"Have you already sold off all your lots?"

"Oh, no. No, not quite. We have some interest, people I know in London have put in, but yes, still room to get in."

"And must you build all your houses to plan," asked Szabo, "or could one purchase several lots from you and build something larger?"

"Ah. Well, I'm sure that could happen. As long as the house and the grounds were in keeping with the style of the surrounding development. Which is certainly extremely attractive. More like something you'd see on the Cote d'Azur."

"It sounds marvelous. Could you show me the site?"

"Absolutely," said Fergus. "Whenever you like."

"Tomorrow morning? Ten o'clock?"

"Certainly. I'll pick you up at your boat."

"Fabuleux," said Szabo. He briefly glanced down at the board again, threw the dice, moved, then looked up toward the yoga group under the pines. He found Lulu a compelling sight. They had been introduced before the session began and over the last hour he had watched her work through a sequence of repeating yet continually evolving movements, like the ringing of changes with church bells. He was mesmerized by Lulu's astonishing flexibility, evidently verging on double-jointedness, and her slim, tautly muscled form, smooth brown skin that began to glisten as the class went on, the thick cord of white hair worn in a long braid bound loosely at her neck, the strongly etched dark eyebrows that contrasted with her white hair, her fluidity of motion, her liquid calm. An extraordinary woman. How odd, surprising, that she, this radiant graceful creature, so English, so old world in accent and affect, of such a distinct physical presence, was the mother of the insecure and twitchy Luc, who spoke French with fluent argot.

Lulu liked to finish her yoga sessions with short philosophical readings. She had lately been thumbing through an apposite-seeming volume titled The Awakening of Intelligence, by Jiddu Krishnamurti, left by a guest in one of the rooms. She found much of it incontrovertibly silly, but she liked the author's name and the promise of the title. The cover photograph of the author, however, gave her pause. Krishnamurti was undoubtedly holy-looking, undeniably attractive in that Indian way that she herself frankly couldn't bear but others were so impressed by, a sort of Beatle Gandhi. But if he was so enlightened, why the elaborate, swirling comb-over (unquestionably molded and controlled with hair spray) to conceal his obvious baldness? What a bald admission of self-consciousness and insecurity placed like a beacon of contradiction on the cover of a book touting inner truth or whatever it was. But the readings struck, she thought, the right note, forming a suitable bridge between the stirring and release of physical and spiritual energy and a subsequent gin and tonic.

While her acolytes lay flat on their mats, breathing with the trees sighing delicately above them, Lulu opened the book at a dog-eared page and began to read in her clear voice that carried across the pool and the patio to the bar with the modulation and accent of old radio clips: "'The old culture is almost dead and yet we are clinging to it. . . . Unless there is a deep psychological revolution, mere reformation on the periphery will have little effect. This psychological revolution . . . is possible through meditation. . . .'"

Soon the yoga practitioners came down to the patio with their mats and bags, breathing and stepping like dancers, glowing with perspiration and inner radiance. They settled at several tables. Dominick played bartender and brought them drinks.

Szabo stood, graciously thanking Cassian for such sport. "You will take a check tomorrow, I hope?" He had lost twelve hundred pounds to the Englishman.

"Sure," said Cassian. "Unless you sail off first."

Szabo laughed appreciatively. He crossed the patio and joined his wife, her sister, and Lulu and the other woman at their table. He arranged the sarong neatly about his legs as he sat down. "And how did you all enjoy the yoga?"

"Very pleasant," said Veronique Szabo stonily.

"So it appeared," said Szabo. "It's a rare spot you have here, Lulu. Your own little Alhambra."

"Hardly that," said Lulu, "but it has become an enclave of sorts. One feels one can leave the world outside, to some extent."

"Thank God!" said Sarah Bavister. She was standing, pulling back her hair. She was shaped like a pouter pigeon, small and delicate but with disproportionately large breasts on top of a protuberant chest. "I've been coming here for years. The rest of the world becomes more and more horrible, but here it's always exactly the same. Just like Lulu."

"Darling Sarah," said Lulu.

"Do you take outside guests for meals?" asked Szabo. "Because we would love to join you for dinner tonight. We are four, including your brilliant son."

"We'd be very happy to have you," said Lulu. "I'll tell the cook."

"And will you please be our guests for lunch aboard Dolphin tomorrow?" Szabo looked around the table.

