She dropped to her knees beside him. “Ron, darling, are you all right?”

He smiled weakly up at her. “Hiya kid.” It wasn’t Shakespeare, he knew, but it was the best he could manage under the conditions.

They went arm in arm into her hotel room. Rita’s gown was a see-through and Gabriel was busily looking into it.

She sat him down on the edge of the bed. “Ron,” she said, very seriously, “you can’t leave the show.”

“There’s no reason for me to stay,” he said.

“Yes there is.”

“What?”

She lowered her eyelids demurely. “There’s me.”

10: THE DIRECTOR

Mitch Westerly sat scowling to himself behind his archaic dark glasses. The other passengers on the jet airliner shuffled past him, down the narrow aisle, overcoats flopping in their arms and hand baggage banging against the seats and each other.

Westerly ignored them all, just as he had ignored the stewardesses who had recognized him and asked for his autograph. They were up forward now, smiling their mechanical “Have a good day” at the outgoing passengers and sneaking glances at him.

I should never have come back, he thought. This is going to be a bad scene. I can feel it in my karma.

He was neither tall nor particularly handsome, but since puberty he had somehow attracted women without even trying. His face was rugged, weatherbeaten, the face of an oldtime cowboy or mountaineer, even though he had spent most of his life in movie sound stages—and even in Nepal, where he had been for the past two years, he had seen the Himalayas only through very well-insulated windows. His body was broad shouldered, solid, stocky, the kind that goes to fat when you reach forty. But Westerly had always eaten very sparingly and hardly ever drank at all; there was no fat on him.

He wore his standard outfit, a trademark that never changed no matter what the current fashion might be: a pullover sweater, faded denims, boots, the dark shades and a pair of soft leather race driver’s gloves. He had started wearing the gloves many years earlier, when he had been second-unit director on a racing car TV series. The gloves kept him from biting his fingernails, and he rarely took them off. It ruined his image to be seen biting his fingernails.

Finally, all the passengers had left. The plane was empty except for the three stewardesses. The tallest one, who also seemed to be the boss stew, strode briskly toward him, her microskirt flouncing prettily and revealing her flowered underpants.

“End of the line, I’m sorry to say,” she told him.

“Hate to leave,” Westerly said. His voice was as soft as the leather of his gloves.

“I hope you enjoyed the flight.”

“Yeah. Sure did.” And the offers of free booze, the names and numbers your two assistants scribbled on my lunch tray and the note you slipped under the washroom door.

He slowly pulled himself out of the plush seat, while the stewardess reached up into the overhead rack and pulled out his sheepskin jacket.

“Will you be in Toronto for long?” she asked, as they started up the aisle together, with him in the lead.

“Directing a TV series here,” Westerly said, over his shoulder.

“Oh really?” Her voice said How exciting! without using the words. “Will you be staying at the Disney Hilton? That’s where we stay for our layovers.”

That dump.Not even the fleas go there anymore. “Nope. They’ve got us at one of the older places—Inn on the Park.”

“Ohhh. That’s beautiful. A... friend, he took me to dinner there once.”

They were at the hatch now. The other two stews were smiling glitteringly at him. With his Himalayan-honed senses he could almost hear them saying, Put me in your TV series. Make me famous. I’ll do anything for that. Glamour, glamour, romance and glamour.

He hesitated at the hatch and made a smile for them. They shuddered visibly. “Y’all come out to the studio when you get a chance. Meet the TV people. Just ask for me at the gate. Anytime.”

“Ohh, We will!”

His smile self-destructed as soon as he turned his back on them and trudged down the connecting tunnel that led into the airport terminal building.

They were at the gate area waiting for him. The photographers, the media newshounds, the newspaper reporters, the lank-haired droopy-mouthed emaciated young women who covered Special Events for the local TV stations and show business magazines, the public relations flaks for Titanic and Badger and Shiva knows who else. They all looked alike, from Bhutan to Brooklyn.

They might be the same people who were at the airport in Delhi... and in Rome... and in London, Westerly realized with a thrill of horror. My own personal set of devils hounding me wherever I go. Eternally. Hell is an airport terminal!

He kept his head down and refused even to listen to their shouting, pleading questions until the PR flaks—Why are they always balding and desperate faced?—steered him to one of those private rooms with unmarked doors that line the long impersonal corridors of every airport terminal in the world.

The room inside had been set up for a press conference. A table near the door was groaning with bottles of liquor and trays of hors d’oeuvres. A battery of microphones studded a small podium at the front of the room. Folding chairs were neatly arranged in rows.

Inside of three minutes, Westerly was standing at the podium (which bore the stylized trademark of Titanic Productions, a rakishly angled “T” in which the cross piece was a pair of wings), the hors d’oeuvres were totally demolished, half the booze was gone, the chairs were scattered as if by a tsunami and the PR men were smiling with self-satisfaction.

One of the lank-haired young women was asking, “When you left Hollywood two years ago, you vowed you’d never return. What changed your mind?”

Westerly fiddled with his glasses for a moment. “Haven’t changed my mind,” he said slowly, with just a trace of fashionable West Virginia accent. “Didn’t go back to Hollywood. This is Toronto, isn’t it?”

The news people laughed. But the scrawny girl refused to be embarrassed.

“You said you were finished with commercial films and you were going to seek inner peace; now you’re back. Why?”

Because inner peace comes at eleven-fifty a week at the Katmandu-Sheraton, baby. “I spent two years absorbing the wisdom of the East in the Himalayas,” Westerly replied aloud. “One of the most important things the lamas taught me is that a man should use his inborn talents and use them wisely. My talent is making movies and television shows. It’s my karma... my destiny.”

“Didn’t you make a movie in Tibet last year?” asked an overweight, mustachioed reporter.

“Surely did,” said Westerly. “But that was purely for self-expression... to help release my soul from its bondage. That film will never be released for commercial viewing.” Not that bomb. Never make that mistake again—hash and high altitudes just don’t mix.

One of the media interviewers, his videotape camera strapped securely to the side of his head, asked, “You left the States right after the Academy Awards dinner, with no explanations at all except that you had to—quote, find yourself, end quote. Why did you turn down the Oscar?”

“Didn’t think I deserved it. A director shouldn’t get an Oscar for his first feature film. There were many other directors who had amassed a substantial body of work who deserved to get an Oscar before Mitch Westerly did.” And the IRS and the Narcs were getting too close; it was no time to show up at a prearranged affair.

“Do you still consider yourself the Boy Genius of Hollywood?”

“Never been a boy.” Pushing forty and running scared.

“Why have you come here to Toronto, instead of going back to Hollywood?”

Taxes,pushers, alimony...take your pick. “Gregory Earnest convinced me that ‘The Starcrossed’ was a vehicle worthy of my Krishna-given talents.”

“Have you met the people who’ll be working for you on ‘The Starcrossed’?”

“Not yet.”

“Have you read any of the scripts?”