"Has Horace got many other clients?"
"Not that I'm aware of-why?"
"So what money he makes is dependent on Otis?"
"Do you want to let me in on this or are you going to carry on being oblique?"
I looked around.
"I'll tell you later. I need to check some things first."
I had a friend back in London who was a financial journalist. He knew about all this stuff and could get the low-down on Horace. I intended to phone him as soon as it was day in London.
A couple of the guys from the Joe Blows were in the bar.The Blows were a rhythm sextet that played some very bouncy stuff. The musicians had been around for years but had struck lucky with the score to a TV show that had been a crossover hit.
Among the band-members was Otis's ex-wife Catherine, a gentle woman who played mean tenor saxophone.
I must say I was disappointed by the behavior of the musicians in the bar. I thought they would be draped over each other in a alcohol- and/or sex-induced haze. Then I realized these were the rock survivors-i. e. the dull ones. The squash players. The-yech-golfers.
"I've never used a Flymo," one was saying. "Maybe I should because I know I'm going to cut through the flex one day with my bloody thing. Can you get petrol driven ones? If the Flymo is anything like my current mower, the lead won't be long enough to get that bit at the bottom of the garden-you know, round the back of the rockery."
"What-the barbecue area? I thought that was paved?"
"No, next to there. Where the loungers are for that last bit of the day's sun. Six o'clock every evening in the summer the sun shines on there. We like to have a cup of tea there and put our feet up when I'm home, have a bit of a chin-wag. Debs, she's always planning some changes she is. She sez to me the other day she feels a Welsh dresser phase coming on."
Debs I knew was his wife, your standard rock-star wife-expage 3 girl from Penge turned baby-breeder.
"Off with the old and on with the new, eh?" the other guy said, though I wish he hadn't. I remembered seeing him in a punk band in the early eighties when he used to bite the heads off live chickens. "My Charlene is just the same"
Well, she would be-she was another ex-page 3 girl, though she was from Rickmansworth.
"Does Otis know about the death threats?" I said to Richard.
He gave me a sly look.
"D'you think we'd let him go onstage not knowing?" He grinned suddenly. "Actually it was under discussion. Horace was in agonies.Working out the losses on the tour if Otis didn't go on stage versus the losses if he wasn't around any more taking into account the royalties on the back catalogue if he kicked it."
"But there's no commercial money to be made on this gig is there? I assumed everything was for charity-you know, the drugs thing."
Richard gave me what could only be described as an oldfashioned look.
"Get real Nick. Nobody does anything for nothing. Sure money's going to the charities but nobody's going broke here. And Otis stands to make the most, which he definitely needs"
"I think Horace is skimming."
"I thought you thought that. But have you met a rock manager you couldn't accuse of that?"
"I guess"
Richard looked bored.
"What's this about Baza?" I said after a moment.
"Little bit of R & R before we hit Peru. Going up there tomorrow-it's an hour north of Bogota-then hitting the airport from there." He turned. "Ladies!"
Otis's two backing singers were standing beside us. One black, one close-cropped blonde, both beautiful.
"Nick, meet Sukie andVenus."
They nodded to me.
"How far is it from Cusco to Machu Picchu?" said Sukie, the blonde. "I was hoping to see the Nazi lines."
"Again?" Richard said.
"Nazca lines," I murmured.
"Those huge constructions that can be seen from the air?" the girl said-she had that Californian habit of turning every statement into a question. "In the shape of cows, chickens, and stuff?
"A dog, a monkey, a spider, and birds," I said.
"Whatever," she said with a pout.
Here we go again. More New Age nonsense. I knew about the Nazca lines. They'd been discovered by a German doctor who marked them out largely using a stepladder. Took her forty years, mind. She maintains they represent some sort of vast astronomical pre-Inca calendar. Personally I think it's just another example of the ways the Inca emperors got their subjects to pass the time before the invention of television.
"We've got a similar thing though much smaller in England called the Glastonbury zodiac," I continued. "You can see all the signs of the zodiac on a map of the area around Glastonbury."
