Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘I’m Jo Mooney.’

  ‘What? You’re . . .’ he flapped. She held out a hand, which he grasped unsurely. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he managed, unconvincingly.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she breathed, as he rose out of the leather chair. ‘You were looking for someone male and white. Good job I was looking for someone gangling and confused, or we might have missed each other completely.’

  ‘Touché,’ he conceded with a grin, which she returned.

  ‘Come on, let’s get to my car.’

  Steff was glad to be led towards the valet car park at the rear and not out front to the street, as he feared that the incongruity of his elongated, jet-lagged and generally dazed appearance walking beside Jo Mooney’s shampoo-ad prettiness would inspire rescue attempts.

  ‘So are you Josephine, Joanne or what?’ he asked, trying to dig himself out of the hole she had dropped him into.

  ‘Joely. And, in answer to your next question, one of my great-grandmothers was Irish. It’s a real messy story. There’s an orphanage involved somewhere too. The details are pretty sensitive around my extended family. I learned not to ask.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ Steff insisted innocently.

  ‘Well, why not? In case I told you Mooney was the name of the family that owned my ancestors in the Old South?’

  He was hugely relieved to spot the sparkle in Jo’s eye that betrayed a hidden smile. She knew she had been rumbled and burst out laughing.

  ‘You know, I’m going to come round and take the piss out of you when you’re jet-lagged,’ he told her.

  Jo laughed again and handed a ticket to the valet.

  ‘So did you get a cab out here from the airport?’ she asked, pulling her red Pontiac out on to Sunset Boulevard. Steff noted with disappointment that she was indicating left at the junction with La Brea. He didn’t know what imagined wonders he was hoping to see on Sunset, but the wide-eyed teenager inside him fancied it anyway.

  ‘Not so much a cab, more a kind of minibus affair, driven by a manic Korean and his co-pilot. I think we spent longer going round the terminals circuit than getting up to the hotel. Or maybe it just seemed longer, what with my whole life flashing before me every time we pulled in or out of a lane. It was like Cowdenbeath Racewall on a Saturday night.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s back home in Scotland. Kind of like your Indy 500, but much bigger. Huge scale, hundreds of thousands of fans. Frightening money in the corporate sponsorship.’ Steff smiled to himself as he expanded the outrageous fib. It was revenge for earlier. Like she didn’t just love turning up and telling people she was the Joe Mooney they were expecting.

  ‘The minibus thing did more laps of the track, though,’ he continued. ‘I think the driver was going round until he had picked up enough passengers.’

  ‘No. He was just building up to escape velocity before he could slingshot out of the circuit. You’re lucky he was good. Come off at the wrong angle and I could have been picking you up in Tijuana.’

  The car swung into a busy car park outside a twenty-four-hour diner on La Cienega, just south of Melrose. Jo led him inside, where Steff was delighted by the rows of booths along each window and the long dining bar punctuated by fixed stools. It was the diner of teenage dreams and Phil Spector records. There were even uniformed cops on two of the stools, having coffee cups refilled by cheerfully harassed middle-aged waitresses with big hair. Many of the clientele looked rotund enough to have their own gravitational pulls, which told Steff that croissants were probably not on the breakfast menu; not without steak, eggs, hash browns, muffins and a side order of raw lard. Steff looked again at the Michelin people around him, then back at the dainty Jo, and calculated that the choice of venue was courteously for his benefit.

  ‘You are an understanding and deeply caring person,’ he told her, looking up from the bounteous plate the waitress had placed in front of him.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ she said, digging a fork into her unaccompanied slice of melon. ‘I’ve chaperoned a few Brits in my time. They’re always pretty hungry first morning. Bet you were wandering around before dawn, too.’

  Steff laughed and put up his hand, unable to elaborate for the mouthful of Tabasco-laced steak he was ravaging.

  ‘So you must be flavour of the month with Cinema Scope for them to fly you way out here,’ she stated.

