Merde Happens

by Stephen Clarke

  "I thought you were starting to like it here?" I said.

  "Yes. Yes." She nodded, apparently envisaging her most recent short stack of pancakes. "I was starting to feel at home, but I forgot. Under the surface, it is, it is so . . ."

  "Franchement precarious?" I suggested.

  "I forgot about the guns, the crime."

  "They steal tourists' cars in Paris, too, don't forget."

  "Yes, but not with guns."

  No, I thought, they just loot the contents and set fire to the vehicle.

  "And we have a lot of gun crime in the UK these days," I said.

  "Not as much as here, I think."

  "That's just because knives are cheaper."

  "Paul, how can you joke? Do you think this will be good for your campaign? The British tourist ambassador is attacked in Florida, so vote for England?"

  This hadn't occurred to me, but it sounded like a pretty damn good idea. I'd have to get Suraya on to it.

  "Sorry," I said yet again. Well, they do say it's an Englishman's favorite word. "It must be the shock. He was pointing it at my head, you know."

  "Yes." She put a comforting hand on my arm. It was cold, I noticed. She was suffering from shock. She needed a good old English cup of tea.

  I wondered why I felt so calm and anger-free about the whole nearly-getting-killed business. And what I saw, felt, and heard around me held the simple answer. We were stopped in traffic outside a bright-purple hotel with parasols soaking up the sun on its cafe terrace. A short-skirted, silky-legged waitress was standing on the sidewalk waiting for customers, her head and body slowly rocking to the Latin beat that was oozing out of the building. Death or the threat of it just did not exist. This was life.

  "We have to try and forget what might have gone wrong," I said. "We got out of it safely, and he didn't steal Thelma. That's all that matters. Besides, I'm more worried about what's about to go wrong."

  I turned on to Ocean Drive and began looking for the yellow Porsche. I was distracted, though, by the view on my left. Beyond a line of palm trees and the low hump of a dune, there—suddenly—was the wind-whipped ocean. I whistled as a bricklayer might do at a miniskirt passing his building site. This was one sexy sea. I hadn't seen water that blue since they used to tint postcards of Bournemouth to make the English Channel look like the Indian Ocean. Two days ago I'd been looking at grimy ice, and now this?

  "Paul!" Alexa forced me to look roadward again, just as I was about to hammer into the back of a little Mini Estate with fake wood paneling on its rear doors. A 1980 Mini Clubman Estate. This was our rendezvous.

  Our escort of five or six Miaminis filed slowly past, and we waved and smiled our gratitude to all of them. Last in line was Tony's car. He stopped and lowered his passenger window.

  "See you later, Paul. Alexa. Give me a call if you need me."

  "Thanks again, Tony," I said. "You saved our lives." For once it wasn't an empty phrase.

  6

  Jesus was sitting under a fake-palm-tree parasol. He had his legs spread wide, a phone jammed against his right ear, and sunglasses pushed up like a hairband on his ultradark, short curls. His eyes were apparently trying to hypnotize every passing woman into admiring the large Porsche keyring on his table. He was thirty, maybe thirty-five, and clearly spent most of his life toning his muscles, topping up his tan, and staring at himself in a mirror.

  "Yeah babe, yeah babe, I be dare. Six o'clock. I be dare babe. Ciao." He flipped his mobile shut, and I wondered why he had such existential problems pinning himself down to meet me at a certain time and place, but no trouble at all promising to see someone tonight. The answer was obvious. I wasn't a babe.

  "Hay-zooss?"

  "Yeah?" He looked up warily.

  "Paul West." I held out my hand.

  It took him no more than five seconds to remember who the hell I was.

  "Hey, Paul. Wassup, dude!" He stood up, grabbed my hand, pulled me against him until our nipples were rubbing, and slapped me heartily on the back. We must have been army pals in a former existence. "Whoa, how was your drive down, man?"

  "Oh, fine." I didn't feel like going into the carjacking story.

  "That your car? Cool. There's mine. What you think?"

  "Cool," I told him.

  "Yeah, cool, dude. Siddown."

  "This is Alexa." He'd already noticed her, of course, and had run his eyes over every inch of her body.

