Passing Through the Flame (54 page)

Paul too was blushing, despite his angry frown. “Maybe we all got a little carried away,” he said. “Velva, you’re just a scared small-town girl walking down an airplane aisle, not the queen of the May.” Then he softened it with a little smile that made all the difference, that told her she had connected. “You’re not even Velva Leecock.” His eyes told her that she had made him remember. “Will you try to remember that on the next take?”

The waning sun turned the studio street between the sound stage and the row of office buildings into a canyon of deep shadows and golden shafts of California light straight from special lighting. “Little Miss Muffet certainly made things a bit obvious today, didn’t she?” Rick Gentry said as he crossed Paul’s path on his way to his somewhat-battered brown Bentley.

“What do you mean by that?” Paul said, pausing beside Gentry despite himself. How could he know that Velva picked me up on a fuck film set with the same kind of number she ran today? Was it so obvious that even a fag like Gentry could sense it?

“You know,” Gentry said. “That you and she are having a thing together.”

“What?”
Paul shouted. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Oh, come on,” Gentry cooed, drinking him in with those spoiled-child eyes. “It was fairly obvious whom she was rubbing her legs together for, whose body she was tickling her clit over.” He smiled ingenuously. “Certainly it wasn’t me.”

“What’s in Velva’s head does not necessarily reflect reality,” Paul said angrily. “Perhaps you’ve noticed that.”

“You mean you’re
not
balling her?”

“There’s nothing like that going on,” Paul said, and instantly regretted it as Gentry’s eyes lit up and he leaned closer.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Gentry said softly. “I sensed you had better taste than that. See you in the morning, Paul.”

He stared at Paul for a silent extra beat, letting him know with exquisite subtlety, but with certainty, that what he had sensed was the fact of the matter. Rick Gentry wants
me
, Paul thought as Gentry walked toward his car. What am I going to do about
that?

“What are you worrying about, Mike?” Jango Beck said, lounging in Taub’s vibrator chair as Mike Taub paced his office like a caged cat, wearing a complicated track in the carpet, but never taking his eyes off Beck. Jango Beck wasn’t a man you took your eyes off if you could help it.

Jango took a joint out of a jade case, lit it, inhaled smoke, and spoke around the cloud as he exhaled. “Everything’s going according to plan, isn’t it?”

“Everything’s going better than we planned,” Taub said. “That’s what I don’t like.”

“You’re certainly a hard man to please. Would you rather we were fucking thing up?”

“We are fucking things up, Jango,” Taub said. “I mean Sunset City is the craziest fucked-up project I’ve ever seen. We’re still a month away from the start of this thing, and we’ve already had to shell out four hundred thousand dollars in graft to keep the site and the damned permit. What’s Ryan going to think of when he’s got us up against the wall the day before we open?”

Jango laughed. “I’m sure it’ll be something spectacular,” he said. “What are you complaining about? The film is going to be terrible, you’ve seen the rushes, the festival is running way over budget; we’re going to be able to dump a three-and-a-half-million-dollar turkey in Horst’s lap. What’s bugging you, Mike?”

Taub stared out a big picture window at the eye-killing summertime smog, a blue-gray glaring paleness that washed out colors and bonged your brain. That’s how I feel, Taub thought. Thoroughly bonged. He threw himself down on a couch opposite Beck, whose body pulsated, courtesy of the vibrating chair, with the vile energy of Kali freak or a Manson Family nut.

“Look, Jango,” he said, trying desperately to make some connection with what was going on in that lizard’s head, “we both know that there’s something unnatural in the way this money Ryan keeps sucking out of us goes up and up. We’re even paying graft to honest cops now. How are we going to justify what’s probably going to be more than half a million in graft payments on the books?”

“We’ll carry it in the advertising and PR budget,” Jango said airily. “This film is going to have an enormous ad and PR budget anyway. At least a million and a half, why be pikers?”

Taub goggled. “A million and a half?”

“Why not?” said Beck. “After all, we’re promoting a film and twenty record albums. Amortize it out, and it doesn’t seem so outrageous. Until we slide the bill for everything under Horst’s door. When he has to explain to the board that he went three million over budget on a half-million-dollar film,
then
it becomes outrageous.”

