Thank You for Smoking

Lorre flickered past. Jeff continued, 'It's Bobby de Niro playing a chain-smoking, tattooed psycho in Cape Fear, Andy Garcia smoking through a hole in his throat in Dead Again, Thelma and Louise lighting up and getting loaded then going out to the parking lot to blow the balls off a rapist. It can get very weird with cigarettes these days. Pat Hingle branding Anjelica with a cigarette in The Grifters. Laura Dern and Nick Cage chain-smoking through Wild at Heart, talking about how their parents all died of lung cancer and cirrhosis. Nick Nolte in Prince of Tides. Definitely a man with problems. Or Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry. He goes into a convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes and ends up on the floor with his brains splattered all over the place. He didn't even have time to read the surgeon general's warning. What message is being transmitted in these films, do you suppose? That smoking is cool? I think not.'

'Exactly,' Nick said. 'We need a winner. A smoking role model.'

'Yes. Set in the 1950s, before all the health stuff got out of hand.'

'We'd like it to be contemporary,' Nick said. 'We want people to feel good about smoking now. Everyone felt good about smoking in the fifties, at least until they read Reader's Digest.'

Jeff rested his chin on steepled fingers. 'We'd have to move quickly. Principal photography starts in two weeks. How do you feel about Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Talk about a role model. And a very elegant smoker. That holder, almost feminine…'

'Beautiful smoker,' Jack said.

'We could fix the script. As a matter of fact… '

'What are you thinking?' Jack asked.

'That the cigarettes could be central. The CIA puts the poison in the cigarettes. The cigarettes become the McGuffin.'

'Brilliant,'Jack said.

Nick said, 'So FDR dies… from smoking?'

'Yeah, but not from cancer.'

'I think I'd have a hard time selling that to my people.'

'Yeah,' Jeff smiled, 'I can see where that might be a problem. Contemporary is good, but the mind-set is already hardened against it. The L.A. City Council just voted to ban smoking in restaurants here.'

'I know,' Nick said lugubriously. 'Seven thousand restaurants.'

'So much for the Constitution. It's late in the game for main-stream. Wait a minute, wait a minute…'

'What? What?' Jack said.

'That's it.'

'What?' said Jack.

'The future.'

'Brilliant,' Jack said.

Jeff turned back to Nick. 'I shouldn't really be telling you this, but UFA has a womjep sci-fi picture in development that's going to be very, very big.'

' — Womjep'?'

'Woman in jeopardy. Alien meets Dune meets Star Wars and Darth Vader is gay. A screamer. I've seen the script. It's a very funny part, an Oscar part. The hero is a disgraced space baron with an alien kid sidekick who can turn into anything. The girl is the emperor's daughter who's run away and gotten into some seriously bad company. It's called Message from Sector Six. The effects are going to be amazing. Half an hour of morphing. You know what morphing is? What they did in Terminator 2.'

'They're calling it Morph and Mindy,' Jack said.

'A million dollars per minute. They've already reserved advertising space on the fuselage of a space shuttle launch. They've budgeted a hundred and twenty million dollars. It will be the most expensive film ever made. And they're making it in Mexico.'

'I heard they're already up to one-forty.'

'It better be good. UFA is going to be wide open to product placement.'

'Cigarettes?' Nick said. 'In outer space?'

'It's the twenty-sixth century,' Jeff said. 'They're not bad for you anymore. In fact… in fact… '

'What?' Jack said.

'They're good for you. The Sleeper idea. That reminds me, I need to call Woody, though I don't know what I'm going to tell him. Jack, call Bill Hyman, Jerry Gornick, Voltan Zeig, set up a meeting for this afternoon.'

'Done.'

'I've gone blank. Ginseng depletion. Who's directing?'

'Chick Dextor.'

'Going to be a loong shoot.'

'Tell me about it.'

'Nick,' Jeff said, 'this could be very exciting for all of us.'

'I… but don't you explode if you light up in a spaceship? All that oxygen?'

'It's the twenty-sixth century. They've thought that through. That can be fixed with one line of script.'

'It sounds like… I don't know… '

'Nick. The leads in this movie are Mace McQuade and Fiona Fontaine.'

'No kidding.'

'No kidding. Can you see them, sharing a post-sex cigarette in their spaceship, in a round bed with satin sheets and a clear bubble top. The galaxies go whizzing by, the smoke curls weightlessly upward. That doesn't prime your pump? You don't think that would sell a few cartons?'

'Yeah,' Nick said. 'I guess it would.'

'I'll tell you something else. It's not my role to get involved in this part of it, unless I'm asked, but if I were you I would right away get started on launching a whole new brand of cigarettes and launch it simultaneously with the movie. Sector Sixes. No one has ever done that with cigarettes.'

Jeff stood. The meeting was over. He shook Nick's hand. 'You've done something to me that I try very hard to resist. You've gotten me emotionally involved.'

Outside, Sean was working on a crossword puzzle. In the elevator, Jack said, 'You should be pleased with yourself. Jeff really liked you.'

18

Lorne Lutch lived on an avocado farm sixty miles west of L.A. Feeling the need to have his own hands on the wheel, Nick dispensed with Mahmoud and his Great White Whale and drove himself in a rented red Mustang, with his bodyguards following in their own rented tan sedan with the half million dollars of cash. Maybe Lutch would appreciate the symbolism of Nick's showing up in a Mustang. Or maybe he'd come out with a double-barreled shotgun and blow Nick out of his bucket seat. It could go either way.

He'd read Gomez O'Neal's amazingly thorough briefing book on the man's personal and financial history, detailed enough to make the wiretappers at the National Security Agency blush — where did Gomez get all this stuff? — already he knew to the penny how much Lorne Lutch was carrying on his Visa and MasterCard and how much albumin he had in his last urine test. Gomez's boys had their fingers in every urine test that affected tobacco, avid for traces of dope.

This was a very strange mission, one he would only have taken on for the Captain. The night before, he'd placed a call to Polly, the only person, aside from Bobby Jay, to whom he could turn for pointers on bribing dying product spokesmen. Polly had whistled when he told her what he was up to.