"No shit,"Venus said.
"But not because they are there, just because we have a capacity for making random markers into shapes, turning nothing into something, one thing into another"
Sukie and Venus joined us. Well, Richard really. The only remark Venus made to me was when she touched my face and told me it looked sore. Even I didn't believe that was the start of anything.
Richard took over. With a few drinks inside him he was outrageously laddish with women. I was appalled. The women, depressingly, loved it.
"I heard you two like to sing in harmony," he said with a leer. I flinched. They giggled.
Otis was over the other side of the bar with Ralph. Ralph was giving him a serious talking to. Otis looked mutinous but simply nodded.
"Where's Conchita?" I said to Richard, who at that moment had an arm round each of the singers.
"Out at dinner with her band and some big shot politicians."
I drifted away from Richard and the girls, saw Otis leave the bar. I had a couple of drinks with Perry, the Rolling Stone journalist.A skinny guy in tight black jeans and T-shirt, naturally, with sinewy arms, receding long grey hair pulled back into a ponytail, scraggly beard, and a sallow face.
I abandoned him when he was tying up some theory about pop music being more important than Marx. He was practicing on me before making it into an article, I could tell.
When I left the bar I realized I was drunk. Which is, I suppose, the reason I decided to visit the dance club again.And who should I see across the other side of the bar as I made my careful progress from the door but Otis.
It was pretty dark over there but there was no mistaking his brooding look. And he was brooding.The light shining down on him made him look so intense I decided not to go over.
I looked round for Ralph, couldn't see him. Otis was approached by a trio of squealing, sultry women, including the one I'd been dancing with the night before.
I was getting some hostile looks from the men in the room and, since my body seemed to want to tilt to the horizontal, I figured I should leave. The three women were still clustered around Otis. I looked round to see if the man from last night was also here, then I left.
So it wasn't until the morning that I heard what happened.
We were meeting at ten in the bar to get the convoy to take us on our R & R. I was talking to Richard-he wasn't speaking in anything but monosyllables and I could guess why, the lucky bastard.
Ralph came into the bar. Although he clearly didn't want to speak to us, the bar was too small to avoid it.
"You see Otis?" he said.
"Not since last night down at the club he was boogieing at the other night. Great mover," I said. "Regular ole snakehips."
"Boogieing?" Richard tried the word out for himself. Frowned. "I don't think people still say that without irony, Nick. The eighties were a long, long time ago you know, kid."
"Last night?" Ralph said, ignoring Richard. "Time was this?"
"Midnight-why, has he got a curfew?"
"You saw him there?"
"Great mover," I said. "Regular ole snakehips.
"Never figured Otis for a dancer," Richard said.
"I tell you, for a man his size he can really move." I turned to Ralph. "But is there a problem?"
"Yeah there'
s a problem. He's not supposed to go out without his bodyguard. And never without using the bombproof car. He knows that."
Ralph left us without another word.
"I assumed the death threats were done with," Richard said.
"Apparently not," I said.
"I'd better check this out, too," Richard said.
I didn't see Otis, Ralph, or Richard before I was put in a minibus-excuse me, people carrier-with several other journalists and sent on my way.
We had two bodyguards with us. One was a young guy in T-shirt and denims, his gun stuck in a small holster at the back of his belt.The other, called Raoul, was around fifty and recently retired from the army where he'd been a sergeant major for twenty-five years.
It took us an hour to clear the city.We drove north, past the airport.The older bodyguard pointed out the castle on the right as we came to a large roundabout.
"A drug chief had it imported brick by brick from Spain and rebuilt here."
A mile or so farther on the left was a ranch guarded by tanks and jeep-loads of soldiers pulled up by the side of the road. The President's retreat.
The other journos and I swapped war stories from that epic battlefield, the movie and rock industries. Perry sat with his head in a book.
There were about seven vehicles in our procession, all led by the outrider, who seemed little the worse for wear after yesterday's excitement. We turned on to a dirt road and for the next very bumpy hour hurtled in and out of a series of valleys until, in the final one, we followed a river through to the Hacienda Baza.
