Passing Through the Flame (13 page)

The group around Star quieted abruptly as Beck’s trajectory intersected its perimeter. Instead of clamoring up to Beck, these people parted for him, deferring to him and to Star, preparing a meeting place for these two polar stars of the party, the Queen of Light and the Lizard King.

Beck passed directly in front of Paul, and Paul got a close-up of a face of indeterminate age, with brown eyes so dark they almost seemed all pupil and a mobile, thin-lipped mouth. The Lizard King indeed.

Beck beamed, took Star’s hand. “Hello, Susan,” he said. “Hell, Jango.” Something seemed to go out of her, some subtle edge.

“Hello, Bill.”

“Hello, Beck.” The last name was an insult, emphasized and thrown in Jango Beck’s face. The two women in leather flared like cats, then just as quickly faded into Beck’s aura as he chose to meet the words with a smile.

“How do you like my bodyguards?” Beck said. “They guard my body so well because they lust for it. Always ball your bodyguards, and make sure you do a good job of it.”

“They’re very
you
, Jango,” Horvath said with dripping sarcasm.

“I’m glad you’re getting nasty, Bill,” Beck said. “Shows energy is trapped in there somewhere. Maybe you can channel some of it in a creative direction. Maybe you’ll write some new songs. Or at least do some public performances, if only to show the world that the Velvet Cloud can at least still perform. You’re a hot commodity. Neither of us can afford to have you brooding around getting moldy.”

Terror flashed in Star’s eyes. “No public performances,” she said. “You know why.”

“You’re not afraid of a few bush-league riots, a few thousand pilgrims to Lourdes, are you, Susan? It’s our stock-in-trade.”

“She can’t perform in public,” Horvath said. “It’s bad for her head.”

“If you can’t write any new material to record, and she can’t appear in public, where does that leave us? With a top attraction that has nothing to sell, that’s where it leaves us. A ridiculous place to be, don’t you think?”

Star’s lower lip quivered. “Jango, you can’t make me perform in public.”

Beck shrugged his shoulders, ran a hand absently across the leather-clad thigh of the black bodyguard. “Of course I can make you perform, Susan. As your manager, I have the legal power to commit you to binding contracts.”

Star paled, began to tremble. “Please, Jango....”

Beck smiled a William Buckley smile. “That’s much better. I
can
make you perform, but I
won
’t make you perform until your head is up to it. Would I risk blowing out your mind? Am I a heartless monster?”

“Do you love money?” Horvath said.

“Very good, Bill, very good. You’re warming up. Pretty soon you two will be where the music decides to take you. Where you belong. I’m your friend. I can wait.”

He hugged the trembling Star briefly while the two women in black leather rubbed hips and smiled.

“See you around the party,” Beck said, turning to the crowd, to the dumbfounded audience for which he had played this strange little scene. “Right now, I’ve got to go see a man about a turkey.” And he moved off toward the house, trailed by his lesbian bodyguards, leaving a wake of movement, sudden noise, and supersonic vibrations.

Paul had never seen anything like Jango Beck. He had never seen anything like Star before either, but Beck had batted her around like a cat toying with a terrified mouse. Why had he done a thing like that to her in public? Just to prove that he could do it? To show everyone how terrifying he could be?

Face it, you felt something scary about Jango Beck yourself. How does
The Man Upstairs
look as a movie now, when the man controlling the reality sets turns out to be something like that? It’d be a great movie to make, but I sure wouldn’t want to live in it.

The twinges had begun in Mike Taub’s gut on the trip from his place in Bel Air to Jango Beck’s Laurel Canyon haunted house. Now, walking along the long corridor between the main house and Jango’s private living tower, he felt as if he had swallowed an anvil, and his mouth tasted like Lysol. He paused, extracted a vial of Binaca from a pocket, and squirted two good shots of the stuff into his mouth to mask the taste of heartburn and make his breath publicly presentable.

If only I could take something to kill the taste of having to deal with Jango Beck, he thought as he reached the elevator door at the end of the corridor. If only those bastards Carbo and Williams weren’t involved with Jango in some gutter crap. If only Horst would have a heart attack and drop dead on the spot.

