The Going Rate Read Online Free Page B

things that escaped day-to-day notice. Behind the crane swivelling slowly overhead somewhere near Capel Street were light-grey clouds, like a cannonade from some long-ago naval battle. The sky to the south was parchment – no: pearl.
    The cobblestone lane was new. The old one had been torn up last year and had been meticulously replaced. Brickwork had been repointed, pipes proudly exposed. Copies of recently discovered daguerrotypes of Dublin from the 1840s and 1850s had been placed in salient windows of the restaurant.
    Sa Bhaile – My Place. Staff would speak Gaelic if requested, was the boast, or the “brand,” but diners could expect a savvy, cool dining experience in what had been a livery, a storehouse, a bicycle factory, and then lain abandoned for decades, and was now a backdrop for celebrity snapshots. The lettering on the restaurant sign was harsh modern, doubtless intended as a statement to that effect.
    But he really should be thinking about his pitch, the three points, and no more. Three was a natural number for people to remember, a trinity, just like the old Irish proverbs. Breen sure as hell wasn’t one to take notes. He didn’t have to. The higher up in the firmament you were, the more causal things seemed to be. A whim, a mood, a coincidence, pure luck: they were the reigning deities in the world of film. The true talent had never been the actual writing.
    Fanning had been to book launches here. No-one he had met those times seemed to be interested in the fact that ten years ago this area was where you’d come to fence stuff, to rent a gun, to buy heroin.
    Oh oh: Breen had spotted him. He held up his hand, his fingers spread, and then detached the mobile slightly from his ear. He issued the smile and the eye-roll that Fanning had predicted, and went back to his call. Fanning had mustered a smile, and he slowly nodded his understanding.
    His chest felt overfilled. He took a few steps toward the door of the restaurant, and made a last effort to get his thoughts in order. With Breen you basically had one minute, and it had to be clear and simple, the less said the better. Breen wouldn’t admit to calling it a pitch, of course. It was always “a chat,” or a “bring me up to date.” He wanted to just gossip, or tell a joke, or drop names and tell anecdotes.
    Fanning let his breath out slowly and drew in another just the same. He was conscious of his smile, and maintaining it. Smiling alone, the act of it, made one relax, he had read.
    Breen knew what the business wanted, network or studio. For one thing, poverty in Ireland didn’t sell anymore. As a matter of fact, Ireland didn’t sell anymore. Anyway, as Fanning well knew, the whole business was full to the gills with talent and writers. A few of the younger ones were smart enough to latch on the foreigner thing, like that Mira’s Story, about the divorcee who emigrates to the wilds of Galway. Light, merry, conflict-of-cultures stuff. Throw in a woman’s empowerment, craggy Irish faces, bleak and rain-swollen bog, and the search-for-home stuff. It wasn’t hard, when you thought about it.
    Fanning strolled to the window display of a new decorative ironworks. A slideshow was projected onto a piece of glass just behind the window of the shop. He’d seen the stuff before, but it was still eye-catching. Pictures and movies seemed to float in the air, like holograms. Celtic designs twirled and shrank, and were morphed into door-knockers. Old photos of Victorian gaslamps dissolved into replicas in front of homes that looked Dublin-ish, or at least the U.K. A hotel balcony from a photo of Joycean Dublin gave way to an exact copy, mounted on a French window of a home with Killiney Bay in the background: “For your Juliet balcony.”
    The show began to loop yet again. Just before Fanning turned away, a logo caught his eye, and he stared more intently as it appeared and grew. It was the Magritte