Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  Earnest shook his head. “No, That’s not nice. And it could be risky. No, you just tell B.F. that I understand what he wants and I’m willing to help him. It won’t cost him an extra cent.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing very much. I’ll bet on the Pineapples, too. Maybe he can put me in touch with his own brokers, so that I can get the same rates he does.”

  From the inflection in Earnest’s voice, Montpelier knew that there was more.

  “And what else?” he asked.

  “Oh nothing much, really.” Earnest spread his arms out, expansively. “Just control of the show. I am the Executive Producer, after all. All I want is complete authority. I want to do the hiring and firing. All of it. From here on. With no interference from you or Brenda or anybody at Titantic.”

  “Complete authority,” Montpelier echoed.

  “Right. I can handle Westerly. He’s through as a director, but he still has a good name. I can keep him supplied with enough cat to make him docile . . . .”

  “Cat?” Montpelier’s insides winced, as if they’d been electroshocked.

  “Oh, it’s all completely legal,” Earnest assured him. “I have a few friends at the hospital here who’ll make out prescriptions for him. I get a cut of their fees and the pharmacy price, of course; cat’s very expensive stuff, you know. But that’ll keep Westerly happy and under control.”

  Montpelier found that his hands were shaking.

  “And then there’s Gabriel,” Earnest said with relish. “He goes. I’m going to fire his ass right out of here so fast he won’t know what hit him.”

  “Now wait . . . we need him for the scripts. Those high school kids can’t turn out shootable scripts and you know it”

  “I can find a dozen writers who’ll work for free,” Earnest crowed, “just for the glory of getting their names on The Tube. The local science fiction writers’ chapter has plenty of people who’ll gladly fill in.”

  “But Gabriel has talent! His scripts are the only decent thing we’ve got going for us!”

  “Who cares?” The show’s not supposed to be a hit. Get that through your skull. Think of it as a tax writeoff.”

  Montpelier felt his jaw muscles clenching. “But Ron is . . . .”

  “Ron Gabriel is out!” Earnest shouted, a vein on his forehead throbbing visibly. “His scripts are out, too. Wait until the network censors see them! There won’t be enough left to wipe your backside with.”

  “But the censors have already . . . .”

  “No they haven’t,” Earnest said, with the most malicious grin Montpelier had ever seen. “Gabriel was so late turning them in . . . .”

  “That’s because he had to work on all the other scripts.”

  “ . . . that I let the crew start up production before sending the scripts to the censors. I’ll be meeting with them tomorrow. And with the sponsor’s representatives, too. That will finish Mr. Gabriel and his high-and-mighty scripts!”

  “But . . .”

  “And what do you think B.F. is going to say about Gabriel when I tell him how he’s been sacking with Rita all these weeks, behind his back?”

  “It hasn’t been exactly behind his back.”

  Earnest smiled another chilling smile. “I know that, and you know that, and B.F. knows that. But what will the gossip programs say about it? Eh? Can B.F. afford to have his image belittled in public?”

  Calling this character a snake is insulting the snakes, Montpelier told himself. But he said nothing.

  “Come on,” Earnest said, suddenly very hearty and full of beery good cheer. “Don’t look so glum. We’re all going to make a good pile of money out of this. So what if the series folds early? We’ll cry all the way to the bank.”

  For the first time in many years, Montpelier found himself contradicting one of his primary survival rules. Out of the depth of his guts, he spoke his feelings:

  “I’d always heard that the rats were the first to leave a sinking ship. But I never realized that some of the rats are the sonsofbitches that scuttled the ship in the first place.”

  13: The Three Monkeys

  The restaurant was poised atop Toronto’s tallest office tower, balanced delicately on a well-oiled mechanism that smoothly turned the entire floor around in a full circle once every half hour. It was too slow to be called a merry-go-round, so the restaurant management (it was part of an American-owned chain) called it the Roundeley Room.

  The building was very solidly constructed, since there were no earthquake fears so close to the Laurentian Shield. Since the worldwide impact of a theater movie a generation earlier, dealing with a fire in a glass tower, there were sprinklers everywhere—in the ceilings, under the tables of the restaurant, in the elevators and restrooms and even along the walls, cleverly camouflaged as wrought iron decorations.

