"If anything goes wrong, I don't know you."
"Oh, you are experienced in self-hypnosis," said Heublein.
"Very," said Wanda Reidel, the Octopussy. "Is Heublein your real name?"
"No."
"What's your real name?"
"Gordons. Mr. Gordons."
"Never heard of anybody changing his name from Gordons. What was it before Gordons?"
"Since I am, it is Gordons."
She gave him a one-page treatment of the movie he should try to sell to the writer and the director. She already had Biff Ballon.
Walter Mathias Bledkden was catching the Beverly Hills sun while reading The Wretched of the Earth when he felt something tug at his left foot, dangling in the lung-shaped swimming pool.
"Stop that, Valerie," he said.
"What did you say?" said his wife, wading through another script she would reject. She sat behind him.
"Oh. I thought you were in the pool. I thought you tugged at my foot."
"No," she said.
"Well, I know that. You're not in the pool."
Suddenly he couldn't move the foot. He yanked, but it wouldn't move. It felt as if it were in a vise.
"Help," yelled Walter Mathias Bleekden and his wife dropped the scripts and ran to the edge of the pool where she saw his foot caught in the chrome ladder. She untangled it and went back to her scripts.
"That chrome ladder wasn't there before," said Bleekden. He was in his late fifties and suntan lotion glistened off the white hair of his chest.
"It must have been, dear," said Valerie.
"I know it wasn't," said Bleekden.
"Maybe it's your white guilt, reading that book."
"I'm through my guilt phase. I'm into my activist phase. Only those who stay beyond the fray should feel guilty. My next picture is going to be significant. Socially and morally significant. I don't have to feel guilt. Guilt is bourgeois."
"Your next picture had better be box office."
"That's what I'm talking about. Morally significant is box office. Black is money. Poverty is money."
"I saw a nice treatment of an Indian theme. There's this wagon train surrounded by the Seventh Cavalry and it's rescued by the Sioux."
But Walter Bleekden did not answer. He was struggling with his beach chair. Somehow his neck was through the webbing and his hands grappled furiously at the arms. Valerie tugged but he could not be freed. Underneath the chair his face turned blue and in the insane moment he could have sworn he heard a voice:
"Phone Wanda Reidel."
It seemed as if it came from the legs of the chair.
"Yes," he gurgled and he felt his wife's hands yanking him free.
"My lord, this is freaky," said Valerie. "What are you doing, strangling yourself?"
"The chair grabbed me."
"Let's get out of the sun, dear," said Valerie.
"It grabbed me."
"Yes, dear. Let's get out of the sun anyhow."
Settled in the spacious living room with leather furniture built into the floor, Walter Mathias Bleekden mixed himself a tall light scotch and, still shaking from the beach chair incident, drank it down. He clapped his hands for his houseboy, who did not appear immediately. If there were two things that bothered Walter Bleekden, it was oppression of racial minorities and uppity servants.
"Where is that houseboy?" grumbled Bleekden.
"He'll be here, dear. After all, this isn't that Wanda Reidel garbage. This is real life."
"What Wanda Reidel? Did you say Wanda Reidel?"
"Yes. She's trying to put together a package with you and that hot young writer, Bertram Mueller. A gross theme. It's a takeoff on Hitchcock's The Birds. The furniture and all the surroundings turn against people. Gross. Awful."
"She promised me Marlon Brando. And now she wants to give me Biff Ballon. I won't talk to her."
"You're very wise, dear. It's a loser."
Bleekden nodded. He felt very pleased with himself until later in the day when he went to the bathroom to relieve himself. He opened the door to the bathroom, looked inside and suddenly returned to the living room with his fly still open.
He picked up the silver-handled telephone and dialed.
"Hello, Wanda darling," he said, eyes glazed in terror. "I hear you want to talk to me."
Valerie, surprised, looked in the bathroom. There was the houseboy, kneeling at the bathtub, his shoulders resting on the rim. The bathtub was full. His hair floated above his head at the water line. There were no bubbles coming from his nose or mouth. A massage spray hose was wrapped around his throat.
"Give Wanda my love," yelled Valerie from the bathroom.
Bertram Mueller was finishing a script for Warner Brothers that afternoon when he thought he felt the orange crate move. Mueller typed his work on leftover newsprint using a thirty-five-dollar-and-ninety-eight-cent Woolworth typewriter. His films never failed to gross less than fifteen million dollars, this despite no dialogue ever containing a word with a "Y" in it. That key had broken in the late 1960s when the desk he had built collapsed with the typewriter on it. Normally, such a small fall would not damage even a cheap typewriter, but Mueller had also installed the floor himself.
It took a week to dig the typewriter out of the basement. Mueller hated to waste money on nonessentials. Why spend money on furniture if you could build it yourself? Why waste money on a new typewriter if you could write films that grossed fifteen million each without using a "Y," which wasn't even a legitimate vowel and not much of a consonant either.
Mueller thought it was strange that the crate he sat on moved. He hadn't built the crate.
He looked out over the Pacific from the living room in the newly rented Carmel home for which he paid eight thousand dollars a month. If he was going for eight thousand a month, he certainly wasn't going to squander forty-two dollars on a store-bought chair. Eight thousand a month was more than enough to spend on living quarters, especially when supermarket chains were giving away orange crates.
There was that tug again and now a strangling sensation. He'd have to switch brands of cigarettes. His head felt clouded as if someone were pulling a cord around his neck. The room became dark and he heard the words: "Call Wanda Reidel."
He came to on the floor. That was the first strange incident. Then he discovered that someone had taken his lawnmower and thrown it into the Pacific. The waves lapped up against the handle. And he heard that voice from nowhere again.
"Call Wanda Reidel."
That was a strange thing for a Carmel beach to say.
Back at'the house, he phoned Wanda Reidel.
"Are you trying to reach me for something, Wanda?"
"Yes, Bert. I've got the right package for you."
"Not that thing where the environment rebels? What is it called? Racket Lover?'
"Bleekden is going to direct it."
"How did you get him?"
"Same way I'm going to get you."
"Are you doing something to my furniture?"
"You know me, Bert. I just try to do my best for my clients. Besides, cardboard boxes aren't anything to worry about."
"My furniture is wood now, if you want to know."
"Stick with me and I'll put you in velvet, love."
"Not with Racket Lover."
"Bleekden's in."
"I will not have my name associated with that second-rate farce you're trying to peddle, Wanda," said Mueller.
"Two points off the top," said Wanda, meaning Mueller would get two percent of the film's gross after negative costs.
"It's trash, Wanda."
"Four points, Bert."
"It is an abomination and a waste of time and money and talent. Biff Ballon. Phooey."
"Six points, Bert."
"When do you want the script?" said Bertram Mueller and could have sworn that he heard the phone handle tell him he made the right move, just before Wanda signed off with a "Kiss, kiss."
Before cocktails, Wanda Reidel had put together another "Wandaful package." She made sure she was seen eating out, stopped in on a party to which she was not invited so that those people who viciously asked her how everything was going could be singed to the marrow.