Chapter Eleven: The Introduction

He got himself introduced at the back of the room afterwards.

He had prepared a line. The line was terrible and he delivered it badly.

Kaye looked at him for a moment the way a man looks at a tool he might have a use for. Kaye was not tall. That surprised him — from the seventh row the man had been enormous, and up close he was a compact, careful person with very good shoes and the particular stillness of somebody who has learned that stillness is the most expensive thing in any room.

"You're a country boy," Kaye said.

"Yeah."

"Where."

"New England. Out from Glen Innes."

"Cattle?"

"Cattle and a bit of sheep."

Kaye nodded slowly, and then he said the sentence that Jamie McIntyre carried for thirty years, the way he would later carry you made it, good for you from a film star on a stadium ramp:

"Don't lose the accent. It's worth money. They'll believe a country boy."

And then — and this is the part Jamie never told from stage, because it does not fit the seminar version — Kaye said:

"Why are you standing by the door?"

"...Watching who left."

And Henry Kaye looked at him properly for the first time.

"Come and see me Thursday."