‘Hmm, not bad. It’s bleeding a little, and beginning to swell, but do you know what? I think it will look rather smart when it clears up.’ He replaced the bandage.
‘More brandy.’
‘You’ve been very brave, Susan. That’s enough, you don’t want to go home drunk as a sailor on shore leave. Very brave. Some men would have collapsed. Proves what I say about women being the stronger sex. And getting stronger all the time: soon we men will just be used as houseboys, changing fuses and such. You’ve got much stronger stomachs already, I’ve always said so. Men couldn’t work as prostitutes en masse, they’d be throwing up every time a new baggy body came through the door. They couldn’t give birth, they’d die of fright. They can’t take a tattoo without passing out. I admire the strength of you women, I really do.’ He shone the flashlight in her face. ‘Hmm, you don’t look quite as green as you did a minute ago. Ready to go home?’
She nodded painfully.
‘Good girl.’ Leaning forward, he tapped on the glass. ‘The first Saturday night of next month, Susan. Keep it free.’
He had picked her up just around the corner from the Best at nine, and he had her home before ten. She had told Matthew she was going to Tiger Bay with Zero for the weekend, so of course he was out drowning his sorrows – in alcohol-free lager, naturally. She fell into bed fully clothed, grateful for her thick dark fringe. But when she awoke, late on Saturday morning, Matthew was looking sternly down at her and her brow was bare. She grasped feebly at her missing fringe. Too late.
‘Susan, you appear to have a tattoo on your face. Do you for a moment begin to comprehend what this can do to your blood? And the danger of infection from those wretched needles is beyond belief. In this day and age, and with your knowledge of the subject, I particularly thought you might . . .’
On he droned, about AIDS and Hep B and the whole yucky kit and caboodle. This was typical of the way their relationship had gone. Not WHY?, but a Government Health Warning. It wasn’t much fun living with a pamphlet.
Finally, after touching briefly on the social stigma of tattoos in contemporary society, he asked her how it had happened.
‘Zero and me had dinner at 192 and got so drunk on Velvet Hammers we missed the sleeper from Paddington. She dared me.’
He looked at her dubiously.
‘I was drunk, Matt! You should see Zero! She’s got a Sandinista on her thigh!’
‘Left or right?’
‘Left, of course.’
He sighed. ‘You’re impossible, Susan.’ Rolling off the bed he pulled on his tracksuit. ‘I’m going jogging. See you.’
She lay there miserably for a few minutes, then when she heard the door slam jumped out of bed and ran to the window. She touched her forehead gingerly; the bandage had fallen off and she could feel small brittle beads of dry blood. Slowly she pulled aside the curtain, picked up a hand mirror and stepped out on to the balcony.
The righteous light of the sun shone mercilessly into Susan Street’s face, clearly picking out a word in small red capital letters on her forehead.
SOLD.
The beautiful black girl who had been born Sharon Sealey and was now Serena Soixante-Neuf laughed so loudly that the reporters peeking at her through the glass porthole in Susan’s door recoiled with shock. Wrapped from head to toe in Donna Karan’s soft red leather and sitting on Susan’s desk, she recrossed her legs and lit a small cigar.
‘Well, Sue?’ she asked boldly, looking Susan straight in the eyes. They had met for the first time only half an hour earlier, but Serena was not one for gradually getting to know people. Instant intimacy was her business.
Susan clicked off the machine and pocketed the tape. ‘Wonderful work. Thank you very much.’
Serena preened and smiled slyly. ‘And you’re offering . . . ?’
‘That’s not my job, I’m afraid. You’ll have to talk to our money man.’ She picked up a phone and punched an in-house number. ‘Kathy, can you tell Max we’re ready for him now? Thanks. Tell him Miss . . . Miss . . . Soixante-Neuf is here with the recording.’
Serena screamed with laughter once more. The only thing she liked more than the sound of her own voice was the sound of her own name on embarrassed lips.
