“God almighty, what a mess. What was Gale wearing when she left here?”
“Emerald green skirt, burgundy blouse, white pumps.”
“It was a short skirt, wasn’t it?”
“It was short like the one Sharon Stone was wearing when the paparazzi snapped the world famous shot of her getting out of the limo. Remember that?”
“You remember stuff like that in vivid detail, don’t you, dear.” Roger didn’t answer that one. “You think that skirt might have some effect on these guys?” He didn’t answer that one either, thinking though, that it would unless all of them were eunuchs of the third and highest order, the kind that take care of the King of Saudi Arabia’s harem. “We better do something. It was us that got Gale into this.”
“Shall I call the team?”
“Call them. And tell them to come packing.”
Chapter 52 – Gale and the Boys
After an uncomfortable though chaste night sleeping on an army cot next to the Ford engine block sitting on the floor in the middle of the quonset hut, Gale was holding her own against the pack of hounds, from which Richard was excluded, not due to lack of libido, the stimulation of which he experienced along with the NNs (any male not eunuchized would be included in this demographic group), but simply out of fondness and respect for Gale as a friend and fellow Junie. The evening before, after eating mac and cheese out of a can along with her captors, she had challenged them to a game of strip poker. She figured she had nothing to lose and everything to gain. If she lost, she really wasn’t much worse off than she was, considering the panting of the pack. If she won, and she had reason to think she could prevail, she might avoid the worst case scenario.
By the time the gourmet mac and cheese and white bread with peanut butter on it was consumed, the nitwits all had put away a six pack each. One of the mysteries of mankind, never adequately explained by science, is why some people get energized by alcohol, and some get depressed. Gale had watched the effects of the beer on the guys, and saw that all three of them calmed further down with every beer they drank. Some people get wild and crazy, and others settle into an amiable or boring torpor. Based on this observation Gale proposed the game of cards. That, and the fact that her father had cleaned out just about every high stakes poker game played in the City of Charleston for a period of twenty years, and had schooled her in the game when she was young and impressionable. Gale had, in fact, played for stakes on a par with those on the table this night. The commodities weren’t of the same kind, it is true, but a loss then would have been commensurate with a loss now.
Anyway, after she had emptied her plastic bowl a third time of the main course, and had thrown the bowl over into a corner of the hut, she slipped off her pumps and put her feet, and by definition her legs, which also by definition includes her thighs, up on the table. No centerpiece at a White House state dinner or shindig at Buckingham Palace ever has been more admired than her legs on that table at that point in the evening’s festivities. Richard, who had not had anything to drink, felt his own libido creep into the red zone. He closed his eyes and thought, “I love Anna. I love Anna,” who herself was no slouch in the legs department.
Gale said, “I got a deal for you bozos, now that that lovely dinner is over. How about a little game of poker? You morons from Idaho ever heard of poker?”
The BMIBC corralled his brain power and tried to remember how many different derogatory names this woman had called him in the short time of their acquaintance: nitwit, moron, bozo, idiot. How was she doing that and getting away with it? He was confused, but said, “We play poker good. What you got in mind?” The other two also showed interest.
“What I got in mind is strip poker. Us. I get one of you down to necked, all of you do what I say. Any of you get me that way, I do what all three of you say.” And she wriggled her toes while looking each one in the eye.
The MSMIBC said, “What we need to play a game to get that for? They’s three of us guys, and one of you?”
“Any of you ever tried to thread a moving needle? Without the game, that’s what you face. You win the game, the needle stops moving.”
The NSSMIBC said, “Huh?” The meaning of Gale’s riddle dawned on the other two slowly, and Richard was awestruck. What was she doing? She looked utterly confident, even winking first and then smiling at him. Was she serious about the poker and the stakes, or was she executing some other plan, even more daring and devious? If it was Gwen who was here, playing this game, he wouldn’t be surprised. That’s her all over. But now he was finding deep waters in this fashionista. At least he hoped they were deep. What till he told Jinny about this little episode.
