UNLIMITED
                                     By Kit Reed

NOT EVERYBODY KNOWS IT yet, but sooner or later everybody needs our
services. That is, everybody who matters. Sooner or later they come to us.

      We are the best at what we do. R [6 Star] Unlimited, a subsidiary of Velvet
Martinet Enterprises. My company. But you know this, or you would not be here.

       We take only A list clients and we get top dollar. You can read this in the hang
of our cool suits — laid-back ensembles in pewter and silver, the walking year’s
wages that we go out in when we do business. Think relaxed cut, think designer
items several notches up the food chain from Armani. Top of the line RayBans. The
boots alone! Every hair shining. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as you
look drop-dead gorgeous doing it.

      Take the lobby here in R [6 Star] Unlimited. Elegant. Gleaming. Testimony to
our success. Success pays the rent and I can tell you, we have a one hundred
percent success rate.

       See the malachite reception desk and the glistening parquet of our outer lobby,
the silk Persian rugs with a corner flipped back so you can count the
thousand-knots-per-inch until one of our assistants bothers to come and take your
history. Get a load of our carpeted walls and the tinted one-way glass that juts over
Wilshire Boulevard and Little Santa Monica. The glass for obvious reasons, the
carpeting to muffle the screaming, something we never discuss at these preliminary
meetings. We are at the apex here! Note the Brancusi fountain and the malachite
steps you mount to remind our receptionist that you are still waiting.

       Once you have cleared the outer lobby, observe the lush kidskin sofa in the
Gauguin room where you sit and stew, waiting for me to clear ten minutes for this
interview.

       Success? You bet. Our assistants alone! Quick and clever in their chic black
dresses, the best they can manage on what we pay them. Phi Betes from the Ivies,
these girls killed and died to get here and they’re every one of them a size six, okay?
And if the pay scale seems mean to you and fourteen-hour days excessive,
remember that every one of them aims through craft and diligence to become one of
us.

      The upper echelon. Note that we are all women here. It’s a policy decision.
Tact and efficiency. Finesse.

      Further signs: my office! Instead of a desk, we face each other over my
bronze coffee table. Chinese, dug out of some tomb in the year one thousand, don’t
ask. Then there’s the art: Naum Gabo, a treasure in plexi and monofilament. A tiny
Rothko. A Bacon, and if the torn jaws gape as if the victim is being flayed alive and
screaming as we sit here— well, we’ll get to that. A Pollock. A Degas.
Double-rubbed black lacquer on the walls and silver floors; see our logo inlaid in
gold, which is why you are wearing complimentary terrycloth booties over your
Guccis.

       Yes I know you are a major player. If you were anything less, you couldn’t
afford me.

      Now regard me. Velvet Martinet, the captain of our industry.

       It’s okay to look. You have, after all, been cleared by Security. After
Accounting. We’ve accepted your nonrefundable deposit, Krugerrands as per the
preliminary agreement. Naturally we had the items in question authenticated and the
dollar amount pegged to the market value at the close of that day’s trading. And
your net worth and growth potential evaluated before our receptionist could even
think about making an appointment for you. The balance? We know you’re good for
it.

      Otherwise you would not be sitting here.

       Meet my eyes! This is when I look deep into you and see whether I trust you.
I am the last barrier. All that stands between you and the service you so badly want
from us.

      If I clamp your hands to the table hard enough to scare you, tough. When I
take hold, there’s no man strong enough to free himself. Don’t look away! Not if
you want this. I said, meet my eyes!

      Do not be frightened by what you see. It’s what you’re paying for. Hold still!
Quit hyperventilating. It’ll be over in a minute.

      This is essential. The moment in which I make sure. Sure you won’t panic,
sure you are good for it. Sure you won’t back down or attack me, sure you’re not
from some agency bent on breaking me.

      More. Rapport. We must establish rapport before we can even begin to talk
about your problem.

      Now.

      You can speak. Be assured that if we proceed your down payment and
today’s billable hours will be credited to your balance, which as you know comes
due immediately upon signing.

      Time to lay your problem on the table. Don’t worry. The room’s been swept
and secured. Our people have been over it twice since I met with the last client. It’s
safe for you to say it out loud. It’s even okay for you to call me Velvet.