  ‘They didn’t,’ Steff said, swallowing a gulp of apple juice. ‘I’m paying for this myself. I’ve got a deal with Scope for pictures from the AFFM, but I’m hoping to flog stuff to a few other magazines back home later. Depends how many B-list celebs and players I’m lucky enough to run into. I’ve got a newspaper interested in a kind of photo-travelogue of LA too. If the trip pays for itself, at least, I’ll be happy. I wanted to see the place anyway.’

  ‘You slow down to look at car wrecks too?’

  Steff grinned. ‘Anyway, what about you?’ he asked. ‘I guess you must not be flavour of the month at Cinema Scope if you’ve been sent to babysit this shambles sitting here. Or did you just draw the short straw?’

  Jo smiled, tilting her head to one side. ‘I’m doing the piece,’ she said. ‘I’m going to be your guide through the labyrinth down in Santa Monica anyway, so I figured I might as well volunteer. Give us a chance to make sure we’re approaching this thing from the same angles.’

  ‘So what’s your angle?’

  ‘Revenge,’ she said, a conspiratorial glint in her eyes. ‘I was LA bureau chief on Picture Press International – you know it?’

  Steff shook his head minutely, so as not to interfere with the business of scooping more scrambled egg into his mouth.

  ‘It’s a movie trade paper, based out of London. Most of their material is domestic and European, but the bulk of the ad revenue comes from out here, from independent companies, not the studios. Studios all have European operations and they deal direct. Bottom line is that I had to kiss-ass to all these piss-ant C-movie assholes to keep ’em sweet so they’d keep placing ads come AFFM or Cannes, when they’re hawking their wares to the rest of the business. But now I’m with Scope,’ she said, eyes flashing, ‘I’m gonna get ’em back while they’re all in one place, at their most puffed-up and self-important.’

  ‘What does Scope think about that?’

  ‘They’re cool. I mean, Scope’s British too, but it’s a big-league consumer title so they aren’t worried about upsetting Chuck Fuck from Schmuckfilm. Obviously we gotta tread lightly round Miramax and New Line, but they aren’t the story.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Like I said, Chuck Fuck and company. Lowlifes with artistic pretensions, making soft porn and karate movies for late-night cable slots in Taiwan, except they want you to treat them like Ingmar goddamn Bergman. That’s why you’re here, I guess.’

  Steff looked up from his breakfast, attempting to convey puzzlement somewhere amid the gluttony.

  ‘When I told Dave Geraghty in London what I had in mind, he said he’d try and get you instead of a local freelance. He said your pictures were, how’d he put it?, “emotionally honest”.’

  ‘Well, I don’t get much work from Hello! if that’s what he meant. I don’t like affectation. That doesn’t mean I try and make everyone look like they just got up in the morning – that would be a form of affectation too. I like to try and get behind the screens folk put up, get an image of the person they are when they think no-one’s looking. Far easier said than done, right enough. Soon as you point a camera at somebody, they perform. Some do it more subtly than others, but they all play a part.’

  ‘Dave made your pictures sound like, I don’t know, psychological X-rays.’

  ‘Nah. Nothing quite so wanky and sophisticated. But you can usually tell what I think of the subject without much in the way of in-depth analysis.’

  Steff got back to his plate, oddly relieved to have headed off the discussion.

  Many of his pictures were psychological X-rays. Fortunately, most people didn’t r
ecognise who of.

  three

  ‘You’re telling me you knew all about this and you didn’t think it might be of value for me to hear it?’

  Bannon sipped from a styrofoam coffee cup, steam rising in substanceless wisps from above his mouth like he was an asthmatic dragon. His brow furrowed in confused consternation, which tipped Larry off that he might just be overreacting again.

  ‘It’s a bunch of folks in a parking lot, for Christ’s sake,’ Bannon argued. ‘I wasn’t withholding it, Larry, I just didn’t figure anyone would give a shit. What’s the problem?’

  That was a good question. Larry was aware that his hyper-cautiousness lately had been pushing the needle pretty close to the edge of the rationality meter, but it wasn’t simply the proximity of this outdoor event to the AFFM that had him concerned.

