a grunt and a deflating belly… and the Master of Disaster keeled over backward, him and his great gut and fat bottom. He would have hit the floor with the base of his skull had it not hit the bald-headed director’s thigh on the way down. He lay on the floor with his chest and his belly heaving with shallow breaths. His eyes were open, but they focused on nothing at all and obviously saw nothing at all. Magdalena, being a nurse, knew about such things. Sergei had obviously meant only to push the big man away. But his shoulder had struck Flebetnikov squarely in the nerve bundle of the solar plexus and knocked him out.
Producer Munch wasn’t the slightest bit concerned about the fallen star of his reality show. His attention was devoted entirely to his two cameramen up on their rolling camera stands. He kept hurling his fist with the forefinger rampant toward Flebetnikov and Sergei and shouting, “Get it all! Eat ’em up! Get it all! Eat ’em up!” The only ones trying to help the fat man were Magdalena and Sergei. Sergei leaned over the prostrate hulk, looking for signs of life. “Boris Feodorovich! Boris Feodorovich! Can you hear me?”
Producer Munch and Director Koch were in the throes of a dream coming true.
“Fabulous!” said Munch, who was doing an odd hula inside his guayabera.
“Awesome!” said Koch, who was a generation younger than Munch and didn’t say “fabulous.”
Now Sergei was kneeling beside Flebetnikov, speaking in Russian. Concern that he might have delivered a mortal blow to the fat man was written in anguish on his face. The fat man’s eyes looked like two lumps of milk glass… no irises… no pupils…
“Boris Feodorovich! I swear I wasn’t trying to hurt you! I was only trying to separate us from one another, so we could talk about all this like friends! And I still want to be your friend. Speak to me, Boris Feodorovich! We are proud Russians and we have let these slimy Americans make fools of us both!”
That word—fools—cut through the fat man’s fog. All by itself it created a stimulus response bond. At last, a sign of life! Trying mightily but incapable of anything beyond a gravelly whisper, Flebetnikov kept saying something over and over.
Oddly, he didn’t appear angry at all… merely sad…
Magdalena and Sergei both knelt by Flebetnikov’s belly-up bulk. Sergei’s head was very close to the fat man’s. Then a third pair of knees appeared in their little huddle, knees in a pair of clean, smartly ironed khaki pants… flawless creases… Magdalena and Sergei looked up. It was a thin, pale young Anglo with neatly trimmed, carefully combed blond hair. He had a spiral notebook in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other… not an ordinary ballpoint pen—no, a ballpoint pen with a digital recording microphone built into the upper part, the wider part. He wore a navy blazer and a white shirt. He looked like an Anglo college boy, the kind you saw pictures of in magazines.
He stared at Sergei and said, “Mr. Korolyov? Hi!” He sounded friendly and shy. He blushed when Sergei stared back at him. “I’m John Smith from the Miami Herald,” he said lightly. “I’m covering Mr. Flebetnikov’s party—or reality show or whatever it is—and suddenly there was all this commotion over here.” He looked down at Flebetnikov, then back to Sergei and said, “What happened to Mr. Flebetnikov?”
::::::The Miami Herald. John Smith… Why does that ring a bell?::::::
Sergei eyed the boy blankly, but not for long. Now he gave him a look that said, in no uncertain terms, “Disintegrate!” What the boy’s arrival on the scene meant—it took Sergei a moment or two to size it up—Oh, great… this whole stupid business could wind up in the newspaper!
“Happen?” said Sergei. “Nothing happen. My friend Mr. Flebetnikov fell down. It was an accident. We call the doctor, for the safety. But Mr. Flebetnikov was stunned only a few seconds.”
“But this gentleman over here”—John Smith looked back over his shoulder vaguely—“told me that Mr. Flebetnikov tried to hit you.”
“He trip and fall,” said Sergei. “It’s nothing, my friend.” Eets nozzing, my fran.
“Golly…” said John Smith, “I need some clarification. This gentleman back here”—another vague nod over the shoulder—“he saw the whole thing and he said Mr. Flebetnikov swung at you. But you ducked the punch—‘just like a professional boxer,’ he said. You ducked the punch and countered with a blow to the body that knocked Mr. Flebetnikov out!