Passing Through the Flame (21 page)

Never before had Star stood this close to imminent death. A word, a random sound, would set this human bomb off, and the black core within his red rage left her no doubt that he could kill, that he had killed. It was a cancer in his soul, a cancer in which he took baleful pride.

But Jango Beck glided out of the light and into the darkness like a serpent. The other man reached into his jacket for something with the hole-in-reality heaviness of a weapon, a gun, but before he could bring it out, Jango emerged from the darkness into his cone of light, confronting him with a Buddha’s mask of calm in which his eyes glistened like mocking coals.

“Try to remember you’re not talking to some West Point furhead with a broomstick up his ass or an opium warlord you’ve got in you hip pocket,” Jango said quietly. “I just dabble in this business for old times’ sake. I’ve got bigger fish to fry. If you’re afraid to keep working for me, I’ll just fold the whole operation with no hard feelings. I can afford it.”

“I can’t afford it, and you know it!”

“Exactly.”

The word echoed and hung in the air like a gong, a mantra of control. The man called Chris quivered in frustration. His rage collapsed in on itself, the killing energy suddenly confined in the mysterious sonic shell Jango’s final word had created; confined, the rage turned on itself, became a black fire of murderous selfloathing. Wave after wave of pain washed over Star, drawing her toward it like a black vortex.

She found herself stepping into the nearest cone of light. Her body was illuminated by the harsh spotlight from without, and from within by some source of energy pulsing from beyond her inner core. She was Star, she was love, and the need, the awful need of this walking darkness, this man devoured by his own thirst for blood, was calling to her, would give her no peace....

“You’re a monster, Jango,” Star’s voice said.

Jango Beck turned. “Hello, Susa—” He stopped, paused, bowed ironically. “Hello, Star.”

“You’re a mind-fucking monster.”

“Life is a null-sum game.”

Chris stared at her, sudden lust fouled in his mind with boiling frustrated rage. She could sense the ugliness of it, the desire to claw her clothes to shreds, bruise her flesh, throw her down on the nearest floor and rape her till she gibbered for mercy, and beyond, far beyond, a loathsome crossing of hate and love fueled by the terrible pain within. Beyond her fear and disgust, she felt a boundless pity, a selfless glow of tranquil certainty transforming itself to a golden warmth of skin and thighs.

She could see that Chris was receiving the vibrations of love in which she was bathing him, but he was confused, fearful, disbelieving. Jango seemed to sense what was happening too, and like a reptile, he glided back into the darkness.

“You want me, don’t you?” she said simply.

He stood there, not uttering a sound, not moving.

Star felt herself enveloped in her own golden light, riding it, bathed in it, finally dissolving into it. “You can have me,” she said. “Right now. You can have anything I have to give.”

She moved through the darkness toward him, sensing his essential helplessness before her. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Bill blow her a phantom kiss with the beginnings of tears in his eyes. But what hurt her worse was that hint of awe.

“JANGO BECK to see you, Mike.”

Mike Taub sighed, crunched a Maalox pill, gulped the chalky stuff down dry. “Send him in, Betty,” he said, flipping off the intercom. He started to reach for the bottle of tranquilizers in the left-hand middle drawer of his kidney-shaped teak desk, then changed his mind. It would be a big mistake to try to deal with Jango on any kind of downer, and anyway, all the Thorazine in Hollywood wouldn’t do anything for his nerves at this point.

Jango had been turning back all his calls since that damned party on one plausible excuse or another, while vibrations of the deal he was setting up echoed up and down the Eden Tower. Beck was floating rumors about how the Velvet Cloud would finally get off its ass and record a new album at the so-called “Carnival of Life” he was going to set up. He was talking up the publicity value of an appearance in a movie shot at the Carnival of Life to the producers and managers of every group Eden or Dark Star had under contract, how an album cut at the rock festival would take off like a rocket with all the free PR. He’s already trying to get them to underbid each other. This damn deal is assuming real substance, and behind my back.

