The Big Bamboo (28 page)

“Thank you—”

“Almost forgot about the Pink Floyd laser show at the planetarium…”

“That’s not a movie.”

“I know, but we were baked.”

“Which brings us to the special guest portion of our program.” Serge dragged a third chair into view. “And tonight we have with us a
very
special guest, the star of the upcoming Vistamax release,
All That Glitters
…” He stood, turned offscreen and began applauding. “Ally Street! Come on out here!…”

Serge kept applauding. “Ally Street, folks!…Ally, come on, we’re filming…” Serge’s applause dwindled. Coleman leaned forward and looked to the side to see what was taking so long.

“Ally! Get out here right now! Don’t make me come over there!…Okay if that’s the way you want it…” Serge whipped a giant gun from his pants and marched off the right side of the screen. A moment later, Ally walked into the picture with an arm twisted behind her back.

“Let go! You’re hurting me!”

Serge shoved her down in a chair and took the next seat. He stuck the gun back in his pants. “Ally, you look great! What have you been doing with yourself? I mean, besides making an incredible movie!”

Ally folded her arms in protest.

Serge took a deep breath. “Seeing anyone?”

Ally secretly slipped a piece of hotel stationery from her pocket. She unfolded it and held it up for the camera: HELP!

“Gimme that!” said Serge, balling up the piece of paper. “Always kidding around. So what’s new in Ally World?”

Defiance.

Serge chuckled nervously at the camera and tapped an index card on his knee. “I understand you’ve had some excitement in your life. Want to tell us about it?”

Ally shot him a disgusted look. “What are you, some kind of idiot?”

“I just go by the cards,” said Serge. “They mentioned something about a kidnapping. I’ll bet our audience would love to hear about it.”

“Screw you! Okay? Screw you and your stupid friend. I’m out of here!” Ally got up and walked off camera.

“That’s not how Hepburn handled success!”

A woman’s hand appeared from the edge of the screen and threw a beverage in Serge’s face. He smiled at the camera as drops rolled onto his chest. “What do you know? Our first show and already something for the highlight reel.”

Serge jumped up and ran offscreen.

“Get back out there!”

“Take your hands off me!”

“I can’t believe I fucked you! You don’t even know the
current
vice president!”

“Let go!”

“You owe it to your fans!—”

The tape went black.

Serge grabbed the ringing phone in room 222.

“…Hi, Tori. Hey! You’ll never guess! We were on—…You already saw it? Wasn’t it great!…Oh…But I thought you’d like—…I see…I see…Stop shouting. I can’t understand—…But we didn’t leave the room. We filmed the whole thing inside—…But you didn’t say that…No, you never said that…What do you mean, ‘I shouldn’t have to’?…Look, if you can’t speak the language with precision, you shouldn’t go blaming—…You’re shouting again…”

Coleman cracked his third beer of the morning and emptied half in his first guzzle. While waiting for the burp, he read the side of the can like a cereal box.

Serge hung up the phone.

“Serge, you ever read beer cans?”

“I already know the plot.”

“Says they won gold medals in Helsinki, Munich and Amsterdam. The last was 1903.” Coleman giggled.

“What’s so funny?”

“What if they won the medals for, like, the javelin? You know: ‘Whoops. Sorry about that!’”

Serge didn’t answer.

“What’s the matter?” asked Coleman. “You don’t look happy.”

“Tori’s mad at me again.”

Coleman took another chug. “What’s new?”

“This time she might have a point. I mean, she has been really nice, giving us this job.” He stood.

“What are you going to do?”

“I have to think of a way to make it up,” said Serge. “Something special that lets her know how much we think of her.”

“Like what?”

He slapped the top of the TV. “I’ve got it!” He grabbed a magazine and some scissors.

Coleman looked over his buddy’s shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Starting the ransom note.”

“But we already got paid.”

Snip, snip. “This isn’t about getting paid. It’s about showing Tori we care.” Snip, snip.

“But doesn’t she keep telling us not to draw attention to ourselves?”

