THE TWENTY-FOOT-LONG white Mercedes limousine with the blackout windows and FLAUNT IT license plates crept moodily in Friday night traffic en route to the pagodas and movie star foot-steps-in-cement of the Hollywood Chinese Theater and the long-awaited world premiere of The Satanist. Inside, on mink-lined upholstery, rode two men in Armani tuxedos and a traveling tank that contained a snake.
“Did they change my script very much, Mr. Zelig?” asked the childlike, trusting voice of Drood.
“Ah, well, only the musical sequence, Jonathan.”
“Musical sequence?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll like it.”
Drood lowered his head, seemed to listen, and then nodded.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I think that I will.”
He looked up at the mogul, who sat opposite him.
“I’m so sorry that you’re blind, Mr. Zelig.”
“That’s kind of you. Most people are.”
At the confluence of Hollywood and Vine, the mogul turned his head to gaze idly out a window at the weekly public scourging of studio executives caught reading manuscripts, screenplays or treatments prior to announcing their acquisition, as opposed to relying on the usual reports from their volunteer staffs of twelve-year-old readers.
“I really like your face, Mr. Zelig.”
The mogul turned and stared for a moment.
“My mask, you mean, Jonathan?”
“Oh. It’s a mask?”
“Yes. It’s a mask. It’s Charo. Tell me, how are they treating you, Jonathan?”
“Oh, fine.”
“I’m so glad they let you out for this tonight.”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Mr. Zelig.”
“Yes, Jonathan; and neither, quite frankly, would I.”
Five months had passed since Sprightly had spurned him. The hope of his sick imagination relied upon this evening’s humiliation of Hazard and its aftermath of media outrage and scorn; somehow, he pondered, as he stared distractedly at the mugging of an elderly tourist by a man in an ape suit with a yellow revolver concealed amid a cluster of ripe bananas, Sprightly might yet become disillusioned. But if not, he was still guaranteed his revenge, for the evening’s boos for Hazard, and its hisses—here the mogul’s quick gaze shifted over to Jeff and the festive pink ribbons tied and bowed around his neck—were a tonic that his heart foresaw with eagerness, if not with unbridled joy. As for me, who will blame me? the mogul reflected; everybody knows that I’m totally crazy, maybe even the craziest man on earth!
“Simpson thinks your snake is a very nice person.”
The mogul turned his mask to the author inscrutably.
“Is that so?” he said after a moment.
“He wants to know where he can send him some poems that he’s written. They’re pretty. They’re all about rice.”
Maybe not the craziest, Zelig amended.
The mogul returned his gaze to the window. They were a block from the entrance to the theater and already he could hear the fans cheering the stars as they arrived in tuxedos and formal gowns. Zelig had insisted on a “world premiere” complete with all its trappings and hullabaloo—the invited celebrities and television interviews, the spotlights and a swarming press—in order to maximize Hazard’s disgrace. In addition, all the West Coast reviewers would be there. As for the national critical establishment, Zelig had arranged a simultaneous screening at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory with mats on the floor for seating. The printed and beguiling four-color invitation specified “gala reception beforehand featuring popcorn, Milk Duds and Coke,” and beneath it, the allurement in large block letters: “ALL YOU CAN EAT! FREE! FREE!”
“Are you ready for your interview, Jonathan?”
“Yes.”
Zelig turned to him.
“You sound a little blue. Are you blue?”
“I hate it when they call me the Prince of Darkness, Mr. Zelig.”
“Yes, I hate it when they call me that, too.”
Drood made an odd little groaning sound, then he sighed and turned his head to stare glumly out the window. “My wife came to visit last week. She says she wants to try and get back together.”
“Does that please you?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Zelig. All those cats. Electricity makes you see a bunch of things differently.”
“Jonathan?”
The author turned his gaze to the mogul.
“Yes, sir?”
“You remember about your interview, Jonathan?”
“Interview?”
“In front of the theater. With the man. You remember? You remember what it is you’re going to say?”
“How Mr. Hazard told Simpson what to tell me to write?”
“Do we need to drag Simpson into this, Jonathan? Perhaps the chain of authorship should be more direct.”
“I’m scared the Writer’s Guild might hurt me if I do that, Mr. Zelig.”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“Okay, I’ll remember, Mr. Zelig.”
