Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  Then why do they have editors? he asked himself. Computers can check a manuscript’s spelling and grammar much more thoroughly than any human being can. What do editors do that computers can’t?

  His ruminations were interrupted by Lori’s stepping through the Boss’s office door and out into the corridor. A grim-faced gray-haired man clutching a long trailing sweep of narrow white sheets of paper fluttering behind him like the tail of a kite bolted past them like an underweight halfback being pursued by the first-string defense. He brushed so close to Lori that she jumped into Carl’s arms.

  “Who was that?” he asked, releasing her as the gray flash disappeared down the hall.

  “Grenouille, the assistant managing editor,” Lori said without moving from his side. “He’s always in a rush.”

  Carl shook his head. “This is an odd place.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” Lori laughed.

  As they headed back toward her office, Lori said, “How’s your hotel room?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a hotel room. Okay, I guess. It’s walking distance to the office.”

  “My apartment’s down in the Village. How about letting me cook you dinner tonight?”

  “Fine!”

  “And then you can come and watch me dance.”

  Carl tried to stop his face from reddening, but he could feel his cheeks turning hot. “Uh, okay, sure.”

  Lori grinned up at him.

  Alba Blanca Bunker sat on the edge of the enormous round waterbed waiting for her husband. She was tired. It had been a hectic, exhausting day. The new line of historic novels was not selling well. It had seemed so right: a line of novels based on true history, the actual deeds and romantic exploits of some of history’s greatest figures—Cary Grant, Lynn Redgrave, Willie Nelson, Barbara Walters. But despite a six-million-dollar publicity campaign, the books were moldering in the warehouses. Nobody seemed to want them.

  She sighed deeply and lay back on the waterbed, allowing her filmy white peignoir to drape itself dramatically across the tiger-striped sheets. She studied the effect in the overhead mirror. This bedroom had been their fantasy place when they had first built this home out of a converted warehouse next to the Disneydome, years earlier. With voice command either she or her husband could convert the holographic decor from jungle to desert, from underwater to outer space. With a sad little smile she remembered how the circuitry had blown itself out in a shower of sparks during one particularly vocal bout of lovemaking.

  Nothing like that had happened for many years now. The room was a cool forest green, the scent of pine in the whispering breeze, the bint of a full moon silvering the drawn draperies of the window.

  She knew where her husband was. In his office talking to Beijing, trying desperately to nail down the deal that would open up the Chinese market. A billion potential customers! It could mean the salvation of Bunker Books.

  Or could this MIT whiz kid be their salvation? His invention worked, there was no denying it. How much would he want for it? How much would it cost to start a whole new line of operations, electronic books instead of paper ones? That’s why we need the China deal, she told herself, to provide the capital for developing the electronic book. Otherwise . . .

  There was still the tender offer from Tarantula Enterprises. Pandro would never sell his company. Never. He had built it practically from scratch, with nothing but the ten million his father had loaned him. Bunker Books was his creation, and he would go to hell and burn eternally before he would sell the company or any part of it.

  Still—if she could get him to pretend to consider the Tarantula offer, they might be able to raise some capital from a few insiders down on Wall Street. No, that wouldn’t work. Pandro wouldn’t stoop to such chicanery. He would plug ahead stubbornly trying to close the China deal with those elusive, wily orientals. She did not trust men who spoke so politely, yet never quite seemed to do what they said they would.

  The electronic book. We’ve got to have it. And somehow find the money to develop it. Nothing else matters. It’s either that or bankruptcy.

  She lay perfectly still on the beautiful bed in the beautiful room, waiting for her husband to come to her while her mind searched out a way to avoid the yawning black abyss that was ready to swallow Bunker Books. No path appeared safe; there was no way out of the financial chasm awaiting them. Except perhaps the electronic book. Perhaps.

  She fell asleep waiting for her husband to leave his work and come to bed. She dreamed of electronic books and showers of golden coins pattering gently over the two of them as they lay coiled in a passionate embrace.

