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you may be wondering why I’m burdening you with this self-consciously nostalgic tour of the Louvre’s Greatest Hits. The point is this: Standing before the Venus de Milo and contemplating her charms as a piece of classical sculpture, as anicon for the ages, I had a banal thought that has come to generations of art-benumbed museumgoers: I wondered what had happened to her arms.
    At this point I would have moved on to Henri IV’s brazen mistress, but something kept me rooted to the spot. Something was suggesting itself to me, some opportunity trying to claw its way out of my unconscious.
    And then some idiot called out, “Crandall!” and I once again found myself surrounded by a crowd suddenly freed by the shouter from their shyness. As I signed autograph after autograph I despaired for my lost spark of inspiration, until finally some bold soul asked me if I was at the Louvre preparing to shoot an episode of the show.
    “Not the show,” I said, the idea blossoming in the pit of my stomach as I spoke. “A movie.”
    I had found my subject. I had to get hold of Frédéric right away: We were going to make a movie about the guy who finds the arms of the Venus de Milo. The only question now: comedy or drama?
    •       •       •
    On my way to Fred’s bookstore I had a notion I was being followed. Not in the way I’d come to expect, but by someone who meant me harm. I kept turning around and saw no one whose mien was any angrier than normal, upon which I realized that any reasonably intelligent assailant would make a point of wearing as bland and distant an expression as possible. I stopped at a newsstand and bought a stack of papers—the Guardian, le Monde, Libération , the Herald Tribune —and affected an air of deep engagement as I sauntered over to an outdoor table at a café and sat.
    The Herald Tribune ’s crossword was unreasonably difficult for a Tuesday, and as I drank my coffee and concentrated on the puzzle, I’m moderately embarrassed to say that I forgot all about my absurdnotion about being followed. All I can say about that is that the prickly feeling on the back of my neck stopped, and by the time I got up and left, my mind was on other things (39 Down: McKinley assassin), and by the time I made it to Fred’s bookstore, I was back in the world of the Venus de Milo, raring to solve her mysteries.
    Fred seemed happy to see me but a wariness remained. “Hadn’t called you yet,” he said. “I did buy a book on screen-writing, though.”
    “That’s great,” I said. “So here’s what we call in Hollywood the ‘High Concept,’ if you’re ready to start.”
    “Shouldn’t I be signing a contract first?”
    “I don’t know, why would you need to do that?”
    “I don’t even know how much you’re going to pay me.”
    I shook my head. “This isn’t that kind of a deal, Fred.”
    “Frédéric,” he said.
    “Okay, listen. This is what we call a spec deal. You and I write the script, I get us some meetings, and someone else gives us the money for the script.”
    “Us?”
    “You and me. You’ll get the lion’s share of the script money, I’ll just take a story credit. And when it gets made you’ll be a producer and get a fee for that, too.”
    “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you just hire me to write the script?”
    I shook my head again, hoping that Fred’s naïveté was a sign of his purity as an artist and not of his being a greedy pain in the ass. “In the film business you never shell out your own money. It’s unprofessional. Which doesn’t mean I won’t have a little money thrown your way in the meantime, it just means I don’t want to be your boss. I want to collaborate.”
    He looked down at the floor, his mouth twisted into a petulant scowl. “It’s just that I was hoping I’d be able to quit this job in order to work on the script.”
    “You’ll be quitting the job before you know it. Now listen. I’ll reimburse you for the screenwriting book, and