‘And I’m him now. These hands are his hands, feel them? This is his body hard on yours, feel the little badges you admired, cutting into you. They hurt, don’t they? Scratch … and the buttons on that tight tunic, feel them too?’ His boots against your legs, pushing you wide for him, come on open wide, wide! Pretend. Leni! Pretend! It is unreal, all unreal things are real, you said. What is he like beneath that smooth white cloth, what do you invent him to be like? Crushing you down: your hands are on his back, I can feel them pressing him down on you, they slide lower, that’s right, let them go, down, down, over the big belt, over his hard buttocks. Oh yes! Caress him, hold him tighter and tighter, grinding into you like this and this and this. He is strong, German, your blood, your heritage, push to him, push to him … that’s it, that’s right, my little whore … he is taking you, taking you, taking you …’

She tore her head away from his hands, rose high to reach his thrusting hips, cried out, beating clenched fists wildly against his back, her voice rough and harsh. ‘No! No! No! Don’t let him! Don’t let him! Let it be you, let it be you … let it be you!’

Archie had no fixed idea of what a Film Producer would look like. As far as he could remember he had never even met one, but from what he had read and from what he had heard, here and there, and without much interest for it was not a part of his world, he gathered that they must all be what his father had called ‘Jew boys’. Plump, small, ringed hands, cunning eyes: like toads, from some unpronounceable place in Central Europe. Zigeuner Barons, he would venture, robbers who had fled the ghettos of Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest, or Berlin, looting and plundering on their way, stealing wantonly from the Classics and the Bible, cribbing from the Classical Composers and turning the ugly results into a messy, indigestible porridge of nonsense which, with much glitter and gloss and a shrewd, if deathly, vulgarity, they would serve up to the greedy Masses accompanied by orchestras of soaring violins. Those were Film Producers. Of course, he reasoned, not all ‘Jew boys’ were like that. Some could appear to be quite different; they might have fair hair and skins, even red hair. Some altered their names, renounced their faith and married into some of the very best families who had, unhappily, fallen upon hard times financially. But wherever you looked, if you looked carefully enough, you would find that the common factor which they all shared was money. So one had to be on one’s guard at all times, for one could so easily be coerced or bribed, and he was determined that it should not happen to him over the heavy script that lay upon his elegant knees. For although it was surprisingly far more literate than he had imagined, it contained a grave error of fact which he would never, under any circumstances endorse, no matter what he was offered or how this Grottorosso fellow tried to persuade him to put his name on what they called ‘the credits’.