The Cooperman Variations (17 page)

Back at Vanessa’s NTC office, I weathered Sally Jackson’s painful apologies for the way our quiet drink ended. She was very kind about my eye, which had turned an impressive purple with a rim of pale yellow reaching through green for blue. She reported that Gordon had gone off meekly into the night almost as soon as Sally had explained who I was. This kind of behaviour, she reported, was new to Gordon, and probably wouldn’t happen again. “He tried to sleep in his car last night, parked across from Crystal’s apartment, but he was made to move on by the cops. Now he thinks I called them. I know, because he was on the phone in the middle of the night. I’m at my wit’s end with that man, Benny.” Sally was looking a little wilted this morning. She’d taken extra care dressing and making up her face. The results showed more about her rough night than her voice did. I wondered whether Ken Trebitsch gave her a little extra on the side for being his snoop in Vanessa’s kingdom. I was guessing that it was Trebitsch who called the Chief.

“Where’s her ladyship?”

“Closeted with Mr. Thornhill. He called early; she had to reschedule two meetings.”

“What does Mr. Thornhill want?”

“Hard to say. He’s been on her back all week. He wants changes in the department. I know that. She’s not giving him an inch. She’s fighting him on the changes. So far, there are no winners.”

“Is Mr. Thornhill in this alone, or does he have allies?”

“Oh, Ken Trebitsch has his hands in that pie too. A bigger bite of prime time might make him smile. He might even take me to lunch without pumping me for information. Ken’s an empire builder of the old school. Thornhill likes him, because he knows the type. He’s easier to understand than someone like Ms. Moss.” This sounded like a confession. My black eye was paying off in spades.

“Do you trust Trebitsch?”

“As far as I can throw a baby grand. He’s had people in here measuring the floor space. How’s that for undermining the opposition?”

Before I could answer, Vanessa was suddenly standing there in the doorway. “Undermining what opposition?” she demanded. Her eyes looked as though she wanted to hit somebody. Anybody.

“I was asking about Ken Trebitsch.”

“That son of a bitch! He’s got more clocks on the wall of his office than CBS, NBC, ABC and Switzerland put together. He’s the sort of newsman who’s just bursting to yell, ‘Sweetheart, get me rewrite!’ The only trouble is that he wouldn’t get the joke. You have to recognize a cliché before you can see the fun.”

“You’ve had a rough morning,” I said, trying to change the subject.

“All
my mornings are rough, Benny. You should see some of them. They dump their slag on my afternoons, which are worse.” I thought that after last night she might have lowered her gunsights. I never figured out why I was the favourite target for her black humour. Almost everything she said suggested that she was the only one who did any work at NTC. I don’t know what she was complaining about. She was still alive, wasn’t she?

Vanessa was wearing a charcoal grey pant suit with a white shirt that aped an Oxford button-down. She wore it open at the neck without a tie, just the way I like it. Her hair had abandoned the loose, newly combed look of the previous evening, and was now severely bound by an unforgiving silver clasp. “You’re expected to attend me this afternoon, Benny. My afternoons are dillies. Friday afternoons are the worst of the bunch. Especially now that this damned Dermot Keogh Hall is in the works.”

“How does that make it worse?”

“Where to start?” She took a breath. “Raymond Devlin is looking after Dermot Keogh’s estate. You know that. Since he decided to give a big whack of that money to us, he has been demanding first-class treatment from Ted Thornhill. Well, big, brave Ted has passed him on to me as often as he could. Ray needs a lot of hand-holding, Benny, and I’ve been elected to do most of it. After all, he can still back out if he wants to.”

“What about those papers I witnessed in your office?”

“That’s just for the building. He’s got I.M. Pei to do the design. Did I tell you? He’s the best. The big money will come later to sustain programs and endow concert series. Ray wants to keep a continuing interest in the Hall, even after it’s been launched. We’re going to see a lot of Ray Devlin around here in the next few years.”

She rested a small briefcase on the edge of Sally’s desk and opened it. She sorted some papers and left three with Sally. Then she added, as though it had just occurred to her: “Benny, I’m off to L.A. tonight. I’ll be there for four days, maybe longer. I’ll be back Tuesday at the earliest. I have to see the new man at Universal to get something solid in the way of deadlines and delivery dates. I’ve got to take a meeting with Max Winkler at Warners to settle the fall schedule. You got all that?” She was relaxing a little behind her rapid-fire stream of talk.