The author turned his moody gaze back to the window and gloomed, “I just don’t want any credit arbitrations.”
Far behind them, a dusty, blue Lincoln sedan tooled along with Tony DeSky at the wheel and, beside him, slumped down in the passenger’s seat, a miserable, catatonic Hazard in a tux. DeSky tapped lightly on his car horn and waved at a large group of men in an open truck that had just pulled in ahead of them. The band of broadly smiling Mexicans waved back. “Patsy invited them,” he said without expression. “Everybody’s comin’ tonight except Sprightly. Too bad. I really think she shoulda come,” the agent rued. Drawn by the flashing red light of a squad car, he glanced to the right where he glimpsed a policeman slipping the cuffs on an out-of-work studio head who had burst into Musso-Frank’s and demanded the liver and onions at gunpoint.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head; “She shoulda come.”
Earlier that day in the Malibu Colony, the Hazards had debated the wisdom of attending. Hazard, with a sentence of death at his throat, had paced with a Cajun martini in his hand while Sprightly sat knitting in a chair at the bar. She was wearing a housecoat and fluffy slippers.
“I’m not going,” she repeated, her eyes on her work.
“But you’ve got to.”
“No, I don’t,” she said tautly. “You’ve got to. You let him put it into that stupid damned contract.”
“You’re the star. If you’re not there, it’s going to look pretty strange.”
“I’m just not gonna sit there while they look at my tits!”
Hazard stopped pacing, silenced. He walked behind the bar and took a breath. “You want a drink?”
She shook her head and said, “No. I’m not drinking.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, scrounging in a bucket for some ice. “You haven’t been drinking at all these days. How come?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Not in the mood.”
He sipped at his drink. “What’s that you’re knitting?”
“I don’t know yet,” she answered.
“In development?”
Despite herself she nodded and smiled good-naturedly as she expertly flipped another thread. “Yeah, Jason. In development. Right. That’s right.” She looked up. “You all packed?”
They were booked on American at noon the next day. Hazard planned to lie low in their Connecticut hideaway for six months while he polished a script, his magnum opus, designed to be shot on location in Egypt.
He said, “Yeah, I’m all packed; packed and ready to go.” He knocked back the dregs of his spicy martini and quickly went to work at building another. Sprightly darted looks of concern.
“You gonna have any more of those?” she asked.
He said, “Ten.”
They heard a door close. Ralph had padded in off the beach. “Very much of good luck tonight, sahib. Everyone in whole Colony talking.”
Hazard felt a headache coming on. “Thanks, Ralph.”
The guru clasped his hands together, bowed deep and then flapped to the kitchen on sandy bare feet. Hazard watched him flowing away like the Ganges, brown and muddy and unweeting of his care. “So, okay, I’ll go with Tony tonight,” he said morosely.
He took his martini with him up the bedroom; time to shave and get dressed for his public execution. Once in the room, though, he felt a depression and he miserably sank to the edge of the bed, where he hung his head and fozzed his fate. Since the night that Charles Dickens and Andy Warhol had united to bizarrely invade his dreams, the director had fitfully wrestled with integrity; his manic mien had vanished, and he looked at the project just as it was and untinted by ludicrous rationalizations. He had even accepted his failures of the past. But like a rabid and maddened Nosferatu, he’d been unable to pull his frenzied fangs from the throat of the Zelig three-picture deal. This really isn’t me, he now argued again to himself; it has nothing to do with my work: every frame of this movie is Arthur Zelig’s from the first fade-in to the last fade-out. I have nothing whatever to be ashamed of, he went on to delude himself again: I’ve learned a lot. My next film will be my finest. They’ll forget this. I know what I’m doing. It’s all right. Suddenly Hazard came crashing to earth as a line from the musical sequence assailed him, the striking refrain, “Get out of that cat!” He lowered his head with a quiet groan. It will soon be all over, he tried to assure himself; it will be over and buried and gone. He looked up through a window at far Catalina and thought once again of his extraordinary dream. Yeah, alright, so I’m selfish and completely self-centered and a user and abuser of Sprightly and a prick. So what do you want from me? I’m an artist!
He’d recounted the dream to Isadore Shriek, placing stress on its quality of total reality. “Did you like that?” Shriek had interrupted him; “I can give you that high anytime,” and, so saying, had immediately scribbled a prescription for something called Gristle Etouffée at Benny the Spic’s Lost Horizon Cafe, to be followed by “hot tub and sturdy colonics.”
