“The moment I came home. It’s truly lovely. And
“Well, like you say, it’s very romantic…”
“Oh yes.”
“And uh truly lovely,” he said.
“Indeed. So what shall we do first? Would you like to play what you’ve been practicing, or would you like to bust your chops on the new one, as they say?”
“Why don’t we just bust my chops?” Ollie said, grinning.
“Very well,” Helen said, and turned to the piano.
“Spanish Eyes” had a picture of Al Martino on its glossy front cover. With a flourish, Helen threw the cover back to reveal the actual sheet music.
Ollie was looking at a whole hell of a lot of notes.
“Gee,” he said, “I dunno.”
“Oh come now,” Helen said. “Is this the man who mastered ‘Night and Day’?”
“Yeah, but…”
“Put your hands on the keyboard, Mr. Weeks,” she suggested. “Please note that this is written in the key of…”
THEY LEFT THE masks on because being Arafat and Hussein and Bush made them feel like big shots. Sitting at the kitchen table, the television set going in the other room, they kept reaching for banded bundles of money in the dispatch case, counting each bundle and writing down their separate tallies. Each bundle had twenty hundred-dollar bills in it. That came to $2,000 a bundle. Altogether, there were a hundred and twenty-five packets in that dispatch case. That didn’t seem like very much, but that’s what $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills looked like.
While they counted, they started talking about what they were going to do with all that money, even though it didn’t seem like all that much now that it was actually here in front of them.
Yasir Arafat said he was going to use his $83,333 dollars to hire 833 suicide bombers at a hundred bucks a pop to go blow up restaurants and school busses and dance halls and the like all over Israel. Avery thought he was merely speaking in character, but Kellie figured he was probably anti-Semitic.
Saddam Hussein picked up the cue and said he was going to use his share of the money to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles to shoot at “your father,” he told Kellie, “get the job done right this time.”
George W. Bush said she would spend her share of the money on a pair of strappy Prada pumps.
“That’s not in character,” Avery told her.
“They’ll be in character if I wear them with an Armani dress,” she said.
“You’re supposed to be Bush,” he said.
“Whoever,” she said, and shrugged airily. All this money was making her a bit light-headed. Though, to tell the truth, it didn’t look like so very much, fitting in the dispatch case that way.
They kept counting it.
In the other room, the six o’clock news was coming on.
The lead story was about Tamar Valparaiso’s kidnapping. This immediately caught their complete attention. They got up from the kitchen table at once and en masse. Leaving all that money behind—though now that they were used to it, it didn’t seem like all that much, really—they went into the living room and plopped down on the sofa as if they’d just got home from school, three kids who bore unfortunate resemblances to Bush, Arafat, and Hussein. The real Bush, Arafat, and Hussein were probably watching CNN themselves at that very same moment, though probably not wearing masks. And they probably were not as interested in Tamar Valparaiso.
The anchorman was saying there were no clues as yet to the whereabouts of the kidnapped rock star.
When they heard the word “star,” all three world leaders turned to look at each other, each of them realizing that Tamar hadn’t been a star before they’d kidnapped her.
The anchor was saying that neither the police nor the FBI would ascertain whether or not a ransom demand had yet been made.
“Good,” Arafat said.
This was Avery Hanes, in case Kellie or Cal had forgotten.
The anchorman said, “Meanwhile, Billboard 200 reports that
“
“Shhhh,” Bush warned.
“…the number-one position, having sold 750,000 copies since its debut this past Friday. This places it higher on the charts than Avril Lavigne’s new album at number four, the Dixie Chicks at number six, and Xzibit in the number-eight slot.”
The anchorman took a breath.
“In Israel this morning, another suicide bomber…”
Avery got up to turn off the television set. He pulled off his mask in the next instant. Kellie and Cal, taking this as their cue, removed their masks as well. They all looked very serious all at once.
“She’s a fuckin star,” Cal said.
“I told her ten million,” Kellie said.
“What?” Cal asked, looking at her as if he wished she would speak English every now and then.
“I told her it would sell ten million copies,” Kellie explained. “Her album.”
“Well, it only sold 750,000,” Cal said, still looking angry.
“Only enough for number one,” Avery said.
“She told me we should’ve asked for a million bucks,” Kellie said.
The men looked at her.
“But that was when I said she’d sell ten million.”
The men were still looking at her.
