I don’t know if I’m hearing him right. Paulo killed people?
‘When I told my wife what I did, she was horrified,’ he shakes his head. ‘But she loved me anyway. She began working towards the results I was trying to achieve, but her ways of achieving those results were different. She marched in Lisbon in what is now called the Carnation Revolution. One day she, along with many others, protested outside the PIDE headquarters. That’s the day PIDE officers went to the roof and started shooting into the crowd. Four people were killed, one of them my wife. We had only been married for seven months,’ Paulo pauses, his voice momentarily lost. ‘The world remembers the Carnation Revolution as a virtually bloodless coup. Our country was so happy to be free from dictatorship it didn’t even pursue the PIDE officers who shot into the crowd. Our new leaders reasoned it was time to move on. I couldn’t. I tracked two of them to Spain.’ He pauses, as if choosing his next words carefully. ‘Force is necessary when you can’t get justice any other way.’
‘I don’t know how to find her,’ I tremble. ‘I wish–’
‘You find a way to find her,’ Paulo says resolutely. ‘Wishing is futile. Every day I sit at my café and I think about my wife. I wish she were never taken from me. But nothing, nothing, can bring the dead back to us.’
I watch Paulo as he speaks. Everything seems just a little too far off, just a little out of reach, like I’ve been shoved into the wrong end of a giant telescope.
‘I need to call the police,’ he’s saying. He’s got one hand on his cane and the other on my shoulder. ‘Jerry, listen to me. It’s obvious you aren’t here legally. They aren’t going to look kindly on that. I’ve talked to Diana – my wife’s sister. I’ve told her everything. Let us deal with the police. You need to go, now. The longer you wait the less chance you have of finding her.’
I open my mouth to say something but nothing comes out. And as I leave Paulo and Bela and the apartment forever, I stroke the barrel of the gun. ‘Sometimes a death for a death is the right thing,’ a voice says in my head.
The only thing is, there’s no note, no sign, no indication of who should die for Bela’s death. Epiphany and I, we’re both her murderers.
The sun is too bright. A father walks with his beautiful daughter. Lovers make out under a tree across the avenue. Two grandparents swing their grandson by his arms. The whole street looks like one big pharmaceutical ad – everyone is happy, everything is perfect. The world shouldn’t look like this. Not today. Not after what’s happened.
I finger the gun in my khakis. Maybe if I do it in the middle of the road? Cars will be forced to stop. People will be forced to pay attention. If I take someone with me, I bet I’ll even get in the newspapers – maybe some magazines. If I clean out the whole street, I bet we’re talking TV movie. I could reach the widest audience possible then. My character could scream: ‘Why didn’t you hurt with me? Why didn’t you tell me how to stop the pain?’
Paulo, he told me to find her. But I’m just me. I don’t know how. There’s no sign pointing to Epiphany Jones.
And I hurt so much. I want it to stop.
I step off the curb when someone grabs my arm. A snap of air whips by as a little car spits past where I would have been walking. The man who stopped me, his eyes are big and black and proud. ‘Fuck you,’ I say. His long face becomes confused. ‘Fuck you!’ I scream. My saliva dots his skin.
The happy happy people on the happy happy street have all begun to stare. I’m acne on the complexion of their product-perfect day. The grandparents pull the grandkid close. An ice cream vendor is frozen mid-scoop. Across the road a group of beautiful young people furtively glance at me as they kiss and hug goodbye.
But when they part, a woman remains behind.
Her smile is kind, her frame small, her hair thin. And I know if I could see her eyes up close, they’d be blue with green flecks.
She waves me over.
I stumble across the street. Tears of joy flood my eyes.
‘Hello, alleegator.’
My entire body trembles with sublime weakness. I drop to my knees and wrap my arms around her waist. I press my face into her stomach. I say, ‘Bela.’
Her little giggle. Oh, I can hear it! My heart, it beats in these large, slow pulses. It rejoices in oxygen again.
