Show Business Is Murder (28 page)

He had written up to the very end. He didn't know how many more pages, but he could feel the door closing. He didn't think about it consciously, but he knew somewhere inside that he'd have to get through Henry Wilder to put it down, to put it all down. But for now, he couldn't face the typewriter, so he concentrated on washing his pants and shirt in the sink so he wouldn't smell at the meeting. He would try to tape the hole in the knee from the inside so it wouldn't hang open.

He had given Barry the latest segments—the total was now one hundred seventeen pages and two paragraphs on the one hundred eighteenth. The pages were not numbered and he did not consciously count them, but each fresh sheet tolled, somehow, inside his head. Although he turned over the new pages the day before yesterday, he remembered just
how he had written the storm, and could still feel it rattling inside him.

The thunder was still there, and it was all light that didn't fade and shrapnel still in flight. I waited for the trees to stop shaking—what world what ungodly world where even the trees shake and the soil flies at you and folds under you—and for the rain to stop whipping my cheeks, but I had waited days or months already to no avail. When the ground eats its own progeny, then we've all come to judgment day, but I'd seen it all, seen the very ground spread its jaws and pull my struggling comrades down into tunnels and unimaginable torments, seen bodies waist deep in soil jerking with the movement of hands gripping them beneath the ground. And yanked down in a flash of foreign tongue moving vertically even in sound and then a scurrying of footsteps beneath. Always beneath and below. Footsteps in the cellar of my mind, even then in the rain with the shock of the blast still settling over and throughout me.

And the skies opened only with rain.

He knew that he was almost there; he had even allowed one of Wilder's hands to creep over the edge of the coffin, but he slammed the lid on it. It would have to wait until after his meeting if he was going to get through it.

“I'M TELLING YOU,
you would've died if you saw him. I know, I know—the suit. Last year Armani. Well he's a prick. He was a prick when I knew him at Doubleday. That's right, that's exactly right. Can't talk foreign, I want him off my fuckin' Rolodex.”

Adam Diamond leaned forward and hit the fourth red button in from the left. “Janice. Richard Dawkins. Off the fuckin' Rolodex, out of the computer. Done.”

“Yes, just like that, Harvey. I trust your judgment, especially when it coincides with mine. Hey—and guess who I've got coming in in about . . .” Adam flicked his Movado out from beneath a cuff. “. . . five minutes? The guy—the bum guy I told you about. Jaston Tanker. I'll—”

The green light flashed on his desk, and a female voice crackled through. “We have a security problem, Adam. A homeless man in the lobby won't leave, says he has an appointment with you, but I have you with Janson Tanker for your twelve o'clock and Michael Weaver for your twelve thirty.”

“Goddamnit Janice,” Adam roared. His voice dropped with the second half of the same breath. “Harvey, I'll call you back.” He slammed down the phone and stood up, leaning over his desk toward the intercom. “That probably
is
Jaston Tanker.”

The intercom was silent for a minute. “You mean
Janson
Tanker, Adam?”

Adam was silent for a long time as he tried to control his breathing. Finally, he spoke, his voice wavering with rage. “Just you push me, you cunt. You push me about an inch further and you'll be rolling calls the rest of your
fucking
life. Now get him in here.”

He sighed, and raised the jade duo balls from their box, a blue case with a flowing Asian design. He sat down and rolled his black leather chair to his enormous glass desk.

After a few seconds, there was an uncomfortable knock on the door, and then Janson entered the room. Adam could see how security had mistaken him for a bum; his shirt was so washed out that it had faded to a greenish gray, the color all clothes turned to once they were old enough.

Janson crossed the room, a walking shadow. He hadn't shaved, but the stubble was as much a part of his face as anything else.

He was probably the kind of guy who grew scruff within
seconds after shaving, just to cover his face a little, Adam thought. Not just to make him look tough, but to keep something in. He had the hardest green eyes Adam had ever seen. They reminded him of his father's.

“Please. Sit.” Adam beckoned Janson forward, indicating the smaller seat on the far side of the desk.

“Tha—” Janson cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said, and sat down. His voice was rich and deep; it had a full rainbow of colors in it. Adam found himself instantly charmed.

“I like you,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Janson replied. He didn't look shocked (Adam bet it took a hell of a lot more than that to shock a guy like Janson), just perplexed. And more than a little out of his element. Adam tried again.

“I like you. I like your writing. I haven't read it all, but I took home the first half of your book as a weekend read and I like your style. Reminds me of . . .” Adam stopped for a minute, studying the Lichtenstein hanging behind Janson's head. “Reminds me of Faulkner. I'm intrigued. I want to read more, I want to know more. You've got a rough style that's not meant to be polished. I like that. I like the . . . animal feel. Where'd you get it?”

