The Starcrossed

by Ben Bova

  “Must be an emergency hatch,” Brenda murmured.

  The man hesitated a moment; then, looking downward, he reached below the level where Sheldon could see. He hauled up a strange-looking object: long and slim at one end, thicker at the other, with a round drum in the middle.

  “A Tommygun!” Sheldon realized, in a frightened whisper. “Like they used on the ‘Prohibition Blues’ show!”

  The dark-suited man threw a leg over the rail and clambered onto the deck. He clutched the Tommygun with both hands now, his left arm stretched out almost as far as it could go to reach the front handgrip.

  He turned slowly in the shadows along the deck and saw Brenda and Sheldon frozen near the rail.

  “Don’t make a move,” he whispered. In a voice that Sheldon somehow knew.

  Leaning over the rail, the dark-suited man called, “Come on up, you guys. Its okay.”

  Sheldon knew that voice. But he couldn’t place it. And the hat was still pulled too low over the man’s face to recognize him.

  “They’re going to hijack the ship.” Brenda whispered. “Do something!”

  Sheldon didn’t answer. He was busy staring at the Tommygun.

  Two more dark-suited men climbed up to the deck. Each of them carried huge, ugly-looking pistols. Colt 45s, Sheldon realized. Named after the beer commercial.

  The first man stepped up to Sheldon and Brenda, shifting the Tommygun to the crook of his arm.

  “You dirty rats,” he said. “You didn’t invite me to your party. So I’m crashing it.”

  He was close enough to Sheldon to see his face now. And recognize it. They were being confronted by Jimmy Cagney.

  Behind Cagney stood Allen Jenkins and Frank McHugh, both grinning rather foolishly.

  Cagney hitched at his pants with his free hand. “Where’s Finger?” he demanded. “I wanna find that rat. He’s the guy that gave it to my brother and now I’m gonna give it to him.”

  The voice finally clicked in Sheldon’s memory. It was Ron Gabriel doing his Cagney imitation.

  “Ron?” Sheldon asked, a little timidly. “Is that you?”

  Cagney’s face fell. “You recognized me. Shit. I thought I had you fooled, Sheldon.”

  “You did. It’s a wonderful costume.”

  Brenda said, “That’s really you, Ron?”

  “Reah… who’re y… Brenda? Wow, you look terrific!”

  “Thanks.”

  “How did you recognize me?” Sheldon wanted to know.

  Cagney-Gabriel shrugged with one shoulder. “Gary Cooper. You always use the Cooper costume. Every party.”

  “Once or twice,” said Sheldon, defensively.

  “Often enough.”

  Sheldon started thinking. Not about his costume, but about Gabriel crashing the party. When he thought that Cagney and his henchmen were hijackers or thieves, he had been scared. But the thought of Gabriel coming face to face with B.F. terrified him. I’ve got to keep them separated, he realized.

  “Let’s go up to the Sky Bar and have a drink,” Sheldon said, pointing forward and up.

  “I wanna see Finger,” Gabriel replied, switching back to his Cagney voice. “I wanna show him my violin.” He hefted the Tommygun.

  Brenda stepped closer to him and slipped an arm inside Gabriel’s arm. “Come on, tough guy,” she said, doing Bacall perfectly. “Buy a girl a drink.”

  Gabriel couldn’t resist that. “Okay sweetheart. Umm… they got any grapefruit up in that bar?”

  “Never mind,” Brenda-Bacall said. “You don’t need a grapefruit. All you’ve got to do is whistle.”

  As the five of them headed down the swaying, rolling deck toward the bar perched atop the ship’s bridge, Sheldon thought, And all I’ve got to do is keep Brenda with him.

  They took over a corner table in the Sky Bar, ordered drinks and watched the moonlight on the waves. Gabriel parked his Tommygun behind the sofa that they sat on. A blocky-looking computer over by the dancefioor was belting out the new atonal electronic music and flashing its lights in numbered sequence for the dancing couples slinking along: one, two, one-two-three; one, two, one-two three. Every once in a while the computer would throw in an extra beat, just to keep the humans off balance. Most of the dancing couples were heterosexual.

