The Cooperman Variations (4 page)

While Vanessa was still talking, she caught sight of Hy Newman and me in the waiting area. “Hy, darling!” she said. “How
are
you? How is Phyllis? I was thinking about you only yesterday. We really have to do something new and exciting with the
Nutcracker
for Christmas. I keep getting the same old garbage fed me. You know what it’s like. What I need is the Hy Newman touch. Will you promise to call Philip Rankin this afternoon? Tell him you were talking to me. Promise, now.”

Newman stood dumb. He was disarmed and laid out. A touch of colour leapt to his cheekbones. Meanwhile Vanessa moved past his swaying body to grab me by the arm. I could feel her strength as she pulled me into her office and closed the door by leaning on it. “Give me a second, Benny,” she called, scooping up the phone. “Sally? If I see Hy Newman up here again, we are going to have that unpleasant conversation that’s been pending. Do I make myself clear? I feel sick enough today without having to run into the Ghost of Christmas Past on the way to my desk. You understand?” Now it was Vanessa’s cheeks that were burning. Her usually warm grey eyes were on fire. “I don’t give a sweet fuck what you tell him. That’s your department. You be the heavy in this or I’ll find someone who can.” She slammed down the phone again and sat, or rather collapsed, into the big executive chair behind her large desk. It was probably Louis Quatorze the Fifteenth or something, but I couldn’t tell.

The office of the head of Entertainment was everything it should be: windows on two walls, relentless interior decorating and hardly any paper visible on a flat surface. Labelled portraits of the founders of NTC, large and suitably framed in gold leaf, stood out on one wall, with smaller ones showing the founders of NBC and CBS for good measure. A portrait of Edward R. Murrow hung on one panelled wall and the familiar golden statuette given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stood at attention in a niche. I wondered when she had had time to be in the movie business. A flotilla of golden and silver European and Canadian television awards shared another shelf. I noticed that with a respectable handgun I could get off a couple of good shots at the chair behind Vanessa’s desk without moving too far away from the elevator. I wanted the desk shifted, just to make it harder for the opposition. If there was an opposition, of course.

“Benny, why do times get complicated and short? I’m late now for a taping. You’ll have to come with me. It’s a historic event: it may be our last in-house production. I’ve cut off people like Hy Newman because we are no longer producing our own series of entertainment shows. We’ve cut back to the late-night stuff, like
Vic Vernon After Dark
. Come on. We can talk on the way.” She grabbed a big blond-leather bag and a buff suede coat and headed for the door without looking back to see if I was coming. People in the outer waiting room scattered. Sally held the door as we disappeared into the burgundy elevator. Here she reached into the bag, produced a compact and began adjusting her makeup. She knew exactly how much time she had before we arrived at the main-floor lobby. When the doors opened, the compact had been returned to its zippered compartment in her bag and Vanessa Moss, her smile in place, walked directly to the revolving doors.

Vanessa’s custom midnight-blue Range Rover had been brought around, and a young man in a T-shirt and jeans pulled his forelock as he held the door open for her. “Get yourself a suit, George, and I’ll see if I can move you up a notch or two before I’m out of here.”

“Thanks, Miss Moss. I will!”

“Poor bastard,” she said, as we pulled out into traffic on University Avenue, “he’s been trying to get his toe in the door since I worked here the first time. And that was five years ago. He does something with computer animation. Supposed to be very clever. Don’t know what he’s doing around here. Yesterday I heard Bill Franks, the head of Drama—he’s the house producer on Springbank’s production of
Julius Caesar
—asking whether Brutus and Cassius couldn’t be combined into one character for simplicity’s sake. It’s a wonder they still schedule Shakespeare. It only happens when we have to go before the CRTC to renew our licence once every ten years. But that’s all slated to go now. And that’ll include Bill, thank God. I can get the Mankiewicz
Julius Caesar
, if I’m ever insane enough to program Shakespeare. Of course, education’s wasted on people like Bill. They’re like potatoes in the sun: the light makes them poisonous. Do you have any aspirin?” I patted my pockets and shook my head.

