by John Niven
‘Lance? Steven. How are you?’
‘Schteeven! Ah’mgreatbuddyhowsyou?’
‘Sorry?’
Lance tried again. And again.
‘OK, Lance? All you have to do is listen, OK? We’ve got Lucius. Keep this very quiet but you’re coming to New York day after tomorrow, on the Unigram jet. Fred has all the details. Just, he’s coming with you. OK?’
‘Fred?’
‘Your guy Fred? Your bodyguard?’
‘Oh! Fred! Thasssgreat. I love Fred.’
‘Sure you do, Lance. Look, don’t worry. It’s all going to work out. Just take it easy, OK? Everything’s going to be fine.’
‘SchureSchteeeven. No pobbem. I … I’ll see you in … in …’ Where had he said? What city? ‘NEW YOIK! I’ll see you in New Yoik, motherfucka! I … thankshhh. Thankshh fo taking care o all the shit, this fu, fugging shit. I … I love you, man.’
But the line was already dead. Lance flopped back in the lounger on his deck, the western deck of the house, looking stupefied towards the ocean, a warm glow in his loins, content that something good had just taken place, disquieted only by the growing realisation that the warmth he was feeling was due to the fact that he had, once again, pissed himself. Oh well. He reached for the bottle.
FORTY-EIGHT
Art Hinckley hung up, laced his fingers behind his head, and looked around his office, at the fake wood panelling, the hissing fluorescent tubes, the nail salon across the parking lot. The Thai massage place where he sometimes availed himself of a happier ending than he was used to in his business dealings. He smiled. New York. They would be signing the contracts day after tomorrow. Goodbye, fake panelling. Goodbye, nail salon. Hello, happy endings. Real happy endings. Cash. Prestige. Power. Back end. Art had played the long game. Had doled his hand out slowly and precisely and had won. He looked at the stack of Unigram contracts on his desk, offering Behemoth Inc. (equal partners: A. Hinckley, B. and G. Murphy) a 5 per cent share in all of the company’s future net profits on all of Lucius Du Pre’s recorded output. There were similar contracts to be signed between them and Schitzbaul’s company Platinum Talent, guaranteeing them the same split on all of Du Pre’s non-record-company income: touring, advertising revenue, merchandise and so forth. The contracts all had dozens of yellow Post-it notes sticking out of them – designating pages where amends and annotations had been made in Art’s crabbed hand. Where he had thunderously struck out clauses that offended him, where he had countered some of his proposals Unigram had rejected with a furious ‘STET!’ He had used a lifetime of legal skills in this work and it had felt so good, knowing that upon completion he would receive something of a different order to his usual fee, his 50 per cent of some guy’s four-thousand-dollar damages for twisting his ankle on an Orange County sidewalk. Upon signature of these agreements Art would receive his share of twenty million dollars. And that was just an advance. Like Stelfox said, if they got this back-from-the-dead record right, they all stood to make hundreds of millions. A true player. Go big or go home. He dialled the number. Bridget answered.
‘It’s done. We’re there. Pack your bags – we’re going to New York to sign the contracts.’
‘Shit, really? Fuck. That’s great.’
‘We’re going on the Unigram jet. Staying at the Plaza.’
Art tossed this off casually, as though he were saying ‘we’re going to Domino’s, getting a pizza’.
‘Wow,’ Bridget said, then yelling, ‘Glen! HEY, GLEN! We –’
‘Bridget, wait!’ Art said. ‘Listen, there’s a condition.’
‘What?’
He told her.
‘No way. No fucking way! I don’t want them in the same fucking room,’ Bridget said.
Christ, Art thought, now you play the perfect mother. ‘It’s just for a few minutes,’ Art said. ‘Apparently he just wants to say goodbye.’
‘I don’t know,’ Bridget said.
‘Bridget, think for Christ’s sake. We’ve been working on this deal for months now. Just one meeting and then we’re done.’
‘I don’t like it …’ Mother Perfect said.
‘Well, you don’t have to like it. We just have to get it done. OK?’
Finally, reluctantly, she said, ‘OK.’
