Turn of the Century (82 page)

Snyder punches his remote. The tape rolls. Cut to Penn Jillette doing chin-ups for a small audience on the balcony, cut to blank leader, cut to a very slow wide-angle panning shot of the side of a building, a column and a door from up high, in color but so fuzzy it looks almost black-and-white. No audio. It’s from a surveillance camera. Find two human figures on a sidewalk, their backs to the camera,
just as the taller figure takes three long-jump strides toward the building, leaping at it, attacking it, leaving a barely visible mark on the wall about eight feet above the ground.

All falling objects are the same: they stop accelerating, and eventually they stop. He clings to his simple Newtonian faith, surrenders to it, waits for the bottom, knows there must be some final thud
.

“There are more of those scenes,” Snyder says. “As you may recall.” He stops the tape. “This came from the Treasury Department, by the way. The Secret Service reviewed all of that night’s surveillance videos from the hotel, because of the candidate’s presence. We informed them that you do not, as far as we are concerned, represent any threat to any of their protectees. And you’ll be glad to know the monetary damages claimed by the Venetian are negligible, four figures.” He almost smiles.

Snyder has returned to his accordion file. Vlig sits and stares.

This must be the bottom, then.

George thinks of the villain’s ritual speech halfway through the third act of James Bond movies:
Before I kill you, Mr. Bond, you must take a tour of my installation as I explain every detail of my mad scheme
. He thinks of what Lizzie says: All clichés turn out to be true.

Saddler opens the door, sticks his smiling face in. “Do we have closure?”

No one replies. George stands, and turns to retrieve his briefcase. His
Journal
and
Post
have slid out of the side pocket.

“Well,” Saddler says, “just promise you’ll think about the Judge Bork show. We see it as a very prestigious-type program.”

George, looking down at the counter, stuffing the newspapers back in one-handed, has his back to Saddler.
“A signal-to-noise ratio that’s
too
high,”
he said.
“Lance the boil,”
Vlig said.

“Also,” Saddler says, “tiny, tiny FYI? We would be grateful if you
would
take Mr. Milken’s calls. But in any event, George—and I know this reflects Harold’s feelings as well—just keep on being a
neat guy
.”

George is holding his briefcase, but he’s still looking down. He’s staring at a white curling brush wedged back between the edge of the wooden counter and the window.
A NEW 59 FOR A NEW CENTURY
it says in red on the white handle, and
E. ZIMBALIST, TEAM 59
.

This is the bottom. This is the
thud
.

He leaves, and on the way out, he spots Laura Welles in the instant before she ducks into an office, practically leaping away, out of sight.

At least Vlig’s lawyer didn’t pull out a copy of the St. Andrew’s Science and Society indoor-pollution study, the smoke-speck-per-billion evidence from his bedroom.

But maybe they do have it. Maybe they’re keeping that secret. If that became public, it would incriminate Lizzie as well. And Lizzie is a member of Team Fifty-nine.

Daisy is busy as George wafts past her desk toward his door. “Good news,” she says, bent down, holding a plug into the back of the printer as it prints, “I
think
it’s good news: we’re on hiatus this week.” Daisy sits up, but George is already hovering in his office near the window overlooking the park, disintegrating into a blackish mist that will momentarily disappear up into the HVAC vents. “Laura Welles’s office called,” she says, raising her voice.”Tomorrow through Friday in our slot they’re running an encore presentation of a miniseries called
Roots 2063
. So I guess we have an extra week to do the next shows.

“Does ‘encore presentation’ mean rerun?” Daisy says as she steps into his office.
“Crikey
, George, what spooked
you?”

She went to sleep after a call from Hank Saddler, and she was awakened around six San Francisco time by another call from Hank Saddler. She assumed he was phoning again about Timothy Featherstone. But no, this morning he has
good
news to deliver—the most recent Media Perception Index results for Harold, the MBC, and Mose Media Holdings are all “trending
very
positive.” Buying the internet companies and Fine Technologies, and hiring Lizzie, he tells her, have already increased the instances of “shrewd-slash-savvy” and “bold-slash-visionary” by half. “And we’re getting a few pops on both the ‘stabilizing-slash-proactive’ and ‘enlightened-slash-progressive’ axes,” he says, “which we’ve
never
had. If the stock price follows, Lizzie, you’ll pay for yourself in no time!” She can’t get back to sleep, so she checks her messages at both offices, and her e-mail. And the stock price, which she finds she can’t resist doing anytime she checks her e-mail, since every point up or down is equivalent to $500,000 of her personal wealth.
Paper wealth
, she reminds herself at each peek,
paper pretax wealth
, which isn’t hers even on paper
until the deal closes. The Dow had been down 44 points in the first ten minutes of trading, but ticker symbol
ME
, Mose Media Holdings, opened up 1¾. The six-month graph of the stock price still looks uncannily like an Etch-A-Sketch tracing of America’s southern border, ending as of this morning east of Panama City and Destin, where the Gulf cuts north toward Tallahassee. Maybe Saddler’s Media Perception Index does work, she thinks. A million dollars richer (on paper, pretax), she lets the room service boy bring in her grapefruit and currant-studded Irish oatmeal. “Are you enjoying your stay at Coppola Square?” he asks. So far, she has been asleep for eight of her nine-hours stay. “Yes,” she answers.

