"I didn't mean that."

You can't expect me to speak ill of my employer." Again there was that dimly seen glimpse of white teeth.

"Well, that's one way of answering my question. But, well, look, the bloke must be loony-or is that an offensive term?"

"Only to psychiatrists. I don't speak to them. Loony's fine by me. But I'd remind you that Mr. Gerran has a very distinguished record."

"As a loony?"

"That, too. But also as a film-maker, a producer."

"What kind of producer would take a film unit up to Bear Island with winter coming on?"

"Mr. Gerran wants realism."

"Mr. Gerran wants his head examined. Has he any idea what it's like up there at this time of year?"

"He's also a man with a dream."

"No place for dreamers in the Barents Sea. How the Americans ever managed to put a man on the moon-"

"Our friend Otto isn't an American. He's a central European. If you want the makers of dreams or the peddlers of dreams there's the place to End them-among the headwaters of the Danube."

"And the biggest rogues and confidence men in Europe?"

"You can't have everything."

"He's a long way from the Danube."

'Otto had to leave in a great hurry at a time when a large number of people had to leave in a great hurry. Year before the war, that was. Found his way to America-where else-then to Hollywood-again, where else?

Say what you like about Otto-and I'm afraid a lot of people do just that you have to admire his recuperative powers. He'd left a thriving film business behind him in Vienna and arrived in California with what he stood up in."

"That's not so little."

It was then. I've seen pictures. No greyhound, but still about a hundred pounds short of what he is today. Anyway, inside just a few years chiefly , I'm told, by switching at the psychologically correct moment from anti-Nazism to anti-Communism-Otto prospered mightily in the American film industry on the strength of a handful of nauseatingly superpatriotic pictures, which had the critics in despair and the audiences in raptures.