Turn of the Century (102 page)

“No, she actually
did
. She had them threaten me and take all the things from my hotel room.”

“I doubt that.”

They’ve moved too far down the hall for Lizzie to make out Chas’s reply clearly, but she can tell that he’s getting more distraught. She hears “King Harold” and either “Wong” or “wrong,” followed by the heaving creak of the first step up to the top floor.

Chas Prieve is deranged, and he’s broken into the house
, Lizzie repeats to herself disbelievingly as she steps out of the closet, across her bedroom, and toward the doorway, quiet as she can be. (“Walk like a Mohican, in the movies,” her father used to tell her when they went hiking in the mountains behind Malibu.)
Chas is deranged, and he has a knife
, she repeats to herself now as she presses against the wall by the door and inches her face out to look down the hallway.
He has a long, ugly knife, and he’s heading up to the children’s floor
.

No
.

“Chas, stop right now, Chas. I mean it.” She is in the hallway, pointing the .38-caliber WiseWeapon at her former West Coast marketing and sales vice president.

She has startled him. He points the knife at her and with his free hand grips the bannister like a railing on a ship in rough seas. His expression has turned from missionary zeal to rage and fear, as though Satan herself has appeared. George worries that Chas might lunge past him toward Lizzie, and steps up onto the first tread to block his way back down.

“Just let me go get the disk, Chas,” George says. “It’s yours, and you can have it.”

But Chas is staring at Lizzie. “You will not triumph, Lizzie Zimbalist. You and the Mose forces.”

The weirdness of his language makes her pause.

“Chas?” she says. “This is not some fucking video game. I don’t know what Mose did to you, or what the Malaysians did, or anybody else. But I didn’t have anything to do with it, whatever it was. I didn’t even know about that disk until a few weeks ago.”

“The cartridge is my only remaining asset.”

“You come down here, Chas. George will go get the disk, and come back and give it to you. You come down
here
.”

Chas shakes his head—quick, tiny, frightened shakes. “I trusted you before, Lizzie.” He starts climbing again slowly, glancing back and forth behind him at George with the ice ax and Lizzie with the gun.

“Chas!”
she says, sidling toward the stairs and holding the pistol with both hands, like she’s seen in the movies, “I’m serious. You
stop.”
She takes a step toward the stairs, raising the gun a couple of inches as she gets closer to keep it aimed on him, stops, then takes another step, raises the gun, stops, then another.

George sees that she’s feeding the dementia by threatening him. He knows Lizzie has never fired any kind of gun, and won’t be able to shoot Chas. George continues his creep up the stairs right behind him, Chas taking a step and pausing, George taking a step and pausing.

The three of them could be performing a postmodern dance piece.

“George, get back out of the way,” she says. “Chas, I’m about to shoot you.”

Chas turns away from her and starts up the stairs faster.

Lizzie tries to aim low, and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. She pulls the trigger again, and again. Nothing happens.

Chas is up on the dark top landing now, even more agitated, looking for George’s office, heading toward LuLu’s and Max’s doors.

“Come on,
stop
,” George says, right behind him.

Chas doesn’t, and George swings the two-pound, two-and-a-half-foot-long climbing ax at Chas’s back, grazing his butt. Chas turns and crouches, grunting and stabbing underhanded at the air between him and George (like he’s seen in the movies). George swings the ice ax
like a tennis racket as hard as he can, backhanded, toward Chas’s right hand, the knife hand.

The knife drops and Chas screams. Whimpering and cursing, holding his hand and splattering blood, he rushes past George, past Lizzie, and down the stairs.

“Give me the gun,” George says to his wife.

They slowly follow Chas down two flights, but stop when they hear the front door open. They don’t hear it close. Upstairs, they hear floors creaking, doors opening, a “Mommy?” and a
“Dad?”

“You go call 911 and be with the kids,” George tells Lizzie, “I’ll stay here in case he’s still downstairs.”

“It’s not loaded,” she says.

“No, it
is
loaded. But it’s a smart gun—only I can shoot it. It’s programmed for me to say ‘Ready to fire’ into the chip on the handle to make it work.”