“Exactly,” said Serge. “That’s the thing about rules. You have to look for the reason behind them. Tori doesn’t want us to do anything because the police might suspect her more. So that’s why we
have
to do something. The note will divert suspicion away from her. What do you think?”

“You’re very thoughtful.”

“She’s going to be so surprised!” Snip, snip, snip…

Coleman settled in to watch some tube. The day wore on. Coleman was surfing through the low numbers when he caught a local station. “Serge, we’re on again…”

Serge snipped through a glossy page. “A rerun?”

“No, the second episode.”

“Told you we’d get a series.” Snip, snip.

“Serge, I don’t think it’s a series. The anchorwoman just said they were showing it for people to phone in tips to the police.”

Serge stopped cutting and stared at Coleman. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Tearing me down.”

“I’m not. That’s what they said on TV.”

“Listen, our show isn’t about any one person. This doesn’t need to get ugly like Simon and Garfunkel.”

Coleman shrugged and fired up a fattie. “How’s the note coming?”

“Try finding a
Q
.”

On TV in the background, two men wearing panty hose:
“…Our latest demands for the release of Ally Street…One: no more sports movies where during the climactic game someone connected to the team is cheering from a hospital bed…Two: ‘Born to Be Wild’ banned from soundtracks about dickless suburbanites…Three: no more ‘Judge’ shows. What’s with the chick always dragging in her loud, fat-ass best friend to yell at the guy that the loan of a month’s rent was really a gift? That’s not in
my
Constitution…Four…”

Coleman toked up and held it as long as he could, then a coughing fit.

Serge pressed his hands down on the bedspread. “Coleman! You’re blowing my little letters around!”

“Sorry.” He picked paper squares off the floor. “Looks like a lot of work.”

“It is,” said Serge, squeezing Elmer’s onto the back of an ampersand. “I don’t know how the other kidnappers do it.”

“…Seven: congressional investigation of theater snack counters. I want to buy ju-ju beans, not a ju-ju bean mine…Eight: retroactive death penalty for the guy behind me during
Star Trek II
who told his girlfriend: ‘Spock dies at the end’…Nine: What the fuck was William Hurt doing in
Lost in Space
? Not a demand, just curious…Ten…”

Coleman pointed at the completed portion of Serge’s work along the edge of the bed. “Are the notes usually ten pages long?”

“No idea,” said Serge. “Haven’t read any before.”

Coleman took another hit. “I think it’s just supposed to be a single paragraph.”

“Maybe for the other guys. But I take pride.”

“What’s in the note?”

“Well,” said Serge, reaching for the first page, “I’m new to this and wasn’t sure how it was supposed to work, so I remembered some stuff from an article I once read about effective business communication. They said you first have to understand your letter’s objective. Land a job, pitch a product, apologize for banging the big client’s wife. Next, gauge your audience. In kidnappings, usually hostile, so I thought I would open with a joke. After that, tell a little about myself, but not too much, because you want them to keep reading. Another thing the article said is if there’s bad news, you bury it a little, soften them up first by emphasizing the positive. Then, when they’re all happy and off guard, you tuck in the bombshell and hope they don’t notice. Like, ‘Why don’t we get together sometime for lunch, and, oh, by the way, could you bring a million dollars in unmarked, nonsequential bills?’”

“Sounds like you know what you’re doing,” said Coleman.

“The only thing the note still needs is Proof of Life.”

Ally was sitting on the bed. She had just finished trimming her toenails and was now painting little daisies on them. She felt she was being watched. She looked up at Serge and Coleman. “What?”

“We need Proof of Life,” said Serge.

“What’s that?” said Ally. She noticed Coleman’s right hand. “Why does he have those scissors?”

“Don’t make this difficult,” said Serge. “We just need a little of your hair…”

A naked lightbulb came on in a props closet.

“Jesus Christ! What’s wrong with those guys!” said Mel.

“They’re psychopaths!” said Ian.

“Calm down,” said Tori. “I just talked to them again. It’s all taken care of. Another minor misunderstanding. I wasn’t clear with my instructions.”

