This Other Eden (46 page)

Rosalie,
like most women who live with men, found the male habit of constantly
rearranging their wedding tackle whenever an idle moment occurred most
disconcerting. On the phone, reading a book, stirring the dinner, blokes are
always handling their privates and Rosalie, who had just spent nearly a month
alone with Max, felt certain that if Max were dead and his muscles were going
through their final involuntary spasms, somehow or other, one of his hands
would end up on his dick.

‘Is he
breathing?’ she asked desperately.

‘Yes,
he is, but he’s a mess, that’s for sure. Most of his insides are on his
outside. We have to get him to a hospital.’

‘We
can’t. If we do that, Tolstoy will find him for sure and he won’t screw it up
twice. We have to stay undercover.’

‘Rosalie,’
Judy pleaded, ‘this is Hollywood and a huge star has been terribly wounded,
possibly fatally. This is not something we can keep quiet.’

Max
wasn’t dead. His body was in total shock, but he could hear what they were
saying. What is more, he knew how to deal with the problem under discussion —
the same way you dealt with any problem. With a considerable effort Max managed
to attract Judy’s attention by tugging at his sleeve.

‘Call
my agent,’ Max whispered into Judy’s ear and gave him the number.

‘Of
course,’ said Judy, ‘why didn’t I think of that,’ and grabbed his phone.

Judy
was not himself in that great biz called show, but he lived in Los Angeles, and
he knew that when stars had problems, whatever those problems might be, they
turned to their agents to sort them out.

‘Koch
Associates,’ said a steely voice over Judy’s phone. A voice which implied by
its very tone that unless you had already had a featured rôle in at least three
shows, not to even think of seeking representation. Even Judy was momentarily
intimidated. Then he remembered that he was not actually an aspiring actor and
had no burning belief inside him that he could make it, if only he were given
the chance, nor was he seeking representation. He therefore had nothing to fear
from the armour-plated voice that answered the phones at Koch Associates.

Emboldened
by this thought, he said, ‘Listen, my name is J. Schwartz, I’m an officer with
the FBI. Max Maximus is in big trouble and I have to speak to his agent.’

There
was a brief pause and another voice came on the line, this time even steelier
and more forbidding than the first.

‘This
is Geraldine Koch. If you’re some actor trying to bluff your way through to me,
get off the phone now, or I shall see to it that your next public appearance
will be in a Salvation Army breadline!’

‘Ms
Koch, this is J. Schwartz of the FBI. Now shut up and listen to me!’ Geraldine
was so unused to being addressed in this manner that, astonishingly, she did
shut up, at least for long enough for Judy to say, ‘Plastic Tolstoy has taken
out a contract on Max.’

‘What!’
Geraldine cried, panic cracking the steel of her voice. ‘Max told me he was
retiring! You say he has a contract with Plastic Tolstoy! That can’t be, I do
his deals, not the FBI!’

‘Ms
Koch, will you be quiet,’ Judy shouted. ‘I am not talking about a film
contract, I’m talking about a murder contract! They’ve already hit him once and
he’s got about a hundred bullets in him. Now we know that Tolstoy will try to
hit him again the moment he finds out where Max is. He needs hospital treatment
in complete secrecy and he needs it now.’

Geraldine
was calm again. Things were not quite as bad as she had thought; Max was only
dying. For a moment she had thought that he had gone to another agent.

‘Where
are you?’ she asked.

‘We’re
in a car just coming on to Sunset at the Chateau Marmont.’

‘Head
for 289043 Melrose,’ Geraldine said. ‘It’s just past all the bondage gear shops
and don’t ask me how I know that. It’s a convent hospital called The Little
Sisters of the Above the Line Costs. There will be a medical team waiting.’

