this.

"I don't need money, Mr.a"what did you say your name was?"

"Smith."

"Mr. Smith, I have all the money I could ever want. I have done well in this business, Mr. Smith. Quite well. I am no longer the struggling writer who conceived Stranger in Town. These days I choose my projects on the basis of quality."

"You disparage yourself unnecessarily, Mr. Hurn. We believe that Stranger in Town was a series of the highest quality. In some ways, in fact, it represented the very peak of televisual art. The existential dilemma of the protagonist, the picaresque nature of his journeyings, the obsessive fascination with the nature of memory . . . That scene . . ." The young man's eyes came alive. "That scene when Cooper bites into a watermelon like this. I remember summer days, summer nights, a cool breeze on the porch, the river rushing by. I remember a woman's lips, her eyes, her deep blue eyes. But where, d.a.m.n it?

Where?"

Hurn stared, openmouthed. "You remember that? Word for word? Oh, my G.o.d."

"Art, Mr. Hurn. Unabashed art."

"Adolescent pretension. Fakery. Bulls.h.i.t," Hurn said. "Embarra.s.sing.

Oh, my G.o.d, how embarra.s.sing."

"In some ways trite," the young man conceded. "Brash. Even clumsy sometimes. But burning with an inner conviction. Mr. Hurn, you must help us. You must help us bring back Stranger in Town."

"You can't," Hurn said. "You can't bring it back. Even if I agreed it was worth bringing backa"and I'll admit to you that I've thought about it on occasion, though not in many years. I've always had a sense of it as a piece of unfinished business . . . But even if I wanted to help you, it couldn't be done. Not now.

It's too late, much too late. You can't repeat the past. We have absolutely no doubt on that question."

"Boats against the current," Hurn said. "But no, no, I can't agree.

It's like when those promoters wanted to reunite the Beatles."

"Beetles?" Smith asked. "What beetles?"

"The Beatles," Hurn said, astonished. "'She Loves You." I Want to Hold Your Hand." Like that."

"Oh, yes," Smith said vaguely.

Where is this guy from? Hurn wondered. Mongolia?

"What exactly is your proposition, Mr. Smith?"

The young man became businesslike. He pulled a sheaf of notes from his briefcase. "One episode of Stranger was completed but not edited when the cancellation notice came from the network. We have acquired that footage, and it would be a simple matter to put it together. We have also acquired five scripts for the second season, commissioned prior to the cancellation. And we have an outline of your proposal for subsequent episodes, including a concluding episode in which the ident.i.ty of Cooper is finally revealed. We would like you to supervise the preparation of these unwritten scripts and to write the final episode yourself. We are looking at season of twenty-six fifty minute episodes. For these services we are prepared to pay you the equivalent of two million dollars."

"The equivalent, Mr. Smith?"

"In gold, Mrs. Hurn." The young man picked up the large suitcase he had brought with him into the writer's house. He opened it up. It was packed with yellowish metallic bars.

"My G.o.d," Hurn said. "That suitcase must weigh a hundred pounds."

"About one hundred and twenty-five pounds," said Mr. Smith. "Or the equivalent of about one million dollars at this morning's London gold fixing."

The young man, Hurn recalled, had carried in this suitcase without the slightest sign of exertion. He hefted it now as though it were full of feathers. Obviously he was not as frail as he looked.

"Tell me, Mr. Smith. Who is going to star in this show?"

"Oh, Vance Maccoby. Of course."

"Vance Maccoby, if he is even still alive, is a hopeless alcoholic, Mr. Smith. He hasn't worked in this town in twenty years. I don't even know where he is. Have you signed up Vance Maccoby, Mr. Smith?"

"Not yet," the young man said. "But we will. We will."

"My name's Loomis," said the tall man with the limp as he stood beside Cooper at the bar. He picked up the shot gla.s.s and stared into it thoughtfully.

"First or last?" Cooper asked.

"Just Loomis," said the man.

"I'm Cooper," said the other. "Or at least that's what I call myself.

One name's as good as another. There was a book in my saddlebag by a man named Cooper . . ."

"You forgot your name?"

"I forgot everything," he said. "Except to speak and ride and shoot."

Loomis drained his drink. "Some things a mon don't forget," he said.

Cooper stared at him intently, "Have I seen you in here before? There's something familiar. . ."

"I don't think so," Loomis said. "I'm a stranger here myself."

The edges of the TV screen grew misty, then blurred. The picture dissolved. Another took shape. A bright, almost hallucinatorily bright summer day. A farmhouse. Chickens in a coop. The door of the house open, banging in the wind.

The camera moved through the door, into a parlor. Signs of struggle, furniture upended, a broken dish on the floor. A man stooped to pick up the fragments.

"Aimee?" he called. "Aimee?"

The camera moved on, into a bedroom. A woman's body sprawled brokenly across the bed. The window open, the curtain blowing. And then a face, a man's face, staring into the room. His arm, holding a gun. A gunshot.

Darkness closed in. Outside, the shadow of a man running away. A shadow with a kind of limp.

And back, suddenly, to the bar.

"You all right, Cooper?"

"I'm all right," he said, gripping the bar tightly. "I'm all right."

Yehh," said the fat, bald man in the armchair. "Let's hear it for the strong silent ones."

He picked up his gla.s.s from the TV table in front of him, made a mocking toast to the blank screen, then winked to his old agent, Feldman, sitting on the couch next to the young man. There was something a little odd about the young man, but the fat man was too drunk to put his finger on it. Maybe it was the Desi Arnaz haircut. . .

"Vance," Feldman said. "Vance, Ia"I hate to see you like this."

"Like what?" said the fat man who had once been Vance Maccoby. "And the name if Henry. Henry Mulvin."

