by John Niven
‘You want to add much to it?’ Tim asks.
‘Nope. Just make sure we can hear all the words, sweeten it up for mastering and we are done, buddy.’
‘Woah. Thank God. I just gotta take a piss break …’
Tim leaves. I reach into his jacket and find his wallet. His driver’s licence tells me that Tim Montgomerie lives in apartment 4a, 18 Bennington Avenue, Queens, NY. I quickly photograph it with my phone and replace it.
He comes back and we spend another couple of hours getting the opening just right, starting very minimal, gradually introducing a little bass, then the drum loop. I yawn, exhausted, and look at my watch – 7.15 a.m. I realise that outside of the submarine of the studio New York City has gone from day to night and back to day again. I stretch out on the sofa at the back of the room and quickly fall into a deep sleep. I dream that I am at the Grammys, onstage accepting an award, one of many that I am clutching. In the audience Clive Davis and Ahmet Ertegun are both smiling and applauding. Ertegun winks at me and does gun-fingers.
FIFTY-FOUR
Ten passengers on the eighteen-seat Gulfstream out of Burbank to La Guardia: Ruth Blane and her assistants Les and Jenny, Lance Schitzbaul and his bodyguard Freddy, Glen, Bridget and young Connor Murphy, their lawyer, Arthur Hinckley, and James Trellick of Unigram. There had been an awkward few moments between the Hinckley/Murphy axis and Schitzbaul when they all boarded, with Glen Murphy unable to help himself from saying ‘Hey, Lance, I guess we’re partners now?’ and Schitzbaul having to be held back by Freddy, but, now that the jet had reached cruising altitude and the champagne and cocktails were flowing freely, everyone had loosened up a bit and the atmosphere was closer to a school outing, or the weekend retreat of a group of successful executives. These ten souls were, after all, bonded by a unique shared experience: outside of Steven Stelfox, Dr Ali and Terry Rawlings, they were the only people in America who knew Lucius Du Pre was alive and well. On her third Bloody Mary, Bridget Murphy came and sat in the empty back seat beside Schitzbaul, towards the rear of the cabin. ‘Lance, look, I’m sorry about Glen. You know how he gets …’
Schitzbaul looked along the aisle, to where Bridget’s husband and son sat. Tough as he was, the manager found it hard to maintain anger at Bridget when the image of his client … doing his thing with her son came into his mind.
‘Ah hell, Bridget,’ he said magnanimously, ‘I’m fucken sorry. Sorry things got so fucken fucked up …’ He held his flute out, accepting a generous refill from the passing stewardess. Two more refills and another double Bloody Mary (as well as a trip to the bathroom for a bump of blow for Bridget) and the conversation had moved on, Bridget saying in a low whisper …
‘It’s not as simple as people think, you know? I mean, my son, I … I’ve known he is the way he is since he was small. As a mother, I, you …’
‘You know? Right?’ Lance said.
‘Right.’
‘You know he’s gay?’
‘Oh, sure. And I mean, he was in love with Lucius. In love. He’d have, I mean, in history, the ancient Greeks,’ Bridget wanted to try this line out again, ‘they …’
‘It was no crime?’
‘Exactly. That sort of thing, between an older man and a boy, it … it was …’
‘It was accepted.’
‘But, if you were in our position …’
‘Honey, I understand.’ Lance looked at her. ‘Listen, we’re going to try and make it right. OK?’
‘I’m glad we can talk this out, Lance. Like adults. Stay friends.’
‘Sure.’
The manager and the blackmailer clinked glasses, Bridget savouring the strong liquor, the tingle of the cocaine, the smooth speed of the Gulfstream, all the touchstones of her new life as a rich woman. She turned the magical words ‘make it right’ over in her head as she looked to one of the front tables, to the tower of contracts stacked between Art and the label boss, Trellick, the documents, the legal instrumentation of ‘making it right’.
‘And you still need to lose clause 14, here of the appendix …’ Art was saying to Trellick.
Trellick looked at the offending text, a subclause designed to screw profit participants out of their back end, the kind of standard legalese he’d spent a lifetime engineering into deals. ‘Listen, you fu—’ he heard himself begin to say. Trellick fought back all his natural instincts, a lawyer’s instincts, honed over many negotiations, instincts that told him to fight tooth and nail for every piece of real estate in a contract, and said ‘Sure, Art …’ as he took his Montblanc and struck out the offending paragraph. Art Hinckley sat back in the soft cream leather and ticked an item off his list of final deal points. He smiled to himself as he reached for the Pol Roger. Negotiating, with leverage and a glass of cold champagne, on a private jet: it was everything he’d dreamt about since law school.