  ‘Who are these people, boss? I’d just like to know that much. Who are or what is the American Legion of Decency?’

  ‘The hell should I know? But if they live up to their name you shouldn’t have any trouble out of them, should you?’

  ‘Well shouldn’t someone have checked this sort of shit out before we let them set up camp in front of the Pacific Vista Hotel?’

  Bannon rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll be straight with you, Larry. I don’t know who these people are, and it wouldn’t make a difference if I did. Permission – and I mean permission with gold trimmings – came down from the mayor’s office on this thing, with instruction to the police department to adopt a Yes-I-can policy, ‘stead of looking for potential problems. All I know is it’s some kind of Christian rally deal, and there’s a lot of Christian votes in Santa M. Work it out. Inside your fortune cookie with this particular meal, it just says “Deal with it”, okay?’

  ‘Okay sir.’

  It was more a statement of resignation than committed intention.

  ‘And for Christ’s sake lighten up about it. I know you ain’t been down here long, but I also know that in your time on the job you’ve survived gang warfare, the mob, earthquakes and mass riots. Suddenly you’re antsy about a parking lot full of Bible-bunnies. Jeez. Everybody in this town’s so goddamn edgy these days, it’s like fuckin’ New York’

  Larry couldn’t help but laugh, watching the chief get steamed. It was like looking into a mirror, seeing him chase his tail and snap at himself. Thank God he still found the sight of it ridiculous.

  ‘Understood sir,’ he said, and turned to grip the handle on Bannon’s office door.

  ‘Know what you need, Freeman?’ Bannon asked, putting down his cup and leaning across his inflammably cluttered desk.

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘You need somethin’ real to be worryin’ about. My guess is the Bible-bunnies wouldn’t get allocated too much brain-time if you had more meat to chew on. My fault, partly, I guess. Been ridin’ you light until you got used to the place, just lettin’ you get to know all the main faces and places down here at the beach.’

  ‘Believe me, sir, I was happy to pass on the AmTrak thing.’

  ‘Yeah, well, let’s see what else we got.’ Bannon looked down at his desk. It was impossible to determine what he was focusing on, how many layers down into the paperwork strata his gaze was penetrating. ‘Woah!’ he said, eyes widening, face grimacing. ‘You’ll be glad that one’s already allocated. Movie time. “Honey I shot the kids because I was piped high as the ozone layer and I thought they were trying to eat me.” Yuk, Rankin’s treat, that one.’

  He picked at the growing nest in front of him, tossing some faxes towards the coffee-spattered bin behind him where he’d no doubt be angrily searching for them half an hour later.

  ‘Oh yeah, here it is,’ he said, holding up a hand-scrawled note. ‘Movie time again. “One of our submarines is missing.”’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No shit. Coast Guard called. Some kind of scientific research boat, based out of Santa M. Found abandoned and drifting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Entire crew MPD. Coroner’s office needs an official police once-over for the fatal-accident report.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about boats, sir.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it, neither does the coroner. You haven’t “liaised” with the Coast Guard yet, have you?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Well now’s the ideal opportunity to introduce yourself, don’t you think? Take a spin down there this morning, see what the deal is. And don’t make any gags about their shorts, they don’t like it.’

  Once again, Bannon was right. The whole town was wired. It wasn’t like paranoia, which was what you got in New York, a constant state of heightened alertness like mainlining caffeine, whereby the moment you closed the front door behind you and hit the street everybody had to be treated as a hostile threat until they could prove otherwise. An outgoing personality and a trusting nature would be filed as contributory negligence on an NYPD homicide sheet. It was like a sustained vibrato note in the symphony of a city: high, discordant, always audible but sometimes dampened in the ear by its very familiarity; and the pitch was determined by how many people were crammed into the city’s limited space. In New York or Chicago, for instance, it was a piercing note indeed.

