“Nothing very much. I’ll bet on the Pineapples, too. Maybe he can put me in touch with his own brokers, so that I can get the same rates he does.”

From the inflection in Earnest’s voice, Montpelier knew that there was more.

“And what else?” he asked.

“Oh nothing much, really.” Earnest spread his arms out, expansively. “Just control of the show. I am the Executive Producer, after all. All I want is complete authority. I want to do the hiring and firing. All of it. From here on. With no interference from you or Brenda or anybody at Titanic.”

“Complete authority,” Montpelier echoed.

“Right. I can handle Westerly. He’s through as a director, but he still has a good name. I can keep him supplied with enough cat to make him docile...”

“Cat?” Montpelier’s insides winced, as if they’d been electroshocked.

“Oh, it’s all completely legal,” Earnest assured him. “I have a few friends at the hospital here who’ll make out prescriptions for him. I get a cut of their fees and the pharmacy price, of course; cat’s very expensive stuff, you know. But that’ll keep Westerly happy and under control.”

Montpelier found that his hands were shaking.

“And then there’s Gabriel,” Earnest said with relish. “He goes. I’m going to fire his ass right out of here so fast he won’t know what hit him.”

“Now wait... we need him for the scripts. Those high school kids can’t turn out shootable scripts and you know it.”

“I can find a dozen writers who’ll work for free,” Earnest crowed, “just for the glory of getting their names on The Tube. The local science fiction writers’ chapter has plenty of people who’ll gladly fill in.”

“But Gabriel has talent! His scripts are the only decent thing we’ve got going for us!”

“Who cares?” The show’s not supposed to be a hit. Get that through your skull. Think of it as a tax writeoff.

Montpelier felt his jaw muscles clenching. “But Ron is...”

“Ron Gabriel is out!” Earnest shouted, a vein on his forehead throbbing visibly. “His scripts are out, too. Wait until the network censors see them! There won’t be enough left to wipe your backside with.”

“But the censors have already....”

“No they haven’t,” Earnest said, with the most malicious grin Montpelier had ever seen, “Gabriel was so late turning them in....”

“That’s because he had to work on all the other scripts.”

“...that I let the crew start up production before sending the scripts to the censors. I’ll be meeting with them tomorrow. And with the sponsor’s representatives, too. That will finish Mr. Gabriel and his high-and-mighty scripts!”

“But...”

“And what do you think B.F. is going to say about Gabriel when I tell him how he’s been sacking with Rita all these weeks, behind his back?”

“It hasn’t been exactly behind his back.”

Earnest smiled another chilling smile. “I know that, and you know that, and B.F. knows that. But what will the gossip programs say about it? Eh? Can B.F. afford to have his image belittled in public?”

Calling this character a snake is insulting the snakes, Montpelier told himself. But he said nothing.

“Come on,” Earnest said, suddenly very hearty and full of beery good cheer. “Don’t look so glum. We’re all going to make a good pile of money out of this. So what if the series folds early? We’ll cry all the way to the bank.”

For the first time in many years, Montpelier found himself contradicting one of his primary survival rules. Out of the depth of his guts, he spoke his feelings:

“I’d always heard that the rats were the first to leave a sinking ship. But I never realized that some of the rats are the sonsofbitches that scuttled the ship in the first place.”

13: THE THREE MONKEYS

The restaurant was poised atop Toronto’s tallest office tower, balanced delicately on a well-oiled mechanism that smoothly turned the entire floor around in a full circle once every half hour. It was too slow to be called a merry-go-round, so the restaurant management (it was part of an American-owned chain) called it the Roundeley Room.

The building was very solidly constructed, since there were no earthquake fears so close to the Laurentian Shield. Since the worldwide impact of a theater movie a generation earlier, dealing with a fire in a glass tower, there were sprinklers everywhere—in the ceilings, under the tables of the restaurant, in the elevators and restrooms and even along the walls, cleverly camouflaged as wrought iron decorations.

The restaurant was up high enough so that on a clear day diners could see the gray-brown smudge across Lake Ontario that marked the slums of Buffalo. To the north, they could watch the city of Toronto peter out into muskeg and dreary housing developments.

The weather had turned cold, with an icy wind howling down from the tundra. But it was a clear, dry cold, the kind of air meteorologists call an Arctic High. Air crisp enough to shatter like crystal.

From his seat in a soundproofed booth, Les Montpelier watched the last rays of the sinking sun turn the city into a vermillion fantasyland. Lights were winking on; automobile traffic made a continuous ribbon of white light on one side of the highways, red on the other. Safely behind the insulated windows, Montpelier could hear the polar wind whispering past. But he felt warm and comfortable. Physically.

“It’s a beautiful view,” said the man across the booth from him.

“That it is,” Montpelier agreed.

The man was Elton Good, who had flown up from New York. He was a tall, spare, almost cadaverous man in that indistinct age category between Saturday afternoon softball games and Saturday afternoon checkers games. His eyes were alive, deep brown, sparkling. He wore an almost perpetual smile, but it looked more like an apology than anything joyful. His clothes were straight Madison Avenue chic—neo-Jesuit, minus the religious icons, of course.

Elton Good worked for the Federal Inter-Network Combine (FINC), the quasipublic, quasigovernmental, quasicorporate overview group that interconnected the rulings of the Federal Communications Commission, the pressures of the Consumer Relations Board, the demands of the national networks, and the letters from various PTA and religious groups. Since network executives usually filled the posts of the FCC and CRB, the job wasn’t as taxing as it might sound to an outsider.

Elton Good was a censor. His job was to make certain that nothing disturbing to the public, contrary to FCC regulations or harmful to network profits got onto The Tube.

“Is Mr. Gabriel always this late?” Good asked, with a slight edge to his reedy voice.

Montpelier couldn’t reconcile the voice with the sweetly smiling face. “He had to stop at the hospital. They’re taking the bandages off his face.”

“Oh, yes... that... brawl he got himself into.” Good edged back away from the table slightly, as if he might become contaminated by it all. “Very ugly business. Very ugly.”

This is going to be some dinner, Montpelier knew.

In another soundproofed booth, across the restaurant, Brenda Impanema was smiling at Keith Connors, third assistant vice president for marketing of Texas New Technology, Inc.

Connors wore a Confederate-gray business suit, hand-tooled Mexican boots, and had an RAF mustache that curled up almost to the corners of his eyes.

“I knew I’d spot y’all in the middle of a crowded restaurant even though I’d never see y’all befoah,” he was saying. “I jes’ tole myself, Keith, ol’ buddy, y’all jes’ go lookin’ for the purtiest gal in the place. These Canadian chicks don’t have the class of California gals.”

Brenda smiled demurely. “Actually, I was born in New Mexico.”

“Hey! That’s practically in Texas! No wonder yo’re so purty.”

Connors was beaming at her, the glow of his toothy smile outshining the candle on their table by several orders of magnitude. He had already shown Brenda holograms of his Mexican wife and their six children—all under seven years of age. “Guess I’m jes’ a powerful ol’ lover,” he had smirked when she commented on the size of his family.