Desire

by Louise Bagshawe

  ‘We got a great front-cover lead. Two British royals, marriage troubles. No, it’s sourced from a butler.’ He tried to sound confident. Fuck Sam Murray! Fuck him and his demands for millions of dollars and wire fucking transfers! He could have that and a brace of Brazilian-waxed hookers if he’d call and give Rich something he could use. But no, now he had Eli Wassman, the money man, the guy who decided how much they all got paid, on the fucking phone from corporate HQ in Manhattan. And he had to sell him your basic celebrity splitsville cover.

  ‘That’s not a cover. Not this week. This week it’s page ten, and only if it’s true. And sourced.’

  True! And sourced! Rich passed a hand over his fat brow. What did the asshole think he was running here, the New York Times?

  ‘Nobody wants some old-hat film stars, Rich. We need Lisa Costello on the cover. We need news. Where’s Sam?’

  ‘Deep undercover,’ Rich lied. ‘Working on the biggest story you’ll ever print.’

  ‘Well he’d better work a lot faster. I got advertisers ready to sue us. We promised a gigantic exclusive last week. Do you have any idea how much we jacked up the rates? It’s practically the Superbowl! Things like this can keep our paper afloat for years. Don’t fuck this up.’

  Rich panted with nerves. The job was his life. All the whores and the blow and the easy lays in the clubs, everything went away if USA Weekly kicked him out. Even his fucking Ferrari was a company car.

  ‘Look, Sam’s taking his time. It ain’t my fault . . .’

  ‘Rich. Don’t give me excuses, give me a story. A major fucking story. Or we’ll find someone who can.’

  ‘I’m on it,’ he managed, and slammed down the phone. It rang again immediately.

  ‘What the hell is it now?’ Rich Frank screamed at his secretary.

  Sarah wasn’t fazed, she was used to his moods. Her voice came through his phone, calm and collected.

  ‘It’s Sam Murray.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Rich shouted.

  ‘You think I don’t know Sam’s voice? It’s him, on three. Pick up.’

  His heart thumping like a teenager at a pop concert, Rich depressed line three’s button, his hands shaking. God! Could it be? That selfish, drunk jerk had hauled himself off his ass to save the magazine?

  ‘Rich Frank.’

  ‘Hey. It’s Sam.’

  It was him, it fucking was. Rich’s pent-up fear and frustration exploded into rage. ‘Sam! You prick! Where the fuck have you been! I got corporate rooting around inside my ass with a flashlight!’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Sam said. Deadpan, the arrogant fucker.

  ‘Yeah, well. We’ve all been busy. Trying to keep this rag afloat. Do you understand that? Hundreds of people could get fired if we don’t get a cover.’ Including me, he didn’t say. ‘The whole damned building is waiting on you, Mr Superstar. So don’t give me any crap. Tell me you got something for me.’

  ‘I got something for you.’

  Suddenly Rich didn’t want to kill Sam any more. He wanted to kiss him. ‘You little beauty. You are a superstar after all. I’m gonna make you rich, Sam Murray.’

  There was a beat.

  ‘Send me the money by wire. All of it, everything else you owe me.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Rich said immediately. But there was something in Sam’s tone, some weird note, something that didn’t sit right with him. A sombre kind of voice, the way you spoke when somebody got sick. It didn’t seem like Sam was kidding. ‘That’s not our deal and you know it,’ he added, although less certainly.

  ‘Never mind our deal. Here’s why you need to send the money. This will be the last story I ever write for you. Whatever you owe me, pay me now. There won’t be another chance.’

  ‘You’re gonna kill yourself? Jesus, Sam . . .’

  ‘No, I’m not going to kill myself. Somebody else might kill me. They tried to already.’

  They tried to? Rich couldn’t help it, his mind leaped to the story. There was no point beating himself up; newspapers was what he did.

  ‘Rich, here’s the thing. I am about to start talking. You’ll set up a tape. You’ll transcribe. This will hit newsstands and be the biggest story in American journalism since O.J. Only you’ll have an exclusive. Maybe it’s not Watergate, but it’s all over the TV, and it’s the kind of thing that makes a career for a guy like you. You want to sit in that stuffy office all day with the fucked-up A/C?’

  Rich jumped out of his skin and looked around himself, as though Sam Murray might be hiding in the air vents.