  LA was different. The conurbation spread so far and wide that the note was low and bassy, but occasionally it built up, gradually, powerfully, irreversibly, like a wave. You felt it grow around you, noticed it in people’s attitudes, noticed it in yourself, even the off-duty self that wasn’t purposefully taking the city’s temperature every day. Maybe in the route you took to the ball game, cutting out a neighbourhood you’d have driven through six months ago. Maybe in how long you’d drive around looking for a parking space that would cut down the distance you’d have to make on foot. Maybe in how many times you looked at the clock waiting for your spouse to come home. And these waves didn’t recede naturally: first they had to break, which was the scariest part. That, in itself, added to the tension. People knew something had to give, and they were wound so tight these days because they couldn’t envisage what it might be.

  A wave had been building up through the late Eighties and into the early Nineties. It broke over the Rodney King beating trial, but if that hadn’t happened it would have broken on something else; the later the more violent. The next wave was broken early in its rise by the quake two years later. It wasn’t just a few buildings that got levelled – an event like that gave everybody a big enough scare for them to forget all the other shit they usually got so worked up about, at least for a while. But eventually the wave started to grow again. The OJ trial proved something of a curve-ball. It kept everybody distracted for the best part of a year, and the outcome denied the South Central powder keg its spark, but that courtroom had used race and prejudice to twist justice in a way that was even more ugly than in Simi Valley in ’92. Meantime, the wave kept on growing.

  Larry called it 1999 Syndrome. It was a new and potent strain of a very old disease, called Things Are Getting Worse.

  He figured that once upon a time a bunch of Australopithecines were sitting around a fire, discussing in guttural grunts how the neighbourhood wasn’t what it used to be, how the paths weren’t so safe no more, and how it all must be heading for some dreadful culmination. Such a shame, too, because they all remembered the days when you could leave the cave without rolling a big rock in front of it.

  LA used to be such a great town, he had been told. Such a great, great town, but not no more. Larry remained confused about the historical dates and duration of the Angelino Golden Age, as he had never heard two corroboratingly consistent opinions on when exactly it ended, what caused the Fall, or what the signs of decay had been. Funny thing was, he’d lived here his whole life and had apparently missed it; missed that crime-free, drug-free, opulent epoch, living instead through decades consistently peopled by rich and poor, good and bad, healthy and sick. The years passed, the crimes changed, the motives changed, the diseases changed, but there were always crimes, always motives, always diseases.

  So many ti
mes he’d heard that story, that story of the lost LA, sunk for ever like Atlantis, its splendour and achievement never to be repeated. Guys in the station house, guys in the bar, folks round the table in a restaurant.

  ‘Sure, there was always crime,’ they’d concede, ‘but these days, well . . . They’re coming into our neighbourhoods, stealing our cars from in front of our houses. Our own streets ain’t safe. Never used to be like that.’

  Then they wouldn’t know where to look for a minute, embarrassed, hoping Larry would ‘understand’ what they meant; then angry if he was going to make a deal out of it.

  What they meant: niggers and spics used to steal from each other, shoot each other, rape each other, what the hell did we care? They stuck to their neighbourhoods, we stuck to ours. But these days they’re crossing the invisible line, all the balls in the world, stealing from us, shooting us, raping us. Never used to be like that.

  Things Are Getting Worse.

  And the big fear, the big question, was where was it all leading? Where would it end? All the time that wave kept growing, so how would it break this time?

  Now the calendar had flipped over into year 1999, providing the dash of Tabasco that really spiced up the recipe. As if folks in LA weren’t spaced-out enough, now we had a biblical overtone running through everything, and Larry had seen enough corpses in his time to know the equation: psychotic + Bible = disaster. There were the national legends if you wanted extreme examples – Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy – but every cop who’d worked murder or rape cases knew there was no publication more destabilising to an already fragile mind. Maybe it was the mysticism and superstition; maybe it was the notion of something greater ultimately being in control, that abdication-of-responsibility deal; maybe it was the images of supreme power. Who knew? But it fucked them up every time. Dangerous software, a former colleague had called it. A lot of machines simply weren’t equipped to run it.