Merde Happens

by Stephen Clarke

  "What a great welcome," I said, suddenly eager to kiss up as much as possible.

  "Yeah, but you got to get your anorak and kilt on. We can't do anything without the logos. Contractual obligation."

  A porter heaved my bag in through one of the doors, and I changed into my stage costume. As soon as the anorak was on my back, Larry jabbed me on the upper arms, not to vaccinate me against gambling addiction but to add a couple of stickers to my collection. One was the letter representing a famous hamburger restaurant, the other a full-face ad for a pop diva who had taken up residence at one of the resorts and was charging a fortune for twice-nightly run-throughs of her old songs.

  "Each time you go into one of the resorts, you'll wear the appropriate baseball cap," Larry said.

  "Right." Soon they'd be tattooing logos onto my face.

  I went to reenact my arrival for the cameras, hosted by an insanely welcoming Candy, and when I walked back out to the parking area, followed by my entourage of film technicians, she took my arm and pulled me toward the limo. The whole taxi line was watching now. It must have looked as if I was about to get the sort of in-transit service that even the world's sexiest airlines can't offer.

  5

  At first, I got a Manhattan flashback. I was in the taxi again, leaving the famous skyline behind and heading out to the Bronx.

  The tall, pulsing lights of the Strip swept past, and I asked why we weren't stopping.

  "Relax," Larry said. "We got you in the coolest place in town."

  We drove north for thirty champagne-filled minutes. I reclined my leather seat and listened only half-attentively as Larry and Candy ran through the list of stuff I was going to be doing over the next couple of days. Most of it sounded like a beefed-up version of the appearances I'd done in New Orleans. I just had to put on my uniform and smile for the cameras. Much less stressful than setting up a tea party or doing the Highland Fling.

  I was tired now, and let things flow over me. The voices, the hum of the engine, the lights outside the windows, and the bubbles in my throat. I thought how stupid it was of Alexa to drop out of all this. If she'd stuck in there with me she'd be riding in the world's longest limo through the city that is a kind of distillation of America. All the neon, the swank, and the money concentrated in one place. She wanted to make a film about America and here I was, getting filmed covered in logos. It didn't get more American than this.

  And yet she'd chosen to give up and stay with a pair of arty Floridians and an ethnically confused Bostonian. A typically French thing to do, I decided. Duck out when the going got tough, stay cocooned in a safe environment, and miss out on the real action.

  Although maybe it was better that way, a logical voice told me. How easy would it be to win the competition with a French girlfriend in tow? She would, at this very moment, be hassling me about her photos on the Visitor Resources website, forcing me to choose between doing what she wanted and going all out to earn my bonus and keep my share in the tearoom.

  My head was starting to tell me things that my heart didn't want to hear.

  The limo turned into a winding driveway and stopped outside a grand hotel entrance, monopolizing the whole valet parking zone. A young guy in a porter's costume came over, wondering which door to open. He took off his sunglasses and tried to peer in through the tinted windows. Finally, Candy solved his problem by stepping out.

  I followed her and looked up at a kind of five-story hacienda, a building apparently designed by a poor Mexican immigrant who struck lucky on the slot machines and decided to unite his whole village in one giant farmhouse.

  The doormen ushered me in, but I had to wait for the TV crew to film my delight at setting eyes on the hotel. Like the star I now was, or at least like an exhausted, half-drunk traveler, I let my entourage and the hotel staff flurry around me, and did nothing but smile and say hello until I found myself in the middle of a suite that was bigger than most of the apartments I've ever lived in.

  There were doors leading off in all directions, an ocean of deep golden carpet, and, as a centerpiece, a table covered in a small banquet. Bottles of wine and beer, a whole chicken, a bowl of fruit, salads, wraps, silverware, and a tankard of iced water with yet another bottle of champagne bobbing there like a giant green iceberg.

  How quickly stars get jaded, I thought, as I ignored the champagne and made for one of the three queen beds, pausing only to pop a strawberry in my mouth as a kind of nightcap.