He raised his bulk from the armchair and waddled into the tiny kitchen of the trailer to refreshen his drink.

Feldman looked helplessly at the young man.

"I told you, Smith. I told you this was pointless. You're going to have to find yourself another boy.

Jesus, there must be hundreds in this town."

"There's only one Vance Maccoby," the young man said firmly. "Mr. Feldman, would you leave us together for a while? I promise you that I'll be in touch in the morning in regard to contractual arrangements."

"Contractual arrangements? You're whistling in the wind."

"I can be quite persuasive, Mr. Feldman. Believe me."

I believe you, Feldman thought. Or what would I be doing in this stinking trailer?

When the sound of Feldman's Mercedes had disappeared into the distance, the young man turned to Vance Maccoby.

"Mr. Maccoby," he said almost apologetically, "we have to have a serious talk. And in order to do that you will have to be sober."

"Sober?" the fat man laughed. "Never heard of it."

"This won't hurt," the young man said, producing a flat, boxlike device from his pocket and pointing it at the fat man. "It will merely accelerate the metabolization of the alcohol in your bloodstream." He pushed a b.u.t.ton.

"But I don't want to be sober," the fat man said. He began to cry.

"When this is all over, Mr. Maccoby," the young man said soothingly, " you need never be sober nor unhappy ever again."

"Guess I should ride on," Cooper said. "You got a nice little town here and I could easily settle in it. But a man can't settle anyplace until he knows who he is."

"You think he knows?" the girl asked. "You think that limping man knows who you are?"

"Yes, he does," Cooper said. "He knows, and he's going to tell me. Fact is, he's itching to tell me. He thinks he just wants to kill me, but first of all he wants to tell me. Otherwise he would have just finished me off back at Oscar's barn. Him and me, reckon we got ourselves a piece of unfinished business. But he's got the better of me, because he knows what it is."

"He may kill you yet," the girl said, dabbing at the tears that had begun to well up in her eyes.

"I can take care of myself."

"Will you come back?" she asked. "Afterward?"

"Maybe so," he said. "Maybe so."

He rode off into the distance.

"Print it," said the director. "And see you all tomorrow."

Carefully Vance Maccoby dismounted from his horse and began to walk back to his dressing room. Bill Hurn fell in step with him.

"That was good stuff, Vance," he said.

Maccoby smiled, although it was more like a tic. The skin of his face had been stretched tight by the face-lift operations, so that his usual expression was even blanker than it had been in his heyday. He took off his hat and ran his hand through his recently transplanted hair. Under the supervision of the strange young man called Smith, he had lost close to a hundred pounds in the three months prior to shooting.

For all these changes, close up Maccoby looked every one of his forty-six years. The doctors could do little about the lines around his eyes, and nothing at all about the weariness in them. And yet the camera was still good to him, particularly in black and white. Hurn had argued fiercely on the subject of film stock, but Smith had been adamant. "It must be black and white. Just like the original. Cost is not the question. This is a matter of aesthetics."

Black and white helped hide the ravages of time. It just made Maccoby look more intense, more haunted. Perhaps that was why Smith had been so insistent. But Hurn doubted that. In many ways Smith was astonishingly ignorant of the mechanics of filmmaking.

"I didn't know," Maccoby said, "that he was still in here." He pointed to his chest.

"Cooper?"

"Maccoby," he said. "Vance Maccoby. Inside me, Henry Mulvin. Still there, after all these years. I thought I'd finished him off for good.

But he was still in there."

Maccoby had not, to Hurn's knowledge, touched a drop of alcohol in six months. He was functioning well on the set, with none of the moodiness or tantrums that had marked his final days in Hollywood. But the stripping away of that alcoholic haze had only revealed the deeper sickness beneath: his unbearable discomfort with himself, or rather with the fictional person he had becomea"Vance Maccoby, TV star.

Isolated, cut off, torn away from his roots, existing only on a million TV screens and in the pages of ma.s.s-circulation magazines.

Was that, Hurn wondereda"and not for the first timea"why he had made such a great Cooper? Despite his mediocrity as an actor, there had never been anyone else to play the role.

"Vance," he said. "Henry . . ."

"Call me Vance. You always did. That's who I am here. For this little command performance."

"Vance, why did you agree to do this?"

"Why did you agree, Bill?" And don't tell me it was the money. You don't care about the money any more than I do. You have all you want.

I had all I needed to stay drunk."

"I don't know," Hurn said. "Smith . . . he just made it seem so important. Like there were millions of people just sitting around waiting for a new season of Stranger in Town. He flattered me. And he tempted me. This was my baby, remember, and the network killed it. And I suppose there was a part of me that always wanted to do this. Finish it properly, tie up all those loose ends. . . . And yet I know the whole thing is crazy. This show will never run on a U.S. network. Not in black and white. Unless we put it straight into reruns." He snickered. "Maybe that's the plan. I mean, who would even know the difference? This whole thing is so--1960."

They had reached Maccoby's dressing room.

"Well," Maccoby said, "Smith is telling the truth, in a way. There are millions of people waiting for this."

"In Hong Kong? North Korea? I mean, where does he expect to sell this stuff? Who are these overseas investors of his? HOw can he p.i.s.s so much money away like water, and how does he expect to ever recoup it?

The whole thing is bizarre."

"Oh, it's bizarre all right," Maccoby said. "It sure is bizarre." He glanced up briefly into the hard blue sky. Then he said, "Well, I better get cleaned up."

"You killed her," Cooper said. "You killed her and you tried to kill me. But somehow I survived. And I crawled out of there, halfway out of my mind. And I crawled into the desert. And a wagon train found me.