Alone, Remo heaved a sigh of relief. He'd jumped the first hurdle. And in spite of what the Master of Sinanju might think, he wouldn't crack. He would absolutely not tell Chiun where he was really going. He was saving them all a lot of grief. After all, it would be impossible to get any work done in California with Chiun hawking his latest screenplay to every waiter and cabana boy in L.A.
As he was leaving the room the pirated videotape atop the television caught his eye. The Taurus Studios logo stared out at him from the spine of the box. It was stupidity on a level he had never encountered before.
"What kind of idiots would use their own company logo on a shipment of illegal merchandise?" he wondered aloud.
This thought on his mind, he slowly trailed the Master of Sinanju down to the kitchen.
Chapter 4
"They were this close," lisped the effete male secretary. He held up a thin, pale hand-index finger and thumb a hair apart. A pointless gesture since the person he was talking to was on the other end of the telephone line. "This close to getting their little bronzed fannies tossed out onto Wilshire without so much as a toodle-oo."
He paused as he listened to his manicurist drone on. Sometimes the man could be such a bore. He adjusted the wire headset on his delicate, bleachedwhite coif as he let the man prate on for more than three whole seconds.
"Well, Nishitsu is the one that put them in charge," the secretary said conspiratorially. "You should have seen it when the studio went eye deep in a pool of red ink. Little Jappos in their tiny little Chairman Mao pajamas running around bowing and screeching at everyone in sight."
The manicurist asked another question.
"I thought so, too, love. But before you could say 'Give my regards to Broadway,' in swoops Sultan Omay with some sort of grandiose scheme to resurrect Taurus. He actually hired them both back."
The secretary listened for a moment before snorting loudly at a remark the manicurist made about the Taurus bull and one of his employers at the studio.
"Too true, too true," agreed the secretary with a girlish giggle. "Only his tailor and a thousand Sunset whores know for sure."
The office door suddenly swung open, and the secretary stiffened in his seat as a pair of men at the fringe of early middle age entered the foyer. "So, five o'clock, then?" he said into the phone. His voice dropped low. "Yes, it's them." His voice rose again. "Perfect, love. See you then."
With a careful stab of a perfectly buffed fingernail he severed the connection. The secretary folded his hands neatly atop his desk as the two men strode past him.
"Any calls?" one of them asked gruffly.
The secretary shook his head. "Uh-uh." He smiled.
The man who asked the question seemed displeased with the response. "What about press? We get any press today?"
"Not in Variety," the secretary replied. With every syllable he spoke it sounded as if he were about to burst into song. He tapped a copy of the trade paper, which was the only other item on the neat desk save his slender high-tech phone.
The unchanged ill humor of the two men clearly indicated that there was no place other than Variety they thought of as legitimate press. They pushed open the glossy glass-and-silver door beside their secretary's desk. Etched into the glass was the legend Hank Bindle And Bruce Marmelstein: Magic Makers. Beneath these words was the logo of Taurus Studios. A small reference to the Nishitsu Corporation had been scratched over by the business end of a set of Porsche keys.
Inside the huge office was as sterile as an operating room. Two gleaming chrome-and-glass desks with matching chrome chairs were positioned on either side of the room so that each was the precise mirror image of the other. The desks faced the glass doors and had been set up beneath a long picture window. The enormous blind that hung before the window was drawn tightly.
A half-dozen framed movie posters were lined up on the wall beside the right desk. The same six posters also adorned the left wall. In this weird mirror image the mates of each poster stared across the room at one another like wallflowers at a highschool dance.
Aside from the desks, chairs and artwork, there was nothing else in the large, empty office. The whole room seemed to be a sort of modern vision of an old sitcom episode where the two stars were fighting. Visitors to Bindle and Marmelstein's Taurus offices half expected to see a line of masking tape running up the middle of the room. In fact, at the end of the Japanese Nishitsu reign and before the Sultan Omay acquisition, there had been.
Bindle and Marmelstein felt the sticky tape residue tug at the soles of their matching Saucony Hurricane running shoes as they crossed the antiseptic gray carpeting. They plopped down behind their respective desks.