  "Don't get comfortable, you got work to do."

  Larry Corelli was standing over me, crooking a thumb toward the door.

  6

  "Hey, that's not fair," I said.

  From the shocked look on the dealer's face, I could tell that it wasn't polite to imply, even obliquely, that the blackjack game was in any way rigged.

  "Not fair, sir?" she asked. She was a small Asian woman with a silky waistcoat and a black bow tie. Her hair was gelled into a helmet around her head, as if to protect her from gamblers who might try to knock her out and steal her rack of chips. She looked toward Larry for support. He was standing behind me, out of camera shot.

  "Cut, guys," he told the TV crew. He put a heavy hand on my anoraked shoulder. "What's the problem, Paul?"

  I showed him my cards.

  "I won, right? Twenty. The dealer got nineteen, and these two guys had only sixteen and seventeen. I won."

  "Yeah?"

  "So why don't I get all the money? How come the dealer gets to keep their stakes? I won ten dollars but she wins— what was it? Ten each?" I asked the two guys at the table with me, a fresh-faced blond kid who looked so young that he'd been carded before he could order a beer, and an old black guy with a halo of gray curls and a fistful of rings. They nodded noncommittally. Like I said, it wasn't polite to argue. "I won, but I get ten and the dealer gets twenty. It's not fair."

  The hand on my shoulder got heavier, and the voice got huskier.

  "Yeah, Paul, but if they'd bet a hundred dollars and beaten you, you wouldn't have had to pay their winnings, right?"

  It took me a second to work this out.

  "Oh, right."

  "And it's not your money, anyway."

  This was true. Larry had brought a pocketful of chips as props for our filming.

  "Still doesn't seem like very good odds, though. Just doubling your stake."

  In reply, Larry simply breathed out noisily, and for once I was glad to be wearing a kilt. Without its celebrity status, I got the feeling I might have been leaving the casino with bootprints on my backside.

  "Let's go shoot some craps," Candy chipped in. "That's fun."

  She took my arm and led me across the crowded gambling hall. It stretched in all directions, as far as I could see. Dealers were standing at card and roulette tables opposite customers of all ages, colors, and sizes, who shared one thing in common—the intense look of someone watching a pair of pandas to see if they will breed. The pandas in this case being their chips, which were in just as much danger of extinction.

  In a ring surrounding the tables were terraces of brightly lit slot machines, being fed by gamblers sitting on barstool-type chairs. There was no noise of cascading quarters, though, because this place had been modernized, and the machines took only notes. At one end of the hall was a cinema-like area of seating by a bank of TV screens. Customers were watching every type of sporting activity known to man. Except cricket and petanque, of course.

  Lots of people were smoking, but you couldn't smell a thing.

  "The air extractors must be fantastically strong," I said to Candy as a woman at a slot machine waved her arm in frustration and almost burned my eye out.

  "Yes, and they pump oxygen in," she said. "It helps people to concentrate."

  "And stops them getting tired and going to bed," I added. I had no idea what time it was. There were no clocks, no windows, and the dim light seemed to be set at a permanently unobtrusive level. You could have gambled all night and not noticed that it was pointless paying for a
hotel room.

  "Uh, Candy?" Larry was just behind us, smiling as if his cheek muscles had been strained in a bubble-gum-chewing contest. He pulled her to one side and murmured down into her hair. She nodded assent and returned to my elbow.

  "Apparently they don't pump oxygen in," she told me. "It's just very efficient air-conditioning."

  "Right."

  Seemed Larry had had a discreet word about trade secrets.

  "Where in England do you live?" she asked me.

  "Paris."

  She laughed and gave me a playful poke in the ribs.

  "I love Paris."

  "You've been there?"

  "Yes, when I go home I sometimes stop over."

  "Home?" I looked down at her chest. Not to get an eyeful of her cleavage, but to see her name badge. Everyone working in the city seemed to have a badge with their name and hometown on it, presumably so that visitors could tell if their dealer or waiter was from their own hometown and tip them extra. Candy's and Larry's both said "Las Vegas."