Geraldine
put the phone down and tried to concentrate. Max may not have left her but the
situation was still very serious. What could Max possibly have done to offend
Tolstoy enough for Tolstoy to try to kill him? Trying to kill someone was a
fairly radical step, even by the cut and thrust standards of Hollywood.
Geraldine wondered if this meant that the movie deal which she had been
negotiating for Max with Tolstoy’s people was off? It would at least be on
hold, that was certain. Max’s position was clearly a delicate one. When a
producer took out a murder contract on an actor, the actor’s agent knew that
difficult negotiations lay ahead. Geraldine resolved not to panic. She had
worked in a tough town for more years than her cosmetic surgeon cared to
remember and she had learnt over those years that there were very few problems,
if any, which saturation lunching could not eventually fix.

‘Pixie
Dawn,’ she snapped into her intercom. ‘Clear my diary. As of now, we are
lunching for our lives.’

Specialist
treatment.

Rosalie pulled into 289043
Melrose to find a crack medical team on full alert. Max was whisked out of the
car and on to an emergency trolley and taken straight into an intensive care
theatre. Judy and Rosalie could only watch anxiously through the glass wall as
Max’s clothes were cut away and the dedicated surgeons and doctors began their
work.

‘They
look like they know their business,’ Judy said, attempting to comfort a
tight-lipped Rosalie. Rosalie’s hand stole to her stomach. She had only just
become pregnant, so there was nothing to feel, but she none the less felt aware
of some presence inside her.

‘I want
my child to know its father,’ she said quietly.

Judy
had not realised that Rosalie was pregnant. He did not know what to say, so he
said nothing.

After
about ten minutes the head surgeon emerged from the operating theatre, looking
very perplexed.

‘Well,
we can’t find anything wrong with him, I’m afraid,’ he said, and there was a
hint of irritation in his voice. He had been called in from a particularly
tense game of VR golf against Jack Nicklaus and he rather resented the
intrusion.

‘Can’t
find anything wrong!’ Rosalie gasped.

‘That’s
right. There’s not a whiff of drugs about him. We’ve checked his genitals and
his posterior and all that’s clean as a whistle. There’s no overdose, no sexual
disease, I’ve looked right up him and there’s definitely nothing wedged in his
backside. To be quite frank, I’ve absolutely no idea why you’ve brought him
here at all.’

‘Because
he’s dying! You stupid bastard!’ Rosalie screamed in the man’s face. ‘Look at
him.’

The
surgeon turned and seemed to notice for the first time that Max was riddled
with bullet holes, and had virtually no blood left in him.

‘You
mean
that’s
what you want us to look at?’ he asked, very surprised.

The
misunderstanding lay in the fact that The Little Sisters of the Above the Line
Costs was a private hospital, with the emphasis on private. It was not used to
dealing with ailments that might be categorised as non-scandalous. People got
riddled with bullets all the time in LA. Death by gunfire was a perfectly
socially acceptable way to go, it could happen to anyone and could not possibly
be considered in any way embarrassing or necessitating expensive cover-ups. The
Little Sisters was a hospital that specialised in such cover-ups, dealing as it
did with things that people needed to be kept quiet. Drug overdoses, pubic
crabs, strange objects that had got themselves stuck up people’s bottoms or in
other orifices — vacuum cleaner nozzles, Coke bottles, small animals, etc.
(Small animals were particularly common, in fact, the hospital boasted rather a
fine menagerie of assorted gerbils, hamsters and possums that had been rescued
from the interior plumbing of various drugged-out movie stars.)

When
the Little Sisters had received an urgent call from Max Maximus’s agent,
demanding an immediate admission, they had of course presumed that the ailment
was of a scandalous nature, which is why they had spent so long probing one of
the few holes in his body that had not been caused by a bullet.

Counsel.

Whilst the doctors worked
on Max, Judy and Rosalie considered a plan of action. Despite being understandably
upset and anxious about Max, Rosalie was thinking clearly. She remained
adamant that the only course of action was to take the evidence of Plastic
Tolstoy’s crimes to Jurgen Thor, the one person with the influence to get it in
properly before the public. Judy, on the other hand, still wanted to go to the
police and have Tolstoy arrested.

‘With
what we’ve got on that tape we could put him away for thirty years,’ Judy said.
‘I mean quite apart from all the environmental stuff, we have him commissioning
an attempted murder.’