I weep with relief and squeeze her thin legs hard. I kiss her waist. I bite her hip so I can feel she’s real. She strokes her fingers through my hair and purrs, ‘My little alleegator.’ And I look into her eyes. Blue with green flecks. She caresses my face and I lean my cheek into her soft hands just as she pressed her ear into my kiss on the day she was irritable with me for discovering her preparing the vegetables.
‘I don’t want to be another person who stops believing in the small things,’ she says. ‘Gypsies, God, miracles and magic.’ She smiles and pets my head. ‘And, as silly as it sounds, love.’
‘I know, baby,’ I say, my face smeared with tears, ‘We talked about this remember? It doesn’t matter.’ A tiny laugh escapes my mouth. It’s a laugh of relief; of joy; of a second chance at a new future. ‘You’re here.’ Salty tears slip into my mouth.
‘My grandmother always said to me this: just because you do not see fairies dancing on the lawn does not mean they aren’t there.’
And my heart takes a deep, slow beat, as if realising something in Bela’s words that my mind refuses to. I bury my face into her stomach and sob, ‘I remember.’
‘And as silly as that may seem – even if it is wrong –’ she continues, ‘what harm does it do to believe?’ She takes my chin in her hand so I’m looking into her eyes. ‘What good is one more unhappy person going to do for this world?’
‘I remember, baby,’ I say again as she smiles down on me. And her lips, they bellow briefly, in a round little way, the way they do before she begins her last words. My chest constricts as air is forced from my body.
‘OK,’ she begins…
‘No, no, no,’ I tremble, spasms rippling through my soul. ‘Please. I can’t make it without you.’
‘I go now,’ she smiles at me. ‘See you later, alleegator.’
‘No! Please,’ I beg. I hold her tight. I’ll pin her to this spot. I’ll never let her go again. I’ll never hurt again. I won’t allow it. I will her to stay with me.
But it doesn’t help.
My arms ensnare nothing but air. I look like a human basketball hoop kneeling on the sidewalk. On the street the pharmaceutical characters are at a standstill. The grandparents clutch their grandson. A shop owner is on his cordless calling the police. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll have shot myself by the time they get here.
And out of everyone staring at me there’s this young kid who stands a little closer than anybody else. He’s got a balled-up piece of newspaper in his hand and wears a playful grin. He can’t be older than five. The world is still good and beautiful to him. God is loving. His parents are caring. Bad guys always go to jail.
The pure pools of his eyes stare into mine as his amusement grows at my frozen basketball-hoop body. Then with the flick of his wrist he sends his balled-up newspaper sailing towards the day’s perfect sky, where it appears as if it could be a piece of broken coral floating in a calm, blue sea. Then the balled-up newspaper, it completes its arc and begins its descent towards the earth where it, much to the boy’s satisfaction, drops between the rims of my arms. ‘Dois pontos!’ he shouts.
And feeling the gun in my pocket pressed hard against my thigh, I gaze at the balled-up newspaper resting at my knees. I watch it unfold, blossoming like a flower in a time-lapse video. Black-and-white letters bud into florets of words until one headline – one sign – stands out. It’s the only sign I’ve ever needed.
‘The Cannes Film Festival Starts Today.’
40
Cannes
This is me, forty-eight hours after leaving Porto on a train.
This is me, faking my way through life again.
This is me, standing on the Promenade de
la Croisette, pretending everything is just great.
A fifty-foot Jordan Seabring looms over the Croisette, Cannes’ main boulevard, which has the beach and boardwalk on one side and the most expensive hotels in Europe on the other. On the banner, Jordan is wearing a surprisingly conservative red dress and holds a 3D-generated creature – something of a cross between a porcupine and a snail – in the palm of her hand.
Every building on the Croisette is plastered with more of these massive banners promoting the summer’s sure-to-be blockbusters. There’s the grim and gritty superhero movie about the alien from another planet staring Hugh Fox; the vampire-romance with the pretty-boy actor; the final part of that geek-turned-mainstream fantasy trilogy.
