"Lola, would you stop laughing for just a second?" Arnošt shouted at his protegee, who, despite his protests, had finished her marijuana joint on the metro and was now as sane as a man who had just been kicked in the head by a horse.
Lola, who was only able to stay on her feet because Arnošt was dragging her behind him like a sack of potatoes, laughed uncontrollably again and squealed, "You're really pretty when you're angry, you know that? How come you don't have a girlfriend yet? You're almost always this annoying..."
Arnošt took a deep breath and counted to ten.
Yes, a typical way to deal with a difficult situation, but still effective nonetheless. At that moment, those ten seconds were all that separated Arnošt from murder of passion... followed by suicide of passion.
"Lola," Arnošt said, his voice trembling. "If you don't stop acting like a spoiled little child right now, I'm going to kick your ass!"
"You wouldn't..." giggled Lola, leaning back against Arnošt, taking great care to touch him with as much of her full breasts as possible.
And that's when Arnošt ran out of patience. With Lola, with his work, and with the whole world.
He was tired of everyone messing with him. He was fed up with the fact that even a common, filthy porn actress could afford to treat him like this. He was fed up with those pompous old men who shamelessly capitalized on people's love of low-quality, shoddy filmography, thinking you could write a script in two weeks!
And now he wanted to take life into his own hands again! He wanted to show everyone that it was not a good idea to mess with him and win back some of the respect he had lost a long time ago, even if he had to achieve it in a somewhat controversial way.
And so, without giving it any more thought, Arnošt slapped Lola's soft, make-up covered face.
After that fateful slap, both Lola and Arnošt froze, as if they had no idea which of them had the greater right to be angry in this situation and who should show his indignation first.
And so, being completely drugged, insulted and confused, Lola could no longer contain herself and burst into tears like a little girl, whom she now resembled in clothes and hairstyle in addition to her behavior.
And that was the end of Arnošt's efforts to win Lola's respect. He had just been seized by this unexpected burst of self-respect, but it was all washed away by Lola's tears. Arnošt was still just a human, and a man moreover. So she had awakened in him that eternal gentleness which a single tear from a beautiful woman can always awaken in any man with a bit of feeling in his body.
Well, one could argue about Lola's beauty. She might have had a chance to become beautiful in her childhood, but now, ruined by her profession and drug addiction, she was at best mediocrely attractive, but hey, Arnošt was a mediocrely demanding man.
So, overcome by an unknown regret, Arnošt patted Lola gently on the shoulder and said softly, "I'm sorry... I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry. I just need this meeting with the investors not to end in disaster, and for that I need your help. It would help me immensely if you would come with me now, sit down silently and be still. Do you think you can do that? Would you do that for me?"
Lola turned her big blue eyes on Arnošt, smiled, then snapped, "No."
"You damn creature!" Arnošt hissed impatiently, shaking Lola roughly. "So differently. I don't give a damn what you think of it. You're just going to go inside, sit in your chair like a good girl, and shut up, or I'll throw you out the window right here on the tenth floor and leave you to splash on the sidewalk!"
"Fine!" Lola snapped in annoyance, pulling away from Arnošt. "God! You don't have to be so mean!"
It may not have been the respect Arnošt craved, but at least she agreed, and that was enough for him, so he grabbed her roughly by the wrist and dragged her into that dreaded room that even the toughest rock singers left crying.
As soon as the semi-transparent glass door closed behind them, they found themselves in conference room number four-a room that had become a kind of image of hell itself in the minds of the young artists. Fire and brimstone be damned! The real devil sat at the end of this long square table, surrounded by shriveled house palms, sipping water from a white plastic cup.
Yes, at the very end of this promenade of papers and dying houseplants sat the Chief Investor himself, a short bespectacled man as shriveled as the plants he sat among and as starched as the stacks of carefully arranged papers that lay before him.
And on either side of the table, with a grave expression and a cheap pen instead of a gun, sat his army of lawyers, watching his every move intently, listening to every word of the poor artist who had come to show them his work, and looking for any legal loophole in his output that would allow them to legally strip him of his copyright and pitch his work to some poor schmuck who could complete the project for half the price.
But Arnošt didn't have to worry about that. Firstly, because he himself was one of those losers who made films for minimum wage for investors, and secondly because he had not one word of the planned script. They can't steal what you don't have, can they?
But of course Arnošt couldn't tell the investors that directly, he had to talk his way out of it somehow, describe here the story of a film so repulsively shoddy that the Chief Investor would loathe to even glance at his non-existent script, or hope that some merciful higher power would put an end to their meeting.
But things were looking pretty bleak with miracles that day, so Arnošt had to fend for himself.
"Dear sirs!" Arnošt addressed those present and clapped his hands.
At this command, all the lawyers at the table began to confer in passionate whispers and leaf through thick books on copyright law.
This did not surprise Arnošt, who was not attending such a meeting for the first time. Such passionate leafing was once triggered, even when a fly drowned in a cup of water of one of the lawyers.
