The Ayatollah's Money

by Richard Dorrance

  Chapter 68 – The Home Stretch

  Laleh and Shim were at work on time after their day off, but god, did they have hangovers. On top of the champagne aperitifs they had drunk a great French cabernet, and on top of that a bottle of aged port. It was lucky the captain had shown up a few minutes early to take the boat back to the marina, because it was him rousting them out of bed that got them to The Hall in time to avoid Gwen’s managerial wrath.

  Everyone was glad for the day off, and everyone wished they’d had more days off, but they realized they were in the home stretch of the production, and that excited them. They could taste opening night. The first direction Sody gave was to David Holmes: play the musical score. He rocked the house for an hour and fifteen minutes, and everyone loved it. The music was the same sort of eclectic mix he’d used for Oceans Twelve: a lot of synthesizer, a lot of orchestrations, a few simple ballads here and there, just one great song after another. He and Sody still had a lot of work to do mixing the action and the music, but all the raw material was in the can.

  Jinny and Roger had felt uneasy letting Laleh out of their sight the day before, but they realized she and Shim needed not only time away, but time together. Alone. Now they were back on guard duty, Jinny hanging around Laleh, and Roger covering everyone else and The Hall in general. He and Jinny had spent part of their day off at the outdoor gun range up in the Francis Marion National Forest outside of town, operated by the Forest Service. Those had been Gwen’s orders. They had taken Monique along and given her a lesson in gun use and safety, after which she did well firing a hundred rounds at the targets Roger set up. Jinny and she were an odd couple together, him a hundred ninety pounds of Russian constructed concrete molded into a five foot four inch frame; her a lissome French blonde who hung Stella McCartney haute couture rags on her five foot eleven inch frame which had been molded in both important regions by none other than God’s little helper, himself. For some reason the others couldn’t quite fathom, however much they loved him, she thought he was cute. He thought she was, acceptable. The good news for everyone was that Big George is not the jealous type.

  Now, that might have something to do with George's newly rekindled interest in the yak girl, the woman with whom he’d set the screen on fire in Leatherheads. They had spent their entire day off avoiding Gale, who figured this was her last opportunity during the production to pin George’s ears to the headboard and ravage him until his entire physiology screamed for mercy, after which it was her plan to start on Wegs, and then, if she could find her and the twenty-four hour period wasn’t yet expended, Monique. There is a word that inadequately describes Gale’s libidinous inclinations, and it is spelled prodigious.

  First she bribed the hotel detective to let her into George’s room, where he and Wegs found her waiting for them when they came back from breakfast. They threw her out, kicking and screaming. When she wouldn’t leave, they ordered a car and headed out of the historic district towards Sullivan’s Island, with Gale trailing in her Ferrari. They thought they’d be safe taking a walk on the public beach there, but Gale kept trying to drag George into the obscurity of the dunes. He was ready to call 911 when Wegs thought instead to call Gwen, who knew the only person who can handle Gale when she's like this is Little Jinny Blistov. Gwen called him, who just was finishing his first shave of the day at Pierre’s Mens Salon, Monique sitting in a huge leather chair watching the lumbering procedure, sipping on a Bellini. Jinny and Monique hightailed it over to Sullivan’s, found the trio on the beach, whereupon Jinny said, “Sorry girl, Gwen’s orders,” picked Gale up like a newspaper, tucked her under his arm, took her back to the June’s house on Church Street, opened the front door, and threw her bodily into the vestibule, him wanting to get back to having fun with Monique during their day off. He wasn’t sure just how long Monique was going to hang around Charleston after the production was over, considering her alternative of going back to a mansion on Lake Como in Italy and hanging out with Big George, in peace, quiet, and wealth.

  Sody hadn’t taken the day off at all, but spent it in The Hall, perfecting his method of transitioning between a live stage performance and a canned film performance. He had realized he wasn’t made to spend his days in his New York City apartment, experimenting with different kinds of semolina and olive oil; he had realized this was his element, and now he was making serious hay. One thing he worked on was how the actors left the stage when the presentation shifted to film, and then reappeared when it shifted back to live acting. He had two methods: one was having the actors literally climb through slits in the outer screen, the one closest to the audience, this movement being obscured by trick lighting, and the other was the traditional use of mechanized traps doors in the stage floor. The Hall had three of these trap doors, and Sody and the three actor assassins, the two Italians and the Greek, who he paid to work on the day off, spent a couple of hours under the stage testing the trap doors and making sure they operated perfectly. After changing the hydraulic fluid in them and oiling the moving parts, the lifting mechanisms worked not only smoothly, but also noiselessly.

  Two of the actors spent another hour jumping back and forth through the screen slits while the third guys worked the lights, to Sody’s direction, sitting out in the theater seats. With just the right levels, angles, and colors of light, Sody got it so both the actors and the front screen disappeared on stage, and then the actors would simultaneously appear in the film projection on the back screen.

  Now everyone was back on duty, Gale being the only unsatisfied member of the troupe. Jinny attempted to assuage her pain by telling her they’d be friends again when Monique and George went back to the old country, but it didn’t work very well. When Gale is horny, nothing short of a legion of Roman soldiers is going to do the trick. Gwen figured out what to do, as usual, which was to tell Sody he needed an assistant director, now that they were in the home stretch of the production, and that person was Gale. He looked at her like she was crazy, but then got the unmistakable message this was not a request, and put her to work with the assassin actors working out an action scene in the balcony during which the assassins make their first appearance and announce their mission: to exact justice in the name of Allah and his number one on earth, The Ayatollah, against the traitorous Laleh and her infidel collaborators. The two Italian stud action actors and the not-exactly chopped liver Greek guy, all thought Gale was a riot, them having to beat her off with sticks in order to accomplish the tasks Sody gave them.

  At the end of that first day back, Sody called a meeting on stage to go over the status of the production. Gale appeared calm after Jinny mixed her a double Sidecar to sip on. Sody said, “Ok, here’s where we stand. Let me know if you disagree or see things differently. First, we’re using the Kind of Blue process to transfer the information from Shimmey’s script to the actors, and it’s working. That’s a tribute both to Shim and to the actors, who’ve found a way to communicate content through an informal and fluid process. Not everyone can do that. George and Wegs help Shim get the dialogue right, and he’s doing a great job of realizing my visions and getting them down on paper in rough form. Second, the story is such a natural that it’s writing itself. The combination of theft of money from a powerful person, and the protection of a new love interest in the face of retribution, is simple and dynamic. Wegs is just killing the character of Laleh, at once smart, fearless, and adventurous, while at the same time engaging with a strange man she’s falling in love with, and whom she recognizes as someone she needs help from. Bravo, Wegs. Lastly, we have the filmy play, which is a lot of fun to mess with. Yesterday we worked through all the kinks of transitioning between film and play, and that process works.

  "So, now we have twelve days until opening night, and things look good. We just have to crank out the script, rehearse, fine tune, and we’re there.” He paused and looked at Gwen and then Laleh. “How are things from your perspective, Madame Impresario? And yours,
Madame Story Creator and Financier?”

  Gwen looked at Laleh, and Laleh looked back. Then Gwen looked at Roger and Laleh looked at Shim. The two boyfriends looked at each other, then at everyone else on the stage, and back at their girls, nodding. The girls looked back at Sody and said, “Rock on.”