Szabo laughed affectionately. "My dear Luc. Who were you thinking for the girl?"

"I don't know. Isabelle Huppert-"

"Roy Scheider never would go to bed with such a girl. Too neurotic, talking talking all the time-"

"She has terrible freckles," said Veronique, without looking up from a thick, atlas-sized magazine, Yacht, with boats the size and shape of buildings on its cover.

"It's true," said Szabo. "They are not running through the jungles of Asia, driving on the highways in America, for Isabelle Huppert covered with freckles, talking, having depressions. My distributors never buy this film with such a girl."

Szabo chartered a yacht in Monaco for six weeks. Full crew, chef, plenty of cabins. A quiet cruise along the Riviera with his wife and her sister, very beautiful girl. Luc must come along, Szabo insisted. They would work every day and make a few changes and have the completed draft by the end of the cruise.

"Um . . ." It sounded like true arrival: cruise the Riviera on a yacht with a film producer, women, write a screenplay. But even after a meal with Szabo and Veronique, Luc couldn't wait to get away from them and clear his head. ". . . Well, I-"

"Graham Greene wrote The Third Man on Alexander Korda's yacht on a cruise in the Mediterranean," said Szabo, raising bushy eyebrows at Luc.

Luc hadn't known this, but he thought The Third Man an exemplar of the power of withholding information from the audience. "I love The Third Man-"

"So what does she say to him?" asked Szabo. "If we don't hear what the old woman says to Block, we have the audience wondering what is going on."

"But Gabor. Don't we want the audience to wonder what's going on? To not know? Like in The Third Man."

"No. If they don't know, they don't care. The Third Man opened very bad. Now is a classic, then was a big disappointment for Sandy. Casablanca, it's the letters of transit. You know this immediately. That's your MacGuffin, but we know what it is. Everybody is running around looking for the letters of transit. Whoever gets them, gets out of Casablanca. Simple. Here, Block doesn't know what he's looking for. He looks stupid. We don't care, nobody cares. We must hear what the old woman tells him in the ear in the station."

"But the whole movie is him finding out what she whispered. Who she is, what Yatsevich is looking for. And what the movie's really about is how Block finds meaning in his life by doing something right. That's the mystery, and people will find that more interesting than-"

"Doesn't work. My distributors will be saying, 'What it's about?' I can't tell them it's about Roy Scheider running around looking for himself to find out who he is. They will think it's a hippie story and they will say no. Roy Scheider knows who he is. He's a tough guy. He's a man. So I have to say to them, it's about a man finding the paintings taken by the Nazis, that only the old woman whose father took them knows where they are and she tells Roy Scheider, and he goes to find them and kills the bad guys who are chasing him and he gets the girl. That's a movie."

Luc had always believed he would be successful and make money as a writer. His father, Bernard Franklin, of Walpole, Massachusetts, was a longtime Paris-based journalist with the Herald Tribune who had written books about French exceptionalism and Anglo-European interests. Luc had seen his father write them, one after another, published only to vanish into the black holes of bookshops, never to be seen again. Luc found his father's books dull-nobody read them on airplanes or in cafes-and they made almost no money at all. Luc wanted to write novels. Like Hemingway and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald, and later like Kerouac, that would sell better than his father's earnest efforts and be made into movies.

When the novel he'd written at twenty-seven had been turned down by every publisher he'd sent it to, he sank into prolonged shock. He started writing another but, sundered by doubt, put it aside. One day in Paris he met a friend at Le Select who was having a drink with a film producer named Claude. Luc's friend introduced him to the producer, describing him as a writer. Claude talked about a story he'd read in a newspaper about a refugee who had tried to swim from an outlying Albanian island to the heel of Italy, a distance of fifty miles. He'd been picked up at sea close to the Italian coast, with no sign of a boat or raft nearby, and taken back to Albania. "Can you imagine?" said Claude, looking at them both. "The dream, the bravery, the disappointment!" Luc mentioned the John Cheever story "The Swimmer." Claude remembered the movie, which he had loved. "Ah, Burt Longcastaire." He hadn't known it was adapted from the Cheever story. He called Luc the next day, and they met and talked again about the story of an Albanian trying to swim to Italy. Was it possible, Claude wondered, that anyone could stay afloat for so long? Luc told him about the high salinity of the Mediterranean, which would help any swimmer, and how he himself had spent much of his childhood swimming around Mallorca. Claude offered Luc twenty thousand francs-about five thousand dollars-if he would write the screenplay of the story they would outline together. Luc agreed. Claude gave him a book of screenplays written by Jean-Claude Carriere to show him how they were written. Luc wrote the screenplay in a month. Then Claude became wrapped up making another film, but Luc had been paid to write a screenplay. He was a screenwriter. He was hired to write more. Since he was bilingual, he could write screenplays in French or English-he wrote several in both languages so producers could show a property to both French and American distributors. He wrote spec screenplays to offer for sale-people in Hollywood were making fantastic sums selling spec screenplays; Luc even thought of going to Los Angeles, to the Mountaintop-and for several years went with a producer to the Cannes Film Festival. Eventually, little by little, nothing happened. He was thirty. The creeping sense of disjunction between what was supposed to happen in his life and what was actually happening, began to terrify him. He saw himself sinking into oblivion.