When the BMIBC, employing a double entendre which Richard couldn’t tell was intentional or lucky, said, “Deal,” and that’s exactly what she did. Richard played, but only perfunctorily. He watched Gale play not only the cards, but the guys, in ways that would have made her father proud. It took her exactly eleven hands and thirty-eight minutes to peel the NSSMIBC down to his dirty jockeys. When he lost his next hand, the MSMIBC threw his cards at him, screamed, “You idiot,” and walked outside. Through the fog of beer the BMIBC dimly created the awareness that he had been played, and not only at the card game. He said, “Fuck it,” handcuffed Richard and Gale to their cots, and collapsed onto his own. The next morning he uncuffed them, shook his finger at Gale, told the MSMIBC to watch them, and went outside to think about Anna and her grandfather.
When they were somewhat alone Richard said, “Slick. You took a risk, and it paid off. You were good.”
Gale looked at the guy sitting at the far end of the quonset hut, and then at the front door. She said, “I poked the tiger in the eye. That backed him off for a while, but it doesn’t mean he’s blind.”
He smiled at her and said, “When I write my next screenplay for Spielberg, can I use that line?”
Chapter 53 – The Second Song
When Jools hung up the phone he turned to Scotilly and said, “Should I go tell Anna about Gale, and what they want?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. We don’t want to disrupt the artists.”
“But don’t we owe it to her to tell her the nitwits want her; that they’re after her?”
“Normally, I guess we should. But this isn’t normal. This is Paul McCartney writing the greatest rock opera ever. So, we have to make sacrifices on the altar of art.”
“The what?”
“The alter of art. You heard me. That’s what we got going on down there. They are working down there, right?”
“I think so. Let me go check.”
“Ok, but don’t tell them about Gale. Yet.”
Stella had spent the morning doing one last mix of Hey Renn, while Anna and Paul had started on the second song, which was to be the first song of the opera. This time Paul had written out a draft of the lyrics first, which told the story of his alter ego and Renn meeting for the first time. In the story he owned a couple of acres in Napa Valley, and made an expensive but very good cabernet sauvignon. She was a landscape architect writing a book about the history and culture of the valley, which started with Italian and Portuguese immigrants in the 1850s. The man found the woman in his public tasting room one afternoon, sipping the new vintage of his wine, and looking at a 1921 map of the valley that she had brought with her that showed his property. He’d never seen this map, or the photos of the vineyards taken in the same year. She liked his wine, and he liked her blond hair. At dinner that evening on his patio he served her a twenty-two year old bottle of his wine, and that sealed the deal. They found they both liked to cook, and go hiking out at Point Reyes National Seashore, and watching the dancers of the San Francisco Ballet Company, and working in the vineyard, except during harvest time when they had to work sixteen hour days for three weeks, and reading crime novels written by Rex Stout, and watching the documentaries of Ken Burns, especially Jazz, and visiting the burgundy region of F
rance, where they each gained ten pounds from eating the great food and drinking the pinot noir, and looking at golden objects in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and looking at Chartres Cathedral, which kept their standards of artistic achievement at a high level.
Paul abstracted all these activities into a set of symbols, and wrote the symbols into the simple lyrics of the first song in the opera, which told the listener what the opera was about. It was about a man and a woman who loved doing the same things together again and again, over a period of many years, and how this resulted in a long-term love. When he had eleven stanzas of lyrics written on a yellow legal pad, he said to Anna and Stella, “Let’s have lunch. After that we can make up the music.” They went into the kitchen, where Stella made a giant salad in a large wooden bowl, and served it with a baguette and unsalted butter. Halfway through the meal Paul got up and went down the corridor to studio, from which the girls heard a jazzy melody issue from the Steinway. Four minutes later Paul sat back down at the table and buttered the end piece of the baguette, his favorite. When he finished chewing he said, “I got the melody down. We’re good. I really want Renee to hear the song. And the other song. Maybe we can get this one down and onto the CD before dinner, and get Jools to take it to the Junes to send to her.”
