And he did not have the five — he feared that this particular five was forever out of range. Other means must be found to keep the wolf from the two doors of his coupe. Pat left the lot with despair in his heart, stopping only momentarily to get gas for the car and gin for himself, possibly the last of many drinks they had had together.

Next morning he awoke with an aggravated problem. For once he did not want to go to the studio. It was not merely Gyp McCarthy he feared — it was the whole corporate might of a moving picture company, nay of an industry. Actually to have interfered with the shooting of a movie was somehow a major delinquency, compared to which expensive fumblings on the part of producers or writers went comparatively unpunished.

On the other hand zero hour for the car was the day after tomorrow and Louie, the studio bookie, seemed positively the last resource and a poor one at that.

Nerving himself with an unpalatable snack from the bottom of the bottle, he went to the studio at ten with his coat collar turned up and his hat pulled low over his ears. He knew a sort of underground railway through the make-up department and the commissary kitchen which might get him to Louie’s suite unobserved.

Two studio policemen seized him as he rounded the corner by the barber shop.

‘Hey, I got a pass!’ he protested, ‘Good for a week — signed by Jack Berners.’

‘Mr Berners specially wants to see you.’

Here it was then — he would be barred from the lot.

‘We could sue you!’ cried Jack Berners. ‘But we couldn’t recover.’

‘What’s one take?’ demanded Pat. ‘You can use another.’

‘No we can’t — the camera jammed. And this morning Lily Keatts took a plane to England. She thought she was through.’

‘Cut the scene,’ suggested Pat — and then on inspiration, ‘I bet I could fix it for you.’

‘You fixed it, all right!’ Berners assured him. ‘If there was any way to fix it back I wouldn’t have sent for you.’

He paused, looked speculatively at Pat. His buzzer sounded and a secretary’s voice said ‘Mr Hilliard’.

‘Send him in.’

George Hilliard was a huge man and the glance he bent upon Pat was not kindly. But there was some other element besides anger in it and Pat squirmed doubtfully as the two men regarded him with almost impersonal curiosity — as if he were a candidate for a cannibal’s frying pan.

‘Well, goodbye,’ he suggested uneasily.

‘What do you think, George?’ demanded Berners.

‘Well —’ said Hilliard, hesitantly, ‘we coul............