Across the aisle from the two lawyers and their paperwork Ruth Blane was busy crafting draft after draft of the new press release while her assistants worked the bot accounts. Now, in addition to explaining how Du Pre had survived the plane crash and remained hidden for nearly five months, Ruth also had to account for the fact that his body mass had nearly doubled. ‘Give me options,’ Stelfox had said. Like a great film director, like Kubrick, Stelfox didn’t always know what he wanted, but he knew when he saw it. When they’d done American Pop Star together Ruth had always been impressed with his instinct, very early on, for which contestants would play best with the public. For the kinds of backstories that had the right combination of factors: illness, unbelievable poverty, familial abuse, a hidden, overpowering talent that could not be denied. And, above all, a happy ending, a little piece of the American dream that everyone could buy into.
‘Yep, this is going …’ Les said, sitting opposite her, wired into his laptop, ‘two and a half thousand retweets and climbing.’ He turned the screen around to show Ruth the tweet, sent from an account somewhere in Ukraine: ‘Guys! Lucius is alive! Am hearing rumours he’s gained a lot of weight! #LUCIUSLIVES.’ Below it the replies feed was already crammed with exactly the responses you’d expect: ‘I knew it!’ ‘Poor Lucius!’ ‘He’s out there! Don’t believe the FAKE NEWS!’ and so forth. When they unveiled Du Pre many of these tweets would be trotted out again by the lunatics as proof positive that they had been right all along.
‘OK, good,’ Ruth said. ‘Now, what do we think about a feeder? He got captured by a fan who was also a feeder?’
‘Mmmm, interesting,’ Les said.
‘That’s interesting,’ Glen Murphy was also saying, up at the front of the plane, to Jenny, Ruth’s assistant, Connor Murphy sleeping beside his father as he came on to a woman he had just met. ‘I mean, I’m a Pisces, right? So the whole thing, we’re sensitive, intuitive, we get easily overloaded by crowds or overstimulating environments. It’s, like, hard to pin us down, because we’re so, so, uh, keen on just getting away to a place where we can experience some downtime and meditative R&R, you know? People think we’re flaky because of the way we, like, swim in and out of people’s lives? But when we do surface, man, when we do surface we are magical friends. Ahhhhh, ahhhh …’ He sniffed loudly. ‘Rose-coloured glasses kinda people. We are attentive and inspiring. You know, composing a photo, listening to music, meditation in my Zen den. Einstein, Rihanna, Steve Jobs … they’re all Pisces. You know what I’m saying, Jenny?’
Did this jerk do all the coke in the world? Jenny wondered as she searched for a reply, before realising any kind of reply was superfluous to requirements: Glen was already off into another anecdote, something about falling off his bike when he was nine. Jenny burned her eyes into Ruth’s back, praying, willing her boss to acknowledge her, to ask her a question, to throw her a lifeline and get her away from this maniac scumbag. But no, she was deep into it with Les. So Jenny sat there and tearfully took both barrels of the coke-monologue. She held out her glass for a refill. Down there, below the clouds and the sunshine, something like Wyoming passed miles beneath them.
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FIFTY-FIVE
Around the time the Gulfstream was crossing the Rockies, up ahead of them, on the East Coast, Terry Rawlings blinked the sleep out of his eyes, fighting exhaustion as he forced himself to stay focused. He had slept for just four out of the last forty-eight hours, on the night-flight back from LA, and he was having to do some very complicated last-minute assembly in the confines of the hall closet – a space just some two metres by one metre. He was holding a circuit breaker in his right hand and a small screwdriver in his left while he screwed an earth wire tight into position. Most of the job had been done in the privacy of his room several floors below, but there were a few last-minute adjustments that had to be done in situ. His left leg was cramping, due to having been bent against the wall for so long. Earth wire screwed tight, Terry snapped the circuit breaker into place, wiped sweat from his brow, and felt in the darkness for the ‘on’ switch. He flicked it – lights coming up on the panel in front of him, a very low hum. He breathed out and began punching in his settings. It was quality workmanship this thing, German-made, but routed out of the Middle East with a paperwork trail that would be easily followed back to the beach house in Malibu. Satisfied all was in place, Terry was pocketing the remote control when he felt his phone buzz gently in his inside pocket.