  The restaurant was up high enough so that on a clear day diners could see the gray-brown smudge across Lake Ontario that marked the slums of Buffalo. To the north, they could watch the city of Toronto peter out into muskeg and dreary housing developments.

  The weather had turned cold, with an icy wind howling down from the tundra. But it was a clear, dry cold, the kind of air meteorologists call an Arctic High. Air crisp enough to shatter like crystal.

  From his seat in a soundproofed booth, Les Montpelier watched the last rays of the sinking sun turn the city into a vermilion fantasyland. Lights were winking on; automobile traffic made a continuous ribbon of white light on one side of the highways, red on the other. Safely behind the insulated windows, Montpelier could hear the polar wind whispering past. But he felt warm and comfortable. Physically.

  “It’s a beautiful view,” said the man across the booth from him.

  “That it is,” Montpelier agreed.

  The man was Elton Good, who had flown up from New York. He was a tall, spare, almost cadaverous man in that indistinct age category between Saturday afternoon softball games and Saturday afternoon checkers games. His eyes were alive, deep brown, sparkling. He wore an almost perpetual smile, but it looked more like an apology than anything joyful. His clothes were straight Madison Avenue chic—neo-Jesuit, minus the religious icons, of course.

  Elton Good worked for the Federal Inter-Network Combine (FINC), the quasipublic, quasigovernmental, quasicorporate overview group that interconnected the rulings of the Federal Communications Commission, the pressures of the Consumer Relations Board, the demands of the national networks, and the letters from various PTA and religious groups. Since network executives usually filled the posts of the FCC and CRB, the job wasn’t as taxing as it might sound to an outsider.

  Elton Good was a censor. His job was to make certain that nothing disturbing to the public, contrary to FCC regulations or harmful to network profits got onto The Tube.

  “Is Mr. Gabriel always this late?” Good asked, with a slight edge to his reedy voice.

  Montpelier couldn’t reconcile the voice with the sweetly smiling face. “He had to stop at the hospital. They’re taking the bandages off his face.”

  “Oh, yes . . . that . . . brawl he got himself into.” Good edged back away from the table slightly, as if he might become contaminated by it all. “Very ugly business. Very ugly.”

  This is going to be some dinner, Montpelier knew.

  In another soundproofed booth, across the restaurant, Brenda Impanema was smiling at Keith Connors, third assistant vice president for marketing of Texas New Technology, Inc.

  Connors wore a Confederate-gray business suit, hand-tooled Mexican boots, and had an RAF mustache that curled up almost to the corners of his eyes.

  “I knew I’d spot y’all in the middle of a crowded restaurant even though I’d never see y’all befoah,” he was saying. “I jes’ tole myself, Keith, ol’ buddy, y’all jes’ go lookin’ for the purtiest gal in the place. These Canadian chicks don’t have the class of California gals.”

  Brenda smiled demurely. “Actually, I was born in New Mexico.”

  “He
y! That’s practically in Texas! No wonder yo’re so purty.”

  Connors was beaming at her, the glow of his toothy smile outshining the candle on their table by several orders of magnitude. He had already shown Brenda holograms of his Mexican wife and their six children—all under seven years of age. “Guess I’m jes’ a powerful ol’ lover,” he had smirked when she commented on the size of his family.

  Brenda hadn’t quite known what to expect of the executive from TNT. Bernard Finger had called her that afternoon and ordered her to have dinner with the man and show him some of Toronto’s night life.

  “TNT could take over sponsorship of the whole show, all by themselves,” Finger had said. “They’re big and they’re not afraid to spend money.”

  Brenda glowered at Titanic’s chief. “How nice do you want me to be to him?”

  Finger glowered back at her. “You get paid for using your brains, not your pelvis. There’s plenty action for a Texas cowboy in town. You just show him where the waterholes are.”

  So she had dressed in a demure, translucent knee-length gown and decorated it with plenty of the electronic jewelry that TNT manufactured. As she sat in the booth, silhouetted against the gathering twilight, she glittered like an airport runway.

