Free Three Balconies by Bruce Jay Friedman Page A

great novelist Albert P. Weiner. The man who, perhaps unknowingly, had caused Baum such enormous grief, had succumbed to pancreatic failure at the University Hospital of Innsbruck. The obituary was lengthy. It seemed to Baum that it went on forever. At one point, the author threw in a bitter personal note.
    â€œOne of the great literary crimes of the century is that Albert P. Wiener – obviously for political reasons – was denied the Nobel Prize for Literature.”
    Baum wondered about his own obituary. How much space would be allotted to him? Was there any assurance that he would receive more than a brief mention? And would those damnable words – he’d once been “mentioned in the same breath as Wiener” – be repeated?
    A small funeral was scheduled for friends and family, to be followed, weeks later, by a large memorial service for the general public. It seemed unlikely that Baum would be asked to attend the funeral. He made a vague plan to show up at the memorial service and scribbled down some notes, in case he was asked to speak.
    â€œAn unlikely giant has left us,” he would begin.
    But why ‘unlikely?’

    Baum’s eighty-ninth birthday was a week away. After reading the Wiener obituary, he finished his breakfast and took what had now become a long and arduous trek to the shed. Once there, he started an excellent woodfire. In past years, with nothing better to do, he had become an expert on kindling. With some effort, he took his old Remington portable typewriter down from the top shelf of a closet. His daughters had ridiculed him for not switching to a computer, but for many years, he’d felt he had no use for either machine. Sitting at his desk, he blew on his twisted fingers to try to get some blood flowing. His back ached and he could feel his breakfast, undigested, in what felt like a package beneath his ribs. Simple breathing was a hardship. Only one eye functioned properly. But Wiener was gone. Now he could focus. Now he could begin.

A Pebble In His Shoe
    THE HOTEL, in the south of France, was Egyptian in motif and baffling in its design, as if the architect had proceeded with his first draft and been wildly off target. Corridors that seemed intriguing suddenly turned dark and came to an abrupt ending. The bar was out on a weird limb. Only with luck could Jack find his room without assistance. At first, he took on some of the responsibility for his confusion, assuming that the hotel was probably brilliant in its conception and it was his fault for not getting the hang of it. He then learned that a group of Lebanese had lost millions on its wild and purposeless construction and had finally thrown up their hands and sold it back to the French at enormous loss. The new owners, offering immaculate service, caviar and fresh croissants, were inching their way toward a profit.
    He had come to France for some talks with a film actor he admired named Marty Hatcher. Brilliant in his career in England, Hatcher had performed adequately in American films and had gotten rich. He continued to be brilliant in flashes, and it was the flashes that Jack remembered – a lopsided smile, a ridiculous walk, the perfect mispronunciation of a familiar word. Which was not why Jack made the trip. A French producer had paid for it; considerable sums would come Jack’s way if the proposed film got off the ground.
    A nice bonus was that he liked Hatcher, although their first meeting had begun ominously. Much like the design of Jack’s hotel, the notion he proposed to Hatcher had been wildly off target. Jack saw himself as having made a wasted trip and fell into
general despair. In this situation, another star might have been cruel and let him flounder. But Hatcher had gently eased him onto safe and comfortable ground. In essence, what they would do was keep the outlines of Jack’s idea and drop the politics (an irritant to the non-political Hatcher). And they would, of