Kill 'Em All

by John Niven

  ‘Uh, passport?’ the man said.

  Much fumbling in the fanny pack. Lucius handed it over and the man frowned at it. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘Hello,’ Lucius said, again.

  ‘This is you? Man, you look like Lucius Du Pre in this …’ The official tried to correlate the postage-stamp-sized face in his hand with the sweating mound of blubber in front of him. Now he noticed the entry stamp on the passport – Quatain. ‘And you’ve been out of the US for … almost four months? Mr … McCann?’

  ‘Yes. Jesu. Months,’ Lucius nodded, having no idea what was going on.

  ‘And what was the purpose of your visit to Quatain? Put your hand on the scanner please. Yeah, no, just there. OK.’

  ‘Purpose?’

  ‘Why were you there? OK. You can take your hand off now.’

  ‘I …’ Lucius found himself unable to speak. Why had he been there? Because there had been a problem. Connor. Connor who betrayed his love. Because people could not understand how a man and a boy, how they could … only Jesus could … Deranged though he might be, Lucius sensed that honesty might not be the best policy here. However, he figured that if good old-fashioned celebrity still carried some clout anywhere, then it did so here, in America. The guy was running his passport through some sort of scanner now too. Lucius stepped closer to the glass and lowered his voice …

  ‘Sir, I must be honest with you. I’m – urrr, gnnn – I’m travelling under an assumed name, for security purposes. I … I am Lucius Du Pre!’

  Great, another fucking wack job. The Homeland Security officer looked at the 200lb sweat-soaked atrocity in front of him. Then at the huge queue of weary travellers still to be dealt with. His computer chirruped a healthy green, showing that the passport was good and that the bearer was on no watch lists and had committed no crimes.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, and I’m George Clooney. I just work here ’cause I like to meet people, you know? OK, Lucius, here you go. Welcome home.’

  ‘Thank you, sir, God bless you.’

  ‘OK. Right. Next!’

  And like that Lucius Du Pre was back on American soil.

  Fortune continued to beam down on him with a smile more powerful than a television evangelist’s. Having stumbled out of international arrivals – having got over the shock that there were no crush barriers holding back rows of screaming fans, no NYC cops watching the fans, chewing gum, hands on hips, just over the cowboy jut of the holstered pistol, no microphones being thrust in his face, no scrum of photographers running backwards, snapping away – Lucius was grappling with the very real question of ‘what do you do now?’ when he saw a counter with a sign above it. The sign proclaimed: ‘AAA Car Service. Limos, SUVs and Town Cars. New York’s Finest.’

  What a fuss people made of how difficult it was to manage life! Lucius snuggled down further into the grey leather, feeling proud of his own resourcefulness, his ingenuity and can-do spirit. When he got back to Narnia he might let some of the staff go, start doing more for himself, economising like Lance had been urging him to. Less than ten minutes after seeing the sign and following the exchange of only three hundred of his crumpled American dollars Lucius was sitting in the back of an eight-seat stretch job with full bar and TV. Having established that he had no baggage the cheerful black chauffeur had held the door open for him and asked, ‘Where to, sir?’ For the first time in the duration of this awful trip Lucius had felt the surge of his old life returning. But where to? What was the name of that place? The place where he normally stayed when he came to New York? That was it!

  ‘Yessir! The Plaza Hotel! All right!’ The chauffeur had grinned, lit up by the promise of a hefty tip to come.

  At dusk on a beautiful late-May evening, Lucius slid through a borough he did not know the name of (track housing, stone cladding, pizza joints and liquor stores, America always showing you its coal before you get to its gold), across a bridge he did not know the name of, over a river he did not know the name of, and suddenly there it was, glinting in the gathering darkness – the burnished towers of Manhattan. Somewhere in there lay Madison Square Garden, the place where he had been due to make his great comeback, before things got … derailed.

  They rolled through the deep valleys of Midtown and then, suddenly, the explosion of greenery as Central Park appeared and then they were pulling into the circular drive of the hotel just as night fell. Lucius handed the driver an additional hundred-dollar bill (‘thankyousirppreciateit’) and fought off the advances of the three bellboys who tried to take his non-existent bags as he made his way up the steps and into the lobby. Emboldened by his recent triumphs with airlines, immigration officers and car services, he strode straight up to the desk.