  “Yessir, you shore are purty,” Connors said, with a puppydog wag in his voice.

  “Do you think,” Brenda asked coolly, “that your company will want to advertise your electronic jewelry on ‘The Starcrossed’? Seems like a natural, to me.”

  The booths at the Roundeley Room were soundproofed so that private conversations could not be overheard, and also to protect the restaurant’s patrons from the noisy entrances made by some customers.

  Gloria Glory swept into the restaurant’s foyer, flanked by Francois Dulaq, Rita Yearling and Gregory Earnest. The effect was stunning.

  Once a regally tall, statuesque woman, Gloria Glory had allowed many years of success as a gossip columnist to freeze her self-image. While she still thought of herself as regal and statuesque, to the outside world she closely resembled an asthmatic dirigible swathed in neon-bright floor-length robes.

  No one ever told her this, of course, because her power to make or destroy something as fragile as a “show-business personality” was enormous. In the delicate world of the entertainment arts, where talent and experience counted for about a tenth of what publicity and perseverance could get for you, Gloria Glory possessed a megatonnage unapproached by any other columnist. Her viewers were fanatically devoted to her: what Gloria said was “in” was in; who she said was “out” went hungry.

  So words such as fat, overweight and diet had long since disappeared from Gloria’s world. They were as unspoken near her as descriptions of nasal protuberances went unsaid near Cyrano de Bergerac.

  The maître d’, the hatcheck girl, two headwaiters who usually did nothing but stand near the entrance and look imperious, and a dozen other customers all clustered around Gloria and her entourage.

  The hatcheck girl and most of the customers were asking Dulaq for his autograph. They recognized the hockey star’s handsome face, his rugged physique, and his name spelled on the back of the All-Canadian All-Stars team jacket that he was wearing.

  The headwaiters and most of the men in the growing crowd were panting around Rita Yearling, who wore a see-through clingtight dress with nothing under it except her own impressive physique. The traffic jam was beginning to cause a commotion and block the newcomers who were piling up at the head of the escalator.

  The maître d’, with the unerring instinct of the breed, gravitated toward Gloria Glory. He had never seen her before and never watched television. But he knew money when he sniffed it. Calmly ignoring the rising tide of shrieks and curses from the top of the escalator as body tumbled upon body, he gave Gloria the utmost compliment: he didn’t ask if she had a reservation.

  “Madam would you prefer a private room, perhaps?”

  Gregory Earnest, roundly ignored by all present, started to say, “I made a reserva . . . .”

  But Gloria’s foghorn voice drowned him out. “Naah . . . I like to be right in the middle of all the hustle and bustle. How about something right in the center of everything?”

  “Of course,” said the maître d’.

  Gloria swept regally across the crowded restaurant, like a Montgolfier Brothers hot-air balloon trailing pretty little pennants and fluttering ribbons of silk. Earnest and the two stars followed in her wake, while the maître d’ preceded her with the haughty air of Grand Vizier. The jumbled, tumbled, grumbling crowd at the top of the escalator was left to sort itself out. After all, that’s what insurance lawyers were for, was it not?

  Montpelier couldn’t hear the shouts and shrieks from the foyer, of course. But he watched Gloria and her entourage march to the table nearest the computer-directed jukebox. He breathed a silent thanksgiving that Gabriel hadn’t arrived at the same time as Earnest.

  “Um, would you like a drink, Mr. Good?” he asked.

  Good held up a long-fingered hand. “Never touch alcohol, Mr. Montpelier . . . .”

  “Les.”

  “Alcohol and business don’t mix. Never have.”

  “Well, that’s one thing you and Ron Gabriel have in common,” Montpelier said.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “He doesn’t drink, either.”

  “Really?” Good’s perpetual smile got wider and somehow tenser. “That’s a surprise.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From all the depravity in his scripts, I assumed he was either an alcoholic or a drug fiend. Or both.”

  “Depravity?” Montpelier heard his voice squeak.

  “Yer not married or nuthin’, are yew?” asked Connors.

  Brenda shook her head slowly. “No, I’m a rising young corporate executive.”

