by Ben Elton
‘I don’t think so, Rosalie,’ said Judy. ‘Tolstoy owns the lion’s share of the world’s communication systems. You can’t fight a propaganda war with him, even with that tape. His will be the loudest voice.’
‘Maybe, but there’s one voice people still listen to. One voice which will always be heard, even if not one of Tolstoy’s channels were to broadcast him. Jurgen Thor has the status to get the truth about Tolstoy into the public domain. I say we take the tape to him.’
Rosalie had been galvanised back into action. All thoughts of retreating from the world had vanished from her mind. She no longer wanted to hide away in Max’s Claustrosphere. She knew now that the end of the world was not inevitable, it was being manipulated, and she wanted to fight.
Just then, further discussion was cut short by the voice of Plastic Tolstoy. He was not speaking to them, but Rosalie and Judy could still see and hear him over Max’s phone, which still lay, its line open, on Tolstoy’s desk.
Plastic Tolstoy was speaking to his assistant on his intercom. ‘Sugar, are the despatch people at the gate? … Good . Yes, Max Maximus the movie star will be emerging in a red Porsche … Yes, tell them to make sure they do it well away from the house. The usual rules apply.’
Rosalie and Judy both knew instantly what Tolstoy was saying. Rosalie grabbed the phone off the hook, thus finally ending the lengthy recording.
‘Call it off, Tolstoy!!’ she screamed down the phone, desperately trying to make the man at the other end hear. ‘We know what you’re doing! We heard you! Killing Max will achieve nothing!’
But Tolstoy got up and left his office without hearing the tiny tinny voice emanating from Max’s phone.
‘Tolstoy!’ Rosalie screamed, ‘I’ll kill you if you hurt him. I’ll kill you!’
But she could hear the office door close, and knew that he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Hollywood Treatment
Failing the hit.
‘Rosalie,’ Judy pleaded, cowering behind the dashboard, his knuckles translucent on the armrests of his seat. ‘If we get pulled for busting red lights we won’t even get a chance to try and save Max.’
‘Nobody’s going to pull me over,’ Rosalie responded tersely. Her whole body was hunched forward, willing the car to go faster, her chin nearly touching the steering-wheel. ‘If we can get a few cops chasing us, all the better.’
They were driving very fast through the quiet tree-lined streets of the Beverly Hills Fortified Village, in a desperate effort to intercept Max’s red Porsche.
‘They can’t have got to him yet. They can’t,’ Rosalie was repeating to herself as they hurtled across the exclusive residential area.
But they could and they had.
Rosalie and Judy skidded around a sharp corner in a leafy little road to find Max’s Porsche slewed into the middle of the highway and another car, full of what looked like common hoodlums pumping bullets into it.
Much to Judy’s dismay, this terrible sight caused Rosalie to accelerate forward and she deliberately slammed her car into the side of the car occupied by the hoodlums.
‘Get Max,’ Rosalie cried, as they came to rest and their heads stopped whipping back and forth. ‘I’ll cover you.’ It was only then that she remembered she did not actually have a gun. ‘Shit!’ she said.
‘Here, use mine,’ said Judy. ‘I’m not very good with it anyway,’ and he handed her his regulation issue machine-pistol.
By this time, the killers had regained some of their composure, and were thinking about finishing off the job which had been interrupted by the crash. They did not realise that what had happened was anything other than an ordinary accident on the public highway. They were therefore considerably surprised when the driver of the car began to shoot at them, killing one of their number almost immediately. This was not how the contract was supposed to go. There was not, as far as the killers were aware, supposed to be any resistance. Perhaps it was the cops? If it was not the cops, it would certainly not be long before the cops arrived. The killers took stock and the situation was not to their liking. The police were coming and some mad woman was firing at them for some reason, but what? Could it possibly be because she’d dented her car? The killers wondered if they should call it a day, their job seemed done anyway. Max definitely looked dead. He was slumped in his car, completely covered in blood and bullet holes. Indeed, so much blood did there seem to be that, if the bullets hadn’t killed him already, he would shortly drown. Feeling their professional obligations to have been fulfilled, the killers withdrew.