“Jesus Christ, what chutzpah!” Taub exclaimed. “How do you make money appear and disappear out of thin air like this, Jango? Is it magic?”

“Didn’t you know, Mike? I’ve sold my soul to the devil.”

“The devil couldn’t afford it. He’d go broke trying to fulfill his end of the contract.”

Beck laughed. “At which point,” he said, “the property would revert, and I’d sue him for punitive damages.”

It was all very cute and all very funny, but it was just another way Jango had of keeping you from looking at what he didn’t want you to see. He made everything add up right, but you
knew
there were hidden factors propping the whole structure up.

“How are we going to sell this giant PR budget to the Carbo-Williams combine when we sell the studio off?” he asked. “Somebody is going to have to eat the loss on the graft payments.”

“Only the IRS,” Beck said grandly, “and I think they can afford it. The graft tab exists only on paper.”

“What are you talking about? We’ve paid out the money to Ryan.”

“Who relayed it to his principals, after taking his own cut. Who happen to be much the same principals as the people behind Carbo and Williams. So you see, they’re just tossing their own money from one hand to the other through a time warp and taking a tax loss in the process.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Jango?” Taub said, a bubble of acid bursting at the back of his throat, searing the membranes. “Are these people who own Carbo and Willians and Ryan too who I think they are?”

“Leave us not be crude, Mike,” Jango Beck said, leaving no doubt in Taub’s mind that Beck had caught him up in some horrible Maf machination, that Beck was probably now all that stood between him and being
owned
by those bloodsuckers already. If they didn’t own Jango himself.

Taub shook his head. No, there’s no way anyone can own Jango Beck, he thought. Somehow that only made it worse.

“We’ve got to stop this kind of thing, Jango,” Sandra Bayne said, tossing her copy of the
Flash
onto Beck’s desk. It slid across the slick marble surface like a hockey puck; Jango fielded it nicely as it sailed off the far edge.

“Sunset City or Rip-offsville,” Jango read aloud, then tossed the paper back onto the desk. “Not much of a turn of phrase,” he said diffidently.

Sandra sat down on a couch in front of the desk and glared at Jango, ensconced in his silver egg chair like a psychedelic caterpillar on a toadstool. For some reason, his smooth, unworried face reminded her of Paul’s: a contrasting tapestry of unresolved tensions as he made rapid love to her, thrusting frantically, coming quickly, leaving her unsatisfied, then sinking into a light and troubled sleep. It was as if Jango were sucking energy from Paul’s desperation, growing even sleeker as the impossible situation leached energy from Paul, etched lines into his face, turning him into a driven and desperate man, a monomaniac holding himself together by an act of will.

“You should read that story,” she said. “It’s not just a dumb headline. Somehow, Stein’s found out an awful lot. There’s some juicy stuff in there about Velva Leecock, the fuck film star, and how Gentry got his part by balling you.”

Jango burst into laughter. “Now I
am
offended,” he said. “What an insult to my taste! Does it say who was supposed to have done which with what to whom?”

“Jango, for chrissakes, be serious!”

Jango grinned at her. “Do you think Gentry balled me too?”

“How the hell would I know? I’ll admit nothing else makes much sense. Why else would you have cast him? Just to torture Paul?”

“What makes you think
I
know why I did it?”

“Very funny, massah, very funny. But there’s stuff in there that’s not so funny.”

“I doubt it,” Jango said. “But then, I have a more perverted sense of humor than you do.”

“For one thing, Stein’s somehow gotten wind of how bad the rushes are. For another, he’s harping on the fact that only Eden and Dark Star groups will be appearing at the festival, that the film is just going to be a rip-off record album promo. That we’re exploiting the people.”

Jango leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands. “This is supposed to make me quake in my boots?”

There was a casual, calm masculine certainty coming off him to which Sandra couldn’t help responding, couldn’t help feeling a reawakening of old lusts, couldn’t help admiring this son of a bitch King of the Hill. She felt a growing warmth between her legs and hated herself for it. And hated Jango for deliberately causing it. Most of all, she hated him for being able to do it with such foolish ease.

