SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA | 1971
It was still dark when Karoline Rosenda unlocked the front door to the offices of Celestial Records. The thick fog smothering the Outer Sunset had long begun to seep into her bones as well as her spirit. Without bothering to turn on the overhead lights, she made a beeline for the small kitchen to start a pot of the toxic black coffee she was famous for.
It was gearing up to be the worst day of her short career, if not the last. Z was not going to take the news that she had lost their star artist to the tide very well. She wondered if she should just start boxing up her desk before he came in, and decided that there wasn’t really anything she needed to remind her of this particular episode of her life. At least her boss was not traditionally what you could call an early riser. Rosenda wasn’t sure what other pies Avidan’s fat fingers were stuck in, but certainly most of them were still cooking late into the night.
Rosenda was wrestling with the rusty chrome can opener and a new three-pound can of Maxwell House when she caught a muffled sound of laughter coming from the back office. Suddenly hit with the realization that she might not be around to drink a pot of coffee, she gave up the fighting with the tinplate steel canister and went to face the music, so to speak.
Approaching Zev Avidan’s office, she noticed a strip of hellish red light seeping under the closed door. From inside the office, Rosenda could hear the sound of a party going on. The raucous laughter of intoxicated young women was punctuated like a cymbal crash by the crystalline splash of a dropped glass.
What the hell? She mouthed, grabbing the nearest heavy three-hole punch before confronting what was sure to be intruders. Suddenly the door slammed open and a weary bacchanal in its final thrum revealed itself to her. A woman in high heels and the wide-eyed look of a racehorse just cut loose from the starting gate, tottered past Rosenda to what she hoped would be the company ladies’ room.
“Karoline, get your tush in here!” Avidan shouted over Cole’s last album blasting out of the large office stereo speakers that faced his huge oaken desk.
“Mr, Z,” Rosenda struggle to find words. “What is all this? It’s not even 7 o’clock. Have you been here all night?”
“Dammit, is it morning already? Hang on, I need to get Monarch on the horn. We are going to need them to drill a goddamn oil well for all the records they are going to be pressing! What time is it in L.A.?”
“Oil what?” Rosenda stepped over the legs of a young Italian man in a rumpled suit sitting on the shag rug smoking a cigarette with a girl in a orange A-line mini skirt on his lap. The pop art pattern barely wrapping the girl’s ass was a shapely field of bloodshot eyes all staring at her. “It’s the same time as… will someone please tell me what is going on here?”
“Signora, it seems that the unfortunate demise of your so-called rock star has been quite the stroke of luck to ‘Mr. Z.’” The man rolled the girl off of his lap and stumbled a bit as he stood. “Marone! Giulia you need to go on a diet. I can’t feel my leg.”
“That was your leg?” The young woman stood and straightened the eyes. “That is a disappointment. I should go find Vanda. Which way was the… ”
“Straight down the hall, dear,” Avidan searched in his jacket for a match. “Karo, is your roommate still looking for a job? Ring her up and see if we can get her down here to make us some coffee.”
“Am I fired, then?” Rosenda cast her eyes down to the beleaguered shag.
“Fired?” Avidan, having found and a struck a match, began to laugh until the flame burned his fingers. “Ouch! Absolutely, not! I need you on a plane to L.A. immediately. We need to repackage the back catalog and get it into production. I can’t trust that shmegegge at Monarch not to fuck this up.”
“The back catalog?”
“Yes! I want every note, every belch, every wet, juicy fart squeaked out by that son-of-a-bitch Lucious Cole to flood the market,” Avidan decreed. “Record label one-oh-fucking-one: There is nothing like death to boost the back catalogue.”
“Your boss here owed some people quite a bit of money,” the Italian man straightened out his suit and looked around for the women to begin his leave. “Against all odds, it looks like his problem has resolved itself. We were just celebrating his good fortune. And ours.”
Román Leão 
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