by John Niven
‘He was fucking weird that time we had him on the show, right?’ Dick says. We had Du Pre on as a guest artist, on season two or three, way back when. I wasn’t much involved, Dick handled all that stuff, but I heard about the endless rider requests, the usual demands that no one make eye contact with him. The separate dressing rooms for his personal chef, personal trainer, personal banker, personal llama and so forth. Standard stuff. ‘You think the rumours are true?’
‘Which rumours?’ I say.
‘Come on,’ Dick says. ‘You can’t libel the dead.’ No, I think, but you can dent their record sales. All publicity is good publicity? Not when it involves your demented self-blackened balls banging off some kid’s arse cheeks. ‘The whole fucking little boys stuff. You reckon there was anything to it?’ I think of the grainy footage, badly lit, Du Pre’s face, distorted and mad at the point of orgasm.
‘Nah, mate,’ I say, pushing my plate away. Signalling the waiter for coffee. ‘It’s all bollocks.’
Just then, a charge shoots through the room, a hushed murmur, a collective intake of breath, the air seeming to tighten around us, as if the available oxygen is being sucked out to feed something whose needs are far greater. It is something I have experienced before, when you walk into a place with someone who is very, very famous.
Dick and I turn our heads at the same time, just as a collective cheer goes up, and we see him – on the other side of the room, surrounded by those guys in the dark suits, with the bulging shoulders, making his way to his table, shaking the outstretched hands, smiling, patting shoulders.
The man. The. Fucking. Man.
He’s wearing chinos, polo and red MAGA hat, the candyfloss straw of the hair flying out beneath it. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve met everyone. I’ve been around enough famous people to know how to handle shit like this. But I find that even my heart is pounding like a fourteen-year-old boy who was half asleep in front of Fantasia when he realised Lucius’s hand was inside his pants and clutching his boner like a fucking gearstick. People are beginning to clap. ‘Holy shit …’ I whisper to Dick.
‘He does this,’ Dick whispers back. ‘He loves it.’
And, as in a dream, before I quite know what’s happening, he’s passing right by our table. We’re standing at his point, clapping along with everyone else. Grinning. He’s maybe five feet away from me, a Secret Service guy in the way. ‘President Trump,’ I shout, thrusting my hand out, raising my voice above the din. He turns to look at me – the eyes pale blue, piercing, a real, proper hit of Führer Kontakt – and, just for a second (or am I imagining this?) the president’s fixed grin seems to falter, to flicker like a bad connection as he takes in our table: Dick and me, two men, dining alone together. No families. No boilers hanging off us, making us, at best, losers, and, at worst, queers. ‘We love you in Great Britain!’ I say. He claps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Brexit, right? Brexit. Good job …’ and then, in slow motion, it’s happening: he takes my hand, skin-on-skin, four digits sliding across my palm, the thumb coming around the back, up over the knuckles, the bone-crushing pressure as he pumps it. And all at once I am filled with rage and hatred at the liberal media. Because it is clear, perfectly clear, as my regular hand is engulfed in this thing, this huge, thick-fingered paw.
Lies. All lies.
And then he’s being urged on by the Secret Service, getting swallowed up by the crowd as he moves off across the members’ dining room of Mar-a-Lago. I stare at my hand – the schoolgirl who just met the pop star. ‘Fuck me,’ I say to Dick as we slump back into our seats. ‘Did that just happen?’
TWENTY-EIGHT
The following morning I do not join Chrissy on her commercial flight back to LAX as I have some pressing business to take care of in New York. I kiss her goodbye in the lobby and take a car to Miami International and then a NetJet – a poxy, ancient G550 which I am forced to share with one other passenger, some pro golfer, but the only private flight available – to New York, where I spend a tedious but very necessary afternoon on Wall Street, in a conference room at Stern, Hammler & Gersh, surrounded by lawyers and investment bankers, all armed with P&L reports, earnings projections and cash flow statements.
The Sultan came through. It took some doing though. A shell company had to be set up first. The shell company then transferred funds to the International Bank of Cyprus. The IBC then invested the funds in several new corporations registered in the United States. These new corporations are about to lend money to me.
