“It looks like it knows a lot,” Frank said. “It has that sort of look, you know what I mean?”
Kelly said, “Did you make up your minds?”
“We’re in,” Frank said, and Robby nodded.
“Good,” Kelly said. “Let’s go sit down out here.”
They went out to the main cabin and sat down and Frank said, “Don’t build up the suspense, Kelly. We said yes. What’s the caper?”
Kelly said, “Do both of you know of a movie actress named Sassi Manoon?”
Robby laughed, and Frank said, “Know of her? For God’s sake, she’s like top box office of the entire world! Come out of your ivory tower, Kelly!”
“I’m not in an ivory tower,” Kelly said. “I know how popular Sassi Manoon is. I wasn’t sure you two did.”
“We do,” Robby said. “What’s the pitch?”
“We’re going to steal her,” Kelly said.
(2)
Windows
From her hotel-room picture window Sassi Manoon could see Las Vegas, which was too bad, because she didn’t like Las Vegas and didn’t want to be in Las Vegas. She preferred to look the other way, at her luggage all packed and ready to go. If only she could remember where she was going.
Sassi Manoon, thirty-two years old, beautiful, rich, well tended, famous and beloved of millions, hated to admit it but she was bored. She didn’t want to be a cliché, and she knew the bored rich bitch was the most banal of clichés, but she couldn’t help it. She was between movies, between husbands, and between destinations. All dressed up and too many places to go, none of them worth the trouble.
A few years back, when someone had asked Sassi if she’d ever thought of writing her biography, she’d answered, “Are you kidding? My biography came out of a Xerox machine.” And in many ways it was true — her life seemed determinedly stock, the inevitable movie-star history. An orphan, she’d been brought up by foster parents on a North Dakota farm, and it was through winning a local beauty contest at fifteen that she’d been started on her way to fame and fortune. Along the way she’d had a teen-age marriage with a sailor met in San Diego, the marriage annulled after four months by mutual agreement, and followed in the sixteen years since by four other husbands, all of them now ex. She’d had small parts in three B movies and a dozen rotten television shows before her appearance as a poignant prostitute in The Stark and the Wicked had catapulted her to notoriety. The notoriety had gotten her Max Manning, one of the most brilliant agents in Hollywood, and Max Manning had gotten her stardom. Her price was now eight hundred fifty thousand dollars a film, and she made an average of one and a half films a year. She had stopped collecting magazines with her picture on the cover when the collection filled a small closet, and the last time she could remember having been excited about anything was four years ago when for a period of ten days she had seriously contemplated throwing the whole thing over and becoming a nun.
That was the problem, in a nutshell. Nothing new ever happened, there were no more mountains to climb, no more surprises around the corner. There weren’t even any more corners, nothing but the straight flat road of assured success and guaranteed wealth and adulation. Working on a movie was still fun sometimes, depending on the script and the director and the other people in the cast, but the times in between were increasingly a drag.
“Maybe it’s time to get married again,” she told herself now, and grimaced at the thought. A husband might be fun for a while, but sooner or later they became a cumbersome part of the luggage, a sort of Valpack with legs.
She laughed at that thought and went over to the window again, but it was still Las Vegas outside. She thought maybe she’d leave her money to teleportation research. Wouldn’t it be nice to teleport? Switch instantly from where you are to where you want to be. No planes, no taxis, no bellboys, no interminable copies of the Saturday Evening Post.
Where would she like to be right now? Instead of Las Vegas, what place would she like to be looking at outside this window?
Well. Somewhere.
She’d come in from somewhere just yesterday. New York. In from New York on a plane with Benny Bernard and the Afghans. Benny had taught her gin, just as though nine other men hadn’t taught her gin at various times in her life. He hadn’t made a pass yet, but he would. Another inevitability.
Las Vegas. Sassi sighed, looking out the window. She was here because dear old Max had a new boy, and the boy had opened in a show here, and all Max’s most prominent clients had dropped in for the premiere to assure the boy some decent press coverage. Sassi had had too much to drink, and right now for the life of her she couldn’t remember what Max’s new boy did. Sing? Dance? Tell jokes? Shadow box?
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in, Benny,” Sassi called, daring fate to prove her wrong, and the door opened and Benny Bernard came in, saying, “We got an hour and a half to catch our plane.”
Benny Bernard was second-generation movie, somebody’s nephew. When you don’t know what to do with a useless relative, and he never finished high school, you get him into one of the craft unions, stagehand or sound technician or something like that. When you don’t know what to do with a useless relative, and he’s got a college diploma, you put him in public relations. Benny Bernard, somebody’s nephew, had graduated four years ago from Cornell. For the last three months he’d been Sassi’s traveling companion, her spokesman to the press.
“An hour and a half,” Sassi said, turning away from the window. “I can’t wait. Where do we go this time?”
“Jamaica,” Benny said, surprised. “For Christ’s sake, lovey, you were the one bitched to get this gag.”
“Oh! The festival!”
“Of course the festival,” Benny said. “You’re a judge, your honor.” He sat down in the white and gold Italian Provincial armchair near the window, and crossed his legs. His shoes buckled on the side, his tie was narrow enough to cut Levy’s Jewish Rye, and he smelled of an aftershave with an Oriental name. Sunlight streamed in on him from the Las Vegas sky, but on Benny sunlight looked like radiation sickness.
“Judge,” Sassi said, and smiled.
She’d forgotten all about it. Three months ago the letter had come from the Montego Bay Film Festival in Jamaica, asking her if she would be one of the judges this year, and she’d snapped at it. Something different, something new. Foreign movies, foreign movie people, another kind of movie world from the one she knew. And With some class attached to it, some intellectual cachet. Sassi had felt very honored, and when Max and the studio and everybody else had tried to talk her out of it, claiming it wasn’t for her and she should leave her time free for more important possibilities, she had refused to be dissuaded. She was going to be a judge, by God, at an important film festival.
“I don’t know what you want with it,” Benny was saying now. “Frankly, you don’t need that kind of publicity. You’re too big for stunts.”
“I don’t suppose you ever heard of the word prestige.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Benny said, “and I’ll tell you what it is. Schweppervescence. But you ain’t Commander Whitehead.”
“You’d rather I took a year off and went to Actors’ Studio?”
“As what? A prop?”
Sassi’s face turned to stone. “I’ll see you at the airport, Benny,” she said.
Benny heard the ice in her voice, and he knew he’d gone that little bit too far. “It’s a joke, lovey,” he said, not quite hiding his nervousness. “Gay badinage, you know?”
“Pick up Kama and Sutra at the kennel. Send somebody up for my bags. Good-bye, Benny.”