Taub pressed a brass stud in the elevator doorframe. The door slid open, and he stepped inside. The interior of the little elevator was draped with black velvet and carpeted in red. Instead of numbers, the four floor buttons had stylized pictures on them like international road signs: a bookshelf with a man reaching for a book, a desk with a figure sitting behind it, a bathtub with a man in it scrubbing his back, and a bed upon which two silhouette figures were balling. Grimacing, Taub pressed this last button. The door slid shut, and the elevator glided smoothly upward. Just like Jango to want to see him in that damned bedroom instead of conducting business in his office like a civilized human being.

The elevator came to a gentle stop, the door slid open, and Taub stepped out. He was in a large circular room with a high ceiling that was one huge round mirror. A ring of floor-to-ceiling windows ran around the entire circumference of the room, except for the small area taken up by the elevator landing, completing the illusion of open space. Although Taub had been here before and knew what to expect, he was still seized by a moment of vertigo, for the ring of windows looked out upon a long drop to black nothingness for about three hundred and forty degrees. On one side, the dark, shaggy, lightspeckled slopes of the Hollywood Hills, on the other, the unreal brilliance of the city nightscape, both far, far below. The mirrored ceiling heightened the illusion, made the room seem like a platform in the open air on stilts high atop the tallest peak in sight, an acrophobe’s nightmare brought to exquisite perfection.

There was a rich green rug on the floor and a matched series of low rosewood chests, stools, and tables. Four brass standing lamps cast red, blue, green, and yellow light from the periphery of the room, creating a weird white light in the center that tended toward colors out by the edges. A huge circular water bed dominated the center of the room. The frame of the bed was also rosewood, and the headboard was cushioned in red velvet and equipped with a series of lights, shelves, ashtrays, and a tiny bar. A similar, though lower, footboard had a color TV, a radio, a tape deck, a phone console, and speakers built into it.

Jango Beck was lying on the bed propped up against the red velvet cushioning holding a snifter of brandy. He wore a white suit with brown suede piping and high alligator-skin boots. On either side of Beck, their heads resting on his stomach, were two of the hardest and yet most beautiful dykes Taub had ever seen: a fairskinned blond with sunken blue eyes and a bruised feral mouth and an afro-ed black with thin, knifelike, almost Semitic features. Both were wearing skin-tight black leather suits covered with patterns of silver studs. Each had a hand on the inside of Beck’s thigh and another on the hip of her sister. Taub was turned on, disgusted, and frightened all at the same time, a sickly throbbing that united his loins and gut.

“Hello, Mike,” Beck said conversationally. “Sit down. Some brandy?”

“Yeah,” Taub said, perching on the edge of the water bed as far away from Beck and his two dykes as he could get. Beck poured him a snifter of brandy from a crystal decanter, handed it over, and ran his hand absently through the blonde’s hair. She quivered, moved her hand higher along Beck’s thigh, slid her other hand into the tight black leather V of the black woman’s crotch. Taub downed half his brandy with a gulp that sent a bolt of fire into his churning gut.

“I was told you had some business you wanted to discuss?” Beck said, sipping at his brandy.

Taub nodded. “You know the general outlines of this sell-off deal,” he said. “We’re supporting Horst’s studio operation off the record end of Eden just because he’s built himself a strong enough position on the board to block the sale of the studio. If we can sell off Eden Pictures, we get rid of a permanent drain and latch onto a big chunk of working capital.”

“And Horst gets canned, and you become president of EPI,” Beck said, running his hand across the black woman’s breasts. Taub looked away and found himself staring out and down into reeling blackness. He hastily refocused his eyes on Beck. The black lesbian had inched up his chest so that her arms were now around his neck; the blonde was massaging her buttocks with both palms.

“Okay, so I stand to be the big winner,” Taub admitted. “But if I move up to number one, you move up to number two.”

Beck laughed. “From where I sit, I am number one,” he said. “I control Dark Star outright, I have the Velvet Cloud, which is the hottest item the corporation has, and I have an unlimited expense account as vice-president of Eden Records. All the advantages and none of the hassles. Collecting impressive titles or moving my name around an organizational chart bores the shit out of me.”

Taub took another gulp of brandy. This was going just as badly as he had known it would. Those idiots Carbo and Williams just don’t understand what dealing with Jango Beck is like.