  ‘Welcome to the Plaza. How may I help you?’

  ‘One hotel room please. I love Jesu!’ Oops. That had slipped out.

  ‘Do you have a reservation, sir?’

  ‘Ah. One hotel room please.’

  ‘Yes, I … how long will you be staying for?’

  ‘Uh … a month? PTOO!’ The man looked at him. ‘I mean,’ Lucius added, ‘a week?’

  ‘One week …’ He did his thing with the computer. ‘I’m sorry, sir. We’re very busy. I’m afraid the only room we have available is a one-bedroom penthouse suite.’

  ‘Yes. A suite.’

  ‘A suite? Not a room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK …’ He ran an eye over the filthy kaftan, the fanny pack strapped over it. And, Jeez, this guy could use a shower. ‘That’s forty-two hundred dollars a night, including taxes, comes to … twenty-nine thousand, four hundred dollars for the week. How will you be pay—’

  The snick of the Amex going down.

  ‘Just one moment, Mr … McCann.’ He ran the card. It lit up green all the way across the board. As ever in America, the entrance of true money into the arena changed the timbre of things. ‘Excellent. Thank you, Mr McCann. You know …’ He leaned over, lowering his voice. ‘We also have one of our Metropolitan suites available. Two and a half thousand square feet with views over the Park. The rack rate is eight thousand a night but I could give you twenty per cent off that …’

  Lucius beamed. ‘Jesu loves me!’

  THIRTY-NINE

  I haven’t smashed up an office in a long time. Ruth’s conference room looks like fucking Godzilla came through here, with a few of his mates, on a stag night, mankinis on, ten pints deep, into the shots now, Jägerbombs clamped in tiny claws, shouting ‘WHO WANTS SOME?’, nothing mattering.

  After I hung up on Ali I went for the whiteboard first, ripping it off the easel and throwing it across the room. But you can’t really do much damage with a whiteboard. So I picked up a chair and put it through the TV – freeze-framed on Trump’s face, his bottom teeth bared in that underbite snarl, his thumb and forefinger forming that ‘O’ in mid-air – savouring the dull electric bang, the splintering screen. Now that felt better. At this point Ruth ushered everyone out of the room and closed the door behind them while I really got to work. I swung the black pyramid of the speakerphone unit around by its cord, smashing it off the wall until the plastic shattered and circuitry flew everywhere. Using one of the broken chair legs as a baseball bat I turned Ruth’s drinks trolley into a nest of broken glass, vodka, gin, whiskey and tiny flecks of glass showering my face. I threw decanters at the walls, tore the DVD player out from beneath the smoking TV and hurled it the length of the room where it obligingly met with a framed, original Led Zeppelin tour poster, the glass exploding all over the carpet. Then I picked up another chair – a heavier job, steel and leather – and cracked it off the corner of the conference table again and again and again until the table splintered and my hands were vibrating. And all the time I was doing this I was screaming ‘BASTARD!’ over and over again at the top of my lungs. Finally spent, I slid down the wall and considered the full horror of the situation I had managed to get out of Ali – who I will almost certainly be having killed very soon.

  The staff went
to take Du Pre’s breakfast tray in around lunchtime as usual. Some movie was playing on his TV but he wasn’t in the bed. They searched his mansion. Then the Sultan’s palace. Then the grounds. Nothing. He’s gone. He cannot drive and has no access to a car. He was last seen around 6 p.m. the night before, wandering in the palace gardens. The palace itself is surrounded by what Terry calls, what soldiers call, ‘MMFD’. Miles and Miles of Fucking Desert. They are now searching the desert. The enormity of my situation dawns on me. Sitting here on the carpet, numb, stunned, I realise that my phone has not stopped ringing for the last fifteen minutes. I look at it. Chrissy. Will you still love me when I’m poor?

  ‘Hey,’ I say, my voice thick, raw from all the screaming.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she says.

  ‘Yeah. Just, not a good time right now.’