‘Right. I’ll email you the address of where we’re getting the jet. Nine a.m. day after tomorrow. Tell Glen I said hi.’ Art hung up. A couple more days and these jerks would be out of his life forever. Maybe out of everyone’s lives if he went down the route Stelfox was suggesting. He’d need to look into this properly. Maybe have a few lunches and dinners with Stelfox. Get to know him better, now they were sort of partners.
Art was looking forward to that.
FORTY-NINE
Bridget walked up the hallway and found Glen amid the forest of packing crates, busy with the tape gun and the Sharpie. She didn’t know where half of this shit had come from, or understand why he wanted to take it. As far as Bridget was concerned they could just buy new shit when they moved next week. She was enjoying looking around their house now that they were leaving it. Every patch of damp, every crack in the plaster, every worn patch of carpeting, reminding her of how far they had come, how well they had done. ‘That was Art,’ she said.
‘What? Problem?’
‘Nope. It’s all done. We’re signing day after tomorrow. In New York.’
‘Huh? Why there?’
‘We’re going on the Unigram jet. They’re putting us up at the Plaza.’
‘No shit?’ Glen grinned, reached for a beer. ‘See what I told you?’ he said. ‘That’s some actual respect for you. Fucking playas, playas …’ He did the little Tropic Thunder dance.
‘Yeah yeah,’ Bridget said. ‘But listen, Du Pre is going to be there. We’ve got to bring Connor. He wants to say goodbye.’
‘What?’
‘Yup.’
‘That sick, twisted, goddamned –’
‘Art says we need to just suck it up. It’s one meeting.’
Glen thought about making a scene. About telling them all to go fuck themselves. Telling them ‘what kind of a fucking father do you think I am?’ That he wasn’t about to have his son in the same room as that paedophile freak for five minutes. Then Glen thought about something else – the image of millions of dollars coming into his mind. Boxes and boxes of crisp banknotes as far as the eye could see, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouses of them.
‘Ah fuck it,’ he said. ‘It’s one meeting, right?’ He popped that beer and chugged it down. Burping, he said, ‘Hey, private jet, right? You know what that means?’
‘What?’
‘No security. Take a couple of grams, get high in the sky!’
‘Jesus, Glen …’
She walked back off down the hall towards Connor’s room, to tell him about the trip, to tell him his special friend was still alive, and that he’d be seeing him one last time. Behind her she could hear Glen, doing his stupid dance, rhythmically chanting ‘PLAYA, PLAYA, PLAYA …’
FIFTY
‘Steven? It’s Ruth.’
‘Ruth. Panic over. We’ve got him.’
‘Oh, thank Christ for that. Where?’
‘New York. The Plaza.’
‘How did he get –’
‘It’s a long and mental fucking story. I’ll tell you when you get here.’
‘When’s that?’
‘Day after tomorrow. Nine a.m. You’re getting the Unigram jet out of Burbank. We’ve got a lot of work to do so bring Les and Jenny.’
‘Gotcha.’ Ruth scribbling it all down. ‘But tell me this – how the fuck did he get himself to NYC from fucking camel-fucker land without getting recognised?’
‘Well, let’s just say he’s gained a little weight …’
‘Oh man. How much?’
Stelfox laughed. ‘Somewhere between Boss Hogg and Brando in Apocalypse Now.’
‘Jesus Christ. You … how come you’re laughing?’ She started laughing too. He had one of those la
ughs, a laugh you jump in with gratefully, a laugh that you would do anything to inspire.
‘It’s just too fucking good. You couldn’t make it up. Wait until you hear his plans for the next phase of his career. But don’t worry. I’ve got it all figured out. We’re all going to make a ton of money. I’ll see you soon.’ He hung up.
‘Les! Jenny!’ Ruth shouted out of her ever-open office door. ‘Get the fuck in here.’
FIFTY-ONE
‘I mean, I’ve been thinking about it,’ Chrissy said. ‘I’m only twenty-nine. I’ve got my whole career happening right now …’
‘I’ll come with you. You won’t be alone in this, Chrissy.’
