by John Niven
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Half a mil? Worth a punt.’
‘Okey-dokey,’ Trellick says. ‘Tell business affairs we’ll match it.’
‘Fantastic,’ Chrissy says. ‘They’re spinning in Vegas in a couple of weeks. I’m going to go up.’
‘Sure.’
‘Great, thanks, James. Nice to meet you, Steven. How long you in town for?’
I look at Trellick. ‘I’m not sure,’ I say.
‘Well, see you around.’ She leaves as Sam comes in with the coffee, Trellick and I both watching that fine Texan backside sashay away across the room. We exchange a look that says ‘very doable’.
‘Thanks, Sam,’ Trellick says. ‘No calls, OK?’
She leaves.
‘OK,’ he says finally, ‘outside of the people who made it, the existence of what I am about to show you is known to three people.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ I say. ‘Let’s crack on …’
‘All right, boys and girls,’ he says, turning his laptop towards me. ‘Eyes down for a full house …’
Do you know much about pornography? Are you well versed? The footage Trellick shows me belongs to the genre known as ‘amateur POV’: low grade, shot in a domestic setting with poor lighting and zero production values. The thrill of this particular substratum is its extreme reality, the fact that while you’re frantically tugging at your crazed baton you can easily picture this being real, almost filmed without one party’s consent, as the clip Trellick is showing me almost certainly was. The camera seemed to have been placed squarely in the centre of what you’d normally take to be the woman’s head. Except, in this case, judging by the genitalia, the woman’s role is being played by a young boy. So, for a bit, we get a shot of a man’s head, a thick tangle of black curly hair, as he enthusiastically works away between the kid’s legs. (Apart from the fact that we are watching gay porn, the experience of sitting in a darkened office during the day watching disgraceful filth with Trellick is reassuringly familiar, reminding me of when we used to work together in the nineties.) Then there’s a rushed, jerky, change of positions, banging and blurring, and then some pixelated, shot-much-too-close footage of the man’s stomach, the camera rushing in towards it and then back out, in and back out … The guy’s stomach, you notice, is mottled, very tanned but with pink, reddish patches, like bad sunburn. Some more frantic changing of positions and now the kid is facing a large mirror so we can see his face perfectly. He is very good-looking, maybe twelve or thirteen, and he is wearing a baseball cap. And … Jesus.
Right behind him in the mirror, banging and thrusting like a madman, pumping away as though the very act of sodomy itself were about to be banned or rationed, is …
Lucius. Fucking. Du Pre.
My jaw drops.
On-screen Du Pre’s does too as he starts unleashing an urgent, primal howl, as he starts shouting in the high-pitched voice I know so well from countless hit records, countless interviews, ‘THE EMPEROR IS COMING! THE EMPEROR IS COMING! THE EMP … OHHHHHHUURRRRRRR!’
Du Pre collapses on the kid’s back, panting, and the screen goes black. Trellick stops it. It, and Du Pre, has lasted all of one minute and fifty-two seconds. I take a deep breath, exhale, and say the only thing I can say.
‘Fuck. Me.’
‘Exactly,’ Trellick says.
I mean, I’d heard rumours – who hadn’t? But industry rumours are one thing. Actual footage of one of the biggest pop stars in the world viciously buggering a child, that’s a whole other kettle of prison.
‘So where are you at?’ I ask.
‘Come on,’ Trellick says. ‘We’ll go meet the others.’
Down a long hallway and then he’s opening the doors to a boardroom where two men sit at the head of the dark wood conference table, the matt-black pyramid of the speakerphone in the middle of it. I know one of them. ‘Lance …’ I say, extending a hand. I haven’t seen Lance Schitzbaul, Du Pre’s manager, in five or six years. He’s gained weight, an impressive feat considering he was starting from about 250 pounds. He must be in his early sixties now and looks like he’s aged twenty years in the last five. Broken blood vessels on his cheeks, the eyes rheumy. It’s a Brian Clough pus. A drinker’s coupon.
‘Hey, Steve,’ Lance says, getting up, already sweating, from the breakfast smorgasbord he has spread in front of him. ‘Some fucken deal, huh?’
He embraces me into his hefty German-Jewish-American mass, his silk shirt damp, his bearded face scratching my cheek.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I just saw the, um, show.’
