by Eden Maguire
When the song ends and you step back into the here and now, you leave a little piece of your heart with Zoran.
‘Excuse me.’ The set had ended, leaving us sighing. Zoran had made his exit but his backing group played on.
Grace and I turned towards the speaker – Spirit in the Sky, complete with war paint and dreamcatchers at his belt.
‘I’m Ezra,’ he told us. ‘My job is to check names against the list of invites.’
God, even the party stewards were extraordinary. Not stubble-headed guys in black polo shirts who need to spend more time in the gym.
‘Can you give me your names?’
‘Grace Montrose,’ Grace told him, overcome and almost stammering with embarrassment.
I was looking for an official guest list, not seeing it in his hand. ‘Tania Ionescu,’ I said with a frown.
Ezra registered the information with the slightest of nods. ‘Cool. Can you please follow me?’
Grace panicked, afraid we were about to be thrown out. ‘Did you bring the invites?’ she hissed.
‘They’re in the car.’ Personally I wasn’t worried, though I did decide to follow Grace as she trailed after Ezra. I didn’t even believe he was an official steward – more like this was his way of getting cosy with Botticelli Grace, who he’d worked out was probably the most beautiful girl there.
‘It’s OK, there’s no problem,’ he told us as he led us away from the crowd and down the side of the stage towards a high security barrier where two more conventional heavies stood guard. I saw them through the gloom – bare-armed and stocky, standing with feet wide apart and hands clasped in front of them.
‘We left our invites in the car,’ Grace began to explain. She misjudged the uneven ground and missed her footing, giving Ezra the chance to reach out and support her. He waited until she got her balance then walked on up to the nearest security guard.
‘What are we doing?’ I muttered, spotting a coil of cable and carefully stepping around it. ‘Do we really want to follow him? I mean – do we?’
‘He told us no problem.’ Grace’s white costume showed up in the dark, but I couldn’t read her expression. ‘Actually, it looks to me like he’s getting us backstage passes!’
‘No way!’
‘Yeah – look.’
Security guy number one beckoned us then asked us to hold out our wrists while he stamped a number on to our skin. Grace’s read twenty-two, mine was twenty-three. As soon as it was done, the guard stood aside to let us through the gap in the wire fence.
‘Zoran would like to meet you,’ Ezra told us but looking only at Grace. ‘He asked especially.’
Confused didn’t cover it. Dumbstruck maybe.
‘I guess you have questions,’ Ezra invited.
We hurried to keep up with his long stride. ‘The main one would be “why?”’ I was ahead of Grace, crossing an area of flat, smooth asphalt painted with a giant yellow circle – the famous Brancusi helipad. Why had the rock legend chosen to invite two unknowns into his inner circle?
Our native guide didn’t answer this one, only strode on towards a cluster of dark, state-of-the-art buildings set into the steep, rocky hillside. ‘Curious, huh?’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It took me a long time to find you among that crowd. I guess I asked two hundred girls for their names before I picked the right ones.’
‘In what way “right”?’ With Grace all set to follow Ezra between sliding glass doors into one of the main blocks, it was down to me to keep on firing the questions.
Once again he ignored me. ‘I had most people’s pictures off Facebook, but no one is easy to identify in costume, that was the problem. Especially you, Tania – the mask covers most of your face.’
‘It’s a bird mask. She’s a bird of paradise,’ Grace informed him sweetly, stepping through the doors into a hallway the size of a tennis court. The floor was white marble, the walls lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. ‘Cool, huh? Her boyfriend gave her the idea.’
Ezra broke his stride. ‘Boyfriend?’ he checked.
‘Orlando,’ Grace explained. ‘He’s in Dallas. He couldn’t make it.’
Our guide nodded and walked on. ‘What about you, Grace? Did you come alone?’
‘Jude’s sick. He has asthma. Smoke really gets to him.’
‘That’s tough. Those guys are missing a big event.’ We’d reached the far end of the hall, where Ezra pressed an elevator button. ‘What did you think of the music?’ he asked us.
‘Out of this world,’ Grace told him.