  ‘Shit. OK. Well, I’m afraid what I have to say probably isn’t going to improve your mood.’

  ‘Look, Chrissy, right now I don’t give a flying fuck about the Norwegian Arse Bandits fucking deal or whatever the fuck the cunts are called.’

  ‘It’s not about that.’

  ‘What, for fuck’s sake?’

  ‘I … I’m pregnant, Steven.’

  Of course. Obviously. Natürlich. Totes. Good one.

  ‘I …’ I say. Silence. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

  I hang up and sit there for a bit, on the floor, amid the wreckage. Two pieces of good news swim into my vision. One is a full bottle of J&B that somehow survived the carnage. The other is the intercom box. I unscrew the cap on the pale whisky and drink a good draught down. Then I hit the intercom.

  ‘Ruth, can you send one of the kids in? Les or Jenny?’

  ‘Sure. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Bad. I’ll pay for everything. Sorry.’

  ‘No, fuck the room. I mean Du Pre. What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s … bad. I just need to think. Put everything on hold just now.’ I hang up and take another pull of whisky as the door opens a few inches and Les puts his head in, taking in the American Carnage.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Les, get me an ounce of very good cocaine.’

  ‘Do you think that’s a good –’ He looks at me – insane, covered in broken glass and liquor, surrounded by matchwood – and thinks better of it. ‘Gimme an hour,’ he says.

  Pouring neat Scotch into a tumbler, I call Terry. It takes about five minutes to give him the rundown. ‘Right,’ he says, cool, professional. ‘I’ll get on it. But I’ll need to get out of here. What do you want me to do with Bill?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Tandy.’

  ‘Who the fuck is Bill Tandy?’

  ‘The chap I’m holding hostage in his own basement right now. Do we still need him?’

  ‘Fuck. No. I shouldn’t think so. Just … use your best judgement.’

  I hang up and really start drinking.

  FORTY

  Terry Rawlings hung up the phone and walked back down the creaking wooden stairs into the basement, where Mr William Tandy – the gag, the rope binding him to the chair – watched him approach with wide eyes, this terrifying stranger who had not spoken a word in forty-eight hours. Tandy’s judgement was not what it once had been. He had not eaten and had soiled himself many times. Terry was whistling, having found the only silver lining in this situation – he would not have to clean Tandy up now prior to the staging of his death. Tandy watched him open his bag and take out some sort of medical kit. Terry eased a syringe into a small, clear glass ampoule and drew the plunger back, loading it up with a massive 400mg of morphine sulphate. While unflinching in performing his duties, Terry Rawlings was never needlessly cruel. There was no reason to hurt this man unnecessarily, this poor unfortunate man whose only crime was to be in the right place at the right time. Tandy started to struggle uselessly against his bonds as Terry approached and began rolling up his sleeve. ‘It’ll sting a little,’ Terry said as the needle went in. Tandy was shouting at him through the gag, angry, confused, begging. And then, very suddenly, he wasn’t doing any of that stuff. He was on the crest of a rainbow-coloured wave, rushing up and up, crystal water tickling his back as he exploded into the sky, kissing the face of God for an instant before, almost smiling, he died.

  Terry got to work, opening the door of the pot-bellied stove in the corner, building the rudiments of the fire that would consume the basement, the house and Tandy himself. A fire that would fool any insurance investigator.

  FORTY-ONE

  Lucius stood at the window of his suite at dawn, savouring the view of Central Park, the strings of lights going off, already the crowds of milling tourists. To the east he could just see the dun block of Trump Tower, the sun rising somewhere behind it. He understood all about that now. He’d been watching bits of the rolling news channels, finding, now that his mind was fresher than it had been for many years, that he could catch up on world events. Trump was the president. Weird. The new president, Lucius saw, also loved the word ‘beautiful’. Maybe they could meet. Trump might like to come to the shows at the Garden once they got them rescheduled. Lucius needed to speak to Lance about that. He was definitely going to call Lance soon, right after he’d dropped a few pounds …

