Passing Through the Flame (23 page)

“—right on!—”

“—Eden and Warner’s too—”

“—flipping out, Barry—”

After the noise level dropped a bit, Artie Dugan, who had been leaning his ponderous bulk against the other layout table, said rather uneasily, “How do you expect to accomplish that, Barry?”

“Blackmail,” Stein replied.

“—heavy—”

“—power trip—”

“—no way you can blackmail Jango Beck—”

“How are you going to blackmail Jango Beck, Barry?” Dugan said in strangely measured tones.

“I’ve seen your column for this week, Artie. Three favorable reviews of Dark Star albums. What I propose is that we dummy two record sections this week, with two of your columns. One the usual stuff, and the other a hatchet job on Dark Star Records Vicious pans of their releases. A special feature on Beck’s rip-offs. Interviews with enemies of Beck. Whatever crap we can dig up or make up. Then I take both dummies to Beck and let him make his choice.”

“That’s blackmail, all right,” O’Brian said approvingly.

“—suicide to play that kind of game with Jango Beck—”

“—better than nothing—”

“But Beck can just turn you down because we won’t be able to get out another issue without his money,” Toby said.

“I don’t think Jango knows that,” Stein said. “Either way, we have nothing to lose.”

“Let me get this straight, Barry,” Artie Dugan said, drawing his words out like molasses. “You’re suggesting that I compromise the integrity of my column by writing bad reviews of albums I’ve just written good reviews of? That I write something other than my honest opinion of—”

“Fuck off, Dugan!” Jonas shouted. “Every third-rate flack in town knows he can buy a review from you for a T-shirt, two tickets to a concert, a piece of ass, or your name on an album cover.” Dugan put on a great show of indignation, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. He was corrupt, and everyone knew it, but he used his buyability to make himself a power in the record industry, to make himself the most quoted reviewer around. It got him fame, made his column sell the paper, and got the paper a certain amount of record ads. Artie Dugan was the kind of compromise a communal paper had to make to survive in a capitalist economy. What he was really afraid of was endangering his own gravy train by attacking an important company. Well, Lenin had covered that in his remark about omelets and eggs.

“—still, it’s really a scummy thing to do—”

“—scummier than folding?—”

“—the only way you can deal with exploiters like—”

“—not as if we were really going to run the blackmail issue—” Over the general hubbub, Stein became aware that the extension phone in a nearby alcove was ringing. It was a good excuse to let them thrash it out among themselves for a while, work their objections out on each other, so that he could come back in a minute or two and move them toward the proper decision. He went to the phone, letting the meeting break up into small group arguments. He picked up the phone. “Los Angeles
Flash.”

“Mr. Barry Stein, please,” a female voice said.

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Stein, Jango Beck.”

A cold flash went through Stein, as if a microphone had been discovered in the makeup room, as if he had been caught with his pants down, as if Beck had been reading his mind. But that’s impossible, there’s no way he can know, I didn’t even have the idea half an hour ago, and we went over the place for bugs only last week....

“—could really get us in trouble if he called our bluff and went to
Rolling Stone—”

“—what’s the difference if we fold anyway—”

“—heard stories that Beck might do something a lot worse than expose us to the media—”

“Hello, Barry, I think I may have some good news for you.” Jango Beck’s voice on the telephone was easy and friendly. Stein relaxed a shade, but only a shade; with Jango Beck, you never knew what was really going on behind the mask of the moment.

“I could use some good news,” Stein replied cautiously.

“Remember, I told you I thought the paper deserved to survive, but I thought it was a bad business proposition, and I wouldn’t put any of my own bread into it....”

“You’ve changed your mind?”

“—can’t wage a revolutionary struggle by becoming exactly like the exploiters you’re fighting—”

“—fire with fire, I say—”

“I don’t change my mind when it comes to throwing money down ratholes,” Beck said. “But you remember I also said I’d try to find some sucker dumb enough to bail you out. Well, I think I’ve got the man.”

Stein felt his pulse quicken, felt hope rising like a great warm bubble of superoxygenated air in his chest. “Who?”

“Harry Marvin,” said Jango Beck.

