The Frumious Bandersnatch Read Free Page B

legal provided the station mentioned on air that payment had been made. Usually, the deejay merely said, “This record was brought to you by Bison Records.” Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew that the music industry was a twelve-billion-dollar-a-year business. They further knew that only three broadcasters controlled more than half of the top hundred radio markets in the U.S. There were 10,000—count ’em, Maude—10,000 commercial radio stations in the land, and record companies depended on about 1,000 of the largest ones to create hits and sell records. Each of those thousand stations added approximately three new songs to its playlist every week.
    Enter the independent record promoter.
    Hired by the record company, the indie got paid each time there was an “add” to the playlist of a Top 40 or rock station. Average price for an add was a thousand bucks, but the fee could go as high as five or ten thousand depending on the number of listeners a station had. All in all, the indies earned about three million bucks a week for their services.
    That was a lot of fried corn husks, honey.
    Whittaker knew, and Di Fidelio knew, and everyone connected with either Bison Records or WHAM—“Radio 180 on your dial!”—that a record promoter named Arturo Garcia, who worked for the indie firm of Instant Prompt, Inc., had made a deal with WHAM that guaranteed the station $300,000 in annual promotional payments provided its list of clients regularly made the station’s playlist. Morever, in certain special circumstances…
    Consider, for example, the case of Tamar Valparaiso’s debut album, Bandersnatch. What with Carroll’s original rhyming (which would certainly sound like hip-hop doggerel to many teenagers), and what with Tamar’s poundingly simple five-note melody (that would most certainly sound sexually-driven to many teenagers), the title-song single seemed poised, please dear God, to do what Alicia Keys’ Songs in A Minor had done in its first week, more than 235,000 copies for a debut album, #1 on both the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart and the R&B Album Chart, please dear God, let it happen!
    But just in case God wasn’t listening, and just in case all that legal payola didn’t do the trick, IPI (ever mindful of its guiding slogan, “The Tin Is in the Spin”) was paying WHAM—and each of forty other top stations around the country—a $5,000 bonus for fifty plays in the first week of “Bandersnatch’s” release. That came to a hundred bucks a spin, and that was a whole lot of tin, man.
    To put it mildly, much was riding on the success of that album.
    Meanwhile, in the main stateroom of the River Princess, Tamar Valparaiso was getting into her scanty costume.
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    EVER SINCE 9/11, and especially since the FBI began issuing vague warnings of terrorist attacks hither and yon but nowhere in particular, the Police Department had been on high alert for any possible threats to the city’s bridges. There were 143 men and 4 women in the Harbor Patrol Unit, which operated a municipal navy of twenty vessels, ranging in size from twenty to fifty-two feet. The workhorse of the HPU was the new 36-foot launch, which could travel up to thirty-eight miles an hour—more than twice the speed of the older vessels in the fleet. The Police Department had recently purchased four of these boats at a cost of $370,000 per. To the relief of taxpayers everywhere in the city, the boats were expected to last twenty years.
    Not too long ago, Sergeant Andrew McIntosh would have been wearing the same orange life vest over his blue uniform, but there wouldn’t have been a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle lying across the dash. You broke those out only when you were going on a drug raid. Those and the twelve-gauge shotguns. Nowadays, with lunatics running loose all over the world, the heavy weapons were de rigueur for the course, as they said in old