Szabo looked like a life raft.

The Szabos, with Veronique's sister, boarded the yacht in Monaco. Luc was to join them two weeks later. Since his plane ticket was to Nice, Szabo told him to meet the yacht in the little port of St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, between Nice and Monaco. Although he'd never been there, Luc knew of it: it was where Somerset Maugham had bought a fabulous villa and lived much of his long life.

The yacht was not there when he arrived by taxi in midafternoon-they would be out sailing during the day, Szabo had told him over the phone, back in port by sunset. Luc left his bag at the capitainerie, and walked uphill along the narrow lanes of the Cap, between high hedges of pine and cypress and dense bulwark copses of flowers that allowed only partial views of the great pastel-hued, frosted, and crenellated villas. These were the homes of the rich and the not famous: disenfranchised European nobility; Nazi profiteers; modern industrialists; and some genuine, unimpeachable strains of old money. Not writers.

He was looking for Maugham's Villa Mauresque. He'd read Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge, the story of a young man seeking truth amid the trappings of European luxury, many times. Just as many times he'd seen the glossy black-and-white 1946 Oscar-nominated movie adaptation, starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney-whose nipples visibly harden beneath her gossamer-sheer silk blouse in the final climactic scene as she parts from her lost love, played by Tyrone Power, for the last time-in a villa on the French Riviera.

With his millions made from writing, Somerset Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque, and lived out his days there in luxury, writing in the mornings, playing bridge through the afternoons, entertaining some very fortunate guests. One of them, Luc read in some biography of the writer, had walked through the house and gardens, marveling: "All of it from writing!"

He finally found the entrance to the Villa Mauresque. Maugham had been dead for almost twenty years, but the Moorish symbol he had adopted to ward off the evil eye, monogrammed into the cover of all his hardcover books, was still engraved in stone at the entrance to the villa's driveway.

They worked mornings in a quiet spot on the forward deck of the yacht, sitting in folding teak director's chairs with their coffee, while the crew prepared breakfast, and Mireille, Veronique's sister, slept late in the aft cabin. As they talked, Veronique stood behind Szabo, a tray beside her, squeezing and lancing and wiping with alcohol and cotton balls the dense new crop of acne cysts that had boiled up through the skin across Szabo's back and shoulders during the night. It took her at least half an hour every morning. Szabo ignored her as he would a manicurist and concentrated on their story. Luc tried not to look at the pile of blood-and-pus-soaked cotton balls mounting on the tray.

Since fleeing Hungary as a documentary filmmaker after the 1956 uprising, Szabo's attenuated commercial instincts had been honed by producing soft-core pornography for the German and Scandinavian markets, before moving successfully into increasingly less lurid mainstream features. As they pulled apart and reconstructed Luc's story to reflect the requirements of his distributors, Szabo's tone, his approach to the project, shifted. Before, he had been confident, amused by Luc's naivete, but respectful of his ideas, his story. Now, he became visibly less happy. "I don't know," he began to say, clicking his tongue in his mouth as he worried a gap in his molars, "we're losing focus." Their morning work sessions grew irregular. Szabo, a chronic insomniac, always up early to work and chase away nocturnal demons, began to appear late. Or to sit in the yacht's teak-paneled saloon, sipping coffee and looking distractedly at the charts of the nearby coasts. He grew bored.