Do you know much about corporate financing? About reverse buyouts? Leverage? Junk bonds? Money is cheap right now. It’s not quite the crazy, golden days of the mid- to late eighties but, with the right credit line, you can buy pretty much anything. It’s all a question of when to get in and when to get out. Of identifying undervalued assets.
You need to understand this stuff to a certain extent, but don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I like this shit, unlike everyone else in this room. I yawn and fold my hands behind my head as the talk of pure money flows around me – ‘soft money … hard money … long bond curve … LIBOR … COMEX … beta rate …’
Like most of my contemporaries I made my first real cash flipping property, back in the day. You’d buy an undervalued toilet in Hammersmith, or Kensal Rise, get a squadron of Poles in, lick of paint, bit of seagrass matting, turn it and burn it at great profit and on to the next one. You did this three or four times and – bosh – a million quid in the bank, which seemed like so much money back in 1999. I got out of this racket ages ago, when Trellick’s then PA Lucy left her job to become a property developer. When the fucking secretaries are reckoning they can be players, what you have there is market saturation, my friend. See you later, Sooty.
But everything is looking good here in the conference room of SH&G. Everything is looking doable. There’s a couple of i’s needing to get dotted, a couple of t’s for crossing. And I can’t pretend that having to invest close to two hundred million of my own cash (close to all my liquid assets) isn’t making me more than a little nervous, but, assuming a couple of things go my way – and they fucking will – it’ll be a very merry Christmas indeed, Mortimer.
We take a break and I stand up at the window, drinking lukewarm coffee, looking west across Lower Manhattan, towards the Hudson, towards the sun, sinking behind where the World Trade Center used to be. I am thinking about the guys on the first plane, the only ones who knew what was coming, screaming their fucking heads off as the fat belly of the jet hunkered down over the rooftops of Queens, the glittering towers unspooling towards them as they gave it maximum ‘ALLAHU AKBAR’ in the instant that everything around them carbonised at a billion degrees. I am thinking about how anything is possible if you are prepared to go all the way.
I check my watch. I have an early, off-the-record dinner with a journalist I know at the Wall Street Journal before I fly back to LA. A couple of the tips I gave this guy before Du Pre’s accident – about how Du Pre’s upcoming tour would be cancelled, about how the company was desperately overpaying on deals like Norwegian Dance Crew – helped to drive Unigram’s stock down even further while I quietly bought large blocks of shares. I need to keep feeding him. But discreetly. This is, after all, proper insider trading now.
May
TWENTY-NINE
Quatain, Persian Gulf. Friday 19 May 2017
Late spring, gradually moving towards summer.
The temperatures in Quatain climbing into the forties.
Could he do it? Lucius wondered. If you had told him a little over twenty minutes ago when they brought the plate in that he’d soon be wondering whether or not he could finish the lot all by himself, he’d have said you were insane. But apparently you wouldn’t have been. He’d eaten nine pieces of fried chicken – just one plump, juicy leg left on the salver. He picked it up and let his teeth sink into the crisp, fat-drenched skin, a spurt of grease soaking into the thin cotton of his shirt. Well, let’s be honest, ‘shirt’ wasn’t covering it any long
er. What he was wearing here was closer to a bell tent. Granted, his mind was clearer than it had been for years. But it had undeniably come at a cost. It was incredible what giving up opiates after years of addiction would do to your appetite.
It had begun right after he’d started flushing his morning pills down the sink and passing on his evening injections. A strange, almost forgotten feeling, a keening, nagging tug down in the pit of his stomach that, at first, he naturally mistook for fear, anxiety, before he realised the malady had a simpler cause: hunger. Lucius was starving.
