Chapter 70 – The Final Conflict
Gale greeted the 800 people who crowded into The Hall on opening night. She was decked out in a gold silk dress with burgundy trim and burgundy pumps, and decorated with a yellow gold diamond necklace and earrings. Most of the male members of the crowd would have paid the price of their ticket just to see her. She handed each guest a small card that informed them that parts of the performance would take place out in the theater, and they were welcome to stand up or get out of their seats if they needed to. Sody knew this would inconvenience a few people, but he said it had to be done.
Jinny and Roger were dressed in tuxes, and hadn’t wanted to carry their guns, but Gwen had insisted. Her intuition told her not to let down their guard even though nothing had happened over the final twelve days of rehearsals. Jinny complained it made him look fat in his tux, but that reason cut no ice with her. Roger said, “You really think the idiots are going to try something on opening night?”
“I don’t like it that they haven’t tried something before now. They’re not the brightest assassins I’ve ever known, but that doesn’t mean they’re not committed to their orders. They seemed committed to me.”
Jinny looked at Gwen and asked, “You’ve known assassins before this?” Gwen never ceased to amaze him.
“That was a figure of speech. But I’ve known bad guys before, and they qualify.”
So Roger and Jinny came to the performance heeled, and assumed their security duties, with Jinny hanging around Laleh and Roger cruising the theater at large. Shim was so nervous he was sick, despite the ministrations of Laleh, Monique, and Gwen. David Holmes sat at the soundboard next to the lighting director, and got ready to blast throughout the theater the greatest soundtrack in the history of filmy plays. Big George, Wegs, and the supporting actors were excited and relaxed at the same time, knowing the performance was tightly choreographed by Sody, yet had a Kind of Blue improvisation and fluidity component built into it. He had given them leeway to go with the flow if they needed to.
The theater was small enough that everyone saw the large movie screen at the back of the stage, and wondered about it. Was this a play or a film? Gwen’s PR materials deliberately had been vague about this, adding more mystery to the bigger mystery of why Steven Soderberg and George Clooney were presenting a new work in Charleston. The PR simply had stated that Clooney and Zellweger would participate in each of the nine performances, in person, and tickets had gone for $1,000 a pop.
Colonel Aliaabaadi, Lewy The Lieutenant, and Priss The Private had spent their last twelve days rehearsing for their performance. Just like actors and directors and producers hope for a big payoff from their investments of time and effort (writers know better than to expect much in the way of material rewards, them being both nobler and wussier than others involved in the biz), the assassins also hoped to be rewarded for their performance. These rewards would be of two types: the spiritual satisfaction of laying upon Laleh’s head the wrath of Allah as delegated to and implemented by the chosen soldiers of The Red Scimitar, and the material satisfaction that would accrue from squeezing out of her during her last breath the account number and routing number of the bank that held whatever remained of The Ayatollah’s Money, which they hoped was a lot.
It was during their twelve days of rehearsal that Priss, the assassin strategist and tactician, had come up with the way to execute their mission. In his $800 a night hotel room, sitting on the two inch thick synthetic carpeting rather in the large upholstered armchair so as to maintain his physical toughness, he had rented The Godfather. Fascinated, he watched the scene where Al Pacino goes into the men's restroom of the Italian restaurant, gets the gun hidden behind the toilet, comes out and kills the police captain. As soon as he saw that, he whooped it up and ran down the hall to The Colonel’s room. He knocked and said, “Boss, I got a great idea, let me in.”
“Not now. I’m busy. Tomorrow morning in the coffee shop, 10am.”
“Boss, I solved the problem, how we’re gonna do it. Let me in, I gotta tell you now.”
Two minutes later the door opens, Priss goes in, says to Ms. Smith, “How ya doing? Sorry to interrupt, but this is business.”
The Colonel said, “This better be good.”
