We Are Toten Herzen (TotenUniverse Book 1)

by Chris Harrison

  "A good publicist knows just how much to feed the press and then let them run the story in any direction they want. When it's done well the publicity can be enormous and cost you nothing. Madonna, for example, was the arch exponent of this. Someone like Michael Jackson, on the other hand, was eventually consumed by adverse publicity. It reached a stage where he and the people around him were no longer sowing those initial seeds and they lost control of their own message and stories."

  Mark Lawson

  "It's a risky tactic played by politicians now, at their peril some might say. Do you think that's what happened in 1977 when Toten Herzen were allegedly murdered? In terms of publicity, was that, to use a phrase, a botched job?"

  Anna Parkinson

  "Well they obviously didn't recover from it, so something must have gone wrong somewhere. Whoever was responsible doesn't seem to have been identified."

  Mark Lawson

  "Lance Beauly, Rob Wallet, the band's spokesman now, interviewed you when he was investigating the publicity stunt from 1977. Do you think he was getting close to what really happened back then?"

  Lance Beauly

  "He must have found something."

  Wallet heard Elaine turn up the television volume.

  Lance Beauly

  "I think he was zoning in on Lenny Harper. The funny thing is, we're all talking about information on the internet nowadays, but Rob Wallet found very little information on the net apart from headlines from newspaper archives. I think finding Lenny Harper in Germany revealed something because the next thing there's an announcement and the band are making a comeback."

  Jonathan Knight

  "Except, Lenny Harper is now dead and the band have only been seen by executives at Sony. Allegedly. We don't even know if it's the same band."

  Terence Pearl

  "So there are still answers to be addressed even now. Why haven't they shown their face in public. What happens if they appear in public?"

  Mark Lawson

  "There were reports of an impromptu performance in a bar in New York owned by the former Cat's Cradle drummer Alan Miller."

  Lance Beauly

  "People heard it. No one saw it. There's a difference. Something like that would have been all over Youtube, but there's nothing other than anecdotes. Give it time and you can bet forty thousand people will claim to have been there that night. The reality is probably closer to twenty or thirty."

  Wallet studied Terence Pearl's body language, baffled as to why Mark Lawson was offering him any kind of respect. Had he not read Pearl's theory about Scientology secretly buying the Vatican? An A4 sheet of paper glided out of the printer.

  Terence Pearl

  "What I find incredible is that we have a number of murders, five is it? Five critics in Britain, Lenny Harper in Germany, three people in America. . . ."

  Mark Lawson

  "Well four people in America if you include Anthony Rawls, the fifteen year old from Boston."

  Terence Pearl

  "Well, even more yes. And yet nobody is questioning the band. The manager Rob Wallet was arrested, but released and there's no suggestion that they're still under suspicion or being watched, monitored. How many connections do these people have? Germany, Britain, America."

  Jonathan Knight

  "There is a worrying correlation here. You can look at every person who has died and they all have one thing in common. They've done something that upset the band in one way or another."

  Mark Lawson

  "A fifteen year old boy in Boston?"

  Jonathan Knight

  "Apparently he had created a pretty disgusting Facebook page about the band and I don't really want to repeat its name, but it had a lot of faked images on it. It was only taken down by Facebook the day after he was killed."

  Wallet heard Knight's words and shouted through to the lounge. "Didn't you like being described as a MILF?"

  "Children need to learn to respect their elders. He knows now some lessons in life are tougher than others."

  "Here, take a look at this." Wallet walked in and handed Elaine the printout. It was a screen grab. "I thought Terence Pearl might have a video of his appearance on that news item and I was right. There's your man. The Peter Miles lookalike."

  Elaine sat up. Wallet had casually presented the past, a lifetime's memories, on a single sheet of paper. He would have given anything now for Susan's ability to get inside someone's head just to find out what unanswerable questions were bubbling up from the depths of Elaine's subconscious. Her eyes gave nothing away, but they darted around the image looking for any clues secretly stored in it.