How he’d begun to gorge on all the things he hadn’t eaten since childhood (for many years because he wasn’t allowed them, always dieting to fit into one skintight stage outfit after another, and then, later, because his digestive system had been pummelled into shutdown by the side effects of things like, well, having a general anaesthetic every bedtime), torturing the Sultan’s team of chefs (after all, Lucius was effectively the only resident of a six-star hotel) with half a dozen or more requests every day for things like spaghetti marinara covered in cheese, mountains of mashed potatoes silky with butter, French fries by the bucketload, six-egg omelettes stuffed with onions, bell peppers and ham, and, his current favourite, endless platters of fried chicken. Then there were the desserts, consumed at night, the calming, soporific effect of these starch-and-sugar marathons helping him towards sleep in the same way the propofol had before. Key lime pies just visible under thick whipped cream, cherry and vanilla cheesecakes washed down with quarts of milk, chocolate brownies, marble cake and pavlovas. And, in between all of this, the boxes and bars of candy: Hershey bars, Snickers, Junior Mints, anything that tasted of home. So, certainly, he’d gained some weight in the last two months. A few pounds.
Actually, about eighty of them.
Five feet six inches tall and now weighing in at just under two hundred pounds, Lucius Du Pre tossed the remains of the leg onto the plate and waddled into the bathroom, where he regarded himself in the mirror.
His face, it … it had just vanished. His eyes were there all right, just two bright, black pebbles marooned in a puddle of flesh, his mouth a tiny ‘o’ somewhere below them. He washed his hands and wiped his lips, rinsing grease off them with cool water. Yes, all of this had taken its toll on his frame in the past couple of months. But the mind, the mind was sharp. Sharper than it had been for years. ‘Hah!’ Lucius barked out loud, alone in the bathroom, before adding ‘OOMF!’ and ‘GROO!’ and then a quick bark and growl session. Yes, there had been some side effects to coming off his meds as swiftly as he had (simply dumping his champagne glass full of anti-anxieties and antidepressants down the toilet every morning now), but Lucius would argue that, despite troubling lapses like the other afternoon when he had a fifteen-minute conversation about Moses with his nightstand, his mind was definitely clearer now.
And the things his mind was planning …
Three weeks ago, knowing Dr Ali would be long gone at the golf course, Lucius had waddled over to his set of rooms and had a good look around, for one thing he knew his plan would require. And, boy, had he found it. Thick rolls of dirhams stuffed into the pockets of trousers and shirts, sitting out in plain view on the dresser, on top of the TV. And then, in the bedside drawer – jackpot. Stacks of American dollars in banded wads of hundreds. It had been so long since Lucius had had any need for the stuff he was surprised to see Benjamin Franklin still on there. He’d furnished himself with several thousand dollars in cash before his wanderings took him further into Ali’s chambers, into his dressing room off the main bedroom. The black medicine bag hadn’t really been hidden, just tucked away behind a pile of shoes. In times only very recently gone by the discovery of the goodies in this bag would have constituted a very different kind of treat for Lucius, but now, already panting hard from the effort of kneeling down among the smell of leather brogues and laundered suits, it hadn’t been drugs he was looking for. He had been wondering about something else entirely. Sure enough, right down in the bottom, hidden beneath the brown tubs of barbiturates and glittering spansules of amphetamines, there it was: a passport. It had his face on it (well, the face he used to have) but the name of a Mr Fergal McCann. Fergal. What an odd name. More was to come. Tucked inside the passport, in the photo page, was a single, thin slice of plastic: a Platinum American Express. A card that also bore the name of Fergal McCann. He had returned the passport and Amex to exactly the spot he’d found them and then did the same with the medicine bag. Lucius had some work to do before he could take advantage of these finds, work he was returning to now as he set himself up in his usual spot by the windows with pen, pad and watch, his yellow-and-gold Rolex, the one with the second hand. Lucius was keen to see what kind of time his boys made today. It was usually very standard, within a minute or two every week. But there had been variations. He needed to know how often and how much. He had to be precise. He would only get one shot at this. Lucius glanced towards the mini-freezer beside his bed. He knew there was a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in there. Phish Food. Those chunky little dark chocolate minnows studded though the ice cream. Mmmm. Could he really be hungry again already?
