The Stars Trilogy (22 page)

She paused again. Jamie was still rapt in attention.

“At this point in the story, around 1979, the Khmer Rouge is being defeated by the Vietnamese army. It is during this time that the boy and the American make a daring plan to escape together. When the Khmers are forced to flee Cambodia toward the hills, they use the chaos and make their move. They both kill at least a dozen Khmers in several skirmishes that nearly get them both killed, too. They run almost non-stop under the cloak of the forest, dodging land mines and traps. Finally, after three days, they break out into the shoreline. They find a boat anchored in a small cove. They make it to an island in Thailand.”

“Oh, they do not die!” Kasia exclaimed.

“Hush,” Jamie said to Kasia. “Please, continue, Celine.”

“When they reach Thailand, the American contacts his government and they both seek refuge at the American embassy. He is able to connect with his family in the States. A friend of his happens to hold an important position at the embassy and he persuades the guy to allow the young Cambodian to seek asylum here, in the US. He fakes the boy’s identity, telling the embassy the boy is a peasant who rescued him from the Khmers.”

“Oh, he comes to America! Great! Does he become successful?” Kasia asked eagerly.

“Yes. With the help of his American friend whose family is so grateful to him, they adopt the boy as one of their own. He goes to school and finishes a degree. He becomes a successful American citizen. He is able to bring most of his family members to the States and he is about to marry his fiancée, an American primary school teacher. By middle class standards, he is living a charmed life, quite a long way from his life as a young, ruthless cadre. This brings us to the present time. The current Cambodian government with a directive from the UN is prosecuting former Khmer Rouge leaders and cadres. The boy who is now a thirty-five-year-old successful lawyer in California is suddenly under arrest and is to be tried in a Cambodian genocide tribunal. He was betrayed by one of his jealous relatives who got left in Cambodia while he migrated most of his family to the States. The relative reported him to the authorities as one of the young cadres that served under Pol Pot’s regime.”

She stopped.

Jamie was silent, waiting for her to continue. She gave him an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, that’s all I know of the story. Ben and Rocky haven’t decided on the ending yet.”

Jamie drank from his glass. “What a...very compelling story,” he said thoughtfully.

“Th-thank you, Mr. Knoxville,” she responded shyly.

Jamie smiled at her. “Please, call me Jamie. You make a great story-teller, Celine. I have read about the on-going prosecution of former Khmer Rouge leaders. It’s a very timely subject.”

“I know. This will be a thought-provoking story that will make us examine our moral code in this time and age. What is freedom when choice has been violently and ruthlessly ripped from your very soul? Is freedom really so hard to achieve in a world where democracy is the ruling ideology? What is freedom of choice really and to what extent should we go to get it? Isn’t freedom to live a decent, violence-free life a God-given and constitutional right of every human being and therefore one must struggle to achieve it no matter the cost? What if we violate someone else’s freedom to achieve this constitutional right? Where does morality lie there? Lots of questions. Lots of grey areas. Hopefully, this movie will be able to answer some of them.”

Jamie was silent again as he stared at the swirling cognac in his glass. Then he looked up and grinned. ”Dare here hit the jackpot when he hired you, Celine. Why does he always beat me to it?”

Celine stole a glance at Dare. His face had gone so serious she wondered if she had overstepped her boundary. She was about to whisper her apologies to him when Jamie spoke.

“I’m in! You have my money, Monty.”

Her eyes widened. She glanced at Dare again. There was no surprise in his face. He was looking at Jamie in a rather odd way. He seemed neither pleased nor disappointed.

“You won’t regret it, Knox,” Dare said simply and raised his glass to Jamie. He finished his drink.

“Well, isn’t it peachy? Now we can all move on to the fun stuff! I can’t tell a story like her but I can dance like J-lo, babe,” Kasia said to Jamie, sounding already bored. “Come on, guys, let’s transfer to the Sky Bar at the Mondrian. There’s no action here.”

Jamie turned his head to his right and Celine caught the exasperated expression on his face.

When nobody responded to her suggestion, Kasia excused herself and walked out of the room.