Talk to my agent.
Having got the dead, or at the very least, nearly dead Max into the back of the car, Rosalie also accelerated away from the scene of the incident. She did not know where she was going, but she did know that she had to get away. Max was a celebrity and if news of his being gunned down got out there would be a media circus, and it would be impossible to keep him hidden. Rosalie felt sure that if Max was alive Tolstoy would try to hit him again.
‘Is he alive?’ she shouted over her shoulder at Judy, who had got into the back seat and was attempting to tend to Max. ‘Please tell me he’s alive!’
‘I don’t know, I think so. Yes, I think he is. He’s twitching a little, although that could just be reflexes,’ Judy replied.
‘Is his hand on his crotch?’ Rosalie shouted back.
‘No.’
‘Then it isn’t his reflexes.’
Rosalie, like most women who live with men, found the male habit of constantly rearranging their wedding tackle whenever an idle moment occurred most disconcerting. On the phone, reading a book, stirring the dinner, blokes are always handling their privates and Rosalie, who had just spent nearly a month alone with Max, felt certain that if Max were dead and his muscles were going through their final involuntary spasms, somehow or other, one of his hands would end up on his dick.
‘Is he breathing?’ she asked desperately.
‘Yes, he is, but he’s a mess, that’s for sure. Most of his insides are on his outside. We have to get him to a hospital.’
‘We can’t. If we do that, Tolstoy will find him for sure and he won’t screw it up twice. We have to stay undercover.’
‘Rosalie,’ Judy pleaded, ‘this is Hollywood and a huge star has been terribly wounded, possibly fatally. This is not something we can keep quiet.’
Max wasn’t dead. His body was in total shock, but he could hear what they were saying. What is more, he knew how to deal with the problem under discussion — the same way you dealt with any problem. With a considerable effort Max managed to attract Judy’s attention by tugging at his sleeve.
‘Call my agent,’ Max whispered into Judy’s ear and gave him the number.
‘Of course,’ said Judy, ‘why didn’t I think of that,’ and grabbed his phone.
Judy was not himself in that great biz called show, but he lived in Los Angeles, and he knew that when stars had problems, whatever those problems might be, they turned to their agents to sort them out.
‘Koch Associates,’ said a steely voice over Judy’s phone. A voice which implied by its very tone that unless you had already had a featured rôle in at least three shows, not to even think of seeking representation. Even Judy was momentarily intimidated. Then he remembered that he was not actually an aspiring actor and had no burning belief inside him that he could make it, if only he were given the chance, nor was he seeking representation. He therefore had nothing to fear from the armour-plated voice that answered the phones at Koch Associates.
Emboldened by this thought, he said, ‘Listen, my name is J. Schwartz, I’m an officer with the FBI. Max Maximus is in big trouble and I have to speak to his agent.’
There was a brief pause and another voice came on the line, this time even steelier and more forbidding than the first.
‘This is Geraldine Koch. If you’re some actor trying to bluff your way through to me, get off the phone now, or I shall see to it that your next public appearanc
e will be in a Salvation Army breadline!’
‘Ms Koch, this is J. Schwartz of the FBI. Now shut up and listen to me!’ Geraldine was so unused to being addressed in this manner that, astonishingly, she did shut up, at least for long enough for Judy to say, ‘Plastic Tolstoy has taken out a contract on Max.’
‘What!’ Geraldine cried, panic cracking the steel of her voice. ‘Max told me he was retiring! You say he has a contract with Plastic Tolstoy! That can’t be, I do his deals, not the FBI!’
‘Ms Koch, will you be quiet,’ Judy shouted. ‘I am not talking about a film contract, I’m talking about a murder contract! They’ve already hit him once and he’s got about a hundred bullets in him. Now we know that Tolstoy will try to hit him again the moment he finds out where Max is. He needs hospital treatment in complete secrecy and he needs it now.’
Geraldine was calm again. Things were not quite as bad as she had thought; Max was only dying. For a moment she had thought that he had gone to another agent.
‘Where are you?’ she asked.
‘We’re in a car just coming on to Sunset at the Chateau Marmont.’