  "Hey, Alexa, great to meet you." He shook her hand formally, bowing like a prince at a garden party, and then looked away as a girl in a bikini top shimmied past. I could see the affront in Alexa's eyes.

  "You had breakfast?" Jesus pronounced it almost as a French person would—"brek-fass."

  "Yes," I said.

  "No," Alexa said, no doubt wanting to punish the guy by ordering something at his expense.

  Jesus laughed and turned toward a tall, coffee-skinned girl in a white shirt and short black skirt who was keying something into the cafe's ordering system.

  "Hey, Yooliana, we get some menus?" Jesus called out. He gave the girl his most loving smile. She finished her keying and ambled over with a small sheaf of menus. Her hips swung so far from side to side that I was sure she was going to slam the tables over as she walked. The only stable part of her seemed to be her pierced belly button. If this was the general standard of waitresses in South Beach, I drought, I'd be spending my whole time here eating and drinking.

  The cafe was as sexy as its waiting staff. It occupied the forecourt of yet another art deco hotel, a long, sky-blue four-story building with what looked like a bright-pink air-traffic-control tower poking up in the middle of its facade. The name was written down the sides of the control tower in purple neon lettering, unlit for the moment. Clearview, it said. An accurate description—from up there you would see nothing but blue Atlantic.

  Jesus asked us about the trip so far, but kept flipping his phone open every three seconds to make sure he hadn't missed any calls or messages. In between flips he scanned the horizon for signs of female life. If any specimens came close enough, he called out a "hey" to try and strike up a conversation. Alexa quickly gave up talking and glowered at him over the bagel and milkshake that she'd ordered.

  "So, about the Scottish dancing?" I tried to lead the conversation toward practicalities.

  "Hey, Clara!" Jesus called out to a small, curvy woman, who looked as if she was trying to save the world's fabric resources by buying clothes three sizes too small. Though by the look of her upper body, she had used up a fair chunk of the world's silicone stocks. They had to be false. Even so, Clara was, I had to concede, what most men would class as a babe. She had certainly been stocking up points on her loyalty card at the beautician's—her legs were as smooth and shiny as the paint job on a brand-new car. She stopped and smiled at Jesus.

  "Come siddown," he begged her, pulling up a chair. She obeyed coyly. "This is Clara."

  Clara shook hands politely, frowned at the rumpledness of my clothes, and embarked on a long conversation with Jesus. It was in Spanish, but I understood all of it because it was also in the universal language of "You never called, yes I did, no you didn't, OK I'm sorry let me make it up to you, OK you call me, yes I promise, mwa mwa, goodbye."

  As she shimmied off down the sidewalk, Jesus looked very pleased with life.

  "About the dancing?" I reminded him.

  "Oh yeah," he said. "We see them here tomorrow for brunch, OK?"

  "Tomorrow? But the event is tonight, right?"

  "Oh, no, iss tomorrow, dude, not tonight. No problem, man."

  This news was shocking enough to distract Alexa from her glowering and bagel eating. "Tomorrow?" she gasped. "But we hurried—"

  "Hey, Maria! Maria, yo!"

  Jesus had lifted himself half out of his chair and was waving at a tall, light-skinned woman on the other side of the street. She had a barbed black tattoo around her bare white waist.

  "Maria!" He mimed a prayer that she would stop, but she s
eemed to be out of the range of divine intervention.

  Jesus sat down again, not in the least put out.

  "So the event is tomorrow?" I reminded him.

  "Yeah. One here, one close by, and another, uh, somewhere else."

  "Three events?" I tried to work out whether this was good or bad news. Pretty good, I decided. No, actually it was astonishingly good. Three shows, three audiences, three operations to report back to London, and all put together by diis guy who seemed unable to concentrate on any event not direcdy related to his dick. "So did the mayor's office set all this up?" I asked.

  "Uh? Mayor's office?" Jesus looked at me as if I'd sprouted feathers.

  "Yes, I understood that events here were being coordinated by City Hall?"

  "City Hall?" Now I had wings and a beak, too.

  "You don't work for City Hall?"

  "What? No!" I had finally revealed my true identity as a species of talking flamingo.

  "Who do you work for, then?"