Anna didn’t remind him that Jools was their captor, and not likely to literally take the CD to the Junes, who without a doubt were trying to find and rescue them, and would like to break Jools on the rack. She didn’t want to disturb the McCartney state of creativity with minor details like that. She just nodded, hardly able to wait to get back to the studio and hear what the song would sound like. Again she was afraid of the challenge, and again Stella looked at her with confidence. As they walked down the corridor Stella said, “Stop thinking. Just feel. That’s all you have to do.”
The afternoon was similar to the previous afternoon, very businesslike, with Paul switching instruments at will, moving from the synthe to the piano to the bass to the drums, talking to Anna and Stella now and then, telling them what to do and play, all in a soft and encouraging voice. Mostly he played the synthe with settings that made it sound like a Lowrey organ being played by Garth Hudson of The Band, on the Stage Fright album. He had Anna play a harmony line on the piano, while he pounded the beat with his foot on the floor. Over three hours he stretched the melody out to fit the lyrics, set down bass and drums tracks on the synthe, coached Stella in making the settings on the mixing board the way he wanted to hear the overall sound, and began creating the vocal phrasings that expressed the content of the lyrics. At 4pm they took a half hour break for expresso, and then were back at it until 7pm, which was when Stella recorded the third version onto the CD that held the first song.
At 11am that morning Jools had unlocked the iron doors of the bunker and walked down the cold corridor, wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into, being now associated, however remotely, with a fourth kidnapping. He also worried about not being able to tell Anna that a bunch of NNs wanted her ass so badly they separately had kidnapped two Junies, and thus set up a reckoning with Gwen, Roger, Jinny, and the others. He poked his head into the living room first, which was empty, then the kitchen, and finally into the studio. When Anna saw him, having been requested by both Stella and Paul to beat him up, she whirled on the piano bench, picked a handful of drum sticks off the kit, and threw them at him like a knife-thrower in a circus act. Thwap, blip, thwap, the barrage hit him in chest, stomach and face. She screamed louder that Scotilly did when playing the Taliban crazy, “Out, you worm, out, or I’ll tie your little pinhead inside the bass drum, and wail on the pedal until you’re stone deaf. Out!”
This outburst interrupted both Stella and Paul, who looked at her after Jools retreated out of the bunker in terror. She said, “You asked me to beat him up. What’s the matter?” For his part, back in the safety of the big house, Jools sought succor in rewashing Scotilly’s lingerie he had washed earlier that morning. There was something comforting about handling the soft silk in the soapy warm water.
At 4pm he screwed up his courage, put his ear just inside the bunker doors, and heard music from far down the corridor. At 7:30pm he tried again, and this time heard voices from much closer, from the living room, and no music. With a high level of trepidation he crept down the corridor and peeked into the doorway. The artists were relaxing, each with a flute of champagne in their hand, which he took to be a good sign. Stella said, “C’mon in, braveheart. Anna won’t bite you now.”
He inched around the frame of the doorway, watching for an indication that Anna was going to throw her flute at his head. Instead, she smiled and said, “You have work to do, Jools. We have the CD done and ready to send to Renee. You need to get it to the Junes, tonight.”
“You mean you have songs done? Already? Songs to send to her to get her to come here and do the opera?”
“That’s it. Two songs, and a message from Paul, asking to perform in the opera. Which is what he wants, which means it’s what you want. So, there it is, get going,” and she pointed at the coffee table.
Jools crept forward like a hyena trying to steal a bone from a carcass under the eye of a lion. When he had the CD in his hand, he backed away, bowed a butler’s bow at the doorway, and got his ass out of there. Back in the house he showed Scotilly what he had. She took it and put the CD into a player, and they listened to the songs and the personal message. At the end Scotilly said, “If that doesn’t convince that woman to come down here for this gig, she is on the far side of dead and gone. Call the June people, tell them what we have, and get their address. Don’t give them ours. Tell them we will have someone deliver it to them tonight. Call a messenger service, tell them we want something delivered, meet the person across the bridge at the supermarket parking lot, and give it to him there, along with their address.”