“It is, Boss. All the PR stuff on the website says opening night is black tie, right. But we want to make a statement about who we are and why we’re kidnapping the woman, right? And we can’t do that if we’re wearing tuxes, right? We gotta look like badass Islamic terrorists, with turbans, smelling like camels. So, we get into the theater the day before the performance, right, and we hide our assassin's clothes and stuff in the cloak room. Then we arrive at the show in our tuxes, get in, go to our seats. When the time comes, we get up like we have to take a leak, get our stuff, change into it, and attack. It’ll work just like it worked for Michael Corleone. Bam, Bam, right in the head.” Priss looked over at Ms. Smith, then back at The Colonel, smiling.
The Colonel got up and started pacing the carpeting made with loving care by the crafts persons in Omaha, just like their counterparts used to do on the steppes of Persia. Ms. Smith said to him, “Just because you’re doing business here doesn’t mean you’re off the clock. I’m doing business here, too, remember, and my time is just as valuable as yours.”
The Colonel doubted the validity of her statement, but he didn’t make anything of it, saying, “No problem, honey, you’ll get paid. Relax, have another of shot of tequila,” which she did. Finally he looked at Priss and said, “Ok. I think it’ll work. Let’s practice it tomorrow.”
They practiced it, including the bit where after donning their turbaned assassin’s garb in the theater restrooms, they sprinkled themselves with extract of camel urine to make their performance personas authentic and instill terror into the hearts of the audience members. They thought it would work, though they decided only to practice it once because it took four showers each to get the camel stink off. In any case, that was their plan to get into the theater, and then to take over the performance. Change clothes, create a diversion in the balcony, assault the stage, grab Laleh from the wings, make a political statement to the audience, and then get the hell out of there, taking Laleh with them. Get back to hotel, extract the account and routing numbers, and execute her using the cesium 325, which they continued to rag on Hablibi to get for them, the lazy little diplomatic shrimp.
And now here they were, sitting in their tuxes on opening night, sweating a little, listening to Sody make his introductory speech. When the lights dimmed, Sody came out on stage, wearing his goofy black glasses, and followed by the actors. He said, “Good evening, and welcome to Charleston. We hope you enjoy the show. Our format is unusual, so we're going to start things a little differently from what you may have experienced before. I’m going to brief you on the story, and then introduce you to the actors. As the card you received when you entered the theater says, some of the action is going to take place out in the theater, so feel free to move around if you want to.
“This is the story of a young woman from a Middle Eastern country who wants a better life. She wants to make a big change and to make a simple statement to a powerful politician whose cultural policies she disagrees with. She takes something valuable from him, leaves the country, and starts a new life here in Charleston. She thinks she's safe, but soon learns that men are after her who wish her harm. But, she has new friends here, and a new man in her life who protects her.” He paused. “That’s all I’m going to tell you about the story, and now I’m going to introduce you to the stars of the show, George Clooney and Renee Zellweger.”
George and Renee step forward and George says into a microphone, “HELLO Charleston. Are you ready?”
The audience yells back, “YES.”
Renee says, “Then let’s get this show on the road,” which David Holmes does, in spades, by launching the soundtrack. And with that, Sody’s show begins, with Geor
ge and Renee starting on stage. When the first transition happens and they disappear from the stage and reappear on the screen, the audience is wowed. The story carries through its plotlines from the theft of the money to Renee and George meeting in London to him bringing her to Charleston, where they fall in love. Then comes the arrival of the assassins, a first attempt on her life which George foils, and then another attempt. The action jumps back and forth between the stage and the screen, and then explodes out into the theater, with action sequences in the aisles and the balcony. Sody’s choreographed mayhem captures everyone present, including the three Iranian assassins, who still can’t believe this art is imitating their real lives. Finally, during an interlude on stage with George telling Laleh their lives won’t be like this forever, The Colonel gets a grip on reality, and signals his troops that the time has come; the time of truth.