‘And this is Brandon Krell,’ Trellick says, gesturing to the other guy in the room, a bearded thirty-something in suit and tie. ‘Our CFO. He’s the only other guy at the company who knows what’s going on.’
‘Brandon,’ I say, shaking his hand.
‘Steven. Heard so much about you. A real honour.’
We all settle around the table. ‘Right,’ I say, shooting my cuffs. ‘Just let me ask all the obvious questions first so we can get through it. Lance, I’m assuming you’ve been here or hereabouts before, why not just pay the cunts off?’
‘They want fifty million dollars,’ Lance says.
‘So? Your client’s a billionaire.’
A pause as the three of them look at each other.
‘Lance?’ Trellick says.
Lance sighs as he slides a manila folder towards me. ‘Take your time …’ he says, his mouth full of bear claw.
A master at reading balance sheets, it takes me ten minutes – flipping back and forth, my eyes going over the columns, down and up, turning to the appendix and back again – to fully come to grips with things.
Lucius Du Pre is broke.
Not broke like you’re broke, you, you idiot, sitting there in your flat reading a fucking book like a cunt.
It’s not like he can’t afford to go on holiday or go out for a big night with his mates or buy a new sofa. But in real terms, in rich person’s terms, another three months of living like he does and he’s fucked. I look at some of the expenses – millions of dollars a year on plane charters, clothes and paintings. Trips to London and New York with an entourage of fifteen to twenty people, hairdressers, stylists, bodyguards, chefs and so on and so on. The costs of running his Narnia ranch alone seem to come in at over two million dollars a month. Among larger expenses are things like the thirty-minute short film called Mirage which Du Pre scripted and self-funded and which he had directed by the late Tony Scott (Top Gun, Black Rain) at a cost of twenty-five million dollars. It went straight in the bin when he decided he didn’t like his hair. Some years back he spent ten million dollars buying the Elephant Man John Merrick’s skeleton.
I look at some ‘miscellaneous’ expenses: 46,000 dollars in architect fees for a house Du Pre was going to buy in Pacific Palisades. (He changed his mind.) A million-dollar fee to the actor Charlie Sheen for appearing at a party Du Pre threw. 380,000 dollars on a convertible Bentley, 210,000 on a customised Lincoln Navigator sports utility vehicle. 250,000 on an antiques shopping spree in Beverly Hills. There are also some smaller incidental items: a few Tiffany lamps, a vintage IWC watch, a dinner for twenty-two people at Nobu. It comes out at about a million and change.
And that was how August 2015 went.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like spending fucking money, but this …
There are also, starting a few years ago, large, regular and ominous payments listed in the ‘legal services’ column: ranging from ten thousand dollars to a few million. Payments, Lance explains, made ‘without prejudice’ (i.e. we admit nothing but here have some cash and fuck off and shut up) to the guardians of various children who enjoyed especially close relationships with his client.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘James, Unigram gives them the money. Advance it against royalties, buy a bit of his publishing off him or something.’
‘Brandon?’ Trellick says.
Krell slides another manila folder towards me. ‘Again, take your time,’ he says.
This fi
le takes longer to digest. It details Unigram’s dealings with Du Pre over the last fifteen or so years. Fifteen years ago things were fine. Du Pre was laughing. All the way to the bank. Happily buggering infants along the way. And then a couple of things coincided: he bought Narnia and he pretty much stopped recording and touring. Well, after five years of this things got understandably shaky on the cash flow front. So Du Pre sold half of his publishing company to Unigram for just over 100 million dollars. I remember the deal going down at the time, thinking they’d got a bit of a bargain there. This cash injection obviously shored things up a bit. Then, after another few years of shopping like a cracked-up Eva Perón on Supermarket Sweep and buggering kids like it was the Walton Hop Christmas party, and this part I don’t know because it was obviously kept very quiet, Du Pre sold the remaining 50 per cent of his publishing (his only real asset) off for another hundred-plus million.
Getting more recent now, 2013, Schitzbaul came to the company and begged for their help. Du Pre was promising a new record, promising to tour again. Trellick was in charge by this point and he authorised a hundred-million-dollar loan against future royalties as well as helping Du Pre arrange lines of credit, to get him through the rough patch, until his monster comeback record came out. These are listed in an appendix – 120 million from Bank of America, for which Unigram stood guarantor, 25 million from Citigroup and another 30 million from something called Crystal Finance, a private ‘wealth management group’ (a kind of TolerHouse! for the incredibly rich), both collateralised against Narnia. I look at Trellick and shake my head. He looks suitably shamefaced.