The Croisette crawls with stargazers and hopefuls. The people who look rich are most likely the poor ones – having spent their savings trying to impress the truly wealthy who are here. Desperate people stand on corners asking total strangers if they have an extra ticket to spare for this event or that showing. And everyone here, everyone, speaks English. You don’t come to the festival if you can’t speak English. English is the language of Hollywood. Even the gypsies that come from all over Europe to pickpocket the people here speak English.
Just past a huddle of street vendors hawking DVD movies and glossies of the stars I find a semi-classy shop where I buy some off-brand shoes, shirts, pants and a tux.
This is me, knowing I need to fit in.
As the clerk wraps up my new clothes, I flip through the Cannes edition of The Hollywood Reporter someone has left in the shop. The cover article is about the film that’s opening the festival: The Princess of the Sands. It’s an animated CGI film about an Arabian princess named Houda who discovers a race of creatures living below the Sphinx. Her evil half-brother, the king, has enslaved these magical creatures. Jordan Seabring voices the princess. This is Hollywood’s sex kitten trying to appeal to the under-twelve crowd.
Growing up, reading about the festival in Entertainment Weekly, everything looked so magical. The palm trees, the red carpet, the fancy limos. I believed the fantasy that the festival was about celebrating the best of film. But my father explained that Cannes is really about the backstage deals. For every film that’s in competition there are a thousand films being viewed privately in hotel rooms, and on yachts, and on portable DVD players between courses in fancy restaurants.
The public face of Cannes is about the big-name stars and the best of ‘art cinema’. It’s about Hollywood telling the world that film is noble, that film is profound. But the private face of Cannes is all business. It’s a marketplace. It’s about sales. It’s about desperate directors trying to get a meeting with a big producer so they can sell the film they mortgaged their house to shoot. It’s about fading stars trying to be photographed to get back into the public’s eye. It’s about young and beautiful women prowling the large hotel bars, hoping to catch the attention of someone important who will invite them to an exclusive party. And at these parties, these young and beautiful women, they’ll do anything to become the next big starlet – the next Jordan Seabring.
And it’s at one of these hotel bars where I know I’ll find Epiphany. If Matthew really does have her daughter, she’ll need to find someone with a way into his party.
I pay the clerk when he’s done wrapping my clothes. Everything’s designer imitations, but it still costs me almost a thousand euros. But I won’t get into the hotel bars if I don’t look the part. Everything in Cannes during these three weeks is about image.
Outside the Carlton Hotel life-size statues of two of the characters from The Princess of the Sands flank the doorway. One is Jordan Seabring’s princess; her large eyes and wrist-thin waist sure to give eight-year-olds eating disorders for the rest of their lives. The other statue is the princess’s evil half-brother, the king. He’s got a triangular grin and barrel chest and holds an Arabian sword in one hand and a football-sized red jewel in the other.
The Carlton is the hotel where my father always stayed. Matthew wouldn’t be here but some of his lower-downs might be, which means Epiphany could show.
This is the best plan I’ve got. This is my version of Paulo’s, ‘You find a way to find her.’
The concierge tells me with a hint of snideness that he’s sorry, but the best rooms have been booked for almost a year – just after the last festival ended. ‘You understand.’
Meaning, if I really was important, I should know that.
So I put two hundred euros on the counter and the concierge takes the bills, folds them and puts them in his pocket.
He says they do have a single room left. It’s small and is only on the second floor. No bigger than a closet, really. Desk. Bath. DVD player. Normally it’s for the help working night shifts. ‘You understand.’
I place another hundred euros on the counter that disappears just as quickly.
He says that, at this late stage, however, the room is as much as their normal single-bed suites. That is, four thousand for the week. ‘You understand.’
I hand the money over.
He raises his eyebrows. ‘And the name? For the register?’
‘Jerry Dresden,’ I say. And I spell it for him. ‘Give it to anyone who asks, got it? Anyone.’
‘I understand,’ he says.
