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I wanted a cigarette bad. Yeah, I know it’s not politically correct. They say the last twelve years of a smoker’s life can be a living hell, what with emphysema, heart problems, and about a dozen different kinds of cancer, but why trade on something I probably wasn’t going to have anyway. This isn’t to excuse my behavior in the following hours but to explain it. When I’m cranky I show it and say it and I’m never at my best. I can apologize later, which I usually do, but people have told me I’m Jekyll and Hyde about my smokes. At least since the tornado I am. It was almost ten hours—ten waking hours—since my last smoke and I was itching in places I couldn’t scratch. First off, I don’t like flying, and LAX did nothing to alleviate those fears. They have two rules at LAX. No smoking, and don’t do anything today that you can put off until tomorrow. It took forever to get boarded on my flight and then we ended up sitting on the tarmac for an hour and a half, waiting for other planes to take off ahead of us. Then the flight, long and boring. After landing, another forty-five minutes in baggage claims—the airport was kind enough to lose only one of my two bags. All through the terminal I was looking for a place to stop and refresh myself but there were No Smoking signs everywhere. When I stepped outside my first reflex was to reach for my pack and look for the crowd of guys off in one corner with a cloud for a halo and ecstasy—the short term kind—all over their faces. The night was hot and muggy and I felt sweat climb across my forehead and upper lip immediately. I spotted the crowd across the street under an overhang for a rent-a-car company. I stepped off the curb and damn near got run over. The driver of the taxi was kind enough to suggest ancestral fault and drove on without stopping. And me needing a ride. In return, I was kind enough to wave him good-bye with a special one-finger salute. I made it to the overhang, nodded at my fellow second class citizens, dropped my bag and had the pack out. Of all the second class citizens there, I was probably more second class than all of them. Here I was, thousands of miles from home, doing a job I wasn’t getting paid for. And why? Because of my boss, that’s why. For those of you who haven’t met her or seen her picture in all those ads she puts out, Griselda the Great is a tall woman (not that you can see that in the ads) of exceptional Mediterranean beauty. She wears black when she’s working or wants to impress people. She has raven black hair and sultry dark eyes that slant ever so slightly to give a hint of Oriental mysticism to her trained look. High cheekbones, aristocratic nose and lips that could invite a man’s temptations in neutral or incite riots at the Vatican when she let it beam. She could also turn her look into something terrible. Most people didn’t know this, but Griselda had complete control over all her facial muscles and many was the time I’ve seen her do something undefined, unidentifiable, that changed her look completely and still left you wondering what was different. She was also a trained ventriloquist, which I guess was important if you were going to be Psychic to the Stars. Rumor had it that she first came to Hollywood with stars in her eyes, but cattle calls and directors’ couches dissuaded her. She always insisted on being her own boss anyway. Less then twenty-four hours before she had called me into her office. This was the working office, not the show office, where she took clients who wanted to be impressed—she had two of those kind of offices. One was a round room with a crystal ball on a round table and only two chairs on opposite sides of the table. The room was all dark and moody and gave me the creeps. She did a lot of business in there. The other room was on the third and top floor of her mansion. The ceiling had been rebuilt in some kind of glass to let in the night sky and stars. Hidden lights, holographic imaging and state of the art sound effects rounded out the special services. It was a room where you could just turn off the lights and stare up at the night for a long time. A very humbling room. I liked that one much better. The working office was a white room with a couple of computers, DSL lines and satellite link-up. When I walked in, she was cracking and eating pistachios. She slid a paper—one of those rag mags you can pick up at any convenience store or supermarket—across the table at me. I looked at it briefly. There was a picture of me and some print.
“Is this a limerick,” I said. “It’s not even dirty. Where’s the old man from Nantucket? At least he said I was young.” She smiled. “You think you are hard-boiled, don’t you.” There was a sly look in her eyes. “You do. This is me, Jack. Don’t con a con-man.” “Is that why you called me? To give me etiquette lessons?” “I have a job for you.” “Another one?” “This one is different, I think, even for you.” I raised my eyebrows. “How much am I not getting paid this time?” “In the five figures,” she answered. “What do I have to do for all this money I’m not getting paid?” She paused, taking her time, cracking open a pistachio and eating it. “The job itself is simple enough, perhaps too simple. But there is a catch. For this one you must fly.” “Forget it.” I turned to the door. “If I forget this, I forget everything. You know what that means Jack; everything as in everything I have done for you, everything I am still doing for you. Do you want that?” I turned back, a hard smile on my lips. “I’ve worked for you for almost six months, Gris. I’ve made you lots of money. You call me hard-boiled. Well, I call you pseudo-capitalistic. You want others to think you’re just in it for the money but there’s more to you than that. I don’t think you’d do that.” “No? Perhaps. Perhaps not.” “You know I hate flying.” “I know. I would not ask if it was not necessary. There is no time to drive there. The execution is tomorrow …”
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