No one who should call does call. Not Mose, not Saddler, not George. She is walking out the door, headed for her nine o’clock with Penn McNabb in Milpitas, when the phone rings. It is a reporter named Jack something from
Variety
, an apparently young man who seems to be both channeling Walter Winchell and faking Walter Winchell’s idea of an Ivy League vocabulary.

“Sorry, I’ve got to go.”

“So you’re hypothesizing it was more creative diffs with the big boys than it was just a cost-benefit Ax City kind of decision?”

“Since until two minutes ago I didn’t know about this, I have no idea what the reasons are,” she says. “I didn’t even know it
was
canceled. I’ve got to go.”

“Ms. Zimbalist, off the record, when the rubber meets the road on the Fifty-ninth Floor, has Harold Mose just bitten off a chewier chunk of metanews nouvelle cuisine than he can eat? And when the suits squeezed, he had no choice but to go FIFO on
Real Time
because it was a downside twofer—pricey and provocative?”

“Listen, I love my husband’s show. I think it’s brilliant. But I’ve only worked for MBC for a few weeks. I am not a television programmer. What those guys think an audience will or won’t like is not necessarily what I like or don’t like. I’ve got to go, I need to make some calls and I’m late for a meeting, okay?”

“So you’re positing a kind of execu-lady difference, feminism as regards mass and niche on the tube, is that it?”

She hangs up.

Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh,
shit
. She feels horrible for George. Feeling
someone else’s pain has become a cheap joke, thanks to the president (like so much else), but Lizzie’s heart aches. She knows how it feels to fail quickly and spectacularly (Murdoch online), and she knows how much of himself he has poured into this show. Oh,
George
.

She calls George at work, but there’s no answer, and there’s no answer on his portable or at home either.

She’s crying.

She knows the real torture for him will be the pity. The calls and chance encounters brimming with kindly, soothing, there-there strokes for the poor, poor victim.

And her. His rage will curdle and harden, become a tumor of hatred. He won’t believe she’s known nothing about this. She will be a collaborator. She will be his enemy. (And maybe she is to blame: she never told him not to use the digital video-insert trick, because she couldn’t bear that conversation.) He will construe her as a beneficiary of his misfortune, she knows, the Krupp factory manager exceeding production quotas thanks to the slave labor, a Swiss banker shrugging off the vaultful of unclaimed ingots. Then she remembers the stock price: the reason it’s moving up this morning is
because the show was canceled
. Even if that isn’t true, he’ll be convinced it is. Should she go back home, display her tears, testify to her vicarious agony, hold him, explain? But if she cancels the trip, he will feel monumentally pitied. It may be best that she disappear for these couple of weeks, a stretch of pain that might prevent some deeper, longer, crippling set of wounds. If she’s out of his way, he can seethe and rail alone, without her trotting off to Fifty-seventh Street every morning, swearing her innocence and pitying him every night.

She phones him again, and still gets no answer anywhere. She calls Mose in Sun Valley, and leaves a message. She doesn’t know what else to do, and she needs to get going. It would be bad form to arrive late to fire her investment banker’s brother from the company he started.

The meeting with the staff lasts an hour. Some of them cry. Afterward, he takes fourteen of them to lunch. After lunch, he returns six calls from newspaper and magazine reporters and tries hard to sound sane and blithe. He has never before, as either journalist or subject, engaged in such a recondite discussion of ground rules as he does with the reporter
from
Variety
, spending five full minutes specifying and negotiating the meanings of “not for attribution,” “off the record,” “background” and “deep background.” To all the reporters, on the record, he says only, “This is the business we have chosen” and “It’s just
television
,” but on background he encourages them to check out the network’s plans for a New Age cable channel. (He considers saying that the New Age channel was his and Emily Kalman’s idea that the network swiped, but decides it would muddy the issue and might strike the reporters as deranged.) Two of the reporters ask whether there is any connection between the cancellation of
Real Time
and Featherstone’s suicide, and to each he pauses meaningfully and says, “Off the record? I have no idea.” Three of them bring up Lizzie. George says, for the first time in his life, “I have no comment,” after first extracting from each of them a promise not to quote him saying “I have no comment.” He makes a few calls. He phones his lawyer. He phones Emily Kalman, who says she will put him in touch with her friend Bert Fields, the Hollywood lawyer. He phones Ben Gould. He phones Zip Ingram. And then he goes home.

On East Forty-second Street near the United Nations, as his car waits for the light, a yellow taxi bumps them lightly from behind. His driver, a young Russian or Eastern European, is out of his car and screaming, it seems to George, almost before the accident happened. And then the taxi accidentally bumps the parked Town Car again.