  He was working on his second bourbon and water. Their dinners remained on a corner of the table, untouched.

  “Must be tough to get ahead. Lotsa competition.”

  “Quite a bit.” Brenda sipped at her vodka sour.

  “If TNT sponsored yer new show, it’s be a real feather in yore cap, huh?”

  “Yes it would. But I won’t go to bed with you for it.”

  Connors’ face fell. “Wh . . . who said anything about that? I’m a married man!”

  Now Brenda permitted herself to smile again. “I’m sorry,” she said with great sincerity. “I didn’t mean to shock you. But, well . . . there are lots of men who try to take advantage of a woman in a situation like this. I’m glad you’re not that kind of man.”

  “Hell, no,” said Connors, looking puzzled, disappointed and slightly nettled.

  Brenda sweetened her smile. Have to introduce him to some of the professional ladies working at the hotel, she knew, before he decides to get angry.

  Earnest sat across the table from Dulaq. Between the two men sat Gloria Glory and Rita Yearling. Four appetizers had been served; two were still sitting untouched but Dulaq’s and Gloria’s were already demolished.

  “And you, you great big hunk of muscle,” Gloria turned to Dulaq, “how do you like acting?”

  The hockey star shrugged. “It’s okay. Ain’t had a chance t’really do much . . . wit’ the riot and all . . . .”

  Earnest felt his blood pressure explode in his ears.

  “Riot?” Gloria looked instantly alert. “What riot?”

  “It wasn’t a riot,” Earnest said quickly. “It was just a bit of a misunderstanding . . . .”

  “I’m afraid it was all my fault,” Rita offered.

  “Dis Gabriel guy gimme a hard time, so I punched him out.”

  “You hit Ron Gabriel?”

  For an instant there was absolute silence at the table. Even Dulaq seemed to realize, in his dim way, that Gloria’s reaction would have enormous implications for his future in show business.

  “Uh . . . yeah. Once. Between de eyes.”

  Gloria’s bloated face seemed to puff out even more and she suddenly
let loose a loud guffaw. “Oh no! You punched that little creep between the eyes! Oh, it’s too marvelous!” She roared with laughter.

  Dulaq and Rita joined in. Earnest laughed too, but his mind was racing. Fearfully, he touched Gloria’s bouffant sleeve. She wiped tears from her eyes as she turned to him.

  “Um, Gloria,” he begged. “You’re not going to, uh . . . broadcast this, are you?”

  “Broadcast it? Ron Gabriel getting what he’s always asking for? It’s too delicious!”

  “Yes, but it could, well . . . it could reflect poorly on the show.”

  Gloria put her napkin to her lips and for a wild instant Earnest thought she was going to devour it. But instead she wiped her mouth and then flapped the napkin in Earnest’s direction, saying:

  “Greg . . . you don’t mind me calling you Greg, do you?”

  Earnest hated being called Greg, but he said, “No, of course not.”

  “All right, Greg, now listen. It has always been my policy to speak no evil of the people I like. I like Bernie Finger and I love this heavyweight champion you’ve got here . . . .” She nodded in Dulaq’s direction. “And you’ve got a lovely new starlet. She’s going to be a winner, I know. So, no matter how much I loathe Gabriel, I won’t breathe a word about the fight over the air.”

  Earnest sighed. “Oh, thank you, Gloria.”

  “Nothing to it. You are getting rid of the little creep, though, aren’t you?”

  “Oh we certainly are,” Earnest assured her. “He’s on his way out. Never fear.”

  Ron Gabriel, meanwhile, had arrived and let himself be led quietly to Les Montpelier’s booth. He didn’t see Gloria, Earnest, et. al., mainly because he was wearing dark glasses and the restaurant’s twilight lighting level was quite dim. As it was, Gabriel had a little difficulty following the head waiter who showed him to the booth. He tripped over a step and bumped into a waitress on the way. He cursed at the step and made a date with the girl.

  As he slid into the booth, he said, “I’m not eating anything. They just pumped me so full of antibiotics at the hospital that all I want to do is go home and sleep. Let’s just talk business and skip the socializing.”