Elimination Night (33 page)

“So it’s all politics.”

“All I care about is catching the mole, getting through the finale next Thursday, then getting on a plane to the farthest point away from Greenlit Studios on Earth, so I can live to see another season—if Sir Legs Eleven gives us that pleasure,” said Len. “Now
think,
Bill. How come you’re suddenly acting like you’re working at
Vogue
magazine, with all these cabs and designer dresses.”

There was no point in hiding it any longer. I was amazed Len hadn’t figured it out for himself already, in fact. “Okay,” I sighed. “So I meant to tell you this a few weeks ago.”

“Tell me
what?
” Len looked urgently at Dick, who reached for his notebook.

“It’s Joey,” I said. “I’m… writing scripts for him. Same thing Tad’s been doing for Bibi all season, basically. Only I’m doing it at nights and at weekends. Moonlighting.”

It was the first time I’d ever seen Len look genuinely surprised. “You mean…
you’re
the one who… ?” He couldn’t even get his words out. I noticed something else in Len’s face, too. Another first: He was impressed. There was no hiding it.

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

“So… the joke about the banjo and the cheese stick that got picked up by Letterman the other—”

“Mine. Well, now it’s Joey’s, technically. Mitch had me assign the copyright.”

“Wow, Billy the Kiddo, I had no idea. A scriptwriter.
You.
Well, who would have guessed it? I wanted to be a writer myself, y’know. Always thought I had a novel in me. Mind you, I suppose you could write a hundred novels about this bloody place.”

“Am I in trouble?” I asked, expecting the worst, which Len was usually only too happy to deliver.

He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the table. Dick looked uncomfortable with the informality and straightened himself, as if to compensate.

“I’ve given you a hard time on this show,” Len declared, with a frankness in his tone that made me nervous. “I remember calling up Bibi not long after you got Bill’s job, and telling her to invite you over for lunch when you’d been out drinking until three a.m., just so I could hear how you’d suffered through it. The celery was the best part. Oh, I almost
died.
That was Bibi’s idea, by the way. And the fact she kept it going for
seven hours
before you asked to go home. Priceless! They brought out the cheeseburgers and fries the second you were out the front door.”

“You mean…” A ripple of heat rose up through my chest and into my face. “That was—”

“What I’m
saying
is,” Len went on, “I wanted you to quit or commit. There was something about you, Bill: You were good at your job, but you always seemed above it, like you didn’t care, like you had some bigger plan.” He was looking right at me now, leaving me with no choice but to meet his gaze, when all I really wanted to do was get up and tug at his hair, to see if the Merm could actually be real.

“Let me tell you something, Bill,” he continued, changing course. “I was bullied at school. Mercilessly. Head flushed down the toilet twice a day, at ten o’clock and three o’clock, without fail. You could set your fucking watch to the sound of me going under. But it made me a better man, Bill. It made me want to make a living out of what everyone had mocked me for—my love of
pantomime
—and go on to make so much money, fuck so many beautiful women, and buy such an enormous car, that I could come back to Chiswick and laugh in the faces of all those meat-brained arseholes with their shitty houses and ugly wives.”

“That’s a touching story, Len,” I said, squirming. “A modern-day fairy tale.”

“I haven’t finished yet.”

“I think I already know where you’re headed.”

He pressed on. “So if I’ve been hard on you, Bill—
it was for your own good,
” he said. “And look at you now: Writing scripts for Joey Lovecraft! I’m glad you found a way to make this job work for you, Bill, and to answer your question, no, you’re not in trouble. You have my blessing, as long as this stays off-the-clock. Just don’t tell Ed Rossitto, whatever you do. And if I ever find you sitting around in a beret, looking at the flowers for inspiration, you’re fired.”