  As the waiter brought their drinks, Brenda leaned close enough to Sheldon to whisper in his ear, “Thanks, hero.”

  He looked askance at her. “For what?”

  “For sticking me with…” She made a tiny nod in Gabriel’s direction. He was busy watching the dangers and arching his eyebrows at the prettiest of the girls.

  “You volunteered,” Sheldon protested.

  “Sure. When it looked like you were going to faint. You’re hiding behind a woman’s skirts!”

  “You can handle him,” Sheldon assured her. “Don’t be afraid…”

  Brenda was suddenly yanked up from the sofa.

  “Come on, kid,” said Gabriel-Cagney. “Let’s show them how to do it.”

  He pulled Brenda onto the dancefloor. Sheldon watched them gyrate as he sipped his drink and watched Gabriel’s henchmen surreptitiously. They were paying no attention to him; instead, they were ogling a table full of Rita Hayworths, Jill St. Johns and Tina Russells.

  Carefully putting his drink down on the table. Sheldon slowly got to his feet. Alan Jenkins gave him a sour look.

  “Men’s room,” Sheldon said. Jenkins shrugged as if to say, What do I care?

  He edged past the dancefloor, trying not to trip over anybody in his clumsy platform boots. Thankfully, Gabriel’s back was to him. But that meant that Brenda was facing him and the look she shot at him was pure venom.

  Sheldon mouthed at her, “Relax and enjoy it,” and scuttled out of the bar.

  He raced down three flights of stairs, clutching madly at the railing to keep from falling. The ship tossed and swayed and the stairs seemed to be trying to deliberately move out from under Sheldon.

  But finally he made it to the Main Lounge. B.F. was sitting at a table near the bandstand, surrounded by blondes of all description, from a Pickford to a pair of Monroes. Lassie, believe it or not, was lying on the carpeting at his side.

  A George Jessel was on the bandstand singing the Marine Corps Hymn, while George Burns and Jack Benny argued quietly but with great animation, off at the far end of the lounge, over who would go on next.

  Sheldon made his way around the outer perimeter of the once-plush Lounge, squirmed through a phalanx of blondes and finally managed to get close enough to Bernard Finger to lean over his shoulder and whisper:

  “Trouble, B.F.”

  Finger raised his dimpled chin in Sheldon’s direction. “So he sings off key. So did the original Jessel.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Ron Gabriel’s crashed the party.”

  “What?” Finger shouted laud enough to startle Jessel into almost a full bar on-key. “That little snot! Here? Uninvited?”

  “What else?” Sheldon said.

  “How’d he get here? Where is he? What’s he want? Is he hitting anybody?”

  If Sheldon weren’t convinced that it was impossible, he’d have been tempted to speculate that B.F. was physically frightened of Ron Gabriel.

  “He’s in the Sky Bar. Brenda’s got him in tow.…” And suddenly Sheldon realized that this was an opportunity straight out of the blue, a gift from Olympus. He had B.F.’s complete and undivided attention.

  He took a quick breath, then suggested, “Maybe we’d better get you to a more protected location, B.F. You know how crazy Gabriel can be.”

  Finger pushed two blondes aside and stood up. He seemed almost dazed with fear. “Yeah… right…”

  “And there’s a lot about this situation that I have to tell you about,” Sheldon went on.

  “Okay,” Finger said. “Down in my stateroom.”

  Finger’s stateroom was a suite, of course. And it was actually up on deck from the Main Lounge, not down. It wasn’t until the steel doors of the luxur
ious suite were firmly locked behind them that Finger appeared to relax.

  “That Gabriel,” he muttered. “He’s crazy. He hit Lucio Grinaldi once, just for adding two or three songs to one of his scripts.”

  “That was Gabriel’s adaptation of In Cold Blood, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Finger plopped down into an overstuffed chair. “Imagine punching a producer just for turning a show into a musical.”

  A butler appeared and took their order for drinks. Sheldon sat down. His chair accommodated itself to his body. The air was sweet and cool. The suite was dimly lit, quiet, tasteful, with the kind of silence and comfort that only a lot of money could buy.

  “Who’re you, anyway?” Finger said suddenly. “You work for me, don’t you?”

  “I’m Sheldon Fad.”