"Ooh, yes, please!" said Sarah. "It's such a fantastic-looking boat. I'm dying to come aboard and have a look."

"Yes, thank you," said Dominick.

"All of you, yes?" Szabo's gaze stopped at Lulu.

"It's very kind of you," she said, smiling pleasantly, standing up. "Now I must go see Claire about dinner. We sit down at nine."

Szabo watched her for a moment as she padded away on bare feet. Then he turned around in his chair to face the two men still at the corner table by the bar. "Gentlemen, you'll come to lunch with us tomorrow aboard the yacht, I hope?"

"Thank you! Love to," said Fergus.

Cassian simply smiled, thinly, acknowledging the invitation.

Szabo and his group finished their drinks and left to walk back to the port along the sea.

Fergus remained at Cassian's table.

"Do you play?" asked Cassian, setting up the board.

Fergus laughed. "Not in your league."

"Oh, don't worry about that," said Cassian. "We can play a game for fun."

It didn't sound like fun to Fergus. "Actually, I should push off pretty soon too." But he sat and toyed with his drink. He'd heard of course that Ollorenshaw had been in prison for financial irregularities at a rarefied level. It was practically a credential. Fergus was intrigued by him.

"Your property plan sounds good," said Cassian, arranging the backgammon pieces.

"Yes, I think so," Fergus said cheerfully. "Should do jolly well."

"Do you think you could have gone for a denser development of the property?"

Cassian was gazing at him like a lizard with heavy-lidded eyes through the yellow lenses of his glasses.

"Well, of course, we talked about it. It would have meant a lot more work. More money up front. And then a much bigger impact on the surrounding properties. Quite frankly, I don't think we'd have got the go-ahead from old Gerald if we were looking to do anything more ambitious."

"I see," said Cassian. He rattled the dice in the cup and threw them down onto the board. A three and a one.

"Can't tempt you?"

"Oh, all right," said Fergus. "Just one game, then. I have to get into town pretty soon."

Luc didn't hang around after walking Szabo and his wife and her sister along the shore road to the Rocks and making introductions, pecking his mother's cheek. He went into the garage and wheeled the old tinny Rieju Jaca out into the dusty street and jumped on the kick-starter. The bike fired right away. Gracias, Vicente. A thousand pesetas when I see you, amigo.

Luc cruised back to the port to pick up Gaspard, Dolphin's Guadeloupean Creole chef, who needed to replenish the ship's stores. He drove through Cala Marsopa with Gaspard on the back of the bike, pointing out the fruit and vegetable markets. He dropped him at the new supermarket behind the plaza.

"They'll deliver to the boat," Luc told him. "Most of the mercados too. Or they can call you a taxi to take you back to the port. The taxis will drive down along the quay to the boat."

"Formidable," said Gaspard. He cut an exotic figure among the doughy white European tourists in department store summer wear. Six-foot-four, skinny, cafe-au-lait complexion with pouting lips, enormous and frankly inquisitive, frankly gay blue eyes, kinky black ponytail. He wore a billowing white linen shirt and red capri pants, a tasseled Moroccan Berber satchel slung over his shoulders. "Merci, mon cher," he said, blowing Luc a kiss and waving him away.

Luc idled the bike through town. The streets, now mostly macadamized, built up, newly fronted and sidewalked, still took him, by no matter what route, along inexorable azimuths backward into the past. He looked as always for a certain head, hair, body shape, general aspects that he wished or feared would suddenly shift and lock into vivid particularity. Most of all he wanted to see her face.

He stopped at the tabacos near the port, once a dark hole-in-the-wall selling cigarettes and loteria tickets with toothless fishermen sitting on chairs outside, now a smart glass-windowed retail space that also sold olivewood chessboards, botas, castanets, small felt-covered bulls, and bullfight posters. The fishermen and their chairs were gone. He bought a pack of Gitanes, and said bona tarda to the aged crone who no longer recognized him.

She was standing outside, looking at the Rieju, a little boy holding her hand, when he came out.

"It is yours," said Aegina, "I thought so."

She looked at him calmly, a small smile-he could read nothing else. The kid was dark-haired, olive-skinned, like Aegina, gazing up at him with large brown eyes.

"And this is yours?" Luc asked.

The kid moved behind Aegina when he saw Luc looking at him.