  Grinning at the absurdity of my line of questioning, Jesus produced a business card from the breast pocket of his florid shirt. It was thick-grained, and had as much gold on it as the bath taps at Buckingham Palace. Its embossed calligraphy read, "Jesus H. Rodriguez, Vice President of Development, Golden Beach Realtors."

  "What's a realtor?" I asked. The opposite of a fake one, I guessed, but that didn't help much.

  "You donno?" Now I was a dunce even by flamingo standards.

  "No."

  "Real estate, man. We buy, we sell, we develop. This is Miami, man. Welcome to the realty world."

  As his laughter cackled out across Ocean Drive, I wondered why my events here were being organized by a real estate agent, a breed that usually comes just below serial killers in the straight-talking and reliability charts.

  "Everything here organized by the Cubans and the realtors," Jesus said. "And you lucky, you got yourself a Cuban realtor." He gave us his cackle again. "Don worry, man. We invited the people you want, the ones who suppose to vote for you." At least he had some idea what the contest was about. "And a realtor tell a politician to come to a party, he comes, man. He comes." He flashed a conspiratorial smile at Alexa, who met it with her full arsenal of Parisian disdain.

  "Where are we sleeping?" she asked. "I need to change my clothes and take a shower." She stretched, taunting Jesus with a double eyeful of her straining T-shirt.

  "Here." Jesus poked a thumb over his shoulder toward the Clearview sign. "Ask Yooliana, she show you your room. You go put on your bikini, catch some rays, yeah?"

  "Jesus, baby!" A suntan on legs was swaying toward our table. She had long blond hair tliat hung in spikes as sharp as her stiletto heels, and was wearing (but only just) a halter-neck top and skintight white jeans. She had three-foot-long eyelashes, and was carrying a pink leather handbag that looked barely big enough to hold a mini-vibrator. Jesus saw her, and leapt to his feet.

  "Wow, baby," he cooed. "You incredible." He took her hand and kissed it as if it had just written him a check for a billion dollars. "I give you the honor of meeting Anna, my fiancee."

  I only just managed to stop myself laughing. Fiancée, I thought, did I hear right? Jesus was actually planning to stop chatting up other women long enough to say "I do"?

  "Nice to meet you, Anna," Alexa said, giving the poor girl such a look of pity that she turned to check herself out in the hotel window to make sure her hair hadn't fallen out. "Come, Paul, we must leave the happy couple alone. Jesus has been so impatient to see his fiancee."

  "Aw." The lucky lady groaned with delight and slobbered kisses all over Jesus's face. America, least of all Miami, just wasn't the place for French irony.

  7

  Inside, the Clearview didn't immediately live up to the promise of its chic facade. Unless this was some new trend in Miami minimalism, the hotel was a construction site. None of the rooms we passed had doors on them. Most had bare electric wiring poking from the walls, and one had only half a ceiling.

  "You having some work done?" I asked the picturesque pair of black-skirted buttocks that I was following along a wide, bare corridor.

  Juliana (as her staff badge called her) laughed. She had thick black hair piled up on top of her head, and Cleopatra's face, with a comma of eyeliner giving her a permanently amused look.

  "We're having the works," she said. She spoke as slowly and liltingly as she walked. "Hayzooss is pimping our ride."

  At the end of the corridor, we came to an entrance that actually had a door in it. Juliana pushed it open, and looked surprised to see that the room beyond had a tiled floor and fitted light switches.

  "Your dressing room," Juliana said.

  "Dressing room?" Alexa asked, crinkling up her nose at the decorating smells.

  "Yeah, you're dancing, right? Gonna be a good party. Free whiskey cocktails and all. You Scotch?"

  "We're not dancing." Alexa looked at me sternly, inviting me to confirm this as soon as possible.

  "No, we're not dancing" I said. "We're the ..." I didn't know how to describe our role here. "A Scottish group will be dancing while I schmooze with the people from City Hall, and hand out literature about Britain's tourist attractions."

  "So you're a kind of ambassador?" Juliana asked.

  "Yes, a kind of ambassador."

  "Cool. I never saw an ambassador in shorts before." She gave my legs a flirtatious look, handed me a key and shimmied out the door. I'm sure my legs were blushing as brightly as when they'd worn the kilt.