In short, not only is Du Pre broke, he owes the label a hundred million plus interest. He owes private lenders nearly twice that. His monthly debt payments are almost five million dollars.
‘Fuck,’ I say. I look at Schitzbaul. ‘How did you let it get to th—’
He’s been on edge since we sat down. Now he explodes, banging the table.
‘THE FUCK IT’S MY FAULT, YOU FUCKING LIMEY COCKSUCKERS! You try managing that guy for five fucken minutes. Don’t listen to no one! I fucken told him – “Lucius, if you keep spending like this and you ain’t earning, then –” I GAVE THAT SONOFABITCH THE BEST GODDAMN YEARS OF MY LIFE AND THIS IS HOW IT PANS OUT! MOTHERFUCKER!’
Big managers have to rant now and then and we let Schitzbaul get it out. But really, he’s got nothing in his hand. After a minute or so I raise my left index finger and say, softly, ‘Uh, Schitzbull?’
‘IT’S SCHITZBAWL!’
‘Lance, shut the fuck up, OK?’ To my surprise he immediately does so, pushing back his chair and walking over to the bar, where he begins fixing himself a Stoli on the rocks at ten o’clock in the morning. ‘Of course,’ I say to Trellick and Brandon, ‘even if there was fifty million sloshing around to pay them off there’s the question of …’
‘Good faith,’ Brandon says.
‘Exactly,’ Trellick says.
Which is to say, the kind of people who’d arrange to videotape their own child being anally raped by a madman and then not go to the police but instead use the tape for blackmail purposes aren’t going to be at the top of a list headed ‘people you’d trust to keep their end of a fifty-million-dollar deal’.
‘There’s also the question of Unigram being a publicly traded company …’ Trellick says.
‘Meaning that if it got out that you’d helped with this in any way you’re finished,’ I say.
‘Correctos,’ Trellick says.
This is bleak. I think for a moment then ask, ‘Who’s met with them?’
Trellick and Brandon both look at Schitzbaul.
‘Glen and Bridget Murphy. They’re scumbags,’ he sighs, draining his glass, the fight gone out of him now, ‘just a pair of fucking scumbags.’
‘Have we considered …?’ I don’t finish.
‘Whacking the pair of them?’ Schitzbaul says. ‘Sure. I’d happily do it my fucking self. But it’s the usual: their lawyer, one Art Hinkley of Pasadena – and this guy’s another piece of work, believe me – has a “letter to be opened in the event of our deaths”. It … it’s a nightmare.’ Schitzbaul wanders off, looking out of the windows, presumably picking one to jump from.
‘How long do we have?’ I ask.
‘A week and then the tape gets mailed to Good Morning America,’ Trellick says. ‘Stupid fucking hicks probably think you can go and get fifty million out of the ATM.’ He shakes his head. And then puts it in his hands. ‘If this goes public …’ I have never seen Trellick so stressed.
I follow his train of thought. If ‘Lucius Does Little Boys’ goes public …
Unigram is out a hundred million immediately.
Plus another 120 million when Bank of America comes calling and says ‘fuck you, pay us’.
Du Pre’s comeback tour? Gone. Overnight the cunt will become the most toxic brand since American Airlines said ‘we beat our customers’.
As for Unigram? They’re done too. They’re the label that funds paedophilia.
There is silence for a long time, broken only by the tinkling of ice in Schitzbaul’s glass as he stands up at the windows, looking out at sunny LA, pursuing the only course open to him at this point – drinking himself senseless – until I say, ‘OK, guys. You’re going to have to give me some time with this. Lance, how much does Du Pre know?’
‘About the tape? Jackshit.’
‘Keep it that way for now. How about his financial situation, how clued up is he there?’
‘Well, he ain’t doing these comeback shows for fun. I’ll tell you that for fucken nothing. Had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. He knows it ain’t great, but as to how bad it really is? Nah, with the drugs, the injections and whatnot? He’s pretty much got his head in the fucken sand.’
‘You need to get it out. Make him understand how bad it is. Now.’ Schitzbaul nods. ‘Trellick, let’s have dinner tonight when I’ve got my head around all this a bit. It … it’s a fucking belter. Brandon? Nice to meet you. Can you get all these files over to my place?’
