Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  “Vincente glowered at me and said nothing but that I would do it or that, as he put it, his protection would be withdrawn. Then he and Magdalena went into a huddle, making frantic plans in rapid Spanish, while I thought gloomily of Mexican jail cells and the bad types who dwell therein. It would be like Vincente to clear himself with both touts and cops by fingering me.

  “I asked Magdalena about this later as she was straightening my tie, preparatory to my venture into the lion’s den. She shrugged in response. ‘You must go to the hotel,’ she said. ‘That’s for sure.’ ‘And afterwards?’ ‘I’ll pick you up, of course.’ She paused. ‘Or you can make other arrangements.’ I knew then that Vincente did not expect my return, that he was sure I’d get caught, that he did not care much either way.

  “Magdalena, who had more appreciation for my personal charm, gave me a couple hundred pesos along with a huge bouquet of flowers and a brown paper package containing the contents of Beauty’s purse. We went out to the car together, while Vincente stayed barricaded in our room. ‘We could drive north,’ I said to her. ‘How far do you think we’d get?’ Magdalena asked. Of course, she was right.

  “All the way to the hotel, I felt sweat on my forehead. I rehearsed what I’d say to my folks— if I was allowed to call my folks, if I dared to call my folks. I was all too aware that I hadn’t called them when I could have called them, that I’d let them down, that in some ways I could never go home. I was ashamed and frightened and then fatalistic: my life was over at eighteen.

  “’Get out,’ Magdalena said. The car had stopped. The entry portico of the hotel shaded the windshield, a smiling bellman opened my door. I walked into the lobby, dazed as a deer in headlights.

  “I had strict orders to leave the package and flowers for immediate delivery to the Beauty, emphasis on immediate. Pronto, Vincente had told me a dozen times, pronto, pronto! I made my way through a cluster of dark men in team track suits and warm up jackets, all laden with gym bags and crowded by eager fans, to the high marble topped reception desk. I expected to be seized at any second by some indignant bellman. Instead, I was utterly ignored.

  “The receptionist on the phone was switching at top speed between Spanish and English. Another was sorting out some difficulty for a stout, self important guy with a scrub brush mustache who alternately consulted his cell phone and his clipboard and was satisfied by neither. The manager, dark, suave, impeccably suited, spoke in deferential tones to a group of noisy and expensively dressed Latin tourists, the women with big hair and stiletto heels, the men with wild, open shirts and gleaming hair pomade on complicated ‘dos and sideburns. I stood, awkward with the flowers and package, glancing around at the lobby, the bellmen, and the fatal restaurant where I had seen the Beauty, and, I realized, her room number.

  “’In and out, quick, quick,’ Vincente had said, but Vincente was going to turn me over to the police or to El Gigante’s dangerous supporters; my immediate future included nameless back alley horrors or some ghastly lockup. In such circumstances,” Morgan said, “it behooves one to attempt some gallantry, some beau geste! I went to the elevator and squeezed in at the last moment beside two guests and a cart full of luggage.

  “I got out on nine and walked the rest of the way up to the Beauty’s floor, the eleventh. When I eased open the stairway door, I spotted two big guys in green tracksuits lingering near the elevator: Vincente had given me certain valuable life skills. I checked the nearest room number and scuttled along the hallway to 1147. Before I could lose heart, I knocked.

  “No answer. I had not considered that she might be out. With a fearful glance over my shoulder, I knocked again. This time, I heard a sound, and then someone asked ‘Who’s there?’ in Spanish. ‘A friend,’ I said. ‘A friend returning lost property.’ There was a pause, before I heard a soft sound near the door, which, a moment later, opened.

  “I was standing three feet from the Beauty, who had a puffed and darkening eye and a swollen lip. ‘You’ve been hurt,’ I cried. ‘What’s happened? Who has done this to you?’

  “There are times, after all, when one is saved by a spontaneity which reveals the heart. She grabbed my arm, pulled me inside, and locked the door behind us.

  “’Who are you?’ she demanded. I held out the package in return. ‘It’s all there, money, cards, key. Everything but the purse.’ She tore open the package, dropping money and cards in her haste to find the little red envelope. She snapped it open, took out the key and held it up to examine it. ‘You’ve saved my life,’ she said.