  "You have a thing with hotel receptionists, Paul," Alexa said. "First Boston and now here."

  "She's not a receptionist," I protested.

  To my surprise, Alexa agreed. "No, because I am not sure this is a hotel."

  Our room was actually a studio apartment, with a newly fitted kitchen. It looked as though no one had stepped inside the place since the furniture had been delivered. There were no cups, no cutlery, the fridge was empty, and there wasn't even a coffee machine.

  The balcony, though, was equipped with one of the best sea views I'd ever seen. Straight ahead was the line where the blindingly blue sky sliced into the sunlit ocean. Down a few degrees was the creamy white surf rolling in toward an almost empty beach. Closer still, in the shade of the swaying palm trees, a bunch of people dressed in only swimwear and sunglasses were playing volleyball, or rather showing off their perfect bodies while leaping around on either side of a net. The whole scene was a hymn to hedonism.

  There was only one thing to do.

  "I'm not sure an ambassador is supposed to do that," Alexa said, as I shed my shorts and began making diplomatic advances toward her. "And I don't think I am in the mood after what happened."

  It took me a second to work out what she meant. Oh yes, she was still harping on about nearly getting shot. It seemed so long ago, and so absurd compared to the sheer vibrancy of what was happening now. It was as though whatever happened to you before you arrived in South Beach didn't matter. Everything was here and now. The hedonism rubbed off on you, and you felt an urgent need to rub it on to someone else.

  "No, Paul. Can't we wait till later?"

  But Alexa was, after all, dressed only in a sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of shorts that could have been bodypaint. Gently, using all the tact required to restore amicable Anglo-French relations after the trauma of recent events, I continued my advances.

  As usual, the softly-softly approach toward France paid off, the greater good of the Entente Cordiale won the day, and soon we were giving the brand-new mirrors on the fitted wardrobe their first sight of what was probably going to be a long career of voyeurism.

  With the open balcony doors letting in a mix tape of distant surf, volleyballers' laughs, and cafe salsa, we got into the South Beach mood.

  8

  Several hours later, I found myself sitting up in bed, wondering where I was. The light had faded. The room was empty except for the sound of the street below.

  "You were dreaming," Alexa said, She'd
been sitting on our balcony. "You were saying, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'"

  "I usually am," I said.

  As soon as I'd gathered my wits, I called Suraya to find out what was what. She wasn't there, naturally enough, because it was the middle of the night in India. Instead, I got through to a guy who called himself Harry. His real name, he eventually admitted, was Hemang, and he was ecstatic to know that I was in Miami.

  "Hey, I gotta cousin there," he said, sounding more American than most of the Americans I'd met recently. "He's a Dennis."

  "A Dennis?" Was this some codename for honorary US citizens? When you got your temporary visa you were a John, and if you got your green card you were a full-blown Dennis?

  "Yeah, don't you say that in England?"

  "No, we just say you're a naturalized citizen."

  "Uh?" Hemang was confused, and so was I, so I retorted with an "Uh?" of my own.

  "I mean he's a Dennis, like a dennal practitioner, ortho-dennic surgeon or whatever."

  "Oh, a den-tiss-tuh," I enunciated.

  "Yeah!" Now he was ecstatic again.

  "OK, that's wonderful. But the thing is, I really need you to help me with something."

  "Shoot," he said. I could imagine him with his feet up on his desk, his earpiece and chin mic askew, his hands free to pump at the PlayStation on his knees.

  I told him I'd like some info about the setup between Miami City Hall and these realtors (a word I didn't have to explain to Hemang). I also asked for the names and contact info of the Scottish dancers we were going to meet. Plus, if he had them, more details about the three events tomorrow night.

  "OK, I'll get back to you with all that," he said.

  "Soon?" I asked.

  "Gimme twenny minutes," he said.

  Amazingly, he got back in only ten, and with some startling revelations. The realtors were, he told me, the sponsors of the events. They'd paid to take them over from Visitor Resources. Why a firm of real estate agents in Florida would want to sponsor a display of Scottish dancing I didn't know. It was outsourcing at its most extreme. I just hoped that a chunk of my bonus wasn't being outsourced to the realtors if they helped us to win the competition.