But she was imagining Jango’s body moving on hers, just the same.

“It’s not just the
Flash
, “she said more softly.
“Rollings tone
is printing the same kind of stuff, a little more subdued. It’s coming out of New York and Chicago, too. The whole underground media is coming down on Sunset City, and it’s starting to take an ugly turn. I’m afraid—”

“For Paul,” Jango said in a cold, certain voice.

Is it possible that I’ve succeeded in making Jango Beck jealous? Sandra wondered.

“Yes, for Paul,” she said. “Everybody smells bomb around this project. I know damn well
you’ve
figured out some way to come out ahead; but this is Paul’s first chance to make a major feature, and when it turns out to be a king-sized turkey, his whole life will be ruined.”

“Apparently you have less confidence in your lover’s ability than I do,” Jango said teasingly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe he’ll be able to pull something good out of Sunset City.”

“You stick him with Rick Gentry and Velva Leecock, you stand by and let the underground press work itself up into a frenzy that’s liable to turn this thing into something worse than Altamont, and you can sit there and tell me you expect Paul to turn this mess into a decent film?”

“I expect nothing. I merely construct parameters. Conrad’s fate is in his own hands, within those parameters. It’s—”

“I know, I know, it’s the nature of the game.”

Jango got up and walked over to the big circular water bed, a slow, languorous cakewalk. He sat down on the bed, spreading his legs wide apart, leaning up against the headboard, opening his arms to the world. He licked his lips like a cat. Sandra a felt weakness in the pit of her stomach, lust in her loins, dread in her heart.

“What do you want from me?” Jango said, layering the words with multiple meanings.

“Not what you think I want, you bastard,” Sandra said weakly.

“Oh, you can have that, too.”

Sandra found herself walking over to the water bed and sitting down beside Jango, his eyes tracking her all the while.

“Let me try to do something about this bad press,” she said. “At least let me try to help Paul.” She found herself staring down into the black depths of those eyes, unable to look away, not wanting to. She felt her body leaning toward his, a reasonless gravitational attraction, like that of the earth for the moon.

“Do anything you want,” Jango said. “Do anything you can.”

He placed his right hand on the inside of her upper thigh. Without thinking, she moved into it, grinding her pelvis against his hand, sighing, then clamping her legs tight around it. Jango’s strong but delicate fingers found the quick of her, and she rolled over onto his arm, moaning, rubbing against him, hating herself for it.

“I’ll even tell you that you’ll have to ball me for it,” Jango said. “It’ll make you feel ever so much better about what you want to do.”

“I hate your guts, you know that?” She sighed as her mouth reached for his, as her hand moved to his fly.

“Why don’t you move out of this place?” Sandy said, rolling over in Paul’s bed so that they were lying face to face and side to side under the covers. “You could move in with me. I’ve got plenty of room.”

In the dark of the bedroom, Paul could barely make out her face, and he knew she could barely make out his, which was just as well. “I really appreciate the offer, Sandy,” he said, touching her lightly on the cheek, “but this isn’t the time to make that kind of decision. My head’s going around like a pinwheel.”

“I could be the eye in the center of your storm,” she said, “I could ply you with coffee in the morning and chicken soup at night.”

What do I tell her? Paul thought. That Velva is intent on balling me, so if I move in with her, it’ll make shooting the picture even worse? That I’m thinking of screwing my leading lady to get better footage out of her?

“I’m just not ready to move in with someone in the middle of this film,” he said.

“Is there someone else, Paul?” Sandy said. There was a strange tension in her voice, almost a guilty tension, as if she were reading his mind and reflecting his own guilt back to him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Rick Gentry.”

“Huh?”

“He’s been sending me spirit messages for a week. I think that’s why there’s so much hostility between us. My leading man wants my ass. Isn’t it heart-warming? Isn’t it marvelous?”

“Poor baby!” Sandra cried, hugging his head to her breasts. “What are you going to do?”

“If I thought it would do any good, I’d be tempted to give him a little,” Paul said dryly. “Fortunately for my masculinity and unfortunately for the film, not even that could turn him into a competent actor. Oh, shit, Sandy, this thing is such a mess! It’s all so hopeless!”