      Oh yes, and for client protection, our cameras are recording this transaction.

      Um, Ah. The client sits with his head between his knees. This is so hard! The
humiliation. The desire, fib. Ah! Before we start, could I ask you a couple of
questions?

       Meanwhile, elsewhere: In deepest Brentwood just north of Sunset,
producer/developer Whitney Ryder is waked by a phone bleating. He swims in his
empty bed, groping for the damn thing. Got to stop that noise! It is late afternoon.
Daphne’s been gone since Sunday — no biggie — and he’s snorted and popped a
few things in the interim, not because he’s bummed, exactly, just to ride the wave
until he hears from Bobby that the big deal is completed.

       It is not exactly nice to be awake right now. The larger circumstances of
Ryder’s life have begun sliding into place like massive stones on rollers moving in to
seal some pharaoh’s tomb.

       Pawing through yellow satin sheets, he hits a lump. “Gotcha!” He snaps like a
seal catching a fish and pops talk with his thumb, shouting, “Ryder!”

      “It’s me,” Bobby says. “You don’t have to yell.”

      It’s Bobby. “I was asleep!”

      “While Rome is fucking burning,” Bobby says. Bobby finished U.C.L.A.
before he moved up from the mail room to become Ryder’s assistant. He’s right in
there with the classical allusions. It’s one of the reasons Ryder keeps him around.
“We’ve lost the deal.” “Fill me in.”

        “Drove my Chew to the levee but the levee was dry.” Never one to say a thing
just once, Bobby says, “I called our money but our money isn’t returning our
calls.”

      “They — what?”

      “I’m telling you, somebody got to them.”

      “Our money?” Betrayed, Ryder howls, “Somebody got to our money?”

    “Somebody got to our money.” Bobby rides on. “They backed off and
Maxamar waltzed in and scooped up the property.”

      “Maxamar! Bastard, bastard!” Ryder growls. “Getchell!”
      “You don’t know it was Getchell,” Bobby says.

     “My best friend! It’s gotta be.” Yes there is a rat loose in the infrastructure.
Gnawing at his vitals. Ryder snaps, “Who the hell else could it be?”

      “He wished you success,” Bobby says like a good assistant.

       “Yeah, right,” Ryder says bitterly. “Right before he walked.” He’s pissed at
Getchell; best buds since fourth grade in Ocala, coming up together under the
Florida sun, two little kids with big ambitions. Move west, make it big in L.A.
Together. Three days before the key meeting, his sandbox pally Duane Getchell
takes his marbles and walks. “Eight bucks gets you 160 K it was Getchell.”

      “He sent flowers.”

      “Flowers,” Ryder snorts. “Horseshoe or funeral wreath?” Dead is just as
dead. He feels creditors gnawing away to that old grade-school refrain, “Oh heck,
oh heck, it’s up to my neck...”

      Bobby strikes a note halfway between hard and gentle. “Look at it this way,
he’s not the only one out there...” who hates you.

        “Whoever it is...” Ryder is wired by this time, wide-jawed and furious,
wacked out on adrenaline and crosshatching the bedroom like a retriever bagging
flies. “The bastard is going to pay.”

      “Who?”

      Ryder says through clenched teeth, “Whoever’s behind Maxamar.”

      “Don’t be so sure.”

      “And pay big time — what did you say?”

      Bobby mumbles something Ryder can’t quite grasp.

      “What did you say?”

      “...sure it’s a bastard,” Bobby mutters, frff, “um...Daphne.”

      “Daphne would never do a thing like that to me. I think she still loves me.”
Ryder shakes the flip-phone angrily. “I told you, quit mum bling.”

      Bobby mumbles, marginally louder. “Egil Hoover.”
        “My broker?”

        “Well,” Bobby mumbles, “Daphne is still married to him.”

        “Oh, Egil. Egil’s a bastard, but he isn’t vindictive.”

        “That’s what you think,” Bobby says.

        “Then think harder!”

     Bobby is trying to find a way to break bad news. Out of his fuzzy silence
comes the worst. “Could be our money screwing us.”

      “Just because our money isn’t returning our calls, that doesn’t mean we’re
being screwed by our money.”

        Bobby mumbles a little louder.

