by John Niven
‘If you got away with it …’ Bridget says.
‘Got away with what?’ I say.
‘If no one finds out, like, the truth?’ Glen says.
That stupid fucking word again.
‘So what you’re here to ask,’ Art says, getting to it, ‘the reason you’re finally telling us all this, is “will we play ball?”’
‘Yep.’ I’d rather they did play ball, for now. I am mindful of the fact that they have that footage stashed away somewhere. That could definitely interfere with Du Pre’s glorious comeback. If they don’t play ball, trust me, they really don’t want to meet the consolation prize waiting for them in the parking lot.
‘What’s in it for us if we don’t get straight on the phone to every newspaper and TV station in the country the moment you walk out that door?’ Artie says.
I reach into my jacket and throw a CD onto the desk. Artie picks up the copy of Remembrance by Lucius Du Pre. ‘Look at the back,’ I say. ‘Down at the bottom.’ His eyes track down and find the words ‘Executive Producer: Steven Stelfox’.
‘That’ll be the three of you. I’m offering you a credit and points on everything Du Pre does after the comeback. There’ll be the new album, then another greatest hits, then who knows what? There’ll be touring and merchandise and product tie-ins.’ I perch on the edge of Art’s desk and sip coffee. ‘I’m offering you guys a piece of the pie across a 360-degree deal that will make hundreds of millions of dollars in the next few years.’ I’m kind of free-forming at this point, but so what? ‘You want, what, twenty million dollars? You know what? Given the fact that the only thing the American public has so far proved resistant to forgiving is getting caught with your actual cock up a child’s arse, given the leverage you have, I’m stunned you’re aiming so low. Because let me tell you something about being rich – it costs a lot of fucking money. Here …’ I throw my chequebook onto the desk. ‘I’ll write you a cheque right now for twenty mil. I can write you that on my fucking current account. So you’ll get what? Six and a half mil each plus change? I’m assuming you don’t want to go and live in Costa Rica? Wanna stay here in LA, right? So, Artie, I’m guessing you’ve already got a scheme in place to set up a little company, Black Mail Inc. or whatever, make the three of you directors –’ Artie says nothing – ‘declare the money “fees for professional services”, pay the IRS the minimum you can get away with and keep on rocking? Right? Great –’ Glen goes to say something – ‘Don’t interrupt me, Glen. So with some decent accounting you pay twenty-five to thirty per cent in taxes, leaving you with about four million each. You buy a nice house, move out of that shitbox of yours, right?’ I slap Glen on the shoulder. He glares at me. ‘There’s a couple of million gone, minimum. You’ve got two million each. Then you start with all the flying first class, staying in nice hotel suites, shopping at Barneys, putting little Connor into a good school, all that crap. You know what? You’re broke in three years. And what are you going to do then? I’m guessing you don’t have another kid who a rich celebrity has chosen to use as a human spunk bucket. Trust me – a few million dollars is not rich any more, guys …’
I sit back down and light a cigarette.
A moment while Artie looks at his clients. I smoke and watch the three of them. Trellick thought this meeting, my whole ‘full and frank’ strategy, was an incredibly bad idea, but I have no doubt as to the outcome.
Well, I say ‘full and frank’ but, of course, there’s full disclosure and there’s full disclosure. There are still certain things that, for these guys, will remain on a need-to-know basis. They do not need to know, for instance, that yesterday I bought another half a million shares of Unigram stock. They do not need to know that the shell companies SH&G set up with the Sultan’s money have also been quietly buying up Unigram shares, shares they will sell to me when the timing is just right, shares that will add up to a stockholding position that, when combined with Trellick’s block, will present a very compelling picture. And the reason I do not doubt the outcome of this meeting? Because I think I’ve divined the characters of the participants correctly. Art – the failed music lawyer. Glen – the failed agent. Bridget – the failed actress. Forget about the money, these people want what every fool out there wants. They want to be part of the most beautiful thing America ever created: the entertainment industry. They want to be on the inside, they want to see their names among the credits and in the trades. They want to get good tables in restaurants and have people whispering behind their menus, saying shit like – ‘Oh, those guys over there work with Lucius Du Pre.’ They want to be players.