The wide square sail, emblazoned with a coat of arms that incorporated a leaping delphinus, was rarely used. The engine propelled the yacht, and the generator ran all day and most of the night. They motored to Antibes and ate dinner at Chez Felix in the old town. Szabo had heard that Graham Greene dined there every night and he hoped to meet him. He had greatly admired Greene's brief performance as a film distributor in Truffaut's film La Nuit Americaine, but they failed to spot the elusive author on two consecutive nights.

"I want to sail in the sea," Szabo told the yacht's captain, Tony Clement, a weathered, laconic Englishman with a good accent, dressed in white shirt and shorts. "Not this back-and-forth between boat parking lots. I want to sail across the sea to another country. I want a voyage."

"Quite right too," said Tony agreeably.

"Where can we go?"

Tony spread a chart of the western Mediterranean across the saloon table. "Well, Corsica-"

"How long?" cut in Szabo.

"Calvi in a day-"

"Farther," said Szabo. "A voyage. Out of sight of land. Sailing all night. Across the sea."

"How about the Balearics?" said Luc to no one in particular.

"Where?" asked Szabo.

Luc touched the chart, more than a foot across the paper below the French coast.

"What is there?"

"Islands belonging to Spain," said Tony. "A day and a night and a day perhaps to get there."

"Do they have charm?"

"Well, it's not the Cote d'Azur."

"Actually," said Luc, "I more or less grew up there."

Szabo looked at him in surprise. "Where?"

Luc placed his finger on the chart again. "Right there. The east end of Mallorca. My mother has a small hotel there."

"Really? Is it charming?" said Szabo.

Luc was suddenly full of inspiration again. "It's beautiful," he said.

Four.

Luc slept aboard the yacht, but rode his motorcycle early to the Rocks to catch his mother at breakfast.

"Darling, I don't go aboard boats," said Lulu, "except ferries. You know that."

Yes, yes, he knew. So she always said, and he couldn't recall her aboard a boat in all the years they'd lived beside the sea and a port full of yachts and friends who came and went in them. But Szabo was taken with her. She had impressed him, and Szabo wanted to impress her back in his own arena aboard his fancy rented ship. People had been impressed by Luc's mother all his life and he knew the power of her reflected glory.

"Mother, the boat's not leaving port. It's the size of a building. You won't feel any movement-"

"I don't get seasick. I just don't go aboard yachts," said Lulu emphatically. "You know that."

"I know," said Luc. "But Gabor keeps going on about you. I think he's arranged the whole lunch just to see you again."

"I can't help that. He can come here if he wants to see me."

"It's just a lunch."

"It's a boat."

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" said Luc. "Just because you had a rotten time with your first husband on some little boat a hundred years ago, what's that got to do with life now?"

"That won't help, darling."

"I know. You don't do what you don't want to do. I know that. What an idiot I am to think you'd make an exception for me."

Abruptly, he left and zoomed off on his motorcycle.

She was immune too to the cajoling of Sarah Bavister. "Oh, Lulu, you've got to! Look at that bloody boat! Come on, we've got to go see it. Really, don't you want to?"

"No, I don't."

After breakfast Lulu pulled on gloves and picked up secateurs and climbed the steps to the garden above the pool. Yesterday's light breeze was gone. What remained, barely felt on the skin, produced a sound like gentle exhalation overhead in the canopy of the pines that shaded much of the garden. She snipped at the rosebushes planted along the back wall. They were doing awfully well. She'd sprinkled Tom's and Milly's ashes in the rose beds in May. They had died in a small plane crash on the way to a fishing holiday in Scotland-just when they'd become wonderfully rich from all those strawberry punnets. Cassian had brought them down from London in two large Horlicks bottles. Tom and Milly had rented Villa Los Roques during the summers after the war. They'd invited Lulu down, and then loaned her the money to buy the place. "We'll keep it in the family!" they said.

Dear Milly. Was she was being fanciful to imagine that the roses had never looked better? Snip . . . snip . . .

Luc was intelligent, of course, but she was no longer sure of his talent. She had read his prose-the beginnings of abandoned novels, the one he had finished which she thought poor and which had been roundly rejected by publishers. He'd talked about another novel, a story of a journalist in Paris during the occupation. That at least sounded commercial because it had Nazis in it. Then he had started writing screenplays instead. Snip . . . snip. She had to admit he had some sort of facility for film writing. She saw the scenes he wrote clearly, but she wondered why anyone would go to see such films, full of aimless people with a knack for self-destruction. She disliked recognizing Luc in these characters-they all seemed pathetic, and therefore quite believable. Snip . . . At least he was making a little money. She'd helped him out a number of times, but it was always disappointing to give money to a grown man.