        Some days Ryder hates Bobby. He growls, “I said, what? What did you
say?”

       Oh, desperate man, Bobby just keeps mumbling, but loud enough so Ryder
either will or won’t be able to catch what he is pitching.

        “Fuck that shit,” Ryder shouts, even though he’s not exactly sure what
Bobby’s telling him. By this time Ryder has shouldered the phone in and out of the
shower without getting it wet; he’s combed his hair and he’s shaving with his sweet
little electric. In another minute he’ll have to unglue his ear from Bobby long enough
to wriggle into the Gap T-shirt and the Armani. Once he is armored, he has to go
forth and slay multitudes. Reaching for his Calvin briefs, he starts with the day’s
instructions. Pickups. Folders to be pulled for the next meeting. Calls to be arranged
so there may even be a next meeting.

     Bobby says into the brief silence that falls as his boss ducks into the T-shirt,
“Anything else?”

      Ryder ticks off ten items for Bobby’s phone list — the small private investors
they have to squeeze just to keep going until their money kicks in — and right before
he pops Bobby out of existence and clicks the phone shut he says, “Find out who’s
screwing us. Get on it!”

       Which leaves Whitney Ryder alone and silent on a peak in Brentwood. In full
armor, he stands in the darkened room with the round bed slippery with satin sheets
and redolent of Daphne. And broods. The big project up in flames, Daphne gone.
Ryder has thirty clays to pay up on the house or get out and ten days to cover
certain key investments. Stones rolling in to seal the pharaoh’s tomb.
      It is so fucking inevitable.

      Doom creeping up, followed by ruin. And all he can fix on is finding out who
gave the first stone a kick and started it moving.

       Surprised by grief, Ryder belches words: what Bobby was trying to tell him
that he didn’t want to catch but knows he’s going to have to deal with. Our money,
he thinks.

      We don’t even know who our money is.

      Questions. Questions! What gives you the right to ask questions?

       I just thought maybe the deposit. Urn. Ah. Entitled me to a further explanation.
Miserable, the client shifts in the deep sofa. This is so hard! Putting it in words. The
rage. The humiliation. I mean, before I tell you my problem.

      The need.

        Woman like me, you think I don’t know where you’re coming from? Honey,
this is Velvet. You’re sitting here, and you think I don’t already know your
problem?

       Your problem. Your problem. I know more than you do about your little
problem. Where it comes from and who did it to you. What you’re feeling. Who to
get for this. How. I probably even know exactly what you want done to him. The
perp that ruined your life. The exquisite torture you want prepared for him.

      And count on it, we here at R [6 Star] Unlimited know precisely how to make
our solution beautiful and specific. A work of art that you will treasure forever,
preserved in memory. Tapes if you want, transcripts. Stills. Laminated front page of
the L.A. Times with an account of it. The whole magilla. Which is, of course, what
you are really paying for.

      As described in the preliminary, this job’s complex, but doable. You can
count on our discretion.

       But you have reservations, and since you’re on our A list, I’ll indulge you. Let
you in on the A. B. and C. of a few of our major successes. Rest assured, when we
do your job, nobody but the target knows who hit him. And, of course, our client,
which is why you are paying top dollar. When our targets fall, believe me the world
hears about it, but only our clients know how exquisitely it came about or that your
victim — yes, let’s just come out and say it g your victim — knows the why. And
who to thank for this beautiful feat of ruination.
       Take the studio chief, you know his name. His exec gets hell from the guy
because he’s quit the studio for something better. Exec quits, right; chief gives him
his blessing, right, but all around the poor exec, new partners bail and sure deals
start collapsing. Right, the chief is out to get him. So the exec calls us.

       You know what happened, it was in all the papers. Bingo-bango, studio’s top
bankable stars, things start happening to them. Car wreck, to say nothing of the fire.
Forget reconstructive surgery, there goes half the chief’s stable, and on the first day
of principal photography. His biggest star goes schizzy, our work—now that you
know, you’ve got to admit that one was especially creative. And untraceable. His
three stars that bail to undergo sex change operations and five years of deep therapy,
to say nothing of the mudslides that took out the hundred million’s worth of stuff
they’d built for Kostner’s Iliad plus Odyssey: Aeneid Days, your complete Troy
plus Crete plus various trinkets like the genuine life-sized sandstone face of Abu
Cymbal on the back lot annex: director says: accept no substitutes, spare no
expense,” you can imagine. You think it’s easy to take out Troy with a mudslide in
the dry season?