Beck bit the black woman lightly on the ear. “On the other hand,” he said, “I have no great attachment to John Horst. I just don’t see any advantage to me one way or the other. So why don’t you just tell me what you had in mind, Mike? It might just tickle my fancy.”

The black woman slid off Beck and turned over on her back beside him. The blonde half crawled over Beck’s torso and kissed the black woman on the lips while Beck idly massaged the small of her back. Taub felt like leaping into the pile, like dashing for the elevator, like throwing up. But most of all, like getting this horrible scene over with, one way or the other.

“Okay, look, Jango,” he said, “what we’ve got to do is make Horst’s name shit with the board, to show up the film operation for the rathole it is, so that even a cretin will be able to see that it’s a hopeless economic drain on the corporation. So what’s the best way to do that?”

“You tell me, Mike. You know how innocent I am when it comes to business.”

“The answer,” Taub said, “is to trick Eden Pictures into making one final turkey, a bummer of a film with a three-, four-, five-million-dollar budget that’s such a piece of dreck that Horst won’t even be able to get a TV movie release, that he’ll have to beg drive-ins to take as a second feature. With a dead loss like that and the studio already so shaky, Horst’s ass will be grass. The sell-off will go through, Horst will be out, I’ll be president of EPI, and we can even sell the loss for ten cents on the dollar.”

Jango Beck reached into a humidor, pulled out a long, thin cigar, lit it, blew smoke. He moved his free hand from the blonde woman’s back to the black woman’s crotch while the blonde rubbed her cheek against the black dyke’s breasts. Beck nodded approvingly.

“That’s elegant, Mike,” he said. “That’s really elegant. It has much more panache than I thought you had in you. Of course, there’s just one piddling minor detail which I’m sure you’ve already worked out. Namely, how do you propose to make an experienced studio executive like Horst make such a brainless, fatal blunder?”

The weird lighting suddenly created rainbow auras around the periphery of Taub’s vision, and the room seemed to reel like a merry-go-round spinning on a pinnacle of darkness, threatening to pitch him down, down, down on a long spiral whirl into the nothingness far below. The two black leather dykes writhing all over Beck and each other became two other dykes on a grimy sheet in the Haight, flickering on a movie screen while Jango Beck stood there beside him in the darkness. A bubble of acid gorge burst in Taub’s throat. He felt trapped and tiny and helpless.

“Well... ah... that’s where I’m stuck, Jango,” he said lamely. “Carbo and Williams suggested to me that you... with your... ah...”

Beck sucked thoughtfully on his cigar. The blonde slithered back across his body and nestled in the crook of his arm as Beck spread both arms out wide, an expansive gesture. The black dyke moved into Beck’s other armpit. The two women began massaging each other’s crotches.

“Let me get this straight, Mike,” Beck said. “You want my help in pushing the sell-off through, and you want to do it by mousetrapping Horst into making one terrible terminal turkey. But you don’t know how to get Horst to do something so obviously stupid, so you want
me
to figure something out. Is that the game?”

Taub felt ridiculous, humiliated, defeated. Still, now that Jango is about to turn this stupid idea down, at least I can go to Carbo and Williams and tell them I tried to bring Jango in and he didn’t go for it. Maybe then, with Jango out of the picture, I can find some way to talk them into keeping the deal alive.

“That’s the game, Jango,” Taub said quietly.

Beck puffed on his cigar. “Tell me, Mike, if I help you pull it off, what’s in it for me?”

Taub could find nothing to say.

Beck downed the rest of his brandy and looked directly at Taub. His deep brown eyes seemed like endless tunnels down into God-knows-where.

“Don’t worry, Mike,” he said, “I’ll think of something.”

“Huh?”

“I love the idea. I consider it an artistic challenge. As for my payoff—have I ever been at a loss for a profit-making angle?” The room started to whirl again. Despite everything he could or couldn’t do, Taub found his fate in the hands of Jango Beck again, slipping down into the whirlpool of Beck’s machinations. This was too easy, Carbo and Williams had been too right about something they shouldn’t have been right about to begin with, Jango was being too cooperative too easily. Taub suppressed a gag, then almost choked on a big liquid belch that set his throat afire.

On the water bed, Beck and his two black leather lesbians were rolling all over one another in a tangle of limbs and torsos. “See you at the party in a while, Mike,” Jango muttered. “It seems I’ve got to relieve some tension here.”