“Myron, Myron, Myron, you also said the last film was a guaranteed Academy Award. Instead I wind up having to do a scene with 2,000 cockroaches on me …” The memory made Shari stick the carrot spear into the cluster lovingly arranged in the Pierre Deux bone china cup.
“Shari, cupcake! They were beetles. Little kids in Rangoon or someplace keep them as pets …”
“Beetles, my ass! I’m telling you they were roaches. Big fucking roaches.” She flopped down on the Turkish striped-satin Donghia chaise. “Look Myron, you get me my sixteen mil or I’ll finally take lunch with Jack Newhouse over at CMS.”
Myron’s assistant’s eyebrows went up. Myron nodded as he closed his eyes confidently as if to say, watch me handle this. “Now, baby girl, has Uncle Myron ever not made money for you? And you break my heart with threats? Threats aren’t going to win you that Oscar.”
“That’s only a threat if you don’t deliver! Love to Marsha and the kids, bye.” America’s current reigning female box-office attraction tossed her Freddi Fekkai — dyed blonde mane as she hung up the phone with no more regret than if she’d had her secretary order a pizza.
Shari felt she had earned her right to piss downhill. Having started out a wiry black-haired Jewish actress doing performance art pieces at the Nuyorican Café in New York’s Alphabet City, she climbed her way up to her lofty perch as Variety’s most bankable female star. She achieved the altitude by latching on to the winged talent of a fringe director who catapulted himself, and her career, into the mainstream when he finally got his big break.
It was of little consolation to her that she had been twice nominated for an Academy Award. Myron Weisberg, agent extraordinaire, was right. Winning the Oscar was the one thing that had eluded her thus far.
She was heading into one of her seven Italian marbled bathrooms when she heard the beep from her computer that announced she had mail. She poured half a glass of Remi Martin 125th anniversary cognac, a surviving bottle of which fetches $6,000 for the 1978 vintage. With one knee on the chair, she bent over to see who e-mailed her. Within a few seconds, she adjusted her position and sat squarely on the custom-designed, body-molded Swedish ergonomic chair.
The only perceptible motion was caused by the gentle current of purified air from the filtration system she had demanded the studio install and pay for and which created a gentle billowing of her silk kimono. The richly colored and finely embroidered ancient wrap had been a gift from the head of Sony to celebrate her last film going past the $200 million mark. She was told it had been a ceremonial robe worn by a concubine to the emperor in some Japanese past century. She couldn’t remember which dynasty but she knew the fucking thing was practically a Nipponese national treasure. Shari reasoned that since a French film critic classified her body as an American national treasure, it was perfectly fitting for her to wrap it up in this Jap schmatte.
For the next twenty-five minutes, the motion picture star sat before her computer motionless.
Was the expenditure ordered by a superior or other department? If yes, fill out form CYS 20028.
“Who creates these forms?” Hiccock grumbled to himself. His thoughts were interrupted by Cheryl.
“Professor Hiccock?”
“Yes, Cheryl?”
“Would you give this disk to Doctor Tyler, please?”
“Certainly, what’s on it?”
“It’s all the subliminal messages we have decoded so far, arranged in outline format the way she wanted.”
“I’ll make sure she gets it.” Hiccock returned to the contents of the folder on his desk — the federal employee’s reimbursement form FERF-1037. It was more than ten pages long. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Cheryl was still there. “Is there something else?”
“I could help you fill out that form.”
“Thank you, but this is something I’ve put off too long. It should only take me another four years or so.”
“If you decide you’d like to hand it off to me, let me know.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
Janice walked into the office a few seconds after Cheryl left. “You still working on that?”
“I keep getting interrupted.” He put his pen down with a bit too much force.
“My, my, aren’t we cranky?”
“I’m sorry, Janice, it’s my own fault. It’s twenty grand of my money that I’m trying to get back for that MIT contraption. That works out to about a dollar a page.” He slid his hand under the form, displaying the heft of the document. “Oh, Cheryl stopped by and asked me to give you this.” He handed her the CD.
“The subliminal screens outline. Great, now I can get started.” She walked over to her desk, which was actually a table across from Hiccock’s desk. She had decided to move into his office in the White House rather than be across town at the FBI profile lab. She slipped the disk into her computer and tapped the space bar, waking the machine up from its sleep mode.
Hiccock complained to the form he was struggling to fill out. “No, I don’t have any outstanding federal student loans.”
Janice smiled. On the screen, the report came up. It looked like a lengthy poem, with all the sentences and words on the page flush left and each phrase on its own line. Each line was numbered. “Pretty smart,” she noted aloud.
“What is?”
“Cheryl put numbers on every line so we can refer to each. Sharp cookie, that one.”
“Yeah, I’m glad she’s working out. She wasn’t using her full potential on Reynolds’s staff.”
“Oh, was that it?”
“Was what it?”
“Give me a break, Bill, you can’t be that blind.”
Hiccock put down his pen. “What am I missing here?”
“The girl’s got a crush on you that could flatten a dump truck!”
“Really?”
Janice threw a pencil at him that ricocheted off his shoulder.
Shari Saks picked up her white, gold-leaf, French-styled phone that was once the bedroom phone of silent screen siren — and later Coca-Cola icon — Clara Bow. In those days, she was known as the “It Girl.” The phone was a gift from Louis B. Mayer who, as the legend goes, presented it to Clara as a peace offering after he tried to get his hands all over her “its.” Jewish film moguls, Japanese electronics moguls, all the same, she equated in her mind. It was as if the word mogul was Latin for “breast-man.” Men are such schmucks, she thought as she started dialing a number to a private telephone that was only to be used in dire circumstances. She could not recall why, but she knew the circumstances were dire.
The president stopped by Hiccock’s office unannounced on his way to a fund-raiser out west for an influential senator. “Any breaks?”
“Janice is just digging in now, she may have something soon.”
“Where is she? I’d like to meet her.”
“She just went over to the FBI profile lab. She’s going to be so disappointed that she missed you.”
“I’m sure we’ll meet sooner or later. Let me know if anything new comes up.”
“Will do. Heading out of town?”
“Another rubber chicken for Dent. He’s got a big state there, with the most electoral votes and gobs of high-tech money behind him. I need to let the good people of California know that I am running for reelection as president and not him. Or at least that’s the line I am supposed to spew according to Reynolds.”
“Dent! You know, right before all the feces hit the air-circulating device, I had my position papers on his national firewall initiative forwarded to him. I think he’s got a good idea there.”