The Range Rover gave us a higher view of the cars in front of us than I got in my Olds. It didn’t do us any good, however; we still had to wait in line until the lights changed. Toronto drivers are in a bigger hurry than I’m used to. University Avenue looked like a street that had been laid out before the collapse of National Socialism. Albert Speer would have loved University Avenue. It was like driving through a graveyard of huge monuments. The boulevard between the northbound and southbound lines of traffic tried to take the curse off the prospect with flower gardens and fountains, but the dullness was ingrained. Order and discipline prevailed and endured.

“Benny, I’ve been thinking. You’re going to have to tell the cops involved in this case that you’re working for me. Tell Jack Sykes at 52 Division. Introduce yourself. Explain that you’re running interference for me. Okay?”

“You’re the boss.”

“You’re bloody right.”

Vanessa looked impatient, checked her watch and slipped a package of cigarettes out of her bag. “Benny,” she said, as she applied the car’s lighter to the cigarette between her lips, “you never saw me do this. I gave up this filthy habit over a year ago. I can give you the date, if you need it.” I nodded, and began worrying whether I would be able to refuse her offer of a smoke. I needn’t have. She didn’t offer.

“I have a lot of enemies at the network, Benny. They’d just love to know that I have bad habits on top of everything else.”

“With a murderer loose, I shouldn’t worry about lung cancer. When are you going to fill me in on what you want me to do?” I avoided calling her “Stella,” but couldn’t use “Vanessa” to her face yet. Some people have a heavy hand with a vocative; they don’t believe in pronouns. Me, I just use a person’s name when I find that for some extraordinary reason I’ve remembered it.

“Benny, all you have to do is stick close to me. You’re my extra skin until I say stop. Okay? I need you and depend upon you utterly. You’re an absolute angel for letting me take you away from dear old Grantham. Don’t think I’ll forget that. I know you’re not supposed to carry heat up here, but isn’t there a way around that?”

“Canadian law doesn’t favour concealed weapons. I could get permission to carry a piece, but I’d have to dress like a Brinks guard.”

“Just keep me from harm’s way, that’s all I want. If I can stay alive and hold on to this job for another six months, I’ll die happy. All I need is to be able to quit on my own terms and not on theirs.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind. One thing, Vanessa. I want to be able to nose around to find out where the danger is coming from. It’s not a great idea just to wait for him to try again. Would you like to give me a hint about your own suspicions? Who should I be looking out for? An unbriefed bodyguard isn’t much better than no bodyguard.”

“You’ll meet the lot of them as we run through the obstacle course that constitutes my day, Benny. First, we are going to meet a producer, Eric Carter, who is working beyond his competence. He knows it and I know it. He built a reputation doing six shows with Dermot Keogh, the cellist. We won awards for the network with Keogh. Now Keogh’s gone, Eric is a leftover. He has the smell of failure on his clothes these days. I need him to succeed, while everybody else, who is supposed to be supporting him, wants to see him fall on his ass. They know I’m not well and they’re taking advantage of the pain I’m in. That describes the sort of snake pit this business is: they want him to fail because it will reflect badly on me even though this production package has been pending for over a year. If it works, Nate Green will get the credit because he was my predecessor; if it fails, the shit on my heel is all mine.”

“What happened to Keogh? I know he drowned, but how do you drown in April?”

“He was a scuba diver. A lot of string players are. He was diving some wreck up north.”

“What a waste.”

“I still think it’s strange talking about things
happening
to Dermot. Dermot used to
make
things happen. He was never passive. You must have read about it. He was only forty and with a fat Sony contract and carte blanche around here. He could out-Casals Casals. Too bad, really. He was lots of fun.”

It was Wally Skeat from the Grantham radio station who’d introduced me to Dermot Keogh back in April.

“Dermot’s death was tragic, Benny. Tragic in the sense that we were taught to use the word in school.” Vanessa’s eyes were shining as she spoke Dermot Keogh’s name. For a few seconds she was silent, then she announced, “I don’t want to talk about it any more, Benny, not right now. Okay?”

I tried to change the subject: “Who’s Len Cook, Vanessa, the guy you scolded before he escaped into the elevator?”

“Len’s finished with me. Just working out the last weeks of his contract. He’s the executive assistant you’re replacing, Benny. I think he’ll turn up in News next. He hasn’t ruined anything there yet. Next question?”

“What about Bob Foley, the guy who went crazy? Len Cook used his name to try to dissipate your anger.” The remark that everybody in the corridor had laughed at still bothered me, because I wasn’t in on the joke. If it was a joke.