  “’You should leave him,’ I said. ‘He isn’t worthy of you.’

  “She gave me an odd look. ‘And you’re a thief,’ she said.

  “You know, until that moment I had not really seen myself that way. ‘I’ve had bad luck,’ I said, ‘I had no choice.’

  “She gave that particularly sweet and sad smile which I’ve remembered ever since. ‘Who’s had choice?’ she asked. We stood there for a moment, looking at each other, understanding, if not everything, a great, great deal. She went to the bureau and returned with a handful of large bills. ‘Take this,’ she said, ‘and put every penny on Atalante.’

  “I was alarmed. ‘Things will be all right now,’ I said, fearful for us both. ‘El Gigante will surely play now, won’t he? And your team will win.’

  “When she shook her head, I understood another of the reasons that she seemed sad. ‘It is not to be. El Gigante will play, but the team will lose. It is already decided.’

  “I kissed her hand and suggested such mad things that she laughed before she told me I had to leave. I took the stairs two at a time, all eleven flights, swaggered through the lobby and out under the arch of the portico. The Fairlane was nowhere in sight. A bellman opened the door of the first cab in line, and I left, a free man.

  “I kept back enough cash for a room and dinner, but followed the Beauty’s instructions with the rest. That night, I watched the match from a bar stool in a smoky cantina. The game was tense and scoreless for eighty agonizing minutes. Knowing little of the sport, I focused on El Gigante, a rangy, hawk nosed man with brown skin and wild shoulder length black hair, who seemed bigger in every way than any other player on the field.

  “He was graceful, despite his massive torso and brutal expression, a fluid, unhurried presence, who could, when an opening presented itself, move unerringly toward the goal. Even with reasons to dislike him personally and fear him professionally, I could see his quality.

  “Five minutes from the end of time, the visiting keeper bobbled a save and a tiny, stocky man from Atalante sent a rebound into the back of the net. My companions in the cantina, were divided, patriotism clashing with prudence: almost to a man they had bet on the visitors. Atalante pulled everyone back onto defense, and the match was in injury time before El Gigante took a wobbly pass and charged in alone on goal.

  “Was his timing a hair off, did his foot slip an inch or two? He drew back one of his thick and powerful legs and shot the ball no more than an inch wide of the net. The close up camera showed an impassive face and proud, contemptuous eyes. At the time, I felt only relief. Now, you know, I take a more sympathetic view. I think that, being a genius of sorts, El Gigante was even less lucky than the Beauty— and certainly not as lucky as me.

  “I slipped out of the cantina and caught a cab. I had the driver wait while I collected my winnings, then went straight to the bus station. I was as rich as I was ever likely to be, and I figured that something could be worked out at the border. As it was,” Morgan concluded with a smile, a smile which, I noticed for the first time, held a hint of sadness.

  “What about El Gigante and the Beauty?” I asked. “Did you ever hear of them again?”

  “El Gigante played in Spain, before returning home to offend the drogas and get gunned down in the street. Perhaps he’d had enough of thrown games or perhaps he grew less skillful with age. I never heard what happened to the Beauty, whose generous spirit saved and changed my life.”

  �
�Perhaps she got away from El Gigante and his dangerous friends,” I suggested.

  “My profoundest hopes for her,” Morgan agreed. He put a drop more whisky in his glass and raised it again. “To Beauty,” he said, “Now we must call it a night.”

  Ideas in My Head

  You know that old saying, “Don’t try to put ideas in my head?” I’ve had an interesting example of that, and I can tell you that once certain ideas get into your mind, they lodge there like grit. You can’t get them out and you can’t leave them alone; pretty soon, you can’t think of anything else.

  That’s the way it was with Jack and me. Once Herbie had planted the suggestion, there was nothing we could do about it. And anyone who knew Herbie, that’s Herbert A. Rothberger to those of you outside the business, probably wouldn’t blame us at all.

