Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  “Yeah,” he says, “no heist, no nukes, we heist a guy. A young guy— get the girlie audience.”

  Herbie shakes is head. “Stale. You need a guy in his prime. Harrison Ford of a few years ago.”

  “More than a few,” I mutter, but Herbie doesn’t notice.

  “All right, all right,” Jack goes, “guy in his thirties, maybe.”

  “Forties,” says Herbie, who’s closer to fifty, I’m thinking.

  That limits the pool of actors— and raises the price, but I can see this is personal for Herbie. He’s got a stake in this, something beyond the usual profit margin for Distracting Productions.

  “You want a kidnapping story,” I says. “With a man the victim?”

  “Kidnapped but not the victim,” Herbie says. “Not the victim. Where you guys been? Audience surveys pass you by? We’re sick of all these girlie men.”

  “Our perpetrators bite off more than they can chew?” This plot line’s been around since O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief.” Not that Herbie reads.

  “Yeah. You got it.”

  “Diamond merchant, maybe?”

  “Too ethnic,” says Herbie.

  “But he’s got portable goods on him. There’s your motive.”

  “I got to plot this for you?” asks Herbie. “They hold him for ransom—”

  “Requires an organization,” says Jack, thinking out loud.

  I realize we could use our heist prep scenes if we modified them a little.

  “Smart has organization. Dumb’s different. These guys grab him and go. They’re operating seat of the pants,” says Herbie.

  “This is a farce?”

  I get a look of thunder. Herbie lowers the boom. Reaches for the death ray.

  “Look,” he says, “This is real. This is reality, today’s mean streets. Danger on every corner.”

  “Yeah, but the plot’s got to be plausible. You got a big executive, ransom worthy, he’s got the bodyguard, he’s got the chauffeur.”

  “Look,” says Herbie, “not all of us run scared. I drive myself unless I gotta find parking.”

  Jack gave me a sideways look. I think that was it; right then, I felt the idea. You know, you can feel an idea coming. Like with a story, you don’t have an idea, and then you still don’t have an idea but you have this feeling that one is in the vicinity, that you just have to watch and wait and you’ll find yourself sitting down at the computer and typing in Scene I. That was the sort of feeling I had when Jack looked over at me.

  “Gated property, though,” Jack says. “Like yours.”

  We’ve been to Chez Herbie, where we were checked and double-checked and scrutinized by little glowing lights— and recorded, too, probably. All this to keep down the covetousness of the general public, which might cast a longing eye on the velvet lawn, the topiaries, the roses, the marble fronted palace, the soigné assistant, and the shrewish, if very desirable looking, blonde wife.

  Herbie gives a snort of exasperation. “You get him at work.”

  “Most executive offices are better protected than your private homes,” Jack said.

  “There’s always a weak point,” says Herbie.

  “Garage?”

  “You got it. The monitoring in this one isn’t worth shit. They got a fortune worth of trash compactors and air filters but they’re cutting corners all the time on the monitors.”

  “Problem is their car, though,” I said. “And even a rental—”

  “Maybe they walk,” says Herbie. “Maybe they drive both cars. Christ, I thought you were the writers and I was the producer. You get this done, I’m going to take a writing credit. You get him in the garage, see, and you wrestle him into the back of the car.”

  “Nobody wrestles Harrison Ford into the back of a car,” I observe. “Not in his heyday.”

  “Have to whack him good,” says Jack.

  “No damage,” says Herbie, “not so soon. Drug him, maybe. Save the blood for later.”

  “We talk about this a while. Then Jack and I get our marching orders. Back to the script one more time. We’re really punchy but we rack our brains and study garages until we finally come up with a story that’s ingenious, real quality, but at the same time, no good. We know all too well what Herbie wants now: man against the elephants, ie., middle aged, overweight CEO outwits the lowlife and emerges triumphant.

  Still, we need money, we need money now. We put aside a clever, if brutal, plot involving a quick killing and a trash compacter and ditch a script loaded with smart lines to bring our CEO home in glory. We call the office and once again Herbie’s secretary tells us to drop it off at his house.

