Read The Man In The Seventh Row for Free Online Page B

a suit is sitting behind a desk considering some papers.
    'I want to report a murder,' says the visitor.
    'Sit down,' says the man behind the desk. There is a hard edge in his voice. He is a man who says no more than is necessary, sometimes not even that much.
    'Who was murdered?' he asks.
    He looks at the newcomer and the visitor pauses, like a professional actor attempting to crank up the tension and heighten the sense of expectation. The man behind the desk looks at him impassively, and waits for him to speak. Murders in Los Angeles are about as remarkable as tulips in Amsterdam. The man behind the desk has heard it all before, and seen it too.
    His visitor takes a deep breath, considers the question 'Who was murdered?', and weighs up his response.
    'I was,' he says.
    The policeman's face shows not a flicker of reaction. He picks up another piece of paper and begins to read it, as if the topic of discussion has turned out to be too trivial to warrant any further attention.
    'Do you want to hear my story or not?' asks the visitor. 'I don't have much time left. A day, two days, a week at the most. And then I will be gone.'
    'Where?' asks the policeman.
    'The movies,' says the man.
    The policeman raises a quizzical eyebrow. Now it is his turn to pause. 'You're going to the movies?' he says, his voice rising only very slightly at the end.
    'I'm disappearing into the second dimension,' says the man. Quickly reconsidering the melodrama inherent in his comment, he feels he must elaborate. 'The movies are taking me over,' he says. 'Taking over my thoughts. Taking over my body. I can walk and talk but I have no life of my own anymore, no life outside the movies.'
    The policeman frowns and raises a hand to his chin; as if he does not know whether to laugh or cry for assistance. The policeman is not someone to whom laughter comes easily. And he never cries.
    'Name?' says the policeman.
    The visitor appears to be considering whether he should tell him. They sit looking at each other, the impassive grey-suited policeman sees his own image looking back at him from across the desk, reflected in the sunglasses the stranger is still wearing. Instinctively, the stranger reaches up to the glasses and takes them off. For the first time the policeman looks into the tired blue eyes of the other man and is struck by the beauty of the face. He reckons the man is in his mid- to late-thirties, but there are still signs of youth in the delicately chiselled features, an angelic, innocent quality in a city that was named after angels, but long ago lost the last traces of whatever innocence it may once have possessed. The policeman can appreciate beauty in a painting, in a passage of music, in a woman, in another man's face, even. He appreciates them in secret. In the eyes of this man who thinks he is being taken over by the movies the policeman sees a child.
    Most people in this city are taken over by the movies. That is why they are here. Serving beers. Waiting tables. Just waiting. Waiting for the big break that will turn them into the next Tom Cruise, or the next Julia Roberts. But more likely the only movies they will ever make will involve sex with strangers filmed by other strangers. They are no more than children when they come to LA . They quickly grow old, lose their looks and mislay their innocence. Every day the policeman sees people who have been taken over by the movies. They live in trailer parks and dirty, cramped apartments, and they turn tricks on Sunset Boulevard until their own suns set. He has looked on their corpses, abused by drugs and sexual perversion and sees a dream that turned into a nightmare. They were dead long before they were taken to the morgue.
    He looks into the blue eyes of this stranger. And he sees something entirely different. The policeman used to go to the movies, quality films, arthouse films, that his buddies on the force would never have heard of. He went in secret. The visitor is British and he reminds the