  "I'm from Romania," she said. "Foreigners get badges saying 'Las Vegas.'"

  I'd thought her accent was South American. I complimented her on her English, and she told me that she'd come over five years earlier to find a job in a hotel. She'd worked her way up from chambermaid to waitress, and then Larry had spotted her and taken her on at his press office.

  "I am buying my apartment, and I have seen a little house I want. You can get on in this country, in this city," she said. "All you need is ambition, energy, and good communication skills." In her case, the communication was not only verbal but very visual.

  "Where you live in Paris?" she asked.

  I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I still had an address chez Alexa. Yes, be positive, I told myself.

  "The Bastille, and before that the Marais," I said.

  "The Marais—that's the gay area, right?" She looked down at my skirt.

  "Yes," I said. "I'd be pretty popular if I went there now."

  She was the only one paying any attention to the kilt, though. There were so many weirdly dressed freaks, and the waitresses had to glam up so much, that one guy with bare legs didn't even warrant a turned head.

  I was given a pair of dice and told to throw them. My protests that I didn't understand the game cut no ice with Larry. He placed a few chips for me on the high-sided table and told me to roll. A circle of customers watched me intently.

  "Whatever happens, you cheer, OK? You just won a fortune."

  I blew on my hand like they do in the films and threw the dice against the far end of the table. They came to rest among the piles of chips, and I cheered. Other people nodded for some reason, and began to bet. A few of them egged me on, though I had no idea what I was being egged on to.

  I threw again, the dice bounced and rolled, and when everything settled down, most of the other players groaned. It seemed impolite to sound pleased by their misfortune, but I did as Larry asked and cheered as if my horse had just come in after I'd mortgaged my house for stake money.

  "You can edit out die others, right?" Larry asked—or told—the sound guy who had been holding his furry lollipop mic over die table.

  "Yeah, we got him separately on a radio mic," die guy said.

  "Good." Larry picked up die dice and replaced them on die table. "Get a close-up," he told the cameraman. He made sure a number was showing. I couldn't see which.

  "Did I lose?" I asked.

  "Yeah," Larry said. "The come-out roll was seven, so the don't bets lost."

  "Of course." Can't we try the slot machines now? I wanted to ask. I'll be able to understand three cherries.

  "What's up next?" Larry asked Candy.

  She checked her list and grinned.

  "Wax," she said.

  The hairs on my legs stood on end, trying in vain to run for cover up my kilt.

  7

  Maybe it was die high doses of oxygen I'd been breathing, but I was still wide awake when they dropped me back at die hotel at about two in the morning. And my freshly detoxed brain was sifting out all sorts of poisonous doubts about the crap (and craps) I'd been asked to do.

  I calculated the time*difference and put a call through to Suraya, who had recently had lunch with her scooter-owning neighbor in a chic, dimly lit restaurant and was worried in case her father should find out about her torrid thali session.

  I eventually managed to drag her attention back to the job, and double-checked that my recent kilt-and-anorak-wearing activities had been officially OK'd by London. I didn't have any more "visit Britain" literature to give out, and no one in London or India seemed desperate to send me any.

  Suraya said she thought London was "totally at one with me," but put me through to Tyler anyway. I got the feeling that she needed some quality time alone with her text messages.

  Tyler had just got into the office, but he was very chirpy. I wondered whether Visitor Resources hadn't taken to pumping pure oxygen through their air-conditioning. Or cocaine.

  "The breakdown's not a catastrophe at all," he reassured me. "You don't need the Mini till L.A. Everything's going fine."

  "But it's all getting less and less British," I told him. "In the past twenty-four hours, I've promoted Louisiana shrimps, Mississippi riverboats, Las Vegas casinos, and a nationwide chain of American hotels. The most British thing I've done is kiss the Queen."

  "What?"

  "At Madame Tussaud's here. It's set up so you can pose with the waxworks and pretend you're famous. People were snogging actors and dry-humping singers, even the dead ones."