  “I don’t like this,” says Jack. “Something here smells funny. Totally funny. It’s like he wants to keep this out of the office. What’s he got going here that’s not strictly flicks?”

  “Beats me,” I says. As it turns out, our professional imaginations didn’t run as fast as Herbie’s. “He doesn’t like it, we pitch our other solution.”

  Jack looks at me. “He gets one more chance, this is it.”

  And I don’t say anything, though I know what he’s talking about and though silence bespeaks assent. Call it a folie à deux. Or tres— I got to include Herbie somehow.

  We get the call late. Herbie’s pleased. The script’s crap, but Herbie’s pleased. As writers, we don’t feel great, but we need the cash.

  Jack puts on his lucky Toledo Mud Hens hat, and we hustle off to Distracting Productions as lights come on in the City of the Angels. Upstairs, Herbie is alone, his decorative secretary departed. I don’t see any sign of our script, which I take as a bad sign, but he says, “So you got it done. Not bad at all.”

  We’re expecting our contract, but Herbie starts talking about his financing difficulties, certain problems with his stake in a special effects action flick that ran over budget. “I love this, don’t get me wrong; I love this,” Herbie says.

  “You could have told us a month ago,” says Jack.

  “A month ago, I didn’t love the script,” says Herbie. “You understand this business. Things change.”

  We let him have it then, but Herbie didn’t budge. The script was “great, super; ideal for his purposes” and “maybe in the spring his finances will allow, etc, etc.”

  Jack and I go slamming out of the office. “We’ve been had,” says Jack, “but I don’t know what his game is.”

  I’m no wiser, and there we are swearing up a storm and kicking along the sidewalk when Jack says, “I forgot my hat.”

  Personally, I never want to see Herbie again, but that hat’s a classic and Jack can’t write without it. To save time we cut back in the side door of the garage and we’re tearing up the ramp when we see Herbie, suitcase in hand, heading for his black Mercedes. He’s whistling as if he hasn’t a care in the world.

  “Hey,” says Jack. “I gotta get my hat out of your office.”

  “No time,” says Herbie. “I’m in a major hurry.”

  “It’s my Mud Hens hat,” Jack says. “I gotta get it.”

  “Tough.” Herbie opens his trunk with the remote, throws in his luggage, and reaches for the door.

  I’ve never seen Jack move quicker. Next thing I know, he has Herbie’s arms behind his back. Herbie’s struggling and shouting, and I clock him one and then again. He deserves it. Jack’s trying to trip him up, but Herbie breaks away and I stick out my leg. Crash, Herbie bangs into the side of the car and he kind of staggers and makes a lunge again for the door. I don’t know yet if I hit him or Jack, but in all the confusion Herbie falls, bam, onto the cement and doesn’t get up.

  He’s out cold. So much for man against the elephants. The garage is suddenly very quiet; I can’t even hear the traffic on the Strip. That’s an effect often used in thrillers of the psychological persuasion, but which surprises me.

  Jack and I look at each other. “What are we going to do?” he says.

  “He comes to, we don’t work in this town again.”

  That�
�s a consideration. But I take a closer look at Herbie and suddenly I feel sick and hopeful at the same time. “I don’t think he’s coming to.”

  Jack disputes this, claiming esoteric medical knowledge.

  I check again and shake my head. “He’s not coming to.”

  We look at each other for a moment, then bang. That’s what I mean by ideas in your head. We’ve plotted this out. And when somehow the situation jumps from the page to the VIP section of Herbie’s garage, we know what to do. Without thinking whether this is a good idea or a bad idea, we pick up his keys, grab Herbie the Inert and drag him to the back, where, yes, indeed, there’s the trash compactor chute. Jack punches in the numbers; he always does his research, right down to trash compactor access. With the over-the-top plots we cook up, you gotta have the details right.

  Just the same, I’m in a sweat until the thing starts to grumble and the door slides open. One, two, three, heave! Herbie with his patent leather loafers and his mean disposition disappears with a soft thud.

  “What about his car?” I ask as Jack wipes the key pad and the handle.

