“He wrote a book, originally called American Hero. Which became the movie Wag the Dog, with Hoffman, De Niro, and a bunch of other cool people, including Willie Nelson. The movie was low budget by Hollywood standards; twenty million. In the first quarter it grossed forty million. Beinhart, who has monkey points, gets his first statement. Do you want to guess?”

“Zero? They claim it made no money?”

“Please. You have no respect for Hollywood creativity. It was twenty million in the hole. A few years later, as it continued to play around the world, it got to forty million in the hole. He claims that the last time he asked, which was about eighteen years after it was released, it had reached sixty million in the hole.

“Beinhart was unlucky. He couldn’t afford a few hundred thousand for lawyers and forensic accountants. But he was lucky. He’d read the book…Fatal Subtraction…about Buchwald, Murphy, and Paramount, as part of his research for the novel, and knew he had to be satisfied with the up-front money, which he was, and not to be surprised or disappointed that they were liars and thieves and there was no back end.”

“What does that have to do with you and me?”

“And Maddie,” I said. “After all, we’re acting on her behalf.”

“And Maddie.”

“How do we enforce the back end? I certainly can’t do what Buchwald did, hire hot-shit lawyers, take you into court, and have the judge force you to pay me for an illegal action.”

“You have my word…”

“Please,” I said. “Even if Maddie had showed up alone, as agreed, with twenty thousand, as agreed, instead of you with half that amount, I would want to find some way to insure the back end.”

“I simply wanted to meet you, have a better sense, and establish a working relationship,” she said. “I thought it reasonable to break things into a couple of extra steps.”

“Don’t be defensive,” I said, adding with an offensive sneer, “You are what you are,” and then switched back to my let-us-reason-together voice. “The other solution would be to raise the front end high enough that I’d accept the fact that you were unlikely to pay the back end.”

“How much would that be?”

“Originally the back end was going to be a hundred, on top of the twenty, up front. Since then, we’ve had some problems. Also, Maddie said her husband was worth ten or twelve million…and the sense I got from her voice and her manner was that she was coming up with the lowest number she thought she could get away with…but even if she was being honest and accurate and even if you’re getting 30 percent for your litigation finance…there’s more than enough at stake for me to raise my price.”

“How much?”

“Let’s say two-fifty,” I said.

“To be clear, two hundred and fifty thousand?”