I was silent. More questions had crowded in. Or rather, new suspicions. True, I had no direct experience of the glam but tacky world of groupiedom. But I’d read about it in magazines since junior high and it felt like this was what we were being pulled into – big rock star uses a sidekick to select hot chicks for post-gig entertainment. Girls are more than happy to cooperate. If nothing else, they can sell their sordid story to the highest tabloid bidder.
‘And you?’ Ezra asked me.
‘I was kind of surprised to see him onstage. And I was wondering – is this a dry run for Zoran’s big comeback tour?’
Ezra raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m only the messenger. What do I know?’
The elevator doors slid open and we stepped inside. There were no up buttons, only two to go down. The doors slid shut. My stomach lurched a little as we dropped underground.
‘Did he ask you to bring other guests to meet him, or are we the only ones?’ I checked. The lift stopped and I reminded myself to pay attention to the route we took, in case the need arose for a quick exit.
‘You’re special but not that special,’ Ezra teased, appraising us at close quarters. He checked out my bird mask with its purple plumage, my body-hugging turquoise and gold feathering, then the silky cords bound around Grace’s flimsy white shift, her flat gold sandals and bare feet.
‘So is it a best-costume thing?’ Grace asked, suddenly self-conscious. She’s a sweet girl but I don’t really see her making it to the top as a psychologist. Meanwhile, I suspected I might be showing too much upper thigh. And was there an unintentional bondage thing going on in Grace’s costume? I saw for the first time that this was the way it might look. Realizing there was nothing to be done about the thigh problem, I did manage to hitch up my bodice to show less cleavage.
‘No, it’s not a best-costume thing,’ Ezra said with an enigmatic smile. The elevator jolted to a stop. ‘Follow me,’ he instructed.
‘Do we have a choice?’ I muttered.
‘Don’t get lost.’
Actually, this was good advice. I mean, we were underground in a sort of dimly lit maze. There was a main corridor with identical passages leading off and really no chance of keeping track of where we were. Anyhow, there were distractions in the shape of amazing Jackson Pollock-style drip paintings on the walls, alcoves screened by gauzy drapes and glimpses through open doors of sitting rooms with animal-skin rugs, white leather sofas draped with fur throws, even a room with a giant cinema screen.
‘Zoran built right into the mountain.’ Ezra had stopped checking us out and was transformed into the complete tour guide. He was so good at it that I even began to forget that he was dressed like Geronimo. ‘He worked alongside the architect every step of the way. For instance, he specified special infrared lighting throughout to compensate for the lack of natural daylight. And of course building into the rock gives him maximum privacy.’
‘Like Bill Gates.’ Grace must have read that somewhere. ‘His place is built into the hillside and it overlooks a lake.’
I doubted that Bill Gates had tracks from the Heavenly Bodies album piped through his entire house, which is what we were experiencing as a background to Ezra’s tour. And I guessed that his taste in decor didn’t include this row of primitive carved masks that scared the crap out of you with their staring eyes, bones through their noses and straggling black locks of real human hair. I shuddered as we walked on by.
‘Bought from a museum in Mexic
o just before it closed down,’ Ezra informed us, picking up my reaction. ‘They represent Aztec gods. This is Tepeyolohtli, god of the interior of the earth. Appropriate, huh?’
I believed the Tepeyo … thing without question. Like I said, I was in a hurry to leave them behind.
We moved along the corridor and into a new track – the one called ‘Spirits’, which made it to number one in the singles charts – about loving and losing and the power of the mind to keep love alive even after death. Zoran’s final album contained more spiritual stuff than I’d realized. And this track used high woodwind instruments, probably Mexican or South American pipes, with the usual guitar and keyboard more in the background. Anyway, it was weird how they overlapped – the masks on the wall and this particular song.
‘Are you ready to meet the great man?’ Ezra asked, pausing at a glass screen through which we could see a small room with plain white walls and minimalist furniture, no rugs on a polished wooden floor and green-tinted strip lighting concealed behind cornicing that ran the length of all four walls.
I thought this was strange too – that a guy with all these millions should make his sitting room look like the interior of a hospital.
