I took a breath. "Well," I said, sliding back into the booth, "since you put it that way."
Harker rubbed a hand across his chin and I heard whiskers bristle. He gestured for a waiter and I ordered a Beck's; they didn't have Singha. While we waited for my medication, I looked at him.
He looked like a cop: in fact, more than anything else in my fractured frame of reference he conjured up William Burroughs' Thought Police. Thirty-five to thirty-eight, spare and snaky thin, a taut, high-boned face, skin drawn tighter than a snare drum, clear blue eyes, and a jutting chin. He had a bony, possibly broken nose, an angular Adam's apple, a flat-top, and thin, muscular wrists that stuck out from cuffs that were half an inch too short. He seemed big somehow, although I had the feeling that he was shorter than I was. For a man who looked as though his nails might usually be dirty, he sure put a lot of effort into them. He'd started on his left hand.
A burst of disc-jockey laughter, hearty, abandoned, and insincere, greeted a disc-jockey joke at the bar as Roberto put a cold bottle of Beck's in front of me. I waved away the glass, asked for another beer in three minutes, and upended the green bottle into my mouth. Harker watched with something that would have passed for envy in a less abstemious man, put the red knife down, and sipped at his half-empty club soda. It had a crushed wedge of lime floating on top of it.
"I wonder what they used to do with all those limes," I said after I'd knocked back half the beer. "It's like mesquite."
"I don't understand," he said. "What's like mesquite?"
"Before people stopped drinking. Now everybody has a lime in his bubble water. Look around. Half the poor souls in this room are kicking the DT's with lime and carbonation." He took a gulp from his. "What did they do with all those limes before?"
"What's that got to do with mesquite? Mesquite's a wood, isn't it?"
"It's the wood," I said. "Try to get a piece of fish that hasn't been cooked over mesquite. Thank you, Roberto," I said, as Roberto plunked another Beck's in front of me. "Momentito." I drained the first and handed it to him. "If half the mesquite-grilled food we eat in L. A. is really cooked on mesquite, there must be acres of mesquite, forests of mesquite, hundreds of thousands of square miles of mesquite somewhere. Have you ever been in a mesquite forest?"
"No," he said shortly.
"Neither have I. Neither, I'd be willing to bet, has anyone else in this appalling room. So where's it all come from?"
He took a disapproving sip of his club soda. "Do you really think this is interesting?" he said.
"It'll do until you say something that is."
He smiled wolfishly and I could hear spit bubbles popping in his mouth. He reached into a pocket and his clothes rustled. That was why he seemed big: all his sounds were amplified. He tossed a photo on the tabletop and it made a plopping sound. His blue eyes bored into mine.
"Sally Oldfield," he said. "I want you to follow her."
I picked up the photograph. "Nice face. A fine, inviting overbite. What's she done? And have you got any identification?"
Crisp rustling this time, as he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a card. He dropped it, with predictably ear-splitting results, next to my bottle. Ambrose Harker, it read, chief of security, Monument records. Then some phone numbers.
"She's stealing money," he said. "And she's leaking our release schedule to the competition. We also believe she's helping other labels get in touch with our talent."
"Why would they want to do that?"
"To steal them. To sign them, to take them away from us. Do you know what I mean?"
The phrase had sharpened my headache and refreshed my memory. It had run through our phone conversation like an operatic recitative.
"You ask that more often than anyone I've ever met. I'll bet you make the waitress show you her order pad before she goes to the kitchen."
"Understanding is important," he said, as though he were reciting dogma. Dogma silences me: what can you say to someone who's just told you that, in essence, he's signed away his free will? Fortunately, I was spared the necessity of thinking of anything to say by the sight of Roberto, standing above us with pad in hand. Harker ordered first with the air of someone who usually orders first. He said, very slowly and clearly, and more loudly than was strictly necessary, that he wanted a chef's salad, making absolutely sure that Roberto understood he didn't want any ham, and I ordered a burger.
"Onions, si or no?" Roberto said.
"Si, and then si again," I said.
"You mean two onions?" Harker said.
"Let it rest," I said. "And another beer."
"On the way," Roberto said cheerfully, already heading for the kitchen.
"You're going to get two slices of onion," Harker predicted gloomily. "You just watch."
"I've faced more compelling crises. If I do get two, I'll give you one."
"You certainly take a careless approach to life."
"Mr. Harker," I said, "it's my life. I'll be careful with yours, okay?"
"Just don't be careless with Sally Oldfield."
My beer looked very good all of a sudden and I drained it. Harker passed a hand over the back of his neck. His hair crackled. "You have to stay with her," he said. "I don't tolerate slip-ups."
"Yipes," I said. There was a long pause. "Why don't you fill me in?"
"She's in A amp;R," he said.
"Here's your big chance. I don't understand."
"Artists and repertoire. The people at a label whose job it is to look for talent. She was hired because she had a good background in underground music," he said distastefully. "The kind of bands that play in the little clubs."
"Head-banging," I said. "Heavy metal, mohawks, chain saws, and G-strings."
He didn't ask me what I meant this time. "Exactly," he said. "It's important in music to be, um, current. If bands that play heads of cabbage are what sells, you look for bands that play heads of cabbage." Roberto or somebody put another beer on the table and I picked it up.
"You drink too much," he said.
"But my heart is pure. So what's she doing wrong?"
He eyed the beer and hefted his own glass. It was empty. No one scurried to refresh it. He put it down again and sipped a bit dolefully from a glass of water. "A lot of money, cash money, flows through A amp;R," he said. "These kids in these shit bands, they've never seen a buck. Let's say someone from Monument shows up at one of these places and hands them a thousand bucks not to sign with anyone else. They don't. Or maybe they do."
"And if they do, the money sets up housekeeping in the debit column."
"There's virtually no way to recover it. These musicians, they're using drugs and, um, drinking. If you confront them they say they've never seen anyone from Monument, and who can prove the contrary?"
"Who indeed? How much money do you think?"
"More than thirty-one thousand dollars of Monument's operating capital." He lifted his arm, and a moment later Roberto slapped another beer on the table.
"For me," Harker said, turning a shade of red that would have interested a cardiologist. He picked up the Swiss Army knife and slammed it onto the table. 'Perrier for me, okay? Do you understand?"
"Comin' up," Roberto said, and disappeared forever.
"What about the rest of it? Release schedules and all that?" I shoved my water across the table at him as a pacifier.
"Schedules are everything," he said, taking a dour sip. "You can sell two million copies of an album by putting it on the market at the right time, or half a million by doing it wrong. Let's say you've got an album by a middle-selling band, someone like, oh, who knows, the Dranos. Put it out in a week when nobody else is releasing, and you'll do okay, maybe a few million units. Put the Dranos out against Michael Jackson, you're looking at returns. And the label behind Michael Jackson picks up most of the few million units you were counting on."