“I’ll pack a bag,” I said.

“What for? Nobody on the coast is trying to kill me.”

“But, where better to nail you?”

“Your job is
here.”

“But,
Vanessa!”

“I’ve thought it through, Benny. I can look after myself in L.A.” There wasn’t any point in arguing further.

“I’ll unpack,” I said. “Do you want me to drive you to the airport?”

“George is driving me, Benny. Now he drives as well as parks. He’s moving up in the world.”

Later, just when I was getting tired of moving from floor to floor, maintaining radio silence in the elevators and being dragged limp from meeting to meeting with Vanessa, I discovered that Vanessa kept up communications between appointments on her cellphone, which she used as she walked down the corridors. Once she emerged from the Ladies’ with the phone to her ear.

“Mark, are you listening to me, Mark? I want no more monkey business from you. I want the first six episodes, as you promised, on the agreed date. No ifs, ands or buts. So fix it up and get the six shows to me
on time.”

Then she was in a wrangle with another outside producer.
“Yesterday’s Headlines
, Frank, is a
game
show. Why show it to Ken Trebitsch, sweety? Game shows are Entertainment, not News. Yesterday’s news is history, Frank, and that’s Entertainment.
Capisce?”
She lowered the cellphone and dumped it in her bag.

When I found a clear moment, I asked her more about her place on Lake Muskoka. While we waited in a very empty boardroom, between meetings, she filled me in on the details of how to get there and where to find the keys, which were kept hidden in an old barbecue under a leanto with other half-discarded junk such as paddles, broken oars, folding chairs and old sun umbrellas. She didn’t question me about what I was planning. To tell the truth, I don’t think she cared much. She had already moved out of Toronto and its problems; she was already in Los Angeles defending NTC interests against the moguls at Universal and Warners. When I bugged her to give me numbers where she could be located, she said she’d leave them in an envelope with Sally. We got through the whole afternoon without once looking into one another’s eyes. Last night was already in a sealed box, dropped overboard, only leaving me with the knowledge that she slept with a loaded gun under her pillow.

I don’t know what to say about that part of the night before. As I said, it began with a hug, but it quickly got out of hand. I have been with a few women in my time, but never have these encounters had so much violence and passion and so little personal feeling. Vanessa was good in bed, but scary. When the gun came out from under the pillow, it did nothing for my ability to concentrate. After she had pressed the muzzle into my groin, I tried to get it away from her, tossing the bedclothes around, and she fought, biting and kicking, until I’d thrown it across the room. She tried to retrieve it, but I held on to her. I’ve got scratches on my back to show that she didn’t like being handled this way.

When I’d showered and dressed, I found that she’d thrown a blanket and pillow on a couch for me. The bedroom door was closed.

At one point in the afternoon, the producer Eric Carter joined us just long enough to gloat over the fact that his Christmas show was in the can, on time and less than fifty thousand dollars over budget, which was almost like being under budget, judging from his grin. Vanessa took the news soberly and sent him off with some scripts for series pilots to look at over the weekend. Was that a way to say thanks in television land? I wasn’t sure.

While Vanessa dictated a string of letters to Sally, I went digging in the kitchen for something to eat. I found a brownish orange and half a lemon, nearly turned to stone. I tried these with boiling water and some sugar cubes and promised to treat myself better next week.

“Oh, Mr. Cooperman!” The voice came as a surprise as I strolled the corridor away from the Men’s. I looked behind me. At first the hall looked empty of all but the usual traffic on the blue broadloom—people with letters to photocopy, coffee mugs to return and reports to rewrite—then I saw an arm waving from an open doorway. As I walked back towards it, I tried to recall the fruity voice that hailed me. The answer came a moment before my eyes confirmed my guess. It was Philip Rankin, Music Department. Puffy face, like a fish drowning in air. One of the people trying to get Vanessa to leave NTC. I nearly laughed out loud as I tried to imagine him holding a shotgun.

“You’ve had a merry thought,” he said, waving me into the darkish room. I was surprised that my face was so legible.