‘Head for 289043 Melrose,’ Geraldine said. ‘It’s just past all the bondage gear shops and don’t ask me how I know that. It’s a convent hospital called The Little Sisters of the Above the Line Costs. There will be a medical team waiting.’
Geraldine put the phone down and tried to concentrate. Max may not have left her but the situation was still very serious. What could Max possibly have done to offend Tolstoy enough for Tolstoy to try to kill him? Trying to kill someone was a fairly radical step, even by the cut and thrust standards of Hollywood. Geraldine wondered if this meant that the movie deal which she had been negotiating for Max with Tolstoy’s people was off? It would at least be on hold, that was certain. Max’s position was clearly a delicate one. When a producer took out a murder contract on an actor, the actor’s agent knew that difficult negotiations lay ahead. Geraldine resolved not to panic. She had worked in a tough town for more years than her cosmetic surgeon cared to remember and she had learnt over those years that there were very few problems, if any, which saturation lunching could not eventually fix.
‘Pixie Dawn,’ she snapped into her intercom. ‘Clear my diary. As of now, we are lunching for our lives.’
Specialist treatment.
Rosalie pulled into 289043 Melrose to find a crack medical team on full alert. Max was whisked out of the car and on to an emergency trolley and taken straight into an intensive care theatre. Judy and Rosalie could only watch anxiously through the glass wall as Max’s clothes were cut away and the dedicated surgeons and doctors began their work.
‘They look like they know their business,’ Judy said, attempting to comfort a tight-lipped Rosalie. Rosalie’s hand stole to her stomach. She had only just become pregnant, so there was nothing to feel, but she none the less felt aware of some presence inside her.
‘I want my child to know its father,’ she said quietly.
Judy had not realised that Rosalie was pregnant. He did not know what to say, so he said nothing.
After about ten minutes the head surgeon emerged from the operating theatre, looking very perplexed.
‘Well, we can’t find anything wrong with him, I’m afraid,’ he said, and there was a hint of irritation in his voice. He had been called in from a particularly tense game of VR golf against Jack Nicklaus and he rather resented the intrusion.
‘Can’t find anything wrong!’ Rosalie gasped.
‘That’s right. There’s not a whiff of drugs about him. We’ve checked his genitals and his posterior and all that’s clean as a whistle. There’s no overdose, no sexual disease, I’ve looked right up him and there’s definitely nothing wedged in his backside. To be quite frank, I’ve absolutely no idea why you’ve brought him here at all.’
‘Because he’s dying! You stupid bastard!’ Rosalie screamed in the man’s face. ‘Look at him.’
The surgeon turned and seemed to notice for the first time that Max was riddled with bullet holes, and had virtually no blood left in him.
‘You mean that’s what you want us to look at?’ he asked, very surprised.
The misunderstanding lay in the fact that The Little Sisters of the Above the Line Costs was a private hospital, with the emphasis on private. It was not used to dealing with ailments that might be categorised as non-scandalous. People got riddled with bullets all the time in LA. Death by gunfire was a perfectly socially acceptable way to go, it could happen to anyone and could not possibly be considered in any way embarrassing or necessitating expensive cover-ups. The Little Sisters was a hospital that specialised in such cover-ups, dealing as it did with things that people needed to be kept quiet. Drug overdoses, pubic crabs, strange objects that had got themselves stuck up people’s bottoms or in other orifices — vacuum cleaner nozzles, Coke bottles, small animals, etc. (Small animals were particularly common, in fact, the hospital boasted rather a fine menagerie of assorted gerbils, hamsters and possums that had been rescued from the interior plumbing of various drugged-out movie stars.)
When the Little Sisters had received an urgent call from Max Maximus’s agent, demanding an immediate admission, they had of course presumed that the ailment was of a scandalous nature, which is why they had spent so long probing one of the few holes in his body that had not been caused by a bullet.
Counsel.
Whilst the doctors worked on Max, Judy and Rosalie considered a plan of action. Despite being understandably upset and anxious about Max, Rosalie was thinking clearly. She remained adamant that the only course of action was to take the evidence of Plastic Tolstoy’s crimes to Jurgen Thor, the one person with the influence to get it in properly before the public. Judy, on the other hand, still wanted to go to the police and have Tolstoy arrested.