  ‘Or do you want to be the guy on the other end of the phone? Do you want to sit in the boardroom? This story is your ticket, Rich. And if I file it and you don’t pay up, I’ll talk about that. To a rival paper. Let every hack in LA know that USA Weekly doesn’t stick to their deals. Maybe you’ll screw me over, but you’ll never get another story.’

  ‘Fuck you, Sam,’ Rich hissed again. But he was worried suddenly. Worried this guy meant it. Worried that he might be about to blow the exclusive of a lifetime.

  ‘You’ll wire the money as soon as I hang up. Put it this way, Rich. If I don’t get confirmation from my bank within the hour, I will call up Larry King, live on air, and blow your exclusive. However close publication is, TV and radio can always match it. Capisce?’

  ‘Si,’ Rich Frank moaned miserably. ‘God, I hope you’re right, Sam. I hope this story is good enough for the fucking Pulitzer.’

  ‘It’s better than that. It’s good enough for Entertainment Tonight and 20/20.’

  ‘Did you catch her?’

  ‘Catch her?’ Sam laughed. ‘You could say that. Why don’t you wire up a mike. I’ll dictate, you go straight to press. Call a conference if you like, have the staff sit around that dumb oval table in the office. You can wire the money while I talk and they type. And if I don’t get it within one hour of hanging up the phone, my next call is to CNN. And I start saying this shit all over again. No exclusive means no sale.’

  Rich clenched his fist, he was so pathetically grateful. ‘You got it. Wait right there.’

  ‘I can call back.’

  ‘No!’ he practically screamed. ‘Stay where you are! Malcolm! Michael! Tim! Colin! Get the fuck in here! Get tapes! It’s Sam Murray!’

  There was the sound of chairs scraping back on linoleum as the hack pack rushed into the boardroom. Rich almost pushed Sarah inside, then turned it over to them, placing his phone in the centre of the table, on speaker.

  ‘Get this typed and on to the cover. Sam, you still there?’

  ‘I’m here.’ Beat. ‘Some of the stuff I’m saying is going to shock you. I don’t want to be interrupted. I’m going to hang up frequently and call back so I can’t be traced. Got it?’

  ‘We got it, we got it,’ Rich pleaded, sweating some more.

  ‘Then you better get on to the transfer. Here we go.’ Murray cleared his throat. ‘This is Sam Murray, reporting from the road on the Lisa Costello case. It’s not going to be a usual story. For one thing, Lisa Costello is standing right next to me. For second, she didn’t do it. And for a third, I’m in love with her.’

  A murmur ran right around the table. Rich glared daggers at everybody, and Sam’s disembodied voice continued to float around the packed boardroom, this time without competition.

  ‘This is the story of a movie mogul murdered. A trophy wife blamed. A friendship betrayed. It’s the story of the real killer, a supposed friend of Josh Steen’s, who really hated him and his fiancée. And it’s the story of a hired assassin wielding a royal dagger, then flying across the world to finish the job with the woman he set up. Only that assassin is now dead. And I killed him.’

  ‘Christ!’ said Martha Varney, the features editor.

  ‘Don’t fucking interrupt,’ Rich said intently. ‘I want this typed. I want it printed. Don’t edit a word.’ He stood up from the table.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Varney whispered.

  ‘Where do you think? I’m going to pay the guy his money,�
�� Rich answered.

  And for once in his life, he didn’t resent it at all.

  Sam finally hung up the phone forty minutes later. He had talked, and the words had flowed easily out of him. Lisa was standing next to him, her beautiful eyes prickling with tears at times. That was hard to see, but he ploughed on. With almost every word he felt their burden getting lighter. It was a rough story. They’d both been wrong. The lecherous, lazy tabloid hack. The trophy wife who didn’t have the guts to get out. They weren’t perfect. But they had not deserved this.

  He’d told them everything. How Lisa had gotten drunk, provided a nice opportunity. Tricked Alice and hurt her and tied her up. Stolen a passport. Fled to Europe. He described hunting her, falling in love. Flinging his ethics out the window, his safety, his chance of a payday. He talked about the FBI. He talked about second chances. Their love, and how it surprised him, how he’d never thought he could feel like this. The sensation of being trapped. Driving over the border, late at night, in a car. Lisa the ‘hooker’, sharing a motel. How hard it had been not to touch her.