       So that was one.

       And that fat presidential wannabe — white hair, bestseller, holier than us until,
sprong, he goes bats on TV and in one speech alienates and loses the votes of the
entire moral majority. That was our work. Can’t give you any more details because
we are pledged to protect the identity of our clients, but you begin to get the scope
of our operation?

       Not to mention the recent demise of a head of state who shall remain nameless
for reasons which I can’t share with you even though your own peculiar situation
here guarantees your perpetual silence in this sensitive matter.

      And you will note that this isn’t a punishment-fits-the-crime situation, it is
bigger than that. And subtler.

       We take large steps.

       So. The thing. What you want from us?

       You will get from us. It’s guaranteed.

        That’s kind of what I’m afraid of. This isn’t a big thing, it’s a little thing. At
least I think it is.

BIG THING? Little thing? Rest assured, we tailor our services to fit the client. I
myself originated the program, I and my friend Serena. You think we started big? No
way. We started small. All the best things in this town start small, that’s the beauty
of L.A., you can come in on the rails and ride out in a white stretch with built-in
swimming pool.

        We weren’t always what you see before you. Plush Velvet Martinet
Enterprises. Not by a long stretch. Just two nice girls fresh from Fall River, move
west to make it in the biz; Serena’s an actress, and I...I thought I was writing the
script that would kill the world, mega-budget, mega-stars, pickup in ten figures. But
for the time being we were only clerks in Bullocks’ at the Beverly Center. Serena
made buyer, on her way to the top as a manager, and I was selling fucking bras while
I worked on my idea -the one I developed with this cute guy I actually thought was
really in love with me.

       Then things happened. Little things. Like a clerk in Serena’s department gets
jumped to department chief, and doesn’t she feel shitty. So we deal with the
problem. After the accident, Serena’s promoted to section manager. Then a friend
has a knockdown dragout with a customer and you know how things are, word gets
around, and she comes to us. Serena and I deal with the problem, but by that time
we are both bored of Bullock’s and we set up a small office on Third Street, right
next to the bridal shop? You know the comer. And one thing leads to another.
Woman standing by the parking meter outside Celine’s, fighting with a suit in
wraparound Raybans until the guy’s car pulls up, the suit gets in the back and
zooms off and his girl is left standing there crying. Serena sidles out and next thing
she knows, bingo-bango, she’s in our office. As it turns out she’s a Mafia princess.
We were brilliant.

       Because let me tell you, okay, the guy in the suit is a lying, two-timing bastard,
and if there’s one thing we here at R ...... Unlimited know, it’s how to deal with
slimy, scum-sucking, two-timing bottom feeders that lie and take your...

      But we were talking about you.

       Meanwhile, elsewhere: Whitney Ryder has flipped his plastic onto the waiter’s
tray at Spago. He and his foreign business contacts have just finished dinner — the
early seating. It’s so early that nobody who is anybody has even thought of arriving,
but for the first time in the decade he’s been eating here, Ryder has failed to get a
window seat. Their table is behind the stairs and entirely too close to the kitchen.
Instead of admiring twilight exhaust fumes above Sunset, his Danish guests are
gaping like gummy fish in a Jell-O aquarium.

       It is testimony to Ryder’s precarious position that the only contacts he has left
right now are from countries so far away that the news of his imminent demise has
not reached them. Annoyingly, the waiter returns and after a murmured exchange
leaves with Ryder’s other plastic. Across from Ryder, his Danish investors sit,
regarding him with unblinking eyes that seem to crack and dry as they wait and go on
waiting. Would they please, just please excuse themselves and go upstairs to the
bathroom? The waiter returns from the register, embarrassed. He grimaces at Ryder.
There is a long silence. A looong silence. Finally one of the Danes reaches across
the table, slipping something into Ryder’s hand. Five crisp hundreds. It is
humiliating!

       It is both logical and terrible that when he goes to the ATM for valet parking
money the LCD tells Ryder that in both savings and checking departments, he is
functionally a dead man.

