Passing Through the Flame (93 page)

“Take this body, ease your pain....” Her lone voice filled the silence, and he found the fingers of his hands squeezing music out of his guitar, and he wrapped the music around her, telling her that he was there, wherever she was, there, where the music had taken them.

And he felt the music take the audience, for on the other side of that frozen moment, the people
were an
audience again, a flowering meadow of human faces, wondering at the unreality of wherever it was that they had been.

“Let me take you on a trip back to yourself again....” And he could feel the vibes of the people sliding down from the shrill feedback screaming of those mad moments past, mellowing down into the sound of the music and finally flowing right into it.

They played through the four verses of the song twice, and when it was over and he glided around the last note of her voice into silence, the only applause was an enormous sighing, a soft human wind, the breath of peace.

“Don’t hurt anyone,” she said into that shaken, gentle calm. “Take care of everyone.” She touched Chris Sargent’s cheek, and the three of them stood there in the sunlight, bleeding together, flesh to flesh to flesh.

Then, from nowhere, from everywhere, Jango Beck’s voice filled the amphitheater. “This scene is over. Everyone lay down your guns. There will be no arrests. There will be no prosecutions. There will be no retribution. Everyone is free to go home. If he can find it. Welcome to the morning after.” Even now, Jango had had the last word.

But when Horvath looked into Susan’s eyes, he saw that for them, there would be no going home, no returning to whom and what they had been. She was still up out there, looking back from where she had gone with her green eyes focused on her own private and lonely reality.

“Take care of me, babes,” she said. “I don’t exactly know where I am, and I can’t make it without you.”

“Where you are, that’s where I’ll be, babes,” he said, never loving her more. “I’ll go where you take me.”

The sun was sinking behind the western ridgeline like a ball of fire shining through a fog of blood: a smoky, smoggy sunset that sent deep, reddened shadows marching across the half-empty campgrounds. Paul Conrad took a few feet of just the orange sun wallowing in the deepening blue of the sky, then directed the helicopter pilot to track slowly up the slope of the campground at three hundred feet.

Paul took a wide-angle shot of the campground below as the helicopter slowly followed the slope up to the ridgeline: an ever-changing panorama of tens of thousands of people in various stages of decamping, leaving the suddenly abbreviated festival in unnaturally subdued haste. The helicopter passed over tents coming down, beaten scars on the earth, piles of equipment gathered together, people slinging packs on their backs, and a slow, steady movement of people winding their way south toward the parking lots, hauling bundled possessions like shell-shocked refugees. The red light and deep shadows, the hunched quietude of the people turned the shot into a strange, somber twilight landscape: the night after the bombs fell, the evening after the city burned, the sad scattering of the tribes when a people’s time is over.

Paul wondered about the film’s ending. I could use this as the final shot of the film, he thought. It just about sums it up, at least for the film’s major audience. Sure people like happy endings, but that’s because life doesn’t give them many Hollywood endings of its own.

Yet Velva and I have ours, even if we’re not exactly walking arm in arm into the sunset. And what happened this afternoon ended in something beautiful when it should have been a holocaust. Who won and who lost? What about the damned revolutionaries? What about the groups who lost all those album tapes? What about Star?

Or Rick Gentry?

Or Sandy.

Or Jango Beck. He’s got himself a winner of a movie, but he’s lost himself twenty record albums and maybe his best group. How much of this did he set up? Did he win or lose?

And those people down there, did they lose their youth, or did they gain their maturity? Like the man says, every time something new is born, something old dies.

The helicopter crested the ridgeline. Far, far below, the stage tower was an empty metal skeleton down at the bottom of a saucer bisected into segments of shadow and reddish-gold light. Paul had the camera hover two thousand feet above the meadow, then centered the image in his viewfinder so that the light half of the frame equaled the dark. Then he had the pilot spin the copter slowly on its own axis while he counterrotated the camera, producing a doubly disorienting swirl of black and gold. He ordered the pilot to hold the copter steady while he came out of this impromptu wipe into a shot on the orange ball of the sun bisected by the line of the horizon. Just the sun itself behind the land. From this angle, it could as well be sunrise as sunset. It might be as good a final shot for the film as any.

