Thank You for Smoking

"It'll look much more effective. Here, look." Nick dumped the money out. "And shake it like this to get the last bundle out. Also, it would be great if you could cough while you're doing it. The whole time you're dumping, you should be denouncing, sort of build up to the last piece of silver. You might even call it that. You know, as in the thirty pieces of silver, from the Bible, the Judas payoff. Then you tell them what you're going to do with it." "What am I going to do with it?"

"You're going to give it to the cancer ranch. Of course."

"Well, I do have a family. "

"Whoa, Lorne. You can't keep the money."

"Why the hell not?"

"How's that going to look? Denouncing us and then keeping it? It's blood money. Look at it." They both stared at the bundles of hundred-dollar bills on the floor. Lot of money.

"I'm going to have to talk this over with Roberta," Lutch said, shifting uneasily in his seat.

Nick drove back to L.A. fast. He got pulled over for going ninety-two miles an hour. The cop wrote him up for the full amount. Nick didn't argue.

The next morning Gomez O'Neal called Nick at the Encomium. "We just heard that Lorne Lutch canceled out of a local TV talk show for next week. Nice going."

The Captain called five minutes later. "Gomez O'Neal tells me it worked. I knew it would. Good work, son."

BR called. "I gather things are going well out there."

Nick hung up and called Lutch. "Lorne," he said, annoyed, "what's going on?"

"Roberta and I are still thinking about it," he said.

"Look, it's not going to do any good to denounce us a week or a month from now. Outrage is like fish, it's got to be fresh. Do it today. It really should have been yesterday."

"Suppose," Lutch said, "I denounced you for giving me a hundred thousand dollars? Would that be all right with your people?"

19

Jack Bein called to say Jeff had news and wanted a meeting at seven the next morning. "That's not too early for you, is it?" Nick told him that in Washington, too, business started early.

"I spoke with everyone involved in Sector Six," Jeff said, sipping on a cup of ginseng tea. "I told them what we wanted, and," he smiled cynically to let Nick know that their response had come as no surprise, "they told me what they want, which is a lot of money. An amount of money that," he chuckled smoothly, "surprised even me. And I like to think that I do not surprise easily."

"How big an amount of money?" Nick asked.

"This is a movie about outer space. The sum of money is appropriately astronomical, you might say."

"Well," Nick said, "my industry does forty-eight billion a year, so I'm probably not going to faint. So what are we talking about?"

"For Mace to smoke, ten. For Fiona and Mace to smoke, twenty-five. I said to them, wait a minute, so where's this extra five coming from? Usually when you buy two of something, there's a discount. They said it was for the synergy. These are not dumb people. They got it right away: Mace and Fiona lighting up after some cosmic fucking in the bubble suite is going to sell a lot of cigarettes."

Twenty. five? "We only want to rent their lungs for two hours," Nick said. "We're not asking them to get cancer."

"That's funny," Jack Bein said.

"I wouldn't take these numbers as being set in concrete," Jeff said. "The point is, they want to play. This is a very expensive film, even with the additional financing. I shouldn't be telling you this, but the Sultan of Glutan is looking to expand his presence in this country, and is getting into the film business." "Getting into it is right," Jack said.

"The reason I mention this, in the strictest confidence," Jeff went on, "is that I wanted to ascertain if you'd have any problem being financially co-involved with the sultan."

So that's why he's telling me all this, thought Nick. Jeff Megall did not make small talk, or lightly breach confidences. The sultan had been in the news lately. They had discovered more oil on one of the more remote islands in his archipelago. It was inhabited by several thousand primitive tribesmen who quaintly thought the oil drillers were raping their earth-mother by sinking their shafts into her, and so, logically, hacked them to pieces. The sultan, being the richest man on earth and therefore impatient with inconvenience, responded by ordering his air force to bomb the island until nothing remained alive on it but the especially hardy species of lizard, Komodo terribilis. The U.N. had denounced the action, and world opinion was strongly against him; so much so, in fact, that a half-dozen international celebrities had cancelled out of his annual yacht party in Costa Splendida that year.

"Let me add," Jeff said, "that the sultan's participation in the financing will be completely anonymous. We're doing it through one of his off-off-shore corporations." He spread his hands, palms up, in the international gesture of helplessness. "As for the controversy, that's not for me to say. I try very hard not to get involved in politics."