Janson frowned, biting his lip and pulling it to the side. Adam could see something moving in him like wind through a chime. Discomfort, maybe. “My mother was a schoolteacher,” Janson finally said. “Had me reading early and typing by high school. I had a year of junior college before the war.” He was proud of that. Proud, yet not asking for approval.

“I have always thought,” Adam replied, “that formal schooling is vastly overrated.”

Janson flicked his head back slightly in response, and Adam could detect a slight edge in his eyes. Suddenly he didn't like him quite so much.

“You want me to cut the bullshit and tell you why you're here, don't you?” Adam asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what I do?”

“No.”

“I'm not really an agent like you'd think of an agent. More of a packager. I put deals together. Books. Movies. People. I like your style, I like your writing. I already told you that. I need the end of your book, then I need to run it through a circuit of editors and producers.”

Janson watched Adam attentively, chewing on the skin underneath one of his fingernails.

“Now, here's what I can do for you,” Adam continued. “I can run this story through my circuit, and if it goes, it goes. Not small time. I'm talking book deal, publishing, hard and soft cover—I don't work with anything without a hard release. I'm talking film rights, and we can negotiate for screenwriting credit. It depends what you come up with, how much the studios like it and you, and if you can give them what they want. A publishing deal can get you from twenty-five thousand to a quarter of a million. That used to be more than you could expect for a first-time writer, but first-time writers are hot. Unless you're John Grisham or Jane Austin, established writers are having a tough time at the movies right now. They're looking for hot young writers. You're not exactly young, but you're new and that's the biggest word from LA to New York. Film rights go, they can go seven figures.”

Adam watched Janson's eyes widen.
I have him,
he thought.
He's mine and only mine until I decide if I'm using him
. He continued, tasting the words as they rolled from his tongue. “Now
I
deal mostly with film rights, but if those go, you can expect a publishing deal. What publisher isn't going to want to get a book if we get you on line with a big
studio? None. More money for you, more money for them.” He paused and let the thoughts sink in, fumes settling over a softly lit meadow.

Adam cleared his throat once. Sharply. “Now before you go picking out the color of your new BMW, I'm telling you now that none of this could go. When it's all said and done, I'm making you no promises, no guarantees. But I will tell you this.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I want the end of the book, I want you to release the whole thing so I can have people ‘officially' read it and so I can move it around my office and through my contacts. I want you to sign this—customary procedure. Leaves you with the rights to all profit, the ability to decide your own contract with us or with anyone else. It just gives us the right to read it and says you're aware we may have other properties with similar themes.”

Janson leaned forward and signed.

You idiot,
Adam thought.
I could be taking your house right now and you wouldn't know the fucking difference
.

In fact, Adam was moving through proper legal channels just as he'd claimed. He was too far along in his career to risk “borrowing” material, but the simple scrawl of Janson's signature on the form infuriated him. The trust in simply giving up his name like that, in relinquishing it.

But he had him now, and had him just where he wanted him. He had the full story (and the only copy from the appearance of the first two-thirds of it), and all the time in the world to decide if he wanted to make it hot.

Adam took the form back across his huge desk. “Great,” he said, forcing a smile, though he didn't feel much like smiling at all. “We'll be in touch. I'll have Scott pick up the end of your manuscript from your buddy at your . . . dinner place. Any questions?”

Janson studied a dirty fingernail. “Yeah.” His eyes were glazed, distant. He raised them. “Are we having lunch?”

“No. Sorry. I have a lunch meeting later. I'm afraid you'll have to pick something up on your way back,” Adam said. He smiled handsomely and his eyes flashed to the door.

HIS FEET ACHED
from walking by the time he got home, but he was good at ignoring pain, and he thudded heavily up the stairs to his tiny room. The meeting hadn't gone too badly. He remembered the manic nausea that had washed over him when Adam introduced those numbers, that money, so casually. Twenty-five thousand dollars to a quarter of a million. Janson couldn't think in numbers that big, couldn't quite get a handle around them and put them somewhere that showed what they were. He didn't even try.

The lowest number was more than his father had saved in his entire life, let alone earned in a single year. But a lifetime of blue bruises that turned a sickly black was enough to wash some of the green from the dollars floating through his head.

Just one thousand dollars,
he thought.
That's not much, not much given the numbers these men talked. Could get me far and away from here and put me up for a few nights in a new town—a town, not a city—until I found work. Somewhere I could see the sky, not just a translucent gray fog, and trees glancing from pools of water standing as still as sleeping shadows. And cool nights with stars laid out like holes clear through to heaven
.

He closed his eyes and thought for a minute, his mind catching the image of a wood fire burning in the country somewhere, of smoke moving through the night air along lines as soft as the curves of a woman.

