"The Manhattan office, darling."

"Metro has an office here?"

"Sure. All the studios do. Oh, the East Coast office wants to rip the throat out of the West Coast office and vice versa but they're still part of the same company. They're that big building on Central Park West. You must've seen it."

"Oh, like I ever go uptown."

Awesome.

The corporate office building of the Entertainment Corporation of America, proud owner of Metropolitan Pictures.

Forty stories overlooking Central Park. A single company. Rune couldn't imagine having twenty stories of fellow workers above you and twenty stories below. (She tried to imagine forty stories of Washington Square Video, filled with Tonys and Eddies and Frankie Greeks. It was scary.)

She wondered if all the Metro employees ate together in a single cafeteria? Did they all go on a company picnic, taking over Central Park for the day?

Waiting for the guard to get off the phone, she also wondered if someone would see her and think she was an actress and maybe pull her onto a soundstage and throw a script into her hand…

Though as she flipped through the company's annual report she realized that that probably wouldn't be happening because this wasn't the filmmaking part of the studio. The New York office of Metro did only financing, licensing, advertising, promotion, and public relations.

No casting or filming. But that was all right; her life was a little too busy just then for a career change that'd take her to Hollywood.

The guard handed her a pass and told her to take the express elevator to thirty-two.

"Express?" Rune said. Grinning. Excellent!

Her ears popped in the absolutely silent, carpeted elevator. In twenty seconds she was stepping off on the thirty-second floor, ignoring the receptionist and walking straight to the ceiling-to-floor window that offered an awesome view of Central Park, Harlem, the Bronx, West-chester, and the ends of the earth.

Rune was hypnotized.

"May I help you?" the receptionist asked three times before Rune turned around.

"If 1 worked here I'd never get any work done," Rune murmured.

"Then you wouldn't be working here very long." Reluctantly she pried herself away from the window. "This is the view you'd have if you flew to work on a pterodactyl." The woman stared. Rune explained, "That's a flying dinosaur." Still silence. Try being adult, Rune warned herself. She smiled. "Hi. My name's Rune. I'm here to see Mr. Weinhoff."

The receptionist looked at a chart on a clipboard. "Follow me." She led her down a quiet corridor.

On the walls were posters of some of the studio's older movies. She paused to touch the crisp, wrinkled paper delicately. Farther down the hall were posters of newer films. The ads for movies hadn't changed much over the years. A sexy picture of the hero or heroine, the title, some really stupid line.

He was looking for peace, she was looking for escape. Together, they found the greatest adventure of their lives.

She'd seen the action movie that line referred to. And if the story had been their greatest adventure, well, then those characters'd been leading some totally bargain-basement lives.

Rune paused for one last aerial view of the Magic Kingdom, then followed the receptionist down a narrow hallway.

Betting herself that Mr. Weinhoff's would be one totally scandalous office. A corner one, looking north and west. With a bar and a couch. Maybe he'd be homesick for California so what he'd insisted they do to keep him happy was to put a lot of palm trees around the room. A marble desk. A leather couch. A bar, of course. Would he offer her a highball? What was a highball exactly?

They turned another corner.

She pictured Weinhoff fat and wearing a three-piece checkered suit, smoking cigars and talking like a baby to movie stars. What if Tom Cruise called while she was sitting in his office? Could she ask to say hello? Hell, yes, she'd ask. Or Robert Duvall! Sam Shepard? Oh, please, please, please…

They turned one more corner and stopped beside a battered Pepsi machine. The receptionist nodded. "There." She turned around.

"Where?" Rune asked, looking around. Confused.

The woman pointed to what Rune thought was a closet, and disappeared.

Rune stepped into the doorway, next to which a tiny sign said S. Weinhoff.

The office, about ten feet by ten, had no windows. It wasn't even ten by ten really, because it was stacked around the perimeter with magazines and clippings and books and posters. The desk-chipped, cigarette-burned wood-was so cluttered and cheap that even the detective with the close-together eyes would've refused to work at it.

Weinhoff looked up from Variety and motioned her in. "So, you're the student, what's the name again? I'm so bad with names."

"Rune."

"Nice name, I like it. Parents were hippies, right? Peace, Love, Sunshine, Aquarius. All that. Can you find a place to sit?"

Well, she got one thing right: he was fat. A ruddy nose and burst vessels in his huge cheeks. A great Santa Glaus-if you could have a Jewish Santa. No checkered suit. No suit at all. Just a polyester shirt, white with brown stripes. A brown tie. Gray slacks.

Rune sat down.

"You want coffee? You're too young to drink coffee, you ask me. 'Course my granddaughter drinks coffee. She smokes too. God forbid that's all. she does. 1 don't approve, but I sin, so how can I cast stones?"

"No, thanks."

"I'll get some, you don't mind." He stepped into the corridor and she saw him making instant coffee at a water dispenser.

So much for the highballs.

He sat back down at his desk and said to her, "So how'd you hear about me?"

"I called the public relations department here?" Her voice rose in a question. "See, I'm in this class-The Roots of Film Noir, it's called-and I'm writing this paper. I had some questions about a film and they said they had somebody on staff who'd been around for a while…"

" 'Around for a while,' I like that. That's a euphemism is what that is."

"And here I am."

"Well, I'll tell you why they sent you to me. You want to know?"

"I'll tell you. What I am is the unofficial studio historian at Metro. Meaning I've been here nearly forty years and if I were making real money or had anything to do with production they'd've fired my butt years ago. But I'm not and I don't so I'm not worth the trouble to boot me out. So I hang around here and answer questions from pretty young students. You don't mind, I say that?"

"Say it all you want."

"Good. Now the message said-do I believe it?- you've got some questions about Manhattan Is My Beat?"

"That's right."

"Well, that's interesting. You see a lot of students or reporters interested in Scorsese, Welles, Hitch. And you can always count on Fassbinder, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola. Three, four years ago we got calls about Cimino. That Heaven's Gate thing. Oh, we got calls! But I don't think anybody's ever done anything about the director of Manhattan Is My Beat. Hal Reinhart. Anyway, I digress. What do you need to know?"

"The movie was true, wasn't it?"

Weinhoff's eyes crinkled. "No, that's the whole point. That's why it's such a big-deal movie. It wasn't shot on sets, it was based on a real crime, it didn't cast Gable, Tracy, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, or any of the other sure-draw stars. You understand? None of the actors that'd guarantee that a film, no matter it was a good film, it was a bad film, that a film opened, you know what I mean, opened!"

"Sure." Rune's pen sped across the pages of a notebook. She'd bought it a half hour before, had written Film Noir 101 on the cover, then smeared the ink with her palm to age it, like a master forger. "It means people go to see it no matter what it's about."