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Show Acting Alone Page 447 her knowing any of the specific details. It was an interesting image: Sam's agent as silver-haired Reverend Moon. Possibly Sister Polycarpana was right. She was the expert on organized religion. Sam only worshipped books. Sister Polycarpana also, in her Bride o' Christ sanguinity, assumed that Sam was in no immediate physical danger. She suggested that after this mysterious piece of writing began to languish in the comic book dust on Mini Mart shelves, its sales starting seriously to sag, the old man would probably allow Sam to break loose and spill just enough specific beans to Mike Wallace or some other slimy fucking prick like that (Sam's, not Sister Polycarpana's terminology) and public interest would be revived miraculously by national TV coverage. "Don't you think that's possible, maybe? And your agent will vanish with his commission as sales peak out at an unprecedented ten or so million." Good for her. She could slightly relax, for she had faith in the ultimate orderliness of the universe. But Sam twitched day and night in a deep-fat frybasker of misgivings. He had been tormented all along by the question of why anybody so old and rich and apparently high up in such a huge, if mysterious "real world" organization would deign to go moonlighting in the piddly penny-ante book industry. He had assumed that the old man, the "agent," had been lured by the potential movie deals. Yeah. Maybe the ancient bloodsucker wanted to get his liver-spotted hands into the big acetate panties of Gulf Oil, which reputedly owns in subsidiary form most of the few remaining non- Arab portions of Hollywood. Bring Hollywood into it, not to mention Gulf Oil, and the numbers began to seem as though they'd be more reasonably attractive to a giant capitalistic monster such as Sam sometimes imagined |