‘I’d just … I’d really like to see you right now.’
‘Me too. Listen, I’m going to be stuck here for a bit. Trellick’s coming to New York day after tomorrow, to tie this Unigram sale up. There’s a few loose ends about the Du Pre estate too. I’ll get the office to book you a flight, OK?’
‘What? I just blow off work?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Oh, about work. Danny Rent called. He’s willing to accept two hundred thousand for Norwegian Dance Crew.’
‘Nazi Dance Crew? Fuck that. Wait another week and we’ll counter.’
‘OK.’
‘About the other thing. I’ve got an excellent doctor here. I could book it in –’
‘“It”, Christ …’ said Chrissy.
‘Sorry, sorry. Not “it”. You. Us. Book us in.’
‘Yeah, I guess so. Why wait?’
‘Look, we’ll talk more when you get here, OK?’
The line was as clear as water, even though they were looking at different bodies of it as they spoke. ‘Look, I have to run, Chrissy. I’m in the studio all day tomorrow.’
‘Does Trellick, James … does he know about …?’
‘No. Of course not.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘See you day after tomorrow.’
Chrissy hung up and put the phone down on the little metal table in the little garden of her little house in Silver Lake. She patted her belly, where the little thing grew. She had been anxious the last few days, more on the edge of her mind than she cared to admit. She was twenty-nine. Still young. She could have another baby. Steven was right. It was the right decision. She went into the kitchen and rooted in the drawer until she found them – a pack of Marlboro Lights, hidden under some tea towels. She’d stopped smoking when she found out. Oh well, it didn’t matter much now. She went back into the garden and lit one.
She started crying.
FIFTY-TWO
Terry Rawlings was slick.
He’d parked high up in the Malibu hills and hiked in the dark through scrubland before gaining access to the rear of the property through the garden. The yards were large, the neighbouring houses far away, no one to notice Terry’s lithe form in black night camo, moving low and fast through the trees and bushes. The basic alarm system had taken him less than thirty seconds to disable. And now here he stood in the kitchen, breathing softly, his ears cocked for anything, his pulse only very slightly elevated.
Terry moved through the rooms, noticing some of the things on the walls – framed photographs of the owner of the house with celebrities, framed professional certificates and degrees – as he moved towards the study, its location known to him from a study of the architectural plans of the house. He pushed the door open and there it was, switched off, inert. He set his heavy backpack down and turned the machine on, the Apple logo coming up obligingly in the middle of the screen. It was an older machine, a godsend. In less than a minute Terry had bypassed the computer’s minimal security checks and was inserting his memory stick into the port. The program started uploading.
Terry sat there in the dark, his face blued by the light of the screen, the only sound the noise of cars, far below on the PCH1, roaring south towards LA, or north out of LA, through here and on towards Trancas and Big Sur. Now Terry didn’t really understand tech stuff, he couldn’t have explained to you how the Timelord program worked, he only knew that it did. What it did, when he’d used it on a few black ops jumps back in the day, was to load documents onto your hard drive in a manner that convinced the computer they had been there for some time. What it did was establish a non-paper paper trail. Satisfied the computer was doing its thing, Terry left it to it, picked his backpack up, and headed upstairs, moving low, below the windows.
He secreted several of the items in his backpack in the closet in the master bedroom. In the bathroom he worked hard, imprinting a fine residue of powder all around the large marble tub. As a final touch he placed a copy of the Quran and a few choice pieces of literature in the right-hand bedside drawer.
Back downstairs he saw Timelord had finished uploading the tranche of documents, the plans and schematics and instruction manuals. He unplugged the memory stick, turned the computer off, and wiped down every surface he’d touched. In the kitchen, by the sliding door to the backyard, he tapped at the alarm keypad, resetting it. He slid the door closed and locked it before before retracing his steps through the garden, over the fence and back into the scrubland. Twenty minutes later – a tougher hike than on the way down, the going all uphill, although his pack was lighter now – he regained his rented Dodge. He snapped the rubber gloves off and checked the timer on his watch – the whole thing had taken just less than an hour. Not bad.