In fact, before George finishes his sentence, he hears and feels a little servomotor
whirr
and
click
inside the WiseWeapon. They both stare at the gun, as if it were alive, as if it had hissed. “I guess it’s ready to fire now,” George says. The quarter-second
whirr
repeats, but not the
click
.

Between Christmas and
New Year’s, the news wants either to be freakishly happy or freakishly grim; either glorious acts of good Samaritanism involving people of different races and children surviving an avalanche by creating bubblegum-bubble air pockets, or else a doped-up bus driver mowing down a dozen carolers and the accidental execution of a rural family by federal agents with the wrong address; either Frank Capra or Oliver Stone.

The news this jubilee season has inclined toward the former. Even the biggest bad news story is not really very terrible. On December 26, Mose Media Holdings announced it was selling all its TV stations to Barry Diller, laying off fourteen hundred employees, and declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. “Although the MBC as a broadcasting network will sign off permanently at midnight December 31,” the Mose press release said, “it will be reborn immediately as Reality Channel, an extraordinary new tripartite concept in cable programming.… During the day, Reality Channel’s ‘Sunlight Daypart’ will feature New Age and holistic lifestyle and entertainment programs; followed by a four-hour prime-time block (the ‘Wake! Daypart’), which will feature in-depth coverage of the passings of the celebrated, based on the hit MBC series
Finale;
followed in late night by the ‘Camelot Daypart,’ featuring
documentary nostalgia from the Sixties and Seventies about bygone and beloved American newsmakers, such as the Kennedys.” The cable channel reincarnation strategy looks dicey to most analysts quoted in the newspapers, although they variously agree that because Harold Mose is a bold, shrewd visionary whose buccaneering contrarianism has succeeded in the past, his reinvention of Mose Broadcasting cannot be dismissed out of hand. One example of his visionary shrewdness,
The Wall Street Journal
story said, was “his creation of asset-backed securities based on television programs such as the MBC series
NARCS
, which was still a top-rated show last spring—allowing Mose, in effect, to count his chickens before they hatched and sell them before they died.” Still, the price of Mose Media Holdings’ stock dropped more than 80 percent in one day, from $22
¹
⁄
₁₆
to $4⅜. (At Key West, Lizzie’s startlingly accurate, yearlong stock-price graph line lost its bead and kept heading south-southeast; it is now in the Lesser Antilles.)

And the good news has been spectacularly fine, a holiday media dream, as if orchestrated, exactly the sorts of stories Americans adore hearing and seeing at this season, exactly what producers and editors love giving them. On the twenty-second of December, the first day of Hanukkah, a dozen struggling charitable enterprises around the country received anonymous million-dollar donations, each check drawn on the same account, a mysterious nonprofit New York City corporation called Hey! Free Money! The next day another dozen Hey! Free Money! checks arrived at other charities, and the day after Christmas a dozen more—by yesterday, a million dollars apiece to a hundred methadone clinics, soup kitchens, and literacy groups, to law firms that defend indigent death row inmates and micro–credit agencies that write small loans to impoverished entrepreneurs.

The network news shows gave extensive coverage to one of the first day’s recipients, a battered-women’s shelter (and “animal rights outreach agency”) operated by a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, that lost its funding and was going to close on the thirty-first. “This money will endow our work in perpetuity,” the church’s large, red-faced minister told her TV interviewers. “We have no idea who the donor is—and as Unitarians we each have our own comfort level with the idea of divine intercession—but right now, I believe in miracles. As our sisters and brothers in Mexico would say,
‘¡Viva milagros!’
”