  “Leave it. We gotta get that hat, though.”

  Up the back stairs, down the hall. I’m drenched with sweat and I can hardly breathe. Doing stuff like this is seriously different from even the most vivid imagining. At the door, I pull my shirt cuff over my hand and when Jack turns the key, we open the door, adrenaline bathing every cell, alert for alarms and sirens. I think I’m going to pass out before Jack grabs his hat, and we get ourselves downstairs and onto the street. It feels like we’ve hit a worm hole and accessed some parallel universe, because everything looks the same but feels different.

  Nothing is quite real to us; we’re light and new. At the same time, any thoughts about the garage and Herbie and the sound of the compactor bring certain details up to more reality than we can handle, number one being the script we followed. This is burned soonest and wiped off our computer disks, and we make an effort to erase the plot line from our neurons as well.

  All this ultra caution blows up when we remember that our earlier copies made their way to Chez Herbie. Crisis time. Whatever fiscal or domestic machinations Herbie had in hand, he’d made sure his wife had access to our work. What for?

  We’re clueless, but anyone who looks at the script’s evolution from heist to accidental kidnapping to executive kidnapping would sure have questions now. Especially the bereaved Mrs. Herbie.

  By the end of the week, Jack and I are little more than sweat-soaked nerves. I get so that I’m hallucinating LAPD cruisers and I about leave my skin every time the phone rings. The longer— inexplicably longer— we wait for what seems inevitable, the worse it gets, and I think we’d both have been committable but for a lucky spell of hurry up work on a soap pilot.

  By the time we come up for air, the Rothberger case is on the back pages. A few months later it’s stony cold. Herbert A. Rothberger disappeared from his office, leaving half a million dollars skimmed from Distracting Productions in the trunk of his Mercedes. No one has heard from him since.

  A year later, Jack and I have almost convinced ourselves none of this had anything to do with us, when we get a call from Leonie Rothberger. Major panic attack, but we can hardly snub the new— and able— head of Distracting Productions.

  Next afternoon: same office, different secretary; no more Bowflex and Nordic track. Mrs. R ran to a nice line of Asian porcelain and modern furniture. She had a big mane of blonde hair and a vaguely predatory air. A fat pile of familiar looking scripts sat on her desk.

  “I’ve been going through the files,” she says. “Herbert had a number of your properties.”

  “We’d been discussing some projects with him at the time— of his—” I’m at a loss for words, so I add, “So tragic for you,” though she hardly looks consumed with grief.

  “Slipstream is a nice piece of work. I’d like to option it.”

  Well, well! It’s nice to be appreciated even by the dangerous Leonie Rothberger. We have a good meeting about casting and production and she offers very fair terms. At the end, she puts her hand on the rest of the scripts. “What do we do with these?”

  “We were under a bad influence at the time,” says Jack. “I think the shredder’s the best place for them.”

  Leonie Rothberger gave a faint smile. She’s not a woman to reveal her emotions, but— scriptwriter’s eye— I pick up on that. “The wisest thing for your reputations.” A little pause; a warning? “Kidnappings and ransoms are so overdone.”

  “And maybe for you, too,” I says.

  “He’d have taken the money and run, if he hadn’t been— intercepted somehow.” She looks at us very steadily. I guess right then that she has a good working theory of whatever Herbie’s game was and maybe also who did the intercepting.

  I don’t trust myself to answer and neither does Jack. After a beat, Leonie Rothberger switches on an industrial strength shredder and starts feeding in the scripts. “I hate to do this to gentlemen with imagination,” she says as our writing turns into packing filler. “But it’s for your own good.”

  “Ashes to ashes and pulp to pulp,” says Jack.

  Mrs. Rothberger gives a feline smile. “Amen to that,” she says.

  The Paradise Garden

  On the day his buried his poor, mad, tubercular mother, Dwayne assumed his dead father’s name, hung the American Lieutenant’s military tags around his neck for luck, and left the Philippine refugee camp. After extraordinary hardships and dangers, he reached new and strange California, where the casual offer of assistance to an elderly Mexican with a flat tire secured him employment. When Dwayne Nguyen proved trustworthy, hard working, and substance free, he was promoted to be the old Mexican’s driver and apprentice and came to work in the paradise garden.