Hazard shook his head. The dream still haunted him. He thought someday he would learn its true meaning.
He stood up to make ready for horrid night.
* * *
At six, DeSky pulled up at the Hazard house in his 1987 blue Lincoln. “Nah, I don’t want no limo,” the agent had grimaced; “then the driver’ll tell us he’s real good luck and drove Lucas and Spielberg to the opening of Star Wars. They’re a pain in the ass, these guys, they’re fulla shit. Come on, now, get in or we’re gonna be late.”
When the car had beetled into the line for drop-off, the scene at the theater was pandemonic. Everywhere strobe lights flashed and blinded while Army Archerd lurked near the curbside interviewing stars for the television camera and cordoned-off fans huzzahed and oohed. Adding to the din and raucous cacaphony, two obscure religious groups waved signs while chanting slogans protesting the film. The Demonics, a Bakersfield cult that worshipped Satan and owned a large chain of health food stores, had charged through their spokesman, Vic DiFazio, that The Satanist was “blatantly discriminatory,” giving Satan an undeserved press. “So okay, that’s just the Devil’s thing, alright? Being fucky,” DeFazio had vividly asserted sometime earlier. “So why are we getting all bent out of shape?” The other group, Satanists and Exorcists for Choice, believed strongly that “only the persons possessed” had the right to choose whether to expel their demons.
DeSky took his cigar from his mouth and smiled warmly. “Hey, that’s great. I just love all this shit, don’t you?”
The director said, “I think I’m about to throw up.”
The agent turned to him. “You serious?”
“Yes.” His voice was strained.
“You wanna get out here, kid?”
Hazard nodded and started from the car.
“I’m gonna have me a beer across the street at the Roosevelt,” drawled DeSky. “Come and get me when it’s over. I can’t watch this kind of stuff.”
Hazard nodded, slammed the door and threw up in the street.
“Holy shit,” the agent murmured. “This thing must be a whole lot worse than I thought.”
Hazard took a handkerchief out, wiped his mouth, then hustled toward the brightly lit entrance of the theater. His intention was to slip past Archerd undetected, but he heard his name being called, turned around and saw the interviewer waving him over. Hazard paused and then wretchedly trudged to the camera.
“Yes, ladies and gentlemen,” Archerd beamed, “the director of the year’s most awaited film, the luminous, distinguished Jason Hazard himself. Come on, Jason, come in a little closer, if you would.”
Hazard glumly moved in a few steps.
“Well, Jason, this is quite big night for you, isn’t it? In fact, it’s a pretty big night for us all. This is surely, and without exaggeration, the most anticipated, talked-about film in a decade. How are you feeling about it?”
“Okay.”
“There was so much secrecy surrounding the film. Is it true it has a scene that almost got you an X?”
The director felt the stirrings of nausea returning. Staring wildly and fighting for control, he shook his head.
“No comment? Still keeping things under wraps?”
A quick headshake.
“Can you say there’s any truth to the rumors of mysterious happenings on the set? Bad accidents, unexplained fires and the like?”
The director stared glassily into space. In his eyes tiny points of panic shone.
“That bad,” said Archerd, frowning.
A terse, quick nod.
“Arthur Zelig just talked to us, Jason. Was he just being terribly modest when he said he had nothing to do with the picture, that it’s been all your baby every step of the way?”
Hazard bolted and ran toward the theater entrance.
Archerd stood watching him expressionlessly, then turned his head and looked into the camera. “Mysterious,” he ruminated gravely. “Everything connected with this picture is eerie.” He turned to the side as a man in a serape and sombreo approached him. “Let’s see now, who’s this?” Archerd wondered aloud. “Can you give us your name, sir?”
“No. No names. Djou know you got a really dirty men’s room in dis place? Djou people got to try to keep it clean a li’l bedder.” He handed the perplexed reporter a card. “Call thees number,” he instructed, pointing it out. “Thees lady, she can fine us right away, no problemo. Ask for her.”
Archerd squinted at the card: “‘Ask for Patsy?’”