WE’VE BEEN SITTING HERE for a long time. A very long time. Do you realize
that you’ve exceeded your deposit in billable hours and we haven’t broached the
matter of your problem?

     No, we haven’t. I’d like to tell you everything, but I’m just not quite
comfortable.

       Oh, don’t get all shy on me. We’re supposed to be doing business here, and
every minute we sit here not laying our cards on the table is costing you another
hundred. That’s six K an hour, which at the rate we’re going is going to be a lot of K
if you decide not to go through with the operation. In for a penny, in for the whole
deal, so you might as well cut to the chase and let it all hang out for me so we can
get started.

       You’re lucky I cleared my calendar tonight. Otherwise I’d be on my way out
the door right now for drinks with my colleagues at the Peninsula before dinner at a
place so exclusive that even you have never heard of it. Snuff show at the interval,
living party favors, yes it is hot —this week, at least. If I were you I’d get on with
this, because every minute we sit here not laying open the spine of this critter is
costing you, so I’ll tell you a couple of things and then you’d better get ready to tell
me a couple of things.

      I know how it feels to get stuck sitting on an embarrassing problem. Slide this
way, slide that, you’re still stuck on a ridge and the damn thing is cutting into you.
And don’t by any stretch think you’re the first person to walk in here with an
embarrassing problem.

      Or the only person sitting here who’s ever had one. I could tell you things...

        Okay, okay, I could tell you. Serena? Right, she isn’t on the masthead, you
noticed, so that’s one story. There we were in our little shop on Third, me and my
first partner; we could barely pay the rent but we were beginning to, you know, get a
leg up on the business? A world of people out there, and most of them are hurting.
Serena and I did pretty well nickel-and-diming, but no way was I going to spend the
rest of my life nickel-and-diming. Remember I was developing this script with my
boyfriend, he was going to get us a meeting and if we could only get a meeting we
could sell it on the basis of the pitch alone, or that’s what he told me.

      But I forgot to mention the best job that ever came out of R ...... Unlimited.
We’re all too young to remember The Godfather, but it’s on TV a lot and there is
this scene in The Godfather? Guy crosses the Don. Wakes up with blood in the bed,
reaches down by his feet and there is this severed head, his prize racehorse! And
they slipped it in there so quiet and smooth that he slept through the night without
even knowing that they put this thing in his bed or even feeling it.

       Compared to those guys, we here on Wilshire at Little Santa Monica work like
ice cream on velvet. If Saddam Hussein has that funny walk and keeps his elbows
tight to his sides today, if every time he sees a rose or hears somebody humming a
certain tune his breath stops, it’s because of a little job we did. No no, I can’t name
the client. I can’t even give you the details. I can only tell you if Velvet Martin
Enterprises tops the pops in the Fortune Five Hundred, we have earned it.

      Serena? I told you! Gone. Left the company. Right, Serena.

       I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that. What I can tell you, I can only say that by the
time I was done with her, Serena wasn’t going to be poaching on anybody else’s
boyfriend, not then, not ever, and she knew what had happened to her and where it
was coming from and there’s not one damn thing she can do about it, shit, the bitch
can’t even prove it. My boyfriend. And if I...

       Sit down! Am I scaring you? Man; that’s what you’re paying for! You better
believe you’re lucky to be sitting here. You’d better thank your damn stars that
you’re knee to knee with a professional with enough guts and fire to scare the crap
out of you. And that you can afford it.

      All right, all right, I know? But would you please lighten up a little?

       Meanwhile, elsewhere: It’s odd. Now that he’s alone in the house again, now
that he’s downloading the contents of his bulging Filofax on the Bedemeier table,
now that he’s moving scraps of paper from pile to pile, Whitney Ryder is, not
depressed exactly, but thoughtful. On the road to enlightenment. At the moment his
train of thought is stalled at a stop midway between suspicion and certainty.

       His hands crosshatch the buried wood surface. Whole fucking desk stops
being his as of the first. Without having to be told he’s finished, Ryder knows he is
finished in this town. Still he can’t stop moving piles of things to other piles. Sorting.
Discarding. This, from Getchell. Nothing, or nothing much.

      This from Egil Hoover, forget it.

