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.”
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, handtooled Mexican boots, and had an RAF mustache that curled up almost to the comers 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, of 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 of lover,” he had smirked when she commented on the size of his family.
Brenda hadn’t quite known what to expect of the executive from TNT. Bernard Finger had called her that afternoon and ordered her to have dinner with the man and show him some of Toronto’s night life.
“TNT could take over sponsorship of the whole show, all by themselves,” Finger had said. “They’re big and they’re not afraid to spend money.”
Brenda glowered at Titanic’s chief. “How nice do you want me to be to him?”
Finger glowered back at her. “You get paid for using your brains, not your pelvis. There’s plenty action for a Texas cowboy in town. You just show him where the waterholes are.”
So she had dressed in a demure, translucent knee-length gown and decorated it with plenty of the electronic jewelry that TNT manufactured. As she sat in the booth, silhouetted against the gathering twilight, she glittered like an airport runway.
“Yessir, you shore are purty,” Connors said, with a puppydog wag in his voice.
“Do you think,” Brenda asked coolly, “that your company will want to advertise your electronic jewelry on ‘The Starcrossed’? Seems like a natural, to me.”
The booths at the Roundeley Room were soundproofed so that private conversations could not be overheard, and also to protect the restaurant’s patrons from the noisy entrances made by some customers.
Gloria Glory swept into the restaurant’s foyer, flanked by Francois Dulaq, Rita Yearling and Gregory Earnest. The effect was stunning.
Once a regally tall, statuesque woman, Gloria Glory had allowed many years of success as a gossip columnist to freeze her self-image. While she still thought of herself as regal and statuesque, to the outside world she closely resembled an asthmatic dirigible swathed in neon-bright floor-length robes.
No one ever told her this, of course, because her power to make or destroy something as fragile as a “showbusiness personality” was enormous. In the delicate world of the entertainment arts, where talent and experience counted for about a tenth of what publicity and perseverance could get for you, Gloria Glory possessed a negatonnage unapproached by any other columnist. Her viewers were fanatically devoted to her: what Gloria said was “in” was in; who she said was “out” went hungry.
So words such as
The maitre d’, the hatcheck girl, two headwaiters who usually did nothing but stand near the entrance and look imperious, and a dozen other customers all clustered around Gloria and her entourage.
The hatcheck girl and most of the customers were asking Dulaq for his autograph. They recognized the hockey star’s handsome face, his rugged physique, and his name spelled on the back of the All-Canadian All-Stars team jacket that he was wearing.
The headwaiters and most of the men in the growing crowd were panting around Rita Yearling, who wore a seethrough clingtight dress with nothing under it except her own impressive physique. The traffic jam was beginning to cause a commotion and block the newcomers who were piling up at the head of the escalator.
The maitre d’, with the unerring instinct of the breed, gravitated toward Gloria Glory. He had never seen her before and never watched television. But he knew money when he sniffed it. Calmly ignoring the rising tide of shrieks and curses from the top of the escalator as body tumbled upon body, he gave Gloria the utmost compliment: he didn’t ask if she had a reservation.
“Madam would you prefer a private room, perhaps?”
Gregory Earnest, roundly ignored by all present, started to say, “I made a reserva…”
But Gloria’s foghorn voice drowned him out. “Naah… I like to be right in the middle of all the hustle and bustle. How about something right in the center of everything?”
“Of course,” said the maitre d’.
Gloria swept regally across the crowded restaurant, like a Montgolfier Brothers hot-air balloon trailing pretty little pennants and fluttering ribbons of silk. Earnest and the two stars followed in her wake, while the maitre d’ preceded her with the haughty air of Grand Vizier. The jumbled, tumbled, grumbling crowd at the top of the escalator was left to sort itself out. After all, that’s what insurance lawyers were for, was it not?
Montpelier couldn’t hear the shouts and shrieks from the foyer, of course. But he watched Gloria and her entourage march to the table nearest the computer-directed jukebox. He breathed a silent thanksgiving that Gabriel hadn’t arrived at the same time as Earnest.
“Um, would you like a drink, Mr. Good?” he asked. Good held up a long-fingered hand. “Never touch alcohol, Mr. Montpelier…”
“Les.”
“Alcohol and business don’t mix. Never have.”
