The Talisman

agency,’ Phil said to him in their senior year. ‘It’s nutty as hell and our parents will hate it, but maybe we’ll make it work. So we starve for a couple of years.’
    Phil Sawyer, Sloat had learned since their freshman year, was not rich after all. He just looked rich.
    ‘And when we can afford him, we’ll get Tommy to be our lawyer. He’ll be out of law school by then.’
    ‘Sure, okay,’ Sloat had said, thinking that he could stop that one when the time came. ‘What should we call ourselves?’
    ‘Anything you like. Sloat and Sawyer? Or should we stick to the alphabet?’
    ‘Sawyer and Sloat, sure, that’s great, alphabetical order,’ Sloat said, seething because he imagined that his partner had euchred him into forever suggesting that he was somehow secondary to Sawyer.
    Both sets of parents did hate the idea, as Phil had predicted, but the partners in the infant talent agency drove to Los Angeles in the old DeSoto (Morgan’s, another demonstration of how much Sawyer owed him), set up an office in a North Hollywood building with a happy population of rats and fleas, and started hanging around the clubs, passing out their spandy-new business cards. Nothing – nearly four months of total failure. They had a comic who got too drunk to be funny, a writer who couldn’t write, a stripper who insisted on being paid in cash so that she could stiff her agents. And then late one afternoon, high on marijuana and whiskey, Phil Sawyer had gigglingly told Sloat about the Territories.
    ‘You know what I can do, you ambitious so-and-so? Oh, can I travel, partner. All the way.’
    Shortly after that, both of them travelling now, Phil Sawyer met a rising young actress at a studio party and within an hour had their first important client. And she had three friends similarly unhappy with their agents. And one of the friends had a boyfriend who had actually written a decent filmscript and needed an agent, and the boyfriend had a boyfriend . . . Before their third year was over, they had a new office, new apartments, a slice of the Hollywood pie. The Territories, in a fashion that Sloat accepted but never understood, had blessed them.
    Sawyer dealt with the clients; Sloat with the money, the investments, the business side of the agency. Sawyer spent money – lunches, airplane tickets – Sloat saved it, which was all the justification he needed to skim a little of the cream off the top. And it was Sloat who kept pushing them into new areas, land development, real estate, production deals. By the time Tommy Woodbine arrived in Los Angeles, Sawyer & Sloat was a five-million-dollar business.
    Sloat discovered that he still detested his old classmate; Tommy Woodbine had put on thirty pounds, and looked and acted, in his blue three-piece suits, more than ever like a judge. His cheeks were always slightly flushed (alcoholic? Sloat wondered), his manner still kindly and ponderous. The world had left its marks on him – clever little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the eyes themselves infinitely more guarded than those of the gilded boy at Yale. Sloat understood almost at once, and knew that Phil Sawyer would never see it unless he were told, that Tommy Woodbine lived with an enormous secret: whatever the gilded boy might have been, Tommy was now a homosexual. Probably he’d call himself gay. And that made everything easier – in the end, it even made it easier to get rid of Tommy.
    Because queers are always getting killed, aren’t they? And did anybody really want a two-hundred-and-ten-pound pansy responsible for bringing up a teenage boy? You could say that Sloat was just saving Phil Sawyer from the posthumous consequences of a serious lapse of judgment. If Sawyer had made Sloat the executor of his estate and the guardian of his son, there would have been no problems. As it was, the murderers from the Territories – the same two who had bungled the abduction of the boy – had blasted through a stoplight and nearly been arrested before they could return home.
    Things all would have been so much simpler, Sloat reflected for perhaps the thousandth time, if Phil Sawyer had never married. If no Lily, no Jack; if no Jack, no problems. Phil may never even have looked at the reports about Lily Cavanaugh’s early life Sloat had compiled: they listed where and how often and with whom, and should have killed that romance as readily as the black van turned Tommy Woodbine into a lump on the road. If Sawyer read those