Taub pushed back his overstuffed red leather chair, stood up, and began pacing the office. It was, of course, a corner office and the largest in the tower, and therefore demanded pacing. The north and west walls were seamless sheets of glass. On a clear smogless day (which occurred about ten times a year) you could look west over the urban sprawl of lowland Los Angeles and watch the sun melt into the Pacific like a ball of orange cotton candy on a pane of warm blue glass. On a day like that, you could understand how Sunset Boulevard got its name, a wide ribbon of dusk lights running west across Los Angeles, pointing like an arrow to the juncture of sun and sea.

The rest of the time, ugly brown smog hid the ocean and made the view a lot less inspiring, and Taub preferred the north view of the nearby Hollywood Hills. Since the windows also looked fifteen stories straight down to the Sunset Strip with the appearance of nothing solid at all between you and the big drop, Taub had built a huge piece of teak furniture to provide a three-foot-high psychological retaining wall in front of the windows. The thing ran for twenty feet along the north wall, did a right-angle bend, and ran on for another twenty-seven feet. It contained a bar, a monster stereo rig, speakers, bookcases, a refrigerator, a stove, a medicine cabinet, a sink, record album shelves, a color TV, a tape recorder, glass and crockery cabinets, a wine rack, and plenty of blank space for future installations. The top surface was covered with ashtrays, lighters, hookahs, bits of African wood sculpture and Chinese jade, elaborate roach clips, humidors, fancy and useless boxes, a Spilhaus Space Clock, an all-band radio, and assorted souvenirs of the moment. Around the Eden Tower, it was known as Mike Taub’s Great Wall of China.

Taub’s desk was snugged into the corner opposite the angle in the Great Wall, as far from the giant windows as possible, and the huge expanse between was scattered with couches, leather chairs (one of them fitted with a vibrating device), camel saddles, low tables piled with more bric-a-brac, and a small water bed suitable for balling.

Taub rattled around in this office like a pea in a packing crate. He would’ve preferred something smaller, on a more human scale, but the president of Eden Records had to have the largest office in the tower, and since everyone below him measured his own status by office size, that meant
huge
. He made the best of things by becoming a pacer, conducting business on the march.

The door opened as Taub passed near it; Jango Beck walked in and synced himself to Taub’s wanderings. He was wearing what at first glance seemed to be blue Levis and a blue Levi jacket. But the material was velvet, not denim, and the snaps were cunning gold replicas of the original cheap brass items. Beck also wore a genuine cheap old garrison belt, with the square sides of the big brass buckle sharpened to cruel razor edges, 1950’s New York street-gang style. Pure Jango, Taub thought, quivering a little in the region of his spleen.

“Mike, your worries are over,” Beck said. “I’ve sold Horst the whole deal.
Carnival of Life
is going to be the most expensive rock film ever made, and it’s going to lay a bomb that will make Hiroshima look like a mouse’s fart.”

“How’d you sell it to John Horst, slip a peyote button into his martini?” More likely set him up for some blackmail number, Taub thought. Caught him with his dick in a baby’s backside after sticking it there yourself. Christ, how did I get into this thing?

Jango Beck stopped pacing, sat down on a camel saddle, leered up at Taub like a used magic-carpet salesman. “I convinced him I had you set up as the fall guy,” he said.

“What?”

“Here’s the deal I outlined to Horst. I produce the film, and as producer, I sell the recording rights to myself as Dark Star for one dollar, then I turn around and resell them to you for
mucho dinero.
In that deal, I slip you a fast one—namely, that Eden Records ends up footing the bill for the rock festival when the dust clears. I have a great unknown filmmaker who will shoot a love story against the festival background for under a quarter of a million. So Eden Pictures ends up with a good cheapo film with huge production values, and Eden Records is left holding a big bag for the festival expenses. Horst looks like a champ, and you look like shit.”

Weakly, Taub collapsed onto a chair facing Beck. “I think I may throw up,” he said.

Beck laughed. “Beautiful, isn’t it? We’ve got Horst right where we want him.”

“We do?” Taub said, glancing out the window at the smoggy brown sky over the city. A twinge of vertigo hit him, and he hurriedly concentrated on the intricate pattern of a Persian rug near his feet. It only seemed to make things worse.

“You’ll admit that what I’ve outlined makes things look pretty grim for you,” Beck said.

“Yeah. I think I would admit that.”

“Then imagine how good it looks to Horst.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Jango?”

“Credibility
,” Beck said. “The essential point is that the deal has plenty of credibility from Horst’s point of view. So we can hang him on what he doesn’t know.”