The tyres kicked dust behind the car as he steered it down through the trees, back towards the coast, which he’d be following south, all the way to LAX, where he’d be catching a night flight back to NewYork, where the toughest part lay ahead. But first there was one more quick errand to take care of, conveniently in Santa Monica. Terry checked the address again and then looked at the place on Google Maps. Nice big house. Quiet street. Ideal.
He was tired. He’d sleep on the plane.
FIFTY-THREE
‘For fuck’s sake, no. More hypnotic. Trancey.’
‘OK, OK,’ Tim the engineer says, sliding his mouse, scrolling again through a library of beats. ‘Hang on …’
We’re in a windowless basement, somewhere below the streets of Greenwich Village. It’s been a while since I’ve done this and I’d forgotten that after a certain amount of time in a recording studio it becomes unreal. The recycled air, the low, artificial light, the sonar honks of bass and pings of treble, your peripheral vision studded with the red, white and yellow lights of innumerable instrument panels. You are on a submarine, desperately wanting to come out of the depths, to come up for air, but in this case, the surface is still some distance above us.
‘How about this?’ Tim clicks the mouse and a slow, churning drum loop purrs from the wall of speakers. It’s nice. Nice, but …
‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Too slow …’ He works the mouse and speeds the loop up a few bpm. I give it a few seconds. ‘Nah. Next.’
‘Okaayyyy …’ he says. To be fair, the exasperation of his tone is understandable, forgivable even. We’ve been working on this one track for ten hours straight now and by rights I should have changed engineers, but I insisted on keeping him on at double his usual rate – because I am a genuinely nice guy and I want to minimise the pain and suffering that will be caused later on, in clean-up.
The first seven or so hours of the session were spent compiling a master vocal from the many different takes available. Some of these takes were separated by years rather than months and were recorded in a variety of different studios using different mikes and different miking techniques, as Tim the engineer never tired of pointing out until I told him to shut the fuck up about all the technical stuff and just make them all blend together so the average punter wouldn’t know the difference. Gradually, it started coming together and we finally had a complete, acappella vocal track lasting just over two and a half minutes, though by the end of the process I thought I might actually go insane if I heard one more second of the fucker’s voice.
‘Stop,’ I say, tuning into some beats Tim’s just flipped through. �
��Go back …’ He scrolls back up the screen of his computer, clicks on a highlighted bar. A warm, rolling groove begins. ‘Turn it up,’ I say. Tim slides the fader up and we both listen for a moment. The beat sounds simple, almost a straight 4/4, but as you listen you hear the delicate complexity within it, little accents – bells and woodblocks – tinkling away in the mix, working off the hi-hat and snare. It’s nice and slow, but not too slow, with something uplifting to it. I check the counter on the screen – 62 bpm: right in the sweet spot for the human heart rate.
At this rate of beats per minute your brainwaves and your heartbeat begin to synchronise with the rhythm. Entrainment. It has been proven – scientifically proven, by actual fucking scientists – that music at this tempo calms human beings down. That it can be used on trauma sufferers and accident survivors to significantly improve their mental state. ‘Tim, Tim,’ I say, excited now, not wanting to jinx it. ‘Stick a little bass in. The thing you had earlier.’ He pushes a fader up and a low, underlying bass tone comes in, along with a whooshing sound, accentuating the trance-like quality of the whole thing, taking you into an even deeper state of tranquillity, of weightlessness. This … this could be it.
‘Put … put the fucking vocal up,’ I say.
He slides another fader up and Du Pre’s voice comes in, midway through the take, ghostly, swathed in reverb, as he sings ‘On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep, where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes …’ It’s brilliant. Simple, minimal, eloquent. Music that would soothe and balm the most broken of hearts. It has an almost timeless quality, something outside and beyond pop music: a Gregorian chant feel, somewhere between Enigma and fucking Enya. ‘That’s it,’ I say. ‘That’s fucking it.’ Tim closes his eyes and we both listen along, joined together in the fact that we are the only two human beings in the world who have heard this music being created, who know what has been happening in this room.