‘Look, we, we’re going to need a moment …’ Artie says.
I wander outside and yawn and stretch in the morning light while I check emails on my phone. It’s just after 7.30 and this dismal stretch of southern California is beginning to come to life. Lights are going on up and down the main drag, in offices, in coffee shops, in a Jiffy Lube. Soon these buildings will be full of people who will work there all day long for pocket change before returning to their toilets in Pasadena, Glendale, Orange County and other places – poorer, even more terrible places – that I will never know about. It feels good to stand here watching the rush hour begin and to know you will never be part of it. That you will never eat a three-dollar burrito for lunch, gulping it down in your allotted half-hour in some dismal canteen, standing on the oil-stained cement floor of a garage, sitting at your desk trapped within the grey, open-plan honeycombs of a maze you did not design. Here they come now in their green Hyundais, their brown Camrys, their yellow Mazdas, the traffic sweeping by on the road, sending wind gusting into the lot, catching the fast-food wrappers, soda cups, bits of newspaper and cigarette ends, the garbage chasing itself around in churning circles, much like what is happening behind me where, through the glass window that says ‘A. Hinckley, Attorney-at-Law, Pro Bono work considered’, I can just hear the raised voices as the three partners attempt to reach an agreement. How very out of their depth they are, how thin the ice they are standing on is, and, below the ice, waiting to tear them to pieces, the sharks. Terrible sharks with rusted hypodermics for teeth, the chambers of the syringes filled with plague, anthrax and AIDS. This thought feels familiar to me, like I had it before, a very long time ago. Across the lot, that consolation prize sits at the wheel of the Dodge, drinking a styrofoam cup of coffee and reading a newspaper, looking for all the world like a regular guy waiting for the laundromat to open up. Terry glances my way as he turns his page. Experience has taught me that it’s better to have an ex-SAS mercenary on hand and not need him than it is to need him and not have him. Will he be needed this fine morning in Pasadena? While I would certainly draw no small amount of pleasure from watching Hinckley, Bridget and Glen beg for their lives before Terry pulled the trigger on his silenced Ruger and blew them all away, tarping up their bodies and later dissolving them in acid, I’m still hoping that won’t be necessary. But Terry’s always worth having around, I reflect as I read an email from one Tommy Groont, a private investigator based in Oslo I hired on Terry’s recommendation. And a fine recommendation it has proven to be: these photos Groont has attached, taken on some Norwegian high street, have remarkable clarity given they are nearly twenty years old, taken well before everyone travelled with a digital camera in their pocket. Yes, just look at the hatred and rage on those faces. I forward the photographs on to Ruth, along with some instructions. She’s handling this as a favour, given the eye-watering retainer she’s getting on the Du Pre account. I click ‘send’ just as I hear the door opening behind me and turn to see Bridget holding it open.
I walk back in and stand in the middle of the room, very much not sitting down.
‘We want paper,’ Artie says.
‘Iron-clad fucking contracts,’ Glen adds uselessly.
I smile. ‘Not a problem,’ I say.
As I walk back to my car I pass that Dodge. The window is down. ‘All good, boss?’ Terry says, not looking at me.
‘Y
up,’ I say. ‘Time to bring Fergal home …’
THIRTY-ONE
Late spring in Vegas. Utterly indistinguishable from pretty much any other time of the year. Danny Rent sipped his tea – poxy American tea – as he scrolled through the message boards full of chatter about his act. Chatter that had intensified since they made their decision. It had been a surprisingly short conversation with the band. As soon as he’d told them that Unigram were willing to go to 1.5 million dollars they’d looked at each other for a few astonished seconds before Thorsten – man of integrity and credibility – had smiled and said, ‘Hells yes!’
It had not been a call Rent had been looking forward to making. As a manager you hated pissing off a label you knew you would want to do business with again, but it had to be done. He’d rung the band’s lawyer, who’d rung XL’s lawyer, who’d rung XL and told them how flattered the band were by their offer, how much they loved the roster and all that but, sorry, they were signing to Unigram. Surely, Danny knew, it would only be a matter of time before XL were on the phone to him, demanding to know what the hell had gone wrong, increasing their offer and so forth. But this call had not come.