      This, from his money, but he still doesn’t know who in hell his money is,
much less where were they when his operation went into overcall. All he’s got is this
phone number printed on a featureless card, that’s all, and forget about trying it,
they’ve stopped returning his calls.
      When all is said and done, he is left with three items. This, from Maxamar.
Note: find out tmw. who bought Maxamar. And, crumpled almost to extinction, a
note scrawled on the back of a grocery receipt. Bobby’s hand. And on the back of a
Visa receipt, Ryder company plastic, this other note. Daphne. Daphne’s illegible
smudge crosshatched with the handwriting he knows by heart, Daphne and...

      They’ve cleaned him out.

       Son of a bitch! Cleaned him out and scared off his money and now he knows
that the two of them are sitting there, wherever there is, sitting there laughing at him,
the fucking, fucking...

     “I gave you the keys to the store. I took you fucking shopping at fucking
Armani and now...” He stands up and howls. “Bobby!”

      Everything in him solidifies: Whitney Ryder goes cold and hard. He is
resolved. Son of a bitch.

      Fixed on what he will do to them.

       Ms. Martinet, you’ve been extremely patient. You’ve told me everything
except how you do what you do. But you haven’t given me a clue as to how you do
it. You...

       That’s the beauty of our operation. Until you state your problem, that remains
to be seen. Our madness always fits the method. Sorry, I don’t mean to make light
of this.

       But I was telling you about me. Remember, this is my business and I am the
master of my business. Serena, you know about, but the boyfriend, the man I was
writing the picture with t okay, you saw it. My baby, my picture! Big budget, major
studio, big time gross exceeding the net and my name nowhere on it, not in the
credits, not in the ads, me nowhere near the bank when the fucker that stole my
fucking script waltzed in and took the front money and the pickup plus points,
believe it! My boyfriend! And me on the outside, like fucking Lazarus. He and
Serena pulled my beautiful, make-me-famous property out from under me and sold it
like a Persian rug and I... What?

      Oh, I took care of Serena.

      Him? You don’t want to know. Suffice it to say that I’ve been biding my time.
Wait. My light’s blinking. Call I’m expecting.

      Oh, Stephanie. Yes. Put him through to my assistant. Get him here and when
you get him here... Make him wait.
       But I was telling you about me. I bide my time. I am the master of this game
and all related operations, and you will note that in spite of my own concerns you
have my complete attention.

    Nothing that happens here happens accidentally. The boyfriend. My scheme
— now you will see precisely how good I am at what I do.

       He’ll be here — wait a minute, the display on this Itchy and Scratchy watch is
hard to read — in about three minutes.

       Oh, Stephanie. He is? Fine. He can wait until I’m finished with this client.
Then he can wait a little longer. When you think he’s about to walk, you can buzz
him in.

       So he’s coming in here, he’ll be walking in that door some time after I finish
taking your particulars and we have the complimentary champagne to seal our
arrangement. He’ll come in that door well after I open this one and you leave by the
Privileged exit. Right, as a preferred customer, you get primo treatment.

       Oh, him?. Listen, if he’s here tonight it’s in spite of the fact that he’s got zero
deposit and no hope of a down payment. Ail he’s got is the hunger. But I assure
you, I will see him.

      Pissed, he’s going to be, desperate and begging for our services; hooked on
his own story and so choked up that he’ll sob it out before he even focuses on me.
Panting for revenge, you dig? Hung up on the unanswered question.

      Not the why, okay. The who. Who was his money, that drew him out on that
limb and then pulled it out from under him. And me?

      I’m going to look him in the eye and in the second that falls between eye
contact and resignation, he will see everything.

      He goes, You. And I go:

      If you have to ask, you can’t afford me.

      ~~~~~~~~
      By Kit Reed

        Kit Reed’s recent books include her collection Weird Women, Wired
Women, and her latest “Kit Craig” thriller Some Safe Place. A new collection entitled
Seven for the Apocalypse is in the works. She says this story arose from a brief
flirtation she had with Hollywood, when agents were returning her calls from moving
cars and people bought her drinks at the Peninsula Hotel on Little Santa Monica, in
the shadow of CAA. All that power, she thought—what if someone unleashed it on a
different sort of cause?