But
Rosalie was absolutely insistent.

‘He’s
my husband, it’s my tape, and we’re taking it to Thor.’

In her
own mind Rosalie had rejoined Mother Earth. She was again a green activist and
Plastic Tolstoy’s confessional tape was the most effective weapon the
Environmental Movement had ever been given.

‘If we
can get this out to people, maybe we can stop the rot!’ Rosalie said. ‘Maybe we
can show people what’s being done to their world while they twiddle their
thumbs. It could be the Third Great Green Scare, something to really shock
people into fighting back.’

‘I
suppose it could,’ Judy conceded.

‘Of
course it could. We have to try anyway, and that means getting this tape back
to Europe. If we stay here we’ll be dead anyway.’

That
reminded Judy of something. Plastic Tolstoy knew all about him. He was in as
much danger as Max was, and so, in that case, were his loved ones. He called
home. His husband Roger was very upset.

‘Judy!
Thank goodness it’s you! You have to come home right now! The house has been
ransacked. I just got back, everything is —‘

‘Roger!’
Judy interrupted. ‘Are the police there?’

‘Not
yet. I called them but —‘

‘Get
your passport and get out now! Come to 289043 Melrose.’

‘Don’t
be stupid, Judy, the house is a bomb-site, I have salmon for —‘Now, Roger! Get
out now!’

Agent
of conflict.

For a few hours Max’s
condition remained critical, but as it turned out Rosalie and Judy had
interrupted the killers in time. By the afternoon he began to respond to
treatment.

They
knew they could not remain long at the hospital, though, reasoning that on
hearing Max had been spirited away, Plastic Tolstoy would be anxious to ensure
that he was dead.

‘The
first thing he’s going to do is start checking the hospitals,’ said Judy. ‘We
need to get Max out of town quickly and into some hiding place or other that
Tolstoy can’t figure out. That goes for me too, for that matter. Tolstoy’s
going to want to clean this whole thing up properly, and that includes me.’

‘Well,
I really don’t see how looking up old TV schedules could have got you into so
much trouble,’ Roger observed, but Judy assured him that it had.

‘The
best place to go would be my granny’s place in Ireland,’ said Rosalie. ‘Tolstoy
doesn’t know my name, so I doubt that he would find us there and it gets me
close to Jurgen Thor.’

‘That
means an air ambulance,’ Judy replied, ‘also European visas. Those things are
difficult to organise, and we could certainly never do it without sticking our
heads above the parapet. If we swan round LA trying to get air tickets and our
passports stamped, Tolstoy will spot us for sure.’

There
was a gloomy silence. Every second they remained inactive brought Tolstoy’s
deadly shadow closer. Just then, the solution arrived in the unlikely figure of
Max’s agent Geraldine, who burst through the door with flowers from her
Claustrosphere.

‘OK,’
she said to Judy and Rosalie. ‘Thanks for getting him into hospital but I’ll be
taking charge from here on in.

‘I
don’t think so,’ said Rosalie.

‘Well,
I’m sorry, Miss, but I’m not interested in what you think. What you think
doesn’t matter. All that matters is Max needs me and I’m here for him. Excuse
me.’ Geraldine turned her back on Rosalie and tapped a number into her phone.
Rosalie and Judy were a little nonplussed. It was not so much what Geraldine
had said, but the way that she had said it. No one can put people down the way
an agent can, particularly an important Hollywood agent.

It is
probably not that they particularly enjoy being rude. Being rude just happens to
be the principal function of their professional existence. To an agent there
are two types of actor, those who are happening and those who are not. Hence
there are two kinds of rudeness. There is the rudeness which is directed
at
those
who are not happening, and the rudeness which is directed at others
on
behalf
of and for the benefit of those who are happening. The rudeness
directed at the unhappening is not normally very rude. In fact, it is really no
more than the understandable brusqueness which any decent agent must develop in
a world where there are a thousand actors seeking every job. The rudeness
directed downwards is often tinged with affection and understanding, for agents
are human beings too and it would soften any heart to be constantly surrounded
by so much frustrated ambition.