The orange sun rising out of the waters painted a brilliant sheen of highlights on the gentle Pacific chop as Barry Stein stood in the fantail of the hydrofoil, lost in the thrum of the engine, staring at the twin wakes of foam bubbling northward across the endless glassy sea toward Los Angeles, toward the ruins of his life.

“What are you mooning about now, Stein?” Chris Sargent’s voice said in his ear. He turned to see Sargent standing there, shirtless, a neat white bandage around his left arm. He felt no threat or menace in Sargent’s voice now. It was Sargent, and no one else, who had assumed responsibility for the safety of the Provisional Revolutionary Council, who acted when the rest of us were standing around like corpses at our own funeral, who shepherded us through the crowd and got us aboard this boat for Mexico, away from the consequences of our own acts. And it was Sargent, who had started the killing, who threw away his own gun and stopped it. Sargent and
Star.

Who am
I
to put
him
down?

“I’m wondering what we’re all going to do now,” Stein said. “Well, I’m getting out of the revolution racket, that’s for sure,” Sargent said. “I’m gonna sock away some more bread in the dope business for another couple years, then leave the Green Mountain Boys in charge of a guy I’m bringing along, and then retire on a percentage of the take. What I’ll do for a hobby then... like the Mexes say,
quien sabe?”

“I suppose I’m out of the revolution business myself,” Stein said. “Hell, I can’t even go back to the States.”

“Why not?”

“People were killed back there, I think a dozen dead, someone said.”

“So what? Nothing anyone can pin on you personally. If I were you, I’d wait till things simmer down a little and then go home and run my paper.”

Stein looked at Sargent incredulously. “What about Beck?” he said.

“Jango?”

“We turned his rock festival into a bloodbath, burned half of it down, and destroyed his record album tapes. I don’t have any illusions about Jango Beck letting bygones be bygones.”

Sargent laughed. “If Jango wanted you snuffed, you wouldn’t have gotten this far,” he said. “No, I think all you people can go home when your own people forget about fragging you, because Jango isn’t pissed off at you. I think Jango got just what he wanted.”

“Just what he wanted?
What on earth was that?”

Sargent shrugged.
“Quien sabe?Don’t
ask me what Jango Beck wants. I think half the time he doesn’t know himself. But you can bet that he set things up so he got it just the same.”

“You really think it’s safe for me to go back?” Stein said.

“I think you’d be stupid not to. After all, Jango set it up so you’ve gotten what you got involved with him to get. Just like everyone else. Jango plays fair, in his own weird way. Value given for value received, like he says.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your paper. You’ve got it back free and clear, thanks to Jango.”

“Thanks to Jango? It was
you
that strong-armed Marvin.” Sargent held up his good hand. “Let’s leave it at that,” he said. “Point is, you got something to go back to, and I’d just about guarantee that as far as you’re concerned, Jango Beck’s a satisfied man.”

“What was it all about, Sargent? What was Beck really after? What was he trying to do?”

“Damned if I know. But I reckon he did it. I reckon we all did our little pieces of it okay.”

Ruby Berger came out of the cabin, walked across the deck, and put her arm around Chris Sargent’s waist. Stein had to admit that they looked...
right
standing there in the sunrise together, two hard survivor types on the deck of their own little island of control. He felt a certain sadness, but no regret, no further jealousy. Any woman that ends up looking right for Chris Sargent would’ve been hell on wheels for me!

But he found that that didn’t mean he had to dislike her or even dislike Sargent. Let them have their trip, he thought. And let him be right, let me get back to my trip, my world, to the
Flash,
where I really function. My little corner of the revolution.

“What are you thinking such heavy thoughts about, Barry?” Ruby asked.

“About winning and losing in love and war,” he replied. “About the revolution.”

“Some revolution!” Sargent sneered.

Ruby sighed. “I think maybe we’ll never see the revolution in our times,” she said. “I think what we did made it even further away. Man, sometimes I think maybe we’ll never get our shit together.”

