“I think I’m going to stay,” he said.
The president smiled and shook his hand. “Of course.”
Charlie watched the motorcade pull away. He took off his jacket and loosened his tie, and hiked over the rise of grass toward the carousel. Halfway down the slope, a girl about twenty looked up. She wore a tie-dyed dress and had a long braid down her back.
“Hey,” she said.
Charlie stopped.
“I know who you are. But you don’t have to talk about it.”
He smiled.
“You should take off your shoes,” she said, then turned up the music on a tape deck next to her. From the speaker, Jerry’s voice rose, strained, struggling to reach the high notes:
“Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings.
But the heart has its seasons, its evening, and thoughts of its own.”
REASONABLE DOUBT
THE GOVERNOR SAT, FEET UP, LOOKING AT HIS DESK DIARY and counting weeks until the New Hampshire primary. He hated the word “gubernatorial.” It reminded him of “goober,” a term his adolescent son had used to describe a moron or geek. More important, the governor was concerned with ends, and “gubernatorial” stank of means. Humming a few bars of “Hail to the Chief,” he called in his speechwriter and demanded the fruits of that morning’s labor.
Fresh out of Yale, the kid never shaved. But the cunning little bastard would cut his own grandmother’s throat if she stood in the way of something he wanted. The governor loved that, happy to have someone so ruthless on his team.
“We go with a neg,” the kid said.
“That’s what I was thinking.” The governor nodded.
“We crush the earthquake. We crush the president and all the liberals. We support the mayor and the citizens. And we offer prayer as an answer, but only in closing.”
“Subtle.”
“Soft.”
“Subversive.”
“God bless California. God bless America,” said the governor, filling his chest with air.
“Practicing again?”
“Don’t be a smartass.”
At Warner Brothers Studios, on the second floor of Producer’s Building Seven, at the Tailspin Pictures conference table, sat the Finnish action director Henny Rarlin, whose blockbuster movie Die Hard as a Rock had earned him a place on the Hollywood A-minus list. A moment ago, Ethan Carson had tried to impress him by speaking some Finnish. No go. Seated on Ethan’s left was Grace, and next to her sat the newest member of the Million Dollar Spec Club. Ian wore tiny round tortoise-shell Armani eyeglasses which, he thought, made him look terribly intelligent. The three of them waited for Henny Rarlin to finish a heated conversation on his cellular phone.
“Why? Why, why, why?” he asked the apparatus. Then, loudly: “Well don’t call me until you fucking know.” He snapped his cellular before turning to the others and announcing, “I haven’t read the script.”
Ethan, Grace, and Ian grimaced appropriately.
“But I love earthquakes. I made some notes.”
“Notes?” Ian took off his glasses. “But you haven’t read the script.”
“Ian …” Grace tried.
“I don’t need to read your fucking …”
“Now, now.” Ethan began to kiss some Finnish ass.
Henny Rarlin stood up and towered over Ian. “Lemme tell you something, you little child. You sold your script to Varner Brothers. They bought it for Tailspin Pictures. Now it belongs to me.”
Ian tried to swallow.
“Ian …” Grace tried again.
“You shut up,” he told her. “A week ago you wouldn’t even show the goddamn thing.”
“Not here, Ian …”
“What are they fighting about? What are you fighting about?” Henny Rarlin wanted to know.
“Nothing,” Ethan said. “Creative differences.”
“I am the director. Who are they to be having creative differences?”
The room fell silent. Ian fiddled with his glasses. With his eyes, Ethan told Grace to apologize. Right. This is business, she realized. And sometimes business sucks. But then she caught a glimpse of Ian, his expression so smug it nearly knocked her off her chair. You asshole, she thought, and before she could stop herself, she hissed, “If it weren’t for Charlie’s prediction, nobody would’ve looked at your fucking script.” Then she got up and stormed out of the room.
Grace was so angry she could barely see the road. She shouldn’t have walked out like that, but all she could think about was breaking up with Ian as soon as she got home. Seven months she’d given to that obnoxious come-lately, and she’d be damned if she’d give any more.
When she turned west onto Franklin, Grace was thoroughly blinded by the setting sun. She pulled to the curb, rooted around in her bag for sunglasses, looked up, and saw a 7-Eleven located conveniently before her. The next thing she remembered was paying for a pack of Merits and getting back into the car. For old time’s sake, she pushed in the dashboard lighter, tore off the cellophane and aluminum wrapping, and tried to retrieve a cigarette before the contraption popped out. Grace examined the lighter’s glowing tip before giving life to the Merit hanging from her lips. She smoked without shifting position and felt a dizziness that soon passed. Then she lit another and, refreshed, pulled back into traffic. And so, in a time of need, Grace had been reunited with an old friend.
“We live in an age of sound bites and media hype.” The governor smiled across his audience, meeting every attending pair of eyes. “It has become possible to transmit and receive information alarmingly quickly — to compose quickly, send quickly, receive quickly, and, sadly, react quickly. I read everything printed about this sensational prediction, really dug there in the science. But I’m shaking my head. And I’ve been talking to a lot of people who’re shaking their heads, too. Scientists and scholars and heads of universities — they think it’s hullabaloo. But the media spun it into a story, and with that story, they sell papers. I’m all for enterprise, but what we pay for when we buy newspapers, or when we’re watching the news on television, is the truth. So I say, if there’s an earthquake coming, let it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt — in this nation, under God, with liberty. Because in the world of speculation and sensationalism, there is no justice for all. God bless California. And God bless the United States of America.”
THEY ALL LAUGHED
EARTHQUAKES MEANT BIG MONEY. STERLING CARUTHERS knew that. Loma Prieta had paid off sixteen billion dollars, and Northridge had come through for thirty. The key, Caruthers thought, was in knowing how to make devastation work for you.
He sat in his office at the Center for Earthquake Studies pondering just that, watching stock quotations and real estate prices scroll down his computer screen. Both were declining steadily, but he knew there was a way to make a killing from it all. There must be a passage through those numbers, a pathway to exorbitant wealth. It was just a matter of solving the equations, of studying the situation until the proper combinations made themselves known.
Caruthers thought about the moguls. What would they have done? The Chandlers, the Dohenys, the Harrison Gray Otises. Men of vision, he thought, who made a killing in the San Fernando Valley, way back in 1904. Caruthers sat in his swivel chair, and praised the science that had brought him to the threshold of an opportunity this large. Watching columns of numbers cascade on his monitor, he opened his mind to the world of speculation, lighter than air.