However, someone had been talking to someone. The industry websites and message boards were already full of vitriolic gossip, like the posting Danny was now reading in his suite at the MGM Grand from a user called Musichead1975.
Unigram paying 1.5 million for the NDC deal? Just goes to show how over that company is. Nothing to offer but cash. When did they last break a new artist? If it hadn’t been for Lucius Du Pre’s death they’d have posted their worst year in history. XL would have been the smart choice for the band. Guess they got greedy …
It was a sentiment echoed in the other tab open on his laptop, an article on the Music Week website, in the business section, where, just that morning, a further drop in Unigram’s share price had been announced.
… while Unigram’s cash flow has been helped by the phenomenal sales of Lucius Du Pre’s back catalogue, analysts seem to be taking the view that this is a temporary blip. The Wall Street Journal continues to report talks of a takeover bid brewing. The only bright light for the company in terms of new talent has been the news that they are rumoured to have won the hotly contested battle to sign EDM act Norwegian Dance Crew …
Fuck sake. Were they making a mistake here? Should he just get Richard Russell on the blower and deny everything? Danny looked down at the fuming streets of Vegas, criss-crossing away from him into the shimmering heat haze of the desert. Nah, calm down. It’d be all right. Stelfox was dark, fucking dark. But they’d had the offer. They’d bank the cash. They’d be all right. Unigram wasn’t going anywhere, was it? It was a fucking institution. Focus on the important stuff. 1.5 million. Like Bo Diddley used to say – take that dollar and fuck the rest.
An email arrived. From Ruth Blane. The PR woman. Danny knew her a bit, from conventions, gigs. The header read ‘Have you seen this?’ Danny hesitated, fearing spam, before curiosity overcame him and he clicked on it. There was a link and, above it, the words ‘Holy shit – someone forwarded this to me. Thought you should know …’ He clicked on the link and went from puzzled, to astonished, to enraged as his gaze tripped down the few lines of text. His anger mushroomed into genuine fury tinged with terror when he looked at the photograph. What the fuck? No … no, this couldn’t be true. But it did look like him. Oh Jesus. Jesus Christ. Who’d seen this? Oh fuck …
THIRTY-TWO
Trellick and I are in his office, discussing which triggers we pull and in which order. Timing is crucial. Everything impacts on everything else. ‘How low can the share price go?’ I say, repeating his question aloud.
‘I think there’s a dollar, dollar-fifty still to go,’ Trellick says.
‘Bollocks. Needs to go lower than that for this to work.’ I’m watching CNN with the sound down over Trellick’s shoulder.
‘More like a two-dollar fall?’
‘Three,’ I say decisively.
‘Three? Fucking hell, Steven. What’s going to cause that?’
I look at him. He raises a hand. ‘Actually, I don’t want to know. It’ll take a fucking miracle though. How on earth you think …’
Trellick drones on, but I’ve drifted off, my eyes wandering to the TV set in the corner, CNN flickering soundlessly, still constantly showing images from yesterday’s bombing in Manchester, the cordoned-off arena, the cops, rerun footage of people fleeing. Trump’s Twitter avatar comes up on the screen and I thumb the volume up. It seems the Donald has weighed in on Twitter, calling the terrorist ‘losers’.
‘How presidential,’ Trellick sighs.
There was more of this, earlier today. Trump visited the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem and wrote in the guest book: ‘So amazing! Will never forget!’ There has been much chatter today, in the press, on social media, about how poorly this compares with Obama’s long, eloquent note in the same book a few years earlier. About how stunned people are that the seventy-year-old president of the USA often sounds like a teenage mean girl. So fucking what? Like the Trellick of a few weeks ago, these people are all still mired in the old world. They’re walking around in flares. They’re strolling around St Petersburg in November 1919 saying, ‘Hey, we can keep some of our stuff, can’t we?’ ‘No, mate. That’s over. Not only will you not be keeping anything, you see that wall over there? Well, in a minute, we’re going to take you, and your wife, and your kids, and we’re going to line you up against it and fucking shoot you.’ And while everyone’s going bananas about all this crap, about fucking tweets, the real shit is quietly happening behind the scenes. This morning the White House released Trump’s first budget proposal – billions for the wall, for the military and, most importantly, for massive tax cuts. I am fucking drooling at the possibility of this. Obviously, to pay for all of it, there are going to be billions of dollars of cuts to shit like Medicaid, food stamps, meals on wheels, whatever. What a total fucking result. This is the new reality: we do what we fucking want and there will be no accountability. I mean, eloquence, articulation, being ‘presidential’ … the Donald doesn’t give a gypsy fuck about that shit. What does he care about?