So Arnošt calmly motioned Lola to take one of the vacant seats at the table and continued, "Today I'm here to introduce my new project. It is a tragicomic story-"
"Get your hands off me or I'll sue you!" Squeaked the uptight young lawyer Lola sat down next to, who was obviously very uncomfortable as she slowly and subtly began to move from her chair to his lap.
"Lola! Behave!" sighed Arnošt, who had given up hope of making Lola a model presentable actress, and only wished that she would sit silently in her seat and not touch any lawyers.
"Fine!" Lola snapped, rolling her eyes and moving back to her seat, whereupon the harassed lawyer moved himself and his chair as far away from Lola as possible, even at the cost of getting closer to the colleague he hated with all his heart.
"Excellent..." muttered Arnošt, picking up his previous speech a little clumsily, "So, as I said-"
Nor this time Lola let him finish his thought either. She raised her hand like a schoolgirl in the first row and, without waiting for someone to call her out, squeaked, "Can I go to the bathroom?"
"No!" Arnošt said, more surprised than angry. "We're in the middle of a meeting."
"But I need to pee!" Lola said disgruntledly, measuring Arnošt with a hateful look.
"Too bad for you." Arnošt rebuffed her disinterestedly and continued his speech to the investors, here represented in the person of the Chief Investor and his lawyers.
"Now, let me draw you into the amazing story we're going to write together for the audience-"
This time, however, he was interrupted by the Chief Investor himself, "You haven't written it yet?"
"What?" Arnošt stammered. He wasn't a naturally deceitful person, lying was abhorrent to him, so the moment another less principled person would have said anything to save himself, he suddenly froze in that gray territory between truthfulness and self-preservation.
"Well, you said we write it together. And I ask you, how? After all, you've already written it, haven't you?" The Chief Investor asked, raising one eyebrow contemptuously.
Arnošt laughed, as if by pretending this was all one big misunderstanding he could somehow magically change the undeniable fact that he hadn't actually written any script.
"That was an unfortunate turn of phrase." Arnošt said with a nervous smile. "Sorry about that, it's been a tough day."
"I had a hard day too." The Chief Investor laughed contemptuously. "Do you know who was here before you? Some shady director, raising money for his pornographic play! I told the poor fellow that I would not support such an evil work of the Devil, and what did he do? He literally called me 'Mud under the hooves of a lame horse', threw a flower pot at me that was on the window behind you and ran out like a little child."
"Oh, I know him!" Lola added her unsolicited and completely unnecessary opinion to the discussion. "That's the one I was working for. And don't take it personally, do you know how many times I was 'Mud under the hooves of a lame horse' for him? I can't even count! Sometimes I've even been 'Dirt in a fat pig's snout'... but then again, to be fair to him, he only called me that when he was drunk. He wouldn't call anyone that when he was sober."
At this unexpected admission from Lola, every face in the room turned to her, wondering in horror what kind of monster they were sitting with. For most of the puritanical starched lawyers, Lola's narrative was downright adventurous.
The awkward silence was finally broken, to the relief of all present, by Arnošt.
"Lola, you know what? Go to the bathroom. And while you're out there, stay there, I can do it myself."
"Thanks, director!" Lola said happily, planted a kiss on Arnošt's cheek and ran out into the hallway.
"So..." continued Arnošt, who was so nervous at this point that he too was not far from throwing things and calling people dirt under the limbs of farm animals himself. "The story takes place-"
At that moment, however, a rather agitated secretary burst into the room and said anxiously, "Gentlemen, I'm sorry, but-"
"Damn it, woman! Can't you see we're having a meeting!" Arnošt exploded, fed up with the fact that everyone was free to talk as they pleased, but as soon as he opened his mouth, someone interrupted him. Now it was his turn!
The secretary looked at him with a disapproving look that seemed to say 'Fine, you bastard, do as you please. You'll have to take the consequences yourself', and marched offendedly out of the room again.
"That girl had something on her mind, Mr. Veselý, don't you think?" remarked the Chief Investor amusedly.
"No, not really. It was I who had something on my mind!" Arnošt retorted, and resumed the presentation of his imaginary script.
"The protagonist of my story is the classic useless man as we know him from Pushkin's Onegin. He has plenty of money, a nice wife, a nice house-just everything one could wish for. Until one day..."
Arnošt couldn't believe it. No one interrupted him. They all sat silently in their seats and listened, occasionally a lawyer flipped through his book of laws, but this rather amused Arnošt.
Yeah, bandits, try to steal that shit I haven't even written..
And so, when no one interrupted him, Arnošt continued his crazed monologue for another ten minutes or so.
He himself had no idea how he could think of such nonsense that he was now presenting to the investors, but apparently he had caught their attention.
Everyone was silent and he was talking.
Everything was going according to plan. Maybe it wouldn't be such a disaster after all.
Yeah, it could be a good day after all. When he's done here and gets money for a movie he doesn't have a script for yet, he'll go to a bar and dance and drink cocktails until dawn.
Dancing with some beautiful unknown girl on the terrace of a dance club in the orange evening light. That'll be nice...
But then Arnošt was interrupted by something other than a human voice.
A blue light flashed outside the building and police sirens sounded throughout the neighborhood.