“Just surprised that you remembered my name, that’s all.” Rankin’s office was one of the larger kind, with a door leading to a receptionist or secretary, the usual way of gaining entrance to this holy of holies. But Rankin kept his private door open from time to time to catch the traffic coming and going. I couldn’t make myself believe that he was on the lookout for me particularly.

“Take it as a compliment, dear boy. They don’t come around that often that you can ignore them. Accept them, grapple them to your heart and cherish them. But, be on your guard, my dear fellow. These corridors are crowded with spies and deceivers. Take care.” He placed a canny finger alongside his nose.

“I thought a ‘merry thought’ was a wishbone.”

“I’m serious, Mr. Cooperman. This place is as packed with false friends as a piñata.”

“Why would anyone bother? In the short time I’ve been here I’ve learned that the executive assistant is the lowest form of life.”

“Nevertheless. You are close to a hotly contested area.”

“Entertainment?”

“Exactly! The world revolves. Things are happening.”

“I haven’t heard that Vanessa Moss has been eclipsed. When was that announced? Her name was still on her door ten minutes ago.”

“While you are right to question the accuracy of what I’ve just said, I fear that the truth—that she’s not been sacked yet—is a mere quibble. But that doesn’t mean the blades are not being sharpened, my boy. The wagons have been circled, and the wagonmaster has a bee in his bonnet about that woman. Well, it’s only a matter of time.”

“I like your openness. It’s good to know where we stand.”

“You see, it’s only the commercial interests that have saved her this week. The CEO is trying to gauge the reception of our unloading that baggage with the murder thing still unresolved.”

“Are you saying that the advertisers are calling the shots? That NTC is run by snake-oil salesmen?”

“Oh dear! What a low opinion you must have of the medium, Mr. Cooperman. What I meant to say is that they are still trying to see if she fits their definition of a liability. If she’s not a liability—and that has to include all of the publicity she’s garnered both for herself and the network—can she be described as an asset? I think not.”

He must have read an uncomplimentary expression on my face.

“You know, Mr. Cooperman, we have a book of advertising standards that spells out the rules for acceptable commercials. Toilet tissue, for instance, must stress absorbency and softness, but without showing the product near anything made of porcelain. I think snake oil is banned no matter what the approach. We have recently gone in for brand-name companies taking a high-toned institutional approach. ‘The following concert by the late Dermot Keogh was recorded in Madrid with the support of the Morgan Armstrong Corporation and Bix-a-bix Cereal Products.’”

“You knew Dermot Keogh well. I’d forgotten that. I know people in Grantham who have all of his recordings.”

“Yes, dear boy. And he keeps on selling. Luckily, we have a great deal of him on tape and on compact discs. His reputation will not stop growing for another ten years.”

“I remember one summer, up at Dittrick Lake, I was staying with friends and he was giving a radio concert. Warm night. Stars. We turned the radio up loud inside the cottage and listened to the music on the patio where we could look out over the lake. The house became a kind of sounding board for his cello, so that we felt that we were right there at the concert. I’ll never forget that.” It hadn’t actually been Keogh I’d heard, but the adapted anecdote fit the situation.

“That would have been the summer
before
last. There were no concerts last summer, of course.”

“You said that there are half a dozen biographies about him in the works. Why aren’t you writing one of them? You knew him better than anybody.”

“Too sadly true. I don’t think I’m ready to ride his coattails into the
New York Times
best-seller list, thank you very much. I’ll not repay his friendship in that way. Why, during his lifetime, someone approached his father—old Michael
was
still alive then—asking him all sorts of questions about Dermot’s childhood. When he heard about it, Dermot was fit to be tied. ‘If you want to know about
me,’
he said, ‘ask
me!’
Oh, that wasn’t a good day to be close to him. No, indeed!”

“Was he unforgiving?”

“He was generosity itself in most things. I’ve never known a more liberal spirit. But, on the subject of his own life, especially of his past, he demanded and insisted on holding a tight rein on all the options.”

“A control freak?”

“Something of that. The real mystery is why would he bother. His life was as ordinary as could be. His father was a streetcar conductor and his mother was a kindergarten assistant in a private school. They were neither rich nor poor. Apart from his genius, he was a nobody. I think it was a matter of control for control’s sake. Ray should have known that.”