  "So who is he?" asked Wallet. "Is that Peter Miles? Is he like us? I don't know what he looked like, but you do."

  "It's not him," said Elaine. "He looks just like him, his face, his build, the way he stands, but it's not Pete."

  Pete? An overly familiar term for a man last seen in 1973. Wallet was afraid to probe any further. He knew the limits of Susan's patience and how far you could push before Dee finally snapped, but Elaine was a quiet volcano and didn't need an excuse to blow up in your face. Never one to give too much away she was permanently steaming and gave no indication of how long you had left before the boiling magma emerged. Wallet tip toed around her.

  "What about Terence Pearl, who's he?" she asked, still studying the print out.

  "Not too sure. All I can find is a PDF of a school governors' meeting in Ipswich. I think he was a teacher, might still be."

  "When?"

  "Recently. PDF was dated 2011. All the stuff on his website was written this year. Links to his books are broken. Maybe they don't exist."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Call me paranoid," said Wallet, "but you announce your return and he starts writing about you. Maybe he's got a different agenda. Especially with this guy literally in the background." Wallet tapped the A4 sheet. "Someone needs to talk to Terence Pearl."

  "You think he's drawing us into something? Can you dig a little more, find out what you can about him?"

  "Yeah. I'll try."

  Lance Beauly

  "Whatever the reason for their secrecy now it was always the same back then. I had very limited time with the band, you know. You'd do a photoshoot and that was it. In, out, no time to set things up, talk to the band, discuss things with them."

  Mark Lawson

  "And who was behind that? Who was controlling access to them?"

  Lance Beauly

  "The band were. Initially it was Micky Redwall, he did everything, but he was slowly squeezed out of decision making and left to deal with the administration. He managed the affairs of the band, but by the end of 1976 I think the public face, the publicity and what have you, all came down to the band and in particular Susan Bekker."

  Anna Parkinson

  "I think you can see why the Sony deal may have gone bad. If the band still had that attitude, that desire to control things, I think they would have found it very difficult to deal with the highly detailed intricate management systems that labels have in place for major artists. No label like Sony is going to give a band carte blanche in the way that Toten Herzen enjoyed in the 1970s. Nobody has that these days. Whatever happened to sour that relationship was either unexpected or calculated."

  Mark Lawson

  "You mean the band deliberately engineered the fall out?"

  Anna Parkinson

  "I don't know for sure, but it's not impossible. They're not the only major label and the others might be looking on now and thinking we can handle them. I think what they do next will give us a big clue. If they disappear again it didn't work, someone pulled the plug, but if they walk into a bigger deal then it was a clever piece of gamesmanship. Quite remarkable actually."

  Mark Lawson

  "Lance Beauly, are the band capable of that? Are they clever enough, or should I say, are they informed enough to string out a major label like Sony?"

  Lance Beauly

  "Susan Bekker certain
ly is. It wouldn't surprise me. If you knew her you'd realise straight away what she's capable of."

  "Fucking amen to that, Lance," said Wallet to the television.

  28 (June)

  Wallet listened to all the activity in the farmhouse: the whispers, the tapping of laptop keyboards, the ticks and clicks of gadgets, the plastic soundtrack of modern preoccupation. What does a publicist do when there's no publicity to talk about? He had considered turning proactive, but that becomes information invention and, historically, Micky Redwall was the arch-master of that technique and look where it got him. All chewed up and spat out. A dog's dinner of a man.