Grace nodded while I frowned. What in the world have we walked into? I still wondered.
‘Nervous?’
Grace nodded. ‘This doesn’t happen. My head’s spinning.’
‘It’s OK to feel that way.’ Ezra did his best to ease us into the situation. ‘Just try to mingle, wait for Zoran to make the first move.’
‘Mingle?’ Didn’t it usually take other people to achieve this? And what kind of first move exactly? I peered through the screen at the clinical, empty room.
‘This way.’ Ezra took an unexpected turn right, quietly singing the words to ‘Spirits’ as we walked on – ‘Love lives on, it never dies/ My love stays with you, there are no goodbyes …’ until the corridor opened up to a vast underground room as different from the hospital waiting room as you can imagine.
For a start, this space was crowded with maybe thirty party-goers all in fancy dress, a mixture of boys and girls. And it was dimly lit by wall lights that glowed yellow from ornate gold brackets, so it took me a while to pick out Aaron and Holly. Actually, it was the silver helmet that did it.
‘You too, huh?’ She sped across the room on her winged heels. ‘They picked you to join the inner circle!’
‘How long have you and Aaron been … mingling?’ I wanted to know, relaxing a little now that I saw normal guys from Bitterroot among Zoran’s ‘special’ guests.
‘Maybe fifteen minutes.’ She pointed to Ezra, who had taken Grace to a small bar in the corner of the room and was offering her an iced drink. ‘We were picked out of the crowd by the same guy as you. Look – the cool one who’s hitting on Grace right now.’
‘Don’t worry, she already told him about Jude,’ I said, practically biting my own tongue off when I realized how naive that sounded.
Holly’s eyebrows hit her hairline then she passed quickly on. ‘So, how unreal is this. This is a party within a party and we actually get to meet the host!’
‘Totally weird,’ I agreed. ‘How did he choose his special guests, do you know?’
‘Pretty much stuck a pin in the list – that’s what I heard.’ Holly’s glance shot restlessly around the room. Like everyone else, she was holding her breath until the great man appeared. Meanwhile, her enthusiasm bubbled over.
‘Have you seen the dudes he has working for him?’
‘Besides the dreamy dreamcatcher? No.’
‘So look over by the inner door. Check out the guy with the Aztec necklace and the eagle wings.’
I looked and saw another tall, semi-naked figure wearing a feathered cloak over one shoulder, a black loincloth and a collar of braided gold. ‘I see him.’
‘Lewis. He’s the god of youth. See those football-player thighs. And the one over there, with the beaked helmet and eagle wings – Daniel. He’s some kind of sun god.’
‘Yeah, I get the theme,’ I muttered, hardly bothering to look. Zoran and his team obviously had a thing for Aztecs and Native Americans. I wondered if the man himself would be in costume when he finally made his big entrance. Meantime, I spotted Grace and Ezra moving away from the bar towards Lewis, the god of youth.
It was then, while I was looking in the opposite direction, that the inner door opened and Zoran appeared.
It was as if someone had flicked off the sound switch. Silence fell, and all heads turned towards the costumed figure in the doorway.
Here’s my second in-the-flesh impression of Zoran Brancusi, this time from close up: he’s even taller than you imagine, maybe six feet five inches, with hair cropped close to his skull and no spare flesh to soften the angles of his face and jaw. The skin is taut over the bones, the eyebrows flat and heavy over dark, glittering, heavily lashed eyes. So it isn’t height, the smoothness of his skin, or even the headdress of black feathers rising like a Mohican plume over the smooth dome of his skull that holds your attention, but the strength of his gaze.
We stood transfixed, waiting for him to walk among us.
He worked the moment, looking sharply from one guest to another, unsmiling, eyes darting here and there. Like everything else about him, his costume was extraordinary – the black feathered headdress, the lithe, bare torso, the angel-wing tattoo on his left arm, the fringed leather trousers and bare feet.
Then low music broke the silence, Zoran took two steps forward and drew us towards him like iron filings to a magnet.