There were things he could still do. Not many, not skills, but there were things, and a check with four digits on it could get him to a place where he could show just what those things were. Once he didn't have to bend his back to keeping the door shut, he could bend it to other tasks. And
leave the city with its one check a month, its stamps for meals, its pitiful offering of a lifeline which did not include a life.

He swung the door open to find the typewriter staring at him, a metal eye in the middle of the stark room. The odor of his sweat drifted to him as the draft sucked the stale air past him into the hallway. The typewriter watched him expectantly. Not yet, he told it with his eyes. Not yet. He fell on his mattress, exhausted, and watched the rotating fan overhead.

Janson couldn't write for several days and nights, until he was convinced that it would never come, and that he had lost it all. He had lost the check with four figures on it, the town that was not a city, and worst of all, the demons would forever stay their perch inside him. He watched the fan spin for nights and nights and then, at last, it lulled him to the edge of a cliff where sleep was waiting.

He had no idea when he woke up, but he woke up typing, and there was night all in his room and in his head. He was drenched in sweat, and it took him great effort to pull his clinging undershirt off. His fingers were running, running away from something, and they hammered on the metal keys until they ached with a dull throbbing pain. The ragged skin on the side of one of his fingernails finally gave way. He winced as he typed on. Droplets of blood made their way down under the key and flew up with the key's release, faintly spraying the sheet. The paper was almost out, and he prayed to a God he no longer believed in that it would hold just that much longer, just until it was out of him.

The wind picked up the rain on its bosom and bore it to my face. It was no longer liquid, but a thick, solid paste smearing my brow and eyes. I was all feet and knees high-pumping and knocking my gear, but I had Henry's footsteps to pull me through the mud and the brush. The one face from
before the war, the one laugh I knew from a time when all laughs weren't merely crackings of the soul to push the fear out. Again I thought of his footsteps when he blocked for me against Allston and I was the county sweetheart. A two-hundred-eighteen-yard game, and all two hundred and eighteen had been my feet in his footsteps just as they were now, but that was back when boys would be boys and when we loved rather than feared the thickness of soil and turf. I watched his feet sink in the mud ahead of me and pressed my own into the messy mounds they left.

The copter was there just like they'd sent word on the radio, but then they sent all codes and numbers over the radio and all we usually got was fire and brimstone. They were behind us still as they always seemed to be and we could see the spinning blades lowering in the clearing ahead, and suddenly our whole lives narrowed to a single gem-like point. Three hundred yards from the jungle to the clearing. I could feel my soul moving to the clearing with the might of a boulder on a downhill roll. It pushed toward the opening with euphoric longing, with a desire to escape that was red tinged pink around the edges and lit like a forest fire underneath my moving body.

That was when the ground gave and I saw Henry's knees where his feet had been and then his shoulders and he dangled above the tunnel, the roaring rain crashing on him even through the leaves. The whirring of the helicopter tormented our ears with the full glory of our world just in reach and leaving without us. The ground yawned around him and a furrow opened up and I saw his legs still moving like they were running. One of them appeared beneath him in the tunnel with his gun trained up on us. On his ridiculously kicking legs and my head framed in the light above the tunnel, and with our guns somewhere back in the blast behind us, dropped in tangles of brush and churning soil when we first heard the full promise of the metal bird which would carry us like babies to our
rebirth. And it called to us still, deep-throated from the clearing ahead, the only sweet-voiced bird I heard in sixteen months spent in a bird's habitat.

He stared at me from below, all cruelty in the smallness of his eyes, and jerked once with his gun to indicate my movement, that he wanted me to drop to them, to fall into the earth of my own volition after willing myself to life with a will like steel doubled over. And it called, hovering gently, that it was leaving without us and we had been so close, Henry Wilder and I, to going back shoulder to shoulder and starting to drink away the memories together but alone. We had been strides away that I counted in my mind as I gazed ahead and saw the line of the blades through the bend of the trees and the mist, and Henry was already lost, his legs within their reach and no hope of pulling up and out and free.

I flooded with instinct; it moved through my body like water washing across my grave, and I kicked him, just once, a shove of my boot on his shoulder and I was running before he fell. I didn't see his face—no, I did not, or even the few hours of sleep that I now steal would be lost—just the surprised face of the underground rat below as Henry's living body hurtled toward him blocking out the sun and his arms raised momentarily above his face as he stepped back in surprise to avoid the falling man and missing, sweetly missing, me as I fled on fairy's wings to my bird.

I swear to God, though by then I was all but through to the clearing with footsteps between us that had never turned over faster, I swear to God that even above the angry wind and the cry of the copter I heard his body hit the ground. I heard it then, and I've heard it every night since. It comes to me, all echoes in hallways and rapping knuckles against wooden doors. The sound of Henry Wilder's living body hitting beneath the earth in a jungle that carried the licks of Hell's little flames on every leaf.