Chapter 54 – Clues to the Bunker
Little Jinny Blistov opened the front door of the June’s house at 9:30pm. Subconsciously the messenger noticed Jinny’s arm behind his back, but it didn’t register that the reason was Jinny had a gun in his hand. A half hour earlier Gwen had listened to Jools tell her he was sending her the CD by messenger, so she had had time to form a plan, which Jinny now was implementing. He said, “Come in, I’ll get you a tip.” When the young man with long hair and scruffy beard stepped through the foyer, Jinny grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him into the kitchen, where he found the rest of the team sitting and drinking coffee. They had been doing this for the last four hours, unsuccessfully trying to figure a way to find the NNs and rescue their friends. Gwen knew going after Jools and Scottily was small potatoes compared to that serious need, but something was better than nothing. With his gun, Jinny pointed to an empty chair, and said, “Have a seat, son.” When the boy was seated, Jinny pulled his own chair next to him, put his hand without the gun in it on his neck, and gently began to squeeze. He said, “Where did you pick up the package?”
The boy said, “Aah….aah….aah.”
Guignard threw a rolled up napkin at Jinny and said, “You’re scaring him. How’s he supposed to answer?”
Jinny said, “I will lead him through his zone of fear and into the realm of self-expression, from which we will attain that which we seek.”
Roger looked at Guignard and said, “What kind of books has he been reading?”
“I’m not sure. He only reads them late at night when he thinks I’m asleep. But I know, it has to stop. I’ll find them when we get out of this mess we’re in, and burn them.”
Again Jinny asked, softly, “Where did you get the package?”
Looking at Guignard like a supplicant looks at a stained glass image of Mary, the boy squeaked out, “At the parking lot. Supermarket parking lot.”
“Which parking lot, son?” The pressure from Jinny’s hand increased slightly.
“At the bridge. This side of the bridge.”
�
��Which bridge, son. Just tell us that and everything will be ok.”
“Bridge over from Sullivan’s Island.”
Gwen said, “What did the person look like that gave you the package?”
“Guy. White. Real white. Stood like he had a poker up his ass. Wearing cologne. Black and white clothes, real sharp creases. Shoes shined. Manicure.”
Jinny looked at Gwen, who nodded. He released the pressure on the boy’s neck, but stuck the gun in his side. Roger took a roll from his pocket, peeled off two hundreds, and handed them to the boy. Jinny said, “You’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?”
“About what?”
And Jinny led him to the door.
Back in the kitchen Gwen had her eyes closed. When Jinny sat down, she opened them and said, “You remember the second to last time we talked with Jools on the phone? When he told us about Gale being snatched? He said something interesting. You remember?” She looked around the table, but had no takers. “He said, ‘I was about to go down to the bunker and check when the phone call came. I will do that now, and get back to you when I can. Ta, Gwenny.’ He said ‘bunker’. What does that mean?” She paused, then said, “Now I know what it means. It means one of the old military bunkers on Sullivan’s Island. They built them there around 1900 and again during WWII. Lots of them, like a dozen or so. We have them. We can find where they’re holding Paul and Anna and Stella.”
Roger said, “Sweet, babe. Good work. But that’s not the serious thing, is it? Richard and Gale are the serious thing. We need to find them.”
Guignard poured everyone more coffee.
Chapter 55 – The NNs Make Their Demand
After scaring the shit out of the messenger boy, the Junies listened to the CD, were duly impressed, and packaged it into a FEDEX overnight envelope. Roger was prepared, having gotten the name and office mailing address of Renee Fleming’s management firm. He did this by calling Paul’s manager, and telling him Paul badly needed to send something to Ms. Fleming. The manager perked up at this, wondering what was going on behind his back, but nevertheless used his industry connections to get the address. He also called Fleming’s manager and told her to expect a package from Paul McCartney the day after tomorrow.
The Kidnapping of Paul McCartney Page 21
