Juice by Stephen Becker Read Free Book Online Page A

corrupt. Harrison was tough, and could be counted on.
    The word “indispensable” crossed Rhein’s mind again; he dismissed it. He finished the heart of artichoke and wiped his lips. He drained his glass and refilled it. He pushed away the mountain of dead leaves and attacked the salad, eating directly from the bowl. For a moment his face was reflected in the varnished black tabletop: thin, jowled, lined. His eyes, he knew, were still bright, his mind alert, his senses functioning perfectly. His hair was thin and white. He had never used glasses. He was five feet eight and had a potbelly, but that did not matter. The belly was Robert’s fault, and if it was the price of Robert’s food, he would pay cheerfully.
    Well, damn Harrison anyway, he thought. We can do without him. He’s not on contract, and if he were we could buy it up. This is still my organization. Obsolete?
    He laughed aloud.
    Obsolete? I can hire and fire. When you can still do that, you’re not obsolete. Replace Harrison? Any time. RCA, CBS, they’d all come over to me for the right price. And if Harrison’s right, if I’d need more than one, I could buy up two or three. The whole damn thing’s been slipping away from me. I’ve let them all forget that it’s mine. Fifty years. Half a century. That’s a lot of work. It takes a man. Not a college boy. A man.
    When the telephone rang Arthur Rhein was sitting alone in the kitchen of his two-story, ten-room penthouse apartment. He was in his shirt sleeves, and by the bright light of a large frosted bulb over the sink he was swabbing the last trickle of dressing from a wooden salad bowl. Beside the bowl, shadowed, stood a glass of bubbling imported ale.
    â€œThen,” John James Davis opined, his left index extended in minatory rigidity, “then the cowards took over.”
    Sebastian (who had apparently no surname and who owned Là-Bas, in the cocktail lounge of which John James Davis was holding forth) waited in fascination. He glanced quickly at Davis’ inamorata, who was, he realized gratefully, one of the two or three women of his acquaintance who could correctly be considered more plush than the room she now graced, a room which alone had cost Sebastian seventy-five thousand dollars. The woman, a Mrs. Newbery, was smiling slightly; in her eyes was adoration spiced freely with affectionate ridicule.
    Davis slumped back, swirled his whisky, and sipped. “No,” he said. “Horrible. Gutenberg opened the floodgates. Removed the last barrier. Destroyed privacy forever. Exposed us to the charlatan, the pedant, the minor poet that lie in every man. And removed him from our reach. Impeded—terminated, really—the natural process of vengeance, upon which, quite reasonably, aesthetics had previously been based.”
    â€œYou’re handsome, but hopelessly addled,” Mrs. Newbery said. She sat—delectable, a figurine—on the brown leather banquette. Davis, large and angular, in a club chair, faced her across the table. Sebastian was at his left, her right, in another club chair.
    â€œAnd you,” Davis told her, “are devious. You know very well that it makes no difference to me what you think of my brain. A compliment to my looks enslaves me. You, on the other hand, being entirely and impossibly beautiful, are thoroughly flattered, to the point of bemusement, when I give you credit for normal intelligence. We are both, in other words, cliché personalities, taking our virtues for granted and responding only to sweet denials of our deficiencies. Which means simply that like everyone else we can exist only in an atmosphere of genteel deceit. When I tell Sebastian that he is possibly the best restaurateur on the West Coast, he shrugs; he is piqued at my geographical restriction. When I tell him he dresses beautifully, he smiles broadly, his eyes sparkle, and by some alchemy his tweed becomes visibly more