“Which is?”

“Which is, number one, the film is going to be a horrible piece of crap because the kid filmmaker, far from being a genius, is a lox whose talent runs the whole range from arty-farty hand-held incomprehensibility to low porn. I’ve looked at what he considers his best footage, and on a clear day you can smell it from Catalina. And just to make sure the film stinks, I’m going to control casting. The leading man will be Rick Gentry, and the leading lady will be a talentless fuck-film star. Horst will end up with a film that’ll have to be buried with a stake through its heart.”

Jango Beck smiled a crocodile smile. “Nor will it be a
cheap
piece of crap,” he said. “As producer I will contrive to blow the quarter million budget on preproduction alone, though of course the bills will be delayed until the shooting is well under way. Further, putting on the rock festival will entail enormous graft payments to the politicians and gendarmes of wherever we choose to grace with its presence. And the capper is that
Horst
will be stuck with the festival expenses.”

“How?” Taub said warily. Jango’s gone too far this time, he thought. He’s gone to too much trouble to convince me that he’s playing Horst for a sucker, counting on my vanity to make me believe that he isn’t going to do it to me too.
That
much vanity I ain’t got!

Beck got up and began pacing in small circles. “The way I’ve got it set up. Eden Records stages the rock festival, and Eden Pictures—namely, me—just goes there and films it. I have a supercomplex contract drawn up that sticks you with that as sneakily as possible.”

“Marvelous. Heart-warming.”

“But nowhere in that contract does it say anything about film rights to the festival,” said Jango Beck.

“Huh?” Taub said slowly, rising to his feet and pacing along with Beck as he loped back and forth in front of the north window. Dimly, he was beginning to see the pattern.

“Horst thinks that you’re being tricked into putting on the festival with record money,” Beck said. “What he overlooks is that if Eden Records pays for the festival, it
owns
the festival. And all rights therein,
including
film rights. So poor dumb Jango Beck shoots a film there as an employee of Eden Pictures and, when he’s finished, gets socked with a bill for film rights by Eden Records, a bill which just happens to equal the festival expenses. Because I’m such a righteous dude, I accept the bill on behalf of Eden Pictures.”

“I love it!” Taub shouted. “It’s beautiful!” Horst runs up a gigantic loss and has nothing to show for it at the other end, he’s out on his ass, and we can even recoup ten cents on the dollar on the loss from the Carbo-Williams combine. And the records... Lord, we can record live albums at the festival with every group we have under contract and use the whole thing as a giant publicity stunt for the albums at Horst’s expense! It sure doesn’t pay to screw around with Jango Beck!

And that, of course, is the kicker.

“What’s in all this for you, Jango?” Taub said. “You end up producing a turkey film, and that’s all. Where’s your percentage?”

Beck stopped pacing and leaned against the Great Wall. “You’re going to pay Dark Star Records one million dollars for the
Carnival of Life
recording rights,” he said.

“A million dollars! That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? We can record fifteen or twenty albums, so we’re really talking about fifty thou an album. You think the festival won’t be worth that much in publicity, you can set the damn thing up yourself, who cares? Besides, no one said you couldn’t bill me for the appearance of Eden talent in my film. No one said that bill couldn’t be for a million, too. One more nail in John Horst’s coffin.”

“So you’re going
to
siphon a million bucks out of this thing into your own pocket. It’s all a great big shuck to defraud EPI of a cool million.”

“Fraud is such an unpleasant word.” Jango said. “Besides, it would never stand up in court. It’s all quite legal.”

“If not quite moral...”

Beck shrugged. “Morality is the opiate of the ruling class,” he said. “Would I let morality stand in the way of making a quick million?”

Taub studied Beck as he lounged against the teak cabinetwork. Jango looked smug and a little eager. He always looks smug, but he doesn’t always look this eager, and it isn’t always as easy to figure out what his angle is. Jango helps me bury Horst and push the studio sell-off through, and in return he milks EPI of a cool million with
my
connivance.
Quid pro quo
, right up-front. That’s the only way you can afford to deal with Jango Beck—when you can see exactly how he’s making his own outrageous profit. I’m throwing him a million-dollar bribe, and that makes it kosher.