“Would you mind swapping partners, Dare?” Jamie said.

“She’s not my partner. She’s my secretary and now, scriptwriter, it seems. Yes, I would mind very much. That is one dumb chick, Knoxville and I am not inclined to humor you, even for twenty million dollars.”

Celine forgot she was merely a secretary. “Dare!” she chided her boss, scandalized.

To her surprise, Jamie chuckled. “I understand. What I’d give for her to remove a few pounds from her bumpers to add to her noggin. You know, I’m actually thinking of funding a study for doctors to extract fat from boobs and booties and transfer them to the skull. Would you like to co-finance it, my friend?”

“Sure. But that won’t sell. A lot of women think men are so into plastics that they invest all their hard-earned money in Silicon Valley. They fail to notice that we are heavily investing in Wall Street.”

Celine’s jaw dropped. “You guys are such...”

Two pairs of eyes full of machismo turned to her. “Yes?” they said almost in unison.

“Misogynists,” she said flatly, truly insulted by their blunt assessment of women.

Jamie leaned on the table and rested his chin on his palm. “Why, Celine, do you think she’s smart?”

She opened her mouth to say something but closed it.

“There you go,” Jamie said. “Point proven.”

“But you didn’t have to say that!”

“So, we are brutally honest. You are way too nice for your own good.”

“So, why are you with her if you think she’s...mentally challenged?”

Jamie looked at Dare uncomfortably.

Dare shrugged. “Sex.”

She made an O with her lips.

Jamie cleared his throat, shifting in his seat.

“But she obviously loves you,” she persisted.

Jamie laughed. “What she loves about me are my Rolls-Royces, my Beverly Hills mansion, my island in the Caribbean and restaurants like this.”

“How cynical!” she exclaimed, looking at them in stern disapproval.

“No, Celine. We are just realists,” Jamie said gently, looking very amused.

“You must be brothers. You sound alike.”

Jamie coughed. “I’m curious though. Why do you think she loves me?”

“Are you blind, Mr. Knoxville? Don’t you have a mirror? You are gorgeous! And...smart and...and..quite charming! What woman won’t love you?”

Jamie’s lips went slack. Then he cleared his throat again. “Dare, where did you find her?”

“Under a rock.”

“Which part of Cali? Maybe there’s another one hiding under a rock somewhere.”

“No. She’s unique, in a weird way.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Don’t forget the rule of the rock, man. Between it and a hard place, better choose the latter because you have a chance of making the hard soft. The rock however will remain a rock and it will definitely crush you.”

“Oh, is that what the rock experts say, brotha?”

“It is. But not in the way you think.”

The two men exchanged serious, intense stares.

Jamie sighed. “The wind is very...nice...and calm. Should it become stormy and change course, can I go sailing and smell the breeze?”

“It won’t change. Not for some time. A long time,” Dare answered flatly.

Jamie picked up his glass. “Ah. Shame,” he mumbled and finished his cognac.

The two men seemed to be suddenly conversing in a language that only the two of them could understand but thank God for that. Had they continued their women-bashing in front of her, she would have bathed them with the most expensive cognac found in the restaurant cellar which was currently sitting on their table and that would be bad for her mission. That will surely get her fired from her job.

When both men became silent, she decided to reel the topic back to business. “So, let me clarify, gentlemen. Is the deal closed? How much are you investing in this movie exactly, Mr. Knoxville?”

Jamie looked at her with a twinkle of humor in his eyes. “You heard him. Twenty million dollars. Is that cool enough, Celine?”

“Great!” She happily turned to Dare. “Congratulations!”

Dare didn’t say anything. He was now looking at Jamie in a not so friendly manner. It was strange because he just got what he wanted from Jamie.

Jamie cleared his throat. “Well, I think Kasia is right. This calls for a celebration. Dance with me, Celine?”

“Sure! But not before...” She opened her little clutch purse and took out a small pen. She moved her plate aside and spread a white napkin in place of it. She started scribbling on the white cloth. Then she looked up at Jamie, gave her one of her practiced Julia Roberts smiles and raised the napkin with both her hands for him to read what she had written. “You sign this!”