“Foley is a senior technician assigned to the Vic Vernon talk show,
Vic Vernon After Dark
. Do you know it?”

I nodded. I’d seen it a few times without making it the regular end to my day. Vanessa hadn’t stopped talking: “… Late night with visiting celebrities? We do it live from Studio Four five nights a week. Last night Foley walked off the show. He just got up and left, saying to no one in particular, ‘I don’t need this shit.’”

“What prompted it?”

“Oh, there was some wrangle going on about the sound quality. Vic Vernon is an egomaniac. You know, the sort of guy who remembers what he was wearing the day Kennedy was shot. Only he wasn’t even
born
then. I don’t know the details, but Vic was sounding off about his microphone. Said it gave his voice a tinny quality.”

“Did it?”

“Who
knows
with Vic. Ten minutes earlier, he was unhappy with the lighting, which hasn’t been changed since the last time he was unhappy with it. It’s just the insecurity of the artist, Benny. If you expect somebody to let his entrails hang out in public regularly, you’ve got to expect him to demand a thing or two that might be unreasonable in normal adults. Anyway, Foley had had it with Vic’s tantrums and said so. It was half a minute before broadcast, Benny!
Thirty seconds
to air, so Bob isn’t going to find a job anywhere in the industry at the level he was working at. Even the people who hate Vic won’t hire him. But he doesn’t need to care. He’s got the Plevna Foundation to administer.”

“The what?”

“Later, Benny.”

Vanessa pulled up in a small lot behind what looked like a car dealership on Yonge Street. “This is it,” she said. “Studio Seven is just about the last of our sound stages. We’ve been getting rid of them all over the city.”

“Cutting down on the overhead?”

“Bill Paley said it years ago, Benny, we’re not into real estate. We buy and sell programs. That’s the way ahead. There’s a lot of confusion, especially with the old diehards who like the smell of the greasepaint. But that’s Dodo-land. That’s ancient history.”

I wanted to ask who Bill Paley was, but I’d shown off enough ignorance for one afternoon already. We walked past a protesting commissionaire and through a back door leading to a sound stage. Here dozens of children dressed in blue tulle and sporting silver halos and wings were pulling at the contents of three boxes of pizza. Walking around them were various floor managers and kid wranglers, carrying bags of knitting in case a dull moment should unexpectedly appear.

“Ernestine, you
can’t
carry a wand if you’re going to be an alto! The altos aren’t carrying anything. It’s just the little ones who carry wands, dear. Understand?” I outgrabbed a wedge of pizza from under the nose of a blonde, blue-eyed angel, who gave me a withering sneer. Vanessa led the way through the tulle to a control booth overlooking the sound stage. We walked in and closed the door behind us. On a line of illuminated monitors, I could see a band of brass players in grown-up versions of the costumes I’d already seen. The monitors blocked the view of the studio below from the right, and flats on the set obscured it from all the other directions. In fact, the eight or so people sitting closest to the glass could only see what was going on below through one or more of the monitors. Nobody turned around as we came in.

The angelic brass players were standing on steps rising towards a set of pearly gates. Highlights from the French horns, trumpets and trombones shone through the smoke or fog that was obscuring what was going on. One of the musicians was coughing into a red bandana that probably hadn’t been cleared with the costume department.

The control room supported a gloom of its own. The monitors supplied the only bright spots in view. The rest of the illumination came from tiny points of red and green lights shining on control panels. Script assistants read by lights so dim as to imperil their vision. For a moment, nobody looked at us; then, when we were spotted, the producer called “Cut!” and everybody went on a five-minute break, while Vanessa and he had words in the suddenly emptied room. “Eric, I want you to meet my new assistant. Eric Carter, Benny Cooperman.” Carter glanced in my direction and bussed Vanessa on both cheeks.

“I’m half a day ahead of schedule, Vanessa. In spite of the lighting trouble I told you about. The kids are going to be terrific. Just like you said. I can’t believe this woman,” Carter said to me, “she’s right about everything. Even the effects! You said they’d slow us down and you were right, but I’ve got fifty replacement kids so I’ve cut down on the kiddy breaks. I just use different kids and keep rolling. Saved me hours and hours.”