Snip . . . snip . . .

This ludicrous film producer obviously liked him. He'd invited Luc on holiday. He had money. He was full of praise for Luc's work. He might actually make the film.

Snip. Miss you so, Milly, darling. What do you think?

Later, as she came down the steps from the garden, she found Sarah beside the pool.

"I will come to lunch with you," announced Lulu.

"Oh, darling Lulu, how wonderful!" said Sarah.

"What time do we have to be there?"

"One, I think."

"We'll go in my car."

She went into the house to change.

"I'm so glad Lulu's coming!" Sarah said.

"I'm surprised," said Dominick, who lay nearby, eyes closed, glistening with oil in the noonday sun. "Lulu doesn't do boats, you know."

"You're coming, aren't you?" asked Sarah.

"Oh yes," said Dominick. "I want to see inside that boat. I bet it's got a fuck nest the size of the Great Bed of Ware."

Fergus's Range Rover purred along the quay just before ten. He parked beside the yacht. Dolphin's deck was five or six feet above him and he could see no one aboard. Gingerly, holding its rope rail, he mounted the narrow, unsteady, aluminum gangplank thingy.

"Hello," he said when a crewman, polishing a brass thingy, came into view. Then he saw the film producer farther away on the foredeck, his shirt off, his wife doing something to his back. He could tell the man had forgotten.

"Hallo!" said Fergus again. "Did you still want to see our property?"

"Of course! I am coming."

Five minutes later, Fergus was driving him through town. "Are you in fact looking for property?"

"Always," said Szabo. "The Cote d'Azur, the Cinque Terre, all too crowded now. Not peaceful. So I look around anywhere. I would like a villa in a quiet place near the sea in the sun. Not a long flight from Paris. There is an airport here, yes?"

"Oh, absolutely," said Fergus. "Palma, an hour and a half away. Flights all over Europe. Probably two hours to Paris. Four hours door to door. That wouldn't be bad, eh?"

Gerald was pruning the olive trees-trees that were no longer his, technically, though he was unsure of the exact demarcation between his land and the lot he had now officially sold to Fergus and his cabal of developers. Hopefully they wouldn't chop them all down, even those on their parcel, but build their villas to blend into the landscape and preserve as much of it as possible-as Fergus had assured him was their intention. It had even occurred to Gerald that they might not be able to sell their lots and the development might come to nothing in the end. So until some villa-owning holidaymaker told him to clear off out of his front garden, Gerald would continue to prune and look after as many trees as were left standing.

Now he heard Fergus's voice in the nearly still morning air. That breezy, chummy, confident waffle, though he couldn't make out the words. Gerald immediately grabbed his small pruning saw and the large, worn straw basket he'd brought with him, and scuttled away, his espadrilles making no sound in the brush. He moved upslope out of the line of sight that Fergus, and whoever was with him, would have across the property toward the town and the sea view. He was well up the hill among the prickly pear and the cork oak when he saw them below: Fergus, in Panama hat, and a large man wearing a blue shirt the size of a bedspread. Gerald crouched and watched. They continued a short distance and stopped. Fergus pointed and gestured around him with expansive enthusiasm. Gerald could see from his stolid posture and cursory glances around him that the man in the shirt was unimpressed. Good. He made only a few comments before turning away, leaving Fergus to follow him back the way they'd come, still chattering.

Gerald moved along the hill above them, keeping them in view until they disappeared below the house. He waited until he heard the Range Rover moving down the drive.

He found Aegina painting in her studio off the kitchen.

"Who was Fergus with?" Gerald asked. Rivulets of sweat marked the dust along his temples and neck.

"Some film producer off a yacht in the port. He was showing him the land. Did you talk to them?"

"No. I went to ground."

Aegina laughed. "Of course you did."

Gerald looked at the canvas on her easel. It was a view of where he had just come from: the olive trees, the land falling away to the sea, the distant ridgeline to the north. Aegina had taped a color photograph of the scene to the easel above the canvas. "It's beautiful," he said.