Mr Maxwell Sadkin, family man and pillar of his Reform synagogue, took one look at Serena, blanched and offered up a prayer to his God for protection – though whether from Serena or his own affectionate nature he could not be sure. Susan left them alone to negotiate, Serena towering over the quaking money man. Holding the tape tight in her pocket, she knocked on Bryan O’Brien’s door. ‘Bryan? I’ve got the Lejeune tape. Got a minute?’
Of course he had; he knew a hot putative front page when he smelled one. And this one had it all: sex, financial scandal and the supernatural, the Holy Trinity of the tabloids – even those with pretensions to uptown.
Two years ago Constantine Lejeune had been an unknown Black Country clairvoyant who had turned up on the doorstep of a breakfast TV company claiming to know the whereabouts of a kidnapped knitwear heiress. On the air he went into a trance; on the air the police located the girl, broke down a door and arrested her kidnappers. Since then Lejeune had risen irresistibly to a position unparalleled by any other supernatural superstar.
He could stop clocks – once, spectacularly, Big Ben – bend cutlery – once, controversially, every fork on the yacht HMS Britannia – and find bodies. But he was not content to be an entertainer or even a detective.
He held meetings which one journalist had compared scathingly to Nuremberg rallies – but then British journalists had a bad habit of comparing any public meeting with a charismatic speaker and an audience which extended into double figures to a Nuremberg rally. But Lejeune did spout a strong populist line at his meetings: against immigration and international finance, he managed to implicate a Second Coming into race riots and hinted strongly at having the ear of God. A Yorkshireman of alleged Franco-Greek extraction whose blunt speech was peppered with Gallic exclamations, his greasy good looks and rabble-rousing rhetoric assured him a massive following amongst middle-aged women and overgrown boys. A book and several long-playing records of prophecy (‘Prophet with a profit’, Lejeune’s detractors were fond of calling him) had sold millions.
Yes, if there were two things that Constantine Lejeune particularly hated they were miscegenation and high finance. And now here was a tape which not only had him engaged in sexual congress with a prostitute whose St Lucian accent was clearly in evidence, but also breaking off from his exertions to receive calls from his broker. Constantine Lejeune, hater of high finance and people’s friend, was using his strange gift to make quite a killing on the stock market.
‘I don’t know quite how he could make such a stupid mistake,’ Serena had said. ‘I only know he’s not the first famous bastard I’ve done business with. They all seem to think that if you’re on the game you’re automatically deaf, dumb and blind too. But this is the first one I’ve been really interested in nailing. Call it personal, because he’s a racist jerk, or call it business because he’s the biggest name I’ve had yet, and I know you’ll pay through the nose for him. Anyway, you can take that to the bank.’ With that she had tossed the tape on to Susan’s desk. ‘You know all that stuff he peddles about the Second Coming? I’ve got it all down here. And the third, and the fourth . . .’
Now that unmistakable Black Country-on-Seine voice groaned from O’Brien’s tape machine . . .‘Sacré bleu bah gum . . .’ The Australian laughed and clicked it off.
‘Good work, Sue. I think I can do you a front page for this little beaut. “As Told To” suit you?’
‘Suits me fine.’ Susan Street smiled.
FOUR
‘If Bangkok is a bar girl and Paris is an expensive mistress, then Rio is an orgiast,’ Tobias Pope proclaimed from his mobile Olympus as it moved through the clouds, as fluffy and yielding as a Fifties pin-up blonde, above the Atlantic Ocean.
By his side Susan Street slept, sulked and
stared blankly at the pages of her Tama Janowitz novel. ‘Really?’ she said, in a voice which dripped boredom.
‘But certainly. Brazil is sometimes called the Thailand of Lat Am, but personally I’ve always found Thai women essentially joyless and resentful types behind that grateful facade. If it wasn’t for the hard cash, they wouldn’t touch you with a six-foot dildo. The carioca girls, on the other hand . . . superb beasts. Glossy, healthy brutes. Pre-AIDS, that is. They’re still as loose as ever, though. They’d do it for fun, if it came to that. Which, praise God and the dollar, it never will.’
Susan sighed and put her book away into her Etienne Augier briefcase. Every time she tried to read, Pope pinched an excruciatingly tiny and tender amount of flesh at the top of her inner thigh which her mini-skirted grey wool Alalïa suit left achingly vulnerable. Her Bruce Oldfield tights were already laddered due to numerous digital rebukes. In the interest of her wardrobe, it might be wise to converse with him.