LA PAZ?
is the
Daily News’s
front-page headline this morning about the war in Mexico. (At first, George thought the delivery kid had left them a copy of
El Diario
by mistake.) Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista rebellion, had made a startling announcement during an interview yesterday with MTV News. Ever since his rebellion began in 1994, Subcomandante Marcos, a former graphic design professor, has been a self-consciously postmodern revolutionary. Sometimes his official communiqués are written in the ancient Aztec language Nahuatl, sometimes they quote Hamlet, and they often include the salutation,
“¡Andale, ándale! ¡Arriba, arriba!”
For a time, he even called himself Speedy Gonzalez, after the cartoon character. When the war heated up last spring and he received a stern letter at his secret mountain headquarters from the Warner Bros. legal department, reminding him that Speedy Gonzalez is a trademarked Looney Tunes character owned by Time Warner, he called in a CNN crew and a
Time
magazine reporter. He said into the CNN camera, “Trademark? Trademark? We don’t need no steenkin’ trademark!” then laughed and announced that “as a gesture of reasonableness” he was changing his nickname to Roadrunner. Yesterday, on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the beginning of his uprising, he held another press conference, outside the town of Polho, Mexico. He thanked the youth of North America for their financial and moral support of the rights of Mexico’s oppressed people (“in particular, one noble teenage girl who has been so very generous to our struggle”). And he announced that the Zapatista Front of National Liberation was declaring a unilateral sixty-day cease-fire. Furthermore, Subcomandante Marcos said, his group is now ready to begin good-faith negotiations with the Mexican government (which C-SPAN has agreed to broadcast live, twenty-four hours a day), leading toward what he called “the territorial autonomy we require, our 2001 space odyssey.” He said the new spirit of reconciliation was prompted by a hundred-million-dollar donation his group received last week from an anonymous “enlightened Wall Street capitalist” in New York City.

Lying on his stomach in front of the fireplace, George sees in the Sunday
Times
that both Subcomandante Marcos and the Global Computer Generation Y—symbolized by Willibald, Humfried, and Fanny—were runners-up for
Time’s
Man of the Year. He is pleased (and, at the same
time, the tiniest bit disappointed) to see that neither in the paper’s extensive year-in-review coverage of the Microsoft hoax nor of the Manson parole debacle is George Mactier mentioned at all, just as Lizzie wasn’t mentioned in the Business section story about Intel’s acquisition of Terraplane, which she had helped broker. Hank Saddler’s plea in federal court last week is, of course, the kicker to the
Times
‘s Microsofthacker story—the paper says that Henry Saddler may be the first white-collar criminal defendant in history to plead not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

Lizzie, closer to the fire and sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, is staring, her thoughts roaming in a post-lunch, long-holiday-weekend, absolute-last-day-of-the-millennium drift. LuLu has carefully propped up around the living room every Christmas card they received, as she did last year, but to have enough space this year, she required the Corbu coffee table and both Shaker end tables as well as the mantelpiece. So many are family portraits, Lizzie notices—but black-and-white, as maximum tastefulness now requires. They received several what-the-family-has-been-doing-all-year holiday form letters, like the corny ones Edith Hope used to send out every year, except that all of their friends’ versions wink at themselves, in one way or another apologizing for indulging in the custom—neo-corn.

She remarks on the unusual number of cards. George nods and keeps reading.

“What I mean is, doesn’t it make you feel good?” she says. “That with all the crap about us in the papers, people are using the opportunitty to reach out and say, ‘We’re thinking of you’?”

George looks up and smiles skeptically at his wife. He says, “ ‘We’re thinking of you, because now you’re infamous, and we want to feel like friends of celebrities, even though you’re celebrated for being suspected criminal coconspirators, because the crime is so sexy.’ That doesn’t make me feel
bad
. But I wouldn’t attribute all the cards entirely to an outpouring of spirituality and good will, no.”

“I hadn’t thought of that at all,” she says, looking at the fire, not quite smiling. “What an unsentimental prick you are.”

“That’s why you love me,” he says, throwing the A section aside and belly-crawling the four feet across the rug to put his head in her lap, “that’s part of my pluckiness.”

She puts a hand on his temple and stares into the fireplace. The fire is hot on his face. “So, Señor Plucky,” she says, “how long would the film take you to do, do you really think?”

“A month? Two? I don’t know. Maybe longer. Depends what it turns out to be.” George is leaving Tuesday for a week in Mexico, laying the groundwork for a documentary he plans to make about Zapatista teenagers as an MTV-PBS coproduction, to be partially underwritten by Benetton. He’s taking Sarah with him, since she’s on winter break.

“I need to get a real job, you know. We don’t exactly have fuck-you money.”

Her 498,000 shares of Mose Media Holdings stock vested on the twenty-ninth, the day before yesterday, and she promptly sold them all, as she has always planned to do. She planned, however, to cash out for $24 million (the value of her shares in June, when the deal was done), or for $11 million (the value on Christmas Day, before the Chapter 11 announcement), not for only $2.181 million.