"Yes. This is Charlie. Charlie, will you say hello to Luc? He's an old friend of mine."

The little boy remained behind his mother, clutching her thigh.

"He's beautiful, what I can see of him. Which is that he looks like you."

"Luc, I'm so sorry about your father," she said. Earlier in the year, Luc had sent her a letter, addressed to C'an Cabrer in Mallorca because he didn't know her London address, telling her that his father had died of metastasized prostate cancer, a day before his sixty-first birthday. "I liked him very much when we met in Paris. I'm so sorry."

"He liked you too," Luc said. "And you heard about Teddy?" One of their cohort of childhood friends whose parents lived in or returned seasonally to Mallorca, whom they'd known and played with most summers as long as they could remember, Teddy Trelawney had overdosed on smack and died in New York that winter.

"Yes, I heard," said Aegina, glancing down at Charlie, who started pulling his mother's arm, holding on to her hand with both of his. "I can't believe that, how he got to such a place. Teddy had a such a sweet and beautiful nature."

"I'm sure he was sweet to the end," said Luc. Her hair was shorter, shoulder length now, still deeply dark, black except in the sun, and otherwise she looked much as she had the last time he'd seen her, like this on the street four years ago-better, he decided: there was more of her in that face now. "You look good," he said.

"You do too. You look thinner."

"I've been running. I ran a marathon in April."

"I can't imagine that."

Charlie was now tugging hard. "Wait a minute, Charlie," she said. "Are you still in Paris?"

"Yeah."

Her arm was stretched sideways, Charlie was leaning perilously away from her. "I want to go," he said.

"Yes, we're going, Charlie," said Aegina. She looked at Luc, the kind of look that conveyed in less than a second an acknowledgment of the bildungsroman of their shared history.

"It's good to see you. Bye."

"Bye," he said, feeling something like a bowling ball in his chest. He watched them walk away down the checker-textured sidewalk. Charlie had let her hand go, but now Luc saw Aegina's hand and the boy's move toward each other reflexively until they clasped.

Luc stuffed the cigarettes into his shirt pocket and climbed aboard the Rieju and rode away. It was after five, people were coming off the beaches. The streets were mobbed with strangers, British, Scandinavian, German tourists familiar with the town, owning it as if it were now theirs as it had once been his.

Three.

A man named Block traveling with his wife steps off a train while it's stopped in a station somewhere in Europe. He enters the station cafe to buy a newspaper. Inside, an elderly woman stumbles. Block catches her, she clings to him, saying something he can't quite hear. People in the bar crowd around them to help. Block tries to get away-his train is leaving-but now the elderly woman is clutching fiercely at his lapels, babbling something into his ear with feverish insistence. Others support the woman, lay her down, and Block pulls free. He runs outside into pelting rain, but his train pulls away without him.

Soaking wet, he goes into the station, asks the woman in the ticket booth if he can get word to his wife on the train. She shrugs, she doesn't think so. Block asks when the next train leaves. Not for another two hours. He walks back into the cafe. The old woman has died-she lies on the ground, quiet and still. People have pulled back, buzzing about what has happened, waiting for the police, ambulance. Block orders a coffee. As he drinks it, shivering in his wet clothes, a man appears at his elbow to thank him for trying to help the old woman. He did nothing, says Block, he was simply there when she stumbled. The man sees Block is cold and wet and buys him a Cognac. Gratefully, Block sips it. She appeared to be saying something to you, says the man who bought him the Cognac. I wasn't listening, says Block, I was trying to get back out to my train. You must have heard something, the man says. Now Block looks at him, sensing, for the first time, something other than friendliness- "But really, come on, Luc. We need to know," Szabo said. "The whole movie turns on this, what she says to him. We don't need to know this?"

"Gabor, we will know-eventually. Yes, of course we need to know," Luc said carefully, respectfully. "But this is kind of the point: it doesn't really matter what the old woman says. He doesn't know, we don't know-that's good: tension, suspense. All we, and he, know is that these other guys think he knows, so they come after him. It's the MacGuffin. I thought you liked that, the fact that we don't know."

"Yes, yes, of course I like it. I like it. I love it. But will the audience like it? Will my distributors like it? Will they understand that this is a piece of movie cleverness that they must accept? I'm not so sure."

