the enviable life of his employer

He supposed the shiny apple might represent fame and wealth, the enviable life of his employer. Then the doll’s eye might be a worm of sorts, a symbol of a particular corruption at the core of fame, and therefore an accusation, indictment, and condemnation of the Face. For twelve years, the actor had been the biggest box-office draw in the world. Since his first hit, the celebrity-mad media referred to him as the Face. This flattering sobriquet supposedly had arisen simultaneously from the pens of numerous entertainment reporters in a shared [9] swoon of admiration for his charismatic good looks. In truth, no doubt a clever and perpetually sleepless publicist had called in favors and paid out cold cash to engineer this spontaneous acclamation and then to sustain it for more than a decade. In a black-and-white Hollywood so distant in time and quality that contemporary moviegoers had only a little more knowledge of it than they had of the Spanish-American War, a fine actress named Greta Garbo had in her day been known as the Face. That flattery had been the work of a studio flack, but Garbo had proved to be more than mere flackery. For ten months, Ethan had been chief of security for Channing Manheim, the Face of the new millennium. As yet he hadn’t glimpsed even the suggestion of Garboesque depths. The face of the Face seemed to be nearly all there was of Channing. Ethan didn’t despise the actor. The Face was affable, as relaxed as might be a genuine demigod living with the sureness that life and youth were for him eternal. The star’s indifference to any circumstances other than his own arose neither from self-absorption nor from a willful lack of compassion. Intellectual limitations denied him an awareness that other people had more than a single script page of backstory, and that their character arcs were too complex to be portrayed in ninety-eight minutes. His occasional cruelties were never conscious.