‘Sure,’ he says as we shake.
‘Steven?’ Schitzbaul extends his hand. This old, broken alky clown, overseeing this as the last act in a management career that has spanned four decades. ‘Thanks for trying to help us out here. Sorry I lost my temper for a minute back there. It’s just … the fucken pressure, you know?’
‘You call that losing your temper?’ I say, smiling.
‘You know what’s really painful?’ Schitzbaul says. ‘And I say this with all due respect, because I love the kid. I mean, he’s got problems like you wouldn’t believe’ (no shit) ‘but, you know, he’s been like a fucken son to me. But, it has to be said, I can’t even see him living much longer. The amount of shit he’s putting into his veins. Never eats. Weighs about a hundred pounds. I think he last took a fucken shit around Thanksgiving. It’s, you know, now this could be the end of him. His legacy. Fucking shame.’
‘Lance,’ I say, ‘I’ll call you later.’
The meeting breaks up and something occurs to me that the average person might find odd. That you out there might find strange and unsettling. It is this: at no point in the hour plus we spent discussing the matter did one of us express any interest in, or sympathy for, the buggered child.
Hey, this is the music industry. You must be looking for the door marked ‘Social Work’.
I have Mike swing by Book Soup on Sunset on the way back to the apartment. I want to pick up some reading.
FIVE
Lucius was crying. This was not unusual. He cried most days, at everything from a stray memory – usually to do with his father: punching his tooth out backstage in Cleveland, unexpectedly telling him he’d done a good job when he came out of the vocal booth one time, jerking him off roughly in the back of the tour bus when he was seven or eight – to an insurance commercial to not being able to get the cap off the toothpaste. But these were real tears. Barking, howling, uncontrollable sobbing. After a couple of minutes
Jay panicked and did the only thing he could think of, the only thing he knew always put Lucius in a good mood – he sent for Dr Ali. Roman Klorovsky – choreographer to the stars – looked down at his client, gnashing and wailing on the floor, and said, ‘Lucius, darling, please, what is wrong, baby?’
‘I CAN’T DO IT!’ Lucius screamed, lying on his back, kicking his heels on the sprung wood floor, yelling over the hard, pounding backing track.
‘Sure you can!’ Roman leaned down and patted his shoulder comfortingly. He looked around the huge gymnasium (one of three at Narnia), looking for the MD to kill the music. Roman made the throat-cutting gesture and blessed silence reigned. ‘Come. Come now. Is easy. We get this.’ It was a fairly simple step after all, just a sort of turn, pivot, kick thing. And Lucius was renowned as one of the greatest dancers in the business. (Although, from what he’d seen in the past couple of days, Roman sensed he might fast be entering his twilight in that respect. Well, the guy had to be fifty at least.) Roman had taken the gig partly out of curiosity and partly because – the usual reason people worked with Lucius Du Pre – the cheque was eye-watering. The NDA he’d had to sign was like the phone book.
‘NO! NO! NO! I MEAN – I CAN’T DO IT! ANY OF IT!’
Lucius took a dance shoe off and threw it across the room – at the room, at Narnia, at everything – and Roman realised what this was about. He’d come up in the Moscow Ballet (Lucius was nothing compared to a prima ballerina who hasn’t eaten in three days) and gone on to work with everyone from Spielberg to Spike Jonze to Kanye and there was one thing he’d learned along the way – the tantrum was almost never about what it was about. It wasn’t the dance step Lucius didn’t want to do.
‘Uh, Lucius,’ a voice said, off to the side. Roman turned to see Jay poking his head back in the door, ‘Lance is here, in the conservatory. You want me to tell him you busy?’
With a deep breath, Lucius pulled himself together. Actually, this was good. Good timing. They’d have it out. Put paid to this ridiculous idea once and for all.
Lance saw Lucius coming towards him across the conservatory – more like the atrium of a grand hotel than something a middle-class homeowner would tack onto the back of their semi – and, drunk as he was, he couldn’t help the ache that fluttered through his heart. He’d managed Lucius for thirty years, since he left the band and went out on his own. Lance had borne witness to the blossoming of his talent and now, he realised, he was witnessing its decline. He took a tug on his drink and tried to clear his head. Now was no time for sentimental trips down memory lane. Now was a time for tough, clear talk.