“The porn king?” Stein said incredulously. He remembered having spent some time talking to Marvin at Beck’s party. Marvin had seemed like a rough-hewn type who had made it big and then tried to educate himself into what he imagined was a class image, a goal he was basically incapable of attaining. But Marvin had also made a big deal about how the two of them were “fellow outlaw businessmen” persecuted by the police and the courts. Harry Marvin as savior of the
Flash
?

“—What about the integrity of the paper?—”

“—much integrity does a dead paper have—”

“—my credibility as a reviewer—”

“—bullshit—”

“The same,” said Jango Beck. “I’ve gone ahead and set up a meeting for you with him at eight tonight at his place in the Valley, the Smut Factory, you know where that is, don’t you?”

“Yeah. But why would Harry Marvin be interested in saving the
Flash?”

“Who knows? I do know he’s moving out of smut books and into fuck films and has more printing capacity than he can use. Maybe he needs a tax loss. Maybe he wants to hide some capital. Personally, I think he’s a lucky asshole who’s out of his depth, a greasy nerd who deserves to be taken to the cleaners. Your name happened to come up in a conversation on another matter, and I laid the story on him, and he remembered talking to you and said he was interested.”

“What’s in this for you?”

“If Marvin bails you out, you’ll stop asking me for bread. And someday, maybe I’ll need a favor from you. Why does everyone always think I’m out to screw them?”

“—gives a damn about Jango Beck—”

“—but if the record companies get wind of this, we won’t be able to—”

“—a kind of justice, really—”

“I’m sorry, Jango,” Stein said. “Really I am. I want to thank you for what you’ve done.” Have I misjudged him? Or is it just that he’s generous with everything but his own money? And to think I was about to blackmail him, they’re still arguing about it. “Yeah, well, keep on truckin’, Barry.
Ciao.”

“
Ciao,
Jango.”

Feeling like a king-sized shit, yet at the same time vibrating with hope, Stein replaced the receiver and walked back into the makeup room. What a weird country this is, when one exploitative shark throws another pig capitalist to the rescue of a collectivist newspaper. Sometimes you can’t tell the pigs from your friends. “What was that?” Jonas asked.

Barry Stein broke into a big grin. “It looks like that was the call we’ve been waiting for. We’re not going to have to blackmail Jango Beck.”

“John Lennon came through?”

Stein shook his head. “That was our fairy godmother. By tomorrow morning, I should know whether we’re going to make it or not.”

“Where’s the money supposed to come from?”

Stein paused to think. Marvin’s name would not exactly send his people into ecstacy; if he told them what he was trying to pull off and the deal fell through, they’d consider him an unsuccessful sellout. If Marvin actually did save the paper, salvation would be its own self-justification. But there was no point in telling them before the fact and losing what confidence he still commanded.

“I had to promise not to say a word until the deal comes through,” Stein said. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll know one way or the other.”

“I thought this is supposed to be a communal newspaper,” O’Brian said. “I thought we’re supposed to make communal decisions. You’re acting like an owner, Barry.”

Stein winced; O’Brian had hit him right in his sorest spot. But the
Flash
was his paper, his family, and he bore the responsibility for keeping it alive, even if that meant he had to act like a pig at times and be called out for it. Every real revolutionary knew that the ends justify the means. But it wasn’t always easy to live with the implications of that truth.

“You’re all just going to have to trust me till tomorrow,” he said. He turned and walked out of the room, feeling the uneasy pressure of eyes on his back; hopeful, determined, but in this moment very much alone.

Down over the crest of the hill came the Toyota, along the road that wound down a series of diminishing foothills toward the sea. Chris Sargent idly stroked the M-16 in his lap, his eyes scanning the scrub growth along the roadside in regular radarlike sweeps. Funny how much this stretch of road looks like the approach to Jango Beck’s house, he thought. Same sort of chaparral, same emptiness, same feeling of something about to jump out at you. We could hold Jango’s house against a small army, or we could wipe out a small army if we ambushed it on this stretch of road.

“I hope these guinea bastards try something,” his driver said. “I just hope they’re stupid enough to try something.”