Getting out of the car and stretching my legs, I looked in astonishment at the beautiful 400-year-old Dominican monastery. I'd been reading up on it in a brochure. It had been in the family of the owner for generations. The family had turned it first into a ranch then an exclusive hotel with rooms for just twenty people.
It was very quiet-thick stone walls, high hills all around, lush gardens in cloisters. I was sharing my room with Richard. It was big and bare-tiled floor, high groined ceiling, and a fire hearth with a canopy over it, the chimney running up inside the wall.
The veranda that ran round the inside of the cloister was walled with exotic foliage and bright flowers. I'd only been in the room ten minutes before Richard turned up. He looked shattered.
"What's happening?" I said. "Is Otis okay?"
"Well, he's alive," Richard said, dumping his bag at the bottom of one of the beds and flinging himself down. "Ralph found him passed out on his bed."
"Is there a problem?"
"The problem is what he did at the club you saw him at last night. Didn't see him get into a rumble did you?"
"Three women were being friendly if that's what you mean by a rumble."
"Only where you're concerned. One of those girls has a guy. Guy got pissed off with Otis."
"I think I know him-Otis danced with her?"
"Apparently not-not drunk enough probably. Guy makes a fuss, Otis leaves, guy leaves with his woman half an hour later, Otis is waiting."
"Oops"
"Oops is right. Otis cold-cocks him."
"Cold-cocks him? Where do you get this lingo, Richard?"
"Seventies movies. Okay-beats the living shit out of the woman away. Now this is rather foolhardy since the Colombian gent, like most of the male population of Colombia, is packing. But Otis takes his gun off him, makes him suck it-"
"Otis must have seen the same movies as you-"
"Then walks off with the gun."
"Otis told you all this?"
"Club manager. Hope it doesn't mean Otis is back on the toot. It really fucks with him"
"So what's happening?"
"Ralph is down paying off just about everybody to keep it from getting in the press, to prevent Otis being arrested-whatever you want."
"And it's working?"
"We'll know later."
Richard went to bed. I went down to the bar-another highceilinged room, the walls covered with paintings, many of them painted by our host. Catherine, Otis's ex-wife, and Beatrice were sharing a swing bench sipping cocktails on the terrace outside.
I looked across the walled garden to the hills around us.
"Fancy doing your yoga practice with me?" Beatrice suddenly said. She pointed to the garden. "It would be lovely to do it there"
Was she being risque or did she mean exactly what she said. Sadly it was the latter.
"Sure," I said. "Meet you in ten minutes."
Okay, okay, the yoga. Astanga vinyasa-power yoga in the States-brisk, gymnastic, flowing, almost constant movement, unlike any yoga you've ever seen. I've been trying for several years to get the hang of the simplest level-the Primary Seriesthough there are five levels higher.
It's hard work and you find yourself in some very unlikely positions. Sometimes at very inconvenient times.
Beatrice was supple from doing a different form of yoga so she kept up pretty well. It was my own fault that disaster struck as I tried to show off. I'd got myself in the lotus position-legs crossed, feet resting soles up against my inner thighs. Then I'd forced my arms down through the non-existent gap between my thighs and my calves-are you following this?-to place my palms flat on the ground. Then I raised myself off the ground.
Frankly I've never understood this position. Even my sort of yoga is supposed to bring inner peace, but staying in this position any length of time-any time at all come to that-was agony.
Quite aside from the cessation of the blood supply to most of the body, it was damned difficult to do. Just as I was lowering myself back to the ground I heard a commotion from the bar.
"Where's the oik who says he saw me?"
Distracted, I fell over. Beatrice, who had been watching me closely, squatted down and leaned over me, attempting to untangle my arms and legs as Otis's hulking form came round the corner. Ralph was at his side.They stopped in their tracks at the sight of Beatrice crouching over me.
Ralph pointed.
"That gentleman there."
Otis shook his head.