He took it out and looked at the screen. From Stelfox. Terry clicked on the message: ‘Apartment 4a, 18 Bennington Avenue, Queens.’ Terry sighed.
He’d need some coffee.
FIFTY-SIX
Dr Ali was tired too. There’d been a screaming brat in the first-class cabin and he’d forgotten his noise-cancelling headphones in his haste to pack and get to the airport. Leaning wearily on the counter in the huge marble atrium he watched while the desk clerk did his thing, tapping and punching away at his terminal. This was what long journeys felt like after a while – a lot of waiting while someone tapped and punched at a computer.
He took his backpack off and sat it by his feet. That had been another time-consuming exercise he could have done without tonight, but there had been no way around it. Mr Stelfox had been very clear that his bag of goodies would be needed later. And, since there was no way to get his bag of goodies out of Quatain and through customs on a commercial flight, he’d had to pay a visit to a Manhattan pharmacy right after he’d landed. In fact, he’d had to visit several Manhattan pharmacies before he’d succeeded in getting all the basic ingredients for Lucius’s favourite cocktails, writing the prescriptions himself on his script pad in the back of the limo. Still, it was all done now, the vast quantities of meds safely in the bag at his feet. ‘And you’re all set …’ the kid was saying to him now. ‘Room 1423. It’s on the fourteenth floor. Do you need some help with your luggage, Doctor?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Not at all. Welcome to the Plaza.’
In his room Ali stretched out on the huge bed, listening to the thrum of water through the open bathroom door as the huge tub filled. A hot bath, a snack from room service, and then a nice long nap before presenting himself and resuming his duties. If all went well it would be a short, but very profitable, re-employment. Breaking a rule about getting high on his own supply, Ali dug around in his backpack of goodies and came out with a strip of Xanax. He bit one in half and chased it down with a sluice of mineral water from the complimentary bottle by the bed. By the time it kicked in he’d be done with his bath. A nice, long nap.
FIFTY-SEVEN
I am in the bedroom, giving Lucius a few last-minute coaching tips. Under instructions from Dr Ali, Terry and I have spent the last forty-eight hours gradually getting him back on his meds and he seems calmer, more docile. He’s stopped punctuating sentences with mad ‘PTOOs!’ and ‘GRRRRs!’ at any rate. From next door, in the suite’s vast living room, I can hear the Plaza staff putting the finishing touches to the catering arrangements. I have organised a buffet dinner – a side of poached salmon, rare roast beef, beluga and sevruga caviar, oysters on the half-shell – and a full, open bar: a glittering tower of every conceivable spirit, mixers, ice, chilled champagne and white wine. The whole thing will be self-service of course. We’ll need total privacy due to the sensitive nature of the topics under discussion. ‘Lucius,’ I say from my seat near the window overlooking the park. ‘Remind me – what do you want to get from this meeting?’
He’s on the bed, propped up on a raft on pillows, his incredible bulk hidden beneath one of the new range of white kaftans I’ve bought him. Apart from my stint in the studio, I’ve pretty much spent the last forty-eight hours straight with Lucius. No mean feat. He plays video games. He will watch TV if it’s a kids’ film or it’s about him. I am not hugely overburdened with what you’d call an inner life, but Lucius? He’s got nothing. He gazes sadly at the great fleshy paddles of his hands and thinks for a moment before saying, very softly, ‘I just want things to be beautiful, like they were before.’
‘And they can be. They really can. But you have to follow my lead. Do you understand?’
He nods.
‘These people, the Murphys and their lawyer, we can make them be quiet, Lucius, but we need to give them quite a lot of money. Our money and your money.’
‘I don’t care about that,’ he says.
‘Good. Then you can leave everything to us.’
‘Will … Connor … will he ever be my special friend again?’
‘Well, that, you know …’ Unbelievably it seems that the monstrous Idi Amin-sized fucker is already thinking about … ‘That’s kind of out of my hands, mate. You haven’t seen each other in a while. Let’s see how it goes, eh?’
‘But I’m so disgusting …’ Lucius surveys his gargantuan body.