  A publicist starved of information becomes a fidgety, nail biting husk confined to long midnight walks around the perimeters of the farm and in a country as flat and squared off as Holland Wallet was starting to wish he was human again. All this because of a golfing analogy. There was information, but the rest of the band weren't sharing it. He occasionally heard talk of partners, investment, production quality, itineraries. The vocabulary of action; the vocabulary of touring. And what bugged him the most was that this was his idea. Fuck it, he wandered up to their front door like a tinker, put the plan to them, not The Plan, His Plan, and they went with it. The fact that he was jettisoned after one error was evidence of their determination and, he selected a curious word, professionalism. They were serious. Too serious for him. He thought Sony was big, but Sony were like a beached whale, everything out of the water, blubber and all, visible and obvious. This lot were an iceberg; Ninety nine percent hidden.

  Susan came out of Elaine's room with the A4 sheet Wallet had printed off. She waved it at him. Was that gratitude? She wouldn't say if it was. Her personality was a maze, but it had a key and the key was her collection of diaries. Susan Bekker's instruction manual. Every action, mood, statement, emotion, wish, opinion, the whole system, was forged in the furnace of her diaries. She had given him just enough material to get to the core of her existence: the creation of her love for music, the genesis of the band, the revelation of the life changing Valentines Day in 1974. All the fundamentals were in one book, but for Wallet the smaller details could be the most significant, particularly the contempt she had revealed for the album cover photo shoot awash with blood, revelling in the vampire image with all its gory awkwardness. He didn't know if that was the conclusion she was hoping he'd come to, but those formative years helped him to understand her behaviour now.

  He stared at his laptop, returned to DuckDuckGo and waited for inspiration to create another list of purchases, another inventory of nostalgia. The webcam on his laptop pointed its beady eye at him and without words suggested an idea that floored him with its brilliance. He rushed out of his room. "I'll be back in an hour," he called to anyone who could be bothered to listen. No one responded.

  -

  The time was almost five am when Wallet knocked on Susan's door. She was sat cross legged on the bed with her laptop balanced on a pillow. She was lost to an online discussion with someone, typing then pausing, typing then pausing. Occasionally she'd smile or laugh gently, shake her head, open her eyes wide; expressions Wallet had never received. "I've got a present for you," he said.

  "Thank you," said Susan without looking up.

  "Something you've wanted for a long time."

  "That could be one of a number of things."

  "Mm. I think you'll like this. It's probably quite high on your list." Wallet waited for her attention. Her body language hardened as if to suggest a pause and she typed some unknowable conclusion, closed the lid of the laptop and followed Wallet as he walked to the bathroom.

  An expectant light was glowing. On the shelf above the sink the toiletries had been moved to one side to make way for a screen, a small flat rectangular gadget about thirty centimetres high. It was a tablet pc propped up like a small mirror.

  A mirror!

  Susan's steps were uncertain, wary of the gadget and what it was doing or where it had come from. She wasn't sure if she wanted to get any closer to it. What had Wallet done? The top of her hair slowly appeared as she crept forward, then her forehead, her curious eyebrows and lines pinching between them. Her eyes were scared, nervous, darkly made up like two heavy shadows. A narrow, aquiline nose above her mouth, lips slightly parted, unsmiling. Her chin completed the picture of her face and finally there she was, blinking, breathing, living. Her pupils were tiny black dots surrounded by brownish red circles; she had laughter lines etched ever so gently across her skin, mixed with the faintest blue capillaries that meandered across her temples. She had seen them before, but in pictures they were always still, lifeless, just a record of the moment. A possible fake. She had never seen them alive, but now she knew they were real, they were moving with her. She reached to touch the screen and her own hand reached back towards her. She didn't know her eyelashes were so long, or that the cleft above her top lip was so narrow. The gentle bulge of her mouth where it covered her canines was now obvious; she could see her tongue rolling over them. She stroked her cheekbone, and the bridge of her nose, the near straight line of her chin. When her face tightened she could see it responding, her mouth was starting to curl upwards and as she watched and waited a solitary tear escaped down her face and paused before dropping from her soft round jaw. This was the same woman she remembered from the last time they met. She hadn't changed, hadn't changed a bit.

  "You need to remember to invert the image horizontally," said Wallet hesitantly.