* * *
Hazard lurched to the theater’s immaculate men’s room, but by then the spurts of nausea attacking him subsided. He sighed, looked in a mirror, and was shocked by what he saw. I am looking at a dead man, he thought, a fucking corpse. He grasped the sides of a washbasin, lowered his face and splashed cold water on it, then toweled. He had to go through with this: the contract specified sanctions unless he attended the first public screening. He sighed, combed his hair and walked down to the theater, where the orchestra section was abuzz with excitement, not only because of the novel’s notoriety, but the airtight secrecy as well that had cloaked the production from the start, no less than the rumors of weird misfortunes relating to the cast and crew of the film. Sprightly Hazard, for example, was rumored to have given birth to a child with no nose whatsoever and the head of a wasp, a report that, when it reached the comedian George Burns, caused that icon to observe, with a tap at his cigar, “Well, at least it can join any club that it wants.”
The director skulked past people who knew him and went to the roped-off last three rows where he sat beside a powerful Hollywood agent. In front of him were Zelig, Miss Peltz and Drood. The mogul turned around to him and stared. Hazard sensed the smile of spite behind the mask. “Hello, Jason. I’m so happy to see you here. Look, Jonathan—it’s our brilliant director. You must greet him.”
Drood turned around. “Oh, hello, Mr. Hazard.”
“Hello.”
“Have you read my pages yet, Mr. Hazard?.”
“No, I thought I’d wait to see them on the screen tonight.”
“Ah, here we go, here we go!” rasped Zelig excitedly. He eagerly turned toward the screen. The lights in the theater were slowly dimming and an ominous tympany sound began throbbing through the speakers of the theater like the beating of a heart. There were gasps, and though the buzzing of the audience softened, the level of excitement in the whispers intensified. The curtains began to rustle back.
“Gee, whiz, here we go, Mr. Zelig,” said Drood. “I’m excited. Thanks again for this really neat seat.”
“You’re the reason we’re all here, my dear boy.”
“I am?”
The film faded up and after the Zelig Studio logo there appeared on the screen an unusual version of the so-called possessory above-the-title credit. It read:
Completely Jason Hazard’s
“THE SATANIST”
Hazard sank lower into his seat and contemplated sneaking out of the theater after placing a dummy in his place.
“Is this seat taken or isn’t it empty?” the director heard a vacuous, breathy voice asking. He looked up at a stunning young blonde in her twenties and the source of the heady perfume he was inhaling. “Oh, my God, you’re Jason Hazard!” the girl said excitedly, a hand pressed up to her face. “Oh, I’m your biggest, biggest fan! Can I sit here? Is it empty?”
Hazard nodded, looked away and murmured, “Sure.”
“I’m Barely Barcelona,” said the girl. She sat down. “Oh, this is really too tubular for expression! I mean, I used to be a model but now I’m an actress. And now here I am sitting with my favorite director. Oh God! I mean, I only saw Illegible six times! Incidentally, are you sure this seat is empty?”
“I’m certain.”
“I’ll be quiet now. I guess you want to concentrate on things? Just remember, though, I really am a very good actress.”
With a flip of her hair, she turned her head toward the screen. The title had faded up to eager applause, and then a deadly, awed hush of anticipation had fallen on an audience eager to be thrilled. As the scene in the Georgetown house began, the young actress, while vacantly staring straight ahead, placed her hand high up against Hazard’s inner thigh. “Oh, your wife is so beautiful,” she whispered. “What an actress.”
Startled, Hazard froze, numbly staring at the screen, but when he reached down to pull away the errant hand, the actress clutched at it, squeezing it more tightly than ever. “God, I can’t believe I’m sitting here next to you!” she huskily whispered. “Gee, your hand is so cold, it’s like ice. Warm heart? Okay, I’m not going to talk anymore.”
Hazard tried to extract his hand but found he couldn’t; the girl had the grip of a frenzied hawk. He decided to fix his attention to the screen. The scene in the Georgetown house had begun, the telephone call from the assistant director.
“Ooh, this is so scary!” the actress whispered.
