Mishkin supplied the fuller version of his involvement with Bulstrode, and his sad life, not stinting on a description of his own sins, and when he came to his connection with the supposed Miranda Kellogg and his hopes regarding her, Crosetti said, “According to Carolyn she was an actress Shvanov hired to get the manuscript away from you.”

“Yes, I thought it was something like that. Do you…did she say what happened to her?”

“She didn’t know,” said Crosetti shortly and then began to speak about his own family and about movies, ones he loved and ones he wanted to make, and Mishkin seemed remarkably interested, fascinated in fact, with both of these subjects, about what it was like to grow up in a boisterous and happy family, and whether movies really determined our sense of how to behave, and more than that, our sense of what was real.

“Surely not,” Mishkin objected. “Surely it’s the other way around-filmmakers take popular ideas and embody them in films.”

“No, the movies come first. For example, no one ever had a fast-draw face-to-face shoot-out on the dusty Main Street in a western town. It never happened, ever. A screenwriter invented it for dramatic effect. It’s the classic American trope, redemption through violence, and it comes through the movies. There were very few handguns in the real old west. They were expensive and heavy and no one but an idiot would wear them in a side holster. On a horse? When you wanted to kill someone in the Old West, you waited for your chance and shot him in the back, usually with a shotgun. Now we have a zillion handguns because the movies taught us that a handgun is something a real man has to have, and people really kill each other like fictional western gunslingers. And it’s not just thugs. Movies shape everyone’s reality, to the extent that it’s shaped by human action-foreign policy, business, sexual relationships, family dynamics, the whole nine yards. It used to be the Bible but now it’s movies. Why is there stalking? Because we know that the guy should persist and make a fool of himself until the girl admits that she loves him. We’ve all seen it. Why is there date rape? Because the asshole is waiting for the moment when resistance turns to passion. He’s seen Nicole and Reese do it fifty times. We make these little decisions, day by day, and we end up with a world. This one, like it or not.”

“So screenwriters are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.”

“You got it,” said Crosetti. “I mean we’re in a movie now. Why in hell are the two of us waiting in an isolated cabin for a bunch of gangsters? It’s nuts. Why is a hundred-million-dollar manuscript sitting on a table in that isolated cabin? Totally wack. I’ll tell you why. Because we both made a chain of decisions, and each of those decisions was conditioned by a movie theme. When the mysterious girl calls John Cusack and tells him to rescue her, he doesn’t say, ‘Get real, bitch!’ He moves heaven and earth to rescue her, because he knows that’s the script, and here I am, and right next to me is William Hurt, the slightly corrupt, guilty guy, still clinging to decency, but not sure if he wants to live or not and he’s put himself in this dangerous situation for…for what? Oh, there’s his mysterious girl, of course, but mainly it’s self-punishment, a need to have some major explosion to either wipe him out or blow him the hell out of his expensive unsatisfactory life. Stay tuned.”

“William Hurt. That’s not bad.”

“No, and when the gangsters get here, they’ll act like gangsters in the movies, or, and here’s a subtlety that’s not often used, they’ll act the opposite of movie gangsters. That’s the great thing about The Sopranos-movie gangsters pretending to be real gangsters watching movie gangsters and changing their style to be more like the fake ones, but the fact is, it really happens. The one thing you can be sure of is they’re not going to be authentic. There’s no authentic left.”

“Amalie is authentic,” said Mishkin, after a moment.

“Yeah, she is,” Crosetti agreed. “But Amalie’s unplugged from the culture, or maybe she’s plugged into something else, God maybe. But it’s the exception that proves the rule, and notice, she’s not in this movie.”

“No, she’s not. But I’ll tell you one thing: you’re wrong about me. I don’t mean about my character, the William Hurt business, but about what I’m doing here. It’s not just a vague despair. It’s part of a plot.”

“Yeah, but that’s just what I’ve been say-”

“No, not a movie-type plot. A scheme, a device, a manipulation, so that the bad guys get theirs.”

“What is it? The plot, I mean.”

“I’m not going to tell you,” said Mishkin. “I’m going to reveal it when everyone gets here.”

“Jake, that’s the oldest dodge in the book. Will there be redemption by violence after?”

“I certainly hope so. Are you worried?”

“Not in the least. The John Cusack character has to escape and get the girl. You, on the other hand, might not make it.” He yawned vastly and added, “Shit, man, I mean this is fascinating but I’m falling over. It’ll be daylight in a couple of hours and I have to get some sleep. You look pretty beat yourself as a matter of fact.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Mishkin. “There are bedrooms galore upstairs, beds all made, rafts of cozy quilts: make yourself at home.”

He picked a bedroom with a view over the water, kicked off his boots, slipped under the quilt, went out in an instant; and awakened to the coughing roar of a large powerboat engine. He rolled out, scrubbed at his eyes, and went to the window. On the lake someone was inexpertly trying to dock a twenty-eight-foot Bayliner cruiser. They had the canvas top on and the plastic windshields rigged, but Crosetti figured it must still be fairly cold in a trailerable boat like that, designed for summer cruises. The snow had stopped, the sky was pearly bright, and a wind from the east whipped up small whitecaps. The unskilled pilot was trying to bring the boat into the west side of the dock, so of course the wind was blowing him away from it, the craft’s high profile acting as a sail, and he wasn’t giving the boat time to answer the helm, was also gunning the throttle, banging the prow against the dock and bouncing away. He should have just pulled back and gone around to the other side, where the wind would have bedded him up against the rubber fenders with no trouble. So thought Crosetti, who had spent every summer of his boyhood out on Sheepshead Bay with his parents and sisters and assorted cousins, packed dangerously into a twenty-two-foot rental.

Now a man dressed in a leather car coat and city shoes came out of the cabin and went forward, slipping on the wet fiberglass, and he went down sprawling when the boat slammed the dock for the sixth time. Crosetti figured this clown show would take a while, so he used the bathroom, pulled on his boots, made a short cell phone call, and descended to the kitchen. Mishkin was there, drinking coffee.

“They’re here,” said Crosetti, pouring himself a cup. “Pop-Tarts?”

“Yes, my daughter corrupted me when she was small. Have a couple.”

“Thank you,” said Crosetti, putting a pair into the toaster. “Have they managed to dock yet?”

The kitchen window was on the wrong side of the house, but by moving close to it one could just make out the foot of the dock. Mishkin peered past the chintz café curtains and said, “Just about. They’ve secured the pointy end and now they’re trying to maneuver the stern into place.”

“I guess they’re probably better gangsters than they are pilots.”

“Oh, yes. There were some fairly mediocre gangsters sent for me in New York, although not by Shvanov. I bet he’s brought his first team on this venture. So…still think it’s a movie?”

“No, I’m starting to get scared, since you ask.”