“Then we’ll have to make it a Top Ten series. We’ll have to get the best writers and producers and....”

Finger shook his head wearily. “They’re not putting up that much money.”

Oxnard was struck by the contrast in their two expressions. Finger looked utterly tired, on the verge of defeat and surrender. Brenda was bright, alive, thinking furiously.

“What we need first is an idea,” she said.

“For the series?” Oxnard asked, almost under his breath.

“And I know just who to go to!” Brenda’s eyes flashed with excitement. “Ron Gabriel!”

Finger’s eyes flashed back. “No! I will not work with that punk! Never! I told you before, nobody calls me a lying sonofabitch and gets away with it. And he did it to my face! To my goddamned face! He’ll never work for Titanic or anybody else in this town again. I swore it!”

“B.F.,” Brenda cooed into the phone screen, “do you remember the first lesson you taught me about how to get along in this business?”

“No,” he snapped.

“Well I do,” she said. “It’s an old Hollywood motto: ‘Never let that sonofabitch back into this studio... unless we need him.’”

“I will not...”

“B.F., we need him.”

“No!”

“He’s a great idea man.”

“Never!”

“He works cheap.”

“I’d sooner see Titanic sink! And the whole holographic project go down with it! Not Gabriel! Never!”

The image clicked off the screen.

Brenda looked up at Oxnard. “Better cancel the wine,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because we’re driving out to Ron Gabriel’s place. Come on, it’s not far.”

2: THE WRITER

Oxnard and Brenda ran through cold, heavy sheets of rain to her car. Although it was only a few yards from the restaurant door, they were both gasping and drenched as they slid onto the plastic seats and slammed the car doors.

Brenda rubbed at her eyes. “At least it’ll clear away the smog for a while.”

Sucking in air through his mouth, Oxnard realized that for the first time in weeks there was no perfume smell pervading the environs. And he could breathe without noseplugs.

“Every cloud has a platinum catalytic filter for a lining,” he said.

Brenda laughed as she gunned the car to life. In the dim light from the dashboard, Oxnard could see that her long red hair was glistening and plastered down around her face. It somehow looked incredibly sexy that way.

They roared off through the rain and soon were threading the torturous curves of Mulholland Drive, heading up into Sherman Oaks. The rain and sudden cold made the car’s windshield steam up and it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. The headlights were drowned in gusting walls of rain.

Twice they found themselves on the shoulder of the road, with nothing between them and a sheer drop except a few inches of gravel. Once, on a hairpin curve, Brenda nearly steered into an oncoming set of headlights. Which car had drifted onto the wrong side of the road, it was impossible to tell.

Oxnard was just as drenched when the car finally glided to a stop as when he had first climbed in. But now he was soaked with clammy nervous sweat. Brenda seemed perfectly at ease, though.

“Here we are,” she said cheerfully.

“Here” was a low-slung modernistic house perched on the shoulder of a hill, in the middle of a long winding street lined by similar houses. Brenda had pulled the car up on the driveway, so that by sliding out on the driver’s side they could splash across one small puddle and dive directly under the protective overhang at the front door.

The door was more ornately carved than Queequeeg’s sarcophagus, a really handsome piece of work. Hanging squarely in the middle of it, under the knocker, was a tiny hand-lettered sign that said:

TRY THE BELL

with a drawing of a hand pointing one finger toward an all-but-invisible button, hidden behind a flowering shrub.

Brenda touched the doorbell button and a speaker grill set above the door grated:

“Yeah?”

“Ron, it’s Brenda.”

“Brenda?”

“Brenda Impanema... from Bernard Finger’s office.”

“Oh, Brenda!”

“Can we come in?”

Oxnard was beginning to feel foolish, standing out there with the wind cutting through him, wet and chilled, all the rain in Southern California sluicing down around them, watching a girl he had just met talking to a door.

“Who’s we?” the door asked.

Brenda seemed to be enjoying the fencing match; well, maybe not enjoying it, but at least neither surprised nor dismayed by it.

“Someone you’ll enjoy meeting,” she said. “He invented the...”

“He?” The voice sounded disappointed.

For the first time, Brenda frowned. “Come on, Ron. It’s cold and wet out here.”