This is me, breaking down again. It happens as soon as I’m in the room. Just like I did on the train coming here this morning. I break down and I cry. I hurt so bad.
Then I take the gun out of the paper bag Paulo gave me. It’s the kind that you need to pull the cock back on. Like one of those Wild West Howdy Doody guns. It’s got a barrel chamber with six bullets in it.
And Paulo’s wrong. This is revenge, not justice. Justice would have been Epiphany going to France – on her own – without murdering Bela.
Justice would have been everyone leaving everyone else alone.
In my mind I can still hear Bela’s little giggle. I can still feel her hands on me.
What was she thinking as Epiphany strangled her? Did she know what was going on? Did Epiphany tell her that she was my punishment for not going to France; for not believing in her voices? And as she died, was she angry at me?
With the gun in my hands, I know Bela would be angry at what I’m about to do.
But she’s dead. And the dead don’t see. They don’t feel.
This is for her memory. It’s to show Epiphany she can’t take an innocent life. That she can only push the weak and cowardly around for so long before they push back.
41
Bullets
‘They put you on a boat and knock you out. You wake up at the party on some island off the coast, and the only way they let you leave is by knocking you out again.’
‘I’ve heard if you’ve never been in a picture with a twenty-mil opening day, there’s no way you’ll be invited.’
‘I’ve heard it’s thrown by Matthew Mann.’
In all the swanky hotel bars, Cannes’ most exclusive party is talked about in whispers.
‘How would Mann afford it? I heard all the glasses are made of diamonds and the plates are solid gold. The guests get to keep them, too.’
‘I heard guests have to sign a non-disclosure agreement!’
‘I heard you go to bed one night and you wake up the next morning with the invitation laying next to you. No one knows who delivers them – or how they got in to your room.’
All anyone knows for sure is that the party hasn’t taken place yet. No one wants to risk saying they were there to a person who’s going and knows it hasn’t happened. The good news is that means Epiphany is still in Cannes. No doubt she’s heard the same whispers and is waiting until she can meet someone who’s going. The bad news is I’ve been going from hotel bar to hotel bar for two days and haven’t spotted her.
It’s the fifth day of the festival and the city is in full swing. The Carlton bar is crowded when I return at quarter to midnight. I’ve wasted the last four hours sitting in the Majestic, hoping Epiphany m
ight show there.
However Bela did it, whatever it was, it’s wearing off. I’ve started to see my figments again. On the walk back I saw Ana Lucia dribbling her soccer ball. Rachel called me from the beach. She said, ‘You haven’t fucked until you’ve fucked in the sea under a full moon.’
The Carlton’s waiters in their white coats double in the large mirror lining the back of the bar as they dash from table to bar and back, ushering drinks to all the Very Important People. The bar is packed with beautiful girls. These are the girls who emptied their bank accounts just to get to Cannes. Girls who spent every last penny on the dress they’re wearing now. And that dress, it’s the same one they’ll wear every night of the festival because it’s the only one they could afford. It’s the dress that perfectly shows off their young bodies. The dress which will, they hope, persuade a producer to sleep with them and then offer them a role in his next film.
I’m at a small table near the back. At the table next to mine are five loud Americans, all dressed in suits, drinking and laughing. All but one of the men looks to be around my age. They laugh extra hard when the older man tells a joke. The older man, his beard is perfectly manicured, like his suit and his eyebrows and his nose hair.
‘Look, Frank,’ the manicured man says to one of the younger guys, ‘This is your first year here, right?’
Frank smiles too big.
‘A little word of warning,’ the manicured man says. ‘If a beautiful woman hits on you – it’s really a man. For some reason Cannes really brings out the transvestites.’
‘It’s true,’ chimes in another American. ‘Just ask Mark!’ Laughter erupts.
‘It was one time, and anyone could have made that mistake,’ a red-faced
Mark says.
More laughter.
Across the bar another group of beautiful girls enter. They scan the room, look chronically dissatisfied, and leave as quickly as they arrived.
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