Neither man looked at the other.
In spite of the heavy soundproofing they'd had installed when Nishitsu had put them in charge of the once profitable studio, both of them were able to hear a low, steady rumbling from beyond the sealed window behind them.
Something within the room rattled in response to the earthshaking movement outside. It was not the posters, whose frames had been permanently secured to the walls with solid-gold screws at great cost to the Nishitsu Corporation.
They listened for the source of the noise, trying to hone in on whatever was causing the persistent glassy rattle. After a moment Bruce Marmelstein noted with a smirk that it came from his partner's desk. Neither the look nor the location of the rattle sat well with Hank Bindle.
Irritated that his should be the only piece of furniture rattling, Bindle pressed a button on his desk. Half of the room-length blind-the half behind Hank Bindle-slowly powered open, revealing a wide studio lot. Not to be outdone, Marmelstein pressed an identical button on his own desk. His half of the blind opened, as well. Swiveling on chrome bases, the men spun their chairs around simultaneously.
The lot below them was bustling with activity. Two sides were hemmed in by large studio buildings. The third consisted of the office complex in which Bindle and Marmelstein now sat. The fourth opened out into another wide lot, which, in turn, ended at a distant white wall.
Every inch of space in the first lot seemed to be filled with all manner of military equipment. There were antiaircraft guns on flatbed trucks. Military transport vehicles. Jeeps, trucks and Land Rovers.
In between the vehicles milled men with rifles and machine guns. They were dressed in flowing white robes. Loose-fitting mantles covered their heads and hung down across their shoulders. Many of the men wore headdresses of cordlike material around their mantles. There were hundreds of men dressed in this manner all around the first lot.
A cloud of dust rose from the second, more distant lot. Through the smoky film a column of tanks could be seen involved in what appeared to be some sort of military maneuvers near the white wall. The relentless ground-shaking of these metal behemoths was obviously responsible for Hank Bindle's rattling desk.
Bindle and Marmelstein watched the activity through the one-way glass of their huge office window. Cold air from the superchilled room frosted the edges of the glass. At long last one of them spoke.
"I'm a little troubled by this whole war-movie concept," Hank Bindle said. It was the first complete sentence he had spoken to his partner since the Nishitsu Pullout.
"Bad box office," Bruce Marmelstein echoed.
"Forget that Saving Private Ryan fluke. Hell, I could have sold tickets to my scrotum tuck with a cast like that." His tan face was drawn into a serious expression. Not so serious that it might cause wrinkles. He wasn't due for a peel for another six months and he wanted to minimize the damage between now and then.
"We could come up with an angle," Bindle ventured to his partner.
"You mean like a Schindler's List for the nineties?" Marmelstein suggested.
"Schindler's was nineties," Bindle sighed. "Better yet. Strike while the iron's hot. How about Schindler's List II?"
"No, I don't think Spielberg will go for it."
"Damn," Marmelstein muttered. A spark of inspiration suddenly struck. "Did Schindler write any more lists?"
"What, you mean like Schindler's Other List?" Bindle said, taking up the thread.
"Posolutely," Bindle enthused. "Maybe no one's bought up the rights yet." He stabbed at his intercom. "Ian, get me Schindler on the phone."
"Schindler, Mr. Bindle?" the effeminate voice of their young secretary droned.
"You know, the guy with all the lists. Tell him we'll give him whatever he wants not to sign with Amblin for the sequel."
"Or Dreamworks," Marmelstein cut in on his line.
"Just set up a meeting," Bindle ordered, shooting an annoyed look at his partner. He released the intercom. "Now, you realize before we even get started, someone's going to have to take the fall when we hose this list guy," he said pensively. He wheeled in his chair. "How important is Ian to you?" Bindle asked Marmelstein.
"He knows where a lot of the bodies are buried," Marmelstein reminded him. "Especially the you-know-what with the you-know-whats."
"What?" Bindle asked, totally confused. "Iratedpay ideotapevays," Marmelstein replied in his best pig Latin.