“Thank you, Len,” I said—and I guess I meant it. For an asshole, he hadn’t been as
much
of an asshole as I’d expected. Maybe he wasn’t even that bad. Maybe he was just misguided. “For the record,” I said, refusing to let his theory of management go unchallenged. “I don’t think bullying made you any stronger. I think you would have done well anyway. I think bullying just makes people who are bullied do the same thing to others. It’s miserable, Len. A miserable, pointless cycle.”

“Agreed,” said Dick, unexpectedly.

“Jesus Christ,” coughed Len, taking his feet down from the table and glaring at us in turn, disgust in his eyes. “You two should go take a fucking cuddle break.”

“I’ve got a much better idea,” Dick suggested, impatiently. “Why don’t we get back to business?”

“Yes,” agreed Len. “Where were we?”

“Suspicious activity,” prompted Dick. He seemed eager to get me out of the room, move on to the next interrogation. Presumably they were working their way through the entire
Project Icon
payroll, in which case, it was going to be a long day.

“Right, yes,” said Len, fingers on his temples to focus himself. “So before you go, Bill: I need you to tell us
anything
you’ve seen or heard at
Project Icon
that’s given you cause for concern. Anything. I know you think all this press has been good for the ratings—and it has, yes—but Sir Harold has made his feelings very clear: He wants this leak plugged and the person responsible for it punished. This bingo business has
pushed him right to the edge, Bill. Plus, the man’s
eighty-two years old.
He’s unpredictable. Any excuse, and
bam!
He’ll shut us down. And I don’t even need to tell you how much pressure Nigel Crowther is putting on the old bugger to give
The Talent Machine
a clear field in September. We’re not home free yet, Bill. Not by a very long shot. So think:
Who could be doing this?
”

Wingwoman

THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY,
when finale night arrived, I was on an airplane.

No kidding: At 4:47 p.m., local time—thirteen minutes until opening credits—I was at five thousand feet, and rising. Only this wasn’t a commercial jet, taking me back home to Mom’s place in Long Island. No, it was a Beechcraft Super King Air, a rattly old twin turboprop deal, the engines vibrating at precisely the same frequency as my recently formed headache. There’d been a lot of drinking the previous night, after Sir Harold’s speech. And who could blame us, really, after everything we’d been through? Still: There I was, in an actually-quite-flattering jumpsuit, with a parachute on my back, and a steel frame over my chest to support a wireless camera unit. Next to me: an instructor and a technician, the latter recalibrating some vital piece of mobile broadcasting equipment.

Oh, and yeah: Joey was right behind me. They had him in the “full James Bond”—tuxedo jacket, white shirt, bow tie, striped pants, cummerbund, spit-polished shoes… the works. Not to forget the
Project
Icon
-branded crash helmet, radio headset with microphone, and—most important of all—matching black parachute.

He grinned and made the triple ring sign.

Joey, being sober, was the only member of the
Project Icon
staff without a skull-crushing hangover—and he’d spent most of the day being insufferable about it: making a high-pitched, nondirectional humming noise during rehearsal, for example. Or mock-vomiting in front of Bibi. (This had backfired somewhat when he actually
did
vomit.)

We kept gaining altitude.

Six thousand feet… seven…
eight
…

In case you’re wondering: I told Len and Dick everything. More or less everything, anyhow. When I skimped on details, it was to protect Joey. The details are never kind to Joey.

I started with Milwaukee, and Bibi’s threat to set me up. And then I moved on to the part about how my pills had later gone missing—
what a coincidence!
—and reappeared right there in the bathroom of Joey’s trailer. Naturally, I lied and said Mitch had discovered them in good time. (There was no need to get into the whole thing about Maison Chelsea, especially with regards to Joey’s tongue and my mouth.) I even came clean about Crowther, believe it or not. The helicopter, the yacht… the fact that Chaz Chipford himself was
right there,
by the fireplace, drink in hand, those improbably dimensioned women fawning all over him. The only detail I left out was the appearance of Bill. It was irrelevant; and besides, I’d signed that confidentiality agreement, and didn’t want to push my luck. As for the climax of my tale: It was Crowther’s revelation that he knew about Joey’s admission to Mount Cypress Medical Center,
seconds after Mitch had texted me.
I didn’t mention the aspirin, of course. “Someone must have tipped him off,” I said, hoping they’d suspect, as I did, that it was Bibi.