‘Hi,’ he said, still observant, only nodding his head as kids clustered round. ‘Hey, how are you doing? Great to meet you. Hi.’ He spoke but he was constantly on the lookout for members of his team who had organized the party within the party. When he spotted dreamcatcher Ezra, he gestured for him to bring Grace to his side and then he beckoned Daniel the sun god and apparently gave him the order to comb the room until he found someone in particular.
I wasn’t prepared for that someone to be me and so acted pretty dumb when sun god eventually came to fetch me.
‘There must be some mistake,’ I mumbled, with Holly shoving me from behind.
‘You’re Tania Ionescu, right?’ Daniel said.
‘Yeah but Zoran doesn’t know me. Why is he asking to see me?’
The go-between looked me straight in the eye and shrugged.
‘OK, I get it – you’re only the messenger,’ I muttered. My heart was racing, my palms sweating.
‘Just follow, OK?’ As he turned, Daniel’s eagle wings brushed my shoulder and for a split second I had the image of him actually soaring across a pure blue sky. I saw his cruel, curved beak, his huge wingspan, heard the beating of wings. I was his prey, cowering below. ‘Follow,’ he said again.
And sun god took me to meet Zoran.
3
It was a lonely walk, pulse racing, knees weakening. I felt like a moth metres away from a scorching flame.
‘Tania Ionescu,’ sun god said as he delivered me to the master then quietly backed out of range.
‘Ionescu,’ Zoran repeated.
‘I-O-N-E—’ My gut reaction was to spell my name, like always.
Zoran cut me off with a nod. ‘You’re from Romania.’
‘My dad,’ I corrected. ‘I was actually born here.’
‘A citizen of the United States.’ The eyes were fixed on my face, the voice was mostly expressionless though I thought I picked up a small hint of amusement here. ‘So where in Romania were your dad’s family?’
‘In Bucharest.’
‘During the Ceauşescu regime?’
I nodded. ‘Dad escaped with his family and came here in eighty-six.’
‘And remained.’ The gaze stayed on me, pinning me to the spot. ‘I guess he could go back home now.’
‘I guess.’ The legend talked banal family stuff like anyone else – how bizarre – while fellow guests jostled for his attention.
A girl held out a pe
n, bared her arm and begged for an autograph. ‘But he married an American?’ Zoran asked.
I nodded. ‘He says that here feels like home now. He reads American history.’
How many gawky, geeky, lame remarks can one girl make in the space of an evening? Keep on counting.
‘I left the country when I was five years old,’ Zoran told me. ‘My family spent time in the former Czechoslovakia. After my dad was assassinated, my mom and I kept on moving west – Switzerland, Spain, eventually Mexico.’
Assassinated is not a word you expect to be dropped into casual party conversation. It throws you off balance and begs a thousand questions, which I somehow couldn’t shape up into proper sentences. ‘Jeez, I’m sorry,’ I breathed inadequately.
He shook his head. ‘It happened a long time ago. I don’t really remember my father. And that kind of childhood – always moving on – it gives you an independence, a strength. I guess what I’m saying is that I learned early on not to need people.’
‘I guess.’ A few gossip-mag details flitted through my head – the fact that Zoran had a zillion rock chick girlfriends through the years but had never married or had children, that he owns homes in New York, Italy and the Bahamas.
‘I’m a wanderer, born and bred. But the counter side of that is that I’ve developed a strong nostalgia for my homeland.’ Zoran steered me through the crowd, ignoring the bustle and clamour around us, making sure his stewards kept the autograph hunters at bay.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Ezra and Grace were following in our wake.
‘It’s highly romantic and completely illogical,’ Zoran continued. ‘Here am I, living this rootless, privileged existence, achieving what everyone would recognize as the impossible American dream, but still yearning to be in contact with little old Romania, to be part of a big family, to know the language, the culture of my forefathers.’
I nodded, flattered by the confession, by his assumption that I was on the same wavelength, that I was even worth talking to. I mean, he was way up there; I was nobody. By the way, unlike my dad’s, Zoran’s English was perfect. Maybe a little formal and quaint for a rock star, but grammatically right on.