  Murder Three

  John Watson was a professor of sociology at the New New School, at Central Park North. The neat rows of condominiums marched northward through Harlem, each lovingly renovated building flanked on both sides by blockwide vegetable gardens, also lovingly tended by the neighborhood residents. Watson could have taken considerable pride in the role he had played in turning Harlem into a model of peace and prosperity.

  All his younger years he had battled the city, the state government, the feds, and the people of Harlem themselves. His enemies had been hopelessness and resistance to change: the indifference of the masses and the brutal opposition of the dope peddlers and slumlords and crooked city officials who made their millions out of the sweat and suffering of Harlem’s people.

  His allies had been the mothers who had seen their children killed by narcotics, or guns, or knives. And the brighter youngsters who sought a way out of the endless cycle of misery and poverty. They had little power. But they had guts and brains. Then John Watson hit upon a stroke of genius. He made allies of the building contractors and their associated trade unions. Rebuilding Harlem made jobs for nearly a generation of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, truck drivers. It made hundreds of millions for the companies that employed them. The money came from taxes, of course: local, state, and federal. But the payoff, as John Watson spent twenty years explaining to appropriations committees, would be a Harlem that was productive, a Harlem that housed taxpayers, not welfare cases. Not criminals and diseased addicts.

  Now, as he strolled along Martin Luther King Boulevard toward Rev. Jesse Jackson Park, Watson took no small measure of satisfaction in the happiness that he saw all around him. Harlem was not heaven; it was not even the Garden of Eden. But it was no longer the rotting, drug-infested ghetto that it had been when he was a child growing up in it.

  It was a considerable shock, therefore, when a strange white man stepped out of a car parked in a clearly marked bus stop zone and sank a switchblade knife into John Watson’s heart. He died almost instantly, while the white man got back into his car and calmly drove away. None of the stunned witnesses could provide the police with the car’s license number, probably because the license plate had been carefully smeared with dirt beforehand.

  It was a monument to John Watson’s life work that this foul murder was treated as any other would be, both by the police and the media. Everyone was shocked. No one suggested that such an event was only to be expected in Harlem.

  Eight

  Carl sat sweating in the smoky Greek nightclub on Ninth Avenue, watching a fleshy half-naked young woman performing the artfully erotic oriental ritual known in the West as the belly dance.

  The place was only half-full, but almost all of the customers were men. Most of them sat up at the bar itself, squinting through the haze of cigarette smoke and muttering an occasional “Yasoo!” at a particularly stimulating movement by the dancer up on the tiny platform that passed for a stage. A three-piece band—reedy clarinet, big-bellied stringed bouzouki, and the inevitable drums—played weaving snake charmer’s music. Now and then the drummer would sing in a wavering, almost yodelling high-pitched tenor.

  Carl sat alone at a table near the stage, close enough to smell the dancers’ heavy perfumes and feel the breeze from their veils as they twirled about. Men staggered up to the edge of the stage now and then to press dollar bills i
nto the dancer’s bra or g-string. Carl had never seen that before. In Cambridge, where he had met Lori, the belly-dancing was more of an Armenian clan gathering. Everybody danced before the night was over, linking hands in a long human chain that wended around the restaurant and, sometimes, right out into the street.

  But that had been in Cambridge. Now he was in New York. They played by different rules here. It had been a dizzying, stupefying couple of days. Now, as he sipped alternately at a water tumbler filled with milky iced ouzo and a tiny cup of powerful, muddy Greek coffee, Carl wondered how long it would take before P.T. Bunker, the founder and president of Bunker Books, would condescend to meet with him.

  “Mrs. Bee wants me to entice you into turning the prototype over to her, so she can show it to Mr. Bee,” Lori had told him in the cab as they rode to the club.

  “She what?” Carl had snapped.

  Patting his knee, Lori said soothingly, “Relax. I’m going to do no such thing. If P.T. Bunker wants to see your prototype, he’ll have to see you along with it.”

  Carl felt his misgivings ease away. Slightly.