But no time for that now. For here they came, the van rumbling up the drive. ‘BRRRR!’ he spat, clamping his hand over his mouth to silence himself. He wrote down the time and started watching the second hand. This time next week, he’d be ready …
THIRTY
My Bentley – still chirruping and gulping as the engine cools – looks incongruous in the parking lot in front of the Pasadena offices of Art Hinckley, attorney-at-law. It’s one of those mini-malls you see off the freeway: a 7-Eleven, a nail salon, a cellphone accessories store, a laundromat, a Subway. One of those places that screams ‘America’. The only other car here, parked at the far end, is a nondescript Dodge.
Also screaming ‘America’ are the expressions on the faces of Glen and Bridget Murphy as they stare at me: stunned, floored, flummoxed, looking for meaning in a situation suddenly beyond their comprehension. Hinckley himself, sitting behind his ridiculous faux-antique dark-wood-and-green-leather-inlay desk, is faring a little better at pulling off a game face. He’s wearing tinted glasses, which help to hide the anger and confusion in his eyes, but they can’t conceal the trembling rage with which he’s gripping his pen. I mean, I don’t blame them. Memorial Day is next week. They rocked up here for the 7 a.m. meeting I called (me fresh from a 5.30 a.m. stint in the gym, Hinckley bleary-eyed and badly shaved, the Murphys looking as if they might well have been up all night) expecting to pretty much be asked ‘where would you like us to send the cheque?’ and now they’re hearing all this. The three of them look like Ned Beatty, wandering around glazed and numb after he’s been gang-beasted by those hillbillies in Deliverance.
‘I’m sorry,’ Hinckley says, trying to keep his cool, ‘can you say that again?’
I cross my legs, shoot my cuffs, and repeat the statement I opened the meeting with, with great deliberation. ‘Du Pre is alive. We faked the crash. Next week, we’re bringing him back from the dead. There’s going to be a new record to follow.’
‘I … you … where is he?’
‘I’m sorry, Bridget, that’s on a need-to-know.’
‘Need to know?’ Art says.
Being the stupidest of the group, it is Glen who is roused to anger first. ‘YOU LYING FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!’ he screams. ‘WHERE’S OUR TWENTY MIL?’
‘Be quiet, Glen,’ I say softly, not taking my eyes off Artie, flicking an invisible piece of lint from my trousers. For a second I think Glen is going to go for me and part of me wants this to happen, but Bridget places a calming hand on his forearm, restraining him. I give them a moment, watching the collective wheels turn. Artie puts his pen down and sits forward. ‘You’re going to bring him back and say … what?’
‘He was thrown clear of the crash. He wandered in the mountains with amnesia for a few days before he was found by a fan. A crazed fan. A fan who kept him hostage in a cabin for months. You know – a F
ritzl-meets-Misery-type deal – before Du Pre gradually regained his memory and was able to escape his basement prison and get to a phone.’
As I speak I’m aware of the bewilderment on their faces, of how utterly mental this pitch must sound, hearing it for the first time, when you haven’t spent weeks working on it, honing it. Yeah, well, go tell George Lucas that ‘a kid living on a dead-end planet turns out to be the son of the dark ruler of the galaxy and he uses mystical powers to defeat evil’ sounds mental. I continue, staring Artie down. ‘The only number Lucius could remember was his manager’s – Lance Schitzbaul. He rang Lance, who, understandably certain his client was dead and fearing an impersonator and a scam, also not wanting to alert the media, decided to send private security to investigate. The fan-slash-captor was killed in the ensuing shootout and Du Pre was rescued. He’s heavily traumatised. Sedated. Not speaking to the media. Blah-de-blah, bish bash bosh, my old man said be an Arsenal fan.’
Silence for a moment. And then Bridget starts laughing. ‘That’s … you’re fucking insane.’
‘Why … why have you done this?’ Art asks finally.
‘Because I figured it was doable,’ I say. ‘You know what I asked myself, kids? What if Elvis really wasn’t dead? And imagine you were Tom Parker. Imagine you were RCA?’ I warm my tone up, making them feel like equals, like co-conspirators, as I get up and pace around the small office, helping myself to some tar-like black coffee from the dripping pot, the liquid making those tiny hisses as it hits the hotplate. ‘How much fucking money would you make?’