"Yeah, well he's just pissed off because I decked him yesterday." He raised his voice. "I should leave him like that, love, I really frigging should."
"Hi again," I said brightly. Otis came and stood on one side of me, Ralph on the other. Otis's eyes were red-rimmed.
"You the guy who claims I was out at the dance club last night?"
"You wen' without me las' night you Conchita was standing on the bar terrace. She tossed her head. I felt sure she would run the whole gamut of stereotypical Latin spitfire emotions if she had a mind.
"I didn't go out," Otis said, flicking a finger towards me. "This guy says I did but he's a journalist-you know, truthteller."
"I saw you," I protested. I felt vulnerable arguing from my trapped position. I had pins and needles in my arms and legs. Not to mention my feet.
"Thought you saw him," Ralph corrected from my right. I looked over. "Otis says he never left the hotel room."
"How you know, you had enough to drink you don't remember nothing anyway," Conchita expostulated-something I don't see every day.
"I saw you in this club downtown."
"Who was he with?" Ralph said. I glanced across at Conchita.
"Er ... three fans last I saw"
"Yeah I know about his fans," Conchita called over."Wiggle- ass types with one thing on their mind. Same thing on your mind, you asshole."
"Jesus, Conchita, can you just hold it down for five frigging minutes," Otis said wearily.
He looked at Ralph.
"I never left the hotel room," he said, but with less conviction. "And I certainly didn't punch anybody out.And what about this gun I'm supposed to have taken?You find it in my things?"
Ralph shook his head.
"You probably dumped it," he said quietly.Then he addressed me. "Did you see an altercation with the guy you had trouble with the night before?"
I shook my head-no mean feat in my current position.
"Did you drink?" Ralph s
aid. It seemed like they were going over familiar ground.
"What the fuck do you think?" Otis almost bellowed, his face reddening, a vein on his neck throbbing. "But I didn't go out last night!" He jabbed a finger at Ralph. "You told me I wasn't allowed to go out so I didn't. I stayed in my room like a good little scout. If you don't believe me check the contents of the mini-bar. As in-there ain't any."
"You did get drunk then?" Ralph said sharply.
"As a stoat. How many times do I have to tell you?"
"And you say you damaged your hand punching a wall?"
"I assume so, yes."
Otis slumped, the anger suddenly gone.
"What you mean if I was drunk how do I know what the fuck I did?" He shook his head. "I would have remembered." He looked almost pleading. "I would."
I finally saw Otis's manager at dinner. The Rock Against Drugs tour were the only guests so it was quite boisterous in what had once been a chapel. Beatrice was at a table with the rest of her band and the Joe Blows. On such occasions journalists sit below the salt. I was at the opposite end of the main table to Otis, who gave me the occasional baleful look. Richard was sitting between Sukie and Venus.
I watched Horace. He didn't talk to anybody much, just focused on his food and a large amount of red wine. Once I caught him looking at me in a thoughtful way.
I thought there might be a bit of ad hoc musicality after dinner but everyone was tired. Otis and Conchita left first. Beatrice slipped from the room when my back was turned. I suspected there was rather a lot of casual pairing off to which I was not party and definitely not privy. Richard didn't come back to our room.
I could hear the various moans and cries of pleasure across the cloister during the night. Everyone was at it except me. I didn't even have my hardwood dolphin to hug-Bridget had taken an unaccountable fancy to it and kept it close by her in her handbag.
I got up with the dawn-what the hell else was there to do? There was a mist over the hills. The hotel had horses and we'd been invited to help ourselves if we wanted a ride. My last experience of horseriding hadn't ended too well when on the Sussex Downs. I'd started a cattle stampede.
But I fancied myself as a gaucho wearing chaps riding fast across the pampas, though I wasn't altogether sure what chaps were. Pampas either, for that matter. I went to the stable block. Not a chap in sight, nor a set of those things-are they boleros?-that are two balls on each end of a rope and you chuck it and knock people out. I was probably in the wrong country for that.
Two to Tango (Nick Madrid) Page 10