  “Oh?” No comprehension whatsoever dawned on Finger’s Cary Grant face.

  “I’m one of your producers. I did the ‘Diet Quiz’ show last year.”

  “Oh, that one!” Recognition beamed. “The one that got renewed.”

  The butler brought the drinks and Sheldon eased into a roundabout explanation of his problems with “The Starcrossed.” How it was Gabriel’s idea and the untrusting fink had immediately registered it with the Screen Writers Guild. How he, Sheldon, had hit on the money-saving idea of taking the show to Canada for production. (B.F. smiled again at that; Sheldon’s heart did a flip-flop.) How Gabriel wanted Brenda as a hostage or harem girl.

  “Probably both,” Finger grunted.

  Sheldon nodded and pressed on. He told Finger that only Brenda’s body stood between him and a face-to-face confrontation with Gabriel.

  “And he’s carrying a Tommygun,” Sheldon concluded.

  “Now? Here?”

  Sheldon nodded. “I think it’s going to be very vital to us to have Brenda go with us to Canada.”

  “You’re damned right,” B.F. agreed.

  “But she doesn’t want to go.”

  “She’ll go.”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “Don’t worry about it. What I tell her to do, she does.”

  “She might quit”

  B.F. shook his head, a knowing smile on his lips. Somehow, it didn’t look pleasant. “She won’t quit. She can’t. She’ll do what I tell her, no matter what it is.”

  6: THE CONFRONTATION

  Ron Gabriel sipped a gingerale as he sat at one of the Sky Bar’s tiny round tables. Brenda Impanema sat on the couch beside him, staring moodily out at the moonlit ocean. On his other side, Allen Jenkins and Frank McHugh were playing poker on a little table of their own.

  The crowd in the bar had thinned considerably. Many couples had drifted outside, now that the ship was clear of the L.A. smog and the moon could be seen. Others had gone down to their staterooms for some serious sexual therapy.

  “It’s like a movie scene,” Brenda said, reaching for her Hawaiian Punch. “Moonlight on the water, the ship plowing through the waves, romantic music…”

  Gabriel scowled at the computer, which was now issuing a late 1970s rotrock wail. “Call that romantic?”

  Brenda, still in Lauren Bacall’s looks, made a small shrug. “It could be romantic.”

  “If it was different music.”

  “Right.”

  “Then all you’d need would be Fred Astaire tapdancing out on the deck.”

  “And sweeping me off my feet.”

  Gabriel looked in the mirror across the room and saw Jimmy Gagney. But he no longer felt like Cagney. I should have come as Astaire, he told himself. But Cagney fitted his personality better, he knew.

  “How come I can’t sweep you off your feet?” he asked Brenda.

  Becall grinned back at him. “It’s chemistry. We just don’t react right.”

  “I’m crazy about you.”

  “You’re crazy about every girl you meet. And I don’t want to go to Canada with you.”

  Gabriel remembered why he had come aboard. He picked up his glass of gingerale. In the mirror, Cagney’s face hardened.

  “I don’t want to go to Canada at all. Period.”

  “We can drink to that.” Brenda touched her glass to Gabriel’s.

  Cagney scowled.

  She tossed her head slightly, so that the long sweep of her hair flowed back over her bare shoulder. “Are you really after me or just my body? Or just a grip on B.F.?”

  “That’s a helluva question,” he said.

  “It’s of more than passing interest to me.”

  Gabriel put his glass down firmly on the tabletop. Without looking up from it, he said, “I’m crazy about you. I don’t know anything about your body. I’ve seen it clothed and it looks pretty good. But more than that I can’t tell. And I don’t go after girls for business reasons.” He looked up at her. “What I have to settle with Finger I’ll settle for myself. And it’s time that I did.”

  Brenda put a hand on his arm: “If you confront B.F. you’ll blow the whole series. He’ll have you kicked off the ship and out of any connection with Titanic.”

  “So I’ll take the idea someplace else. I don’t need Titanic. He needs me.”

  “He’ll make life miserable for you.”

  Gabriel pulled his arm free of her. With a light tap on her cheek, he went back to pure Cagney. “Don’t you worry about me, kid. I know how to handle myself.”