Or Teddy, of course.

Or both of them, working together: Team Evil.

I was in that room for what seemed like hours, going through all of
this. When I was done, Len looked drained of what little color he’d had to begin with. Dick, on the other hand, could barely have smiled any wider. I doubted that he’d ever had a more interesting day. Then the pair of them stood up, thanked me, told me they’d look into it, thanked me again, and hustled me out of the door.

It was over. Done.

Now for the consequences.

I didn’t actually see Len again until the day before the finale, when Sir Harold made his “presentation” to the
Project Icon
staff. The Big Corp CEO was supposed to have delivered this in person, of course—it was an annual fixture—but he couldn’t, on account of his ever-worsening Bavarian problem. Instead, the crew set-up a video link between Greenlit Studios and his hotel suite in Berlin, and we awaited his address in the seats usually reserved for the audience.

Eventually, Sir Harold’s face appeared in triplicate on the stadiumgrade monitors.

“Can he see us?” someone whispered.

No one was sure.

“
Guten Abend, Kollegen,
” he began, smiling weakly. He looked every bit as bad as I feared he would: as though every organ in his body were struggling to function. His voice was half-gone, too. All that testimony, no doubt. The Germans had him in court eight hours a day. No life for an octogenarian—even if he
was
a billionaire.

“For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of visiting beautiful Deutschland,” he went on—without any discernible sarcasm—“that means, ‘Good evening, colleagues.’”

Introduction over, the camera panned out jerkily, to reveal a hunched, scowling figure next to him.

“
Oh, Jesus,
” Len groaned from the front row, not bothering to keep his voice down.

“As some of you over there in Hollywood will know,” said Sir Harold, gesturing sideways, “this is Rabbit’s Director of Global Advertising, my good friend Bertram Roberts.”

“Hello,” said Bert, his mouth curled in a way that suggested he was suffering from profound dyspepsia. Given his general posture, this wouldn’t have been surprising.

“So, over the past few days, Bert and I have been looking at the Jefferson numbers for season thirteen,” revealed Sir Harold, ominously. “And all I can say is—
Wow, what a comeback.
Amazing what the survival instinct can do, eh? Really, very impressive indeed.” He mimed applause, reminding me of the time he’d done the same thing in Bibi’s movie theater. “Congratulations to you all. And to think, it wasn’t so long ago I doubted you’d even make it to the live episodes! Well, now there’s hope. I’m delighted to say that Bert and I have put together some projections, run them past accounts, and we’re in a position to renew
Project Icon
for a fourteenth season…”—the beginnings of a cheer—“as long as the ratings of tomorrow night’s finale are enough to raise your
season average
to the number one position. Because number one, as you know, is what Big Corp is all about.”

A confused pause: The cheer was on hold.

Without a spreadsheet of the Jefferson numbers for every episode to consult—not to mention a calculator—it was impossible to figure out exactly how many viewers we needed to make up for the show’s atrocious performance at the beginning of the season. A lot, obviously. Still, we’d been doing well lately.

Outstandingly well.

Fortunately—or unfortunately—Bert was on hand to provide clarification. “Thirty million,” he said, with a tiny, don’t-hold-me-to-that shrug. “Should be enough. Thirty-one would be more comfortable, of course. We think it’s achievable.”

“So there you have it,” Sir Harold concluded. “Chins up, everyone. You’re almost there.”

He reached forward, and the screen went blank.

Muttering in the auditorium. A few groans. But there was hope.

That was when Joey put up his hand and said, “Hey, guys: crazy idea.
How about
—”