"But it's also what's existential about this story, Gabor. It plunges Block into a labyrinth of meaningless detail and confusion-I mean, there's a logic behind it all for Yatsevich and his thugs and we make that clear-but it's so wild and confusing for Block that he begins to question the structure and meaning of everything in his life. That's why he changes."

"And he gets the girl," said Szabo.

"Yes. But that's not the change," said Luc, gently. "However, as he changes, she increasingly believes in Block, so she reflects his new view of himself."

Szabo laughed. "It's not that complicated. Is not his new view of himself that she likes. Is his cock."

They'd started in Paris, meeting in Szabo's home, in cafes, over dinners at Brasserie Balzar, where Szabo and Veronique liked to eat several nights a week. Szabo's wife was nearly always there during their talks, a silent, uninvolved presence who would concentrate on her food or read a book, apparently as unengaged in their discussions as a dog-until she spoke.

The screenplay was tight before Szabo ever saw it. Luc had struggled to make it work like a watch. There were no extraneous parts. It moved fast from the station bar to the second train, where Block meets the girl and they jump on a bus eluding the man who bought him the Cognac, to the house on the lake and the long rowboat ride through the fog and finally the dingy office and the photographs of the old woman as a young girl holding hands with the man, the industrialist, who was her father. Luc had made the locations purposely vague, bland, unidentifiable-like the chilly Clermont-Ferrand of eric Rohmer's Ma Nuit chez Maud that Luc loved so much. Apart from suggesting that this could happen anywhere to anyone, it also meant the film could be made wherever a producer decided to shoot it, wherever he could make his deals and wanted to spend his money. This pragmatic approach had informed every decision Luc had made in constructing his story. This one would get made.

Szabo loved it. He raved about it. He got it: the existential odyssey that propels Block toward an understanding of the hollowness of his life and a move toward a more authentic one. He had bought an eighteen-month option on the screenplay with an option to renew for a further eighteen months. They talked about cast.

"I see Roy Scheider," said Szabo, early on, peering sharply at Luc to convey the acuity of his vision. As they discussed the screenplay, Szabo started calling Block "Roy," describing how Roy steals a car from the station parking lot at night- "But Block doesn't steal a car," Luc said. "Block wouldn't do that. He wouldn't know how to steal a car. That's not his character. They take the bus-"

"Luc, Luc." Szabo waved a forked morsel of veal, smiling indulgently, paternally. They were eating dinner at Balzar. "Roy Scheider doesn't take the bus. Who takes the bus in the movies? You have to wait in line with women who are bringing home chickens for dinner. With schoolchildren. The action stops. No. It's impossible. Roy Scheider can't stop to wait for a bus."

"What if it's not Roy Scheider?" The actor's hard, angular features were not what Luc had imagined for his softer, more physically vulnerable protagonist, a man with a face that could illuminate doubt and fear.

"Who, then?"

"Well," carefully now, "I don't know . . . how about Albert Finney?"

"Albert Finney? Albert Finney doesn't open a movie. I don't get my distributors with Albert Finney. Who knows Albert Finney?"

"He's a great actor. He's got a human face."

"Luc. Albert Finney-who is this? English character actor, good for five minutes in the whole movie, eight seconds at a time, as bureaucrat or heavy, to give a note of class. Everybody in the world knows Roy Scheider. The French Connection. Jaws. For this, they know Roy Scheider in Finland, in Africa, in the jungle towns in Borneo where every week they paint the movie posters badly by hand as mural on the cinema wall and you see this great big Roy Scheider with eyes popping out of his head like a squid being chased by a giant shark. And guess what"-Szabo pushed the forkful of veal into his mouth and smiled knowingly, openmouthed, at Luc as he chewed, audibly grinding the meat to pulp with his molars-"Roy's cheap. I talk to his agent. He wants his own movie. He doesn't want to be Gene Hackman's buddy or second violin to the shark. He wants to be a star all by himself. To get the girl, not the fish! And I guarantee to you that he will read your screenplay and see that it is tailor-made for him, with a few changes. Like he doesn't sit and wait for a bus. Nobody takes a bus."

"Cary Grant took a bus in North by Northwest."

"You put Cary Grant in a wheelbarrow and everything in the movie looks fantastic. Not Roy Scheider. He needs a fast car and Raquel Welch in the passenger seat. Then you got a movie."

"Raquel Welch?"