  Where was I? Alien ideas in the brain are seriously distracting and some days I have problems putting my thoughts in order. Which is a laugh, being that Jack and I are professional wordsmiths. Arsen and Dutton— you can ask around— everyone knows us. We’re not maybe your top of the line scriptwriters and script doctors— no auteur stuff, no Oscars on our shelves— but we’ve had a couple of pilots made and we’ve written for most of the top cop shows and hospital dramas and we’ve both made major money in the soaps. Several film scripts too— one of them made— I want you to see we’re pros.

  Nonetheless, even pros get the blues in the form of rejection slips from baby-faced execs with their feet on their desks and your script bound for the shredder. Jack and I’d hit a run of bad luck, which is why we wound up one wet day— a bad L.A. omen right there— in the offices of Distracting Productions, the bailiwick of Herbert A. Rothberger, AKA Herbie, pitching an action yarn.

  Slipstream was a solid piece of work with a nice role for the child phenom of the moment, a moppet with blue eyes and blonde hair named Ashley Button. I kid you not. She was known around the studios as Cuteas, as in cute as a button, and she was a serious talent with a good memory and precocious eyes.

  Our plot was watertight. That’s Jack’s doing. His dialogue is ready for the bin, but his plot construction is a thing of beauty, and I think Herbie got to him before he got to me. I think so.

  Anyway, we’re sitting in Herbie’s big office beside a Nordic track with zero miles on its odometer and a spidery Bowflex that looks carnivorous, and a decorative secretary who’s probably not as dumb as she looks. I usually do the talking so I launch into our spiel: “A big time hijacking goes bad when the cargo turns out to be nuclear fuel rods. The robbers go on the lam with the representatives of a rogue state behind them and both the CIA and the FBI bringing up the rear.”

  “Think the X Files without the aliens,” says Jack. “Advanced paranoia.”

  Maybe wrong to mention a Fox show to Herbie, who had, I seem to recall, a death feud with the network.

  “So what the hell is it?” he says, not waiting to find out. “Is this a heist picture?”

  “Yeah, a heist picture, but not just a heist picture, because, see along the way, they’re spotted by this little girl, who gets her father involved, plus we’ve got the subplot with the agents, kind of a father-son or brother-brother thing going…”

  This goes nowhere with Herbie. To Herbie, Moby Dick is a fishing story, pure and simple.

  “Heist pictures are dead. With Tom Cruise, maybe. Cast of unknowns and the little blonde brat— no way.”

  “We don’t have to cast unknowns,” I says.

  Herbie snorts. He has a particularly repulsive nostril clearing snort like a pig with a fly up its nose that brings his own porcine nature front and center.

  “You guys bring me a Tom Cruise, a Cate Blanchett, a Will Smith picture, I’ll be the first to let you know.”

  See the kind of guy we’re talking about here? Gratuitous, right? As if he wasn’t resident in the B Picture universe himself.

  “However,” I says, “this is a heist picture with a difference. And the script’s like a clockwork toy.” I start to describe the novelties and beauties, the many ingenuities that Jack has concocted and which I have adorned with razor sharp dialogue.

  “Heists are dead,” says Herbie. “Plus there’s no romance. How’re you going to pull in the date audience with no romance?”

  “All right, all right,” says Jack, who’s quick off the mark plot-wise. I can see the wheels turning in his mind, clear as one of those old clocks with glass front and back so you can see the gears moving. “There’s the kid, we start from the kid, all right, and we add…”

  He doesn’t even get the sentence out before Herbie says, “No kids. Kids are for Oxygen, Lifetime, housewives in the afternoon. Forget the kid.”

  “Forget the kid,” Jack repeats.

  “I wouldn’t touch the kid for an Oscar nomination— her mother’s poison and her dad’s a lawyer.”

  “We make her an adult,” says Jack.

  Herbie purses his lips. “A hot babe?”

  “Combustible,” Jack says.

  “Maybe with a thing for one of the robbers?” I suggest.

  “Yeah,” says Herbie. “You try that and get back to me.” His hand’s already hovering over his intercom button.

  Jack and I get out onto the street. We’ve forgotten umbrellas and it’s pouring. “Remind me never to buy a gun,” Jack says. “I wouldn’t trust myself.”