  It was hard, dieting. It called for discipline, willpower, self-control, all areas where, it had to be acknowledged, Lucius had historically struggled a tiny bit. He picked up a slice of twenty-eight-dollar room-service pizza and chewed on it thoughtfully. He’d try to cut his number of daily meals down to three from six or seven. And he’d definitely cut out eating after midnight. That was gone. His bedtime snack last night for instance, a simple club sandwich or two washed down with a quart of Diet Coke, and all over by 11.30. The problem was, for the time being at any rate, the candy and the milk and the boys were all gone. What did that leave him? Food. He folded the slice of double cheese and sausage over onto itself and crammed it into his mouth thinking something like – Lucius Du Pre brings so much pleasure to so many millions of people, why shouldn’t he have the odd treat too? As he ate, Lucius was engaged in another act he found comforting – watching his old videos. The cable music channels seemed to have one on every fifteen minutes or so, sometimes playing two or three of them in a row. He was watching the video for ‘Sexx Man’, from the early nineties: his dance routine, the blur of feet, the juddering hips, like a man plugged into the electrical grid. He looked down at himself, at the gut churning as he chewed, trembling under the Plaza robe. (He really had to get around to getting some new clothes – another thing to talk to Lance about.) The video for ‘Sexx Man’ faded out and into the video for ‘December’, his tremulous torch song that had been number one for six weeks over the Christmas holidays of 1988, Lucius sitting at a white grand piano, stroking the keyboard dreamily, singing about how cold it was now that she was no longer here. A thought …

  Maybe there could be a new Lucius?

  A new kind of show. Leave the dancing to the dancers and focus on just singing. Pavarotti didn’t do anything except sing, did he? He could even use a stool. Wear a tuxedo. Concentrate on the ballad end of his repertoire – ‘She’s Gone’, ‘The Rain Don’t Miss Me Anymore’. That kind of thing. Yes, he’d run this by Lance. Tomorrow. He’d definitely call Lance tomorrow. He was probably worried about him. Dr Ali too. He’d be wondering where Lucius had got to.

  He tossed the last pizza crust onto the plate and reached for the room-service menu. Dessert. The sundae here was superb – three scoops of ice cream, chocolate brownie bits, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, a ton of M&M’s and a maraschino cherry on top. All for just eighteen dollars! Then again, the coconut lady cake and the vanilla cheesecake both had strong merits of their own. Decisions. This was why you had people like Lance. They answered on the first ring.

  ‘Yeah, uh, hi. Yeah, it’s me.’ A guilty giggle. ‘Could, could I get the sundae please? Oh – and the coconut cake? Great. Oh oh – a
nd the vanilla cheesecake? Thank you.’ Hotels were so beautiful.

  The presentation of the show. How to do something remarkable, something that had never been done before? But here Jesus had been helping him with that too. It had come to him earlier that day, when he was singing his little song, in the hall closet, naked, with toilet paper stuffed in his ears (to help him only hear Jesu) and bits of hotel stationery with ‘JESU’ written on them fastened all over his body with his own saliva.

  White. There would be so many of them.

  And they would all wear white.

  June

  FORTY-TWO

  I really want to fire a gun, something big – a .357 Magnum, a Desert Eagle – just to feel the release of capping off some massive fat rounds, but they won’t let me on the shooting range in Burbank because I’m reeking of booze and I guess I have cocaine flecked around my nostrils and some blood on my face and, whatever, they’re not fucking having it. I tell the pair of Chinks working there to go fuck themselves and storm out, staggering back to the limo, the bright afternoon sunlight scorching my retinas even through my sunglasses.

  ‘Where to now?’ Mike asks as I fall into the back seat.

  ‘Just fucking drive,’ I say. I’m back with Mike at the wheel again, Mike who started this whole adventure with me, what, three, four days ago? I’ve kind of lost count. I know I’ve been through a bunch of limo drivers though. I made the second guy drive me for pretty much twenty-four hours straight, during which time he had no food, water, bathroom breaks. I was pushing him hard, I’ll admit it, as we hit the bars of East Hollywood. Then Silver Lake, then Echo Park, then Washington Heights, all the time getting further and further away from anywhere I might encounter anyone I know as my condition, well, I don’t want to say deteriorated, but … I’m off my fucking nugget.