  “It’s just that it’s almost impossible to get to see Mr. Bunker. He’s so busy all the time.”

  “What about when he comes to the office?”

  “He never comes to the office,” Lori had said. “We never see him. Mrs. Bunker runs the office and he stays in their home down in the Lower East Side.”

  “That’s a pretty posh neighborhood, isn’t it?” Carl had asked. “Near the Disneydome and all.”

  Lori smiled bitterly. “Listen: I know plenty of starving writers, hungry artists, editors who have to take moonlighting jobs just to pay the rent on their studio apartments. But publishers live in posh neighborhoods and drink champagne every night.”

  No champagne for me, Carl told himself as he took another sip of the ouzo. It was powerful stuff, even iced. Strong flavor like licorice. The waiter had taken one look at Carl and decided he did not look Greek. When he brought the first ouzo, he also brought a stainless-steel bowl filled with ice cubes. “You don’t drink it straight,” he insisted. “You put ice in it. No friend of Yasmin’s is going to throw up on this floor!”

  The waiter was watching him now, from the shadows in the corner of the room, a dark scowl of suspicion on his swarthy mustachioed face. There was a table full of young, broad-shouldered men on that side of the stage, laughing and drinking and hollering to the dancer in Greek. They looked like stevedores from the nearby docks. Muscular types, shirts opened to their belt buckles to show off their hairy chests.

  A crash from up near the bar made Carl swivel his head. The men up there, older, balder, paunchier, were laughing uproariously. One of them raised his emptied glass over his head and smashed it to the floor. Everybody laughed and applauded.

  The ouzo should be relaxing me, Carl told himself. I ought to be loosening up, like everyone else. Instead he felt tense, wary, as if he had been trapped alone in a strange and dangerous land.

  The dancer finished with a flourish and a hearty round of “Yasoos” and applause, then scurried offstage with dollar bills flapping from her costume.

  The music died. Muttered conversations and occasional bursts of laughter were the only sounds in the club. Carl finished his glass of ouzo, then sipped carefully at the coffee. When he began to taste the mud at the bottom of the little cup, he put it down and signalled to the waiter.

  The swarthy man was at his side like a shot. “Another coffee?”

  “When does Yasmin come on?”

  “She is next.”

  Carl pulled in a deep breath. His nose wrinkled at the acrid smell of cigarette smoke. “Another ouzo,” he ordered.

  “And coffee?”

  “No. Just the ouzo.”

  “You don’t like our coffee? Too strong for you?”

  Carl looked up at him. “I love your coffee.”

  “Then I bring you another cup.”

  The man was being protective, Carl realized. “Okay. Another cup of coffee. And another glass of ouzo.”

  “Hokay.”

  The waiter also brought a glass full of ice cubes, with a fierce scowl that told Carl he would not tolerate his drinking the ouzo straight.

  The band started tuning up again as Carl was pouring the clear liquor over the ice and watching it turn pale milky white, wondering what chemical reaction caused the change in color. Then the club’s bass-heavy loudspeaker announced: “And now, our next Oriental dancer—Yasmin! The Armenian Dervish!”

  It was Lori all right. She was beautiful. Bare flesh as smooth and flawless as the most perfect fantasy. She moved sensuously, sinuously, hips weaving a spell that soon had Carl breathing hard.

  The first part of her dance was all right. The dancers all started with see-through veils that really hid nothing, but at least discouraged admirers from trying to stuff money into their costumes.

  Carl gulped at his watered ouzo as slowly, tantalizingly, Yasmin removed her veils. She smiled at Carl as if to say she were dancing especially for him. But although his eyes were riveted on her, he could hear the raucous remarks coming from the table across the way.

  Carl felt every nerve in him tightening. It’s just their way, he told himself. They’re not being crude or obscene. Still, as Lori danced, he found himself glaring at the table full of young stevedores.

  She moved toward their side of the stage and, sure enough, one of the hairy grinning apes stood up and tucked a dollar bill in the g-string circling Lori’s hips. She danced away from them, back toward Carl, bending over him slightly so that her breasts swayed with the music.