‘If Rio is an orgiast, and Paris is a mistress, then what’s London?’ she asked patiently.
He turned and laughed into her face. He’d been hoping for this one, she could tell. ‘A whore. Down on its luck. Two-bit. A two-bit whore whose speciality is getting down on its knees and sucking the dick of any rich American who crosses its path. That’s what your countrywomen are famous for, isn’t it? What did they say about English girls during the war? One Yank—’
‘—and they’re off,’ Susan finished wearily. It was a revelation hearing Tobias Pope’s witticisms and wisdoms. Somehow she hadn’t excepted the head of one the biggest communications empires in the world to have a marginally less sophisticated sense of humour than a stand-up comic in a North Country working-men’s club.
He chuckled happily at his joke. ‘Yes, yes. I’ve always thought it strange, you know, that only Italy should be shaped like a part of the human physiognomy. If there was any natural justice in the world, the British land mass would be a Y-shaped pair of open legs and the tip of the United States would be thrusting into it. It would be appropriate, wouldn’t it? Economically, militarily and sexually.’
‘Isn’t it a coincidence,’ Susan said sarcastically, ‘that the women of countries suddenly become so wildly attracted to rich Americans when their countries are being screwed in every other way by the United States. This animal magnetism couldn’t have anything to do with a certain little thing called financial necessity, could it?’
‘As in your case, you mean?’ Tobias Pope sipped his J&B thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I do see your point. It must be torment trying to struggle by on fifty-five thousand pounds sterling per annum plus expenses. No wonder you’re a whore.’
She thought about asking the stewardess for some earplugs on the pretence of trying to sleep.
‘Yes, a remarkable country, Brazil. A country of paradoxes. The people are a unique racial inter-marriage of African, Indian and European, but the stratification of their society is still savage. Which is as it should be. Dark-skinned on the coastal north of Rio, light-skinned to the south.’
‘South Africa-on-Sea,’ she muttered.
‘Speak up, young woman, don’t mumble. Yes, in the seventy years up to 1950 Brazil took in four and a half million Europeans, and something like fifty thousand a year since then.’ His upper lip winced in mild distaste. ‘The Japs have moved in recently, unfortunately. There’s a fair number of them in coffee. Some mornings in the business quarter you feel like an extra in Bridge Over The River Kwai.’
She had to smile. Just like Joe Blow in the street, Tobias Pope had a deep and violent dislike of the Japanese. She had asked him why at the airport that evening, as he stared with disapproval at the camera-clacking hordes of Japanese tourists taking a photographs of the planes, the people, even litter bins. ‘Because the women are ugly and the men are clever. That’s not how the yellow races should be. Or any race but the Americans, come to that.’
‘Brazil, as I’m sure you know by now, thanks to the ecology gangsters who run our TV channels, has the largest virgin rain forest in the world which contains one third of the world’s trees and covers an area larger than Europe. But in the last sixty years, praise God, a quarter has been destroyed and another four per cent goes every year. It’s a terrible thing, conservation – it makes cowards out of the people. The rain forest is being pulled down with no thought for anything but a fast buck. Which is just as it should be. A brave and optimistic people. Riddled with AIDS, naturally. You can buy a woman for the price of a pina colada. It has been a biggest gap between rich and poor of any country in the world. That fact alone is proof the United States is not what is used to be. Yes, it’s a wonderful country. Healthy.’
Susan took a deep breath. Here was where laying out the financial pages of the Best came in useful. ‘So healthy that if it declared itself bankrupt, the world banking system would probably collapse? So healthy that it owes one hundred billion dollars and can’t even pay back the interest?’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers, Susan.’ He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. ‘Especially if you read it in one of mine.’