Hazard tensed as the dreaded moment approached. But when Sprightly walked into the darkened bedroom and whispered, “I sure do love you, Guy”—this followed by a delicate but definite braying—no more than a nervous little titter broke out among an audience gripped by their expectations and quelled by the director’s and the novel’s reputation. Some took it for a dream or for a purposely bizarre demonic delusion, while others floated judgment and awaited the certain disclosure of its deeper and true meaning. But when Emory Bunting played his scene with John Tremaine proposing the exorcism of a mule, a thunderclap of laughter burst forth from the audience; then another, and again and again. Hazard’s body temperature dropped eighteen degrees and he began to sink lower and lower into his seat, and as the laughter continued unremittingly, Zelig turned around in his seat to stare at him with naked satisfaction.
“The mule has been speaking in an unknown tongue.”
“Oh, I daresay he has.”
The roof fell in.
Hazard could simply bear no more. Though reluctant to miss the musical sequence, he leaped up and started an escape from the theater just as the scene with the Bishop had ended and a loud and giddy chattering erupted in the audience. He made it to the aisle but his progress was slowed by his need to continually cuff at the starlet who was clinging to his leg with both her arms: in the foyer, the strength of four male ushers was required to pry her grip loose from the director’s body even as Hazard continued to cuff her. “I—cannot—help you!” he would grit with each slap. “My career is over! I can—not help!”
They were able to free him somewhere in that golden land between the footsteps of Gary Cooper and the prints of Betty Grable’s legs. At the end, as they pried the starlet loose, she asked Hazard, “Am I ever going to see you again?”
The shattered director found DeSky at the Roosevelt.
“Tony!”
“Hey, Jason! Holy shit, kid, who died?”
“I think me. Come on, Tony, drink up. Let’s move, let’s get out of the neighborhood.”
“Uh-oh. No good, huh?”
“They’re laughing their asses off!”
“Yeah, you said they might do that. Too bad,” said the agent. He knocked back the rest of his vodka neat and set the shot glass down on the bar with a clunk. “Well, at least it’s all over.” He looked at Hazard’s hand. “Hey, they really must hate it,” he said. “I can see there where somebody bit you.”
* * *
The beginning of the drive back to Malibu was somber, except for a brief and unsatisfying moment when the agent had to swerve to avoid a yeti that had just emerged from Barney’s Beanery and was lumbering across the street. Momentarily, Hazard was roused from his funk.
“Hey, Tony, did you see that?” he blurted excitedly. “Did you see what that was back there?”
“Yeah, I saw him last week,” said the agent unflappably. “We had a talk. He’s fulla shit just like I thought.”
Thereafter, a funereal silence reigned until the car reached the beach at Santa Monica, whereon the agent, perhaps inspired by the shine of the moon upon the waters, began to descant upon his future retirement and how he’d recently purchased twenty acres of sloping land in Malibu Canyon so that one day he could spend all his time raising goats, and then how, when that vivid exploration had ended, he looked forward to the coming of Thanksgiving Day, when, as always, he and Patsy and the children would have dinner at the Roy Rogers Restaurant in Palm Springs. Then he talked about death. “Someone oughta write a book about that,” he said raspily. “I mean, think about it: death: what a downer! Somethin’s really kocked up about the whole idea.”
“Tony, why are you bringing this subject up now?”
“I dunno. I just think about it a lot.”
The subject arose again at the Hazards’, after the agent had come in for a beer. They were sitting in the teahouse, close to the surf on this clear and quiet moonlit night. Hazard had come in to find a note from Sprightly: “Hope you’re okay,” she had written.
“Don’t wake me, I took two sleeping pills and told the service to hold all our calls. I set the alarm for 7:15. Make sure you’re not up too late tonight, pie, and leave the door unlocked for Ralph, I think he’s out walking on the beach with that Pakistani jerk who bought Joey’s Ribs. You’re the greatest director in this world and I love you more than anything.”
She’d signed it with kisses.