‘With what we’ve got on that tape we could put him away for thirty years,’ Judy said. ‘I mean quite apart from all the environmental stuff, we have him commissioning an attempted murder.’
But Rosalie was absolutely insistent.
‘He’s my husband, it’s my tape, and we’re taking it to Thor.’
In her own mind Rosalie had rejoined Mother Earth. She was again a green activist and Plastic Tolstoy’s confessional tape was the most effective weapon the Environmental Movement had ever been given.
‘If we can get this out to people, maybe we can stop the rot!’ Rosalie said. ‘Maybe we can show people what’s being done to their world while they twiddle their thumbs. It could be the Third Great Green Scare, something to really shock people into fighting back.’
‘I suppose it could,’ Judy conceded.
‘Of course it could. We have to try anyway, and that means getting this tape back to Europe. If we stay here we’ll be dead anyway.’
That reminded Judy of something. Plastic Tolstoy knew all about him. He was in as much danger as Max was, and so, in that case, were his loved ones. He called home. His husband Roger was very upset.
‘Judy! Thank goodness it’s you! You have to come home right now! The house has been ransacked. I just got back, everything is —‘
‘Roger!’ Judy interrupted. ‘Are the police there?’
‘Not yet. I called them but —‘
‘Get your passport and get out now! Come to 289043 Melrose.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Judy, the house is a bomb-site, I have salmon for —‘Now, Roger! Get out now!’
Agent of conflict.
For a few hours Max’s condition remained critical, but as it turned out Rosalie and Judy had interrupted the killers in time. By the afternoon he began to respond to treatment.
They knew they could not remain long at the hospital, though, reasoning that on hearing Max had been spirited away, Plastic Tolstoy would be anxious to ensure that he was dead.
‘The first thing he’s going to do is start checking the hospitals,’ said Judy. ‘We need to get Max out of town quickly and into some hiding place or other that Tolstoy can’t figure out
. That goes for me too, for that matter. Tolstoy’s going to want to clean this whole thing up properly, and that includes me.’
‘Well, I really don’t see how looking up old TV schedules could have got you into so much trouble,’ Roger observed, but Judy assured him that it had.
‘The best place to go would be my granny’s place in Ireland,’ said Rosalie. ‘Tolstoy doesn’t know my name, so I doubt that he would find us there and it gets me close to Jurgen Thor.’
‘That means an air ambulance,’ Judy replied, ‘also European visas. Those things are difficult to organise, and we could certainly never do it without sticking our heads above the parapet. If we swan round LA trying to get air tickets and our passports stamped, Tolstoy will spot us for sure.’
There was a gloomy silence. Every second they remained inactive brought Tolstoy’s deadly shadow closer. Just then, the solution arrived in the unlikely figure of Max’s agent Geraldine, who burst through the door with flowers from her Claustrosphere.
‘OK,’ she said to Judy and Rosalie. ‘Thanks for getting him into hospital but I’ll be taking charge from here on in.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Rosalie.
‘Well, I’m sorry, Miss, but I’m not interested in what you think. What you think doesn’t matter. All that matters is Max needs me and I’m here for him. Excuse me.’ Geraldine turned her back on Rosalie and tapped a number into her phone. Rosalie and Judy were a little nonplussed. It was not so much what Geraldine had said, but the way that she had said it. No one can put people down the way an agent can, particularly an important Hollywood agent.
It is probably not that they particularly enjoy being rude. Being rude just happens to be the principal function of their professional existence. To an agent there are two types of actor, those who are happening and those who are not. Hence there are two kinds of rudeness. There is the rudeness which is directed at those who are not happening, and the rudeness which is directed at others on behalf of and for the benefit of those who are happening. The rudeness directed at the unhappening is not normally very rude. In fact, it is really no more than the understandable brusqueness which any decent agent must develop in a world where there are a thousand actors seeking every job. The rudeness directed downwards is often tinged with affection and understanding, for agents are human beings too and it would soften any heart to be constantly surrounded by so much frustrated ambition.