‘So you slapped on a few pounds. Long holiday, who doesn’t? We’ll get you the best guys. Personal trainers, dieticians. Have it off by Christmas. No bother. It’s just important that we remember the name of the game here tonight. Right? And what is the name of the game?’ There’s a soft knocking at the partially open door.
‘Uh, sir? We’re done.’
I walk over and open it fully. The head of Guest Services stands there, his staff behind him and, behind them, the transformed suite. Soft lighting, a few candles flickering, lots of fresh-cut flowers in urns and jars. On one side of the room the buffet table groans with expensive treats, the burnished silver domes on the hot food, catching the candle-light, flickering and glowing. On the other side of the room the dining table has been set up as a kind of work area: multiple copies of the Behemoth Inc./Du Pre/Unigram contracts.
‘Excellent,’ I tell the guy as I press of wad of hundred-dollar bills into his hand. ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ he says. They leave.
‘Lucius,’ I say again, ‘what’s the name of the game tonight?’
‘Make a deal,’ Idi says finally.
‘You’re a prodigy,’ I say. ‘OK. Now just relax and leave the talking to us, OK?’
I walk across the suite to the bar and pour myself a slug of chilled Grey Goose. I take out my phone and dial her number. ‘Hi there,’ Chrissy says.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Did you get in OK?’
‘Sure, your housekeeper let me in.’ Chrissy laughs. ‘I still can’t believe you have a place here …’
‘Where are you?’
‘At the living-room window.’
‘You can probably see me from where you’re standing.’ I move over to the windows and look down the darkness of Fifth Avenue, red tail lights, white headlights, Chrissy just a five-minute walk away at my New York apartment.
‘I mean, it’s so ridiculous.’
I know what she means. I know the room she is currently standing in: two thousand square feet, floor-to-ceiling windows, sunken conversation pit, wet bar, walls lined with hardback first editions. All, obviously, the work of the decorator.
‘You know what’s ridiculous?’ I say. ‘The amount of money I’ve made on that place. So, look, make yourself at home, but don’t wait up. I’ll probably be late.’<
br />
‘Long negotiation?’
‘With these fucks? Undoubtedly. I’ll see you later, OK?’
I hang up. Don’t wait up. When did I last …?
I sip my drink at the window, enjoying the warm rush as the neat spirit hits my empty stomach. Lost in thought, it takes me a moment to realise the doorbell is ringing. I cross the thick carpet and open it: the Murphys and Hinckley – obviously the first to arrive, the kid tagging shyly behind them.
‘Guys!’ I say, pumping hands, air-kissing. ‘Art, Bridget … and you must be Connor.’ I extend my hand. The kid just looks at it until Mom nudges him.
‘Shake hands, Connor, like a grown-up.’ The little freak gives me a weak, wet shake. Man, if I had a kid …
‘Come on in …’ I say. ‘Let me get you all a drink. Lucius!’ I call out as I lead them into the living room. ‘Lucius!’
For a moment it’s like Lucius and I are an old married couple, entertaining guests in a sitcom. And then Lucius appears in the doorway from the bedroom. I savour their reactions: Bridget and Glen’s open mouths, Art’s shock. I mean, they almost flinch as this massive dark beast starts coming towards them. As for the kid, he just says, ‘That’s not Lucius,’ as the doorbell rings again and I’m opening the door to Trellick and Schitzbaul. ‘Hey, guys,’ I say. ‘Good timing. Lemme get you all a drink …’
I busy myself with ice, bottles and mixers, my back to the room, enjoying the sound of a roomful of people trying not to say ‘What the fuck happened to you?’
Terry Rawlings waits in the car. He’s found a good spot, one of the street lamps is broken, affording him a nice, dark area to park in. There are lights on in many of the homes on this quiet street, but the curtains and blinds are mostly drawn at this hour, the blued flicker of TVs visible behind them. Only one real concern – the second floor of the building directly opposite him. Lights blazing, windows open, shadows passing on the ceiling as the occupants go about their business. He checks his watch, a little after 11 p.m. A few more minutes pass before Terry sees him, recognising him from the driver’s licence photo on his phone, coming along the sidewalk on the other side of the street, walking from the direction of the subway, carrying a large pizza in its cardboard tray. He goes into the building. Terry gives it five minutes and gets out of the car.