  That was not its official name. The ordinary eye takes things as given, namely that this was the six acre lot around the Spanish style mansion of one Lennart Barber, an extremely wealthy exporter of agricultural chemicals, now living in semi-retirement. The eye of one raised amidst squalor and grief by madness and scholarship saw things differently. The orange trees, roses, bougainvillaea; the hibiscus, camellias and olive trees, the profusion of flowers and the dark thickets of shrubs were the perfect setting the glittering courts and warrior queens which his scholarly mother had told him about night after night in their tent. And as paradise gardens must, this one had a thorny and desiccated heart: a magnificent collection of cactuses, which were the old Mexican’s special pride.

  He had an impressive expertise with these succulents, and although Señor Barber had a habit, indeed, a policy, of making frequent, complete, and inexplicable changes in staff, the proprietor of Rodas Landscaping was exempted time after time. His great skill— and perhaps his near blindness— caused the whirlwinds of dismissals and expulsions to pass gently over him. In this way, old Jorge Rodas came to know more about Lennart Barber’s affairs and nature than many who considered themselves his acquaintances or even his friends.

  This information was to prove useful to his apprentice, a young man of good intelligence but eccentric education, and also to the young woman who stepped out onto the terrace one hot afternoon. Señor Rodas, having made his inspections and given his orders, had retired to rest in the potting shed, leaving Dwayne to see to the weeding and watering.

  The young woman’s name was Amelia. She was twenty-one years old and she had arrived from the Philippines six months before to marry, sight unseen, Lennart Barber as an alternative to other, less reputable, means of improving her family’s finances. She was almost beautiful and unfailingly polite. Besides Tagalog, she spoke some English and good Spanish. Her other qualities were as yet hidden from her husband, but they were perceived almost instantly by Dwayne Nguyen, who looked up from a thicket of floridabundas and fashionable English roses to see her standing by the wall of the terrace.

  She was wearing a little white dress that left her brown arms bare, but Dwayne glimpsed the golden armor benea
th the fabric and, although normally the shyest of men, raised his straw hat in the same courtly gesture Señor Rodas had perfected.

  “How hot it is,” she said in Spanish. She was already becoming used to air-conditioning and sea breezes and finding the summer days scorching. “Would you like some water, a cool drink?”

  Although Dwayne was neither hot nor thirsty and although Señor Rodas discouraged familiarity with their customers, he answered her, not in Spanish but in Tagalog. “How very kind of you. I would like a drink of water.”

  The result was more than he could have dreamed: her eyes filled with tears, and Dwayne, who had never had so profound an effect on any young woman, felt his heart turn over. She went into the house and brought him water, a beautiful, shining, colorless column in its own plastic bottle, and handed it to him so that she could hear him thank her in her own language, and watched him drink it, so that he could tell her it was refreshing. He understood. One’s own language is water for parched ears. When he apologized for not speaking Tagalog better, she shook her head. “Beautiful,” she said.

  After that, Señora Barber came out early every day so that she could pick her flowers while Rodas Landscapers worked in the yard. She always consulted gravely with Señor Rodas about which blooms might be picked without disturbing the overall display, and she began to show interest in the cactuses, although she confessed honestly to him— honesty and straight-forwardness were among those qualities as yet unknown to her husband— that the desert garden did not appeal to her in the same way as the roses and other flowers.

  “Yes, that is quite natural,” old Señor Rodas said. “Flowers are the proper setting for the young and beautiful. But these desert species, Señora, are the plants for our maturity and old age. Now they are my favorites, as they were the favorites of the Señora who planted them many years ago.” So great was his love of the cactuses and other flora, that he began taking both his apprentice and the young Señora Amelia through the collection almost daily, pointing out beauties and peculiarities, and teaching his pupils the proper Latin, Spanish and, if he knew them, English, names. When she spotted plants from her homeland, Señora Amelia, in turn, would tell them the names in Tagalog for the pleasure of hearing her native speech.