  Carl was panting now. Then another one of the stevedores jumped up on the stage with a fistful of bills and started pushing them into Lori’s bra. She looked slightly alarmed.

  Before he could think, Carl was on the stage and pushing the young Greek away from her. The music stopped. All the other stevedores got to their feet, fists clenched. The mustachioed waiter dashed up onto the stage and stood between Carl and the others. The rest of the waiters gathered around.

  Carl found himself being politely but firmly led by both arms out of the club and out into the street. His waiter shook his head sadly at him and said, “Not enough ice.”

  It was drizzling. Carl felt like a perfect idiot. And he also felt furious that there were men in there pawing Lori’s body. And she was letting them do it! He started walking in the general direction of his hotel, letting the drizzling rain cool him off. He imagined it sizzling to steam as it struck his body, he felt so heated.

  After what seemed like an hour’s walking he found himself back at the same club. I must’ve walked around the block, he realized. Like a man lost in the desert, he had made a circle and returned to his starting point.

  Briefly he wondered what would happen if the half dozen or so stevedores came out the door right at this instant. But instead, when the club’s front door swung open, Lori stepped out, looking worried and slightly dishevelled, bundled in a beige raincoat.

  “Carl!”

  He started to say hello as casually as he knew how, but his throat was raw and it came out as a croaking “Hi.”

  “Whatever possessed you . . . ?”

  “I got mad.”

  She did not seem angry. In fact, she was smiling. “You decided to protect my honor?”

  “Something like that.”

  Almost, she laughed. But she caught herself. “Come on, you can walk me home.” She pulled a miniature umbrella from her capacious shoulder bag and opened it. Carl had to snuggle very close to her just to keep his head under its tiny red canopy.

  Quite seriously, Lori asked, “Don’t you know that the waiters protect all the dancers? This is a respectable club; they don’t allow any nasty stuff.”

  “Just feeling you up onstage, in front of everybody.”

  “That’s nothing. It’s like leaving a tip for the waiter.”

  “Do you enjoy having strange guys paw you?”

  For a moment she said
nothing. Then, in a small voice, Lori told him, “I’d enjoy it more if someone I knew very well pawed me.”

  Carl gulped and asked, “How far is it to your apartment?” It was a studio apartment on the second floor of an old redbrick high rise in the Gramercy Park area. Once the neighborhood had been prime real estate, but it had been going steadily downhill for a generation. Still, Lori assured Carl, the building was safe. The automated security system kept strangers from entering the lobby, and the bars on the windows discouraged burglars.

  Carl did not notice the automated security system or the bars on the windows or anything other than Lori, the nearness of her, the warmth of her, the scent of her. In his mind he heard swirling reedy music and saw her dancing for him alone. They danced together, the oldest dance of all, entwined in each other on a foldout bed until he fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Lori lay next to Carl’s peacefully slumbering body. It smoldered like hot lava, and she pressed herself against him. He was out like a light, poor baby. Too much ouzo, she diagnosed. She smiled at the cracked ceiling in the shadows of her little apartment. The noise from the traffic of Third Avenue and the wailing sirens of the ambulances from the hospital across the way did not bother her now.

  But something else did. The novel. The novel. The greatest piece of literature she had ever read, in manuscript. Not as good as Tolstoy or Proust or even Dickens, but as good as anything ever written in America. As good as Hemingway or Twain or Fitzgerald, even when he was sober. Better.

  They’ll never let me publish it. They’ll say it’s not commercial. It’s not a Thorn Birds or a Shogun. It’s merely the finest piece of literature written by any American since Christopher goddamn Columbus stumbled ashore. And there’s no market for fine literature. That’s what they’ll say.

  But, Lori told herself, if I bring them Carl’s electronic book, if the company gets rich on the idea that I brought to them, then I’ll have the power to publish what I want to. I’ll be able to bring this great work of literature to print.