Hazard poured a shot of tequila for himself in the hope that it would punch out his lights fairly soon, got the agent a beer, and then aimlessly chatted: about the business, Hazard’s future, what film he’d make first. Then, as more alcohol was consumed, the agent brought the conversation back to death. “I had a brother with terminal cancer,” he recounted in that beery, laryngeal voice. “Near the end I had him over at Lipschitz Memorial; you know the one, I can’t think, I’ve got a block. I’d made a deal with the doc he should feel no pain, so they had him juiced up on cloud nine all the time. So one day I walk in and he doesn’t see me, he’s lookin’ straight ahead like he’s concentrating hard, like he’s listening to someone at the foot of the bed, and then he nods and he says to this nobody standing there, ‘So, okay, so what happens after that?’ Then the nurse comes in and interrupts. Later on while I’m with him, he starts in talkin’ to himself pretty good. Yeah, he’s lookin’ out the window, ya see, and he’s smilin’ and he says, ‘I finally understand it. I finally know the whole purpose of life.’ Then he shakes his head and looks down and starts laughin’. ‘It’s so simple,’ he says, ‘so simple,’ and he’s chucklin’ so hard he’s got to wipe at his eyes. Another nurse came in right then and made me leave, she had to take some blood or somethin’ from him, so I never got to hear from my brother his secret. That same night he died. Death. What a fuckin’ disgrace. We gotta do somethin’, Jace, we gotta stop it, we gotta throw a fund-raisin’ dinner or somethin’, maybe somethin’ at the Hollywood Bowl with Frank. Anyway, the thing I wanna ask you, Jason, is you think he coulda really been talkin’ to someone?”
“Who?”
“My brother.”
“You mean talking to spirits?”
“Yeah, spirits.”
“No.”
“I didn’t want you to say that, Jason.”
“When you’re dead you’re dead.”
“That right?”
“That’s right.”
“Who negotiated that deal?”
After midnight, Ralph filtered in off the beach, took one look at the faces of Hazard and DeSky and decided not to ask about the fortunes of the film. He turned and walked back to his room and went to bed. A little after one, the agent left with a hug and a promise to return Hazard’s phone calls promptly. The director poured one more drink, a large glass filled with Bristol Cream sherry, then sat with it gloomily staring at the ocean in the hope that some voice there would say, “You did right,” and by the last boozy sip, by the final regret, he had once again fallen asleep in his chair.
He dreamed that Ralph was dating Madonna.
Tap tap.
The director creaked open his eyes. Dawn was seeping in and DeSky was at the window, tapping at the glass with an index finger. Hazard gave a muffled little grunt, got up, shuffled to the door, pulled it open, said, “Shit,” and then turned and slumped back toward his nest in despond. “Hey, Tony, what’s up?” he groggily uttered. He saw a small object on the seat of his chair. Unthinkingly, he picked it up, clasped it in his hand, plopped down in the chair and shielded his eyes against the bright stabs of the rising sun.
“Okay, now, just listen to this,” slurred DeSky, padding in with a raincoat worn over pajamas. “Here’s the good news: my Mexican cleaners gave notice. Last night they called Patsy and said they saw the picture and they couldn’t be connected with that kind of filth.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“It looks like you’re employable again.”
* * *
The film was closing in on the final fade when the agent turned around in his seat to speak to Zelig. “This is big, Arthur. Huge. Bigger than Ghost. It’s got to do three hundred million easy. Whose idea was it to make it as a comedy? Hazard’s?”
The end-title music was swelling. Credits crawled. The agent turned back to join the spirited applause. Zelig was bewildered, at first, in shock, then he felt a great anger and wrenching dismay, but as he heard the applause sustaining, growing louder, the wild shouts of “Bravo!” now lacing the air, he abruptly gaped and froze all motion.
“My God, I can see!” he gasped. “I can see!”
The crowd rose to its feet. The applause was thunderous.
“Down in front!” Zelig shouted at first, but when he stood and peered up at the screen he grew livid.
“Where’s my credit?” he squealed. “I don’t see my credit!”
The excited applause and acclaim continued. Distraught, Zelig started now to shout at the screen: “I picked the director! I shaped the script! I picked the heads of department and the cast and the crew! I heard the rushes! WHERE’S MY CREDIT?”
The litany of “Where’s my credit?” continued long after there was no one in the theater left to hear it. Getting into his limo an hour later, the mogul said tightly, “You’ll pay for this, Jeff.”
* * *
“Isn’t this somethin’?” mused DeSky. He slapped at an L.A. Times review with its references to “catharsis” and a “cleansing of terror.” “Same with all of them. I called all around, our guys here and our guys in New York. This goddamn picture of yours is a smash! Isn’t that what I told you that day at the Plaza?”
“Yeah, Tony. I guess that’s why you get the big bucks.”
Hazard unclasped his hand just then, and he looked at the object he’d found on his chair. It was a silvery emblem in the form of a female breast intertwined with the block letter “N.”