  And finally, the assassin. He’d flicked through the man’s phone. Sam thought he was called Felix. There was a garbled message from a woman, maybe something he’d forgotten to delete from voicemail. It sounded like that. Sam said he knew the name of Felix’s client, but was leaving it out. It was important to scare the fucker. Important to keep him guessing as to what Sam knew. The story was hot enough without it.

  Sam could hear the gasps, the oohs and aahs of the journalists, many of them his friends. It was truly an incredible story. A once-in-a-lifetime thing. It blew the lid off the perception of Lisa, it told a tale of life on the run, incredible wealth, desperation, the sense of being hunted, falling in love against the odds. It blew up every fantasy, every perception of the easy life, the trophy wife who had it all. It shone a torch into the darkness of the world surrounding Josh Steen. It told America that Lisa was innocent, totally innocent. And that somebody was trying to kill her - a package deal with her husband.

  TV was going to talk of nothing else. And this would be one of the biggest-selling issues in the history of magazines.

  When Sam was finally done, he said, ‘Rich? You sent the money?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said the disembodied voice. ‘It’s there. Go check. Thanks, Sam. You know what this means.’

  ‘See you later, Rich. At times it was fun.’ He put down the receiver, turned around. There she was, tears in her eyes, his Lisa, his woman. He had defied the whole world for her. And he would do it all again, in a second.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘We don’t have time for it. Hold on one more second, OK?’

  He picked the phone up again and called his bank. Yeah, they were happy to confirm the money was there. Amazing how deferential they sounded after a huge payoff. He issued orders quickly, used to the routine by now; the money split, landed in numbered accounts, a bit of it to an account under a false ID he’d set up when still training as a Fibbie and had used now and then ever since. Never needed it as much as he did today.

  The whole set of transactions took him five or six minutes, and when the last call was done, he replaced the receiver and felt a hundred pounds lighter. He exhaled; he looked out, past the whitewashed houses, to the sea, dark and massive under the twilight sky. A huge part of his life was over. He was the story now, and he could never be a journalist again. And he didn’t care. Lisa was the future. She had changed everything, and now there was no map. And he found he loved it.

  ‘Now what?’ she said.

  She was shivering. The temperature had dropped with the sun. He turned around, took her into his arms. Held her closely, heating her with his body. He wanted to make sure she was not cold. He wanted to protect her from every bad thing, ever. Or at least die trying.

  ‘Now we go back to the house. Make love.’

  ‘I like that part,’ she said.

  ‘And then tomorrow we take a ride to Barcelona. From there we fly back to LA.’

  ‘How the hell do we do that?’

  ‘I have a connection in Barcelona.’ He hoped to God Roderigo was still active. Christ knew what he could come up with otherwise. ‘We’ll get fake passports. He makes the best. We cut your hair, dye it again, get you some sunglasses, you fly in.’

  ‘That simple?’ she asked, pressing against him.

  ‘Best things in life usually are.’ He slipped his hand into hers. ‘Let’s go home.’

  Home. God. They didn’t have one. Right now he wasn’t sure he could ever offer her one again. Maybe this was the dumbest move in the world. Flying back to the States, where they fried you for murder. Where law enforcement knew exactly what it was doing, and had the time, the money and the patience to catch you. As of this second, he was a millionaire. So far, so good, on the run. He could make that cash last a lifetime. It wouldn’t be luxury, but they’d have each other, and a new life.

  This was a risk, a fucking giant risk.

  But they would take it anyway.

  Yuri shifted a little in his seat. It was buttercup leather, a sleek modern chair that complemented the cowslip walls of the Beverly Hills sitting room. The lady of the house had decked this all out in a fantasy of white and shades of yellow; Paris meets California sunshine. Exactly the wrong kind of room to do dark deals in. It was incongruous, and he enjoyed meeting the client here. He insisted on entry to their homes. Unsettled them from the very start, and put the balance of power exactly where it should be in their relationship. With him.

  The client hated him in this room. Hated him period. No problem. He was used to it. If the idiot hadn’t hired Felix Latham instead of him, he wouldn’t have this problem now.

  ‘This job will be very expensive. Not that these things are ever cheap. But times have changed since round one.’

