Enderby smiled. "A lot," he said. The money part of his brain grew suddenly delirious, lifelong abstainer fed with sudden gin. He trembled as with the prospect of sexual outrage. "A thousand dollars," he said. They stared at him. "There," he said. And then: "Somewhere in that region anyway. I'm not what you'd call a greedy man."

"We might manage five hundred," Schaumwein's assistant-friend said. "On delivery, of course. Provided that it's what might be termed satisfactory."

"Seven hundred and fifty," Enderby said. "I'm not what you'd call a greedy man."

"It's not an original," Mr. Schaumwein said. "You mentioned some guy called Hopkins that wrote the book. Who is he, where is he, who do I see about the rights?"

"Hopkins," Enderby said, "died in 1889. His poems were published in 1918. The Wreck of the Deutschland is out of copyright."

"I think," Mr. Schaumwein said carefully, "we'll have two more scatches on the racks."

What, after Mr. Schaumwein had gone back to the Kasbah and then presumably home to Chisel Productions, was to surprise Enderby was that the project was to be taken seriously presumably. For a letter came from the friend-assistant, name revealed as Martin Droeshout (familiar vaguely to Enderby in some vague picture connection or other), confirming that, for $750.00, Enderby would deliver a treatment for a film tentatively entitled The Wreck of the Deutschland, based on a story by Hopkins, which story their researchers had not been able to bring to light despite prolonged research, had Enderby got the name right, but it didn't matter as subject was in public domain. Enderby presumed that the word treatment was another word for shooting script (a lot of film men had been to his bar at one time or another, so the latter term was familiar to him). He had even looked at the shooting script of a film in which a heavy though not explicit sexual sequence had actually been shot, at midnight with spotlights and a humming generator truck, on the beach just near to his beach cafe-restaurant, La Belle Mer. So, while his boys snored or writhed sexually with each other during the siesta, he got down to typewriter-pecking out his cinematisation of a great poem, delighting in such curt visual directives as VLS, CU, and so on, though not always clearly understanding what they meant.