  "You didn't hump the Queen?"

  "No. To tell the truth, most people were doing American hugs—you know, where you put your arms around someone and keep your genitals at a polite distance."

  "But even without genital contact, one doesn't hug the Queen." He sounded in an implausibly jovial mood today. Perhaps it was Ecstasy they were piping in.

  "No, I had to lass her, though. And they told me to put my tongue in her ear."

  "What? I hope you didn't leave it there."

  "No. It tasted of wax. Appropriate, really."

  Tyler almost giggled. This wasn't like him at all. It was downright worrying.

  "Don't you mind?" I asked. "I'm meant to be promoting British tourism, and all I seem to be doing these days is showing off my calves and wearing foreign logos."

  He made a sound like a beer can opening.

  "Pfff. We're global now, aren't we? The whole world's going global. Even America."

  "True." Though America always seems to stay American, despite all the Korean cars and Spanish radio stations. The same way that France stays French, whatever the scaremongers try to say about the invasion of McDonald's and ; Starbucks. "But what am I doing here, then? The voting ceremony is in a few days' time. Aren't I meant to be securing Las Vegas's vote?"

  There was a slightly embarrassed silence on the other side of the Atlantic.

  "I'll tell you what you're doing," he finally said. "You're making money. This will be the first campaign we've ever kept in the black, and with the new branded-entertainment deal, we're on target to—"

  "Branded what?"

  "Branded entertainment. It's what you're doing, apparentry. Getting paid to stand about in key places while someone films or photographs you. The logos might be foreign, but the kilt's British. And the money's coming back here." He blabbered on about creating a new economic model for government campaigns.

  "Hang on, though. There's something not quite right here." My problem wasn't with making money. I'm all for that. But I didn't see how all the logo-wearing tied in with the campaign to get Americans to vote for Britain and, yes, to win me my bonus when we came home with the World Tourism trophy,

  I told him this, straight.

  "Oh, don't worry," he said. "They're all Americans, so they'll vote for the most famous guy. Vegas included. Just think, you might become a waxwork."

  8

  I lay back, waiting for a late breakfast
to be delivered to my suite. Candy had called and told me I had the morning off, and I was making the most of it in the comfort of a gently bubbling whirlpool bath.

  I picked up the bathroom phone extension and decided to see how things were going down south. I got through to Juliana, who told me they'd fetched the Mini the previous evening and had set off for Vegas immediately. They were already well past Dallas.

  "Why didn't you wait till morning?" I asked.

  "No way I was going to spend another night in that shack." I heard her shiver. "Hey, Jake wants a word with you."

  Jake came on, asked me how things were going, and sounded very pleased with himself. I guessed it wasn't just because the Cajun guys had agreed to set his translations to music.

  "OK," I said, "answer yes or no. You finally did the deed with Juliana, right?"

  "Yes, man, oh yes . . ."

  "Hey!" Juliana was protesting in the background. "I know what you guys are talking about." She grabbed the phone back. "Yes, Paul, we did sleep together. And if you add up all the dates and half dates we had, it easily comes to three, so don't go thinking I'm some woman of easy virtue, OK?" I promised I wouldn't dream of it. "Oh, and . .. you heard from Alexa?" She sounded embarrassed by the transition from women of easy virtue to my supposed girlfriend.

  "No." The tone of my voice told the whole story.

  "Well, hang in there, we'll be with you tomorrow."

  While we were speaking, I'd noticed a red light flashing on the hotel phone, among all the autodial buttons. Seemed I had a message.

  Or two.

  The first was from Elodie. She was "in town," she said, as Americans love to do, and was going to meet up with me the following evening. Oh yeah? Not if I can help it, I thought. "I've cleared it with Larry," she said, as if anticipating my excuse. How the hell did she know about Larry? And how did she know where to find me? Stupid questions. She knew everything. She proved this by signing off with "Oh, and congratulations for getting to Vegas. I hear that your Mini didn't make it. You should have chosen a Renault. Much more dependable."