Pauleng Go ducked as the whisky bottle hurtled toward his head and smashed on the opposite wall. He cried out in anguish.
"Lara! Sweetheart! Darling! That was a twenty-five-year-old malt!"
She knew it, too, the bitch. He'd seen her hand pause over an indifferent bottle of Tokyo Gold, before clamping firmly around the neck of the Lagavulin.
"You can afford it!" Lara shouted, at window-rattling volume. "Take it from the money you've cheated me out of, why don't you?"
"Lara, look. I sorted all this out with Beni, you know I did and I know he told you about the new studio rates. Things are hard, even in Bollywood: you know about the tax thing, Beni explained. Don't you remember?"
Of course she didn't. He'd be amazed if she could remember what she'd had for dinner last night.
"Lara . . . put the Chateau d'Yquem down, there's a love."
Sixty dollars a bottle and no doubt that would soon be joining the whisky-sodden wallpaper. It wasn't the money. It was almost a crime against God. To Go's surprise, however, Lara did as he asked her. She set the bottle carefully down on the table, turned on her kitten heel, and left, with a glowering ebony glance over her silken shoulder. Go could hear the deathwatch tapping of those heels all the way down the marble hall. With a sigh of mingled exasperation and relief, he picked up his cellphone and put a call through to Beni.
"The thing is . . ." Beni was saying, twenty minutes later, for the third time. "The thing is, we can't get rid of her. Audiences love her and you know why, it's all due to her—"
"Yes, sure, I know," Go replied. There were some things he didn't want discussed over the phone, even though it was supposed to be a secure connection. "I know, I know all that stuff. But she's seriously nuts, Beni."
A pause. "Yeah. I know all that stuff, too. She's kind of bound to be, man."
"You're saying it's our fault?"
"We got her the gig. And the one before that. And the—"
"—one before that," Go finished for him. "You're right. I suppose now we've just got to deal with the consequences."
That evening, he sat down in front of The Wild and the Blessed. The first gig . . . It had been the first time he and Beni and Lara had worked together, before he'd really understood about Lara. He knew what the deal was, of course: he'd been there from the start. But he hadn't really got his head round all the ramifications. And Wild had been, well, wild. How could you not fall in love with Lara Chowdijharee? Stunning girls were as common as beetles in Bollywood, but Lara was . . . well, Lara was something else.
Being nearly brained by a full bottle of your best malt tended to put the dampeners on starry-eyed romance, however. It wasn't the first time it had happened. The rot had started to set in toward the end of the second movie, The Wild and the Damned. Lara had been playing the same character—sweet, selfless Ranee Pur—but somewhere along the line she'd started asking for script changes, and getting them. Character changes, too. Big ones. Go—who had after all been responsible for the initial script—had never really envisaged Ranee as the AK-47-toting kind of girl, somehow. Audiences seemed to have taken it in their stride, however, and Go couldn't deny that it had seemed to speak to the modern Indian woman. There were Ranee car fresheners and fridge magnets, Ranee underwear and mouse mats. Lara was under round-the-clock protection, though whether they were protecting Lara from the crazier fringes of her devoted fans, or the crazier fringes from Lara, Go did not really care to consider too closely. Given how she'd begun to treat her producer and her agent, God alone knew how she'd deal with some poor benighted stalker.
Go had been in the industry too long, however, not to recognize the feeling of being held facedown over a barrel, with legs firmly spread. When the last credits of The Wild and the Blessed had rolled over a close-up of Lara's exquisite face, he dialed her private number.
"Darling girl? Beni and I have been having a little talk . . ."