From the window of her hotel suite on the Avenida Atlantica, she could see the pure white beaches of Rio, resembling a smorgasbord of spilled cocaine, and the banquet of tanned flesh barely tethered by the briefest of tangas that used it as a catwalk, hoping to exchange almost criminal beauty for legal tender. These girls were not professionals, though, just beautiful and poor in the wrong place and hoping for a man who was as kind as he was rich. The robust earthiness of their beauty robbed even this situation of its exploitative sordidness and, despite herself, she smiled as the soundtrack to a travel advert floated through her head – ‘Brasil’, ‘Rio’, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’.
She turned her head idly to the right, and gasped.
Less than two hundred yards from her window, level with her eyes, was a man-made mountain of trash. On it, children, dogs and rats competed on equal terms for the pickings. Around its base stood flimsy wooden shacks and around these stood weary women looking helplessly and hopelessly at the children. Rag and bone, she thought dazedly, these people are made of rag and bone.
‘The favelas,’ said Tobias Pope behind her. ‘No sanitation, power or water. They ring every big city here, living off the waste. A very ecological system. I think of the favelas as a frame; their repulsiveness makes the beauty of Rio proper even more of dazzling.’
‘I don’t think Rio’s beautiful. All those skyscrapers and freeways and flyovers and armies of people scuttling along like survivalist ants. It’s like a corrupt Legoland.’ She gestured towards the favelas. ‘And now this—’
‘Put your sunglasses on,’ said Pope impatiently ‘It will help your vision and your conscience.’
‘It’s like heaven and hell in the same place. It’s horrible.’
He laughed patiently. ‘But Susan, you’re describing your own country, or any rich Western country. America is one thing for me, but it certainly doubles as hell for the poor. The same with you and British. You just don’t have to look it in the face, that’s all. You sit in the West End drinking Piper and talking about socialism and you don’t have to look at the East End or the North Country. At least they’re honest here. Go down to Copacabana or Flamengo for a swim carrying a camera or wearing jewellery and you’ll be lucky to come back with your bikini. The poor get a good shot at the rich here.’
‘And vice versa.’ She gestured at the girls on the beach.
They talked about Two Nations at home; they didn’t know the half of it. Brazil was both Disneyland and Dante’s Inferno: the poor and the rich; the ugly and the beautiful; the sexual invitation of the beach girls and the huge billboards which purported to warn against AIDS but, due to the beauty of the models and the carefree smiles which could have been pushing stockings or lipstick, only served to act as further stimuli in this already over-heated city. The Brazilian people seemed a lot like the rain forests themselves: natural wonders mown down by
what passed for civilization but were really the most base urges of the First World: the pursuit of sex and money. If Rio was the Bangkok of Latin America it was only that the recklessness of the desperate was always wilfully mistaken for sensuality by the people who sought to exploit it. To call the Brazilians hedonistic was like saying that American ghetto blacks were hedonistic because they took drugs, caught AIDS and otherwise destroyed themselves. Brazil was a ghetto and, like most ghettos, it doubled as a playground for the rich. Physically and fiscally, Brazil was being screwed.
‘Charming animals, aren’t they?’ said Pope at her shoulder, tracing her gaze to the beach. They stood at the window in the Avenida Atlantica joined by a kind of understanding. They could both comprehend the massive unfairness of the fact that this beautiful and lively people were condemned to strutting their stuff for their supper in a city that was little more than a brothel. The only difference was that he approved of the arrangement and she didn’t.
The only difference! How her priorities were changing already! She drew back and looked at him.
He recoiled and laughed almost tenderly at the expression on her face. ‘Oh, Susan! You’re so English! Look at your face! The Roman haughtiness of the nose, the Norman disdain of the eyes, the Teutonic disapproval of the mouth, the Viking iciness of the bearing – perfect English girl!’ He sighed. ‘You’ll never understand how to go about having fun, you Euros, will you? You’ll never understand that the only way not to feel the world’s pain is to go at it like a pig at a trough. Otherwise you’re lost. Look at that beautiful mess out there. Wallow in it. Enjoy the craziness of it. Or it will be your downfall. You won’t sleep at night and you won’t be happy. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’
‘What do you know?’ she said sulkily.
‘I know, young lady, believe me.’ He opened his mouth, then closed it, then blurted, ‘I was a Communist at your age!’
Ambition Page 5