“I wonder,” Stein said. “That’s what I think when I’m feeling down. But this morning I think maybe we’ve been looking at it all wrong. This morning I think that the real revolution is something bigger than any event, something that moves through all of us as long as the changes keep coming. Maybe that’s what Mao was getting at when he talks about permanent revolution. The revolution isn’t a historical event; it’s a continuously unfolding process. It isn’t the final goal of the changes; it’s the changes themselves.”

Sargent shook his head, frowned half-seriously at Ruby. “Is this the kind of shit I’m going to have to listen to?” he said.

“You’d better get used to it,” she answered. “I’m not going to play a dope smuggler’s old lady for very long. Like Barry says, we’re going to have to keep going through changes.”

Sargent frowned again, this time in genuine exasperation. “I’m sure we will,” he said. Then, challengingly: “Fucking-A we will, lady.”

Barry Stein stared down into the rushing waters, watching the wavelets crest and break and foam and rise again.

MIKE TAUB crunched another Maalox tablet, swallowed it dry, and glanced nervously around Jango Beck’s conference room, his stomach boiling. Anthony Carbo looked cool and almost aristocratic in a pale-blue suit that, combined with his gray-blond hair, made Taub think of all the tennis-playing country-club snots he had ever seen. Cool and confident. Derek Williams looked more obviously the shark today in black-and-white pinstriping, a supersuccessful used car dealer who had graduated to classier things. Sharp and confident, a more obvious arrogance.

These bastards had a right to look confident, but why did John Horst look cool as a fucking cucumber in his mint-green suit? He should be shitting pickles, Taub thought. The ax is about to fall on his whole life. What else can go wrong? Losing twenty album tapes is making this an awfully expensive victory, but it
is a
victory. The film is four million dollars in the hole, and Horst has to know it. How can he be so fucking
calm?

Taub shuddered as the door opened and Jango Beck walked into the green-walled room carrying a black briefcase trimmed with silver and wearing a modishly cut black business suit with a bright-red shirt and a Western string tie. On Jango, it was a costume, a statement of intent, and the Riverboat Gambler persona that Jango had assumed filled Taub with dread. And Horst smiled. He actually
smiled.

Jango sat down in the only empty chair, opened his briefcase, and spread an intimidating fan of paper over the oiled oak tabletop like a dealer displaying his cards. Motes of dust drifted through the hard-edged cone of light cast by the overhead chandelier. Jango leaned forward on his elbows. His black eyes seemed to take in the whole room. There was no doubt who was dealing the cards. Damn it, why is Horst so confident?

Carbo and Williams pulled smaller stacks of paper out of their briefcases, what seemed to Taub like a defensive reaction. Only Horst and himself weren’t barricaded behind paper, and
Horst wasn’t nervous.

“Well, we’re all busy men,” Jango said, “so let’s get on with it. Mr. Williams, the purchase agreements....”

Derek Williams, stone-faced, slid contracts across the oiled wood at Beck, Horst, and Taub. “As we agreed,” he said. “This calls for the Bank of the West to purchase fifty-one percent of the stock of Eden Productions, Incorporated for a hundred million dollars.”

“What?”
Taub screamed. “That’s not the deal at all! We’re just selling you the physical assets of the studio, not control of the whole damned corporation!”

Williams cocked his eyebrows at Jango. Jango leaned back in his chair, held up his hand like an Indian chief. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar, Mike,” he said. “It’s just a series of technicalities.”

“
Technicalities?
What the fuck do you mean,
technicalities?”

“
Simplicity itself, Mike,” Jango said softly. “The Bank of the West acquires fifty-one percent of EPI for one hundred million on paper. It then sells the studio, its assets and liabilities, to the combine for a much smaller price, taking a tax loss in the process. Then the combine divides the assets from the liabilities...”Jango glanced at Horst. At
Horst!

“That’s right, Mike,” Horst said. “The combine sets up the Eden Distributing Corporation, which retains all rights to the Eden film inventory. A separate corporation with me as president.”

“And the combine retains all the Eden Pictures
liabilities
in the original EPI corporation,” Jango said. “All the red ink. Then the combine sells the physical studio property to Carbo Enterprises for development and folds EPI as another fat tax loss.”