  To his cronies, who looked up from their cardgame, Gabriel said, “Keep her out of trouble.”

  They nodded. Both unemployed, nonselling young writers, they were looking forward to script assignments on the series. If they could avoid starvation long enough to wait for the series to go into production. At the moment they were avoiding starvation—and work—by living in Gabriel’s house.

  The rest home for starveling writers, Gabriel thought as he made his way around the dancefloor and toward the Sky Bar’s exit. But he remembered his own beginning years, the struggle and the hollow-gutted days of hunger. Somehow he seemed to have more fun in those days than he did now. Shit! You’d think there’s be a time when a guy could relax and enjoy himself.

  He reached the exit and gave a final glance back. Jenkins and McHugh had resumed their cardgame. Bacall had moved closer to them and started kibbitzing.

  Gabriel hitched up his pants and made a Cagney grimace. “Okay, Schemer,” he whispered to himself. “Here’s where you get yours.”

  It took a while for Gabriel to figure out where Finger had gone. He searched the Main Lounge, the pool area and all the bars before realizing that Finger must have retreated to his private suite.

  Theoretically, the suite was impregnable. Only one entrance, through double-locked steel watertight doors. Nobody in or out without Finger’s TV surveillance system scanning him. Gabriel considered knocking off one of the fire alarms, but rejected that idea. People might get hurt or even jump overboard and drown. Besides, Finger had his own motor launch just outside the emergency hatch of his suite. That much Gabriel knew from studying the ship’s plans.

  For a few moments he considered scrambling over the ship’s rail and down the outer hull to get to the emergency hatch. But then he realized that there would still be no way for him to get inside.

  With a frown of frustration, Gabriel paced down the ship’s central staircase, thinking hard but coming up with no ideas.

  He stopped on the deck where the ship’s restaurant was. Looking inside the elaborately decorated cafeteria, where the walls and even the ceiling were plastered with photos from Titanic’s myriad TV shows—all off the air now— Gabriel started on a chain of reasoning.

  It was a short chain, the last link said that there must be some connection between the ship’s galley, where the food was prepared, and Finger’s suite on the deck above.

  Gabriel made his way through the restaurant-turnedcafeteria, heading for the galley. A few couples and several singles were scroffing food hastily, as if they expected someone to tap them on the shoulder and put them off the ship. Gabriel noticed almost subliminally that they
weren’t the young hungry actors or writers or office workers; they were the older, middle-aged ones. The kind who dreaded the inevitable day when they were turned out to the dolce vita of forced retirement on fixed pensions and escalating cost of living.

  Move up or move out, was the motto at Titanic and most other business establishments. The gold watch for a lifetime of service was a thing of ancient history. Nobody lasted that long unless they owned the company or were indispensable to it.

  Gabriel walked like Cagney through the cafeteria: shoulders slightly forward, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He entered the galley, where a couple of cooks were loafing around a TV set.

  “Hey, whatcha doin’ back here?” one of them asked, a black tall enough for college basketball.

  “City Health Inspector,” Gabriel replied in his own voice.

  The cook towered over Gabriel and waved a frozen dinner-sized fist at him. “What is this? We paid you guys off last week, on your regular collection day.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “Those guys are in jail. There’s been a crackdown. Didn’t anybody tell you?”

  The cook’s face fell.

  “I ought to get your name and number,” Gabriel bluffed, “so that you can be subpoenaed…”

  The other cooks had already backed away into the shadows. “Hey wait…” The black man’s voice softened.

  Gabriel put on a smile. “Look, I don’t want to make trouble for you guys. I got a job to do, that’s all. Now, how many exits are there from this area… for emergency purposes.…”

  Within seconds, Gabriel was riding alone up the tiny service elevator to the kitchen of Finger’s suite.

  The door slid open silently and he stepped into the darkened kitchen. He stopped there, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness so he could move without bumping into anything. He heard voices from another room.

  “…and according to the computer analysis, doing the show in Canada will save us a bundle of money.” Sheldon Fad’s singsong.

  “Whadda’ the Canadians know about making a dramatic series? All they do is documentaries about Eskimos.” The dulcet tones of Bernard Finger, part foghorn and part fishmonger.