I take a wild guess. “Blake Lewis?”
Rosary has newfound admiration for me. She says, “J’you know hing?”
I lay a steadying arm around her shoulder and she hobbles back to the office with me.
It’s not just Lewis who’s there. It’s the steak-eaters and a contingent of polyester suits. Also Slattery.
“Consigliere!” Lewis says as I walk in. Slattery writes this down in his notebook.
I cock my head and say, “Let’s go,” and the steak-eaters and Slattery follow me into my private office. Rosary, who is flush in the face, stays outside with the polyester.
“What the—?”
Nutsy Nunzio cuts me off from dropping the f-bomb. “Jeez, Stanley,” he says. Clear from the other side of my desk I smell the breath. Like a doggy bag you bring home in a taxi. “You think it’s okay we do this TV job?”
Nutsy is wide-eyed like an innocent kid. Though knowing of his problems with anger management, it is hard for me to imagine Nutsy ever being a squirt. The Orphan Annie expression also goes for Pete the Pipe and Charlie the Pencil Man.
Lewis is sitting there like the cat that ate the canary. Today he’s in one of those outfits like the TV hair helmets wear in war zones: blue denim shirt, safari jacket, starched dungarees.
I ask him, “What did you tell my clients?”
He shrugs. “I hung around the Palomino after you left. I met some people. I gave them the elevator pitch.” He turns to Slattery and explains, “That’s when you have to put across your big idea to a studio exec before the elevator gets to where he’s going.”
Nutsy and Charlie nod as the Pipe passes judgment: “Sounds like a plan to me.”
Pete does not get his moniker from smoking a meerschaum. It’s from rumors when he started off his career and was seen around leaky gas valves that caused industrial accidents around the city. Nowadays he considers himself a good citizen for being involved in the political life of his country. Meaning he takes bets on elections, sometimes doing things to improve the odds in his favor.
“The putz we got in the White House,” says the Pipe, “we should do everybody a favor and put Charlie on him.”
Which prompts the Pencil Man, alleged to have erased people, to chime in with, “How about I explode his freakin’ mountain bike?”
Everybody enjoys a nice wet laugh, including Slattery, who is no doubt dreaming up a streamer for the cover of tomorrow’s paper, something cute like, CAN A KILLER TV SHOW CANCEL BUSH?
“You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you?” I ask Lewis. “For instance, what’s Slattery doing here?”
“He’s my whole advertising budget — zero down for an exclusive on The Assassination Show,” says Lewis. “One story in one New York paper and — whammo! — everybody and his brother are providing us free publicity.”
Nutsy gets excited.
“The dough he don’t spend for ads, it’s that much more for us,” he says. “Jeez, I’d like to see the frat boy meet up with some permanent violence. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“I’m not going there,” I tell Nutsy, who now has a pair of blue veins throbbing on his temples. “And I’m surprised you’re all speaking to me like you are. In the past, you’ve been circumspect. Which I appreciate.”
“If I catch your drift,” says the Pipe, “you shouldn’t worry, because Blake here says free speech is legal under the First Amendment to the Constitution.”
Charlie says, “We come here this early in the a.m. out of respect for you, Mr. Katz. We don’t want to do nothing without your blessing. Besides which, we’re cutting you in.”
Blake makes like the canary again. With all that’s going for him, he doesn’t need my blessing and he doesn’t need to make an elevator pitch. Hollywood’s going to be showering him with money for the honor of underwriting the minimal costs of The Assassination Show.
I put my head in my hands.
The deal that’s making my scalp hurt is this: Starting with George W. Bush, a couple of hand-held cameras record the pungent conversations of three alleged hoodlums from the Bronx who are plotting to assassinate the president of the U.S. of A., maybe with advice and counsel from their consigliere, which I haven’t decided yet.
Such a gag, everybody out there in TV Land is going to think. Which it is: a great circular joke starting with the misnomer “reality TV” and winding up right back to the truth of the phrase, which is a lie.
But since we don’t pay attention to the criminal whoppers that Monkey Boy and his crew tell us every day, why get our national panties in a twist over television fibs? Maybe you’ve noticed that from coast to coast, every TV news anchorman and giggly lady has the same sign-off nowadays: “We’ll see you here tomorrow night.” Really?
Some newspaper critic is bound to call Blake Lewis a hip, groundbreaking genius. I suppose he is. A smart person knows what smart people want. A genius knows what stupid people want.
Let’s say my clients don’t advance the plot anywhere near Monkey Boy during the ten weeks Lewis has got by way of network commitment to his groundbreaker. Tension will mount just the same. The Secret Service will go ballistic. The Christers will go as bonkers as Nutsy Nunzio. And you can rely on the members of Congress for their usual discernment and maturity in dealing with public controversy that gets them air time.
And at the end of an unsuccessful ten weeks’ hunt for Monkey Boy, Lewis simply recruits another pack of “technical advisors” to see about snuffing some other annoying potentate someplace else in the world. The tension mounts all over again. Pure genius.
As I mentioned, I have seen the series contracts Wendy has drafted. Five-percent commission on the tens of millions that Lewis stands to accrue for the worldwide premiere, followed by hundreds of millions more on the succeeding ten-week collections, followed by millions more for repeat performances and millions more for spin-off rights…
…Well, doing the math, even on Wendy’s small-fry projects, I just about fainted.
No wonder the kid wants in on the racket. I’m thinking Mimi would be proud. But when she’s got all the dough anybody would ever need, will Wendy come home?
It’s now late afternoon and it’s a matter of hours before the bulldog edition of the Post is on the streets and the s-bomb hits the fan.
Lewis and his advisors and polyesters have gone to lunch at the Palomino and come back, to where Rosary is entertaining them with the story of chicken man that I mentioned.
“Sometimes I think there’s a very big neon sign floating over this office,” she says, flirting shamelessly with Lewis. “It reads, Strange people — welcome.”
Anyhow, she relates the referred case of a cash-paying client from Westchester who was nabbed in a naughty motel by the Bronx vice squad. The cops found him bare naked under the covers and happy about it. There were no girls in the cheap room with him, or boys. But there were maybe a dozen chickens from La Marquéta under the Queensboro Bridge.
“The live birds are there to boil and pluck,” says Rosary, blushing in Lewis’s gaze. “It’s against the sanitary laws of the city, but there you are.”
“Is your name actually Rosemary?” Lewis asks her.
“Oh, it used to be. I go to mass every day, so I changed to Rosary. J’you like it?”
“It’s charming.”
Rosary continued with the story of the suburban geek, a CEO called Bill Cunningham. What Cunningham did to violate his secret aviary caused the sheets and walls and carpeting to become sticky with chicken blood, tomato-red turning to rust-brown. Little chicken heads were in a heap by the bathroom doorway, where Cunningham’s pinstripes were carefully hung on the knob.