  ‘I get that.’ Cold and clipped.

  ‘You have two targets; at this point they’re both famous, and USA Weekly is about to hit the stands in a special edition. Rumours on the wire are that it’s a doozy. Sam Murray, special correspondent, admitting he’s in love and on the lam. Also clears Lisa Costello.’

  ‘How can it clear her?’

  There was no point hiding what would be common knowledge soon enough. He had always enjoyed delivering bad news. He was bad news.

  ‘The FBI found semen stains on the honeymoon bed, at an angle that meant Josh Steen couldn’t have made them. Hair in the shower, too. And they got Felix’s body over in Europe. DNA confirms. That clears Lisa Costello nice and neat.’

  There was a sharp intake of breath. ‘Semen? Hair?’

  He grinned. ‘Felix was always sloppy. That’s probably why he got dead. You shouldn’t economise with the important stuff, OK.’

  ‘I don’t care about cost.’

  ‘Yeah. Good. You need this done. They have Felix now. They’ll track his ID soon. Then bank accounts, everything. Sam Murray is the one that would bother me. The girl . . .’ He shrugged. ‘She’s a slippery little bitch. Impressive. But he was working for the Bureau once. Good rep, just selfish, lazy. Looks like he’s trying to put that right.’

  The client shifted. It was never a happy point in their lives when they came to see him.

  ‘Can you find them?’

  ‘I play in bigger leagues than Felix Latham. I got access to Interpol computers, I have contacts at the telecoms exchange. Got people in the FBI, the police. I pay all of them. Takes money. Lots of money.’

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  Snotty. ‘That’s a yes. I can find them. If you got the cash.’

  ‘It’s what all you people say.’

  He was supremely relaxed. ‘We both know that if you had better options, you’d have taken them. In my business it’s about money. There are no awards ceremonies. No Oscars, no kudos. Just money. Your problem meets my numbered bank account. For this job the price is ten million, five million each.’

  The eyebrows lifted in genuine shock. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘You can bu
y a lot cheaper, but nobody more reliable. I’m high-end. It’s what you need.’

  ‘But the cops will find that kind of money transferred out. They’ll track it.’

  ‘A succession of small payments.’ He smirked. ‘Relatively small, at least. Various accounts. I have some slush businesses. I’ll instruct you on how to pay.’

  ‘OK.’ It was almost a sob. ‘Don’t come back for more; there isn’t any.’

  He leaned forward. ‘Believe me, I know your finances. If you had more, you’d be paying it. It will take me several days to track them. They’ve gone to ground. Then I’ll kill them. It’ll be fast.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where they are?’

  The question was pathetically eager. It was fun to answer honestly. ‘Not till I’ve tracked them. But my best guess is that they’re coming here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘To find you. Expose you. They don’t get out from under until you’ve been charged. Sam Murray is going to hunt you.’

  A blink of fear. ‘How the hell can you tell that?’

  Finally he threw out a bone. A touch of reassurance. ‘Because Sam Murray is my prey now, and I’m watching him.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ll be in touch tonight. Start transfers immediately.’

  ‘I’ve been let down before.’

  ‘Felix Latham has missed targets before,’ Yuri said. ‘My record is perfect. These two won’t spoil it. You get what you pay for.’ He walked out.

  It was early in the morning. The rising sun reddened the sea, sending ochre and ruby flashes across the windscreen as Sam drove along the coast road. He’d called Hans, found a neighbour with a car they could borrow, no questions asked; God knew how he’d get it back, but maybe Hans would take care of that. He couldn’t worry about it. That was life on the run. You took things. Risks. Passports. Other people’s cars.

  They would turn inland soon. Lisa was bundled up against the window, sleeping. He was glad of it. They had made love for most of the night. Breaking to eat, and then lying together until she made him hard again. He could scarcely believe what it was like with her. When they fell asleep, he’d woken in the night, wanting her, and had pulled her to him, taken her when she was half asleep, woken her thrusting inside her, his mouth clamped on hers. And she’d kicked and scratched and bitten; she’d squirmed beneath him, gasped and sobbed until he had her bite down on a pillow. Such torrents of passion. She was so excited by him, she made him feel ten feet tall. Love. It was weird. And exhausting. But he could handle little sleep. He’d sleep on the plane. If they got on it.