15: THE WARNING
“You don’t understand!” Bernard Finger shouted. “Every cent I had was tied up in that lousy football team! I’m broke! Ruined!”
He was emptying the drawers of his desk into an impossibly thin attache case. Most of the papers and mememtoes—including a miniature Emmy given him as a gag by a producer, whom Finger promptly fired—were missing the attache case and spilling across the polished surface of the desk or onto the plush carpet.
The usually impressive office reminded Les Montpelier of the scene in a war movie where the general staff has to beat a fast retreat and everybody’s busy stripping the headquarters and burning what they can’t carry.
“But you couldn’t have taken everything out of Titanic’s cash accounts,” Montpelier said, trying to remain calm in the face of Finger’s panic.
“Wanna bet?” Finger was bent over, pulling papers out of the bottommost drawer, discarding most of them and creating a miniature blizzard in the doing.
Montpelier found himself leaning forward tensely in his chair. “But we still get our paychecks. The accounting department is still paying its bills. Isn’t it?”
Finger straightened up and eyed him with a look of scorn for such naivete. “Sure, sure. You know Morrie Witz, down in accounting?”
“Morrie the Mole?”
“Who else? He worked out a system for me. We keep enough in the bank for two weeks of salaries and bills. Everything else we’ve been investing in the Pineapples. Every time they win, we bet on ’em again. The odds keep going down, but we keep making sure money. Better than the stock market.”
“Then you must have a helluva cash reserve right now,” Montpelier said.
“Its already bet!” Finger bawled. “And the Pineapples play the Montana Sasquatches this afternoon…” He glanced at the clock on his littered desk. “They’re already playing.”
“Shall I turn on the game?” Montpelier asked, starting to get up from his chair.
“No! I can’t bear to watch. Without Toho they’re sunk.”
Montpelier eased back into the chair.
“Yes!” Finger burst “Turn it on. I can’t stand not knowing!”
He went back to rummaging through the desk drawers as Montpelier walked across the room to the control panel for the life-sized three-dee set in the corner.
“The Pineapples still have their defensive team intact,” Montpelier reasoned. “And Montana’s not that highscoring a team…”
He found the right channel and tuned in the game. The far comer of the office dissolved into a section of a football field. A burly man in a Sasquatch uniform was kneeling, arms outstretched, barking out numbers. The crowd rumbled in the background. It was raining and windy; it looked cold in Montana.
The camera angle changed to an overhead shot and Montpelier saw that the Sasquatches were trying to kick a field goal. The ball was snapped, the kicker barely got the kick past a pair of onrushing Pineapple defenders, who ruined their orange and yellow uniforms by sprawling in the mud.
Again the camera angle changed, to show the football sailing thrugh the uprights of the goal post. The announcer said, “It’s gooood!l” as the referee raised both arms over his head.
Finger groaned.
“It’s only a field goal,” Montpelier said.
“So as the teams prepare for the kickoff,” the announcer said cheerily, “the score is Montana seventeen, Honolulu zero.”
With a gargling sound, Finger pawed through the attache case. He grabbed a bottle of pills as he yelled, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” and poured half the bottle’s contents down his throat.
Montpelier turned the game off, just catching a view of the scoreboard clock. Only eight minutes of the first quarter had elapsed.
He turned to Finger. “What are you going to do?”
His face white, Titanic’s boss said softly, “Get out of town. Get out of the country. Get off the planet, if I can. Maybe the lunar colony would be a safe place for me… if I could qualify. I’ve got a bad heart, you know.”
Raising his eyes to an unhelpful heaven, Finger said, “The other bankruptcy hearings were when we owed money to banks. Or to the government. What we owe now, we owe to the mob. When they foreclose, they take your head home and mount it on the goddamn wall!”
“The gamblers…”
Finger wagged his head. “Not the gamblers. I’m square with them. The bankers who backed us on ‘The Starcrossed.’ It’s their money I’ve been betting. When the show flops they’re gonna want their money back. With interest.”
“Ohhh.”
“Yeah, ohhh.” Finger knuckled his eyes. “Turn the game on again. Maybe they’re doing something…”
The three-dee image solidified, despite annoying flickers and shimmers, to show an orange-and-yellow Pineapple ball carrier break past two would-be tacklers, twist free of another Sasquatch defender and race down the sidelines. The crowd was roaring and Finger was suddenly on his feet, screaming.
“Go! Go! Go, you black sonofabitch!”
There was only one Sasquatch left in the scene, closing in on the Pineapple runner. They collided exactly at the Montana ten yard line. He twisted partially free, and as he began to fall, another Sasquatch pounced on him. The ball squirted loose.
“Aarrghh!”
What seemed like four hundred men in muddied uniforms piled on top of each other. There was a long moment of breathless suspense while the referees pulled bodies off the mountain of rain-soaked fiesh.
Finger stood frozen, his fists pressed into his cheeks.
The bottom man in the pile was a Sasquatch. And under him was the ball.
“Turn it off! Turn it off!”
They spent the rest of the afternoon like that, alternately turning on the three-dee, watching the Sasquatches hurt the pineapples, and turning off the three-dee. Finger moaned, he fainted, he swallowed pills. Montpelier went out for sandwiches; on Sunday the building’s cafeterias were closed.
He idly wondered how far the bankers’ revenge would go.
Finger wolfed down his sandwich as if it were his last meal. They turned the game on one final time, and the Sasquatches were ahead by 38-7 with less than two minutes to play. Finger started calling airlines.
He set up seven different fights for himself, for destinations as diverse as Rio de Janeiro and Ulan Bator.
“I’ll dazzle them with footwork,” he joked weakly. His face looked far from jovial.
The phone chimed. With a trembling hand, Finger touched the ox button. The same comer that had showed the football game now presented a three-dee image of a gray-templed man sitting a a desk. He looked intelligent, wealthy, conservative and powerful. His suit was gray, with a vest. The padded chair on which he saw was real leather, Montpelier somehow sensed. The wall behind him was panelled in dark mahogany. A portrait of Nelson Rockefeller hung there.
“Mr. Finger,” he said in a beautifully modulated baritone. “I’m pleased to find you in your office this afternoon. My computer doesn’t seem to have your home number. Working hard, I see.”
“Yes,” Finger said, his voice quavering just the slightest bit. “Yes… you know how it is in this business, heh heh.”
The man smiled without warmth.