Jamie slowly read from the napkin. “This is to certify, that I, Jamie, Knoxville, producer extraordinaire, has agreed to co-finance my friend Dare Montgomery’s directorial project, a full-length movie of yet untitled state, for twenty million dollars. This agreement is signed with my free will and healthy state of mind and will be binding and be upheld in any court of the United States of America.”

Jamie stared at her, a frozen grin on his lips mingled with the shock in his eyes. “Seriously?”

She stood up and walked to Jamie’s side and spread the napkin on the table, in front of him. She handed him the pen.

Jamie looked up at her, a funny expression on his face. The guy was obviously blind-sided, but at least he wasn’t pissed off. She’d learned this trick from her brother, the CEO of Vega Multi-Media. Jordan called it the art of seductive negotiation. Disarm your target with your charm and wit and knowledge of your subject. Put him on the spot, use his momentary surprise to ambush him into sealing the deal.

Shaking his head, Jamie looked at the napkin again. “Would you like to be an actress, Celine? I have a movie in the works with Martin Scorsese and he needs an Asian woman to portray a big role.”

“No,” Dare suddenly butted in.

“I’m not asking you, brotha.”

“Should I answer that before or after you sign? Would that affect the agreement?” she asked smoothly.

Jamie smiled up at her. “No. But just in case you have aspirations in Hollywood, just tell me. You can be the next Audrey Hepburn.”

“Oh, I love her in Breakfast at Tiffany’s!”

She saw doubt creep in Jamie’s eyes. “Really? What’s your favorite line of Holly’s?”

She knew it was a test. Too bad it was her fave 60s movie since she was thirteen. And thank God she was a trying hard theater actress in college who once played Holly.

She bent and put one hand on the table and the other on Jamie’s shoulder and then she slowly rested her gaze on Dare, looking him straight in the eye.

“You know what’s wrong with you, Mister Whoever-You-Are? You’re chicken, you’ve got no guts. You’re afraid to stick out your chin and say, “Okay, life’s a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness.” You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified somebody’s going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

Dare became so still. His eyes became shuttered as he stared at her with suddenly cold, cold eyes that chilled her to the core.

Nervously, she looked at Jamie who was staring up at her with real fondness in his eyes now. What she’d give to see Dare look at her like that.

“That wasn’t spoken by Holly Golightly,” Jamie commented.

She shrugged. “I really like Paul better. Paul is the real free-spirit. Holly is the scaredy-cat.”

Jamie signed the napkin. “Satisfied?”

Smiling triumphantly, she held out her hand to him. “Shall we?”

Jamie took her hand and stood up.

They left the table and went to the lounge.

Dare checked his watch for the nth time. They’d been gone for fifteen minutes.

Kasia materialized back into the private room, no doubt sent by Jamie to entertain him while the bastard worked his charm on his woman. A few more minutes and he would lose all his good teeth from grinding them in resentment.

Your woman?
mocked his conscience. He drank from his glass. He refused to feel possessiveness toward her.

He was not a possessive person.

They were nothing to each other.

He would fuck some starlet tonight.

Plenty of beautiful women for him. Dozens!

Yeah, right. Like the one keeping you company? You sure are having fun!

“So, Dare, how is Gabrielle?” Kasia finally got tired of small talk.

“Busy with her lawyers, I suppose,” he answered, bored like shit.
Damn you, Knox!

“I wonder when the divorce will be final.”

He looked at her lazily. “Why?”

She traced her long red fingernails on the rim of her wine glass. “So we can hang out.”

“We are hanging out now.”

“Not really.”

He looked at his watch again. Seventeen minutes. “Does my married state stop you from hanging out with me if you really wanted to?”

She smiled coyly. “No. But...I’d like to more than hang out with you.”

“What about Jamie?”

“He’s fun and cool but not the marrying type,” she said without a hint of guilt or shame.

“And you think I am?”

She shrugged. “No. You’re the divorcing type. I kinda like that better.”

“You like to be divorced?”

She shrugged. “Married first.”