They get up and go to the cloak room at the rear of the theater, where they open the air conditioning duct panel and remove their hidden tote bags. Off come the infidelish tuxedos, and on go the noble attire of turbans, robes, and camel scent. Allah, does that stuff stink. The Colonel pulls out one of the Desert fucking Eagles, and Lewy pulls out the other. They look at each other, and The Colonel issues his final words of command leadership: “If anything happens, remember, FORTYVIRGINSFOREVER.” They exit the cloak room, with The Colonel taking the center aisle and the others taking the sides. The love scene on stage is over and the action has transitioned back to the screen. The attackers run down the aisles, beards flowing behind them, guns raised, camel stink invading the seats. Priss and Lewy run up the steps at each side while The Colonel vaults onto center stage, like he did before, all three screaming Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar.
Gwen, Roger, and Jinny are standing in the wings at stage left, while Laleh, Sody, Shim, Gale, and Monique are standing in the wings on the other side. With the appearance on stage of the three musketeers from Iran, Sody looks at Monique and says, “What the hell?”
Priss, who doesn’t have a gun and so is not trying to impress and intimidate the members of the audience, looks to stage right and sees Laleh standing next to the woman who gave him the hundred dollar bill for the pizzas he’d delivered. He yells to his boss, “There she is.” The Colonel looks, see her, and both he and Lewy run to the side, point their big dog guns at her, and drag her back onto the stage. Gwen isn’t as shell-shocked as Sody and the others on the far side of the stage, and acts instantly. When The Colonel starts making his big speech to the audience about the wrath of the Red Scimitar falling heavily on the corpusculating neck of American culture, she whispers to Roger and Jinny, and they disappear behind the screen.
This was show time for The Colonel. He had been rehearsing this speech for most of the last twelve days, whenever he wasn’t making time with Ms. Smith or recuperating from another tequila hangover. He talked about American imperialism, and the clash of cultures, and the evilness of modernity, and how MTV was corrupting the youth of the world. He went on about how the sanctions were killing Iranian babies and how the presence of American military bases in the heart of Islam was an affront to every believer of the one true faith. He went on long enough that Lewy’s arm got tired holding the fifteen pounds of Desert fucking Eagle iron over his head, trying to impress the audience, and he had to lower it down to where it now pointed at Laleh’s head. Priss was starting to get a feel for what is was like to be on the stage in front of 800 mesmerized people, all of whom were thinking, this is the wildest performance I’ve ever seen. He hoped The Colonel would leave him a little airtime, even though he hadn’t prepared a speech. He was ready to improvise, and had the introductory lines worked out, when something happened.
None of the assassins knew exactly what it was, and neither did Laleh, who didn’t like having that big gun pointed at her and was getting ready to clock Lewy across his forehead. None of them heard or saw anything because they were pandering to the audience and it happened silently behind them. What the audience saw, and what startled them again, was three people rise out of the stage on mechanical lifts, two men wearing tuxedos and one woman wearing an Yves Saint Laurent emerald green dress trimmed in silver, with silver four inch pumps, all holding guns in their hands. The audience saw them carefully walk up behind the three assassins and place the end of their gun barrels against the backs of the assassins’ heads, lean forward, and say something the people in the audience couldn’t hear. But whatever they said to the assassins had an effect, because the The Colonel stopped blathering and Lewy dropped his gun away from Laleh’s head and Priss stopped trying to figure out what he was going to say when his turn came to proselytize about the greater glory of Islamic culture. This hiatus in the dramatic action was followed by the seven people on the stage exiting to stage left, and Roger motioning back across the stage to Sody to gear up the programmed action again.
Sody did his best, and so did Big George and the gorgeous Wegs, and David Holmes tried to recapture the atmosphere with his music, but there was something anticlimactic about the rest of the performance. The whole thing came off well, and the reviews were great, and the remaining eight performances all sold out. But, that opening night blast, that was a hard act to follow.
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Richard Dorrance lives in America's most beautiful town,
Charleston, South Carolina.
You can look at other books on his website: richarddorrance.com
The Ayatollah's Money Page 70