  "What? What do you mean?" Susan sniffed and leaned on the sink. Wallet brushed her shoulder as he pinched the base of the tablet's screen to reveal a line of icons, one of which was a double triangle.

  "The video camera is for web conferences so it films you the right way round. To make the image look like a reflection you need to press the triangle icons and it flips horizontally. You'll see yourself as if you were looking in a mirror."

  Susan nodded. "Thanks."

  "I'll let you have a play with it. Battery lasts about eight or nine hours so it should be just long enough to get yourself ready." He glanced at her digital reflection before walking away.

  "Thanks, Rob," she said.

  Wallet smiled and quietly closed the door as Susan dropped her head and sobbed.

  29 (July)

  The coming of summer was making normal life complicated as the needs of vampires and humans diverged. Problematic business meetings were held late into the night to avoid the vampires from being fried like bacon, but the midnight hour meant the humans were half asleep. In Rotterdam the band gathered close to Crooswijk cemetery to meet someone who didn't mind working the graveyard shift. Wallet's nostalgia trips were rubbing off on the others and Susan had offered to drive to bring back old memories of being behind the wheel of a car. Squashed in the back, Dee, Elaine and Rene argued about Top Trumps strategies and how to beat the person with the Boeing 747 card. Susan ignored them and parked the Audi close to the perimeter of the cemetery. Everyone piled out except Susan and Wallet.

  "The mirror means a lot to me," she said. "Look, you still have work to do to keep up with us, but I'm feeling a little more confident you might be coming through. What's happening now, all the whispering and the messages, it's something we've been meaning to do for a long time and I mean a long time."

  "The Plan?"

  "Call it the plan if you want. We should have done this a long time ago, but for one reason or another it never felt right and for all your annoying habits and lack of ability it was you who persuaded us that now was the time."

  "I think there's a compliment in there somewhere."

  "Not really," Susan said. "More of an acknowledgement."

  "So why now?" Wallet felt closer than he'd ever been to an explanation.

  "Seeing you compared to Lenny Harper made me realise that our friends are getting older. We could wait forever, it means nothing to us, but, well you've met Almer, you'll meet another one tonight, two actually, sort of." She frowned and studied her nails. She didn't need a mir
ror for those. They reminded her every time what she was. "So, let's say from here on the plan will become apparent, what it is, what it means, but in spite of the mirror, if you mess up on this a lot of people will lose out who can't afford to lose out, so that's the weight you'll be carrying. I still need convincing you're here for the right reasons."

  He needed to convince himself. He had been sure at the start, but that reason would get him killed now. Exploit the comeback, make a mint, write about it, live on it for thirty years like Lance Beauly and Jonathan Knight. But insight changes things and Susan's diaries were enough to tell him about all four of them and they were human, whatever crazy nocturnal world they lived in, they were still four twenty year olds with the world in front of them and a chance to take it again and again until they got it right, got it how they wanted. He thought he could help, but that now seemed astonishingly arrogant; admit it, this lot actually had twenty years experience on him, they knew more than he did, more than they revealed, they new more than anyone who dared sit in the same room. They were helping him. "I'm beginning to realise I'm out of my depth," he said, "I just need some steering to what you want me to do. What's best for you."

  "We all have to share the same ambition and you haven't convinced me yet what you hope to get out of all this."

  "If I had diaries I could let you draw your own conclusions. Look, I led a dull life. Then this happened and it all became interesting. I wasn't born to be anything, Susan. I didn't have that gene in me, I always had to think hard about what I wanted. I'm not like you, I didn't have a light bulb moment during a day off from school. I just drift. I drift around because I don't know where I really want to go. You know I've interviewed so many people and they often get asked what would you be if you weren't a singer, songwriter, drummer, pianist, and they say I don't know. That's why they get to where they are, because they can't or won't consider anything else. I never had that single minded outlook, and without that unless you're loaded you won't get anywhere. I need to become like that."