Loyalty. Trust. The rarest, most precious of resources.
I look sideways at Trellick, watching the TV. We are now deep into some very dark shit. Do I have his loyalty? Can I trust him? I think so.
My phone starts ringing – ‘RENT’.
I hold the screen up to show Trellick. ‘That’ll be the miracle you ordered,’ I say. I hold a finger to my lips as I slide the bar over to take the call, sticking it on speaker and putting on my most sombre, serious voice. ‘Danny,’ I say.
‘Steve, I got a bit of a problem here …’
‘I know. I’m looking at it now.’ My tone is glacial as I bring the photo up on my laptop and turn it around for Trellick to see.
‘Eh? Fucking … how?’
‘Ruth, she’s a mate. She knew we were in on the NDC deal and thought I ought to know.’
‘Fuck. It’s … I …’ I can hear him, literally scraping the stubbly skin off his head in lieu of hair.
‘It’s a fucking nightmare is what it is, Danny.’
‘I get that, mate.’ Mate, no less. I pump an imaginary cock in Trellick’s direction. ‘But, look,’ Rent goes on, ‘we’ve got a deal, right?’
‘Danny, if this gets out, have you any idea what’s going to happen?’
‘It ain’t getting out. I’m on it. I’m gonna find out who’s sent it to Ruth, what they’re fucking after, pay them off, whatever. It ain’t a fucking problem …’
I look at the photograph on the screen, the photo that the investigator in Oslo sent to me, that I sent to Ruth and that Ruth then sent to Danny.
It shows Thorsten Lunt of Norwegian Dance Crew, back in the nineties, when he was in his late teens. In the photograph he is not the smiling, beatific, pot-smoking champion of universal love and house music we met backstage in Las Vegas. Oh no. In this photograph the y
oung Thorsten’s blond hair is much shorter and severely cut, his blue eyes are blazing, his features are composed into a vicious snarl and his right arm is thrust ramrod straight into the air, the palm flattened, the fingertips straining for the sky. He is wearing a leather jacket and a white T-shirt, the T-shirt emblazoned with the cool, levelling gaze of Adolf Hitler, the whole ensemble topped off with a swastika armband. There’s no way around it …
The cunt was a fucking Nazi.
Obviously this turn of events has awakened in me a deep and new-found respect for Thorsten Lunt, but that’s neither here nor there. ‘It ain’t a problem?’ I repeat to Danny. ‘Danny, Unigram is a publicly traded company. When Trellick finds out about this,’ Trellick is now nodding, holding a thumb up to me, ‘he’ll have to tell the chairman, the board. There’s no way –’
‘Steven, I’m going to fucking kill this thing!’ Danny says.
‘Well, good luck with that, mate. Get back to me, yeah?’
I hang up.
‘Fuck me,’ Trellick says.
‘By the time this photo does the rounds,’ I say, ‘the share price will be in the crapper. We’re the label who signs Nazis. By next week Rent’s going to be in here begging us to sign those Scandinavian pederasts for a dole cheque and a crate of fucking Red Bull.’
‘My hat,’ Trellick says, ‘is off. Just out of interest though, how does the lovely Chrissy feel about the, um, strategy you’re currently employing in pursuit of her deal?’
‘Ah, I didn’t think she needed to be troubled by the finer points. I’m just trying to help.’
‘So considerate …’
‘Right, so day after tomorrow we send the jet for Ali and Lucius.’
‘What are you going to do about finding your Fritzl-meets-Annie Wilkes?’