“Minor! They’re making movies!…”

“…And sending them to the networks!” said Ian. “They’re clearly insane!”

“No,” said Tori. “Just intense. That’s what you get with people in this line who are good. But everything’s okay now. I had a very frank talk with them. That room’s now probably the most boring in the whole town.”

Ally ran across the room and over the top of the bed. “Get the hell away from me!”

Serge was right behind, followed by Coleman, bouncing over the mattress. “Just a little hair.”

“Go to hell!”

“Coleman. Get her! She’s circling back your way!”

“She got by me! She’s too fast…”

Another lap around the room and over the bed.

“Coleman, don’t run with scissors!”

The office of the Glick brothers was full of police again.

Sound technicians unplugged audio cables and packed up equipment.

“Sorry,” apologized Detective Babcock. “The lieutenant says we’ve been putting in too many man-hours since the trail went cold. You have to understand—we haven’t had any contact since…shoot, when was that?”

“You’ve done everything you could,” said Tori. “We really appreciate the concern.”

The sound technicians left. The detectives followed and got ready to close the door. Tori and the Glicks exhaled with relief.

Babcock stopped and turned around in the doorway.

Tori and the Glicks tensed and smiled again.

“There’s still hope,” said the detective. “Never let go of that.”

“We won’t. Thanks!” They waved.

“Who knows?” said Reamsnyder. “Six months down the road, something could turn up. We’ve seen crazier stuff.”

Three people grinning. “Sure thing.”

“Don’t hesitate to call if you think of anything,” said Babcock.

“We won’t.”

The door started closing. It opened.

“You have our cards?”

“Several,” said Ian.

“You know where they are?”

“Somewhere,” said Mel.

“Here’s a few extras,” said Babcock.

“Thanks.”

“Well, we’ll be going now.” They waved from the doorway.

Tori waved back, talking to herself through smiling, gritted teeth. “Come on, close the door, that’s it…”

They closed the door.

“Whew!…”

“Glad that’s over…”

Crash!

The giant picture window on the side of the office shattered. A heavy rock skipped across the floor.

The door opened quickly.

“What was that!” said Babcock.

“Look!” said Reamsnyder. “A rock.”

“Something’s tied to it,” said Babcock, picking it up and pulling off the string. “It’s a ransom note.”

The view from the seventy-fifth-floor office suite was blinding, even though it was after midnight. Garish, multicolored advertising lights made the night air glow like Times Square and Vegas combined, except in Japanese characters, except for the yellow McDonald’s
M
. The streets below were clean but noisy with cars, buses, motorcycles.

A large man with pocked skin stared out the window, not focusing on anything in particular. Mr. Yokamura. He smoked a filterless cigarette pinched between his thumb and index finger. In the distance, a jumbo jet flew by at eye level on its approach to the international airport. The range created the illusion it was flying too slow to stay aloft. Mr. Yokamura had a phone to his head. It was ringing.

Behind him, on the other side of the office, was a flat-screen plasma TV. The volume had been turned off. It replayed the same thing Mr. Yokamura had seen too many times already: a pair of men wearing panty hose on their heads, voiced over in translation. When Ally Street held up her sheet of paper, it was superimposed with the Japanese symbol for HELP.

On the carpet was an executive putting cup and an array of five golf balls left midplay. A putter stuck halfway out the smashed glass of a display case containing priceless antiquities.

Someone answered the phone at the other end.

“Get me The Tat,” said Mr. Yokamura.

No answer was necessary. Mr. Yokamura hung up and stared out the window with hands behind his back, watching another jetliner going the other way, across the Pacific.

A naked bulb came on in a props closet.

“I swear to God, I’m going to have a heart attack!” said Mel.

“A ransom note on a rock!” said Ian. “Where did you find those madmen!”

“Just calm down,” said Tori. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because we’ve still got the advantage,” said Tori. “Except for that note, the police have nothing. Nothing at all. And that’s how it’s going to stay.”

“I can’t go through with this,” said Ian.

“You don’t have a choice!” snapped Tori. “The note said they’re going to call us again in…”—she looked at her watch—“…fifteen minutes.”