With his olive skin and black hair, Aaron Baum could’ve passed for a Mexican; he hated that, and he hated the Mexes for it. He didn’t like being used for that quality, so he made sure his Spanish never got more than rudimentary to prevent being ordered on such missions. Sargent didn’t like that attitude, he didn’t like watching a man deliberately letting a potentially valuable asset go to waste, but Baum was a good driver, and knew how to handle the wire-guided antitank missiles, so he kept him on anyway.

“Yeah, well don’t go around wishing for people to shoot at you,” Sargent said. “That’s looking to get yourself killed.”

Baum eased the Toyota around a tight bend, his hands easy on the wheel, but his face tense and eager. Maybe too eager. “Then why this setup?” he asked.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Sargent said. “A few dead wops is a message I wouldn’t mind laying on the organization, especially if we make them look helpless in the process.” Also, he thought, I take no chances with my own ass. Sure, using the same Toyota for another coke pickup is asking for a hit—best way to find out if they’re going to be dumb enough to try it again. Maybe after the way I handled the hit man, they’ll make a heavy enough commitment so that they’ll really get scared when we wipe their force out.

Sargent had no doubt that the force he had committed to this mission would pulverize anything the organization was likely to hit the Toyota with. The car looked the same, but there was one-inch armor plating inside the door panels, around the gas tank, and engine, and behind the firewall. He and Baum were both wearing fiberglass body armor under their clothes. All they would have to do was duck down away from the windows and sit tight for a minute or two.

Any organization ambushers would be expecting a trailing guard, if they were expecting anything, and the Land Rover thirty car-lengths behind the Toyota would satisfy their simple minds. The crummy old Ford flatbed truck way up the road
ahead
of the target vehicle wouldn’t be likely to arouse their curiosity as it went by. It was a rusty old hulk carrying a smelly load of chickens, runty piglets, straw, vegetables, and Mexican
campesinos.

But the
compesinos
were eight Green Mountain Boys, and the straw concealed an M-60 machine gun, a bazooka, and eight M-16’s. The cab had the usual radio, a finicky heat-sensing rig which might or might not pinpoint human bodies lurking in the underbrush, and for overkill’s sake, a marksman with a Stoner rifle. If there was an ambush, the organization would get a nasty little taste of the kind of ordnance and personnel it was up against.

But this is all a stupid game. Instead of offing organization soldiers, we should capture a couple, interrogate them to get a line on their lower-level cadres, round up as many of
them
as we can quickly, interrogate them fast, then hit everyone on the higher echelons all at once. That’d give the bastards the message!

Trouble is, it’d give Jango the message too, and the Mexican army would be all over us, and probably led by spooks, too. Hard to believe that Jango can really buy off the CIA and the federal narcs, but not at all hard to believe that they’d come after our asses if he stopped. And those boys know how to play the game by our rules. A lot of the boys were pissed off when Jango made me blow the cover of that narc network to an underground paper instead of dropping their bodies in the ocean, but if Jango really
has
been greasing the feds, I gotta admit that that was playing it smart. They’re out of our way now as sure as if they were dead, and thirty-three dead federal narcs is something no one could grease our way out of.

A burro stood half on the road around the next turn; Baum swerved easily to avoid it, without losing speed. Up ahead, Sargent could see the truck for a moment before more curves in the road took it out of line of sight. Aside from their three vehicles, the road seemed empty, fore and aft, for as far as he could see.

An empty road through empty hills under a flat blue sky bleached slightly by the sun. The alien sameness of Mexico, where the people spoke a language that barely penetrated his consciousness, and the women were disconnected bodies to him, and he knew that the only people he could trust were his own men. As long as he kept them under reasonable control.

Too much like the Nam. The trips out into the mountains to buy the pot harvests were too much like small patrols in the boonies trying to beat the VC out of the local rice harvest, except now we’re playing the other hand. The
campesinos
we buy from are no more trustworthy than the dinks. The hassle we still get once in a while from
banditos
is like black pajama action, and you could compare the Federales and the Mexican army to regular NVA units without stretching things too much except in the area of competence.