  We go back and rework Slipstream. Cuteas has transmogrified into an eighteen-year-old bombshell who’s definitely trouble. She’s friends with one of the heist team, a fact her FBI agent father only belatedly registers. “We got parental angst, we got family, we got high drama,” I tell Herbie when we see him next.

  “And we’ve sharpened up the suspense,” Jack says. “The guys on the heist are really pawns of terrorists. They don’t realize and when they do…”

  His film eminence frowns. “People don’t want to be scared,” says Herbie. “They want to be scared, but not of something that could really happen to them.”

  “You want Godzilla,” said Jack. “You want Creature of the Black Lagoon?”

  “Listen, I’m trying to help you guys.” Herbie’s all offended. “What’s her name, the broad with the father complex—”

  “Heather.”

  “Heather’s a dumb name, Heather’s been overdone.”

  “We can change the name,” I says.

  “So change it. She has possibilities. Fuel rods— who the hell understands fuel rods? See what I mean? That’s why I say, heist pictures are dead.”

  “Slice of life? A smaller drama?” Jack asks. “Father daughter conflict— straight laced agent versus rebel daughter? Heist in the background?”

  “Some small pictures have done well lately— good return on investment,” I says.

  Herbie agrees to look at the rewrite.

  By this time, we’re beginning to sweat. Jack’s been borrowing from me and I’ve been pawning stuff acquired in my palmy days. We buckle down, anyway. Like I say, we’re pros all the way. We lose most of the heist except the actual theft and focus on the conflicting loyalties of the father and daughter.

  “We’ve got a different angle on the perpetrators, too,” I tell Herbie at the next meet. “No more professionals. Small timers, desperate men. There might even be a role for a good kid actor— one of them has a sick child. See, it’s desperate men on both sides.”

  Herbie listens to all this. At least this time, we get through the whole pitch. “You know, you guys got no sense of the times,” he says when we’re done. “Sympathetic criminals— tricky at best. Okay if they’re rich, get what I mean? You redo Topaki, professional thieves, glamour guys— women love outlaws— you’re okay. Poor and desperate— no way. Throw the book at them. Where’ve you been?”

  Back to professionals. Back to square one, but we don’t mention. “That can be done,” I says. I’m thinking that we have most of what’s needed back in version one.

  But that’s not enough for Herbie. He basically doesn’t like the heist at all.


  “Suppose it goes wrong even earlier,” says Jack. “Suppose our juvenile female winds up a hostage? Ropes and bondage,” he adds— Herbie’s tastes being well known.

  “I’ll look at it,” he says, and then as an afterthought, he adds, “You get it done fast, drop it off at my house. I’m out of the office a couple of days.”

  This sounds like interest, so, back at the computers, Jack and I pull three straight all-nighters. Now the daughter is hanging out with a trucker whose unwittingly been assigned the nuclear cargo. Missy’s with him in the truck when they are hijacked at a rest stop. He gets shot— we debate over his fate— and she becomes expendable, but maybe irresistible, supercargo. Lots of opportunity for cleavage and noir close-ups; heavy breathing in semi-darkness— Herbie stuff all the way.

  Jack and I exchange high fives and figure we’re home free. We messenger the script, and sure enough we get called back into his office pronto, but when we start talking about the fine points of the new story, he’s suddenly not sold. That’s Herbie— New England weather in Southern California— the worst of two worlds.

  “It’s all right,” he says, “it’s a picture. But I’m thinking chick kidnapping’s been done, know what I mean?”

  We do, having hit every cliché in the book as per his own request, because Herbie demands the sure thing. We’d had a script for Cuteas— a genuine talent; we’d had topical suspense— ripped from the headlines, no less, but that was too much novelty for Distracting Productions. So we went the other way and here we sit while he has second thoughts.

  “Now,” he says, like he’s just come up with inspiration, “you got a guy kidnapped, man against the elements, that kind of stuff, I’m maybe hearing you.”

  Man against the elephants, I think, elephants being a herd of Herbies with loud ties and black shirts and elegant little patent leather loafers with no socks. I’m getting up from the table before I cross some verbal Rubicon, but Jack’s into the challenge— he later told me he was desperate; he’d maxed all his credit cards and he was ready to run with whatever Herbie threw his way.